The Ukrainian National Movement in Dnieper Ukraine after the Era of Reforms

The demise of the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood and the dispersal of its mem­bers seemed a serious blow, yet it did not mean the end of the Ukrainian national movement. By the late 1850s, another Ukrainian revival was under way both within and beyond Dnieper Ukraine.

The Right Bank and the khlopomany movement

Within Dnieper Ukraine itself, the new revival was the result of specific conditions in the Right Bank. Chapter 28 showed how the Polish gentry continued to domi­nate the socioeconomic and cultural life of Russia’s so-called Southwestern Land (Kiev, Volhynia, and Podolia provinces), how the area became a stronghold of Polish nationalism and supporter of the Polish rebellion of 1830-1831, and how the tsarist government reacted by abolishing or replacing Polish schools in the area with Russian ones and by using the Little Russian cultural revival as a force with which to counteract Polish nationalism. In 1838, to ensure the implementation of its new policy, the imperial government appointed General Dmitrii G. Bibikov as governor-general for the three Right Bank provinces. Bibikov was an outstanding example of the stern bureaucrat who helped to enforce the repressive rule of Tsar Nicholas I (reigned 1825-1855). Bibikov was determined to reduce the hereto­fore dominant role of the Polish gentry in the Right Bank. In order to achieve this goal, he implemented several governmental decrees which regulated the duties of the serfs and which, to a certain degree, improved their status. He also took up the chairmanship of a regulatory commission to revise the privileges of the gentry. The result was that between 1840 and 1845 more than 64,000 persons had their noble status revoked. According to the imperial authorities, these persons could not prove with a sufficient amount of acceptable documentation a legal right to belong to the noble estate.

Actually, Polish concern with the specific culture of the Right Bank was already well advanced in the 1830s. The Polish national revival and the Romantic move-

ment in Polish literature had produced several writers who were avidly interested in the history of the Right Bank. They included a group of local patriots known as the “Ukrainian school” of Polish literature: the poets Antoni Malczewski, Jozef Bogdan Zaleski, and Seweryn Goszczynski, the prose writer Michal Czajkowski, and the critic Michal Grabowski. For a while, the group also included the greatest Polish Romantic writer of the day, Juliusz Slowacki, a native of Volhynia who wrote several plays based on Ukrainian historical themes.

Apart from these Polish Romantic writers of the Ukrainian school, there evolved a kind of populist movement among the existing and now-demoted Polish gentry who were disillusioned by the failure of their November Insurrection of 1830-1831 and who considered that the future of the Polish cause would depend upon the support of the local peasantry. The result was an attempt to understand the Ukrainian peasantry, including its language and culture. This attempt was car­ried a stage further by the so-called khlopomany, or peasant lovers.

The khlopomany were sons of the Polish gentry who were studying in Kiev and who called for the emancipation of the peasantry and the democratization of soci­ety. As Poles or polonized Ukrainians of the noble estate, they felt guilty for the centuries of oppression levied upon the Ukrainian peasantry. Hence, when talk of a new Polish revolt began in the late 1850s, the khlopomany rejected such an option. Some members of the group went even further: they rejected their Polish identity and returned to what they considered themselves, or their forefathers, originally to have been - Ukrainians.

Ukrainianism in St Petersburg and the renewal of the organizational stage

While the khlopomany, or peasant lovers, were adding new strength to the Ukrain­ian national movement on the Right Bank, the imperial capital of St Petersburg was serving as another kind of setting for the cultural revival. The accession to the throne in 1855 of the “reformer” tsar Alexander II brought a certain relaxation in the police-state environment that had been created by his predecessor, Nicholas I. In these new conditions, St Petersburg soon became the home of the leading members of the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood. Kulish, who was already in the city, was allowed to publish after 1855. Four years later, Kostomarov arrived to take up the influential post of head of the department (katedra) of Russian history of St Petersburg University. Even the “dangerous” Shevchenko was released from exile and allowed to settle in the imperial capital, where he was made a member of the Imperial Academy of Art and was again permitted to paint and to publish until his early death in 1861.

Kostomarov and Kulish produced major monographs on Ukrainian history in the 1850s. They included Kostomarov’s biography of the Cossack hetman Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi (1857; 2nd ed., 1859; 3rd ed., 1876) and Kulish’s two- volume Zapiski o luzhnoi Rusi (Notes on Southern Rus’, 1856-57). In accord with the tradition established during the first half of the nineteenth century, these works appeared in Russian, although Kulish republished his historical novel Chor- na Rada (1857) in Ukrainian and compiled two editions of a Ukrainian-language primer (Hramatka, 1857, 1861) for use in Sunday language schools for adults.

Besides publishing their own creative writings, Kostomarov, Kulish, and Shevchenko joined other Ukrainians in St Petersburg in starting a cultural circle known as the Hromada with the support of two philanthropic Ukrainian land­owners, Vasyl’ Tarnovs’kyi and Hryhorii Galagan. The St Petersburg Hromada pub­lished several works by Ukrainian writers, as well as the journal Osnova (1861-62), which during the two years of its existence became the platform of the Ukrainian national movement. It was on the pages of Osnova, for instance, that Kostomarov published his influential article “Dvie russkii narodnosti” (“Two Rus’ Nationali­ties”), in which he decisively put forth the thesis that on historical, cultural, and linguistic grounds Russians and Ukrainians formed two distinct nationalities (see chapter 2).

Ukrainian hromadas also arose in Kiev in 1861 under the leadership of the khlopomany (Antonovych, Ryl’s’kyi, and Mykhal’chuk) and Left Bank Ukrainian populists (Chubyns’kyi and Stoianov), as well as in Kharkiv, Poltava, and Cherni­hiv, where under Leonid Hlibov the journal Chernyhovs' kyi lystok (1861-63) was published. The aim of the hromada movement in Dnieper Ukraine was to pre­pare the peasantry for their national as well as economic liberation by teaching them about Ukrainian language and culture in the so-called Sunday schools and by publishing books and staging plays in Ukrainian. The first Sunday school was founded in 1859 in Kiev. By 1862, there were sixty-seven spread throughout sev­eral Dnieper-Ukrainian towns and villages. It was for those schools that Kulish and even Shevchenko (Bukvar’ iuzhnorusskii, 1861) published elementary primers.

