Laboratory of Modernity: Ukraine between Empire and Nation, 1772–1914 9780228018582

Table of contents :
Cover
LABORATORY OF MODERNITY
Title
Copyright
Contents
Tables
Preface: What Can Ukraine Teach Us about the Modern World?
Maps
PART ONE: UKRAINE 1772–1831
1 Between Two Empires
The Age of Enlightened Absolutism and Its Legacy
Dynastic Empires Change Space
The Rise of Bureaucracy
How to Tackle Diversity?
2 From Enlightenment to Romanticism
Ukrainians as Empire Builders
Dr Frankenstein’s Laboratory of Nationalism
Heritage Gatherers, Glory Hunters
Ukraine Begins in the East
Old Regime under Threat: Poles and Decembrists
PART TWO: UKRAINE 1831–1876
3 The Age of Romantic Nationalism
Another Ukraine, Other “Ukrainians”
Inventing an Ancient and Holy City: The Rise of Kyiv
The Making of One Nationality is the Unmaking of Others
From Serf to Prophet: The Improbable Case of Taras Shevchenko
Was There a Revolution in Ukraine in 1848?
4 The Age of Reforms
Tradition vs. Modernization
Liberal Interlude in Russia: The Reformers
Liberal Interlude in Russia: The Reformed
The Birth of the Intelligentsia from the Spirit of Reform
5 The Empire Strikes Back
Poles Rebel, Act II
“There was not, is not, and cannot be” a Ukrainian Language
Fathers and Sons, Ukrainian Style
From Austria to Austria-Hungary
PART THREE: UKRAINE 1876–1914
6 Galician Exceptionalism
Ruthenians in Search of a Nation
The Ukrainian Piedmont
From Dawn to Dusk of the New Era
Whose City Was It? Lviv vs. Lwów
7 New Society, Old Empire
Nation of Peasants: Social Mobility and Immobility
The Curse and Blessing of Resources
Was Ukraine Russia’s Colony?
Society at the Crossroads
Live Fast, Die Young: Birth, Death, Family, and Gender
The West is the Best? Oil Boom, Rural Poverty, and Emigration
Imperial Pecking Order: Peoples of Ukraine
8 Politics and Culture between Empire and Nation
The World(s) of Fin-de-Siècle and Beyond
The Dubious Blessing of Illiteracy
When Ukraine Learned to Read: Non-Readers into Readers
Between Theater and Terrorism
“People do not exist for States”
The Un/Solved Ukrainian Dilemmas: Epilogue
Timeline
Notes
Bibliographic Essay
Index

Citation preview

la b o r a to r y o f moderni ty

The preparation of Laboratory of Modernity: Ukraine between Empire and Nation, 1772–1914 has been funded by a generous donation from the Temerty Foundation.

Підготування книжки Laboratory of Modernity: Ukraine between Empire and Nation, 1772–1914 здійснено завдяки щедрому дарові Фундації Темертеїв

Laboratory of Modernity Ukraine between Empire and Nation, 1772–1914

Serhiy Bilenky

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago and Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press Edmonton • Toronto

© Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies 2023 iSbn iSbn iSbn iSbn

978-0-2280-1756-1 978-0-2280-1757-8 978-0-2280-1858-2 978-0-2280-1859-9

(cloth) (paper) (eP df) (eP Ub )

Legal deposit fourth quarter 2023 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Laboratory of modernity : Ukraine between empire and nation, 1772-1914 / Serhiy Bilenky. Names: Bilen'kyĭ, Serhiĭ, author. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2023043813X | Canadiana (ebook) 20230438172 | iSbn 9780228017561 (cloth) | i S bn 9780228017578 (paper) | iS b n 9780228018599 (eP Ub) | iS bn 9780228018582 (eP d f) Subjects: lcS h: Ukraine—History—1775-1917. Classification: lcc dk508.772.b55 2023 | ddc 947.707—dc23

This book was typeset in 10/13 Sabon Pro.

Contents

Tables | vii Preface: What Can Ukraine Teach Us about the Modern World? | ix Maps follow page xiv

Part one: Ukraine 1772–1831 1 Between Two Empires | 3 The Age of Enlightened Absolutism and Its Legacy | 3 Dynastic Empires Change Space | 9 The Rise of Bureaucracy | 22 How to Tackle Diversity? | 27 2 From Enlightenment to Romanticism | 38 Ukrainians as Empire Builders | 38 Dr Frankenstein’s Laboratory of Nationalism | 50 Heritage Gatherers, Glory Hunters | 57 Ukraine Begins in the East | 72 Old Regime under Threat: Poles and Decembrists | 81

Part two: Ukraine 1831–1876 3 The Age of Romantic Nationalism | 91 Another Ukraine, Other “Ukrainians” | 91 Inventing an Ancient and Holy City: The Rise of Kyiv | 99 The Making of One Nationality is the Unmaking of Others | 106 From Serf to Prophet: The Improbable Case of Taras Shevchenko | 115 Was There a Revolution in Ukraine in 1848? | 122

vi

Contents

4 The Age of Reforms | 132 Tradition vs. Modernization | 132 Liberal Interlude in Russia: The Reformers | 146 Liberal Interlude in Russia: The Reformed | 155 The Birth of the Intelligentsia from the Spirit of Reform | 164 5 The Empire Strikes Back | 179 Poles Rebel, Act II | 179 “There was not, is not, and cannot be” a Ukrainian Language | 189 Fathers and Sons, Ukrainian Style | 205 From Austria to Austria-Hungary | 217

Part three: Ukraine 1876–1914 6 Galician Exceptionalism | 227 Ruthenians in Search of a Nation | 227 The Ukrainian Piedmont | 241 From Dawn to Dusk of the New Era | 250 Whose City Was It? Lviv vs. Lwów | 260 7 New Society, Old Empire | 274 Nation of Peasants: Social Mobility and Immobility | 274 The Curse and Blessing of Resources | 285 Was Ukraine Russia’s Colony? | 295 Society at the Crossroads | 308 Live Fast, Die Young: Birth, Death, Family, and Gender | 325 The West is the Best? Oil Boom, Rural Poverty, and Emigration | 342 Imperial Pecking Order: Peoples of Ukraine | 357 8 Politics and Culture between Empire and Nation | 384 The World(s) of Fin-de-Siècle and Beyond | 384 The Dubious Blessing of Illiteracy | 402 When Ukraine Learned to Read: Non-Readers into Readers | 411 Between Theater and Terrorism | 430 “People do not exist for States” | 449 The Un/Solved Ukrainian Dilemmas: Epilogue | 470 Timeline | 489 Notes | 497 Bibliographic Essay | 539 Index | 567

Tables

3.1 Composition of Galicia’s population by nationality, 1825–57 | 123 5.1 Ukrainian publications, 1860–76 | 199 7.1 Decrease in peasant landholdings (in desiatynas), 1863–1900 | 276 7.2 Value of industrial production in millions of rubles per province, 1879–93 | 297 7.3 Structure of the industrial workforce in Ukraine (in thousands), 1901–07 | 298 7.4 Ukraine’s industrial output per industry, 1912 (in percentages) | 299 7.5 Nationalities in Russian Ukraine per province (in percentages), ca. 1897 | 309 7.6 Population of Russian Ukraine’s largest cities, 1800–1914 | 310 7.7 Urban population of Ukraine by region, 1897 | 311 7.8 National composition of Ukraine’s urban population by region, 1897 | 311 7.9 National composition of selected cities, in thousands and percentages, 1897 | 315 7.10 Social composition of selected cities, in thousands and percentages, 1897 | 316 7.11 Communicable diseases in Ukraine per 10,000 people, 1910–14 | 328 7.12 Birth rates in Ukrainian provinces per 1,000 people, 1861–1913 | 329 7.13 Nationalities in Russian Ukraine, 1897 | 359 8.1 Ukrainian lubok literature, 1908–1913 | 414 8.2 Genres and print runs of Ukrainian literature, 1908–13 (totals) | 415 8.3 Recovery of Ukrainian publishing, 1881–1904 | 433

P re f ac e What Can Ukraine Teach Us about the Modern World?

The historian of modern Ukraine is subject to two kinds of pressure. The first comes from people who wistfully express the desire for a “feelgood history of Ukraine,” one that would focus on “positive” factors instead of tragedies like the Holodomor or World War II. Recently a friend of mine, musing about such matters, asked me to imagine that Jonathan Swift had written such a book. In fact, Swift once did, namely, his infamous satirical essay with its intentionally grotesque arguments “modestly proposing” that Ireland’s poor resolve their wretched situation by selling their children as food to the rich. A Swiftian take like this one on Ukraine’s history might have similarly novel and dramatic effect, but that is not the goal of my work. While there will be no more mention of the Holodomor or World War II here – for the obvious reason that they happened beyond the times I address – the book at hand is hardly a “feel-good” history, especially considering the context in which the book was completed – during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. That said, in writing it I endeavored to keep in mind readers like my friend, a non-academic with a genuine interest in the history of modern Ukraine and its place in eastern Europe. The second pressure comes from a very different source. It is the challenge any historian of Ukraine feels working in the shadow of the great and prolific historian Mykhailo Hrushevs'kyi. His monumental, multivolume History of Ukraine-Rus', now available in a highly readable and accomplished English translation produced by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, ends with the mid-seventeenth century. For all his scholarly productivity, Hrushevs'kyi did not write comprehensively about the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as he did for the earlier centuries. Among other things, revolutionary politics, including

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his leadership of a fledgling Ukrainian state in the wake of World War I, precluded this. Today, the project he began as a young scholar in the 1890s seems impossibly ambitious in every way – in scope, volume, detail, the sheer range and number of sources he used and cited. We can hardly imagine an individual historian as immensely erudite, industrious, single-minded, dedicated, and prolific, with comparable knowledge of sources and languages and the time necessary to accomplish the enormous task of completing the history. Given that reality, what kind of history of Ukraine is a committed historian, writing in English, to produce? The book I offer here takes a close look at Ukraine in the “long” nineteenth century during which the modern era dawned in Europe. It was inspired by another historian of Ukraine, Ivan Lysiak Rudnytsky, especially by his excellent and still unmatched Essays in Modern Ukrainian History. But whereas Rudnytsky’s work is a collection of closely related yet independent essays, my work has a defined structure. A cross between textbook and monograph, my book consists of three large chronological parts divided into eight thematic chapters, each of which has smaller sections dealing with a particular theme or issue. These themes and issues – the real bones of the book – are aligned chronologically but also cluster around two conceptual nuclei: the “national-imperial complex,” and Ukraine as a “laboratory of modernity.” The sections form a continuum, which is bound together by questions and inner references. Despite allowing some omissions and discontinuities, this structure has the big advantage of being dynamic in form, as opposed to the static nature of many traditional historical surveys, which tend to deal with topics like politics, economy, industry, society, ideology, and culture separately and largely in isolation from one another. In taking a different approach, my book has also become replete with questions, some answered and some only posed, whose purpose is to provoke further discussion. The years 1772 to 1914 were the time when the empires of Europe were in their prime. Simultaneously, it was a time when a multitude of new political, cultural, social, and economic ideas and institutions were conceived within these same empires—ideas and institutions which subsequently came to define our own world. During this entire period, present-day Ukraine was divided between the Austrian and Russian empires, and each imposed different political, social and cultural models on their subjects. This inevitably led to great diversity in the lives of Ukraine’s inhabitants during that period. What is surprising

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is that despite being subjected to different and even conflicting power models during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, during that time Ukraine was not only imagined as a distinct entity with a unique culture and history but was also realized as a set of social and political institutions. It was the imagination of several groups of intellectuals and activists, initially from the Russian Empire and later joined by likeminded individuals and groups from the Austrian Empire that made the existence of modern Ukraine possible. Hence, the emergence of the Ukrainian national project spearheaded primarily by a populist intelligentsia on either side of the Russian-Austrian border will be very much at the center of this book. But the history of modern Ukraine is more than a history of its intelligentsia, national movement, or Ukrainian national identity. It is also a study of a pluralistic society, culture, and political arena in which Ukraine itself was a project competing with alternative, and in fact more dominant, imperial and national projects. Given this geopolitical complexity, the story of modern Ukraine encompasses the historical narratives of several major communities, including ethnic Ukrainians, Poles, Jews, and Russians, who lived side by side for centuries, courtesy of the expanding empires of which they were a part. Thus the “long” nineteenth century was above all the time of Ukraine’s experience of empire. As much as it was the era of a national project (or projects), it was also a time of an imperial project, including what it meant to be an imperial subject in eastern and central Europe. The issue of empire and nation, or the “national-imperial complex,” as I have put it elsewhere,1 was particularly strong in the Russian Empire, in which there were no clear geographic and administrative borders between its diverse communities, on the one hand, or between “Russians” (meaning Orthodox Slavs) and the empire per se, on the other. Austrian-ruled Ukraine had its own share of troubles caused by difficult relations between varied ethnic and religious groups. My book contains the stories of both those who opted for the imperial choice and those who went against the empire and chose nationalism or socialism, modern forces incompatible with the old dynastic empires (though these, too, were evolving and seeking to modernize to some degree). But for any given number of empire destroyers, there were just as many empire builders (or even many more, if the bureaucracy and military are included). Hence, both the making and the unmaking of empire are among the topics of my history. And then there were those people – in fact, a great many people, constituting a

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“silent majority” in both empires – who did not overtly make either a pro- or anti-imperial choice and instead simply strived to survive in the often unfavorable or outrightly hostile world around them. This was also the critical time when many of the social, economic, demographic, and cultural fundamentals of modern Ukraine were created. The history of “imperial” Ukraine thus showcases several crucial issues of global modernity, which I, in agreement with Steven Pinker, understand as the “erosion of family, tribe, tradition, and religion by the forces of individualism, cosmopolitanism, reason, and science.”2 The issues coursing through the times included: the tension between center and periphery; internal colonialism; the making and unmaking of nationalities; the mobilizing potential of modern nationalism, contrasted with its opposite, the national indifference of the masses; reactionary responses to modernity, ranging from state-promoted xenophobia and pogroms to religious conservatism; the proverbial “resource curse” (owing to an abundance of agricultural or mineral riches); the chasm between urban and rural communities; the growing appeal of revolution. An over-riding aspect, especially evident in the Russian part of Europe, was the incompatibility of autocratic government, on the one hand, with liberal culture, economy, and society, on the other – a conflict subsequently conspicuous time and again in the twentieth century and now in the twenty-first. Any student of the nineteenth century, regardless of attitude toward Marxism, has reason to share the preoccupation of Eric Hobsbawm, the eminent historian of capitalist modernity, with the impact of abrupt changes and crises in society. Nineteenth-century Ukraine certainly offers a large number of such changes and crises as cases for study. What do I mean by the metaphor “laboratory of modernity”? As the cultural historian Alexander Etkind recently reminded us, modern empires often made use of colonies as “laboratories of modernity” in which to design and try new technologies of power. Once a certain method was tested in a colony, whether internal or foreign, it could then be applied to the metropolitan center itself. Whether Ukraine on the whole was such a “colony” is a matter of debate, but Etkind’s conceptual framework can certainly be applied to some parts of Russian-ruled Ukraine. For instance, he mentions an official who first “civilized” Poland, was then transferred to Tashkent in Central Asia, and afterward was sent on to St Petersburg, where he continued to “civilize” Russia and Russians.3 Many such officials actually came from Ukraine, and from at least the late eighteenth century Ukraine itself was a testing

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ground, or “laboratory,” for imperial power. A caveat was that the laboratory was not fully controlled or directed by the imperial government. It was simultaneously a playground for unconstrained forces of modernity, as well as a medium through which various truths about the modern world were transmitted. But modern Ukraine can be viewed as a laboratory of a different kind. The historian Mark von Hagen has written that Ukraine constitutes “a veritable laboratory for viewing several processes of state and nation building and for comparative history generally.” He has gone on to say that several features of Ukrainian history that have long been perceived as “weaknesses” could now be reinterpreted as “strengths,” among them “the fluidity of frontiers, the permeability of cultures, [and] the historic multiethnic society.”4 At the same time, there was undeniably a premodern, traditional, even primordial element in Ukraine during the “long” nineteenth century, something which made it not quite a “European” country but appealed to the imagination of any European “Orientalist,” whether a leisure traveler of the late eighteenth century or an industrial capitalist in the next century. It is worth noting what this book is not. It is not a comprehensive, event-driven history of modern Ukraine. Rather, it is a wide-ranging effort to zero in on Ukraine-specific issues while also addressing such larger questions as: Why is Ukraine important for European and particularly east European transnational history? What were Ukraine’s responses to modernity? What was unique and what was typical about Ukrainian history in the “long” nineteenth century, poised between the traditional and modern worlds? Global modernity will serve as the prism through which we will look at Ukraine’s internal development. In the process, I hope my readers, whether academics or students, public intellectuals or journalists, policy experts or novices, gain a deeper understanding of some of the pressing issues facing Ukraine and the international community today. Laboratory of Modernity: Ukraine between Empire and Nation, 1772–1914 provides readers with a comprehensive background in the key political, social, and cultural developments that have shaped Ukraine as we know it today. In sum, what follows here is the story of a Ukraine existing between competing imperial and national projects, a “laboratory of modernity” in which issues of universal concern were first posited and tested, with outcomes that were subsequently applied elsewhere.

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I wish to thank the Ukrainian Studies Fund, Inc. and its generous donors for many years of support during the research and writing of this book. The Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, in particular the head of its Toronto office, Frank E. Sysyn, and its deputy director, Marko R. Stech, provided an academic environment which proved of great benefit to my research and writing. My special thanks go to Professor Sysyn, as well as to Heather Coleman, Yaroslav Hrytsak, Maxim Tarnawsky, and Volodymyr Sklokin, for their reviews of my manuscript in whole or in part and their invaluable comments; dealing with the latter improved my text considerably. My thanks to Richard Ratzlaff and McGill-Queen’s University Press for transforming my computer-generated manuscript into a physical book (along with its electronic doppelgänger). Uliana Pasicznyk made sure that my non-native English conveyed my ideas clearly and in full. I am grateful to Dmytro Vortman for the excellent maps he produced for this book, as he did for a previous one. I am greatly indebted to Viktor Korotkyi of Kyiv National Shevchenko University, a prodigiously knowledgeable historian of nineteenth-century Ukraine and unrivaled expert on its bibliography, for his very supportive mentorship. Since becoming my first academic supervisor many years ago, Dr Korotkyi has generously and continually supplied me with relevant scholarly publications and sources, even when I was no longer able to delve into all of them. Some portions of this book are based on materials he supplied and incorporate ideas that he shared with me. My thanks to Michael Boguski for suggesting a genre for this book. This is my third book that has benefitted from the friendship and spiritual energy of Douglas Donegani. Paul R. Magocsi provided me with sound advice, continuous encouragement, and a steady supply of issues of The New York Review of Books (as well as lodging in his home, where most of this book was written). My longtime friend Oleh Majewski was always ready to respond from Kyiv to my sudden historical inquiries (thank goodness for Facebook). He also repeatedly referred to and thus recalled the many valuable insights once shared with us by Omeljan Pritsak, the encyclopedic scholar from a different epoch who was our mentor at Kyiv University in the early 1990s and forever changed my life. I am grateful to Taras Koznarsky, Hanna Protasova, Ostap Kin, and Valentyna Kharkhun for their consistent willingness to answer my at times naïve questions about Ukrainian literature and culture. Hanna Protasova was also kind enough to listen to my ramblings about various ideas, discoveries, and frustrations during long months of lockdown in Toronto in the spring of 2020. I alone, of course, am responsible for the final product before you now.

Key

Map 1 | East-Central Europe, 1751

Map 2 | Ukrainian lands, 1751

Map 3 | East-Central Europe, 1796

Map 4 | Ukrainian lands, 1796

Map 5 | East-Central Europe, 1835

Map 6 | Ukrainian lands, 1835

Map 7 | East-Central Europe, 1913

Map 8 | Ukrainian lands, 1914

Map 9 | Railroads, 1885

Map 10 | Railroads, 1913

Map 11 | Proportion of serfs in the population as a whole, by province, ca. 1860

Map 12 | Industrial production, by province, 1879–93

Map 13 | Communities with a population over 20,000, ca. 1897

Map 14 | Ethnic composition of population, by province, ca. 1897

Pa r t o n e

Ukraine, 1772–1831

1 Between Two Empires

th e a ge o f enli g h t e n e d a b So lUti S m a nd i t S l e g a c y Today the concept of enlightened absolutism is apt to be relegated to a footnote in history textbooks, when it should in fact be recognized as a crucial source of modernity across the European continent. What do I mean by the word “modernity”? If viewed through the prism of material objects and daily life, the concept certainly has to include things like railroads, factories, cars, department stores, mass-produced clothes, and communication devices, as well as the multitude of others that have been produced over the last two centuries. Yet one can well argue that other innovations, such as the abolition of serfdom and slavery, legal protection for free speech, and religious tolerance, have had even more importance for human society. The latter phenomena actually derived from an unlikely source – enlightened absolutism. In the most general sense, this term has been used to describe the series of administrative, legal, socioeconomic, educational, and religious policies that developed under the influence of enlightened philosophy and were pursued by Europe’s absolute rulers in the second half of the eighteenth century. In many ways, the birth of the modern state and modern society was a result of this development. The concept itself is a marriage of two seemingly incompatible notions: absolutism, as a form of autocratic rule, and the Enlightenment – also referred to as the Age of Reason – as an intellectual and cultural movement. As an ideology of statecraft, absolutism spread among European rulers from the mid-seventeenth century, whereas the Enlightenment is usually attributed to the eighteenth century.

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In about 1750, several absolute rulers across Europe began to experiment with the enlightened ideas being advanced primarily by French, Scottish, and Italian intellectuals. These rulers began to be viewed as enlightened monarchs. There were also other sources of enlightened absolutism. For instance, an older school of rational statecraft – so-called cameralism, dating from the second half of the seventeenth century– influenced reform efforts by some enlightened rulers, particularly in Prussia and Russia, and these rulers began at times to identify themselves with an impersonal state. Another such source was a theory of natural law including the idea that a social contract bound the ruler to his or her subjects; it defined the duties and responsibilities of both sides and also advocated religious tolerance and legal reform. Aside from the influence of these and other enlightened ideas, in the second half of the eighteenth century a state’s policies were defined by such practical concerns as the recruitment of soldiers and raising sufficient revenue to finance its administrative and judicial needs; these, in turn, allowed the state to pursue more ambitious foreign policies. The Enlightenment added an extra dimension to absolutist regimes. Its rational and humanistic new ideas undoubtedly shaped specific policies, though to what extent is difficult to say. The goals of the state were now to provide better government and advance the prosperity (both material and spiritual) of its subjects – goals that still define good governance today. In this sense, the period saw the first emergence of what we today might call a welfare state, as some enlightened rulers attempted to take charge of public health and sanitation (by establishing cost-free hospitals for the poor and public laundries, for instance), communication, law and order, urban planning, the distribution of food after failed harvests, and the like. The Enlightenment provided a broad intellectual context within which such measures could become possible. In effect, enlightened absolutism was one of the first all-European fashions in politics, one that spread from Portugal in the west to Russia in the east. Among the ground-breaking reforms that some states implemented were the abolition of torture and even, in some cases, the elimination of capital punishment; the codification of laws; the abolition or limiting of serfdom; secularization; religious tolerance; expansion of primary education; new university curriculums; and the implementation of free trade ideas (by French physiocrats). The spirit of enlightened absolutism is best conveyed by a statement made by the grand duke of Tuscany and future Holy Roman emperor, Leopold, in

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a political testament of 1790: “a ruler, even a hereditary ruler, is only a delegate, a servant of the people, whose cares and troubles he must make his own.”1 To examine how the Enlightenment influenced particular rulers and their policies, let us consider three renowned instances of enlightened absolutism, that is, the reigns of Joseph II of Austria (Holy Roman emperor, elder brother of Leopold), Frederick the Great of Prussia, and Catherine II of Russia. As emperor, Joseph II of Austria (r. 1765–90), for a time co-ruler with his famous mother, Maria Theresa (until 1780), presided over a series of the most radical reforms made anywhere in Europe. A parsimonious individual, Joseph endeavored to balance the state budget as well as trim the expenses of his own court. About him one contemporary wrote: “few sovereigns devote so much time to business and so little to pleasure or dissipation.” As if anticipating political practice in democracies today, obliging politicians to tend to their constituencies, Joseph traveled across his huge empire, making himself available to all his subjects and collecting tens of thousands of petitions, many of them critical of his policies. In the early 1780s, he also substantially relaxed censorship, which led to remarkably free political debate in his empire. Two points on his diverse reform agenda were especially progressive: the institution of religious tolerance, and the limitations put on serfdom where it still existed in his realm. When his much less tolerant mother and co-ruler, Maria Theresa, decided to expel Protestants from the empire’s central provinces, he called the action “unjust, impious, impossible, harmful, ridiculous.” After she died, he granted a measure of tolerance to Protestants, Jews, and Orthodox alike. In 1781, his celebrated Patent of Toleration granted a degree of civil equality to Protestants and Orthodox, allowing them to build their own churches, open their own schools, attend university, enter civil service, and buy or sell land. In 1782–83, he issued similar patents to Jews, allowing them to enter all trades and professions, which led to his being called “Emperor of Jews”; it was the most far-reaching toleration reform issued in Catholic Europe. Joseph II also increased state control over the Catholic Church itself to a considerable degree, thereby creating a national church much more dependent on Vienna than on Rome. This kind of “modern” religious policy became a crucial component in the state-building aspect of enlightened absolutist rule. Influenced by enlightened and humanitarian motives, Joseph II proceeded to improve the plight of serfs, even mounting an effort to abolish

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serfdom. Between 1775 and 1785, he issued a number of edicts that greatly improved the condition of serfs in central and eastern Europe, particularly in newly annexed Galicia. Obligatory labor service to landlords – that is, corvée – was limited to two or three days per week; serfs were granted basic civil rights; child labor was abolished; serfs could marry, move, or enter a trade without unreasonable interference from their landlords; and serfs could now seek redress in the court system. In 1789 he even decreed a total abolition of serfdom, but implementation of that failed, owing to fierce aristocratic opposition and his death in 1790. Among Joseph II’s other remarkable reforms was the introduction (in 1774) of compulsory primary education, which meant a massive increase in state expenditure on schooling. By 1790, the extent of state-run primary education was greater in his empire than in any other European state. Some features of a welfare state had also been introduced, including poor relief, free health care for the poor, and homes for orphans and unmarried mothers. In sum, these policies testify to the forward-looking nature of Joseph II’s rule, especially when considered by the standards of the time. Joseph II of Austria’s much older contemporary, Frederick the Great of Prussia (r. 1740–86; sometimes called “Old Fritz”), formulated the spirit of enlightened absolutism based on a doctrine of the social contract in his own writings. “The monarch is the first servant of the State,” wrote Frederick, and thus “is required to contribute actively to the good of the State” (1752). Frederick also advised that good rulers “put the interests and the advantage of the public good before their own” – certainly a revolutionary idea for an absolute ruler of the time. Much of what he did was a continuation of policies instituted by his father, Frederick William I (known as the “Soldier King”), that could hardly be called “enlightened” (for instance, favoring nobles in civil and military service). Nonetheless, young Frederick was a passionate proponent of the Enlightenment (signing himself le philosophe at age sixteen): he corresponded with Voltaire, inviting him and other philosophes to Potsdam, and he himself wrote political theory from an enlightened standpoint, declaring that “philosophers should be the teachers of the world and the teachers of princes.” Frederick was undoubtedly the greatest popularizer of the Enlightenment in Germany, and perhaps in all of Europe. Although he promoted the militarization of society (prompting the dictum “Prussia is an army which has a country”), Frederick permitted astonishingly open debate on religious, philosophical, and political

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matters, inspiring Immanuel Kant to refer to the Age of Enlightenment as “the century of Frederick.” In a remarkably modern spirit, the monarch declared: “the sovereign has no right to dictate the way in which citizens will think.” Prussia under Frederick was not yet a state ruled by law, but he extended legal protection to all citizens, including serfs, although, like Joseph II, he stopped short of abolishing serfdom. But Frederick apparently not only detested serfdom but sincerely believed that “the humblest peasant ... even the beggar, is just as much a human being as His Majesty himself” and “the prince is equal to the peasant before the law.” In 1755, he abolished the practice of torture, drastically reduced the issuance of death sentences in his realm, and began to subscribe to the modern strategy of applying prevention rather than punishment alone in law enforcement. Finally, Frederick’s views on religious tolerance, even if they had utilitarian aims, were unprecedented for his time, and they remain extraordinary today. Scandalizing public opinion, he dismissed Christianity as “an old metaphysical fiction, stuffed with fables, contradictions, and absurdities.” It was perhaps for this reason that he was ready to tolerate any religion, embracing pagans, atheists, and Jesuits alike. As early as 1740, in an instruction on religious toleration, he declared that “all religions must be tolerated,” adding a statement that sounds outrageously progressive even today: “all religions are just as good as each other, so long as the people who practice them are honest, and even if Turks and heathens came and wanted to populate this country, then we would build mosques and temples for them.”2 Our third enlightened ruler, Catherine II of Russia, was a German princess by birth who spoke Russian with a strong accent all her life. Nonetheless, she wrote theater pieces in Russian, admired the visual arts, and loved philosophy and men (preferring officers to philosophers and artists). Catherine liked to represent herself as an enlightened ruler, a “philosophe on the throne,” and is famous for having corresponded with Voltaire and Diderot, the luminaries of the Enlightenment. In the bourgeois and prudish nineteenth century, misogynistic commentators described Catherine as a “whore” (traces of this also occur in Ukrainian anti-imperialist discourse), but her own century, the eighteenth, was a time of libertines and boasted a much more permissive culture. Two of contemporary Europe’s most notorious libertines, Marquis de Sade and Giacomo Casanova, included the Russian empress in their sexually explicit prose, in which the empire served as an arena for sexual conquests and unbridled fantasies (all belonging to visiting Westerners).

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Catherine’s personal sexual proclivities were exaggerated as much as her “enlightened” reforms were. Yet the latter were duly praised in the West, where the idea of an empire bent on Westernization in a showdown of civilization versus barbarity held great appeal. In reality, many of Catherine’s policies were far more limited in scope than those of her counterparts elsewhere in Europe, although she did in fact adopt some elements of the all-European enlightened agenda. Catherine’s earliest and most publicized effort at imitating a European legal discourse was tied to the Legislative Commission of 1767, an attempt (largely unrealized) at codifying Russian law according to enlightened legal norms. The “Instruction” (Nakaz) Catherine composed to guide the commission’s deputies – nobles, townspeople, state peasants, and representatives of the empire’s “non-Russian tribes” – consisted of norms she borrowed from Enlightenment jurists, particularly Montesquieu and Cesare Beccaria. Once translated into German, French, English, and Latin, the “Instruction” made Catherine an instant celebrity in Europe. Despite the fact that the commission failed to deliver a legal code – and subsequently seemed more like a publicity stunt by the empress – the very effort at codification likened her to an “Astraea, realizing justice, bringing the Age of Gold.”3 One significant element of the commission’s work directly affected Ukraine. Now entitled to send deputies, Ukrainian nobles, Cossacks, intellectuals, and even burghers submitted their own legal proposals to the commission in St Petersburg. In the process, these deputies developed a legal consciousness, and they learned not only to defend their corporate rights but also to speak on behalf of their political nation of “Little Russia” – that is, the Cossack state, or Hetmanate. Unfortunately, the whole point of Catherine’s enlightened rule was to crack down on “political nations” like “Little Russia” and Livonia, and their separate political, social, and legal traditions. In Catherine’s vision of imperial unity, there was no place for an entity with the status of, say, Scotland in the British Empire. Indeed, in 1782, under Catherine, the Hetmanate and its unique administrative order based on Cossack regiments were dissolved; its highest office – that of hetman – had already been abolished nearly two decades earlier, in 1764. Among subsequent generations of Ukrainian patriots and populists, Catherine’s rule and legacy would be irrevocably stained by her 1783 decree legalizing serfdom in Ukraine. One of her “enlightened” measures, targeted at cities across the empire, was the introduction of a uniform urban order based on the newest European principles. This proved to be a controversial policy. In

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effect, her Charter to Towns of 1785 abolished a centuries-old system of municipal self-government in Russia’s western borderlands, including Ukraine, and replaced it with an empire-wide municipal order supervised by a supreme magistrate sitting in St Petersburg. In contrast to her European peers Joseph II and Frederick the Great, who both sought to limit aristocratic privilege and undermine serfdom, Catherine increased the power of landed aristocrats by strengthening their right to own serfs and freeing them from service to the government. Building on a decree by her deceased husband Peter III, the empress confirmed these and other privileges in a Charter to the Nobility in 1785. Ukraine was directly affected by the enlightened and not-soenlightened policies of Joseph II of Austria and Catherine II of Russia. The Enlightenment influenced much of what these rulers did at home, but when it came to foreign affairs, many actions taken by the self-proclaimed philosophes on their thrones could hardly be called “enlightened.” Among the latter, perhaps the most infamous were the partitions of Poland-Lithuania. Indeed, one can argue that in eastern Europe the “long” nineteenth century began with these partitions, particularly with the third and final one, in 1795, which brought about the dismemberment of one of the largest and most powerful states in Europe. This act of unprovoked aggression also led to a massive geographic redistribution of historic Poland’s former lands among three great powers with rising ambitions: Austria, Prussia, and Russia.

d y naSti c em P i r eS c h a n g e SP a c e Particularly from the mid-eighteenth century, absolutist empires showed an impressive ability to transform space, whether geographic, administrative, or ethnographic. Never before had government managed to concentrate resources sufficient to support such grand transformations. Owing to the power of absolute rulers over space, in the late eighteenth century the lands of present-day Ukraine were divided between two empires – the Habsburg (Austrian) and the Russian – both of whose rulers claimed an adherence to enlightened principles. This massive geopolitical rearrangement was the direct outcome of the three partitions of Poland-Lithuania in 1772, 1793, and 1795. The partitions had resulted from a preoccupation with the balance of power on the part of three rulers, to the extent that if one of them was adding more territory, the other two had to do so as well. By dividing Poland, each of the three rulers sought to prevent an over-reaching expansion by either of the

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other two. The partitions themselves concerned two large regions of present-day Ukraine, namely, Right-Bank Ukraine, acquired by Russia, and western Ukraine, acquired by Austria. The third partitioning power, Prussia, acquired only some Polish ethnic territory, mostly west of the Vistula River. Even the most insightful eighteenth-century ruler could not have anticipated the future rise of Ukraine. Yet by expanding their respective dynastic territories and pursuing their internal policies, the Austrian and Russian rulers were laying the foundations – both geographical and other – of modern Ukraine. Empress-dowager Maria Theresa of Austria, a pious Catholic, was reluctant to take part in the dismantling of Catholic Poland; she was more interested in regaining Silesia, which had been lost to Prussia twenty years earlier. However, Maria Theresa also came to recognize that in the future Poland’s southern palatinates could serve as valuable compensation for Silesia or even be exchanged for it. Ultimately she was forced to take action by her son and co-regent, Joseph II, and the empire’s Chancellor Kaunitz, even if she later reportedly wept over her Catholic brethren, the “oppressed Poles.” Frederick, the Prussian king, would say of her sarcastically: “She cried, but the more she cried, the more she took.” The large portion of Poland that the Austrian Empire acquired had formed distinct and diverse administrative units in that country, but the government in Vienna decided to lump them together into one large crownland. The new imperial region turned out to be a true melting pot, with a large population of Greek-Catholic Ruthenians (descendants of the East Slavic population of medieval Rus') augmented by Roman Catholic Poles and Jews. The new crownland of Galicia could certainly be considered one of the Habsburgs’ most artificially created administrative regions. Vienna’s challenge was not only to justify its rule over this curious new territory but also to put a name to it – that is, to lands that had not constituted a single unit within Poland. Initially, Habsburg bureaucrats had little understanding of the complex ethnic relations in the region. They attempted to justify the First Partition of Poland in 1772 by tying it to a legendary medieval event of dubious legal or historical validity. In a result of the partition, Austria was annexing the palatinate of Rus' and parts of the Belz, Sandomierz, and Cracow palatinates. It was asserted that in doing so the Habsburgs were simply “re-annexing” territories that had once (for short periods, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries) belonged to Hungary. Now that the Habsburgs were the kings of Hungary as well, Austria was claiming

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the lands of a former medieval Ukrainian principality as part of their patrimony. As Larry Wolff has written, “Galicia – in spite of the dynastic Habsburg insistence on a thread of continuity from medieval Halych – was created virtually ex nihilo in 1772, a mere name for the Habsburg portion of Poland. Continuity would be articulated afterward ... The invention of Galicia in the late eighteenth century would lead to various and competing cultural attempts to articulate what it meant to be Galician.”4 In creating the new province, Austrians also coined a name for it – the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria (a Latin term for Volhynia), or simply Galicia (in German Galizien, from a Latin name for the medieval town of Halych). The administrative capital of the new crownland was the city of Lviv (Lemberg in German), once the capital of the medieval principality of Galicia-Volhynia and an important commercial and cultural center for Poles, Ruthenians, Jews, and Armenians alike. Unofficially and informally, the new Austrian province was split into western and eastern halves, reflecting its artificial imperial origins. Eastern Galicia (the former Polish palatinates of Rus' and Belz), like Right-Bank Ukraine to the east, had its own striking socioeconomic and ethnic characteristics. In eastern Galicia, a relatively small group of noble landowners, nearly all of whom were Roman Catholic Poles, together with a much smaller group of Greek Catholic petty gentry presided over a million peasants, most of them Greek Catholic Ruthenians. By inventing Galicia,5 the Habsburgs were creating their poorest province, and one soon torn apart by an increasingly national conflict between Poles and Ruthenians (that is, Ukrainians) that would rival the infighting between Czechs and Germans in Bohemia and Moravia. Two more areas of present-day Ukraine had also come under Habsburg rule. The first was Bukovyna, then a part of northern Moldavia, populated primarily by Orthodox Moldovans (Romanians) and Ruthenians, which was annexed from the weakened Ottoman Empire in about 1774. The second area was Transcarpathia, or historical Subcarpathian Rus', which from the eleventh century was an integral part of the Kingdom of Hungary, ruled by Habsburgs since 1526. During the long nineteenth century, these three “Ruthenian” areas would be subject to diverse policies emanating from their imperial centers, Galicia and Bukovyna to those from Vienna and Transcarpathia to those from Buda/Budapest. That situation would deepen and cement their differences from each other. Together, the three regions would differ even more strikingly (as they do even today) from the Ukrainian lands under Russian rule.

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Ukraine, 1772–1831

Unlike Maria Theresa, Catherine II, her Russian accomplice in the partitioning of Poland-Lithuania, had no qualms about “oppressing” an officially Catholic state. Catherine’s concern was the fate of the Orthodox “dissenters,” who were in fact oppressed in the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth, an early modern “republic” that had united the Polish Kingdom and Grand Duchy of Lithuania since 1569. On the eve of the First Partition of Poland in 1772, the Commonwealth’s population was estimated at 14 million, of whom more than 5 million (36 per cent) were Ruthenians (“Russians” to Catherine); of the latter, most were of the Greek Catholic faith, or Uniates (4.7 million), and the rest were Orthodox (400,000). By the time of the Second Partition in 1793, the number of Ruthenians had decreased to ca. 2.5 million (28 per cent) in a total population of 9 million. Although “dissenters” – that is, Eastern Christians and Protestants (but not Jews) – could own property, serve in the army, and vote in nobiliary elections, they were not permitted to hold public office or participate in the Polish Diet (Sejm). By the 1770s, religious minorities in Poland-Lithuania, despite their numerical strength, were treated as second-class citizens. Unsurprisingly, Russia under Catherine II declared itself to be the main protector of the Orthodox in Poland and presented that as a justification for its increasing interference in Polish internal affairs and, subsequently, as a pretext for the partitions. Another argument had a historical connection: Russia was “gathering the lands of [Kyivan] Rus',” whose legacy it had claimed for centuries. Thus, on the eve of the Second Partition in 1793, Catherine specifically made reference to the Russian “recovery of lands inhabited by peoples of the Russian faith and race.” There were more practical concerns behind the Second Partition. Catherine was greatly alarmed by the ongoing French Revolution, particularly the abolition of the monarchy and ensuing violence: she even thought that a French Jacobin was on the way to St Petersburg to assassinate her. She also believed that the Commonwealth’s ground-breaking reforms and liberal constitution of 3 May 1791 were orchestrated by French revolutionaries in concert with local Jacobins in Warsaw. Both the Russian and the Prussian governments were convinced that in signing the partition treaty in 1793, they were uprooting Jacobinism in Poland. Catherine probably did not have a prior plan for the Second Partition and was prompted to take action by the French Revolution and the war with Jacobin France in 1792. Ironically, had it not been for violent events taking place far to its west, Russia may well have refrained from partitioning Poland (or, at least, not done so in the

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eighteenth century), and so Ukrainians – had they emerged as a modern nationality at all – might have been divided among several European states, as, for instance, the Kurds are today, rather than between the two empires of Austria and Russia.6 As a result of the Second Partition, Russia acquired 250,200 square km of territory and over three million inhabitants, mostly East Slavic peasants but also including Catholic nobles and Jews. Two years later, Poland’s fate was sealed by the Third Partition, which gave Russia another ca. 120,000 square km of territory and more than a million inhabitants. The Russian Empire now included all of Right-Bank Ukraine, which within the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth had comprised the four palatinates of Kyiv, Bratslav, Podolia, and Volhynia. The proportion of ethnic Ukrainians in the Russian Empire had now soared from 13 to 22 per cent. The partitions also brought many Jews and Poles within Russia’s borders, which radically changed interethnic dynamics in European Russia and would later fuel xenophobic sentiment amidst the Russian authorities and their local supporters. Also, Russia and Austria had now become neighbors, setting the stage for future geopolitical competition between the Habsburgs and Romanovs. By 1797, after some experimentation with the division of space, the government in St Petersburg decided to divide this huge territory into three imperial provinces (guberniias) approximately equal in size: Kyiv, Volhynia, and Podolia. The division was based on abstract geographical principles rather than on any consideration of history or ethnography. With this division, Poland had disappeared from the political map of Europe, but Poles had not disappeared from the lands they had previously ruled; in fact, in some of these territories, such as Right-Bank Ukraine, in the new nineteenth century their influence seemed only to increase. Local Uniate and Orthodox peasants found themselves dependent on the same masters as before, as if Poland-Lithuania continued to exist, despite the Russian government’s intent to erase the name of Poland forever (as asserted by Paul I, Catherine’s unloved son and successor). The Polish problem would become one of the major predicaments in relations between Russia and other European powers throughout the long nineteenth century. Roman Szporluk has insightfully assessed the role of the partitions of Poland in Russian-Ukrainian relations in this way: With the Russian annexation of what had been Poland’s border territories in 1793–95, an “undoing of 1667” (that is, of the partition of Ukraine between Warsaw and Moscow) took place. For Ukrainians, the Polish partitions rearranged the stage in the midst

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of their transition from an administrative regional or provincial problem within the empire to an “inter-nationality” and finally an international problem. Most obviously, the east and west banks of the Dnieper were now united within one state. Not only were there many more Ukrainians in post-1795 Russia but, for the first time, the Polish question began to play a crucial role in the RussoUkrainian relationship.7 Another immediate consequence of geopolitical change in eastern Europe in the late eighteenth century was the colonization of the steppes, an unfulfilled goal of all previous sedentary civilizations in the region whose achievement now was crucial for a modernizing empire. Between the 1760s and 1790s, the Eurasian steppe frontier, which for many centuries had separated settled farmers from invading nomads, disappeared at a rapid pace. Catherine, who famously loved the South and mused about restoring Greece’s ancient glory, aspired to wrest Constantinople (Istanbul) from the Ottoman Turks. That she did not accomplish, but she did acquire for her empire the once Ottoman, Tatar, and Cossack lands north of the Black Sea, as well as the entire Crimean Khanate, territory which then became known as New Russia and Taurida and today are parts of southern Ukraine and the Crimea. The weaker the Ottoman Empire became, the stronger Russia grew. By the 1790s, St Petersburg exercised unrivaled authority in the region north of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. In 1772, in the context of the Russian-Ottoman war of 1768–74 and under Russian pressure, the Crimean Khanate, which had controlled much of the steppe north of the Black Sea, declared its independence from the Ottoman Empire and effectively became a Russian protectorate. In 1783, Catherine II abolished the khanate’s independence and annexed the Crimea and adjacent lands to Russia as part of the province of Taurida. By giving the new territory a Greek name, Catherine sought to erase the region’s Muslim-Tatar history and reconnect it to a semi-mythical Greco-Roman past. It was not merely coincidental that the Viennese composer Christoph Willibald Gluck’s most famous opera, Iphigénie en Tauride, and Goethe’s poem Iphigenia in Tauris (both nominally based on an ancient play by Euripides) appeared in 1779 and 1787, respectively, after Catherine’s early successes in the south. When Gluck presented his opera to the Viennese public in 1781, it was attended by Catherine’s son Paul, then on a visit to Emperor Joseph II. At around this same time, the Crimea became an object of intense Orientalist fascination among West European travelers and writers.

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A Frenchman who traveled to the peninsula in 1787 provides this scene from his exotic daydreaming during a stay in the Crimean city of Bakhchisaray: “I remember that lying down upon my divan, overwhelmed by the extreme heat, enjoying however with delight the murmur of the water, the cool of the shade, and the perfume of the flowers, I abandoned myself to Oriental indolence, dreaming and vegetating as a true pasha ... I could believe for some moments that I was a veritable Moslem prince, whose aga or bostangi came to take his sacred orders.”8 Despite the new Russian mythology emphasizing the Crimea’s links to ancient Greece, western European observers were clearly noting primarily Oriental images, as if the locale they were visiting was in Turkey or Persia. To adopt Larry Wolff’s apt metaphor, for these Europeans the Crimea became an “illusionary Orient,” a condensed model of an “Orient of Europe,” signifying the rise of eastern Europe as a new subcontinent in the minds of enlightened Europeans. Finally, Russia’s annexation of the Ottoman lands between the lower Dnipro and Dnister Rivers (1774–91) and founding of the city of Odesa (by Catherine, ca. 1794) permanently outlined the political map of the region. The annexation also expanded further southward the boundaries of “eastern Europe” as a newly imagined borderland between Europe and Asia. In the twentieth century, the southwestern border of independent Ukraine would follow the same imperial map. The steppes farther north, the domain of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, had come under Russia’s imperial gaze decades earlier. During the 1750s, the Russian government under Empress Elisabeth expropriated two large areas from the Zaporozhian Cossacks. One area, in northwestern Zaporozhia, was named New Serbia, and the other, in the far northeastern corner, came to be known as Slavic Serbia. Both areas were settled primarily by colonists from the Balkans (Serbs in particular but also Bulgarians, Romanians, and Greeks) and were organized into frontier military settlements. The later legendary ethnic diversity of Ukraine’s southern and southeastern regions was a deliberate product of Russian imperial policies dating from the 1750s. The Zaporozhian Cossacks, although resenting the new colonists, continued to serve the Russian government loyally in its wars against the Ottoman Empire. For their service, they claimed the newly conquered (in 1774) Turkish lands between the Boh (Southern Bug) and Dnipro Rivers, which the Russian government was not inclined to grant them. In its eyes, now that the Crimea had ceased to be a vassal of the Ottomans, the “unruly” Zaporozhian Host’s aspirations to act as an independent polity had become obsolete.

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Hence Catherine resolved to implement a plan put forward by her favorite, Prince Grigorii Potemkin: the Zaporozhian Cossacks were accused of unlawfully claiming the formerly Ottoman territories, seizing agricultural lands, granting asylum to numerous refugees, hiring peasants (up to 50,000!) to work for them, and plotting to establish their own “wild” government over an independent area. The plan presupposed the destruction of the Zaporozhian Cossacks’ stronghold, the Sich, and the abolition of their military organization, the Zaporozhian Host; both of those goals were achieved in 1775. The steppe lands and those beyond that had once been the domain of the Zaporozhians – the Host and Sich that a Russian critic would later condescendingly refer to as the “Algeria of the North” – were now incorporated into the province (guberniia) of “New Russia” (Novorossiia), governed by Potemkin himself. The autocratic government continued to experiment with geographical divisions, but the policy of colonization first devised in 1764 proceeded unabated. As governor of New Russia, Potemkin welcomed various categories of people and offered favorable terms to all, including peasants of every ethnicity, serfs who had fled from their landlords, military deserters, those fleeing religious persecution, and outright criminals (who were promised amnesty). Another category was foreigners invited by Catherine and her successors: initially, they were refugees from the Ottoman Empire, including Moldavians, Wallachians, Bulgarians, Greeks, and Albanians, but later people from western Europe, including Italians, Swedes, Corsicans, and, especially, Germans and Mennonites. Catherine herself issued three decrees specifically inviting her fellow Germans (in 1763, 1789, and 1790). However, the largest group of German settlers arrived in southern Ukraine in 1804, after a similar decree was issued by her grandson Alexander I. Colonists were attracted by free land and tax exemptions (granted for twenty to thirty years after arrival). Germans and Mennonites were also exempted from military service and given substantial trading privileges, setting them apart from most other social and ethnic groups in Russianruled Ukraine. By the early nineteenth century, Germans had founded numerous colonies in the formerly “wild” steppes north of the Black Sea and had become known as Black Sea Germans (Schwarzmeerdeutsche). By 1845, their number approached 100,000, and in 1897 it reached 283,000, accounting for 4.6 per cent of the population of the three “New Russian” provinces of Kherson, Taurida, and Katerynoslav.9 Perhaps the biggest symbol of the region’s changed demographics was the presence (from 1789–90) of German and Mennonite colonists on

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and near Khortytsia Island, the site of the Zaporozhian Cossacks’ Sich, opposite the new town of Oleksandrivs’k (today Zaporizhzhia). Half a century later, in the 1840s, Ukraine’s national poet Taras Shevchenko was still indignant that his beloved steppes had been “sold out to Germans and Jews,” an allusion to the many German and relatively few Jewish colonists who still remained there. In yet another poem, the poet wryly decries that “a wise German is planting potatoes at the [Zaporozhian] Sich” as an affront to Ukraine’s historical memory. Aside from several assaults on German settlers by local brigands in the early years of colonization, the population of New Russia grew steadily and impressively. The total male population of the vice-royalty (namisnytstvo) of Katerynoslav (in existence from 1783 to 1796) which included New Russia was put at 724,678 in 1787 and 819,731 in 1793. When compared to most other regions of the empire, the remarkable features of this population were its very small component of serfs (only 4,139 males in 1784) and striking mixture of ethnicities and social groups, defying the rigid social hierarchy present everywhere else in imperial Russia. Such a high degree of social and ethnic diversity might also have been characteristic of other frontier zones in the process of colonization, such as North America’s fabled Wild West. Also impressive was the ease with which Catherine’s loyal lieutenant Grigorii Potemkin “founded” cities in his province of New Russia, including Katerynoslav (1778–84), Kherson (1778), Mariupol (1782), Mykolaïv (1789), and, most notably, Odesa (1789–94), on territory just acquired by Russia from the Ottoman Empire. In reality, however, the space on which these “new” cities appeared had not been empty, and some settlements had existed before Russia’s takeover (for instance, Odesa stood on the site of an Ottoman encampment called Hadzhibey). This entire region served as an early “laboratory of modernity” for imperial colonizers. Several of its newly established (or reestablished) cities would become models of urban planning and commercial economy, showcasing the European façade of the Russian Empire. The pursuit of modernity often ignited the colonizers’ unbridled imagination. A fascinating story about the design of a panopticon recently cited by Alexander Etkind presents an example.10 Initially, “panopticon” simply meant a circular building set in the middle of a larger compound so as to allow a small number of people to oversee the work or activities of a larger group, such as supervisors over laborers or prison inmates. A site and structure of this sort was designed for Potemkin’s estate at Krichev (Krychaw; in present-day Belarus) by the brothers Samuel and

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Jeremy Bentham of Britain. A similar one, intended to serve as a combination factory and dormitory, was laid out in Kherson in the 1780s but was left unfinished. The idea would later be replicated in the construction of as a shipbuilding wharf and school near St Petersburg.11 A decade later, the panopticon acquired its most famous function – that of a jail, the first of which was built in Britain in 1821. This kind of innovation by colonizers like Potemkin and technical experts like the Bentham brothers was what would turn the newly conquered “wild” steppes north of the Black Sea into the empire’s laboratory of modernity. The process also became laden with new myth-making. An imperial myth of long standing had to do with Russian colonization itself: it elaborated on the ingenuity and prowess of Catherine II and, by extension, the Russian Empire as whole in bringing civilization to previously virgin lands – that is, implanting a civilizing mission in the south. In this regard, the Russian imperial myth resembled the mythology of the “discovery” and civilizing of America by European settlers, who generally also did not acknowledge the natives they found there as legitimate inhabitants of the continent. Similarly, the Russian authorities expropriating the southern territories from the Zaporozhian Cossacks, Ottoman Turks, and Crimean Tatars referred to these lands as New Russia, in the conviction that they were indeed “new” and “Russian.” Literature, both fiction and nonfiction, played a crucial role in this colonial mythology. America’s shifting frontier had as its promoter James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851), whose most celebrated novels appeared between 1823 and 1841 in the series The Leatherstocking Tales. The “New Russian” frontier literature was best represented by Apolon Skal'kovs'kyi (1808–99), whose writings would appear about two decades later. Skal'kovs'kyi was born in the town of Zhytomyr in the Ukrainian hinterland; he was brought up in the Polish culture of the local elites and studied at the universities at Vilnius (Wilno) and Moscow. Most of his professional life was spent in Odesa; there he became a leading historian of the Zaporozhian Cossacks and southern Ukraine, particularly New Russia as a region of imperial colonization, and became known as the Herodotus of New Russia. Among his major historical works were studies of the eighteenth-century Zaporozhian Cossacks and social bandits in southwestern Ukraine known as haidamaky, as well as a history and statistical account of New Russia and Odesa, in particular. Most of these works were written in the 1830s to 1850s, long after the places he studied had been colonized and “disciplined” by Russian authorities with the aid of real and imaginary panopticons.

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From the 1850s, influenced in part by the works of Sir Walter Scott, Skal'kovs'kyi also wrote historical fiction in Russian about Cossackpopulated southern Ukraine on the eve of Russian colonization, producing the novels Kagalnichanka (A Girl from Kahal’nyk), Brat’iaiskupiteli (The Brothers-Redeemers), Khrustal’naia balka (The Crystal Beam), and Mamai. This paradoxical fusion of Ukrainian Cossack history and Russian colonial mythology marked the transformation of the “wild” steppes, a frontier zone dominated by Zaporozhian Cossacks, Tatars, and Turks, into a New Russia seen as a beacon of imperial modernity. A modern-day historian of southern Ukraine aptly noted that Skal'kovs'kyi’s works depicted the Zaporozhian Cossacks “from the point of view of Russian nationalism” and thus as part of the Russian Empire, thereby inserting a romantic vision of local history into the “Procrustean bed of Emperor Nicholas’s triad [Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality].”12 Arguably the earliest and most spectacular elements of Russian civilizational mythology were produced during Catherine II’s famed trip along the Dnipro River to the Crimea in 1787. The trip’s purpose was to celebrate colonization and showcase the visible achievements of a modernizing Russia and its enlightened empress. Hailed as the Cleopatra of the North, Catherine began her journey from St Petersburg (in January) with accoutrements that included 14 carriages, 124 sledges, and 400 other vehicles. She was accompanied by Prince Grigory Potemkin, whose name would forever afterwards be associated with the so-called Potemkin villages. As Catherine and her entourage progressed along the river, her distinguished tour guide Potemkin presented a grand showcase of the empire, in which locations en route were lavishly decorated stage sets and the welcoming people on them were performers. The traveling empress was greeted by her picturesque subjects, peoples ranging from Cossacks and nomadic Kirghiz tribesmen to “savage” Kalmucks and utterly exotic Amazons. In Kyiv, the empress halted the journey three months, having decided to spend time there even though she found the city unimpressive; deciding to improve it, she directed her engineers to come up with the first “regular plan” for the city (a project subsequently abandoned). During her journey, the empress mixed state business with personal matters: in Kaniv she met with her former lover Stanisław Augustus Poniatowski, the king of Poland, and later, in Kherson, she entertained Emperor Joseph II. The trip became legendary throughout Europe, and can in that sense be said to have anticipated the tabloid journalism of

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our own time. A French commentator provided this vivid description of the imperial spectacle staged by Potemkin: “Towns, villages, country houses, and sometimes rustic cabins were so ornamented and disguised by triumphal arches, by garlands of flowers, by elegant architectural decorations, that their aspect completed the illusion to the point of transforming them, to our eyes, into superb cities, into palaces suddenly constructed, into gardens magically created.”13 These “Potemkin villages,” designed by none other than Samuel Bentham, were of course mere façades, as was much of “Westernized” Russia itself. Among the few skeptical voices addressing the actual colonization was that of the Russian official Pavel Sumarokov (1767–1846), who wrote about his travels across New Russia to the Crimea in 1799. He did not see a spectacle of empire anything like that enjoyed by Catherine II and her guests in 1787. In describing his journey from Ielysavethrad (today Kropyvnyts'kyi) southward to Mykolaïv, Sumarokov expressed his disappointment at what he was seeing, and he even went so far as to acknowledge the past presence of the Zaporozhian Cossacks: From Ielysavethrad to Mykolaïv there lies an extensive steppe, the former domain of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, where, apart from a few dugouts built for the post and a couple of small villages, there is no settlement along the road whatsoever. This route of 172 versts [ca. 183 km – Sb ] is the most boring; one’s sight gets lost in the distance; the spatial setting is always flat, almost monotonous; the fields are uncultivated; and because the area is uninhabited, a traveler experiences some kind of depression. Along this entire way there is not a single tree, and the inhabitants construct their huts from stone ... There are only a few animals and birds here ... The inhabitants of this region are all fugitives from different provinces …”14 In these harsh surroundings Sumarokov was buoyed by arriving in the newly built town of Mykolaïv, which he found quite pleasant. In an implicit reference to imperial modernity, he noted the “miraculous transformation of a remote and uninhabited steppe into a good city in just three years.” Thus here, along the edge of the Eurasian steppe frontier and at the close of the eighteenth century, for the first time in history, rural and urban settlers were able to colonize the steppes without fear of retaliation by nomadic peoples. The modernizing empire was enabling the colonization of lands that until recently had been unpopulated, underpopulated, or ruled by Islamic vassals of the

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Crimean Khanate and Ottoman Empire. As a result, in the first decades of the nineteenth century New Russia was resembling what California would be during the Gold Rush; except here it was not gold but grain that attracted thousands of farmers and entrepreneurs. Catherine II was instrumental in reorganizing and incorporating an even more important part of Ukraine: its historic and cultural heartland on the left bank of the Dnipro, that is, the Ukrainian Cossack state known as the Hetmanate, or Left-Bank Ukraine. The expansion of Russia – or Muscovy, as it was known abroad well into the eighteenth century – was closely connected to the agendas of its rulers. In 1654, Muscovy made one of its earliest territorial additions to the southwest. The Hetmanate, emerging from war with PolandLithuania, requested status as a protectorate of Muscovy from its tsar, Aleksei Mikhailovich (1629–1676). Consequently, the Cossackadministered territories on the left (eastern) bank of the Dnipro River as well as the city of Kyiv on its right bank joined the framework of tsarist Muscovy. At first, the Hetmanate enjoyed some cultural and political prominence in Muscovy, particularly during the tenure of Ivan Mazepa as hetman (1687–1709). But after Mazepa’s anti-Muscovite alliance with the Swedish king Charles XII and their military defeat at Poltava, a prolonged time of turmoil ensued, followed by severe curtailment of the Hertmanate’s autonomy. By the 1780s, the Hetmanate had largely been dissolved within the administrative system of the Russian Empire. In 1782, its traditional territorial division into nine regiments was reorganized into the three imperial vice-royalties (namestnichestva) of Kyiv, Novhorod-Sivers'kyi, and Chernihiv, centered in the cities with those names. The reorganization disregarded historical links and made little economic sense. All of the former Hetmanate’s central institutions, such as the treasury and post, and its highest administrative organ, the Little Russian College, were abolished. The second largest Ukrainian Cossack territory in the empire, so-called Sloboda Ukraine, to the east of the Hetmanate, had lost its autonomy (the Cossack order and the regimental system) more than a decade and half earlier, in 1765. Established in its stead was the province of Sloboda Ukraine, with its administrative center in Kharkiv; it was renamed Kharkiv province in 1835. Catherine’s policy of centralization brought an end to the process of early modern Ukrainian nation and state building. That process had aspired to religious and ethnic homogeneity, reflecting the general European political model after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. As a

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modernizing empire with global aspirations and cosmopolitan elites, Russia would soon radically restructure Ukraine’s territorial space and change its demographics. By the eve of the nineteenth century, the territory of Russian-ruled Ukraine was divided into nine imperial provinces, with ever fewer traces of Ukrainian distinctiveness in administration, geography, or society. Most of Ukraine’s historical regions were now part of a single increasingly centralized state. For the Romanov dynastry of Russia, as for all absolutist regimes, geography – treated as an abstract map subject to continuous intervention from above – mattered much more than ethnographic differences or historical legacies. The various centralizing measures that Russia began undertaking in the last quarter of the eighteenth century might be called administrative russification. A centralized imperial space, now divided into equal territorial units, required administration by loyal bureaucrats whose ethnic, religious, and linguistic identities were secondary to their loyalty to the empire as a whole. By and large, such bureaucrats would serve outside their own place of origin – for instance, ethnic Russians in Ukraine, Ukrainians in Siberia, and ethnic Germans throughout the empire. By contrast, the linguistic and cultural russification of minorities was not on the agenda until the 1830s (when it was first applied to the rebellious Poles). To use a framework proposed by Michel Foucault, the late eighteenth century subjected the territory of present-day Ukraine to administrative modernization and bureaucratic rationalism. An important byproduct of that process was a new concept of space as the object of limitless governmental creativity, rendering that space measurable, governable, and divisible. This new, abstract map of the empire confronted the legacies of the past, as empire builders and technical experts undertook to erase all previous ethnographic, historical, and cultural features. Their goal was to institute a universal empire. Did they succeed?

th e r i S e o f b U r e aU c r a c y In statecraft, modernity was marked by the rise of a bureaucracy – that is, a salaried officialdom responsible to the central government. This class of officials replaced the local landed nobility in administering the state. A similar process was taking place across Europe, but the rise of a bureaucracy and concomitant decrease in the role of landowners was distributed differently. For example, Britain, France, and several German states (Prussia, in particular) had become known for their

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numerous, efficient, and largely non-corrupt civil servants, whereas the bureaucracies of the Ottoman and Russian empires were continuously understaffed, underpaid, and infamously corrupt. Bureaucratic officialdom in the Habsburg Empire stood somewhere in between – Franz Kafka’s notorious depiction of it notwithstanding – and was clearly more akin to that in Britain and France than in Russia. What was the demographic reality in the Ukrainian lands that were divided between Austria and Russia? In 1804, the population of the Habsburg Empire was set at 21.2 million people; in 1850, it stood at 31.3 million, the second largest figure in Europe after France. Russia’s population grew more substantially: it was 36 million in 1796, 45 million in 1815, and at least 67 million in 1851. The population of the Ukrainian lands in both empires had similar dynamics, with the Russian-ruled territories experiencing a higher growth in population. For example, around 1795 the population of the Russian-ruled territories of Left-Bank Ukraine, Right-Bank Ukraine, and southern Ukraine (New Russia) was estimated at nearly 8 million people, whereas the population of Austrian-ruled Ukraine – namely, Galicia, Bukovyna, and Transcarpathia – was 2.47 million, or 23.7 per cent of Ukraine’s entire population. Across all of these lands, the population as a whole stood at 10.4 million (of course, Ukraine’s demographics and borders were not then viewed in present-day terms). In 1851, the population of the Russian Empire’s nine “Ukrainian” provinces reached 11.5 million (more than 11,600,000 if areas part of present-day Ukraine are included). At about the same time (1850), the population of Austrian Galicia was 4,667,600 (about half of whom lived in the province’s eastern or “Ukrainian” part); in Bukovyna it was 377,581; in Transcarpathia it was about 500,000. Thus the population of these western Ukrainian lands (that is, those in present-day Ukraine) was about 3 million. By 1900, the trend had accelerated: around that time, the population of Russian Ukraine reached 23.776,000, whereas that of Austrian Ukraine was slightly more than 5 million.15 As we see, between 1795 and 1897 the population of Russian-ruled Ukraine increased threefold, whereas that of Austrian-ruled Ukraine merely doubled. By 1900, the population in all the Ukrainian lands as a whole was roughly 29 million. If Ukraine had then been a separate country (as some national activists were then already imagining), it would have been among the most populous countries in Europe. The slower rate of population growth in Austrian-ruled Ukraine might be explained by the fact that these lands, due to their population density

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Ukraine, 1772–1831

(among the highest in Europe), had insufficient arable land to support that population, which forced people either to emigrate or have fewer children. In Russian-ruled Ukraine, areas north of the Black Sea were still sparsely populated, and these steppe lands and their fertile soil were continuously attracting an influx of people from the more populated regions of central Ukraine. Another factor was a demographic boom among minorities, particularly Jews, whose numbers grew steadily, from about 300,000 at the end of the eighteenth century to over 900,000 in the mid-nineteenth century, and then to over 2 million, or 8.5 per cent of the total population of Russian Ukraine, in 1897. In short, the Ukrainian lands in Russia experienced one of the highest rates of population growth in Europe. In order to rule over such masses of people, governments needed a constantly expanding pool of civil servants. But not every state could afford to support a multitude of officials, let alone find and retain efficient ones. The Russian government is generally thought to have wielded an enormous bureaucracy, but in reality the Russian Empire was at a disadvantage in comparison to other European states. Although it was the most populous state in Eurasia the tsarist empire lagged far behind major European powers in number of civil servants. For example, in the 1790s, civil servants in the Habsburg Empire numbered 14,000, for an overall population just over 20 million. In 1796, Russia had a population of 36 million, but it employed only between 12,000 and 16,000 thousand civil servants (that is, between 600 and 1,000 per province).16 At about this time, France, arguably the most centralized country in Europe, had about 90,000 civil servants for a population of 26 million. Clearly, Russia was being administered by a far smaller number of officials per capita than any large state in Europe. After the tsarist empire introduced a ministerial reform in the early nineteenth century, that situation changed somewhat. Especially during the reign of Nicholas I (1825–55), there was a growing bureaucratization of public administration, together with an increase in the number of salaried officials and rapid growth in the imperial bureaucracy. For example, by 1842 there were 74,500 ranked officials and clerks beneath the lowest (14th) rank on the Table of Ranks; by 1857, they numbered more than 122,000. Correlating the latter figure with the empire’s population of 74 million in 1858 yields the civil-servant-to-population ratio of 1:606: in this regard, even during its most “bureaucratic” age Russia was woefully behind Austria, France, and Britain. Contrary to the perceptions of nineteenth-century Russians themselves, they were not more plagued by a ubiquitous bureaucracy than

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were their European neighbors. Austria, with a population of about 21.2 million in 1804, had a bureaucracy estimated at 102,000, or one official per 214 inhabitants. Owing to different criteria for who was considered to be a civil servant, some Austrian sources gave a smaller figure: between 26,969 and 52,320 in the 1860s and 1870s (probably excluding Hungary). By 1900, that figure had grown to 65,415. The category of civil servants was now understood to include “officials [employed] in the imperial court, state, provincial, and district administrations.” Of these, 20 per cent were engaged in policy making (Konzeptsdienst); 55 per cent were clerks and clerical workers (Kanzleiund Rechnungsdienst); 10 per cent were teachers; and 15 per cent were low-level servants such as guards or doormen (Diener). Had all public employees been included, the number would have risen to 336,000. 17 After the introduction of rural and urban self-government in 1864 and 1870, respectively, the number of civil servants in the Russian Empire grew dramatically, to the extent that it became virtually impossible to verify their number. What is certain is that Russia’s civil service continued to be undermanned, which led to poor implementation of the empire’s Great Reforms in the 1860s.18 According to some estimates, as late as 1910 the ratio of people employed in state and public service to the general population was 1:161 in Russia, 1:137 in Britain, 1:88 in the USa, 1:79 in Germany, and 1:57 in France.19 Throughout its history, the Russian Empire evidently lacked a sufficient number of officials to administer its vast territories in accord with European standards.20 The role of the bureaucracy as a means of imperial integration was far more pronounced in Austria than in Russia. Created as a result of the reforms launched by Maria Theresa in the 1750s and 1760s, Austria’s professional bureaucracy became part of a centralized administration hierarchically linking Vienna and the provinces. These bureaucrats were recruited centrally, and they were usually posted to regions other than their places of origin; subsequently, they were often transferred from province to province. Aided by its loyal bureaucrats, the central imperial government in Vienna began to exercise unprecedented control over the crownlands. What Austrian bureaucrats had in common were an education in legal and state management, technical knowledge, and social expertise, which made them a distinct group of highly skilled individuals positioned between the state and society. Habsburg civil servants also shared basic traits and values, such as obedience, loyalty, and pride in the honest and efficient fulfillment of their duties. The administrative elite often went on to hold visionary and ethical ideas about society and

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Ukraine, 1772–1831

politics, based on the concepts of universal human rights and the civic duties of all citizens. Most of these values and principles within the imperial bureaucracy became a norm, owing to the enlightened policies of Maria Theresa and Joseph II. In Austria, the civil service became a domain of the middle classes: between 1780 and 1848, only 20 per cent of its civil servants were aristocrats by descent; the rest were mainly bourgeois in origin, education, lifestyle, and values, even if many were subsequently ennobled for their service. By contrast, bureaucrats in Russia did not identify with a particular economic or social class. They depended almost entirely on the person of the ruler, since no regularized legal system protected their positions. As a result, Russia never developed into a true Rechtstaat that could guarantee the security of its civil servants, let alone that of its subjects. The professional ethos of the Russian imperial bureaucracy remained low, with the exception of liberally minded “enlightened bureaucrats” who were part of the central apparatus in the 1850s and 1860s. Nonetheless, the social and ethnic composition of Russia’s civil servants did change somewhat in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For one thing, more and more commoners entered the imperial bureaucracy, especially at the local level (although the values and lifestyle of Russian officials, unlike those of their Austrian counterparts, could hardly be called “bourgeois”). Preliminary research indicates that in the mid-nineteenth century, the provenance of officials serving in the imperial capital of St Petersburg and several selected provinces was as follows: 40 per cent were of noble birth, 30 per cent were sons of junior military officers and lesser civil servants, 20 per cent were sons of churchmen (particularly true in the provinces), 5 per cent were sons of peasants or burghers, 2 per cent were from the merchant class, and a final 2 per cent were sons of foreigners.21 Russia’s Table of Ranks was designed by Peter I as a system of social advancement through state service based on merit, and as such it contributed greatly to the creation of a diverse army of imperial bureaucrats. The Russian administrative system made use of ennoblement as a means to encourage and reward upwardly mobile officials: those who reached the 8th rank in the Table of Ranks were granted hereditary nobility (after 1845, the 5th; after 1856, the 4th). Personal nobiliary status, not transferrable to one’s descendants, could be attained by entering the lowest rank, the 14th (from 1845, increased to the 9th). As the century progressed, a majority of officials were themselves the children of officials, whether nobles or non-nobles. There is no precise

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data on the geographic distribution of different groups of officials, but we can assume that hereditary nobility predominated among civil servants in Right-Bank Ukraine, with its many hereditary Polish nobles, whereas in the socially diverse Left-Bank and, especially, New Russia a large portion of officials were from non-noble backgrounds. As for ethnicity, the Russian imperial bureaucracy included many non-Russians, especially Poles and Ukrainians, as we shall see later in this chapter.

h o w to ta c k le d i v e rS i t y ? How did governments and their growing bureaucracies respond to the challenges posed by the integration of vast new territories? The responses to these challenges in Vienna and St Petersburg may have differed, but the issues these governments faced were similar. About the partitions of Poland a historian of Austrian Galicia recently said: [They] for the first time in history created a direct border between the Russian and the Habsburg monarchies. After 1772, Vienna and St Petersburg were dealing with some similar issues: masses of new subjects – Polish, Ruthenian, and Jewish; an untypical social structure of the newly annexed population, most notably, a remarkably high percentage of nobles. Similar intentions generated similar reforms, which were oftentimes carried out concurrently in the Russian and Austrian parts of the partitioned territories. The results were often contradictory, as neither of the two monarchies managed to carry their plans to completion. Each stumbled along the way, making numerous adjustments that sometimes defied the very intentions behind the reforms.22 It might seem that the Austrian rulers “proved to be more efficient in generating loyalties favorable to Vienna” – that is, to their state – but one can argue that St Petersburg, too, managed to secure the loyalties of its new subjects, at least until the 1830s (with the notable exception of the Duchy of Warsaw, which was essentially a French protectorate set up by Napoleon in 1807; his campaign against Russia in 1812 attracted thousands of Polish volunteers). More important, the Austrians viewed their newly acquired and, indeed, fabricated crownland of Galicia as a unique laboratory for their enlightened policies, where Vienna intended to build institutions and bureaucracy from scratch. That bureaucracy was to be staffed by loyal

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German speakers from across the empire, which by default excluded locals – Polish nobles, in particular – and rejected Polish administrative traditions. A supranational, Austro-German culture was expected to prevail in administration, education, and the local public sphere in general. The Austrian rulers and bureaucrats quite justifiably regarded the Polish social and political relations that they inherited in Galicia as backward. The impressions Austrian officials had of Galician society just after the annexation were entirely negative. The Austrians spoke of witnessing the “anarchy” and “violence” of the ruling Polish nobility, as well as the extreme poverty and moral decay of the common people, especially the Ruthenians. In 1773, Joseph II wrote angrily from Lviv about what he himself had seen: “Here I am then among the Sarmatians [that is, Polish nobles – Sb ]. It is incredible everything that has to be done here; it is a confusion like no other: cabals, intrigues, anarchy, finally even an absurdity of principles.” A prominent Austrian bureaucrat had even harsher words for the local Polish nobles, calling them “the most inhuman, abominable wild thing.”23 Given all this, the Austrian government’s primary concern in Galicia was to establish order and social discipline, with the broader goal of strengthening the state through the promotion of education and civil liberties among their subjects. As part of an agenda of enlightened absolutism, Empress Maria Theresa and her successor Joseph II launched a series of policies in Galicia that attempted to weaken the dominance of the Polish nobility alleged to be the source of political disorder. To administer the province, the Habsburgs planned to rely not on these nobles but, instead, on salaried Austrian bureaucrats. Indeed, until the mid-nineteenth century, virtually all Vienna-appointed governors of Galicia were high-ranking Austrian bureaucrats who came from or had previously served in western parts of the empire, from Austria proper to Italy and Portugal to Bohemia and Lorraine. In implementing such a policy, the Austrians were choosing to support the disadvantaged Ruthenians (Ukrainians) at the expense of the local Polish elites. How did these enlightened policies affect Galicia? As we know, the reforms of Maria Theresa and Joseph II were undertaken with the intent of transforming the Habsburg Empire into a rationally organized and modern bureaucratic state, and they did have some success. For instance, between 1766 and 1788 criminal procedures were standardized, and torture was abolished. In 1781, an edict of toleration was applied to the three Catholic rites (Roman, Greek, and Armenian) professed in Galicia, all of which were now declared legally equal. This

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was a dramatic change in the social standing of the Ruthenian faithful of the Uniate Church and, in particular, its clerical establishment. In 1774, that Church was officially renamed the Greek Catholic Church, and the term “Uniate” was banned (as being offensive). This was perhaps the earliest sign of what would be an enduring pro-Ruthenian stance of the Habsburg administration. The church became subordinate to the state, and priests became equal to other state servants. Because many Greek Catholic priests could barely read their church books (or any books, for that matter), the government opened seminaries to educate the Ruthenian clergy. The first such seminary was the so-called Barbareum – a Greek Catholic institution attached to the Church of St Barbara in Vienna (1775–84) – followed by the Ruthenian Institute (Studium Ruthenorum, 1787–1809), part of the university at Lviv (Lemberg), founded in 1784 and the first such institution in the Ukrainian lands. A general seminary in Lviv continued to train Greek Catholic priests for decades to come. Thus, thanks to the Austrians, the “backward” Ruthenians were exposed to modern urban education in both Vienna and Lviv. As a result, the mental map of local Ruthenian priests expanded dramatically, from a rapidly shrinking Polish world to an expanding central European Habsburg realm which included such diverse lands as Bohemia, northern Italy, the southern Netherlands (Belgium), and Hungary. Young Ruthenian seminarians and priests continued to be attracted to Polish culture and society, and many would participate in the radical Polish underground well into the 1830s. But now loyalty to the Habsburgs began routinely to outweigh attraction to Polish or Russian political designs. Another effective way to fight “backwardness” was through mass education accompanied by aggressive secularization – that is, the closing of churches and monasteries. Joseph II made elementary education compulsory for his subjects, with stipulations that instruction be provided in the vernacular languages of the local ethnic region, something that was never done in Russia. In most schools German was taught as either the first or second language. It seemed that Galician Ruthenians, most of whom were still serfs, were now being given a chance to enter the “civilized” world via German, a language of science, philosophy, and literature with global stature. At the turn of the 1800s, there was something of a reversal in the Habsburgs’ initial policies vis-à-vis education: compulsory schooling was abolished, and the Polish language was reintroduced in all primary schools in Galicia. In 1818, however, after some pressure from an emboldened Greek Catholic clergy, the Ruthenian

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Ukraine, 1772–1831

vernacular was officially recognized as the language of instruction in Greek Catholic schools. By 1843, Ruthenian was the sole language of instruction in 921 of the 2,132 primary schools in eastern Galicia; in another 938 schools, instruction was in Ruthenian, Polish, and German; in 190 schools, it was in Polish alone; and in 81, instruction was exclusively in German. At the same time, all five secondary schools (gymnasia) in Galicia initially operated in German and Latin (later in German and Polish). At the university in Lviv, which had opened with Latin as the language of instruction, there was a switch to German in 1817, and only in the 1870s would Polish gradually begin to replace German as the main language of instruction. A few of the university’s courses, primarily in the department of theology, would continue to be taught in the local Ruthenian vernacular, mixed with elements of Church Slavonic. Although the Austrian authorities stopped short of a total abolition of serfdom, Galicia’s peasants experienced dramatic improvements in their situation. In 1781–82, Joseph II declared the abolition of their personal dependence on landlords and limited their corvée service to 30 days per year. In addition, peasants were allowed to marry without their landlord’s consent and even to leave his land if they could find a replacement to perform their service obligations; moreover, they could seek justice in courts now independent from local landlords. Some of these measures were later reversed, but Galician Ruthenian peasants and clergy retained gratitude to the Habsburgs for their efforts to limit the power of Polish lords over their enserfed subjects. Some vital reforms in the legal, educational, and religious spheres, such as the equality of Catholic rites and creation of a separate Galician metropolitanate for Greek Catholics in Lviv (1807), were never reversed. In these respects, in particular, Austria stood in stark contrast to Russia. Yet the Austrians’ initial intent to transform Galicia into an example of a successful integration failed in several respects. First, some traditional institutions that dated back to the times of Polish rule were never fully eliminated, so the power of local Polish aristocrats was not seriously undermined. Second, the position of German culture as a prime vehicle of civilization was immediately challenged by a strong Polish civil society, to such effect that many Austrian officials and their children, in particular, were assimilated in the culture of the Polish elites. For instance, as early as 1809, an Austrian bureaucrat had this to say about the impact of Polish society, particularly women, on his fellow German-speaking bureaucrats in Galicia: “The luxury of Polish women

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impressed the Germans, and these women’s influence on the business of court councilors is often quite obvious. Their style, furniture, and all the little things (Kleinigkeiten) proved to have an irresistible impact on Austrian bureaucrats.”24 Third, instead of becoming a model province of the empire, Galicia remained one of its poorest and most backward: in fact, so-called Nędza galicyjska, or “Galician poverty,” became a widespread metaphor for the dire state of the local economy. It was the Ruthenian Greek Catholic peasantry, of course, who were the most disadvantaged in terms of economic well-being and social progress. The Ruthenian-Ukrainian leadership, both clerical and secular, depicted these socioeconomic disadvantages in ethnic and religious terms, thereby inflaming an intense conflict between Ukrainians and Poles in the political arena that would last well into the twentieth century. The rise of that conflict was arguably the Austrian government’s biggest failure in dealing with Galicia and its communities. The initial interactions between the Russian government and its Ukrainian subjects were quite different. Unlike the Ruthenians in Galicia, who were primarily enserfed peasants, with a relatively small group of clerical leaders and a very small group of petty nobles, the Cossack nation that had developed on the left bank of the Dnipro in early modern times had a landowning class of Cossack officers and gentry. Also, the state it had formed was recognized by contemporaries in the West. For instance, in 1796 a study by the German historian Johann Christian Engel titled Die Geschichte der Ukraine und der ukrainischen Kosaken, wie auch der Königreiche Halitsch u. Wladimir was published as part of the series Die Allgemeine Welthistorie, a general history of the world begun by the Protestant theologian Siegmund-Jacob Baumgarten (1706–1757). Unfortunately, such political and historical study of Ukraine in the West would not survive the centralizing policies of Catherine II. Catherine herself initially recognized the early modern political nation of “Little Russia,” as she did that of German-dominated Livonia, but only in order to start dismantling these entities. She outlined her longterm policy as early as 1764: “Little Russia, Livonia, and Finland are provinces governed according to privileges which have been confirmed; to destroy them by revoking them all suddenly would be unseemly – but to call them alien and to treat them as such would be more than a mistake, it would be really stupid. These provinces … should, in the gentlest manner, be brought to the point when they become Russian and stop looking like wolves to the woods. The approach to this is very

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simple if sensible people are appointed to rule in these provinces; when there is no longer a hetman in Little Russia, we must strive to make the name and memory of hetman disappear and let no one be appointed to that post.”25 In the early 1780s, Catherine’s appointee as governor-general of Little Russia, Petr Rumiantsev, oversaw the abolition of Ukraine’s autonomy; in particular, he eliminated the Hetmanate’s local administrative units based on Cossack regiments, along with the Cossack bureaucracy. No popular revolt or notable Cossack opposition followed the dismantling of Ukrainian autonomy, a fact so puzzling that some populist historians of the late nineteenth century surmised that there was general contentment with it. The reason for that, they claimed, was that for all practical purposes the Hetmanate’s peasants were increasingly tied to estates owned by Cossack officers and the gentry. More than 90 per cent of the peasants in the Hetmanate did indeed live on such estates. In May 1783, when Catherine II issued a decree prohibiting 300,000 peasants from leaving estates owned by the landed gentry and obliging them to perform free labor for these landowners, she was simply confirming the situation that had existed for decades. It comes as no surprise, then, that the peasantry viewed the end of Cossack autonomy with some sense of Schadenfreude. But why did the Cossack elites themselves not oppose the dissolution of the state they had formed and led for more than 130 years? The Cossack leaders did show remarkably little concern for the demise of their polity (aside from submitting petitions to the Legislative Commission in 1767). Admittedly, after the fiasco of Mazepa’s defeat by Peter I, the Hetmanate’s ruling class was wary of any direct confrontation with the government, which would only make matters worse. Another obvious reason for the lack of opposition was that most highly placed Cossack officers retained their properties and privileged status after the 1780s. Rumiantsev, a skillful administrator, ensured the former Cossack officers’ loyalty by granting them both rank and promotion (their noble status had already been recognized in the 1760s, albeit somewhat informally). The Cossack leaders also retained their privileged positions in the administration of the imperial vice-royalties that had replaced the Cossack regiments. Thus, using carrots rather than applying sticks, the Russian government gradually won the loyalty of the Cossack elites. Curiously, according to legal practice in the Hetmanate during the early modern period, the personal rights of Ukrainian nobles were greater than those of their Russian peers. Only

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with Catherine’s Charter to the Nobility of 1785 were the rights of Russian nobles raised to the Ukrainian level. But with that charter’s application to the former Hetmanate, Ukrainian nobles also gained something important to them: official status as Russian imperial nobles and thus the opportunity for vertical and horizontal mobility across the empire’s social and geographic space. An essential question remained: who was to be recognized as a noble? At the time, the Russian government was unwilling to apply the criteria that had been used in the Hetmanate to determine nobility. Only a fraction of those who claimed noble status in the Cossack state (their number was at least 100,000) were admitted to the Russian imperial nobility in the 1780s. Nonetheless, Governor-General Rumiantsev maintained cordial relationship with the Cossack officers, liberally granting them the rank of hereditary nobles and staffing his military and civilian command primarily with Ukrainian cadres. He also developed close personal relations with the leading Ukrainian aristocratic families, even serving as godfather to their children. In return, the Cossack elite adored Rumiantsev. Unfortunately for his Ukrainian clients, Rumiantsev tangled with the wrong man, the all-powerful Potemkin, and consequently lost his job as governor-general. In line with long-standing Russian political tradition, the new governor-general of Little Russia, Mikhail Krechetnikov, reversed many of his predecessor’s policies; in particular, he strengthened imperial control over who could be granted the precious status of a Russian noble. Consequently, in 1795, only 12,597 claimants were recognized as “nobles without any doubt,” and even these had to undergo protracted litigation to prove their noble status. For many Cossack officers of mid-rank, the process of securing recognition as imperial nobles would take decades. The matter was finally settled in 1835, when Tsar Nicholas I issued a decree bestowing hereditary noble status on the descendants of all those who held Ukrainian military and civilian rank of any level except the lowest. As a result, the number of hereditary male nobles in Left Bank Ukraine reached 22,000, but that was a meager number, given the many thousands of rank-and-file Cossacks who aspired to noble status as well. The latter were relegated instead to the separate social category of “Little Russian Cossacks” (more than 553,000 “souls” in 1838), who socially and juridically stood below nobles but slightly above state peasants. The Cossacks, unlike state peasants, were allowed to own land, but in return they were expected to participate in Russia’s major wars through the first half of the nineteenth century. At the bottom of

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society were the serfs, who comprised about 40 per cent of the population of the two Left-Bank provinces and served mostly Ukrainian but also some Russian noble landowners. Right-Bank Ukraine was culturally a far more foreign territory, and it took longer for the Russian government to fully integrate it into the imperial system. In the Russian Empire that territory, annexed from Poland in the 1790s, was officially known as the Southwestern Region. It was divided into the three imperial provinces of Kyiv, Volhynia, and Podolia, under the administration of tsarist governors. There a few fabulously wealthy Russian (and mostly absentee) landowners came into possession of thousands of Ukrainian serfs. But landed and landless members of the old Polish nobility vastly outnumbered the Russian newcomers in the region, and until 1830 they enjoyed almost unlimited self-government in cultural, social, and administrative matters. An added complexity was that in contrast to the local nobles, the surrounding peasantry – about 80 per cent of whom were serfs – were Ukrainian-speaking and Orthodox (the Uniate Church was fully abolished in the region in 1839). Urban dwellers were mostly Jewish, and the highest administrative officials (governors, in particular) and policing authorities were largely Russian.26 According to Daniel Beauvois, in the early nineteenth century the total population of Right-Bank Ukraine was 3,320,200, of whom some 262,500, or 8 per cent, were members of the Polish nobility. Thus the population of this region had a much higher proportion of nobles than did other regions of Russia (where the average was less than 1 per cent!). In addition, Jews, who played a crucial role in the Polish nobiliary economy, comprised about 9 per cent of the population; they were living in the heart of the infamous Pale of Settlement (established in 1791), beyond which they were not allowed to reside permanently. The great majority of the region’s inhabitants were still Orthodox Ukrainians, officially labeled “Russians” by the imperial government. It was utterly ironic that in the state that considered itself to be the protector of people of the Orthodox faith across the continent, a group of Catholic landowners, numbering some 20,000 people in 1810, owned more than two million Orthodox serfs. Remarkable, too, was the fact that more than 92 per cent of the region’s nobles were landless; this petty nobility functioned as economic clients of the wealthy landowners, serving them as estate managers, accountants, teachers, lawyers, governesses, bards, and common servants. Some Polish aristocrats were ready supporters of the Russian government, just as their former Cossack rivals in Left-Bank Ukraine proved

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to be. The connection was mutually beneficial: the Poles sought to preserve their fortunes in the Russian-ruled territories, whereas Russian high officials relished taking on the personal and political prestige attached to famed Polish aristocratic names. Many scions of Polish aristocratic families intermarried with Russian counterparts. For instance, Franciszek Ksawery Branicki (1730–1819) was a long-time Russian ally whose unshakeable support of Catherine II had earned him (in 1794) the dubious honor of being sentenced to death by Polish rebels (who hanged him in effigy). Branicki married the wealthy Russian heiress Alexandra von Engelhardt (said to have been Catherine II’s illegitimate daughter) and laid out an impressive park, named Aleksandria after her, near his town of Bila Tserkva, some 90 km southwest of Kyiv. Count Stanisław Szczęsny Potocki (1751–1805), another wealthy Polish aristocrat who supported the Russian regime during the partitions of Poland, was known as a “little king of Rus'” owing to his extensive holdings in Ukraine (which included the historical towns of Uman' and Tul'chyn). This Potocki, too, founded a fabled park, naming it Sofiïvka (Zofiówka) after his adventurous Greek wife; located near Uman', it came to symbolize the presence of Polish aristocratic culture in Russian-ruled Ukraine. This propensity of Polish magnates to create elegant parks following the partitions was telling evidence of their ready transfer of loyalties from the Polish state they had helped bring down to autocratic Russia. Perhaps the most famous Polish loyalist in service to Russia was Adam Jerzy Czartoryski (1770–1861), who would later, after the failure of the Polish November Uprising of 1830, become head of the conservative camp of the Polish “Great Emigration.” As a young man, this member of the Czartoryski family was sent by his father to be a hostage to St Petersburg in an effort to save the family’s holdings from confiscation. There he befriended Grand Prince Alexander, the future tsar. In 1804, Alexander appointed Czartoryski as Russia’s foreign minister; he also became a senator, a member of the State Council, and the curator of Vilnius (Wilno) University, the educational institution that supervised both Polish and Russian schools in Right-Bank Ukraine from Kremenets' in Volhynia to Kyiv. In 1815, Adam Jerzy Czartoryski became co-founder of the constitutional Kingdom of Poland under the scepter of the Russian tsar. He also helped other Poles pursue illustrious careers in imperial service. One of his protégés, Jan Potocki (1761–1815), author of the enigmatic novel The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, was an early proponent of the “Asian system,” a pioneering agenda of Russian colonialism that called for the conquest of the

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Caucasus and the empire’s advance toward Afghanistan, Mongolia, and China. Jan’s younger brother Seweryn (1762–1829) was a senator and the first curator of Kharkiv University (established in 1805) and its large educational district, credited with recruiting renowned professors and shaping a remarkably enlightened curriculum. In these ways, eastern Ukraine briefly became a part of the Polish cultural world. At the same time, Poles like these, together with “Little Russian” aristocrats from the left bank and Baltic Germans and the numerous west Europeans in imperial service, were the equal partners of Great Russians (ethnic Russians per se) in building the Russian Empire as a Eurasian power. The Polish civilization in Right-Bank Ukraine is often seen through the prism of the impressive accomplishments of Polish culture and education, such as the prophetic poetry of Juliusz Słowacki or the fame of his alma mater, the Kremenets' Lyceum (locally called the “Volhynian Athens”). Yet a more long-lasting and hardly praiseworthy legacy of Polish rule in the region was the enserfment of Ukrainian peasants by Polish noble landowners. The lifestyle of these landowners and the plight of their serfs have been compared with the situation in the Antebellum South of the United States, where rich white plantation owners enjoyed a comfortable existence based on the exploitation of black slaves. Many Poles imagined Right-Bank Ukraine as a mythological Arcadia or proverbial land of milk and honey, especially those who were forced to emigrate or were exiled by the Russian authorities and thus lost the real land – and their lands – forever. Still, until at least 1831, Right-Bank Ukraine as an Arcadia was a reality for thousands of Polish nobles who continued to live in the region. Russian policies towards the former Crimean Khanate were initially cautious and gradual, like those applied to other newly integrated territories. Crimean nobiliary elites (beys and mirzas) were offered Russian nobiliary status, and Muslim clerics were allowed to preside over the faithful. Local Muslim peasants remained legally free, in contrast to their Christian peers elsewhere in eastern Europe. Nonetheless, by the end of the eighteenth century some 100,000 Crimean Tatars, not wishing to live under Christian rule, left the peninsula and the steppes to its north for the Ottoman Empire. In general, until the 1850s policies of tolerance remained in place, especially during the tenure of Prince Mikhail Vorontsov as governor-general of the province of New Russia (1828–54) of which the Crimea was a part. Yet the number of Crimean Tatars steadily decreased: from 90 per cent of the Crimea’s population in 1783, to 60 per cent in 1854, and to just 34 per cent in 1897.

