The Gates of Europe
Page 25
Ukrainian activists based much of what they did from 1905 to 1907—from forming parliamentary caucuses to establishing Ukrainian educational and scholarly institutions—on the accomplishments of their counterparts in Austria-Hungary, where the age of mass politics had arrived decades earlier. Instead of an impediment, the Russo-Austrian border served as a boon for the Ukrainian national movement: when things became difficult on one side, activists from the other picked up the torch and helped their brethren. From the 1860s on, Dnieper Ukrainians who found themselves in trouble because of prohibitions on Ukrainian publications received help from and gave support to Galician Ukrainophiles. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Galicians found themselves in a position to assist Dnieper Ukraine.
The key figure in the transfer of the Galician experience to Dnieper Ukraine was a forty-year-old professor of Ukrainian history at Lviv University, Mykhailo Hrushevsky. An alumnus of Kyiv University, Hrushevsky came to Galicia in 1894 and established himself as the leading Ukrainian academic on either side of the Russo-Austrian border. He began writing his multivolume History of Ukraine-Rus’, the first academic work to establish the Ukrainian historical narrative as completely distinct from the Russian one. He also served as president of the Lviv-based Shevchenko Scientific Society, turning it into an equivalent of the national academy of sciences that Ukraine did not yet have. Once he heard about the formation of the Ukrainian Club during the First Duma, Hrushevsky left his students in Lviv and moved to St. Petersburg to edit the club’s publication and serve as adviser to the Ukrainian deputies. In the next few years, Hrushevsky moved the journal Literaturno-naukovyi visnyk (Literary and Scholarly Herald ), which he had been editing in Lviv, to Kyiv, where he also founded the Ukrainian Scientific Society, modeled on the Shevchenko Scientific Society in Lviv.
Hrushevsky claimed that the “liberation of Russia”—the goal of the broad liberal coalition that had emerged in the Russian Empire on the eve of the revolution—was unattainable without the “liberation” of Ukraine. He sought a democratic and autonomous Ukraine within a democratic federal Russian state. He called on the Ukrainian intelligentsia to join Ukrainian political parties instead of sacrificing their national agenda in the service of “all-Russian” goals. Hrushevsky also aimed to prevent a possible alliance of Russian liberals with Polish nationalists at the expense of Ukrainian political and cultural goals. He argued that there should be no separate deals when it came to nationalities, all of which should be treated equally. He feared that a Russo-Polish agreement on the introduction of the Polish language in the schools of the former Poland-Lithuania would entail the exclusion of the Ukrainian language from the school system. The Polonization of the Ukrainian peasantry would thus replace the Russification of the Ukrainian countryside in the western provinces of the empire. As things turned out, the threat did not materialize.
Hrushevsky’s Galician experience very much informed his concern. The Ukrainian National Democratic Party dominated Ukrainian politics there. Created in 1899 with the help of Hrushevsky and his close ally Ivan Franko, Ukraine’s best-known Galician writer, it united Ukrainophile populists and socialist radicals. The national democrats declared Ukrainian independence as their ultimate aim (before Mikhnovsky’s Revolutionary Ukrainian Party), but their immediate goals included the division of Galicia into Ukrainian and Polish territories and equality of ethnic groups in the empire. None of this sat well with the Polish political parties. The Polish National Democratic Party, led by Roman Dmowski, sought to assimilate Ukrainians into Polish culture, while the Polish socialists, led by the future head of an independent Polish state, Józef Piłsudski, argued for a federal solution to the Ukrainian question. There was little room for compromise between the Polish and Ukrainian visions of Galicia.
Polish-Ukrainian relations deteriorated beyond repair during the 1907 elections to the imperial and Galician parliaments—the first elections based on the principle of universal male suffrage. The Ukrainians did relatively well in the imperial elections but failed to break the Polish grip on the Galician legislature: the electoral law benefited the Polish upper classes and was further manipulated by Polish officials. The result was a Ukrainian loss and violent clashes that resulted in several deaths. Relations between university students belonging to the two national communities were also highly antagonistic. Hrushevsky felt it necessary to take a handgun when he went to teach evening classes. Polish-Ukrainian relations reached a new low in April 1908, when a Ukrainian student assassinated the Polish viceroy of Galicia.
