The generational tension between the Ukrainophiles and the proponents of the Little Russian idea developed into an ideological one as the Ems Ukase radicalized the Ukrainophiles. This applied particularly to Mykhailo Drahomanov, who, dismissed from his university professorship, left the empire for Switzerland. Drahomanov settled in Geneva, where he created a body of written work that made him the most influential Ukrainian political thinker of the nineteenth century. He was also the first to embrace socialist ideas. In the 1880s, he argued for the distinctness of the Ukrainian nation and promoted the idea of a European federation that would include Ukraine, going back to the ideas expressed by Kostomarov in his Books of the Genesis of the Ukrainian People. Drahomanov’s federation, however, was not to be Slavic but all-European. Through Drahomanov’s writings, the Ukrainian movement reemerged from the shock created by the destruction of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius and began to think again about the political goals and implications of its cultural activities.
Drahomanov was also the first political thinker whose ideas made a strong impact on developments in Austrian Ukraine. While most of Yuzefovich’s accusations against the Ukrainophiles were false, his claims that they had established close contacts with Galicia and that the Valuev circular had only strengthened those contacts were true. With no possibility of publishing their works in Ukrainian in the Russian Empire, the Ukrainophiles took advantage of the opportunities existing in Galicia. The Ems Ukase, inspired by Yuzefovich’s denunciations, made Galicia even more attractive for that purpose. With literary publications prohibited in Russian-ruled Ukraine, Ukraine’s best-known literary figures, including the writer Ivan Nechui-Levytsky and the playwright Mykhailo Starytsky, published their works in Galicia. The Ems Ukase did not stop the development of Ukrainian literature, but it created a situation in which most of the prominent authors resided in the Russian Empire, while their readers were across the border in Austria. The writers had no direct access to their readers, and vice versa. Ironically, this situation helped promote the development of a common literary language and culture on both sides of the imperial border.
By the time eastern Ukrainians discovered Galicia as a place for the free expression of their thoughts and a publishing market, the Galician Ukrainians had effectively split into two competing groups, Russophiles and Ukrainophiles. The split became fully apparent in the wake of the constitutional reform of 1867 in the Habsburg Empire. After losing wars to Italy and Prussia, two rising nation-states, the Austrian government decided to prolong the existence of the empire by making major concessions to its most belligerent constituents—the Hungarians. The Austro-Hungarian Compromise created a dual monarchy known as Austria-Hungary. The Kingdom of Hungary acquired its own parliament and broad autonomy, linked to the rest of the empire through the person of the emperor and a common foreign and military policy. But the Hungarians were not the only Habsburg nationality to benefit from the deal: the Poles and Croats also obtained autonomy. To the horror of the Ukrainians, Polish autonomy came at their expense: Vienna turned the province of Galicia over to rule by its traditional Polish elite.
The leaders of the Ukrainian movement felt betrayed: the Hapsburgs had punished their loyalty while rewarding the rebel nationalities. The compromise of 1867 sounded a death knell for the dominance of the church hierarchy and the Old Ruthenians. It strengthened the Russophile movement, whose leaders, including the Greek Catholic priest Ivan Naumovych, argued that the Ruthenians had gotten nothing for their loyalty and had to change their attitude to the government if they wanted to resist Polonization. He also attacked efforts to establish a separate Ruthenian nation. Indeed, there was no chance of its withstanding the Polish political and cultural onslaught. According to Naumovych, the Austrian Ruthenians were part of a larger Russian nation. His supporters considered themselves Little Russians, arguing that the literary Russian language was in fact a rendition of Little Russian and that a “Little Russian” could master it in an hour. The task turned out to be much more difficult: attempting to master Russian, the leaders of the movement created a mixture of Russian and Church Slavonic in which they tried to communicate with one another and write their works.
