The Ukrainophiles

The nascent Ukrainian movement, which suffered a sharp setback when the Brotherhood of Sts Cyril and Methodius was crushed in 1847, showed new signs of life after the death of the arch-conservative Nicholas I in 1855.

The prime concern of this group was to improve the lot of Ukrainians, especially the peasantry. Except for Shevchenko, all agreed that hromada activity should be apolitical and should focus on the enlightenment of the masses. Kostomarov and Kulish were adamant about restricting their activities to the cultural field and avoiding any radicalism that might arouse the ire of the authorities.

To popularize their ideas, the St Petersburg group obtained, with great difficulty, permission from the authorities and in 1861 established Osnova, the first Ukrainian periodical in the Russian Empire. It was funded by two wealthy Ukrainians, Vasyl Tarnavsky and Hryhorii Galagan. During its brief twenty-two-month existence, Osnova functioned as a means of communication and arouser of national consciousness among the Ukrainian intelligentsia scattered throughout the empire.

The renewed activity of the Ukrainians was well received by the Russian intelligentsia of the capital. Russian journals accepted articles in Ukrainian and supported Ukrainian cultural development. Shevchenko often appeared at public readings with such titans of Russian literature as Ivan Turgenev and Fedor Dostoevsky.

In Kiev, meanwhile, a new generation of Ukrainian enthusiasts composed mostly of students also formed a hromada. Numbering several hundred, the Kievans concentrated on developing a network of Sunday schools for the illiterate peasantry. Between 1859 and 1862 they established several schools, with hundreds of pupils, in the region of Kiev. In the long run, however, the most important feature of the Kiev hromada was the new type of adherents that it attracted.

Among the Polish and Polonized nobles of the Right Bank there appeared in the early 1860s a small group of students who, conscious-stricken by the age-old exploitation of the peasantry by their own class, resolved to draw closer to the masses among whom they lived. Adopting Ukrainian speech, dress, and customs, this group, led by Volodymyr Antonovych, was called the khlopomany (lovers of the peasantry).

On the eve of the Polish uprising of 1863, the khlopomany openly broke with Polish society, declared themselves Ukrainians, joined the Kiev hromada, and plunged into the work of enlightening the peasantry. Their sense of obligation to the narod was reflected in an open letter they sent to a Moscow newspaper: “As individuals who have benefited from a higher education, we should concentrate all our efforts on providing the people with the opportunity to gain an education, become conscious of their own needs, and obtain the ability to fulfill them. In a word, through their own internal [personal] development, the people should reach a level to which they are legally entitled.”¹

In response to a Polish accusation of betrayal, Antonovych, the scion of an old, Polonized Ukrainian noble family, published his famous “Confession” in Osnova.

Inspired by the example of the Kievans, the Ukrainian intelligentsia in Poltava, Chernihiv, Kharkiv, and Odessa also established their hromady and expanded the Sunday-school network until there were close to 100 such schools in Ukraine. Members immersed themselves in the traditional study of ethnography, philology, and history. In the style of the khlopomany, they adopted the dress of the Ukrainian peasants, observed their customs, ate their food, consorted with them in taverns, sang their songs, and, in the privacy of their homes, spoke Ukrainian. There evolved among them a cult of the Cossack, replete with the wearing of colorful Cossack dress. However, it was not Cossack hetmans and starshyna whom they idealized but the freedom-loving Zaporozhians and haidamaky who supposedly epitomized the nature and strivings of the Ukrainian masses. In the latter part of the 19th century, this romanticized, apolitical combination of populism, volunteerism, and Ukrainian ethnicity became known as Ukrainophilism.

But even the modest, measured activity of the Ukrainophiles aroused suspicions. In 1863, when the Polish uprising was at its height and suspicion of non-Russians mounted, the government and even the Russian intelligentsia concluded that the Ukrainian movement represented a potentially mortal threat to Russia and they turned against the Ukrainophiles.

Part of the Russian press, led by such ultrapatriotic newspapers as Vestnik iugozapadnoi Rossii, Kievlianin, and Moskovskii vedomosti, launched a vicious campaign against the Ukrainophiles and their alleged attempts to undermine the Russian state. Soon much of the Russian intelligentsia, which until only recently had viewed Ukrainophiles with benevolence as enthusiasts of a harmless, colorful regionalism, now began to see them as a genuine threat to the empire. While many Russians believed that the Ukrainian movement was a Polish plot to undermine their hold on the Right Bank, the Poles viewed it as a Russian ploy to weaken their position in the region.

The Ukrainians, for their part, hastened to stress their harmlessness. Antonovych and about twenty members of the Kiev hromada published an open letter assuring the Russian public that “our goal is only to educate the people,” and that “all talk of separatism is a silly joke since we neither need it nor will we benefit from it.”² But their remonstrances had little effect. In July 1863, Petr Valuev, the minister of internal affairs, secretly banned the publication in Ukrainian of all scholarly, religious, and especially pedagogical publications. Only belles-lettres were allowed to appear in the “Little Russian dialect.” Valuev declared that the Ukrainian language “never existed, does not exist and shall never exist.”³ Soon after, the hromady disbanded, Osnova ceased publication (for want of subscribers more than because of repression), and a number of Ukrainian activists were banished to distant parts of the empire.

