The Gates of Europe

by Serhii Plokhy

  Why did the Habsburgs act as they did? Paradoxically, for the same reason as the Romanovs. The two empires shared the same concern—rising Polish nationalism—but chose different strategies to fight it. The Russian imperial government liquidated the Uniate Church and arrested the development of the Ukrainian movement in an effort to protect the imperial Russian nation against Polish “propaganda,” whereas the Austrian authorities tried to counteract that propaganda by building up the Ruthenian movement in their realm. They never sought to turn the Ruthenians into Germans and had no problem with their development as a distinct nation. In fact, they encouraged that process as a counterweight to the well-developed and organized Polish movement.

  Such was the policy first put into effect by the Austrian authorities in the revolutionary year of 1848. From Palermo to Paris to Vienna, liberal nationalism was on the rise in Europe, challenging the Congress of Vienna’s borders and the governments that ruled within them. In March 1848, inspired by the revolutionary events in Paris, the Hungarians demanded independence from the Habsburg Empire. They would fight for their freedom with arms in hand. The Poles followed them, rising in Cracow and then in Lviv with demands for civic freedom and autonomy. Many of these demands sat well with neither the government in Vienna nor with at least half the Galician population. The Ukrainians made up about half of the 4.5 million residents of the province. The Poles accounted for about 40 percent and Jews close to 7 percent. Ukrainians constituted an absolute majority in so-called Eastern (original) Galicia, while Poles were in the majority in Little Poland, now called Western Galicia, which included the city of Cracow. Jews lived throughout the enlarged imperial province, with approximately 60 percent of Eastern Galician Jewry residing in cities and small towns.

  The province was agricultural and less economically developed than most of the Habsburg possessions. After the partitions, Emperor Joseph II removed the traditional Polish elite from the business of running the government and brought in imperial bureaucrats—mostly Germanized Czechs from Bohemia—to create a new administrative system; he also raised the educational and cultural level of the population and protected the peasants from the abuses of their masters. While he removed the Polish elite from power, Joseph originally ignored the Jews, allowing them to keep their autonomy in exchange for paying a so-called toleration tax. Then in 1789 he issued an Edict of Toleration, which was a major step toward the emancipation of Austrian Jewry, but it also disbanded traditional Jewish institutions, prohibited the use of Yiddish and Hebrew in official documents, established German-language schools, and introduced military service for Jews. When the revolution came to Lviv in March 1848, many Jews were happy to join forces with Polish opposition to the empire. Yet, as the Austrian army crushed the Hungarian Revolution with the help of Russian troops, Polish hopes for the restoration of the commonwealth and Jewish hopes for equality were also dashed.

  The Galicians who benefited most from the revolution were the Ukrainians—arguably the most loyal to the empire and originally the most reluctant participants in the events. They were not eager to join the Polish revolt, as the original Polish appeals made no mention of the Ukrainian population of the region or its needs. In April 1848, the leaders of the Ukrainian community, all of whom happened to be clerics of the Uniate Church, issued their own appeal to the emperor, declaring their loyalty and requesting protection against Polish domination and rights for the Ruthenian language. With the blessing and support of the Austrian governor of Galicia, Count Franz Stadion, the Greek Catholic clergy created their Supreme Ruthenian Council. The chief of the Lviv police, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (father of the future writer), approved the founding of the first Ukrainian newspaper, the Galician Star. Stadion saw the new council as “a means of paralyzing Polish influence and getting backing for Austrian rule in Galicia.”

  Under its ecclesiastical leadership, the Supreme Ruthenian Council turned out to be an effective counterweight to the Polish National Council, which spearheaded the Polish national revolution. The supreme council differed in its demands from the Polish National Council on almost every major issue. If the Poles were radical, the Ukrainians were highly conservative. On the future of Galicia, while the Poles wanted autonomy for the entire province, the Ukrainian leaders wanted it divided, with the restoration of the former, smaller Galicia, where Ukrainians formed a 70 percent majority. Two hundred thousand people signed a petition to partition the province. It did not happen: Galicia remained intact. But the Ukrainians emerged from the revolution with a political organization and a newspaper of their own, mobilized as never before.

