Toward a Critique of Drahomanov’s Program

In his “Avtobiograficheskaia zametka” (Autobiographical Note) written in 1883, Drahomanov complains that “in my polemics with various camps carried on over many years, I have never encountered a truly con­scientious opponent, that is, one who would present my views correctly and then refute them with his own arguments, especially factual ones.”⁸ This rebuke was addressed to contemporaries, but it may also be applied to many of Drahomanov’s posthumous critics.

The all-Ukrainian character of Drahomanov’s program should be stressed at the outset. Drahomanov was the first political publicist and ideologue whose view included the whole of Ukrainian territory from the Kuban region to Transcarpathia. The fate of the “wounded brother’’ of Transcarpathia was particularly close to his heart, and he devoted a sepa­rate paragraph to it in the “Introduction’’ toHromada.

This leads us to a related matter. Drahomanov was a consistent sup­porter of the ethnic (or, as it used to be called, “ethnographic’’) princi­ple. For him, Ukraine meant the territory on which Ukrainians consti­tuted the majority of the population. Proceeding from this principle, Drahomanov refuted the pretensions of Ukraine’s neighbours to rule the territory and people of Ukraine. He was particularly severe in his criti­cism of Polish historical legitimism, in whose name Polish patriots aspired to restore the old Commonwealth in its pre-1772 borders, includ­ing Right-Bank Ukraine and eastern Galicia. Drahomanov argued that Poland had a right to exist only on the territory inhabited by the Polish people and that claims to ethnically non-Polish territory were extremely harmful not only to Ukrainian interests but also to the long-range national interests of Poland itself. The experience of succeeding generations has resoundingly vindicated the accuracy of this diagnosis.⁹

Drahomanov correctly foresaw that Ukrainian identity would become strong only when all of Ukraine was covered “with a network of com­rades and associations, all of them linked one to another.’’ In other words, he advocated the creation of a Ukrainian social “infrastructure.’’ The absence of this infrastructure—that is, the amorphousness and lack of organization of the popular masses and the alienation of the educated strata of society from the common people—was the fundamental reason for the weakness of Ukrainian identity in the nineteenth century. The Ukrainian national movement did indeed follow the path toward which Drahomanov directed it. In this respect, great successes were achieved, primarily in Galicia. Because of unfavourable political circumstances, the Ukrainians of Dnieper Ukraine did not manage to build their infra­structure until the Revolution itself, and this fact weighed decisively on the outcome of the liberation struggle of 1917-21.

Drahomanov called for the politicization of the Ukrainian movement and fought against the conception of so-called apolitical Ukrainianism adhered to by most members of the Stara Hromada, whether out of sin­cere conviction or a desire for protective colouring. This did not mean, of course, that Drahomanov, himself an eminent scholar, lacked an ap­preciation of cultural values. But he quite rightly believed that cultural life cannot develop normally when a nation is deprived of political free­dom. Nonetheless—and this is a most important point—he organically linked national liberation with the struggle for human rights, a demo­cratic political order, and social justice. Drahomanov was an ardent Ukrainian patriot, but he did not make an earthly god of the nation. His patriotism was anchored in universal values, and in it there was not a trace of chauvinism.

Probably the most attractive aspect of Drahomanov’s program is the breadth of its intellectual horizons. Drahomanov did not take a parochial view of the Ukrainian question, nor did he regard it as a matter of merely current interest; rather, he considered it in historical perspective and in a universal context. It is another question whether Drahomanov’s philoso­phy ofhistory is wholly acceptable to Ukrainians today. But it is certain that in the person of Drahomanov Ukrainians have a political thinker of great intellectual stature from whom there is much to be learned even when one disagrees with him.

Finally, Drahomanov’s accomplishment as a creator of Ukrainian pub- Iicistic prose should not be neglected. In the seventies and eighties of the last century, when Drahomanov was active, there was as yet no fully de­veloped Ukrainian political terminology or publicistic style. For Drahomanov, as for other “conscious” Ukrainians of the time, it was easier to write of higher matters in Russian than in Ukrainian. Reading the “Introduction” and other works of Drahomanov written in Ukrain­ian, we sense that he was contending with linguistic difficulties.