While the Ukrainian national democrats failed to achieve their major goal—the partition of the province and the attainment of Ukrainian autonomy within Austria-Hungary, they did quite well in promoting their educational and cultural agenda. In the 1890s, during a short-lived reconciliation between the Ukrainophiles and the Polish establishment, Galician schools introduced Ukrainian as a language of instruction. It maintained that status despite the deterioration of Polish-Ukrainian relations in the first decade of the twentieth century. The first generation of Galician Ukrainians educated en masse—there would be 2,500 elementary schools teaching in Ukrainian by the eve of World War I—was now learning about world affairs in the Ukrainian language as a matter of course. This simple fact would become the foundation of a strong Ukrainian identity in the region for generations to come.
The Russophiles, who promoted a form of the Russian language, lost the battle for the school curriculum. They were also losing the competition at the ballot box. In the elections of 1907, Ukrainian politicians forged alliances with Jewish candidates (at least two Jewish deputies to the Austrian parliament won election with the support of Ukrainian voters), while the Poles tried unsuccessfully to support the Russophiles. The Ukrainian parties won twenty-two seats in the imperial parliament, while the Russophiles took only two. The Russophile movement had ceased to be a serious threat to Ukrainian populism in Galicia.
Ukrainian parties in the Russian Empire found themselves in a very different situation after the Revolution of 1905. If anything, they were losing the battle for influence among their own people. The Ukrainian language was never allowed into the schools, and with the end of the revolution the authorities began to shut down Ukrainian organizations and harass and close Ukrainian-language publications. Russian nationalist organizations, on the other hand, got a free hand to conduct their propaganda among the Ukrainian peasantry.
The government of conservative Russian prime minister Petr Stolypin was building up political support in the western borderlands of the empire by mobilizing radical Russian nationalism. The new electoral law helped pro-nationalist candidates to win election. In Ukraine, as in the rest of the empire, Russian nationalist organizations allied themselves with like-minded hierarchs and priests of the Russian Orthodox Church, spreading Russian nationalism and anti-Semitism among Ukrainian peasants and city dwellers. Kyiv became the site of the most scandalous trial in imperial Russian history—the Beilis affair, in which a Jew stood accused of the ritual killing of a Christian boy. The Pochaiv monastery in Volhynia became a hotbed of Russian nationalism and anti-Semitism in the years leading up to World War I. The largest imperial branch of the Union of the Russian People was based in Volhynia. Members of the union and similar organizations claimed to be defending the interests of Russians (in the Ukrainian case, Little Russians) against “foreign” Polish and Jewish exploiters. Their propaganda represented the “foreigners” as capitalist bloodsuckers and revolutionary radicals.
The results of the Ukrainian elections to the Third Duma (1907–1912) demonstrated the appeal of imperial Russian nationalism. Out of forty-one deputies elected in Ukraine, thirty-six were characterized as “true Russians,” a term used at the time to define Russian nationalists. The assassination of Petr Stolypin in Kyiv in September 1911 by a Russian Socialist Revolutionary changed nothing in imperial politics. Russian nationalist parties gained 70 percent of the Ukrainian vote in the elections to the Fourth Duma�
��a stunning result, given that ethnic Russians made up no more than 13 percent of Ukraine’s population. The majority not only of voters but also of those elected on the Russian nationalist ticket were ethnic Ukrainians, such as the founder of the Kyiv Club of Russian Nationalists and a ranking member of the Fourth Duma, Anatolii Savenko. Another ethnic Ukrainian, Dmitrii Pikhno, headed the Kyiv branch of the Union of the Russian People. The Kyiv newspaper Kievlianin, which he edited, became the mouthpiece of the nationalist organizations. In the course of the Revolution of 1905, radical Russian nationalism had effectively replaced whatever remained of Ukrainian distinctiveness among the promoters of Little Russian identity.
