Lost Kingdom

by Serhii Plokhy

  If anything, the outbreak of the Great War in August 1914 would strengthen the unity of that virtual nation and create conditions for its expansion beyond the borders of the empire.

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  THE FALL OF THE MONARCHY

  ON AUGUST 31, 1914, EMPEROR NICHOLAS II SIGNED A DECREE renaming the Russian capital from St. Petersburg, the name given to it by its founder, Peter the Great, to Petrograd. The reference to the saint was gone, replaced with the name of the tsar who had founded the city. More importantly, the German “burg” was replaced with the Russian “grad,” signaling that Russia was turning its back on its close links to Central Europe and embarking on a process of gradual isolation from the West. That process would gather strength in the 1920s, when Petrograd was renamed Leningrad to honor the leader of the Bolshevik revolution, and would reach its peak in the next decade under Lenin’s heir, Joseph Stalin.

  The original change from the German to the Russian name was made in the early days of the World War I, which pitted Russia against Germany and Austria-Hungary, and was inspired by an upsurge of Russian patriotism. It was made by Tsar Nicholas himself, without much consultation with his chief ministers. He was clearly responding to the expectations of the masses as opposed to those of his cabinet. The Great War was not the first military conflict with a Western power, of which there had been many in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but no one had suggested altering the name of the capital in those days. Times were changing. On both sides of the freshly drawn front lines, nationalism was on the rise, and nothing fed it better than war. This one was supposed to be short and victorious, but the change of name was by no means provisional and aroused jubilation among Russian nationalists. “A great historical fact has come to pass,” wrote a newspaper at the time. “The capital of the Russian Empire, Petersburg, which bore that name for more than two centuries, has been renamed Petrograd by imperial decree. That which the finest Slavophiles dreamed of has been realized in the great epoch of struggle against Germanism.”

  A few weeks earlier, on August 2, tens of thousands of citizens had poured into the square in front of the Winter Palace, where the Revolution of 1905 had begun nine years earlier. This time they came not to protest and demand but to manifest their patriotism and loyalty to the monarchy. Russia’s world-renowned opera singer Fedor Shaliapin (Chaliapin) led the crowd in the hymn “God Save the Tsar.” People knelt when Nicholas II came onto the balcony to greet them and read his manifesto on the start of the war, which Russia had officially declared on Austria the previous day. Nicholas explained the government’s decision as a response to Austria’s attack on Serbia, a fraternal Slavic and Orthodox state. “True to its historical precepts, Russia, one in faith and blood with the Slavic peoples, has never regarded their fate with indifference,” read the manifesto. He then explained that with the German declaration of war on Russia, more was now at stake than Slavic solidarity. “WE unshakably believe,” continued Nicholas, “that all OUR faithful subjects will rise concordantly and selflessly to the defense of the Russian Land. Let internal disputes be forgotten at this terrible hour of trial. May the union of the TSAR with HIS people be consolidated even more firmly.”

  The war was presented not as a struggle of one European empire against another but as a contest of the Russian people and the Slavic world they led with the Germanic race. The crowds in front of the palace, bearing banners and portraits of the tsar, were most receptive. At the very center were two banners, one calling for “Victory for Russia and all Slavdom,” the other demanding “Freedom for Carpathian Rus’.” Although war was declared in Petrograd under the pan-Slavic banner, the Russian question was profoundly involved from the start. Among the immediate war aims was that of taking under the tsar’s high hand the last remaining patrimony of Kyivan Rus’—the “Carpathian Rus’” of Austrian and Hungarian Galicia, Bukovyna, and Transcarpathia. That would complete the reunification of the “Russian” lands.

  On August 17, Russian forces crossed the Russo-German border into East Prussia. Official rhetoric focused on the need to crush aggressive Teutonic might. On the following day, Russian commanders led their troops across the border with Austria, proclaiming the goal of liberating long-suffering “Russians” oppressed by the Habsburgs. The war on the southern sector of the Russian front was supposed to solve the Russian question once and for all, uniting all Russians under the emperor’s rule. It also offered a unique opportunity to crush rising Ukrainian and Belarusian movements within the empire, ensuring the complete unity of the reconstituted Russian nation.

