The Gates of Europe

by Serhii Plokhy

  While historians still argue about the exact meaning of Uvarov’s triad, its clear and simple structure provides a good framework for the discussion of imperial policies in the Western borderlands from the 1830s on. The ideal subject of the Romanovs had to be not only loyal to the empire (that had sufficed during the Age of Reason) but also Russian and Orthodox. The Polish November Uprising had called into question the Ukrainian peasantry’s loyalty to the empire. In the eyes of the imperial authorities, the peasants were definitely Russian but often not Orthodox—most in the newly acquired territories remained Uniate. Thus, to ensure loyalty to the empire and create an ideal subject of the tsars, they had to convert the Uniates to Orthodoxy to break the religious solidarity between Catholic nobles and Uniate peasants. The tactic used to achieve that goal essentially reversed the method of the Union of Brest. Instead of proselytizing among Uniates on an individual basis, the government and its supporters among the Uniate clergy would turn the entire church over to the Orthodox, more or less as the Polish authorities had done for the Uniate Church in the late sixteenth century and then again in the early eighteenth.

  In 1839, a Uniate church council, convened with the support of the government, declared the “reunification” of the Uniates with the Russian Orthodox Church and asked for the tsar’s blessing. The emperor approved the request and moved the army into the region to ensure that the union in reverse would not meet with a new revolt. More than 1,600 parishes and, by some estimates, over 1.5 million parishioners in Ukraine and Belarus were “returned” to Orthodoxy overnight. In Belarus, Volhynia, Podolia, and a good part of the Right Bank, Orthodoxy and nationality were brought together in the service of autocracy. It was the beginning of a long process of “Orthodoxization” of former Uniates, accompanied by their cultural Russification. Since Orthodox seminaries used Russian as their language of instruction, the intellectual elite of the church was being converted not only from Uniate Catholicism to Orthodoxy but also from Ukrainian or Ruthenian to Russian nationality.

  Much more complex and difficult was the battle for the “hearts and minds” of the secular elites in territories threatened by the Polish uprising. At first the empire adopted its usual tactic: integration of the Polish nobility into the empire with no detriment to its legal status or landowning rights. Emperor Alexander made use of Polish aristocrats and intellectuals to promote his liberal reforms. Especially useful were Polish contributions in the realm of education, where Poland had made significant progress before being crushed by its neighbors in 1795.

  The scion of a Polish aristocratic family, Prince Adam Andrzej Czartoryski, played a key role in creating a new educational system in the Ukrainian provinces of the empire. During the first decade of the nineteenth century, he served as an advisor to Alexander and, for a few years, was the de facto head of Russian foreign policy. Alexander also put Czartoryski in charge of the Vilnius educational district, centered on Vilnius University, which had jurisdiction over a good part of western Ukraine. Another Polish aristocrat, Seweryn Potocki, head of the Kharkiv educational district, with its center in Kharkiv University, supervised the rest of Ukraine. The founding of both universities and the development of a public school system throughout the region were among the main achievements of the reform, which the first minister of education of imperial Russia, Kyiv Mohyla Academy alumnus Petro Zavadovsky, supervised.

  If there was any nationality policy in St. Petersburg in the early nineteenth century, it rested on the idea of the Slavic unity of the Russians (understood as including Ukrainians) and the Poles. That changed with the November Uprising. Adam Czartoryski, who remained in charge of the Vilnius educational district until 1823, became the leader of the Polish revolutionary government in December 1830. Later, from his suite in the Hotel Lambert in Paris, he led the activities of the “Great Emigration,” the term for the members of the uprising who fled west. The alliance between the Russian autocracy and the Polish Catholic nobility came to an end. So did the advancement of education, which relied on Polish participation and loyalty. The imperial government picked up the gauntlet of cultural war thrown down by the leaders of the November Uprising, instituting measures to Russify Ukraine and the other former Polish territories of the empire. Count Uvarov was eager to develop Russian-language education and culture as counterweights to the dominant Polish culture of the borderlands.

