The Gates of Europe

by Serhii Plokhy

  Major St. Petersburg factories were on strike, but the factory owners refused to satisfy the workers’ demands, which included introduction of an eight-hour workday. The Industrial Revolution had produced a new social phenomenon, the working class, and it was appealing to the tsar for recognition of its basic rights. “We did not ask for much; we wanted only that without which there is no life, only hard labor and constant suffering,” wrote Father Gapon. But the petition also included a number of political demands, chief among them the election of a constitutional assembly. The last time someone had demanded a constitution from the tsar was in December 1825. Back then, the regime had crushed the revolt of the military officers later known as Decembrists with the help of artillery. The tsar and his government believed that they had to show their resolve once again and not repeat the mistake of Louis XVI of France, whose indecisiveness had, in their opinion, cost him his throne and his life in the French Revolution.

  As the demonstrators approached the tsar’s Winter Palace—the building that now houses the Hermitage Museum—the army opened fire, killing more than a hundred people on the spot and wounding more than five hundred. Father Gapon survived, but never again would he pray for the tsar or hope for his protection. In the appeal that Gapon wrote that night, he called the tsar a beast. He also called for vengeance: “So let us take revenge, brothers, on the tsar, who is cursed by the people, on all his treacherous tsarist spawn, on his ministers and all robbers of the unfortunate Russian land!” Full revenge would have to wait another thirteen years—Bolsheviks would gun down Tsar Nicholas II and his family in July 1918—but the revolution that the tsar’s circle hoped to avoid began right away. It propelled the whole empire, including the Ukrainian provinces, into a new era—the age of mass politics, characterized by the creation of political parties, parliamentary elections, male suffrage, and growing governmental reliance on nationalist support.

  The revolution came to Ukraine three days after the events of Bloody Sunday in St. Petersburg. On Wednesday, January 12, the workers of the South Russian Machine-Building Factory in Kyiv went on strike. Those in the metal works of Katerynoslav, Yuzivka, and the rest of the Donbas soon joined them. The flames of class war now engulfed the economic boom areas of the previous fifteen years. If before January 1905 the workers had merely asked for better conditions, higher pay, and an eight-hour workday, they now backed their demands with strikes, demonstrations, and open resistance to the authorities. When it came to resistance, the overpopulated and impoverished village did not lag far behind the city. The peasants began by cutting down trees in forests belonging to the nobility and went on to attack noble’s mansions. There were more than three hundred such attacks, with peasants of the former Cossack territories on the Left Bank of the Dnieper leading the way. The peasants expected the tsar to issue a manifesto transferring the noble lands to them. It never came. Instead, the government used the army to crush the revolts, killing sixty-three peasants in December 1905 in the village of Velyki Sorochyntsi, the birthplace of Nikolai Gogol (Mykola Hohol) in the Poltava gubernia. The Velyki Sorochyntsi tragedy was anything but an exception.

  In the summer of 1905, the regime began to lose the unconditional support of men in uniform, most of them former peasants. In June, there was a mutiny on the battleship Potemkin of the Black Sea Fleet. Most of its leaders and participants were sailors recruited from Ukraine. Though planned for October, the uprising began in June as the sailors mutinied over borshch (beet soup) prepared with spoiled meat. The petty officer Hryhorii Vakulenchuk from the Zhytomyr region appealed to his comrades, according to some accounts, in Ukrainian, with the words, “How long will we be slaves?” After a senior officer shot and killed Vakulenchuk, the leadership of the revolt passed to Opanas Matiushenko, a twenty-six-year-old sailor from the Kharkiv region. The rebels killed the commanding officers, raised the red flag, and headed from the open sea to Odesa, where they supported the workers’ strike going on in the city. The arrival of the battleship with the corpse of Vakulenchuk provoked new protests, riots, and skirmishes with the police.