  THE FIRST MONTHS OF THE WAR WITNESSED AN UNPRECEDENTED upsurge of Russian nationalism, fueling the high expectations of the leaders of Russian nationalist organizations. They had long argued for support of the Russophile movement in Austrian Galicia and fought against Ukrainian activists, who were branded as traitors to the Russian nation within the empire. Their time had finally come.

  The manifesto issued by the Russian commander in chief, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, on the eve of the Russian invasion of Galicia in August 1914, presented the Russian advance as the liberation of a long-suffering branch of the Russian people. “Brothers!” read the manifesto. “The judgment of God is upon us! Patiently, with Christian humility, the Russian people languished for centuries beneath the foreign yoke, but neither cajolery nor persecution could break its hope for freedom. As an impetuous stream breaks rocks in order to merge with the sea, so there is no force that could stop the Russian people in its drive for unification. Let there be no more Subjugated Rus’!” The manifesto also sought to justify the Russian incursion in more traditional, historical terms: “May the domain of St. Vladimir, the land of Yaroslav Osmomysl and Princes Daniil and Roman, throwing off the yoke, raise the flag of Russia, one, great, and indivisible.” Finally, it appealed to the Ukrainian subjects of the Habsburgs, urging them to rebel against their government for the sake of a bright future in the Russian Empire. “And you, long-suffering fraternal Rus’, rise to greet Russian arms. Liberated Russian brethren! You will all find a place in the bosom of Mother Russia.”

  The slogan of the unification, or, rather, reunification, of the virtual Russian nation divided by the border with Austria gained prominence during the early days of the war, serving to justify the conflict in ethnonational terms, mobilize public support for the war within the empire, and turn “Russians” abroad against the Habsburgs. If Austrian officials had ever doubted that Russia would play the Russophile card against them in the coming war, the Russian manifesto eliminated all doubt and provided formal justification for the roundup and detention of Russophiles.

  In the first weeks of the war, thousands of real and alleged Russophiles—intellectuals, priests, and village leaders—were sent to Talerhof, a detention camp in an open field near the town of Graz in Styria. Out of its 20,000 inmates, some 3,000 would die of malnutrition and disease. Many of those who ended up in Talerhof and the other Austrian detention camp of Terezin were in fact not Russophile but Ukrainophile activists. In the commotion created by the war, those who were politically engaged often took advantage of the situation to denounce their opponents to the authorities. Ukrainian activists believed that they had been denounced by the Poles. Some were, while others were accused by their own, or were overheard saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. The typical accusation was that someone had been heard claiming that living conditions would improve once the Russians came to the region. Most inhabitants of Galicia and Bukovyna would soon find out for themselves whether that was true or not. Many were disappointed.

  To Russia, the first months of the war brought not only high expectations but also early disappointment. The bad news came from the northern sector of the front. After initial successes in East Prussia, one of the Russian armies there suffered a major defeat in late August 1914. Another army had to retreat as well. But in Galicia, on the Austrian front, Russian military operations met with continuing success. On September 3, Russian formations entered Lviv, which was
renamed from the German Lemberg to the Russian Lvov. Later that month, Russian troops approached Peremyshl, an ancient Rus’ center with a strong fortress that was doggedly defended by the Austrian army for almost half a year. In March 1915, the exhausted Austrian garrison ran out of ammunition and was forced to surrender. Galicia and Bukovyna were now completely under Russian control. Plans were made for a major new offensive through the Hungarian plain to take Budapest and Vienna, knocking Austria-Hungary out of the war. Few people doubted that Peremyshl and the rest of Galicia would now be Russian forever. Transcarpathia, or, in the imperial parlance of the time, Subcarpathian Rus’—a region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire under Hungarian rule—was to come next, completing the “gathering” of the Rus’ lands initiated, according to Russian historiography, in the fifteenth century by the first Russian ruler to call himself tsar, Ivan III.

