Ukrainian sociopolitical movement between the mid-19th and early 20th
century seemed to involve only “conscious Ukrainians”. Even then, however,
forces existed which had not yet actively declared their pro-Ukrainian nature
but had huge sociopolitical potential
These forces included the more moderate part of
Ukrainian society, largely the liberal intelligentsia, nobility and various
officials. They gradually became involved in various all-Russian government and
non-government structures: city councils, zemstvos, regional branches of
scientific and societal institutions, etc. They addressed issues in the local
economy, popular education, healthcare, transport network, statistics and
cultural work. These efforts went hand in hand with their resistance to assimilation
carried out by government agencies and gave rise to “our nice national order”,
to quote from the well-known ethnographer and historian Mykhailo Drahomanov.
Ukrainian peasants, too, had extremely important
potential that could develop into a Ukrainian movement. After serfdom was
abolished in 1861 and a chance appeared to enhance their financial standing and
socio-political involvement, they acquired new features as a social group.
Traditional Ukrainian politicians believed that the Ukrainian peasantry had
grown indifferent, but it exploded with a wave of national self-identification
at the turn of the century, pouring millions of its members into cooperative
societies and village associations and later supporting the Ukrainian Central
Rada as the national movement leader.
The autocratic Russian regime did not allow open
political life and the spread of any opposition sentiments in society. However,
the tsarist government could not stop discontent. Taras Shevchenko wrote a
number of poems which established, with renewed energy, the idea of
uncompromising struggle against the Russian regime which resorted to much
tyranny and national persecutionin Ukraine. Shevchenko was a deeply
nationalistic Ukrainian poet. He unswervingly condemned the anti-Ukrainian
policies of the Russian Empire. His monumental figure was a great catalyst for
the formation of national identity in the masses and the establishment of the
idea of Ukraine’s independence.
Liberals and Slavophiles against “citizens” and
“khlopomans”
In the late 1850s, the Hromada,a Ukrainian society,
was formed in Saint Petersburg. Its most active members were Mykola Kostomarov
and Panteleimon Kulish. Supported by notable Ukrainian donors, large landowners
Vasyl Tarnovsky and Hryhoriy Galagan, Kulish set up his own printing shop in
Saint Petersburg and started publishing cheap Ukrainian books for the masses.
The authors included, among others, Shevchenko, Kulish, Marko Vovchok, Hryhoriy
Kvitka-Osnovianenko, Danylo Mordovets, Hanna Barvinok, Oleksa Storozhenko and
others. Hromada’s branches later sprang up in Kyiv, Chernihiv, Poltava,
Kharkiv, Katerynoslav and other cities.
Saint Petersburg’s Hromada published the Osnova journal in 1861-62, the key
all-Ukrainian periodical that played an important role in the history of
Ukrainian spirituality. It was the first national social-scientific and
literary journal. For nearly two years, it had a significant impact on the
literary process in Ukraine and the development of Ukrainian culture as it
entrenched the concept of Ukraine’s independence and the singularity of its
historical process in mass consciousness.
Hromada’s activities raised suspitions in Russian
society. For a while, government officials simply watched on asOsnova was published and the Ukrainian
movement surged, but the Russian liberal press and a number of intellectuals
immediately exploded with sharp, negative criticism. The reason was the
successful development of the Ukrainian literary process and its increasing
public and political influence among various strata of Ukrainian society. While
Russian journals quite often published Ukrainian-language literary works early
into Alexander I’s liberal rule, the situation soon reversed, and Russian
public figures turned into archenemies of the Ukrainian culture as they tried
to deny the Ukrainian language and culture and prove that the Ukrainian
movement was a Polish plot. For example, Mikhail Katkov, editor ofMoskovskie vedomosti (Moscow News) and Russkiy
vestnik (Russian
Newsletter) and a representative of moderate Russian liberalism, tried to
convince the Russian public that the Ukrainian language in the works of
Ukrainian authors was completely artificial. He claimed that the intentions of
the Ukrainian intelligentsia to develop their literature, culture and science
were misguided and at variance with the demandsof real life.