One point of Drahomanov ’ s program that cannot fail to offend the con­temporary Ukrainian reader and arouse his spontaneous protest is the re­jection of the idea OfUkrainian state independence. This exceedingly im­portant problem requires more detailed consideration; we should try to comprehend Drahomanov’s motives and arguments.

In analyzing Drahomanov’s stand against independence it is necessary to distinguish clearly between two aspects, which we shall term prag­matic and ideological. There is no internal relationship whatever between these two aspects, and we must consider each of them separately.

On the pragmatic side, Drahomanov saw no realistic preconditions for a separatist Ukrainian policy at that time. It was rendered impossible not only by the Ukrainian people’s lack of organization and the relative weakness of the Ukrainian national movement, but also by the contem­porary international situation. Drahomanov considered that the cause of Ukrainian independence could be actualized only in the event of a great European war and would require the support of one of the great powers. As he stated in the “Introduction,” without the active assistance of France under Napoleon III, there would have been no independent, united Italian state. But there was no prospect of Ukraine’s obtaining such outside assistance.

We must admit that Drahomanov’s negative conclusions about the prospects for Ukrainian independence objectively reflected contempo­rary political conditions.

Drahomanov was also correct in associating the prospects for the Ukrainian cause with the political evolution of Russia and Austria- Hungary, i.e., the process of the democratization of these states. Later developments confirmed the accuracy of his prognosis. In Dnieper Ukraine, the Ukrainian movement emerged from Clandestinity and began to gain strength only after the Revolution of 1905, which abolished the Ems Ukase and partially limited the tsarist autocracy. The crucial turning point in Galicia was the reform of the law on elections in 1907, which in­troduced universal direct suffrage for males to the Vienna parliament. Only at this point did the Austrian government begin to take the Ukrain­ians into account as a genuine force.

But in addition to the pragmatic side of Drahomanov^,s rejection of in­dependence, there was also a second, ideologically motivated, aspect. As a supporter of the doctrine of anarchism (“non-authoritarianism”), Drahomanov regarded statehood— all statehood—with principled dis­trust.

In order to explain this position of Drahomanov⁵s, it should be recalled that anarchist and semi-anarchist ideas were widespread in European po­litical thought during the nineteenth century. “The period with which we are now concerned (the era of the seventies and at least up to the mid­eighties) is characterized by the dominance within revolutionary circles throughout the continent, except in Germany, of greater or lesser tenden­cies toward anarchism.’’¹⁰ Indeed, even the theoreticians of German so­cial democracy, Marx and Engels, did not in principle constitute an ex­ception to this rule. According to their teachings, the final stage of hu­man development is supposed to bring with it the “withering away of the state,” although this will occur only after the triumph of a socialist revo­lution and a transitional “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Views approxi­mating those of the anarchists were also held by many exponents of clas­sical liberalism. They often favoured the conception of the “minimal state” or the “night-watchman state,” meaning a state whose respon­sibilities would be restricted to the defence of public order and tranquil­lity; all else was left to individual initiative and voluntary association. Some liberal thinkers expressed serious doubts whether the state should intervene in such matters as public education and health care, or whether, for instance, compulsory education and obligatory vaccination against smallpox did not constitute, as it were, an inadmissible limitation of indi­vidual freedom. It should be added that a leaning toward anarchism is es­pecially understandable in the mind of someone born in the Russian Empire, for whom the idea of statehood was inevitably associated with oppression and arbitrary rule.

Accordingly, Drahomanov believed that it would be possible for the Ukrainian people to bypass the problem of independent statehood in their historical development and to work toward an ideal “non-authoritarian and stateless order. ’ ’ There is no question that he was deeply mistaken in this belief. It may be agreed that the establishment of a Ukrainian state is an exceedingly difficult undertaking, and that it was so not only in Drahomanov’s time but remains so today, a century later. But there are hundreds of states in the world, and new ones keep making their ap­pearance. By the same token, there is nothing impossible in principle about the establishment of a Ukrainian state. On the other hand, Drahomanov’s utopian “non-authoritarianism” is something that no one has ever seen and that one can scarcely expect to see.