These developments marked the height of the populist era, during which it became the vogue for the intelligentsia to don traditional Ukrainian dress (at least colorfully embroidered shirts - vyshyvani sorochky) and to go out into the coun­tryside.

Russian reaction to the Ukrainian movement

The mood was already changing in Russian intellectual circles. During the first half of the century, for instance, Ukrainianism or Little Russianism had been favored. In the words of Orest Pelech, a perceptive observer of that period, “The Ukrainian language and works using it occupied a peculiar position in the Zeit­geist of the Empire’s educated public: it was considered quaint, humorous, beauti­ful, and therefore, chic.”¹ It is not surprising, then, that those public intellectuals who represented the main currents of Russian thought at the time - the “liberal” Westernizers and “conservative” Slavophiles - initially welcomed the Little Russian cultural movement and even published works in Ukrainian on the pages of their periodical press. In the 1860s, however, the mood changed, and writers in several patriotic Russian organs (Viestnik Iugo-zapadnoi Rossii, Kievlianin, Moskovskie viedo- mosti, Russkii viestnik) began to argue that Ukrainian, or Little Russian, was only a dialect of the Russian language. Their approach seemed to provide an answer to the rhetorical question posed a few decades earlier by Aleksander Pushkin, Russia’s foremost Romantic poet: “Will not all the Slavic streams merge into the Rus­sian sea?”²

Pushkin’s formulation encapsulated the widespread interest at the time in the ideology of Pan-Slavism; namely, the view that all the Slavic peoples somehow formed a unified body (based on linguistic and cultural criteria) and that they should coop­erate in order to promote their cultural and political interests regardless of the country, or empire, in which they lived.

These intellectual debates soon entered the world of real politics, and by 1862, provincial governors in Little Russia were receiving more and more reports of a sup­posed desire on the part of Ukrainian leaders “to separate Ukraine from Russia.” Such information was passed on to the central government in St Petersburg. Indeed, the landowners, who had just been deprived of their serfs, were always suspicious of the populist intellectuals and their cultural work among the peasantry. The peas­ants, in turn, were not especially pleased with the terms of the emancipation. By asso-

The Valuev Decree

In March 1862, Pylyp Morachevs’kyi submitted a Ukrainian translation of parts of the New Testament to the Imperial Academy of Sciences. The academy approved the text, but it was rejected by the Holy Synod of the Russian Ortho­dox Church, partly on the ground that a translation into a legally nonexistent language would be politically dangerous. In connection with this matter, the minister of the interior, Count Petr Valuev, issued a circular to the office of censorship on 18 July 1863. This circular has came to be known as the Valuev Decree.

For some time there have been debates in the press about whether a distinct Little Russian literature can exist. Those debates were prompted by the appearance of works by a few writers noted for their more or less outstanding talent or originality. More recently, the question of a Little Russian literature has taken on another aspect that, as a result of purely political circumstances, has nothing to do with strictly liter­ary interests. Previous works written in the Little Russian language were intended solely for the educated classes of South Russia; now, however, the supporters of a Little Russian nationality have turned their attention to the un-educated masses. Those supporters, who hope to have their political ideas implemented, have under­taken the publication of books for basic reading, primers, grammars, geography texts, etc. under the pretext of spreading literacy and enlightenment. The criminal actions of many of these individuals have been the subject of an investigation by a special commission.

In St Petersburg, there is even a fund to publish inexpensive books in the South Russian dialect. Several of these books have already been reviewed by the board of censorship in St Petersburg. A certain number will also be presented to the board of censorship in Kiev. The Kiev board has had some difficulty reviewing these publica­tions because of the following circumstances: (1) teaching in all schools is without exception conducted in the common Russian [obshchesusskii] language and nowhere is use of the Little Russian language permitted; (2) the very question of using this dialect in schools is not resolved, and the very mention of the question is greeted on the part of most Little Russians with consternation such as we have seen in the press.

They [the press commentators] argue convincingly that a Little Russian language has not, does not, and cannot exist, and that its dialects as spoken by the masses are the same as the Russian language, with the exception of some corruptions from Poland. In other words, the common Russian language is fully understandable to Little Russians as to Great Russians, and is even more understandable than the so-called Ukrainian language that has been created for them by a few Little Rus­sians and especially by Poles. Those people attempting to prove the opposite are reproached by the majority of Little Russians themselves for separatist intentions that are dangerous for Russia and detrimental to Little Russia. This phenomenon is even more deplorable and deserving of attention, since it coincides with the politi­cal intrigues of Poles and virtually owes it origins to them. This is evident from the fact that the majority of Little Russian works received by the board of censorship are actually submitted by Poles. Finally, the governor-general of Kiev has concluded that the proposed publication of a Little Russian translation of the New Testament now being examined by the board of ecclesiastical censors is dangerous and harmful.

Taking into consideration the alarming situation in our society that certain politi­cal events have brought about, and knowing that the question of teaching in local dialects has not yet been sufficiently resolved in the legal code, the minister of the interior, pending agreement with the minister of education, the chief procurator of the Holy Synod, and the chief of police, has deemed it necessary to issue an order on censorship concerning the publication of books in the Little Russian language. Only those works which are in the category of belles-lettres are permitted; the approval of books in the Little Russian language that have religious content as well as those of a pedagogical nature or that are intended for mass consumption is to cease. These instructions were brought to the attention of His Majesty the Emperor, and His Maj­esty was pleased to grant them his royal favor.

source: I.O. Hurzhii, ed., Khrestomatiia z istorii Ukrains’koiRSR (Kiev 1970), pp. 168-169.

ciating populist cultural work and peasant discontent with political separatism, the economic and social elite of Dnieper Ukraine now had, so they felt, a sure way of turning the imperial government against the Ukrainian movement. Finally, in 1863 the Poles revolted against tsarist rule once again. After the January Insurrection of 1863 was suppressed, the imperial government was more determined than ever to end all manifestations, real or apparent, of separatism. The well-known conservative Russian journalist Mikhail Katkov conceived the idea on the pages of his influential joumal Russkii viestnik that the Ukrainian movement was little more than a “Polish intrigue.”