  Vilnius University, which rivaled the University of Oxford in enrollment for some time, was closed in 1832. The government had no more patience with a school it considered a hotbed of Polish nationalism. Other Polish-run educational institutions in the region also shut their doors, among them a lyceum in the town of Kremianets in Volhynia. The government transferred the lyceum’s rich library, collection of sculptures, and trees and shrubs from the botanical garden to Kyiv, where it created a new imperial center of learning to replace Vilnius University in 1834. The Polish language was banned there; Russian was the only language of instruction. The new university was named after Prince Volodymyr (Vladimir) the Great—the first Orthodox autocrat and a Russian to boot, as far as official historiography was concerned.

  The imperial authorities set about turning Kyiv, a city of only 35,000 inhabitants that Pushkin called “decrepit” in comparison with Warsaw, into a bastion of empire and Russianness on the European cultural frontier. They restored Orthodox churches according to the imperial taste of the time and banned Jews from the city. They built new boulevards and streets, and new names appeared on the map of the ancient city. One of them was Gendarme Way, reflecting the symbolic and practical importance of police for the regime and its stability in the borderlands. In 1833, the new governor of Kyiv, Podolia, and Volhynia, sent to Kyiv with instructions to “merge” the Right Bank with the rest of the empire, suggested building a monument to Prince Volodymyr. Tsar Nicholas I personally examined the proposal. He loved the idea. It took twenty years to realize the project, but in 1853 the city got its statue. It stands today not near the university, as originally planned, but on the bank of the Dnieper, its ideological meaning and historical legacy open to a range of interpretations, from symbolizing Russo-Ukrainian religious and ethnic unity to memorializing the founder of the first Ukrainian state. Few people realize today that the statue was originally meant to assert an imperial claim to former Polish possessions on the Right Bank of the Dnieper.

  The founding of the new university in Kyiv (the third one in the Ukrainian lands after the universities in Lviv and Kharkiv) was an important turning point in the history of the region. The university’s main goal was to educate local cadres to serve as agents of Russian influence and promoters of Russian identity. The government also created a historical commission with the task of collecting and publishing manuscripts and documents to establish that Right-Bank Ukraine, Podolia, and Volhynia were historically Russian lands. It all began as planned. The local talent, mostly descendants of Cossack officer families and sons of priests and junior officials from the former Hetmanate, came to Kyiv to join the new institutions and engage in intellectual combat with the traditional Polish enemies of the Cossacks. But by the end of the 1840s, the imperial authorities found themselves in a precarious situation: the university and the historical commission, envisioned as bastions of struggle for Russian identity against the Polish challenge, had become hotbeds of a new identity and a new nationalism.

  In February 1847, a student of law at Kyiv University named Aleksei Petrov turned up in the office of the Kyiv educational district to denounce a secret society that aimed to turn the Russian Empire into a republic. The investigation launched into Petrov’s allegations uncovered the clandestine Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, named for the Christian missionaries who had enlightened the Slavs not only with a new religion but also with a new language and alphabet. Its members included a professor of history at Kyiv University, Mykola (Nikolai) Kostomarov—he would later become the founder of modern Ukrainian historiography—and a newly appointed drawing instructor
, Taras Shevchenko. Born to the family of a Russian noble in Voronezh province on the border with Sloboda Ukraine, Mykola Kostomarov often stressed that his mother was a Ukrainian peasant woman. Whether that was true or not, mid-nineteenth-century Kyiv intellectuals prized peasant origins—they all wanted to work for the people and be as close to them as possible.

  No member of the brotherhood had better populist credentials than Kostomarov’s coconspirator Taras Shevchenko. Born in 1814 into a family of serfs in Right-Bank Ukraine, the young Shevchenko joined the household of a rich Polish landlord and first went to Vilnius and then to St. Petersburg as a member of his court. There Shevchenko showed his talent as an artist. A Ukrainian painter in St. Petersburg discovered him while he was drawing in the city’s famous Summer Garden. Shevchenko was introduced to some of the leading figures of the Russian cultural scene of the time, including Russia’s best-known poet before Pushkin, Vasilii Zhukovsky, and a founder of Russian romantic art, Karl Briullov. Shevchenko’s work, personality, and life story made such an impression on the artistic community of St. Petersburg that its members decided to free the young serf no matter what. They bought his freedom with 2,500 rubles, an astounding sum by the standards of the time; the funds were the proceeds of the auction of a portrait of Zhukovsky, painted specifically for that purpose, by Briullov.