This cardinal error of Drahomanov’s was rooted in a mistaken under­standing of the idea of freedom. It is untrue that statehood and freedom are by nature incompatible concepts. On the contrary, Hegel was right when he asserted that freedom is possible only within the framework of the rule of state law. Nor is there any basis for the belief that “the voluntary association of free and equal individuals’’—Drahomanov’s socio-political ideal—will ever replace the state, even in the most distant foreseeable futre. Voluntary association has an important function in the life of society, but it is not a panacea. For the coexistence of people in so­ciety continually produces new individual and group conflicts, whose resolution necessitates a government endowed with appropriate authority and armed with the “sword of justice.’’ It is desirable that people obey the law voluntarily. But people are not angels, and a law differs from an ethical norm in that it is backed, in case of need, by the sanction of force. This applies in equal measure to a democratic state. State power in a democracy is differently constructed and functions differently from that in an absolute monarchy or a totalitarian dictatorship. But democracy is by no means to be identified with the absence of state power or anarchy.

Drahomanov’s theoretical principle—his dislike of statehood as such and his mistaken concept of freedom—was the reason for his un­derestimation of the importance of the national state as an irreplaceable safeguard of national freedom. On this question, contemporary Ukrain­ian political thought occupies different positions from those defended by Drahomanov. Nevertheless, if we wish to be fair, we must remember certain “mitigating circumstances’’ that lessen the weight of Drahomanov’s “offence.’’

In the first place, Drahomanov’s stand against independence was not a consequence of Russophilism, of which he was groundlessly accused by integral-nationalist critics of the inter-war era. In his “Introduction,’’ Drahomanov characterized Russia as “the foreign Muscovite tsardom with boundless bureaucratic centralization’’ (139). Similar expressions are frequently to be found in his works.

Secondly, Drahomanov consistently advocated the organizational in­dependence of the Ukrainian movement, declaring himself opposed to centralized, “all-Russian” revolutionary organizations and Ukrainian participation in them. Drahomanov believed that the struggle against autocracy required a common front of all progressive forces of all the peoples of the Russian Empire. But he conceived of such a common front in the form of co-operation among equal and autonomous organizations constructed on national or regional bases. In a whole series of brilliant polemical works Drahomanov unmasked the centralist and, in essence, great-power inclinations of the Russian revolutionaries, thereby making enemies for himself in this milieu. The matter was one of outstanding, absolutely critical significance. It was not for nothing that Lenin, recog­nizing the right of the peoples of Russia to self-determination in theory, simultaneously fought with all his might to preserve the organizational unity of Social Democracy as an all-Russian party. Drahomanov and Lenin, who took opposing stands on the question of centralization and decentralization, agreed on one point: the organizational structure of a revolutionary movement predetermines the character of the political or­der brought about by a victorious revolution.

Thirdly, while rejecting the ideal of an independent state as a goal of Ukrainian politics, Drahomanov considered Ukraine a separate Slavic nation and did not deny the Ukrainian people a natural aptitude for inde­pendent political life. But it is precisely such pessimistic thoughts that we often encounter among the leading Ukrainian publicists and political thinkers of the nineteenth century. For example, Panteleimon Kulish argued in his programmatic “Epilog ê Chernoi rade” (Epilogue to The Black Council, 1857) that the existence of a separate Ukrainian literature was entirely legitimate, but simultaneously asserted the “political insig­nificance (nichtozhestvo) of Little Russia’’ and the “moral necessity of the merger into one state of the Southern Rus’ tribe with the Northern.’’¹¹ Forty years later, similar thoughts on the inherent political inferiority of the Ukrainian people were voiced by Volodymyr Antonovych, a former colleague of Drahomanov’s and later his antagonist, the leader of the moderate, non-socialist majority in the Stara Hromada. Antonovych maintained that “as a consequence of the ethnographic particularities of its nature, the Ukrainian people did not possess the aptitude to form an independent state.’’¹² Although Drahomanov was no partisan of indepen­dence, he never went to such extremes.