In the resultant atmosphere of suspicion and mutual recrimination, several Ukrainian populists were arrested, the hromada societies and Sunday schools were closed, and their publication activity ceased. As if that were not enough, the tsar­ist minister of the interior, Count Petr Valuev, issued an internal circular on 18 July 1863 banning the publication of religious and educational books in Ukrain­ian. Aside from the supposedly politically provocative content of such books, their very form was found questionable. This is because the ministerial decree accepted the view of the contemporary Russian press that: “the Little Russian language has not, does not, and cannot exist.” In short, the Valuev decree ended the Russian-Lit­tle Russian debate by administrative fiat and with a message that was unequivocal: There is no Little Russian or Ukrainian language, and those who believe there is rep­resent a minority and most likely an anti-imperial, separatist minority.

Despite the restrictions imposed on publishing in Ukrainian (belles-lettres were still permitted), the closing of the Sunday schools, and the limitations placed on the activity of the hromadas, Ukrainians in Kiev were active once again in the early 1870s. This time, however, their activity was of a purely scholarly nature, essentially confined to debates in the Kiev Hromada and to work connected with the Southwestern Branch of the Imperial Russian Geographic Society, established in Kiev in 1873. Ukrainian scholarship, albeit written in Russian, was indeed com­ing into its own. Some extremely important works, especially in ethnography, date from this period, sponsored by the Geographic Society. They include a col­lection of Ukrainian historical songs (1874-75) by Volodymyr Antonovych and Mykhailo Drahomanov, Ukrainian tales (1876) by Drahomanov, chumak songs (1874) by Ivan Rudchenko, and the monumental seven-volume ethnographic and encyclopedic statistical compendium dealing with the Right Bank (1872-78) by Pavlo Chubyns’kyi. In 1874, the Geographic Society also sponsored an impres­sive Archaeological Congress, and the same year the Russian-language newspaper Kievskii t.flfgraf (1859-76) became the unofficial organ of the Kiev Hromada.

Yet even these limited cultural activities seemed too much for the Russian impe­rial government. Actually, it was a founding member of the Kiev branch of the Imperial Russian Geographic Society, a landowner from Poltava and imperial Rus­sian administrator, Mikhail luzefovich, who sounded the alarm. In 1875, he sent two memoranda to St Petersburg claiming that Kiev had once again become a center of Ukrainian separatism. That same year, Tsar Alexander II appointed a commission to report on the “ukrainophile propaganda in the southern provinces of Russia.”³

The commission concluded that the “activity of the Ukrainophiles” presented a danger to the state. It proposed extending the 1863 Valuev Decree to forbid the publication of all Ukrainian books and to prohibit their importation from abroad, especially from Galicia. Plays, lectures, even lyrics to musical compositions should be banned; suspect organizations and newspapers closed; and “dangerous” pro-Ukrainian teachers removed from the classrooms. In short, Russian official­dom was now prepared to back up fully its belief that the Ukrainian language and Ukrainian nationality did not exist.

All the recommendations of the commission were accepted by Tsar Alexander II in May 1876, while he was “taking the cure” at a spa in Ems, Germany. For that reason, the prohibitory measures against the Ukrainian movement came to be known as the Ems Ukase (decree) of 1876. Also at about the same time, the Ukrain­ian activists Mykhailo Drahomanov and Mykola Ziber were removed from their professorial posts at Kiev’s St Vladimir University. In 1881, the new tsar, Alexander III, allowed some modification of the Ems Ukase, whereby dictionaries and musi­cal lyrics could be published in Ukrainian if they used Russian orthography, and Ukrainian plays could be staged if local authorities approved each performance in advance. Permanent Ukrainian theaters or troupes performing only in the “Little Russian dialect” were expressly forbidden, however. It is true that during the last decades of the nineteenth century and until World War I, Dnieper Ukrainian writ­ers, actors, and musicians sometimes managed through ingenious ploys or mon­etary bribes to avoid tsarist restrictions on publication and performance. Nonethe­less, the restrictions of the Ems Ukase remained in effect, and for all intents and purposes stifled the Ukrainian movement. Indeed, schools and churches contin­ued to exist, but they gave no help to the Ukrainian national orientation.

The Ems Ukase

In the interests of the state and in order to suppress the dangerous activity of Ukrainophiles, it would be necessary to take into consideration these measures:

A. For the Ministry of the Interior

(1) Not to allow, without special permission from the administration of the Depart­ment of Printing, the importation into the [Russian] Empire of any kind of book published abroad in the Little Russian dialect.

(2) To prohibit the publication in the [Russian] Empire of all original works or translations in the [Little Russian] dialect, with the exception of historical sources provided that they, if pertaining to oral folklore (songs, tales, proverbs), appear in the common-Russian [obshcherusskaia] orthography (that is, not in the so-called kulishivka [Ukrainian alphabet]).

(3) To prohibit all stage performances in the [Little Russian] dialect, as well as lyrics to musical scores and public lectures (such as those which today are little more than ukrainophile manifestations).

(4) To support the newspaper Slovo, which is published in Galicia and is oriented against hostile ukrainophilism, and to provide it with a limited but steady subsidy [the archival document indicates 1,000 rubles - written by hand in the margin], with­out which it could not survive and would have to cease publication.

(5) To ban the newspaper Kievskii telegraf for the following reasons: that its nominal editor, Snezhko-Blotskii, is completely blind and is unable to function in any way as editor, and that as a result the newspaper is directed arbitrarily by individuals... who are politically very unreliable.

B. For the Ministry of Education

(6) To increase supervision on the part of the local school authorities so that in lower-level schools no teaching in any subject is permitted in the Little Russian dialect [which does not exist - written by hand in the margin].

(7) To remove from all lower- and middle-level school libraries in the Little Rus­sian provinces books and brochures prohibited in the second paragraph of this pro­posal.

(8) To pay careful attention to the teaching personnel in the school districts of the Kharkiv, Kiev, and Odessa provinces, and to request from the inspectors in those districts a list of names of teachers with notes on each about his or her loyalty and relationship to the ukrainophile orientation. With regard to disloyal or questionable teachers, they should be transferred to provinces in Great Russia and replaced by new teachers from Great Russia.