  Russian Cossack units blocked points of access to the port from the city, including the famous Potemkin Stairs—depicted as a site of mass killings and high drama in Sergei Eisenstein’s classic film Battleship Potemkin (1925). There is no proof that anyone actually died on the stairs, but police and army units gunned down hundreds of people all over the city. The battleship eventually left Odesa, avoided an encounter with a flotilla loyal to the regime, and headed for Romania, where the rebel sailors surrendered to authorities. Their leader, Matiushenko, spent some time in Europe and the United States and then returned to Odesa to continue the revolutionary struggle. He was arrested, tried, and executed in Sevastopol, the home base of the Potemkin. At the time of his execution, Matiushenko, who became a symbol of revolution but refused to join any political party, was twenty-eight years old.

  In October 1905, the wave of workers’ strikes reached its peak. A railroad strike paralyzed the whole empire. In Ukraine, workers at the main railway junctions—Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Katerynoslav—stopped work. Industrial workers soon joined them. By mid-October, 120,000 Ukrainian workers and close to 2 million workers throughout the empire had walked off the job. Emperor Nicholas II then changed tactics and offered his rebellious subjects a major concession. In a manifesto issued on October 17, he granted basic civil rights, including freedom of conscience, speech, assembly, and association. His decree introduced universal male suffrage in the empire and stipulated that the conduct of elections to the Duma—the first Russian parliament—would ensure representation of all classes of society. The tsar promised not to adopt any new laws without the approval of the Duma. The absolute monarchy was on the verge of turning into a constitutional one. The liberal intelligentsia received the manifesto with jubilation.

  Among those who stood out in the jubilant crowds that poured into the streets of major Ukrainian cities after the publication of the manifesto were the Jews. Conservative supporters of the monarchy saw Jews as closely associated with revolution. They also blamed Jews for all the troubles that had befallen the local population since the onset of industrialization and rapid urbanization. In many Ukrainian cities, jubilation ended in pogrom. Pogroms were hardly new in Ukraine or the Pale of Settlement in general, which included the former provinces of Poland-Lithuania and the Ukrainian south. The first big wave took place in 1881: after revolutionaries assassinated Emperor Alexander II, the Jews were blamed for the tsar’s death. In present-day Moldova, the Chişinău pogrom of 1903 lasted three days and nights and took the lives of forty-nine people, creating an uproar in the American press and triggering a new wave of Jewish emigration. But the pogroms of the past paled in comparison with those of 1905. In October, hundreds of people died in pogroms in Kyiv, Katerynoslav, and Odesa. Thousands were injured, and tens of thousands of Jewish homes and enterprises were destroyed.

  In Kyiv, the pogrom began after a demonstration that was at once a victory celebration and a denunciation of the tsar’s October 17 manifesto as mere window dressing on the part of the regime. As the demonstrators attacked the city prison, released political prisoners, desecrated the monument to Nicholas I in front of Kyiv University, removed the imperial insignia from the facade of the university building, destroyed Russian imperial flags and replaced them with red ones, and called for the emperor to be hanged, the conservative public blamed the Jews. The following night, gangs of migrant workers, Orthodox zealots, and outright criminals began to attack Jews and their property. “There’s your freedom, there is your constitution and revolution, there’s your crown and portrait of our tsar,” cried one of the attackers. Twenty-seven people were killed, close to 300 injured, and some 1,800 Jewish houses and businesses destroyed. On Khreshchatyk, Kyiv’s main street, only one of twenty-eight Jewish shops avoided destruction.

  After witnessing the pogrom, one of the best-known Jewish authors of the twentieth century, Sholem Aleichem, left the city
and the country for faraway New York. Anticipation of a pogrom became a major theme in his last story about Tevye the Dairyman. The subject is also prominent in those of his stories on which the Broadway classic Fiddler on the Roof is based. In both the story and the musical, the city policeman is sympathetic to the Jews. That was true of some policemen, but many stood by during the pogroms, encouraging the violence. That seems to have been the case in Kyiv. By the time the police took action against the perpetrators of the pogrom, it had been going on for three days.

  In many ways, the Kyiv pogrom was representative of those that took place in Ukraine’s other big cities. The perpetrators were usually workers—recent migrants to the cities from the impoverished villages of Russia and, to a lesser extent, Ukraine who were competing with Jews for jobs and felt exploited and discriminated against by city and factory officials and entrepreneurs. In the Jews, they found easy prey and a “legitimate” target: by attacking them, the perpetrators could manifest and defend their “true Russian identity” and loyalty to the empire’s principles of autocracy, Orthodoxy, and nationality. Peasants would join in to pillage properties in small towns and on the outskirts of big cities. These criminals felt free to attack properties they would not have touched before.