I should like to supplement my critique of Drahomanov’s anarchism and anti-independentism with some observations about his socialism (“communalism”). It should be noted first of all that neither by his scholarly training nor by his interests was Drahomanov an economist. He touched on economic questions only occasionally and in passing. Drahomanov believed that the human race was progressing from capital­ism to socialism, but offered no arguments to support this a priori convic­tion. Drahomanov’s socialism had an ethical basis—protest against so­cial injustice. Moreover, his socialistic outlook was strongly coloured by egalitarianism. Drahomanov not only rejected the system of estates which was still legally dominant in Russia at the time, but believed all social inequality and class differentiation to be evil. Drahomanov saw his ideal in a “classless society,’’ although he did not employ this term. Egalitarianism was linked in Drahomanov’s thought with populism. He often criticized the Russian populists for their idealization of the village commune (obshchincΓ) and elemental peasant revolts, but populist motifs clearly resound in his writings. In the “Introduction’’ to Hromada, Drahomanov identified Ukrainian nationality with its peasantry and con­demned the upper classes (“nobles, priests, and merchants’’) as ex­ploiters who profited from the people’s misery. Drahomanov believed that Ukraine was receptive ground for the spread of socialist ideas: “We think that our Ukraine, which has neither a clergy, nor a nobility, nor a merchant class, nor a state of its own, but has a peasantry quite intel­ligent by nature, will readily adopt the doctrine of a non-authoritarian and fraternal order... ’’(121).

In my critique of Drahomanov’s “communalism” I do not wish to en­ter into the problem of the relative advantages of capitalism and social­ism as economic systems; Drahomanov’s works offer no material for such a discussion. But I should like to consider some national-political and sociological implications of his “communalism.’’

Between Drahomanov’s anarchism and socialism there existed an in­ternal contradiction, although he was unconscious of it. Anarchism strives for the liquidation of the state; socialism does not. Drahomanov, naturally, conceived the future socialist order as one of voluntary associ­ation among groups of worker-producers. This conception is actually close to that of the later anarcho-syndicalism. The experience of the past century has clearly demonstrated its impracticality. In historical practice, socialism has always and everywhere gone hand in hand with the strengthening of state control over society. This applies not only to totalitarian socialist regimes, but also—in lesser measure—to democratic Western socialism.

Returning to Drahomanov’s time, we cannot help noticing that social­ism in all its varieties was then spreading throughout the whole of Europe; it began to penetrate Ukraine in the 1870s. Regarding the exis­tence of a Ukrainian socialist trend as natural, I consider the activity of its founders, Drahomanov and his associates, to have been positive. It was Drahomanov’s great historical service that he consciously adapted the universal ideas of socialism to Ukrainian conditions and attempted to draw Ukrainians away from participation in Russian socialist organiza­tions.

It is another question entirely whether socialism could have become the platform for all Ukrainians, for the whole of the national-liberation movement. Drahomanov asserted that “a Ukrainian who has not become a Communalist demonstrates only that he has not thought the matter through to the end and failed to learn his lesson fully...” (140). In es­sence, then, Drahomanov denied the right of existence to other, non­socialist Ukrainian intellectual and political currents, seeing in them only products of backwardness. Intelligent and educated people of good will cannot, as it were, fail to be socialists. In my opinion, it was the doc­trinaire in Drahomanov who was speaking at this point.

True, there are passages in Drahomanov^,s writings in which he treats this problem quite differently. In 1876, only two years before the “Introduction,” he wrote as follows: “We truly see that throughout the whole of the nineteenth century all sorts of political, social, and religious ideas—from monarchist to republican, from oligarchic to socialist, from the prayer-book to atheism—have been expressed and continue to be ex­pressed in the Little Russian language.”¹³ If this statement was true, however, Drahomanov ought to have asked himself whether the socialist current to which he himself belonged had any chance of swallowing up the other Ukrainian currents, such as conservatism, clericalism, liberal­ism, and nationalism. If not, then there ought logically to have followed an acceptance of pluralism in ideas and politics as a lasting feature of Ukrainian life. But Drahomanov did not draw this conclusion. There was no room in his political conception for the co-existence of various camps, each representing certain positive values.

Drahomanov’s doctrinaire attitude revealed itself most glaringly in his attitude to religion and the church. In his “Introduction” he went so far as to say the following: “In Austria our Communalists must come out against the clergy perhaps even more strongly than in Little Russian Ukraine, precisely because the clergy there has not renounced Ukrainian nationality so openly and, at times, deceives itself and others and even peasant communities into thinking that it stands behind these communi­ties and can improve their lot” (134-5). There is room for considerable doubt whether the lot of the Galician Ukrainian peasantry would have improved if the Greek Catholic Church, which was, after all, a Ukrainian national institution, had been replaced by Polish Roman Catholicism or Russian Orthodoxy!

