Ukrainian Speakers in the Russian Empire
In the Russian Empire, the Ukrainian-speaking population lived primarily in the provinces of Poltava, Chernigov, and Kharkov (on the eastern bank of the Dnieper River; also called Little Russia [Malorossiia] or the Left Bank); Kiev, Podolia, and Volhynia (on the western bank of the Dnieper River, sometimes called the Southwest Region [lugozapadnyi krai] or the Right Bank); and northern Tavrida, Kherson, and Ekaterinoslav (also called New Russia [Novorossia]) (see map 2).
According to the 1897 Russian imperial census, the Ukrainian-speaking population also constituted a plurality of the Kuban Oblast, and a substantial minority in the Stavropol, Voronezh, Don Cossack, Grodno, Kursk, and Bessarabian provinces.20 In light of the prevailing Russian imperial ideology, the authorities designated this Ukrainian-speaking population as Little Russians (malorossy), who spoke a dialect of Russian and who adhered to the Orthodox faith.Ukrainian speakers comprised nearly three-fourths of the population in the above-mentioned majority Ukrainian-speaking provinces, which possessed a multi-ethnic, multinational, and multi-confessional character. In 1897, these territories contained not only seventeen million Ukrainian speakers, but also 2.7 million Russian speakers, 510,000 German speakers, 389,000 Polish speakers, and 1.9 million Yiddish speakers.21
Jews played a significant role in the history of the Ukrainian-speaking provinces in both the Russian Empire and in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. With the partitions of Poland in the late eighteenth century, the Russian Empire acquired the world’s largest concentration of Jews and restricted them to the so-called Pale of Settlement, which covered an area from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea (see map 2). In 1897, this region (more than twice the size of France today) encompassed 4.9 million Jews (94 per cent of the entire Jewish population of the empire). In addition to this restriction, the tsarist government forbade them to own land, to join the civil service, to serve as officers in the army, or to enter the higher schools and universities.
Over 1,400 different laws and regulations bound them to an inferior status. These anti-Jewish measures represented “a tsarist version of the Hindu caste system, with the Jews in the role of the Untouchables.”22 Jews who lived in the densely populated Ukrainian-speaking provinces of the Pale comprised nearly 40 per cent of all Jews in the Pale. The Hasidic movement, centred in Beltz, Bratslav, Uman, Chortkiv, Chernobyl, and Ruzhin, and after the late eighteenth century, the Haskalah (Jewish enlightenment), enjoyed enormous popularity in this region.The overwhelming majority of Jews lived in towns and hamlets (shtetls). In the first half of the nineteenth century, the tsarist authorities banned Jews from living in some of the major cities in the Pale, including Kiev, Nikolaev, Sevastopol, Yalta, and Taganrog, as well as in the countryside. Nevertheless, by 1897, Jews made up 30 per cent of the urban population of the nine Ukrainian-speaking provinces. Only Jews who were merchants of the first guild, persons with a higher education, those who completed their long-term military service, and artisans had the right to leave the Pale and to reside permanently in any part of Russia.23
In addition to members of the Jewish faith, large numbers of Roman Catholics and Lutherans also lived in the Ukrainian-speaking areas. Approximately 186,000 Turkic-speaking Crimean Tatars, adherents of Islam, inhabited the southern part of the Taurida Province.