In the late 1860s, the Russophiles took control of most Ukrainian organizations in Galicia and Bukovyna. In Transcarpathia, the newly empowered Hungarian masters of the land arrested any local cultural development by introducing a policy of aggressive Magyarization. The Russian government supported Russophile activities with stipends and scholarships, predictably arousing suspicion in Vienna. In 1882, the Austrian authorities arrested Naumovych and charged him with treason. He had authored a peasant petition to establish an Orthodox parish in a traditionally Greek Catholic village, which was regarded as an attempt at pro-Russian propaganda. Along with Naumovych, the authorities put on trial a number of other leaders of the Russophile movement from Galicia and Transcarpathia. They were convicted of various crimes against the state and sent to prison. Later, many of the accused, including Naumovych himself, emigrated to the Russian Empire.
Other prosecutions of Russophile activists followed the trial of 1882. While the Russian imperial authorities went after those who questioned that Ukrainians were part of the Great Russian nation, the Austrians persecuted those who promoted the idea. The official crackdown on Russophile activities impaired the movement and helped propel another group of activists to center stage on the Galician political scene. Known as populists or Ukrainophiles, their roots are usually traced back to the Ruthenian Triad and the group’s main ideologist, Markian Shashkevych, but their immediate origins lay in the Prosvita (Enlightenment) Society established in 1868, a year after the Austro-Hungarian compromise. Like the Russophiles, the Ukrainophiles believed that the old policy of orienting the Ruthenian movement toward the imperial government had run its course, as had the model of nation building promoted by the Old Ruthenians. But the way forward proposed by the Ukrainophiles differed quite a bit from that of their opponents. They suggested that the Habsburg Ruthenians were indeed part of a larger nation—not the Russian imperial nation but the Ukrainian one immediately across the border. The Ukrainophiles were at odds with the clerical elite that had traditionally led the Ruthenian movement and presented themselves as defenders of the people’s interests; hence the name “populists,” which stuck to them.
Galician populists and their publications became natural allies of the Ukrainophiles in the Russian Empire. In 1873, with the help of a gift from a descendant of the Cossack hetman Ivan Skoropadsky, Yelyzaveta Myloradovych, the Galician populists established their own scholarly society. To stress its links with Russian-ruled Ukraine and its all-Ukrainian focus and aspirations, it was later named after Taras Shevchenko. The Kyiv Ukrainophiles helped their Galician counterparts establish Ukrainian-language newspapers and journals that served both communities, east and west. With help from the east, the Galician Ukrainophiles were slowly but steadily winning the battle with the Russophiles. In the mid-1880s, the Ukrainophiles took control of Ruthenian organizations in Bukovyna. Intellectual support from Russian-ruled Ukraine turned out to be a crucial factor in the rise of the Ukrainophiles in both Austrian provinces, Galicia and Bukovyna. The two branches of the Ukrainian movement needed each other and benefited, each in its own way, from their cooperation. The Galician Ukrainians radicalized the thinking of the Kyiv Ukrainophiles, helping them imagine their nation outside the embrace of the pan-Russian imperial project.
Ukraine entered the last decade of the nineteenth century divided by the Austro-Russian border, as it had been a century earlier, during the partitions of Poland. But now it was also united in unprecedented ways. The new unity did not come from the church: the division between Orthodox and Uniates remained, now coinciding with the imperial border after the “reunification” of the Uniates under Russian rule. It came from the new idea of nationality. The concept of a distinct Greek Catholic Ruthenian nationality under Habsburg rule, although strengthened by the revolutio
nary events of 1848, lasted a mere twenty years and did not survive the transformation of the Habsburg Empire into the Dual Monarchy. Since the late 1860s, the national movement in the Habsburg Empire had shed its ecclesiastical exclusivity. Both Russophiles and Ukrainophiles were building bridges with their Orthodox brethren across the border. In both camps, there was no doubt that Habsburgs’ Ruthenians and the Romanovs’ Little Russians were part of the same nation. The question was which one—pan-Russian or pan-Ukrainian?