  Shevchenko became a free man at the age of twenty-four. He turned out to be not only a talented artist but also an outstanding poet. In 1840, two years after acquiring his freedom, Shevchenko published his first collection of poems, titled Kobzar (Minstrel). This would become his second name for generations to come. Though published in St. Petersburg, the collection’s language was Ukrainian. Why did Shevchenko, who left Ukraine as a teenager and matured as an individual, artist, and poet in St. Petersburg, decide to write in Ukrainian and not Russian, the language of St. Petersburg’s streets and artistic salons?

  The immediate reasons included the influence on Shevchenko of his Ukrainian acquaintances in St. Petersburg who helped set him free. One of them, a native of Poltava named Yevhen Hrebinka, was completing a Ukrainian translation of Alexander Pushkin’s poem about the Battle of Poltava (1709) when he met Shevchenko. Hrebinka clearly believed that Ukrainians should have a literature, including works in translation, in their own language. In 1847 Shevchenko explained his reasons for writing in Ukrainian in a preface to a new edition of Kobzar :

  A great sorrow has enveloped my soul. I hear and sometimes I read: the Poles are printing, and the Czechs and the Serbs and the Bulgarians and the Montenegrins and the Russians—all are printing. But from us not a peep, as if we were all dumb. Why is this so, my brethren? Perhaps you are frightened by an invasion of foreign journalists? Do not be afraid; pay no attention to them. . . . Do not pay attention to the Russians. Let them write as they like, and let us write as we like. They are a people with a language, and so are we. Let the people judge which is better.

  Shevchenko specifically took issue with Nikolai Gogol, a native of the former Hetmanate who became a founder of modern Russian prose with his books on Ukrainian themes, including Taras Bulba. “They give us the example of Gogol, who wrote not in his own language but in Russian, or Walter Scott, who did not write in his own language,” wrote Shevchenko. He was not convinced by these examples. “Why have not V. S. Karadžić, Šafárik and others become German—it would have been so convenient for them—but instead remained Slavs, true sons of their mothers, and gained good fame?” he wrote about the major figures of the Serbian and Slovak cultural movements. “Woe to us! But do not despair, my brethren, and work wisely for the sake of Ukraine, our ill-fated mother.”

  Shevchenko wrote these words after he had left St. Petersburg and moved to Ukraine, where his friends included the members of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius. If we do not know why Ivan Kotliarevsky, the founder of modern Ukrainian literature, wrote in Ukrainian in his preface to Kobzar, Shevchenko left no doubt about his own motives and those of his friends and coconspirators. They came out of the pan-Slavic movement of the early nineteenth century, which took shape in response to the pan-Germanic movement of the era. They believed that Ukraine was lagging behind in the development of its own language, literature, and culture, but they also assumed that it had much to offer the rest of the Slavic world, if only her sons such as Gogol would turn their talents to serve their country. They envisioned Ukraine as a free republic in a broader Slavic union.

  Mykola Kostomarov wrote the brotherhood’s programmatic document, titled The Books of the Genesis of the Ukrainian People. One inspiration for Kostomarov’s work came from the Books of the Polish People and the Polish Pilgrimage, in which Adam Mickiewicz presented Polish history as a story of the messianic suffering of the Polish nation. According to Mickiewicz, the Polish nation would rise from the grave and save all enslaved nations. Kostomarov reserved that role for Ukraine, whose Cossack origins had made it democratic and egalitarian: unlike the Russians, the Ukrainians had no tsars, and unlike the Poles, they had no nobility. The members of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius cherished the Ukrainian Cossack past, aspired to the abolition of serfdom, and advocated the transformation of the empire into a federation of equal republics, one of which would be Ukraine.