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Thus, on the eve of the nineteenth century, diverse regional nobilities – Ukrainian, Polish, and Tatar – were being incorporated into the Russian nobiliary system. This radically increased the number of nobles in Russia, with Polish nobles now accounting for about one-quarter of all nobles in the Russian Empire. One important question that arises is: what kind of power, if any, did nobles retain in the administration and social life of particular regions? Although the empire’s professional bureaucracy was on the rise and was gradually replacing landed nobilities in administering the country, Russia still perennially lacked sufficient material and human resources to rely wholly on salaried officials. Every province was ruled by a civil governor, who presided over various boards of officials entrusted with political, administrative, financial, and general supervisory functions. Yet many local matters, such as schooling, agriculture, the judiciary, charity, and the nobility’s own well-being, remained in the hands of landed nobles who acted through elected assemblies of nobles on both provincial (guberniia) and district (uezd) levels. A select group of elected nobles (marshals of the nobility among them) even received ranks in Russia’s Table of Ranks. In Right-Bank Ukraine, one memoirist noted ironically, many nobles were obsessed by the ranks attached to elected service in noble self-government, and as a result, “for every hundred nobles there were fifty marshals [of the nobility] who last served twenty years ago and held an office only to receive that rank.” Because most private land was owned by nobles and half of all peasants were serfs (in Right-Bank Ukraine, more than two-thirds), many matters pertaining to rural economy, social discipline (such as dealing with runaway serfs and the provisioning of military recruits), and taxation were decided by institutions of nobiliary self-government rather than government officials. Hence the Russian government could not afford to break with the regional nobilities, even if at times the relationship between the two sources of authority became tense, as during the Polish uprising and conspiracies in Right-Bank Ukraine in the 1830s. The nobles, on their part, relied on the government’s protection during instances of social disorder, when the police and military force of the empire were called upon to deal with rebellious peasants.

2 From Enlightenment to Romanticism

Ukrai ni a nS aS em Pir e bU i l d e rS In 1792, as a result of the Jassy agreement that ended the Russo-Turkish War (1787–92), the international community recognized the Russian annexation of the Crimea and the southern Ukrainian lands that would become New Russia. Signing the agreement on Russia’s behalf was Oleksandr Bezborodko (1747–1799), who presided over much of Russian foreign policy in the 1780s and ’90s. Bezborodko was also the statesman behind the so-called Greek Project, a Russian plan to destroy the Ottoman Empire and conquer Istanbul. It is thanks to his geopolitical and cultural interests that many Greek names came to appear on the map of southern Ukraine and the Crimea, among them Simferopol, Yevpatoria, and Sevastopol. Contrary to present-day Russian ideology, then, Ukrainians were among the chief political architects of the imperial presence in the south, following the countless Cossacks and peasant recruits whose blood had been abundantly spilled in battles against the Ottoman armies. It was also Bezborodko who orchestrated the Second and Third Partitions of Poland, in 1793 and 1795, respectively. Serhii Plokhy has suggested that Bezborodko’s well-documented loyalty to Cossack Ukraine (the Russian statesman even wrote a history of the Hetmanate) influenced his geopolitical decisions and actions, which in tandem erased two historical rivals of the Ukrainian Cossacks – the Crimean Khanate and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth – from the political map of Europe. Bezborodko descended from a family of Cossack notables (his father was general chancellor, or scribe, of the Hetmanate) and was educated at the Kyiv Mohyla Academy. He entered the civil service as a clerk in the office of Count Petr Rumiantsev, then governor-general of Little Russia.

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His service under Rumiantsev in the Russo-Turkish war of 1768–74 greatly advanced his career, and he became the colonel of the Kyiv regiment. The following year, Rumiantsev brought him to St Petersburg, and he became a secretary to Catherine II. Once there, Bezborodko also formed his own chancellery and staffed it with Ukrainian compatriots, among them Dmytro Troshchyns'kyi (1749–1829), a future senator and imperial minister of state appanages (1802–06) and justice (1814–17). Both Bezborodko and Troshchyns'kyi had inherited family fortunes, and both became extremely wealthy landowners thanks to their imperial service – each owned five thousand or more Ukrainian serfs. Thus, as we see, the loyalty of Ukrainian aristocrats to the Russian Empire was augmented by career opportunities in imperial service, which in turn enhanced land and serf ownership. Opportunities of this kind were now driving thousands of Ukrainians of every background to St Petersburg, Moscow, and other major Russian centers. In fact, during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Ukrainians – officially, Little Russians – who had decisively opted for the imperial choice formed a powerful faction within the central government in St Petersburg and served rulers with very different agendas, including Catherine II, her unfortunate and erratic son Paul, and her reform-minded grandson Alexander I. It is interesting to note that as grand prince, the future tsar Paul I was a strong supporter of Ukrainians in St Petersburg and even used Ukrainian words in speaking with troops stationed at Gatchina, his private estate. Paul’s aide-de-camp was a descendant of Ukrainian Cossack aristocracy, and many in Ukraine even hoped that as tsar, Paul would restore the office of hetman and might even assume that office himself. This did not happen: in 1801, the unpopular new Russian ruler was murdered by enemies in his own court. But Paul’s death did not end the Ukrainians’ influence in St Petersburg. If anything, that influence only grew with the accession of young Alexander I. When an imperial system of government ministries was introduced, Ukrainians were among the first ministers to be appointed. They included Troshchyns'kyi, noted above; Viktor Kochubei (1768– 1834), minister of the interior (in 1802–07, 1819–23), and Petro Zavadovs'kyi (1739–1812), minister of education (in 1802–10), who in the 1770s had been one of Catherine II’s lovers. The influence of these Ukrainian-born dignitaries must have been substantial, since Russian officials complained that Ukrainians (“Little Russians”) were protecting one another, taking over key government posts, and thus blocking the career advancement of ethnic Russians.

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The contribution of the scions of Cossack officer families to Russian culture and empire building is difficult to overestimate. Both before and after the Hetmanate’s demise, Left-Bank Ukraine provided major cadres for positions in the Russian Orthodox Church, as well as in education, culture, and bureaucracy. After the abolition of the Hetmanate and, with it, Ukraine’s autonomy, most members of its elites joined in the building of the empire, whether as officials, statesmen, or generals.1 Marc Raeff made the observation that in the eighteenth century Russia had limited cadres from which to staff its growing government bureaucracy – that is, no bourgeoisie, no petty local officials, not many people in the learned professions – and thus employed the sons of soldiers and priests as well as “ethnic outsiders,” particularly Ukrainians, to fill such posts. Beginning in the late seventeenth century, a generation of Ukrainian clerics, often the offspring of rank-and-file Cossacks, responded to Peter I call to take active part in the religious and political administration of the emerging power that was Russia. Chief among them was Teofan Prokopovych (1681–1736), who personally devised the concept of unlimited autocracy for the new empire. Prokopovych was also one of the clerical intellectuals who vaunted the idea of a triune Russian people comprised of three groups: Great Russians, Little Russians (Ukrainians), and White Russians (Belarusians). The migration of educated Ukrainians to the northeast accelerated in the eighteenth century and continued well into the first decades of the nineteenth. Among the most prominent intellectual celebrities born in Ukraine who made illustrious careers predominantly in Russia were the philosopher Iakiv Kozel's'kyi (1729–1794) and the legal thinker Semen Desnyts'kyi (1740–1789). Kozel's'kyi, born in the Poltava region to the family of a middle-rank Cossack officer, was educated at the Kyiv Mohyla Academy, a prestigious academic gymnasium (high school), and the university in St Petersburg. He taught mathematics and mechanical engineering at a military academy and served as secretary of the Senate, yet he never severed ties with Ukraine, serving, for instance, at the Little Russian College in Hlukhiv in northern Ukraine from 1770 to 1786. Kozel's'kyi was also among the first Ukrainian civil servants to receive confirmation of noble status (in 1784). However, his major achievement was not in state service or the sciences but in political philosophy. In his groundbreaking Philosophical Propositions (1768), Kozel's'kyi, inspired by the French philosophes (Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Helvétius, etc.), offered his own take on the theory of natural law and social contract and advocated the equality of all before the law, as

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well as legal restraints on arbitrary government measures. Kozel’s'kyi’s work gave voice to hopes that the Ukrainian elites of the Hetmanate had had for Catherine II’s Legislative Commission. His political philosophy reflected traditional Cossack ideas about a just sociopolitical order, as well as the latest intellectual attainments of European enlightened thought. Semen Desnyts'kyi, Kozel's'kyi’s younger compatriot, was born in Nizhyn, most likely to a family of local burghers. Apparently as a youth Desnyts'kyi bypassed the usual path of upwardly mobile Ukrainians, for he studied not in Kyiv but in Moscow, first at a seminary and then at newly founded Moscow University (1759–60), as well as the “academic university” in St Petersburg. More remarkably, as a protégé of Count Petr Shuvalov, a minion of Tsarina Elizabeth, young Desnyts'kyi was sent to Glasgow University, the celebrated center of Scottish Enlightenment, to study (1761–67) law, science, history, and moral philosophy (with Adam Smith). Returning to Russia, Desnyts'kyi for twenty years (1767–87) taught law at Moscow University and worked on the systematization of Russian law. Like Kozel's'kyi, Desnyts'kyi was greatly influenced by the spirit of reform that characterized Catherine II’s early reign; for instance, he submitted proposals for the division of government into legislative, judicial, and executive branches to her Legislative Commission. Although an advocate of absolute monarchy, Desnyts'kyi adamantly insisted on the rule of law, criticized serfdom, and advocated a liberal political economy, and he is considered to be a founder of Russian legal education.2 Some empire builders proud of their Cossack heritage came from Sloboda Ukraine, the region integrated into the Russian political order earlier than the neighboring Hetmanate. The empire builders from that region emphasized their “eternal loyalty” to Russia, thus distinguishing themselves from their peers in the “treacherous” Hetmanate, which was regarded as “Little Russia” proper.3 In his studies of Sloboda Ukraine, Volodymyr Sklokin has focused on the curious figure of Roman Tsebrykov (1763–1817) and attempted to reconstruct Tsebrykov’s complex identity, which was characteristic of many other nobles in this borderland region during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Born in Kharkiv to the family of a Cossack officer, Tsebrykov studied at a collegium in the city and later at Leipzig University, a major center of the German Enlightenment. Returning to Russia, Tsebrykov served as a translator in the College of Foreign Affairs in St Petersburg and, later, as Tsar Alexander I’s personal translator. In the few of his written works

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that survive, he boldly voices his preference for the Cossack political order over the autocratic imperial one. Drawing on enlightened political thought, Tsebrykov identifies the Cossack order with “popular rule” and regards it as more just than Russian autocracy, owing to its basis in the ideals of liberty, equality, and dignity for all.4 In Sklokin’s view, Tsebrykov’s “composite” identity existed on three different levels: regional (he was loyal to Kharkiv and Sloboda Ukraine), Russian imperial (he referred to himself as “Russian” in the political and religious sense), and cosmopolitan (he shared the “humanist universalism” of the Enlightenment).5 Sklokin has concluded that despite Tsebrykov’s proven loyalty to Russia, the worldview he shared with other descendants of Cossack officers soon gave rise to the anti-absolutist ideology of the Decembrists and Ukrainian romantic nationalists. Especially fascinating was the case of Vasyl' Kapnist (1758–1823). A Ukrainian aristocrat turned Russian literary celebrity born in the “treacherous” Hetmanate, he became a member of the Imperial Russian Academy and later an alleged political secessionist. Kapnist’s grandfather, a Greek of modest origins (notwithstanding the family’s subsequent claim of aristocratic descent), had sided with Russia in the Russo-Turkish war of 1710–11. Kapnist’s father settled in Ukraine and became a Cossack lieutenant. Owing to his exploits during Russia’s military campaigns in the Crimea, he was appointed a colonel of the Myrhorod regiment and obtained extensive landholdings there. Marriage to a granddaughter of a general quartermaster (heneral’nyi oboznyi), the most senior member of the hetman’s cabinet, gave Vasyl' Kapnist’s father entry into the close-knit world of the local Cossack upper class. The family’s wealth and connections would allow young Vasyl' to be educated at an elite boarding school in St Petersburg. His mother reportedly wore traditional clothing, spoke Ukrainian exclusively, disliked her daughter-in-law because she was Russian, and had raised her own children in a patriotic Ukrainian spirit. That spirit would inspire Vasyl' Kapnist throughout his life, regardless of the many personal and literary connections he made within Russian society. After briefly serving in the elite guard regiments of the Russian imperial army during the early 1770s, Vasyl' spent some years in civil service before resigning to devote his life to literature and his rural estate. While in St Petersburg, Vasyl' entered the circle of the prominent Russian classicist poet Gavrila Derzhavin and married one of his relatives. By this time, Kapnist had already written his first major literary work, an ode in French on the festive occasion of the Russo-Turkish

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peace treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774. Fame came in 1780 with the publication of his Russian-language “Satire,” directed against conservative writers. During this time, Kapnist was one of the chief creators of the modern Russian literary language, even though his writings were influenced by his native Ukrainian vernacular and Ukrainian baroque literature. Scholars point out that Kapnist brought to Russian literature the spirit of traditional Cossack democracy along with an aversion to oppression of any kind, whether national, social, or moral. Kapnist wrote his “Ode to Slavery,” arguably his most politically sensitive work, around 1783. It has often been interpreted as his protest against the introduction of serfdom to Ukraine by Catherine II’s decree of that same year. The poem’s implicit message was in fact even more radical: it amounted to a passionate condemnation of the Russian government’s abolition of Ukraine’s political autonomy. The poet begins with the declaration “I will glorify the enslavement of my dear fatherland,” and adds bitterly that his hand is “weighted down by the burden of iron shackles.” More than a century later, Oleksandr Ohloblyn would note the irony of a writer who himself owned several hundred serfs (thanks to Catherine’s decree) voicing a lament about the enserfment of peasants. Most likely, the “iron shackles” here refer to the sad state of Ukraine’s political nation after the abolition of the Hetmanate. The poet was clearly protesting against an outside power’s intrusion in Ukraine’s internal affairs and the subsequent loss of its “dear freedom” under the “heavy yoke of a [foreign] state.” But the “yoke” of Kapnist’s poem was also referring to the “enslavement” of Ukrainian peasants by the Russian state, even though the poet himself had benefitted from it. The message was both political and social, and it is no surprise that the ode (first published in 1806) was excluded from Kapnist’s “complete” works published in 1849. In composing it, Kapnist had likely been influenced by the American Revolution as a successful instance of liberation from foreign oppression: he was quoted as saying that had he not inherited his family’s ancestral village, he “would definitely have left the fatherland and relocated to America.” Kapnist never got to America, but he did go abroad, and on a sensitive mission at that. His trip to Prussia in 1791 was the most intriguing adventure of his life. Prussia, supported by Britain, was then preparing for war with Russia. We do not know much about Kapnist’s mysterious mission, or whom he represented; most likely he was acting on behalf of patriotically minded Ukrainian nobles, including his relatives in Left-Bank Ukraine, particularly those from Novhorod-Sivers'kyi.

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The Ukrainian autonomists apparently placed their hopes on Paul, the future heir to the throne. During 1790 and 1791, thousands of Cossack officers were being denied status as Russian nobles by the new governor-general of Little Russia, exacerbating political discontent in the region. Upon arrival in Berlin in April of 1791, Kapnist claimed to have been sent by compatriots “from Little Russia or Russian Ukraine” who were suffering under the tyranny of the Russian government, from Potemkin in particular. Kapnist urgently needed to know whether he and his compatriots could count on the protection of the Prussian king in their effort “to shake off the Russian yoke.” Unfortunately for Kapnist and the Ukrainians, the Prussians in effect rejected his request. In fact, rather than take a stand against Russia, Prussia would soon participate alongside its former rival in the Second Partition of Poland (1793) and later in the fight against revolutionary France.6 What was Kapnist’s personal stance in all this? It seems paradoxical to us today that while producing Russian writings and contributing heavily to Russian culture, Kapnist was concurrently ready to detach his fealty from the Russian government. However, it is likely that Kapnist and his compatriots did not in fact want to secede from Russia but only sought a more favorable deal, such as the restoration of Ukraine’s autonomy. Whoever might help them achieve that goal – whether he was king of Prussia or the future Paul I – was considered worthy of their loyalty. Also, Kapnist’s love for Ukraine did not contradict his role in Russian culture, which he probably considered common to both Ukrainians and Russians. On the other hand, a Russian memoirist who knew Kapnist well had this observation about him and the attitudes he held: despite acknowledging Ukraine’s religious and cultural proximity to Russia, the poet “secretly hated [Russia] and Russians, Muscovites (moskalei), and katsapy.” Moreover, although Kapnist had married Derzhavin’s sisterin-law, “even such conjugal bonds could not tie him to Russia.”7 Although it was then possible to express enmity towards Great Russians in an ethnographic context, political dissent aimed at the government was absolutely taboo. There could be no public expression of any such sentiment among Ukrainian nobles at the time. Whether or not political dissent existed in private, events of a decade later indicated the opposite attitude. When the French and their allies invaded Russia in 1812, Ukrainian nobles and commoners alike did not rush to welcome the invaders, not least because of Napoleon’s declared support for the restoration of Poland. In fact, whereas many local Polish nobles enthusiastically joined the invading armies, Ukrainian nobles refrained, and

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some even saw Napoleon as “the Devil borne out of hell.” Historians later speculated that Napoleon might have planned to create separate political entities in Left-Bank and southern Ukraine under a French protectorate. But these plans, if they existed, were unknown to the Ukrainian nobles and most likely were mere policy proposals never approved by Napoleon. Recently, Vadym Adadurov, following study of both French and Ukrainian official and narrative sources, concluded that the Ukrainian elites genuinely supported Russia in the war with France, whereas attitudes among the common people toward Napoleon and the French ranged from indifference to outright hostility.8 Symbolic of the pro-Russian attitudes prevailing in the Ukrainian population overall were local grassroots efforts to organize Cossack regiments, in which Kapnist himself took active part. The imperial government moved to approve the formation of several Cossack regiments in Podolia, and there were soon fifteen cavalry regiments of Cossacks and peasants across Ukraine. Some regiments took part in battles against the Austrian allies of the French in Volhynia; many recruits and officers also fought against Napoleon in regular units of the Russian army. Whatever official promises Russia might have made to restore self-government and privileges to the Cossack estate, they vanished after the final defeat of Napoleon’s army. That became a major source of discontent among the Ukrainian nobles, many of whom later joined masonic lodges and the Decembrist movement. Paradoxically, while an absolute majority of Ukrainians, nobles and commoners, willingly sided with Russia against Napoleon, many would-be dissidents of noble descent were inspired by the French Revolution and Napoleonic policies, particularly its renowned legal code and creation of new political entities in southern and eastern Europe, including the Duchy of Warsaw and the Illyrian Provinces in the Balkans. Ukrainian nobles were proud of their role in the Russian victory over the French, but they had also come to realize that Russia’s autocratic regime needed profound change, and they had witnessed firsthand that such change was possible in the example of post-revolutionary France. As one leading Decembrist later said of himself and his compatriots, in anticipating a similar change in Russia they were in fact all “children of 1812.” Kapnist and his political mission notwithstanding, the great majority of Ukrainian nobles and intellectuals remained loyal to Russia before and after 1812 and continued to build its empire and culture. Liah Greenfeld, an expert on Russian nationalism, has estimated that Ukrainians

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comprised around 50 per cent of the intellectual class in Moscow and St Petersburg in the mid-eighteenth century. She has remarked on the special role of the Kyiv Mohyla Academy, noting during the 1750s and ’60s alone more than three hundred of its graduates moved to Moscow and St Petersburg. In both imperial cities, “literally in the front ranks of the nascent Russian intelligentsia, the humble youths from Little Russia forged Great Russian national consciousness.”9 However, the “national consciousness” to which these “Little Russian” youths greatly contributed was more all-Russian than narrowly Great Russian in scope. Many of these Ukrainians remained loyal to their native Ukrainian, i.e., Little Russian, culture and historical tradition while regarding the culture and nation of modern Russia as a higher unity encompassing both Little Russian and Great Russian elements. Indeed, the view that Russia consisted of equal contributions from ethnic Russians and Ukrainians persisted well into the nineteenth century. On a personal level, that view was manifested in the complex identities of individuals who felt themselves to be both Russian (that is, having an imperial or all-Russian identity) and Ukrainian, without opposition or conflict. This duality might seem puzzling today, but to the individuals with such complex identities it seemed natural and even quite “modern,” in contrast to having a “tribal” ethnic identification per se. Paul Robert Magocsi has called this phenomenon a “hierarchy of multiple loyalties” and noted that it long remained a norm among educated Ukrainians. Viktor Kochubei, Russia’s first minister of the interior and nephew of Oleksandr Bezborodko, declared his professional ethics and personal identity in a letter to Prince N.G. Repnin, then governor-general of LeftBank Ukraine: “Although I was born a khokhol [derogatory term for a Ukrainian – Sb ], I am more Russian than anybody else, owing to my principles, my social position, and my habits. My calling and the position I hold put me above all sorts of petty considerations. I look at the affairs of your province from the viewpoint of the common interest of our country. Microscopic views are not my concern.”10 He gave this explanation in the 1830s, while serving as chairman of the Imperial Council and while blocking efforts to reestablish Cossack military formations. At about this same time, Nikolai Gogol (Mykola Hohol’) expressed uncertainty about whether his soul was more Ukrainian or Russian and his belief that the two identities complemented each other. Yet in his works Gogol himself illuminated the stark contrasts between the warm Ukrainian countryside and the cold veneers of St Petersburg better than any of his literary contemporaries. His friend, the historian

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and ethnographer Mykhailo Maksymovych, had similar feelings about his identity. One of Maksymovych’s many pronouncements on the subject is especially telling: I am a native of southern Kyivan Rus', where there is the land and sky of my ancestors to which I predominantly belonged and still belong, devoting my intellectual pursuits chiefly to it. At the same time, I grew up in Moscow, a city I have loved as well. I have also studied northern Moscovite Rus' as a native sister to our Kyivan Rus', as a second half of our common holy Rus' of [Prince] Vladimir, for I have felt and realized that both their existence and an understanding of one without the other are insufficient and one-sided.11 Maksymovych and Gogol are probably the most famous individuals to have felt and expressed this kind of dual Russian-Ukrainian identity in the nineteenth century, but for many thousands of ordinary people, too, love for their native land of Ukraine did not contradict a higher loyalty to Russia as an empire and nation. True, some individuals set aside their Ukrainian origins for the sake of empire, among them Viktor Kochubei, the minister noted above. Another highly placed official, Mikhail Iuzefovich, was a patron of young Ukrainian romantic writers in the 1840s yet later became a relentless persecutor of them in the 1860s and ’70s. Others attempted to maintain a delicate balance between their efforts to preserve certain local institutions in Ukraine and the demands of imperial centralization. Zenon Kohut has pointed to two spheres in which Ukrainian “traditionalists” were especially active: the defense of the native judicial system, which was a combination of the Lithuanian Statute, municipal Magdeburg law, and common law and persisted into the 1840s; and the restoration of Cossack military units, which was attempted in 1812 and 1830.12 The Russian Empire was in major ways a co-production by Ukrainians (Little Russians) and Russians (Great Russians), with important admixtures from Baltic Germans and foreigners performing imperial service. The legacy of this joint empire building served as an important source of political identity and pride for countless Ukrainian-born military men, officials, educators, churchmen, and scientists. Ukrainians eagerly took part in building the empire, and that in turn offered them prominent careers and spectacular social advancement. The imperial system allowed for almost unlimited

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movement both vertically (up the social ladder) and horizontally (across imperial territory). This massive cooperation of the Ukrainian and Russian elites has been compared to the joint contribution by the Scottish and English political and intellectual classes in the formation of the British Empire and modern Great Britain, especially between 1750 and 1850.13 Scotsmen like David Hume and Adam Smith shaped modern British thought, and others helped rule its oversees empire, among them James Murray and James Henry Craig, two Britishappointed governors in Canada, and three of the first governors of New South Wales in Australia. Similarly, Ukrainians – including Semen Desnyts'kyi, incidentally Adam Smith’s student – heavily influenced Russian secular thought, and others orchestrated the Russian Empire’s international triumphs, as did Oleksandr Bezborodko. Comparisons between Scotland and Ukraine are illuminating in another respect. In his studies of Scottish nationalism, the sociologist Tom Nairn posed the question why there was no vernacular-based Scottish national movement in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries.14 The answer he arrived at focused on the legendary Scottish Enlightenment that was dominant in British intellectual discourse at the time. During this time, too, key Scottish institutions were preserved, a distinct Scottish identity was recognized, and scores of Scottish civil servants and professionals filled positions in government, law, business, and the sciences, in London and across the British Empire. In other words, there were no incentives for Scottish romantic nationalists to counter their countrymen’s standing within the empire. Similarly, Ukrainians were in the vanguard of Russian intellectual and sociopolitical life in the eighteenth century and into the first decades of the nineteenth. Yet, in contrast to the Scots, Ukrainians failed to preserve major institutions, and from the mid-nineteenth century their separate identity became increasingly suspect in the eyes of the imperial authorities. By that time, however, the Ukrainian Romantics had already initiated a distinctive national movement, based on the vernacular Ukrainian language, ethnography, and history, that would grow increasingly incompatible with loyalty to an empire. Nonetheless, the boundaries between imperial loyalists and would-be separatists remained ephemeral for quite some time, and the majority of educated Ukrainians cherished their role as empire builders until at least the 1840s. One manifestation of this was the praises Ukrainian poets sang to highly-placed Russian statesmen of Ukrainian descent. One such figure was General Ivan Paskevych (1782–1856), a confidante

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of Nicholas I, whom the tsar rewarded for his notorious persecution of Polish rebels and conquest of Warsaw in 1831 by appointing him viceroy of Poland. Before that, Paskevych had ruthlessly suppressed an uprising of predominantly Muslim mountaineers in the Caucasus; afterward, he crushed the Hungarian Revolution of 1848–49. Paskevych was clearly a genuine loyalist devoted to solving his tsar’s military and political problems. Born in Poltava to the family of a Cossack officer in imperial service, young Paskevych joined the elite Corps of Pages in St Petersburg, where he acquired all-important connections in court society, including friendships with the young princes who would become Paul I, Alexander I, and Nicholas I. Paskevych would play a role in every war waged by the Russian Empire in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, but he was known primarily for his successful suppression of rebellions against autocratic authority. Among Ukrainians, he was famed mostly for his actions against the rebellious Poles, which is hardly surprising, given past antagonisms. A Ukrainian poet of the time, Orest Somov, composed the bilingual Russian-Ukrainian poetic cycle titled “Voice of a Ukrainian on the News about the Seizure of Warsaw,” condemning the Polish November Uprising (1830–1831) and interpreting its aftermath as a joint victory of Russians and Ukrainians over Poles. The cycle was devoted to Paskevych as commander-in-chief of the Russian forces, referred to him as “the tsar’s knight,” and compared his exploits to those of Hetman Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi. Somov glorified General Paskevych for having with his “Russian chest” (Russkoi grud'iu) protected “Holy Rus'” from the Polish “ulcer.” Yet the poet also paid homage to Paskevych for being a “son of Ukraine” and “son of Cossack glory” (despite his having a “Russian chest”) blessed by “the native shadow of the great Bohdan.” Presumably, the shadow of Khmel'nyts'kyi was there to offer supernatural aid to his Ukrainian heir in the battle against the Poles once again threatening Ukraine with a “foreign yoke.” In a prophetic voice emanating from heaven, Khmel'nyts'kyi reminds the Poles of the Cossack victory over them at Zhovti Vody (in 1648) and alludes to Paskevych’s recent victory as Ukraine’s new revenge against the Poles for its “grievances” at Polish hands: Hey Poles! It happens again that in a mighty palm A sword from Zhovti Vody glittered: My knight, a victor of the battle, Waved it heroically.

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The son of Ukraine, the Nemesis, Again took out the audacious horn And again for her grievances He quickly and menacingly took revenge on you!15 Such fierce enmity towards Poles, particularly during their antiRussian uprisings, was common among Ukrainian elites of Cossack descent loyal to the Russian state. That attitude began to change only in the 1840s, with the rise of a new generation of Ukrainian romantic nationalists inspired directly or indirectly by Polish revolutionaries, some of whom even sympathized with their cause of restoring the Polish state. Ukrainians never acquiesced to Polish claims to Right-Bank Ukraine, however, and that long remained the thorniest issue between Ukrainian and Polish activists. More important for us to consider now is why some Ukrainians decided to part ways with their Russian compatriots and refused to participate in building a common culture and state.

dr franken Stei n’S la b o r a t o r y o f n a t i o n a l iSm Dr Frankenstein was the tragic hero in the landmark Romantic novel by that name written around 1818 by the English writer Mary Shelly. In the novel, Dr Frankenstein creates an even more tragic figure, whom he calls his “Monster.” The actual monster, however, was Dr Frankenstein himself, who personified the destructive potential of a selfish ego incapable of love and exemplified the danger inherent in an unregulated imagination pushed to the extreme. Just as Dr Frankenstein’s imagination helped him create his Monster from inanimate matter, so the unbridled imaginations of visionaries of the Romantic age worked to create products that were far more animate yet could prove no less monstrous. These products were the modern nationalities, constructs formed from ethnographic, geographic, historical, linguistic, sociological, and even metaphysical ingredients. Unlike the egotistical Dr Frankenstein, these early Romantic visionaries could hardly be blamed when some of their products later became real monsters. As if having learnt a lesson from Frankenstein’s experience, Romantic nation builders professed unqualified love for their creations, even though preferring to believe that they had not actually created but only “resurrected” or “awakened” them from a slumbering state. In the humanities and social sciences today, it has become commonplace to speak about nationality as a product of imagination, as well

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as a social construct. The phenomenon is usually attributed to the late eighteenth century, although whether it was born in the Americas or western Europe remains in dispute. Most scholars concur that the idea of nationality was just another consequence of a broad social and cultural modernization closely tied to the rise of education, social mobility, and ideas about popular sovereignty, all of which worked to oppose the traditional sociopolitical order, or “Old Regime.” There is also general agreement that once created in one instance, the model of nationality could readily be “borrowed” and “recreated” – or even “pirated,” in the words of anthropologist Benedict Anderson – in other parts of the world. If, for example, the Poles were greatly influenced by French nation building, the Ukrainians were apt to use the “model” created by the Poles, whether consciously or unconsciously, even as they were rejecting Polish claims to Ukraine. Anderson famously defined nationality as “an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” The community is an imagined one because, in Anderson’s words, “the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” That community is also limited, because it has “finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations.” Finally, it is sovereign, because the idea’s very existence is “destroying the legitimacy of the divinelyordained, hierarchical dynastic realm.”16 Other scholars of nationalism, most notably Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm, have emphasized the role of modern economy and, in particular, the demands of industrial capitalism in the rise of nationalism. In any case, the crucial importance of imagination in the making of nationalities seems incontestable. This “imaginative” part was always the easiest in the process of making a nationality. It is the transition from the level of imagination within a small group of intellectuals and enthusiasts to the level of the social and institutional building of a specific imagined community that has proved the most challenging to achieve. In many cases, a “mission” of this kind became impossible: an example is the failed effort to create a Provençal nationality in France. Making the transition was much easier in established states, where the imagination of a ruling authority could rely on a power structure and political borders already in place, as was the case in France itself and in Britain (although not without setbacks). The “mission” became much more difficult if an imagined community did not have a corresponding political structure – that is, for so-called “stateless” nationalities, as potential nation-states. At this point there is

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call to repeat Gellner’s famous definition of nationalism as “primarily a political principle that holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent,”17 even if statehood is not necessarily the goal of a nationalist movement. How, then, was the idea of modern Ukraine and the Ukrainian nationality born? In August 1903, thousands of people gathered at the opening of an elegant monument dedicated to the Ukrainian writer Ivan Kotliarevs'kyi in his native Poltava. They had come to celebrate the city’s native son as a national writer and founder of modern Ukrainian literature. They claimed to be representing the Ukrainian national movement, and they called the event a “celebration of the Ukrainian intelligentsia” (sviato ukraïns’koï intelihentsiï, as later said by the literary critic Serhii Iefremov. The event had attracted “all of nationally conscious Ukraine from all parts of our land.”18 Thus, those present at the event were actually celebrating themselves much more than a long-departed albeit famous poet. Circulating widely afterward was a telling and self-serving anecdote: if a terrible accident had derailed the train carrying guests to the ceremony, the entire Ukrainian movement could have been wiped out. Poltava, a city of about 60,000, had not seen such a massive gathering since Hetman Mazepa’s epic battle there in 1709, and the guests had scarcely been able to find accommodations, for all of the hotels were full. Owing to an official ban on speeches in Ukrainian, the “academic” part of the event became a national demonstration of sorts, as participants exited the meeting hall in protest. More importantly, the Ukrainian intellectuals and national activists who had gathered in Poltava were there to claim Ivan Kotliarevs'kyi as their own precursor. Four decades after the event took place, an admirer of the poet would declare that Kotliarevs'kyi had “started not only the Ukrainian literary renaissance but also the Ukrainian national renaissance, with its goal of a free, independent, and democratic Ukraine” (italics are mine – Sb ).19 Both the celebration in 1903 and the declaration made four decades later distorted the past, or, rather, made use of it for alternate narratives. In the process, Ivan Kotliarevs'kyi, a career soldier in Russian imperial service and amateur poet who had published his renowned work with reluctance, was accorded the role of Ukraine’s first national poet and, indeed, founder of the Ukrainian national movement. How did Kotliarevs'kyi acquire such importance for generations of Ukrainians with diverse ideological convictions, from the romantic panSlavists of the 1840s to the militant nationalists of the 1940s? Ivan Kotliarevs'kyi (1769–1838) had been born to the family of a petty

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noble who was a clerk in the Poltava magistracy, hardly an illustrious career by any standard. Young Ivan had studied at Poltava’s theological seminary, probably a modest educational experience in comparison to the schooling of most contemporary Ukrainians who became prominent intellectuals, military commanders, or civil servants. Lacking an aristocratic pedigree or connections, Ivan, too, went on to work as a clerk, and later became a tutor in the rural homes of noble landowners. In 1796, he decided to join the imperial army and later took part in the Russo-Turkish war of 1806–12. There he apparently distinguished himself on the battlefield, for in 1808 he was awarded an imperial order. His next experienced military service was performed at a remove as, during the French invasion of Russia in 1812, he and other nobles responded to the governor of Poltava’s call to organize a Cossack regiment as a part of the province’s corps of military volunteers. For this and other services, Alexander I promoted him to the rank of major in 1817. Afterward Ivan engaged primarily in civil service and charitable work, particularly as director of Poltava’s Free Theater for which he composed two plays, the sentimental “Natalka-Poltavka” (Natalka from Poltava) and the vaudevillian “Moskal'-charivnyk” (The Muscovite Sorcerer). Both plays were written in 1819 but were published only years later, in 1838 and 1841, respectively, and ever since both have remained classics performed regularly on Ukrainian stages. The work that secured Ivan Kotliarevs'kyi’s place in the history of modern Ukrainian literature is the burlesque travesty Eneïda (The Aeneid), loosely based on Virgil’s classic poem. Kotliarevs'kyi was a tutor in the rural homes of Ukrainian nobles when he began to write this famous and irreverent work in 1794. Its first three parts were published in 1798 in St Petersburg without the author’s consent, and that pirated edition was the first work written in the Ukrainian vernacular to appear in print. The book became an instant sensation, even among Russian-speaking readers, and the poem was supplemented by a Ukrainian-Russian glossary which would be amplified in every new edition of the work. Kotliarevs'kyi subsequently worked on his Eneïda until the end of his life. The first authorized edition was published in 1809; the first full edition did not appear until 1842, after his death. That edition was published in Kharkiv, which by then had become a center of Ukrainian literature and publishing. Kotliarevs'kyi’s decision to write in Ukrainian, which educated people then widely considered to be an uncouth peasant language, proved fateful,20 for it inspired a new generation of romantic writers that came into prominence in the

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1830s. Kotliarevs'kyi made abundant use of dialect, colloquialisms, and slang to convey burlesque humor, as an English translation of his Eneïda attests: Aeneas was a lively fellow, Lusty as any Cossack blade, In every kind of mischief mellow, The staunchest tramp to ply his trade. But when the Greeks, with all their trouble, Had burned down Troy and left it rubble, Taking a knapsack, off he wheels, Together with some reckless puffins – Singed lads, who looked like ragamuffins – And to old Troy he showed his heels. He built in haste a few big dories And launched them on the dark blue sea. Filled to the brim with Trojan tories, And sailed off blind and hastily. But wicked Juno, spiteful hussy [lit., “bitch’s daughter” (sucha dochka) – Sb ], Came cackling like a pullet fussy: Dark hatred smouldered in her mind! For some time now her wish most evil Had been to send him to the devil Till not a smell was left behind.21 Travesty was regarded as a “low” genre in the classicism dominant in literature at the time, and Kotliarevs'kyi used it as a means to differentiate his culturally subversive poem written in uncodified vernacular from respectable works of Russian literature. The Cossacks in the poem had both a mythic and burlesque character; they were portrayed as devoted to excessive eating, drinking, and partying, also a common image of Cossacks in popular culture at the time. While the poem’s authentic language and irreverent humor could appeal to Ukrainians and Russians alike, its plot also had an implicit political message: a veiled criticism of the Russian government for the abolition of Ukraine’s autonomy. Virgil’s Aeneas was a Trojan (as was Enei, his Ukrainian incarnation), but in that figure any reader could also easily recognize the image of a Zaporozhian Cossack. Like the Trojans, the Zaporozhian Cossacks

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were expelled from their home by a foreign power – in their case, from the Sich, to which the poem made constant reference. As Aeneas, or, rather, his travestied alter-ego, Enei, fled from the Trojan Sich, the Zaporozhian Cossacks became homeless fugitives, just as Virgil’s original Trojans had. Marko Pavlyshyn has provided a good explanation for the work’s continuous appeal. On the eve of the nineteenth century, with the rise of the Cossack myth, the Cossacks began to be seen as Ukraine’s national heroes, ones with whom the reader could identify. And, because they were “now defunct,” they inspired “nostalgia for a lost liberty and vitality.” 22 The poem was also extremely funny. The combination of unbridled fun and the myth of the free Cossacks boosted the self-image of modern Ukrainians as exuberant and freedom-loving people, and that self-image spread across generations that sought to find, preserve, or expand their distinctive identity. That identity, they came to believe, was rooted in a glorious history and in liberty, which often evoked social equality and the struggle against foreign tyranny. Not surprisingly, Kotliarevs'kyi’s mock-heroic would later inspire various champions of a democratic Ukraine, its existence forestalled or threatened by an autocratic Russia. Kotliarevs'kyi was by no means a Romantic nationalist, or nationalist of any other kind, for that matter. Also, in social background and biography, he differed drastically from the next generation of Romantics, who engaged in the arts, education, and scholarship on a more professional basis. The latter were predominantly university students, school teachers, professors, writers, independent scholars, and the like – that is, people who after mid-century would be referred to as the intelligentsia. Kotliarevs'kyi belonged to the preceding epoch. His world was one of tight family networks, of “Little Russian” nobles and aristocrats, masonic lodges (he joined one in Poltava), and multiple loyalties. One persistent question then arises: why did Ivan Kotliarevs'kyi choose to write in the Ukrainian vernacular, a plebeian language lacking a proper grammar, rather than in literary Russian? While it is difficult to find a documented reason for Kotliarevs'kyi’s seemingly odd personal choice, we know he was among a growing number of people engaged in similar activities. These individuals endeavored to write in Ukrainian (although most still preferred Russian), studied Ukraine’s history as an extension of their families’ past, and collected so-called antiquities – material and spiritual artifacts, such as Cossack and peasant songs, tales, customs, manuscripts, costumes, and the like. They were mostly rural nobles, often landowners with serfs, and they

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seemed to have a lot of free time. But why did these people do what they did? And what exactly did they do, and how much does modern Ukraine owe to them? To answer these questions, we need to look once again at theories of nationalism. In studying east-central Europe, Paul Robert Magocsi has pointed to two types of nationalism.23 When governments used nationalism from above for political purposes (as in the proverbial case of “peasants into Frenchmen”), one can speak of “state-imposed nationalism.” Magocsi defines this as efforts by governments “to gain the loyalty of their citizens by convincing them that they were united because they apparently belonged to a certain nationality.” Although the most obvious instances were modern France and Britain, that phenomenon was not exclusive to western Europe. Once Greece and Serbia broke away from the Ottoman Empire – in 1821–30 and 1815–30, respectively – they became even better examples of early nationalizing states (to use Rogers Brubaker’s notorious metaphor). But there were many more governments, including those ruling over empires or multiethnic states, that sought to impose a single national identity over their diverse populations. In many cases they failed, especially when the government’s efforts clashed with other nationalisms – those from below – or with what Magocsi calls “intelligentsia-inspired nationalism.” This type of nationalism “emanated from groups who lived in multinational states where a language, culture, and identity other than their own was dominant.” In such circumstances, the leaders of these non-dominant communities “worked to convince their self-defined constituencies that they formed a distinct national group,” and, as such, deserved autonomy, or even statehood. Contrary to a widespread stereotype, “intelligentsia-inspired nationalism” was not the exclusive domain of eastern European peoples. For much of the nineteenth century, Germans and Italians were without their own modern states or existed under numerous jurisdictions, led by feudal secular, and religious rulers. The main promotors of the German and the Italian national identities across fragmented political geographies were not the traditional political authorities but the intelligentsias and professional classes. Today the names Leopardi, Mazzini, Garibaldi, Fichte, Wagner, and the Brothers Grimm are familiar to many of us, but not the names of the rulers under whom they lived. At first glance, the Ukrainian case seems to be the most obvious example of intelligentsia-inspired nationalism. But then, how do we account for the numerous empire builders from Ukraine? Many of them, like

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Bezborodko, Kapnist, and Kotliarevs'kyi, served the dynastic empire loyally as statesmen, bureaucrats, and soldiers while simultaneously contributing to distinctively Ukrainian culture, and even, in some cases, aspiring to political autonomy. However, they adhered to an early modern noble or political “nation” consisting mostly of their nobiliary peers: thus, local patriotism did not contradict empire building. By making use of the abundant resources – academic, political, and cultural – of the imperial state, these nobiliary Little Russians were actually preparing the ground for romantic nationalists and populists – that is, for an “intelligentsia” that would identify nationality with peasants and their vernacular culture. In reality, the boundaries between these two types of nationalism – “state-imposed” and “intelligentsia-inspired” – were often blurred, or one type followed the other. It was only after the 1840s, with the rise of a generation of romantic nationalists and a gradual disappearance of “Little Russian autonomists” from the Russian government, that the Ukrainian case became a quintessential example of an intelligentsia-inspired nationalism. According to Magocsi, that process, once begun, went through three stages: a heritage gathering stage, an organizational stage, and a political stage.

h er i tage gath ererS, g l o r y hUn t e rS Heritage gathering, the first stage in a national movement, usually introduced nationalism to a specific community. In practical terms, this stage consisted of collecting the linguistic, folkloric, literary, and historical artifacts of a given people. On the metaphorical level, “heritage gathering” represented a Frankenstein-like laboratory in which the new nation could first be designed. During the second stage, organizations, schools, and publications were formed to propagate knowledge about the collected heritage among those who shared it. The third and final stage would bring about political participation in order to fulfill the nationalist goal of achieving autonomy or independence for their community. The actual process, however, was a much messier one than the scheme would indicate, and the three stages often failed to follow the prescribed order. The early heritage gatherers – many of them aristocratic amateurs – could hardly be called nationalists. Some were also more glory hunters than heritage gatherers; later, however, their cultural and literary activities were cast by more conscious nation builders as the founding blocks of nationality, as happened with Kotliarevs'kyi and his legacy. Ivan

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Kotliarevs'kyi may have been the most famous of the generation of heritage gatherers, but there were dozens of others. What drove them to work and create as they did? Our sources are insufficient to reconstruct their motivations in full, but we do know that conscious, if somewhat old-fashioned, patriotism played a role. Let us consider, for instance, the case of Opanas Lobysevych (1732–1805). He served as a translator and secretary to Ukraine’s last hetman, Kyrylo Rozumovs'kyi, which earned him the high imperial rank of colonel. More important to us here, Lobysevych was in a sense a precursor of Kotliarevs'kyi’s, in that he produced a translation of Virgil’s “Bucolics” into Ukrainian, reportedly to please his superior, Rozumovs'kyi: the former hetman, who had become an imperial field marshal, was a known devotee of the Ukrainian language. Yet Lobysevych himself gave another, seemingly higher, reason for his literary effort: he had produced it, he said, “for the honor of the nation, our mother, and the champions (liubitelei) of our fatherland.” The “nation” referred to here was undoubtedly Little Russia, that is, the lands of the former Cossack State, or Hetmanate, on the left bank of the Dnipro. Another Ukrainian noble from the former Hetmanate stated the same sentiment even more explicitly: “How pleasant it is to work for the glory and utility of the Fatherland. Our own feelings, the realization that in troubled times, we, nevertheless, did not live in vain, rewards us and comforts us in death and gives us the right to call ourselves ‘sons of the Fatherland.’”24 Love for the fatherland aside, a more pressing factor behind heritage gathering was the challenge of integrating into the empire. Forced by the Russian government to prove their nobiliary origins, thousands of ex-Cossack officers began to search for documents that would confirm their noble status from olden times, or, at least, their ennoblement by Russian rulers in more recent times. If such documents could not to be found, they could be forged. In the early nineteenth century, quite a few Ukrainian authors argued for Russia’s unequivocal acceptance of Cossack ranks as nobiliary ones. Local elites, the “Little Russian gentry” of the two newly created provinces of Chernihiv and Poltava, collaborated to present a common case in support of that argument before the imperial government. The most prominent spokesman for this historical and judicial approach was the noble Tymofii Kalyns'kyi, who was born a Catholic but converted to Orthodoxy and relocated to the Hetmanate from Polish-ruled Belarusian or Volhynian lands in the 1750s. Young Tymofii studied at the Kyiv Mohyla Academy and served as a clerk in a Cossack regiment in an area of northern Ukraine

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that would later become part of the Novhorod-Sivers'kyi vice-royalty and then Chernihiv province. In the 1770s and early ’80s, we find him in Russian imperial service in southern Ukraine (New Russia), where, incidentally, young Ivan Kotliarevs'kyi was among his office colleagues. Returning to Novhorod-Sivers'kyi, Kalyns'kyi served in institutions of nobiliary self-government there. Having married into the local Cossack nobility, he was now ready to become a spokesman for their shared interests. His life illustrates with what ease someone might move between service in the Cossack administration and service within Russian imperial system, even in the case of a recent immigrant and convert to Orthodoxy. In any case, Kalyns'kyi knew firsthand how service and its ranks worked in both the Hetmanate of the Cossack regimental system and in Russia’s Table of Ranks. Working within both systems and comparing them, he became convinced that Cossack officers were not merely equal but actually superior to Russian nobles in terms of public service. Although he had attained only the rather modest rank of titular councilor (9th in the Table of Ranks), Kalyns'kyi was commissioned by the leaders of the Left-Bank nobility to write two manifestos regarding their corporate rights. The first was entitled Mnenie o malorossiiskikh chinakh i o ikh preimushchestve, a ravno i o razbore ikh dokazatel’stv o dvorianstve po sluzhbe i chinam ikh dlia vneseniia v Rodoslovnuiu dvorianskuiu knigu (Thoughts about Little Russian Ranks and about Their Superiority, as well as about the Examination of Proofs of Nobility through Service and Their Ranks for Inclusion in the Nobility’s Book of Heraldry; 1805). Drawing on a wide variety of sources, from judicial documents such as the Lithuanian Statute, resolutions of the Polish Diet, and decrees of the Russian Senate to the historiography of eastern Europe, Kalyns'kyi argued that by the end of the sixteenth century, Cossack officers had been recognized as nobles (szlachta) and had enjoyed greater rights than their Russian peers. Furthermore, not only Cossack officers but the entire Cossack estate was a “knightly order and nobiliary estate”: hence, all Cossacks qualified as Russian nobles. Finally, the ranks of Cossack officers were superior to those of Russian nobles: for instance, those holding the rather low rank of captain in the Cossack order were equal in status and service to voivodes (military commanders) in the Russian system. As for the head of the Cossack state, the hetman was not merely a general field marshal but a sovereign, “a kind of reigning prince.” In 1808, Kalyns'kyi published the next manifesto, titled Primechaniia o malorossiiskom dvorianstve (Notes on

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the Little Russian Nobility). There he doubled down on demands for the ennoblement of all rank-bearing Cossacks, citing particular privileges and charters granted to these “knights” by Polish kings and Russian tsars. His arguments, though based on scrupulous archival research, were not heard by the authorities immediately, and ennoblement proceeded on a case-by-case basis until 1835, when Nicholas I made a fateful decision. Until then, feverish work in family archives continued. All this work on individual cases and archival searches resulted in a curious side-effect: the appearance of several histories of Ukraine focusing on the glorious deeds of the Cossacks. Unsurprisingly, these histories portrayed the Cossacks as a noble estate, true Christian knights who had for centuries defended Orthodoxy against Muslim infidels and Catholic overlords. That depiction had little to do with their actual history, but it was supposed to prove that Cossack officers and their descendants were indeed worthy of becoming Russian imperial nobles. The first known historical works of this kind appeared in the 1770s, before the abolition of Ukraine’s autonomy. Oleksandr Bezborodko himself was known to have composed one, and also to have encouraged others to collect Cossack documents and compose similar works of their own. First to respond to Bezborodko’s call was Vasyl' Ruban (1742–1795), a Kyiv Academy graduate and secretary to Grigorii Potemkin. With documents accessed from the Bezborodko family archive, the young Ruban would publish several historical works that resembled chronicles and contained an eclectic selection of historical data and curiosities. The initial one, titled Kratkiia politicheskiia i istoricheskiia svedeniia Maloi Rossii… (Concise Political and Historical Information about Little Russia), was published in St Petersburg in 1773. More important, in 1777 Ruban published the first general history of Ukraine, Kratkaia lietopis’ Malyia Rossii s 1506 po 1776 god (Concise Chronicle of Little Russia from 1506 to 1776), an updated version of an earlier chronicle written in the 1730s. The Ukrainian expat saw to it that the imperial capital of St Petersburg became the center of Ukrainian secular publishing. Meanwhile, the Orthodox Church, which published only religious literature, controlled virtually all book printing in Russianruled Ukraine (other than a few government-run presses that appeared in the 1790s and operated within a narrow official agenda). It was hardly surprising that Kotliarevs'kyi’s profane Eneïda could be published only outside Ukraine, in St Petersburg. Many heritage gatherers from Ukraine settled in the imperial capital, attracted by the potential to perform state service or by the patronage of other highly-placed

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Ukrainians. St Petersburg also offered them an unrivaled cultural infrastructure, including publishing houses, archives, library collections, and journals of various kinds. During the 1790s, another recent arrival from Ukraine pioneered the study of historical sources to the Cossack past. Fedir Tumans'kyi (1757–1810) was an intellectual powerhouse of the Hetman state. Following education in Prussia’s most prestigious and oldest university at Königsberg (where Immanuel Kant was on the faculty), Tumans'kyi returned to serve in the Hetmanate. In 1778–79, he designed a plan for a so-called topographical description of all Left-Bank Ukraine, an extraordinarily ambitious project that included data on history, geography, vital statistics, economy, ethnography, nature, and the like. That plan gave rise to detailed descriptions of the Novhorod-Sivers'kyi, Chernihiv, and Kyiv vice-royalties compiled by several of Tumans'kyi’s talented associates. In Hlukhiv, the Hetmanate’s capital, Tumans'kyi managed to open an “academic bookstore” selling scientific, political, literary, and other secular works sent from St Petersburg by the Russian Academy, which in effect compensated for the lack of secular publishing in Ukraine itself. After the abolition of the Hetmanate’s autonomy, he relocated to St Petersburg and entered imperial government service. Apparently not content with his jobs at a state bank and the department of education, he launched several periodicals with broad public appeal. Of particular importance was Rossiiskii magazin (Russian Magazine; 1792–94), which published important sources bearing on Ukrainian Cossack history, including a purported 1648 universal (decree) by Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi and a popular Cossack chronicle usually attributed to Hryhorii Hrabianka, a Cossack colonel of Hadiach (the chronicle was written in the early 1700s, and some fifty handwritten copies of it were found). Notably, Tumans'kyi also compiled a pioneering Ukrainian-Russian dictionary (comprising 333 words) as an appendix to the chronicle. The chronicle conveyed a message of particular importance: it advocated for Ukrainian autonomy during the precarious time after Hetman Mazepa’s legendary split with Peter I, when the Russian ruler was persecuting the Cossack leadership. Its author was also defending the Cossacks’ corporate rights and “liberties,” which was of vital importance to Tumans'kyi during the 1790s, when the Russian authorities were severely restricting the number of ex-Cossack officers who could be recognized as imperial nobles. The new fashion in archival research also gave rise to several original histories of the Ukrainian Cossacks based on documents found in

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private homes across Ukraine and in state archives in St Petersburg. The authors of these histories were primarily ethnic Ukrainians, but there were also writers like Alexander Rigelman (1720–1789), a Russian military surveyor of German descent born in St Petersburg. In the early 1740s, Rigelman was commissioned to delineate the new borders between the Russian and Ottoman empires, a charge requiring him to spend much time among the Zaporozhian Cossacks. The result was his Letopisnoe povestvovanie o Maloi Rossii i eia narode i kozakakh voobshche (Chronicle Account about Little Russia, Its People, and Cossacks in General), published posthumously in 1847. The work was a comprehensive outline of Ukraine’s history from ancient times to 1787, accompanied by various ethnographic and demographic materials, including twenty-eight drawings of “types” of Ukrainians, each dressed in the distinctive costume. The author of another influential survey of Cossack Ukraine was Dmytro Bantysh-Kamens'kyi (1788–1850), a Moscow-born descendant of a Moldovan nobiliary family that had settled in the Hetmanate by the early 1700s. Dmytro’s father, Mykola, came from Nizhyn and studied at the Kyiv Mohyla Academy and then at Moscow University; one of the first professional archivists in Russia, Mykola for many years worked in the Moscow archives and published official documents pertaining to the history of early modern Poland, Russia, and Ukraine. As his son, Dmytro surely profited from his father’s expertise and sources. The younger Bantysh-Kamens'kyi’s major work, Istoriia Maloi Rossii so vremen prisoedineniia onoi k Rossiiskomu Gosudarstvu, pri tsare Aleksee Mikhailoviche (History of Little Russia from the Time of Its Annexation to the Russian State under Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich), appeared in Moscow in four volumes between 1822 and 1842. Dmytro’s pioneering work was based on “original Little Russian documents” from 1620 to 1757 preserved in the Archives of the College of Foreign Affairs, but it also relied heavily on narrative sources, primarily Cossack chronicles. In contrast to heritage gatherers of Ukrainian Cossack descent, however, Dmytro Bantysh-Kamens'kyi professed his utmost loyalty to the Russian state; in fact, he devoted the second edition of his history to Nicholas I. A central figure in its historical narrative was Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi, who was depicted as a counterweight to the “infamous” hetman Ivan Mazepa. Dmytro Bantysh-Kamens'kyi’s History of Little Russia thereby put an emerging cult of Hetman Khmel'nyts'kyi within the imperial historical discourse. At the same time, his work legitimized the descendants of Cossack officers as both loyal and noble subjects of the Russian tsars.

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Although less academic in approach, the historical work of another writer presented the aspirations of the Little Russian gentry particularly well. Unlike the “German” Rigelman and the “Moldovan” Bantysh-Kamens'kyi, Mykola Markevych (1804–1860) had impeccable credentials as a Little Russian aristocrat (ironically, it was rumored that the Markevych, or Markovych, clan was of Jewish descent). A passionate advocate of the Little Russian nobility of Cossack origin and its history, Markevych was one of the last aristocratic amateurs to engage in heritage gathering. In the fashion then typical of his class, he was at once a historian, ethnographer, poet, musician, and composer. In 1829, he published in Moscow the collections Elegii i evreiskiia melodii (Elegies and Jewish Melodies) and Stikhotvoreniia eroticheskiia i Parizina (Erotic Poems and Parisina, the latter a translation of Byron’s poem by that title). In 1831, he published a collection of romantic ballads about Ukraine’s historic past titled Ukrainskiia melodii (Ukrainian Melodies). An avid collector of historical sources, Mykola Markevych amassed a huge collection of documents from provincial archives and private homes, including those of his grandfather. His collection was extraordinary by the standards of even the most accomplished heritage gatherers, for it featured rare documents from the archives of Hetman Ivan Skoropads'kyi, Governor-General Petr Rumiantsev, and Hetman Kyrylo Rozumovs'kyi, as well as other statesmen and intellectual celebrities (in total, some 6,550 documents dating from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries). Aside from gathering documents, books, and folk songs, Markevych had also “gathered” human souls – around 700 serfs, primarily inherited from his father – which afforded him a comfortable life on his rural estate. That lifestyle may have represented the spirit of old-fashioned heritage gathering quite well, but it would be increasingly at odds with the new epoch. In that epoch, intellectual pursuits would become inseparable from moral concerns championed by a socially conscious intelligentsia – although, to be sure, most of its members could not afford to live in the style of country gentlemen. It was another of Markevych’s publications that caused turmoil in the empire’s public sphere. Published in Moscow in 1842–43 were the five volumes of his soon controversial and famous Istoriia Malorossii (History of Little Russia). Its publication prompted Osip Senkovskii (Józef Sęnkowski), a Russian critic of Polish descent who was professor of Oriental philology at the university in St Petersburg, to write a review berating Markevych for having written volumes of “tasteless cries, thoughtless considerations, childish fairy tales, and coarse, fables.” In

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addition to this personal attack on Markevych and his work, Senkovskii launched a vehement attack on Ukrainian Cossack history. Casting aside the prevailing Russian and Ukrainian image of Cossacks as Christian “knights,” Senkovskii derided them as an “armed and unruly horde of desperate villains” who ruled over Ukraine with a “knout” and kept its population mired “in slavery, squalor, and barbarity.” The professional Orientalist then compared the Cossacks to the Mamelukes in Egypt, and he called the Zaporozhian Host the “Algeria of the North” – that is, not Christian knights but Oriental savages. This was the ultimate insult to any patriotic Little Russian. Senkovskii urgently admonished other historians to cease glorifying these criminals and to divorce their native land decisively from the “gang of Cossacks.” Finally, the professor condescendingly and with great sarcasm concluded that if the Cossack Hetmanate still existed in their own time, Markevych could not have written his history, because “enjoying the great well-being of Little Russia under the rule of their majesties the hetmans, the author would in all likelihood not have known an alphabet in which to compile all of this and present it as a history.”25 Another scathingly critical voice was that of Vissarion Belinskii, a Russian radical known for his anti-Ukrainian views, who was even more incisive in dismissing Markevych’s style and Ukrainian history. Yet Markevych was offended more by the diatribes of Senkovskii, most probably because in the professor’s disdain for the Cossacks, Markevych perceived an arrogance typical of the Polish nobility. The offended Ukrainian author found support, surprisingly, in the powerful governor-general of Kyiv, Dmitrii Bibikov. In January of 1844, Bibikov petitioned Russia’s Ministry of the Interior to punish the censors who had permitted the Polish-born Senkovskii to publish his scornful review of the History of Little Russia. The governor-general, an ethnic Russian and adamant opponent of what he saw as a harmful Polish influence in the southwestern borderlands, declared that the reviewer had made “insulting” remarks about the Little Russian nationality and showed “the most pernicious anti-national tendencies.”26 Bibikov also made clear reference to the critic’s allegedly pro-Polish bias. But the Censorship Committee defended its censors, saying that Senkovskii was expressing a scholarly opinion and that some of his statements were in fact true. The whole matter reached the highest authority: Tsar Nicholas decided that the critic’s opinions should be refuted by scholarly means rather than through punishment. That was a very unusual decision by a despotic ruler who readily meted out harsh sentences for the expression of

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“opinions,” in cases ranging from those of the Decembrists and Adam Mickiewicz to Taras Shevchenko and Fyodor Dostoevsky. The whole story showed that as late as the 1840s, heritage gathering was perceived as a matter of “opinions” rather than politics. In fact, neither the author Markevych nor his critics Belinskii and Senkovskii suffered any particular consequences. That would very soon change, however, as heritage gathering became part of a broader political agenda. What did Markevych’s Russian critics find so loathsome in his history? Only the first two volumes of his five-volume work were a historical narrative. The other three volumes contained only documents (carelessly printed at times) and appendices, including source descriptions, lists of Cossack regiments, the general officer staff, colonels in the Hetmanate, companies of the Zaporozhian Sich, and the Orthodox higher clergy, as well as some chronological tables. Influenced by the older Cossack chronicles and by the as-yet-unpublished Istoriia Rusov (History of the Rus' People), then circulating in handwritten copies, the author approached the history of Little Russia as an independent process that continued without interruption from the earliest times to the late eighteenth century. In assessing the scope and drama of RussianUkrainian relations, Markevych remained politically correct, listing every possible advantage in Ukraine’s union with Russia: international and internal security, religious freedom, economic benefits, and the nobility’s equal status before the tsar. “The tsar is the same for everyone, and all have equal rights,” as he put it dutifully. Markevych’s focus on Cossacks, Ukrainian statehood, and the Hetmanate’s ruling elites proved too much for some Russian critics to bear, a fact that also signaled an imminent end to innocent heritage gathering as practiced by loyal nobiliary amateurs. Conversely, Markevych’s history, despite its dry narrative and loyalist message, greatly influenced younger Ukrainian historians and romantic intellectuals, among them an aspiring poet who was his friend and would become the national bard of Ukraine – Taras Shevchenko. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were also a time when new national mythologies were being formed. The predominantly aristocratic heritage gatherers and glory hunters were busily producing new myths to prove how old the legacies they were “rediscovering” were. Their histories and literary works – Kotliarevs'kyi’s Eneïda, in particular – were the greatest contribution to the emerging myth of a Ukraine based on a glorious Cossack past. On that trend during this epoch Serhii Plokhy has commented: “A shortcut to the

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production of elaborate mythologies that ‘proved’ the ancient origins of modern nations and provided them with respectable pasts was the forging of ancient documents as well as literary and historical works allegedly lost at some time and now ‘rediscovered’ to the astonishment and approval of a grateful public. More often than not, the authors of such ‘rediscovered’ treasures were in pursuit of literary success and/ or money.”27 In hunting for money and glory, they indeed “found” what they sought, for if not treasure then literary success was embodied in the “rediscovered” manuscript. The historico-political pamphlet Istoriia Rusov (History of the Rus' People) began to circulate widely in Left-Bank Ukraine in the mid-1820s. The work’s introduction claimed that the history had been written by generations of Orthodox monks and was completed by the archbishop of Mahiloŭ, a town in Belarus, in 1769 – that is, more than fifty years before the text became widely known. But it was not, in fact, written in Mahiloŭ. Most likely it was written in Novhorod-Sivers'kyi, the capital of an imperial vice-royalty in 1781–96 and the cultural hub of the former Hetmanate, where a number of patriotic Little Russian nobles and heritage gatherers lived. The History of the Rus' People was arguably the most important and most mysterious work ever produced by the aristocratic gatherers of political heritage. It was the first text to suggest a historical continuity between early medieval Rus' and the Cossack Hetmanate. Although the work itself was attributed to a venerable Orthodox archbishop, the real author or authors remained anonymous and thus unable to claim the literary glory the work acquired among Ukrainians and Russians from the 1820s onward. We are still unsure who wrote it or when it was written. What we do know is that handwritten copies circulated widely from the 1820s, and the work was first published in Moscow in 1846. An important theme in the work was the historical continuity between Kyivan Rus' and the Cossacks of early modern times, which implied that the Cossack Host traced its origins to Old Rus'. Another component was implicit criticism of Russian politics towards Cossack Ukraine in the context of enlightenment principles and the discourse of the French and American revolutions: “Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends [i.e., attempts to deprive people of their inalienable rights – Sb ], it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it and institute a new government … in such form as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness.” We should note, however, that Serhii Plokhy has recently argued against the traditional interpretation of the History of the Rus' People as primarily an

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anti-Russian political pamphlet.28 He has suggested that the work’s goal was in fact “to ease the integration of the Cossack elites into the Russian nobility and society at large.” Also, by evoking the heroic deeds of the “Cossack nation” and implicitly polemicizing against those trying to separate Ukrainians from Russians in any way possible, its author(s) were seeking St Petersburg’s support in refuting Polish claims to RightBank Ukraine. Simultaneously, by claiming the legacy of Kyivan Rus' and celebrating the Cossacks’ glorious past, the History of the Rus' People made a case for a historical nation of Cossacks (“people of Rus'”) separate from both Poles and Russians. Whatever its true goals were, the work inspired generations of patriotic Ukrainian intellectuals, artists, and activists, from the national bard Taras Shevchenko to master historian Mykhailo Hrushevs'kyi. The attention early historians of Ukraine fixed on the Cossacks was surely attributable in part to the fact that most of them were descendants of Cossack officer families. Other historical epochs, such as pre-Mongol Rus', were accorded little attention in Ukrainian historiography of that time, even on the pages of the History of the Rus' People and in the 1842 edition of Bantysh-Kamens'kyi’s more academic work. In our own time, Oleksii Tolochko has pointed out that the former Cossack elites seeking recognition in the Russian Empire could petition for privileged status only in the context of the Cossack system, not by references to a remote Kyivan Rus' past. Dwelling on historical connections to Old Rus' could not provide legitimacy to those elites nor effectively explain differences between contemporary Ukrainians and Russians. Those differences could be explained, however, by ethnographers, linguists, and folklorists, who appeared in great numbers across Europe as the age of Enlightenment gave way to Romanticism. The single biggest influence on heritage gatherers in this transitional age came from the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), who became enamored of the Slavs and Ukrainians in particular. In fact, Herder accorded Ukraine a special role in his optimistic geopolitics of culture. In a popular travel diary published in 1769, Herder wrote: “Ukraine will one day become a new Greece; the beautiful climate of this country, the gay disposition of the people, their musical inclination, and the fertile soil will all awaken. From so many small tribes which in the past were Greeks there will rise a great and cultured nation and its boundaries will extend to the Black Sea, and thence into the far-flung world.”29 This new civilization was also to include Poland and Russia.

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Together with the radical political philosophy he professed during the 1790s, Herder’s most long-lasting impact derived from his view of language and community, which greatly influenced romantic nationalists and historicists in both Germany and eastern Europe well into the nineteenth century. Unlike later political nationalists, Herder was critical of the state as a political entity and prophesized that once people attained complete enlightenment and autonomy, they would abolish the state altogether. Ironically, this anarchistic worldview did not prevent Herder (who, in the 1760s, had resided in Russian-ruled Riga) from praising the “wise rule” of young Catherine II. Yet, above all else, he celebrated folk cultures, particularly languages, in all their diversity. Herder contended that the very existence of a nationality as a separate entity was based on its language. He expressed his metaphysics of language clearly in the statement that “only someone who was brought up in this language, who put his heart in it, who learnt how to express his soul in it, belongs to the nation of this language … By means of this language the nation is educated and formed.”30 Hence, any community of people speaking a distinctive language was potentially a distinct nationality and could aspire to become a sovereign nation. Another crucial consequence of Herder’s ideas was that language was more important than political class (e.g., belonging to the nobility) as the basis of nationality. This notion inevitably opened the way to the formation of the nation on an egalitarian as well as ethnic basis. Whether the heritage gatherers of eastern Europe got that message directly from Herder or via other channels, they certainly welcomed it as additional motivation for their leisure-time activities: now by writing down peasant songs or compiling a grammar of an unrefined vernacular language they were dealing with truly vital spiritual matters. From Josef Dobrovský and Josef Jungman in the Czech lands, to Pavel Josef Šafárik and L’udovít Štúr among Slovaks, to Ljudevit Gaj among Croats and Vuk Karadžić among Serbs, everyone seemed now to be preoccupied with collecting folklore and compiling dictionaries and grammars. Ukrainians, too, jumped on this Herder-driven bandwagon. One of the first heritage gatherers from Ukraine to be influenced by Herder was Iakiv Markovych (1776–1804). With the help of highly placed Ukrainians like Dmytro Troshchyns’kyi, young Markovych got a job as translator in the empire’s department of foreign affairs in St Petersburg. He soon produced a relatively short (98-page) work titled Zapiski o Malorossii, eia zhiteliakh i proizvedeniiakh (Notes on Little Russia, Its Inhabitants, and Products) that proved to be one of the

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most remarkable examples of heritage gathering in the late eighteenth century. Published in St Petersburg in 1798, it was a compilation of historical, geographical, and ethnographic data about Ukraine set within the secular and rational framework of the European Enlightenment. In the course of writing it Markovych had thoroughly researched and consulted any number of historical and philosophical sources, including Herder’s celebrated Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind; 1784– 91). Characteristically, the young Ukrainian author took three pages of notes on passages where Herder spoke about Slavs, in one of the first instances of the transfer of the German philosopher’s ideas into Russia’s public sphere. Markovych took Ukraine – that is, “Little Russia”– to be the “cradle of the Rus' people” (kolybel' Rossov), and he constructed his historical narrative as a direct continuum from the times of the early Slavs through Kyivan Rus' to this “Little Russia” and the Cossacks. In addition to a dense historical overview, the Zapiski o Malorossii contained pioneering (if brief) sociological and ethnographic descriptions of Ukrainians and minority groups (primarily Jews and Germans) on these lands. Unsurprisingly, he regarded Ukrainians with particular favor, attributing to them a gentle and noble character as well as such sterling qualities as dignity, loyalty, openness, kindness, bravery, and – last but not least – musicality. Contrary to later romantic and populist views of Ukrainians as primarily a peasant people, Markovych spoke of a socially diverse nation. “Among native Little Russians,” he wrote, “one can distinguish four classes: Noble, Burgher, Cossack, and Peasant,”31 and noted the particular socioeconomic functions of each group. Describing Ukraine’s geographical situation and natural resources, he unreservedly declared it a “land of abundance and pleasantness,” adding that given its “rich steppes, prodigious husbandry, and good-natured inhabitants,” Ukraine ought to be seen as a “second Switzerland.” At the same time, considering “the Little Russians’ innate penchant for music, in Russia their land is what Italy is in Europe.”32 To quote Taras Koznarsky, Markovych’s Little Russia epitomized “the very essence of civilization and Europeanness within the Russian Empire.”33 In effect, the talented heritage gatherer Iakiv Markovych single-handedly placed Ukraine on top of the bucket list of destinations for any serious Russian traveler. Alas, the author of the Zapiski did not benefit from his work’s success: driven to despair by huge debt, apparently the result of high living in St Petersburg, the young heritage gatherer from Ukraine took his own life.

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Herder also influenced his many adepts to turn their attention to vernaculars that until then were dismissed or frowned upon by scholars and writers alike. Owing in part to the influence of the unauthorized edition of Kotliarevs'kyi’s Eneïda published in St Petersburg, Markovych had already glorified the Ukrainian language spoken by the common people: “If one throws out from it [i.e., the Ukrainian language – Sb ] all coarse words used by a commoner and also all the borrowings from Germans, French, and Crimean Tatars … then one should admit that it is tender, pleasant, and full of passionate expressions and diminutives that originated, of course, from nothing other than the refined sensitivity of its inventors. One can call it the language of love.”34 The language of love it might have been, but no one quite knew how to write a compelling love letter in Ukrainian, for it still lacked a grammar. An actual Ukrainian grammar would appear only two decades later, but even that failed to resolve many issues of orthography, grammar, and syntax. In 1818, the amateur linguist Oleksii Pavlovs'kyi (1773–ca. 1822), published, in Russian and in St Petersburg, the first and rather eclectic Grammatika malorossiiskogo narechiia (Grammar of the Little Russian Dialect). Pavlovs'kyi remarked that he himself was not sure whether Ukrainian was dead or alive (“neither dead nor alive”) or whether it was a distinct language or a dialect of Russian (“almost a real language”). Nonetheless, despite this and many other doubts that they harbored about their diverse activities, the heritage gatherers continued to gather, classify, and write (predominantly in Russian, to be sure). They soon found another genre in their collective heritage to be passionate about – folk songs. Iakiv Markovych had alluded to these as early as 1798, but a devotion to oral poetry began in earnest in 1819 with the publication of several Ukrainian historical songs by Prince Nikolai Tsertelev (1790–1869. Tsertelev’s collection, titled Opyt sobraniia starinnykh malorossiiskikh pesen (An Attempt at Collecting Ancient Little Russian Songs), was dedicated to Dmytro Troshchyns'kyi, as Markovych’s Zapiski were. In his introduction, Tsertelev, descendant of an aristocratic Georgian family but raised in Ukraine, acknowledged that his exploration of Ukrainian songs had not uncovered a “second Iliad”; nonetheless, he compared the songs he had collected to those of the ancient Greeks and Romans (just as Herder once did). All folk poetry, and Ukrainian folk songs in particular, he wrote, expressed the “spirit of the people” better than most written literature did, thus giving voice to “expressions and thoughts captivating to contemporary writers.” During the 1830s and 1840s, this bold statement would become a cliché for many Romantics.

