Ukrainians under Habsburg Rule

The vast majority of Ukrainians in the Austrian Empire lived in Galicia, a southeastern part of the old Polish Commonwealth, acquired by the Habsburgs after the first partition of Poland in 1772.

There was yet another Ukrainian-inhabited region under indirect Habsburg rule. Transcarpathia, on the western slopes of the Carpathian Mountains, had since medieval times been a part of the kingdom of Hungary. In the 19th century, it remained in the Hungarian part of the Habsburg Empire and was isolated from the other Ukrainian lands. The peasants

One word summed up conditions in the Ukrainian-inhabited areas of the Habsburg empire: poverty. Hilly terrain and small plots made agriculture difficult, while the exploitive rule of the Polish nobles had left peasants in a permanent state of economic and physical exhaustion. Moreover, the plight of the small, grimy Galician towns worsened when they were cut off from their traditional markets in Russian-dominated Ukraine as a result of the partitions. Little wonder that Galicia had the dubious distinction of being one of the most destitute and backward areas of the empire.

The vast majority of West Ukrainians were enserfed peasants and exploitation was for them a fact of daily life. In return for the use of their meager plots of land, they owed their landlords labor duties that amounted to as many as five to six days of labor per week.

Under such circumstances, even survival was no simple matter. Isolated in about 3500 nearly inaccessible villages and utilizing primitive farming methods, the peasants of Eastern Galicia managed to attain only about one-third the output of their Czech or Austrian counterparts. Their food intake, which consisted mainly of cabbage and potatoes, was only about one-half that of a West European farmer. When famine struck, as it often did, the already weakened serfs would perish in great numbers. In fact, there were times, such as the period between 1830 and 1850, when the death rate in Eastern Galicia exceeded the birth rate. As might be expected, the life expectancy of the West Ukrainian peasant was low, averaging only 30–40 years.

To alleviate the misery of their condition, peasants often took to drink. They were encouraged in this by their Polish landlords, who had a legal monopoly on alcohol production, and by the tavern-keepers, most of whom were Jews. Some landowners even set regular consumption quotas for their serfs, hoping thereby to dispose of the alcohol they produced. The thought of easing or improving the lot of the peasant rarely, if ever, came to the mind of the Galician nobleman. In all probability, most would have wondered at the very need or feasibility of such an idea, for to them the peasant represented a lower form of human life that defied any kind of improvement. The clergy

Not all West Ukrainians were peasants, however.

Bound to the masses by a common faith, they enjoyed great influence and authority among their peasant parishioners. Yet – especially prior to Habsburg rule – the material and cultural levels of the Ukrainian village priest were scarcely higher than those of the peasant. True, the priestly plots provided by the community were generally larger than those of the peasant, and fees from christenings, weddings, and funerals provided additional income. But the widow and children of deceased parish priests often lived from the same plots as new appointees, while the expense of preparing sons for the priesthood and daughters for suitable marriages bankrupted many a priest.

Because theological training was inadequate, many Greek Catholic priests in Eastern Galicia in the late 18th to early 19th centuries could barely read the Church Slavonic liturgical texts. Consequently, their worldview was not much broader than that of the peasantry. Polish nobles showed the Greek Catholic clergy little respect. For example, it was not uncommon, prior to Habsburg rule, for nobles to force priests to work on their estates. Yet these conditions yielded a positive result, for the Ukrainian clergy developed much closer personal and cultural bonds with the peasantry than did its Polish counterpart.

Because Ukrainians in West Ukraine lacked a nobility and were under-represented among the townsmen to an even greater extent than Ukrainians in the Russian Empire, some modern historians have described their society as being “sociologically incomplete.”¹⁰ As the phrase implies, a “sociologically incomplete” society is severely handicapped; and indeed, in 19th-century Eastern Europe, Ukrainians had little access to political power because of their lack of a nobility. Without townsmen, they were excluded from commerce and industry. That is not to say, of course, that Galicia as a whole lacked a nobility or urban class. In the late 18th century, Polish nobles numbered about 95,000, or 3.4% of the population of the province, and the townsmen, most of whom were poor Jewish artisans and shopkeepers with a sprinkling of wealthy merchants, numbered about 300,000, or 10% of the population. In addition, with the coming of Habsburg rule, a new social group appeared – the bureaucrats. Mostly Germans, or German-speaking Czechs, they were never very numerous. However, tens of thousands of other Germans were also brought into the province by the Habsburg authorities as colonists in the hope that they would provide models of good farming and invigorate the rural economy. Thus, Galician society as a whole was both multiethnic and rigidly stratified, with each of its individual ethnic groups occupying its own distinct and insular social, economic, and cultural sphere.