For almost a decade the Ukrainophiles were forced to lie low. Early in the 1870s, as the xenophobia of 1863 dissipated and censorship was relaxed, the Kievans slowly resumed their activities. Antonovych (now a professor at Kiev University) and his colleagues, reinforced by such talented adherents as Mykhailo Drahomanov, Oleksander Rusov, Mykola Ziber, and Serhii Podolynsky, surreptitiously formed the Old Hromada, so named to differentiate its older, experienced members (about seventy in number) from the young hromady that were also reappearing and that consisted mostly of students. Again, the Ukrainophiles concentrated on nonpolitical activities.

These activities expanded considerably in 1873 when the Kiev branch of the Imperial Geographical Society was founded. The Ukrainophiles enrolled in this semiofficial institution en masse and gained virtual control of it. Under its auspices they commenced the publication of archival materials and founded a museum and a library that collected Ukrainian materials. In 1875, the Old Hromada acquired the Russian newspaper Kievskii Telegraf and used it to provide a Ukrainian prespective on current events.⁴

The ban on Ukrainian publications, however, remained a galling impediment to the development of national culture. To circumvent this restriction, individuals such as Kulish, Konysky, Drahomanov, and others established contacts with Ukrainians in Galicia and used their Ukrainian-language press, especially the newspaper Pravda, to express views banned in Russia. In 1873, with the help of the aristocratic Elisaveta Skoropadska-Myloradovych and the wealthy sugar-baron Vasyl Symyrenko, the Ukrainophiles initiated and financed the creation in Lviv of the Shevchenko Literary Society, which, several decades later, developed into an unofficial Ukrainian academy of arts and sciences.

But it would only be a matter of time before the Ukrainophiles again aroused suspicion. As was so often the case, some of the Ukrainians’ worst enemies emerged from their own midst.

An imperial commission, appointed by an alarmed Tsar Alexander II and including Iuzefovych, recommended a total ban on the import and publication of Ukrainian books, a prohibition against the use of Ukrainian on the stage (even the lyrics of Ukrainian songs that were sung in the theater were translated into other languages), the closing of the Kievskii Telegraf, and a subsidy for Slovo – a pro-Russian paper in Galicia. The Ministry of Education was instructed to prohibit the teaching of any subject in Ukrainian in the elementary schools, to remove from school libraries books in Ukrainian or by Ukrainophiles, and to replace Ukrainophile teachers with Russians. Finally, the commission proposed the liquidation of the Kiev branch and the exile of several Ukrainian activists, most notably Drahomanov and Pavlo Chubynsky. In short, this was a more systematic and ruthless attempt than Valuev’s had been to paralyze the Ukrainian movement. Alexander II, who was vacationing in the German town of Ems, accepted all the recommendations of the commission and on 18 May 1876 the Ems Ukaz went into effect.

Not only did the Ems Ukaz cripple Ukrainophile activity but it brought into question some of the basic assumptions on which the Ukrainian movement rested. Despite the experience of 1863, the Ukrainophiles continued to believe that if they restricted themselves to moderate views and apolitical, cultural work, they would avoid government repression. Kulish even developed a theory to justify strictly cultural Ukrainianism. According to him, the Russians had unusually well-honed, political state-building skills – while the Ukrainians, as demonstrated by their unfortunate history, did not. Therefore, to Kulish it was natural and even beneficial for the Ukrainians to remain in the Russian Empire and to enjoy the security, power, and prestige it afforded them. But he also believed that the Ukrainians with their splendid folklore were culturally more gifted than the Russians. Thus, it seemed only logical that Ukrainians should leave politics to the Russians and concentrate on culture, their strong point. However, the Ems Ukaz shattered Kulish’s hopes for a live-and-let-live relationship between Ukrainian culture and Russian politics, and led him to adopt even more unrealistic views to justify his brand of cultural Ukrainianism.

Kostomarov, another of the “founding fathers” of the Ukrainian movement, became openly defeatist after 1876. Having once written defiantly “Let neither Russians nor Poles believe that they own the land upon which the Ukrainians live,” he now advised his colleagues to submit obediently to tsarist policies.⁵ Other leading Ukrainophiles, such as Antonovych and Zhytetsky, opted for compromise. While they remained committed to fostering Ukrainian cultural distinctiveness, they emphasized that it should not lead to the separation of the Ukrainians from the salutary impact of Russian culture and empire. Indeed, they believed that it was possible to be committed simultaneously to their “narrower” Ukrainian homeland and to the “broader” all-Russian society, which consisted of Russians, Ukrainians, and Belorussians. Others still, such as Borys Hrinchenko and Oleksander Konysky, considered themselves to be exclusively and staunchly Ukrainian and wished to minimize Ukraine’s links with Russia. But they had no concrete, realistic program for bringing this circumstance about. Thus, under the threat of tsarist repression, considerable differences about the goals, tactics, and even the definition of Ukrainian nationhood emerged among the Ukrainophiles and added to their already daunting difficulties. Drahomanov and the rise of Ukrainian socialism