The point here is not that Drahomanov was not personally a believer or that he called for the secularization of Ukrainian civic and cultural life. Drahomanov was right when he pointed out the undesirable effects of Galician clericalism. But as a result of specific historical conditions, the clergy was dominant in the educated Ukrainian stratum in Galicia. Secularization, therefore, depended on the growth of the lay intelligent­sia, and this was a protracted process. In the face of incontestable facts, Drahomanov did not wish to recognize that the Greek Catholic Church and clergy, whatever their faults, had rendered great historical services to the Galician Ukrainians. Nor could he accept the idea that in the future, despite progressive secularization, church organizations would continue to have the right to exist and to carry out important social and spiritual tasks.

In treating problems of social and economic organization, Drahomanov correctly asserted that the denationalization of the upper classes in Ukraine had deprived the popular masses of necessary social and cultural services. But he did not conclude that the Ukrainian people required their own “nobles, priests, and merchants,” for, if they were absent, these necessary functions would be fulfilled by nobles, priests, and merchants of foreign nationality.

To this one might reply that Drahomanov clearly saw the bitter social injustice suffered by the Ukrainian people. How, then, could one de­mand that he approve of the unjust contemporary social order?

But this rebuttal is based on a misunderstanding. Drahomanov had every reason to condemn social conditions in the Ukraine of his day; he also correctly saw that the national liberation of Ukraine was inseparable from the social emancipation of its people. But the heart of the matter lies in the direction of the proposed social change. A colossal distance sepa­rated the pauperized, illiterate, enserfed Ukrainian peasant masses from the well-off, educated, free Swiss people among whom Drahomanov lived at the time. This does not mean, of course, that Switzerland was an “earthly paradise,” although in comparison with Ukraine it might in­deed have appeared to be one. But instead of proposing such a realistic model for the Ukrainian liberation movement—to make the Ukrainian social structure approximate that of the advanced “capitalist” countries of the West-Drahomanov put forward the utopian conception of “communalism.”

The utopian nature of “communalism” consisted not so much in the slogan of socialization of the means of production—which Drahomanov did not, after all, emphasize particularly—as in its populist egalitarianism. This problem is too complex to be considered exhaus­tively in this paper. Christianity teaches that “everyone is equal before God,” which is interpreted in secularized terms as a demand to respect the human dignity of every individual. Abraham Lincoln said that he wished to be neither a slave nor a slave-owner, which is very close to Shevchenko’s ideal of Cossack liberty “with neither serf nor master.” A democratic order is based on the equality of all citizens before the law. Appropriate measures of socio-economic policy make it possible to redress inequality in wages and salaries, to improve social mobility for groups that have suffered discrimination, and to provide special care for those who require it. All this is self-evident, and, in criticizing “populist egalitarianism,” I have none of these measures in mind. I am concerned rather with a peculiar bias, extremely widespread among the East Euro­pean intelligentsia of the nineteenth century, which was characterized by a distaste for social differentiation as such, an inclination toward level­ling to the lowest denominator, toward the assessment of all social and cultural phenomena from the standpoint of the “younger brother’s” in­terests, and toward the identification of the nation with the peasantry.

Drahomanov was probably less afflicted with the populist complex than were many of his Ukrainian and Russian contemporaries, but he was not free of it. Among the items attesting to this is the synthetic account of Ukrainian history in the “Introduction” to Hromada. It is noteworthy that Drahomanov begins this survey with the rise of Cossackdom, prob­ably because medieval, princely, and boyar Kievan Rus’ was not easily amenable to a populist interpretation. In his discussion of the cultural and religious movement of the late sixteenth and the first half of the seven­teenth centuries, Drahomanov makes favourable mention of the repercus­sions OfProtestantism in Ukraine and of the Orthodox lay brotherhoods, but says nothing of the activity of Metropolitan Peter Mohyla and his col­laborators. As for Cossackdom, Drahomanov concentrates on the Zaporozhian Sich, but passes over the Hetmanate in silence. Yet we know that the Sich and the Hetmanate were the two poles of Cossack Ukraine and deserve the historian’s attention in equal measure. In other words, Drahomanov gave a one-sided and therefore distorted picture of Ukrainian history, in which only the “left” side is illuminated, while the “right” side remains in obscurity.

