The Ukrainian National Movement
At the end of the eighteenth century and during the nineteenth, small clusters of urban intellectuals developed a modern Ukrainian national identity, first in the lands of the Cossacks in Left Bank Ukraine (Novgorod-Siversk and Kharkov), then in the Right Bank (Kiev), then finally in the Habsburg lands (Galicia).29 As they defined this new identity and differentiated it from the Polish, Hungarian, Romanian, All-Russian, and Russian identities, they formed informal groups and networks of like-minded people, seeking to propagate their ideas to the peasants.
This modern Ukrainian national movement did not develop in a single or coherent direction. Instead, it evolved along the lines of the three-stage model pioneered by the Czech historian Miroslav Hroch in his study of the “small nations” of northern and central Europe.30 In the academic stage, a small number of scholars and amateurs begin to discover the language, the culture, and the history of their ancestors and emphasize its uniqueness. In the cultural stage, “the fermentation-process of national consciousness,” a large number of patriotic propagandists spread the national idea to the masses. Finally, during the political stage, the broad masses join the national movement and start to make demands on their respective governments. Only during the last stage, when national groups demand extensive political concessions from the authorities (especially autonomy or independence), does this stage enter a nationalist phase.
Although many historians of Ukraine identify the Left Bank primarily with the academic stage, the Right Bank with the cultural stage, and the Galicia with the political stage, each of these regions experienced all three stages, although for differing lengths of time and with varying success.31 As with any historical framework, the dividing line between these periods remains fluid and overlaps in terms of chronology.
These phases did not necessarily start with the academic stage and end with the political stage. They often started and continued in random order. Nevertheless, Hroch’s model provides a useful framework for understanding the emergence of the modern Ukrainian national movement, which mobilized many, but not a majority, in the Ukrainian-speaking territories ruled by the Austrian and Russian empires before 1914.The intelligentsia in the Ukrainian-speaking provinces emerged in the Left Bank during the first half of the nineteenth century. At first, the sons of the minor gentry, such as Mykola Hohol (better known as Nikolai Gogol), sought positions as bureaucrats, junior military officers, or educators.32 With the emancipation of the peasantry in 1861 and the expansion of the educational system, the size of the intelligentsia increased. By the 1870s, the better-off peasants (such as Dovzhenko’s father) began to encourage their children to acquire an education. The industrial revolution in the Donbass and in the Ukrainian-speaking eastern provinces demanded literate workers.33
As the educational system represented elitist values and operated with Russian as the primary language of communication, the intelligentsia in the Ukrainian provinces remained a small group. Those who identified themselves as Ukrainians constituted a minority within this minority. According to the Russian imperial census of 1897, approximately 235,000 men and women out of a total population of 23.4 million (around 1 per cent) in the nine Ukrainian provinces possessed some form of secondary or higher education. Only twenty-four thousand individuals completed some form of higher education, and only seventeen thousand some sort of specialized secondary training. The vast majority of the intelligentsia identified themselves as Russians, Jews, or Poles - not Little Russians. Of those with secondary or university training, 56 per cent declared themselves Russian and 19 per cent Little Russian.34 For a variety of reasons, including socioeconomic and political pressures and the attraction of the prestigious imperial culture, many members of the intelligentsia with Little Russian backgrounds affiliated themselves with Russians, not with those who began to identify themselves as Ukrainians. In 1897, less than 25 per cent of all teachers, 16 per cent of all jurists, and 10 per cent of all writers and artists living in the Ukrainian-speaking provinces spoke Ukrainian.35
Inspired by the reaction to the Normanist and Anti-Normanist controversy in the eighteenth century and the Slavophile-Westernizer debates concerning Russia’s uniqueness in the 1830s and 1840s, the small intelligentsia in the Ukrainian provinces became interested in the future of Russia and, concomitantly, in the future of the Ukrainian people.
They began to clarify their place within the Russian and Austrian empires as they encountered complex, complementary, and sometimes antagonistic visions of “Polishness” and Russianness” in other intellectual circles.36 In competition with other national and imperial visions, the “Ukrainian project” became a never-ending work-in-progress, nurtured in the uneven soil of vastly different regions and empires.The proponents of these new Ukrainian perspectives recognized that they could easily have accepted their ultimate disappearance within the Russian or Polish nations, but they chose to resist this process. By creating the framework of a new culture for a small, impoverished, illiterate, and powerless people, they wagered that they and their Ukrainian-speaking compatriots would prevail.37
These thinkers came from the very institutions, such as the University of Kharkov (established in 1805), the University of Kiev (1834), and the Kiev Archeographic Commission (1843), that the tsarist government had created in order to integrate the Western borderlands into the Russian Empire. Each of these organizations attracted a small number of professors, professionals, and students dedicated to collecting, researching, and critically assessing materials concerning the Left Bank and the Right Bank. The University of Kharkov’s professors (most of whom initially came from the German lands) introduced Western ideas and - influenced by Herder’s interpretations - acknowledged Ukrainian folklore as worthy of study.38
Whereas some of the nobles sought to restore their ancient rights and privileges and to retain a hierarchical order, the intelligentsia embraced a more democratic vision of the Ukrainian identity. By accepting Herder’s idea that all men and women - not just the nobles - belong to the nation, the intelligentsia started the process of undermining the multiple loyalties within the Russian Empire.
In all political systems, individuals possess a network of loyalties (political scientists call these multiple allegiances or “cross-cutting cleavages”), such as those to one’s village, region, province, state, or empire, which remain compatible.
In multinational states, in addition to the imperial identity, individuals may share one or more “national” loyalties or identities. In the Russian Empire, many Ukrainian-speaking people labelled themselves Little Russian and Russian at the same time. They did not think they contradicted themselves in doing so.39 In contrast, members of the Ukrainian national movement, inspired by the poet Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861) and the historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky (1866-1934), introduced a new framework of mutually exclusive identities, setting the Ukrainian identity at centre stage and completely separating it from the Russian and Polish communities. Shevchenko played the same role in the history of Ukraine as did Alexander Pushkin and Adam Mickiewicz for their own nations. The Ukrainian poet emerged as the “Bard and Prophet, the inspired voice of the people, and the spiritual leader of the reborn nation.”40 Hrushevsky, in turn, provided a coherent nationalist model for framing the narrative of the Ukrainian past, present, and future.If Shevchenko recognized the worthiness of the common peasant language, Hrushevsky validated the uniqueness of Ukraine’s history. Employing a scholarly apparatus of historical texts, bibliographies, and footnotes, Hrushevsky scientifically proved that it existed.41 Both gave the illiterate and powerless Ukrainian-speaking masses a national voice and a sense of dignity in an environment that had denied both.42