  By far the most revolutionary development was the abolition of serfdom and the beginning of active peasant participation in electoral politics. Both came about in Galicia in response to Polish revolutionary demands but were introduced by the Austrian authorities and benefited the Ukrainians, who made up most of the province’s peasantry. In Galicia, sixteen of twenty-five Ukrainian members of the Austrian parliament were peasants; in Bukovyna, all five elected Ukrainians were of peasant stock. The election of Ukrainian deputies to parliament had a major impact on the community, as it introduced the Habsburg Ukrainians to the world of electoral politics and taught them self-organization for purposes not of revolt (there were peasant revolts as well) but political action.

  The end of the revolution spelled the demise of the Supreme Ruthenian Council—the government abolished it in 1851—but not of the Ukrainian movement born of the events of 1848. Throughout the 1850s and a good part of the 1860s, people of the same ecclesiastical stock led it. They became known as the St. George Circle, named for the principal Greek Catholic cathedral in the city of Lviv. Their ethnonational orientation gave them a second appellation: Old Ruthenians. Loyal to the empire and conservative in their political and social views, the Greek Catholic bishops and clergymen leading the Ruthenian movement thought of themselves and their people in the Habsburg Empire as members of a distinct Ruthenian nation. Their main enemies were the Poles and their main ally was Vienna, while their fellow Ukrainians, or Little Russians, across the Russo-Austrian border seemed hardly to register in their consciousness.

  While the Revolution of 1848 promoted the formation of a new Ukrainian nation, it left open the question of what kind of nation it was. The “Ruthenian” option represented by the leaders of the Supreme Ruthenian Council included a number of alternatives best represented by the identity choices made by the Ruthenian Triad, a group of romantic writers and poets who appeared on the literary stage in the 1830s. The three leading members of the group, Yakiv Holovatsky, Markian Shashkevych, and Ivan Vahylevych, were students at the Greek Catholic branch of the theological seminary in Lviv. Like national awakeners throughout Europe, they collected folklore and were fascinated with history. They were inspired by the cultural activities of other Habsburg Slavs, and their ideas were rooted in the works of Ukrainian awakeners in the Dnieper region: Ivan Kotliarevsky’s Eneïda, collections of Ukrainian folk songs published in the Russian Empire, and the works of the Kharkiv romantics. They published their first and last almanac, Rusalka dnistrovaia (The Nymph of the Dniester), in Buda in 1836.

  At the time of publication, all three leaders of the group considered the Habsburg Ukrainians to be part of a larger Ukrainian nation. In time, that belief would be shaken and contested. Only one of the three, Markian Shashkevych, is celebrated today as the founder of Ukrainian literature in Galicia. He died in 1843, well before the Revolution of 1848 and the political and intellectual turmoil that it brought about. His colleague Ivan Vahylevych joined the pro-Polish Ruthenian Congress in 1848, and the leaders of the Ukrainian movement subsequently considered him a traitor. In the 1850s the third member of the triad, Yakiv Holovatsky, became a leader of the Galician Russophiles, who regarded the Galician Ukrainians as part of a larger Russian nation. Thus, to use later historiographic terms, the members of the triad became coterminous with the Ukrainian orientation (Shashkevych), the pro-Polish orientation (V
ahylevych), and the Russophile orientation (Holovatsky) of the Ukrainian movement in Galicia.