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One publication had such a powerful influence (on young people, in particular) that some readers who had regarded themselves as Russian assumed a Ukrainian identity almost overnight. This work was not a political manifesto, philosophical treatise, or even a work of fiction. It was, in the romantic fashion, a collection of “people’s poetry” – that is, folk songs – compiled by a young botanist at Moscow University. Mykhailo Maksymovych (1804–1873), who afterward became a sensation in Moscow literary salons, published his famed Malorossiiskie pesni (Little Russian Songs) in 1827. Part heritage gatherer and part glory hunter, young Maksymovych did not see any great difference between folk songs and plants. What botany and folklore in the early nineteenth century had in common was the method by which they were studied: the continual gathering and classification of their artifacts – namely, plants and songs, respectively – would reveal the truth about the natural and human (or spiritual) worlds. The search for truth in folk songs would lead to the discovery of nationality (narodnost’) and the “spirit of the people,” which, in turn, would allow Maksymovych or others like him to compare Ukrainians and Russians on the basis of what they sang. After all, what one could not say as a political activist in autocratic Russia, one might be able to sing – this fact alone might explain why for decades leading Ukrainian intellectuals and radicals remained avid students of folklore and, particularly, of folk songs. They also had a genuine fondness for these songs, and sang them whenever possible. Even Ukrainians who lived in Moscow and St Petersburg and were part of imperial circles there, including Maksymovych, Gogol, and Shevchenko, often gathered in private homes and literary salons to sing folk songs, activity that might or might not have had a political meaning. What was the heritage gatherers’ most lasting contribution to modern Ukraine? As individuals, Ivan Kotliarevs'kyi, Tymofii Kalyns'kyi, Fedir Tumans'kyi, Alexander Rigelman, Dmytro Bantysh-Kamens'kyi, Mykola Markevych, Iakiv Markovych, Nikolai Tsertelev, Mykhailo Maksymovych, and others like them differed markedly in ethnic background, social trajectory, and motivation for their activities, often to such a degree that they hardly seem to belong together. But they did have one characteristic in common: whether genuine heritage gatherers or only glory hunters, they were all studious amateurs who set out to collect the legacy that would become the cultural cornerstone of modern Ukraine. In other words, they defined what Ukraine was (or had to become) in historical, ethnographic, and linguistic terms.

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The first heritage gatherers were not in fact members of the intelligentsia – that is, non-manual workers having a strong social consciousness and advanced cultural interests, often coming from humble backgrounds. They were, rather, old-fashioned nobles and aristocrats who believed they were preserving the vanishing culture of a Cossack nation that politically no longer existed. They were not Ukrainian nationalists, nor did they think about the “revival” of their nation. Most sought simply to preserve or conserve what was left of local culture driven by family pride or perhaps scholarly scrutiny. The Ukrainian language itself was thought to be on the brink of extinction, a sentiment that we saw shared by the author of the first grammar of Ukrainian, Oleksii Pavlovs'kyi. As late as 1840, Mykhailo Maksymovych, by then a professor of literature at Kyiv University, had doubts about the future of the new and emerging Ukrainian literature, fretting that “everything written here in Little Russian [Ukrainian] is in some sense artificial and has only a regional character, like a German writing in the Alemannic dialect. We cannot have a literature in the South Russian [Ukrainian] language; there can only be individual works in this language.”35 Maksymovych’s skepticism can perhaps be attributed in part to his being a transitional figure between a generation of nobiliary amateurs and an academically trained national intelligentsia. He no longer enjoyed the social security of the former but did not yet have the cultural confidence of the latter. Despite the personal doubts and social insecurities of people like Pavlovs'kyi and Maksymovych, their contributions as scholars and heritage gatherers were immense. It is thanks to them that by the 1830s, Ukraine, although still referred to as Little or Southern Russia, had acquired its own history, albeit one centered largely on the Cossacks, ethnography, folklore, and a fledging literary language based on a peasant vernacular. Meanwhile, developments taking place just beyond the eastern boundaries of Little Russia proper – that is, the lands of the former Hetmanate – not only took the activities of the heritage gatherers to another level, but also put Ukraine as an idea and place at the forefront of the romantic public’s attention.

U krai ne b egi nS in t h e e aSt In 1843, the radical Russian literary critic Vissarion Belinskii noted that the city of Kharkiv was “in a sense, the capital of Ukraine, and therefore the capital of Ukrainian literature.”36 Despite his deep-seated aversion

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to Ukrainian literature (considering it peripheral to Russian), Belinskii was right to link “Ukraine” to Kharkiv as its literary capital. In official imperial discourse, Kharkiv was the center of the province called Sloboda Ukraine, initially in 1765–80 and then again in 1797–1835. But if a traveler in the early nineteenth-century were to have asked “How do I get to Ukraine?” the answer and directions he or she got would have been confusing, if not altogether confounding, and no imagined gPS device could have provided the route. What particular place, we need to ask, was meant by the destination “Ukraine”? Serhii Plokhy has offered this explanation of the complex differences between the terms “Ukraine” and “Little Russia” in official discourse and public consciousness in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: In that period, the term [Ukraine] began to be associated first and foremost with lands outside the Cossack Hetmanate. Thus the “Ukrainian line” of fortifications was built in the1730s to the east and south of the Hetmanate. The Sloboda Ukraine gubernia was established in 1765, with its administrative centre in Kharkiv. It kept that name until 1780 and was then restored with different boundaries in 1796; it was renamed the Kharkiv gubernia in 1835. By contrast, the restoration of the Hetmanate’s territorial integrity after its liquidation by Catherine II was associated with the brief existence of the Little Russian gubernia, administered from Chernihiv, between 1796 and 1802. The close association of “Little Russia” with the lands of the former Hetmanate and of “Ukraine” with the territories of Sloboda Ukraine is well attested in a private letter from a prominent Ukrainian intellectual of the period, Hryhorii Skovoroda. In September 1790, he wrote of “my mother, Little Russia,” and “my aunt, Ukraine,” apparently meaning that while he had been born and raised in the Hetmanate, most of his adult life had been spent in neighboring Sloboda Ukraine.37 So when Belinskii wrote about “Ukraine,” what he actually meant was the province of Sloboda Ukraine, with its center in Kharkiv, located in the northeastern corner of present-day Ukraine. More important, at that time the term “Ukraine” itself was being popularized in the poetry and prose of local writers, some of whom were teachers or students at Kharkiv University. Opened in 1805, the institution in Kharkiv was the first modern university founded on Ukrainian lands within

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the Russian Empire (whereas the famed Kyiv Mohyla Academy could rightly be considered the proto-university in Russian-ruled Ukraine). The university was the initiative of the local Kharkiv community, which consistently lobbied the imperial government and raised ample funds (from nobles and burghers alike) for its establishment, a unique case of successful civic pressure on an indifferent if not overtly reluctant paternalistic state. There is some debate as to how voluntary and enthusiastic the support from the nobles of Sloboda Ukraine actually was. There is no doubt, however, that there would have been no university in Kharkiv at that time without Vasyl' Karazyn (1773–1842). A local landowner whose ancestors had emigrated from the Balkans (most likely Bulgaria),38 Karazyn was an adventurer, inventor, friend of the young Alexander I, and a liberal-minded bureaucrat. In many ways he bears comparison to Benjamin Franklin, also an inventor, enlightened thinker, and founder of a prominent university (in his case, the University of Pennsylvania). Kharkiv University reflected the spirit of enlightened liberalism that characterized Alexander I’s early years, and as such it emanated enlightened culture across the southern expanses of the Russian Empire. Portentous words spoken by Karazyn before the local nobility reflected his somewhat utopian expectations of the education the new university would provide: “I dare to believe that our province is destined to spread the light of sophistication and enlightenment. She can be for Russia what ancient Athens was for Greece.”39 Kharkiv had very far to go to become a new Athens. As for the new university, it was difficult even to find students for it, because local nobles were unconvinced that a university education would do their sons any good: the fashion of the time was for them to enter state service at the age of fifteen. Nonetheless, Karazyn’s global thinking helped place the capital of Sloboda Ukraine, then a small town of less than 10,000, on the world map, if only in the minds of his compatriots. “Russians already have returned from their fourth trip around the globe,” Karazyn said to members of Kharkiv’s Philotechnical Society. “For us in Kharkiv, dwelling in the Scythian realm that was terrifying to the Greeks, today sugar cane grows on the Antilles and cinnamon on the island of Ceylon… A fortunate age promising common brotherly union of humanity! Soon the free Negro, having arrived from Guinea on his own ship to Odesa and the enlightened inhabitant of the Sandwich Islands, returning from New York University to his fatherland through Russia, will be able to stretch their friendly embraces toward the Southern Russian and discuss with him the achievements of science at the same place that less than

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two hundred years before served as a dwelling for wild dogs and as a temporary ground for Crimean barbarians who devastated the Russian interior.”40 In the twentieth century, Karazyn’s globalist fantasy would prove prophetic: Kharkiv University would then indeed be a place where Africans and local Ukrainians could study and discuss the sciences. Even in the first decades of its existence, Kharkiv University was among the most cosmopolitan venues in the Russian Empire, at least in terms of faculty and curriculum. For instance, foreigners constituted a majority of the university’s faculty: it included seventeen Germans, five Frenchmen, and just nine “Russians,” of whom at least two were Ukrainians. Also of note is that the university’s first professor of philosophy, Johann Baptist Schad (1758–1834), was recommended to the university’s curator by Goethe and arrived in Kharkiv from Jena. Of course, not every university official corresponded with Goethe, but the first curator of Kharkiv University was not an ordinary official: Seweryn Potocki (1762–1829) was a Polish magnate and a personal friend of Alexander I. Indeed, the role Poles played in founding a university in Kharkiv proved to be no less crucial than that of Karazyn and his compatriots in Sloboda Ukraine.41 In 1802, when reform-minded Alexander I initiated debates about new policies in education, he created a School Commission whose task was to select cities where new universities were to be located. Commission members included Karazyn and two influential Poles – Seweryn Potocki and Adam Jerzy Czartoryski. The Polish contingent proposed a university in Vilnius (Wilno) that would be a major Polish institution of higher learning, supervising secondary education in all formerly Polish provinces, including Kyiv, Volhynia, and Podolia. Concurrently, Czartoryski and Potocki set out to block Kyiv as an option, for fear that a university there would dilute Polish influence in the region. Another consideration was that the imperial government would surely agree to only one university, at most, in the so-called western borderlands. Conveniently, the candidacy of Kharkiv so passionately promoted by Karazyn did not threaten the chances of Vilnius. Thus, the Poles conspired with Karazyn, and together they backed Vilnius and Kharkiv as the locations for the new universities. Polish influence could have now readily spread beyond the Dnipro, given Potocki’s appointment as curator of the Kharkiv school district (he would serve from 1803 to 1816). However, the Polish aristocrat did not set out to polonize Kharkiv and Sloboda Ukraine, although he did expose the city and region to various European ideas, often via Polish channels. One of those channels was former Poland’s

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Commission of National Education (Komisja Edukacji Narodowej, 1773–94), regarded as Europe’s first ministry of education and an inspiration for Russia’s own school commission. The Komisja’s pioneering ideas greatly influenced university statutes across the Russian Empire in the early 1800s (including the principle that the university would supervise all the district’s schools and itself would be divided into faculties). In addition to assuming these Polish structural influences, the university occasionally offered classes in Polish language and literature: in 1817, Potocki proposed its lectureship in Polish to a young Ukrainian writer, Petro Hulak-Artemovs'kyi (1790–1865). The new university was founded in a spirit of cosmopolitan Enlightenment combined with neoclassicism. That was well reflected in Potocki’s inaugural address, delivered in Latin on 17 January 1805 and titled “On the New School System in the Russian Empire and the Benefits It Brings.” The main goal of the educational reforms, he declared, was to assure that on the vast territory between Lithuania in the west and Siberia in the east, from the city of Arkhangelsk in the north to the Caucasus in the south, not a single person would lack education fitting his social estate and personal abilities. In his address Potocki referred to the ancient British universities at Oxford and Cambridge, as well as the German ones in Göttingen and Jena, as examples for Russia’s new universities to emulate. Addressing the people of Sloboda Ukraine directly, the curator praised their successful fundraising effort to found the university and cajoled them to continue to support the new institution: Oh, what a comforting picture of ongoing changes the observer can witness in this region, and see, finally, the introduction of sciences in this land which until now has been only a theater of destruction and armed struggle. Your brave ancestors took these lands away from the Tatars, but these days mere bravery is not enough, for even a military tactic requires science. You have already shown your zeal by making donations, and now, as a reward, your children will be educated in your midst; your city may become the most renowned in the entire state and over time will perhaps become famous in Europe as well.42 The appeal to the civic pride of the local population proved effective, as was later evident in the close collaboration between the community (the nobility primarily) and the university in various charitable, cultural, and educational undertakings. Paradoxically, the focus on

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Greco-Roman antiquity in the neoclassical paradigm did not divert the university’s scholars and students from developing a strong interest in local history and culture. The university went on to publish a number of periodicals – the first such publications in Ukraine – that aside from local news included original and translated poetry as well as scholarship (primarily the studies of language, history, and folklore). The titles of two of these periodicals included the specification “Ukrainian”: Ukrainskii vestnik (Ukrainian Herald, 1816–19; initial print run 500) and Ukrainskii zhurnal (Ukrainian Journal, 1824–25; print run ca. 600 per issue). Despite their essentially loyalist stance, the journals also conveyed the local patriotism of an educated (and mostly nobiliary) society. More important, the journals soon united writers and journalists from diverse regions of present-day Ukraine and beyond, thus transcending local issues limited to the region of Sloboda Ukraine. For instance, Ukrainskii vestnik published a study of Hetman Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi by Mikhail Markov, a historian from Chernihiv province, and an essay by Mikhail Gribovskii (Hrybovs'kyi), a prominent imperial official from St Petersburg (and with a law degree from Kharkiv University), titled “Historical Remarks about Little Russia from the Death of Hetman B. Khmel'nyts'kyi to the Battle at Poltava.” More materials relating to Ukrainian Cossack history, ethnography, and literature were showcased in Ukrainskii zhurnal. Among them was the pioneering article by Ivan Kulzhyns'kyi, “Some Considerations Regarding a History and Character of Little Russian Poetry,” a first attempt at a romantic treatment of Ukrainian folk poetry and literature, from the baroque writings of Hryhorii Skovoroda to Ivan Kotliarevs'kyi. In a combination of the spirits of neoclassicism and heritage gathering, Cossacks were often compared with exotic characters from ancient Greece: “Do you not see a Hercules in every Cossack? He is the son of luxuriant Asia, strengthened by all the hardships of Northern dwellers.”43 Other examples of such cultural blending were the travestied “translations” of the odes of Horace into Ukrainian by Petro Hulak-Artemovs'kyi, in which rural Ukrainian settings substituted for ancient Roman ones, just as they had earlier in Kotliarevs'kyi rendition of Virgil’s Aeneid. Also, in homage to emerging romantic sensibilities as well as the Polish heritage of the new university’s curator, Hulak-Artemovs'kyi produced the poem “Tvardovs'kyi,” a masculinized reinterpretation in Ukrainian of Adam Mickiewicz’s famous poem, “Pani Twardowska.” Hulak-Artemovs'kyi and his writings inspired a group of younger students and professors who became known as the Kharkiv Romantics.

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The group was associated with Kharkiv University from the late 1820s through the 1840s, even though only a few of its members actually came from Sloboda Ukraine. By using the Ukrainian vernacular, these poets and writers shaped the language of poetry and prose for generations to come. In contrast to Kotliarevs'kyi and Hulak-Artemovs'kyi, however, they chose elevated subjects and generally abstained from the burlesque which had become firmly associated with literature in Ukrainian during the previous epoch. In imitating the folk poetry and mythology of simple peasants and Cossacks, the romantic authors imaginatively changed both the form and content of original folkloric artifacts, adding the romantic sensibilities, themes, and modes of expression then fashionable. Yet most of these poets continued to believe that nothing excelled proverbial “people’s poetry” and regarded their own works as merely efforts to express the “spirit of the people” that it contained. The group’s most talented member was Levko Borovykovs'kyi (1806–1889), a native of Left-Bank Ukraine educated at Kharkiv University. There, influenced by his teacher Hulak-Artemovs'kyi, Borovykovs'kyi began to gather folklore and write poetry in Russian and Ukrainian. His mastery of Ukrainian became so pronounced that students today often mistake some of his best poems for modernist works of the early twentieth century. Aside from the psychological meditations typical of Romanticism, Borovykovs'kyi’s themes ranged from the historical (Kyivan Rus' in the Russian-language poem “Baian”; the Cossack-Polish wars in “Palii”; societal banditry in eighteenth-century Right-Bank Ukraine in “Haidamaky”), to the pseudo-historical (his poems “Banduryst” and “Kozak”), to numerous imitations of folk songs, replete with stock images of Cossacks and allusions to “Ukraine’s ancient glory” (e.g., in his poem “Dnipr”). Borovykovs'kyi’s poetic geography thus ranged beyond the boundaries of Sloboda Ukraine to include all the most important areas of present-day Ukraine, including the southern steppe, Right-Bank Ukraine, the Dnipro River, the city of Kyiv, and the Left-Bank region that had been the Hetmanate. The most important intellectual enterprise launched in Kharkiv in the 1830s was arguably a series of literary and historical almanacs that contributed to the mapping of “greater” Ukraine. Behind most of the almanacs stood a single person: Izmail Sreznevskii (1812–1880), an ethnic Russian who had arrived in Kharkiv as an infant; his father was appointed professor of rhetoric at the new university. Once a student there himself, young Izmail and four friends became interested

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in heritage gathering in the romantic spirit. While still a teenager, he confessed liking very much “to listen and read something folksy about simple peasants, shy village girls, [and] old women storytellers.”44 It is with this “something folksy” in mind that Izmail Sreznevskii and his friends decided to compile an inaugural work under the unassuming title Ukrainskii almanakh (1831). However, not much in this almanac was conspicuously Ukrainian: of nine prose works, only three were in Ukrainian or dealt with Ukraine; of more than twenty poems, only three were in Ukrainian, and three others were written in Russian on Ukrainian topics. Other than a few folk songs, the remaining contributions were original or translated poems reflecting the editors’ cosmopolitan romantic interests (including an unspecified “American Ballad” and a fragment from Mickiewicz’s signature poem, Konrad Wallenrod, in Russian translation). Yet even this eclecticism was channeled through local culture and demonstrated a creative exchange with Russian and Polish culture. Owing to the almanac’s local focus, contemporaries unambiguously perceived it as “the first sound of the revival of folk poetry, as evidence that Ukrainians were starting … to realize the individual character of their literature” (quoting a leading Ukrainian writer of the time).45 More almanacs would follow. Utrenniaia zvezda (Morning Star; 1834) published seminal short stories by Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnov’ianenko (1778–1843), a founder of modern Ukrainian prose. It also included poems by Hulak-Artemovs'kyi and a Ukrainian translation of Pushkin’s historical poem Poltava by Ievhen Hrebinka (1812–1848). By this time, Izmail Sreznevskii had published a collection of Slovak songs (in 1832) and was busily preparing another project, this one based almost exclusively on “people’s poetry.” The result was the almanac Zaporozhskaia starina (Zaporozhian Antiquity), which appeared in two volumes (each in three issues) between 1833 and 1838 and contained both original folklore and fabrications composed by Sreznevskii. The volumes also published historical sources – chronicles, documents, narratives, and the like – that served as extended commentary to the folkloric materials and were arranged chronologically, from before the Khmel'nyts'kyi uprising (vol. 1) to the death of Hetman Mazepa in 1709 (vol. 2). Sreznevskii also engaged in forgery, for the same reason that others had done before him, notably Scotland’s major poet James Macpherson, in his Works of Ossian (1765), and the Czech “awakener” Václav Hanka, in his Rukopis královédvorský (1817) – that is, in an effort to create the national epic that their national group lacked. The authenticity of some

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of Sreznevskii’s work did not come under scrutiny until the 1870s, so he enjoyed fame as a foremost expert on the Cossack past and Ukrainian folklore for a considerable time. Zaporozhskaia starina was an accomplished synthesis of heroic folk epic (even if fabricated) and early romantic historiography. Regarding the latter, Sreznevskii was most influenced by Istoriia Rusov (History of the Rus' People), which, ironically, was also a work of mystification mixing together fictitious information, stories, and documents. In faking his sources, Sreznevskii sought to “supplement” the scarcity of historical materials (both folkloric and written) regarding the “inner life of the Cossack people.” In the process, the works of amateur writers from the Russian-Ukrainian borderland contributed greatly to the Cossack mythology that underlay the very idea of modern Ukraine. It is their mythologized image of Cossacks and Zaporozhians that united Kharkiv authors with their peers and audiences in other parts of present-day Ukraine, whether in the Left Bank, southern Ukraine, or even the Right Bank, where Polish writers and readers also enjoyed the Cossack-themed works of the Kharkiv Romantics. In this sense, the heritage gatherers from Sloboda Ukraine were instrumental in creating an all-Ukrainian cultural scene during the early decades of the nineteenth century. It then comes as no surprise that another local writer, Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnov’ianenko, descendant of an influential nobiliary clan of Cossack origin, first articulated the validity and viability of the Ukrainian language in literature and social communication: “We should humble and silence those with inexplicable ideas,” he wrote in 1839, “who are publicly preaching that one should not write in a language that is spoken by 10 million people, has its power and beauties that are incomprehensible in another [language], its idioms, humor, irony, and everything that any formal language is likely to have.”46 All in all, it is difficult to overestimate the importance of Kharkiv and its university for Ukraine’s modern history. The case of Kharkiv shows how crucial universities can be for their host cities. Thanks to its university, this modest, peripheral town began to grow precipitously, its population increasing from 10,000 in 1810, to 23,600 in 1840, to 60,000 by the 1860s. Until the 1850s, at least, Kharkiv was also the capital of Ukrainian culture. In that regard it easily outperformed Kyiv, the city at center stage in the epic war between Russian and Polish culture, where intellectuals with a distinctly Ukrainian agenda lacked the self-confidence of their peers to the east. The output of writers and scholars associated with the university at Kharkiv

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was truly remarkable: between 1805 and 1815, the university published 210 titles, accounting for about one-twelfth (8 per cent) of all publications in the Russian Empire during those years.47 For the nascent romantic movement, Kharkiv and Sloboda Ukraine were a poetic heartland that also provided writers and heritage gatherers from all parts of present-day Ukraine with institutional resources, capital, and consumers of cultural products. Nearly a century later, Kharkiv would become the capital not simply of “Ukraine” as a province situated along the Russian-Ukrainian ethnographic borderland but of Ukraine as a political entity, a republic of the USSr (its capital 1917–34). That could not have happened without Kharkiv’s prior status and role as “in a sense, the capital of Ukraine” in the first decades of the nineteenth century.48 Thus, Kharkiv’s self-designation as Ukraine’s “first capital” in the chant popular among local football fans today carries genuine historical depth, perhaps more than they recognize or intend.

o ld r egi me Und e r t h r e a t : Po leS a nd d ece m b r i StS On the morning of 29 December 1825, the sleepy town of Vasyl'kiv just south of Kyiv was overrun by armed men who turned out to be officers and soldiers of the 29th Chernihiv Infantry Regiment. It also soon became known that they had acted against the authorities’ orders in a defiant mutiny. Even greater turmoil had already taken place in St Petersburg, where two weeks earlier, on 14 December, dissident military officers, including the crème de la crème of Russia’s military, had revolted and suffered devastating defeat on the city’s Senate Square by troops remaining loyal to the tsar. Over a thousand people, mostly civilians, had perished. Five leaders of the uprising and the conspiracy behind it would be hanged, and about a hundred more would be sentenced to hard labor in Siberia. The radicalized officers of the Chernihiv Infantry Regiment had resolved to act in reaction to the defeat of the rebels in St Petersburg, called “Decembrists” after the month of their rebellion. About a thousand soldiers and officers had gathered on Vasyl'kiv’s town square to hear a revolutionary proclamation known as the Orthodox Catechism read aloud by the regiment’s priest. The proclamation included unprecedented, radical messages targeting tsarist despotism: “Question. Why are the Russian people and the Russian soldiers miserable? Response: Because the tsars stole their freedom. Question: What kind of

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government is in accord with the law of God? Response. One that has no tsars. God created us all equal, and when He came down to earth, He chose His apostles from the common people, not from the nobles and tsars.” Hence, there was obviously only one way to amend the situation: the soldiers had to rise up against the tsarist tyranny and “restore faith and liberty in Russia.”49 The proclamation was largely the composition of the rebels’ leader, Lieutenant-Colonel Sergei Muraviev-Apostol (1796–1826), a descendant of the Ukrainian hetman Danylo Apostol. The actions of the rebels did not match their revolutionary rhetoric. Having lost a good deal of time in internal squabbles, they moved westward from Vasyl'kiv to the town of Zhytomyr, expecting to unite with other rebel forces there. But before they could reach that destination, they were vanquished by troops loyal to the government. The rebels’ commanding officers, including Muraviev-Apostol and Mikhail Bestuzhev-Riumin, were sentenced to be hanged in the capital, alongside three other prominent Decembrists. At the site of the executions, once underway, Muraviev-Apostol and another officer, the famed poet Konstantin Ryleev, did not hang but fell to the ground – the ropes around their necks were rotted; yet the condemned were not pardoned, as was customary in such cases. One of the men reportedly reacted by shouting out: “Poor Russia – they can’t even put us to death properly!” The second execution effort did not fail. And the scores of Decembrists not hanged but sent to exile and hard labor in Siberia would soon find that their sentences were as fatal as those condemned to the gallows, only slower in execution. The Decembrist rebellion was unique in modern Russian history in that it posed a perilous threat to Russia’s autocratic government. Members of aristocratic families and officers of elite military units had set out to overthrow the government – and even kill the tsar! Russia had not seen an uprising that threatening since the Pugachev rebellion that was bloodily suppressed in 1775. Paul I had been strangled by his own courtiers in 1801, but that was a palace coup, a turn of events quite usual in Russia, rather than a sociopolitical rebellion involving massive conspiracies and the military takeover of town centers. The authorities wanted to make sure that there would be no repetition of that, and indeed there would not be, until 1917. In 1825, however, the Old Regime in Russia had verged on collapse, or at least on a total makeover. Who were the Decembrists, what did they want, and how did Ukraine feature in their plans? The rebels were high-ranking officers in the Russian military, often from prominent aristocratic families, who

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had been influenced by the Napoleonic wars and, as a consequence, saw need for wide-ranging social and political changes in the Russian Empire. Upon returning from Europe after Napoleon’s defeat, these officers were shocked by the contrast between advanced European societies and the Russian reality. Simply put, they saw that the vanquished lived better than the victors, as demonstrated repeatedly in the Russian imperial state and, subsequently, the Soviet one. Initially, the new European ideas spread through a network of masonic lodges scattered across European Russia, where officers and aristocrats became radicalized, exchanging their recent war experiences for visions of change. Many members of the masonic lodges then joined more politically oriented clubs and organizations, which in turn came to define the Decembrist movement. Ukraine was in the center of this development, as gatherings of the men who would become Decembrists began to take place in Kam’ianets'-Podil's'kyi, Tul'chyn, Kyiv, and Vasyl'kiv, all towns with a heavy Russian military presence. Hence, St Petersburg and central Ukraine became the only places in the empire where the Decembrists staged an armed rebellion against autocracy. The town of Tul'chyn was particularly important, since it was the headquarters of the Second Army, many of whose officers had taken part in the Russo-French war. Located in historical Podolia, Tul'chyn was the property of the Potocki family, Polish aristocrats that remained loyal to Russia (although in the 1820s the town’s owner had a serious dispute with Nicholas I, for which he was exiled to central Russia). Nonetheless, Tul'chyn was the place where, in 1821, one of the most important Decembrist organizations, the Southern Society, was formed. The society was headed by Colonel Pavel Pestel, a Moscow-born member of a Protestant German family and hero of the Russo-French war. The society’s members included Sergei Muraviev-Apostol and Mikhail Bestuzhev-Riumin, who would lead the failed uprising of the Chernihiv Infantry Regiment in 1826, in whose aftermath they would be hanged. Despite the part Ukrainian-born officers had in the secret societies, particularly the Society of United Slavs, which functioned in the provinces of Volhynia and Kyiv, the issue of Ukrainian autonomy or independence was barely raised. The Southern Society’s official program, called Russkaia pravda (Russian Law) in clear allusion to the medieval legal code, envisioned Russia’s transformation into a European nation-state patterned on the French Jacobin model; that had no place for separate nationalities or countries. The program stated outright that Little Russia, along with other ethnic peripheries like Finland, Estland,

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Belarus, the Crimea, and Georgia, “never enjoyed, and can never enjoy, sovereign independence and have always belonged either to Russia itself or, at times, if not to Russia then to Sweden, Denmark, Prussia, Poland, Turkey, Persia, or generally to some strong state.” Accordingly, all these regions “had to reject forever the right to a separate nationality.”50 The only exception was Poland, which was acknowledged as a separate nation worthy of independent existence. As leader of the society, Colonel Pestel was in fact prepared to allot a future Poland a good deal of territory, including the Kingdom of Poland, Grodno province, and the Bialystok district; in addition, Russia would graciously agree to cede to Poland parts of the provinces of Vilnius, Minsk, and Volhynia. This pro-Polish stance was probably the result of collaboration between Poles and Russians in Right-Bank Ukraine, particularly in Kyiv, during the famed Contract Fair (Kontrakty). The largest annual fair in Ukraine, it attracted many thousands of participants from across the empire and from abroad, including thousands of Polish landowners. Prince Sergei Volkonskii (1788–1865), one of the leaders of the Southern Society and a Decembrist, recounted clandestine contacts between Polish nobles and Russian officers during the Kyiv fair on the eve of the Decembrist uprising of 1825. During the prince’s stay at the apartment of his fellow officer Mikhail Orlov, they hosted a “circle of educated people, both Russians and Poles, a fairly wide circle on the occasion of the fair.”51 In Kyiv, Volkonskii met Poles from across the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, from Warsaw to the empire’s southwestern borderlands, that is, Right-Bank Ukraine. Uniting the Russian and Polish revolutionaries, Volkonskii later recounted, were ideas about Slavic unity and federalism. Count Gustaw Olizar, a Polish aristocrat and leader of the Kyiv provincial nobility, reportedly exchanged similar ideas with the Decembrists and Russian masons, for which he was briefly arrested in 1826 and then forced to leave for Europe. This forestalled Olizar’s participating in the Polish November uprising of 1830 to1831, in which many Poles who conspired with the Russian Decembrists in the 1820s would later take part. Right-Bank Ukraine was also the site of Polish groups, legal and illegal, whose goal was to restore the pre-partition Polish state or, at least, unite all its lands with the Kingdom of Poland. As things happened, events in Warsaw had a great effect on developments in Ukraine. On 20 November 1830, a young cadet named Piotr Wysocki entered the officers’ school (Szkoła Podchorążych Piechoty) in Warsaw’s Łazienki Park and interrupted its classes with an agitated and somewhat theatrical

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pronouncement: “Poles! The time for revenge has arrived. Today we should either die or gain victory! Let us take action, and let your chests become Thermopylae for [our] enemies!”52 Eighteen cadets responded: seizing arms from the garrison, they marched out and attacked Belweder Palace, seat of the Russian grand duke Constantine, who barely managed to escape (reportedly by dressing as a woman). The next day, the rebels took control of the city with the aid of some fifteen thousand local residents. The revolutionary government hastily appealed to the people of the northwestern and southwestern provinces (i.e., RightBank Ukraine) to join the uprising. Dispatched from Warsaw was a cavalry corps headed by the seasoned general Józef Dwernicki. In the meantime, nobles in the Podolia and Kyiv provinces began organizing local militias to fight the Russian troops (March 1831), and rebel forces soon numbered 3,000 armed men (mostly petty gentry). Despite courageous effort, however, the rebels were defeated. In western Volhynia, General Dwernicki’s corps, lacking local support, had already suffered heavy casualties and was forced to retreat to Austrian-ruled Galicia. By the summer 1831, the Polish national revolution in Ukraine was over. What was the attitude of local Ukrainians to the uprising? The Polish leadership in Warsaw urged the rebels in Ukraine to recruit the support of local peasants by promising emancipation from serfdom. By and large, these attempts failed. Some local peasants did participate in the uprising, however: documents show that of 5,627 rebels, 1,273 (23.4 per cent) were peasants. To attract peasants to their cause the rebels even composed “An Instruction for the Teachers of the Ruthenian People,” as well as a number of “Ruthenian letters” written in Ukrainian in Latin script, calling on the local population to join forces against the Russian government. “Your brothers, the Poles,” proclaimed one appeal, “undertook to unite you with them so that you could enjoy their rights together. And you will be allowed to enjoy these rights if you, dear friends (panove hromada), join hands with your landlords and expel the Muscovites (moskaliv) … because you all are Poles, even though you speak Ruthenian.” This was incredibly wishful thinking on the part of the rebels, since Ukrainian serfs had never felt themselves to be “Poles”: indeed, for them the word “Pole” (liakh) had become synonymous with “landlord” (pan). For their part, local rebel leaders, disregarding dictums emanating from Warsaw, were reluctant to turn their peasants into “Poles” by granting them land (out of greed) or arms (out of fear), and certainly very few landowners were prepared to give them both. Nonetheless, one landowner of a village just 150 km from

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Kyiv parceled out his land among his peasants, drew up a deed, and ceremonially took an oath at a local church swearing to his bestowal. When, as a result, a peasant commune pledged allegiance to the Polish government, the landowner selected able peasants, provided them with weapons and horses, and dispatched them to a nearby rebel assembly point. In a few instances, there were reports of female Polish landowners “fraternizing” with peasants of theirs who had agreed to join the rebel forces. Generally, however, the peasantry simply did not trust the Poles. In fact, from ca. 1813 to 1835, low-intensity warfare between Polish landowners and Ukrainian peasants was common in parts of RightBank Ukraine. The former serf and military deserter Ustym Karmaliuk (1787–1835) proved a master at conducting raids against Polish landlords and became known as the Robin Hood of Podolia. During the 1830s, some 20,000 peasants and army deserters joined his bands at various times to attack nobiliary estates in Podolia and adjacent areas of the Volhynia and Kyiv provinces. For their part, Russian military and civilian authorities encouraged peasants to attack the rebels and hand them over to the authorities, which they often proved eager to do. The authorities also urged peasants not to trust rebellious Polish landlords and instead promised to restore Cossack regiments. In fact, Nikolai Repnin, governor-general of the Left Bank’s “Little Russia” – that is, the Chernihiv and Poltava provinces – organized eight thousand-man Cossack regiments to fight Poles on the Right Bank. As for the Ukrainian intellectuals of Left-Bank Ukraine and Sloboda Ukraine, they were universally pro-Russian and anti-Polish. Petro Hulak-Artemovs'kyi’s poetry well reflected prevailing attitudes. His travestied rendering of Horace’s ninth ode alluded thus to war with Polish rebels and the restoration of Cossack regiments: “Hail, fellows! Let’s drink a cup of tormentil vodka! It will be fine to have fun today… Doesn’t the white tsar caress us? He has ordered not a recruit but the Cossack from us … Now we will destroy the Poles and Turks! Here comes a messenger to [governor-general] Repnin and says: ‘Forget about the Poles now! Because our Khvedorovych [i.e., Ivan Fedorovych Paskevych] squeezed out all the fat from them; and the celebration in Warsaw has already begun.’”53 The reference was to the conquest of Warsaw on 7 September 1831 by Russian troops under Ivan Paskevych, the bloody exploit for which Paskevych was granted a princely title by Nicholas I. As we saw earlier in this chapter, the poet Orest Somov, too, extolled Paskevych as “a son of Cossack glory.”

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No demands specifically related to Ukraine (other than the abolition of serfdom) were made by either the Russian Decembrists or the Polish insurgents. Nonetheless, the two movements had a strong, if indirect, impact on Ukrainian intellectuals and civic activists. They were seen as examples of an active struggle against despotism. Both movements had also deeply shocked a young Nicholas I, who afterward never countenanced dissent of any sort, public or private. For the next few decades, Russia would be a bulwark of reactionary absolutism for all of Europe.

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3 The Age of Romantic Nationalism

ano th er Uk r a i ne, o the r “U k r a i n i a nS” “Polish Ukraine is surrounded by the Dnipro River on the east, the Boh [Southern Bug] on the west, Volhynia in the north, and the Kherson steppes to the south,” wrote the famed Polish author and émigré Seweryn Goszczyński in the 1830s. He went on to describe the region’s diverse geography in this way: The surface [of that part] of Ukraine … encompasses the most charming diversity. Forests and gorges cover the plains that comprise the largest part of that province from the side of the river Southern Bug. Granite rock can be found along the river banks in the vicinity of [the towns of] Uman', Bohuslav, and Korsun. There are pine woods, wooded plateaus, whole rivers amid swamps, as between Moshny and Smila, the magnificent bodies of water of the Southern Bug and Dnipro, numerous ponds, and several lakes, as well as the approaching seas of steppes. In a word, there are sandy banks and the most fertile plains in the world, the most transparent waters and impenetrable swamps, merry woods and primeval forests, quiet valleys and giant hills; there are uncharted forests and boundless steppes – all gathered here as if on the occasion of nature’s conciliatory feast. It comes as no surprise that I consider this country to be the most beautiful in old Poland; it comes as no surprise that such a land influenced its inhabitants and nurtured a people that may be among the bravest.1

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For the Poles, this “Ukraine,” or “Polish Ukraine,” was synonymous with Kyiv province, which in turn consisted of two historical palatinates of the now defunct Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: Kyiv/Kijów and Bratslav/Bracław. To Ukrainians themselves, however, this middle Dnipro region encompassed territories on both banks of the river. Serhii Plokhy has reminded us that the “major Cossack chronicles of the early eighteenth century, including that of Hryhorii Hrabianka – an important source for Cossack historiography of the later period – were full of references to ‘Ukraine,’ used interchangeably with ‘Little Russia.’”2 Yet for the anonymous author(s) of the History of the Rus' People, written during the first decade of the nineteenth century, the term “Ukraine” was a sign of Polish intrigue, since it was used (supposedly) to distance Little Russia and its Cossack aristocracy from the legacy of Rus' and consanguineous Russia. Thus, by the time of the writing of the History of the Rus' People, local elites had ceased to associate the name “Ukraine” with the territory of the former Hetmanate, and some of them even perceived it as a Polish invention. Accordingly, in the early nineteenth century most local observers referred to the lands of the former Hetmanate (Poltava and Chernihiv provinces) as “Little Russia,” while “Ukraine” was reserved for the province of Sloboda Ukraine centered in Kharkiv. Poles, however, continued to refer to Kyiv province as “Ukraine,” as did local peasants. In the 1840s, a native of this “Ukraine,” the aspiring poet Taras Shevchenko, would give this peripheral concept a much broader meaning, extending it to include all the lands that comprise Ukraine today. Subsequently, this historical Cossack heartland would become the poetic symbol of the entire territory, from the Carpathians in the west to the Don River in the east. If these fluctuating geographic parameters seem confusing, the question of who were “Ukrainians” is even more arcane. “We, the Ukrainians [italics added – Sb ], should know what our grandfathers believed long time ago, we should listen to the tales that the old people used to tell. Let’s learn the people’s songs and we’ll get somewhere … For my simple stories a simple language would suffice, because I write the way the old people from Uman' speak. And our Ukrainian people will understand me …”3 The author of these words was Spirydon Ostaszewski (1797–1875), a wealthy Catholic landowner who took part in the Polish November Uprising of 1830–31. This Ostaszewski was so passionate about the Polish national cause that he left his comfortable mansion near the town of Haisyn in Podolia, chose fifty of his best horses (he owned the largest stable in the area), armed fifty

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cavalrymen, and spent the next few months fighting the Russians in the Kingdom of Poland and Volhynia. After spending some time in a Russian prison, he returned to his mansion in Podolia and devoted the rest of his life to his horses and to Ukrainian folklore. In 1850–51, Ostaszewski published a collection of Ukrainian folktales. He also translated Polish poetry into Ukrainian. In the 1860s, he was exiled to Siberia; after his second return to Ukraine, he again took part in various Polish causes. How, then, do we account for the self-identification as Ukrainian that Spirydon Ostaszewski proclaimed in the introduction to his published folk-tale collection, written in Ukrainian, albeit in Latin rather than Cyrillic script? The explanation is obviously that this wealthy Catholic landowner and ardent Polish patriot was concurrently also a Ukrainian. In his choice of identity Ostaszewski was by no means unique among his nobiliary peers. Some of his fellow Polish nobles went so far as to write poetry in Ukrainian, at times imitating or even forging the content of folk songs in an attempt to convey a Polish-Ukrainian unity that did not exist in the original folklore. Of such authors the best known was arguably Tomasz (Tymko) Padura (1801–1871), who was a poet-in-residence of sorts in households of Polish magnates in Right-Bank Ukraine. Padura saw himself as the Polish-Ukrainian reincarnation of the mythical Gaelic bard Ossian, said to have wandered across Ukraine in 1828–29, dressed as a traditional Ukrainian vagrant and singing his own songs for alms; in one such “folk” song Padura referred to Ukraine as “my mother.” The most famous song attributed to him, “Hej, sokoły!” (Hey, Falcons!), included the following refrain: Wina, wina, wina dajcie, A jak umrę pochowajcie Na zielonej Ukrainie Przy kochanej mej dziewczynie

Wine, wine – do pour it out, And when I die, do bury me In green Ukraine Next to my beloved girl

Very influential among authors of Polish romantic literature was the so-called Ukrainian School, which besides Padura included Seweryn Goszczyński, Antoni Malczewski, Józef Bohdan Zaleski, Michał Czajkowski, and Michał Grabowski. Some critics also associate the school with the renowned Polish poet Juliusz Słowacki and the prolific historical novelist Józef Ignacy Kraszewski. All these Poles were either born in Ukraine or had lived there for years. Among them, the writer and adventurer Michał Czajkowski (1804–1886), a political émigré who converted to Islam and later to Orthodoxy, had the most pronounced

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Polish-Ukrainian identity. In addition to historical fiction dealing with the Ukrainian Cossacks, Michał Czajkowski wrote verses in Ukrainian that imitated folklore and sought to promote the idea of PolishUkrainian union. “We’ll make peace with the Poles/ We’ll greet them with our caps/ There’ll be a common thought, a common task/ Warsaw will be our capital.” In an effort to further propagate Polish-Ukrainian reconciliation, a myth about a Cossack named Musii Vernyhora as a people’s prophet was fabricated and nurtured by various authors, from Czjakowski – for instance, in his Wernyhora wieszcz ukraiński: Powieść historyczna z roku 1768 of 1838 – to Słowacki, especially in his poems “Sen srebrny Salomei,” where Venyhora appears as “Pan-Dziad” with a lyre (1843), and Beniowski (1841–46). A person like Vernyhora may have existed in the late eighteenth century, but his “prophecies” of a future unity of Poles and Ruthenians (Cossacks and peasants) against Russia were resurrected by Polish patriots only after the failure of their November uprising (which itself was often embellished with mystical overtones). That future unity presupposed a restoration of Poland in its pre-partition borders, including Right-Bank Ukraine – the provinces of Volhynia, Podolia, and Kyiv, together with the city of Kyiv. Immediately after the defeat of the November uprising, the Russian authorities began to persecute actual and suspected participants. Many intellectuals with strong Polish-Ukrainian loyalties (such as Czajkowski, Goszczyński, Słowacki, and Józef Bohdan Zaleski) were forced to emigrate. Those who remained had to publicly profess their loyalty to Russia. This was true of the writer and critic Michał Grabowski (1804–1863), who had actually opposed the uprising and served on the editorial board of Tygodnik Petersburski, a conservative pro-Russian newspaper published in St Petersburg. Remarkably, Grabowski nonetheless continued to cultivate a personal interest in Ukrainian history and folklore and to befriend young Ukrainian Romantics, among them Taras Shevchenko and, especially, Panteleimon Kulish. As a result of the Polish uprising, many thousands of people, including suspected as well as actual participants, suffered heavily at the hands of Russian military and civilian authorities. As if breaking with what had been Russian autocracy’s main political approach since at least the 1760s – namely, maintenance of a symbiotic relationship with the nobility – the imperial government began to dismantle the intricate structure of Polish nobiliary society, especially in the northwestern (Lithuanian and Belarusian) and southwestern (Ukrainian) provinces. At first, the tsarist authorities seemed to have found a perfect solution: to deport all

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suspected Poles to Siberia or the Caucasus. But what would become feasible for Stalin in the twentieth century was not yet feasible for Nicholas I in the first half of the nineteenth. A more practical solution was to deprive the numerous landless nobles on these lands of nobiliary status. Tsar Nicholas and many who belonged to Russia’s landowning class frowned on this landless szlachta because its existence did not conform to the Russian concept of nobility based on landownership. Using the uprising as a pretext, Nicholas soon launched an attack against landless nobles. Between 1832 and 1850, nearly 340,000 of them were removed from the rolls of the nobility and relegated to the status of smallholders (the so-called odnodvortsy) or state peasants. Many of these déclassé nobles eventually became indistinguishable from the Ukrainian peasants among whom they lived. By the late 1830s, the Polish writer Józef Ignacy Kraszewski was describing the miserable lives of formerly “noble” villagers in northern Volhynia who still called themselves Mazury (a common self-identification among Catholic peasants). Today they all profess Orthodoxy; with peasants, with whom they interact, they share superstitions, for despite their innate pride they had to adopt some beliefs and customs from the peasantry … The nobility speak the Ruthenian language of Volhynia’s peasantry, sometimes using Polish words and old proverbs – traces of their origins and civilization … The appearance of these people saddened me yet also awoke my interest. The state of their barbaric ignorance and, at the same time, their confused aristocratic memories about having a loftier descent, a pride in each gesture and word – all this engendered a sadness that was also caused by their poverty.4 What distinguished these “Polish” villagers from their “Ruthenian” neighbors was that they kept referring to themselves as szlachta and claimed to hold a coat of arms in common (one not to be found in any major heraldry book). While landless and poor members of the szlachta did comprise a majority of the rebels in Right-Bank Ukraine (some 10,000 names appeared in the investigation reports), repressions against them were disproportionately cruel. One administrative measure in particular facilitated the government’s anti-Polish actions: the establishment of the position of governor-general of Kyiv in 1832. This official, usually a Russian general, was to supervise the three provinces of Kyiv, Podolia, and Volhynia, and was to report not to the minister of the interior but to the tsar himself. One

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of the earliest repressions orchestrated by the first governor-general, Vasilii Levashev, was an assault on Polish education in the region. Before the uprising, there were 19 secondary schools for nobiliary youth in Right-Bank Ukraine, run largely by Catholic religious orders. In the 1820s, nearly 5,000 students attended these schools, with many more attending scores of parish schools. The apex of the school system was the gymnasium, which in 1819 became a lyceum, at Kremenets' in Volhynia; it functioned much like a university and became a source of pride for Poles throughout the western borderlands. Known as the Volhynian “Athens” for its liberal and enlightened curriculum, the lyceum educated many prominent Poles, among them Count Gustaw Olizar, a respected leader of the nobility, and the poets Juliusz Słowacki, Antoni Malczewski, and Tomasz Padura. In 1831–32 the lyceum was closed, as were more than 240 other Polish educational institutions, including private boarding schools. The government planned to open, instead, several Russian gymnasiums and dozens of Orthodox parish schools, all of which were to implement a conservative Russian agenda. The next step was an assault on Catholic religious orders. Of the 86 Catholic monasteries in the region, 61 were closed; their most valuable real estate was confiscated and most of their serfs were lost. After these massive anti-Catholic acts, Russian Orthodoxy became the dominant religion on the Right Bank: by 1840, the region had 11,049 Orthodox priests serving in 4,171 churches, and just 603 Catholic priests in 427 churches. The harshest blow was dealt the Uniate or Greek Catholic Church, a target of the Russian government since the late eighteenth century. In 1839 an imperial decree abolished the centuries-old Uniate Church, and its 100,000 faithful – mostly Ukrainian peasants – were declared to be Orthodox instead. The main Uniate monastery (lavra) at Pochaïv, run by the Order of St Basil since 1713, was handed over to the Russian Orthodox Church. Later that monastery would become a major center of reactionary anti-Polish and antisemitic propaganda, especially in the first decade of the twentieth century. One administrative measure was intended to show the serfs that the Russian government, unlike their landlords, cared about their welfare. In 1847–48 a so-called inventory reform, drafted by Kyiv’s GovernorGeneral Dmitrii Bibikov, set norms for corvée (the labor serfs were obligated to perform for their landlords) and defined land tenure for peasant communes. Dissatisfied by these partial measures and angered by landowners who breached the regulations, the Orthodox peasants rose against their overwhelmingly Polish Catholic landlords across

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the Right Bank. What followed was, to quote David Moon, “one of the most serious outbreaks of peasant unrest in the Russian Empire between the Pugachev revolt of 1773–74 and the abolition of serfdom in 1861.”5 There were at least 310 disturbances in 305 villages of RightBank Ukraine in 1848.6 Despite projecting an autocratic paternalism, Nicholas I was reluctant to openly pit peasants against their landlords, whatever the latter’s religion, for fear of undermining the institution of serfdom across the empire. The tsar warned his subordinates that he would “never permit orders from below” and insisted that his subjects had to “wait for [orders] from above.” The tsar specifically ordered that “the slightest spark of insubordination” by the peasantry of RightBank Ukraine be punished very harshly.7 The order reflected Nicholas’s growing fear of a popular revolt like the one that occurred in 1846 in Austrian-ruled western Galicia, during which local peasants, ostensibly provoked by the government, massacred thousands of nobles suspected of anti-Habsburg activities. After 1831 most Polish institutions were in ruin, and the entire society was deeply shaken. The centuries-old Polish civilization in Right-Bank Ukraine was irreversibly damaged. Yet there were Poles who escaped repressions, literally, by fleeing to the West. These early political émigrés, the so-called Great Emigration numbering about 10,000 people, settled predominantly in France, Belgium, and Great Britain, countries opposed to Russia’s autocracy. Many elements separated the political right, left, and center of the Polish emigration, but they were united in their aspiration to restore pre-partition Poland, including its domain over the Ukrainian-inhabited lands of Galicia and Right-Bank Ukraine. Often blind to the Ukrainians’ own aspirations, the Polish political émigrés envisioned this future Poland as a united state. This was particularly true of the democrats among them who were influenced by the French Jacobin example of nation building. Paradoxically, it was conservatives from the circle of Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski who came to recognize Ukraine (Rus') as the third component in the prospective political union of Poles, Lithuanians, and Ruthenians. Michał Czajkowski, a close associate of Prince Czartoryski from the 1830s to 1860s, was responsible for reaching out to the Ukrainians, and to Cossacks in particular. In his view as expressed in 1835, Cossack Ukraine was the perfect embodiment of the true Slavic spirit, and the idea of an independent Poland was thus closely linked to that of a free Ukraine. Czartoryski envisioned the restoration of the Zaporozhian Sich and old Cossack Ukraine – a utopian view, to be sure – and placed

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great hope in Cossack communities both within and beyond Russia: from the émigré groups beyond the Danube under Ottoman rule (the so-called Nekrasovites, remnants of the Zaporozhians and the Don Cossacks), to the Cossacks of the Don and Ural regions, whom he expected to create their own “Don Kingdom” dependent on Poland. Another member of Czartoryski’s camp, centered at the famed Hôtel Lambert in Paris, was Franciszek Duchiński; a graduate of Kyiv University, he regularly signed his writings as simply “a Kyivan.” In 1848 he declared that Little Russia, which he took to encompass the Chernihiv, Poltava, and Kharkiv provinces, “must constitute a separate state.” Duchiński later developed his famous theory of the Asian (“Turanian”) origins of Russians (“Muscovites”), in contrast to that of Ukrainians and Poles, true “Arians” and Slavs. He understood Ukraine to be the true inheritor of original Rus', whereas Russia was merely a usurper of its ancient name. Thanks to Duchiński and Czajkowski, the Hôtel Lambert group saw Ukraine as an important part of a grand geopolitical game and an object of extensive diplomatic efforts, especially on the eve of the Crimean War of 1853–56. During this period, Czajkowski (who from 1841 lived in Istanbul, having converted to Islam and adopted the name Mehmed Sadyk Effendi) began organizing a “Cossack” regiment under Turkish command to fight against the Russians. That regiment of 1,400 soldiers from diverse ethnic groups would play an important role in the 1854 campaign in the Balkans. Czajkowski and other Polish “Ukrainians” might have been driven not just by geopolitics and Polish interests but also a strong nostalgia for a lost Arcadia, the Ukraine of their childhood and youth. On the role of people like Czajkowski and Duchiński in modern Ukrainian history, Ivan Lysiak Rudnytsky once commented: “Ukrainophile Poles and Ukrainians with a Polish background (the dividing line between these two categories was tenuous) made a definite contribution to the making of modern Ukraine which historians have been slow to recognize. Coming from a national society which possessed strong traditions of statehood and active resistance to foreign oppression, they were able to impart something of these qualities to the Ukrainian movement. Their influence helped to lift the Ukrainian revival above the level of a non-political, cultural regionalism, and stimulated its anti-Russian militancy.”8 This would become evident after the mid-nineteenth century with the rise of the Ukrainian populist intelligentsia. In the meantime, however, the Russian government appeared to be the unchallenged master of Ukraine.

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i nv enti ng a n a nci ent a n d h o l y c i t y : th e riSe of k y i v In 1839, Stepan Maslov, a Russian botanist from Moscow who was then in Kyiv, shared these impressions of the city: The mixing of Poles with Russians seemed quite strange to me; even on walks it was noticeable that among them there was not yet uniformity. Generally, Kiev [Kyiv] in its civil life reflects Polish mores: here there is a Polish [rider] with spurs, one coachman with a whip without a foreitor [postillon] steers four horses, with the long reins connected only to the forward [horses]. Among the citizens one more often hears Polish than Russian [spoken]. If it were not for the fact that Kiev was a Russian holy place whose holiness dominated in it and attracted the hearts of Russians, then it would have been simply a city conquered from Poland. But the remnants of the Saints, the magnificent Lavra [Kyivan Caves Monastery], and God’s temples so much occupied the minds of those who came here in pilgrimage that no one pays any attention to the fortress walls, Polish mores, a single Catholic church, and a house for the kontrakty [annual fairs – Sb ]. All this seems to be secondary, tiny. The real might of Kiev is its religious holiness that attracts to itself the hearts of all Russians.9 At around this same time, Mykhailo Maksymovych, rector of Kyiv’s new university and born just across the Dnipro in Poltava province, spoke of finding himself in a city “where there are so many Poles.” Maksymovych’s friend Innokentii (Borisov), rector of the Kyiv Theological Academy and an ethnic Russian, admitted that while Kyiv was indeed the “mother of Russian cities,” owing to the cosmopolitan spirit of its inhabitants, it was hardly suited to be even Russia’s stepmother, given that its population was as mixed as it was. With a population consisting of a “mixture of Russia, Poland, and Little Russia,” he declared, “how can one be filled here with the Russian spirit?”10 How valid were these critical impressions? The Russian reprisals that came in the aftermath of the November uprising affected not only the countryside and the Polish nobles living there but also the city of Kyiv itself, the center of the Russian presence in the southwestern borderlands. After 1831, the province of Kyiv suffered less damage from the Russian repressions, perhaps because Polish

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influence there was relatively weaker than in Volhynia or Podolia and the Russian presence was stronger. Important, too, was that of the nineteen schools that the authorities allowed to remain open, fourteen were located in Kyiv province, and a good number of those were in Kyiv itself. The most prominent of the latter was the Kyiv gymnasium, which had been founded in 1809. Unlike most other secondary schools in RightBank Ukraine, it operated in Russian, and a majority of its students were “Russians” – in fact, Orthodox Ukrainians. The Kyiv gymnasium became the prototype for Russian educational institutions in the region, after the insurgency of 1830–31 gave the imperial government a pretext to dismantle the educational, religious, and cultural institutions that catered to the Polish community. Kyiv turned out to be on the winning side, for it was poised to benefit from the economic decline of the Polish-dominated heartland, on the one hand, and from the government’s new ideological efforts to enhance the city’s profile, on the other. Kyiv’s economy began to profit from the imperial government’s geopolitical and cultural concerns. It is because of those concerns that St Petersburg decided, in the mid-nineteenth century, to curtail the development of Kyiv’s regional rivals, particularly in the town of Berdychiv, where the economic interests of local Polish landowners aligned with those of Jewish entrepreneurs. Until about 1850, Kyiv and Berdychiv were virtually equal in population size, and Berdychiv actually had the larger economy. However, Kyiv would soon come to dwarf its rival, a consequence of the new policies that Russia launched in the southwestern borderlands after its armies crushed the Polish insurgency in 1831. After that year, Kyiv’s new commercial class, consisting mainly of ethnic Russians, was systematically favored with tax breaks and various socioeconomic advantages, while Berdychiv’s growth slowed. A revealing illustration of the new policies was the closing of the Warsaw-based Polish Bank in Berdychiv and the simultaneous opening of an office of the Russian State Bank in Kyiv. In the winter of 1863, a second Polish uprising decided the outcome of this regional rivalry irrevocably. Berdychiv’s commercial and demographic status declined precipitously after a collapse of the economic alliance between the Polish landed nobility and Jewish financiers, who thereafter relocated to Kyiv and Odesa. Kyiv’s position as the capital of the Russian Empire’s Southwestern Region and the seat of a governorship-general (from 1832) enhanced the city’s status still more. The opening of the imperial university in Kyiv in 1834 became symbolic of the Russian victory over the rebellious Poles. The new

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university bore the name of St Vladimir, grand prince of Kyiv and the Orthodox saint whose officially maintained cult accompanied the Russian ideological conquest of the city as well as the southwestern borderlands. In a decree announcing the new university, Nicholas I declared that Kyiv had been chosen as its site because it was “once the cradle of our ancestors’ holy faith and also the first witness of their civil sovereignty.”11 Curiously, the newly founded university was dedicated “primarily to the citizens of the Kyiv, Volhynia, and Podolia provinces” – that is, to the predominantly Polish-speaking and Catholic nobility of Right-Bank Ukraine. The tsar also spoke of that nobility’s “hereditary pursuit of education” and the fact that the former Polish lyceum in Kremenets', with its library, collections, and faculty, was now being transferred to Kyiv. Thus what was once a cherished Polish lyceum became a Russian university. How are we to interpret this paradoxical logic? The official imperial rhetoric tended to falsify origins and distort continuities. The government sought to conceal the lawless arbitrariness with which the Kyiv (St Vladimir) University was being founded and to obscure its origin in the brutal suppression of the Polish uprising. This was precisely the reason why the imperial authorities created the myth that Kyiv was intended to be the site of a university “since olden times,” as the founding decree disingenuously claimed. In fact, the rhetorical profession of such continuity underscored the all-too-real historical discontinuity and accidental origins of the new university, founded as a consequence of the empire’s repression of a rebellion within its borders. The real situation was that anti-Polish factors had played a major role in founding a Russian university in Right-Bank Ukraine. Several scholarly projects, including archival research systematically conducted by Kyivan academics in Right-Bank Ukraine into the 1870s, were now begun in a cultural war against the Poles. For instance, relying on Governor-General Bibikov and having a political goal in mind, Nicholas I in 1843 established the Kyiv Temporary Commission for the Examination of Ancient Documents (Vremennaia kommissiia dlia razbora drevnikh aktov), later known simply as the Kyiv Archeographic Commission. All historical and archaeological research in Kyiv and the empire’s Southwestern Region was placed under the auspices of this institution, which combined scholarship and politics and would continue to function until 1919. Its members, usually historians or legal scholars at Kyiv University, collected (or confiscated) historical documents from the homes of Polish aristocrats and Catholic monasteries

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throughout the Southwestern Region. In gathering and studying these materials, the Kyiv Archeographic Commission’s ultimate aim was to prove that the southwestern borderlands had been “Russian” and “Orthodox” from time immemorial. Although Kyiv University also fostered the natural and exact sciences, which were often taught there by non-Russians (Germans, in particular), its strong ideological mandate was to promote Russian cultural presence in the borderlands. As stated by Sergei Uvarov, Russia’s minister of education, its key political goal was “to efface those characteristic features by which Polish youth differed from Russian … to bring them increasingly together with Russian ideas and mores, [and] to imbue them with the common spirit of the Russian people.”12 An immediate consequence of these cultural politics was an emphasis on the Russian and Orthodox history of Kyiv and the surrounding area. Yet until the early 1860s, despite efforts to curb the social dominance of Poles in the city and region, the university continued to attract Poles from across the western borderlands, and Polish-speaking Roman Catholics formed its largest group of students. It was also reported that university students with different ethnic backgrounds, whether Poles, Ukrainians (primarily from the Left Bank), Russians, or Jews, were remaining apart and aloof from those of other backgrounds, belying Minister Uvarov’s objective “to efface” ethnic differences. Kyiv was not just a real city but a mythological one, and the myth of Kyiv has often overshadowed its urban reality. That myth, essentially of Kyiv as an ancient and holy city and the “first capital” of Russia, was a conservative and at times reactionary basis for an ideological, social, and cultural appropriation of the city and the southwestern borderlands as a whole by Orthodox Russians. It had been known for centuries that Kyiv was indeed a very old city, but recognition of that remained vague and inconsequential until archeological and historical research provided firmer evidence of its “antiquity.” For instance, a church dignitary visiting from Moscow wrote in his diary in 1804: “It is quite remarkable that although the churches of St Sophia, Pechers'k, St Nicholas, and others … are ancient and some are more than seven hundred years old, in which we would expect to find traces of antiquity, yet we clearly see that in all those churches the icons, iconostases, and painted walls all do not manifest signs of antiquity, but rather reveal that they have been painted or wrought recently or in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries.” He added that evidently “various enemy devastations had destroyed everything ancient and forced [the city] to construct everything anew.”13

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In 1835, the botanist Maslov cited above drew a different picture. For him, Kyiv’s sacred and historic secular monuments were melded together into an inseparable whole. He perceived Kyiv as “a living monument of ancient pre-Christian events” encompassing the burial sites of the legendary princes Askold and Dyr and sites recalling the life of the medieval princess Ol'ha/Ol'ga and battles against invading nomads. Mattering even more was its Christian past, especially the Kyivan Caves Monastery (Pechers’ka lavra), St Michael’s Cathedral, St Sophia Cathedral, remnants of the Church of the Tithes and St Irene’s Church, and St Andrew’s Church. “There are so many sacred memories in Christian Kyiv!” the botanist-turned-historian was moved to exclaim. By the mid-1830s, the educated public was assimilating these “memories” as referring to its own ancient, Russian, and Orthodox past. In fact, what changed between 1804 and 1835 was that a few local “antiquarians” and academics had (re)discovered several of the city’s key sights. In addition, historical fiction and imperial ideology, especially during the reign of Nicholas I (1825–55), obsessed as he was with Kyiv, helped map the city’s identity and ideological functions. The city fit well the ideological construct of “official nationality” devised by Sergei Uvarov as Russia’s minister of education. Forming the new ideology of Nicholas’s reign, the theory of official nationality pronounced Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality as the three pillars of imperial rule and set out to combine the dynastic loyalty of old with modern nationalism. It was precisely at this time that the imperial myth of Kyiv began to take its full shape. Afterward it became the norm to view Kyiv primarily as an ancient and holy city, the original center of Russian Orthodoxy, and Russia’s first capital. Kyiv’s own historian, Mykhailo Maksymovych, who taught at its university from 1834 to 1845 and was an early adept of “official nationality,” expressed Kyiv’s new ideological profile best. In a public lecture he declared that Kyiv “to this day has been the main site of Russian holiness” and that it signified “the national authenticity of Orthodox Rus'.” Maksymovych then recounted the most important components of the myth of Kyiv: the spiritual (as the holy city), the historical (as the “ancient” city), and the ideological (as Orthodoxy’s original heart and as guardian against Polish Catholic influence). The myth of Kyiv also had a dark side. In 1870, Andrei Muraviev, an avowed antisemite and Russian-born enthusiast of Kyiv’s “sacred meaning,” accused Jews of turning the “Holy City” into the “capital of the Yids.” Indeed, in late imperial Russia the myth of Kyiv required that Poles and Jews be cast as political enemies of the city and its region.

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One can argue that if it were not for these two groups of “others,” Kyiv could not have been mapped as the ancient and holy Orthodox city that its myth necessitated, and that Poles and Jews served as catalysts for that conservative myth. Subsequently, from the 1860s, Ukrainians would also be seen as alien to this myth, which by the end of the century was depicted as uniting all the most loyal “children of Rus'” (to use Faith Hillis’s metaphor). By the century’s end, many of these “children” had become aggressively antisemitic, anti-Polish, and anti-Ukrainian. Kyiv, whose myth trumpeted the city’s holiness and antiquity, became a focal point for Russian nationalists in their struggle against real and imagined threats, regardless whether attributed to Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, or revolutionaries, and the actions of the last group were often perceived as the work of “aliens” (inorodtsy), here meaning Jews. While Kyiv’s mythology focused on its Russian and Orthodox history, the city’s actual demographic, economic, and cultural profile defied that master narrative. How, in reality, was Kyiv’s population changing during this time? Was the city as thoroughly Russian and Orthodox as claimed? And how Ukrainian was Kyiv, if it was Ukrainian at all? Kyiv’s pattern of demographic growth differed from that of many central and eastern European cities, which in the modern period either evolved from multiethnic into national urban centers indisputably dominated by one ethnic group (for example, Budapest) or saw a bloody rivalry between two distinct nationalities (as in Prague and Lviv). Kyiv’s pattern of development was in fact rather rare: from a small frontier town dominated by Ukrainian burghers, Cossacks, and the local Church, it developed into a multiethnic imperial metropolis under the aegis of Russian modernity. In other words, Kyiv grew from being essentially a homogenous town (although by 1800 some minorities were well established there) into a cosmopolitan metropolis, in which the indigenous and previously dominant group – Ukrainians – became a dwindling minority by century’s end. Until 1835, Kyiv was an autonomous city administered by its magistracy on the basis of the Magdeburg law, the medieval legal system developed to safeguard a city’s internal affairs and legal procedures against encroachments by a feudal ruler or the state. That system also allowed the city to regulate its own demographics, including who could join the municipal commune and artisanal guilds. When the Russian authorities abolished Kyiv’s Magdeburg autonomy in 1835, they began to decide who would be welcome in the city. In effect, the imperial government set out to control and discipline its population by distinguishing desirable from undesirable newcomers and rejecting the latter.

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For instance, in the 1830s and ’40s the government began to encourage Great Russian merchants and artisans to settle in Kyiv and the region, officially to spur its economic development and unofficially to counter the influence of the Polish landed nobility and Jewish financial capital (which was particularly prominent in Right-Bank shtetls – heavily Jewish communities – like the one in Berdychiv). Somewhat earlier, between 1827 and 1835, the central authorities had decided to expel all Jews from Kyiv, having judged them to be undesirable residents. However, in the 1860s the government reversed course and invited Jewish entrepreneurs and skilled artisans to return to the city, so as to bolster the local economy; welcome at all times, by contrast, were German Protestants, who served as military and police officers, civil servants, and professionals. This is how Kyiv became a city of migrants. At the same time, Kyiv’s “native-born” burghers were consistently marginalized, and the city’s population began more and more to reflect the diverse demographics of the borderlands. In 1874, local Ukrainian academics and socialist-leaning activists conducted a pioneering census of Kyiv’s population, both to monitor the rapid social changes in the city and to show that Ukrainians still lived in it. Their data confirmed that speakers of Ukrainian comprised more than 30 per cent of all residents; a considerable additional number of ethnic Ukrainians were classified as speakers of the “common Russian language” (nationality per se was not indicated). The census also showed that Kyiv had become a thoroughly multiethnic city, with Poles and Jews comprising 8 and 11 per cent, respectively, of the population. These findings greatly alarmed Russian nationalists and devotees of the myth of Kyiv. The census had showed that the government could no longer effectively control the city’s population growth, despite its ongoing efforts to “discipline” minorities there, particularly Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians – that is, those whom it did not perceive as loyal “Little Russians.” Why did people come to Kyiv, and what drove its economy? The city’s population grew slowly but steadily: from about 23,500 in 1820, to 50,000 in 1845, to 70,000 in 1863, then to 116,774 in 1874 and 247,723 in 1897. For much of the century, that growth was attributable to the “transport-cost advantages” of waterborne commerce along the Dnipro River. Owing to those advantages, Kyiv had for decades been a transit center for the grain and timber trade. As the center of an imperial province and, from 1832, the seat of the governor-general overseeing the whole Southwestern Region, Kyiv also attracted government investment and officials aspiring to administer it. As a hub of

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education, with its university and gymnasiums, Kyiv annually drew in thousands of students and their families, which greatly spurred local trade and consumption. In the latter half of the century, with the rise of the sugar-beet industry in Right-Bank Ukraine and the expansion of railways, Kyiv experienced a revolution in transportation and marketing. In 1870, the first railroad linked Kyiv with Odesa via Balta on the Right Bank and a second one built the same year linked the city via the Dnipro with distant points on the Left Bank, as far as Kursk. Its location on a navigable river allowed Kyiv to benefit greatly from the new means of transportation. After 1870, the city’s waterfront, including its terminals for steamships carrying passengers and commercial goods, was linked by rail to the agricultural hinterland, cementing its function as a transfer point for agricultural products on their way to seaports on the southwest and northeast. Railroads and waterways also carried goods through Kyiv to the German and Austro-Hungarian empires via the town of Brest-Litovsk (today Brest in Belarus). Spurred by the new railroads and improved infrastructure, the city’s economy continued to be driven by trade in grain and sugar, which in turn attracted countless newcomers, from laborers and artisans to porters, officials, lawyers, bankers, traders, swindlers, and criminals. Kyiv also remained a magnet for religious pilgrims, for whom it was above all a holy city, and for secular tourists intrigued by its architectural and geographical grandeur, rich history, and thriving present. Consequently, until the end of the Old Regime, the city of Kyiv stood at the center of a whole range of dynamic tensions: between myth and reality, between imperial aims and the pressures of borderland demographics, between the urban and the rural, between Jews and Gentiles, between what the city had been and what it was becoming.

th e ma k i ng o f o ne n a t i o n a l i t y i S th e Unma k i ng o f o t h e rS In the spring of 1847, a young man and his eighteen-year-old wife (they had married on 22 January of that year) set out for Prague, where the husband, a promising philologist, was to study Slavic languages on a scholarship provided by the Imperial Academy of Sciences. A research trip to Prussia, Saxony, and Austria was to be their honeymoon. On their way to Austrian-ruled Prague, they stopped in Warsaw, where they were joined by the wife’s brother. Then, suddenly, things went terribly wrong for the newlyweds and their relative: on 2 April, in Warsaw and

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thus still within the borders of imperial Russia, the trio was apprehended by the notorious Russian gendarmes. The recently married young man was Panteleimon Kulish, a recent graduate of Kyiv University who was already an established writer. His young wife had also begun to write, under the pen name Hanna Barvinok. Her brother, Vasyl' Bilozers'kyi, had graduated from university and had a teaching post in Poltava. On 13 February 1847, another young man, newly appointed as professor at Kyiv University, became engaged to his former student at an elite boarding school. Their wedding was to take place a week after Easter, on Sunday, 30 March. The groom-to-be had already found a suitable apartment, near the iconic St Andrew’s Church, with a magnificent view of the Dnipro River and the Podil district. But on the Friday evening before the wedding day, his quiet academic routine was cut short by a visit from several men, among them the Kyiv governor, the head of the police, and a police colonel. They demanded the key to his writing-table, opened it, and confiscated the large pile of papers they found there: it was the evidence they needed to detain the young professor. His wedding was postponed indefinitely. The young man was Mykola Kostomarov, a rising star of historiography. Around the same time, a promising young bohemian artist – who had been born a serf yet, remarkably enough, had studied at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg – was visiting aristocratic friends in northern Ukraine. He was intent on getting back to Kyiv by Sunday, 30 March, to serve as best man at a friend’s wedding there (he had been best man at Kulish’s wedding a few months earlier). En route to the city, as he was crossing the Dnipro River by ferry from the Left Bank, the young man was arrested. He was Taras Shevchenko, and the wedding he had set out to attend was that of his close friend Mykola Kostomarov. Shevchenko was also aspiring poet as well as accomplished painter, and it was his poetry that had got him into trouble. Some poems of his found among Kostomarov’s papers in Kyiv and among Kulish’s and Bilozers'kyi’s possessions in Warsaw had been deemed not simply irreverent but seditious by the imperial authorities. As more arrests were made, even more of Shevchenko’s subversive poems with “the most impudent and outrageous content” were surfacing. All the young men who were arrested (about a dozen) would be investigated because they were suspected of being part of a secret society, which in the Russia of Tsar Nicholas I was a very serious matter. In the end, ironically, Shevchenko was not charged with membership in that group: he was found guilty simply of being a poet. Nor was Kulish

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found to be a member, according to the investigators. It remains striking how unconcerned the alleged members of the secret society seem to have been about their safety, for they had gone about their daily lives entirely normally. Evidently they did not think that their “revolutionary” activity could be of major concern to the government. The secret society under question was the Brotherhood of SS Cyril and Methodius, named in homage to the early medieval monks who had created the Slavic alphabet. Its alternate name, the Ukrainian-Slavic Society, aptly reflected the pan-Slavic ideas of its members and their conviction that Ukraine would become the center of a prospective Slavic federation. Their agenda of Slavic unity was vaguely rooted in eastern European intellectual and political traditions and in precedents like the Society of United Slavs, the Decembrists, the writings of Czech and Slovak Slavophiles (Pavel Jozef Šafařík and others), and the messianic works of Adam Mickiewicz. The Brotherhood of SS Cyril and Methodius was also ideologically aligned with the political program of Young Europe and its explosive mixture of nationalism and democracy. Modeled on the organization Young Italy, which in the 1830s was Europe’s leading movement aspiring to national unification, Young Europe was an international network formed in 1834 by Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872), an ardent advocate of Italy’s unification. Young Europe encompassed the national societies of Young Italy, Young Poland, and Young Germany, which were coordinated and led by a single central committee. Their common goal was promotion of the ideals of liberty, equality, and humanity throughout Europe. That goal stood in stark opposition to the political atmosphere prevailing across much of the continent since the Congress of Vienna, which had been convened in 1815 to reestablish political order through Europe after Napoleon’s downfall. At the forefront of that consolidated effort stood the notorious figure of Metternich, chancellor of the Austrian Empire. It is very likely that the Brotherhood of SS . Cyril and Methodius was influenced to some degree by Mazzini’s ideas and tactics. One contemporary historian has suggested that the Ukrainian brotherhood was connected to Young Europe through its Polish associates, among them Szymon Konarski (1808–1839).14 Konarski, a political émigré following the failed 1830–31 uprising, returned to Volhynia in 1835, having been entrusted with the nearly suicidal mission of fomenting a new uprising. Surprisingly, Konarski’s recruitment campaign was quite successful: he managed to set up conspiratorial cells in several regional centers, including Kyiv, Berdychiv, Zhytomyr, and Kremenets'. Upon his

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arrest in 1839, in Kyiv alone 134 collaborators were detained, among them 34 students of Kyiv University who had formed their own secret society. The scale of the conspiracy greatly alarmed the authorities. A new wave of repressions against the Poles and potential dissent swept Kyiv and Right-Bank Ukraine. The university students suspected of conspiring with Konarski received unusually harsh punishments: eleven were sentenced to death. Six of the eleven later had their sentences commuted to life-long military service in the Caucasus, plus permanent loss of nobiliary status; the other five were conscripted into the army as privates and retained their nobiliary status. Another fifteen students were conscripted into the army with a possibility of promotion; eight more were transferred to the university in Kazan. Kyiv University was shuttered for a semester, and all its students were dismissed. Polish professors who had come to the university in Kyiv from the lyceum in Kremenets' were transferred to other universities or obliged to retire. Despite all these measures, more conspiratorial activity followed in the 1840s, after the Medical-Surgical Academy in Vilnius was closed, and some of its students were transferred to Kyiv. There is evidence of direct contacts between the Polish students, who were seasoned conspirators, and the Ukrainian students associated with the Brotherhood of SS Cyril and Methodius, who were generally novices at forming secret societies. One of the brotherhood’s founding members, Mykola Hulak (1821– 1899), was most likely familiar with student conspiracies and the radical ideas emanating from Europe. Hulak had graduated from the faculty of law at Dorpat (Tartu) University in what is now Estonia, which at the time was the most prestigious and the only German-speaking university in the Russian Empire. The city of Dorpat was known as a breeding ground for various conspiracies and German and Polish secret societies. According to the testimony of a police informer, Hulak himself was “preoccupied with corporations and secret societies.” From 1845 he worked as a translator for the Kyiv Archeographic Commission, the research institution attached to the chancellery of the Kyiv governor-general. Mykola Hulak would prove to be the most radical and stalwart member of the brotherhood: not breaking down during interrogation, he purposely incriminated himself in an effort to save others. Another founding member of the brotherhood withstood interrogation less well, but he would be one of the most important Ukrainian intellectuals of all time. Mykola Kostomarov (1817–1885), whom we last encountered under arrest on the eve of his wedding, was born along the northeastern Ukrainian-Russian borderland, in an area

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that had once been part of Sloboda Ukraine. His was a socially and ethnically mixed family: his father’s family were wealthy imperial landowners, whereas his mother was a Ukrainian peasant born a serf on his father’s estate. Such a mésalliance was not altogether rare in imperial Russia, but it often caused problems for the union’s offspring. Mykola himself was born a serf and remained one until 1832. Nonetheless, he entered Kharkiv University, where he studied world history and classical Greek literature. While there he developed an interest in Ukrainian history, initially through the prism of folklore, under the influence of Maksymovych’s famous collection of Ukrainian folk songs published in 1827. Soon the young Mykola Kostomarov fully embraced Ukrainian identity in its romantic form. As he later confessed, the more disdain for Ukrainians and their speech that he witnessed, the more strongly he “became attached to the Little Russian nationality.” In the late 1830s and early ’40s he belonged to a circle of Kharkiv Romantics and published several dramas and collections of poetry in Ukrainian (although his knowledge of the language was far from impeccable). The experience in Kharkiv shaped his generally populist and romantic outlook and his historical views in particular. The latter emphasized the populist factor in history, along with the concept of a “spirit of the people” which could be studied through descriptive ethnography and folklore. A more radical premise of his concerned the role of Ukrainians in the Slavic world: Kostomarov believed that Ukrainians had been entrusted with a special mission to liberate other Slavs from imperial despotism and serfdom, a belief that found its fullest expression in the ideology of the Brotherhood of SS Cyril and Methodius. In June 1846, following a short stint of teaching at a gymnasium in the city of Rivne (Rovno) in Volhynia province, Kostomarov was appointed assistant professor of Russian history at the university in Kyiv. That year, he founded the Brotherhood of SS Cyril and Methodius, together with Hulak and Bilozers'kyi. The three young academics surely did not imagine that their informal society would determine not only the life course of each of them but also the history of modern Ukraine. It was Kostomarov who set the brotherhood’s agenda in a manuscript with the Biblical title Knyhy bytiia ukraïns' koho narodu (Books of the Genesis of the Ukrainian People), in the Ustav Slov' ians' koho tovarystva sv. Kyryla i Metodiia (Statute of the Slavic Society of SS Cyril and Methodius), and in two proclamations, all of which were written in 1845–46. The brotherhood’s ideology combined elements of Christian

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historiosophy, democratic republicanism, romantic populism, messianism (patterned on Polish models, especially that of Adam Mickiewicz), and Pan-Slavic federalism. This ideological mixture marked the arrival of Romantic nationalism in Ukraine, and several of its elements would continue to characterize the Ukrainian movement well into the twentieth century. The brotherhood’s statute presented a democratic Pan-Slavic agenda and had these major points: Slavs are predestined to establish political and spiritual unity; each Slavic tribe should be independent; each tribe should have a government based on complete equality; and governance, laws, and education should be based on the teachings of Jesus Christ. Ukrainians were expected to create their own state within a Slavic federation, in what was arguably the first assertion of Ukraine’s political sovereignty in modern history. The ideas of the Brotherhood of SS Cyril and Methodius were in many ways revolutionary; also, as was often the case in Ukrainian (and Russian) history, many had already been tried by the Poles. As Kostomarov anonymously argued for a sovereign Ukraine, a decade had passed since Polish émigrés like Michał Czajkowski and Franciszek Duchiński had voiced the same idea. Kostomarov’s Books of the Genesis of the Ukrainian People was also indebted to Polish literature, for that work was a creative adaptation of Mickiewicz’s famed messianic treatise, Księgi narodu polskiego i pielgrzymstwa polskiego (Books of the Polish People and of the Polish Pilgrimage, 1832). Kostomarov’s work imitated the messianic spirit of Mickiewicz’s original as it traced Ukraine’s place in the history of the world from Biblical times to the ancient Greeks and Romans to the French Revolution. It paid particular attention to Slavic and eastern European history; Poles were featured prominently but not positively, in contravention of Mickiewicz’s message. According to Ukrainian historiosophy, Ukraine was essentially the most democratic and egalitarian nationality and was best symbolized by the Cossacks, but it was also the most victimized one in the history of humankind. Ukraine had united voluntarily with Poland and later with Russia, only to suffer under the repressive yoke of each. In other words, the democratic essence of Ukraine had brought about its national victimization, because neither the Polish gentry (together with the Jesuits) nor the tsars of Muscovy could tolerate Ukraine’s freedom, in which “all were equal and free.” This was a utopian vision of the country’s past, to be sure, but also one that underscored the democratic credentials of Ukraine as a country and its self-proclaimed new representatives, the romantic intelligentsia. The brotherhood was ready to

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make Ukraine a cornerstone of an expected Slavic and all-European federation of peoples, a futuristic vision but also one anticipating the Springtime of Peoples of 1848. At a time when every European radical was decrying the partitions of Poland as a political crime perpetrated by absolutist regimes, the Brotherhood of SS Cyril and Methodius made the case that Ukraine was the earliest victim of the crime of geopolitical partitioning, one in which, shockingly, Poland itself was a perpetrator. “And the Polish landlords with the Moscow tsar see that one cannot do anything with Ukraine and said to themselves: there will be no Ukraine either for you or for me, let’s tear it in half, as the Dnipro had divided it,” declared Kostomarov in the Books of the Genesis of the Ukrainian People, alluding to the notorious Andrusiv truce of 1667 between Poland and Muscovy. “The Left Bank will go to the Moscow tsar for nourishment and the Right Bank to Polish landlords for plundering … And Ukraine had fought for fifty years the most holy and glorious war for freedom in history, whereas the partition of Ukraine is the worst act that can be found in history.”15 The 1667 partition of Ukraine was interpreted as the predecessor of the partitions of Poland in the late eighteenth century, itself a symbolic punishment for the sufferings of its “sister” Ukraine that had once wanted to introduce social equality to Poland. Ukraine was no less historical than Poland and Russia, contrary to the then-developing concept of “historical” and “non-historical nations” (as presented in Hegelian and Marxist thought). And Ukraine’s historicity was not to be measured in terms of upper classes, monarchs, or the state for that matter – a drawback for the romantic populists – but by the existence of liberty and equality. The Books of the Genesis of the Ukrainian People also put forward a new vision of Ukrainian identity, one drastically different from the concept of the “Little Russian nation” represented by the aristocratic heritage gatherers. It is important to emphasize that that generation, which belonged to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and whose crowning achievement was the Istoriia Rusov, shared the principles of the rational Enlightenment and had a worldview based on historical legitimacy. In arguing for Little Russia’s liberation, they referred to political treaties and legal documents of the past that had guaranteed liberties to the “Cossack nation.” The breach of those legal agreements by the Russian side was sufficient reason for the Little Russian upper class (or what was left of it) to seek redress from Russia. By contrast, legal arguments were unimportant to the Romantics

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belonging to the Brotherhood of SS Cyril and Methodius. For them, the imperative for Ukraine’s liberation derived from the new principle of national self-determination. Each ethnic community had a natural right to national sovereignty. Unlike the Little Russian aristocrats that had become embedded in the imperial Russian social system and culture, the new romantic intelligentsia felt increasingly alienated from the imperial order and from Russian culture, even though a considerable number of its members were employed by Russia’s Ministry of Education. After the mid-nineteenth century, it was Kostomarov and his peers who formed the backbone of the nascent Ukrainian intelligentsia. Also, in contrast to the earlier heritage gatherers’ pessimism regarding the future, the romantic nationalists belonging to the brotherhood were remarkably optimistic. They also liked to adopt a prophetic tone: And Ukraine will rise from her grave and will again call on all her brother Slavs, and they will hear her cry, and the Slavs will rise and there will be no tsar, no prince, no count, no duke, no his excellency, no lord, no boyar, no serf, and no slave – not in Muscovy, not in Poland, not in Ukraine … Ukraine will be a sovereign republic in the Slavic union. Then all peoples, in pointing to that place on the map where Ukraine is delineated, will say: behold, the stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.16 As envisioned by the Romantics, this new identity was defined in terms of social equality and reinforced by a strong Christian message: “a true Ukrainian, no matter what his descent is, common or noble, should not love either tsar or landlord, but should love and remember the only God, Jesus Christ.” By the same token, the Ukrainian landlords supposedly established by the decrees of Catherine II were an impossible contradiction in terms: as imagined by the romantic nationalists, the Ukrainian nationality was fully egalitarian and could not have a nobiliary or upper class of any sort. Catherine II was described in the most unflattering terms and held wholly responsible for introducing social divisions into the egalitarian Cossack community: “the German tsarina, Catherine, a universal whore, atheist, and a murderer of her husband, finally destroyed the Cossack Host and liberty, because having selected those who were superior in Ukraine, she granted them nobility and lands and handed the free people over to them in bondage, and she turned some into lords, while others into slaves.” Whether that characterization was historically true clearly did not concern Kostomarov

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or the Romantics. What mattered was the new ethnolinguistic concept of Ukrainian identity, in which “Ukrainian” was now preferable to “Little Russian.” This new identity, based on language and ethnicity, also had social and geopolitical implications, since it embodied social equality and the national principle in international relations. The world now consisted of distinct nationalities, and the dynastic empires had become obsolete. This meant the rejection of both the Russian Empire and Polish national ambitions to restore Poland in its historical, pre-partition borders. At the same time, Poland and Russia were both sources of influence and objects of rejection for romantic nationalists, who had begun to realize that in order for some nationalities to be made, others had to be unmade. Examining the Ukrainian-Polish-Russian triangle, Roman Szporluk formulated his seminal thesis on the making and unmaking of nationalities.17 The making of a “small” or new nation meant the simultaneous unmaking or transformation of another, already existing nation. In consequence, the latter, although preserving the name of an “old,” big,” or “historical” nation, was now in reality a new community. Thus the making of Ukraine, Slovakia, and Bohemia also brought about a transformation of the pre-modern Polish, Russian, Hungarian, and German nations. Szporluk rightly suggested that the new project of instituting a separate Ukrainian nationality spearheaded by the Brotherhood of SS Cyril and Methodius was simultaneously also a rejection of the “all-Russian” nation and historical Polish nation that claimed large chunks of present-day Ukraine. In reality, the brotherhood existed for only about a year (1846), and its activity consisted mainly of a dozen young people debating cultural, social, and political issues in an informal setting. In that case, were the imperial authorities greatly overreacting in meting out harsh punishments to its members? Ukrainians have long lamented the fate of these young men, but was their fate really so terrible, compared to that of other accused rebels and conspirators? Hulak and Kostomarov received the harshest sentences: the former was sentenced to three years of imprisonment in the notorious Schlüsselburg Fortress, and the latter to a year in the scarcely less brutal Peter and Paul Fortress. Afterward both were exiled to the interior of Russia, where they served in local government for several years. Most of the brotherhood’s other members were also exiled to Russia’s inner provinces and put under police supervision. These sentences, however severe for the accused, were exceptionally mild compared to the punishments meted out to the Poles

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(that is, to Konarski and his fellow conspirators) and to some Russians: for instance, in 1849 Dostoevsky and members of the Petrashevsky circle in St Petersburg were sentenced to death, which at the last minute was commuted to hard labor in Siberia. Why were Ukrainians treated so differently? Perhaps the authorities did not take the brotherhood as seriously as it seemed. More likely, however, is that they did not want to antagonize those Little Russians who remained loyal to the empire and were needed as allies against the Poles. That was probably why Tsar Nicholas himself decided to conceal the most radical ideas espoused by the brotherhood from his own senior officials. That was also why Kostomarov was urged by the secret police to rewrite his candid confession so as to eliminate all allusions to separatism. A note made by the Russian secret police speaks of this clearly: “The application of repressive measures will make for them [Ukrainians] the banned ideas even dearer and will likely put the so far obedient Little Russians in the position of irritation at our government, similar to that of the Kingdom of Poland after the mutiny. It would be more useful and wiser not to show to the Little Russians that the government had ever doubted that no harmful ideas had been sown among them and instead to take measures contrary to those taken in the Kingdom of Poland.” Despite the brotherhood’s informal organization, its ideas greatly outlived its limited existence and became a foundation for the building of modern Ukraine. For its members in Kyiv, the abrupt end put to their debates was, in retrospect, a baptism by fire. One of them, in particular, would experience more than a fair share of that fire: he was Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine’s greatest poet.

fr o m S erf to Pr o Ph e t : the i m Pro bable c a Se o f t a r aS S h e v c h e n k o According to reports in the media, the American singer-songwriter Neko Case was very surprised to learn that the surname of the former “girl wrestler” Ella Waldek, then 76, had once been Shevchenko. The information made Case yell out “Hey, that’s my [family] name. Nobody has that name!” Her family’s surname had been changed before Neko was born, and it would later turn out that Ella Waldek was Case’s great-aunt.18 Of course, not all people with the surname Shevchenko are related. Indeed, most have never met, for Shevchenko is one of the most common surnames in Ukraine. But one bearer of that name has become synonymous with Ukraine itself – the poet, painter, and prophet

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Taras Shevchenko (although the footballer Andrii Shevchenko may be better known internationally). The romantic age sought prophets, and the designation was often bestowed on exceptionally visionary poets and artists. Taras Shevchenko’s poetic vision, together with his dramatic biography, make him uniquely worthy of the role of national prophet of Ukraine. Born a serf in Right-Bank Ukraine and orphaned in childhood, young Taras would become a bohemian painter and literary celebrity in the most select artistic salons of St Petersburg, a career path hardly conceivable for someone of his social background. The formation of a genius – and Shevchenko was undoubtedly a genius – is a complex, even mysterious process. Also unclear is what mattered more in his case, nature or nurture. In much of populist and later Soviet tradition, Shevchenko was regarded as a poet of the people who perfectly expressed the peasant mindset because he had imbibed it with his mother’s milk – or, at least, through the folklore to which he was exposed in childhood. Yet, as Omeljan Pritsak reminded us in his study Shevchenko-prorok (Shevchenko the Prophet),19 much of Shevchenko’s populist worldview and his poetic artistry came from his continuous encounter with literary culture, encompassing Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, and western European literature. At age fifteen, Taras left Ukraine to accompany his master to Vilnius (Wilno), then a center of Polish culture in the Russian Empire. Because his master’s wife wanted a portrait painter, young Taras, who had shown an aptitude for drawing, was there sent to study with the then fashionable Austrian-Italian painter Francesco Lampi, known in Polish as Franciszek Ksawery Lampi (1782–1852). This happened during the time of the Polish November Uprising (1830–31), and the aspiring young painter, still a serf, found himself surrounded by the democratic and socially progressive ideas of Polish radicals. Many of them were students or graduates of the university in Vilnius, which was Adam Mickiewicz’s alma mater and a major center of Polish revolutionary activity. Perhaps even more fateful for Taras was time he spent there with his Polish girlfriend Jadwiga, also known as Dziunia. In order to converse freely with her, the young serf taught himself Polish. Together they read Mickiewicz, Polish revolutionary pamphlets, and the writings of Joachim Lelewel, the historian and ideologue of the Polish uprising, just as the Romantics and other young romantic couples were doing across the former Polish lands. According to Pritsak, two of young Taras’s experiences in Vilnius proved especially crucial: first, his relationship with Dziunia, who was

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poor but not a serf, as he was; second, his firsthand knowledge of the Polish revolt against the Russian Empire, especially the dethronement of Nicholas I as Polish king. In other words, Shevchenko learned the value of personal freedom; he also recognized that the Russian tsar was a foreign despot and Russia itself was a proverbial prison of nations. He also realized that the Polish revolutionaries’ slogan Za wolność naszą i waszą (For our freedom and yours) was equally applicable to Ukrainians. Taras Shevchenko spent the next dozen years in St Petersburg, half of them as still the property of Vasilii Engelhardt, the vain Russian aristocrat and landowner who was his master. Engelhardt was now even more determined to profit from his serf’s artistic gift, since the fashion for “in-house artists” among serf-owning landlords had increased. Thus he apprenticed Shevchenko for four years in the workshop of the “guild master-painter” Vasilii Shiriaev. Apart from studying and working on art projects (for example, he drew the original sketches of all the ornaments and arabesques made to adorn the ceiling of the Bolshoi Theater), the young Ukrainian provincial became acquainted with other Ukrainian expat artists, most notably Ivan Soshenko. It was said that Soshenko came across Shevchenko by chance in the city’s Summer Garden, while Taras was drawing the garden’s famous statues of mythological Greco-Roman and symbolic characters. Soshenko took the aspiring young artist under his wing and introduced him to other Ukrainian artists and intellectuals, including ones influential in the capital’s public sphere. Those Ukrainians tended to cluster around Ievhen Hrebinka (1812– 1848). Originally from Poltava province, Hrebinka was a poet, publisher, teacher, and fixture in the capital’s bohemian circles. Another influential compatriot, Vasyl' Hryhorovych, was secretary of the Imperial Society for the Encouragement of the Arts and served as conference secretary for the Imperial Academy of Arts; these two art institutions would soon be instrumental is transforming the enserfed and shy Taras Shevchenko into a rising star in fine arts. From connections such as these, it was evident that a Ukrainian network was not only still active in the capital but also capable of facilitating the careers of new arrivals. In 1838, Taras entered the premises of the Imperial Academy of Arts, the empire’s most prestigious art school, and began to study under Karl Briullov, the fashionable artist whose “The Last Day of Pompeii” was the most famous painting in Russia at the time. As Shevchenko later described that experience: “as if on wings, I, a wretched untidy creature, flew from a dirty attic to the magical halls of the Academy of Arts.” It was indeed a Cinderella story.

