With the deportation of nationalist intellectuals and hostile priests, Bobrinskii’s regime could embark on remoulding Ruthenes into Russians. It received some support for this project from Galician Russophile intellectuals and Orthodox priests, a minority which, in this land of still fluid national identities, regarded itself as part of the Russian people.121 Two key sources of identity were attacked. The first was the Ukrainian language, which as in Russia was banished from public life. Ukrainian bookshops were closed and books and newspapers in the language banned from publication. The Polish press were forbidden by the censor from even printing the word ‘Ruthenian’; ‘Russian’ had to be used instead.122 Most importantly, educational reform was introduced. All schools in Galicia were shut down after the invasion, and although at the end of 1914 some Polish ones were permitted to reopen, Ruthenian schools remained permanently closed. The occupation authorities, taking a long view, plotted to turn Galicia into an organic part of Great Russia by educating Ruthenian children in Russian. Over the winter of 1914–15, special courses were organized in both Galicia and St Petersburg to train teachers in the conqueror’s language. Take-up was disappointing, however, for only around 250 Ruthenian teachers, one-tenth of the total, agreed to attend. While fighting continued and the region’s fate remained undecided, there were limits to the ability of the military occupation regime to implement its Russification programme.123
The second pillar of Ruthenes’ identity, their Uniate Church and faith, was also attacked. Unlike the campaign against the Ukrainian language, this proved not merely ineffective but actually counter-productive. Initially, the Tsarist military had been successful in courting Ruthenian peasants. For them, life during the occupation was better than in peace under their Polish noble landlords. The Russians encouraged Ruthenians to loot estates and settle scores with Jewish neighbours. The occupiers offered seed, food and other goods, often plundered from Jews, at bargain prices. Their popularity rose further when the rumour spread that the Tsar wished to take the land from nobles and Jews and distribute it to the peasantry.124 However, much of the goodwill evaporated once the Russians began to interfere in peasants’ confessional lives. The Tsar was personally to blame for this misstep, for it was he who appointed Archbishop Evlogii, a militant cleric who had made his reputation fighting tooth and nail to rein in Catholic influence in Russia’s western borderlands, to further the interests of the Orthodox Church in Galicia. From his arrival in December 1914, Evlogii’s conduct was insulting. His first act was to celebrate the Tsar’s name day by holding Masses, against the wishes of their clergy, in two of Lwów’s Uniate cathedrals. He gave a provocative sermon, calling on the priests of ‘Galician Rus’ to lead their people into ‘organic unity with Great Russia’ and to bring about a ‘historic union with the Orthodox Russian Church’.125
Bobrinskii and Ianushkevich were usually at loggerheads, but Evlogii succeeded in bringing them together with his proselytizing zeal, which both feared would inflame resistance in the army’s rear areas. In the spring of 1915 these concerns brought about his recall. Nonetheless, ruthless missionizing continued. Bobrinskii’s stricture that Orthodox priests should not be sent to replace Uniate incumbents unless three-quarters of the people in any parish had first voted in support was frequently disregarded. Uniate priests were forced to share or even surrender their churches to Russian Orthodox clergy. Some saw parts of their land, on which they depended for their livelihood, transferred to their rivals. A few were murdered. Their parishioners were also coerced. Peasants were threatened with the confiscation of their land or told that their children would be taken from them if they did not convert to Orthodoxy.126 More subtle methods were also employed; by holding Orthodox Masses in Uniate churches, some of Evlogii’s clergy sought to convert by stealth. Nonetheless, their success was very limited. Time was short, peasants’ loyalties to their Church were strong and the incumbent clergy resisted, advising flocks to take Mass in a Roman Catholic church when no Uniate priest was available. By the occupation’s end, despite the pressure exerted by Tsarist officials, only between fifty and a hundred of the Uniate Church’s approximately 1,500 Galician parishes had opted for Russian Orthodoxy.127