  The choice of orientation was closely associated with the choice of alphabet for writing Ukrainian texts. The “alphabet wars” that rocked Ukrainian society in the 1830s and then again in the 1850s contested three options: the traditional Cyrillic used in Church Slavonic texts; the civic Cyrillic, not unlike that used in the Russian Empire; and, finally, the Latin alphabet. The Austrian authorities and Polish elites preferred that later, as it brought the emerging Ukrainian literature closer to the imperial standard and made it more susceptible to cultural Polonization. But when the government attempted in 1859 to introduce the Latin alphabet for use in Ukrainian texts, the Ukrainians united in opposition. It soon became clear that the new nation taking shape in Galicia would use no script other than the Cyrillic. Whether that nation would be a separate entity or part of a larger Russian or Ukrainian nation remained an open question.

  The Galician alphabet war of 1859 had a strong echo on the other side of the imperial border. That year the Russian authorities prohibited the publication or import from abroad of Ukrainian and Belarusian texts in the Latin alphabet. The measure was regarded as anti-Polish. Its initiator, a Kyiv censor named Novytsky, wrote in a memo that in Galicia the authorities were trying to turn “Russians” into Poles by means of the Latin alphabet. He believed that the use of the Latin script in the Russian Empire could have the same effect. “The peasants of the western gubernias, encountering books here that are written in the Little Russian language, but in Polish letters, will naturally have a greater preference to learn the Polish alphabet than the Russian one,” wrote Novytsky. That in turn could lead them to read Polish books and expose them to Polish influences, alienating them from the “spirit and tendency of Russian literature.” The ban was implemented almost immediately.

  The censor’s primary concern was with the peasants, who were about to be emancipated. Serfdom was indeed abolished in the Russian Empire in 1861, twelve and a half years after the emancipation of the serfs in Galicia and Bukovyna. It happened without a revolution but not without a Polish uprising, which took place in the Russian Empire in 1863. Like the peasants of Habsburg Ukraine, their Russian-ruled counterparts received personal freedom but very little land, making them economically dependent on the nobility. But unlike the Habsburg Ukrainians, the Ukrainian peasants of the Romanov realm received neither the right to participate in electoral politics nor institutions of their own. They would have no university chairs or books in their native language. Moreover, the imperial government forbade the publication of religious and educational texts in the “Little Russian dialect.”

  The prohibition of virtually all Ukrainian publications in the Russian Empire came in the summer of 1863, in the middle of the Polish uprising that had begun in January of that year. At stake once again was the loyalty of the Ukrainian peasantry. The government decided that when it came to the Ukrainian language, its main concern was the consolidation of the imperial Russian nation, which required shielding the peasantry from unwanted advances on the part of the Ukrainophiles. “Previous works in the Little Russian language were aimed only at the educated classes of southern Russia, but now the proponents of Little Russian ethnicity have turned their attention to the uneducated masses, and those who seek to realize their political ambitions have taken, under the pretense of spreading literacy and education, to publishing reading primers, alphabet books, grammar and geography textbooks, etc.,” wrote the minister of education, Petr Valuev, in the directive prohibiting Ukrainian-language publications, now not only in the Latin but also in the Cyrillic alphabet. The Valuev directive did not extend to works of fiction, of which there were very few in the early 1860s. In the five years between 1863 and 1868, when Valuev resigned his office, the number of Ukrainian-language publications fell from thirty-three to one.

  At first considered a temporary measure, the prohibition became permanent in May 1876. That month, Emperor Alexander II issued a decree known as the Ems Ukase (he was relaxing at a spa in the German town of Ems). The new decree went further than the Valuev directive, prohibiting all publications in Ukrainian, as well as the import of Ukrainian-language books from abroad. It also banned Ukrainian-language theater productions and public performances of Ukrainian songs. Like the Valuev directive, the Ems Ukase was kept secret from the general public. The restrictions were loosened in the 1880s, with the removal of plays and songs from the list, but the publication or import of any Ukrainian-language text remained prohibited for another quarter century. The government held to the formula ascribed to Petr Valuev, who claimed that “there was not, is not, and cannot be any special Little Russian language.” The Ukrainian language, culture, and identity came to be seen as a threat no less serious to the unity of the empire than Polish nationalism: the very unity of the Russian nation seemed to be at stake.