  In the fall of 1914, the newly conquered region was placed under the administration of the governor general of Galicia, Count Georgii Bobrinsky, an ethnic Russian who saw Russification as his main task. Upon assuming office, he declared, “I shall establish the Russian language, law, and system here.” The governor’s close assistant in promoting that agenda was his nephew, Vladimir Bobrinsky, a member of the Duma and a leader of the “moderate right.” Since 1907, Vladimir Bobrinsky had headed the Galician Benevolent Society, which supported the Russophile movement and publications in Galicia and Volhynia and lobbied the Russian government to do the same. He argued that by fighting for the Russian cause on the San River—a tributary of the Vistula and one of the main waterways in Austrian-ruled Ukraine—the government could successfully defend that cause on the Dnieper, as the collapse of the Russophile movement in Galicia would only strengthen Ukrainophile propaganda in Little Russia. Now Bobrinsky and his Duma allies, including Archbishop Evlogii (Georgievsky) of Kholm, who was placed in charge of the Orthodox mission in Galicia, gained a unique opportunity to put their ideas for the Russification of Galicia into practice.

  Not only was the name of the city of Lemberg changed to the Russian Lvov, but the names of streets and squares in Galician and Bukovynian towns were also changed. They were now meant to popularize Aleksandr Pushkin and other Russian cultural and political figures. The Russian language was introduced into the educational system with the goal of replacing Ukrainian. Special courses were instituted for local “Russian” teachers to master the Russian language. Ukrainian newspapers were closed and the sale of books published outside the Russian Empire in the “Little Russian dialect” prohibited. Even Ukrainian-language correspondence was banned. Ukrainophile organizations were closed and dozens of their activists arrested. The head of the Greek Catholic Church, Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, was detained in September 1914 and exiled to central Russia, where he spent most of the war in an Orthodox monastery.

  By contrast, Russophile leaders and organizations were supported. Vladimir Bobrinsky personally traveled from one prison to another in the newly occupied territories to release Russophile activists imprisoned by the Austrian authorities. Russophiles who avoided detention by the Austrians or were released from prison by Bobrinsky actively propagandized the population in support of the “White tsar” who had finally extended his protection to the long-suffering population of “Red Rus’,” the medieval name for Galicia. Russian philanthropic societies, which had been active in the region even before the war, now moved into Galicia and Bukovyna to provide assistance to the peasants in the name of the all-Russian idea.

  But wartime conditions limited the Russification program of Vladimir Bobrinsky and his supporters. The military command, especially Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, whose popularity in the army did not sit well with the emperor himself, believed that Galicia and Bukovyna should be integrated into the empire right away. The government, for its part, wanted to postpone integration until the signing of the peace treaty. A compromise was reached whereby full integration was postponed until the end of the war, but the needs of the military were to take precedence until then. The authorities wanted stability behind their lines, not a radical reform that could produce discontent and resistance. Limits were therefore imposed on the Orthodox mission in the region, allowing Archbishop Evlogii to take over Greek Catholic parishes only if they lacked a Greek Catholic priest (many had fled the region or had been arrested by the Austrians) and if a clear majority (at least 75 percent) of the parishioners approved. That was a remarkable change from the first months of the occupation, when the media reported 30,000 converts to Orthodoxy from the ranks of the Uniate Church.

  Among the Galicians who suffered the most from the policies of the occupying administration were the Jews. The espionage mania that engulfed the Russian army and society after the first defeats on the German front led the military to regard Jews as a major security risk and argue for declaring the Jews of Galicia and Bukovyna Russian subjects and deporting them from the area. Since the government refused to go along with appeals for the immediate incorporation of the region into the empire, the military command prohibited all movement by Jews in the zone adjoining the front, effectively putting a stop to Jewish commerce there and undermining the economic foundation of Jewish communities in the region. As the ill-supplied Russian army resorted to requisitions and even plunder to replenish its food reserves, Jews topped the list of victims. The property of those who had left before the arrival of the Russian army was confiscated, as was that of Austrians and Poles who had fled the region.