(9) To appoint in the future for the aforementioned districts teaching personnel who are trustworthy and completely reliable. Such reliability should be based not only on words but on deeds.

(10) To close for an indefinite period the Kiev Branch of the Imperial Geographic Society and to allow its eventual reopening only if the local governor-general is given control, which should occur following the permanent dismissal of all those persons who in any way could be suspected of not being of a pure Russian orientation.

C. For the Third Section [secret police] of His Majesty’s Supreme Chancellery

(11) To exile immediately from the [Little Russian] land [Mykhailo] Drahomanov and [Pavlo] Chubyns’kyi as incorrigible agitators who are dangerous for the region.

Imperial Commission on Ukrainophile Propaganda in the Southern Provinces of Russia, 1875.

source: Fedir Savchenko, Zaborona ukrainstva 1876 r., 2nd ed. (Munich 1970), p. 381.

Schools in Dnieper Ukraine

The number of schools in Dnieper Ukraine actually declined from the eighteenth to the first half of the nineteenth century. In 1856, the nine provinces in Dnieper Ukraine had only 1,320 elementary, secondary, and higher schools, with 67,000 students. This figure represented a mere 0.5 percent of the potential student body. The reforms of the 1860s, however, did provide for the establishment of a greater number of schools, and it was in anticipation of this development that in the late 1850s the populist movement and hromada societies began their cultural work. This included the publication of Ukrainian elementary-school primers and grammars by Shevchenko and Kulish. Within a few decades the numbers did increase, to 3,100 schools in 1898, and then to 4,700 schools with 460,000 stu­dents in 1909. These figures need to be placed in context, however.

There was, for instance, no compulsory education in the Russian Empire, whose per capita investment in education was at the time one of the lowest in the world. Although the zemstvos were permitted to organize village schools in 1874, those schools combined with the church- and state-run schools were insufficient in number for the population of Dnieper Ukraine. The result was that at the begin­ning of the twentieth century, an estimated two-thirds of school-aged children nev­er entered a classroom. At best, 18 percent of Dnieper Ukraine’s entire population could read, although in the predominantly Ukrainian-inhabited villages there was as much as 91 to 96 percent illiteracy (1897).

Even for those few ethnic Ukrainian children who attended school, exposure to the Ukrainian language or culture was out of the question. A law of 1804 per­mitted non-Russian languages to be used as a medium of instruction, and this law was what allowed Polish schools to flourish on the Right Bank at least until the restrictions following the abortive Polish insurrection of 1830-1831. Ukrainian, however, was classified as a dialect of Russian and therefore could not be consid­ered as a medium of instruction.

Nationalist ideologists of all persuasions of course knew quite well that schools were the most effective breeding grounds for creating in young people an aware­ness of national identity and a sense of common national purpose. Nonetheless, the Russian Empire, with its poor record on investment in education, never took full advantage of the potential that schools had for promoting a state-imposed national identity. The resultant high rates of illiteracy in Dnieper Ukraine para­doxically helped to protect ethnic Ukrainians against russification. Consequently, by World War I the vast majority of Dnieper Ukrainians, unaffected by Russian or other nationalist ideology, were ready to be molded into whatever a government in control of the educational system might wish.

The church in Dnieper Ukraine

The Orthodox Church had more access to the peasant masses than the schools. By the nineteenth century, however, the church had changed radically from what it previously had been. Historically, the Orthodox Rus’ Church in Ukraine had played a part in fostering the cultural well-being and sense of identity of the peo­ple. During the Kievan period, and later, during the late sixteenth century, it had become the stronghold of Ukrainian Rus’ culture in the face of Polish political, social, and cultural pressure. It had also been closely allied to the Cossack move­ment and to the Hetmanate state. Through the centuries, the Orthodox Church in Ukraine had tried to maintain jurisdictional autonomy, in relation first to the Byzantine Empire, then to Poland, and finally to Muscovite Russia. In the course of the eighteenth century, however, Russia’s civil authorities beginning with Tsar Peter I reduced the jurisdictional autonomy of the Orthodox Church in Ukrainian lands (see chapter 24). The office of the metropolitan of Kiev was abolished and all eparchies in Dnieper Ukraine were made fully subordinate to the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church based in St Petersburg.

The situation was much more complicated and more difficult for Dnieper Ukraine’s non-Orthodox Christians, most of whom were living in the Right Bank. Soon after 1793, when the Russian Empire acquired these lands from the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth, Catherine II guaranteed freedom of religion both to Roman Catholics (mostly Poles) and to Uniates, or Greek Catholics (mostly Ukrainians and Belarusans). Despite such an “enlightened” measure, both Catho­lic churches were generally considered by Russian society to be intruders on histor­ic Orthodox Rus’ lands. Consequently, it was not long before the status of Roman and Uniate (Greek) Catholics declined.

Between 1778 and 1847, several Roman Catholic dioceses in Belarusan and Ukrainian territories were alternately abolished, restored, and reorganized. In the end, only two Roman Catholic dioceses remained in Dnieper Ukraine - Zhytomyr, in the Right Bank (mostly for Poles), and Tiraspol, in southern Ukraine (mostly for recent German settlers).

The Uniate Church eventually fared much worse. On the eve of Catherine II’s death in 1796, the Uniate Metropolitanate of Kiev (excluding the Eparchy of Chelm/Kholm in the Russian-ruled Kingdom of Poland) was abolished; many monasteries of the Basilian order were closed; and several thousand Uniates were forced to become Orthodox. Two years later the eparchies of Luts’k and Volodymyr- Brest were restored (1806), and within a decade the church was fully reconstituted as the Uniate Metropolitanate of Russia, with its seat in Polatsk. This development proved to be temporary, however, especially after Emperor Nicholas I came to the throne. In response to the emperor’s desire to create a society governed by the principles of “Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality,” the Ukrainian-born Uniate bishop of Lithuania, Iosyf Semashko (reigned 1832-1839), became enamored of Orthodoxy and in 1827 began to draw up plans for the abolition of the Uniate Church. His efforts bore fruit in 1839, when the entire church was abolished once again - this time permanently. Semashko went on to become the Orthodox bishop of Vilnius and Lithuania, while the Belarusan and Ukrainian Uniate faithful were “voluntarily” converted to Orthodoxy. Those clergy who refused (593 of a total of 1,898) were exiled to Siberia or to the interior of Russia. Only in the region of Chelm, which was part of the empire’s jurisdictionally distinct Congress Kingdom, did a Uniate (Greek Catholic) eparchy survive, although it too was dismantled by the Russian imperial government in 1875.