The Russian liberal intelligentsia viewed Ukrainian
culture as a threat to its undivided rule in both spiritual and political life.
The fear that the independent development of Ukrainian culture, language and
literature could become an important foundation for the political separation of
the Ukrainian people persisted among Russian intellectuals, generating
suspicions of Ukrainian political separatism.
The position of many Russian intellectuals was not
that different from the centralist “point of state coercion”, to quote from
Mykola Kostomarov. After all, it was their hidden conviction which contradicted
their outward liberal rhetoric. “I don’t believe a common Little Russian
(Malorissiyisky, a common name for part of Ukraine at the time – Ed.)
literary language could be formed – apart from literary works of purely folk
nature; I don’t see any way in which this may happen, and I do not wish or am
able to wish any artifical attempts to break the integrity of all-Russian
development and disincline Little Russian authors from writing in Russian,”
notable Slavophile Ivan Aksakov wrote.
The position of Slavophiles virtually coincided with
the traditional assimilatory policy of the Russian state. The activists
associated with Osnova (Foundation) were correct in viewing
it as thinly veiled centralist intention to stump the development of a new
Ukrainian movement and make society hostile towards it.
As can be seen, Russian Slavophiles echoed centralists
like Katkov in their demand to use repressions against Ukrainians. This
hypocrity was exposed in Kostomarov’s article “The truth about Rus’ for
Muscovites”: “There are people in Moscow who call themselves Slavophiles, but
they are not what they pretend to be. They want to foster in their own
peopleenmity against another Slavic people… O Moscow! How much your children
bespeak their fathers and grandfathers!”
An important sociocultural phenomenon of the time was khlopomanstvo,
a movement that emerged in the late 1850s among the Polonized Ukrainian
nobility in Right-Bank Ukraine. Khlopomans did not agree with the idea
prevalent among the nobility that the restoration of Polish statehood in
Ukrainian lands would improve the condition of Ukrainians. They saw their
public duty in serving the people, primarily peasants (hence their name,
literally ‘peasant-mania’), to enhance their cultural and educational level,
etc. The leader of the movement was Volodymyr Antonovych, a student at Kyiv
University at the time and later a notable Ukrainian historian. Together with
like-minded people (Tadei Rylsky, Kost Mykhalchuk and Borys Poznansky), he
believed that the dissemination of education and culture, rather than political
struggle, was the only way to economic, political and spiritual liberation of
the people. According to the khlopomans, the Polish nobility in Ukraine was
faced with a dilemma: either continue to be exploiters of the Ukrainian people,
hampering its national development, or return to the ethnic ancestral roots and
work for the good of the people. As they joined the Ukrainian movement,
khlopomans, former nobelemen, became déclasssé and joined the ranks of the
intelligentsia. It took time for the Right-Bank intelligentsia to realize the
need to preserve itself as a stratum whose all-around experience was to serve
the Ukrainian social movement. This new stage when the Ukrainian nobility
rediscovered its identity was initiated somewhat later by Viacheslav Lypynsky.
The new intelligentsia leading the way
In the second half of the 19th century, the leadership
of the Ukrainian national movement was transferred to a new societal stratum –
the intelligentsia, which was composed of both the nobility and people of other
origin. The new generation no longer idealized the Cossacks, as did the the
Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, and focused on the people which,
they believed, needed freedom, material improvements and spiritual revival. It
was in serving the people identified as the peasantry that the Ukrainian
intelligentsia saw its mission. Thus, if the previous period was marked
primarily by a desire to restore the former Hetman state, the new movement was
about protecting people’s interests more than anything else.