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The real magic in that story would be Shevchenko’s liberation from serfdom. It was accomplished through a highly imaginative buyout that was the brilliant idea of his high-society supporters. In 1838, following that plan, Karl Briullov painted a portrait of the famed Russian poet (and tutor of the tsar’s children) Vasilii Zhukovskii. In a lottery the portrait was then sold to the tsar’s family, and the income from its sale – 2,500 rubles – was used to purchase Shevchenko’s freedom from Engelhardt. The young artist’s education would now develop in full measure. From 1836 to 1840, while continuing to attend classes at the Academy of Arts, Shevchenko also engaged in a program of self-education, particularly at Hrebinka’s rich private library. There the young bohemian discovered that Ukrainian folk songs were popular among writers, and he began to study the collections of these songs published by Tsertelev and Maksymovych. It was Hrebinka who gave Shevchenko a copy of Kotliarevs'kyi’s Eneïda to read along with the writings of the Kharkiv Romantics, most notably those of Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnov’ianenko. Hrebinka also acquainted the young artist with Ukraine’s history through Bantysh-Kamens'kyi’s History of Little Russia. A real discovery for Shevchenko, however, was the handwritten copy of the History of the Rus' People he received from Mykola Markevych in 1838. Taras was now increasingly turning from painting to poetry, and he would apply the historical ideology of the History of the Rus' People – the narrative of a sovereign nation that had entered into contractual arrangements with its neighbors – to his strongest poetic cycle, titled “Try lita” (Three Years). We know that Shevchenko also avidly read Edward Gibbon’s classic History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in French translation, with the help of his Polish roommate. Thus, paradoxically, it was in St Petersburg that Shevchenko discovered not only Ukraine’s modern culture and historiography but also its “nationality,” largely through the collections of folk songs that the heritage gatherers had published there and in Moscow. Taras’s writing of poetry began around 1837, and it was what would lead to his becoming a prophet and martyr. But first, owing to his poems, he became a celebrity in the literary and artistic salons of St Petersburg. Frequenting the salons were the empire’s most prominent artists, critics, and public figures, among them Vissarion Belinskii, Mikhail Glinka, Karl Briullov, Fadei Bulgarin, Osip Senkovskii, and Count Fedor Tolstoy. How did the emanicipated serf get into that company? That was due partly to his well-connected friends, such as Hrebinka, but mostly to his new-found glory as a poet. In April 1840, Shevchenko published his

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now legendary collection of poems in his Kobzar, which immediately became a sensation in St Petersburg and Ukraine. Although written in Ukrainian (causing Belinskii to complain that the poet had wasted his talent), the collection was universally seen as the work of a brilliant poet. Even Osip Senkovskii, a critic skeptical about Ukraine’s past and culture, wrote that “no matter in what language [Shevchenko] writes, he is a poet, and … there is a seal of poetry on each of his works that appeals directly to the heart.” It was the greatest praise that a romantic critic could give. At this same time, Shevchenko was transforming himself: from being primarily a painter and essentially an artisan, he was becoming a visionary poet – according to some of his contemporaries, a creator possessed. If the first option had offered the possibility of a comfortable life through lucrative commissions, life as a poet was typically a miserly existence insofar as income was concerned. The romantic concept of having a calling – what in German was referred to as a Beruf or Ruf Gottes an die Menschen – encompassed being both a poet and a prophet. In 1843, Shevchenko, now a young man of twenty-nine, woke to his calling as Ukraine’s prophetic poet. After an absence of a dozen years, it was time, he felt, for him to be in Ukraine again. He returned to Ukraine that same year, and there he met the educated class of old Little Russia, chiefly landowners in the Chernihiv and Poltava provinces and descendants of Cossack officers, who were his readers. Although he befriended dozens of these people, he remained highly critical of them, as belonging to a class that owned human souls and was largely subservient to St Petersburg. Nonetheless, Shevchenko was greeted enthusiastically everywhere he went in Ukraine and acclaimed as its new national poet. In June 1843, for instance, about two hundred people, most belonging to wealthy noble families, attended a ball held in the poet’s honor at the rural mansion of a general’s widow. “A number of pretty women,” wrote one person in attendance, “recited to him by heart excerpts from his works, and he particularly praised the purity of [their] Poltava speech.” There Shevchenko met the son of the Kapnist who had once gone to Prussia with a political mission on behalf of Ukraine. The junior Vasyl' Kapnist, who had been a Decembrist and was imprisoned for a time in the Peter and Paul Fortress, introduced Shevchenko to one of the most important persons in Little Russian society, the former governor-general of Little Russia, Nikolai Repnin-Volkonskii (1778–1845). An ethnic Russian, Prince Repnin had married a granddaughter of Ukraine’s last hetman,

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Kyrylo Rozumovs'kyi. As governor-general (1816–34), he had consistently advocated for the rights of his Little Russian clients and even reacted favorably to the autonomist movement. His rural residence at Iahotyn, just east of Kyiv, combined the traditions of the autonomists and heritage gatherers, on the one hand, and the Decembrists (his exiled brother, too, had been one), on the other, and served as the last center of old Ukrainian autonomist thinking. More remarkably, the old aristocrat accepted Shevchenko as an equal, even as a son, and his daughter Varvara became Shevchenko’s lifelong friend and guardian angel, particularly during his future long years of exile. By establishing personal relations with people like Repnin and Kapnist, Shevchenko linked the new world of Romantics and populists with the older one of Little Russian autonomists and heritage gatherers. Between 1843 and 1845, Shevchenko composed his most significant poetic works, many of which carried a strongly prophetic and radical political message, among them Son (The Dream), Kavkaz (The Caucasus), and Zapovit (The Testament). It is these poems that got him in trouble with the authorities once they discovered them in 1847. In his The Poet as Mythmaker, one of the best analyses of Shevchenko’s poetic world, George Grabowicz reconstructed the poet’s myth of Ukraine, in which Ukraine was not a real place, territory or country but rather a state of being at present and a form of ideal existence in the future. Hence, in Shevchenko’s work history, present, and future were all intertwined. What mattered to the poet as mythmaker was not the rational individual but an idealized community, one often associated with the allegedly egalitarian Cossacks, whose collective truth was to be channeled through a prophet – that is, Shevchenko himself. In social terms, the poet placed his “beloved Ukrainian brotherhood (bratiia)” opposite the “disgusting and ungodly lords (panstvo)” in a manifestation of his spontaneous anarchism. In 1844, the poet-prophet in the making linked his poetic passion about Ukraine’s past to his skills as a graphic artist: the result was an album entitled Zhivopisnaia Ukraina (Picturesque Ukraine), which contained six etchings depicting historical, fairy-tale, and everyday scenes. Significantly, it was Ukraine as a land of Cossack glory centered on Kyiv and its holy places (for instance, the Vydubychi Monastery) that became a symbolic focus for Shevchenko as a painter, poet, and prophet – and thereby for his audience. From this point on, Ukraine gradually replaced Little Russia as the object of loyalty for all modern nationalists, who permanently parted ways with the so-called “all-Russian nation.”

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In March 1847, while again in Ukraine, this time as a painter for the Kyiv Archeographic Commission and newly appointed teacher of drawing at Kyiv University, Shevchenko was arrested. It was not a direct political message in his poetry nor his friendship with members of the Brotherhood of SS Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood that had led to his arrest. Rather, it was the personal attack on Nicholas I and his wife that Shevchenko made in his fiery “political” poem Son that enraged the tsar: And, behold, Tall and grimly sullen He strides out, and at his side The Tsarina comes, poor thing, Like a dried-up mushroom, lanky, And all bone and skin, And moreover, the poor creature, Is troubled with the Twitch. So this is what a goddess is! Gracious! You poor wretch!20 The official charge against Shevchenko cited poems in the Little Russian language having “the most outrageous content.” He was also accused of bemoaning “the alleged enslavement and woes of Ukraine,” glorifying the Hetmanate administration, and pouring disdain and disregard on “persons of the Imperial House” with “incredible audacity, slander, and bile,” instead of expressing gratitude to them for having redeemed him from serfdom. The punishment meted out to Shevchenko for these transgressions was exceptionally harsh: he was made a private in the military, specifically in the Orenburg Special Corps, and sent to serve in a remote region along the Caspian Sea. Nicholas I himself decreed that he was forbidden to write, draw, or paint while in military exile. But Shevchenko would defy that prohibition, and he would make his way back from exile. Instead of silencing the poet, his travails in exile produced a martyr as well as prophet who would inspire future generations of fighters against autocracy. In decades to come, scores of Ukrainian, Russian, and Jewish radicals with Shevchenko’s Kobzar in one hand and Marx’s Capital in the other would set out to rouse Ukraine’s peasants and workers against Russia’s Old Regime, right up to its collapse in 1917.

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wa S th ere a r evo lU ti o n in U k r a i n e i n 1 8 4 8 ? In 1848, the French did it again: once again they rose in revolution, as they had in 1789 and 1830. The people of France – mostly artisans, workers, and the urban poor – again battled on the streets against what they deemed to be forces of reaction and despotism. The figure of bare-breasted Marianne, leading rebellious crowds and personifying the values of the nurturing republic, had become a symbol of the struggle for liberty in 1830 and was again at the forefront in the first months of 1848. After February, when the revolution ended the Orléans monarchy and led to the creation of the French Second Republic, the revolutionary movement subsequently called the Springtime of Peoples spread across Europe. While more radical socialist demands and workers’ groups would suffer defeat, more moderate liberal and middle-class forces would soon be victorious on much of the continent. Great Britain and imperial Russia were among the few countries that did not experience revolutionary events that year, for separate and different reasons. As for Ukraine, did revolution-fomenting Marianne make an appearance there at all? As part of the Habsburg Empire, western Ukraine was exposed to all the important sociopolitical and cultural ideas appearing in Europe, and a call for revolution to wrest rule from the Old Regime was one of them. Yet, if western Ukraine experienced a revolution of any kind in 1848, it was a strange one. The province of Galicia had been ruled by the Habsburgs since 1772. As John-Paul Himka has reminded us, Galicia did not have a good reputation in the empire. For instance, the Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek, in his farcical novel of World War I, The Good Soldier Švejk, would describe one of his characters, Major-General von Schwarzenberg, as having “a mania for transferring officers to the most unpleasant places. On the slightest pretext, an officer was already saying goodbye to his garrison and was on his way… to some drink-sodden, forlorn outpost in the filthy wilds of Galicia.”21 The “filthy wilds of Galicia” existed in reality as well as in literature, despite serious attempts by Empress Maria Theresa and then Emperor Joseph II in the late eighteenth century to improve local conditions. Galicia, the largest Austrian province, was also among the most multiethnic, with Roman Catholic Poles and Greek Catholic Ruthenians (most of whom would chose to become Ukrainians by 1914) accounting for over 40 per cent of the population, respectively, and Jews accounting for another 10 per cent. The figures below reflect the numerical strength, in general, of Galicia’s major communities in the first half of the century:

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Table 3.1 | Composition of Galicia’s population by nationality, 1825–57 Year

Poles

Ruthenians

Jews

Total

1825

1,800,000

1,740,000

270,000

3,850,000

1846

1,994,802

2,441,771

335,071

4,875,149

1857

1,981,076

2,085,431

448,973

4,632,866

Source: Himka, “Dimensions of a Triangle,” 26.

Despite the legal equality of Greek Catholics and Roman Catholics in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the socioeconomic status of Ruthenians never approached that of Poles, and it worsened in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The dominance of Polish culture in the region was not seriously questioned, and in the 1830s, on the eve and in the aftermath of the Polish uprising in the lands of neighboring Russia, it only increased. Polonization had taken place for centuries, so that by the early nineteenth century most Ruthenians belonged to various categories of the peasantry, with an additional very thin layer of clergy. Chłopy i popy (peasants and priests) was how Poles mockingly described traditional Ruthenian society. In fact, the Greek Catholic (or Ruthenian) clergy was far from uniform in composition or standing. Its elite included Basilian monks, who monopolized episcopal offices and were by culture, if not ethnicity, largely Polish. Parish priests, by contrast, were poor, badly educated, and socially inferior; culturally they remained largely Ruthenian, although many preferred to refer to Polish books rather than Church Slavonic or Ruthenian ones. If anything, the polonization of educated Ruthenians only intensified in the 1830s. For instance, Greek Catholic seminarians and many parish priests were known to embrace Polish culture, political values, and nobiliary manners. As one witness later recalled, the wife of one Greek Catholic priest (its clergy could marry) “began to dress up like some countess in hats, scarves, and fashionable dresses,” and in her home conversation “was in Polish; the upbringing and conduct of the children in the house was also Polish.”22 Simply put, the Polish language meant high culture and

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Europe, whereas the Ruthenian vernacular implied the backward world of illiterate peasants and linked Ruthenians suspiciously with Russia. Observing Galicia in around 1830, it could well be imagined that in two or three generations, Ruthenians – at any rate, educated ones – would become true Poles. But that did not happen, in part because of the activities of local heritage gatherers and early romantic enthusiasts. Father Ivan Snihurs'kyi (1784–1847), whose education and career benefited considerably from Habsburg reforms that revitalized the Greek Catholic Church, personally provided valuable institutional support for heritage gathering, education, and even new romantic literary works by Ruthenians in Galicia. Educated in Vienna himself, he taught theology at Vienna University and was later appointed bishop of Peremyshl' (Przemyśl) in eastern Galicia (1818–47). A staunch promotor of education for Ruthenians, in 1818 he founded a teachers’ college and began to provide generous stipends for Ruthenians aspiring to serve the Church or the state. Despite nearly unanimous opposition from the Polish nobility at the Galician diet, Snihurs'kyi pushed to increase the number of the elementary schools in the Ruthenian countryside and was successful in opening some 400 new ones. In Peremyshl' he also presided over a group of learned priests engaged in heritage gathering and writing. The group produced grammars of a “literary” Ruthenian language that was a mixture of the spoken vernacular and Church Slavonic. However, neither that macaronic language nor literary works written in it (mostly religious poems) satisfied the new romantic generation of Ruthenians raised on German and Polish secular literature that included such luminaries as Goethe and Mickiewicz. Nonetheless, thanks to Snihurs'kyi these young Ruthenians were not alienated from the Ruthenian cause. The first group of Ruthenian romantic writers to appear in Galicia, the so-called Rus'ka triitsia (The Ruthenian Triad), were supported both materially and morally by Bishop Snihurs'kyi. The threesome that became known as the Ruthenian Triad came together sometime around 1832 and soon also drew in about twenty young people (seminarians and priests), of whom a good number were also involved in the Polish national underground. However, the mid1830s was also a time when some young Ruthenians were deciding to break with Polish culture and society: they were students of Lviv’s Greek Catholic seminary, in training to become priests at an institution where European Romanticism, Polish patriotism, and democratic pan-Slavicism were also in the air. Markiian Shashkevych (1811–1843),

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the aspiring and charismatic priest who was the leader of the Ruthenian Triad, was also a talented poet and among the first educated Ruthenians to begin writing in the local vernacular. Choice of language was in itself a critical issue. Iakiv Holovats'kyi, the second member of the Ruthenian Triad, complained that “Poles want to force us to accept Poland as our fatherland”: he forcefully added his own belief that “on the Rus' land, from the Rus' root, under the Rus' sky, there will be and there should be Rus' flowers and fruits.”23 But how was literary horticulture of that sort to be cultivated on native Rus' soil? That was not known. Breaking with the Polish culture that had become native for most educated Ruthenians was sure to be a painful process. For instance, educated Ruthenians, including members of the Ruthenian Triad, published their works in Polish journals, worked on academic and literary projects at the Ossolineum (the foremost Polish research center and library, which was founded in 1817 and opened to the public in Lviv in 1827), and generally knew literary Polish better than the Ruthenian vernacular. On top of that, it was unclear what the contemporary Ruthenian language was, or what it should become. Officially, in German, called ruthenisch (Ruthenian), the language used in education and writing in Galicia (by priests, primarily) was in fact a local variant of Church Slavonic known at the time as SlavenoRusyn. In essence it was a dead language spoken neither by priests, who preferred Polish, nor by the common people, who spoke a local vernacular. It also proved ill-suited to expressing modern concepts and secular ideas. But what was an alternative? The local vernacular lacked a proper grammar, and the question of whether it should be rendered in the old Cyrillic alphabet (based on Church Slavonic) or a modern Cyrillic (civic) script or even the Latin alphabet was a matter under debate. Questions of orthography and alphabets were escalating into a contentious political matter. In that linguistic impasse, Shashkevych made a strong case for using the Ruthenian (Galician-Ukrainian) vernacular in the Cyrillic (civic) script in his polemical tract Azbuka i abecadło (1836), published by the press established in Peremyshl' by Bishop Snihurs'kyi. Concurrently, and as a counterweight to the dominant Polish influences, Shashkevych’s generation was introducing Galicia to the new literature coming from Russian Ukraine, beginning with handwritten copies of Kotliarevs'kyi’s Eneïda. Another strong influence emanated from local folklore: the first collection of Ruthenian folk songs was published by Wacław Zaleski (Wacław z Oleska) as Pieśni polskie i ruskie ludu galicyjskiego (Polish and Ruthenian Songs

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of Galicia, 1833). It did not matter that Zaleski was a Pole and former governor of Galicia who considered Ruthenian to be a dialect of Polish. Important was the fact that Vienna, as the capital of a multiethnic empire, was a place where intellectuals of various Slavic ethnicities – Czech, Slovak, Croatian, Slovenian, and Ruthenian – could meet and collaborate. Individuals like Josef Dobrovský, Ján Kollár, Pavel Šafárik, and Jernej Kopitar were seasoned national “awakeners” and role models for their less experienced Ruthenian peers. The Ruthenian Triad’s crowning achievement was the publication in 1837 of a relatively small (82-page) volume titled Rusalka Dnistrovaia (Nymph of the Dniester). It included romanticism’s greatest hits – that is, folk songs and some original poems by Shashkevych and his two compatriots. There were two truly revolutionary things about this otherwise modest publication. First, it used the spoken Ruthenian vernacular phonetically, thereby setting standards for what would become the Galician Ukrainian literary language. Second, in the work’s brief preface the editors declared that they belonged to a common cultural space with Ukrainians in Russia: “Benevolent fate permitted among us, too, the appearance of collections of our folk songs and other good and important products.” The words “among us” and “our” referred almost exclusively to the publications of folklore and literary fiction in the Russian Empire by Ukrainian (“Little Russian”) authors. These included Kotliarevs'kyi’s infamous Eneïda (St Petersburg, 1809), Kvitka-Osnov’ianenko’s Little Russian Tales (Moscow, 1834), the poetry of Petro Hulak-Artemovs'kyi and Tymko Padura, and the collections of Ukrainian folklore published by Prince Tsertelev, Mykhailo Maksymovych, Ievhen Hrebinka, and Izmail Sreznevskii (four volumes of his Zaporozhskaia starina). The sad fate of this enterprise and its founders reflected how difficult it would be for the new romantic generation of Ruthenians to succeed in the public space of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, dominated as it then was by Metternich’s reactionary agenda and Galicia’s own narrow-minded and cautious Greek Catholic establishment. Owing to this combined pressure, Rusalka Dnistrovaia could not be published in Galicia; it could appear only in the other half of the empire, in Buda, the capital of Hungary, where censorship was more lax. Once the work was actually published, only two hundred copies reached readers in Galicia. To complicate matters further, all three members of the Ruthenian Triad suffered personal consequences owing to its publication. Markiian Shashkevych was sent to a remote parish, where he soon perished (of

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exhaustion, it was said). The clerical careers of Iakiv Holovats'kyi and Ivan Vahylevych were greatly circumscribed, to the extent that Vahylevych converted to Lutheranism in the 1840s and apparently embraced Polish national identity. It seemed that nothing could help the development of the nascent romantic nationalist movement among the Ruthenians. And then the Poles did it again, just as the French had: they rose in insurrection. And that, paradoxically, would benefit the Ruthenians, much as the defeat of the Polish November Uprising of 1830–31 had benefited Ukrainians in the Russian Empire. The bloody events of 1846 in the western (“Polish”) half of Galicia altered the balance of power in the province once again. In reaction to the constant maltreatment of serfs by their landowners, and spurred by the so-called Cracow Uprising in February of that year, a rebellion referred to as “the Galician massacre” resulted in the plunder of more than five hundred estates of the nobility and the murder of thousands of nobles, including some left-leaning reformers who had genuinely sought to abolish serfdom. What was most shocking to Polish society was that it was the Polish peasants often idealized by romantic writers who had massacred their “consanguineous” Polish nobles. The uprising and massacre showed the weakness of Polish radicals in the region and heightened the Austrian authorities’ suspicion of Poles. Through the remaining first half of the nineteenth century, the relationship between Poles and Austrians continued to be complex and uncertain. The aristocratic Polish oligarchy retained its loyalty to the government. Although Galicia’s key offices in Galicia remained in the hands of AustroGermans and German-speakers, Polish landowners still had informal power and dominated the Estates of Galicia (1817–45); as a parliamentary body lacking any real power (it was limited to sending petitions to the emperor), its chief achievement was probably establishing the Ossolineum as a major library and research institution. Initially, most representatives at the Estates were conservative aristocrats, but in the 1830s and ’40s they came to include more progressive members, who debated the abolition of serfdom and in 1845 even voted in favor of its abolition (though lacking authority to implement it). Even though the Estates were deprived of real power, the parliamentary body served as a training ground for cadres of a future Polish administration of Galicia. Unlike members of the landowning elite, wide circles of the nobiliary youth were becoming increasingly radicalized during the 1830s and ’40s, and many would reject not only the Austrian government but also German culture altogether. One radical Pole went so far as to compose

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a verse imitating a Ukrainian folk song: “Slavdom is our mother, /Our father is in heaven /All the Slavs are our brothers, /Only the German is a dog.”24 Fatefully, however, the Polish radicals failed to reach out to the Polish peasants, let alone Ruthenian ones, as the events of 1846 made clear. The Austrian government would turn that failed opportunity to its advantage. In the wake of 1846, instead of siding with Polish patriots against the ruling Austrians, Ruthenians energetically began to seek the government’s protection against what they saw as continual Polish oppression. For instance, in a polemical piece titled “The Situation of Ruthenians in Galicia,” Iakiv Holovats'kyi, formerly a member of the Ruthenian Triad, sharply criticized both the Polish oligarchy and the local Greek Catholic establishment for keeping Ruthenians at the level of “Barbarians … without literature, without journals, without schools.” Yet not only did Holovats'kyi abstain from criticizing the Austrian government, but he urged it to support Ruthenians as a reward for their loyalty and resolve in the face of Polish “revolutionary intrigues.” Oddly enough, Holovats'kyi, who would later become an ardent Russophile, dismissed the validity of any Ruthenian sympathy for Russia, owing to the harsh plight of its serfs and the much worse conditions of Orthodox priests there than of Ruthenian priests in Galicia. Moreover, “Muscovitism swamps everything … The centralizing Russian government looks askance at the emergence of a Little Russian literature.” He concluded that “by favoring Ruthenian literature [in Galicia], Austria could exercise influence on Little Russia,” in effect calling for a return to the pro-Ruthenian policies of Joseph II.25 Holovats'kyi’s article appeared under the symbolic if not very imaginative pseudonym of “H. Rusyn [the Ruthenian].” Luckily, in their early attempts at nation building the Ruthenians and Holovats'kyi in particular found an important ally in another group of Slavs – the Czechs. Arguably the most advanced Slavic community in Europe, the Czechs had their own interethnic troubles (with Germans, in their case) in Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia. Nonetheless, the Czechs took the Ruthenians under their wing, and it was a Czech intellectual employed as an Austrian bureaucrat in Galicia who introduced the two surviving members of the Ruthenian Triad, Holovats'kyi and Vahylevych, to prominent Czech literati and journalists. Among these was Karel Havlíček Borovský (1821–1856), who sympathized fully with the newcomers on the national scene: he referred to Ruthenians as “a lamb between two wolves” (meaning Russia and Poland) and urged Austria to support them as a means of influencing Ukrainians in Russia.26

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In the end, the Austrians did just that. In 1847, Count Franz Stadion was transferred from Trieste to Lviv as the new governor of Galicia. He was entrusted with the mission of using the loyal Ruthenians against the untrustworthy Poles, in a classic instance of the ancient imperial game of divide et impera. Meanwhile, the revolution in Vienna was escalating quickly and incrementally. Between 6 and 12 March 1848, educated urban professionals – lawyers, doctors, professors – began to circulate petitions demanding the immediate implementation of civil liberties (freedom of press, civil rights, trial by jury), constitutional reform, and emancipation of the peasants. On 13 March, students and workers clashed with troops in central Vienna, and this time the government capitulated. Chancellor Metternich, long the symbol of reaction, resigned; press censorship was ended; and permission for the convocation of a constitutional assembly (Reichstag) was granted (although workers could not vote). Finally, in May, serfdom was abolished. Developments in Galicia kept their own pace. On 16 April 1848, Governor Stadion abolished serfdom in his province – weeks earlier than anywhere else in the empire – in an effort to secure support for the government from both Ruthenian and Polish peasants. Polish nobles and professionals embraced the revolutionary spirit immediately: they founded a Central National Council that demanded extensive autonomy for Galicia and formed a National Guard to defend the revolution. However, when their council claimed to represent both Poles and Ruthenians, the Poles were taken aback to learn that the Ruthenians had no interest in this. It was at this point that Ruthenians became involved in a “strange” revolution. That revolution was strange because it was imposed on them from above by the Austrians themselves. Upon learning of the Poles’ demands and initiatives, Governor Stadion began to encourage the Ruthenians’ meek clerical leadership to formulate their own demands. Ironically, Stadion was not sure who the Ruthenians in fact were, so he asked their representatives directly: “Are you and Great Russians one and the same nation?” Alarmed, the Greek Catholic priests hastily replied “No!” But, as it turned out, they themselves were not altogether sure who Ruthenians actually were. On 19 April, the clergy sent the Austrian emperor, Ferdinand, a petition calling for the recognition of the Ruthenian nationality and the formal division of Galicia into Polish (western) and Ruthenian (eastern) parts, a proposal that Stadion himself had put forward earlier. On 2 May 1848, the first legal Ruthenian (by default, Ukrainian) political organization, the Supreme

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Ruthenian Council (Holovna Rus'ka Rada), was established under the leadership of Greek Catholic clerics. The Ruthenians were now obliged to decide who they were, and quickly. In the first version of its manifesto, the Supreme Ruthenian Council opted for a local, Galician identity, modestly declaring “We belong to the Galician-Ruthenian nation that numbers 2.5 million people.” By its final version, however, the manifesto had expanded to also include in its newly imagined community Ukrainians (Little Russians) from Russian Ukraine: “We Galician Ruthenians are part of a great Ruthenian people that speaks the same language and numbers 15 million, of whom 2.5 million live in Galicia. At one time our people were independent and the equal of the most powerful peoples in Europe; we had our own literary language, our own laws, and our own rulers …”27 Now, the Rutheninans’ demographics definitely looked far greater, their history more glorious, and their future more optimistic. Regardless of their attainment through the Austrians’ help, several new achievements suddenly brought Ruthenians within the framework of modern politics. In addition to the establishment of the Supreme Ruthenian Council as the Ruthenians’ first legal political body (it soon expanded into fifty district councils), there came a milestone election to the imperial parliament (Reichstag) in the spring of 1848, publication of the first Ruthenian (Ukrainian) newspaper Zoria Halyts'ka (Galician Star; 1848–52), appointment to the first chair of Ruthenian language and literature at Lviv University, and the first mass campaign among Ruthenians, demanding the division of Galicia into Polish and Ruthenian parts (with the collection of 200,000 signatures!). The parliamentary experience they had been exposed to proved particularly important for the Ruthenians, even though the parliament itself was short-lived (it was dissolved in less than a year). Twenty-five Ruthenian deputies from Galicia, of whom fifteen were former serfs, had taken part in it! One of them even gave a speech in broken German, praising the emperor of Austria-Hungary for the granting of liberty, while blaming lords and landowners for continuing to exploit their former serfs instead of paying them indemnity. In the Russian Empire, by contrast, Ukrainians would have to wait another fifty-seven years for an opportunity to deliver a similar speech before a parliamentary body. In the “Austrian” half of the Habsburg Empire, the revolutionary experiments ended by the fall 1848 (in Hungary they ended by the summer of 1849). Still, the Ruthenians of Galicia benefited greatly from that “strange” revolution. Encouraged by the Austrian authorities, they

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had emerged as a new nationality, and this gave Poles reason to protest that the Ruthenians were invented by Governor Stadion (to whom one historian, Lewis Namier, referred as “one of the most enlightened and efficient of Austrian administrators”). It is hardly surprising that when violent clashes broke out in Austria’s major cities, Ruthenians did not rush to fight against the government. In November 1848, when Lviv became the site of an armed struggle between Austrian troops and Galicia’s National Guard staffed with Polish revolutionaries, the Ruthenians stayed home: this was not their war (even though Lviv, a city they shared with the Poles, was heavily damaged). It was in part the Ruthenians’ rejection of the revolution launched by the Poles that made a separate Ruthenian national movement in Galicia possible. In this sense, Ruthenians could be said to have behaved like counterrevolutionaries. In fact, Ruthenians responded enthusiastically to the emperor’s call for the creation of provincial national-guard units: in January 1849, they formed a special military unit called the Ruthenian Sharpshooters (Ruthenische Bergschützen) with the specific goal to defeat the “arrogant” Hungarian revolutionaries. The revolution of 1848 did take place in western Ukraine, and the Ruthenians were directly affected by it. Although they did not “make” a revolution in 1848 in the way that the Poles, Hungarians, Austro-Germans, and Czechs did, in that year the Ruthenians of Galicia got their first taste of liberty – a limited one, to be sure, but liberating and exhilarating nonetheless.

4 The Age of Reforms

tr a d i ti o n verSUS mod e r n i z a t i o n Somewhere in rural Ukraine, soon after the death of her father, a welloff Cossack, a girl named Olesia met a young fellow whom she fell in love with at first sight. Their love story was far from romantic, however, and it did not proceed happily. It so happened that her beloved was not a free Cossack, as Olesia was, thanks to her father, but a serf owned by his landlord. If she married a serf, Olesia would bring shame on herself, her family, and her fellow villagers, all of whom also belonged to the Cossack stratum. The young members of her Cossack community went so far as to surround her home, shouting “We won’t let her go, we will not! The daughter of a free Cossack must not become a serf, casting ridicule on herself and shame on her village!” But Olesia defied them and married her beloved, thereby immediately becoming a serf herself. Before she gave birth to their first child, the couple’s landlord evicted them from their home, saying he needed it for another serf family. In years to come, and especially during harvests, Olesia had to work her master’s land while her small children remained untended. The money she had inherited from her father ran out, and the family was desperately poor. To make matters worse, her husband was forced to accompany his landlord to Moscow, leaving his family behind. He died in Moscow without ever seeing his wife or children again. More years passed, and Olesia’s adolescent children, obliged to serve the landlord’s children, left her too. After the death of her husband Olesia had legally ceased to be a serf, and she could have reclaimed her status as a free Cossack. But she did not know the law and so continued to live on her landowner’s property. When a sympathetic burgher tried to hire Olesia

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as a nanny for his children, her landlord’s wife demanded an unreasonable sum of money to let her go. As time went on Olesia’s health declined precipitously, owing to her unrelenting burden of hard work. As she lay dying, the landlord’s wife refused to allow Olesia’s son to visit her, and she died alone. If this tragic story sounds like fiction that is because it is fictional, related in the short story “Kozachka” (Cossack’s Daughter) by Marko Vovchok (1833–1907), the pioneering female writer whom educated contemporaries called the Ukrainian George Sand. Yet the story had a realistic component, in the light it shed on the actual divisions in Ukrainian rural society in pre-reform times and especially on the unfortunate life of its serfs. Ukrainian literature is replete with tales of serfs suffering at the hands of their noble landowners (whether Russian, Polish, or Ukrainian), and Marko Vovchok’s story, first published in 1857, was but one of many. The world it depicted was a daily reality for almost half of Ukraine’s population before the reforms of the 1860s. In that world, traditional institutions like serfdom hardly changed at all. Historically, tradition and modernization have clashed everywhere in the world, but that clash was particularly dramatic in tsarist Russia. As the pace of reforms grew, the more resistant the forces of tradition seemed to become. Despite a series of reform efforts by Russian autocrats, especially Peter I, Catherine II, Alexander I, and Alexander II, much of Russian imperial society and economy remained unchanged, as if impervious to real reform. Apart from the limits on modernization inherent at the pinnacles of Russia’s imperial administration, certain local conditions shaped Ukraine’s traditional socioeconomic order. Serfdom remained Ukraine’s most conspicuous marker of tradition, not only in comparison with Europe but with Russia as a whole.1 For instance, in 1859 the Russian Empire’s total population stood at 67,081,167, of whom 23,069,631, or 34 per cent of the population (in European Russia, 37 per cent) were serfs. Despite a considerable decrease in the percentage of serfs in European Russia overall, from 44 per cent in 1833 to 37 per cent in 1859, in Ukraine that figure remained high: on the eve of the emancipation, serfs comprised 41.5 per cent of the population of the nine “Ukrainian” provinces (or 5,310,440 people of ca. 12,785,000). In Right-Bank Ukraine, the percentage of serfs among all peasants was particularly high: 78.5 per cent in Volhynia, 83.8 per cent in Kyiv, and 87 per cent in Podolia, for an average of 59.5 per cent in Ukraine overall. Of all the imperial provinces, the province of Kyiv had by far the largest serf population: there the number was 1,121,062,

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followed by 1,041,051 in Podolia and 864,161 in Volhynia. These three provinces were among seventeen imperial provinces of the forty-eight comprising European Russia in which serfs were more than half of the entire population: 59.5 per cent in Podolia, 57.6 per cent in Kyiv, and 56.5 per cent in Volhynia. In the Left-Bank provinces, by contrast, serfs comprised only 37.4 per cent of the population in Poltava and 37.6 per cent in Chernihiv; in the provinces to the south and east, those percentages were still smaller: 31.5 in Katerynoslav, 31.2 in Kherson, 29.7 in Kharkiv, and only 5.9 per cent in Taurida province.2 Remarkably, about 34 per cent of all serfs in Right-Bank Ukraine belonged to just 240 landlords.3 How unfortunate was it to be a serf in Ukraine? It was undoubtedly a very difficult life, for serfs were completely dependent on their landlords. A serf’s landlord could confiscate all his property, sell him or members of his family individually (until at least 1833), or sell his entire village. Technically serfs were tied to the land, but in reality they were bound to the person of their landlord. A serf could be lost in a card game; his landlord could punish him physically or dispatch him to Siberia or conscript him into the military service as a recruit (between 1827 and 1846, nearly 4,000 serfs were sent to Siberia by their owners). Beginning in the 1830s, there were legal limits on the kind and amount of physical punishment that a landlord could inflict on his serfs: for instance, no more than 40 blows by rod, 15 blows by cane, and no more than two months’ imprisonment in the village jail. However, zealous nobiliary landowners often exceeded the legal limits, and the authorities largely turned a blind eye to the excesses. Contemporaries habitually used a term for slavery in speaking about serfdom, as Vasyl' Kapnist famously did in his poem “Ode on Slavery” (1783) and the Russian author Alexander Radishchev did in his deceptively sentimental Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow (1790). Yet serfdom was fundamentally different from slavery – American slavery in particular: serfs had some legal protection from brutal treatment; they had to provide their own sustenance; they paid their landlord only a certain portion rather than the whole of whatever they earned in money or goods. Their situation was worse in some parts of Ukraine, particularly on the Right Bank, where serfs were obliged to work unpaid on the landlord’s land three or, during harvest, as many as six days a week. The social world of serfs could at times be quite complex. One former serf described the intricate situation around some rural properties in Sloboda Ukraine that were owned by a wealthy Russian magnate and

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absentee landlord. A large village and surrounding farmsteads, with a total population of ca. 20,000 people, were administered by two levels of authority: the owner’s estate manager, who fulfilled the landlord’s wishes and commands and was responsible for production and profitability; and a local commune, which decided more mundane matters, such as the allocation of work among serfs and the provisioning of recruits. The commune’s decisions were virtually all made by a group of wealthy serfs called “town-dwellers,” or meshchane – an absurd misnomer for people who were both serfs and country folk. Some of the so-called town-dwellers were better off than the true meshchane who were the urban burghers, and a few were even better off than many nobles. One memoirist gives this description of serf “town-dwellers”: They were mostly involved in trade, and many possessed considerable capital – anywhere from one thousand to two hundred thousand or more rubles. Their main trade was in grain, tallow, and skins. As for their ways, nothing good could be said about them. These characters were degenerate Little Russians, ridiculed as renegades who had picked up nothing but vices from the Moskals [Muscovites]. Inflated by their wealth, these Little Russians had contempt for those below them, that is, for people who had less than they did … They lived ostentatiously, trying to imitate town-dwellers, dressing in elegant zhupans [tunic-like coats] and mixing Little Russian with Russian style. Frequently they threw drinking parties. Their homes were decorated lavishly but without taste.4 Of course, these village oligarchs did not work on their landowner’s land; like most other local serfs, they paid their owner a rent-in-kind, or quitrent, rather than perform corvée. The memoirist quoted above is Alexander Nikitenko (1804–1877). His father was unique among serfs without belonging to the group of well-off serf “town-dwellers.” As a teenager the elder Nikitenko sang in his owner’s famed choir, became literate, and even learned French. Later, he became a scribe (senior clerk) in the village and key administrator responsible for thousands of people. A man passionately committed to justice and fairness, he got into a fight with his village’s corrupt oligarchs and was stripped of his position by his despotic owner. Afterward the elder Nikitenko worked as a village teacher and also occasionally tutored the children of neighboring landlords, who eventually helped him get work as an estate manager, an incredible promotion for a serf.

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Yet, despite the privileged position an estate manager usually held in rural society, his son Alexander was denied admission to a gymnasium because he too was a serf. That denial pushed the ambitious young Alexander to the brink of suicide, and he even obtained a gun, with two bullets, for that purpose. Luckily, his blossoming literary talent came to the attention of some prominent Russian intellectuals, including the poet Vasilii Zhukovskii, and Alexander Nikitenko was freed from serfdom, as Shevchenko would be a decade later. No doubt our memoirist was exceptionally able as well as very fortunate, for he subsequently became an intellectual fixture in the Russian literary world, a professor at St Petersburg University, and a respected imperial censor. Although a demonstrably loyal and successful imperial subject, this Nikitenko later accused the government he served of treacherously imposing serfdom on free Ukrainian settlers, bluntly declaring that “Russian policy turned [Ukrainians] into serfs.” He went on to describe what harm “peasants suffered under the oppression of slavery” at the hands of their landowners, including subjection to forced labor, inhumane treatment, and sexual debauchery.5 In addition to these well-publicized ills of serfdom per se, the relatively slow growth of the general population and in the number of serfs in particular was attributable to man-made and natural calamities, including wars, famines, and epidemics. The 1830s, for instance, were marked by not only warfare but cholera epidemics (1830–31), bad harvests, and famines (1833–35, 1839). The 1840s proved particularly deadly for peasants, owing especially to the famines of 1843–46 and a widespread cholera outbreak in 1848–49. That year, 668,012 people across imperial Russia died of cholera, and the Ukrainian province of Katerynoslav was particularly hard hit: it reported 116,157 fatalities, or 13.25 per cent of all residents, most of them peasants. Notably, between 1812 and 1859 the number of male state peasants, who lived on state-owned lands and were not enserfed, increased by 69.5 per cent, whereas the number of serfs grew by only 4.2 per cent.6 Soviet historians usually attributed this sharp difference chiefly to a greater exploitation of serfs by their landowners, who demanded more unpaid corvée labor in response to the growing demand for grain on global markets. However, David Moon has offered what may be a more accurate explanation: by the mid-nineteenth century the number of serfs fell radically because tens of thousands of them became state peasants or transferred to other social estates, as the government made it easier for serfs to buy their freedom or landlords themselves freed their serfs for

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economic or abolitionist reasons. Also, every year many were drafted into the army and thus legally ceased to be serfs.7 Yet, as noted above, in Ukraine both the absolute number of serfs and their proportion of the population remained high, constituting telling evidence that modernization was penetrating the Ukrainian countryside only very slowly. As for the cities and towns in Ukraine, the Russian government sought to increase control over urban residents by first limiting and then abolishing traditional institutions of municipal self-government. With the abolition of Magdeburg law in Ukraine (Kyiv lost it by 1835), the social order in urban areas began increasingly to conform to the Russian norm, which held burghers to be a marginalized group. Also, in Russian-ruled Ukraine urbanization was exceedingly slow; by contemporary European standards, even its largest cities were relatively small. An unusual instance of impressive urban growth was the population of the city of Odesa, founded in 1794 by Catherine II, which by 1860 reached 112,500; by contrast, Kyiv had only 55,000 inhabitants, and Kharkiv had around 50,000. As late as 1897, less than 16 per cent of Ukraine’s population lived in cities and towns, and ethnic Ukrainians comprised only one-third of urban residents (more about this in chapter 7, below). What were the reasons behind these statistics? Before the 1860s, there were relatively few social or economic incentives for rural people to move to urban centers, and ethnic Ukrainians, in particular, were reluctant to become urban dwellers. Also, serfs could not, of course, leave the land at will. As for free peasants, when faced with overpopulation in the countryside, they preferred to seek out new agricultural lands, often in remote areas, rather than move to cities within Ukraine. Was that because of a mystical, innate attachment to the soil, or were there more rational factors at play? One rational factor had to do with the nature of serfdom in Ukraine. As Bohdan Krawchenko has pointed out, in Ukraine, with its rich black soil, landlords required their serfs to pay their duties in labor – that is, in corvée – rather than in monetary rents earned from doing other work, such as in crafts or trade. Consequently, Ukrainian serfs (and, after 1861, freed peasants) did not migrate to towns, as did their peers in Great Russia – that is, in the traditional homeland of ethnic Russians. In this context, one can even speak of Ukraine’s being afflicted by the black-soil curse. In contrast to Russia, where rural folk increasingly acquired skills as artisans or as service, industrial, or commercial workers, peasants in Ukraine stayed on the land; if they did move, it was to migrate to the southern steppe region and

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continue to work on the land there. Annually, nearly 90,000 peasants left Poltava province alone in search of a living in southern Ukraine (New Russia), the Crimea, or along the Don River, where they grazed cattle, cut hay, harvested grain, and fished. The local workforce could not fill the labor needs of the industry and commerce developing in Ukraine’s larger cities. Consequently, instead of employing local, unskilled laborers from the countryside, industrial capitalists imported already skilled workers from ethnic Russia, thereby contributing to the russification of urban areas. In addition, in the practice of crafts and trade across Ukraine some government policies favored ethnic Russians. Patricia Herlihy rightly pointed out that Kyiv, Ukraine’s second largest city after Odesa, grew very slowly before the reforms of the 1860s, adding little more than 10,000 residents between 1840 and 1860,8 most of whom were ethnic Russian merchants and artisans encouraged to settle in the city by tax breaks and other financial incentives. These newcomers did indeed facilitate urban economic growth, but they bore no comparison to the socially liberal middle classes prominent in European cities from at least the 1860s. Russia’s enterprising religious dissidents known as Old Believers were socially conservative; often persecuted by the government, by the end of the century they had lost much of their social and economic impact in Ukrainian cities, especially Kyiv. In contrast to the West, Russia’s social system preserved certain “feudal” vestiges. In consequence, legally defined social estates hindered the development of modern economic classes and capitalism in general. Traditionally, Russia’s urban population was split into several social estates, each having different rights. That system was introduced in full in Kyiv and other cities at the end of the eighteenth century. For most of the next century, burghers, or townspeople proper – that is, those registered as meshchane – were a minority in most of the empire’s cities: in mid-century they numbered fewer than two million males, or one-third of all urban residents. The other two-thirds were either peasants working as tradespeople or craftsmen outside the guild system, or nobles, officials, merchants, soldiers, and the like. In the late eighteenth century, Catherine II first established “townspeople” as a broad social category ambiguously having both modern economic and traditional legal connotations. Born and raised in Germany, Catherine brought a typically European concept of the urban middle classes to Russia by introducing the category of “urban dwellers in general”: it included all urban residents engaged in trade, crafts, the arts, or the sciences – that is, almost

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everyone who was not a noble or a peasant. That categorization was an enlightened autocrat’s attempt to bring Russia closer to Europe by incorporating the concept of a third estate in her vast domain. The social reality proved much more complicated, and Catherine’s legal innovation spawned a system full of contradictions. For example, the law retained an older Russian definition of “townspeople” as a distinct social estate comprising petty traders, shopkeepers, artisans, and beggars. Law and practice then separated these townspeople, or burghers (meshchane), from merchants (kuptsy), the privileged urban bourgeoisie with capital over 500 (later 1,000) rubles and exemption from the poll tax. In the words of Daniel Brower, that situation was also marked by an “extraordinary degree of disarray and disregard for both legal norms and state-imposed regulations.” In this sense, nineteenth-century Russian urbanism encompassed both a “caste-like hierarchical order and disorder.”9 Even the reforms of the 1860s and ’70s and the evolving economic situation did not destroy the ascribed social estates (sosloviia). During much of the late imperial period, Russian autocrats adhered to the conservative utopia of a stratified social order that favored nobles and bureaucrats. Peasants were feared yet also revered for their productive labor and famously stalwart “Russian” character. Burghers or townspeople, by contrast, were neither feared nor revered but, rather, despised for their “parasitic” economic activity and their alleged narrow-mindedness. Throughout Russian-ruled Eastern Europe, burghers or townspeople remained a socially oppressed and economically destitute social group, comprising on average only about a third of all urban residents. Unlike nobles and merchants, townspeople could not travel freely from city to city. They had to be registered in one particular city and needed a special permit (“leave pass”) from that city’s “municipal society” to study or enter civil service; they could employ no more than sixteen people, among other restrictions. Only in 1906 were some of these restrictions lifted. Some townspeople managed to become entrepreneurs, but by the 1860s and ’70s many more had been relegated to the working class. Most continued to lead the traditional lives of burghers, working in commerce as traders, peddlers, small shopkeepers, salespeople, self-employed artisans, minor clerks, servants, and the like. Until the 1860s, Ukraine experienced slow economic growth, with modern technologies and industries playing only a minor role in the traditional economy. Although most households engaged primarily in subsistence-level agriculture, through the nineteenth century grain

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production continued to expand, with the Ukrainian lands functioning as the proverbial breadbasket of Europe and major supplier of agricultural products. Wheat was Ukraine’s main crop, accounting for more than 75 per cent of all wheat exports from the Russian Empire nearly every year between 1812 and 1859. The southern steppes, which had remained deadly for sedentary agriculturalists over many centuries, now attracted new rural settlers, nobles and commoners alike, to their fabulously fertile land. These lands became known as the steppe El Dorado, though the wealth to be made there was not gold but the stuff for bread. Grain production greatly increased with the opening of huge swathes of arable land in the south – that is, New Russia: about 2 million acres (800,000 hectares) in the early nineteenth century, and another 15 million acres (6 million hectares) by the 1860s. A growing international economy and geopolitics also accelerated the development. Following the Napoleonic wars of the early nineteenth century, an enormous demand for wheat developed in Western Europe. Industrialization and the triumph of free trade opened vast new markets. The liberal reforms of Alexander II and the 1861 emancipation of serfs stimulated the production of wheat for market in the Ukrainian hinterland. The rapidly growing city of Odesa served the steppes as the most convenient port of export, and this mutually beneficial relationship between the enterprising city and the agrarian hinterland became the most dynamic part of Ukraine’s otherwise traditional economy. Odesa’s impressive growth was also based on its being a duty-free port from 1817: by 1847, more than half of all exports from the Russian Empire went abroad through Odesa, headed mainly to western Europe. While the fertile steppe lands were benefiting greatly from proximity to Odesa and other maritime ports, in Ukraine’s central and northern areas grain production and sale were being undermined by low prices owing to overproduction, distance from seaports, and poor roads, many of which were unusable for much of the year. Before the construction of its first railroads in the 1860s and ’70s, Ukraine’s transportation infrastructure was meager. Even when railroad construction got underway, Ukraine’s railroads lagged far behind Russia’s for decades, in 1879 accounting for only 5.3 per cent of the empire’s total railroads.10 The first railroad in Ukraine, opened in 1865, linked Odesa with the town of Balta in the grain-producing area of southwestern Ukraine. Prior to that, most products – all grains, salt, and fish – were transported from the hinterland to Odesa by river barges or overland, often by so-called chumaks, the wagoners and traders who traversed Ukraine from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century and

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conducted half of its salt trade during that time. The chumaks’ ox-driven wagons brought salt from the Crimea and salted dried fish from the Black Sea, the Sea of Azov, and the Don River. In the 1830s to 1850s, these same traditional long-distance haulers, usually Cossacks or state peasants, imported about 41,000 tons of fish annually. On their return journeys, they carried wheat, farm products, and manufactured goods south into the steppes, the Crimea, and Moldova. In short, the chumaks were the main carriers of bulk cargo during that period, and they played a crucial role in Ukraine’s economy by promoting the development of internal and external trade (later, most chumaks were no longer independent traders but simply carriers of commercial goods). With the rise of railroads and the shrinkage of steppe pasturage for oxen, the wagoners’ trade began to decline; but in the 1880s, there were still about 200,000 working chumaks in Ukraine. As if to mirror their exclusive role in the traditional economy, chumaks often appear in folklore, where they symbolize geographic and economic mobility. Hence, in addition to its usual function of holding back progress, tradition was sometimes also a force able to offset the destructive effects of modernization . Not surprisingly, several prominent Ukrainian capitalist families traced their ancestry to successful chumaks who acquired notable wealth. The Tereshchenko family is a case in point. Their rise in wealth and status was matched by very few other Ukrainian families of commoners either before or after the Great Reforms of the 1860s. An entrepreneurial Cossack family from Hlukhiv in northern Ukraine, the Tereshchenkos initially grew rich by trading in wheat and lumber and later by investing in the expanding sugar industry. One enterprising member of the family, Nikola Tereshchenko (1819–1903), leased and then acquired lands and sugar refineries from landowners hard hit by the emancipation of serfs in 1861. By the end of the 1860s, Nikola owned a dozen sugar plants in Hlukhiv. Concurrently, he served as the city’s mayor, from 1851 to 1872, and in 1879 he received the highest of imperial honors: his father and all his descendants were elevated to the hereditary nobility. In 1874, Nikola, now the affluent owner of an industrial and commercial empire, relocated to Kyiv after a short stay in Moscow. By this time Kyiv had become the “sugar capital” of the empire; its railroad and stock exchange were also bringing more and more risk-taking newcomers to the venerable but also now modernizing city. Remarkably, Nikola, who had only a primary education, his son Oleksandr, and his brother Fedir became members of the founding committee of the city’s newest cultural institution, the Kyiv Municipal

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Museum, as well as its biggest patrons. Nikola donated his collection of portraits of Kyiv’s historical figures to the museum and also purchased a large collection of antiquities for it. Nikola’s grandson Mykhailo (Mikhail), inheritor of a part of the Tereshchenko business empire and a trained lawyer, befriended Russian literary celebrities like Andrei Bely and Aleksandr Blok. Later, during the Russian Revolution, he was a minister in Russia’s Provisional Government and led successful negotiations with Ukrainian socialist politicians in Kyiv. Mykhailo’s own grandson Michel, born in Paris, brought the history of the family full circle: Michel immigrated back to Ukraine, and in 2015 he became mayor of Hlukhiv, the same provincial town in which his ancestor Nikola was mayor more than 150 years earlier. The story of the Tereshchenko family is not just a Cinderella-like fairytale or inspirational rags-to-riches tale of entrepreneurial people, so common in America at about the same time. It is also an impressive example of how one enterprising family made good in a traditional pre-reform economy while at the same time advancing new capitalist endeavors in a modern technological age. Most of the family’s commercial activities were still related to agriculture, yet that was a new kind of commercial agriculture, centered on the emerging sugar beet industry and requiring innovative methods and new skills. The production of sugar, arguably the fastest developing area of the economy at the time, was a cross between agriculture and a modern, technology-driven industry that emerged in Left-Bank Ukraine and Kharkiv province in the 1830s and on the Right Bank a decade later. Sugar processing provided huge incomes to the owners of sugar refineries, which were initially located on the rural estates of nobiliary landowners (Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian). In 1847, there were 144 sugar refineries in Ukraine, with 57 in Kyiv province alone; more than 90 per cent were owned by nobiliary landowners,11 often with serfs serving as managers. Around this time, the number of workers employed in sugar processing exceeded 29,000, of whom 3,314 were permanent employees and 26,000 were seasonal workers; notably, 33.4 per cent of the latter were women.12 By 1857, sugar refineries in Ukraine numbered more than 220, most of which were powered by steam; thus Ukraine had 76 per cent of all steam-powered sugar refineries in imperial Russia.13 Although only 58 per cent of the empire’s sugar refineries were in Ukraine, it already produced 80.5 per cent of all the empire’s sugar, valued at 10,205,900 rubles (79 per cent of the total value of the sugar the empire produced that year). On the eve of serfdom’s abolition

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in 1860–61, those employed in sugar processing – 52,238 men and women, one-third of them in Kyiv province – accounted for almost two-thirds of all industrial workers in Ukraine (85,139).14 By contrast, in Russia as a whole, workers in sugar refineries made up only 8.9 per cent of the industrial workforce, indicating the near dominance of sugar processing in Ukraine’s industrial sector at the time. Sugar processing seems to have developed at the expense of other sectors by drawing capital and attracting landowners’ attention, which at the time were both in short supply. Ironically, while the empire was supplying much of Europe with sugar, the consumption of sugar there was the lowest in Europe, twenty times less per capita than in the Uk and four to five times less than in Germany and France.15 The earliest commercial enterprises were small in size and nearly all their workers were serfs. In 1828, nobiliary landowners owned 54 per cent of all economic enterprises in Ukraine, and 74 per cent of all workers at those enterprises were proprietary serfs. The largest of these enterprises were sugar refineries, each of which on average employed between 149 (in 1848) and 232 (in 1857) workers. Second largest were textile factories, with around 100 workers employed at each plant. While these manufacturing enterprises remained small, the number of plants and workers continued to grow. The total number of plants and factories increased from 200 in 1793 to 649 in 1825, then to 1,542 in 1844 and 2,329 in 1860. The workforce (employed primarily in sugar processing) grew even more dramatically: from 15,000 in 1825, to 51,744 in 1846, to 81,800 (or possibly 110,000) in 1860. Most of these workers were in Kyiv and Kharkiv provinces (32,135 and 12,100, respectively).16 However, they were not modern industrial workers per se but hired laborers employed in modest artisanal shops. Serfs continued to comprise a significant portion of the “industrial” workforce, and many more aspired to be workers than the existing industries could employ, Manufacturing in Ukraine was traditionally dominated by food processing, weaving, candle making, soap making, and the distilling of alcohol. Before the rise of sugar processing, distilling was the single largest industry, with hundreds of distilleries in every province (457 in Poltava, 442 in Chernihiv, 372 or more in Kyiv). In addition, Ukraine was replete with taverns, averaging one per 135 thirsty “souls” (compared to one per 802 in Russia itself). Naturally, the production of alcohol brought huge profits to the manufacturers and ruin to many who indulged in it. But by the 1840s and ’50s, the distilling of alcohol, together with the practice of traditional crafts such as weaving, began

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to stagnate, owing to unfavorable Russian tariffs and competition from Russian merchants and manufacturers. Simply put, local “capitalists” lost out to Russian capital. As a result, no city like the English Manchester or Polish Łódź ever emerged in Ukraine. Wholesale and retail trade in Ukraine was also monopolized by migrants from Russia. These people created networks of merchants across the country, each of whom hired multiple itinerant peddlers (at times more than 400); in this system, both the merchants and the peddlers were ethnic Russians. Russians were also overrepresented in the most technically advanced occupations, which required the use of machinery. In general, most plants and factories used little machinery at the time. Machine-building as such hardly existed in Ukraine, and actual technological wonders, other than steamboats on the Dnipro River, were few. That changed when people in Kyiv realized that they needed a bridge over that legendary river. The construction of the so-called Chain Bridge, the city’s first permanent bridge over the Dnipro, between 1848 and 1853 became a groundbreaking enterprise in several respects. The bridge was designed by a British engineer and built by workers brought there from Great Russia (allegedly because they drank less than the locals), using equipment made in the city by a Russian industrialist. Both the industrialist and the guest workers were Old Believers, that is, they belonged to the community of Russian religious dissidents renowned for their business acumen and work ethic. The plant itself, a cast-iron, steam-powered foundry, was the first modern industrial enterprise in Kyiv and one of the first such plants in Russian-ruled Ukraine. For a time, it was the largest plant in the city, employing nearly 150 laborers, most of whom were ethnic Russians. Among other things, it produced cauldrons and presses for sugar refineries, as well as rams for the pile drivers used in the construction of the Chain Bridge, long the most visible sign of international modernity in Kyiv. A series of far-ranging changes on the eve of serfdom’s abolition in 1861 bore on the social and ethnic profiles of industrial owners and laborers. As a result of those changes, most factory owners (94 per cent) were capitalists like the Tereshchenkos, and most workers were hired laborers (74 per cent), rather than serfs.17 More owners belonged to minority groups (many were Jews) or were Western expats (Frenchmen, Belgians, Brits, Germans). In this way, too, modernization was at work in an international sense. At this point it is reasonable to ask: Did the wealth accumulated by a few cosmopolitan entrepreneurs trickle down to benefit people living at low income levels, that is, the majority of the

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population? The Tereshchenko family was undoubtedly exceptional, but other local families of even humbler origins managed to succeed in pre-reform society. Serfs in Great Russia had incomparably more chances than serfs in Ukraine to acquire wealth and personal freedom through trade and crafts, yet some in Ukraine managed to do so as well. Among them was the above-mentioned Alexander Nikitenko, who attained high social standing in pre-reform imperial society through education and intellectual pursuits. Several other people attained high social standing thanks largely to economic activity. The sugar-processing industry, in particular, made a number of landowners fabulously wealthy and also allowed some local serfs to change their lives profoundly. Fedir Symyrenko (1780s–1867) was born a serf in Kyiv province but managed to free himself from bondage through trade in grain, cattle, and leather goods. Between 1815 and 1820, Symyrenko joined forces with another serf family, the Iakhnenkos, to found a trading company carrying their names. The Brothers Iakhnenko and Symyrenko Trading House soon became a prominent player in commercial agriculture in Ukraine, with stores and warehouses operating in Odesa, Mykolaïv, and Sevastopol. However, the partners actually made the bulk of their fortune from investments in sugar processing. In 1843, they established the first steam-powered sugar refinery in the Russian Empire, becoming the first peasants to own a major sugar enterprise. In 1848, the former serfs opened another sugar refinery near their home, in the town of Mliïv, that became the largest sugar plant in Europe. A year later, they added a machine-building plant to their business empire and began manufacturing steamboats (the first ironhulled steamer in Russia, proudly named “The Ukrainian,” was made at the plant in 1851). Aside from the steamboats transporting sugar along the Dnipro, the plant manufactured the machinery needed by the sugar refineries. As the Brothers Iakhnenko and Symyrenko Trading House became more and more successful, its operations expanded to Kyiv, Ielysavethrad (present-day Kropyvnyts'kyi), Kharkiv, Moscow, and Nizhnii Novgorod. Now “famous across the empire,” the company was supplying their “best products to all major markets,” its creditors stated. The master mechanics and machine operators it employed were receiving extraordinarily large salaries, up to 16,000 rubles a year (the average worker’s salary was 150).18 At its height, the Brothers Iakhnenko and Symyrenko Trading House exemplified the local origins of capitalist modernization in Ukraine. Then, in the early 1860s, a sudden economic downturn severely undermined the

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firm’s financial standing and reputation. Contemporaries noted, too, that the “indiscreet” use of credit and “lavish lifestyle” of some family members had contributed to its demise. After the downfall of the Iakhnenko brothers’ and Symyrenko’s company, sugar processing in Ukraine became dominated by Belgian, French, and other foreigners. This also became the case in railroad construction, machine building, coal mining, and steelmaking. But in the post-reform period, another local family attained unrivalled economic success. The Brodskys were a Jewish family originally from Brody in Galicia. Having settled in Kyiv province in the early 1800s, they later became business moguls specializing in sugar processing – Lazar Brodsky was justifiably called the “sugar king” – and in the milling of flour. Family members also cooperated with the Tereshchenkos, that other local, successful entrepreneurial family, in various commercial ventures and charitable causes. These two families and a few others did indeed attain remarkable success and influence, but most people in Ukraine, particularly ethnic Ukrainians, continued to live in a traditional world without any immediate access to the benefits of modernization. Most Ukrainians seemed stuck in limbo between tradition and modernity, with the latter’s benefits passing them by like steamers on the Dnipro.

liberal i nter l Ud e i n r USSi a : t h e r e f o r m e rS On 19 February 1861, serfdom, or “slavery,” ceased to exist in Russia. On that day, Tsar Alexander II signed a manifesto with an awkward bureaucratic title, Regulations Concerning Peasants Leaving Serf Dependence, that in effect abolished serfdom throughout the empire. As if that were not dramatic enough, other measures marking a true liberal interlude in Russia’s history were being put into effect. Nearly five years earlier, on the occasion of his coronation as tsar (26 August 1856), Alexander II had issued a festive manifesto granting clemency and other reprieves to people persecuted during the reign of his father, Nicholas I; among them were Decembrists, members of the Petrashevsky Circle, and Poles who had taken part in the rebellion of 1830–31. That manifesto also announced a three-year suspension in the obligation to provide recruits for long-term military service. In 1857, the universally hated “military settlements,” where reserve soldiers were to perform agricultural work as well as military service, were abolished. A new image of the tsar as a national monarch was now being projected, one that drew heavily on the Russian mythic tradition. Richard Wortman has termed

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this new image of authority a “scenario of love,” in which the monarch was to “emulate Western rulers who earned the love of their peoples by working for their benefit.”19 It was expected that a romance of this sort between the monarch and his subjects would demonstrate the empire’s national character. Its actual result turned out to be a somewhat contradictory blend of the official nationality championed by Nicholas I and newly propagated liberal reforms. Occasion to test the new “scenario of power” came in the fall of 1855, when Alexander II set out on a ceremonial trip through New Russia to the Crimea, as if to imitate the legendary journey his great-grandmother, Catherine II, had made in 1787. The difference was that Catherine’s trip had celebrated the Russian conquest of the Crimea, whereas Alexander had nothing to celebrate. His intent was to inspire the troops defending the peninsula against the Ottomans and their Western allies, who were threatening to undo one of Catherine’s famed achievements by wresting the Crimea away from the empire. Along the way, in Odesa, Kherson, and Mykolaïv, imperial troops greeted Alexander II with rapturous love and nearly religious devotion. To that point, the “scenario of love” seemed to be working as planned, a least on the home front. The same did not prove to be true on the battlefront. In March 1856, Alexander was obliged to sign the Treaty of Paris, confirming Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War (1853–56), a consequence of Russia’s inadequate infrastructure and reliance on an army consisting largely of enserfed peasants. Despite that loss, or perhaps because of it, the pace of reforms accelerated. One by one Ukrainian dissident intellectuals began to return from exile, among them those once involved in the Brotherhood of SS Cyril and Methodius. First to return, thanks to influential protectors, was Panteleimon Kulish, who in 1850 had settled in St Petersburg and endeavored to become a Russian writer (without much success) still during the reign of Nicholas I. Next was the historian Mykola Kostomarov.When Alexander II ascended the throne in the fall of 1855, Kostomarov was allowed to make a four-month visit to St Petersburg; the next year the former exile made an academic tour of Europe. In the fall of 1859, Kostomarov was invited to teach Russian history at St Petersburg University, an astonishing comeback for someone who had dared to call the tsar’s august great-grandmother Catherine II a “universal whore.” In 1856 Vasyl' Bilozers'kyi, Kulish’s brother-in-law, was permitted to settle in St Petersburg, where he got a staid job as a bureaucrat that allowed him to make connections with important

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people. In 1857, two years after Nicholas I’s death, the poet and artist who became Ukraine’s national bard, Taras Shevchenko, was released from military exile. However, like other national-minded Ukrainians repressed by the imperial government, he was not allowed to live in Ukraine; after spending half a year in Nizhnii Novgorod, he went to St Petersburg. There, in September 1860, in an extraordinary turn of events for a man accused of personally insulting the tsar and his wife (who was still alive!), Taras Shevchenko was designated an academician-engraver by his alma mater, the Imperial Academy of Arts. Mykola Hulak, arguably the brotherhood’s most radical member, was the last to return, in 1859. Unlike his former co-conspirators, Hulak eventually settled not in the imperial capital but in Odesa, where he got a relatively prestigious teaching post at a gymnasium (classical high school). Notably, another former radical, the novice Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky, was officially pardoned in 1857, but it took another two years for him to be released from military service in Siberia and allowed to return to European Russia. Over the next dozen years, Alexander II implemented the most significant modernizing agenda in Russia since the times of Peter I, that is, the series of dramatic changes that became known as the Great Reforms. As yet, nothing anticipated the fate that would befall the “Tsar-Liberator” – the sobriquet Alexander II’s imperial image-makers gave him – at the hands of radical populists on 1 March 1881. His reforms were indeed wide-ranging, affecting all aspects of imperial society and administration: social, judicial, economic, cultural, bureaucratic, financial, educational, and military. Together, most contemporaries, including conservative landowners, agreed that the reforms amounted to a total makeover of the country. In the words of Alexander Nikitenko, the former serf who became an acclaimed writer and intellectual, the reforms set in motion the transformation of “a country of arbitrary bureaucratic rule.” As a result, 40 per cent of the population was freed from bondage (1861); the state budget was made public (1864); rural and urban areas were granted organs of self-government (1864, 1870); owing to the introduction of trial by jury (1864), courts became independent of officialdom and the nobility; censorship was eased (1865); university statutes were liberalized (1863); and the army was modernized through the introduction of universal conscription (1874). All this was accomplished in a mere thirteen years, less time than Russia’s other major reformers, Peter I and Catherine II, had taken to implement their ambitious agendas. Alexander II’s role in the process was vital, but it also required able,

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enthusiastic, and dedicated assistants. To adopt the apt title of Bruce Lincoln’s renowned study, “in the vanguard of reform” stood a group of “enlightened” bureaucrats who not only provided much needed expertise about the empire’s economic, administrative, and judicial concerns but also impelled Alexander to demonstrate leadership. In the end, the reforms of the 1860s and ’70s proved to have serious limitations, and some were implemented half-heartedly. Nonetheless, they irreversibly changed the country and imperial society. Although they did not comprise a single overall agenda, the Great Reforms did have a common thread: they aimed to integrate all social estates, including former serfs, into state institutions. They also aimed to implement a new civic strategy of governance in partnership with society. Let us look first at the emancipation of serfs and the introduction of self-government in rural and urban communities, two measures that affected a majority of Ukraine’s population. The emancipation of serfs had been on the empire’s official agenda since the early nineteenth century, and strong views about the amorality and economic inefficiency of serfdom had circulated even earlier. The Russian writer Alexander Radishchev made a strong case against serfdom in his pamphlet Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, published in 1790. Upon reading it, Catherine II declared its author to be “a rebel worse than Pugachev,” thereby comparing him to the leader of a bloody peasant rebellion suppressed fifteen years earlier, and ordered that copies be confiscated and destroyed. Radischev himself was arrested, tried, and got a death sentence, which was commuted to exile in Siberia after he publicly disowned his work. The enlightened tsarina added a sardonic comment to her decree banishing Radishchev: “he goes on lamenting the sad fate of peasants, although it is irrefutable that there is nothing better in the entire universe than the fate of our peasants in the hands of a good landowner.” The empire’s conservatives couldn’t agree more. One defended serfdom as a patriarchal institution intrinsically much more humane than emergent capitalism: “There is something paternal and tender about the mutual relationship between a lord and a serf,” wrote one of them in 1803. “By contrast, the relationship between a master and a hired servant seems to me purely mercenary … To provide for elderly servants who are retired because of old age – this is the right future. This is much more humane and much kinder than a simple monetary market.”20 But most serfs disagreed, and some, daring to vote with their feet, fled from their “paternal” landlords and took part in revolts.