In my judgment, the common root of all the above-mentioned views of Drahomanov was a unilinear, Undialectical understanding of socio- historical development, and hence an inability to recognize the necessity of social differentiation and political pluralism. It should be added here that not only Drahomanov, but Ukrainian political thought in general, has experienced perpetual difficulty with the problem of differentiation and pluralism. Ukrainian left-wingers have dreamt of a “classless soci­ety” and Ukrainian right-wingers of “national solidarity,” two opposing conceptions that nevertheless have in common a rejection of pluralism. Alone among Ukrainian political thinkers, Viacheslav Lypynsky clearly saw that modern society cannot help but be differentiated along class lines, that a nation cannot consist only of the “toiling masses,” but must also include an elite, and that a state requires not only a government but also a legal opposition. (But it must be added that Lypynsky sought the solution to the problem of a pluralistic order on an undemocratic basis.)

We have concluded the critical analysis of the “Introduction” to Hromada of 1878, the first modern Ukrainian political program, but we must round out our discussion with a few supplementary remarks. Any­one familiar with the whole of Drahomanov’s creative output cannot doubt that his thought is much richer than can be determined on the basis of the “Introduction” alone. Moreover, the “Introduction” does not necessarily display the author at his best. In order to verify this thesis, it suffices to compare the “Introduction” with another programmatic treatise of Drahomanov’s, Volnyi soiuz—Vilna spilka (Free Union) of 1884.¹⁴ Instead of the utopian ideal of “non-authoritarianism,” we find in Free Union a detailed proposal for the constitutional reordering of the Russian Empire on a democratic and federalist basis. Many of Drahomanov’s proposals, such as those for constitutional safeguards of human and civil rights and a system of local and regional self­government, retain their significance even today. In Free Union Drahomanov did not preach “communalism” but instead proposed a whole series of well-thought-out, concrete socio-economic reforms, al­most all of which, it may be noted, were implemented in democratic countries in the following decades. Nor is there an apotheosis of the peasantry in Free Union, though there is a genuine concern for social jus­tice and for the well-being of the popular masses. There is no summary condemnation of the “lords” simply because they are “lords”; on the contrary, Drahomanov appeals to noblemen, industrialists, and even army officers to take an active part in the struggle against tsarist autocracy. There are no appeals to struggle against religion; instead, there is a conception of the constitutional separation of church and state on the American model, along with constitutional guarantees of complete freedom of conscience and religious worship. At the centre of his entire program in Free Union, Drahomanov placed the idea of political free­dom, subordinating to it all other postulates, whether social ones or Ukrainian national ones.¹⁵

How is one to explain these divergences between the programs of the “Introduction” and Free Union^cI Can it be that Drahomanov’s world­view underwent a radical change during the six years that separate the two documents? Was he inconstant in his convictions? Such inconstancy was ascribed to him by Lypynsky: “For there is in history not one, but several Drahomanovs.... Under the influence of the Russian school, he lost the moral and political bearings that were in his family and in his home, and later sought such bearings for himself throughout his whole life, changing them constantly.... ”¹⁶ This characterization is interest­ing, but it is mistaken. Contrary to Lypynsky’s assertion, Drahomanov never altered his basic principles. His world-view took shape early, and he held to it throughout his life. As Oleksander Mytsiuk correctly ob­served: “That the program of Free Union did not signal a ‘right-wing deviation’ in Drahomanov may be seen from the fact that he remained faithful to his anarcho-socialist world-view to the end.... ”¹⁷