The greatest victims of Russian occupation were Galicia’s Jews. Their treatment was, as an official Habsburg report written in the aftermath of the invasion discovered, ‘much more severe than that of the rest of other classes in the population, in places truly inhuman’.128 Tsarist officers soon came to believe that, as the ethnographic studies had predicted, Jews were spying and working to undermine the Russian occupation, and so singled them out for harsh treatment. Hostages, whose numbers increased rapidly from October 1914, were drawn disproportionately from the Jewish population: although Jews made up only an eighth of eastern Galicia’s inhabitants, they were more than half – 1,160 – of the 2,130 hostages deported by the Russian army up to mid-1915.129 Financial penalties too were levied primarily against them. When Stanisławów, a city in the south-east of the Crownland, was fined 50,000 crowns as a punishment for alleged sabotage, it was stipulated that Jewish residents were to pay 36,000. To rub in the unfairness, the sum was collected in full, while the city’s Poles and Ruthenes were forgiven the remaining 14,000 crowns. Similarly, when telephone lines in the surroundings of Kołomyja were damaged, Jews were blamed and warned either to pay a heavy fine or face expulsion from the city.130
Tsarist civilian officials appointed to oversee the localities were even worse than the army officers. The dregs of the imperial bureaucracy, poorly educated, anti-Semitic and venal, they abused Jews mercilessly. The City Governor of Lwów, Yevstafiy Nikolaiyevich Skalon, is a good example. As the well-informed Rappaport-Ansky recounted, he had already become notorious for his corruption as Police Commissioner of Kiev. In Galicia, he ‘openly took bribes, fleeced the living and the dead, and victimized both individuals and the whole community’. With house searches, arrests and threats ‘to string up every tenth Jew’, he extorted a thousand roubles of protection money from the Jews of the city.131 Disturbingly for Austrian leaders, many Habsburg police and justice officials collaborated with the Russians, and some took advantage of the occupation regime’s anti-Semitism to vent their own hatred of Jews. These Polish civil servants, it was claimed, had ‘made their business the systematic persecution of the Jews, their suppression, pauperization and humiliation in front of the authorities and population’.132 The Chief of Police in Przemyśl, Eugen Wierzbowski, who was subsequently sentenced to a year and ten months’ hard labour for collaboration, was singled out for particular criticism. Jews were convinced, against the denials of Galician officials, that Wierzbowski had directed Russian officers seeking billets to wealthy Jews’ apartments, singled out the most respected Jews for hard and demeaning street cleaning and fortress-building work, and betrayed Jewish men of military age, who were then deported.133
Persecuted, unprotected by law, and at the mercy of prejudiced Tsarist town commandants and greedy civil officials, hate-filled collaborators and violent soldiers, the Jews found themselves in a form of purgatory due to the occupation. Accentuating their suffering were epidemics brought by Russian troops into Galicia. Typhoid, smallpox and above all cholera ravaged the whole population. The damage to housing and infrastructure – 188,981 buildings were destroyed during the invasions – made all vulnerable, but Jews, whose shtetls had often been singled out for arson by Russian troops, were probably particularly exposed.134 Some 200 Jews died in the town of Zaleszczyki and 300 each in Nadwórna and Horodenka. In Jaryczow Nowy, the 140 people killed by epidemic diseases represented about a sixth of the town’s Jewish population.135 To Manès Sperber, a child at the time in the shtetl of Zabłotów, it seemed that the end of the night was the peak time for deaths, for it was then that the weeping of the bereaved frequently awoke him. ‘In the nocturnal stillness’ one could hear ‘the cries of the family trying to hold back the dying person.’ The corpses of the dead were terrible to behold, their faces distorted. ‘Some lay th
ere as if their terrible cramp had only relaxed that very instant.’136
The Tsarist High Command, and especially the virulently anti-Semitic Chief of Staff, Nikolai Ianushkevich, foresaw no place for Jews in Galicia’s Russian future. Meals at headquarters were enlivened by animated debate among officers on how best to go about ‘exterminating’ them.137 However, in practice, Stavka had no genocidal intentions but instead proposed to uproot Galicia’s Jews by destroying their livelihoods. The first step was to demand the confiscation of the 8 per cent of Galician land in Jewish ownership. Against objections from both Bobrinskii and the government, Ianushkevich argued cynically that if the victims were to have Russian citizenship imposed on them, the plan would not contravene international law. A census of Jewish land ownership was taken over