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Ukraine experienced a series of massive peasant disturbances – in 1796–97, 1820–26, 1830–31, 1847–48, and, especially, on the eve of the Great Reforms, in 1855–56. Serfs vented their grievances in various ways: they presented complaints against their landowners to local and central authorities; they set manorial estates ablaze; they killed landowners and estate managers; they fled; they refused to perform corvée; and finally, they put up armed resistance against local authorities and the military. In 1822–32 alone, the authorities exiled 176 peasants suspected of arson to Siberia. When it occurred, the killing of landowners was usually committed by small bands of peasants acting in the style of social bandits. In 1848–51, serfs killed 24 noble landowners and 7 estate managers; they attempted to kill 16 more in Right-Bank Ukraine alone. This wave of social violence swept across all parts of Russian Ukraine and was apparently unrelated to the victims’ ethnicity, for they included Poles, Jews, Russians, and Ukrainians. Unsurprisingly, these instances of murder and arson did not improve the serfs’ overall situation but only worsened it. By contrast, flight often did lead to relief and freedom. The most popular destination of runaway serfs was New Russia, where serfdom as an institution was not well rooted. In Kyiv province alone, some 25,000 people, most of them serfs, were declared to be missing (“on the run and in unknown absence”) in 1816. Peasants fled in large numbers not only to New Russia but also to Moldova (during the Russo-Turkish War, 1806–1812) and to the Caucasus (in 1832 and 1837). Despite brutal pursuit and persecution by tsarist agents, serfs continued to flee right up to the emancipation of 1861. In general, and despite its illegality, vagrancy was rampant throughout the empire, as tens of thousands of peasants officially labeled “vagrants” were “on the move.” In 1856, some 31,800 such “vagrants” were apprehended in the empire, including 11,000 in Ukraine. Riots were the ultimate expression of social discontent. The bloodiest ones seem to have occurred when the government attempted to corral state peasants into so-called military settlements. During 1817– 19, in the town of Chuhuïv in northeastern Ukraine, imperial military authorities arrested some 2,000 rebellious men – 20 of whom died after being flogged – and exiled 400. During this same time, a former serf and army deserter, Ustym Karmaliuk, became the leader of a veritable army of peasants and military deserters in Right-Bank Ukraine. During the 1830s, almost 20,000 people joined his bands, attacking nobiliary estates in Podolia and adjacent parts of Volhynia and Kyiv provinces. According to official estimates, there were 19 major peasant

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disturbances in Ukraine in the 1830s, and 79 in the 1840s. Peasant protests continued right up to the reforms: in the early 1850s, there were 13 in Left-Bank Ukraine, 7 in New Russia, and 47 in Right-Bank Ukraine.21 The largest peasant insurgency, in 1855, became known as the Kyiv Cossack Movement (kyïvs’ka kozachchyna). Its immediate cause was a tsarist manifesto calling for the creation of a volunteer corps to fight Russia’s enemies in the Crimean War (1853–56). In its wake, dubious rumors began to spread among peasants in Kyiv province, to the effect that those signing up for the corps (“Cossacks”) would be freed from serfdom and granted the lands and possessions of the nobiliary landlords. Serfs began to compile lists of themselves as “free Cossacks,” refused to perform corvée, and attempted to replace local authorities with their own organs of self-government, or “village communes.” This time, it was the terrified landowners who fled. The Ukrainian writer Ivan Nechui-Levyts'kyi (1838–1918), whose father was a priest from the area, left a vivid description of these events: Meanwhile, a strange rumor appeared among the people and spread across the countryside like a bolt from the blue: a rumor about freedom. People began to make noise like a pine forest during bad weather. A rumor arose, as if from the grave, about the Cossacks. There were riots, like blazes in the middle of the night, in the Vasyl'kiv and Kaniv districts [of Kyiv province]. The people rose up and moved in bands from village to village, as if seeking to find freedom quickly. Everybody signed up to belong to the Cossacks, because it was said that whoever signed up for the Cossacks would not perform corvée. From somewhere came the rumor that freedom had already arrived from the tsar but was being concealed from the people by the priests, who sided with the nobles. The people then began to demand that the priests inform the public about that freedom, and they began to taunt and mistreat them.22 Soon, however, the regular troops and police reestablished order, at the cost of 39 rebels dead and 63 wounded. The whole story pointed to the crisis in the legitimacy of traditional institutions like serfdom and the official Church, two pillars of Russia’s autocracy. It also emphasized the dearth of communication between the autocratic government and the country’s silent majority – the enserfed and destitute peasantry – that no longer wanted to remain silent. Finally, the story reflected the peasantry’s almost mythical belief in the Cossack way of life and the

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freedom they associated with it. Serfdom was seen as the ultimate opposite to that freedom. Over time, the government was forced to react to the serfs’ grievances not only with violent repression but also with policies of appeasement. Official measures making it easier for serfs to buy their freedom from their owners began to appear as early as 1803. That year Alexander I signed a decree allowing serfs to redeem their personal freedom and any land they held and become free farmers. During Alexander I’s reign (1801–25), more than 160 such redemptive transactions were made successfully, with whole peasant communes buying their freedom (nearly 47,000 male serfs in total). These figures were still small, representing less than one per cent of all serfs, but the process had become possible, and it accelerated over the next few decades. Between 1816 and 1854, more than 950,000 serfs obtained their freedom either individually or collectively, accounting for around 10 per cent of all proprietary serfs in the empire. During the 1840s, serfs were permitted to redeem themselves even without their landlord’s consent if his/her estate was up for sale to settle debts. In 1839, in a secret report to Alexander I’s successor, Nicholas I, the political police admitted that “in general, serfdom is a powder magazine under the state,” one set and waiting to explode.23 By the 1850s, arguments against serfdom had become so widespread that the next tsar, Alexander II, championed them himself. This is not to suggest, as some Soviet historians did, that social unrest – a so-called revolutionary situation – forced the autocratic government to implement reforms. But, by this time, it had become clear to most people that serfdom was obsolete. The leading figures in Russian government, the so-called enlightened bureaucrats who had encountered liberal ideas at universities in the early decades of the nineteenth century, were now pushing for an immediate abolition of serfdom. Among these liberal professional bureaucrats were several who were from Ukraine or were of ethnic Ukrainian origin. This new generation of empire builders from Ukraine believed that modernizing the empire and its society through reforms was the best way to avoid revolution and prevent the empire’s collapse. Chief among them was Russia’s minister of internal affairs (1841–52) and state appanages (1852–55) Count Lev Perovskii (1792–1856), a grandson of Ukraine’s last hetman. This Perovskii oversaw the training and recruitment of the new generation of liberal officials who would become prominent during the Great Reforms. His brothers were also high imperial officials: Vasilii was governor-general of Orenburg, Nikolai was governor of the Crimea,

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and Boris was a tutor of the future tsar Alexander III. Ironically, in 1881 Lev Perovskii’s grand-niece Sofia Perovskaia (she was a granddaughter of Nikolai Perovskii, daughter of Nikolai’s son Lev, governor of St Petersburg) would be hanged for taking part in the assassination of Alexander II, the tsar the Perovskiis served for generations. One man in particular exemplified the Russian Empire’s reformminded official. Andrii Zablots'kyi-Desiatovs'kyi (1807–1881) was perhaps the ablest man in St Petersburg, responsible for improvements in the life of the peasantry across the empire and advancements in the gathering of rural statistics. Born to a poor noble family in northern Ukraine, he became a key official in the newly created Ministry of State Appanages, then headed by another renowned reformer, Pavel Kiselev. Evidently the young Ukrainian expat well expressed the social conscience of senior liberal bureaucrats, for Andrii was given wide powers and leadership in preparing reforms dealing with state peasants and other pressing matters within the new ministry. Although that ministry dealt chiefly with state peasants, Zablots'kyi also researched the lives of serfs and became convinced that serfdom was a great evil. In 1841, he submitted to his superior, the minister in charge, a memorandum titled “On Serfdom in Russia” in which he decried the lawlessness of serfdom: “Not being able to possess property, the serf cannot defend his rights in the courts … Half of the state’s inhabitants, according to the law, are excluded from any protection of the law.”24 He was also convinced that serfdom caused vices such as beggary and drunkenness among the peasantry. But for him the elimination of serfdom was not only a matter of morality or social discipline: serfdom had to be abolished also from the economic, industrial, and legal standpoints. A more mysterious part of Zablots'kyi’s career was his overt and at times covert support of popular enlightenment in general and Ukrainian culture in particular. In 1862 Zablots'kyi, then secretary of the State Council’s legislative department, submitted through a superior a memorandum to Alexander II clearly indicating that its ideas were supported by Dmitrii Bludov, chairman of the State Council, and Dmitrii Miliutin, minister of war. The memorandum related how the reformist agenda was linked to borderland politics and the struggle against Polish influence in the “western provinces.” In order to gain the support of non-Poles in the region, Zablots'kyi proposed introducing the use of local “dialects,” including Ukrainian, in all education, from elementary schools to gymnasiums to universities. Additionally, he proposed that Ukrainian be used in publishing, church sermons,

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and legal matters. These were indeed radical ideas. Surprisingly, the tsar was reported to be in favor of the proposals, although for the time being he had decided not to act on them. A second attempt at supporting education in local vernaculars was blocked in 1863 by Petr Valuev, the moderately conservative minister of internal affairs (1861–68) who opposed the liberal reformers in the government and whose name would be forever associated with the suppression of the Ukrainian language (see chapter 5). Until the early 1860s, however, the reformers’ position within government appeared to be secure. Another prominent liberal official of Ukrainian descent, Serhii (Sergei) Zarudnyi (1821–1887), from Kharkiv province, was a major architect of the plan to emancipate the serfs and the celebrated legal reform of 1864, which led to his appointment to the senate in 1869. His senior colleague Oleksandr (Aleksandr) Kochubei (1788–1866), scion of a famed aristocratic family of Ukrainian Cossack origin, served as a senator from 1831 and member of the State Council from 1846, and was reported to be an ardent supporter of the Great Reforms. Another reformist official from Ukraine, Mykola (Nikolai) Stoianovs'kyi (a protégé of Zarudnyi’s), was a highly qualified jurist and coauthor of the judicial reform. In 1862, Stoianovs'kyi was appointed a deputy minister of justice; in 1867, he became a senator, and in 1875 a member of the State Council. There is some evidence that in the late 1850s and early ’60s one – and perhaps more – of these highly placed reformist officials of Ukrainian origin, allegedly someone who was both a senator and member of the State Council (but not clearly identified), took part in the Ukrainian cultural club in St Petersburg known as the Hromada. Was that mysterious person Zablots'kyi-Desiatovs'kyi, as Johannes Remy has suggested? Zablots'kyi did indeed serve on the State Council from 1859, but he was only appointed a member of it in 1875. No matter who it was, we know that there were a number of influential Ukrainians in the capital who sympathized with Ukrainian cultural causes and opposed Valuev’s anti-Ukrainian sentiments. On the eve of the emancipation, several more men from Ukraine entered reformist circles in St Petersburg by joining the so-called Editing Commission, the organ created on 17 February 1859 to work out a draft of the reform. Among that commission’s liberal-minded members were highly placed officials like Zablots'kyi-Desiatovs'kyi and representatives of the landowning class who had already been in state service. One of the latter was Nikolai Bunge (1832–1895), a leading financial expert from Kyiv University who was of German descent. Two others,

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Vasyl' Tarnovs'kyi (1810–1866) and Hryhorii Galagan (1819–1888), were wealthy landowners from Left-Bank Ukraine who opposed serfdom and sponsored Ukrainian cultural works. This abolitionist lobby was backed by Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich, Alexander II’s younger brother. The tsar himself had branded serfdom an evil with no place in his “scenario of love,” and he had already in 1856 famously said that it would be better if the emancipation of the serfs “came from above rather than from below.”25 Represented as a general sacrifice made for the common good, the emancipation had already long been anticipated, even by Alexander II’s wholly conservative father, Nicholas I. Despite opposition to it by large segments of the landowners, the tsar wanted the emancipation to be seen as an initiative of the loyal nobility. Nobiliary landowners were expected to submit their opinions on the matter to one of forty-six provincial committees, staffed by fifteen hundred men. As Richard Wortman has noted, this fiction of the emancipation as a nobiliary initiative allowed the tsar to include the nobility in his “scenario of love” and portray himself as the leader of a nation in the process of renewal. Where Alexander II encountered opposition from conservative officials, especially those on the State Council, he backed the reform party within the government arguing for the emancipation of serfs with land. In the end, the Editing Commission set the size of the land allotments that peasants could buy from their landlords. But the reformers’ calculations turned out to be very different from the expectations of those who were about to undergo the reform – the serfs themselves.

liber a l i nterl Ud e i n r U SSi a : t h e r e f o r m e d The statutes of emancipation that were actually passed on 19 February 1861 granted the serfs individual freedom but not much else. The statutes themselves were the half-finished result of four years of work by the provincial committees and the Editing Commission. The serfs had indeed been freed, but they did not receive free ownership of the land allotments they had worked on and considered their own. Instead, they had to redeem these allotments from their former landlords through loans obtained from the state. Until the allotments were redeemed in this way, the former serfs were under “temporary obligation” to the landlords and had to continue to give them payments in cash or labor. Specifically, the now free former serf was obliged to pay his former master in cash or labor 20 per cent of the estimated value of the land he

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held. That process was to continue until 1 January 1883, after which all peasants had to pay off the established per cent of the redemption sum in full. Most of the empire’s former serfs undertook to pay the full redemption sum well before that date: by 1870, more than 66 per cent had done so, and 85 per cent had done so by 1881. By that time, redemption of land by former serfs was nearly complete in much of Ukraine; in two provinces, Kharkiv and Kherson, the per cent of those still in “temporary obligation” was among the lowest in the empire – 2.3 and 5.2 per cent, respectively. As this process was taking place, it appeared that the former serfs, now free peasants, were leasing their allotments from their former landlords. The size and price of peasant allotments differed from locality to locality, with maximums and minimums determined by the Editing Commission. A totally new group of officials, the “peace mediators” (in Russian, mirovye posredniki), was charged with implementing the peasant reform. Usually humane in outlook and independent from local officials, including governors, the mediators helped the landowners and peasants complete and sign the required “regulatory charters” regarding the size and price of allotments to be redeemed. As of 1 January 1862, only 2,796 such charters had been approved, but in 1863 already 73,195 were implemented (about two-thirds of the total required by the government). However, half of these were left unsigned by peasants unhappy with the price, quality, or size of the parcels of land offered to them by their former landlords.26 Rates of signed charters were lowest in Belarus and Right-Bank Ukraine, regions where the animosity between nobles (usually Roman Catholic Poles) and peasants (Orthodox Ukrainians and Belarusians) was highest. In Ukraine, more than 1.5 million former serfs, almost 30 per cent of their total number, had refused to sign the charters, yet they had nonetheless been put into effect. This led to massive peasant protests all across Ukraine: between October 1861 and January 1863, at least 960 acts of resistance took place in 1,314 villages, affecting more than 790,000 people.27 Resistance took various forms. For instance, in a village in Chernihiv province peasants simply walked away from a peace mediator as he read the relevant statute; in Katerynoslav province, villagers hid in trees and pelted the mediator with rocks.28 Clearly, what the peasants wanted was very much at odds with what the government could deliver. The peasants wanted land, of course, but without any “regulatory charters” or compulsory payments. As the governor of Kharkiv province observed: “They [the peasants] believe that

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when the awaited hour strikes, all compulsory relations with the squires [landlords] will cease and the land will be given to the peasants without charge.”29 The government’s response to such expectations was tellingly reflected in words by the tsar himself: “Rumors have reached me,” Alexander II declared before a gathering of peasant elders in Poltava in 1861, “that you are awaiting for some other volia [freedom]. There will not be any other volia than what I gave you. Do what the law and the statute [of 19 February] require. Labor and toil. Be obedient to the authorities and the squires.”30 In other words, the freedom or volia that the peasants had been promised did not include the disappearance of paternalistic – and often overtly despotic –authority in imperial Russia. For the peasants, freedom was inextricably linked to ownership of land. Did the emancipated serfs of Ukraine gain or lose land after 1861? As a rule, the government sought to defend the interests of the landed nobility, and that was reflected in the reform’s specific measures. For instance, in the north of Russia the allotments assigned to ex-serfs tended to be large and costly, because landowners there preferred to get cash rather than retain the poor soil, whereas in the south, especially in Ukraine, allotments were smaller and cheaper, for here landowners wanted to retain the fertile lands that were the proverbial black soil. One resourceful method of dividing the lands in question was as follows: if the land worked by a serf before the reform exceeded the maximum allowed for redemption in any given locality, the landowner could appropriate the excess – “cut it off,” in the terminology of the day – thereby yielding surplus parcels known as “cuts.” Conversely, landowners could grant allotments to their serfs as gifts, free of charge but often of poorer quality. In practice, only peasants in Right-Bank Ukraine benefited from the creative use of “cuts” and “gifts”: they got 18 per cent more land after the emancipation than they had held before it. That happened at the expense of local Polish landowners, punished by the Russian government for their real and alleged disloyalty. By contrast, peasants in all other parts of Ukraine lost considerable amounts of land. In parts of the Left Bank, for instance, peasants ended up with 1.6 times (or 37.5 per cent) less land than they had before the reform. In Poltava province, “cuts” accounted for 37.2 per cent, in Kharkiv 28.3 per cent, in Chernihiv 21.9 per cent, in Taurida 23.1 per cent, and in Kherson 13.8 per cent of the total area of peasant landholdings before 1861. Overall, Ukrainian peasants lost the use of more than a million hectares of land, much of it the famously fertile black soil that the nobles were determined to retain in their possession. Abusing their privileged status,

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nobiliary landowners often resettled their former serfs not on land they had worked but in other locations where soil was unfit for cultivation. For instance, of more than 3,000 regulatory charters for the Left Bank and southern Ukraine, 993 or almost one-third included provisions for the forcible relocation of peasants.31 The size of allotments was also often inadequate: in 1863, in the southern provinces the average was 6.7 to 7 hectares per household, and on the Left Bank it was 2.8 to 3.7 hectares. Thus the absolute majority of peasants in Ukraine received allotments of less than 5 hectares (13.5 acres), which was below the subsistence level.32 Right-Bank Ukraine, in particular, had many land-poor households: there they amounted to 68 per cent of all peasant households; next was LeftBank Ukraine, where they were 43 per cent. In addition, landed nobles continued to own the commons that serfs had previously used at will and now had to bargain to use, which underscored the peasants’ continued dependence on their former masters. Contrary to the good intentions of many reformers and peace mediators, the redemption scheme took on the appearance of a scam whereby the state exacted as much money from the peasantry as it could by pricing the majority of landholdings above their market value. According to some estimates, the market value of lands to be redeemed in Ukraine stood at 128 million rubles, whereas the redemption value was set at 165.6 million rubles. Most peasants could not pay the full amount, so the state took it upon itself to pay 80 per cent of the sum peasants owed the landlords. That, in turn, obligated the peasants to pay back huge “loans” to the state at an annual interest rate of 6 per cent over a period of 49.5 years. By 1906, the peasants had paid the state 382 million rubles, three times the market value of the land they had received. In the process, the state as creditor had enhanced its power and control over the village. Having studied the emancipation and its aftermath, Daniel Field has concluded that while the manifesto and statutes of 19 February 1861 abolished the peasants’ bondage to landlords, “the hegemony of the landed nobility, of officials, and, most generally, of non-peasants over peasants emerged almost intact.”33 Still, the government had managed to forestall social tensions by preventing the emergence of a massive class of landless peasantry. And when the Old Regime collapsed in 1917, lands owned by peasants vastly outweighed lands owned by the nobility, unlike in some European countries, including Britain and Germany. An important aspect of the hegemony over the peasantry that Field speaks of was the continued dependence of newly freed serfs on the

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peasant commune, as well as on newly introduced communal organs that substantially increased their dependence on the state. The so-called “repartitional” commune regulated the local peasantry’s economic activities and made it difficult for families to leave their allotments and relocate elsewhere. It also allocated and reallocated local communal obligations and repartitioned allotments among individual households. The repartitional commune functioned on the principle of mutual responsibility (kruhova poruka), whereby if one of its households could not pay its taxes, the others were to make up the difference. Hence the commune could redistribute or “repartition” allotments according to the productive capacity of each household, so each dutifully paid its share of communal burdens. This proved to be a convenient arrangement for both landed nobles and state officials. The repartitional commune was more typical of the ethnically Russian provinces, but, contrary to the stereotype, it also existed in Ukraine: in many areas, more than half of all peasant allotments were held by communes (albeit with less authority over individual households than in the Great Russian provinces). In southern Ukraine, for instance, communal ownership of land exceeded 90 per cent; on the Left Bank, too, it dominated over individually owned allotments. By contrast, in Podolia communal lands accounted for less than one per cent of all peasant allotments. Irrespective of their exact type, new communal organs were set up across rural Ukraine, not just in villages with collective land tenure. A mutual responsibility for paying taxes was introduced even in areas without repartitional communes. To make matters worse, transition from communal land tenure to individual ownership or to withdrawal from a commune was made increasingly difficult: both required the consent of at least two-thirds of all commune members. Also, a peasant could not, for example, enter state service or a university without obtaining a leave pass from the commune. Even mere physical movement between communes was discouraged. The reform also effaced local variations in the peasants’ self-organization by introducing a unified Russian system of rural administration: according to that system, a gathering of peasants in each village (skhod) elected a village elder (starosta) and tax collector who jointly oversaw the distribution of obligations or duties, tax collection, and the redistribution of allotments. Adjacent communes comprised a single church parish having 300 to 2,000 male members, thereby creating a volost', the lowest level of rural self-rule. The volost' was governed by an administration (volosne pravlinnia) consisting of an elected chief (volosnyi starshyna), village

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elders, and other officials elected by assembly (volosnyi skhod). The state granted the chief and village elders of the volost' the authority to impose penalties on offending peasants, ranging from fines to arrests to forced labor. The communal organs were closely supervised by newly created “provincial offices in peasant affairs,” chaired by the province’s governor and influenced by its leading landed nobles. As a result, the state increased its authority over the peasants, while less affluent nobles lost much of what authority they had had, forcing many of them to sell their land and enter state or professional service. The commune’s authority over its members diminished to any considerable degree only between 1906 and 1910, as a result of the Stolypin agrarian reforms, which allowed peasants to privatize their landholdings and pass them on to their offspring. A law of October 1906 abolished communal responsibility for the payment of taxes. Still, as observers today point out with bitter irony, the peasants of Russia and Ukraine were actually fully emancipated only in 1974, when they received internal passports like any other Soviet citizens. Nonetheless, history has rightly recorded that on 19 February 1861, proverbial “slavery” was abolished in Russian-ruled eastern Europe, since people there could no longer be bought or sold. Moreover, after 1861 peasants were not only personally free but would soon be able to participate in a new organ of self-administration inaugurated in 1864. Called the zemstvo system, it was the first institution in Russia in which all estates could take part. There former serfs could mingle with landed nobles and members of the rising intelligentsia. It did not provide a parliament, since no central (all-Russian) zemstvo was permitted. Also, the functions of provincial and district zemstvos were strictly limited to local economy, primary education, charity, and healthcare. Even contacts between provincial zemstvos were restricted, and the first legal all-Russian congress of zemstvo members did not take place until 1904. Divided into three curiae based on property qualifications rather than social estates, the electors included nobles, clergy, peasants, merchants, industrialists, and professionals. Although underrepresented, peasants were still sizable minorities in both provincial and district (povit) zemstvos. For example, in the first elections to district zemstvos, nobles made up 41.7 per cent of elected members, peasants 38.4 per cent, merchants 10.4 per cent, and clergy 6.5 per cent. Among those elected as delegates to provincial zemstvo assemblies, the estates were much less proportionately represented: nobles and officials constituted 74.2 per cent, merchants 10.9 per cent, peasants 10.6 per cent,

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and clergy 3.8 per cent.34 Over time, peasants and merchants began to replace nobles in the district zemstvos. Nobles managed to retain their influence, however, and among delegates to provincial zemstvos their numbers even increased, particularly in Poltava province, to 81.6 per cent in 1883–86. Despite a rather slow start, by the late 1870s zemstvos were actively resolving numerous problems facing their villages and towns. They organized small-scale credit, helped peasant communes purchase land, and granted food to malnourished peasants. In one area, however, the zemstvos were utter failures: they lost the struggle against the proverbial Leviathan – that is, to transform autocratic Russia into a constitutional Rechtsstaat. Of particular significance in that struggle were the Kharkiv and Chernihiv provincial zemstvos, which in the late 1870s and early ’80s attempted to form a united movement of liberal zemstvo members across the empire (more on this in chapter 8). Notably, in Right-Bank Ukraine zemstvos were introduced only decades later, in 1911, because in the aftermath of the Polish January Uprising of 1863, the tsarist government distrusted the largely Polish nobility that would have dominated there. Urban residents got a taste of the reforms as well, particularly with the municipal reform of 1870 that followed the Zemstvo Statute of 1864. Having lost their autonomy with the repeal of Magdeburg law in the 1830s, Ukraine’s towns and cities now got municipal organs that represented all urban residents rather than only selected social groups, as was the case with the pre-reform order. Henceforth cities and towns were granted autonomy on a range of socioeconomic and fiscal matters, based on a model tested in Moscow in 1862 and Odesa in 1863. According to the municipal reform of 1870, organs of municipal self-government were based on economic classes rather than “feudal” social estates, just as the zemstvos were. The reform established a municipal council (duma) with an executive (uprava) headed by an elected mayor. The duma had authority over various local matters, including city beautification, local trade and industry, public health, education, sanitation, and fire safety. Policy making, however, remained beyond its scope of authority. The reforms of the early 1870s brought about a dramatic change in the composition of municipal leadership throughout the empire and created new urban regimes. The new law, which imitated the municipal systems of Prussia and Austria, granted the franchise to men twenty-five years of age and older who satisfied property requirements and paid municipal taxes as owners of real estate or businesses. As in the Prussian curial

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system, voters in Russian cities were split into three “classes,” each paying one-third of all taxes assessed, irrespective of how many people belonged to each class. The purpose of this three-class system was “to prevent the majority’s advantage over the minority, [as would be] inevitable when all voters combined cast their votes.” Thus a small minority of the largest taxpayers elected as many deputies as did much more numerous groups of voters. Most eligible voters chose not to vote in the 1870s and ’80s. In Kyiv, for example, only 16.4 per cent of voters came to the polling stations. The ratio of voters to residents was also small: in Kyiv there were 3,222 eligible voters, equaling only 4.2 per cent of the municipal population, still a considerable increase over the mere 150 to 200 voters prior to the reform. Meanwhile, St Petersburg’s 18,590 eligible voters represented only 3.4 per cent of the city’s residents. Notwithstanding the very limited franchise, the new city administration represented all urban residents, regardless of their social estate. This did not mean, however, that the system was democratic. Rather, after 1870, municipal governments, especially in larger cities, represented the interests of certain groups of the bourgeoisie, among them industrialists, bankers, professionals, and well-to-do homeowners. In Kyiv, for instance, these groups shaped the urban regime after 1870 by taking advantage of “informal arrangements” with the imperial officials and by accumulating various types of capital – financial, symbolic, and sociopolitical. In Kyiv, the municipal duma was increasingly staffed by multiethnic entrepreneurs and professionals. At city hall, such different individuals as the academic of German descent Nikolai Bunge, the Jewish lawyer Lev Kupernik, the Greek Odesa-born merchant Ivan Tolli, and the “old-time” Ukrainian merchant Fedir Voitenko all shared the floor, if not each other’s ideas or priorities. Also to be found at city hall, of course, were nobles and administrative officials. In fact, the autocratic government viewed these people as the most desirable and reliable municipal leaders. Yet even they showed dissatisfaction with the state, sometimes with more fervor than representatives of humbler social estates. For instance, Odesa’s largely aristocratic city leadership famously clashed with the governor-general of New Russia in 1888 over finances. In another instance, a particularly bold proposal calling for a constitution in Russia was brought forward in the city duma of Mykolaïv in 1881. A nastier consequence of post-reform municipal order was the rise of far-right populists in city halls, especially after the conservative turn of the 1890s. A notorious case was the ascendancy in Kyiv’s municipal government of Vasilii Protsenko (in 1900–06),

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a particularly repulsive reincarnation of Karl Lueger, the infamous antisemitic mayor of Vienna. A physician by profession and villain by character, Protsenko presided over a savage anti-Jewish pogrom in the city in October 1905. It is very difficult to give a complete and coherent assessment of the Great Reforms. The reforms were indeed “great” in that they irreversibly changed imperial society by emancipating the serfs, granting self-government to urban and rural communities, liberalizing education and thereby giving rise to a growing class of professionals, technical experts, intellectuals, and civil servants. More significantly, the reforms put Russia on a course of global industrial capitalism and modernity. Yet the reforms also had inherent and even “fatal” (Ben Eklof’s word) flaws: the most serious were the failures to limit the autocracy, eliminate arbitrary rule by the bureaucracy, and defend liberal values from the assault of reactionaries, especially in the wake of Alexander II’s assassination. Autocracy was not reformed, and the person of the tsar remained inseparable from the state. Erroneously and ultimately tragically, Alexander II believed that the people he ruled saw in him “a paternal and unlimited lord, placed there by God,” as if there were a “mystique ruling among the people.”35 The allegedly liberal tsar rejected all calls for a representative government, warning, instead, that if Western constitutional forms were adopted in Russia, the outcome would be not “the unity of the State but the disintegration of the Empire into pieces.” As major studies of Russian autocracy and imperial bureaucracy have confirmed time and again, autocracy’s authority as a separate and dominant institution remained intact throughout the entire imperial period. It also proved decisive at focal points in the regime’s history – during the Decembrist revolt, the emancipation of the serfs, the “counter-reforms” of the 1880s, and the aftermath of the 1905 Revolution.36 Marc Raeff pointed to another important shortcoming of the Great Reforms – the failure to produce an efficient bureaucracy, detached from the figure of the tsar, equipped with its own professional ethos, and safeguarded by judicial guarantees of its social standing. “Because the bureaucracy, such as it was, remained at the mercy of an autocrat,” wrote Raeff, “it could not consistently carry out long-range policies of transformation and reform. That bureaucracy was also separate and distinct from the society it administered. Russia developed almost none of the intervening links that can be identified in Western Europe, nor did Russia possess a common legal language that could serve as a medium of communication between society and the state. Russian

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officials constituted a class that was in conflict with both the source of its authority and the subjects of its concerns.”37 In effect, the autocrat’s personal power precluded the development in Russia of a Rechtsstaat – constitutional state – that could guarantee the security of both its officials and the subjects they administered. Raeff aptly observed that instead of becoming a Rechtsstaat, imperial Russia was a Reglamentsstaat –that is, a regulatory state. The failure to produce an efficient bureaucracy attested to the failure to produce an impersonal state separate from the tsar and the autocracy he personified. This, in turn, led to the growing alienation of various groups in educated society from both the personalized autocracy and the impersonal bureaucracy. Most important in this regard was the impetus the Great Reforms indirectly gave to the rise of a potent new social and ideological challenge to the autocratic rule – the intelligentsia. Perceived as a stereotypically east European phenomenon, the intelligentsia was arguably Russia’s most famous literary and ideological export to the West, widely popularized in works by Turgenev, Chernyshevskii, Tolstoy, and Chekhov. Ukraine, however, was already in the process of fashioning its own intelligentsia.

th e b i r th o f th e i n t e l l i g e n tSi a fro m th e S Pi ri t o f r e f o r m In 1847, when he was arrested, Mykola Kostomarov did not sport a beard. Then a young assistant professor at Kyiv University, Kostomarov was thus a state employee, for whom having beards was banned. But by 1870, having briefly been a professor at St Petersburg University (in the early 1860s, while still beardless!), Kostomarov had grown a quite long and bushy beard, as is evident in the renowned portrait of him by Mykola (Nikolai) Ge. Decades earlier, in 1837, the despotic Nicholas I had prohibited the wearing of beards or mustaches by civil servants as being “totally inappropriate.” The ban lasted until 1874, when his son and heir, Alexander II, permitted beards in the military (except for those in the Imperial Guards). Interestingly, it was the next, highly conservative tsar, Alexander III (sporting a beard himself!), who extended that permission to all civil servants, including academics like Kostomarov (who by then had retired). What changed between 1847 and the 1870s was not simply fashions in facial hair but entire social and ideological structures. Over the next several decades, Kostomarov and many of his peers would continue to appear on photographs sporting longish and bushy beards.

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Photographs were then relative novelties, but, like beards, they soon became ubiquitous signs of the new times. Another sign, only slightly less directly evident, was the emergence of the new ideological subculture known as the intelligentsia. Photographic images of bearded men, individually and in groups, began to appear in great numbers from the 1860s on, a preferred visual representation of any male who aspired to be and appear a member of the intelligentsia. Soon there was an abundance of photos depicting groups of men of various ages, often with unkempt beards, long hair, and visibly time-worn clothes. In these photos women soon joined the men, without beards but often dressed in similarly untidy fashion. Conspicuous facial hair was typically seen as a symbol of independence and non-conformity. However, Alexander III – the first Russian ruler since Aleksei Mikhailovich of Muscovy (r. 1645–76) to grow a beard – viewed that fashion not as a politically ambiguous innovation but as a sign of devotion to Russian tradition. These contradictory perceptions were one simple indication of the growing ideological disparity between the tsar and his subjects. Hardly surprisingly, the dominant narrative of late imperial political history soon became that of the intelligentsia clashing with the autocracy, as if other social and professional groups had ceased to exist. Historians now agree that it is almost impossible to give an “objective” sociological or philosophical definition of “intelligentsia.” One plausible description could be as a “self-defined, self-proclaimed subculture” having a host of subjective meanings.38 In some sense, this category of people united those who deviated from social norms, that is, individuals who felt out of place in the constraints of their ascribed social status and/or prescribed function within formal institutions. In order to project a new – and largely self-fashioned – identity as members of the intelligentsia, these individuals had to have certain attributes, that is, possess social and symbolic “capital” of some sort. Usually this consisted of post-secondary education and a particular set of values, typically ones at odd with the existing sociopolitical order. The latter included deep concern for issues of public interest, a sense of guilt and personal responsibility for these issues, and a tendency to view social and political issues as moral ones.39 More important, the intelligentsia continuously reflected on What is to be done?, a call first voiced in 1863 in the tremendously influential yet hopelessly tedious novel with that title by Nikolai Chernyshevskii, himself an archetype of an early intelligent. That novel, with its radical call to action, inspired an entire generation of populist and increasingly revolutionary intelligenty. Many

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acted on their beliefs in undertakings that ranged from teaching in village schools (the domain of the liberal zemstvo intelligentsia) to stalking and killing the tsar and his officials (the path of the radical populists and anarchists). By allowing only very limited space for public debate while also, astonishingly, nearly doubling university enrollments, Alexander II would fall victim to a radical intelligentsia he himself had inadvertently helped come into being.40 It should be said that many notorious and radical “Russian” members of the intelligentsia were in fact ethnic Ukrainians or came from what is now Ukraine. Contrary to the popular view, “intelligentsia” as a term referring to the collective intelligence of a social group was not coined by Russians or in Russia. Most likely, it was first used by Poles from Prussia in the 1840s (the philosophers Karol Libelt and Bronisław Trentowski are traditionally credited) and then popularized by Russian literati in the 1860s (first by the minor novelist Petr Boborykin). In Russia, the notion of an intelligentsia became linked to the Great Reforms, although its origin there can be traced back to the 1830s and ’40s and the generation of intellectuals influenced by German idealism and Romanticism. Initially, most of these individuals were of noble descent, but more and more they were people of a class already known as the raznochintsy (“people of various ranks”), that is, commoners not easily ascribed to any of the existing social estates. Defined only loosely in legal or social terms, the raznochintsy included priests’ sons who chose secular occupations, ranked but non-noble officials and their children, non-nobles with a higher education, and assorted technicians and proto-professionals, among others. Elise Wirtschafter has noted that from the mid-nineteenth century the raznochintsy were identified with socially progressive writers and then later with the non-noble, radical democratic intelligentsia. On the eve of World War I, Vladimir Lenin spoke of the socially diverse raznochintsy as being the backbone of the revolutionary movement prior to its final proletarian stage. Consequently, for many contemporaries the intelligentsia was synonymous with the raznochintsy, a much older but equally nebulous category. Given the underdeveloped corporate and professional ethos in Russia, there the intelligentsia’s social functions overlapped with ones that in Western societies were reserved for professionals such as physicians, lawyers, technical and financial experts. But in Russia many such people were neither radical nor oppositional and may not have identified with the intelligentsia at all. Those who did proclaim themselves to be members of the intelligentsia in the Russian Empire were

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concerned with pressing sociopolitical, moral, and cultural issues and often overtly showed discontent with the ruling regime. They were also prone to “almost narcissistic self-awareness.”41 Additionally, the intelligentsia of the empire’s ethnic peripheries was active in first imagining and then building new national communities. Benedict Anderson vividly described the mindset of these ethnic intelligentsias, who believed that they were merely “awakening” sleeping nations (as if they were sleeping beauties!) rather than creating them. Hence, they called what they were doing a national “awakening” or “revival” and referred to themselves as “national awakeners.” Anderson goes on to explain how “sleep” was understood in this context: “it permitted those intelligentsias and bourgeoisies who were becoming conscious of themselves as Czechs, Hungarians, or Finns to figure their study of Czech, Magyar, or Finnish languages, folklores, and music as ‘rediscovering’ something deep-down always known.”42 In other words, the “awakeners” firmly believed that these nationalities already existed and only had to be brought to self-consciousness. As we know, from the late eighteenth century a number of heritage gatherers and glory hunters, some featured in chapter 2 of this book, actively engaged in “awakening” Ukraine. They can well be regarded as a proto-intelligentsia, although many had no particular stake in moral or social issues. Nor were they political radicals. What these aristocratic amateurs and the later populist intelligentsia had in common was that they were well-educated individuals, often graduates of classical high schools, Orthodox seminaries, and universities, who took it upon themselves to lead the “people” and guide them toward their “higher enlightenment” (Karol Libelt’s phrase). In the Ukrainian case, most such early “national” intellectuals were from families of the so-called Little Russian gentry of Left-Bank Ukraine (the former Hetmanate). Until the mid-nineteenth century, nearly half of the most active heritage gatherers were teachers at universities or classical high schools. The initial group, active during the 1830s and ’40s, was very small, only about twenty-five people who were primarily writers, literary critics, or researchers in history, ethnography, or language. Several hundred other individuals, mostly landed nobles, constituted the educated public of the nascent national discourse. Many were also affected by the monumental debates between Slavophiles and the Westernizers that were concurrently underway during the 1830s and 1840s in Russia and are often considered a major intellectual force in shaping the intelligentsia there (for instance, Maksymovych sided with the Slavophiles, as later did Kostomarov).

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In writing about “intelligentsia-inspired nationalism,” Paul Robert Magocsi has determined that it was typical of many “stateless” ethnic communities in eastern Europe. He also imaginatively coined the terms “heritage gatherers” and “heritage-gathering stage” in a national “revival.” According to his schema, the initial “heritage-gathering” stage in Russian-ruled Ukraine can be said to have lasted from the 1780s to the 1840s (chapter 2, above). Its next, organizational stage lasted from the 1840s to 1900, followed by its “political” stage (1900– 1917).43 Whether we accept this tidy sequence of three stages or not, important differences between various generations of the national intelligentsia are readily discernable. The new, post-reform generation of Ukrainian intellectuals – the intelligentsia proper – came of age in the mid- to late 1850s, and initially it coexisted with the previous one, that is, the former members of the Brotherhood of SS Cyril and Methodius. However, in social, cultural, and geographical terms there were notable differences between the two. At this point, the story moves to the west of the Dnipro River. In the late 1850s, some Kyiv University students of Polish noble descent from Right-Bank Ukraine again became preoccupied with the liberation of Poland. Many of the would-be rebels understood that since they lived in Ukraine, to be successful they needed the support of Ukrainian peasants. Influenced by the populist and democratic thinking of the time, these sons of the Polish or polonized gentry felt guilt for the local peasantry’s centuries of oppression. A good number of these students began to wander through the countryside, mingling with local peasants, learning their speech, songs, and way of life, and in the process propagating the idea of Polish-Ukrainian fraternity. These young men were pejoratively referred to as chłopomanie, literally “peasant lovers,” by their more socially aloof Polish compatriots. A few loved peasants literally, married peasant girls, and settled down in the countryside. The most radical of these Polish youths went to great lengths to find their own purported Ukrainian origins. Some, feeling guilt for the Polish past, rejected their Polish identity, nobiliary status, and connections within Polish society and instead embraced a newly found Ukrainian identity. In a sense, they became born-again Ukrainians. Now, one could be only either a Pole or a Ukrainian, refuting the long-standing Polish tradition of dual PolishUkrainian loyalty, which in the 1850s and ’60s was still championed by prominent émigrés like Franciszek Duchiński and Michał Czajkowski. The most remarkable of these “new” Ukrainians was Volodymyr Antonovych (1834–1908). Born Włodzimierz Antonowicz to a patriotic

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Polish family in the town of Makhnivka, in the Berdychiv district of Kyiv province, by a curious twist of fate he became a prominent professor of Russian history at Kyiv University and a major organizer of Ukrainian civic life. His family belonged, he asserted, to the “middle class” of Polish society in Right-Bank Ukraine that typically earned a living as teachers, tutors, governesses, lawyers, etc., offering their services to wealthy landed nobles and magnates. His Catholic mother, Monika Górska, once a governess in wealthy Polish households, was a Polish patriot who sought to instill her national and social values in her son. Antonovych liked to emphasize that his biological father was not, as his name suggested, Bonifacy Antonowicz, a Polish noble from Lithuania who served as a tutor in Right-Bank Ukraine, but the son of an émigré Hungarian revolutionary whom Volodymyr’s mother met ten years after separating from her Polish husband. Antonovych was also proud that his biological father was half-Ukrainian (on his maternal side) and a graduate of Lviv University. A passionate advocate of contemporary anthropology, Antonovych later in life also held that the “inheritance received from one’s ancestors” – that is, heredity – determined up to 75 per cent of one’s personality, that is, much more than upbringing, education, or personal initiative. In other words, he staunchly believed that nature easily dominated over nurture. That determinist concept of identity allowed Antonovych to distance himself even more from the Polish world. From 1850 to 1860, Antonovych was a student at Kyiv University. His initial field of study (undertaken at his mother’s insistence) was medicine. Upon graduating from the medical faculty in 1855, he did practice medicine, first in Berdychiv and then in Chornobyl, a town he later called a “great desert and dirt of spiritual sphere.” But, having freed himself of that obligation, he resolved to return to his alma mater to study history. There he became active in the Polish student movement, specifically in its radical democratic branch, whose goals were not only restoring Polish statehood but also securing social equality, abolition of serfdom, and the education of Ukrainian peasants. Officially still a Pole, he joined the underground group called Związek Trojnicki (Union of the Three), whose name referred to the three historical lands of Right-Bank Ukraine – Volhynia, Podolia, and “Ukraine” (the Kyiv region) – that had been part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth prior to 1795. Antonovych differed from others in the group, however, in his scholarly ambitions and sociopolitical radicalism, and especially in his harsh criticism of the Polish gentry for their mistreatment

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of Ukrainian peasants. He later recalled how he and several friends traveled on foot about the countryside, dressed in peasant attire. This dressing-up in itself dangerously blurred social boundaries in the eyes of Polish nobles and the Russian police. The peasants, too, seemed dumbfounded by the spectacle of this social drag show, that is, educated, nobiliary youths deliberately dressing as peasants did. In fact, they did not understand what was meant by the word “students.” Nonetheless, the locals usually greeted Antonovych and his fellow populist chłopomanie more with warmth than wariness. Some accounts of their travels bear resemblance to modern anthropologists’ encounters with remote tribes in Amazonia or Papua New Guinea. “We usually obtained permission from the peasants to spend the night with them,” the aspiring anthropologist Antonovych recalled years later. “Not once did our hosts accept payment for a night’s lodging or for supper. We observed this on our first trip and stocked up with crosses, icons, St. Barbara rings and the like, which, in departing after a night’s lodging, we distributed as gifts to the children.”44 What Antonovych was describing here amounted to discovery of the peasantry as a yet unknown indigenous group, one that was first to be studied, then enlightened, and finally invited to join the national community that the intelligentsia was in the process of imagining. Here the joke was in fact not on the “aboriginals” but on Antonovych himself: the peasants often offered money to the young travelers, having taken them to be vagabonds and thus reversing the roles typical of such exploratory encounters. Although Antonovych had embraced a positivist worldview still as a youth, his idealized view of the “people” and professed “cult of hromada” – his almost irrational belief in a peasant commune – developed then did not change over the ensuing years.45 As late as the1890s, Antonovych in his memoirs characterized the Ukrainian peasantry thus: “The people appeared before us not as the gentry pictured them, but as they really were. We perceived in them very strong natural logic and highly developed ethics, which were reflected in a readiness to help and in a sympathetic attitude to everyone in need.”46 The chłopomanie’s increasing association with Ukrainian peasants and their culture led to their alienation from the majority of Polish students and, in particular, from the underground Związek Trojnicki group, absorbed in readying another insurrection against Russia. These Polish students, like generations of Polish rebels before them, planned to include RightBank Ukraine in the new Poland. In the name of national unity, they urged Antonovych to tone down his criticism of the gentry. Instead,

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Antonovych became increasingly convinced that the interests of the Polish gentry and Ukrainian peasants were incompatible and, therefore, choosing between the two was unavoidable and necessary. In the fall of 1860, Antonovych arrived at a fateful decision: he would sever his Polish connections. Soon afterward, he rejected his Polish identity altogether by converting to Orthodoxy. In 1862, he formally left Polish society with the publication of his famous essay, “My Confession,” in Osnova, the journal put out by Ukrainian expats in St Petersburg. That act symbolized his transition from being a Pole to being a Ukrainian (or “South Russian,” in the terminology of the time). Agreeing rather than arguing with his Polish critics, Antonovych declared that he was indeed a “turncoat” who was choosing to be on the side of the oppressed. That same year, he began his long association with the Kyiv Archeographic Commission, which had been established by the Russian government in 1843. As noted earlier, the commission was charged with uncovering and publishing documents and other archival materials that would prove the “Russian” character of RightBank Ukraine and thus refute Polish claims to cultural dominance there. Antonovych served as the commission’s editor-in-chief from 1863 to 1882; in 1870 he began work as assistant professor at Kyiv University. Not surprisingly, his Polish critics later accused him of selling out to the Russians and betraying his fellow Poles right on the eve of the January insurrection of 1863. Later the Russian political police would promote the rumor that young Antonovych chose the “Russian side” for material gain. It was alleged that as a Pole he had been denied a stipend, and that was the real reason he had converted to Orthodoxy; also, that the conversion not only brought him the coveted stipend but led to his university post a few years later. This fabricated narrative was vicious slander, but Antonovych’s highly secretive nature did not help to dispel the various myths and falsehoods swirling around his public persona. On the other hand, his secrecy and cautiousness are understandable, given that he was kept under constant police surveillance all his life. What protected Antonovych was his reputation as an unrivalled expert in antiquities, consulted by Russian and international celebrities, aristocrats, and even royalty: among his clients were Italy’s crown prince Victor Emmanuel and one of Russia’s grand dukes, both of whom paid visits to his modest home in Kyiv. As noted above, Antonovych’s “Confession,” perhaps the single public expression of his true feelings, appeared in the legendary (and at that time sole) Ukrainian periodical Osnova. Why did the imperial

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capital, detested by so many Southerners, appear on the map of the Ukrainian national movement at all? As the chłopomanie were still roaming about the countryside, their precursors, the former members of the SS Cyril and Methodius brotherhood, began to return from exile and resume the academic and artistic careers abruptly derailed in 1847. By 1860, the founding fathers of Romantic nationalism in Ukraine – Kulish, Kostomarov, Shevchenko, and Bilozers'kyi – had all settled in St Petersburg. It was then that the city founded by Peter I became the center of the Ukrainian national movement, as well as the center of Ukrainian literature and journalism in the Russian Empire. As one former associate of the brotherhood admitted in 1861, “everything that is the best in high Ukrainian society is in St Petersburg; everything that is the best and remains in Ukraine is in the fields, at the ploughtail [that is, the peasantry itself – Sb ]. The rest is just trifles.”47 This statement reflected the social imagination of Ukrainian national leaders: the community they imagined consisted of the intelligentsia (“high society”) and the peasants (those “at the ploughtail”). But one remaining question would long go unanswered: what was to be done about the nobility and wealthy capitalists – who were often the intelligentsia’s sponsors – let alone the Russians, Jews, and Poles who lived on the Ukrainian lands? What mattered most, however, was that in the wake of the Great Reforms, the city of St Petersburg proved to be a relatively safe space in which various sensitive questions of the day could be raised, if not immediately addressed or answered. St Petersburg was a genuinely cosmopolitan metropolis, albeit, to be sure, one with diabolic qualities, as one famous “Southerner,” Nikolai Gogol, had depicted convincingly in his famed literary oeuvre. Whether the devil had any role there or not, the imperial capital became a favorable place for Ukrainian activities, much more so than in Ukraine itself, which was much more tightly supervised by the imperial authorities. Thus, the best option for Ukrainian intellectuals was to reside and work in the imperial capital. It was here that Kulish published his seminal works on his own printing press: the monument of folkloric and ethnographic heritage gathering Zapiski o Iuzhnoi Rusi (Notes on Southern Rus'; 2 vols, 1856–57); the pioneering historical novel Chorna rada, khronika 1663 roku (The Black Council, a Chronicle of the Year 1663; in 1857); and the primer Hramatka (1857) intended for use in Sunday schools, the first of which would open in 1859 in Kyiv. Kulish creatively used diy tactics: he not only founded his own printing press but devised his own orthography of the Ukrainian vernacular, so-called Kulishivka, which, among

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other things, replaced the Church Slavonic (and Russian) letter ы with и and introduced the letter g (now the long-suffering letter ґ, which in the Stalinist 1930s cost more than one linguist an untimely death). Kulish also published the works of other writers, most notably Marko Vovchok’s Narodni opovidannia (People’s Tales; 1858) and the third edition of Taras Shevchenko’s Kobzar (1860). The latter, Shevchenko’s seminal poetry collection, appeared in the impressive print-run of 6,500 copies, financed by Platon Symyrenko, scion of the famed family of sugar manufacturers spoken of earlier. In 1861, Kulish’s printing press also published Shevchenko’s most renowned romantic historical epic, Haidamaky. It is here, in St Petersburg, that in the fall of 1858, the old friends Kulish, Kostomarov, Shevchenko, and Bilozers'kyi founded the cultural club they called “Hromada” in a clear reference to a village commune, in line with their romantic and populist outlook. The group was not a political party but, quite literally, a tea party and informal gathering of intellectuals and public servants interested in various aspects of Ukrainian culture. Hromada meetings usually took place on Mondays at Vasyl' Bilozers'kyi’s apartment, where just tea, bread, and cheese were served – clearly, the participants must have been attracted not by the food but by the promise of food for thought and discussion. Since membership was wholly informal, it is hard to ascertain how many people attended Hromada meetings, but various sources put that number between fifty and sixty. These individuals were Ukrainians, Poles, and Russians, from dissident writers to imperial generals and statesmen. Between 1858 and 1862, Bilozers’kyi’s apartment was one of very few places in the imperial capital where the radical populist Chernyshevskii (soon to be exiled to Siberia) could socialize with the conservative statesman Ivan Delianov (soon to be appointed deputy minister of education). With financial support from the wealthy Ukrainian landowners Vasyl' Tarnovs'kyi and Hryhorii Galagan, both members of the Editing Commission working on a draft for the emancipation of serfs, the St Petersburg Hromada launched its most important publication – the journal Osnova (22 issues, 1861–62), published by Bilozers'kyi at Kulish’s printing press. Despite bitter editorial squabbles between Kulish and Bilozers'kyi, Osnova united the most important Ukrainian intellectuals of the time, and it became Ukraine’s prime intellectual product of the Great Reforms. The journal’s collaborators, numbering more than fifty people, were both young people from Ukraine like the former chłopomanie

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Antonovych and Fadei Ryl's'kyi (born Tadeusz Rylski) and seasoned Ukrainian activists like Kostomarov, Kulish, and Shevchenko. By that time, Shevchenko had become a symbolic figure for all Hromada sympathizers, and his poems (or diary writings) opened every new issue of Osnova (over seventy instances in total). The journal’s editorial agenda was deliberately vague, so as not to alarm the censors: its stated aim was to “study” the land populated by “predominantly South-Russian people.” One major preoccupation was the “practical significance of the people’s language [i.e., Ukrainian – Sb ] in education and sermons.” Put differently, the journal’s goal was to define a distinct Ukrainian identity by exploring such issues as the separate status of the Ukrainian language, national history, and the still popular romantic notion of “national character.” Ironically, editorial meetings were conducted mostly in Russian, with only droplets of Ukrainian. It comes as no surprise, then, that the journal was bilingual, Russian-Ukrainian. Kulish, for instance, recognized that a periodical published exclusively in Ukrainian was “impossible,” owing to a shortage of readership and authors, since “our language is not yet sufficiently developed.”48 A few controversies surrounded some of the materials published in Osnova. One had to do with the negative reaction of the Russian conservative press to articles by Kostomarov, particularly “Two Rus' Nationalities” and “Reflections on the Federative Principle in Old Rus'.” Both articles emphasized that, historically, Ukraine and Russia have been distinct and equal entities, even when they complemented one another. Conservative critics objected to Kostomarov’s strong federalist message and his advocacy, through Osnova, for a separate Ukrainian language; their argument amounted to denunciation of “Little Russian patriotism” in general and the “Little Russian party” in particular. Another controversy was sparked by an accusation that some fictional and nonfictional texts published in Osnova had antisemitic content. The Odesa-based Jewish weekly Sion did, in fact, fault Osnova for its hostility to Jews, as well as for undermining Russia’s unity. Kostomarov and Kulish responded to these accusations rather dismissively, on their part pointing to Jews’ historical association with Polish nobles against the interests of Ukrainian peasants, insularity from Ukrainian common people, and distancing from Ukrainian culture. Kulish went so far as to compare Sion to the biblical Judas, casting it as an instigator and traitor. Some historians today consider this dismissive reaction to have been a “political blunder” and lost opportunity to win the secular Jewish intelligentsia over to the Ukrainian cause.49 In any case, plagued by internal

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disagreements, accusations of inciting separatism, police harassment, censorship, falling subscriptions, and financial difficulties, Osnova’s editors were soon forced to cease publication. The journal’s close in the midst of whirls of controversy did not, however, herald the end of the movement that stood behind it. If anything, pro-Ukrainian activists became even more energized. The Hromada initiative begun in St Petersburg soon spread across Ukraine, uniting wide circles of liberal and, at times, radical intelligentsia. Most important, at least symbolically, was the Hromada in Kyiv (later known at the Old Hromada), which for the first time in modern history united Ukrainian activists from both the right and left banks of the Dnipro. The Kyiv Hromada’s origins have been obscured by controversy of its own, over who deserves more credit for its founding, the former Polish chłopomanie or students in Kyiv who came from Left-Bank Ukraine. Student groups from the Left Bank certainly acted independently of their Polish counterparts, and they were far more numerous. But it is equally true that Volodymyr Antonovych and a few of his friends, once members of a Polish gmina (student commune) based in Kyiv, came to play a dominant role. In any case, in the early 1860s the new (though soon to be known as the Old) Hromada in Kyiv did not have any formal or even obvious leadership. Accounts vary, but the first society of the Hromada type in Kyiv was most likely founded in 1859 by students from Left-Bank Ukraine who, in the spirit of the positivist philosophy then fashionable, felt morally obligated to improve the condition of the working people through educating them. In late 1860 or early 1861, the chłopomanie Antonovych, Ryl's'kyi, and several others joined existing groups to form the Kyiv Hromada. One unexpected and sad event showcased the growing strength of the young pro-Ukrainian activists in Kyiv. On 27 February 1861, Taras Shevchenko, the poet and artist already widely held to be Ukraine’s national prophet, just 47 years old, died suddenly in St Petersburg. He was buried there, in Russia’s capital. Two months later, in accordance with his wishes, his body was transported to Ukraine for reburial. On 7 May, thousands of Kyivites gathered to see his coffin being moved along the bank of the Dnipro towards a steamer that would take his body to its final resting place on Chernecha Hora (Monk’s Mountain), near the town of Kaniv. Taras Shevchenko’s reburial procession was one of the largest public spectacles ever held in Kyiv, and it brought the chłopomanie and early Hromada activists into the spotlight. Speakers at the ceremony included Antonovych, then a recent university

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graduate in medicine and history, and Mykhailo Drahomanov, then a student of Greco-Roman history. These two young men would soon become the leading members of Kyiv’s Hromada, and they would eventually gain renown as the most important nineteenth-century Ukrainian intellectuals. By this time, in 1861, many of Kyiv’s populist-minded university and gymnasium students were already taking part in the proliferation of Sunday schools for peasants and the urban proletariat. Indeed, during the first period of the Kyiv Hromada’s existence, from 1859 to 1863, its members devoted themselves almost entirely to teaching at Sunday schools. The first Sunday school in Kyiv opened on 11 October 1859. The city was in fact the birthplace of the Sunday school movement in the Russian Empire: in this way, too, Ukraine was a laboratory of imperial modernity in the age of reforms.50 Ironically, the Sunday schools were most likely patterned on Jewish Sabbath schools for artisans in Odesa, which resulted from an educational reform associated with the Jewish enlightenment (Haskala) movement, supported by Nikolai Pirogov, a renowned surgeon, liberal thinker, and curator of the Odesa school district.51 Soon there were dozens more Sunday schools in Ukraine; the cities of Kyiv, Poltava, and Odesa each already had five. There were also Sunday schools in Kharkiv, Chernihiv, other towns and some larger villages. In 1859–60, they numbered 68,52 and by 1862 there were more than 100. In Kyiv, various groups of Hromada members divided the urban turf for their Sunday schools as if they were rival gangs. For example, the former Poles or chłopomanie worked in the Sunday school located in the “New Building” area close to the university and were known informally as “The Ukrainians” (they taught almost exclusively in Ukrainian). These “Ukrainians” in fact included not only seventeen Ukrainians but four Poles, one German, and a Jew.53 Those teaching at the Sunday school in the Podil district were primarily university students from Poltava province. Drahomanov was among them; he and his colleagues frequently used Russian textbooks, which led to their being labeled “The Cosmopolitans.” Finally, the group behind the Sunday school in the district of Pechers’k was called “The Slavophiles,” owing to its mixed Russian-Ukrainian membership and vaguely Slavophile ideology. Hromada members had now earned credentials as the proverbial servants of the people, serving as non-salaried teachers who brought the fruits of enlightenment to the urban poor. The language of instruction was usually Ukrainian, a measure permitted by Curator Pirogov, who had meanwhile been transferred from Odesa to the Kyiv school district.

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Teaching materials included Kulish’s Hramatka (Grammar, 1857) and Shevchenko’s Bukvar’ iuzhnorusskii (South Russian [i.e., Ukrainian] Primer, 1861); the latter was published in a huge print run of 10,000 copies, paid for by the author himself. Classes of one to three hours’ duration were held every Sunday; the subjects of study, according to regulations for 1861, included reading and writing, religion, arithmetic, and drawing – conspicuously innocent subjects. But by June 1862, the tsarist authorities had suddenly decided to close all Sunday schools. Petr Valuev, the empire’s infamous minister of the interior, attributed the closure to the alleged discovery of revolutionary propaganda in some of the schools.54 Only in the 1880s and ’90s did Sunday schools again begin to operate across the empire. To be sure, the Sunday school movement itself could not have solved the issue of illiteracy in Ukraine, which would remain ubiquitous well into the twentieth century. However, the movement did show the growing ambitions of Ukrainian activists and their ability to reach out to the masses. It was this direct access to peasants and workers, as well as the overt social activism of Hromada members, that alarmed the authorities. In early 1863, after the Sunday schools had been closed, the authorities officially banned Hromadas overall as well, another instance of autocracy’s usual mistrust of public initiative of any kind. The liberal phase of Alexander III’s reign was beginning to be phased out. At the height of its activity, in 1862, the Kyiv Hromada had 200 to as many as 250 members. By and large, these people were from what was soon to be recognized as the intelligentsia, but some were from other distinct social groups – peasants, Cossacks, clergy, civil servants, burghers, and landowners. They were also of different nationalities – Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, Poles, and Germans. The Kyiv Hromada did not have a clearly defined program or structure. As stated in its only public declaration, “Otzyv iz Kieva” (A Reply from Kyiv; 1862), signed by twenty-one members (five from the Right Bank, the remainder from the Left Bank), the Kyiv Hromada rejected revolutionary activity and resolved to focus instead on educating the peasantry and cultural matters. The signatories rejected the imposition of any political or social doctrine on the masses and declared their readiness to wait for the time when “the common people themselves will be able to speak to us about things that at the moment are inaccessible to their intellectual development.”55 Rejecting political “separatism” of any kind, Hromada members embraced the notion of cultural separatism as a way to promote the development of Ukrainian language and literature.

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This public declaration marked the birth of a Ukrainian intelligentsia per se. Also, by declaring its own mission in these specific terms, the Kyiv Hromada positioned itself as a moderate and positivist Ukrainian alternative to radical and increasingly violent Russian populism of the kind exemplified, for instance, in Dostoevsky’s novel Demons (Besy), with its depiction of a student’s murder by fellow radicals in Moscow in 1869. The initial Hromada movement was indeed a great social and cultural experiment – an optimistic attempt at inclusive activism that was possible only in the late 1850s and early 1860s, when a window of opportunity for a combined force of liberal nationalism, positivist social action, and political liberalism was still open in Russia. A broad agenda of this kind would become more and more impossible in the times to come, marred as they were by the rise of Russian chauvinism, revolutionary terrorism, and autocratic reaction. In the meantime, the year 1863 had arrived: it would mark the turning point in the entangled history of the Polish-Russian-Ukrainian encounter.

5 The Empire Strikes Back

P o leS reb el, a c t i i When news of the disturbances in Warsaw in the winter of 1863 reached Kostomarov in St Petersburg, he was shocked. The historian would later admit that what he found most shocking was that a number of his Polish friends – including Zygmunt Sierakowski (1827–1863), with whom from 1860 to 1862 Kostomarov was especially close, meeting at the public library and at social occasions – proved to be active participants in or ardent supporters of the January Uprising. While in exile at the Orenburg fortress from 1849 to 1854, Sierakowski had befriended Taras Shevchenko, and when both returned to St Petersburg they had attended the Hromada’s famed gatherings at the home of Bilozers'kyi. Captain Sierakowski, who had been a stellar student at the General Staff Academy, had captivated Kostomarov by his strongly democratic ideas, belief in Slavic federation, devotion to the idea of the people’s enlightenment, and rejection of “the gentry’s attitudes” – that is, the despotism of the nobility in old Poland. When a Polish insurgency arose in Lithuania, Sierakowski had appeared among the insurgents as a military leader in the Kaunas (Kowno) palatinate, rumored to have ordered the execution of Russian Pow s. Soon he was badly wounded, captured by Russian troops, and then hanged in Vilnius (after his wounds had healed, as if only a healthy man could be put to death in Russia). Kostomarov felt that by taking part in the uprising Sierakowski had betrayed him personally and the ideals they had supposedly shared. Instead of mourning the violent death of his former friend, the historian lamented at his own naïveté: “Having learned of his fate, I had to acknowledge

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my inexcusable naïveté and the credulity with which I took at face value everything that the Poles, our common enemies [my italics – Sb ], had been telling me.”1 Was Kostomarov’s negative reaction to the uprising typical of the Ukrainian intelligentsia of the time? Twenty years later, in 1883, Mykhailo Drahomanov (1841–1895), a rising star in the Hromada movement, recalled the events of 1863 at almost exactly the same time as his older compatriot Kostomarov was setting down (in fact, dictating) his own recollections. Drahomanov, on his part, admitted that he did not have “firsthand knowledge” of the Poles, and although he sympathized with them as “victims of Russian despotism,” being a Ukrainian he could never completely forget that “Poland had also been one of Ukraine’s oppressors.” When Drahomanov entered Kyiv University in 1859, he had learned that the Poles there were all “aristocrats” who often beat their servants and afterward piously knelt down in church. By contrast, the “Orthodox” students – that is, Ukrainians and Russians – were all “ardent democrats and atheists.” Young Drahomanov was also struck by the Poles’ “intolerance” toward Ukrainians. The Ukrainian students, unlike the Polish ones, were not political radicals, despite the fact that many were interested in Ukraine’s history and language and in teaching them in schools. And, since at that time the Russian government “did not inhibit the publication of Ukrainian materials, nor did it prevent schools and churches from attempting to teach in Ukrainian,” Ukrainians were not hostile toward the authorities. Conversely, the Ukrainian students were angered by Polish claims to Right-Bank Ukraine and were ready to side with the tsarist government against the Poles. Drahomanov, however, disagreed with such attitudes. He did not share the Ukrainian students’ “outright hostility” toward the Poles. “Besides that,” added the young Drahomanov, who would become a lifelong contrarian, “the idea of an alliance of any sort with the tsarist government against the Poles seemed to me both outrageous and erroneous.” How did Drahomanov react to the impending Polish uprising? He simply decided to walk away from “the politics of student circles” altogether and, instead, focused on teaching at the Temporary Pedagogical School where village teachers were being trained.2 When he returned to “politics” on the eve of the uprising, his Ukrainian orientation emerged more strongly and he joined Kyiv’s Hromada. Somehow Drahomanov completely omitted the topic of the January Uprising in his otherwise detailed “autobiographical sketch” (was this “montage” a deliberate or unintentional oversight?).

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Like Kostomarov, he preferred not to go into details about those bloody events, as if there was something shameful in the events themselves or, perhaps, in personal attitudes towards the uprising. Whatever the attitudes of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, a Polish uprising did indeed break out in Right-Bank Ukraine. Groups of future insurgents first sprang up in the region in 1856, initially as academic discussion groups. In Kyiv, for instance, one such group included twenty students, referred to as “purists” (or “puritans”) because of their opposition to the widespread heavy partying and debauchery that the authorities encouraged as a way to steer students away from politics. A student occupied with drinking and womanizing was thought to be less of a threat to public order than a student caught thinking soberly. The group’s radicalization was influenced by contacts with military officers returning from the Crimean War. Veterans, especially of lost wars, have often been champions of radical and revolutionary ideas, and such individuals had a direct bearing on the January Uprising. By early 1857, seven illegal groups uniting Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, and Jews were already in existence. Most Polish radical students then joined the Union of the Three (Związek Trojnicki), a conspiratorial umbrella group that consisted of smaller cells known as gminy (from the Polish gmina, “commune”). Each gmina represented the graduates of one gymnasium (classical high school) in a specific location. Curiously, Volodymyr Antonovych chose to belong to the gmina of Bila Tserkva even though he had been a student in Odesa. Antonovych was not the only young person to claim Ukrainian origins, and a considerable number of conspirators and later insurgents were in fact from mixed Polish-Ukrainian families. Until Antonovych’s public “confession” in 1862, people with borderland identities adhered to the same conspiracy that sought the liberation of Poland. The Union of Three even got in touch with the officers’ circle in St Petersburg headed at the time by Zygmunt Sierakowski, then still Kostomarov’s friend.3 In the fall 1861, the conspirators embarked on a more daring enterprise: they established a secret printing press in, of all places, the Kyivan Monastery of the Caves, heart of Russian Orthodoxy and conservative imperial ideology! Poles who infiltrated the press’s staff managed to publish the first issue of the newspaper Odrodzenie (Revival) in 100 copies. It conveyed one simple message: a call for the “restoration of the Fatherland [i.e., Poland].” However, the editors also acknowledged the demand of Ukrainians for self-determination, while still hoping that Ukraine would voluntarily unite with Poland.

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The conspirators proceeded to found an underground Polish society in Right-Bank Ukraine by doing what governments usually do, that is, addressing education and taxation. They set up a network of underground Polish schools, which by the summer of 1862 already numbered 43. Their teachers even included a son of Count Gustaw Olizar, a wealthy landowner in Kyiv province and elected leader (marshal) of its nobility. The schools’ curriculum emphasized the Polish language and literature and included a strongly democratic and anti-tsarist message, usually conveyed through Adam Mickiewicz’s patriotic Polish poems but at times through Shevchenko’s Ukrainian ones. Poles began to donate substantial amounts of money even more zealously to the revolutionary cause, purportedly to support former political prisoners now allowed to return home from exile: between 1858 and 1863, that legal fund accumulated more than 90,000 rubles. But this sum was negligible compared to an illegal fund to which the wealthiest landowners and merchants dutifully contributed. For example, a certain Count Plater from Kyiv province donated 127,000 rubles before the uprising and another 140,000 once it began.4 During the uprising, the local insurgent leadership – the Executive Committee in Rus' – even mandated extraordinary taxes on Polish citizens of differing social standing, from wealthy landowners and capitalists to professors and professionals, which were to be exacted by the National Guard (gendarmerie). In general, the fundraising campaigns of the time proved a tremendous success in mobilizing the public on the eve of the uprising. Another foray into mass politics was the wave of public demonstrations and near riots that swept Polish communities across Right-Bank Ukraine in 1861–62. Inspired by the visit from abroad of Władysław Mickiewicz, son of the famed poet, huge crowds gathered inside Catholic churches and on public squares to sing patriotic Polish hymns and demand rights for the Polish language and community overall. On 9–10 March 1861, between two and four thousand people gathered in Zhytomyr’s Roman Catholic Cathedral to commemorate the killing of five Polish protesters at the hands of Russian troops in Warsaw the previous month. In September, events in Zhytomyr took a more threatening turn for the Russian authorities, as a thousand-strong crowd besieged the governor’s residence and some people even got inside. Most ominous, however, was a demonstration that took place in Kyiv, on 9–10 October. It started at the city’s Roman Catholic Cathedral, where some 200 students gathered and began to sing patriotic Polish songs. When a police official who was also present (incidentally, an ethnic Pole) attempted to stop the singing,

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he was dragged outside and beaten with sticks. The angered students then continued to march along Khreshchatyk Street towards the university, where they smashed the glass of notice boards displaying official decrees and destroyed a portrait of Alexander II hanging in the university’s assembly hall. These actions may seem to resemble those of today’s football hooligans, but the students involved were in the vanguard of Polish democratic youth on the eve of a national uprising. A good number of them would not live past 1863, or would be sentenced to exile in Siberia. All in all, during 1861 there were 97 mass manifestations by patriotic Poles in Kyiv province, as well as 21 in Podolia province and 142 in Volhynia province.5 Support for the Polish national cause seemed to be as massive as ever, which must have bolstered the conspirators’ confidence. But in reality that confidence was hardly warranted. The real masses in the Right-Bank provinces spoke Ukrainian and stayed away from Polish manifestations. How, then, did the conspirators plan to reach out to these people, a mostly illiterate if not always silent majority? Having proclaimed the goal of building a new society in a decree of 22 January 1863, the revolutionary “National Government” in Warsaw on 31 March issued an appeal to the Orthodox Ukrainians under the symbolism-laden title “Golden Charter” (Złota Hramota). Written in both Polish and Ukrainian, the charter informed the “country folk” that Poland and Lithuania had risen up against “Muscovite rule” and proclaimed the intent to establish the freedom, equality, and happiness of “all community members (myrian) irrespective of their faith and social estate.” The promises the insurgency’s “National Government” was making to the peasantry included not only basic civil rights but also ownership of land allotments without any call for redemption – a strong contrast to the Russian emancipation act of 1861, which stipulated that former serfs were obliged to redeem the lands they received through monetary payments or labor. How was this generous and indeed forward-looking Polish offer received by Ukrainian peasants? We know that when the uprising in Right-Bank Ukraine broke out on 26 April 1863, each major insurgent detachment carried with it many copies of the Golden Charter. Printed on expensive paper in gold ink and crowned with a beauteous image of Archangel Michael, a historic symbol of the Kyiv region, the charter appealed to both the social concerns and aesthetic sensibilities of the local peasants. Nonetheless, the peasants’ reaction was lukewarm, at best, while at worst they actively helped the Russian authorities against

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the insurgents. One tragic incident came to symbolize the historical and literal miscommunication between the (Polish) nobles and (Ukrainian) peasants. After several receptions welcoming the Golden Charter in villages and towns southwest of Kyiv, at which local peasants often greeted the Poles with the customary bread and salt, a group of agitators arrived at the village of Solov’ïvka, near Fastiv, on the night of 27–28 April. Here the peasants were less receptive to the charter’s message. Faced with their rejection, and clearly outnumbered, the Polish insurgents, of whom there were twenty-one, agreed to lay down their arms. Suddenly, a shot rang out – who had fired it was unclear. Believing it came from the Poles, the peasants fell on them: in the ensuing melee, twelve of the insurgents were slain and the others, wounded, were thrown into a cellar. This episode, and others like them, amounted to a low-intensity jacquerie supported and fanned by the Russian authorities. Set up in every major village was a force of armed guards, and the peasants signed up to join them so eagerly that enlisted men in the three Right-Bank provinces soon exceeded 312,000.6 A further irony was that many of these peasant guards performed their duties overzealously, detaining and assaulting their own landowners who were not involved in the uprising. As one tsarist official reported: “Armed with scythes and knifes,” the peasants were engaging in “rampage and plunder, wreaking havoc” and staking claims to the landlords’ properties. As Alexander Pushkin famously and aptly wrote: “May Heaven spare us from witnessing a Russian rebellion; it is senseless and pitiless.”7 By contrast, the Ukrainian “rebellion” was in fact neither “senseless” nor “pitiless,” but it terrified the imperial government nearly as much as the Polish uprising that partly caused the peasants’ violent social activism. In the future, the Russian government would refrain from pitting peasants against landed nobles in Right-Bank Ukraine, if only to preserve the social order. In 1860–62, the Poles had made impressive use of conspiratorial tactics to mobilize Polish national publics in Right-Bank Ukraine, but their actions during the actual uprising had failed just as impressively. Despite numerous acts of individual and collective heroism, and the many insurgents who made the ultimate sacrifice, the uprising fell far short of the revolutionary government’s goal of preparing all Polish provinces for “a general uprising [my italics – Sb ].” As it turned out, the uprising was neither a general one nor did it encompass all the provinces, even of Right-Bank Ukraine. For instance, there was no uprising in Podolia province, for there the main conspirators had all been apprehended well

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before 1863. Of the dozen districts comprising Kyiv province, the uprising spread to just four. Only in Volhynia did the insurgents manage to organize an armed struggle in most districts: there the main regiment, led by Edmund Różycki, a former lieutenant-colonel in the tsarist army, numbered a thousand men (among them five Frenchmen who had participated in Giuseppe Garibaldi’s Italian campaigns).8 In reality, though, most insurgent groups were poorly armed, often relying solely on sabers and axes, and even those who had guns and rifles lacked ammunition (each recruit was usually issued only two or three bullets). The uprising was also not “general” in social and ethnic terms, for an overwhelming majority of insurgents were Poles from nobiliary families. Of the 903 men convicted as insurgents in Volhynia, only 101, or 11 per cent, belonged to the peasantry, and another 162, or 18 per cent, were smallholders (most likely déclassé nobles). In Kyiv province, of 1,336 convicted insurgents, 182 were peasants and 267 were smallholders, that is, 13.5 per cent and 20 per cent, respectively; the rest were wealthy landowners, professionals, military officers, students, and burghers. Remarkably, around 90 per cent of the peasants who participated in the uprising were Roman Catholics, not Orthodox.9 Not only was the social base of the uprising markedly narrow, but the total number of armed insurgents in Right-Bank Ukraine was quite small, between 5,600 and 6,000.10 It should come as no surprise, then, that those persecuted and executed in Right-Bank Ukraine numbered only two to three thousand. Aside from a few hundred rebels killed in battle, and the very few who were court-martialed and executed afterward (9 in Kyiv, compared to 180 in Vilnius and 475 in Warsaw), a few thousand suspected rebels were found guilty and condemned to various terms in penal servitude, exile (mostly in Siberia), and penal battalions. All in all, by 1867 the courts had found 3,100 people guilty of political crimes related to the January Uprising, or roughly half of all rebels from Right-Bank Ukraine. These men comprised only about 5 per cent of all those punished across the entire territory of the former PolandLithuania (the largest group came from Congress Poland). In addition, the landed properties of 144 Polish landowners from Right-Bank Ukraine were confiscated (50 in Kyiv province, 16 in Podolia, and 78 in Volhynia). The government refrained from large-scale land redistribution, so as not to antagonize the nobiliary class. Finally, a heavy tax was imposed on the Polish landed nobility, totaling 4,177,651 rubles in 1865.11 Consequently, the ratio of population per soldier in the three Right-Bank provinces remained the lowest in the empire (except for

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Poland): 82 to 1, compared to 269 to 1 in the rest of Ukraine. As late as 1897, Volhynia hosted 49,793 troops, compared to just 5,093 in Poltava province and 7,289 in Katerynoslav province.12 But while the immediate repressions were limited to a few thousand Polish nobles,13 the wider sociopolitical and cultural consequences affected all communities in the western part of the empire, including Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Belarusians, and Jews, as well as Polish society overall. Ukrainians as a community were affected by cultural repressions despite the fact that there were no links between the rebels and any substantial number of ethnic Ukrainians. Other than the few peasants who joined the uprising, most Ukrainians abstained from it or actively aided the Russian government. Not the Golden Charter, not the fabricated folksongs composed by Polish rebels to convey an anti-Russian and pro-Polish message, and not even “Cossack Savva” – a nom de guerre adopted by one of the rebel leaders – could win the hearts and minds of Ukrainian peasants. As for the Ukrainian intelligentsia, the stance of Kostomarov, Antonovych, and Drahomanov – that is, sympathy for their Polish friends, alongside rejection of Polish goals and means – were typical. Antonovych famously deserted the Polish conspirators well before the uprising broke out. Moreover, around 1861 he was among the approximately one hundred and fifty students (primarily Orthodox) who demanded that Polish manifestations be crushed.14 He also urged his friends to stay away from the insurrection (even so, some Russian officials suspected him of being a rebel both then and ever after). Another example involved Samostaine slovo (Independent Word), a handwritten underground sheet edited by Ukrainian students from Kyiv University. Its editorial of December 1861, titled “To Polish Ruthenians,” unequivocally dismissed the idea of Poland in its 1772 borders, alluding to the “Jesuit yoke” that Polish nobles still sought to impose on Ukraine. The same year, a similar argument was put forward by a student named Oleksandr Stoianov in another underground sheet, Hromadnytsia, the unofficial organ of the Kyiv Hromada. Stoianov reproached his Polish peers for a number of reasons: proclaiming Kyiv University a Polish school; turning a joint student protest into a Polish national one; maintaining that the city of Kyiv was located on Polish soil; and using Sunday schools to polonize Ukraine. “Yes, a Polish student should be a citizen and son of his motherland,” declared Stoianov, “but in Warsaw, not in Kyiv.” Regardless of the veracity of his accusations, the dominant mindset of the Ukrainian intelligentsia – old as well as young – was vigorously against another Polish uprising.

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There were, however, individuals associated with the Hromada of Kyiv who at the same time were sympathetic to the Polish cause. One night in April 1862, a short bald man with long mustache crashed a student party in Kyiv. The stranger was dressed in the elegant uniform of a hussar lieutenant-colonel. When he suddenly took off his jacket, those at the party – most of whom were adolescent radicals – were surprised to see a Ukrainian embroidered shirt, the traditional attire of peasants. The exuberant stranger proceeded to talk about the French Revolution and democracy – fiery topics at student gatherings in the 1860s. His name was Andrii Krasovs'kyi (1822–1868), and he belonged neither to the Ukrainian peasantry nor to the intelligentsia. His life seemed to be a cross between that of a Russian Decembrist from the 1820s and the Mexican outlaw Zorro’s. The son of a Russian war hero of Ukrainian descent and an aristocratic Russian mother, Andrii Krasovs'kyi graduated from the elite Corps of Pages in St Petersburg. During the 1850s he served with the hussar squadron in Russia’s military campaigns along the Danube and in the Caucasus. Severely wounded, he spent a year in Kyiv convalescing and then went to St Petersburg to serve in the prestigious hussar regiment of Empress Alexandra. There he became radicalized and may even have joined a mysterious revolutionary group. In 1859 he traveled to Europe, where he established contacts with Russian and Polish émigrés, most notably with Alexander Herzen, whose subversive publications he then carried back to Russia. He also met Garibaldi, symbolically father of all European radicals. In 1861, Krasovs'kyi, by then a lieutenant-colonel, got an appointment to teach at the Officers’ College (kadetskii korpus) in Kyiv, allowing him to spread radical ideas among teachers and students at the city’s government-funded schools. He also taught drawing at one of the Sunday schools in Kyiv and traveled widely across the countryside, propagating the dissident poetry of Taras Shevchenko (whom he had met) and others. That same year, Krasovs'kyi was present at a memorial service in Kyiv’s Roman Catholic Cathedral for the recently deceased Polish historian and émigré Joachim Lelewel. The service was attended by all the rebels who would lead that year’s uprising; afterward Krasovs'kyi kept copies of Polish patriotic hymns and Lelewel’s portrait as a memento of that “great day.”15 In spring 1862, having disguised himself as a peasant (he wore an embroidered shirt beneath his uniform), he went to the town of Korsun, near Kyiv, where, remarkably, he took lodgings with a relative of Taras Shevchenko’s. There, in Zorro-like fashion, the hussar-officer-turned-peasant defended the

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local peasants against their landlords and the authorities, incited popular protests against “regulatory charters,” and urged former serfs to demand land without redemption. When soldiers were sent to suppress the disturbances, Krasovs'kyi, dressed in Ukrainian clothing, admonished them for taking up arms against the peasantry and thundered that they were acting like the soldiers who had crucified Christ. Predictably, he was arrested and subsequently exiled to Siberia, where he died in suspicious circumstances, his life again imitating a Decembrist’s, if not that of Christ himself. As indicated above, Krasovs'kyi’s very appearance had an impact on the impressionable minds of aspiring radicals. One of them who was a gymnasium student later told police during an interrogation about connections between the Ukrainian radicals led by Krasovs'kyi and Polish conspirators. Today his confession is believed to have been a fabrication by Russian authorities intent on substantiating that there were such connections. The unfortunate young “confessor” – whose guilt, if any, lay in fraternizing with peasants, drinking vodka together with them, and singing folksongs (including “Ukraine Has Not Yet Died,” today Ukraine’s national anthem) – was deported to Vyatka in the north of Russia. In reality, there apparently was no actual collaboration between Polish and Ukrainian “secret committees” on the eve of the January Uprising. What’s more, the Ukrainian “secret committee” that was subsequently a darling of Soviet historians most likely never existed. And Krasovs'kyi himself, swashbuckler that he may have been, was not the leader of any revolutionary society allegedly cooperating with Polish revolutionaries. Rather, he was a one-man committee who tried to disseminate radical ideas in every direction. His extravagant and at times reckless behavior might also be attributable to the severe head wounds he once sustained, which must have affected his mental health. Aside from Polish hymns and his own satirical writings, police found in his possession issues of Samostaine slovo and Hromadnytsia, the two handwritten sheets edited by members of the Kyiv Hromada. Although both sheets were highly critical of Poles and their claims to Ukraine, they also contained materials critical of the autocracy and Russians in general. For instance, one issue featured the saying: “A Russian is to dirt like a beetle is to shit.” One of Krasovs'kyi’s own satires, written in Ukrainian, described an ethnically Russian innkeeper in Ukraine as “so ugly, like a beast, that it is unpleasant even to spit! … He came here barefoot and naked but is now playing the boss.”16 To the authorities, a folksy Russophobia of this kind was not as pernicious as political Polonophilia.

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Although no Polish links were ever proven, the Krasovs'kyi affair led to dire consequences for the Ukrainian intelligentsia and its movement. This came about even though the Lelewel-worshipping radicalized officer himself was an oddity among Ukrainian intellectuals and activists, virtually all of whom stayed away from Polish rebels, partly from fear of repressions but mostly owing to a genuine dislike of Poles themselves or their traditional attitudes towards Ukraine. To help understand such attitudes, historian Ivan Lysiak Rudnytsky, channeling his inner Drahomanov and using his arguments, proposed that for Ukrainian peasants, the very word for Poland connoted serfdom, whereas for the Ukrainian intelligentsia a restoration of Poland in its pre-partition borders meant another partition of Ukraine into two halves. So, in Drahomanov’s words, “if Ukrainians are to shed blood …, then only for the autonomy of their whole people.”17 Thus, as long as the Poles clung to the concept of “historical borders” that encompassed all of Right-Bank Ukraine, a Polish-Ukrainian alliance could exist only in the hot heads of Russian government officials.

