World War I
The last phase of Austrian rule in Galicia began in August 1914, with the outbreak of World War I. It ended four years later with the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire in October 1918.
From the outset of hostilities, Galicia, especially its eastern, Ukrainian-inhabited half, was a theater for military operations. After a brief advance onto Russian territory, the Austro-Hungarian army led by Field Marshal Conrad von Hotzendorf (1852-1925) was turned back by a series of swift Russian victories that began on August 5; one month later the tsarist armies reached the San River and the well-defended walls of Przemysl. During their rapid retreat, Habsburg troops, especially the Hungarian Honveds, took revenge upon many inhabitants whom they considered to be Russian spies. Several hundred people-both local Russophiles and Ukrainophiles, Orthodox and Greek Catho- lics-were summarily shot, hanged, or herded off to concentration camps, the most infamous being Talerhof in Styria.Militarily in control of eastern Galicia, the Russian government installed a civilian administration headed by Count Georgii Bobrinskii, who immediately cooperated with local Russophiles, including Semeon Bendasiuk (1877-1965) and Volodymyr Dudykevych (1861-1922), and pro-Russian Poles, including Professor Stanislaw Grabski (1871-1949) and Count Leon Pinihski (1857— 1938). Ukrainian cultural and educational institutions were closed, plans were made to dismantle the Greek Catholic church, and several leaders, including Metropolitan Andrei Sheptyts’kyi, were arrested and deported to Russia. Those Ukrainians who managed to flee westward before the Russian advance settled in refugee camps, the largest of which was at Gmünd in Upper Austria. The tsarist army captured Przemysl in March 1915 and advanced even farther westward into Galicia as far as Gorlice and Tarnow on the Dunajec River.
Finally, an Austrian counteroffensive (with German help) began in May 1915. Within a month the Russian government was driven out of L’viv and the tsarist army was pushed back, so that it managed to retain only the far eastern section of Galicia, south of Ternopil’ between the Seret and Zbruch rivers. The rest of Galicia remained under the control of an Austrian military and civilian administration until November 1,1918. The Russians held most of eastern Galicia again briefly during the offensive led by General Aleksei Brusilov (1853-1926) in the summer of 1916, but by the fall of that year they were driven back to the region around Ternopil’, which they were finally forced to abandon in July 1917.During the war years, Galician-Ukrainian leaders set up new interparty political organizations in Vienna. The first of these, the Supreme Ukrainian Council (Holovna Ukrains’ka Rada), within a week of its establishment on August 1, 1914, united the Ukrainian units in the Austrian army into a military formation known as the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen (Ukrains’ki Sichovi Stril’tsi). This unit fought within the Austrian ranks against the tsarist army on the eastern front. The Supreme Ukrainian Council cooperated with the Union for the Liberation of the Ukraine (Soiuz Vyzvolennia Ukrainy), also founded in Vienna in August by Ukrainians from the Russian Empire.
Eventually, two factions arose among the Galician Ukrainians, which were in basic agreement about ultimate goals but not about tactics. The General Ukrainian Council (Zahal’na Ukrains’ka Rada, est. May 5, 1915) led by parliamentarian Kost’ Levyts’kyi (1859-1941) supported the idea of an independent state for Dnieper Ukrainians in the Russian Empire but called only for national autonomy for Galicia within Austria. The other faction, the Ukrainian Parliamentary Representation, led by levhen Petrushevych (1863-1940) and supported by the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen was after 1916 less conciliatory toward the Austrians and demanded the separation of Galicia and a guarantee of Ukrainian autonomy even before hostilities ceased.
The imperial Habsburg government made some token concessions but never fulfilled the basic demands of either Ukrainian faction. By 1918, when the end of the war was in sight and it was clear that Austria was to be on the losing side, Ukrainian leaders met in L’viv on October 19, stated their intention to declare an independent western Ukrainian state (comprising northern Bukovina and northeastern Hungary as well as eastern Galicia), and carried out that intention after the breakup of the Habsburg Empire less than two weeks later.Documents from Austrian archives on the Ukrainian problem in Galicia have been published in a multivolume collection about Ukrainian developments during World War I. Austrian attitudes toward the Ukrainian problem within and beyond its borders, the formation of the Sich Riflemen, the activity of Metropolitan Sheptyts’kyi in exile, the implications of the Treaty of Brest-Litovs’k (February 1918) for Galicia, and the role of Habsburg Archduke Wilhelm in Galician- Ukrainian affairs are among the subjects for which there are numerous documents in this collection.[497]
With regard to general histories of the war years, there are none that deal competently with all aspects of eastern Galicia (political, socioeconomic, cultural, military) during the years of World War I. Of the general surveys that do exist, Jozef Skrzypek presents the view of a supporter of Polish rule in Galicia;[498] Volodymyr Osechyns’kyi reflects the highly critical Soviet attitude toward all actors in the drama, whether local Poles, Ukrainophiles, Russophiles, the Austrian government, the Greek Catholic church, or the “reactionary” tsarist military machine and civil administration;[499] and Helga Grebing and Wolfdieter Bihl provide dispassionate accounts of Austro-Hungarian policy toward Ukrainians during the war.[500]
The initial months of the war and in particular the Russian occupation during the fall and winter of 1914-1915 have received much attention.
