Ukrainians in the First World War

For the Ukrainians, who had to fight for both of the warring sides, the impact of the war was immediate, direct, and devastating. Throughout the struggle Galicia was the scene of the biggest, bloodiest battles fought on the Eastern front.

But along with the physical damage, the war highlighted and exacerbated the plight of peoples, such as the Ukrainians, who had no state of their own to protect their specific interests. Vast numbers of Ukrainians – the Russian army alone had 3.5 million Ukrainian soldiers and 250,000 served in the Austrian forces – fought and died for empires that not only ignored their national interests but, in the case of Russia, actively sought to destroy their national movements. Worse still, as combatants on opposing sides, Ukrainians were forced to kill each other. The only positive aspect of the war was the possibility that it would weaken the warring empires and thus create new political opportunities for their repressed subjects. But at the outset at least, this possibility was too remote to be treated seriously.

The Ukrainians in Austria reacted quickly to the outbreak of hostilities. On 3 August 1914, all their parties formed the General Ukrainian Council (Zahalna Ukraiinska Rada) in Lviv, headed by the respected parliamentarian Kost Levytsky, for the purpose of providing Ukrainians with a single, united representative body. Declaring that “the victory of the Austrian-Hungarian monarchy will be our victory and the greater the defeat of Russia, the sooner will come the hour of Ukrainian liberation,” the council called on Ukrainians to fight for constitutional Austria (their best friend) against autocratic Russia (their worst enemy).¹ Shortly after its formation, the council issued a call for volunteers for an all-Ukrainian military unit.

The socialist emigres from Russian-ruled Ukraine also formed a political organization in Lviv in order to act as (self-appointed) spokesmen for their compatriots under tsarist rule. An important, even historic, feature of this organization, called the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine (Soiuz Vyzvolennia Ukrainy – SVU) and led by Volodymyr Doroshenko, Andrii Zhuk, Marian Melenevsky, Oleksander Skoropys-Ioltukhovsky, and Mykola Zalizniak, was that it was the first group that unequivocally announced that its goal was the formation of an independent Ukrainian state. To achieve its purpose, the SVU resolved to cooperate with Germany and Austria against Russia.

But even before these organizations began to function, they were forced to flee to Vienna when the advancing Russian armies broke through Austrian defenses and occupied much of Eastern Galicia by early September. This Austrian setback had terrible repercussions for the Ukrainians of Galicia. Looking for excuses for their defeats, Austrian and Hungarian commanders turned a willing ear to accusations made by the Polish provincial administration that their defeat was due to the “treachery of the Ukrainians,” who allegedly secretly sympathized with and aided the Russians. As a result, the retreating Habsburg armies, and most notably the Hungarian troops, unleashed a reign of terror among the Ukrainian populace. Initially, Russophiles (but later Ukrainians in general) were arrested by the hundreds and executed without trial.

The fate of Galician Ukrainians who were subjected to Russian occupation was also unenviable. The tsarist government quickly made it clear that it did not consider Eastern Galicia to be a new or temporary acquisition, but rather referred to it as an “ancient Russian land” that was now “reunited forever with Mother Russia.” It then set about to transform the myth of Galicia’s “Russianness” into a reality. Count Georgii Bobrinsky, a brother of an influential Russian conservative who had long advocated acquisition of Galicia, was appointed governor-general and immediately began a concerted attack on the Ukrainian movement, or “Mazepism” as it was called by tsarist officials. He was enthusiastically supported by the Russophiles, whose leaders, such as Volodymyr Dudykevych, Semeon Bandasiuk, and Iuliian Iavorsky, had earlier fled to Russia and now returned with the victorious Russian armies. Russophiles identified and denounced Ukrainian activists (just as the latter had denounced the former to the Austrians a few weeks earlier), who were then arrested and deported deep into Russia. Thus, as Russians persecuted Ukrainophiles and Austrians repressed Russophiles, the mutual denunciations of Galicia’s ideologically divided Ukrainians exacerbated their already sorry plight.

