Ukrainian Political Parties

Like the Russians and the other nationalities in the empire, the Ukrainians were also caught up in the political activism that characterized the 1890s and early 1900s. They were motivated, on the one hand, by the general reaction to the repression of the 1880s and, on the other, by the inspiring example of the new dynamism and fresh ideas that appeared among Russian radicals.

These “new” Ukrainians were, for the most part, students and it was in the milieu of the gymnazium (high school) and the university that these individuals established the personal contacts and developed the ideas that led them actively to oppose tsarism. The career of a Ukrainian activist usually followed a familiar pattern. A youth would first be exposed to “subversive” ideas in a gymanazium where a liberal teacher or elder colleagues would introduce him to contraband publications and invite him to secret discussion groups. Once in university, such an individual would then join a Ukrainian student hromada, some of which, like those in Kiev and St Petersburg, had hundreds of members. As a member of the hromada, the student would be exposed to a variety of ideologies, become acquainted with well-known activists, and often commence illegal activities, such as the publication and distribution of antitsarist literature.

Students were further radicalized by conflicts between them and the government. For example, in 1901 the government forcibly drafted into the army 183 student activists from Kiev University. This called forth a massive sympathy strike throughout Ukraine and led to the expulsion from the universities of numerous students, many of whom concluded that their only option was to become revolutionaries.

The first organized appearance of these young “conscious” Ukrainians occurred in 1891 when a group of students, led by Ivan Lypa, Borys Hrinchenko, and Mykola Mikhnovsky, gathered at the grave of Taras Shevchenko to form the Brotherhood of Taras (Bratstvo Tarasivtsiv). Concerned that the best of Ukrainian youth were being lost to Russian revolutionary organizations, the brotherhood resolved to forge the Ukrainian movement as a serious alternative to Russian radicalism and Russian culture in general. It established contacts with student groups in Kiev, Odessa, Poltava, and Chernihiv and began sponsoring lectures, plays, and celebrations honoring Shevchenko. Some members of the groups also joined a publications society of about eighty members, mainly elementary school teachers, whose goal was to disseminate Ukrainian literature among students and peasants. Lypa and his colleagues also urged Ukrainian authors to utilize European models in their work instead of Russian ones.

But the brotherhood’s most noteworthy achievement was the publication in 1893 of its famous credo, “The Declaration of Faith of Young Ukrainians,” in Pravda, a Lviv-based newspaper. This strongly worded document reflected a militant nationalism and contained a stinging critique of the Ukrainophiles for their intellectual dependence on Russian culture. Its authors confidently declared their intention of becoming something the older generation had never been – a genuinely Ukrainian intelligentsia. As a sign of their “uncompromising Ukrainianism” they bound themselves to speak Ukrainian at all times, to raise their children in the “Ukrainian manner,” to demand the teaching of Ukrainian in schools, and to defend the Ukrainian cause on every occasion.

Rumblings of discontent, the appearance of splinter groups led by younger members, as well as the numerical growth of the hromady finally forced the elder statesmen of the Ukrainian movement to act after the long hiatus of the 1880s. In 1897, on the initiative of Antonovych and Konysky, they resolved to form a clandestine organization that would unite all the Ukrainian activists in the empire. The result was the General Ukrainian Organization (GUO), a federation of about twenty hromady plus many student groups and individual members that was directed by an executive committee in Kiev. According to secret police estimates, its active membership was around 450, about 100 of whom were based in Kiev. As usual, one of the first acts of the organization was to attempt to get the “Ukrainian message” into the printed media. This goal was reflected in the establishment of a GUO literary publishing venture and a bookstore in Kiev. The organization also sponsored morale-boosting anniversaries of Shevchenko and other noted Ukrainian writers. Especially noteworthy in this regard were the festivities honoring Ivan Kotliarevsky in 1903 and the composor Mykola Lysenko in 1904 in which several thousand members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia participated, including representatives from Western Ukraine. To aid those individuals who were persecuted by the police for Ukrainophile activities, the GUO established a special fund. But although the appearance of the GUO indicated that the older generation of Ukrainians had also become aware of the need to organize, the nature of their activities showed that they were still unwilling to renounce cultural activity for politics. Thus, when the 19th century came to an end, the Ukrainians still did not possess what other minorities, such as the Jews and the Poles, already had – a political party.