Since it is precisely from this period that the real animosity and deep-seated hatred between Galician Ukrainophiles and Russophiles derives, it is not surprising that several accounts of the Russian occupation, most of which were written during the war years, are highly polemical in nature. The Ukrainophile viewpoint, best represented by Ivan Kryp”iakevych, stresses the degree to which Ukrainians suffered under Russian occupation.[501] The Russophile view considers the tsarist army to be liberators who, however briefly, restored the “true Russian” character of the land. They have given particular attention to the “Talerhof martyrs,” loyal patriots who suffered for their nation.[502] As might be expected, both the Ukrainophiles and Russophiles, in an effort to discredit their opponents, accuse each other of duplicity and cooperation with the Austrians, Russians, or local Poles.The Polish view of 1914-1915, best expressed in contemporary accounts by Feliks Przysiecki and Jozef Bialynia Cholodecki, tries to explain in a larger Polish context the reason why some local Poles, influenced by their countrymen in the Congress Kingdom (Roman Dmowski among others), found it necessary to cooperate with the Russian administration.[503] On the other hand, Soviet writers are highly critical of a policy that they believe strove to preserve the interest of local Polish aristocratic and bourgeois “exploiters.”[504] Some documents and studies on Russian policy toward the Greek Catholic church and descriptions of Metropolitan Sheptyts’kyi as “prisoner of the tsar” between 1914 and 1917 are also available.[505]
Because of the Russian invasion during the first weeks of hostilities, most Ukrainian political leaders fled from Galicia and remained in Vienna for the duration of the war. Their activity on behalf of the homeland is chronicled in the four-volume historical memoir of Kost’ Levyts’kyi: three volumes deal with events up to March 1918, and the fourth concerns the crucial changes in the attitudes of Galician national leaders between March and October of that year.[506] There are also available decrees and other documents issued by the General Ukrainian Council and the Ukrainian Parliamentary Representation,[507] as well as studies on Galician interaction with the Vienna-based Union for the Liberation of the Ukraine founded by Ukrainians from the Russian Empire living in Austria.[508] The generally loyal stance of Galicia’s leaders toward the Austrian Empire until
the very last months of the war is revealed in much pamphlet literature demanding the division of the province and the “restoration” of the medieval Galician- Volhynian Kingdom under a Habsburg scepter.235 The hoped-for ruler of the restored kingdom, the Habsburg Archduke Wilhelm Franz (VasyT Vyshyvanyi, 1895-c.
1950), is the subject of separate studies.236As for military developments, there exists an extensive literature on campaigns in the region during World War I, including the Battle of Galicia (August 5- September 11, 1914), the Austro-German counteroffensive against the Russians (May-June 1915), and the short-lived offensive of General Brusilov (June 5- September 1, 1916). These events are covered in great detail in general Austrian and Russian military histories of World War I;237 in the memoirs of the leading protagonists-the Austrian Field Marshall Conrad von Hotzendorf and the Russian general Aleksei Brusilov;238 and in studies of individual battles-L’viv (August
235 See n. 68 above; and Michael Lozynskyj, Wiederherstellung des Konigreiches Halytsch- Wolodymyr: Galizien und das ukrainische Problem in Osterreich (L’viv 1918).
236 Wolfdieter Bihl, “Erzherzog Wilhelms ‘austroukrainische’ Tätigkeit 1918,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, N.F., XIV (Wiesbaden 1966), pp. 51-57; and the biography by Nykyfor Hirniak, Polkovnyk Vasyl' Vyshyvanyi (Winnipeg: D. Mykytiuk 1956).
237 Osterreich-Ungarns letzter Krieg 1914-1918, 7 vols in 15 (Vienna: Vlg. der militärwissenschaftlichen Mitteilungen 1930-38), especially vols I, II, IV; A.Μ. Zaionchkovskii, Mirovaia voina 1914-1918 gg., 3 vols, 3rd ed. (Moscow: Voenizdat 1938-39), especially vol. I.
See also the chapters on Galicia (1914) and the Brusilov offensive (1916) in Norman Stone, The Eastern Front 1914-1917 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons 1975) and in the memoir-like account of the journalist Stanley Washburn, Field Notes from the Russian Front (London: Andrew Melrose 1915) and his The Russian Offensive (London: Constable and Co. 1917); studies of the 1914 campaign in N. Auffenberg-Komarow, Aus Osterreich-Ungarns Teilnahme am Weltkriege (Berlin and Vienna: Vlg. Ullstein 1920) and in N.N. Golovin, Iz istorii kampanii 1914 goda na russkom frontie, vol.
Ill: Galitsiiskaia bitva (Paris: Rodnik 1930); and of the 1915 Russian retreat in Mikhail D. Bonch-Bruevich, Poteria nami Galitsii v 1915 godu, 2 vols, Trudy Voenno-istoricheskoi komissii, vol. I (Moscow 1920-26) and Hans Niemann, Die Befreiung Galiziens, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Ernst Siegfried 1916).238 Feldmarschall Conrad, Aus meiner Dienstzeit, 1906-1918, 5 vols in 8 (Vienna, Leipzig, and Munich 1922-25), especially vols IV and V; A.A. Brusilov, Moi vospominaniia (Riga: Mir 1929), French translation: A.A. Brousilov, Memoires (Paris: Hachette 1929), English translation: A Soldier’s Notebook 1914-1918 (London: Macmillan 1930).
See also the memoirs of an Austro-Hungarian officer on the 1914 Galician battle: Octavian C. Täsläuanu, Trots mois de Campagne en Galicie (Paris and Neuchatel: Attinger freres 192?).
21-September 11, 1914),[509] San (September 1914),[510] Gorlice (May 1915),[511] and Horodok-L’viv (June 1915).[512]
The history of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen within the Habsburg army has also been traced from its beginnings as a paramilitary organization in March 1913 to its participation in Carpathian Mountain battles (September 1914) and against the Brusilov offensive (summer 1916) until its incorporation into the Ukrainian Galician Army (November 1918). The best works on the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen are by Osyp Dumin and Stepan Ripets’kyi, who have written histories of the unit and edited collections of articles, documents, and biographies of its leading participants.[513]