the winter of 1914–15, and in February 1915 the Tsar signed a ‘Liquidation Law’ permitting land owned by Austro-Hungarian and German Jewish subjects within 160 kilometres of the front to be expropriated. Other, even more damaging measures aimed against Jews were the restrictions placed by the military on their freedom of movement in February 1915 and, after Ianushkevich’s complaints, in March the dismissal of nearly all Jewish Galician court employees. The limitations on movement were a particularly heavy blow, for although motivated principally by security concerns, their primary effect was economic. Jews were forbidden to enter Galicia or to move between its districts, and as Bobrinskii had rightly predicted, this cut off Jewish traders from their markets and hindered the army from buying the goods it needed. That, in turn, led commanders to claim that Jews were sabotaging the war effort by denying the wares they now did not have to the Russian military.138
The Tsarist army’s security paranoia, which spiralled over the autumn of 1914, ultimately prompted it to turn in Galicia, as elsewhere, to mass deportation. Jews were late victims of this measure. First to be affected in the summer had been enemy subjects in Russia’s western borderlands and military-aged men in conquered territories. In the winter of 1914–15, the practice had radicalized when the army started targeting Germans as an ethnic group. The thousands of East Prussians deported to the Volga were dwarfed by the hundreds of thousands of people from Russia’s own German minority cleared from western regions. Only from January 1915 were Jews, still considered a less dangerous collective than the Germans, subject to major centrally organized deportations. Interestingly, the measure was conceived at first in reaction to Habsburg atrocities, an early case of racial stereotyping by the region’s autocratic regimes interacting to produce escalating suffering and bloodshed for its ethnically mixed population.139 After the Habsburg army recaptured Czernowitz, the capital of Bukovina, in October 1914, disturbing reports of its brutal punishments, including the hanging of Russophile peasants, reached Russian military commanders. Local Jews were blamed for identifying Russian sympathizers to the Austrians. When, after being retaken by the Russians, Czernowitz appeared again to be about to fall to Habsburg forces in late January 1915, Ianushkevich ordered hostage-taking and deportations ‘in order to prevent atrocities against the population which is devoted to us’.140
Ianushkevich’s obsession with spies bred collective hysteria throughout the army and soon led to the extension of deportations across the Galician front.141 Embracing an idea first suggested for use against German men, the commander-in-chief Grand Duke Nikolai ordered on 12 March 1915 that Jews be pushed towards Austro-Hungarian positions. Within a week the order had been carried out, although, as in East Prussia, patchily. The town of Tyśmienica was one place affected. On 17 March, Russian troops herded around 2,000 Jews towards the firing line. As a means of expulsion, the measure was totally ineffective; eventually the unfortunate people were allowed to return. Their absence did, however, allow local officials and soldiers the opportunity to plunder their homes. In other areas, Jews were sent east rather than west. The Jewish population of Mościska was driven, regardless of age or health, 35 kilometres eastwards to Gródek and some people were made to trek 65 kilometres to Lwów. The Russians claimed that spying by these people had prevented their troops from capturing the nearby besieged fortress of Przemyśl.142 Around 10,000 people were caught up in similar expulsions. When, a fortnight later, the fortress city did capitulate to Tsarist forces, more deportations followed. From late March, 17,000 Jews were expelled from Przemyśl, many of whom crowded into Lwów. Bobrinskii, who disapproved of the measures, faced a humanitarian crisis. The old, infirm and infants were among the people forced out of their homes, with no thought given as to how they could be provisioned and sheltered. Many died from hunger, exhaustion and exposure. When Bobrinskii’s military superiors ordered him to transfer the deported Jews to Russian governorships further east, the horrified imperial government belatedly became aware of Stavka’s actions and began to protest vociferously. Regardless, the deportations continued in April.143