  Although the mobs associated revolution with the Jews, the crowds that both celebrated the tsar’s manifesto and found it wanting were led by activists of a number of political organizations, only a few of which were Jewish. Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks, a radical wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, were in the forefront of the workers’ strikes and demonstrations. They denounced the manifesto. The party aimed to topple the regime by means of an all-empire strike and uprising. The Mensheviks, a branch of the same party that opposed Lenin’s dictate, conducted their own propaganda. Also very active was the Russian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries, which established cells in Kharkiv, Zhytomyr, and Chernihiv, among other major Ukrainian cities, before the revolution. Many Jews joined the social democrats, Mensheviks and Bolsheviks alike, but they also had their own political parties. One of the most active in the events of 1905 was the Jewish Labor Bund, a socialist party representing Jewish workers and artisans.

  While Jewish participation in the revolution, more often than not under the banners of the Bund, indicated the importance of national and religious minorities in the unfolding revolutionary struggle, the main “all-Russian” parties refused to make any meaningful concessions to the empire’s nationalities. Leaders of the Bund were among the organizers of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party but left it once Lenin questioned the autonomous status of their organization and its exclusive right to represent Jewish workers. The Bolsheviks and the social democrats in general believed in one indivisible workers’ movement, as well as one indivisible Russian Empire. The Socialist Revolutionaries were more flexible, recognizing the importance of cultural autonomy and willing to consider a federal structure for the Russian state. But those concessions were insufficient to prevent the national minorities of the empire from forming their own political parties.

  Ukrainians on both sides of the Russo-Austrian border had been busy founding their own political parties since the 1890s. It was an age when political forces all over Europe had entered the party-building stage, hitting the streets in an effort to organize the masses in support of their political agendas. In Russian-ruled Ukraine, the first political party was created in 1900. Its mobilization stage began in the city of Kharkiv. A group of local students who refused to join all-Russian parties and sought to merge socialist and nationalist ideas established a party of their own, the Revolutionary Ukrainian Party. The activists formed a network of cells in Ukraine and began working among the peasants, calling on them to revolt. They also adopted a program elaborated in a pamphlet written by Kharkiv lawyer Mykola Mikhnovsky, titled Independent Ukraine and printed in Galicia. With it the first Ukrainian political party created in the Russian Empire proclaimed independence as its goal.

  “The fifth act of a great historical tragedy, the ‘struggle of nations,’ has begun, and its conclusion is fast approaching,” wrote Mikhnovsky, all but predicting the disasters of the coming world war. Mikhnovsky suggested that the way out of the nightmare of great-power antagonism was “shown by newly liberated nations that had risen against all forms of foreign domination.” He continued, “We know that our people, too, are in the position of an enslaved nation.” He then declared the goal of Ukrainian national liberation and, being a lawyer to boot, developed a legal and historical argument to denounce the Russo-Ukrainian agreement concluded by Bohdan Khmelnytsky in 1654. Mikhnovsky claimed that Russia had violated its conditions by encroaching on the rights and privileges given to the Cossack officers in Khmelnytsky’s day. Hetmans Ivan Vyhovsky and Ivan Mazepa had used similar arguments back in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Unlike them, however, Mikhnovsky called on his countrymen to set themselves completely free, not to accept a Polish or Swedish protectorate.

  The pamphlet marked a turning point in Ukrainian political thinking in the Russian Empire. Its acceptance as the program of the first Ukrainian political party boosted Mikhnovsky’s ideal. But the party soon split on the question of whether to prioritize nationalism or socialism. Mikhnovsky’s thesis about the coming independence of Ukraine was relegated to the background for another seventeen years. It would return in January 1918 in the fires of another revolution. For the time being, in the Revolution of 1905, most Ukrainian politicians sought autonomy in a “liberated” democratic and federal Russia, not outright independence. Indicative of the mood in society was the success of the Spilka (Union)—a social democratic party that emerged from Mikhnovsky’s Revolutionary Ukrainian Party but was multiethnic in composition, with close ties to the Russian social democrats and the Jewish Bund. In April 1905, the Spilka had close to 7,000 members. Its success was due in part to its status as a regional branch of Russian social democracy.