  The society had a small membership and did not last much longer than a year. Its members were soon arrested—Kostomarov a few days before his wedding and Shevchenko on his arrival in Kyiv, where he had come to take part in his friend’s marriage. Some imperial bureaucrats discerned the beginnings of a new and potentially dangerous trend in the brotherhood’s activities. They described the suspects’ ideas as “separatist,” and the emperor himself called them the result of Paris (meaning exile Polish) propaganda. But others believed that the members of the brotherhood were loyal subjects of the empire, true defenders of Rus’ against Polish influence, who had pushed their local Little Russian patriotism too far and should not be punished too harshly. Ultimately, government officials decided to impose relatively mild sentences so as not to attract too much attention to the brotherhood and drive the Ukrainophiles—the term came into existence in government circles in the mid-nineteenth century—into an alliance with the Polish national movement.

  The Russian authorities described the brotherhood’s aspirations as the unification of the Slavs under the scepter of the tsar. They kept its true program a secret even from the highest officials of the empire. Kostomarov was sentenced to a year in prison. Other members of the brotherhood received prison sentences of six months to three years or were sent into internal exile, usually working at bureaucratic jobs in the more distant provinces. Emperor Nicholas I gave the harshest sentence to Shevchenko, sending him to serve as a private in the imperial army for ten long years without the right to draw, paint, or write. The emperor was appalled by the personal attacks on himself and his wife in Shevchenko’s poems and drawings. Shevchenko held the autocracy responsible for the plight of his people and his land, which was not Russia but Ukraine. His work thus attacked two of the three elements of Uvarov’s “official nationality”: autocracy and nationality. Nor was his Orthodoxy of an imperial kind.

  Through their writings and activities, Kostomarov, Shevchenko, and other members of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius had initiated what we would now call a Ukrainian national project. For the first time, they used the findings of antiquarians, folklorists, linguists, and writers to formulate a political program that would lead to the creation of a national community. In the course of the next century, the ideas advocated by the members of the brotherhood and presented to a broad audience in Shevchenko’s impassioned poetry would profoundly transform Ukraine and the entire region. The most obvious sign of that change today is the Shevchenko monument in front of the main building of Kyiv University. It replaced a statue to the university’s founder, Emperor Nicholas I.

  chapter 15

  The Porous Border

  In 1848, one year after the Russian i
mperial authorities cracked down on the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, the Ukrainians of the Habsburg Empire created their first political organization in Lviv, the Supreme Ruthenian Council. The Galician Ukrainians referred to themselves as Ruthenians or Rusyns and were generally known by those names in the empire. The council was a very different type of organization from the one that had existed in Kyiv in 1846 and 1847. Whereas the brotherhood acted in secrecy, had few members, and was destroyed by the Russian imperial authorities, the council got started with the help and encouragement of the Austrian governor of Galicia and enjoyed a large membership and broad public support.

  Despite all the differences between the two organizations, the coincidence in the timing of their creation points to a very important feature in the development of Ukrainian culture, national identity, and political activism. That development had two tracks, and when movement on one slowed down or stopped, progress on the other could proceed or even gain speed. Separated by the imperial Russo-Austrian border, the Ukrainian activists were united by a myriad of links in the process of nation building. Such links extended across a political border that also became religious in the course of the nineteenth century, dividing Ukrainian Catholics (Uniates) from Ukrainian Orthodox. More often than not, contacts between the two groups of Ukrainian activists continued despite the wishes of the two competing imperial powers and developed along multiple channels, which helped the two branches of the movement to engender a common vision of Ukraine’s future.

  Helping the Ukrainian activists, divided by political borders but united in spirit and national ideology, to overcome their limitations was the simple fact that the two imperial governments followed very different policies toward their Ukrainian minorities. Nowhere were those differences more pronounced than in the treatment of the Uniate Church, which the two states had inherited from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Unlike the Russian authorities, the Austrian ones had never persecuted the Uniates or tried to “reunify” them with the dominant (in their case, Catholic) “mother church.” In fact, they treated the Uniates with respect, as indicated in their new official name, Greek (that is, Byzantine-rite) Catholics. Their Polish Catholic brethren were called Roman Catholics. The government also created a seminary to educate the Greek Catholic clergy, first in Vienna and then in Lviv. In the early nineteenth century, the church acquired its independence of the remaining Uniate bishoprics in the Russian Empire by raising the Lviv bishopric to the status of metropolitanate. With most of the secular elite embracing Catholicism and Polish culture, the Greek Catholic clergy were the only leaders of Ruthenian society, and in time they formed the backbone of the modern Ukrainian national movement.