Since the 1860s, narodnytstvo (populism) was fully
established within the Ukrainian movement and spread its views to social
sciences and the humanities, as well as to literary activity. The populist
school of historiography (Kostomarov, Oleksandr Lazarevsky, Antonovych and
later Hrushevsky) cemented in Ukrainian society for years to come a view on
Ukraine’s pastin which the dominant historical force was spontaneous mass
movements aimed at satisfying popular socioeconomic interests. In the study of
the Cossack period, the state-building activities of the Cossack starshyna(officers)
and the Hetman’s power were relegated to the background, while the activities
of the rank-and-file Cossacks, sometimes openly destructive, were glorified.
This school greatly underestimated Ukrainian statehood in the Princely Era and
early modern history (the Ruthenian-Lithuanian period).
The liberal-populist intelligentsia, which viewed
itself as the only representative of the Ukrainian people, fiercely opposed the
attempts of the traditional Ukrainian nobility to play an independent political
role. It hampered the engagement of both individuals and separate social groups
in the Ukrainian movement. As a result, this conduct alienated well-to-do,
politically and professionally experienced residents of Ukraine.
However, the emergence and establishment of the
populist intelligentsia in Ukrainian sociopolitical landscape did not mean that
the ideological influence of the Ukrainian nobility was eliminated. After its
representatives and the descendants of the Cossack starshyna joined the
Ukrainian national revival, they imposed on the Ukrainian movement traditional
autonomist-federalist views of the state system in the context of future
relations with Russia. These views held by the Ukrainian nobility, complemented
by the ideas of Western liberalism and sociopolitical conceptions of the
Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, became central in the ideology of
Ukrainian populism. Marked by inconsistency and ambivalence in its approach to
the nation’s key goal, i.e., obtaining state independence, this ideology was
definitive for the Ukrainian movement as suchfor a long time.
For a while, the tsarist government refrained from
repressions against the Ukrainian social movement, which pursued largely
cultural and educational goals at this stage. However, the Polish Uprising of
1863 changed the situation. The slogan of radical noble circles “For your and
our freedom!” and agitation among Ukrainian peasants raised unjustified
suspicions in the Russian government that separatism was possible in the
Ukrainian national movement. This suspicion was fuelled by Russian chauvinist
circles which believed that the development of the Ukrainian cultural and
national movement would lead to Ukraine’s breakaway from Russia and to the
empire’s eventual collapse. Katkov and the Russian pro-government press tried
to persuade Russian society that the Ukrainian movement was a result of a
Polish plot and that the Russian government had every reason to expect a
Ukrainian uprising like the one in Poland.
A campaign against the Ukrainian movement,
Ukrainian-language schools and Ukrainian literature was launched. The tsar
dispatched his man to Ukraine to investigate “Little Russian propaganda which
has surged there”.
In 1863, Interior Minister Valuev issued his infamous
circular banning the printing of textbooks and popular and religious books in
Ukrainian. He wrote in a letter to the Minister of Education: “There is and
cannot be any separate Little Russian language.” Russian tsarism persecuted not
only attempts to spread ideas about Ukraine’s right to political
self-determination but also Ukrainian culture, literature, theatre, education,
etc.
On 18 May 1876, Alexander II added a new page to the
history of anti-Ukrainian repressions by issuing the so-called Ems Ukaz in the
form of a secret instruction. Under the ukase, Ukrainian-language books were not
allowed to enter the empire, original Ukrainian-language works, translations
and even lyrics to accompany music were banned from publication. Plays and
public recitals in Ukrainian were also prohibited.
Drahomanov and his influence
However, the Ukrainian movement could no longer be
stopped. It had entered a new stage and found a new opinion leader in Mykhailo
Drahomanov. As an opponent to Russia’s autocratic centralism and a police
state, he proposed a programme of evolutionary socialism building, for the most
part, on Proudhon’s ideas. His political ideal was a federalist transformation
of society: free communities were to form a federation within Ukraine and then
establish the federative community of the peoples in Russia, later a Slavic
federation and, finally, a federation of the world’s peoples.
However, Drahomanov’s political activity and his
socialist ideaswere met with hostility in Kyiv’s Hromada where they
exacerbatedinternal tensions and triggeredthe emergence of a radical wing.