On the orders of the tsarist administration, all Ukrainian cultural institutions, cooperatives, and periodicals were shut down. Limits were placed on the use of Ukrainian and efforts were made to introduce Russian into the educational system. The Greek Catholic church, a hallmark of West Ukrainian uniqueness, was attacked with special vigor.

Map 19 Ukraine in the First World War

The Russian treatment of Galician Ukrainians, which Pavel Miliukov, the noted Russian statesman, denounced in the Duma as a “European scandal,” was consistent with the attitude of the tsarist government toward the Ukrainian movement in the Russian Empire. At the outbreak of war, almost all Ukrainian organizations and newspapers were repressed. When Mykhailo Hrushevsky, the acknowledged leader of the Ukrainians, returned to Kiev in 1916, he was arrested and exiled to the Russian north. With undisguised relish, Sergei Sazonov (the tsar’s foreign minister) noted at this time: “Now is exactly the right moment to rid ourselves of the Ukrainian movement once and for all.”² However, after its disastrous losses in 1915, the tsarist government lost some of its confidence and softened its tone somewhat. Cautiously, Ukrainian cooperatives, bookstores, scholarly societies, and several newspapers in the Russian Empire began to function again. A semisecret Ukrainian political organization, the Society of Ukrainian Progressives (Tovarystvo Ukrainskykh Progresystiv – TUP), resumed its work as the coordinating body of the Ukrainian movement and agitated for constitutional government in the empire and autonomy for Ukraine.

Meanwhile, on the Austrian side of the front, West Ukrainian politicians gathered in Vienna in May 1915 and reestablished their representative body, the General Ukrainian Council. As the war dragged on and Austria-Hungary weakened, the nationalities of the empire, Ukrainians included, grew bolder in their demands. Thus, the General Ukrainian Council announced that its goals were independence for Russian-ruled Ukraine, which it hoped would be conquered by the Austrians, and broad autonomy for Eastern Galicia and Bukovyna. However, when in 1916 Vienna promised the Poles even greater powers in Galicia, the council resigned in protest. Thereafter, the Ukrainian Parliamentary Club in the Vienna parliament, headed by Evhen Petru-shevych, represented West Ukrainian interests.

The East Ukrainian emigres of SVU, supported by German and Austrian funds, also carried on their work in Vienna. Their organization dispatched representatives to many European capitals to propagate the cause of Ukrainian independence. Although producing few concrete results, the work of SVU with hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian prisoners in Austrian and German captivity, about 50,000 of whom were placed in separate camps, not only raised the soldiers’ national consciousness but led to the creation of the so-called Greycoat and Bluecoat divisions that would later fight for the Ukrainian cause. Thus, as the war dragged on, it was clear that the Ukrainians, like other nationalities, were becoming steadily more aggressive in pursuing their own interests and less willing to concern themselves with the fate of the empires that had ruled them for centuries.

By 1917 almost all the combatants in the war were on the verge of exhaustion. But tensions were especially acute in Russia, where the strain of total warfare was compounded by the weaknesses and blunders of an inflexible, corrupt, and backward regime led by the ineffectual Nicholas II. Of all the participants in the war, Russia had the highest military casualties, with over 8 million men killed, wounded, or captured. These horrendous losses caused much bitterness because they had often been the result of careless mistakes on the part of inept commanders who had been appointed by the tsar. Meanwhile, the extent of the corruption and inefficiency in the Russian bureaucracy and among Russian industrialists was demonstrated in the fact that hundreds of thousands of soldiers had been sent against the enemy without even guns or ammunition. Even more widespread were the strains that the war and governmental blundering imposed on the society as a whole. With about half of all able-bodied men drafted into military service, the production of food and finished goods declined and prices rose drastically. Hunger became commonplace, especially among workers in the cities, and as strikes multiplied, a sense of disillusionment spread among the people.