Thus, the apparent contradictions between the “Introduction” and Free Union are to be explained otherwise. Drahomanov’s political out­look was a complex synthesis of anarchist, socialist, democratic, liberal, federalist, and Ukrainian patriotic elements united on the basis of a posi­tivist philosophy. Depending on time and circumstance, Drahomanov elaborated certain elements of this synthesis; other elements then receded into the background, as it were, but he did not renounce them, and, given the proper circumstances, they would return to the fore in his writings. The radicalism of the “Introduction” stemmed from the fact that in this work the accent was placed on theoretical principles and ultimate, ideal goals. Nor can there be any doubt that the character of the “Introduc­tion” was influenced by Drahomanov’s closeness to Russian revolution­ary circles in the early period of his residence in Switzerland, as well as by his co-operation with Serhii Podolynsky. Drahomanov did not ap­prove of Podolynsky’s “spirit of revolt,” but yielded at times to pressure from this colourful, dynamic individual.¹⁸ Free Union was written under different conditions. During the preceding six years, Drahomanov had become completely disillusioned with the Russian revolutionaries, with almost all of whom he was now at daggers drawn. Podolynsky, too, was gone, having fallen victim to an incurable mental illness. Free Union was addressed to the liberal Ukrainian zemstvo activists with whom Drahomanov had established contact. This programmatic document stressed practical goals in the struggle for freedom in Russia and Ukraine during the forthcoming years or decades. Oversimplifying somewhat, it may be said that the “Introduction” was Drahomanov’s maximum pro­gram, while Free Union was his minimum program.

Which of these two programs is closer to us today? The answer to this question depends, of course, on the outlook of the contemporary student of the history of Ukrainian political thought. Speaking for myself, I con­fess that all my sympathies are on the side of Drahomanov the liberal, constitutionalist, and reformist; concerning Drahomanov the com- munalist, doctrinaire, and utopian, I have reservations in principle that I have attempted to explain in this article.

A host of new questions now arises in logical consequence—about the reception of Drahomanov’s legacy of ideas in Ukraine (both Dnieper Ukraine and Galicia) and in Russia, as well as its influence on the forma­tion of Ukrainian political parties and on the later development of Ukrainian political thought. In the Ukrainian and non-Ukrainian Iitera- i ture one may encounter the most contradictory opinions on these matters. At the same time as the well-known Socialist Revolutionary activist Mykyta Shapoval hailed Drahomanov as the “ideologue of the new Ukraine,”¹⁹ the integral-nationalist publicists of the inter-war period were condemning him as the greatest evil-doer in modern Ukrainian his­tory and the malevolent spirit responsible for the failure of the Ukrainian struggle for independence of 1917-21.²⁰ In conclusion, I cannot forgo the pleasure of quoting two capable foreign scholars. The Polish histor­ian of the Ukrainian movement, Stanislaw Smolka, wrote during the First World War: “Contemporary Ukrainianism regards itself as nurtured by Drahomanov; not even moderate groups dare to dispute this.’’²¹ But the well-informed Soviet researcher David Zaslavsky asserted in the very first sentence of his as yet unsurpassed biographical study: “M.P. Drahomanov is one of the authors who are greatly respected but little read in Ukraine.’’²² In order to disentangle this bundle of contradictions, a separate work would be required.

Notes

1. Information has been drawn from the following sources: M.P. Drahomanov, ^bbAvtobiograficheskaia zametka” in Literaturno-publitsystychni pratsi (Kiev 1970), v.l; M. Hrushevsky, Z pochyniv Iikrainskoho Sotsiialitsychnoho rukhu: Mykh. Drahomanov ³ zhenevskyi Sotsiialistychnyi hurtok (Vienna 1922); D. Zaslavsky, M.P. Dragomanov: Kritiko-biograficheskii ocherk (Kiev 1924); M. Hrushevsky, ^bbMisiia Drahomanova,” Ukraina, no. 2-3 (1926); I. Zhytetsky, ^bbOstannii vyizd M.P. Drahomanova za kordon,” Ukraina, no. 2-3 (1926).

2. See V. Kalynovych, Politychni protsesy Ivana Franka ta ioho tovaryshiv (Lviv 1967).

3. M.P. Drahomanov, Turki vnutrennie ³ vneshnie (1876); Vnutrennee rabstvo ³ voina za osvobozhdenie (1877); Do chego dovoevalis (1878). These brochures are reprinted in Sobranie politicheskikh Sochinenii M.P. Dragomanova, 2 vols., ed. B.A. Kistiakovsky (Paris 1905-6), v. 2.