“th er e waS no t, i S no t , a n d c a n n o t b e ” a Uk r a i ni an la n gU a g e As Polish conspirators were busily planning the uprising, Ukrainian activists in Kyiv were busy condemning the Polish actions and declaring their loyalty to the Russian government. Moreover, the members of the Kyiv Hromada enjoyed the clandestine support of the Kyivan governor-general, Illarion Vasil'chikov (in office 1852–62), who wanted to use their activities as an ideological weapon against the Poles. Vasil'chikov’s intent found some backing in St Petersburg, but his direct influence did not extend beyond the Right Bank. His sudden death in 1862 made the lives of Ukrainian activists in Kyiv more precarious, but the situation of their peers on the Left Bank was much worse. The fate of a few Ukrainian activists in Poltava proved to be an example of what could happen when the local governor was not a friend. There denunciations against local activists came to the surface in the winter of 1861. The affair began when students at a Poltava gymnasium were alleged to have been caught speaking disrespectfully of the tsar, a serious crime in Russia, and their teachers, members of the local Hromada, were held responsible. Then, in October 1861, Poltava’s civil governor wrote a strong denunciation of its Hromada members to the chief of gendarmes in St Petersburg, claiming that several teachers and public

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servants “who understood incorrectly the idea of progress and aimed at the revival of the Little Russian nationality” had shown disrespect to the local authorities.18 The governor also began to name names – for nine of the alleged culprits – and proposed that four of them be sentenced to administrative exile (without trial). Unfortunately for the accused, the year 1862 was on the horizon, and it would prove a bad year to be a political suspect in Russia. The regime’s first and foremost victim then was Nikolai Chernyshevskii, an icon of revolutionary populists: charged with having written a revolutionary proclamation calling on peasants and soldiers “to seek liberty,” he was arrested in June 1862. Chernyshevskii was sentenced to civil (mock) execution, followed by penal servitude (1864–72) and exile to Siberia (1872–83). The same year, a couple of radical populists were found to be teaching at Sunday schools in St Petersburg, and the government reacted by closing all such schools across the empire. By December 1862, four men from Poltava involved in the Sunday school movement had been deported to Russia’s remote areas, charged with seeking the independence of Ukraine. Exile to the north of Russia also awaited the prolific ethnographer and journalist Pavlo Chubyns'kyi (1839–84), accused of having composed a proclamation titled “To All Good People,” calling on peasants to rise and take up arms. Unlike Chernyshevskii, who was indeed responsible for issuing a revolutionary proclamation, Chubyns'kyi was not the author of one: his sentence was based on trumped-up political charges. Ironically, a work that Chubyns'kyi actually did write, the poem Ukraine Has Not Yet Died (1862), turned out to be much more consequential than any revolutionary proclamation of the time, for it soon became Ukraine’s unofficial national anthem (and, in a slightly changed version, the official one today). But the youthful dissent went far beyond singing and drinking with peasants, or even teaching in Sunday schools. As the Poltava case showed, early Hromada activists were not all so ideologically innocent after all, and some were in fact driven to revolutionary ideas, if not revolutionary tactics. Johannes Remy has cited the example of Viktor Loboda, director of the Poltava telegraph agency, who bluntly argued for Ukraine’s separation from Russia in a manner reminiscent of Polish revolutionary journalism. “One or the other: state or liberty” is the way that the radicalized civil servant posited the dilemma before Ukrainians. Loboda went on: “There is no reason to be tempted by the status of a member of a large state. Such a country as Russia is unimaginable as free. Only despotism can keep together in the same

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conditions all those differences between a Finn and a Tatar, a Muscovite and a Ukrainian. In a free state a majority decides everything. That is again Muscovite domination.”19 Loboda was subsequently deported to a remote town in Perm province in the Urals and never returned to Ukraine. Members of the Poltava Hromada are known to have discussed revolutionary topics, such as a prospective union between peasants and the intelligentsia to take joint action against the nobility. However, while they sympathized with revolutionary goals and possessed some “bestsellers” of illegal literature, among them Herzen’s texts and the revolutionary sheets Velikoruss (Great Russian), their only overtly “political” or “revolutionary” activity was holding private debates on issues of public concern. The problem was that no one knew exactly which public expressions of Ukrainian identity were permitted by law and which were punishable by penal labor. That was often decided by local authorities on an ad hoc basis, as demonstrated by the opposing examples of the Kyiv governor-general Vasil'chikov and the Poltava governor Volkov. The two repressive measures enacted in 1863 and 1876 were intended to bring more clarity to the issue by delimiting the public space in which Ukrainian identity could be expressed. The first of these measures, the so-called Valuev Circular of 1863, was a direct response by the Russian government and its local agents to alleged – and largely imagined – links between Ukrainian activists (“supporters of the Little Russian nationality”) and their Polish counterparts. There was no Polish-Ukrainian conspiracy on the eve of 1863. The circular itself, however, was the result of a conspiracy between several highly placed officials in St Petersburg – the minister of the interior, Petr Valuev; the minister of war, Dmitrii Miliutin; and the chief of gendarmes, Vasilii Dolgorukov – as well as the Russian nationalist press, headed by Mikhail Katkov, editor of Russia’s largest daily newspaper, Moskovskie vedomosti (Moscow News), and their allies in Kyiv. The latter, whom Faith Hillis has aptly called “the Little Russian lobby,” were led by Mikhail Iuzefovich, head of the Kyiv Archeographic Commission. For people like Iuzefovich, once a patron of Panteleimon Kulish, Little Russia was an integral part of Russia now being threatened by Ukraine – a newly minted separatist concept, as they saw it, and a product of “Polish intrigue.” Enemies of pro-Ukrainian activists had been present for decades, but their position strengthened considerably with the outbreak of the January Uprising. In fact, the uprising became an immediate pretext for a wholesale assault on the most active

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members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia and the national community they claimed to represent. What followed was a series of arrests of Ukrainian activists in 1862–63, including that of the radicalized officer Andrii Krasovs'kyi, often on fabricated charges of collaborating with the Poles. One particularly ridiculous case was that of Volodymyr Syniehub, a young acquaintance of Krasovs'kyi’s. Under interrogation, Syniehub confessed to belonging to a secretive “Kyiv Society of Little Russian Propagandists” having connections to Polish conspirators and involving Krasovs'kyi. Syniehub also named many Hromada members (who in the end avoided punishment thanks to the intervention of the Kyiv governor-general). Although the young man later retracted his testimony, and the investigators themselves saw his confession as dubious, Syniehub was nonetheless exiled to Russia’s north, allegedly for talking politics to peasants. Valuev, Dolgorukov, and company had simply needed someone like Syniehub to provide “evidence” to justify the Valuev Circular they were then drafting. A day or two earlier, on 21 June 1863, as if coincidentally with the Syniehub confession, Katkov had published his infamous editorial linking a supposed “Jesuit intrigue” to the “Ukrainophiles”: “Intrigue it is, intrigue everywhere, the perfidious Jesuit intrigue, Jesuit by its origins and its character ... This intrigue, certainly, could not miss an opportunity to use the Ukrainophile tendencies.” He went on to allude to Kostomarov’s recent theory of “two Rus' nationalities” – that is, Russian and Ukrainian – as an absurdity: “Our literature came up, shamefully, with a theory about some sort of two Russian nationalities and two Russian languages. This is an offensive and silly sophism, as if there could be two French nationalities and two French languages!”20 Hence, by endeavoring to publish books in the “newly created Little Russian language,” the Ukrainophiles were engaging in “dirty business” and “serve as the weapon of the most hostile and darkest intrigue … of the sworn enemies of their Ukraine.” Who were these enemies? They were, of course, the Poles, the veritable bogeymen in Russian nationalist minds at the time. Some Poles were even pretending to be Ukrainophiles themselves, just to undermine Russia’s unity. In fact, intoned Katkov as if reciting an incantation: “Ukraine had never had a distinct history, never constituted a separate state, and the Ukrainian folk is the pure Russian folk, native Russian folk, and an essential part of the Russian folk.” By the same token, the Ukrainian language “has never existed, and despite all the Ukrainophiles’ efforts, still does not exist.”21 It was the ubiquitous Polish intrigue alone that was responsible for creating

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“the ghost of a distinct nationality in Ukraine.” Doubling down on the Polish-Ukrainian conspiracy, Katkov ominously added that the aspirations of Ukrainophiles “completely coincide with the Polish interests hostile to the Russian nationality, as well as with the orders of the Austrian government.” He concluded with an ad hominem attack on Kostomarov, a refusal to publish his request for donations to support the printing of Ukrainian books, and a final allusion to the persistent threat posed by the Poles.22 The Moscow journalist’s public outburst would have immediate consequences, ones dire for the targets of his denunciations. The very term Ukrainophiles that Katkov used so abundantly was intended to be pejorative. “In the ’60’s the terms ‘Ukrainophilism’ and ‘Ukrainophiles’ began to appear in the Russian press,” Volodymyr Antonovych recalled later. “Semi-official publicists used them to refer to a certain part of the intelligentsia of South Russia.” However, the originally pejorative term soon became a self-designation, and by 1881 Antonovych himself was already using the term widely, for instance, in his explanatory handwritten note “The Views of the Ukrainophiles,” composed for the Russian senator Aleksandr Polovtsov, who inspected the Kyiv and Chernihiv provinces at the time and was sympathetic to Antonovych and his friends. The term itself was styled after “Slavophiles,” which designated a group of Russian conservative Romantics and was first applied by gendarmes in 1847 to members of the SS Cyril and Methodius brotherhood. A portion of Katkov’s rather paranoid arguments about a Polish intrigue and the “non-existent” Ukrainian language found their way into a piece of writing that became the basis for the text of the Valuev Circular. Within a week of Katkov’s editorial, on 27 June, the Kyivan censor Orest Novitskii (Novyts'kyi), a former philosophy professor and prominent member of the Little Russian lobby, sent a letter to Minister of the Interior Valuev regarding the publishing of Ukrainian-language books for a mass audience. The arguments against the Ukrainian language and literature that Novitskii presented there were adopted in full in the circular issued by Minister Valuev on 18 July 1863. The minister agreed with the censor’s assessment of the current situation: “…education in all schools without exception is conducted in the AllRussian language, and the use of the Little Russian language is not permitted in any school; … but even the raising of this question meets with indignation on the part of the majority of Little Russians, who have often spoken their minds in the press. They prove with great

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conviction that there was not, is not, and cannot be any special Little Russian language, and that their dialect, as used by uneducated folk, is the same Russian language, only corrupted by Polish influence [my italics – Sb ]; that the All-Russian language is just as understandable to Little Russians as it is to Great Russians, and even more comprehensible than the so-called Ukrainian language which is being invented for them now by some Little Russians and especially Poles.” These infamous words have since become a symbol of the chauvinist Russian dismissal of Ukrainian identity; they are also perhaps the most overt rhetorical expression of Russian repressive policies towards modern Ukraine. Evident in the circular are instances of faulty logic in Novitskii’s and Valuev’s main argument: although there is no Ukrainian language (and cannot be one), that language, paradoxically, is poorly understood by the Ukrainians themselves. Also, how does one ban something that does not exist? Formally, the document banned only works “intended generally for primary mass reading” (e.g., primers and textbooks) and those with “spiritual content” (translations of the New Testament), while permitting literary fiction (“fine literature”). In reality, however, it vilified all those labeled “Ukrainophiles” by politicizing their activities and linking them to Poland’s “influence” and the “political intentions” of Poles. According to the circular (and against all historical evidence), the Poles took part in forging “the so-called Ukrainian language” and suppled “the greater part of Little Russian writings.”23 The “circular” itself was declared to be a temporary measure, and one Russian historian, Aleksei Miller, believes that was the case. However, other scholars, including Johannes Remy, maintain that its prescriptions were intended to apply indefinitely. In fact, when Mykola Kostomarov visited Valuev at his country cottage and pleaded with him to lift the ban, the minister’s position did not waver. Kostomarov ‘s own life would be affected by the new repressive measures: he was forced to decline a job offer from Kyiv University, owing to opposition from the Kyiv governor-general, who unsurprisingly suspected the famous historian of being a Ukrainophile. Not all Russian statesmen supported the anti-Ukrainian reaction. In contrast to Valuev and Miliutin, some members of the State Council – including the minister of education, Alexander Golovnin – actively opposed the Valuev Circular and even tried to block it. Valuev managed to outmaneuver his opponents by securing the support of Alexander II himself. In general, three phobias became intertwined in the suspicious minds of Russia’s autocrat and some of his officials: Polish “intrigue,” Ukrainian “separatism,” and socialism. Aleksei Miller has described

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the political atmosphere in which the circular was born in this way: “The combination of the fear of Ukrainian separatism as such with the danger of its manipulation by the Polish liberation movement was the main reason for harsh government reaction. The authorities suspected the Ukrainophiles, sometimes with good reason, because of their socialist populist orientation. The significance of this factor was growing together with the socialist movement.”24 To this point, the rippling effects of the January Uprising were affecting not only the Ukrainian intelligentsia and Polish nobility but also inhabitants of Russia’s western borderlands in general. The same day that Valuev issued his circular, Alexander II banned the teaching of Polish in any state school in Russia’s Western provinces (the order was later mitigated somewhat). In fact, the Russian administration’s overall goal in the former Polish provinces (the so-called Western Region) was annihilation of Polish language and culture. In 1863, a punitive special tax was imposed on all Polish-owned estates in the region, equaling 10 per cent of each estate’s income (it remained in force until 1897). Polish officials who had any dealings with peasants and even Orthodox officials whose wives were Polish were transferred to the ethnically Russian provinces. For Poles, job opportunities in public service were severely limited, whereas “Russian” officials enjoyed substantial advantages. The elected marshals of provincial nobilities, who constituted a major symbol of Polish social autonomy, were now to be appointed by the state. The use of Polish in public was strictly prohibited, as was the printing and distribution of books in the Polish language (from 1864). Arguably the most notorious discriminatory measure against the Polish community was one implemented in 1865. In April of that year, the new governor-general of Kyiv, Alexander Bezak (in office 1865–69), who was openly hostile to the Poles, submitted a proposal that would curb Polish social and economic influence in the Southwestern Region. The tsar, having the goal of creating a class of “Russian” landowners in mind, signed a decree prohibiting the sale of landed estates in the region to “persons of Polish origin,” a deliberately vague definition that included any person of the Catholic faith (excluding peasants) born anywhere in the former Polish territories. These directives were reinforced by additional measures between 1886 and 1893, with the result that Poles could now inherit lands only from their spouses or parents: in all other instances, estates had to be sold into “Russian hands.”25 Even peasants who were Catholic, regardless of their ethnicity, began to encounter obstacles to buying land allotments in Right-Bank Ukraine.

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Given these draconian measures, did the Russian government succeed in driving Poles away from the land and creating a vaunted class of Russian landowners? Repressive economics did in fact bring gains in that regard. By 1897, land owned by Catholics in the Western provinces sank to 50 per cent of all land available, while land owned by the Orthodox increased to 43 per cent. The proportion of landowners who were Orthodox increased even more dramatically – to 70 per cent in Right-Bank Ukraine. But the Russian victory was not as significant as these figures might indicate, for many of the new Russian owners were absentee landlords who illegally rented their properties to Poles and Jews. Also, for the small group of fabulously wealthy Polish magnates who by now were heavily involved in sugar processing, it was business as usual.26 Finally, there were measures specifically targeting the Catholic Church, universally seen as the bulwark of Polish identity in the region. By the end of 1867, the government had closed 30 Catholic monasteries; in addition, 160 Catholic churches and 30 chapels had been closed or handed over to the Orthodox. Catholic priests were prohibited from moving about freely or delivering improvised sermons. The mass conversion of Belarusian Catholics “back” to Orthodoxy was undertaken, and by 1868 some 70,000 people did indeed convert (many later reconverted back to Catholicism). Russian replaced Polish as the language of religious instruction for Catholics in all schools in the western provinces. There were also consistent efforts (backed by the influential Katkov) to make Russian the language of Catholic sermons in Belarus (rejected by conservative statesmen who could not fathom there being a “Russian Catholic” (whether of Belarusian, Ukrainian, or Russian ethnicity). Some Russian officials feared that a Catholic mass in Russian would become more appealing to the common people than the officially sanctioned Orthodox liturgy in Church Slavonic and thus undermine Russian Orthodoxy. Finally, between 1864 and 1904, the authorities prohibited use of the traditional Latin script for the Lithuanian language, replacing it with the Cyrillic one. Overall, the culture war the Russian government waged against Catholics and Poles lasted, with varying intensity, until at least 1905. One should keep in mind, however, that at this time similarly repressive measures against minority languages and cultures were also being applied in France and Britain (Breton and Scottish Gaelic are two cases in point). Whereas Polish identity was both recognized and suppressed, Ukrainian identity was not recognized while still being suppressed.

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However, after 1863 Poles were discriminated against as individuals, whereas Ukrainians, by contrast, were not: officially considered “Orthodox Russians,” the Ukrainians were, in fact, treated preferentially. In other words, Poles were recognized but excluded, while Ukrainians were not recognized but included. Thus, for Ukrainians inclusion came at the price of recognition. Except for a dozen “excluded” individuals (like Chubyns'kyi), suspected “Ukrainophiles” were by and large spared persecution, and millions of apparently loyal “Little Russians” from every social estate did not personally experience any discrimination. Indeed, several noted Ukrainophiles came to be employed by the vengeful Russian state in the Kingdom of Poland, in areas like education, the official press, and administration, owing to a conversation sometime in 1863 between Hryhorii Galagan, a wealthy landowner and suspected Ukrainophile himself, and Tsar Alexander II. In the wake of an informal agreement resulting from that conversation, Kulish and Bilozers'kyi landed comfortable government jobs in Warsaw, and Oleksa Storozhenko, another former associate of the journal Osnova, was employed by the Vil'na (Vilnius) governor-general as an active russifier. Kostomarov, too, was energetically courted to come to Warsaw, but he was sufficiently high-minded to refuse the offer. In Warsaw, Kulish, by contrast, pledged allegiance to the “government party” and mused on “the future of the Russian world.”27 Meanwhile, their younger colleague, Kyiv Hromada leader Volodymyr Antonovych, was climbing the ladder of imperial officialdom as principal archivist and editor at the Kyiv Archeographic Commission and professor of Russian history at Kyiv University. Upon his appointment as ordinary professor in 1878 and dean of the faculty of history and philology in 1880, several high-ranking imperial officials dismissed the “rumors” about his Ukrainophile sentiments as being totally baseless. Mikhail Iuzefovich, head of the Kyiv Archeographic Commission, most likely knew of Antonovych’s Jekyll-and-Hyde-style double life, but he nevertheless characterized his protégé as “deeply hostile to Ukrainophile trends.” The local chief of gendarmes went so far as to add that in the 1860s the appointee Antonovych had “suffered” at the hands of the Ukrainophiles. By all accounts Antonovych was protected by local imperial officials, who saw him as an invaluable asset in their fight against the Poles. In fact, he was awarded an imperial order for “impeccable service,” and when he retired in 1895 he held the highest academic title the ministry of education could bestow– distinguished ordinary professor. In his academic work, too, this human “asset” proved to be a

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committed enemy of historical Poland and its political system dominated by the nobility, the proverbial oppressors of local “Russians” for centuries. Born a Polish noble himself, Antonovych knew firsthand what that oppression entailed. In general, the specific geopolitical situation of Right-Bank Ukraine (a/k/a the “Southwestern Region”) linked historical research closely to an imperial agenda. As Patricia Kennedy Grimsted has convincingly shown, several scholarly projects, including the systematic archival research conducted by Kyivan academics in Right-Bank Ukraine, were linked to Russia’s cultural war against the Poles. From its inception in 1843 to 1919, the Kyiv Archeographic Commission supervised historical and archaeological research in the city and throughout the region. Commission members, most of whom were historians and legal scholars from Kyiv’s St Vladimir University, collected (or, rather, confiscated) historical documents from Polish aristocratic homes and Catholic monasteries wherever they could be found. For a time, scholars with a Ukrainian background, some of whom, like Antonovych, also had a distinct Ukrainian cultural agenda, were at the forefront of the cultural war between Orthodox Russia and Catholic Poland. In that situation, one had to choose sides wisely. Despite attempts to invalidate it (especially by Minister Golovnin), the Valuev Circular remained in force and effectively stifled Ukrainian book publishing for almost a decade. The following table of the number of Ukrainian-language titles that appeared between 1860 and 1876 is indicative (see table 5.1). Concurrently, from 1864 to at least the end of the decade, the activities of h romadas in Kyiv and elsewhere in Ukraine were effectively suspended. And in the spring of 1863, one initial member of the Kyiv Hromada wryly wrote, “The city of Kyiv is awful and disgusting – that is, not the city itself, but the people,” referring to the depressing atmosphere that descended with the closing of Sunday schools and removal of several leading activists in 1862. Only one school – funded by Ukrainophiles, and illegal – continued to exist until 1864; virtually all other schools and publishing enterprises launched by the h romadas ceased to function, owing in part to repressions and in part to the lack of funds and audience. Then, suddenly, in 1869, the Ukrainian movement rebounded. Why just then and not earlier? In general, the Russian imperial government lacked a coherent policy vis-à-vis nationalities, religious minorities, and peripheries. There were several competing sources of policymaking, from the tsar himself and the State Council

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Table 5.1 | Ukrainian publications, 1860–76

1860

1861

1862

1863

1864

1865

1866

1867

1868

1869

20

28

33

15

11

2

2

2

1

4

1870

1871

1872

1873

1874

1875

1876

3

9

8

4

32

22

17

Source: Remy, Brothers or Enemies, 169.

to individual ministries and regional governors-general. On top of that, governors-general (military heads of several provinces combined) and governors of single provinces had a great deal of influence and authority in dealing within the empire’s diverse peripheral demographics, and they frequently acted at will. This sometimes led to specific local policy arrangements (as seen from an informal deal between Kyiv governor-general Vasil'chikov and the Kyiv Hromada in the late 1850s to early 1860s). Personalities mattered as much as structures and official policies. In 1868, Petr Valuev lost his post as interior minister; his successor, Aleksandr Timashev (in office 1868–78), was much more tolerant of the Ukrainophiles. More importantly, there was also a new governor-general of Kyiv, Prince Alexander Dondukov-Korsakov (in office 1869–78). A liberal administrator who opposed a police state system, he reversed some of the strictest anti-Polish measures of his predecessors. Dondukov-Korsakov gained particular popularity among the Kyivan citizenry when he ordered his son, a recent university graduate, to spend six months as a simple soldier, grooming horses and cleaning stables. Sometime around 1870, the Ukrainian intelligentsia noted signs of an overall retreat from the repressive policies initiated in 1863. The first indications had to do with book publishing. In 1871, a seemingly

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unremarkable brochure titled Deshcho pro svit Bozhyi (Something about God’s World) was published in Kyiv. It presented some fundamentals of astronomy, geography, and meteorology and was intended for a mass audience. Under the strictures of the Valuev Circular, this brochure should have been banned and not published at all – yet it was. Moreover, during the 1870s almost ninety other Ukrainian titles were published, many between 1874 and 1876. At least eighteen of them appeared in clear violation of the circular.28 One curious example was a book on bears and hunting by the young anthropologist Khvedir Vovk; one of the earliest works of Ukrainian nonfiction, it was written in the celebrated style of the modern-day master of the genre, John McPhee. Remarkably, in 1869 the Kyiv Hromada had been renewed (and thus later was known as Old Hromada). Its new members included Mykhailo Drahomanov and Mykola Lysenko, who would gain renown as Ukraine’s leading composer. Hromada meetings took place every Saturday night, in rotation from one member’s apartment to another’s. The 1870s were arguably the best time to be a civic activist and free-spirited intellectual in nineteenth-century Ukraine, owing to the support of Dondukov-Korsakov, now Kyiv’s governor-general. He believed that restrictive measures would succeed only in radicalizing the Ukrainian national movement and driving it underground, making it difficult for the authorities to monitor. Also, Ukrainophile scholars were still viewed as Russia’s best intellectual asset in the epic battle against Polish influence in the region. Advocating dialogue instead of repression, choosing the proverbial carrot rather than a stick, the governor-general made a deal with the leaders of the Ukrainian movement not unlike the one his predecessor Vasil'chikov had made with the Kyiv Hromada more than a decade before. The Ukrainophiles’ legal activities now centered on the Southwestern (Kyiv) Branch of the imperial Russian Geographical Society. Opened in 1873 with funds provided by the state and Governor-General Dondukov-Korsakov himself (he donated 500 rubles), the society’s Kyiv branch was to conduct research into Ukraine’s ethnography, history, and statistics, and also publish folklore and scholarly works. Remarkably, having consulted with some venerable conservatives (Mikhail Iuzefovich, for one), Dondukov-Korsakov decided to engage young dissident scholars like Pavlo Chubyns'kyi (recently back from exile) and Volodymyr Antonovych in the work of the society, and in 1875 Antonovych was appointed head of the Kyiv branch. Mykhailo Drahomanov, a prominent member of the branch, later recalled that it was Ukrainian activists of the “older” generation

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(“mainly gymnasium teachers”) who “composed the kernel of the newly established Southwestern Branch of the Russian Geographical Society.”29 The older generation he was referring to were people then in their late 20s or early 30s. To a large degree, the Imperial Russian Geographic Society monopolized the humanities in Kyiv, prioritizing study of folklore and ethnography. Drahomanov, Antonovych, and other members of the society’s Kyiv branch and local Hromada believed that folklore, particularly historical and “political” songs and tales, reflected the democratic values of the people. In short order, the society published a landmark collection of Ukrainian historical songs by Antonovych and Drahomanov (1874–75), as well as the Ukrainian folktales compiled by Drahomanov (1876), which seemed to demonstrate the continuity of Ukrainians in time and their living space across regional and political borders.30 There was also a monumental seven-volume ethnographic and statistical study of Right-Bank Ukraine by Chubyns'kyi (1872–78), a delicate analysis of diverse borderland demographics featuring all the “usual suspects” – Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews. Partly out of caution and partly in line with the traditional anti-Polish attitudes of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, Chubyns'kyi sided with the Russian government in identifying “Poles” with the conservative Catholic nobility, and went so far as to chide the authorities for having been too lenient with Poles from the times of the partitions to the November Uprising of 1830. The most daring scholarly project to be undertaken was a comprehensive census of Kyiv’s population conducted on a single day in March 1874. Organized by the society’s Kyiv Branch and actively supported by the governor-general, the census showed a city undergoing rapid social change but also one in which Ukrainians were still very much present. The census data confirmed that Ukrainian speakers were more than 30 per cent of all residents, with another considerably large number of ethnic Ukrainians classified as speakers of the “common Russian language” (there was no separate entry for nationality). The men behind the numbers and the words were swiftly accused of infiltrating a respectable research institution and spreading Ukrainophile propaganda. The census takers became the target of a two-pronged attack launched by Russian conservatives on pro-Ukrainian activists and socialists, which some members of the Geographical Society certainly were. Chief among them was Drahomanov’s friend and colleague from Kyiv University, Mykola Ziber, who would later become his collaborator in Geneva. In 1871, Ziber had defended a dissertation on “David Ricardo’s Theory

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Ukraine, 1831–1876

of Value and Capital,” the first explanation of Marxist socioeconomic ideas presented at a Russian imperial university. The dissertation was published in the university’s official organ, Universitetskie izvestiia (University News), and secured its author a teaching position there. During this same time, Ziber was associated with Kyiv’s Old Hromada and was collaborating with the Geographical Society’s branch in Kyiv (he prepared a system of statistical data collection for it); he was also contributing to Kievskii telegraf (Kyiv Telegraph), the unofficial newspaper of the Ukrainophiles. In the latter half of the 1870s, Ziber, then an émigré in Switzerland, published a series of articles on Marx and socioeconomic issues in Russian and émigré periodicals; among them was Hromada, edited by Drahomanov, which familiarized young Russian and Ukrainian intellectuals with Marx’s version of socialism.31 By 1874, denunciations had begun to appear on the pages of the conservative daily Kievlianin (The Kyivite). An epic battle soon developed between Kievlianin, the voice of the Little Russian lobby, and Kievskii telegraf,32 which in 1874–76 was de facto edited by Drahomanov. The Geographical Society chose to publish its proceedings in Kievskii telegraf. Drahomanov would later recall that the press “began to assail the Kyiv Geographical Society … labelling it a Ukrainophile kahal that smuggled in political separatism under the banner of scholarship. These attacks … grew stronger when the mass arrests of socialists began in Russia in 1874.”33 The conservatives even insinuated that the census had no value. The conflict developed into a personal feud between the editors of Kievskii telegraf and the aging Iuzefovich, whom Drahomanov had earlier accused of banal opportunism – that is, serving disparate political “systems” with the same “stoic strength.” But the real blow to the Ukrainophiles would come not from attacks in the press but from the behind-the-scenes dealings of Iuzevofich and his allies. Iuzefovich was so incensed by the situation at hand that he turned to that popular literary tool in Russian political history – denunciation. By this time, Drahomanov had become the major spokesperson for the Ukrainian national movement. Having trained as a Greco-Roman historian, he always retained a cosmopolitan or, rather, international perspective on Ukrainian issues. As he later recalled, in his teens he was much influenced by the realistic fiction of Marko Vovchok, which largely depicted the wretched lives of the peasants. He emphasized that what he took from her fiction was not nationalism but the “universal social idea,” which formed his “socialist” worldview. Other influences were Russian “liberal poetry,” especially that of Nikolai Nekrasov; the

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works of Herzen, smuggled from abroad; and the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe, which he read in Russian translation. Building on these sources, Drahomanov expressed similar ideas in his early polemical writings of the 1870s, as he was engaging with the Ukrainophiles in Kyiv. For instance, in the article “Germany’s Eastern Policy and Russification,” written in 1872 while traveling in Europe on a government scholarship, Drahomanov argued against russification, as a policy that contravened Russia’s interests. Unlike the case with French and German culture, he maintained, Russian culture was too young and weak to be an effective tool for assimilating minorities. His also argued that russification undermined sympathies for Russia among the Ruthenians in Austrian Galicia. Elsewhere, Drahomanov extolled the contemporary regionalist movements of the Bretons and Occitans (the Provençal movement) in France. In another article of that time, “The Interval in the History of Ukrainophilism,” Drahomanov insisted on the need of getting secular books to the masses, ones which would “teach [them] the positive sciences and provide practical information.” In his view, Ukrainian translations of the Bible, on the other hand, were less relevant and thus less needed. Already a positivist and secularist by this time, later in life Drahomanov would develop his own brand of socialism, one that might be called ethical socialism, coupled with an American style of federalism bordering on anarchism. Already in the 1870s, Drahomanov was becoming by far the most original political thinker in Russian-ruled Ukraine. Alas, Drahomanov did not have much time to spare, for DondukovKorsakov’s policy of “taming” the Ukrainophiles was soon disrupted by the “Little Russian lobby.” It began to view the very existence of Ukrainophiles as antithetical to what loyal Little Russians stood for. The lobby’s adherents suspected –at that time, mistakenly – that Drahomanov and his colleagues were more loyal to Ukraine than to Russia as a whole. In response, Kyiv’s Little Russians began a coordinated attack on the Ukrainophiles in the press and in letters to the notorious Third Department, Russia’s secret police, headed by the chief of gendarmes. Several Kyiv-based authors, university professors among them, wrote newspaper articles denouncing the Ukrainophiles and ascribing a hidden political separatism to their linguistic and cultural agenda. In 1874 one of them wrote, “Why teach in a language which, though native, has no future, and is used only by uneducated people?”34 Another writer bluntly rejected the very idea of Ukraine: “By what right do they dare to intrude with [their] Ukrainian plans onto centuries-old

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(izdrevle) Russian, not Ukrainian, land? … Who, in fact, authorized the Ukrainophiles to deprive us of the ancient name of the Russians and all its attributes, including our common cultural Russian language …, and to replace all this with something Ukrainian, that is, something which originated far later, something particular, meaning only a borderland? … What an absurd and miserable hope that Ukrainian can become for us more important than Russian!”35 The statement could have served as the basis for a friendly debate between the Ukrainophiles and Little Russians – both groups being local patriots, distinguished by differing sizes of their imagined community – were it not for the fact that the arguments of the latter encouraged the government to persecute the former. Then, in April 1875, an embarrassing incident sparked by Iuzefovich took place at an official ceremony honoring GovernorGeneral Dondukov-Korsakov. In the midst of the proceedings, the bitter old man burst into a verbal attack against the Ukrainophiles and threatened to write directly to the Third Department and Alexander II himself if Dondukov-Korsakov did not clamp down on the seditious activities of the Ukrainophiles. The governor-general dismissed Iuzefovich, and he reacted by making good on his threat. In a note of August 1875 addressed to the chief of gendarmes, Aleksandr Potapov, and a second note of October 1875, he labeled Ukrainophilism a “fabrication of Polish-Austrian intrigue,”36 an accusation that would haunt all subsequent generations of Ukrainian national activists in Russia. Despite the joint efforts of DondukovKorsakov and Russia’s interior minister, Timashev, to mitigate the repressive measures Iuzefovich proposed, the vehemently anti-Ukrainian stance of the chief of gendarmes assured that repression would prevail. The chief accompanied the tsar on his travels to Europe, and on 18 May 1876, in the German spa town of Ems, Alexander II signed what became known as Ems Decree. That edict not only reinforced the measures in the Valuev Circular but expanded on it, banning the printing, import, or distribution of any Ukrainian-language publication (“all original works or translations”) within the Russian Empire, as well as the performance of plays or public readings in Ukrainian. An exception was made for historical sources and folklore, but with the caveat that they could be published only in the “common-Russian orthography.” Among the decree’s other draconian measures was the prohibition of teaching in Ukrainian in primary schools and the purging from school libraries of all Ukrainian books (they actually had few such books). Also, two institutions seen as infiltrated by the Ukrainophiles – the

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Southwestern (Kyiv) Branch of the Russian Geographical Society and Kievskii telegraf – were to be shut down. The edict went on to impose personal sanctions against Drahomanov and Chubyns'kyi, who were both to be deported from Ukraine.37 The concerted efforts of Interior Minister Timashev and his staff to postpone the execution of the Ems Decree had proved of little avail. However, they and some other high-ranking officials, including Kyiv Governor-General Dondukov-Korsakov, did succeed in easing the sanctions against Drahomanov and Chubyns'kyi. Drahomanov was promptly – and unusually quickly for Russia at the time – issued a passport that allowed him to escape to Europe early in 1876. Chubyns'kyi was permitted to stay in Kyiv a few months and was then offered a comfortable government job in St Petersburg. However, he did not remain there, in “exile,” for long: in 1879 Chubyns'kyi was already allowed to return to Ukraine – so much for the effectiveness of Russia’s repressive but notoriously inept regime. Did the Ems Decree result in a total ban on all things Ukrainian, or did some space for the expression of Ukrainian identity remain? And how did different generations of the intelligentsia imagine and perform that identity, before and after 1876?

fa th er S and So nS , U k r a i n i a n St y l e “A decent chemist is twenty times more useful than any poet,” famously said Ievgenii Bazarov, a fictional character in the novel Fathers and Sons by the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev, an avowed liberal and Westernizer who preferred to live in Europe. The novel, published in 1862, was set in the Russian countryside in 1859, on the eve of the Great Reforms. Bazarov, the novel’s main character, is a “new” man. He is a nihilist, a man who does not “bow down before any authorities, who does not take any principle on trust, whatever respect this principle might enjoy,” as Bazarov’s university friend explains to his family.38 Bazarov is a university graduate, intent on studying the natural sciences and medicine. Unlike his friend, however, he is not a noble: Bazarov belongs to the raznochintsy (“people of various ranks”), which in the 1860s was a main source of the intelligentsia. Aspiring to be a scientist, he chooses to catch frogs “for the sake of experimentation” in the company of peasant children rather than socialize with the nobiliary family who are his hospitable hosts. One of the family’s older members sarcastically comments that Bazarov “does not believe in principles, and instead believes in frogs.”39 For much of

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Ukraine, 1831–1876

the novel the young nihilist is shown ranting against the idle nobility and the “romanticism” of the generation of the “fathers.” When his friend attempts to engage him in a conversation about romantic feelings, Bazarov responds, “It’s better that we take a look at a bug.” Elsewhere Bazarov becomes a mouthpiece for the 1860s generation, with its dismissive attitude towards arts and philosophy: “Aristocratism, liberalism, progress, principles – just imagine! There are so many useless foreign words here! … We act on the strength of what we recognize as useful. Today the most useful thing is negation, and so we negate.”40 When Turgenev’s novel was first published, some radicals in the press were greatly offended, for in Bazarov they saw slander against the young generation, as well as a crude caricature of the recently departed radical columnist Nikolai Dobroliubov. Others, while not denying the writer’s critical attitude toward nihilistic “sons,” still praised Turgenev for his social insights. In fact, its appearance in Turgenev’s novel made the very term “nihilists” a buzzword in Russia. The American historian Martin Malia would later remark that metaphorically, Turgenev divided Russia’s emerging intelligentsia into two stages: the aristocratic “fathers” of the 1830s and ’40s, and the plebeian “sons” of the 1860s.41 According to Malia, the intellectual difference between the two was that between idealists and materialists. The Ukrainian case generally followed the pattern Malia described but it also differed significantly, in that among the Ukrainian intelligentsia individuals like Bazarov – self-proclaimed materialists and nihilists – were much less in evidence. In 1874, twelve years after Turgenev placed his fathers and sons before the public, the novice Ukrainian writer Ivan Nechui-Levyts'kyi presented his own version of the intergenerational divide in his novel Khmary (Clouds), the first to be set almost entirely in Kyiv. NechuiLevyts'kyi himself was an odd figure: he never touched alcohol, never married, and was rumored to always go to bed at ten p.m., no matter what (and alone, it was presumed). Ironically, this reclusive man became the first literary sociologist of Kyiv’s intelligentsia and urban life in general. Especially vivid were his depictions of the major cultural and sociopolitical ideas championed by generations of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, from the 1830s through the 1860s. Clouds begins at the famed Kyiv Theological Academy (which was the writer’s alma mater) sometime in the late 1820s or early ’30s. Within the academy, we soon learn, interethnic relations were far from harmonious, and this is depicted through the strained relations between two students: a Ukrainian, the quiet and poetic Vasyl' Dashkovych, and

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a Russian, Stepan Vozdvizhenskii, a ruthless careerist who vehemently rejects anything Ukrainian. As the novel progresses, the two young men marry sisters, daughters of the same elderly Kyiv merchant, and both become professors, Dashkovych at Kyiv University and Vozdvizhenskii at the Kyiv Theological Academy. Thus, they represent opposing factions of the nascent Kyiv intelligentsia. Nechui-Levyts'kyi seemed to believe that in the early 1860s, russification in Kyiv could still have been halted and even reversed through the agency of noble-born youth from the countryside, who in the novel refer to themselves as “nationals” (natsionaly). These young men often dress in elaborate Cossack fashion, shocking not only Kyivites but their own families, not unlike the hippies or punks of a century and more later. In the novel, one such group of “nationals,” students at Kyiv University relaxing in a park, catches the attention of Dashkovych’s daughter Olga, a recent graduate of Kyiv’s Institute for Noble Maidens, an educational experience that thoroughly uprooted all contact with Ukrainian culture. Olga is stunned to discover that the clothes some of the students are wearing, including their funny straw hats, are not “Tyrolean” but “boorish.” One of the students is Pavlo Radiuk, who bears a strong resemblance to Antonovych and his fellow chłopomanie – that is, the early Ukrainophiles. If the sedentary scholar Dashkovych represents a melancholy romantic figure from the 1830s devoted to the study of Ukrainian culture, Radiuk embodies a fiery populist Ukrainophile of the 1860s, equipped with the latest positivist and scientific ideas, from Darwin and Spencer to Renan, Feuerbach, and Proudhon, all of whom are mentioned in the novel. In contrast to Dashkovych, Radiuk sees his mission as being to serve the “people” by actively organizing Sunday schools for Kyiv’s working-class residents (just as Hromada members were doing at the time), as well as Saturday “readings” for the city’s Jews. In fact, NechuiLevyts'kyi, through his character Radiuk, was among the first Gentile intellectuals to reach out to Jews and thus “engage them in work in common in Ukrainian society” (my emphasis). Radiuk believes his ideas are applicable not only to education for the masses; he also preaches them to all his friends and family members, and on occasion even to Russian church and civil dignitaries. One of his speeches sets out his democratic nationalist credo succinctly: We protest, with our peasant clothes (svyta), against the despotism that fell upon our Ukrainian nationality, our language, our literature, our life. With this we protest against any despotism and take

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Ukraine, 1831–1876

a stand on the side of our people, defending them against the lords, especially alien lords, against the influence of alien languages, alien faith, against the influence of all the devils and evil spirits who dared to put their hostile hand on our well-being, on our people.42 Radiuk attacks Russian colonialism and the entire social system with even greater vehemence: “We don’t need Turkestan, the army, and the lords!” On another occasion, he shocks his beloved Olga, a shallow and narrow-minded figure, with his feminist stance: he demands equal rights for women in education and employment, and wonders why “women should not be doctors and lawyers.”43 Naturally, Kyiv’s Russian authorities and salons reject Radiuk and his radical message. Eventually he must leave the city for the Caucasus, like the real-life natsional Pavlo Chubyns'kyi and others had to do after the persecutions of 1862–63. Kyiv, which by this time was reshaped by imperial modernity and thoroughly russified, was not ready for the “sons” – the young Ukrainian “nationals.” Nechui-Levyts'kyi’s protagonist Radiuk was in many ways a Ukrainian response to Turgenev’s Bazarov. What Bazarov and Radiuk had in common was their open revolt against the dominant norms shared by the generation of the “fathers” – the more socially passive romantics – and by the establishment. But while Bazarov was depicted as a hard-core nihilist, Radiuk is an ardent Ukrainophile, for whom social and national issues have become intertwined: he belongs to a distinctly Ukrainian brand of the generation of the 1860s. Thus, that decade saw the birth of not only the classical Russian intelligentsia but also a specifically Ukrainian one, often referred to as the “Ukrainophiles,” a term applied above all to actual or supposed members of the h romadas. How did the Ukrainophiles relate to other generations of civic activists and intellectuals in Ukraine and Russia? Did the literary “fathers” and “sons” have their prototypes in real life? Of course, people are being born all the time, so the notion of set and finite generations is to some degree artificial. But people in the nineteenth century did notice intergenerational differences. While Romantics imagined a generation as an ideal formation united by common will and goal, the positivists saw it as a social construct formed by a biological cycle.44 Nonetheless, distinguishable in the period between 1800 and 1876 are three generations of Ukrainian heritage gatherers and “intelligentsia” per se. The first of these was the generation of the early Romantics, born approximately between 1800 and 1815: it included the botanist turned philologist

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Mykhailo Maksymovych (b. 1804), the historian Mykola Markevych (b. 1804), the poet Levko Borovykovs'kyi (b. 1806), the archeographer Osyp Bodians'kyi (b. 1808), and the Slavicist Izmail Sreznevskii (b. 1812). The second generation was comprised of people born between approximately 1816 and 1830: it included Mykola Kostomarov (b. 1817) and Panteleimon Kulish (b. 1819). Taras Shevchenko, too, can be considered part of this generation, although he was born in 1814, on the cusp between the first generation and the second. Shevchenko belonged more to the latter, like other members of the Brotherhood of SS Cyril and Methodius – that is, to the generation of the proverbial “fathers,” whose collective identity was greatly shaped by the experience of political persecution. Finally, there was a third generation, that of the “sons,” born roughly between 1831 and 1846: among them were the historian Volodymyr Antonovych (b. 1834), the writer Ivan Nechui-Levyts'kyi (b. 1838), and the intellectual Mykhailo Drahomanov (b. 1841). These were quintessentially the people of the 1860s: the first generation to adopt the term “intelligentsia,” the notorious “sons” often known as “nationals,” “peasant-lovers,” or – most often – “Ukrainophiles.” In the Russian Empire as a whole, this generation was routinely associated with the subculture of “nihilists,” and with the socially diverse, politically radical group known as the raznochintsy (“people of various ranks”). These were not global cohorts, like the Baby Boomers or Generation X of today, but they did overlap with concurrent generations in Russia. For instance, Maksymovych’s Russian contemporaries included the historian Mikhail Pogodin (b. 1800) and the philologist Stepan Shevyrev (b. 1806), both pro-government academics, as well as the philosopher Ivan Kireevskii (b. 1806) and the poet Aleksei Khomiakov (b. 1804), both prominent Slavophiles. Many of the Westernizers who were the Slavophiles’ chief opponents also belonged to that generation, among them the literary critic Vissarion Belinskii (born 1811), the journalist and writer Alexander Herzen (b. 1812), the poet and journalist Nikolai Ogarev (b. 1813), and the historian Timofei Granovskii (b. 1813). In Russia, the generation of “fathers” included Ivan Turgenev himself (b. 1818, between Kostomarov and Kulish) and his one-time literary rival Fyodor Dostoevsky (b. 1821). It should come as no surprise that Dostoevsky’s political thriller Besy (Demons), published in 1872, already reflected the writer’s damning attitude towards the “sons” as nihilistic, unprincipled radicals who would stop at nothing, including murder of a fellow conspirator, to achieve their demonic goals. The generation of the “sons” was inspired by the radical journalist Nikolai

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Chernyshevskii (b. 1828), who is reasonably considered the spiritual “father” of the nihilists. As mentioned, he was also thought to be Bazarov’s real-life prototype, perhaps along with two radical literary critics: Nikolai Dobroliubov (b. 1836) and, especially, Dmitrii Pisarev (b. 1840), who, as Herzen put it, “in the image of Bazarov recognized himself and his own friends.”45 The alienation of “sons” from “fathers” and intergenerational ruptures on the whole were not as pronounced in Ukraine as they were in Russia. The differences between the first two generations of the Ukrainian proto-intelligentsia can best be understood by looking at the figures of Mykhailo Maksymovych and Taras Shevchenko. Born into a noble family of Cossack descent on the Dnipro’s left bank, Maksymovych, like his fellow nobiliary heritage gatherers, held several competing and often overlapping identities. He was simultaneously a Ukrainian and a Little Russian. He was Ukrainian in the traditional sense of attachment to a local homeland. His Ukraine was a specific geographical and mental reality positioned in the Dnipro basin and centered on Kyiv. That region was the core of medieval Kyivan Rus', the place where Maksymovych could find numerous antiquities both above and under the ground. For him, Ukraine was the “original” Rus', together with Kyiv, in the words of medieval chronicles “the mother of Rus' cities.” Maksymovych was also a Little Russian, since he came from Left-Bank Ukraine, the territory of the Hetman State of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, referred to in contemporary sources as Little Russia proper. By contrast, Taras Shevchenko, born a serf southwest of Kyiv, on the Dnipro’s right bank, provided the poetic Ukraine, as imagined and glorified in folklore and by the Kharkiv Romantics, with a distinct political meaning, so that “Ukraine” eventually replaced the term “Little Russia,” by this time discredited by Russian official use, for generations of his readers. Shevchenko’s imagined community, unlike that of Maksymovych, was defined strictly in social terms and centered on the peasantry. In Shevchenko’s radical poetic vision, the nobility was left outside the Ukrainian nationality. By contrast, networks of noble families, primarily from the Left Bank, were the basis of Maksymovych’s imagined community, one that he usually called South Russian or Little Russian. He remained Russian as well, in the sense of belonging to all Rus', by refusing to adopt an exclusive national identity, be it Great Russian or Ukrainian, and was quite comfortable with multiple loyalties. Nevertheless, the famed scholar of Kyivan antiquities was

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Ukrainian enough to befriend Shevchenko. When these two men spoke about Ukraine, they understood each other and were able to find it on their imagined maps (actual ones designating Ukraine as we know it did not yet exist). They also shared a common past but differed in their interpretation of its role in the present and for the future. It is noteworthy that Shevchenko’s friends Kostomarov and Kulish both credited Maksymovych’s celebrated collection of Ukrainian folksongs (1827) for their personal conversions to Ukrainian identity. What was the relation of the 1860s generation to that of Shevchenko, Kostomarov, and Kulish? How did the “sons” perceive the “fathers”?46 In fact, Shevchenko was referred to as “Father Taras” already by his contemporaries. In St Petersburg, giving a brief eulogy before the coffin in which Shevchenko’s body lay his old friend Kulish addressed the deceased poet as “Father Taras” at least three times – even though, ironically, Kulish was only five years his junior. However, later, in the mid-1870s, the perpetually contrarian Kulish became highly critical of Shevchenko and his poetry, scandalously referring to the latter as a “drunken Muse, supported by the worst, not the best, minds of his native country.” Drahomanov, the most politically astute Ukrainian intellectual of the 1860s generation, acknowledged that Shevchenko had become an icon and “prophet of the Ukrainophiles.” In 1876, as a new émigré in Geneva, he credited Shevchenko with having inspired “a new period in the Ukrainophile movement of the 1850s and 1860s,” infusing it with a “strong democratic spirit.”47 Yet Drahomanov was also a daring revisionist who decried a political cult of Shevchenko in both Russian Ukraine and Austrian-ruled Galicia. In 1878, in a lengthy essay titled “Shevchenko, Ukrainophiles, and Socialism,” Drahomanov cautioned against the uncritical use of Shevchenko’s words and images for political purposes, emphasizing that the poet was neither a modern socialist nor a thinker with “any idea about historical progress.”48 He called for a “critical historical revision of Shevchenko’s life and works” and, by extension, of Ukrainian political culture past and present.49 Drahomanov was more favorable to Kostomarov, whom he singled out among other Ukrainophiles of the 1860s in St Petersburg as the only one with “any kind of solid social ideas.” Yet, while praising Kostomarov’s historical advocacy of democracy, federalism, and the common people, the “son” Drahomanov criticized the “father” Kostomarov for his continuous refusal to speak up about the present.50 Also, Drahomanov, a strong advocate of communal values, blamed Kostomarov for creating a harmful stereotype of Ukrainians as a

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historically individualistic people, in contrast to the “communalism” ascribed to Russians, ignoring evidence pointing to “communal husbandry” among Ukrainians.51 Nevertheless, Drahomanov regarded the veteran historian Kostomarov as his ideological teacher, and even became his first biographer. In addition, unlike older Ukrainophiles, Drahomanov gave credit to “nihilism” and people like Chernyshevskii and Dobroliubov for holding European ideas and enduring the persecution that they did. He also praised the resilience of Russian “nihilism” and its later transformation into “positivism,” whereas Ukrainophilism remained the “weakest and least adaptable” of all liberal movements in Russia.52 Kostomarov, on his part, was a harsh judge of the 1860s generation, particularly of the notorious “nihilists.”53 In lectures taught at the university in St Petersburg during the early 1860s, he emphatically abstained from all expressions of “liberal blabber” (liberal' nichan'ia), and even got into a bitter fight with students demanding his public support of their radical protest. As a result, Kostomarov gained the reputation of being a conservative opponent of “fashionable liberalism.” Having come upon him taking the sacraments, the students were taken aback by his religiosity, to which he had this response: “If you, gentlemen, are the supporters of liberty, then learn to respect it for those opinions that you dislike and are unable to refute by a strictly scientific method.” He went on to attribute the fierce personal campaign against him to the spread of nihilism among young people opposed to all existing systems and institutions – “religion, statehood, morality, law, family, property, art, poetry, and talents.” The nihilists differed from old-school liberals in their extreme disrespect for “positive science,” which for them had only a utilitarian value, insofar as it furthered the improvement of man’s material conditions. Young people liked to study natural sciences, Kostomarov observed, but not many of them became serious scientists. Worse still, young nihilists had begun to set up “communes” where men and women cohabited, rejecting the institution of marriage and changing partners “without any qualms of conscience.” Kostomarov then tackled the discord between “fathers and sons” head-on: “Under such direction, the young generation, naturally, went against the old one; hence there have appeared the hostile attitudes of children towards parents, and, generally, of the young towards the old.” But the worst consequence of the nihilists’ materialist worldview, in his view, was that it bred unscrupulous “crazy fanatics,” for whom the “end justified the

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means” and who “dared to advance their convictions with daggers and guns.” Here he was clearly alluding to the wave of political terror that shook Russia in the 1860s through early 1880s and culminated in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. Were there homegrown Bazarovs in the Ukrainian national movement of the 1860s and ’70s? Most likely there were individuals who, like Bazarov, always stood ready to dissect a frog (after all, Antonovych himself had studied medicine), but there were no known “crazy fanatics” prone to using daggers and guns indiscriminately. Although Ukraine did indeed have its own demons (of the same sort that Dostoevsky exorcised so expertly in his eponymous novel), the few eager to use weapons soon became impatient with the cautious Ukrainophiles and deserted to the Russian revolutionary populists whose favored sport was hunting – mostly after the tsar and his minions. Those who remained within the Ukrainian camp through the 1870s were not people like the Bazarovs but rather individuals like Radiuk, minus that character’s fiery rhetoric. A classic example was Volodymyr Antonovych, a man seemingly able to adapt to any circumstances, so much so that his enemies called him a human chameleon (although not quite like Zelig, Woody Allen’s famous cinematic character). Indeed, Antonovych was known to have led a double life, and his elusive personality was marked by numerous contrasts. Vasyl' Ulianovs'kyi has summed up his various “dualities” thus: a son of one father … he formally bears the name of another (Bonifacy Antonowicz); until today it has been impossible to establish his exact date of birth (1830 or 1834), as well as the first rite of his baptism (Greek Catholic or Roman Catholic); a Pole by origin, he crosses over to the Ukrainian side; he obtains an official education in a Russian gymnasium, but is self-taught in French rationalism; a graduate of the faculty of medicine, he then studies history; he begins his civic engagement in the circle of Polish revolutionaries – and switches over to the Ukrainophiles; a participant in conspiracies, he then collaborates with the notorious Iuzefovich; at university, he teaches courses in Russian history, but privately – in Ukrainian studies; under his legal name he publishes neutral academic texts, but under his penname – polemical essays and journalism; he is based in Kyiv, but he places his high hope on Austrian Galicia; he broke with the Polish movement, but he proposes the idea of a New Era between Ukrainians and Poles in

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Galicia; officially married to Varvara Mikhel' (until her death in 1902), for almost 20 years he was in a relationship with his former student, Kateryna Mel'nyk. 54 His chameleon-like characteristics notwithstanding, Antonovych’s convictions remained steadfast, even if he could not express them in public. A committed positivist and liberal, a devoted adherent of the teachings of Alexis de Tocqueville, Auguste Comte, Herbert Spenser, and Henry Thomas Buckle, he was not a revolutionary but a culture-oriented progressive and democratic populist who advocated for British-style political liberty. This is what distinguished Antonovych sharply from Russian figures of the same generation, who had become increasingly radicalized and driven to resort to political violence. Curiously, it was only after four years of study at Kyiv University’s faculty of medicine that the young Antonovych connected with the Ukrainian students who gave him Shevchenko’s Kobzar to read and told him about the SS Cyril and Methodius brotherhood. Antonovych later said that he had “discovered” the Ukrainian world in the spirit of “French democratic theory,” having needed an intellectual detour to western Europe to find his native land. In fact, that path bore a resemblance to the intellectual journey of Mykola Kostomarov, who had also been exposed to the intellectual ideas of western Europe through the works of the French philosophes. Both men were populists who would go on to discover – or invent – their Ukrainian roots. But their populism was of different kinds: Kostomarov’s “people” was still a romantic idealization, or rather abstraction, while Antonovych’s “people” was a product of new, positivist social science and anthropology, and the result of his own field research. What these two generations of Ukrainophiles also shared was a vision of Ukrainian nationality as an egalitarian community, centered on peasants and patterned on a putative or actual peasant commune. Likewise, their activities were similar: Antonovych, like Kostomarov, combined a clandestine civic activism with the public career of scholar and professor. The difference was that Antonovych and his peers were more socially engaged and increasingly alienated from the Russian government. Yet both generations eagerly took part in the Hromada movement begun in St Petersburg by the “fathers,” which then spread to Kyiv and other cities in Ukraine where the “sons” became dominant. The ways in which younger Hromada members used research was also novel: in contrast to romantic heritage gatherers like Maksymovych or

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Markevych, positivist scholarship was often an implicit tool of Ukrainian nation building. In the first half of the nineteenth century, most Romantics conducted research primarily to find and preserve “antiquities,” placing them in the empire’s common cultural bin and doing nothing to revive them. Indeed, these artifacts resembled exotic animals stuffed and put on display, which in effect made the heritage gatherers themselves into the “taxidermists” of culture. For the generation of scholars who came after them, the goal of doing research was not simply to conserve but to revive, examine closely, and link past with present; thus, rather than being mere taxidermists, they evolved into becoming “physicians” of culture. Hromada activists used heritage gathering and literature to promote and defend their version of Ukrainian community in the face of a despotic state, in a strategy overtly apolitical but covertly subversive. But how could typical members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia of both genders express their identity in public? And what did their very appearance mean – all these embroidered shirts, “boorish” hats, Cossack-style mustaches, and the seemingly endless singing of folk songs? In a pioneering study of rituals, signs, and myth in the ideology and daily lives of the Ukrainophiles, Serhy Yekelchyk has rightly noted that during the last quarter of the century, the only space, if any, Ukrainian patriots could find for expressing their cultural and political identity was “his or her own body.” Due to various official restrictions, the “space of national and oppositional gestures was limited to the patriot’s own body, his or her clothes, food, drinks, haircuts, mustaches, [and] a sheet of paper on which to write a short story from people’s life…”55 More important, all the minutiae and rituals of everyday life, such as clothes, food, drinks, mustaches, and haircuts, could be seen both as functions that reflected a person’s physiological needs and as signs that had wider sociopolitical and cultural meanings. It is these signs or semantic connotations that had a direct bearing on the emerging Ukrainian national myth being created by the Ukrainophiles. That myth consisted of two paradigms: a Cossack one and a peasant one. The first connected the newly imagined community to history – Cossacks and hetmans; the second connected it to its democratic present – peasants as the social content of the new nation. In real life, this dual identity of Ukrainian myth found its expression in two sets of costumes that some Ukrainophiles proudly owned and wore: peasant attire, evidence of their populist credentials, and Cossack attire, symbol of their national allegiance. As Yekelchyk explains, these two costumes performed a “representative function – they represented their people to the world

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and, at the same time, demonstrated the national consciousness of their owners.”56 Inevitably, wearing a folk shirt, sporting a Cossack mustache, or even partaking of “Hetman’s borscht” (unfortunately, no definitive recipe for it has come down to us) was often a conscious – hence political – choice, through which Ukrainophiles expressed their national and social identities. Some of these choices might have had an unexpected Freudian connection, as was the case with the long Cossack-style mustaches in the comic short story “The Mustache” (1861) by Oleksa Storozhenko (1806–1874). The author, himself the proud wearer of a drooping moustache, maintained a delicate balance between life-long imperial service (he was committed to the russification of Poles!) and the suspect calling of being a Ukrainian writer. Upon entry to the imperial civil service, the hero of Storozhenko’s story is obliged to shave off his beloved mustache. Afterward, he feels that he has lost not only his national distinctiveness (he laments that he now looks like a German), but also his virility – his own wife does not recognize him! Beyond the world of fiction, one renowned Ukrainian made having a similarly drooping mustache not only fashionable but nearly obligatory for every mature male Ukrainophile: that person was Taras Shevchenko, whose mustached image (“Father Taras”) was produced en masse in lithographs and small plaster busts from the early 1860s on. While Cossack-style mustaches and attendant attire were the most common markers of masculinity among the Ukrainophiles, many patriotic Ukrainian women expressed their national identity through embroidery, often dutifully making colorful embroidered shirts for their men.57 Much of what the Ukrainophiles did to express their identity was a masquerade, a (cross-) dressing game, and a theatrical performance, rightly perceived by the authorities as a deliberate social and cultural transgression and a potentially dangerous political gesture. Consequently, a good number of Ukrainophiles got arrested for wearing an embroidered shirt or singing a folk song – although, to be sure, the policing authorities did not harass peasants for doing exactly the same. Moreover, there were tragicomic instances in which distrustful peasants beat up urban populist visitors dressed up as peasants, mistaking these unlucky social transgressors for thieves. In a sense, the Ukrainophiles’ behavior in this regard smacked of cultural appropriation, since urban and urbane men of noble descent, largely russified or polonized, were in effect using a folk culture for their political purposes, which were not well understood by the peasants themselves. Yet, owing to fictional

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and real figures – from the student Radiuk in his “boorish” attire of Nechui-Levyts'kyi’s novel, to the real-life radicalized officer Andrii Krasovs'kyi sporting a peasant shirt beneath his hussar uniform, to the classic image of Taras Shevchenko with his Cossack mustache – the signs and rituals of a populist national identity were adopted by the Ukrainian intelligentsia across different generations, given a political meaning, and then imposed on an entire imagined (yet growing!) community of fellow Ukrainians.

fr o m a US tri a to a U St r i a -hUn g a r y Russia had no monopoly on either reactionary policies or absolute monarchy. In fact, in the 1850s the regime of absolutist reaction lasted longer in Austria than in Russia during that same decade. By the summer of 1849, the revolution in the Habsburg lands had been brutally suppressed, with brotherly help from the Russian tsar, especially welcomed by the Ruthenian clerical leaders in Transcarpathia, who sought Russian support against the Hungarian revolutionaries. The dissolution of the “revolutionary” Kremsier parliament in March 1849 ushered in an epoch of so-called neo-absolutism, closely tied to Baron Alexander von Bach, Austria’s interior minister in 1849–59. That decade was marked by the absence of any representative institution and Vienna’s direct authority over its heterogeneous imperial domains. Some provinces, such as Galicia and Hungary, were placed under martial law administered by the imperial army. This time the empire did indeed strike back, and Alexander von Bach seemed to be the Austrian Darth Vader. However, Bach’s emperor, unlike that of his sinister cinematic counterpart, was then still a teenager named Franz Joseph. He would rule from 2 December 1848 to his death in 1916, the longest reign of any emperor of Austria and king of Hungary. Indeed Franz Joseph was the third-longest-reigning monarch in European history, after Louis XIV of France and Johann II of Liechtenstein. Martial law in Galicia lasted until 1854, after which Vienna set up a civil administration in the province headed by a viceroy (Statthalter) responsible only to the emperor. The Polish count Agenor Gołuchowski (1812–1875), a wealthy magnate and personal friend of the emperor’s, became Galicia’s first viceroy under the new regime; in that capacity Gołuchowski was supported by his former boss Franz Stadion, who, local Poles liked to grumble, had “invented” the Ruthenians. Many Poles suspected that in 1848 Gołuchowski had advised the viceroy

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Stadion to support the Ruthenians as a counterweight to the Poles. The Poles had pressured Vienna into appointing another candidate to succeed Stadion, the famed Polish romantic intellectual Wacław Zaleski, an ardent advocate of Polish national interests. However, Vienna was soon taken aback by Zaleski’s increasingly assertive policies favoring Poles at the expense of Ruthenians and Germans, and he was soon replaced, at the insistence of Stadion, then serving as minister of the interior (1848–49), with the more neutral Gołuchowski. A symbol of the neo-absolutist regime and a Habsburg loyalist, Gołuchowski served multiple terms as viceroy of Galicia: first in 1849–59, during the height of neo-absolutism; then in 1866–68, during the most critical reshaping of the empire; and, finally, in 1871–75, during the restoration of Polish rule in Galicia. Gołuchowski gained notoriety with his loyalist and seemingly ethnicity-blind message: “Sirs, I know no nationality.” However, he did introduce the use of Polish alongside Ukrainian in primary schools in eastern Galicia, an overwhelmingly Ruthenian (Ukrainian) region, and he was known to have clashed with German statesmen, including Bach himself, over defense of Polish interests in the province. Gradually Gołuchowski also replaced German officials with Polish ones. Nonetheless, he enjoyed numerous personal connections within the Austro-German aristocracy. For instance, thanks to his friendship with the emperor’s brother, the viceroy successfully lobbied for the construction of a railroad line linking Lviv with Vienna (1861), the first on Ukrainian lands. This was a time when aristocratic patronage rather than capitalist ingenuity was required for large infrastructure projects, and only a viceroy as well-connected as Gołuchowski could pull off such an undertaking. The more popularity he gained among the Poles, the more alienated from the Ruthenians Gołuchowski became, posing the kind of nearly insolvable dilemma that in the twentieth century would turn deadly. Symbolic of the irreparable injury in relations between the viceroy and the Ruthenian community was the so-called alphabet war. In 1859, Gołuchowski came up with the idea of replacing the Ruthenian language’s traditional use of the Cyrillic alphabet with the Latin alphabet, starting with texts to be used in primary schools. Although the new alphabet was to be based on the Czech rather than Polish model, the whole idea enraged Ruthenians, who rightly saw it as a blatant effort to polonize their fledging national community. Iryna Vushko has explained one rationale behind this clumsy cultural policy: “Logically enough, Gołuchowski assumed that the change of alphabet would help eliminate

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differences between the Polish and Ruthenian languages, and that it could help promote polonization. In correspondence with colleagues in Vienna, he justified his language initiatives with reference to the political situation in Galicia, arguing that Ruthenians bore an excessive sympathy for Russia (which of course utilized Cyrillic as well, Ruthenian and Russian being East Slavic languages as opposed to the West Slavic Polish); the change in alphabet, then, could help reduce Russophilism.”58 Gołuchowski’s effort at alphabet reform failed miserably, having succeeded only in uniting and mobilizing the Ruthenian community against what its members saw as a direct threat to their national survival. Vienna, for its part, did not want to antagonize the loyal Ruthenians, and the project was abandoned. But while the viceroy lost the alphabet war, he succeeded in a far more important battle: he prevented the division of Galicia into two separate entities, a Polish (western) and a Ruthenian (eastern), which Ruthenian national activists had demanded continually since the late 1840s. Another victory for the Polish community was the replacement of German with Polish as the language of instruction in prestigious secondary schools (gymnasia) and a restriction on the number of Ruthenian schools during the 1860s and ’70s. Many Ruthenians began to feel that Vienna had abandoned them and was allowing the local Polish establishment to reinforce pre-existing inequities. The neo-absolutist regime was about to expire, but Gołuchowski was proving to be indispensable in the new “constitutional” Austria as well. Yet his course, like that of Austria overall, was determined by international events not favoring the empire. In 1859, Austria lost a war against France and its ally, the rising Italian nation-state of Sardinia-Piedmont (ironically, Piedmont would become an example both Poles and Ruthenians/Ukrainians in Galicia tried to emulate). In direct response to that loss, the Habsburgs decided to restructure the empire’s internal political order by ending the neo-absolutist regime and appointed Gołuchowski, a known constitutionalist, to be the new minister of the interior. Following in the footsteps of the Austrian German Stadion, his Polish disciple Gołuchowski proposed a return to the constitutional order and decentralization by reintroducing the imperial parliament (Reichsrat) in Vienna and local diets in each Austrian province (Ger. Landtag, Pol. sejm, Ukr. soim). Although Gołuchowski soon lost his post, his reforms had long-term consequences for the entire empire, for the parliamentary system, legal order, and semblance of federalism that they established were never altered. Thus was born an awkwardly constructed, Kafkaesque, yet constitutional and multiethnic Austria that

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generations of Austrians would take for granted and even love to hate, including Kafka himself. Only after the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 did many of its former subjects realize, to their utter despair, what they had lost (an angst expressed by, among others, the writers Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth). Gołuchowski’s other legacy, namely, the system of Polish privilege in Galicia that he helped to entrench, was also never reversed. In 1859, while still minister of the interior, he had secured a place for the Polish language in Galicia’s courts and state offices. During his second term in office, he had succeeded in removing many Austro-Germans bureaucrats from Galicia, replacing them with Polish nobles. As a result, Poles greatly outnumbered Ruthenians in administration, the judicial system, education, and among elected representatives in the Galician diet and the imperial parliament. Although Ruthenians comprised about half the province’s population, by the collapse of the empire in 1918 they had never elected even a full one-third of deputies to Galicia’s diet: their largest share was 49 of 150 deputies in 1861, followed by 66 of 228 deputies in 1914, when Vienna was more actively involved in affirmative action on behalf of the Ruthenians. In the imperial parliament, Ruthenians never held more than one-quarter of the seats assigned for Galicia. This disparity in representation was even more evident among holders of Galicia’s highest offices. From Gołuchowski’s third term as viceroy in 1871–75 until the outbreak of World War I in 1914, virtually all Galician viceroys, marshals of the Galician diets, and district sheriffs were Poles, at least in terms of politics (some acknowledged having Ruthenian ethnic origins).59 A privilege had never looked more convincing. Control over Galicia’s administration permitted its Polish landowning political class – much more conservative than its counterparts in the ethnically Polish areas of either Russia or Prussia – to secure its grip on cultural and social life as well. Gołuchowski himself was instrumental in founding a number of educational institutions in the province, among them a prestigious Polytechnic school, Realschule (modern high school), and Polish gymnasium, all in Lviv, and a host of other schools there and in smaller towns. Ruthenian students were outnumbered by Poles and Jews in most of these schools, and most Ruthenians were left with dubious benefits of illiteracy. Meanwhile, another military defeat was shaking Austria’s wellchoreographed and even slightly dull political life to the core. This presumed “dullness,” however, had been mitigated somewhat by the Habsburgs’ view of themselves as the legitimate leaders of a newly

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awakened Germanic world in what had once been the Holy Roman Empire. That “awakening” owed to Wagner as much as to Bismarck. Austria could and did respond to the “innovator” Wagner with the “conservative” Brahms (rather than the Wagnerian Bruckner), but it failed to find a match for the “Iron Chancellor” Bismarck. As a result of this fatal flaw in human resources, Austria was defeated in the world of political Darwinism (although in music it continued to lead). Early in the century, between 1804 and 1806, Vienna had survived the recasting of the Holy Roman Empire as the Austrian Empire relatively unscathed. But two devastating defeats, in 1859 and 1866, forced its long-ruling dynasty to finally come to terms with its own political and historical frailty. The second loss, in particular, at the hands of Bismarck’s Prussia, prevented Vienna from uniting all the German lands under the Habsburgs and within the framework of the so-called Greater German solution (Großdeutsche Lösung). Instead, in 1871, a victorious and militaristic Prussia transformed itself into the German Empire, thus depriving the Habsburgs of their great mission and relegating Austria to the role of being Germany’s satellite. (Some political and historical observers have even viewed Austria’s defeat in 1866 as leading to the rise of Hitler, ironically an Austrian export.) The defeat also made Austria a mechanical jumble of diverse nationalities, rather than the major German power in Central Europe, a role that Prussia now held. That realization led the Habsburg authorities to reconsider their relationships with provincial ruling elites – above all, the Hungarian (blamed for the 1866 defeat) and the Polish – in order to retain the non-German lands of the empire. The outcome was the Austro-Hungarian Compromise (Ausgleich) of 1867, which led to the creation of the Habsburg dual monarchy, or Austria-Hungary, whereby the emperor of Austria was simultaneously the king of the autonomous Kingdom of Hungary. The arrangement was and historically remains unprecedented, in that it created neither a federation nor a confederation. The Kingdom of Hungary could now govern itself according to its own constitution, with its own government and parliament; only foreign affairs, defense, and currency remained concerns in common for both Vienna and Budapest. The empire’s Austrian “half,” of which Galicia was a part, did not even have a proper name: the official reference was to “kingdoms and lands represented in the imperial parliament.” More important, Austria received a revised constitution guaranteeing its citizens equality before the law; freedom of the press, speech, and assembly; and legal protection for the various nationalities,

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unprecedented in the contemporary world (which would later allow Austro-Marxists like Karl Renner and Otto Bauer to reimagine Austria as a genuine federation of central European nations). Consequently, all minority languages received equal right to be used in local schools, administration, and public life (in reality, some languages would prove to be more equal than others). Despite the compromise’s preservation of some feudal privileges, in 1867 Austria got not only a political facelift but also a second chance at sociopolitical life. Reappearing at this point was the political genius of our old acquaintance Agenor Gołuchowski, who once again made himself indispensable in Vienna. He apparently convinced Emperor Franz Joseph that securing the loyalty of Galicia’s Poles required Vienna’s agreement to certain concessions. While denying Poles a wide-ranging autonomy on par with that of the Hungarians, the emperor agreed to institute several administrative changes that amounted to Galicia’s semi-autonomous status. The major beneficiaries of the Galician compromise of 1868 were Polish aristocrats and professional classes, while the losers were clearly Ruthenians of every class. According to the compromise, a Polish aristocrat had to be appointed viceroy of Galicia, while in Vienna a separate minister “in Galician affairs” (from 1871) had to secure the interests of the ruling oligarchy, as the region’s “natural” elite. All socioeconomic and educational policies were to satisfy Polish national interests. In the word of Austria’s foreign minister, “whether and to what extent Ruthenians could exist is in the competence of the Galician diet,” an institution dominated by big landowners, virtually all of them Poles. Thus in Galicia Poles gained control over the provincial government, including the Galician diet, and school administration. After 1871, Lviv University switched from German to Polish as the language of instruction, as secondary schools also did. In addition to having a central research and library facility – the Ossolineum (founded by the Polish aristocratic politician Józef Maksymilian Ossoliński in 1817) – the Poles went on to develop a vibrant public sphere, including multiple newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, theaters, and cultural societies. The resulting attraction of that public sphere – in literature, art, fashion, social life, etc. – were a major reason that thousands of German-speaking officials, Ruthenians, Jews, and Armenians continued to assimilate into Polish culture and society throughout the long nineteenth century. The Galician compromise in effect reestablished the Polish elite’s political rule in Galicia. That monopolistic control was assured through

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the system of electing deputies to the Galician diet, which was inaugurated in 1861 with supervisory authority over local agriculture, industry, and education. Elections were held on a curia system, roughly based on four social classes: landowners, townspeople, traders, and peasants. Representation was not related to a social class’s proportion of the population: the province’s 3,000 landowners were guaranteed almost one-third of all seats. By contrast, in the peasant curia elections were indirect: peasant communities had to first choose electors, who then voted for the deputies. In addition, members of the Polish elite often falsified results, bought votes, or threatened Ruthenian peasants with violence. The ongoing social conflict between landowners and peasants was augmented by a growing national conflict between Poles and Ruthenians-Ukrainians. Ivan Lysiak Rudnytsky has best summed up the various tensions in Galicia at this time: The dominant position of the Poles was bolstered by the social privileges of the landed nobility and the upper-middle class. Conversely, for the Ukrainians the struggle for national and social emancipation was one and the same. In addition to the clash between the social interests of the two nationalities, there was an invidious conflict on the psychological plane. The outlook of the Polish intelligentsia and middle class was largely derived from the gentry tradition. The origins of the Ukrainian intelligentsia were plebeian; every educated Ukrainian was only one or two generations removed from either a parsonage or a peasant hut. Thus even those Polish and Ukrainian groups whose formal education and living conditions were similar displayed divergent social mentalities. Both communities viewed the present conflict as if it were similar to the great seventeenth-century wars between the Polish aristocracy and the Ukrainian Cossacks.60 An inability to solve or even mitigate the looming social and national conflicts in Galicia was a major failure of Austria-Hungary’s celebrated nationality politics. Yet, ironically enough, Ruthenians and Poles remained equally loyal to the Habsburgs until the empire’s dissolution in 1918.

Pa r t t h r e e

Ukraine, 1876–1914

6 Galician Exceptionalism

rU th eni a nS i n Sea r c h o f a n a t i o n The famous manifesto of the Supreme Ruthenian Council of 10 May 1848, addressed to the Ruthenian people and validated by Galicia’s Austrian viceroy, Count Franz Stadion, declared: We Galician Ruthenians are part of a great Ruthenian people that speaks the same language and numbers 15 million, of whom 2.5 million live in Galicia … As a result of an unfortunate turn of fate and various political misfortunes, our great people gradually declined, lost its independence, its rulers, and fell under foreign rule. As a result of these misfortunes, many of our leading figures gradually gave up the Ruthenian rite of their fathers, and at the same time lost their Ruthenian language and left their people, even though the change of rite could not transform their nationality, since Ruthenian blood still flowed in their veins … But since everything in life changes, and as spring replaces harsh winter, so too, brothers, has our unfortunate status been transformed because of the constitution. [We must also] develop and enhance all aspects of our nationality by perfecting our language and introducing it into lower- and secondary-level schools; by publishing a periodical press; by maintaining contacts with our own writers and those of other Slavic peoples; by distributing good-quality and practical books in Ruthenian; and by emphasizing through whatever means that our language is equal to and should be introduced alongside others in public and governmental affairs.

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We will protect our constitutional rights, determine the needs of our people, seek to improve our people’s welfare through constitutional means, and continually defend our rights against any attacks or defamation.1 The manifesto reflected the optimistic vision of the future held by Ruthenian leaders – most of them Greek Catholic clergymen – during the Springtime of Peoples. The past was glorious but marked by a great many “misfortunes”; the present was still uncertain; only the future looked bright, not least “because of the constitution” that allowed Ruthenians to defend their rights, “perfect” their language, introduce it in schools and administration, and use it in book publishing. All in all, the legal framework of constitutional Austria provided a space for building – or rebuilding – the Ruthenian nationality. But what was that nationality? It was defined by “Ruthenian blood,” but that alone would not say much about the Ruthenians’ identity or their relationship to the outside world. So who were the “Ruthenians” named in the manifesto? Its authors proclaimed that they belonged to a “great Ruthenian people,” clearly referring to the people who at that time were usually called Little Russians or Southern Russians, most of whom lived in the Russian Empire. The reasons for such self-identification by members of the Greek Catholic clergy were far from self-evident. What was their relation to ethnic Russians – that is, in the terminology of the day, to Great Russians? Other than the remote past, what united the Greek Catholic Ruthenians of Austria with the Orthodox Little Russians (Ukrainians) of Russia? If what united them was the “Ruthenian language,” then it could not have been a literary one, since as yet no common written language existed; in fact, the spoken vernacular was not yet codified, let alone universally accepted, particularly among Austrian Ruthenians. The future did look bright, but it did not offer much in the way of certainty. Would the two branches of the same people, separated by history over centuries, ever find themselves within a common political space? The question itself was treacherous, as it cast doubt on the political status quo in Europe and the inviolability of imperial borders. These and a host of other questions had to be addressed by the Ruthenians as they developed into a modern political and national community. The answers determined and proposed by various groups of intellectuals and political leaders (again, many of them Greek Catholic priests) differed to the point of splitting the Ruthenian community into separate nationalities.