Although unfinished in more than one sense, the Revolution of 1905 became a turning point in the history of the Ukrainian national movement in the Russian Empire. It marked the first time that Ukrainian activists managed to take their ideas to the masses and test their strength and popularity. For the first time ever, they were allowed to address the masses in the Ukrainian vernacular and use the media to disseminate their ideas. They formed Ukrainian clubs and established Prosvita (Enlightenment) societies all over Ukraine. The Ukrainophiles of older times could only have dreamed of such a breakthrough into public life. The activists accomplished a great deal in a short period. But the end of the revolution, followed by reactionary official policies that found support in the radical brand of Russian nationalism, left the Ukrainian parties in a state of disarray and disillusion. In Austrian-ruled Ukraine, the Ukrainophiles defeated the proponents of the all-Russian idea but were unable to break the hold of the Polish parties on Galician politics. While Ukrainian activists in both empires formulated the goal of Ukrainian independence, even the achievement of local autonomy seemed beyond their means, unless something were to shake the economic, social, and political foundations of the imperial regimes. Realization of Ukrainian dreams of independence or even autonomy would require a major political earthquake. Its first shocks came in August 1914.
IV
The Wars of the World
Chapter 18
The Birth of a Nation
Just two shots were fired on the morning of June 28, 1914, in the city of Sarajevo. With the first, the nineteen-year-old student Gavrilo Princip wounded Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. With the second, he hit the archduke’s wife, Duchess Sophie. Both would die before noon. There would also be major collateral damage. The trigger of the Browning pistol pulled by Princip also triggered World War I.
Gavrilo Princip, a member of a Serbian nationalist organization, hated the Habsburgs and dreamed of a single free Yugoslav state in the Balkans. The Austro-Hungarian government had other dreams. It wanted to preserve the empire and decided to exploit the assassination of the archduke as a reason to go to war with Serbia and punish it as an instigator of Slavic nationalism within the imperial borders. Russia backed Serbia, and Germany stood behind Austria-Hungary, while Britain and France supported Russia. By early August, virtually all of Europe was at war. The Great War, as it was known at the time, cost the world up to 18 million lives, both military and civilian, and more than 22 million wounded.
Historians have long argued about the causes of the first total war in human history. They most often cite the division of the world into two rival military camps: the Triple Entente of Britain, France, and Russia ranged against the Triple Alliance (Central Powers) of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy (later replaced by the Ottoman Empire). Vladimir Lenin emphasized great-power rivalry for control of markets and resources. Other factors include the rise of mass politics in Europe, as well as a military doctrine that stressed the need for speedy mobilization and the power of the first strike. All of them indeed contributed to the outbreak of the conflict and to the warring nations’ inability to end it until four long years of slaughter had passed.
In examining the underlying causes of the war, it is important not to lose sight of the reason why Princip fired the shots in Sarajevo and why Austria-Hungary decided to go to war. That reason was the growing conflict between ever more aggressive nationalism and rapidly weakening multiethnic empires. The war triggered by a nationalist activist did serious damage to empires. The losers included not only Austria-Hungary but also the Ottoman and Russian empires: the first disintegrated completely, while the latter two lost their monarchies and some of their territories, surviving in a different form. Among the victors were the numerous national movements that began building their own states on the ruins of the formerly invincible imperial giants. While hardly a victor by any stretch of imagination, Ukraine was among the nations that the war gave a chance to create a state of its own.
In its first months and even years, the war promised nothing good for minority nationalisms. It created a wave of support for ruling dynasties and imperial power. The Russian government used its outbreak to impose further restrictions on the activities of Ukrainophile organizations. The Ukrainian activists, whom government officials often called “Mazepists”—a reference to the eighteenth-century hetman who had joined forces with Sweden against Russia—were treated as potential agents of the Habsburgs. Despite their assurances of loyalty, the government closed Ukrainian organizations, including the Prosvita (Enlightenment) societies, and shut down the remaining Ukrainian publications, including the daily Rada—the last remnant of the liberal period inaugurated by the Revolution of 1905. All this dashed the hopes of those Ukrainian leaders who saw the war as an opportunity to create a united autonomous Ukraine within the Russian state. The Ukrainian liberals declared neutrality, refusing to support either of the warring sides. Leftist radicals turned to Austria in the hope of defeating the Russian Empire.