Consequently, by the middle of the nineteenth century, Ukrainians in Dnieper Ukraine were all part of the Russian Orthodox Church administered by the Holy Synod in St Petersburg. Church jurisdictions were reconfigured so that there were nine eparchies: Kiev, Chernihiv, Poltava, Kharkiv, Katerynoslav, Kherson, Taurida (created in 1859), Podolia, and Volhynia; as well as Kishinev/Chi^inau and Kholm/ Chelm (created in 1907) covering lands in part inhabited by ethnic Ukrainians. Some of these eparchies had more than one bishop, so that by 1917 there were a total of twenty-six in Dnieper Ukraine. Each eparchy had its own seminary, prepara­tory schools for the seminary, and schools for daughters of the clergy, as well as offi­cial journals, some of which contained important scholarly studies in addition to official church material. All the schools and publications used Russian exclusively.

Russian was also used in sermons. Even the traditional Church Slavonic liturgy was rendered with Russian pronunciation. While parts of the Bible were translated into Ukrainian during the second half of the nineteenth century, the translations were never used in Dnieper Ukraine. In fact, in was the request to publish Pylyp Morachevs’kyi’s translation of the four gospels and the Book of Acts that prompt­ed a debate in governmental circles which led eventually to the restrictions of the 1863 Valuev decree. Other books of the Bible in translations by Panteleimon Kulish and the Galician-Ukrainian Ivan Puliui were published in the Austro-Hun­garian Empire (1869 and 1871), but it was not until 1904 that the full text of both testaments in a Ukrainian translation by Kulish, Puliui, and Ivan Nechui-Levyts’kyi was published in Vienna by the British Bible Society. In Dnieper Ukraine, only a Church Slavonic text (with pronunciation in Russian) was permitted.

Devotion to Holy Russia headed by a God-anointed tsar were attitudes that were particularly entrenched among Orthodox bishops in Dnieper Ukraine. Whether or not they were natives of Ukraine, virtually all the hierarchs felt themselves Rus­sian, and often they became the most active opponents of a distinct Ukrainian national identity. In essence, the Orthodox Church in Dnieper Ukraine became an instrument of russification and a foremost representative of the official impe­rial ideology, with its glorification of the tsar, Orthodoxy, and Russian nationality.

The return to the heritage-gathering stage

With the outlawing of publications in Ukrainian in 1863 and 1876, the absence of cultural organizations, and a school system and church structure opposed to the Ukrainian idea, the national movement in Dnieper Ukraine was basically forced to lie dormant during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Its only manifes­tations were scholarship, some theatrical and musical performances, and the activ­ity of the emigres.

In the field of Ukrainian scholarship there were important results, especially the studies in Ukrainian history by Volodymyr Antonovych of Kiev’s University of St Vladimir. Antonovych founded what became known as the Kiev school of Ukrainian history, the most famous graduate being Mykhailo Hrushevs’kyi. Schol­ars at Kharkiv University also contributed to advances in Ukrainian scholarship, among them the social historian Dmytro Bahalii, the linguist Oleksander Poteb- nia, and the folklorist Mykola Sumtsov. The studies of these and other scholars were, of course, published in Russian, as were the two most important journals of Ukrainian scholarship at the time, Sbornik Khar'kovskago Istoriko-filologicheskago obshchestva (1886-1914) and Kievskaia stanna (1882-1907).

Whereas the establishment of a permanent Ukrainian theater was forbidden, the 1881 modification of the Ems Ukase did permit performances in Ukrainian if local authorities approved and if a play in Russian was given as well. The subject matter of Ukrainian plays, moreover, was restricted to folkloric themes and come­dies. Serious drama, including translations of classical works from other countries, could be performed only in Russian. Despite such limitations, several Ukrainian theatrical troupes were founded during the 1880s. Under the capable leadership of playwrights like Marko Kropyvnyts’kyi, Mykhailo Staryts’kyi, and Ivan Tobilevych (pseudonym: Karpenko-Karyi) and performers like Mykola Tobilevych (pseudo­nym: Mykola Sadovs’kyi), Panas Tobilevych (pseudonym: Panas Saksahans’kyi), and Mariia Sadovs’ka-Barliotti, Ukrainian plays were presented with great success throughout Dnieper Ukraine and even in St Petersburg.

Many of these figures also contributed to Dnieper Ukraine’s musical culture by appearing in performances of the first Ukrainian operas and operettas. The late nineteenth century was, after all, the era of nationalism in music throughout the European Continent, where composers like Verdi, Sibelius, Smetana, Erkel, and Moniuszko aroused patriotic fervor in, respectively, their Italian, Finnish, Czech, Hungarian, and Polish countrymen. Ukrainians, too, were part of these general European trends. In 1863, Semen Hulak-Artemovs’kyi wrote an opera, Zaporozhets' za Dunaiem (The Zaporozhian Cossack beyond the Danube), which because of its accessible storyline and engaging melodies inspired a deep sense of Ukrainian patriotism in generations of theater-goers, whether in urban opera houses or in numerous small towns and even village settings where it was - and still is - per­formed. It is also from this period that Ukraine’s national anthem, “Shche ne vmer- la Ukraina” (Ukraine Has Not Yet Died), derives, with words first published by Pavlo Chubyns’kyi in 1863 and set to musc the same year by Mykhailo Verbyts’kyi. The most influential of all composers, however, was Mykola Lysenko. His life’s goal was to create a Ukrainian national school of music, and with that aim he compiled tran­scriptions of hundreds of folk songs and promoted Ukrainian music at numerous choral recitals throughout Dnieper Ukraine for nearly two decades beginning in the 1890s. Nothing had greater influence on audiences than his operas based on Ukrainian themes - Natalka from Poltava (1889) and Taras Bul’ba (1890) - which were filled with heart-rending melodies that both epitomized and uplifted the Ukrainian national spirit among generations of listeners.