The need for fresh ideas was most acutely felt by the younger members of the Kiev hromada. One of these, Mykhailo Drahomanov, almost single-handedly undertook the task of expanding the intellectual and ideological horizons of his fellow Ukrainians. Despite the fact that his views did not win universal acceptance among the Ukrainian intelligentsia, they inspired many younger members to move beyond the cultural activity of their elders and to address, in a Ukrainian context, the key political, national, and socioeconomic issues of the day.

Born in 1841 in Hadiach, near Poltava, Drahomanov belonged to the petty gentry that traced its roots to the Cossack starshyna of the Hetmanate. While native traditions were respected in his family, they were overshadowed by the cosmopolitan liberalism of Drahomanov’s father, an unusually enlightened and well-read individual. By the time he entered Kiev University, Drahomanov had become a committed democrat, filled with a strong desire to aid the narod. This led him to become a leader in the efforts to establish the first Sunday schools in Russia for illiterate peasants. It was while working with the peasants that Drahomanov, realizing the need for Ukrainian-language educational materials, developed an interest in things Ukrainian and joined the Kiev hromada. It was, therefore, not a romanticized image of Ukraine that brought him to the Ukrainian movement, but a desire to aid the downtrodden in a practical way.

Drahomanov’s goal for Ukraine was the achievement of a political, socioeconomic, and cultural status similar to that of advanced European countries. However, he believed that the achievement of this status was possible only if the Ukrainian movement became more broadly based and appealed to the masses by addressing concrete, bread-and-butter issues. In his view, Ukrainians, who were (in his words) a “plebian nation” of oppressed and toiling masses that lacked a national elite, were ideally suited for political programs combining both national and socioeconomic concerns. Hence his declaration that in Ukraine, a true democrat had to be a Ukrainian patriot and a genuine Ukrainian patriot had to be a democrat.

An avowed federalist, Drahomanov did not advocate Ukrainian separatism from Russia. But because he feared the potential of any powerful, centralized state to restrict the rights of the individual, Drahomanov favored the reorganization of the Russian Empire into a loose confederation of autonomous regions – not necessarily ethnically based – in which decision making rested primarily on the local level. Although he often urged Ukrainians, especially those in Galicia, to acquaint themselves with the best of Russian culture, Drahomanov rejected Pushkin’s view that “all Slavic rivers should flow into a Russian sea.” In a famous article, “The Lost Epoch,” he claimed that on balance Ukrainians lost more than they gained under Russian rule. He stated clearly that the loyalty of Ukrainians should not be to “all Russia” but primarily to Ukraine: “Educated Ukrainians usually work for anything in the world except for Ukraine and its people… They must take an oath to themselves not to desert the Ukrainian cause. They must realize that every educated man that leaves Ukraine, every cent which is not spent for Ukrainian purposes, every word that is not spoken in Ukrainian, is a waste of the capital of the Ukrainian people, and that with things as they are, anything lost is irreplaceable.”⁶

Drahomanov’s career was that of a man completely committed to his ideals. During the repression of 1875–76, he refused to renounce his views and chose foreign exile instead. Before leaving Kiev, he reached an agreement with the Old Hromada whereby with its financial support, he promised to publish a journal devoted to the Ukrainian cause. This was the genesis of Hromada, the first Ukrainian political journal, which appeared irregularly in the late 1870s and early 1880s in Geneva, the home of a small group of Ukrainian political emigres who joined Drahomanov. But along with national issues, Drahomanov also increasingly espoused radical socialist views in Hromada. As a result, a split occurred between him and the much more conservative Kievan Ukrainophiles in 1885 and this rift led to the demise of the journal.

However, as his links with the Ukrainians of Russia weakened, those with the Galician Ukrainians increased. Drahomanov had already visited Galicia and Transcarpathia in the 1870s, and since that time had worked systematically to familiarize West Ukrainians with their compatriots in the east. In time, Drahomanov’s ideas struck root among a small but dedicated segment of Galician youth and would lead eventually to the establishment of the first Ukrainian socialist party.

Drahomanov was not the only Ukrainian activist to be drawn to socialism. His close friends from the Kiev hromada, Mykola Ziber (a half-Swiss and half-Ukrainian economist) and Serhii Podolynsky (the son of wealthy landowners), also played an important role in spreading socialist ideas among Ukrainians. Ziber is best known for being one of the very first intellectuals in Russia to disseminate Marx’s ideas in 1871. The energetic Podolynsky, who developed contacts with Marx and Engels, worked closely with Drahomanov in Europe and helped to organize socialist circles in Ukraine and Galicia.