Again it was in Kharkiv that a group of students, which included L. Matusevych, Iurii Kollard, O. Kovalenko, and the sons of several old Ukrainophiles such as Dmytro Antonovych, Mykhailo Rusov, and D. Poznansky, took the initiative. In January 1900 they founded the Revolutionary Ukrainian party (RUP), a tightly knit, conspiratorial group. The aim of this first East Ukrainian political party was to unite various generations and classes in the struggle for national rights and social revolution. Students in particular responded favorably to the initiative of the Kharkiv group. By 1902, six branches, coordinated by a central committee, functioned in Kiev, Kharkiv, Poltava, Lubny, Pryluky, and Katerynoslav. Many smaller groups of gymnazium and university students were also affiliated with the party. To facilitate the obligatory publication program, a foreign bureau was established in Lviv in Galicia and Chernivtsi in Bukovyna. RUP published two periodicals, Haslo and Selianyn, which were designed to politicize the peasantry, and smuggled them into Russian-ruled Ukraine.

The party soon encountered difficulties, especially when it attempted to formulate its program more precisely. From the outset the problem was whether national or socioeconomic issues deserved greater emphasis from a revolutionary standpoint. Initially, as the party’s publication of the pamphlet Samostiina Ukraina (by the fiery nationalist Mykola Mikhnovsky) indicated, the national question was of great concern to its members. In time, however, in order to expand beyond its original constituency of “conscious Ukrainians” and reach the peasantry, RUP increasingly focused its attention on socioeconomic matters. Moreover, many of its members became converts to Marxism, thus gradually transforming the party into a social democratic organization.

In the process, tensions developed among RUP members. The majority, led by Mykola Porsh and his colleagues Volodymyr Vynnychenko and Symon Petliura, argued that the organization should be a national party, composed solely of Ukrainians but combining nationalism with Marxism.

A note about factionalism is now in order. The radical intelligentsia was engaged in a bitter struggle with tsarist autocracy that precluded a climate of tolerance in which differing ideas could be discussed openly and calmly. This struggle also prevented the development of the Western art of compromise and majority rule – and, thus, factionalism became a widespread phenomenon in all segments of the revolutionary movement. If one group of revolutionaries disagreed with another, it usually continued to adhere to its position and fanatically accused its ideological opponents of stupidity, at best, and of reactionary tendencies, at worst. The group would then self-righteously break off from the original organization to form its own faction. Often, its contempt for its erstwhile colleagues would match that of its hatred of the tsarist regime.

That Ukrainians formed no exception to this tendency can be readily seen from the splits that developed in RUP. In 1902 a small segment of the party, influenced by Mikhnovsky’s intense nationalism, broke off to form the tiny Ukrainian National party. Two years later, a sizable minority that sided with Melenevsky left the party to join the Russian Social Democrats. The goal of Melenevsky’s faction (called Spilka) was to become the leading Marxist party in Ukraine under the sponsorship of the Russian organization. What remained of RUP renamed itself the Ukrainian Social Democratic Workers party and continued its efforts to combine Marxism and nationalism.

A noteworthy aspect of RUP activity was its relations with other non-Ukrainian Marxist parties. In their dealings with the Russian Social Democrats, Ukrainian Marxists found confirmation of something that they had long suspected – namely, that Russian revolutionaries shared with the tsarist government the same predilection for centralism.

Not only did RUP spawn a number of other parties, but it also forced Ukrainian moderates, united in the GUO (General Ukrainian Organization), to take the step that they had long avoided. In 1904, at the urging of Evhen Chykalenko, the GUO voted to transform itself into a liberal political party whose goals would be the establishment of constitutional government, social reform, and full national rights for the Ukrainians in a federated Russian republic. To a large extent the decision of the moderates to take this step was motivated by the fear that the young socialist radicals would take over the Ukrainian movement and lead it on a path that respectable professors, government officials, and zemstvo functionaries would find difficult to follow. Predictably, however, ideological conflicts and factional splits developed and in order to accommodate its left-leaning members, the liberal party renamed itself the Ukrainian Radical Democratic party. Despite the change of name, it remained an essentially liberal party much akin to the Russian Kadets.

Thus, by 1905, the Ukrainian movement had experienced considerable growth. It had developed a variety of parties that offered a range of prescriptions for solving Ukraine’s national, political, and socioeconomic problems. But all these parties still consisted mainly of the intelligentsia and they were continually at odds with each other. Moreover, because almost all the Ukrainian intelligentsia were left leaning, the conservative viewpoint was not represented in the Ukrainian political spectrum, forcing Ukrainians of that persuasion to join Russian conservative parties. These drawbacks notwithstanding, it was clear that the Ukrainian movement had finally moved beyond culturalism and had commenced a new, political stage in its development.