4. The history of the relations between Drahomanov and the Stara Hromada is docu­mented [UArkhivMykhailaDrahomanova (Warsaw 1937), v. 1.

5. M. Hrushevsky, ^bbMisiiaDrahomanova," Ukraina, no. 2-3 (1926):3.

6. M.P. Drahomanov, ^bbVidpovid M. Drahomanova na iuvileini pryvitannia 16.XII. 1894,” in M.P. Drahomanov, Vybrani tvory, v. 1 (all published) (Prague 1937), 89.

7. ^bbPerednie slovo” to Hromada is cited according to the text in M. P. Drahomanov, Vybrani tvory, 93—147.

8. M.P. Drahomanov, ^bbAvtobiograficheskaia zametka,” in Literaturno- publitsystychni pratsi, 1:68.

9. On Drahomanov’s attitude to the Poles and to the problem of Polish-Ukrainian rela­tions, see E. Hornowa, Problemy polskie ¼^, ∕worczo5cz Michala Drahomanowa (Wroclaw 1978).

10. O.K. Mytsiuk, Ukrainskyi ekonomist-hromadivets S.A. Podolynsky (Lviv 1933), 3-4.

11. P. Kulish, “Ob Otnoshenii malorusskoi slovesnosti ê Obshcherusskoi. Epilog ê Chenioi rade,” in Vybrani tvory (Kiev 1969), 499.

12. V. Antonovych⁵S paper, ⁴⁴Kharakteristika deiatelnosti Bogdana Khmelnitskago,’’ was read at a meeting of the Society of Nestor the Chronicler on 14 January 1898 and printed 'm Chteniia Obshchestva Nestora-Letopistsa 13 (1899):101-4. Cited in D. Doroshenko, Volodymyr Antonovych. Ioho zhyttia ³ naukova ta Iiromadska diialnist (Prague 1942), 131.

13. M.P. Drahomanov, Po voprosu î malorusskoi literature. Cited in M. Drahomanov, Literaturno-publitsystychni pratsi, 1:352.

14. M.P. Drahomanov, ⁴⁴Volnyi soiuz—Vilna spilka. Opyt ukrainskoi politiko- Sotsialnoi programmy,’’ in Sobranie politicheskikh sochinenii (Paris 1905), v. 1.

15. See Ie. Pyziur, ⁴⁴Konstytutsiina prohrama ³ teoriia M. Drahomanova,” Lysty do pryiateliv 14 (1966), nos. 8—10, reprinted in Journal of Ukrainian Studies 6, no. 2 (Fall 1981):28-42.

16. I.L. Rudnytsky, ⁴⁴Nazaruk ³ Lypynskyi: Istoriia ikhnoi druzhby ta konfliktu,” in Lysty Osypa Nazaruka do Viacheslava Lypynskoho (Philadelphia 1978), xlvii-xlviii.

17. Prof. Mytziuk, ⁴⁴Die politischen und Sozialokonomischen Anschauungen Drahomanivs,” Jahrbucher fur Kultur und Geschichte der Slaven, New Series 11 (1935), 291.

18. The result of collaboration between Drahomanov and Podolynsky was the “Prohrama” (Program), dated 1 December 1880, that appeared in the first issue of the so-called periodical Hromada over the signatures of M. Drahomanov, M. Pav- lyk, and S. Podolynsky. It was written primarily by Podolynsky, but Drahomanov inserted his corrections. The tone and contents of this document were considerably more radical that those of the “Introduction” of 1878. This was the most left-wing of Drahomanov⁵S political statements, and he later regretted having yielded to Podolynsky⁵S demands. The text of the 1880 “Program” is reprinted in Drahomanov, Vybrani tvory, 1:148-51.

19. The title of ShapovaFs introductory essay in the Prague edition of Drahomanov⁵S Vybrani tvory.

20. A characteristic product of the integral-nationalist camp is a pamphlet by M. Mu- khyn, Drahomanov bez masky (Lviv 1934), in which Drahomanov is compared, in­ter alia, to Azef, and is termed the “true heir of Peter I,” 54-5.

21. S. von Smolka, Die reussische Welt. Historisch-politische Studien, Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (Vienna 1916), 105.

22. D. Zaslavsky, M.P. Dragomanov, 5.