The war began with spectacular victories for the imperial Russian armies. In the north, the Russian troops made their way into Prussia; in the south, they entered Galicia and Bukovyna. In early September they took Lviv, and by the end of the year they controlled the Carpathian mountain passes, advancing into Transcarpathia. The new restrictions on Ukrainian organizations in the empire led to the attacks on Ukrainian activists in Austria-Hungary. The Russian occupation of Galicia and Bukovyna lasted until May 1915—long enough to indicate the future that the Romanov Empire had in store for the Habsburg Ukranians. The occupying authorities raised the banner of the reunification and liberation of the pan-Russian nation, bringing the previously marginalized Russophiles back to the center of Galician politics. The Russian administration replaced Ukrainian with Russian as the language of instruction in the local schools and renamed Austrian and Jewish Lemberg—Polish Lwów and Ukrainian Lviv—as Russian Lvov.
While the Russians supported the Russophiles, the Austrians started persecuting them as soon as the war began. On September 4, 1914, the first Russophile activists rounded up arrived in an open field in the Thalerhof camp near the city of Graz in Styria. Thousands of arrested Russophiles and members of their families soon joined them. Many were community leaders—priests, educators, and members of the educated classes—but most were simple peasants. In the course of the war, close to 20,000 people were incarcerated in Thalerhof, which acquired a sad notoriety as the first concentration camp in Europe. Close to 3,000 prisoners died of cold and disease. Today, only the name of a road near Graz airport—Lagerstrasse, or Camp Street—reminds one of the tragedy of the Galician and Bykovynian Russophiles. Others were shipped to the prison camp of Theresienstadt (Terezin), a fortress in the present-day Czech Republic, which counted Gavrilo Princip as one of its inmates. He died there of tuberculosis in late April 1918, slightly more than half a year before the end of the war he helped unleash. In Canada, the authorities interned close to 4,000 Ukrainians and ordered another 80,000 to report regularly to the police, treating them as “aliens of enemy nationality.” The nationality ascribed to them was “Austrian,” as all were recent émigrés from Austria-Hungary.
Unlike the Russophiles, the leaders of the Ukrainian movement in Austria-Hungary declared their loyalty to the monarchy. In that, they followed mo
st of their peasant supporters, whose favorite song in the years leading up to the war was about the wife of Emperor Franz Joseph, Empress Elizabeth (Sisi), assassinated by an Italian anarchist in 1898. The song addressed Elizabeth as “our lady” and Franz Joseph as “our father.” With the start of the war, the Ukrainian activists formed a Supreme Ukrainian Council, whose name reflected that of the Supreme Ruthenian Council of the revolutionary year 1848. The council called into existence the first Ukrainian military formation in the Austrian army. Out of 10,000 volunteers, the authorities formed a corps of 2,500 called the Sich Riflemen—referring, of course, to the Zaporozhian Sich and the Dnieper Cossacks as an expression of the all-Ukrainian identity and aspirations of the Galician volunteers.
The Ukrainian politicians in Austria-Hungary had a twofold political program: to partition Galicia and achieve autonomy for its Ukrainian part and to form an independent Ukrainian state out of Russian-ruled Ukraine. To achieve the second goal, the Austro-Hungarian Ukrainians not only joined the imperial army but also embarked on the project of turning the Little Russians among the Russian prisoners of war into Ukrainians. Leading that effort was the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine, formed in Vienna but staffed largely by émigrés from Dnieper Ukraine, who knew how to talk to their own people. Among them was the future father of the radical Ukrainian nationalism of the 1920s and 1930s, a native of southern Ukraine with a Russian surname: Dmytro Dontsov.