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Before nationality appeared on the political agenda midway through the nineteenth century, religion was the single most important marker of collective identity in Galicia. As John-Paul Himka has reminded us, religious rite continued to function as “a persistent and unequivocal marker of national identity.”2 In the words of Iakiv Holovats'kyi, “a person in Galicia usually calls himself a Ruthenian only if he professes Greek Catholicism; as soon as he changes his faith to the Latin rite, which often happens now, he ceases to be a Ruthenian and is called a Pole.”3 This was because the Habsburg authorities made baptism in that rite – whether Greek Catholic or Roman Catholic – almost indelible, so as to assure the preservation of each. One’s rite was also hereditary, since Greek Catholic parents could not baptize their children in the Latin rite (between 1624 and 1815, the Vatican issued a series of prohibitions against changing rites). Nonetheless, evidence suggests that in the 1830s through 1850s, the Roman Catholic hierarchy was pressuring Ruthenians to convert to the Latin rite. Despite the official ban on such conversions, annually in the early twentieth century about four hundred Greek Catholics in Lviv chose to become Roman Catholics.4 Religious rite thus continued to denote nationality in the popular consciousness, effectively separating Greek Catholic “Ruthenians” from Roman Catholic “Poles.” Yet, had Greek Catholicism been continuously cast as the sole cornerstone of Ruthenian identity, then broader links between the Galician Ruthenians, the Orthodox Little Russians (Ukrainians), and Great Russians residing in the Russian Empire would have been much more difficult to foster. Although Ruthenians could readily define and describe themselves in traditional religious terms, they did not know how to translate religion into a modern nationality. There were a few options on the table. As Himka succinctly put it, some Ruthenians “thought they were a branch of the Poles; others that they were Russians; still others that they were the unique but small nation of Ruthenians or Rusyns, whose territory extended only over Galicia, Bukovyna, and Subcarpathia, and, of course, still others recognized national kinship not only with the other Ruthenians of Austria, but also with Ukrainian people across the Russian border.”5 Comparatively, during the nineteenth century the first option – the Polish one – was the weakest, despite the increasing appeal of Polish society and pressure to engage with it. Those Ruthenians who opted for connection with the modern Polish nation were known as gente Rutheni, natione Poloni (Ruthenian by descent, Polish by [political] nation). Although the phrase itself gained currency

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in this context only in the 1860s,6 already during the Revolution of 1848 several of Galicia’s Polish aristocrats – including Prince Leon Sapieha, Count Włodzimierz Dzieduszycki, and Count Antoni Golejewski, all claiming to be Ruthenian – established a so-called Ruthenian Congress (Rus'kyi Sobor); belonging to it required Ruthenian ethnic descent but not adherence to the Greek Catholic rite. In contrast to the Supreme Ruthenian Council, the organization that was its rival, the Ruthenian Congress stood for a united Galicia and a common Polish ojczyzna (fatherland). Ruthenian clerical leaders rejected it, however, and one influential bishop who later headed the Greek Catholic Church was quoted as having retorted: “Ruthenians do not have a nobility, and do not need one.”7 Among the very few “real” Ruthenians in the pro-Polish Ruthenian Congress was Ivan Vahylevych (1811–1866), the Greek Catholic priest who in the 1830s was a cofounder of the Ruthenian Triad, the first Galician Ruthenian poetic group to have been influenced by Ukrainian romantic authors writing in Russia. A token Ruthenian in the Polish camp, Vahylevych became an editor of Dnevnyk ruskii (Ruthenian Daily), the mouthpiece of the Ruthenian Congress. During the few months it existed (August to October 1848), Dnevnyk ruskii appeared in the Ruthenian vernacular (in both Latin and Cyrillic scripts) and published content promoting Polish-Ruthenian unity. Vahylevych’s subsequent fate symbolized the near impossibility of maintaining a dual Polish-Ruthenian identity after 1848 (a few individuals did manage to claim one into the early 1900s). For his involvement with the Ruthenian Congress, Vahylevych was ostracized by Ruthenian clerical leaders and forced to leave the Greek Catholic Church for Lutheranism. Thereafter he engaged almost exclusively in Polish cultural projects, working as a proofreader of the revised edition of Samuel Linde’s fundamental Słownik języka polskiego (Dictionary of the Polish Language) and archivist of the city of Lviv. The concept of gente Rutheni, natione Poloni remained stillborn as a political tool, rejected by Ruthenian secular and clerical leaders alike. In commenting on use of that phrase, David Althoen pointed out that in the late nineteenth century many nobles of Ruthenian (and Lithuanian) heritage found it “a useful way to state their attachment to their ethnic heritage along with their political support of a Polish state encompassing all of its former territories, and their support for Polish culture.”8 Even after 1848, some Greek Catholics opted for Polish identity without leaving their rite. They were usually urban residents and

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frequently members of the intelligentsia. One gente Ruthenus, natione Polonus who went on to have an illustrious career in Polish society was Mikołaj Zyblikiewicz (1823–1887), a popular mayor of Cracow (1874–81), deputy in the House of Lords of the imperial parliament (1879–85), and speaker (marshal) of the Galician diet (1881–86; the only non-noble to hold that position). Born in Staryi Sambir to a humble Ruthenian family, Mikołaj Zyblikiewicz studied philosophy in Lviv and law at Cracow’s Jagiellonian University. In all of his posts, Zyblikiewicz consistently defended Polish national interests, often in the guise of Galician provincial interests; nonetheless, he always also emphasized his Ruthenian origins. For example, in 1861, countering opposition from the Ruthenians, Zyblikiewicz, then a deputy in the Galician diet, argued that educational matters, particularly the use of Polish and Ruthenian in schools, should be in its competence, not that of the imperial parliament. He also voted against allowing Ruthenian to be used as an official language at the diet and in secondary schools, and in 1866 he refused to subsidize a major Ruthenian cultural venue and theater in Lviv called Rus' ka besida (Ruthenian Conversation), on the grounds that it would become an “instrument of planting discord and hatred” between Poles and Ruthenians.9 To Zyblikiewicz, those seeking to elevate the “peasant idiom” and rural culture to the national level were dangerous troublemakers. To him, Galicia was a united province and so was the “nation” – and both were Polish; in both, Ruthenians were merely a regional variant of Poles. His stance strongly resembled the one taken by the “Little Russian lobby” in Russian Ukraine, where the arguments put forward by Mikhail Iuzefovich and others like him paralleled those of Galicia’s gente Rutheni, invoking the all-Russian nation rather than the Polish one. Ironically, Zyblikiewicz’s grandnephew would become a radical Ukrainian nationalist and a cofounder of the militant Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. As a Ruthenian of the Polish nation, Zyblikiewicz was already a dying breed: of the Greek Catholics who were students at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow between 1850 and 1918, only 14 per cent declared Polish as their nationality.10 In that case, how many people like Zyblikiewicz were there? The number of “Ruthenians of the Polish nation” is difficult to estimate, let alone establish, owing to the scant (and unreliable) sources available to us. True, the Austrian government did conduct censuses regularly, but there people could state only their religion and “social language”: there was no entry for nationality, then a concept still in the making. Many Greek Catholics did declare Polish

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as their “social language” – 107,000 in 1900, and 235,328 in 1910, according to different estimates – and the largest proportion of Polishspeaking Greek Catholics was in the city and district of Lviv, at 20 to 24 per cent.11 But we cannot assume that all these Polish-speaking Greek Catholics considered themselves to be Poles. Many of them were simply opportunistic and would later, when opportunities of other kinds arose, “return” to their Ruthenian roots. In addition, with the rise of nationalism the share of Polish speakers among Greek Catholics declined, to such an extent that by the early 1900s there were more Ruthenian speakers than Greek Catholics in eastern Galicia, suggesting that tens of thousands of Roman Catholics as well as some Jews had adopted the Ruthenian/Ukrainian language as well. For a Ruthenian peasant, in particular, assuming a Polish identity was not a viable option. In that peasant’s view, social status and nationality were congruent, in the sense that a peasant, was certainly Ruthenian, whereas his landlord was certainly Polish. In Galicia’s rigid social environment, a Ruthenian peasant could hardly become a “Pole.” Luckily, Ruthenians discovered other viable identity options, ones that initially reflected the cultural orientations of Greek Catholic clerics: Old Ruthenian, Russophile, and Ukrainophile. These options, clearly apparent by the early 1860s, were based on different interpretations of the historical past and on language use. People began to ponder in earnest what it meant to be a Ruthenian. As Paul Robert Magocsi has reminded us, all three versions of Ruthenian identity, whether Old Ruthenian, Russophile, or Ukrainophile, shared the concept of being people of Rus' who called themselves rusyny (Ruthenians) and spoke the rus’kyi (Ruthenian) language. But what did these two terms mean? And what were their wider connections – with other Greek Catholics in the Habsburg Empire, the Austrian government, or the Orthodox East Slavs living in the Russian Empire? Let us first look at the Old Ruthenians. Those identifying with this group were represented by the socially conservative Greek Catholic hierarchy. While believing in the existence of a larger East Slavic community – a sort of the all-Russian nation, including Great Russians, Little Russians, and White Russians – they never went so far as to reject their pronounced loyalty to the Habsburg dynasty. They also tended to use Church Slavonic, albeit with slight modification, as their literary language. Also, while sharing their cultural space with that of Russians, they treated Galicia as a distinct ethno-cultural entity, so as not to threaten imperial borders. With the restoration of the constitutional

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order in the early 1860s, the Old Ruthenian party united veterans of the 1848 movement and the conservative clerical establishment. Perceived by the general Ruthenian community as their only legitimate leaders, the Old Ruthenians came to control all the major institutions of nascent Ruthenian civil society, including the press. Chief among those institutions was Lviv’s Narodnyi dim or National Home, built in 1864: Emperor Franz Joseph himself had laid the foundation stone in 1851. The building had come to house a social club, library, publishing house, and research venue; in effect, it was the Ruthenians’ response to the Poles’ famed Ossolineum. If the Ruthenians’ building was a “national home,” what “nation” (narod) did it represent? ProRussian sympathies were on the rise among Ruthenians in the 1860s, yet the conservative Old Ruthenians never wavered from their pronounced loyalty to the Habsburgs. A symbol of this delicate balance between a cultural Russophilism and an Austrian political loyalism was the journal Slovo (Word), published from 1861 to 1887 in Lviv. Bohdan Didyts'kyi (1827–1909), its founding editor, was a transitional figure bridging the 1848 generation, with its vague Ukrainian populist tendencies, with the generation of devout Russophiles. Influenced in his youth by the works of Taras Shevchenko and Ivan Kotliarevs'kyi, Bohdan Didyts'kyi published a poetic collection of his own titled “Songs of the Ruthenian Kobzar” (1853) in homage to Shevchenko’s prophetic image. At the same time, this Ruthenian “kobzar” published a small work which, he claimed, could teach “Little Russians” the Russian language “in one hour.” His method was evidently a failure, for his targeted audience – Galicia’s “Little Russians” – continued to know very little Russian. Despite his growing Russophilism, in 1866 Didyts'kyi printed a Ruthenian primer that for the first time included literature by Ukrainian writers in the Russian Empire – including Leonid Hlibov, Ievhen Hrebinka, and Taras Shevchenko – into the curriculums of schools run by the Austrian government. After 1876, when the Ems Decree effectively banned Ukrainian book publishing in the Russian Empire, the increasingly pro-Russian Slovo secretly received an annual subsidy from the Russian government, to support it as a publication “hostile to the Ukrainophile [trend].” Characteristically, in its first issues Slovo occasionally published fiction and nonfiction in Ukrainian; later it published only materials written in an uncodified mixture of Church Slavonic, Russian, and the Ruthenian vernacular known pejoratively as iazychiie (jargon). By the mid-1870s, Slovo had unequivocally rejected the Ukrainian language and culture

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and was instead filling its pages with writing of dubious quality produced by local Russophiles; alternatively, it chose to republish literature by Russian writers like Konstantin Aksakov, Ivan Turgenev, and Fyodor Tiutchev. From that time on, Russia’s expansion policies began in earnest and its famed Russian culture became a weapon in its geopolitical game. Tolstoy and Turgenev came first (albeit in spirit), followed by Russian soldiers in World War I. Galician Russophiles, for their part, would then take on the role of being Russia’s paid agents of influence, if not sleeper agents, as happened some twenty-five years later, on the eve of the Great War. During the 1860s and ’70s, the boundary between recognizing a common historical and cultural legacy with Russians, on the one hand, and embracing a common (“all-Russian”) national identity, on the other – the two dominant stances taken by the Ruthenian leadership – became more porous. One reason for the Russophiles’ rise during those two decades was the strengthening of Polish rule in an autonomous Galicia, especially after 1868. Polish literary celebrities, unlike their Russian counterparts, already had their armed defenders in the region. This led many Ruthenians to embrace the “Russian world” as a potential alternative to the “Polish swamp.” For as one Ruthenian put it: “It is better to vanish in a Russian cultural sea than to get drowned in the Polish swamp.” A stereotype about Galicia that became entrenched among generations of Ukrainians and outsiders alike and exists to our own day is that the region was always a hotbed of Ukrainian nationalism. Even the most ardent Russian nationalists who today still claim large swaths of Ukraine’s territory for Russia generally concede that Galicia should not be included. Yet, until 1918 many people living in Galicia continued to believe that they were an integral part of the Russian world. True, that belief greatly diminished after 1882, when leading Russophiles were tried for high treason, but it still had support among various segments of the population. So, what was it about Russia that attracted the Ruthenians? Was it the famed composite of Russian writers labeled “Tolstoevsky,” referring to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and so on? Or was it the mighty shadow of the Russian tsar, rendered even mightier by his purse? Or were Ruthenians simply disillusioned with Vienna, faulting it for having failed to be an impartial arbitrator between them and the Poles? In her comprehensive study Die Russophilen in Galizien, Anna Veronika Wendland has argued that the Russophiles were above all a conservative reaction against the political changes of the early 1860s, when Polish rule returned to the freshly autonomous province. Yet

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the Russophiles’ movement, like that of their opponents, the proUkrainian national populists, had its roots in the Revolution of 1848. For several decades after 1848, the conservatives were the majority among Ruthenian activists, and it is they who gradually developed a Russophile orientation in direct response to increased Polish pressure. An indicator of the new Zeitgeist was Iakiv Holovats'kyi, member of the Ruthenian Triad, who not long before, in 1846, had spoken out against “Muscovitism” and Russian centralism but was now drifting toward the Russophiles. Holovats'kyi moved to Russia and ended his career as head of the Viln'a (Vilnius) Archeographic Commission, an imperial institution that promoted russification of Poles in what were called the empire’s Northwestern Provinces, today lands in Belarus and Lithuania. Unsurprisingly, Holovats'kyi died a convert to Orthodoxy. Initially the Russophiles were largely aligned with mainstream imperial conservatism, but subsequently they fell from favor with the Austrian government, which suspected them of disloyalty. They themselves could not resolve the contradiction between their declared loyalty to the Habsburgs and their devotion to a Rus' that apparently stretched from the Carpathians to the Urals. But, in fact, how Russian were they? For decades the Russophiles wavered, uncertain whether to focus on Galicia and its distinct culture, seek a common cultural space with their conservative Little Russian brethren to the east, or fully adopt the language and culture of Great Russians. These were entities of different “sizes,” and size mattered here, inasmuch as it could provide additional argument against the Poles. To be sure, Russophiles of all stripes appreciated Russian high culture as a counterweight to its Polish equivalent. Some even began to use the Russian literary language even though few people in Galicia could understand it – a step that would eventually limit the Russophiles’ popular appeal. It was the Russophiles’ radical anti-Polish stance that allowed them to dominate Galician Ruthenian politics in the 1860s to 1880s and take control of some Ruthenian organizations, including the GalicianRuthenian (Halyts' ko-Rus' ka) Matytsia Society; the latter published school materials and popular-science literature, as well as periodicals for a more learned audience. In contrast to the cautious Old Ruthenians, the Russophiles embraced populism. That stance was best demonstrated by the activities of the Mykhail Kachkovs’kyi Society (Obshchestvo im. Mykhaila Kachkovskoho), named after a judge who provided financial support to both the Old Ruthenians (Russophiles) and the national populists (Ukrainophiles). The society was founded in

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1874 by Ivan Naumovych (1826–1891), a Greek Catholic priest in the town of Skalat near the Russian border. Ironically, as a young gymnasium and university student in Lviv, Naumovych was an ardent Polish patriot who wore a Polish cockade pinned to his breast and the typical Polish revolutionary cap called a konfederatka. Then in the summer of 1848, during a visit to his native village, Naumovych experienced a sudden “spiritual awakening,” supposedly prompted by local Ruthenian peasants. Reportedly, they had flung his Polish cap into a nearby river, yelling words clearly intended to foster that “awakening”: “So much for your Poland!” Naumovych’s native village was near the border with Bukovyna, an Austrian province populated by Orthodox Ruthenians and Romanians. He later recalled that from an early age he had dreamed about converting to Orthodoxy and “returning to the faith of his forefathers.”12 But, for a variety of personal reasons, that “return” had to wait, and meanwhile Naumovych decided to become a Greek Catholic priest. He emerged as one of the leaders of the church reform movement, the so-called obriadovtsi (ritualists), which was striving to purify the Greek Catholic ritual of “Latin accretions.” Purification meant going back to the Eastern (essentially Orthodox) sources of their faith. For instance, “purified” churches were furnished with elaborate iconostases, “silent” mass was rejected as “Latin,” and Orthodox liturgies (composed by Dmytro Bortnians'kyi of Left-Bank Ukraine) were occasionally served, which greatly alarmed the Polish establishment. The peasants were encouraged to get “true” icons imported from the Orthodox holy places of Pochaïv or Kyiv in neighboring imperial Russia. Purist priests, including Father Naumovych, wore long hair and beards in the Orthodox fashion, and they dressed in flowing robes instead of Catholic soutanes. In 1866, Naumovych set forth his complex “Russophile” credo, which incorporated a mix of local Ruthenian, Little Russian, and Great Russian elements. Using language far different from Turgenev’s he declared himself to be “a Russian”: As a Russian (russkii) man, I cannot but see in Moscow the Russian people; and although I am Little Russian while they are Great Russians, both I and they are Russians … A resemblance between our language and Russian is evident, for they are based on the same rules. Education in our Rus' first (nasampered) appeared in Kyiv, and then moved to the north … From the point of view of ethnography, history, language, literature, and religious rite, Galician Rus',

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Hungarian Rus', Kyivan Rus', Moscow Rus', and Tobolsk Rus' are the same Rus'… We cannot separate ourselves behind a Chinese wall from our brethren and reject the linguistic, literary, and national ties [we share – Sb ] with the entire Russian world.13 Here lay the ideological origins of the concept of a “Russian world” (russkii mir), a geopolitical idea that would be rediscovered by the Russian Orthodox Church and a new breed of Russian imperialists in the late twentieth century. One should note, however, that the “Russian world” to which Galicia’s early Russophiles were appealing was not yet a national one; instead, it was part of a pre-national conservative utopia – a sacred community of Old Rus' – rather than a contemporary nation or empire. As a result, the Kachkovs'kyi Society’s official motto had nothing to do with the Russian nation or even Russophile ideology. Instead, its message was summarized in the admonition molysia, trudysia, uchysia, tverezysia (pray, work, learn, and sober up), voiced by all moderate social reformers of the time. In part, the society’s stated goals also reflected Naumovych’s populist mindset, especially the publication of practical handbooks, such as agricultural manuals, for Galicia’s Ruthenian peasant population. During the 1870s, the society successfully opened 25 local branches and 171 reading rooms, and its membership grew from 1,645 in 1875 to 6,123 in 1877. These figures were far higher than those of its rival, the Ukrainophile Prosvita Society, which had only 289 members in 1874, owing at least in part to its high membership fees.14 In the 1880s, however, the Kachkovs'kyi Society’s membership declined steeply, to 3,637 members, in the wake of the Russophiles’ persecution in 1881–82; in the late 1890s it rebounded to around 8,000 active members. Most members were peasants (at least 87 per cent of all new members in the early 1890s),15 who most likely had little concern for the Russophile ideology of its leaders. But that ideology did concern the local Polish and central Austrian authorities, who were consistently reluctant to support the Kachkovs'kyi Society financially. The Prosvita Society, by contrast, got an annual subsidy from the Galician provincial government: in 1870–76 and again in 1884–1907, it received 2,000 crowns; later that sum increased to 8,000 crowns. The Kachkovs'kyi Society was denied any funding until 1910.16 Interestingly enough, during its first two decades the Kachkovs'kyi Society managed to avoid serious friction with the Ukrainophiles. The situation would change only later, in the twentieth century, with the overall politicization of Ruthenian society. In 1908, the influential

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Ukrainian daily Dilo (Action) accused the Kachkovs'kyi Society of being an “agent of Moscow.” Two years earlier, in 1906, Ukrainian students had begun regular attempts to disrupt the society’s annual conventions, declaring them to be “Muscovite” meetings: they heckled speakers and even threw stones at participants.17 By this time the Kachkovs'kyi Society’s influence had weakened, and its rival, Prosvita, was beginning to win the hearts and minds of Ruthenians. In 1906, the Kachkovs'kyi Society had 9,229 members, while Prosvita boasted of having 10,000.18 Prosvita also led in reading rooms and local branches: its numbers were 1,693 and 39, in comparison to its Russophile rival’s 1,261 and 26.19 By 1914, the Russophile-leaning Kachkovs'kyi Society accounted for only one-quarter and the Ukrainophile Prosvita Society for three-quarters of the total number of Ruthenians engaged in the two societies; similarly, the first accounted for one-third and the second for two-thirds of their combined number of reading rooms.20 P.R. Magocsi has attributed the Russophile Kachkovs'kyi Society’s historic loss of membership and influence to Prosvita to the Russophiles’ inability “to develop and promote elements of higher culture based on the local Galician environment.” Instead the Kachkovs'kyi Society had sought its models “in the works of Tolstoy, Pushkin, and other Russian writers that were culturally as well as linguistically removed from the local Galician Ukrainian environment.”21 Russia was simply too far away, and its culture differed too much from the local culture – both folk and “high” – for that approach to succeed, despite all the Russophiles’ attempts to drag Galicia into the Russian world. In the end, neither the “Orthodox” appearance of Russophile priests wearing beards, long hair, and flowing robes nor the combined literary might of Tolstoy and Pushkin seemed to work to good effect. Another important factor was the empire’s Austrians and Poles, who were not about to sit passively and wait for the arrival of the Russian world. In effect, Vienna and Lviv launched a coordinated offensive against the Russophiles. The situation was aggravated by flare-ups of the Austrian-Russian rivalry that always lurked in the background, which convinced the Habsburgs of the need to ensure the loyalty of Galicia’s inhabitants. For their part, the Poles sought to draw Vienna’s attention to the “treacherous” Ruthenians, who, in the event of AustroRussian hostilities, would, they alleged, be eager to side with Russia. By targeting a few suspected Russophiles, the Polish establishment aspired to the larger goal of discrediting the whole Ruthenian national movement, including the Ukrainophiles. First came an assault on the

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Russophile press, particularly the journal Slovo: between 1880 and 1883, twenty-two issues of it were confiscated, on the pretext that they “incited national hatred” (especially toward Poles), “disturbed peace,” “agitated against the authorities,” or unacceptably depicted Russia in a positive light.22 Then the Polish press began to circulate rumors of the mass conversion of Ruthenian peasants to Orthodoxy, although there were in fact only two attempts to do so, in villages where peasants simply wanted a new priest and had no hidden agenda. The ubiquitous Father Naumovych attempted to intervene on behalf of the peasants by composing a petition regarding conversion, but they did not understand his “learned” language and in the end no conversion occurred. Finally, there was der Prozess (“The Trial”), as if anticipating Franz Kafka’s notoriously bleak take on Austrian judicial procedure; however, it would have much more benign consequences for the accused than those suffered by Josef K., the novel’s unfortunate protagonist. On 12 June 1882, a notorious trial that would last forty days began in Lviv. Formally, courtesy of the Austrian constitutional state, the proceedings were a trial by jury of eleven defendants, who included Naumovych, considered the ringleader. All eleven were charged with high treason, which was punishable by death. The defendants were alleged to have been involved in a “spiritual preparation” of Galicia for its future annexation by Russia. The proceedings soon made it evident that the charges were all both politically motivated and clumsily fabricated. No seditious links to Russia were proved. The defendants insisted (albeit probably insincerely) that their Russophilism was only cultural and linguistic in nature and had no relation to politics. Father Naumovych, for instance, declared his utmost loyalty to the Habsburgs: “We, the Rus' … have always been loyal and honest Austrian subjects, we know how many favors have flown to us from the Habsburg dynasty, and our love for it will live forever in our hearts and blood, so no one can accuse us of any illegal plans.”23 He declared that his involvement in the attempted conversions to Orthodoxy was intended only to alert the Vatican to the need of true reform of the Greek Catholic rite (that is, purging it from Polish and Jesuit influences). In his kaisertreu fervor, Naumovych went so far as to say that in his view, the ultimate goal of church reform was to bring Russia into union with Rome. Naumovych concluded his audacious yet loyalist speech with an appeal that the Habsburgs divide the empire’s ethnically mixed provinces and secure the rights of the “weaker” nationalities. At the end of the show trial – it was just that, on the part of both the government and the Russophiles – the charge of high treason was

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dropped, and the jurors, most of them unsuspecting Polish peasants, acquitted the defendants. Neither the government nor the Russophiles got what they had wanted from the trial: the government had failed to prove large-scale collusion with Russia, while the modest journalists and country priests who were the eleven defendants had proved too timid and uncertain to turn the political trial into political theater. In the end, four defendants, Naumovych among them, were sentenced to a few months in jail for “having participated in relations whose goal was to spread hate or contempt against the unified society of the Austrian Empire.”24 Naumovych subsequently suffered other consequences: he was excommunicated from the Greek Catholic Church (for having refused to retract his “purist” views), and in 1885 he finally converted to his beloved Orthodoxy. Having resolved to wait no longer for the Russian world to come to Galicia, he himself moved to the Russian Empire and settled in Kyiv, the true source of his faith. By this time, it had become clear that the Ukrainophile project was better suited to conditions of modernity than was the Russophile agenda. As Andriy Zayarnyuk has explained: “the Ukrainian discourse represented itself as a project of the underdog in a world of advancing and competing nations and claimed to provide remedies to correct this situation” through an emphasis on “progress, knowledge, and civic consciousness.” By contrast, the Russophiles were “vague in defining a national community, more didactic, [and] tradition and religionoriented.” Instead of offering social and economic remedies, they were more concerned “with moral betterment,” East Slavic civilization, and monarchism.25 In other words, the Russophiles miscalculated the demands of modernity. The Russophiles did not vanish from the political stage after 1882, however. After the notorious trial ended, they were if anything even more convinced that Galician Ruthenians were just a westernmost group of Russians. Nonetheless, their alienation from the Ukrainophiles in these years should not be overestimated. As Iaroslav Hrytsak noted in his review of Anna Veronika Wendland’s monograph on Galicia’s Russophiles: “the victory of the rival Ukrainian orientation was firmly grounded on the institutional and cultural work of Russophiles from the 1860s to the 1880s. Russophiles and Ukrainophiles were like twin brothers who did not necessarily love each other but who were bound to live together, especially in their early years; even though they were evolving separate identities, they had a lot in common.”26 If Russophiles

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and Ukrainophiles were “twin brothers,” they belonged to a highly dysfunctional family whose members were most impatient to split the property they held “in common.”

th e U k r a i ni an P i e d m o n t … the other day in Galicia a trial ended … a trial in which both the persecutors and the persecuted, the public and the press, have all disgraced themselves equally … The legal system of Galicia, no matter how Polish it might be, has no judicial right to interfere in the question of how a Galician Ruthenian understands his nationality; still less has the Polish press a moral right to make a crime out of this or that understanding of the nationality issue of Galician Ruthenians … The defendants themselves, however, during the trial proved to be unable intellectually or morally to show us anything resembling dignity and tactfulness or a firm defense of their personal and national rights.27 In an allusion to Gogol’s famed turn of phrase “a lady pleasant in all respects,” Mykhailo Drahomanov, author of the above passage and an émigré living in Geneva, summed up the notorious Lviv trial of 1882 as “a process shameful in all respects.” While sympathizing with the defendants and praising some of their deeds and motivations – Naumovych’s genuine concern for the peasants’ well-being, in particular – Drahomanov was taken aback by how readily the defendants had repudiated their views or simply evaded defending them. On the other hand, Drahomanov was repulsed by the Russophiles’ actual view of Ruthenian culture and language, which he saw as a mixture of old-fashioned, abstruse, or simply ludicrous ideas. The dissident Ukrainian thinker found the latter even more repugnant than the Russophiles’ poorly concealed all-Russian ideology. For instance, Drahomanov quotes one of the trial’s defendants, an editor of the Russophile journal Slovo, as having said: “We, in Galicia, are Galician Ruthenians; there is Little and Great Rus', as well as the White, Red, and Black [Rus']. We belong to Little Rus', Southern Rus'. In theory,” the defendant went on, “I stood for literary unity, but only in theory. I never wrote and don’t write in the Russian language. For Slovo I write in Little Russian …, but to adapt it for the intelligentsia I used not the boorish language but a better one, although not Russian. I wrote in mishmash.” As Drahomanov ironically pointed

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out, the defendant-editor’s statement required a return to the seventeenth century and a casting aside of both Shevchenko and Pushkin. Baroque reasoning of this kind in defense of an artificial language (the mentioned mishmash, or iazychiie) revealed the fanciful national imaginings of the Russophiles, which Drahomanov, an avowed progressive, adamantly opposed. Drahomanov also roundly criticized the views and actions of Naumovych, who used the Ukrainian vernacular in his writings for peasants but switched to the supposedly “more refined” language of iazychiie whenever he addressed the intelligentsia. Worse still, at the trial Naumovych had chosen to speak in Polish – the language of his sworn enemies – because, he said, the Ukrainian (“Little Russian”) language of peasants would not allow him to express the “highest notions.” In Drahomanov’s view, Naumovych’s linguistic choices played into the hands of the Poles, who saw it as yet another proof that the Ruthenian language was not suitable for use in education and administration. In contrast to the Russophiles’ behavior at that trial, the defendants at a similar trial concerning the Ukrainophile daily Dilo testified in Ukrainian and defended their views with dignity. Of course, the differences between the Ukrainophiles and Russophiles went beyond arcane language issues: they bore upon much wider political, existential, and ethical concerns. The Ukrainophiles are endeavoring to rely on what was “living and local, the people’s strength,” declared Drahomanov, while the Russophiles stuck “to the scholastic old times and hunting after the faraway and foreign.” That approach led them to “deathly numbness (mertvennost'), moral absenteeism, then to emigration, and finally to the retreat before the vital and close adversary (‘the Polish element’).”28 Given all this, it was the Ukrainophiles, not the Old Ruthenians and Russophiles, who could stand up to the Poles. By this time Drahomanov had already proved himself to be a shrewd political commentator and prognosticator of sorts, and this time, too, he would be proven right. But who were the Galician Ukrainophiles, the activists also known as narodovtsi (from narod, meaning people or nation)? If one goal of the 1882 trial was to destroy the united political front of Russophiles and Ukrainophiles that had begun to form in the late 1870s, then Galicia’s Polish elites had achieved their goal. However, by weakening the Russophiles they had also opened up space for their on-and-off rivals, the Ukrainophiles, and thus gained a much more formidable enemy. The Ukrainophiles had emerged as a social force in the 1860s

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under the influence of the Hromada movement in Russian Ukraine. As young narodovtsi, they had begun to form their own h romadas, comprised of university and gymnasium students in Lviv, Berezhany, Drohobych, Kolomyia, Przemyśl/Peremyshl, Sambir, Stanyslaviv, and Ternopil. Like their peers in Russian Ukraine, they often dressed in the Cossack manner, as if oblivious of how historical Cossacks had often behaved toward Uniate civilians. The single biggest intellectual influence on the Galician populists came from Taras Shevchenko, “the first and greatest peasant poet of all Europe,” whom they all “read enthusiastically.”29 Aside from the contemporary influences coming from Russian Ukraine, the Ukrainophile ideology also had local roots in the events of the “strange” Revolution of 1848. The Supreme Ruthenian Council’s founding manifesto of that year made it clear that a cultural and ideological identification with Russian Ukraine had already been established, alongside a staunch Habsburg loyalism that would withstand the reestablishment of Polish rule in Galicia after 1867–68. Members of the 1848 generation also had personal links to the young narodovtsi. Among the former was Iuliian Lavrivs'kyi (1819–1873), judge and deputy marshal (speaker) of the Galician diet. Another was Stepan Kachala (1815–1888), a Greek Catholic priest, deputy to the Galician diet (1861–88), and later head of the Ruthenian Club in the imperial parliament (1883–88). It was Kachala who, in his polemical anti-Polish treatise Polityka Polaków względem Rusi (Polish Politics towards Rus'), composed a “stand-alone” credo for Rus' in 1879: No government can invent a nationality, still less can [Count] Stadion … There has been no inclination towards the schism [Orthodoxy], still less toward Moscow among Ruthenians. Ruthenians want to remain Ruthenians … And so while Poles and Russians are fighting for Rus', only Rus' itself suffers from it. Russians and Poles agree only that they do not want to recognize the distinctiveness of the Little Russian nationality, so as to destroy and denationalize Rus' – the former [do so] by means of Orthodoxy, the latter through Catholicism. Yet the Ruthenians are standing up against denationalization, whether pressed by means of Catholicism or by means of Orthodoxy.30 Lavrivs'kyi, Kachala, and individuals like them are the best evidence that the Ukrainophiles did not appear after the Russophiles, as has often been assumed. In fact, both orientations had their beginnings in

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the events of the Revolution of 1848. Afterward the two coexisted, like Neanderthals and Homo sapiens had done millennia before, until the once dominant species became extinct and the other prevailed. Both groups were inspired by a new awareness of links across the RussianAustrian border. The Russophiles, of course, did not fully disappear from Galicia until after World War II, but from the 1880s onward, their numerical and political strength declined steadily. The young Galician Ukrainophiles were truly revolutionary in several respects. The narodovtsi – a term perhaps best rendered in English as national populists – were social progressives with no sympathies for Russia in general, let alone for the tsar. They believed in a separate Ukrainian nationality, a phenomenon Magocsi has called a system of “mutually exclusive identities.” Their imagined fatherland of Rus'-Ukraine stretched from the Carpathian Mountains in the west to the Don River in the east, thus encompassing the entire territory of present-day Ukraine. The narodovtsi rejected, at least initially, the clericalism and conservatism of the Old Ruthenians and Russophiles; they were instead open to intellectual influences from Russian Ukraine, emanating from populist writers, journalists, and, later, political émigrés like Drahomanov. In contrast to the Old Ruthenians and Russophiles, with their macaronic language and baroque monarchism (both Austrian and Russian), the narodovtsi were steadfast in promoting the use of the literary Ukrainian language (based on the vernacular spoken in Galicia), while professing staunch (albeit not uncritical) loyalty to the Habsburgs and uncompromising enmity toward the Poles (albeit open to possible collaboration with Polish democrats). The leading narodovtsi were born mostly in the 1830s to early 1850s; among them were Danylo Taniachkevych (1842–1900), the brothers Volodymyr (1850–1883) and Oleksandr Barvins'kyi (1847–1927), Omelian Partyts’kyi (1840–1895), the brothers Omelian (1833–1894) and Oleksandr Ohonovs'kyi (1848–1891), and Iuliian Romanchuk (1842–1932). This Galician generation of “sons” was analogous to the “1860s generation” in Russian Ukraine, in that they both had a populist and positivist outlook. In social terms, this generation of Ruthenian political and intellectual leaders was mostly of plebeian origin, unlike their Polish counterparts, who were usually descendants of the nobility or professional classes. Another characteristic that separated the narodovtsi from their ideological predecessors and rivals in Galicia was their predominantly secular occupations (except for a few older men like the priest Kachala), even though most were still sons

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of Greek Catholic priests. Such priestly families were usually large, and their offspring often staffed the Ruthenian movement in all its incarnations, from Old Ruthenians to the radicals and even Marxists. The narodovtsi would produce an ideological miracle. By 1867, they were already forging their scattered national and populist ideas into a manifesto of sorts, in which they referred to themselves, without feigning modesty, as the nation’s “soul.” Taking a leap of faith, these young sons of Greek Catholic priests proclaimed the poet Taras Shevchenko, hardly known to sympathize with Uniates, as their own symbolic father.31 To them history was the arena of national “struggles,” regardless whether they took the form of “Christian knights against the Asiatic hordes,” “helpless folk against the insatiable lords and the wicked oligarchy of Poland,” “the Orthodox people against Jesuitism and autocratic Rome,” or “a free nation against the despotic tsars of Muscovy.” All these “struggles” were seen as part of the continuous history of the Ukrainian nation. In this process, modern nationalism did indeed work wonders, selectively “forgetting” /“remembering” dramatic historical events that were now to be the common legacy of the newly imagined nation, the major paradox in its collective memory so famously dissected by Benedict Anderson. In the case of the narodovtsi, the paradoxical process of national imagining culminated in this declaration: We are the upholders of the great testament of our unforgettable bard (kobzar), Taras Shevchenko … We are the devoted children, not forsakers, of a separate Ruthenian nation, its hope and future … We are proud of belonging to a nation of fifteen million, whose name is Ruthenians or Ukrainians, a nation imbued with the Cossack spirit and whose country’s name is “our Mother Rus'Ukraine” … And this nation – contrary to the will of all hegemons and usurpers that still stand ready to abolish it and remove it from the face of the earth – is a sovereign one. It exists thanks to its language, customs, history, character, public opinion, [and] self-knowledge. Its soul is its intelligentsia, which has discerned what lies in its heart, adopted its thoughts, and felt its misfortunes, and has taken it upon itself to revive it through education and science…[The intelligentsia] was born to the words of our first national prophet – Taras Shevchenko… We shall always stand on the side of our poor, rag-covered peasant people.32

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The reader of the manifesto also learned that “our sworn enemies” were the Poles (liakhy, abetted by their allies, the zhydy – Jews) and the Muscovites (moskali). Poles were the incorrigible enemies of Rus' and Ruthenians from times immemorial, to the degree that any cooperation between Ukrainians and Poles in Galicia, apart from master-servant relations, seemed impossible. A good Pole was someone who ceased to be a Pole and became a born-again Ruthenian, an essentially utopian character (probably an allusion to Volodymyr Antonovych and the chłopomanie in Right-Bank Ukraine). The Russians, by contrast, were new on the Ruthenian leaders’ list of enemies, for both the Old Ruthenians and Russophiles overtly sympathized with Russia, primarily with its conservative elements. Now the narodovtsi, as both Ukrainians and populists, were teaching the Ruthenians to dislike “Moscow” and “Muscovites,” in reaction to the “despotism, autocracy, and lack of liberty” that characterized both the people and government of Russia. However, their “harmful deeds” had failed “to absorb and harm Ukraine’s living strength and living spirit.”33 The Austrians were guilty as well, for having conducted an “ambiguous policy” towards the Ruthenians and abandoning them to the “aristocratic spirit” of the Poles. Hence the narodovtsi were rejecting the “comedic loyalism” (aka “loyal Ruthenism”) of the old Ruthenian leaders and, instead, were declaring their exclusive loyalty to the “[Ukrainian] nation, its wellbeing, and its dignity.” Still, they did not go so far as to show disloyalty to Austria or its emperor. They even called themselves “true Austrians,” with, however, a caveat: Austria should become “truly Austrian, equally fair to all its peoples,” not just to Germans, Hungarians, and Poles. It should be a true, federative empire of all its peoples, rather than of predominantly German bureaucrats. A good start would be to divide Galicia into two separate provinces, Ukrainian and Polish, each with its own diet and administration. Another good step would be to purge the Greek Catholic Church of “Latinism” by granting its head the status of patriarch, who in turn would be elected at a democratic “people’s synod.” This daring and ambitious populist agenda presupposed the adoption of the new national identity, coupled with a virulently anti-Russian stance. Not only did it go well beyond most Ruthenian leaders’ expectations, it did not fit with the dominant institutions of the time. The Ukrainian democratic nationalism of the narodovtsi was still a minority faith in Galicia. Ruthenian society was simply not ready for them or their agenda. Until the 1880s, major institutions like the National Home and the press were still controlled by the Old Ruthenians and Russophiles,

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leaving the populists the options of either overtaking the existing institutions or creating their own. The first option proved difficult to put into play. To counter the Russophile journal Slovo, the narodovtsi in 1867 launched their own literary, scholarly, and political journal, Pravda (Truth). The first joint venture by Ukrainians from Austria and Russia, the publication was funded by Ukrainians from Russia (primarily Panteleimon Kulish and Oleksandr Konys’kyi). With some interruptions, it appeared for three decades. Its authors included such luminaries of Russian Ukraine as Hanna Barvinok (wife of Panteleimon Kulish), Marko Vovchok, Panas Myrnyi, Mykhailo Staryts'kyi, Ivan Karpenko-Karyi, Ivan Nechui-Levyts'kyi, Stepan Rudans'kyi, and Oleksa Storozhenko. The narodovtsi–national populists’ first real breakthrough into the Ruthenian public sphere was achieved through the Prosvita Society, founded in 1868 as an association for adult learning. As noted above, Prosvita rapidly established branches and reading rooms in towns and villages across Galicia, and these would play a critical role in the Ukrainian national movement. As a rival to the Russophile-leaning Kachkovs'kyi Society, Prosvita arose from an idea proposed by the veteran activist Stepan Kachala. Prosvita’s first constitution defined it as a learned society whose purpose was “to know and edify the people.” In addition to “promoting the moral, material, and political edification of the people,” it was to “collect and publish all the fruits of oral folk literature.”34 Initially, it had just seventy-two members, all members of the intelligentsia. To appeal to a larger audience, in 1870 Prosvita’s goal was redefined as “to promote education among the Ruthenian people.” In 1876, after the society’s high membership fee was dropped, the society began to grow exponentially. Among its first directors was the judge Iuliian Lavrivs'kyi (1870–73) and the learned priest Omelian Ohonovs'kyi (1877–94), the latter of whom represented a disappearing species in the now predominantly lay leadership of the national populists. From 1881 to 1885, there were 320 reading rooms in Galicia loosely associated with Prosvita. As more peasants joined, its structure changed. In 1891, other reading rooms and branches were incorporated with those of Prosvita into a single network, a process that showed the managerial skills of the narodovtsi. Between 1891 and 1914, reading rooms within the reformed Prosvita Society increased from 5 to 2,944, and its branches increased from 7 to 77. By 1914, three-quarters of Galicia’s cities, towns, and villages had a reading room, and a fifth of

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the Ukrainian population belonged to Prosvita.35 The society became a major force lobbying for Ukrainian-language education, including the establishment of a Chair of Ukrainian History at Lviv University. As it expanded, the society itself began to resemble a complex living organism, with branches or tentacles stretching in different directions: by 1912, in addition to reading rooms it had set up 540 stores, 339 local credit unions, and 121 warehouses. Nonetheless, Prosvita continued to focus on its original goal of educating the masses. With the aid of governmental grants, between 1871 and 1876 Prosvita published seventeen textbooks. Between 1868 and 1918, Prosvita published 348 popular titles (in a total of 2,941,115 copies) in fields ranging from belles lettres to history, economics, science, medicine, and law. Financially, Prosvita benefited greatly from the Poles and Austrians. For example, between 1868 and 1907, its membership fees provided only 202,000 kronen of its total revenues of 793,000 kronen (it actually spent about 791,000). The remaining funds came from subsidies provided by the provincial and central governments, individual donations, and profits from its own operations, such as publishing. Subsidies from the Polish-dominated Galician diet were initially small – much smaller than those received by Polish organizations – but from 1908 they increased to support the society’s growing agenda. From 1870 to 1914, the Galician government donated 190,000 kronen to support Prosvita’s publishing ventures and 173,000 kronen in 1906–14 for economic operations, while the central government provided 42,000 kronen in 1906–09 for the same purpose. Private donations, from both Galicia and abroad, added to its revenues. Until 1914, the Prosvita Society was the Galician Ukrainians’ largest organization and their major symbol of success. It has reasonably been argued that without Prosvita’s mundane work, the prevalence of Ukrainian identity and subsequent emergence of Ukrainian statehood in Galicia in 1918 would not have been possible. Another new institution established by the narodovtsi was the Shevchenko Society of Lviv (1873), initially a literary society which evolved into an all-Ukrainian scholarly institution. Funded by Ukrainians in Russia, its main donor was Ielyzaveta Myloradovych, the aristocratic daughter of a marshal of the Poltava provincial nobility and aunt of Pavlo Skoropads'kyi, hetman of Ukraine in 1918. An early supporter of village schools in the Poltava province, the Prosvita Society, and the journal Pravda in Galicia, Ielyzaveta Myloradovych donated 20,000 Austrian kronen toward its founding. Renamed the Shevchenko Scientific Society (Naukove tovarystvo im. Shevchenka) in 1893, the

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organization became a major publisher and promotor of Ukrainian literature and scholarship. The society also established a library (by 1914 it held 70,000 cataloged volumes and 500 manuscripts and was the most complete collection of Ucrainica in the world), a museum (15,047 artifacts in 1920), and a bookstore.36 Its Zapysky Naukovoho tovarystva im. Shevchenka (Notes of the Shevchenko Scientific Society) began publication in 1892 and became a bimonthly in 1896, under the editorship (1895–1913) of Mykhailo Hrushevs'kyi. In Kyiv the young historian had been Volodymyr Antonovych’s favorite disciple, and he had come to Lviv to assume a position at its university. Publishing Ukrainian-language literature and scholarship relied on private funds, which often came from wealthy Ukrainians in the Russian Empire, who increasingly viewed Galicia as the Ukrainian Piedmont. But progress in another area essential to modernity, education, required the good will of the government. In Galicia that good will was often lacking, especially when it came to the education of peasants. “Peasants should have no entry to schools,” stated Galicia’s top education official, mocking the prevalent stance of Polish reactionaries. “Their duty is to tend to herds; education is the privilege of the gentry.”37 The Viennese government, once a bulwark of benevolent despotism, now driven by more practical concerns, wanted all its subjects to learn to read and write. School attendance became mandatory in Galicia in 1872, but the illiteracy rate in Austria-Hungary’s poorest province remained very high: 77 per cent in 1880, 68 per cent in 1890, and 56 per cent in 1900. Illiteracy was especially pronounced in the countryside: in some areas, it stood at 90 per cent. In the early twentieth century, more than two thousand mostly Ukrainian rural communities still had no schools. Polish schools greatly outnumbered Ruthenian schools (5,680 versus 2,299 grades in total, respectively). In addition, Polish was a compulsory subject in all locally funded schools in Ruthenian villages, regardless of whether any Polish children even lived there.38 In terms of secondary education, the Ukrainian Piedmont looked still less Ukrainian. As late as 1906–07, Galicia had the highest ratio of secondary schools to inhabitants of any region in the empire’s “Austrian” half: one per 107,000. For Ruthenians as a nationality, that ratio was much worse: one gymnasium – that is, academic or classical high school – per 425,000 Ruthenians, compared to one per 69,000 Poles, one per 114,000 Romanians, and one per 215,000 Slovenes.39 In 1914, Galicia had only five state-supported Ukrainian secondary schools: one each in Lviv (founded in 1874), Peremyshl' (Przemyśl;

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1888), Kolomyia (1893), Ternopil' (1898), and Stanislaviv (1905). Even these were generally established only after intense lobbying by the narodovtsi, particularly Iuliian Romanchuk, Oleksandr Ohonovs'kyi, and Oleksandr Barvins'kyi. For Ruthenians, higher education remained inaccessible except to a tiny minority, owing in part to its high cost. A great disappointment to Ruthenian leaders was their failure to establish a Ruthenian university, which they had sought to accomplish by dividing Lviv University into separate Polish and Ukrainian halves, on the model of Prague’s Charles University, which was split into Czech and German campuses in 1882. Ukrainian students seeking higher education had to attend the existing universities in the empire, where the language of operation was German, Polish, or Czech. In 1900, for instance, Lviv University had 605 Ukrainian students (29 per cent of the student population), most of whom were studying theology; another 59 Ukrainian students were at the university in Chernivtsi (Czernowitz; 12 per cent of the student population), and 37 were at the university in Vienna (where they were a mere .6 per cent of the student population).40 Higher education did indeed have a proverbial glass ceiling for Ruthenians, and in most instances that glass was as thick as the concrete later used in the most brutal of all brutalist architecture.

fro m d awn to d USk of t h e n e w e r a In 1890, a ray of hope appeared on the horizon, a potential game changer in the troubled relationship between Poles and Ukrainians: the glass ceiling suddenly appeared to be breakable. That came about in the form of a backroom deal brokered by Volodymyr Antonovych, relying on his allegedly long-severed connections in Polish society. Named “New Era” by its Galician architects, the deal had long-term consequences, despite a limited political run and the lack of a formal agreement. The narodovtsi, led by Iuliian Romanchuk and Oleksandr Barvins'kyi, represented the Ruthenians in negotiations with the Polish aristocrat Count Kazimierz Badeni, then governor of Galicia (and later Austria’s prime minister). The deal’s broader context included the government’s perception of a Russian threat to Galicia and hence a need to accommodate the Ruthenians so as to ensure their loyalty. The Habsburgs pressed both Polish and Ukrainian leaders to negotiate a deal acceptable to both sides. The Poles viewed New Era as yet another way to pit one group of Ruthenians against another. The narodovtsi sought

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to acquire political clout by claiming to represent Ukrainian Galicia as part of a Greater Ukraine, thereby raising the stakes in the negotiations. One of the deal’s longer-lasting effects proved to be local Ruthenians’ accelerated identification with Ukraine, as, during the 1890s, increasing numbers of Galician Ruthenians came to embrace “Ukrainian” as their national name. Consequently, the Russophiles went into free fall, and Galicia did indeed become the Ukrainian Piedmont. Another very significant consequence was the successful establishment of a separate Chair of Ukrainian History at Lviv University, even though the chair’s official title was a deliberate misnomer: “The Second Chair of Universal History, with special reference to the History of Eastern Europe.” The position was reportedly intended for Antonovych himself, but for various reasons the aging professor advised that his favorite student, Mykhailo Hrushevs'kyi, be appointed instead. Given Hrushevs'kyi’s subsequent notoriety, the choice proved a potent marrying of scholarship with politics. The Ukrainians got two more university chairs, in law and in medicine. With the prospect of acquiring more of its own historians, doctors, and lawyers, Ukrainian nation building could begin in earnest. Evidence of that was an increase in the number of secular professionals within the Galician Ukrainian leadership. Another courtesy of the New Era pact was the transformation in 1892 of the modest literary Shevchenko Society into the Shevchenko Scientific Society, which became a viable substitute for an Academy of Sciences. A political victory for the narodovtsi was the government’s decision, over the objections of the Russophiles and many in the clergy, to substitute use of a phonetic orthography of the Ukrainian language for the etymological orthography used previously, which was similar to Russian orthography and based on medieval Church Slavonic. A codified, literary version of Ukrainian also became one of Galicia’s three official languages and thus legal for educational use. New Era allowed Ukrainians to open new schools, including a gymnasium in Kolomyia. Finally, there were now more Ukrainian deputies sitting in the Galician diet and working in the provincial administration. Even the Greek Catholic Church was affected by the deal: it began gradually to purge Russophiles from its clerical ranks, and in the 1890s it began becoming what it is today – a Ukrainian national church.41 For a time, New Era did indeed constitute a new era for Galicia’s Ruthenian Ukrainians – until its very signatories sabotaged it. The Polish elites grew increasingly uneasy about the successes of the Ukrainian

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upstarts. So did some Ukrainians themselves, who opposed collaboration with the conservative Austrian and Polish authorities. Over time, this led to the total makeover of Galician Ukrainians’ inner political scene On the one hand, opposition to New Era was coming from within the narodovtsi camp, where many, including the leading populist Ievhen Olesnyts'kyi (1860–1917), criticized its policies as lacking substance. New Era began to falter and, having suddenly become old news, lasted only until 1894. A schism emerged in the populist contingent of parliamentary delegates, between a pro-government faction, led by Oleksandr Barvins'kyi, and an opposition faction, led by Iuliian Romanchuk, that supported coming to terms with the Russophiles. Opposition to the pact also came from Mykhailo Drahomanov in Geneva and from his local disciples in Galicia, who in fact made a tactical alliance with the Russophiles against New Era. Drahomanov had long been concerned about what he saw as the national populists’ dangerous drift to clericalism. That perception had developed owing to the Barvins'kyi brothers’ search of support for the Ukrainian idea among the clergy. They succeeded in winning over much of the church, but that success came at a high price, for the national movement lost its initial democratic and anticlerical momentum. Early on the populists’ agenda had been marked by social radicalism and anticlericalism, but their small numbers at the time had played against them. As urban intellectuals, the first national populists did not have direct access to the countryside, which was the base that the Ukrainian movement had to have to prevail (more about this in chapters 7 and 8). The road to gaining the peasantry’s support lay through the mediation of the province’s Greek Catholic clergy, which was conservative by nature. That reality led the national populists to strike an informal deal with the clergy which recast their movement in more conservative tones. Reaction to that conservative turn, in 1873 a number of Ukrainophiles in Kyiv signed an “Open Letter from Ukraine to the Editor of Pravda.” The letter, addressed to the Lviv-based mouthpiece of the narodovtsi, a publication funded by Ukrainophiles from Russia, was most likely written by Drahomanov and had seventy-six signatories. It strongly criticized their Galician protégés’ increasing clericalism, particularly as expressed in the popular brochures of Reverend Stepan Kachala. Kachala believed that the peasants’ poverty was rooted not in social injustice or a feudal/capitalist economy but in their own “vices,” like drunkenness, prodigality, and sloth, for which remedies were abstinence, thrift, and enterprise, not class struggle. Elsewhere Drahomanov

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had already decried the socially conservative agenda brought to the narodovtsi by clerics like Kachala and their attempted alliance with the Polish elites. Clearly, Drahomanov could not abide social activism by the clergy and was determined to quell it. Drahomanov was also concerned with the parochialism and chauvinism of mainstream national populists in Galicia. To counter these, he admonished young Ukrainians to read Russian democratic literature and study other European languages, so as to educate themselves directly in the secular democratic spirit. In his view, conservative elements allied to the Greek Catholic hierarchy had hijacked the Ukrainian populist movement in Galicia, a situation that threatened to isolate Ukrainian activists from both the progressive West and their own people. He consistently advocated an all-Ukrainian secular and radical (“socialist,” in his terminology) agenda oriented towards the most liberal Western (and liberal and democratic Russian) models. In effect, Drahomanov was determined to cultivate a generation of true radicals and socialists in Galicia –single-handedly and as if exotic plants grown hydroponically. Drahomanov later recalled how, while visiting Vienna in the early 1870s, he had already begun to plan how to reach the impressionable minds of Galician Ruthenians: I drew up a plan [ca. 1872 – Sb ] for the expansion of the Ukrainian movement in Galicia. This would be accomplished with the help of Russian (Great Russian) literature, the secular and democratic character of which would undermine Galician clericalism and bureaucratism and turn the local youth towards the demos. And the demos there being Ukrainian, a Ukrainian national consciousness would then develop of itself … I venture to say that I, as a “Ukrainian separatist,” disseminated more “Muscovite” (Russian) books in Austria than any Muscovite Slavophile. By 1876 I could claim that my plan had been successful.42 The success Drahomanov had in mind was the decision under his tutelage of two student groups, one Ukrainophile and the other Russophile, to unite. Remarkably, at that time the Russophile group, called “Academic Circle” (Akademicheskii kruzhok), included a young Ivan Franko (1856–1916), who, as an influential writer, poet, polymath, and somewhat less successful political activist, would later for Galician Ukrainians become an iconic figure in the emerging national pantheon, second only to Taras Shevchenko. Of course, the young

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Franko was inspired by democratic Russian literature, not by the might of the tsar. After the student groups’ merger, the newspaper Druh, press organ of the Russophiles (1874–77), became a major source of socialist ideas for Galician Ukrainians. In Drahomanov’s words, Druh’s editors “were the first in Galicia to raise economic questions or the question of the union of Ruthenian and Polish democratic forces.”43 Franko and his socialist friends were a small minority, however, and one not compatible with the mainstream Ruthenian political community, split as it was between the Russophiles and national populists. The appearance of socialist ideas in Galicia proved too challenging to both the AustroPolish administration and the major Ruthenian parties, which abhorred the youthful rebels’ militant agnosticism and social radicalism. What resulted was the first trial of socialists, which took place in Lviv in 1877–78. Ivan Franko was sentenced to nine months in jail, a time he later called “torture,” locked up together with common criminals in an overcrowded cell. Worse still, once finally free he was shunned by mainstream Ruthenian activists, particularly “older national populists and priests.”44 Franko would be arrested three more times, including on the eve (1889) and at the height of New Era (1892). Later, when he ran for the Galician diet and the imperial parliament (1895, 1897, and 1898), in every instance he fell victim to electoral fraud perpetrated by Polish conservative persecutors. Like Drahomanov, Franko saw New Era as a bad deal, devised by Polish lords and Austrian bureaucrats to the detriment of the Ruthenians. The dissatisfaction of these two dissidents contributed to the rise of a radical alternative to established ways of social and political thinking in Galicia. Drahomanov’s disciples were soon advancing a vision of the future that differed greatly from the one championed by Antonovych and Barvins'kyi, architects of the New Era project. In contrast to Antonovych’s cautious approach, Drahomanov advocated direct political action to attain a democratic Ukraine, without landlords or clerical influence. Although the young socialists would be obliged to tone down their rhetoric, it was they who, in 1890, founded the first-ever Ukrainian political party to exist anywhere: the Ruthenian-Ukrainian Radical party (rUrP ), which united Drahomanov-style socialists and more conventional Marxists and looked to Drahomanov as its mentor. The new party’s members included Ivan Franko, Mykhailo Pavlyk, and Ostap Terlets'kyi, all victims of the earliest anti-socialist persecutions. The party’s outstanding characteristic was that its leftist members were the first in the history of the Ukrainian movement to embrace the idea of

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Ukraine’s political independence. One of them, the committed Marxist Iuliian Bachyns'kyi (1870–1940), voice that idea in the groundbreaking pamphlet Ukraïna irredenta (1895), and the rUrP soon made it part of its program. Following a somewhat cryptic definition of dialectics by the Russian populist Chernyshevskii, Bachyns'kyi’s pamphlet presented the case for Ukraine’s independence from a Marxist (“scientific socialist”) viewpoint: The material need of the “Ruthenian” peasants is quite a natural and logical thing. It comes from the nature of today’s peasant economy – primitive and old-fashioned, while the landlords’ economy is capitalist … the peasant is dying, while the state for whose benefit he got engaged in the competition with big capital is unable to help him. This is not surprising, because the contemporary state is not a peasant state and does not feel obliged to help him … The economic development of the bourgeois society, in the condition of free competition now dominant, has led to the downfall of the minor economy as a whole, from the small artisanal shop to the lesser agricultural enterprise. Their representatives, the petty artisan and the farmer, have been pushed into the ranks of the non-propertied class, the proletariat … The political independence of Ukraine is a conditio sine qua non of its economic and cultural development, a general precondition for the very possibility of its existence … [The goal is – Sb ] a proletariat organized in a social-democratic political party, conscious of its cultural and historical necessity, that takes into its own hands the authority of the state and turns all means of production into state property … The Radical Party was the first party to make one of its primary goals the idea of political independence for the Ukrainian people … The party’s economic principles and cultural ideals cannot be achieved, however, without a politically independent Ukraine … The idea of political independence for the Ukrainian people has, in fact, attracted new cadres of supporters from among the GalicianUkrainian intelligentsia and the Galician-Ukrainian proletariat.45 Although it was not immediately clear why the emerging Ukrainian proletariat needed an independent Ukraine – a state whose creation would, after all, depend on the Ukrainian bourgeoisie – Bachyns'kyi made a strong case for the breakup of Austria and Russia, based on economic and political considerations. Ukraïna irredenta, the brilliant

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product of a young Marxist mind, was remarkable in its socioeconomic and political insights, which to some degree were eclipsed by the pamphlet’s radical call for Ukraine’s independence. Owing at least in part to its frequent references to Marx and Engels, the pamphlet was not well received by the rUPr ’s older members, however, even if the younger ones were quite impressed. Ivan Franko, for instance, did not buy into the idea that the development of the relations of production (a major tenet in the Marxist theory of historical materialism) would lead to Ukraine’s independence. He was also annoyed by the Marxist dogmatism and “internationalist” message of his younger colleague Iuliian Bachyns'kyi, who, like all Marxists, anticipated the future dissolution of nation-states – essentially, bourgeois states – and the emergence of an international socialist community in their place. Finally, for Franko the focus on class struggle that Bachyns'kyi was prescribing for the rUrP smacked of “politics of hatred.” Drahomanov, in a letter to Bachyns'kyi, also took issue with his Marxist frame of reference: “I disagree with the exclusively economic philosophy of history and politics, because I consider it a sort of metaphysics, whereas human life is too complex to be explained by one aspect alone.”46 He also pointed to the lack of clarity in the author’s arguments for an independent Ukraine and its relation to the proletariat and the “process of internationalization.” Bachyns'kyi responded by irreverently declaring that he preferred Marx to Drahomanov’s own ideas about “some kind of ‘Slavic’ socialism.”47 Their heated exchange came to an abrupt end in June 1895: that month Drahomanov died in Sofia, Bulgaria, just as the debates between Marxism and nationalism were getting underway. The century ended with further disarray on the Ukrainian political scene. Drahomanov’s death left his radical disciples without guidance, and they began to drift in different directions. In 1899, the right wing of the Radicals (rUrP ), including Franko, joined the majority of national populists to form the Ukrainian National Democratic party, which stood opposed to New Era and its policies. The small Barvins'kyi faction, however, continued to support New Era, and later it formed the conservative (and rather marginal) Catholic Ruthenian People’s Union. It was the new leadership of Mykhailo Hrushevs'kyi that convinced Franko and the Radicals’ nationalist wing to merge with the national populists. The new Ukrainian National Democratic Party was a broad coalition (the historian Ivan Lysiak Rudnytsky compared it to India’s National Congress Party) which combined democratic nationalism with social reformism while also pressing, unsuccessfully, for Galicia’s

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division into Ukrainian and Polish halves. The remaining Radicals stood in permanent opposition to the national democrats, even though the two parties had much in common: most of their leaders were lawyers (alongside a number of “peasant politicians”), and they shared the same ultimate political goal of an independent Ukraine. Granted, that goal was a distant ideal, yet it was also a turning point in Ukrainian political culture. There was now, de-facto, a two-party system among politically active Ukrainians in Galicia. These factions and all others on the Ukrainian political spectrum in Galicia owed much to the early ideology of the narodovtsi, who, in turn, had inherited major tenets of their national populist ideology from the Hromada movement in Russian Ukraine. As Ihor Hyrych has bluntly put it, the narodovtsi simply adopted “a ready-made form” from the Kyivites, whom the Valuev Circular of 1863 and Ems Decree of 1876 had obliged to look to Galicia for the fulfillment of their political imaginings. In this sense, Galicia as the Ukrainian Piedmont was the product – ideological as much as institutional – of Antonovych and his friend Oleksandr Konys’kyi. Galician Ukrainians were also inspired by Italians from Sardinia-Piedmont, as well as the opposing idea of Galicia as the Polish Piedmont. Yet it would be unfair to deny independent agency to the Galician Ukrainians, who navigated the complexities of the Austrian and Polish administrations and negotiated identity with their Galician Ruthenian rivals from the Russophile camp. In fact, Kyiv’s Old Hromada, under Antonovych’s leadership, resolved in 1891 “not to intervene in Galician party affairs, as matters too local and of little significance.”48 Galician exceptionalism may have been shaped by Ukrainian influences from imperial Russia, but it emerged in local conditions, which included the Austrian constitutional state, Polish ruling elites, the dominance of the Greek Catholic clergy (so detested by Drahomanov), and the rise of a vibrant civil society with its own coexisting branches – Old Ruthenian, Russophile, Polonophile, and Ukrainophile. More important, by the late nineteenth century Ukrainian politicians in Galicia could engage in mass politics, relying on the nationally mobilized peasantry as their main constituency, thanks to a wide network of Prosvita reading rooms, credit unions, and cooperatives. Some Poles in Galicia, recognizing what was occurring around them, even began anticipating an unfortunate future for themselves, paralleling the fate that befell the English in Ireland and the Germans in Czech lands (the economist Franciszek Bujak of Cracow noted such a possibility in 1908).49

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Most Poles ignored such potential outcomes, however, and continued to deny equal political and cultural agency to Ruthenians. The impasse was symbolized by two statements, one by a Pole and the other by a Ukrainian. “Polish public opinion looks upon this province as a trust whose splitting up in whatever form is inadmissible,” wrote the Pole; “its unity must remain a noli me tangere [lit. “touch-me-not,” that is, inviolable – Sb ]… The Poles are bound by a sacred obligation to regard Galicia as a ‘historical area’ where they are called to fulfill the duties of the master of the house.” Hence, the Pole continued, the Ukrainians’ demand for equality in the province “means the wish to create a pretended justice, which would consist in putting on a footing of equality two totally unequal things.”50 In response, the Ukrainian, Ivan Franko, gave expression to the Ukrainians’ political mantra of the time: “We wish the Poles complete national and political liberty. But there is one necessary condition: they must, once and for all, desist from lording it over us; they must, once and for all, give up any thought of building a ‘historical’ Poland in non-Polish lands, and they must accept, as we do, the idea of a purely ethnic Poland.”51 Of course, no rational Pole of the time would readily abandon Galicia and accept the idea of an ethnic Poland. Ironically, the Poles in Galicia were also not a ready-made nation. Most local Roman Catholic peasants called themselves Mazurzy (Masurians), and they had yet to be invited to be part of a nation they would have to share with their landlords. The very name “Poles” was associated almost exclusively with those landlords, and it would take time and a great deal of social imagination to extend that name to peasants and other non-nobles. Polish-Ukrainian relations worsened once again in the late 1890s, owing to volatile political campaigns, especially during the “bloody” elections to the Galician diet in 1897, marred as they were by rampant electoral fraud and an attempt on Ivan Franko’s life. That was followed in 1904–07 by a battle to secure democratization of the right to vote, which led to the introduction of universal male suffrage in the 1907 elections to the Austrian parliament. The electoral reform greatly benefited the Ukrainophiles, who that year sent twenty-seven deputies to Vienna, compared to the five seats won by the Russophiles. However, elections to the Galician diet were still based on the old curia system, which discriminated against non-Poles. Also, the elections were rigged by Polish plutocrats, and a Ukrainian peasant protesting against electoral fraud paid for that act with his life. The following year, a Ukrainian Marxist student retaliated by assassinating the man

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whom he held responsible for the electoral violence – Galicia’s viceroy, Andrzej Potocki. To make matters worse, the Polish establishment decided to prop up its erstwhile enemies, the Russophiles – especially those known (after 1909) as novokursnyky (New Liners) – as a counterweight to the more assertive Ukrainians. However, despite the Polish intervention and their Russian support, the Russophiles’ influence in the region plummeted in the years preceding World War I. For instance, in 1914 the Russophile Kachkovs'kyi Society had 300 reading rooms, whereas the Ukrainophile Prosvita society had 2,944; the Russophile Ruthenian Audit Union controlled 106 cooperatives, whereas the Audit Union of Ukrainian Cooperatives had 909. In the 1913 elections to the Galician diet, only one Russophile was elected, against the thirty elected Ukrainophiles.52 What explained the Ukrainian parties’ sweeping victory over the Russophiles? According to Iaroslav Hrytsak, the Ukrainians ultimately won because they promoted a progressive vision of Ukraine based on a strong social (peasant) component, in contrast to the conservative utopia offered by their Russophile rivals. Then, in 1914, the Ukrainians achieved what had seemed impossible – a grand deal with the Poles that far exceeded the provisions of New Era. Brokered by Metropolitan Andrei Sheptyts'kyi, the new agreement presupposed the creation of two separate chambers in the Galician diet, one for the Poles and one for the Ruthenians, and, remarkably, the latter were guaranteed one-third of all seats. In addition, education throughout the province was to be administered by two separate boards, one Polish and one Ukrainian. Even more remarkably, Ukrainians were promised a separate university of their own in Lviv. And then everything changed. Following the sensational murder of an imperial archduke at Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, Poles and Ukrainians, along with their fellow Austrians and millions of other Europeans, would suddenly be swept up in fighting, killing, and being killed in the bloodiest war the world had ever known. The Polish-Ukrainian deal had died stillborn. In the end, Ruthenian-Ukrainians and Poles remained two solitudes, and both stood their ground resolutely. One has to wonder how it would ever have been possible to divide that ground: a delicate provincial patchwork within the larger imperial one of Austria-Hungary? Its most precious component, the city of Lviv, stood in testimony of how people of different ethnic and national communities could be physically close yet psychologically and symbolically remain far apart.

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wh oS e c i ty wa S i t? l v i v vS l w ó w The major cities of Europe were showcases for various issues of modernity. For instance, Paris and Vienna, famed for their impressive achievements in urban planning, architecture, the arts, liberal culture, and technology (especially urban amenities and infrastructure), are regularly referred to as “capitals of modernity.” However, these cities were also facing a host of new social and political issues, among them, growing social and spatial segregation, rising economic inequality, and political radicalization of the masses. In eastern and central Europe, large multiethnic cities like Prague also suffered from another malaise in particular: a worsening of interethnic relations and, subsequently, a division of the public sphere between two or more competing national communities. As a result, urban space reproduced national divides in urban planning, architecture, street names, monuments, and even daily life. Lviv proved to be an exceptional example of how competing nationalisms reshaped urban life in eastern Europe. The city was founded in the mid-thirteenth century by local Ruthenian Orthodox rulers. In 1253, the pope crowned Lviv’s founder, Prince Danylo Romanovych, as Europe’s easternmost rex (king), an event unique in the Orthodox world. From the 1260s to 1340s, Lviv was the capital of Galicia-Volhynia, then one of the most powerful states in east-central Europe, which at one point stretched from the Carpathians to the Black Sea. In modern times, the fact that Lviv was a center of the early Ruthenian state became the Ukrainians’ main argument for claiming the city for their own prospective new state. In the twentieth century, when historical arguments in support of competing nationalisms were made by professional historians and defended by professional soldiers, the competing Ukrainian and Polish claims to the city led to much bloodshed. Ukrainian claims were finally backed by a powerful outsider, Joseph Stalin, with historical and geopolitical arguments supported by whole armies of scholars and soldiers. In the 1340s Galicia-Volhynia ceased to exist as a sovereign power, and there began a decades-long contest for the city of Lviv between the rulers of Poland, Hungary, and Lithuania. The Poles’ arguments, as much military as dynastic, prevailed, and for centuries thereafter they dominated the Ruthenians of Lviv politically, socially, and culturally. This was especially true in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, when the city was part of eastern Europe’s sole great power, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, whose territories stretched from the

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Baltic Sea in the northwest to the Dnipro River in the east and beyond. During this time, Catholic Poles began to assimilate the German burghers who had settled in the city in the thirteenth century and made it a typically German city in both status and design. As Catholic Poles gradually secured their dominance over non-Catholics, Ruthenian burghers lost their socioeconomic and cultural positions as well as their corporate rights. Nonetheless, local Ruthenians continued to reject the Uniate (later renamed Greek Catholic) Church that was established in 1596 in an effort to bring the Orthodox community under the authority of Rome. The Orthodox eparchy of Lviv finally accepted the Church Union in 1700. But Roman Catholic elites continued to view the Uniate faithful as second-class citizens, and they were still denied major political rights and cultural opportunities. At the end of the eighteenth century Lviv became part of the Austrian Empire, and the Austrians were appalled by the socioeconomic and cultural chasms between the city’s Poles and Ruthenians. Remarkably, Emperor Joseph II visited Lviv three times. During his last visit, in 1783, when the city’s external makeover had already begun, an unfortunate yet rather typical mishap occurred: the emperor’s three-horse carriage got stuck in the mire on Market Square in the city center. That incident undoubtedly heightened the emperor’s resolve to improve the city in material as well as spiritual ways. As enlightened rulers, the Habsburgs sought to alleviate not only Lviv’s medieval physical woes but also the general situation of local Ruthenians, in particular by making the Greek Catholic rite equal in status to the Roman Catholic one and by promoting educational and cultural facilities for the Ruthenians and their clergy. However, despite significant progress made by the Greek Catholics, Roman Catholic Poles managed to retain their socioeconomic and cultural if not political dominance. Over time, they even succeeded in attracting the German-speaking Austrian bureaucrats and military officers stationed in the region to Polish nobiliary culture. The Austrian government endeavored to remove urban Polish patricians from power. After 1805, key members of the Lviv city council, including the mayor (burgomaster), were appointed by the Austrian government. Until 1848, all burgomasters were Austro-Germans. German was made the sole language of city administration and the prime language of instruction at Lviv University, founded in 1784 as the easternmost German-language university. German even appeared on cemetery gravestones and monuments. In order to secure Lviv’s new imperial identity, the government maintained a sizable military garrison

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in the city (4,400 soldiers in 1827; 11,800 in 1848). Imperial bureaucrats, too, became a visible presence, as their numbers in the city grew from 580 in 1787, to 790 in 1800, to 1,430 in 1830; most of these people were Germans or germanized Czechs, Hungarians, and Slovaks.53 In many ways Lviv took on the appearance and characteristics of other Austro-German towns. During those decades Polish public life in the city adjusted by retreating to aristocratic salons and balls, the Polish Casino, and similar venues of urban and urbane society. Perhaps the most pressing issue for the Austrian authorities was the rebuilding of Lviv in the wake of the city’s precipitous decay during the eighteenth century. Capital investment for that effort came from Vienna, as it did for all of the empire’s grand plans and infrastructure projects. Because Galicia was not a rich province, Lviv’s commercial and industrial development progressed slowly. Around 1850, the city’s industrial output revolved around the production of matches, textiles, and alcohol. In total, Lviv had 34 manufactories employing a total of some 1,000 workers; the largest of these employed 180 people. Of a total workforce of 17,500 in 1857, only 5,400, or one-third, were employed in manufacturing; all others were civil servants, domestics, professionals, or day laborers.54 In 1870, the city’s three dozen manufactories employed 1,300 people; the largest industrial employer, Lviv Railroad Shops, employed 350 workers and technicians. Thirty years later, at the turn of the century, manufacturing in the city still focused largely on light industry, such as shoemaking, tailoring, and food processing: fifteen thousand people were engaged in some kind of industrial production and manufacturing, about five thousand of them in shoemaking and tailoring and another two thousand in food processing. The Railroad Shops enterprise, with 836 employees, was still the largest industrial employer.55 Unlike Vienna or Prague, Lviv was never the site of any substantial metalworking or machine building. The imperial government simply did not support industrial development in Galicia or its eastern provinces in general. It sought to maintain these regions as suppliers of raw materials and purchasers of finished goods from the central provinces, thus avoiding competition with the empire’s industrial regions around Vienna and in Bohemia. Instead, Lviv developed as a transit hub for trade between Vienna and Odesa. The city did benefit considerably from Eurasian commercial traffic, which ranged from the transport of grain and sugar to the smuggling of goods of various kinds to trafficking in humans. Although not an industrial center, Lviv aspired to become a handsome and comfortable city that would rival Austria’s other large cities, a

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goal in which the Habsburg bureaucracy would act as the major agents of modernity. Between 1772 and 1790, the city’s defensive walls and battlements were in large part razed; constructed in their place (often from components of the old structures) were new streets, boulevards, and parks designed by Austrian architects and engineers. Enhancing the city’s attractiveness was the removal of the ugly trade stalls that had proliferated in its Market Square. In 1837, Lviv acquired a new city hall that, in the view of many contemporaries, resembled a military barracks, mimicking a style typical of public edifices in the age of Biedermeier and Metternich. In line with the Habsburg government’s utilitarian approach to religion, most local churches and monasteries – twenty Roman Catholic and eleven Greek Catholic – were turned into theaters, schools, hospitals, or other public places. As the city’s population grew, so did the number, size, and height of its dwellings: by the 1830s, there were more than 2,600 houses in the city, some of which had four stories and were built in classical style. Residential density increased dramatically: from an average of 25 residents per dwelling in 1840 to 34 residents per dwelling in 1869.56 Lviv’s population grew accordingly, from 22,545 in 1773 to 63,904 in 1827, from 82,184 in 1848 to 93,450 in 1869.57 By 1910, the population numbered 207,000, making Lviv the fifth largest city in Austria-Hungary, after Vienna, Budapest, Prague, and Trieste. After Lviv became the capital of an autonomous Galicia in 1868, the city changed even more dramatically. In the 1880s and 1890s, its built-up area grew by 73 per cent. Building densities increased as well, reaching 80 to 90 per cent in some neighborhoods.58 As in most other large central European cities, the dominant form of dwelling was now the multistory rental apartment building; however, the presence of many high-ranking officials and wealthy professionals in the city led to the construction of villas and palaces as well. The autonomous city administration sought to bolster its authority by standardizing municipal planning, which in turn transformed the city center into a playground for the elites, with regular streets and the smooth flow of traffic in a “circulatory” urban system. Concurrently, the incorporation of more greenery, new sanitary measures, and better hospitals improved the city’s “respiratory” system, allowing at least the city’s better-off residents to breathe and live more healthily. By the end of the nineteenth century, Lviv had become one of the most “modern” cities to have emerged from east-central Europe’s laboratory of modernity. As a provincial capital, the city gained access

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to large investments, and with the introduction of self-government in 1870, it was able to channel those investments into the development of urban infrastructure and architecture. Consequently, by the end of the century Lviv had not only a comprehensive network of radial and circular streets but also the following amenities: in public transport, first a horse-drawn (1879) and then an electric streetcar (1894), the fourth city in Austria-Hungary to adopt that innovation; telegraph (1875) and telephone (1883) service; a municipal water supply (1890–1901); a central electric station (1900); a modern slaughterhouse (1901–04); and a comprehensive sewage system (1914). On city streets, the pace of urban life accelerated with the appearance of bicycles (from 1879) and automobiles (from 1890). The construction of representative public edifices was further evidence of municipal achievements. Lviv had become a splendid city, adorned with hospitals, schools, government structures, theaters, palaces, and churches constructed in architectural styles ranging from historical eclecticism (Gothic Revival and Renaissance Revival) to modernism (Austrian Secession, French Art Nouveau, and “Vernacular Revival”).59 Lviv’s residents proudly called their city “Vienna of the East,” even if there were few other cities in the “east” vying for that title. At the same time, Lviv was plagued more than Vienna itself by a host of deadly diseases tied to urban poverty, from smallpox and diphtheria to typhoid fever and tuberculosis. In the late nineteenth century, one in four residents of Lviv died from tuberculosis, the disease’s highest municipal mortality rate in any of the empire’s large cities.60 The situation was exacerbated by a continuous influx of newcomers, who often settled in the city’s overcrowded working-class suburbs. The city’s reputation as a death trap, particularly for poor residents, did not lessen until the early twentieth century, after the city made use of a large loan from Vienna given in 1895 to combat the public health crisis. The money was well spent, as vital statistics demonstrate: in 1873 the city recorded 46.9 deaths per 1,000 residents; by 1913, that rate was cut by more than half, to 21.7 deaths per 1,000 residents.61 Despite the inequitable development of Austria’s different provinces, Galicia’s Lviv bears comparison with Bohemia’s Prague, a slightly larger city. Both cities were provincial capitals in which Baroque-style structures were interspersed with buildings in more modern architectural styles; both had a significant and historical German presence; both were multiethnic cities whose urban populations differed markedly from those of the surrounding countryside. Prague had long been

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dominated by a German-speaking elite and surrounded by a solidly Czech-speaking rural and small-town population. Lviv was dominated by Roman Catholics – first Germans, then Poles – and surrounded by a Ruthenian-speaking population, first Orthodox and then Greek Catholic. During the sixteenth century Lviv was home to five major ethnic groups – Poles, Ruthenians, Germans, Jews, and Armenians – each of which comprised 5 or more per cent of the city’s population, an unusual situation even in multiethnic eastern and southern Europe. Historically, the city today named Lviv was Leopolis (“city of the lion”) in official Latin documents, Lwów to Poles, Lemberg to Germans, and Lemberik to Jews. By 1840, Ruthenians were neither the largest nor second-largest community living in the city. Polish Roman Catholics comprised 48.8 per cent of its population, Jews 40.5 per cent, and Ruthenian Greek Catholics just 7.1 per cent of city residents; the remaining 3.6 per cent were either German Protestants, Armenians, or Greek or Serbian Orthodox.62 Between the 1850s and 1890s, however, the situation changed considerably: Roman Catholics in Lviv increased by 140 per cent, and Greek Catholics increased threefold, or 420 per cent, owing to the influx of rural migrants settling in the city’s outer suburbs. As a result, out of a total of 206,113 city residents in 1910, Roman Catholics were 105,469 (51.7 per cent), Jews 57,387 (27.84 per cent), and Greek Catholics 39,314 (19.07 per cent).63 Nearly half of the city’s Greek Catholics declared Polish rather than Ruthenian as their spoken language; however, what nationality they claimed is not clear. Also, it is noteworthy that while Roman Catholics were 51.7 per cent of Lviv’s inhabitants, they constituted only 23 per cent of the population of eastern Galicia. The countryside continued to be predominantly Ruthenian, and that would soon cause great concern to the city’s ruling Polish elites. In claiming Lviv as their own, Ruthenians made the historical argument that the city had been founded by Ruthenian princes, whereas Poles used the more tangible one of their numeric, socioeconomic, cultural, and (after 1867) political preponderance in the city. The Poles faced a reverse situation in the cities of Breslau (Wrocław) and Danzig (Gdańsk), where ethnic Poles comprised only about 2 per cent and 2.8 per cent of residents, respectively, in 1900. The fact that today Wrocław and Gdańsk are in Poland, whereas Lviv is not, is one of the great ironies of the twentieth century. Lviv’s modern history has been as much a story of Polish-Ruthenian (Ukrainian) competition as of beautiful architecture, urban infrastructure, and intellectual endeavors. As in Prague, Lviv’s public sphere was

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split along ethnic lines until 1945. Ruthenians had begun to withdraw from the city’s hitherto common public sphere in 1848, while constructing their own public spaces and civil society. True, not every resident of Lviv had to choose living in a city that was either Polish or Ruthenian. Lviv was still the home or birthplace of famous Austro-Germans, including Mozart’s youngest son, Franz Xaver Mozart (1791–1844), who spent twenty-seven years in the city and its environs, and the writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836–1895), at one time referred to as the “Little Russian Turgenev.” The latter, whose surname lent meaning to the term “masochism,” attracted generations of local and international admirers who sensed that the author of Venus in Furs had grasped something peculiar about relations between men and women; interestingly enough, Sacher-Masoch was also unrivaled in his knowledge of Galicia and particularly sympathetic to the Ruthenians. Poles not only retained their urban footprint in Lviv but also amplified it, as Polish aristocrats largely controlled power and space there, particularly after 1867. After 1871, when Polish replaced German as the administrative language, Polish dominance began to be reflected in matters ranging from the city’s architecture and monuments to language use and street names. As a result Lviv indeed became a Polish bastion, attracting increasing numbers of Jews, Germans, and Ruthenians. One witness to the process, Bolesław Limanowski (1835–1935), a noted Polish historian and socialist politician, arrived in Lviv in 1870 and provided this description of its gradual transformation from a German to a Polish city: Lwów gave the impression of being a thoroughly Germanized town. Back then you could see roasted chestnuts in the streets and Jews would call: “Heisse Maronen! Heisse Maronen.” Small shops were called “Greisslerei.” There were many German signs. In the restaurants you could hear more German than Polish… In the theatre there were more performances in German than in Polish. In the Jesuit church the sermon on Sunday was in German. In public administration and schools German had not yet been completely substituted by Polish. Speeches in the Town’s Hall, which were directed at a wider audience, were mostly held in German. Meals, beverages, entertainment, and fashion were modelled on Vienna. Slowly, however, Polishness displaced the German element, and in 1878, the year of my departure, Lwów already had the appearance of a Polish town.64

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A remarkably similar impression was recorded by Ievhen Olesnyts'kyi, a Ruthenian activist and, later, leading Ukrainophile. The son of a rural Greek Catholic priest, Olesnyts'kyi arrived in Lviv to study law in 1879: Lviv (L’viv) presented itself to me as a purely Polish town. All the authorities were Polish, schools and the university were Polish, the theater was Polish, the inscriptions everywhere were in Polish, commerce was in the hands of Poles and Jews, who in national terms also behaved as Poles. The Polish language was everywhere—in stores, restaurants, coffee shops. Even the Ruthenians were speaking Polish. It was a sign of great courage to speak to a waiter or merchant in Ukrainian, and everyone would regard such an act as something extraordinary. The small Ukrainian population in the city hid somewhere in the corners and was not visible in the open.65 He added that Ukrainians could be found mostly among the “lowliest working classes, among domestic servants, and shop guards,” and that it was they who filled the city’s Greek Catholic churches on Sundays.66 After 1867 the Polish administration of the city began to put great emphasis on the nationalization of Lviv’s public sphere. It set about to rename streets and erect monuments to Polish heroes; consequently, a number of streets acquired the names of Polish statesmen and cultural icons. In Prague the renaming of streets evoked fierce resistance from the Germans, but in Lviv the process went virtually unchallenged, other than some initial friction between the “party of Schiller” and the “party of Mickiewicz,” as proponents of German culture and Polish culture in the city’s public sphere were respectively known.67 Between 1869 and 1871, Lviv’s city council passed two sets of resolutions that changed street names. Some of the new names commemorated important Polish historical dates, such as May 3d, marking the adoption of the Constitution of 1791, and November 29, marking the start of the November Uprising of 1830. Other streets were named after Polish statesmen – for instance, King John (Jan) III Sobieski and the revolutionary hero Tadeusz Kościuszko. Still others were named after Polish cultural figures: the romantic poets Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz Słowacki, the dramatist Alexander Fredro, the historians Karol Szajnocha and Joachim Lelewel, the novelist Józef Ignacy Kraszewski, and the historical painter Jan Matejko.68 The Polish national pantheon had now acquired two equally prominent places of repose in Lviv – at the cemetery and in the city’s street signs; regarding the latter, even

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bilingual, wholly apolitical German-Polish signs had been changed to Polish ones. As both physical and aesthetic objects, public monuments are more effective than residential buildings and street signs in the construction of an explicit national narrative. In the late nineteenth century, statuomania in Paris and Nationaldenkmäler across Germany – that is, the erection of a series of monuments commemorating French and German political figures, respectively, in those two countries – established a precedent to be followed by other European communities seeking to visualize their own national and/or imperial “master narratives.” In his classic book about Paris, Patrice Higonnet refers to public monuments as “texts” and adds that “various monuments form a coherent whole, a monumental grammar.”69 During the 1880s, Poles in Austrian-ruled Galicia purposefully began to create national “places of memory” so as to underscore the Polish character of their cities. Until the 1870s, the Austrians sought to prevent the “nationalization” of public space in Lviv by prohibiting Polish street celebrations, ceremonials, demonstrations, and even fireworks on particular anniversaries. Interestingly enough, no monument to an Austrian emperor was ever erected in Lviv; the only slight exception was a plaque placed in the city’s Old Synagogue in 1898 to commemorate the visit of Emperor Franz Josef in 1880. True, three triumphal arches were erected to commemorate imperial visits to the city – one to Emperor Franz I’s visit in 1817 and the others for Franz Joseph’s visits in 1851 and 1880 – but they were temporary theatrical gates, not monumental stone colossi like the Arc de Triomphe in Paris or the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. In anticipation of Franz Joseph’s visit in 1880, local Ruthenians formed their own greeting committee, which encouraged Ruthenian peasants who would be coming to the city to witness the grand event to wear folk costumes, so as to counter the Poles’ representing Galicia as a Polish land. The Poles set out on an ambitious monument-installation agenda of their own. In selecting candidates on which to project monumental glory, they cautiously chose from history and avoided any controversial figures that might antagonize their Habsburg overlords. The city’s oldest existing secular monument, erected in the 1750s, commemorated Hetman Stanislaw Jabłonowski, who defended Lviv against the Tatars in 1695; it was relocated from its original site to a more prominent location in 1859. To be considered suitable for a monumental glory, any figure now had to have impeccable imperial credentials, of course. For instance, one proposed candidate was Jan Kiliński, a humble shoemaker who became

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a commander in the Kościuszko Uprising against Russia of 1794. In 1888 the provincial authorities opposed the revolutionary fighter’s candidacy, stating: “it is incomprehensible that also in Austrian Galicia … personalities who conspired [against Austria] in Poland and fought against Russia … would be honoured in a declarative way with public monuments.”70 Nonetheless, a monument to Kiliński was erected, but it was finally unveiled to the public only in 1895, after the sculptor had minimized its representations of Polish national imagery. Two other monuments were much less controversial: in 1898 one was erected to King Jan III Sobieski, who saved Vienna from the Turks, and in 1901 one was erected to Agenor Gołuchowski, a long-term governor of Galicia. The unveiling of Sobieski’s monument became a Polish national festival that attracted an unprecedented 25,000 people, including patriotic students, ceremoniously dressed nobles, and curious burghers. Erected as well were monuments to Polish cultural icons, including the playwright Alexander Fredro (1897) and Galicia’s most famous poet, Kornel Ujejski (1901), both of whom were born in eastern Galicia. An elegant and graceful monument to the great Polish romantic “prophet” Adam Mickiewicz was erected in 1904; it stands to this day, the most iconic sign of the Polish presence in the city. The unveiling of Mickiewicz’s monument, too, became a mass celebration and gathering of the Polish public – and the first ever filmed. The fact that the cinematic age came to the Poles in connection with honoring Mickiewicz indicates the degree to which modern Polish culture is indebted to Romantic nationalism. Between 1890 and 1910, a dozen monuments of this type were erected, establishing Lviv’s reputation as a “garden” of Polish monuments. In this way, the Polish elites were confidently proclaiming to the world that Lviv was indeed their city. The strangest of these monuments was the “Mound of the Union of Lublin” (Kopiec Unii Lubelskiej), an artificial and, as it turned out, unstable “pile of earth” meant to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the treaty creating the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1569. Despite archeologists’ warnings that its construction would further damage the ruins of a medieval Ruthenian castle on its site, the heaping of more and more soil to steady the mound continued from 1869 to 1890, and the city did not finally give up on it until 1907.71 The whole idea recalls the British film “The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill but Came Down a Mountain,” set in 1917, about a group of Welsh villagers who manually transformed a hill into a mountain in an effort to restore their community’s damaged pride. In the case of the Mound

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of the Union of Lublin, the Polish nation as a whole aspired to restore its pride, so gravely undermined by the partitions of Poland. As for the Ruthenians, their pride was grievously damaged by the existence of the mound itself. Hence many Ruthenians declared – with Schadenfreude, of course – that the mound would inevitably be “blown away by the winds,” like the Polish idea of a “friendly union of nations” it was meant to commemorate.72 Certain monuments and public buildings evoked particular mass enthusiasm and admiration, and among these were municipal theaters. Poles were inspired by the Czech National Theater in Prague (1883), whose creation was supported by an unprecedented fundraising effort that reached across Czech society. However, unlike the Czechs, in their effort to duplicate that achievement the Poles failed to mobilize various segments of society. Hence, as Philip Ther has noted in his study of opera houses in east-central Europe, the Lviv Municipal Theater (1897–1900), today Lviv’s Opera Theater, was sponsored and built almost exclusively by Polish aristocrats, in contrast to Prague’s National Theater, which stood as a “civic institution.” Nonetheless, Polish Lviv was proud of its main theater, ornamented with handsome art depicting classical antiquity and featuring a Polish theatrical repertoire. The new building stood as a proud and beautiful addition to the city’s most important symbols of Polish power-knowledge, alongside the buildings of the Polytechnical Institute (1874–77) and Galician Diet (1877–81). The latter was heavily embellished with sculpture and paintings depicting heroic events in Polish history, including a statue of Poland’s first ruler, Prince Mieszko, and Jan Matejko’s famed painting “The Union of Lublin.”73 Ruthenians, too, attempted to imitate the Czechs (and outdo the Poles!) by building a national theater of their own, but they failed to launch a successful fundraising campaign. The project was even opposed by some influential Ukrainian intellectuals, on the grounds that it would serve the interests of only a small group of people rather than the nation as a whole. What could Ruthenians/Ukrainians do to counteract the well-funded Polish efforts to nationalize Lviv’s public space? They struggled to create, often with scant resources and from scratch, their own society on the margins of the dominant Polish one, that is, one with its own private schools, cooperatives, and scholarly institutions, including the Shevchenko Scientific Society. The most important visual signs of the Ruthenian/Ukrainian presence in the city were, above all, places of worship – the renaissance-style Dormition or “Wallachian” Church,

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the baroque St George Cathedral, and the neoclassical Church of the Transfiguration. There were also several impressive secular buildings that represented culture, economy, and politics. These included the National Home, or Narodnyi dim, built in 1864; the palatial, four-storey building that from 1898 housed the Shevchenko Scientific Society; and the building of the Dniester Society (1895), a mutual loan society that provided funds to a host of Ukrainian national associations. Lviv lacked even a single Ruthenian-Ukrainian monument, however, and there were only a few city streets with a Ruthenian or Ukrainian name (and not one that was named for a modern political figure!). The only significant street name was medieval Rus' ka (“Ruthenian”) Street, forming part of Market Square. Three other streets with a Ruthenian connection were hidden away, for good reason. One street, a narrow eyesore below Castle Hill named after Lev, the princely son of the city’s founder, was notorious as a hub of prostitution; the second, named after the Ukrainian bard Taras Shevchenko, was in a locale that had earned it the nickname “Swamp Street”; and the third, named Shashkevych Lane after one member of the Ruthenian Triad poetic group, was an abrupt dead-end.74 The Ruthenians’ weakness in Lviv was exemplified by the virtual absence of Ruthenian-Ukrainian elected officials in the city during the 1860s and ’70s.75 As the Austrian historian Harald Binder has observed: “despite the growing number of Ruthenians in the capital (by 1890 the Greek Catholics accounted for about 17 per cent of the population), the Polish-Ruthenian conflict had little impact on communal politics. As the newcomers were mostly peasants from the surrounding rural areas, this gain in numbers was not translated into political power in the city.”76 The city’s Polish masters made sure that Ruthenians remained disenfranchised through gerrymandering techniques. Only in 1892 did an independent Ruthenian list participate in Lviv’s municipal elections for the first time, and it received only 100 of 4,622 votes. However, Ruthenians found other ways to remind their Polish fellow residents of their growing presence in the city by, for instance, participating in public events like ones organized in the early twentieth century by the Sokil (Falcon) Society, combining athletics with Ukrainian nationalism. Most important, the city’s Ruthenians took pride in the fact that Lviv was the capital of historical Galicia (Halychyna) and later the Rus' palatinate, and not only of the Austrian crownland of Galizien, a relatively recent product of Habsburg geopolitics. Still, it was the Poles who had more tangible and practical claims to Lviv during the Habsburg period. The entire public sphere and its

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institutions, as well as Lviv’s urbanism in general, favored Poles. “As a result of [Lviv’s] political system (shaped by the influence of the autonomous political institutions, a well-developed press, manifestations and demonstrations of a social and national character) as well as its academic institutions (Lviv University, the Ossolineum, museums, libraries, and secondary schools),” Adam Świątek has explained. “The capital of Galicia was naturally a place which inspired one to develop one’s own well-defined identity. An individual who participated in salons, associations, and organizations and who held public posts was not able to remain a person of undefined identity, at least not for long.”77 That identity was Polish almost by default, while Ruthenians/Ukrainians felt increasingly excluded from the city’s public sphere. Symbolically, Lviv was dwarfed by Lwów. Politically, too, the city was largely in Polish hands, and it would remain so until the outbreak of World War II. Even the city’s Jewish residents felt increasing pressure to assimilate within Polish culture, or at least to profess loyalty to the Polish ruling class.78 It is all the more surprising, then, that over the last three decades the Lviv of Habsburg times has become an object of intense nostalgia and an almost Buñuelesque object of desire in both post-Soviet Galicia and, more understandably, in Poland. Ukrainian nostalgia has perhaps been fanned by the fact that during the 1940s, Lviv lost 80 per cent of its pre-war population – including nearly all its Poles and Jews – and was subsequently repopulated by Ukrainian-Galician peasants and Soviet “specialists” of various ethnicities (mostly eastern Ukrainians, Russians, and Jews). In that sense, Lviv constitutes a good example of how multiethnic empires are remembered today. On mental maps the location of the city has shifted from being in “Austrian Siberia” – as perceived by Austrians in the late eighteenth century – to today being universally seen as Ukraine’s Europe, once lost and now, hopefully, found again. Lviv has also been placed in the midst of contested counter-memories and imagined geographies, in which innumerable personal stories intermingle with national and imperial histories. It is also possible that in contemporary Lviv nostalgia for the good old days under the Habsburg Empire serves to dim or replace memory of the Holocaust and the traumas of the Soviet era. In that case, Lviv’s Habsburg past is a way of forgetting the horrors of the Nazi and Soviet regimes, in which the families of many of the city’s residents were implicated in some way. At the same time, Habsburg nostalgia for an idealized, multicultural Lviv is starkly contrasted

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against the blight and insecurity of the transitional period of the late 1980s and ’90s, when kitschy Habsburg artifacts projected a utopia of material, cultural, and even gastronomic abundance. The nostalgia for Habsburg Lviv, the essentially Polish and Jewish city that is no more, generally includes a variety of names and things, ranging from Vienna-style coffeehouses and Galician cuisine (in which Apfelstrudeln accompany local delicacies), to numerous images of Franz Josef, to the café-museum of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, designed in appropriately masochistic style. As Martin Pollack has emphasized, the nostalgia for Habsburg times in Lviv is also part of a myth of eastcentral Europe and its mix of cultures, identities, and stories. In this sense, Lviv and Galicia can be viewed as east-central Europe in “miniature.” Precisely because today’s Lviv is not quite “European” in terms of its overall standard of living, Habsburg nostalgia allows people – the city’s own residents, above all, but visitors as well – to reimagine and relive life in the city of the past, when it was truly “European.” That nostalgia disregards, of course, the tensions that were inherent in the Habsburg past. Nonetheless, it allows the people of Lviv and other regions of Ukraine to regard themselves as more European and yet at the same time more “authentic.” Nostalgic Lviv is thus, simultaneously, a real contemporary place where one can be at the moment and a place to which one can aspire as an idea, symbol, or myth. Even the grandest myths have their limits. The Ukrainian aspiration to “old” Lviv predictably excludes interwar “Polish” Lviv, birthplace of the science-fiction writer Stanisław Lem of Solaris fame and the PolishFrench filmmaker Andrzej Żuławski, home of the phenomenologist Roman Ingarden and the logician Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz. For those who live in Lviv today, and those across Ukraine and abroad who love the city, the challenge is to go beyond one-dimensional nostalgia to recognize and deal with the various layers of the city’s complex and conflicting past(s). Today there are encouraging indications that more and more of Lviv’s residents are honoring all of their predecessors – people who belonged to different communities, who lived in and made the city what it was in the past and what it is today – by acknowledging and appreciating them as fellow human beings having identities, stories, and, yes, nostalgias of their own.