Ukrainian activists on the Russian side of the border, also divided between proponents of pan-Russian and pan-Ukrainian projects, tried to answer the same question as their counterparts in Austria-Hungary. A response would come, both in Austria-Hungary and in the Russian Empire, from the generation of national activists that appeared on the political scene in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Theirs would be an era of rapid industrial development, urbanization, spread of literacy, and mass politics.
chapter 16
On the Move
In 1870, John James Hughes, a Welsh entrepreneur, sailed from Britain at the head of eight ships. The load consisted of metallurgical equipment, while the passengers included close to a hundred skilled miners and metalworkers. Most of them, like Hughes himself, came from Wales. Their destination was the steppe on the Donets River in southern Ukraine, north of the Sea of Azov. The expedition aimed to construct a full-cycle metallurgical plant. “When I commenced these works, I set my mind upon training of the Russian workmen who would be attached to the place,” wrote Hughes later. The project took several years. With the help of unskilled Ukrainian and Russian labor, Hughes and his crew soon built not only iron-smelting and rail works but also a small town around them. These were the beginnings of Yuzivka, today’s Donetsk, till recently a city of more than a million people and the main center of the Donbas—the Donets River industrial basin.
Hughes’ arrival signaled the beginning of a new era in Ukrainian history. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw major shifts in the region’s economy, social structure, and population dynamics. These changes stemmed from rapid industrialization, as eastern and southern Ukraine became a major beneficiary of economic expansion and urbanization, and the influx of Russian peasants, who provided manual labor in the cities and become the backbone of the industrial proletariat. The same processes were taking place in Galicia, where the oil industry began its European career in the mid-nineteenth century. Rapid industrialization and urbanization were common features of European history in that period, and Ukraine was an important participant. Those processes changed its economic, social, and political landscape for generations to come.
In Russian-ruled Ukraine, first changes began in September 1854 with the landing of British and French expeditionary forces in the Crimea. The invasion was the latest act in the Crimean War, which had started a year earlier with conflict between France and Russia over control of Christian holy places in Palestine. At stake was the future of the declining Ottoman Empire and the great powers’ influence over its vast possessions. The British and French besieged Sevastopol, the base of the imperial Russian navy, which the allies saw as a threat to their interests in the Mediterranean. After a lengthy siege and military operations that resulted in heavy losses on both sides (the disastrous charge of the Light Brigade in the Battle of Balaklava stunned the British public), Sevastopol fell to the invading forces in September 1855. This became an indelible moment of sorrow and humiliation in Russian historical memory. The Paris Peace Treaty, which formally ended the war, precluded the Russian Empire from having naval bases either in Sevastopol or anywhere else on the Black Sea coast.
Russia’s loss of the Crimean War provoked extensive soul-searching in the imperial government and society. How could the Russian army, which had conquered Paris in 1814, suffer defeat forty years later on territory it considered its own? The death of Emperor Nicholas I, who, weakened by the stress of war, died in March 1855 after thirty years on the throne, made a change of government policy almost inevitable. The new emperor, Alexander II, launched an ambitious reform program to catch up with the West and modernize Russian society, economy, and military. During the war, Russia had nothing but sailing ships to confront the steamboats of the British and French. It sank the ships of its Black Sea Fleet in order to prevent enemy ships from entering Sevastopol’s harbor. Now Russia needed a new navy no matter what. It also needed railroads, lack of which had made it difficult to move troops, ammunition, and provisions to places as remote from the center of the empire as the Crimea. Embarrassingly for St. Petersburg, the British, not the Russians, built the first railroad in the Crimea to connect Balaklava with Sevastopol during the siege of the city.
If Russia wanted to keep the Crimea, it needed a railroad connection to the peninsula and its naval base. The government decided to sell Alaska—another remote part of the empire that was difficult to defend and, as officials believed, vulnerable to seizure by the British—to the United States. But Russia would keep the Crimea. The Crimean Tatars were migrating to the Ottoman Empire, and the Russian fleet and fortifications were gone, but Sevastopol became a site of popular veneration—a new holy place of the Russian Empire. The government approved a plan to connect Moscow and Sevastopol by rail via Kursk and Kharkiv. The problem was lack of money. The treasury did not have it, and the Russian crackdown on the Polish rebels in 1863 produced a reaction that would resemble international sanctions of a later era. The French government convinced James Mayer de Rothschild, a major financier of railroad construction in France, to stop lending money to Russia, while British companies that were prepared to build the railroad could not raise enough capital in the City. The construction of the Moscow-Sevastopol line was postponed until the 1870s, but the idea of building railroads in southern Ukraine firmly established itself in the minds of Russian government, military, and business elites.