  The Russian policy of playing the national card against Germany and Austria-Hungary was full of contradictions. In the case of Galicia, two sets of policies came into direct conflict—one that promised support for Polish national aspirations and another that treated Galicia as a primordially Russian land. The Poles were promised reunification of Polish ethnic territory and a state of their own, to be augmented by the Polish territories belonging to Austria. “Let the borders that cut the Polish people into pieces be wiped out. Let it reunite itself as a whole under the scepter of the Russian tsar,” read the manifesto addressed by Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich to the Poles on the eve of the Russian invasion of Austria and East Prussia. “Under that scepter Poland will be reborn, free in its faith, language, and self-government.” As the Russian authorities in Galicia tried to show the Poles that they meant what they said, the Polish-controlled court system remained in effect in some places. The administration that had first closed all Polish schools in Galicia was forced to reopen them and allow the use of Polish as a language of instruction along with Russian.

  The Galician Russophiles felt betrayed. They were not allowed to take positions in the occupation administration, which were often filled by unqualified officials from the Russian Empire. On top of that, the treasonous Poles were now allies of Russia, while the “Russian people” of Galicia were once again being treated as second-class citizens.

  RUSSOPHILE CONCERNS WERE TAKEN SERIOUSLY BY THEIR ALLIES in the Russian nationalist camp and often aired in the Duma. Rightist and nationalist deputies saw the occupation of Galicia in Russian nationalist terms and opposed everything that did not correspond to their vision of that development as a reunification of the Russian land after a millennium of struggle against the hostile West, represented by Germans, Austrians, and Poles. By contrast, the Russian liberals, represented first and foremost by the Constitutional Democrats, saluted the tolerant attitude of government officials toward the Poles of Galicia and Bukovyna. They were divided on the Ukrainian question, as they had been before the war.

  Petr Struve, an influential figure in the liberal Constitutional Democratic Party, believed that the clampdown on the Ukrainian movement in Galicia spelled the end of the movement in Russian-ruled Ukraine. Pavel Miliukov, the leader of the Constitutional Democrats, disagreed with his party comrade, suggesting that he educate himself on the Ukrainian movement in Galicia and read the literature of the Ukrainian cooperative movement there—such phenomena could not be eliminated by means of military occupation. He presented a resolutio
n to the Central Committee of his party demanding “an end to the anti-state system of Russifying occupied territory, the reestablishment of closed national institutions, and strict observance of the personal and property rights of the population.” But the resolution was never passed. Some scholars argue that Miliukov’s intention in sponsoring it was mainly to calm Ukrainophile supporters and allies of his party: if so, it proved futile.

  In any case, Ukrainian activists in the Russian Empire could do little about the Russian nationalist offensive in Galicia. They were on the defensive, doing their best to prove their loyalty to the empire, which was questioned by their enemies in the Russian nationalist camp, who portrayed the Ukrainian movement as the product of a German-Polish-Jewish conspiracy. The Russian nationalists argued that Austrian Galicia was the center of the Ukrainian movement. Long before the war, the Russian nationalists in Kyiv had warned about the possibility of Ukraine leaving Russia and joining Austria-Hungary. With the start of the war, the authorities had acted on the worry and paranoia of the Russian nationalist camp, closing down Ukrainian-language publications such as the Kyiv-based newspaper Rada (Council) and harassing Ukrainian organizations and activists. Branded “Mazepists” by the government, they had little opportunity to express their views to the general public.

  Symbolic of the fate of the Ukrainian movement on both sides of the Russo-Austrian border at the start of the Great War was the fate of Mykhailo Hrushevsky, one of the leaders of the Ukrainians in Galicia and, in the eyes of the Russian nationalists, their main opponent. The Austrian authorities, who suspected him of pro-Russian sentiments (he never gave up his Russian citizenship), ordered him to go west, away from the front line, at the beginning of hostilities. In Vienna, where he spent some time, Hrushevsky was under police surveillance. He left Austria a few days after an order was issued for his arrest. Hrushevsky arrived in Kyiv in November 1914 only to be arrested by the Russian police on charges of pro-Austrian sympathies. The “proof” of his alleged guilt was found in his luggage, which included a Ukrainian-language brochure titled How the Tsar Deceives the People. But that was a mere formality—the order for Hrushevsky’s arrest had been issued soon after the Russian takeover of Lviv. There the authorities found photographs of Hrushevsky together with Ukrainian activists who, according to information received by the Russian police, were working for the Austrian government and against Russia.