Finally, after multiple attempts to come to an understanding with the moderate
leaders of Hromada in 1886, Drahomanov severed ties with the organization and
embarked on highly important activities abroad.
Drahomanov’s importance as a political figure lies in
the fact that he introduced a realization of the need to transition to
political struggle and stepoutside the limits of heretofore dominant apolitical
cultural enlightenment.
Moreover, Drahomanov’s key contribution to the
Ukrainian movement was that he familiarized Europe with the Ukrainian problem.
While on an academic trip abroad in 1873, he started telling Western Europeans
about Ukrainian literature. Among his large-scale works in this area was his
contribution to Nouvelle Geographie Universelle where he presented varied
information about Ukraine in the fifth volume.
However, Drahomanov’s political stance never allowed
young Ukrainian politicians to break out from the firm embrace of Russian
centralism. It seriouslyhampered independist Ukrainian political movements and
organizations and ultimately eclipsed the need for continued struggle for an
independent Ukrainian state. The concept of Ukraine’s traditional autonomy
which was, thanks to Drahomanov, combined with the Western European federalism of
the time, was to become the foundation of the Ukrainian movement’s political
programme for many years to come and led to grave consequences during the
Liberation Struggle.
After the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 and
increased reactionary policies, the Ukrainian movement entered an even more
difficult stage. Hromada organizations partly suspended their activities, and
the ones that remained thought it advisable to focus on purely cultural and
academic apolitical activities needed to justify the separateness of Ukrainians
among other peoples.
Members of Kyiv’s Hromada were active in various
scientific societies, particularly the Nestor the Chronicler Historical
Society, and rallied around Kievskaia starina (Kyiv Old Times), a journal
founded on the initiative of Oleksandr Lazarevsky and Volodymyr Antonovych and
supported by Ukrainian donors, sugar refinery owner Vasyl Symyrenko and
landowner Vasyl Tarnovsky. The journal published research articles on history,
ethnography, archaeology, literature, as well as literary works and historical
documents. The authors included Dmytro Bahalii, Orest Levytsky, Mykhailo
Hrushevsky, Mykhailo Drahomanov, Oleksandra Yefymenko, Oleksandr Lazarevsky,
Ivan Franko, Panas Myrny, Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky and others. Moreover, research
on Ukrainian topics was published in Russian by a number of official societies
in Kharkiv, Odesa and other cities. Drahomanov tried to convince Ukrainian
activists to focus their efforts on democratizing and federalizing the Russian
Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which, in his opinion, would put the
conditions in place for the free national development of Ukrainians.
According to Franko, Drahomanov as a politician
forever remained who he was when he left Russia on foreign trips:gente Ukrainus, natione Russus.
In other words, he could not envision Ukraine “without a close connection to
Russia”. To Drahomanov, the ideas of federalism stood alongside the European
ideals of social equality and political will, which eclipsed the idea of
national independence. This position had an impact on entire generations of
Ukrainian activists who for a long time remained captive to Drahomanov’s view
of the national problem and did not see the prospects of national liberation
struggle. “Without harbouring this national ideal in their heart, Franko wrote,
the best Ukrainian forces were drowned in the all-Russian sea, and those who
stood their ground were discouraged and became apathetic. We now have no doubt
that a lack of faith in the national ideal, elaborated to the extreme
consequences also in the political field, was the main tragedy in Drahomanov’s
life and the reason why his political struggle was hopeless…”
His vision of an autonomous Ukraine within a federated
Russian state was adopted by socialist and liberal Ukrainian parties, something
they did not fully relinquish even in the course of the 1917-21 national
liberation struggle. This was a fatal obstacle to widespread realization of the
need for an independent state.
Social or national?
The domination of social tasks over national issues
(whether in the interests of higher or lower strata) misguided the Ukrainian
movement one way or another, causing social disharmony and inability to
consolidate society, which was very much needed for national liberation. The
key to solving the most pressing social problems was a wide societal
realization of the need for state independence.