Ukrainian literature fared worse than theater and music. The reason was not because there were no Ukrainian belletrists; in fact, a new generation arose that included talented authors like Oleksander Konys’kyi, Lesia Ukrainka, Mykhailo Kotsiubyns’kyi, Borys Hrinchenko, and Ivan Nechui-Levyts’kyi. These and other Ukrainian-language authors even managed to publish in Russian-ruled Dnieper Ukraine. Whether because of the benign content of the material or the ineffi­ciency and lax attitude on the part of tsarist government officials, by the 1890s publishing houses in Chernihiv and Kiev managed to avoid the censors and pub­lish Ukrainian-language books. In the imperial capital itself, St Petersburg, the seemingly innocuous Charitable Society for the Publication of Inexpensive Books for General Use produced several titles after 1898 in the Ukrainian language, especially for the peasantry. Moreover, Ukrainian-language journals from Austrian Galicia still managed to reach subscribers in Dnieper Ukraine.

Nevertheless, the restrictions of the 1876 Ems Ukase remained formally the law of the land in one form or another until 1917. Consequently, the impact of Ukrainian literary, dramatic, and musical works on the public-at-large was limited because of small print runs, the lack of serious or sustained literary criticism, and the absence of permanent Ukrainian-language theaters. Even musical works suf­fered, so that Lysenko’s opera Taras Bul’ba was not performed in public until after World War I. Marginalized in their own homeland, many of the Russian Empire’s Ukrainian-language writers and composers were forced to publish or have their works performed abroad, particularly in Austria’s province of Galicia.

Since the national movement in Dnieper Ukraine had been stopped by the Rus­sian government at the organizational stage and forced to revert to the heritage­gathering stage, the only possibility for evolution toward the third, political stage existed among emigres living abroad. The most important of these were Mykola Ziber, Serhii Podolyns’kyi, and, especially, Mykhailo Drahomanov, all of whom were forced to leave the country after the promulgation of the Ems Ukase in 1876. Drahomanov was actually delegated by the Kiev Hromada to keep the Ukrainian movement alive in the emigration. He did so by publishing a journal, Hromada (1876-82), in Geneva, Switzerland, and by informing western European circles of the Russian Empire’s treatment of Ukrainians. Drahomanov developed the view that the Ukrainian problem was essentially a social one, and that only after grass­roots cultural work and the economic liberation of the peasantry was achieved could serious development in the political realm be expected. Drahomanov was also a supporter of democratic federalism. At the local level, he advocated the introduction of self-governing and independent peasant communes (hromady) that in theory would cooperate whenever the need arose. At the national level, he envisioned the transformation of the Russian Empire into a republic of twenty states, four of which would be on Ukrainian territory.

The beginnings of the political stage

At the very end of the nineteenth century, there was a revival of organizational activ­ity, which soon developed political and not simply cultural goals. The tsarist state was becoming increasingly suspicious of any kind of political activity, so Ukrainian leaders had to proceed cautiously. In fact, most of the older intelligentsia, grouped around the Old Hromada society and the scholarly journal Kievskaia starina in Kiev, promoted cultural rather than political activity as what the Ukrainian movement most needed. In 1897, about twenty of the loosely affiliated hromada societies scat­tered throughout Dnieper-Ukrainian cities united at the initiative of the historian Volodymyr Antonovych and the writer Oleksander Konys’kyi to form the General Ukrainian Non-Party Democratic Organization (Zahal’na Ukrains’ka Bezpartiina Demokratychna Orhanizatsiia). As its name suggested, this group concentrated on publication and cultural work in village clubs and reading rooms.

But these same apolitical hromada societies, especially the ones in cities that had university students as members, became breeding grounds for political organ­izations. Among the earliest of these was the Taras Brotherhood (Bratstvo Tarasiv- tsiv), a secret group of young enthusiasts founded in 1891. Before its liquidation two years later by the tsarist police, the Taras Brotherhood formulated a program calling for liberation from tsarist despotism and the need for the further develop­ment of a Ukrainian national consciousness.

University students, this time in Kharkiv, were also responsible for the establish­ment of the first Ukrainian political party in the Russian Empire, the Revolution­ary Ukrainian party, founded in 1900. The problems faced by this first party were similar to those encountered by later Ukrainian political groups. The imperial government, at least until 1905, generally forbade the existence of “Ukrainian” organizations. Consequently, Ukrainian political groups initially had to remain underground, and this limited the number of adherents they could attract. In fact, none of the pre-World War I Ukrainian parties ever had more than a few thousand members.

With the growth of cities in Dnieper Ukraine and worsening conditions among industrial workers, it is not surprising that socialism, as formulated by the Ger­man political philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, became attractive to political activists in the 1890s. Neither Marx nor Engels took the nationality question seriously, however, so they left little guidance in this area for their social- democratic followers. Engels was scornful of most Slavic peoples in particular, whom he considered at best “remnants of peoples (Volkertrummer), still found here and there, that are no longer capable of leading a national existence and must be incorporated into the larger nations.”⁴ It was not until 1899 - and in the Austro- Hungarian Empire - that social democrats began to give serious attention to the nationality question. Austrian socialists like Otto Bauer and Karl Renner argued that individual nationalities will remain even after the social transformation of society.

In essence, social democrats throughout Europe were faced with the question of how to organize their political parties, whether on the territorial or national principle. In other words, should there be social democratic parties that repre­sent supporters throughout an entire state, or, following Bauer and Renner in Austria-Hungary, should there be parties for individual nationalities which, in turn, would be loosely associated in a federation of social-democratic parties? Of the two leading socialist parties in the Russian Empire, the Socialist Revolution­ary party (est. 1902) favored federalism and national-cultural autonomy, whereas the Social-Democratic Labor party (est. 1898), with its Menshevik and Bolshevik wings, supported one party for the empire as a whole. The argument of the lat­ter was that federalism and national-cultural autonomy were reactionary phenom­ena that would assist the bourgeoisie in continuing to dominate the masses at the expense of social change. The differing positions on the nationality question are what posed a dilemma for Ukrainians and political activists from other national minorities in the Russian Empire. Should ethnic Ukrainians join with all-Russian parties operating on Ukrainian lands, or should they form their own parties on either a territorial or an ethnolinguistic basis? Should Ukrainians seek some form of autonomy, even independence, or should Ukrainian lands remain an integral part of a future restructured Russian Empire? Debates on these issues are what led to splits, mergers, and the creation of several new parties during the first two decades of the twentieth century.