The first railroad built there was much more modest than the line that would link Moscow and Sevastopol. It connected Odesa (Odessa) on the Black Sea coast, northwest of the Crimea, with the town of Balta in Podolia. The new railroad was constructed in 1865, four years after a railway line linking Lviv with Peremyshl (Przemyśl), Cracow, and Vienna. Unlike the Lviv line, the one beginning in Odesa had nothing to do with politics, strategy, or administration. Its raison d’être began and ended with economics. In the mid-nineteenth century, Ukraine accounted for 75 percent of all exports of the Russian Empire. The times of Siberian furs as a major imperial export were gone, while those of Siberian oil and gas had not yet arrived. Thus Ukrainian grain filled the gap in the imperial budget. Podolia was one of the main grain-producing areas in the empire, and Odesa, a city established in 1794 on the site of a former Noghay settlement, became the empire’s main gateway to the markets of Europe.
The cash-strapped empire wanted to increase its exports, which required a railroad, which in turn required money for construction. The governor of Odesa broke that vicious circle with the suggestion of using punitive battalions of the Russian army. Forced labor did the trick—neither for the first nor last time in the empire’s long history. Envisioned as the first section of a railroad linking Odesa with Moscow, the Odesa-Balta line was supposed to go through Kyiv, connecting the Right Bank, with its rebellious Polish nobility, with the imperial heartland and thereby reducing the influence of Warsaw. But the plan made little economic sense. There was little to export from the Kyiv region and the forest zone north of the city; hence imperial strategists dreaming of the political integration of the empire eventually lost the battle to the business lobby. The line from Balta went not to Kyiv but to Poltava and Kharkiv, where it would later connect to the Moscow-Sevastopol line. The latter was built in 1875 after long delays.
The Moscow-Sevastopol line played an important role in the building of a new Russian navy in Sevastopol: in 1871, after the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, the Russian Empire regained its right to a navy on the Black Sea. But the main signif
icance of the line was economic and cultural. On the economic side, it contributed to regional trade and the development of eastern and southern Ukraine; in cultural terms, it linked the distant Crimea to the center of the empire in ways previously unimaginable, promoting Russian cultural colonization of the peninsula. By the end of the nineteenth century, Yalta, originally a small fishing village on the Black Sea coast, had become the summer capital of the empire. The emperor and his family built spectacular mansions on the Crimean coast and supported the construction of Orthodox churches and monasteries there. In addition to the tsar and the imperial family, numerous courtiers, senior and middle-rank officials, and, last but not least, writers and artists spent the summer months in the Crimea. Anton Chekhov, who had a modest house in Yalta, described the experiences of Russian visitors to that Crimean resort in his story “Lady with a Lapdog.” The Russian elite made the Crimea part of its expansive imperial home.
In 1894, when Tsar Alexander III died in his Livadia mansion near Yalta, his body was taken by carriage to Yalta, then by boat to Sevastopol, and from there by railroad to St. Petersburg. By the time of his death, railways crisscrossed Ukraine, linking Odesa with Poltava, Kharkiv, and Kyiv, as well as Moscow and St. Petersburg. From Odesa one could also take a train to Lviv, and Kyiv was linked to Lviv and Warsaw. The first Odesa-Balta line was a mere 137 miles long; by 1914, the overall length of railroads in Ukraine exceeded 10,000 miles. The railways promoted economic development, increased mobility, and broke down old political, economic, and cultural boundaries. Nowhere was that change more profound than in the empire’s newest possessions—the steppe regions of Ukraine.
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