  The October Manifesto produced further changes in Ukraine’s political landscape. In a desperate attempt to recapture the political initiative and split the opposition to the government, the tsar issued his manifesto to grant citizens of Russia civil rights and introduce male suffrage. A monarchist party, the Union of October 17, was established in support of the manifesto. In October, the liberal Constitutional Democratic Party took shape, followed in November by the formation of the nationalist and anti-Semitic Union of the Russian People. The Ukrainian political scene was now split three ways, with socialists and social democrats represented by the Spilka and a number of “all-Russian” parties and groups; the liberal Ukrainophile intelligentsia grouping itself in the somewhat misleadingly named Ukrainian Radical Democratic Party, which cooperated with the Russian constitutional democrats; and the descendants of the Little Russia trend forming the core of monarchist organizations such as the Union of the Russian People.

  All three camps, to the degree that they were concerned with the Ukrainian national question, traced their roots to the Ukrainian cultural revival of the 1830s and 1840s and claimed Taras Shevchenko as a predecessor. None of them wanted to see Shevchenko as a St. Petersburg artist and intellectual: everyone thought of him as a “people’s poet” with a Cossack moustache, dressed in a peasant sheepskin coat. Shevchenko was their ticket to the peasant masses, and in the new era of mass politics, it could be a winning ticket. But only one camp, the Ukrainian liberals, addressed the people in Shevchenko’s language. The Revolution of 1905 finally allowed them to do so after more than forty years of limitations. The breakthrough came in February 1905, when the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences issued a memorandum that advocated lifting the prohibitions on Ukrainian-language publications. The academic community recognized Ukrainian (“Little Russian”) as a language in its own right, not a mere dialect.

  In October 1905, on the same day that Emperor Nicholas II issued his manifesto, official restrictions on Ukrainian publications were dropped as well. By December 1905, tw
o Ukrainian-language newspapers were being printed in Lubny and Poltava. In September 1906, Ukrainian liberals began to publish the first daily newspaper in Ukrainian—Rada (Council)—in Kyiv. In 1907, they began to issue the first Ukrainian-language journal. The first academic publication in Ukrainian appeared in the following year. By that time there were nine Ukrainian-language newspapers altogether, with a total print run of 20,000 copies. That was just the beginning: the following years saw an explosion of Ukrainian-language publishing. The leading genre was the illustrated brochure with humorous content, accounting for an overall print run of close to 850,000 copies between 1908 and 1913, followed by poetry, with a total print run approaching 600,000 copies. The Ukrainian peasants, it turned out, preferred to joke and recite poetry in their own language.

  The first contest for the hearts and minds of the Ukrainian masses came in the spring of 1906, with elections to the first Russian Duma. The social democrats did not participate, and the liberals scored highly. The radical democrats, who joined forces with the Russian constitutional democrats, gained a few dozen seats for their members and sympathizers in the Duma. Upon arrival in St. Petersburg, they formed the Ukrainian Club to promote Ukrainian cultural and political causes. Forty-four of the ninety-five deputies elected from Ukraine joined the club. But the First Duma was short-lived: the tsar found it too revolutionary and dissolved it in two months. Elections to the Second Duma took place in early 1907 with the active participation of the social democrats. The Spilka, with its fourteen elected deputies, emerged ahead of every other Ukrainian party except the monarchists, who got almost a quarter of the popular vote. The Ukrainian deputies formed a second parliamentary caucus, now with forty-seven members. One of its projects was the introduction of the Ukrainian language into the public schools. The caucus did not get very far, as the decline of revolutionary activity in the empire allowed the tsar to dissolve the Second Duma as well. It was in session slightly longer than the first, from March to June 1907. The dissolution of the Second Duma marked the end of the revolution.