At the start of the following month, the strategic balance on the Eastern Front was overturned when the Central Powers launched a successful offensive at Gorlice-Tarnów. In the following chaotic Russian retreat through Galicia, attacks on Jews escalated dramatically. Shloyme Rappaport-Ansky observed how ‘fiery rings’, the sign of villages and towns burning, were clearly visible at night along the routes taken by withdrawing troops. Jewish quarters were plundered and people beaten, murdered and executed. Again, there were many rapes. Community leaders were taken as hostages to Russia.144 Jews were the principal victims, but Galicia’s Gentile population also now found itself in danger. Jan Słomka, the Polish mayor of the village of Dzików, described how during this period his district ‘was stripped cleanest of everything’. Germans and Poles were, after Jews, targeted as hostages. They were taken as insurance that Russophiles would not be punished by the advancing Habsburg army.145 As Stavka’s desperation grew, its orders became more ruthless. First, units were commanded to arrest all men aged between eighteen and fifty. Then, on 12 June, ten days before the fall of Lwów, a new instruction was issued to evacuate the entire population from the front zone. As a concession to the Russian government, Jews were excluded from the measure; instead, they were to be forced towards the enemy. Some Galicians managed to flee when the Russians came. Others bribed corrupt commanders to overlook them. Nonetheless, the number of people moved was staggering. Some 50,000 Jews were shifted pointlessly and painfully around Galicia and between 20,000 and 50,000 were forced into Russia, many ending up in Siberia or Turkestan. About 50,000 Gentiles were also deported or evacuated under wretched conditions in the summer of 1915.146
The Tsarist army’s attempt to remake Galicia as a Russian land was a disaster. People who had once sympathized with the Tsar’s pan-Slavic aims were alienated by his army’s brutality and religious intolerance. Astonishingly, however, Habsburg rulers failed to benefit, for on reconquering the Crownland, they themselves promptly set about alienating every section of the population. Emperor Franz Joseph made a grave error in listening to the advice of his General Staff Chief, Conrad von Hötzendorf, and replacing the Polish Statthalter, the head of the Crownland’s administration, with a soldier, General Hermann von Colard. Conrad blamed the Polish establishment as the cause of what he still believed had been ubiquitous Ruthenian treason in the autumn of 1914. The Poles, he argued, had pushed Ruthenes into the Russian camp in peacetime by repressing Ukrainophile nationalists and promoting Russophiles who had appeared to pose less of a threat to their local political hegemony. While this argument had some merit, the removal of the Crownland from Polish conservatives’ control inevitably perturbed and alienated these traditionally loyal elites.147 That the appointment of a general found much favour with Ruthenes is also unlikely. They were still traumatized by the Habsburg army’s autumn bloodletting. Fearful of another encounter with the force, many thousands fled with the retreating Russians. As one refugee told Rappaport-Ansky, they were still afraid of the Magyars: ‘Wherever they arrive, they take along the healthy young men and slaughter everyone else!’148
The initial joy at liberation felt by much
of the rest of the population also did not last long. The Habsburg military administration foisted on Lwów was incompetent and repressive, and the city suffered a severe food supply crisis in the months after it was freed. By the end of 1915, there were complaints that only smuggling from Hungary, to which the authorities turned a blind eye, was keeping the population alive.149 Worse still, the army launched a witch hunt for collaborators, demonstrating how little it had learned since the autumn. Hundreds were arrested in Lwów alone. In villages in western Galicia, Polish peasants accused of cooperating with the enemy were strung up.150 The military caused further antagonism with the predatory way that it went about seizing recruits to replace the soldiers frittered away in the war’s first campaigns and in fruitless winter offensives in the Carpathians. Dawn house searches and flying checkpoints were used to trap new cannon fodder. More generally, Habsburg troops’ cruel and contemptuous treatment of the Galician population, which they clearly regarded as universally Russophile, was alienating. Lwów illustrates the hostility that developed among Galician civilians for the Habsburg military. There, relations descended to the point at which citizens rioted against the garrison. Detested Hungarian soldiers were withdrawn but the Czechs who replaced them were no better. ‘Seldom was an administration so hated,’ observed one contemporary. Pro-Austrians joked bitterly that the Russians should award the Habsburg army a medal: ‘it has understood perfectly how to alienate the Lwów population’.151
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