  While Alexander II signed the Ems Ukase in faraway Germany, its main initiator and promoter lived in Kyiv. Mikhail Yuzefovich, an ethnic Ukrainian from the Poltava region in the former Hetmanate, had studied at the noble pension (lyceum) at Moscow University. Also a poet who had been on friendly terms with Alexander Pushkin in his youth, Yuzefovich had fought as an army officer and been wounded in the Caucasus. He became an important figure in the Kyiv educational and cultural scene in the 1840s, when he assumed a leading position in the Kyiv educational district and took an active part in the work of the Archaeographic Commission, tasked with documenting that Right-Bank Ukraine had always been Russian. In his political and cultural views, Yuzefovich was a “Little Russian” par excellence. He was a local patriot who saw himself as working for the benefit of Little Russia on both banks of the Dnieper; a moderate populist who believed in the need to protect the Little Russian peasantry from the Polish nobility, Jewish leaseholders, and Catholic (and Uniate) clergymen; and a believer in the unity of all the “tribes” of the Russian nation. He was a loyal subject of the empire, in which he saw an ally and protector of his brand of Little Russian patriotism.

  Depending on time and circumstance, Yuzefovich was both an ally and an adversary of the group of intellectuals known to officials as Ukrainophiles since the times of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius. He was a key participant in the arrest of members of the brotherhood, but turned out to be on their side rather than that of the authorities. Yuzefovich refused to accept a written denunciation from the student who came to him to inform on the brotherhood’s subversive activities. He later warned Mykola Kostomarov about an impending police search and helped him destroy incriminating documents. Yuzefovich did not believe that the activities of Kostomarov and his friends were harmful to the state. He saw them as allies in the struggle against Polish cultural domination of Right-Bank Ukraine and Volhynia. The monument to Bohdan Khmelnytsky erected in downtown Kyiv with Yuzefovich’s active participation embodies his beliefs and loyalties. The original inscription on the monument was “Russia, one and indivisible, to Bohdan Khmelnytsky.”

  By the time of the monument’s unveiling in 1888, Yuzefovich no longer believed that the Ukrainophiles were a harmless bunch. In 1875 he had written a memo to the imperial authorities titled “On the So-Called Ukrainophile Movement,” accusing his opponents from the Ukrainophile camp of trying to tear Ukraine away from Russia. The Valuev directive had not worked, argued Yuzefovich, as it had served only to strengthen ties between Ukrainophiles in the Russian Empire and Austrian Galicia, where the latter acted as agents of the Poles. More drastic measures were therefore needed to stop the destructive activities of the Ukrainophiles. While local officials, including the governor-general of Kyiv, considered Yuzefovich’s accusations exaggerated, the authorities in St. Petersburg, concerned about the unity of the empire and possible intrigues on the part not only of the Poles but also of the Habsburgs, embraced his arguments and logic. The emperor signed a decree that not only prohibited Ukrainian-language publications and their import into the Russian Empire but also pr
ovided a subsidy for a Galician newspaper that was supposed to fight Ukrainophilism in the Habsburg realm.

  Who were the Ukrainophiles whom Yuzefovich considered so dangerous to the Russian Empire? One was Pavlo Chubynsky, the author of the lyrics to the anthem “Ukraine Has Not Yet Perished.” Another was a professor of ancient history at Kyiv University, Mykhailo Drahomanov. Both were members of the Kyiv Hromada (Community), an organization of Ukrainian intelligentsia concerned almost exclusively with cultural work. None of them argued that Ukraine should secede from the Russian Empire or held pro-Polish sympathies. They were critical, however, of the older generation of Little Russian leaders of the Ukrainian movement who had failed to lift the prohibitions introduced by the Valuev directive. More importantly for the origins of the 1876 Ems Ukase, Drahomanov and his supporters removed Yuzefovich from the leadership of the Kyiv Geographic Society—the hub of academic activities in the city. Yuzefovich fought back, with a result that no one could have predicted at the beginning of the conflict.