Lypynsky wrote that a “true revolution against the
populist worldview” was necessary for the Ukrainian movement to leave behind
its autonomist-federalist notions about the future of Ukraine-Russia relations
. “It was only through a tremendous moral effort, he wrote in a letter to
Andriy Livytsky on 16 October 1919, only through boundless love for the
Ukrainian national idea and to the state idea as a political embodiment of full
national will and only by rallying all honest national forces without exception
around internal work towards this idea that it was possible to turn 40 million
dark, self-disparaging slaves into heroes who would build Ukraine and secure a
better human life for everyone.”
The
Ukrainian elites that accepted socialist ideology lacked, for a long time,
clear orientation towards Ukraine’s independence, but this could not stand in
the way of a powerful national-cultural potential which grew as a necessary
foundation for national liberation struggle. The 19th century Ukraine was
concerned with building this kind of potential.
The
resistance of a large part of the Ukrainian elites and many peasants to Russian
assimilatory pressure ultimately led to the emergence of independist movements
in Ukrainian politics. In 1895, Yulian Bachynsky, an activist of the Ukrainian
Radical Party, published a brochure entitled Ukraina irredenta which became the manifesto of
Ukrainian aspirations for state independence. That same year, Franko clearly
testified to the popularity of this idea in society by observing that it was “a
fact of our political life and an expression of the national feeling and
national cosciousness”. He noted that the perceptible “need for Ukraine’s
political independence … will be on the agenda in Europe’s political life and
will stay there until it has been accomplished”.
These
aspirations for political independence, which can be found in the works of
Galician politicians, were echoed by Mykola Mikhnovsky’s conception expounded
in his brochure Samostiina Ukraina (An Independent Ukraine, 1900).
Thus, the idea of Ukraine’s independence started to turn into a clear political
programme on both sides of the Zbruch River.
Independence,
not autonomy, after all!
The
growing realization of the need for an independent Ukrainian state led to a
better understanding that Ukraine had to develop a differentiated class
structure as a precondition. Full-fledged national development had to eliminate
social destruction caused by national oppression. It was along these lines that
Franko criticized Drahomanov’s unreserved “love forthe common people”. It was
also the reason why Franko adopted a pro-independence position and departed
from Marxism.
Drahomanov’s
narrow view on the place and role of the main social classes, his
“peasantophilia”, to use Franko’s description, led to “an excessively narrow
understanding of the nation as the plebs also in purely cultural and
educational efforts and prevented him from couching the cause of national
development in such broad terms in which we formulate itnow.”
In order
to overcome this kind of simplistic view on Ukrainian society, the higher
social strata of Ukrainian origin, which used to accept the Russian or Polish
national state tradition, had to elevate themselves to a higher level of
sociopolitical and national identity.
Throughout
the 19th century, Ukrainian aristocracy underwent a complicated and ambivalent
process of national awakening on both sides of the Zbruch River. This was
vividly manifested in the way ancient Ukrainian noble families changed their
socionational consciousness and political orientation in Galicia and the part
of Ukraine that was under Russia. Despite the dominating positions of liberal
democracy and social trends in the Ukrainian movement, this evolution showed a
desire to balance ideological and political values and stimulate the
underdeveloped right-wing conservative sector.
The
prevalent social radicalism of the Ukrainian movement alienated the
conservatively minded Ukrainian nobility to the point that some of its members
joined monarchic Russian organizations and parties. However, this political
preference was not conclusive. Rather, it was a step towards self-preservation
and protection of socioeconomic interests. The conservative forces which were
not déclassé departed from the Ukrainian liberal-radical movement but preserved
their national instincts, which clearly showed after February 1917. Their
attempt to realize, in 1918, traditional national statehood was a link in the
all-European process of conservative revolutions and a reaction to the triumph
of liberalism triggered by the 19th century and dressed in the new democratic
attire after the First World War.
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