Dnieper Ukraine’s first party, the Revolutionary Ukrainian party, for instance, came into existence in 1900 because young enthusiasts from Kharkiv - some Marx­ists and some nationalists - did not want to join any of the all-Russian revolutionary parties. They were at a loss, however, to draw up a program on their own and so turned to a recently graduated lawyer, Mykola Mikhnovs’kyi, who provided them with the text of patriotic speech, printed as a pamphlet in Austrian Galicia under the title, Samostiina Ukraina (Independent Ukraine). Initially, the Revolutionary Ukrainian party found inspiration in the pamphlet, which, as its title implies, called for the creation of an independent Ukrainian state. Mikhnovs’kyi’s basic premise was that national independence must be obtained for Ukrainians before social liberation could be achieved.

Not all Revolutionary Ukrainian party members agreed, however, and argu­ments regarding national versus social priorities (Samostiina Ukraina never even mentioned the word socialism) led to a falling-out with Mikhnovs’kyi, who in 1902 established his own Ukrainian People’s party. National independence was the pri­mary goal of the People’s party. Those remaining in the Revolutionary Ukrainian party in contrast emphasized their commitment to social change before national independence, and in 1903 they even accepted a merger with the small Ukrainian Socialist party (est. 1900). The emphasis on socialism, however, soon gave rise to controversy over Marxist ideology and the issue of relations with the burgeoning all-Russian socialist movement.

Influenced by Lenin’s views on the nationality question, several figures (M. Basok-Melenivs’kyi, Dmytro Antonovych, Oleksander Skoropys’-Ioltukhovs’kyi) left the Revolutionary Ukrainian party in early 1905 to form the Ukrainian Social- Democratic Union, better known by its Ukrainian acronym, Spilka. The Spilka was little more than a regional unit of the Marxist Russian Social-Democratic Labor party, and it accepted the latter’s view that nationalism was a bourgeois ideology invented to confuse and divide the working proletariat.

With the departure of the left-wing socialists who formed the Spilka, the Revo­lutionary Ukrainian party preserved its ideological commitment to socialist princi­ples and continued to stress the idea of Ukrainian national distinctiveness within a future federated Russian republic. To emphasize its goals, the party changed its name in 1905 to the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Labor party. Notwithstanding its relative weakness during the early years, the party had several members (Symon Petliura, Volodymyr Vynnychenko, Mykola Porsh) who later were to play leading roles in Ukrainian political life.

Besides the national socialist, anational socialist, and nationalist political orien­tations - represented respectively by the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Labor party, the Spilka, and the Ukrainian People’s party - Dnieper Ukrainian politics had a more moderate orientation, represented by the Ukrainian Democratic, later Ukrainian Democratic Radical party. Founded in 1905, this party was headed by such leaders from the General Ukrainian Non-Party Democratic Organization as levhen Chykalenko, Serhii lefremov, and Borys Hrinchenko, who had become convinced that it was necessary to move from the purely cultural to the political sphere. This group called for the introduction of a parliamentary government, civ­il liberties, the use of the Ukrainian language, and a local Ukrainian parliament, all within a federated democratic Russian Empire. To promote its program, the Ukrainian Democratic Radical party published the first Ukrainian-language daily newspapers in Kiev, Hromads’ka dumka (1905-06) and Rada (1906-14), and gen­erally cooperated with the Russian Constitutional Democratic party (the Kadets).

After 1905, the new Ukrainian political parties, which had until then led a semi­legal existence, were given a chance to function openly. In fact, the whole Ukrain­ian movement was given a new lease of life. This change was related to Russia’s defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 and the subsequent domestic dis­turbances that came to be known as the Revolution of 1905. As a result of these events, Tsar Nicholas II was compelled in October to issue a manifesto that called for elections to Russia’s first parliament, known as the Duma. In this new atmos­phere, which also gave rise to the Stolypin agrarian reforms and a decline in the influence of the zemstvos (see chapter 26), the enforcement of censorship laws was relaxed. In February 1905, in response to a tsarist request about censorship, the Russian Academy of Sciences declared that “Little Russian” (i.e., Ukrainian) is a language distinct from “Great Russian” and recommended that the restrictions of the 1876 Ems Ukase and of the revised version of 1881 be lifted.

Although the Ems Ukase was never repealed, its provisions were not enforced, with the result that in December 1905 the first Ukrainian-language newspapers in the Russian Empire began to appear - Khliborob in Lubny, Ridnyi krai in Poltava, and Hromads'ka dumkain Kiev. By 1908 there were nine newspapers with a circula­tion of 20,000 copies as well as the first Ukrainian-language scholarly publications (Ukra'ina, 1907, and Zapysky Ukrains’koho naukovoho tovarystva, 1908—18). Lan­guage standardization was enhanced following the appearance of several gram­mars (including scholarly ones by levhen Tymchenko and Ahatanhel Kryms’kyi) and the monumental four-volume dictionary of the Ukrainian language (1909) under the editorial direction of Borys Hrinchenko. Public access to these materials was made possible through new publishing houses, bookstores (by 1908 nine in Kiev and several other cities specialized in Ukrainian publications), and the open­ing of forty Prosvita popular-education societies on the model used in Austrian Galicia.

While the tsarist ministry of education did not lift its ban on Ukrainian-lan­guage instruction in schools, beginning in 1906 one Orthodox bishop (Parfenii Levyts’kyi) encouraged Ukrainian to be used in sermons and church schools in the Podolia eparchy; and a few university professors (Mykola Sumtsov at Kharkiv and Oleksander Hrushevs’kyi at Odessa) lectured in Ukrainian. Finally, in the fall of 1905, the L’viv University historian and president of the Shevchenko Sci­entific Society in Austrian Galicia, Mykhailo S. Hrushevs’kyi, began to return for extended periods of time to the Russian Empire, where he worked closely with the Ukrainian parliamentary club in St Petersburg. In 1907, he moved the influential Ukrainian-language civic and literary journal, Literaturno-naukovyi vistnky, from Aus­trian Galicia to Kiev, and the following year he became head of the first openly pro­Ukrainian learned society in the Russian Empire, the Ukrainian Scientific Society.

When elections were held in 1906 to the Duma, the Russian Empire’s first par­liament, sixty-two members were returned from the Ukrainian provinces, and for­ty-four of these declared themselves as ethnic Ukrainians. The participation of the new political parties was limited, however, as the socialists boycotted the election, and the Ukrainian Democratic Radicals, fearing the prospect of being able to exert little influence, joined the ticket of the moderately liberal Russian Constitutional Democratic party, the Kadets. Notwithstanding their cooperation with the Kadets, who were sympathetic to non-Russian nationalities but opposed to federalism or political autonomy for such groups, the Democratic Radicals, led by Illia Shrah, set up a Ukrainian parliamentary caucus to press for Ukrainian language rights. At the same time, they beagn publishing in St Petersburg a Russian-language organ, Ukrainskii viestnik (1906), to inform the empire’s politically conscious public about Ukrainian issues.

Despite optimistic expectations, Russia’s first attempt at parliamentary democ­racy was short-lived, and just over two months following its convocation (10 May 1906) the First Duma was dissolved. Elections were held the following year to the Second Duma, which lasted not much longer than the first (5 March to 15 June 1907). Two-fifths of the deputies were socialists, and among them were four­teen from the Ukrainian Social-Democratic (Spilka) party, who joined with other nationally-conscious deputies to form a forty-seven member caucus called the Ukrainian Labor Club (Ukrains’ka Trudova Hromada) with its own Ukrainian- language organ, Ridna sprava - Visti z Dumy (St Petersburg, 1907). The caucus demanded the introduction of the Ukrainian language into schools, the establish­ment of a university department of Ukrainian studies, and local autonomy.

Yet as soon as Tsar Nicholas II felt secure, Russia’s tentative experiment with parliamentarism was decisively curtailed. Even though the Third and Fourth Dumas met, in 1907-1912 and 1912-1917 respectively, in the interim the elector­al laws had been changed. This meant that the Duma was even less representative than before (50 percent of the seats were now in the hands of the landed gentry) and was politically ineffective. Moreover, there were very few nationally conscious Ukrainian representatives in the Third and Fourth Dumas, and no Ukrainian par­liamentary club.

Accordingly, the few political advances made by the Ukrainian movement since 1905 were quickly reversed. By 1908, several members of the Ukrainian Social- Democratic Labor party and the Spilka had been arrested, and the weakened organizations forced underground or into exile and eventual dissolution. Mikh- novs’kyi’s small Ukrainian People’s party as well as the relatively influential and politically moderate Ukrainian Democratic Radical party ceased to exist. In 1908, members of the latter group, headed by Chykalenko, Iefremov, and Hrushevs’kyi, formed the non-party Society of Ukrainian Progressivists (TUP), but this group was forced to revert to the apolitical cultural approach to the Ukrainian problem. Despite their restricted activity, the Ukrainian Progressivists continued to exist in the hope that the political situation would eventually improve and that Ukrain­ian cultural life might be encouraged to function within a future constitutional and parliamentary Russian Empire. Meanwhile, its members tried to publicize and defend the Ukrainian cause in the face of growing Russian chauvinist opinion.

Such chauvinism was evident in both the policies of the imperial government and the writings of Russian publicists. In 1910, Petr A. Stolypin, the tsarist min­ister of the interior concerned with containing potential revolutionary activity by a combination of police repression and gradual socioeconomic reform in the countryside, issued an order closing the Prosvita societies, prohibiting universi­ty lectures in Ukrainian, and enforcing once again the 1876 ban on Ukrainian- language publications. These official acts were complemented by a campaign in the Russian-language press in Dnieper Ukraine (Kievlianin, Kiev) to castigate what was described as the blasphemy of Ukrainian separatism. There was also outspo­ken criticism by Russian nationalist intellectuals like Vasilii Shul’gin and Timofei Florinskii and even by more moderate Kadet leaders like Pavel Miliukov and Petr Struve, who at best might tolerate some Ukrainian cultural activity but who con­sidered any talk of political autonomy a dangerous threat to the “natural” unity of Russia. Consequently, the revival of organizations representing ethnic Ukrainians and the first attempts at Ukrainian political activity during the first decade of the twentieth century were brought to an untimely end by the reinstitution of imperial bureaucratic repression and a backlash of Russian public opinion.

By the outbreak of World War I in 1914 the Ukrainian national movement in Dnieper Ukraine at most had gone through the first, heritage-gathering stage of intelligentsia-inspired nationalism. Political circumstances in the Russian Empire either precluded its further evolution outright or allowed the early organization­al and political stirrings insuffient time in which to develop. The result was that the Ukrainian-oriented intelligentsia, with its conceptual framework of mutually exclusive identities, was effectively cut off from working with and educating the population at large in a Ukrainian national spirit. Meanwhile, that same popu­lation was subjected to a state-imposed national movement and was continually exposed to the Russian imperial ideology, whether in schools, churches, or the army. And if an ethnic Ukrainian peasant ever left the village, he or she entered “Russian” towns and cities, albeit on Ukrainian territory, where all official transac­tions - in factory workplaces, in governmental offices, on the railroads, and so on - were conducted in Russian.

Given this environment, it is not surprising that the conceptual framework of a hierarchy of multiple loyalties continued to prevail in Dnieper Ukraine until World War I. Ukrainianness as something distinct from Russianness had no pres­tige, and being a Ukrainian brought no tangible social, economic, or cultural advantages in the nineteenth-century Russian Empire. Those ethnic Ukrainians who were socially mobile could improve their status only by becoming completely russified or, at the very least, by being Russians from Little Russia. As for the idea of an exclusive Ukrainian ethnic identity, it prevailed only among the intellectual and political fringes of Dnieper-Ukrainian society. Accordingly, before 1914 it was not in the Russian Empire but rather in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, particularly in Galicia, that Ukrainian nationalism survived and even prospered.

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