7 New Society, Old Empire

nati o n o f Pea Sa n tS : So ci al mo b i li ty and i m m o b i l i t y “They say that all Little Russians in foreign lands suffer some degree of homesickness, and some even die from it,” wrote Alexander Nikitenko, a Russian literary scholar and censor who was born a serf in Sloboda Ukraine.1 For young Nikitenko, the “foreign land” was the predominantly Russian town of Voronezh, just a few hours away from his native Ukrainian village. Nikitenko was, of course, exaggerating. Millions of Ukrainians left their native villages in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for places much more remote than Voronezh, and while some did indeed die as a result, primarily of communicable diseases, most of them eventually prospered in those “foreign lands.” So what was characteristic about geographic and social mobility in late imperial Ukraine? Recently, Serhii Plokhy has aptly referred to the entire period between the 1870s and the early twentieth century as an era of being “On the Move.” But who, exactly, moved, and who stayed? And what moved the people and the country that were “on the move”? According to the1897 census conducted in the Russian Empire, 93% of Russia’s ethnic Ukrainians (people declaring Ukrainian to be their native language) were peasants; they, in turn, were 84% of Ukraine’s total population (then 23,833,000). The great majority of these people were illiterate (91–96% of people living in the countryside). The 1861 reform freed peasants, but it did not feed them: the tiny land allotments received by the former serfs were barely enough for subsistence farming. For instance, the average annual income of a peasant family in RightBank Ukraine in the early 1900s was 30 rubles, 83 kopeks, insufficient to

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provide the necessities of life. Average annual costs were the following: food – 19 rubles, 46 kopeks; shelter – 3 rubles, 83 kopeks; clothing – 5 rubles, 50 kopeks; taxes, upkeep of livestock and poultry, and the like – 20 rubles. The total was 48 rubles, 84 kopeks, leaving the average peasant family 18 rubles in debt.2 Regarding food, a kilo of pork cost 32 kopeks, beef 34 kopeks, salted fish 45 kopeks, lard 60 kopeks, sausage 62 kopeks, butter 1 ruble, 27 kopeks, etc., making these standard products expensive in themselves. Clothing and manufactured goods were prohibitively expensive: boots cost 4 to 10 rubles; canvas pants and a shirt – 1 ruble; a tailored suit – 16 rubles, 75 kopeks; ten kilos of coal, 15 kopeks; a liter of gas – 25 kopeks; ten candles – 2 kopeks; and so on.3 To make matters worse, Ukraine’s rural population grew at twice the pace of peasant landholdings, adding to the shortage of land and forcing thousands of people to seek extra earnings through fishing, transporting goods, weaving, or, more rarely, doing seasonal factory work (few rural workers qualified). In the late nineteenth century, the imperial government itself acknowledged that more than eight million peasants in Ukraine needed extra income to survive. Many poor and most landless peasants hired themselves out as agricultural laborers to noble landowners and wealthier fellow peasants (in 1897 the official figure was 425,000), thus creating new social tension in the countryside. The result was increasing polarization between poor peasants and newly well-off neighbors who in the late nineteenth century managed to accumulate most of the lands (90 per cent!) acquired by peasant communities. In 1905, according to some estimates, there were three million peasant households in Ukraine, of whom 44 per cent held fewer than 5 desiatynas (5.3 hectares) of land and thus could be classified as poor. About 40 per cent of the households had 5 to 10 desiatynas, thus in effect constituting a rural middle class. Households with over 10 desiatynas stood at 16.5 per cent and in effect constituted the well-off peasantry: in this category landholding averaged 32 desiatynas.4A few years later, the average peasant landholding was 7 desiatynas (7.7 hectares), whereas the average noble landholding was 360 desiatynas; as a group, nobles owned 30 per cent of the land. Another source indicates that by 1900, the average peasant landholding had actually become much smaller, especially when compared to the situation in the early 1860s: The social historian Bohdan Krawchenko has pointed out a paradox: the average size of a peasant landholding in Ukraine was in fact larger than that of a French, Danish, or Belgian farmer, yet the lives of the

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Table 7.1 | Decrease in peasant landholdings (in desiatynas), 1863–1900 Province

1863

1900

% decrease

Kharkiv

4.5

1.9

57.6

Poltava

2.5

1.5

40

Chernihiv

3.4

2

41.2

Kyiv

2.9

1.2

58.5

Volhynia

4.2

1.7

51.5

Podolia

2.6

1.2

53.8

Kherson

6.1

2.2

63.9

Katerynoslav

6.0

2.3

61.6

Source: Konstantyn Kononenko, Ukraine and Russia: A History of the Economic Relations Between Ukraine and Russia (1654–1917) (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1958), 49.

latter were more comfortable and prosperous, owing to more developed agricultural techniques and greater social integration.5 The dire state of the rural economy in Ukraine is reflected by the fact that whereas between 1870 and 1900 the number of peasants increased from 12.2 million to 20.7 million, agricultural productivity remained unchanged.6 There were more rural dwellers per 100 desiatynas of arable land in Ukraine than anywhere in Europe: 178 in Kyiv province and 157 in Chernihiv province, compared to 79 in England, 84 in France, and 107 in Germany.7 In addition, from the late 1870s the price of cereals from the Russian Empire on foreign markets began to fall,8 further contributing to the poverty of Ukrainian peasants. Nonetheless, until 1917 the grain produced in Ukraine remained imperial Russia’s single largest source of foreign currency. Despite the persistence of traditional agriculture, on the eve of the twentieth century the Ukrainian countryside was undergoing dramatic changes: it became less idyllic and more dynamic, with social tensions, new forms of rural economy (sugar refineries, latifundia), and political propaganda affecting even the most remote communities. In reaction to the worsening conditions of peasant life and, even more, to rising discontent in the countryside (especially during the Revolution of 1905),

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the imperial government found the main culprit to be the peasant commune, which in many ways it had itself created. By destroying it, the government sought to strengthen private land ownership as a way of appeasing the peasants. Another goal, more understated, was to make it easier for peasants to join the ranks of industrial workers by severing their economic, social, and judicial ties to the rural commune. Beginning in 1906, a series of measures known as the Stolypin land reform – after Petr Stolypin, the nationalist politician who was Russia’s prime minister at the time – were implemented that allowed for the development of profitable individual farming. That agenda was in line with a more active role for the state in the market economy, as first tried under Sergei Witte, Russia’s reformist finance minister (1892–1903) and prime minister (1903–05). Some Ukrainians have believed that Ukraine was not affected by these reforms, since the traditional commune was thought to have been largely absent there. In fact, on the eve of the Stolypin reforms communal lands in Ukraine comprised 51.4% of all peasant landholdings; these were particularly prevalent in the south, and in Katerynoslav province they accounted for 99.5% of all peasant lands. Only the three Right-Bank provinces were largely commune-free: there less than 4% of peasant-owned lands were communal lands.9 Now, however, peasants across Ukraine could withdraw from a commune, and they were free to sell, mortgage, and bequeath their land allotments. Naturally, that policy mostly benefitted well-off peasants, who could buy up lands of their less fortunate neighbors. The losers were obviously the poor peasants, who lost their right to use the commons (such as pastures). The destruction of the commune occurred far more precipitously in regions more strongly affected by capitalist agriculture, above all in southern Ukraine and on the Right Bank. By January 1916, almost half of all households in these two regions had left their communes: 42.7% and 48.6%, respectively10 – a much higher rate than elsewhere in the Russian Empire. A peasant might have been “savage, somnolent, and glued to his pile of manure” (in Lenin’s famously condescending words),11 but after Stolypin’s reforms, which accelerated the destruction of communal landholding, the peasants became much less attached to the land (to say nothing of manure). For better or for worse, peasants became more mobile than ever before. So where did the peasants move, socially and geographically? In social terms, a poor peasant could become a well-off or rich peasant (although this had become increasingly difficult by 1900). A rich

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Ukraine, 1876–1914

peasant could then become a merchant and move to the city. Indeed, during the last decades of the nineteenth century, a sort of Ukrainian “national” bourgeoisie developed among members of various social groups, among them nobles, Cossacks, peasants, and burghers. A few of the wealthiest families traced their origins back to peasant ancestors: among them were the Iakhnenko, Symyrenko, and Kharytonenko families, who also gained renown as generous supporters of various social and national causes. However, such options were obviously limited to a small minority of peasants. For one thing, it was predominantly ethnic Russian peasants, often Old Believers, rather than Ukrainians who filled merchant guilds in Ukraine’s towns and cities. For instance, Ukrainian-speaking merchants comprised only 3% of the merchant estate in Kyiv, a figure even lower than that of Ukrainian speakers among hereditary nobles, the most elite group of Kyivites, which was 4.8%.12 Even in Poltava, the most “Ukrainian” of all provincial capitals with a Ukrainian-speaking majority of 56%, the merchant estate was heavily Jewish, 54%, and Russian or Russian-speaking, 28.7%, with Ukrainian speakers comprising only 13%.13 It was possible for local peasants to become socially mobile through education – that is, through study at secondary schools and universities – and leave the peasantry for another ascribed social estate. From the late nineteenth century, an increasing number of peasants joined the intelligentsia, especially its lowest ranks, becoming village teachers, agronomists, and medical assistants (fel'dshery). Many of these people were active in zemstvos, the institutions of rural self-government often seen as bastions of liberal opposition and positivist “organic” work. A remarkable example of a poor peasant’s son who “made it” through education was Volodymyr Vynnychenko (1880–1951), a leading Ukrainian writer and socialist politician. Even more remarkable for a person of his social standing was his marriage (in 1911) to Rozalia Lifshits, daughter of a wealthy Jewish merchant and graduate in medicine of the Sorbonne. Vynnychenko’s life story was indeed very different from that of his intellectual and political comrades, most of whom were children not of peasants but of nobles, priests, government officials, or Cossacks (although some had also married above their social or economic station). For the absolute majority of poor peasants, however, who could neither marry a Jewish heiress, nor go to secondary school, or any school, for that matter, the only way to move across social and economic boundaries was to go to the city and find work there. That was indeed mobility but hardly a promise of upward mobility. According

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to data for 1891, in that year alone more than 772,000 peasants in the Kyiv, Poltava, Kharkiv, Chernihiv, and Podolia provinces migrated to towns and cities in search of work,14 an internal migration comparable in scale to that in modern-day China. Throughout the post-reform period, every spring thousands of rural migrants flocked from north to south, to Kakhovka, Odesa, and other modern-day “slave markets,” as Soviet historians called cities and locales where itinerant peasants were selected by capitalist entrepreneurs and their agents for seasonal work in their rural and urban enterprises. After 1905 the movement of peasants toward factory gates accelerated: in Kyiv province alone 49,000 people opted for industrial work in 1906, and that figure grew to 66,000 by 1910.15 Yet these city-bound peasants would typically end up at the bottom of the urban job market, with the lowest-paying and least prestigious jobs. By and large they became domestic servants, porters, carters, quarrymen, or later miners in the emerging Donbas region, the mineral-rich Donets’ River basin in the southeastern part of Katerynoslav province. The situation in Odesa exemplified how migration worked and what Ukrainian peasants usually experienced in cities. Patricia Herlihy, in her landmark study of imperial Odesa, showed that the growth of this cosmopolitan city, which she appropriately called a “modern Babel,” was due primarily to continuous immigration. Odesa was “fed by immigrants”: in 1892, only 45% of its population had been born in the city, and by 1897 that figure fell to 43.6%.16 In terms of ethnic composition, Odesa was the least “Ukrainian” of the cities in Ukraine: in 1987, just 9.4% of its residents were Ukrainian speakers. Only a small fraction of its 21,649 Ukrainian-speaking men were rentiers: just 224 were supported by interest on savings or stocks, and another 100 by income from land rents. More Ukrainian men served in the imperial military (primarily as soldiers) than in any other occupation in the city. In Odesa, as in other larger cities, Ukrainian speakers were by and large poor, male, unmarried, and worked in the least skilled occupations. Some of the city’s Ukrainian males joined the ranks of industrial workers, usually at the jobs requiring the lowest of qualifications: about 14% worked in quarries and mines (often remaining underground for weeks at a time), 12% worked in small-scale manufacturing, and about 8% worked in transport – that is, on river barges and as chumaks, carters on ox-drawn wagons carrying grain from the countryside to the port. Some probably swelled the ranks of drifters and the unemployed that gave Odesa its amply earned reputation as the Russian Empire’s capital of crime, often

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without punishment. The precarious socioeconomic status of Odesa’s Ukrainian speakers was also reflected by the great preponderance of men over women, 159 to 100 (among Russian speakers the discrepancy was considerably lower – 120 men to every 100 women).17 Given that Ukrainian peasants were not really welcome in large cosmopolitan cities, where did the rural migrants go? Most poor and landless peasants still lived in their rural communities year round and left them in search of work only seasonally, or, at most, for a year or two. Often their destinations were hundreds or even thousands of kilometers away from home – in Bessarabia, the Crimea, the Kuban' or the southern Kherson province, regions where the mammoth estates of agrarian capitalists craved additional labor. While social mobility was limited by economic conditions and Russia’s rigid social system, after the Stolypin reforms of the early 1900s geographic mobility became virtually limitless, stretching across the enormous expanse of the Russian Empire (and in a few cases even beyond it). Peasants were hitting the road in large numbers already in the 1860s. In 1868, a Poltava governor reported that peasants were showing a strong inclination to relocate in the Kuban' region, especially Stavropol province. Overall, more than 367,090 peasants left Ukraine between 1885 and 1900, legally or illegally and usually for good: only a minority returned, often destitute and impoverished. Among those who did not return was the maternal grandfather of Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union’s first and last president. Gorbachev’s grandfather, a Ukrainian peasant from Chernihiv province, relocated to the foothills of the Caucasus, the historical lands of the Muslim Circassians, driven away from their homeland by Russian troops in the 1860s. Peasants had long benefitted from imperial expansion. Troops did their “civilizing” work by first cleansing a territory of undesirable demographics, who were usually nomadic and Muslim. Afterward came peasants, with their cattle and plows, who eventually rooted out the traditional ways of life of the native communities. Southern parts of present-day Ukraine experienced this double pronged – military and agricultural – civilizing process during the late eighteenth century, earlier than the Northern Caucasus did. After the indigenous nomadic peoples had in part been subdued and in part exiled, the northern Black Sea region was open to a continuous migration of peasants – Ukrainian, Russian, German, Bulgarian, and other. Despite a reputation as one of the most ethnically mixed lands of the Russian Empire, the fertile steppes north of the Black Sea were soon flooded by Ukrainian

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settlers – peasants from the hinterland – in successive waves of immigration that lasted until the end of the nineteenth century. Between 1867 and 1897 alone, the Ukrainian population there increased almost twofold, from 1,884,000 to more than 3,531,000, transforming New Russia into a “new Ukraine,” a result of capitalist sticks and carrots – that is, economic pressures and opportunities – rather than nationalist design. It was the forest-steppe zone – the Kyiv, Poltava, and Chernihiv provinces – that supplied most migrants during the 1880s and 1890s, as millions of people left their villages there and headed south toward the Ukrainian steppes and the Kuban' region in the foothills of the Caucasus. Most traveled on foot, others by water. Remarkably, during harvest months the wages and sustenance of seasonal laborers in these southern regions were so high that even miners from the Donbas fled there in search of less grueling work: Ukrainian peasants understandably much preferred working in open fields to drudging in subterranean mines. Peasants also moved in other directions. By the end of the century, about 400,000 Ukrainians had settled in the Lower Volga region, and the military-agrarian pattern of colonization continued in Kazakhstan and Central Asia, where the number of Ukrainian peasants reached 100,000. Arguably the most daring people went even farther – beyond the Ural Mountains, to Siberia and the Far East. Although always challenging and often deadly, the journey became somewhat easier in the 1890s with the opening of the Trans-Siberian railroad (although here “easier” meant traveling in cattle wagons): between 1886 and 1890, fewer than 10,000 people left Ukraine for Siberia, but in 1891–95 that figure grew to 107,000, and in 1896–1900 it was almost 250,000. Of the several hundred thousand people who ventured to begin a new life in Siberia, only 63,000 returned in poverty to Ukraine, now obliged to become hirelings of rich peasants or seek work in the dreaded factories there. Most of those who headed to Siberia came from LeftBank Ukraine (by 1905 their numbers were 198,500 from Poltava province and 128,700 from Chernihiv province), where land was scarce but people were many.18 The total number of people who left Ukraine between 1896 and 1914 reached 1.6 million. Most of them, 1.1 million, emigrated after the Stolypin reforms of 1906, having been encouraged to do so by the imperial government. In 1907–12, people from Ukraine accounted for 46.7% of all migrants from European Russia (1,021,447 of 2,178,358).19 The majority came from Poltava province (almost 300,000), followed by those from Katerynoslav province (225,480), where a relatively small group of greedy landowners

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had amassed enormous properties (often encompassing hundreds of thousands of desiatynas) and literally squeezed poorer peasants from their allotments. Land-hungry and often simply hungry, most of these economic migrants left for good: only about 262,000 (18%) eventually returned home (although many no longer had an actual home there).20 One peasant gave this explanation for why he left his home in Poltava province for Siberia: We’re told that it’s cold in Siberia, but I say that we are colder still here; we’re told that you have to feed cattle indoors for six months, but even if you have to feed them for twelve, at least there’s something there to give them. Here you can’t even feed one cow. Rents are so high that on farming we make a loss, rather than profit. We end up paying the landlord even for the sweat that we’re pouring on to his land.21 Why, to ask again, did so many Ukrainian peasants dare to leave their homes – and even to lose their lives – to journey as far as Central Asia, Siberia, or the Far East, rather than go to the city, which was often a short walk away. Bohdan Krawchenko explained this by the inability of Ukrainian peasants to compete effectively on the urban markets with other communities, above all Russian and Jewish traders and artisans. Rural Ukrainians simply lacked the skills to produce the goods and perform the services needed by potential urban customers and industrial owners, so they instead relied on skills and services provided by more mobile minorities – Russians, Jews, Germans, Poles, and Greeks. Why were Ukrainian peasants less adaptable to modernity and thus to urban life than others were? What, for instance, distinguished them from the Russian peasants? Krawchenko points to the most plausible explanations: the prevalence in Ukraine of rich black soil – that most primordial of all the resource curses – and the traditions of the local agrarian order. The latter was dominated by corvée, the obligatory labor duty exacted from serfs by their landlords in much of Ukraine, in contrast to the monetary rents (obrok) serfs paid their masters in much of Great Russia. Bound to their land allotments, serfs and even state peasants had neither the opportunity nor the incentive to engage in a cottage industry or trade, and thus they never developed the skills needed for a modern economy based on the manufacture of consumer goods. By contrast, Russian peasants were encouraged by their landlords and prompted by the poor quality of Russia’s soil overall to engage in crafts and trade.

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That, in turn, not only provided and increased cash incomes for both peasants and landlords but also allowed urban industries to expand. The Russian peasants-turned-workers were then brought in large numbers by capitalist industrialists (often ethnic Russians or foreigners) to Ukraine, especially its most industrialized southern and eastern areas, from the machine-building factories of Kharkiv, Katerynoslav, and Mykolaïv to the mining and steel towns of the Donbas and Kryvbas regions. In addition, from the mid-eighteenth century the Russian authorities continuously undermined manufacturing in Ukraine by subjecting it to unfavorable tariffs and economic policies. They favored commodity makers from central Russia that flooded Ukraine with Russian-made goods and, in time, Russian-born merchants, artisans, and workers. This left the relatively few Ukrainian entrepreneurs that there were with agriculture as their only economic option. Meanwhile, among both owners and workers, manufacturing increasingly became dominated by non-Ukrainians, many of whom were recent newcomers. As a result, by the turn of the twentieth century 93 per cent of Ukrainian migrant labor consisted of unskilled manual workers, whereas half of Russian migrant workers were skilled or semi-skilled.22 Thus, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian peasants, bypassing nearby factory gates, walked, rode ox-drawn carts, or journeyed in the dubious comfort of cattle wagons as far as the Caucasus, Siberia, and the Far East. Although the railroads did not dramatically enhance the mobility of Ukrainian peasants, they proved vital for the aforementioned factory gates. The first railroads in Ukraine were designed to transport cereals, coal, and sugar beets, rather than humans (unless part of the industrial workforce). Railroads allowed the Welshman John Hughes to realize his idea for a pioneering metallurgical plant in Donbas and provide it with a continual stream of Russian and foreign workers. Among Ukraine’s first railroads was one connecting Kharkiv, as well as Rostov on Don, located further south, with the newly established factory village of Iuzivka (“Hughes’s place”) in 1872. Extended in 1882 to Mariupol, a key port on the Sea of Azov, the railroad provided direct access to the sea for coal mined in the Donbas. Its existence added material economic sense to the more abstract geographical and geological concept of the “Donbas,” or Donets’ basin, a concept formulated in the 1820s by Ievhraf Kovalevs'kyi, a Ukrainian-born mining engineer turned Russian imperial statesman. In 1884, another “coal–iron ore” railroad line linked the Donbas with the Kryvbas – that is, the Kryvyi Rih iron ore basin – which dramatically increased the growth of heavy

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industry in the region. As in the Donbas, business interests stood behind the construction in 1865 of the first railroad built in Russian Ukraine, which linked Odesa with a true “bread basket” of Europe – the town of Balta in the heart of the grain-producing region.23 The railroad linking Kyiv and Moscow via Kursk was built in 1870 as the most efficient way to transport sugar from where it was produced by processing sugar beets grown in Ukraine to its major consumer markets in Russia, the cities of Moscow and St Petersburg. That railroad also had a more sinister “colonial” purpose, for Moscow merchants could now easily dump their commodities on Ukrainian markets via Kyiv and Odesa. The Moscow–Kyiv line was also intended to serve an overtly political goal: “to support the Russian nationality and Russian Orthodox Church in their struggle against Polish influence and Catholicism, as well as to attach [Ukraine] more tightly to the rest of Russia.”24 Strategic and political concerns were even more pronounced in the case of a railroad linking Moscow with Sevastopol in the Crimea. The idea was first broached in the 1850s, during the Crimean War, but due to the perennial lack of resources was realized only in 1875. That railroad, going via Kharkiv, not only played a crucial role in the construction of a new Russian naval base in Sevastopol but fostered further Russian colonization of the Crimean peninsula, which eventually became the “Russian Riviera,” a playground for monarchs, aristocrats, and g/literati, from Tsar Alexander III to the doctor-turned-writer Anton Chekhov to the poet Maximilian Voloshin, founder of a famed art colony in Koktebel. While Ukraine’s hinterland was Russia’s bread basket, thanks to the Moscow-Sevastopol railroad the Crimea became “the palm-tree-lined terrace of the Russian belle époque.”25 On the eve of the World War I, the map of Ukraine was crisscrossed with lines of various thicknesses marking major and minor railroads. The first, Odesa–Balta line was just 137 miles long; by 1914, the overall length of railroads in Ukraine exceeded 10,000 miles (16,000 kilometers),26 making it the best transport-equipped territory in the empire. For each 1,000 square kilometers of area, Ukraine had 23.7 kilometers of railroads, in contrast to 22.3 kilometers in central Russia’s black soil region, 17.9 kilometers in the central industrial region, just 2.2 kilometers in the Urals, and merely 1 kilometer in Siberia.27 As Adam Gopnik aptly put it, “railroads ended isolation and packed the metropolis with people whose work was defined by a complicated network of social obligations.”28 But these trains not only “crowded our streets”: they also reshaped the non-urban environment. Granted, the country

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now “on the move” continued to be driven in large part by the oxen and horses proudly coexisting alongside the steam-driven mechanical beasts traversing the railroad lines. However, the technical wonders had crucial advantages over the grazing animals: speed, independence from agricultural cycles and seasons, and cost efficiency. Trains thus facilitated the movement of people (granted, those who could afford them) and commodities in unprecedented ways. More important, as Serhii Plokhy explains, the railroads “broke down old political, economic, and cultural boundaries.”29 The dismantling of those boundaries meant not only that Ukraine became a conjoined economic entity (if not yet a cultural one) but also that Ukraine was now tied to Russia as never before.

th e c Ur Se and th e b le S Si n g o f r eSo U r c eS By using the examples of Mikhail Gorbachev’s maternal grandfather and the families of two other Soviet leaders, Serhii Plokhy has shown us that Ukrainian and Russian migrants chose different destinations. While the social and geographical trajectory of Gorbachev’s maternal grandfather Panteleimon Hopkalo was typical of Ukrainian peasants moving from one village to the next, Nikita Khrushchev’s Russian father moved from his native village in the Russian-Ukrainian ethnic borderland to industrial Donbas, first as a seasonal railroad worker and then a fulltime miner. At the age of fourteen (in 1908), Nikita Khrushchev joined his father in the Donbas, where he became a mining mechanic and then, in 1918, joined the decidedly urban Bolshevik Party. The father of another Soviet leader, Khrushchev’s treacherous successor Leonid Brezhnev, also moved from a Russian village to the industrial heart of Ukraine. The elder Brezhnev went to the town of Kam’ians'ke (between 1936 and 2016 called Dniprodzerzhyns’k), which, like Iuzivka, was in Katerynoslav province: Leonid was born there in 1906, amid the smells and sounds of a budding steel town. Both Khrushchev’s and Brezhnev’s fathers were originally Russian peasants from Kursk province, who like many other rural Russian migrants reinvented themselves in the south as industrial workers. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the major industries in Russian-ruled Ukraine, like its larger cities, were clustered unevenly across the country. Most people classified as industrial workers tended to live near where they worked, even if that was only seasonally, that is, near sugar refineries, steel mills, coal mines, machine-building plants, etc. These were largely located in the Donbas (coal mining

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and steelmaking), in cities to the east and south like Katerynoslav and Kharkiv (metallurgy and machine building), and in parts of RightBank Ukraine, especially the eastern Podolia and Kyiv provinces (sugar refineries). With the exception of the sugar refineries in the Right-Bank provinces, it was these clustered industrial areas that attracted large numbers of Russian migrants from the north. The Right-Bank continued to be the agricultural heartland of Ukraine and the empire, and sugar processing there was the dominant industry making use of modern technology. While the price of grain fluctuated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the price of sugar both at home and abroad remained high, making this agricultural industry extremely profitable. In the first half of the century, sugar refineries were located predominantly on the rural estates of noble landowners (Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian). By 1850, there were already nearly two hundred such plants in Ukraine,30 the largest of which employed more than two hundred workers per plant. At that time, the smaller sugar refineries, especially ones who that could not afford steam power, were in decline. In the late nineteenth century this trend accelerated, and the industry’s new norm became fewer owners and fewer but larger plants. During the 1880s and ’90s the number of refineries in Ukraine stabilized at about one hundred eighty, but the number of steam engines they used kept growing: by 1896, 84 per cent of all steam engines used in sugar processing in the empire were in Ukraine.31 The economic crisis of 1900–03 hardly affected sugar production: in 1904 there were no fewer than 199 plants, employing 84,860 workers.32 These workers were then 16 per cent of all industrial workers in Ukraine, declined from 50–60 per cent in the late 1850s.33 However, unlike mining, metallurgy, or machine building, enterprises where work was done by adult men, sugar refineries provided job opportunities for rural women, who usually earned about two-thirds of men’s wages for the same kind and amount of work, as well as youths. These people were not industrial workers per se but seasonal laborers, who, for three to four months a year, did grueling factory work twelve hours a day for paltry wages to sweeten others’ lives before returning to their own bitter lives as land-hungry or landless peasants. In his classic realist novel Mykola Dzheria (1876), the Ukrainian writer Ivan Nechui-Levyts'kyi described the dingy conditions in which such rural workers lived: “two long, black bunkhouses, their walls weather-beaten and peeling … looked more like sheds for sheep than living quarters for people.”34 The amenities were merely a large stove with a built-in cauldron, where workers were to cook their food, and

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crude plank “beds,” covered with straw and hay dust, running along one wall the length of the barracks, where men and women slept side by side, covering themselves with their torn coats. Of course, the sleeping arrangements provided no privacy whatsoever and fostered the spread of short romances and communicable diseases. After 1861, when workers became free to move at will, they began to break their work contracts, forcing factory owners to go out of their way to keep the fickle peasant workforce content. To a few bright and ambitious peasants, the sugar beet industry offered schooling in technology and commerce, and some larger plants even supported the training of peasants to serve as technicians. Sugar refineries also offered peasants a degree of economic improvement and personal freedom (including in sexual life) away from the traditional social and moral constraints of peasant communes. Sugar production in Ukraine increased continuously. From about 1 million pounds in 1881–82 it increased to 3.7 million pounds in 1910–11, with Ukraine producing up to 85% of granulated sugar and 75% of lump sugar in the Russian Empire, now second only to Germany in the global procession of sugar beets.35 In 1887, a syndicate of sugar manufacturers gained control of 80–90% of the empire’s sugar production (granulated sugar, in particular), causing the domestic price of sugar to rise prohibitively. For many laborers, sugar was now a delicacy hardly affordable at local markets or stores. The average annual consumption of sugar per capita in Ukraine was 20 pounds, compared to 50 pounds in Germany and 100 pounds in the US.36 It is noteworthy, however, that sugar processing was the only industrial sphere in which ethnic Ukrainians were a majority of the labor force and were a notable presence among industrial owners. By 1895, about two hundred and fifty individuals, including Polish nobles, Ukrainian nouveaux riches of peasant descent, and Jews, owned sugar production facilities in Ukraine. Thanks to technical innovations that reduced the cost of producing each pud of sugar,37 the industry guaranteed good returns to the owners. For instance, in the late 1890s the price per pud of sugar (above 5 rubles) was much higher than per pud of pig iron or coal (96 and 22 kopeks, respectively), and it rebounded quickly after the industrial crisis of 1900–03.38 Further evidence of the sugar industry’s continuous strength was that in 1909, the empire’s sugar production (nearly all in Ukraine) was valued at 306 million rubles, in comparison to the empire’s total production of coal and iron ore, valued at 153 and 16.8 million, respectively.39 The sugar-beet industry was closely linked to local capital: for instance, over 60% of Kyiv’s banks dealt with sugar.

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Heavy industry differed from sugar processing in several key respects. Its workforce consisted largely of Russian migrant workers, its owners were usually foreigners, and it developed mostly without roots in local industrial or economic traditions. Enterprises of this kind are best illustrated by the rise of the industrial Donbas area. When John Hughes arrived in Russia from Britain in 1870, there was nothing to suggest that in less than two decades the ancient steppe frontier on the Donets’ River in southeastern Ukraine, north of the Sea of Azov, would become imperial Russia’s new industrial heartland. The Welshman arrived in the tsarist empire with a fleet of eight ships packed with his own metallurgical equipment and skilled miners and steelworkers, mostly from his native South Wales. What brought this successful industrialist and engineer to the middle of nowhere? That was a contract between the Russian government and the Millwall Iron Works, a renowned British company located not far from London. Russia needed the plating of a naval fortress at Kronstadt on the Baltic Sea and contracted the British metallurgical company to accomplish the urgent task. The Millwall Iron Works selected Hughes as its representative and director of the contract in Russia. Upon arriving in the Azov steppes, the British expat purchased land from Count Serhii Kochubei, a Russian aristocrat of Ukrainian origin (and son of Russia’s minister of the interior, Viktor Kochubei, a direct descendant of Vasyl' Kochubei, the infamous Cossack who was a nemesis of Hetman Ivan Mazepa). The entrepreneurial aristocrat sold the concession to John Hughes in exchange for stock in the New Russian Society for Coal, Iron and Rail Production, which would come to control all of Hughes’s facilities. Kochubei’s land, site of what became Iuzivka (Donets'k), can be seen as a connection between the industrial Donbas and Ukrainian historical tradition, albeit through an imperial Russian detour. John Hughes managed to set his iron works into operation already by 1872. The site he had chosen was geologically unique, in that it had iron ore and coal, as well as access to a water supply. Its eight blast furnaces were subsequently joined by brickworks and a railway line. However, Hughes soon learned that manufacturing conditions in South Wales were not readily replicated in southern Ukraine, for he was hard-pressed to find (and keep) local workers for the enterprise. About the local peasants he complained to the imperial minister of appanages: “The command of labor in this thinly populated district is [even] under the most favorable conditions, very insufficient for undertakings like ours. Especially as the inhabitants are not at all inclined to

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work [my emphasis – Sb ], and this year, owing to the abundance of the harvest, our works have been almost deserted by the workmen during the summer months.”40 An official report to the imperial government also complained that the local population – that is, Ukrainian peasants from neighboring villages – is “unwilling to engage in factory work” or in mining.41 Hughes faced another unexpected problem: the abundance of religious holidays celebrated by the peasants (some 138 annually!). These were days when his workers, virtually all recent rural migrants, refused to come to work. The situation prompted the local Orthodox bishop (having received a financial incentive from the Welshman) to agree to reduce the number of holidays by 15 per cent.42 The more effective and long-lasting solution to the workforce shortage was to import workers from Great Russia, aside from the few hundred west Europeans who had arrived together with Hughes or joined him over the next decade, particularly technical experts like boiler men, blast furnace foremen, machinists, and masons.43 Ten years later, there were some three hundred foreigners among Iuzivka’s population of 5,494 people, and they remained prominent in the city even after 1917.44 There were also many Catholics in the region, mostly Poles but also Frenchmen and Belgians. For instance, in 1915 Catholics in the “village” of Ienakiieve numbered about 3,000, most of whom were employed in a huge RussoBelgian metalwork enterprise. Nearly a century later, Ienakiieve would gain renown as the hometown of Ukraine’s notorious fourth president, Viktor Yanukovych, who claimed that his paternal grandfather was a Pole from Lithuania (that is, not a foreigner per se but also not a local peasant). Aside from their technical skills, the imported foreign workers brought with them what became the most popular form of mass entertainment in modern-day Donbas – namely, the “Beautiful Game,” or association football – at a time when not much else that was beautiful or entertaining was to be found in the bleak industrial region. The famed fc Shakhtar Donetsk (although not founded until 1936) has with good reason been labeled “the other Chelsea.” By April 1913, there existed a regional football league of teams from the region’s industrial settlements, including Iuzivka, Kramators'k, and Druzhkivka. Headed and staffed largely by foreigners, particularly British, Belgian, and French expats, the league was perhaps a way to combat the ennui that befell these barren eastern lands.45 In any case, it took years for the imported new sport to attract the locals, most of whom lived in squalid conditions far removed from the healthy lifestyle it required and fostered. For instance, around 40 per cent of miners in the Donbas lived

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in “dugouts,” and about 65 per cent had less than 4 square meters of living space; thousands more slept in communal beds without even a mattress of their own. Despite these wretched conditions, Iuzivka’s population continued to grow – from 28,000 in 1897 to 48,404 in 1909 (the latter number included 7,918 miners and 6,062 factory workers).46 Relatively few Ukrainians lived in this sub-city, and their number fell even more after the Bolsheviks took power.47 In the Donbas overall, ethnic Ukrainians made up only about 18 per cent of industrial workers overall; the surrounding rural population remained up to 75 per cent Ukrainian. Relations between the migrant workers and the local peasants were at times tense. The latter were reluctant to rent accommodations to newcomers, particularly miners, which often led to bloody conflicts. Peasants saw miners as “dirty mindless creatures who knew neither God nor truth and were capable of murdering someone in a dark alley for mere kopeks,” as a radical Jewish writer recalled.48 He also related how miners from the largest mine in the Slov’ianoserbs'k district raided nearby villages in search of sexual adventures. We have looked at the reasons why relatively few Ukrainians worked in the mines and steel plants of the Donbas, but why did so many Russians move to the south? Not surprisingly, the answer was money. During the 1880s, the average annual income of a peasant working the land in Kursk province was 60 rubles. In the mines of the Donbas, he could earn the same amount in just 150 workdays, and if he was diligent, sober, and thrifty, maybe even twice that amount. This was a far larger income than that of most industrial workers at Russian plants, where a worker’s average income was 17 rubles a month – half the salary of a qualified (and thrifty) miner in the Donbas. By 1900, the wages of coal miners in the Donbas had increased to 266 rubles and that of factory workers to 323 rubles per year, compared with the annual Russian average wage of 203 rubles.49 Accustomed to doing seasonal work in towns and having gained some skills in the process, Russians inundated the Donbas, attracted by high wages that continued to rise and social amenities that continued to improve. In general, workers in the Donbas encountered fewer social obstacles to upward mobility than they did elsewhere in the empire.50 But there was another, less enticing reason why so many Russian migrants worked in the mines. Even for good wages, hardly any sane person wanted to keep laboring at hellish work for long hours deep underground month after month, so factory owners and managers resorted

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to coercing or tricking workers into signing long-term contracts, as became obligatory in 1886. Migrants from faraway provinces proved much more susceptible to snares of that sort. How did the industrial Donbas figure in the late imperial economy overall? By the mid-1890s, the Donets’ Basin was already in effect the Ruhr of Russia, that is, its premier coal- and steel-producing region. As a rule, the steel-producing factories owned coal mines, thereby forming integrated enterprises (which also included pig iron and steel rolling-mills) and cutting the cost of the necessary raw materials. By 1913, the Donbas was producing 87% of the empire’s coal; during the first years of the Great War that fell somewhat, to 79.3% in 1917. Eventually there were over a hundred mining communities in the region. The Donbas and surrounding southern industrial region also produced 73.7% of Russia’s pig iron in 1913, and 71.3% of it in 1917. If Ukraine was Russia’s “bread basket,” the Donbas was its “cauldron of coal and steel.” The majority of workers in the region were coal miners, generally recent migrants from Great Russia. Their numbers grew constantly, from 84,857 in 1900, to 168,440 in 1913, and to 283,773 in February 1917 (then including some seventy thousand prisoners of war). They accounted for nearly 90% of Russia’s miners,51 and changed the demographics of southeastern Ukraine. In 1900 there were about 40,000 iron and steel workers in Katerynoslav province, most of them in the Donbas and largely divorced from the countryside.52 That year, excluding Iuzivka and small steel towns, the population of mining communities in the Donbas was 118,417; by 1908, that had grown to 256,458.53 Who were the major investors in, and beneficiaries from, the Donbas’s meteoric rise to industrial glory? The Welshman John Hughes was the first foreigner to establish a coal and steel enterprise in the area, but Belgian and French capitalists soon arrived as well, and they came to dominate in the region. By 1900, they had invested over 800 million francs in “South Russian” (Ukrainian) coal and steel ventures, fueling the Donbas’s largest boom in coal production. These foreigners connected coal production to steelmaking through use of the iron reserves of Kryvyi Rih, two hundred miles west of the coalfields, thereby “profiting from the symbiotic relationship among steel, coal, and railroads.”54 The long-term result was that by the mid-1890s, southeastern Ukraine had already surpassed all other regions in the production of coal, pig iron, and steel. The Donbas is undoubtedly a prime test case for the study of industrialization, immigration, and the nature of capitalism in late imperial

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Russia. But – to paraphrase the Monty Python quip “What have the Romans ever done for us?” – we can well ask: what has the Donbas actually done for Ukraine? Apart from offering jobs to the local population (most of whom did not take them), the Donbas did indeed boost industrial productivity in the empire. But did Ukraine and Ukrainians, specifically, benefit from the rise of the Donbas? The caveat is not that they did not benefit from it at all, as that others benefitted from it much more. Among the largest beneficiaries of the Donbas’s industrial power, aside from its Western investors, were the Russian imperial government and Russian railroads, for the region provided the bulk of Russian rail output. Among the imperial railroads’ largest suppliers were Hughes’s own New Russian Works, the South Russian Dnepr [Dnipro] Factory, the Donets' Steel Company at Druzhkivka, and the Russo-Belgian Metallurgical Company. The last two plants directed ca. 87 per cent of their output to the railroads; the first two, between 50 and 68.8 per cent.55 Arguably, those companies’ most long-lasting benefit for Ukraine and its population was the transfer of technologies and industrial capabilities that long remained in place (today much of that has been lost, owing to the occupation of parts of the Donbas by Russia and its local proxies). Another large benefit was the construction of the region’s dense railroad network, which both made the rise of the Donbas possible and was itself a product of that rise. The Donbas resembled South Wales, the native land of John Hughes and “cauldron” of British industrial prowess, in more than one way. Rapid industrialization and in-migration undermined the traditional linguistic and religious (Methodist) character of South Wales, especially in its larger cities, much as these processes changed the social and ethnic profile of southeastern Ukraine. The results were that English rather than Welsh and Russian rather than Ukrainian came to be seen as the languages of modernization and social advancement. Another consequence was that having lost much of their traditional identity, the Welsh found themselves in the vanguard of the industrial revolution, giving their modern identity a legacy of social radicalism and a working-class ethos. Ukrainians, too, even though most avoided dark mines and blast furnaces, had to reconsider their traditional view of themselves as a rural people. Did those who ended up in factories and mines remain Ukrainians? Was the Donbas part of a Ukrainian imagined community? And how could Ukrainian national activists reach out to its rowdy urban proletarians? Ukrainian intellectuals and civic leaders were now obliged to reformulate both the role of language in

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the developing Ukrainian political movement and Ukrainian national identity itself. The answers they failed to provide in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would be given by the Bolsheviks on a gargantuan scale in the 1920s and ’30s. Another illustration of the blessing and curse of resources in Ukraine was the case of the city of Katerynoslav (Russian Iekaterinoslav; today Dnipro), capital of the eponymous province that included the Donbas. A city much older than Iuzivka, Katerynoslav was founded in 1776 by, Catherine II’s lover and longtime favorite, Prince Grigorii Potemkin. But the city languished until the late nineteenth century, when it underwent a sudden industrial and commercial makeover. It had its own John Hughes in Oleksandr Pol' (1832–90; grandson of the Cracow-born German nobleman Johann von Pohl), a visionary who contributed greatly to an industrial boom in the city and in parts of the Katerynoslav and Kherson provinces, particularly the Kryvbas.56 His mother belonged to an old Ukrainian aristocratic family, the Poletykas, who spoke Ukrainian at home. Multilingual Oleksandr developed a strong attachment to his native land, once the home of the Zaporozhian Cossacks. After graduating with a law degree from Dorpart (Tartu) University, Oleksandr Pol' returned to his rural estate to begin a multifaceted career as an entrepreneur, archeologist, antiquarian, and civic leader often critical of the Russian government. With the discovery of rich iron ore deposits around Kryvyi Rih in the 1870s, his life changed radically. Encouraged by German geologists and chemists, Pol' fervently championed the need to connect via railway the coal mines of the Donbas with the iron ore deposits of the Kryvbas, an idea that earned him the sobriquet “the fanatic from Kryvyi Rih.” Frustrated with the imperial government and its perennial passivity, Pol' found a big investor in Paris – the wealthy railroad entrepreneur and owner of a vast metallurgical enterprise named Paulin Talabot. In 1880 they joined forces to found the closed joint-stock company “Société anonyme des minerais de fer de Krivoi-Rog,” with five million francs in capital. In 1884 Pol', the company’s largest shareholder and director, was able to realize his ambition. As one German scholar put it: “the French-Russian cooperation resulted from the effort of a GermanUkrainian economic citizen [Pol'] who with energy and selfless passion promoted the modernization of the entire region.”57 The Russian-French company that Pol' began became the second most important player in southern Ukraine, after the New Russia Company Ltd. founded by John Hughes in London in 1869. In the West, Oleksandr Pol' himself became

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renowned as the “New Russian [or Little Russian – Sb ] Columbus.” In 1887, at the celebration of the city of Katerynoslav’s one-hundredth anniversary, the city’s mayor lavished praise on Oleksandr Pol' as “one of the foremost people in the history of our city,” who almost singlehandedly “made our iron-ore riches famous not only in our country but in all of Europe, and this attracted both domestic and foreign entrepreneurs, together with their sizable capital, to us.”58 Pol' was unquestionably a key figure in transforming Katerynoslav from a modest agricultural trade center into the powerhouse of heavy industry and predecessor of Dnipropetrovs'’k (its subsequent name), the Soviet “rocket city,” which, ironically enough, was closed to Westerners, whose capital initially gave rise to the city’s industrial power. The city’s economic and demographic profiles changed dramatically between 1880 and 1900: its population grew from 22,846 people in 1865 to 46,876 in 1885, to 112,839 in 1897, and to 211,070 by 1914. In 1880, there were only 49 factories and plants in the city, with a total output of just 1.5 million rubles and total workforce of 572. Most of its plants and factories were engaged in processing animal and agricultural products (lard, flour, tobacco) or in minor manufacturing (e.g., bricks, candles). By 1903, Katerynoslav’s largest and most lucrative enterprises were metal works, and they were employing 8,088 workers. The city now had 194 plants and factories, with total production valued at 21.5 million rubles and an industrial workforce numbering 10,649. The city had earned its fierce reputation as a working-class town.59 Katerynoslav continued to be a crucial center of the trade in grain, but it was now also a leading producer of iron and hardware in the empire of the Romanovs. The city’s first metal works was the Alexander SouthRussian plant, which opened in 1887 and was owned by the Briansk Joint-Stock Company, reinvesting French and Belgian capitals. Belgians also owned several other metallurgical plants – a tube-rolling mill (1889), two ironworks (1899 and 1914), and a steel foundry (1895): these became the city’s largest industrial employers.60 After the collapse of imperial Russia, most continued to function under Soviet rule and one of them even gave the city its new name.61 Owing in good measure to its growing importance as a commercial and industrial hub, during the 1880s and ’90s Katerynoslav became one of the most multiethnic cities of the Russian Empire, with people from virtually every imperial province and twenty-six countries taking up residence in the city known as the “New America.” By 1897, Ukrainians (that is, those declaring “Little Russian” as their native language) were a

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minority in the city, comprising just 15.7% of its population, a proportion higher than in Iuzivka but lower than in Kyiv. Russians comprised a plurality, at 41.8%, followed by Jews, at 35.4%. As elsewhere in the industrial south and east, Ukrainians were a minority of the working class: they accounted for 30% of rail workers, 20% of steel workers, and just 12% of construction workers.62 Although Katerynoslav, unlike Iuzivka and the Donbas, firmly occupied a place on the mental maps of Ukrainian national activists, industrial capitalism definitely diluted the Ukrainian presence in the city. On the other hand, locals of all ethnic backgrounds were now benefitting from the city’s new-found wealth, and affluent individuals like Oleksandr Pol' were very generously supporting the city’s cultural scene, in which Ukrainian scholars, artists, and writers figured prominently. It was telling that the first director of the Oleksandr Pol' Regional Museum (opened in 1902) was Dmytro Iavornyts'kyi (1855–1940), a famed historian of the Zaporozhian Cossacks who was himself a self-styled Cossack. He presided over a huge collection of cultural artifacts that Pol’ himself had gathered or inherited from his Ukrainian Cossack ancestors. Industrialization brought Katerynoslav thousands of new jobs, hundreds of modern buildings, an innovative bridge over the Dnipro, well-stocked museums, a piped water system, paved streets, and electric streetcars (it was the third city in the empire to acquire them). More important, it opened unprecedented opportunities for local intellectuals and civic leaders in the Ukrainian and Jewish communities, who elsewhere in the empire were disadvantaged politically and legally. Nonetheless, even taking all these opportunities and benefits into consideration, a seminal question remains: was industrialization a colonizing or liberating force for Ukraine?

waS U krai ne rUSSi a ’ S c o l o n y ? “What Ireland was for England, Ukraine has become for Russia: exploited in the extreme, and getting nothing in return. Thus the interests of the world proletariat in general and the Russian proletariat in particular require that Ukraine regains its independence.” These words were spoken not by a Ukrainian nationalist but by Vladimir Lenin, the Marxist internationalist and founder of Russia’s Bolshevik party, during a speech he gave in Zurich in 1914.63 Given Lenin’s own view of Ukraine’s situation, how are we to assess the nature of industrial capitalism in Russian-ruled Ukraine on the eve of the Great War? Had the

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Russian Empire experienced a rapid “industrial revolution,” or, alternatively, a gradual development of commerce and manufacture over several decades? What was the role of the central government vis-à-vis that of foreign investors in the building of railroads, plants, and mines? And, most important, was Ukraine a colony of Russia, as generations of Ukrainian scholars and critical authors have continuously claimed? The British economic historian Peter Gatrell has stated that Russia as a whole appears to have been relatively backward compared to western Europe, and most of its population knew poverty rather than security and an adequate standard of living. Nonetheless, the tsarist economy did grow, especially toward the end of the nineteenth century, when Ukraine was becoming one of the most industrialized parts of European Russia. The provinces of Kharkiv and Katerynoslav, in particular, outpaced Russia’s old industrial hub in the Urals in terms of technological innovation and overall industrial output. In fact, after the modernization of blast furnaces was introduced by foreign capitalists, the high quality of local iron ore gave companies based in southern Ukraine an edge over Russian and some European competitors. Steam power, too, was heavily concentrated in the city of Katerynoslav and shipyards on the Black Sea (as well as at giant machine-building plants in St Petersburg). Based on the total value of industrial production per province (in millions of rubles), the Soviet Ukrainian interwar economist Kostiantyn Voblyi mapped the “industrial geography” of late imperial Ukraine, from consumer goods to heavy industry, as follows: Until the early 1890s, the three chief sugar-producing provinces – Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Podolia – had the most valuable annual output. But by 1893, the southern and southeastern lands where heavy industry was now heavily concentrated, owing to the rise of the Donbas and the Kryvbas, had risen in the rankings, so Kyiv was now followed by Katerynoslav and Kherson provinces as top industrial producers. However, light industry did not at first lose all ground to heavy industry in terms of total production value. Around 1893, light industry still flourished, dominated by sugar processing (valued at 100 million rubles), flour milling (34 million rubles), and distilling of alcohol (14 million rubles). True, some sectors, such as distilling and textile production, had continued to shrink, so that in the early 1900s their share in Ukraine’s industrial output became negligible. By contrast, heavy industry consistently grew in value. It encompassed metallurgy and, to a lesser extent, machine building in Katerynoslav, Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Kherson provinces, with a combined production value nearing

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Table 7.2 | Value of industrial production in millions of rubles per province, 1879–93

1879 Province

1890 Value in rubles

1893

Province

Value in rubles

Province

Value in rubles

Kyiv

62.5

Kyiv

78.0

Kyiv

69.4

Kharkiv

39.4

Kharkiv

53.9

Katerynoslav

54.9

Podolia

29.4

Podolia

46.5

Kherson

40.9

Kherson

24.5

Kherson

39.9

Kharkiv

40.2

Katerynoslav

14.9

Katerynoslav

27.3

Podolia

37.4

Poltava

11.1

Poltava

24.9

Chernihiv

18.9

Volhynia

10.8

Volhynia

20.9

Volhynia

18.4

Chernihiv

5.2

Chernihiv

16.5

Poltava

10.2

Taurida

0.6

Taurida

4.8

Taurida

6.5

Source: K.H. Voblyi, Narysy z istoriï rosiis’ko-ukraïns’koï tsukro-buriakovoï promyslovosty, vol. 2 (Kyiv: Vseukraîns’ka akademiia nauk, 1930), 57.

52 million rubles in 1893.64 Machine building in Ukraine was limited but still adequate to serve nearly all the needs of sugar processing and agriculture. On the other hand, some factories producing agricultural machinery were of enormous size: one such plant, owned by the Elvorti brothers of Britain and located in Ielysavethrad in Kherson province, employed 520 workers in 1901 and 1,109 in 1907. In fact, there were twenty-seven mega-plants in Ukraine in 1907, which together employed 67,000 people, that is, 27 per cent of all industrial workers of Ukraine. A large majority of these workers (52,800) toiled in sixteen iron and steel plants in Katerynoslav province and the rest at three large plants in Kharkiv province, one in Taurida, and one in Kherson. By 1913 there were more than forty such plants in Ukraine, each employing a thousand or more workers; most were in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Katerynoslav, and Kherson province. The province of Katerynoslav was also the site of the largest coal-mining companies; in 1902, twenty-two such companies

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Table 7.3 | Structure of the industrial workforce in Ukraine (in thousands), 1901–07 Year

Industry Coal-mining

Metallurgy

Total Sugar processing

1901

56,208

39,353

83,449

179,010

1902

49,435

35,181

85,852

170,468

1903

49,716

40,384

87,379

177,479

1904

51,326

45,368

84,860

181,554

1905

56,291

45,375

89,486

191,152

1906

65,393

46,966

80,539

192,898

1907

81,839

46,799

80,316

208,954

Source: Istoriia robitnychoho klasu, 1:219.

employed 72,300 miners and technicians.65 The production of pig iron, steel, and railroad tracks was closely tied to the extraction of the requisite raw materials, coal and iron ore, which was almost completely in the hands of foreign-owned companies operating in the Donbas region of Katerynoslav province. By the eve of the new century, the economic profile of Ukraine was no longer defined by grain production alone but also by the extraction and processing of raw resources (iron ore, coal) and food processing (sugar beets, flour-milling). During the 1890s, Ukraine had experienced its own industrial revolution, as its industrial geography and output shifted from light industry and consumer goods, with its traditional base in the forest-steppe zone of central Ukraine, to heavy industry, located primarily in the steppe zone or southern Ukraine. Ukraine’s industrial workforce also kept growing,66 especially between 1901 and 1907, as reflected in the table below. Following the global economic crisis of the early 1900s, the number of industrial workers reached its highest point in 1907, having grown especially in the southeast (and decreased on the Right-Bank and in Kharkiv province, where the majority of sugar refineries were located). Of those employed in manufacturing of any kind, most were found

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Table 7.4 | Ukraine’s industrial output per industry, 1912 (in percentages)

Industries

Workers (%)

Industrial output (%)

Mining

48.7

43.9

Food processing (mostly sugar and flour)

27.9

36.2

Metal working, machine-building

10.1

10.4

Mineral extraction and processing

6.7

2.0

Woodworking

2.1

2.1

Textile/cotton processing

1.3

1.5

Chemical

1.0

1.8

Paper

0.9

0.6

Printing

0.8

0.3

Leather

0.4

1.1

Other

0.1

0.1

100.0

100.0

Total

Source: Istoriia robitnychoho klasu, 1:334.

in Katerynoslav province (70,307), followed by the provinces of Kyiv (63,875), Kharkiv (43,722), and Kherson (35,663). The number of female workers, occupied primarily in the food processing industries, grew from 13% of the workforce in 1901, to 16% in 1907, to 18% in 1914. By 1912, the output of industries involved in mineral extraction, metallurgy, and sugar processing in Ukraine had increased considerably, at the cost of all other industries, as shown in the table below. Although some of these numbers look very impressive, they can be deceptive in terms of production or consumption per capita. For instance, Russia lagged far behind other countries in the consumption of cast iron, which was only 25 kilos per capita, compared to 233 in the US, 173 in Belgium, 136 in Germany, and 106 in England.67 This indicated that overall, the Russian Empire was poorly equipped in modern instruments of production, particularly in the countryside: four times less than in

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England, five times less than in Germany, and ten times less than in the United States. Nonetheless, the number of workers and their productivity level continued to grow: by 1913, the number of industrial workers in Ukraine may have exceeded half a million people.68 This was a clear sign that the working class, that foremost object of the Russian Marxists’ revolutionary hopes, had arrived in Ukraine, especially in its southeast. The weight of the extractive economy also determined the regional distribution of industry in Ukraine. By 1910, the Katerynoslav and Kherson provinces in the southeast were dominant in total industrial output (33 per cent), owing to their rich mineral resources, ferrous metallurgy, and machine building in the Donbas, the Kryvbas, and the city of Katerynoslav. The southwestern region – that is, Right-Bank Ukraine – was still a hothouse of food processing (predominantly of sugar beets but including flour milling) and produced 23.6 per cent of total industrial output.69 Throughout Ukraine, the extraction of raw materials and processing of food products continued to be much better developed than the manufacture of finished goods. As a consequence, Ukraine’s metal works could not satisfy the basic needs of the local population, to the extent that even nails and wire were imported from Russia. Did the government deliberately create a skewed economic structure by supporting the manufacture of finished goods in the north and the extraction of raw materials in the south? And if so, was that done with any colonial intent? The imperial government did indeed seem to support “northern” commodity makers. But it also supported sugar-beet processing and heavy industry based on the extraction of coal and iron ore in southeastern Ukraine, through high tariffs and duties on imported foodstuffs, raw materials (e.g., on pig iron after the 1880s), and semi-finished items.70 Moreover, data of the time points to Ukraine as a place of technical innovation as well as industrial production, rather than as only an exploited “colony” supplying the metropolitan “center” with food and raw resources. If anything, the government abstained from active involvement in economic and industrial development, as was evident in the case of Oleksandr Pol' proposed initiatives. The government’s economic agenda remained narrow and limited. “The priorities of government in Russia lay in defense and in the maintenance of the bureaucracy,” wrote Peter Gatrell. “The direct role of the state in promoting industrialization should not, therefore, be exaggerated.”71 Nonetheless, the state continued to be the largest single factor in the development of heavy industries, as both their main customer and protector against the volatile attitudes of their own workers. By contrast,

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the production of consumer goods was much less dependent on the state and instead was linked primarily to the rising purchasing power of urban and rural consumers. That in turn resulted from the emergence of a class of more well-to-do peasants, low costs of production, and increasing agricultural productivity, among other factors. The state also encouraged foreign investments, particularly during Sergei Witte’s tenure as Russia’s minister of finance (1892–1903) and prime minister (1903–06). Foreign investment began to pour into southeastern Ukraine in the 1880s and accelerated markedly in the 1890s. In 1883, foreigners invested only 3.4 million rubles in local enterprises; by 1890 that sum increased to 8.3 million, and in 1895 it stood at 19 million.72 The resulting growth of metallurgy in the region was on a scale unprecedented anywhere else in the world. During the period 1897 to 1901, foreign investors contributed up to one-fifth of total net investment in Ukraine and a still larger proportion of investment in industry and utilities.73 By 1913, Ukraine, which accounted for less than one-fifth of the empire’s industrial output, was the recipient of about one-third of all foreign investment in the empire,74 data commonly used to argue against the view that Ukraine was Russia’s “colony.” Aside investing in heavy industry, Belgians, for instance, also introduced electric streetcars in the cities of Ukraine: Kyiv (1892), Mykolaïv (1896), Katerynoslav (1897), Sebastopol (1898), and Kremenchuk (1899).75 It was this foreign capital and foreign technology that led to the promethean rise of the Donbas and its twin region, the Kryvbas. For all practical purposes, foreign producers monopolized industrial production in southeastern Ukraine. In 1901, twelve of the region’s major metallurgical companies, prompted by French banks, formed Prodameta – the Society for the Sale of the Metallurgical Products of Russian Industry. By 1911, it controlled 90% of assorted and sheet iron and 74% of pig-iron production. A comparable syndicate, named Produgol' (est. 1904), grew to encompass 60% of the coal-mining industry in the Donbas, accounting for nearly three-fourths of the Russian Empire’s total production.76 Foreign capital made up 87% of that syndicate’s funds. In the Kryvbas, iron-ore companies with foreign capital comprised 86% of all enterprises in the region.77 In 1913, the leading metallurgical companies also all owned or leased ore mines, allowing them to control 80% of the iron ore supply in Ukraine.78 Between 1908 and 1917 there were also twenty-four American companies in southern Ukraine, including the legendary Singer Manufacturing Company, based in Katerynoslav.79 In the years leading up to the Great

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Ukraine, 1876–1914

War, heavy industry in southeastern Ukraine boomed as never before, spurred by soaring prices for its output, higher profits, and near total market control. Who benefitted from this booming economy, based on the exploitation of natural resources and, of course, the workers it employed? By all accounts, the beneficiaries were foreign investors and the imperial government rather than the population of Ukraine, most of which were peasants, increasingly poor and landless. As we have seen, most rural migrants in Ukraine chose to relocate on lands far beyond their own country rather than seek employment at nearby factories or mines. Another factor in Ukraine’s one-sided economy, wrought by the proverbial resource curse, was the absence of a significant manufactured-goods sector, owing to the lack of capital, entrepreneurs, and a skilled workforce. With an economy based on the extraction of raw resources, late imperial Ukraine resembled a sort of post–World War II Persian Gulf state, but one lacking any semblance of equitable income distribution. This also meant that Ukraine’s consumer market was inundated with goods made elsewhere, either in Great Russia or in Europe. As Gatrell has noted, “It was not the basic industries, such as mining and metallurgy, that dominated industrial production [in the Russian Empire – Sb ], so much as consumer goods. As late as 1913, after three decades of rapid industrialization, the two broad categories of textiles and foodstuffs together accounted for around one-half of gross industrial production. This was twice as much as mining, metallurgy, and engineering combined … To put it bluntly, the history of industrialization in Russia was not synonymous with the growth of heavy industry.”80 This situation was a result of a significant growth in rural and urban consumption in 1885–1913. Even during the crisis of 1900–03, the consumer goods market continued to flourish, while in the capital goods sector (coal, iron, and steel, and machine building) output declined. The value of iron ore and coal production remained consistently below that of textiles and foodstuffs (sugar, in particular). Higher profits were to be had in the production of textiles (mostly in Łódź in Russian Poland and central Russia) or in the distillation of alcohol (scattered across European Russia). Profits in the consumer goods industries regularly exceeded the average profits in heavy industry, even during the boom times of the 1890s and 1910–13.81 That was precisely what put Ukraine at a disadvantage: its share in the manufacture of finished and consumer goods was relatively low. The exception was sugar processing,

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which dominated the empire’s consumer market and provided jobs for many thousands of Ukrainian peasants. In most other sectors, however, Ukraine lagged behind. For example, Ukraine’s share in Russia’s overall production of manufactured goods (ranging from foodstuffs and clothes to locomotives and heavy machinery) hovered around 15 to 16% in 1908–12. By comparison, its share in the extractive industries (coal, iron ore, oil) exceeded 27% in 1908. Machine building and metal processing, in particular, were concentrated in central Russia, which provided over 50% of total output in 1908; by contrast, Ukraine’s share of production in these highly technical fields was just 15%. Only in the manufacture of agricultural machinery did Ukraine dominate: there its share of total production was as high as 72%. But in a technologically advanced area like electrical engineering, Ukraine’s participation was an astounding 0%! In that sphere, companies in central Russia and the Baltics reigned supreme.82 Most producers of finished and consumer goods were also based outside Ukraine – in central Russia, Poland, or the Baltic region. Thus the question of whether Ukraine was Russia’s colony cannot be readily dismissed, even if Russian-ruled Ukraine was clearly not a classic “colony” of the kind Europeans had in Africa and Asia. In that case, what kind of colony, if at all, was Ukraine under Russian rule? In his ambitious early work The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899), Vladimir Lenin bluntly referred to Russia’s “southern and eastern peripheries (okrainy)” as “colonies of central European Russia.” Apparently, he also developed a concept of “internal colonization” while addressing the progressive “mission of capitalism” and the demographic movement of peasants to various areas that had been recently “colonized,” including the steppes of New Russia and the Middle and Lower Volga (“the south-east Transvolga”), regions populated largely by ethnic Russians alongside various minorities.83 During the 1920s, several Soviet Ukrainian social scientists began to apply this Leninist framework routinely to Ukraine’s economy and society under tsarist rule, while maintaining a more critical view of Russian “colonialism.” Particularly prominent among them was an economist and government employee named Mykhailo Volobuiev (1903–72), who called Ukraine a colony of the “European type,” in which the development of capitalism resulted in a combination of both backwardness and modernity: Hence, the question of whether there was a single Russian prerevolutionary economy should be answered as follows: it was a single economy on an antagonistic, imperialist basis, but from the

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viewpoint of centrifugal forces of the colonies oppressed by her, it was a complex of national economies.… The Ukrainian economy was not an ordinary province of Tsarist Russia, but a land which was placed in a colonial position.84 In the late 1920s to early ’30s, Volobuiev, an ethnic Russian from southern Ukraine, became a major spokesman for local national communists advocating Soviet Ukraine’s right to control its economy. He demonstrated how central control and continued Russian chauvinism had perpetuated the exploitation of Soviet Ukraine within the Soviet Union. Predictably, in the 1930s Volobuiev became a victim of the Stalinist purges and spent several years in the Gulag, witnessing firsthand the least appealing effects of the new Soviet imperialism. Not everyone agreed with Volobuiev’s essentially Leninist framework. Years later, Ivan Lysiak Rudnytsky best summarized a counterargument. “Tsarist Russia possessed genuine colonies, such as Transcaucasia and Turkestan,” wrote the émigré historian, “but Ukraine could not be counted among them. The administration looked rather on Ukraine as belonging to the core of the ‘home provinces’ of European Russia. The economic progress of Ukraine (‘South Russia’) was in many respects faster than that of the Great Russian center.”85 Rudnytsky acknowledged that Russian economic policies were “adverse to Ukrainian interests” but argued that these policies did not turn Ukraine into a colony. He noted that Ukraine was the recipient of large foreign investments and also became a hub of technical innovation. According to the émigré economic historian I. S. Koropeckyj, in 1913 Ukraine’s share of total foreign investment in industry in the empire (excepting Finland) was an impressive 36%. Likewise, between 1854 and 1908 Ukraine’s share in the total industrial output of the Russian Empire increased from 7.1 to 18.4%– a clear triumph of capitalism over autocracy, in Koropeckyj’s view.86 And even if the central government taxed Ukraine more than it spent there, that policy, however much decried by Ukrainians and others, did not specifically benefit Great Russia. The tsarist government simply did not favor ethnic Russians over other communities, at least not where taxes were concerned. If anything, in the provisions of Russia’s tax policy both Russians and Ukrainians were direct losers, whereas the direct beneficiaries were the Baltic provinces and Poland. Nevertheless, the economist acceded that Ukraine was a colony of Moscow, owing to an unequal economic and political relationship. Koropeckyj did, however, made one important

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reservation regarding this: the imperial government defended the vital interests not so much of ethnic Russians as of cosmopolitan – that is, landowning and military – elites, who “used the Ukrainian economy and extracted its resources to provide a strong defense capability for the country.”87 Another émigré economist, Konstantyn Kononenko, spoke even more bluntly about Ukraine’s colonial status. Applying Volobuiev’s metaphor of its being “a colony of a European type,” Kononenko argued that as late as the 1910s, Ukraine’s occupational structure reflected a highly unequal and patchy industrialization: 74.5% of the population was still engaged in agriculture (for ethnic Ukrainians, that figure was 87.5%), 9% worked in industry, 6.4% in transportation, and 5.3% in commerce.88 Still worse, most industrial and commercial profits and dividends “were excluded from the Ukrainian economy in favor of Russia and of Western Europe.” Between 1891 and 1910, these profits and dividends amount to a staggering 5 billion rubles, more than total capital investment in all Ukrainian industry.89 Another vital factor in this equation was the railroad, which not only moved commodities and people but also reflected Ukraine’s “colonial position.” Railroad trunk lines all ran in one direction, north to south, thus connecting Ukraine’s agricultural, sugar processing, metallurgical, and coal mining industries with Moscow and St Petersburg rather than with each other. There were no trunk lines between those areas of production, and only one direct rail line went from west to east across Ukraine. Even the commercial powerhouse Odesa had only two trunk lines, far from what was needed by Ukraine-based enterprises. In addition, the majority of peasants lived between 30 and 50 kilometers from the nearest railroad station, meaning that they barely benefitted from the more modern means of transportation. Overall, railroads in Ukraine were “subservient to an overall goal: tying the Ukrainian economy with the metropolis and making it dependent upon it.”90 Among other major signs of Ukraine’s “colonial exploitation” were the generally low standard of living of the working classes and pressures from the imperial center on market conditions. “Russia concentrated in her hands,” concluded Kononenko, “the manufacture of goods of universal consumption, derived large profits from the distribution of these goods in Ukraine, and assuring herself of the control of Ukraine’s ties with foreign markets, siphoned Ukraine’s favorable trade balance to service her own foreign debts.”91 As we have seen, those who have viewed Russian-ruled Ukraine as a “colony,” whether of “a European type” or Russia’s “internal” one,

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frequently point to a number of economic factors. First, the export of agricultural products and raw materials from Ukraine dominated over the export of finished goods: in 1913, we recall, Ukraine produced up to 70% of Russia’s coal and pig iron but only 15% of its finished goods.92 Second, the market price of goods produced outside Ukraine was much higher than that of raw resources extracted within Ukraine. Hence the income of “northern” commodity producers exceeded that of “southern” resource developers. Third, the main beneficiaries of Ukraine’s industrial growth were the imperial treasury and west European investors, while the vast majority of Ukrainians continued to engage in subsistence-level grain production, the single largest source of foreign currency in Russia until 1917. Fourth, Ukraine’s population was taxed heavily, and the revenues collected in Ukraine did not return there but were spent elsewhere in the empire. Fifth, the expansion of railroads unified most parts of present-day Ukraine into one economic entity but also linked Ukraine with Russia as never before: via the railroads, Ukraine exported its raw resources to Russia, whereas the latter imported its workforce and commodities into Ukraine. Perhaps it is this last pattern, more than any other factor, that supports the contention of Ukraine’s colonial status. The railroads also changed trade patterns in Ukraine, driving the small fairs that were scattered across Ukraine out of business and concentrating wholesale trade in large cities, where commerce was dominated by Russian merchants. As a result, the production of capital equipment and consumer goods in Ukraine remained greatly underdeveloped. But economics did not tell the whole story, especially when the boundaries between the metropole – Russia, allegedly – and peripheries – Ukraine, in this case – were blurred. In imperial Russia, there were no clear borders separating the heartland from the peripheries. The cultural historian Alexander Etkind has recently spoken of how “Russia has been both the subject and the object of colonization,” by continuously colonizing and exploring itself.93 In other words, the Russian state colonized not only the minorities living in the borderlands but also its own people – ethnic Russians – living in the heartland of the empire. Russia’s “great colonial system” was thus applied both on its “distant frontiers” and in its “dark heartlands.”94 Often there was little or no ethnic difference between the metropolitan colonizers and the people who were being colonized. Russians were indeed colonizing themselves – that belief was widely shared by the empire’s educated elites, from the Slavophiles to the Westernizers, and from Dostoevsky to Tolstoy.

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In the process, classical Russian literature became “an extremely successful instrument of cultural hegemony,” which “conquered more Russians, non-Russians, and Russian enemies than any other imperial endeavor.”95 If literature was the “soft” side of imperial colonization, violence and coercion was its “hard” side, directed not only against minorities but also against the Russians themselves – above all, against peasants. Whether the soft side of colonialism could (and can) exist without the hard side remains debatable. Within this highly circular logic of internal colonialism, Ukrainians, too, could be both colonizers and the colonized. Etkind mentions the case of Nikolai Gogol, the Ukrainian-born writer whom he calls a “great colonial author,” placing him alongside James Joyce and Joseph Conrad. More specifically, the author proposes that Gogol’s famous epic novel Dead Souls be read as a saga of Russia’s colonization, since its plot revolves around an “imperial project” in which the protagonist, Chichikov, sets out to resettle deceased but purchased peasants (serfs) in a new colony in the steppes of New Russia (Kherson province). New Russia, that area of unceasing colonization, was again a place defined by delusion (Chichikov was acquiring dead peasants!), harkening back to the Potemkin villages of eighty years before. Thus, the “colonial nature” of Gogol’s novel Dead Souls and his novella The Nose (featuring a nose that flees from the face of a vain social climber in St Petersburg) was projected onto Russia and the Russians themselves, a perspective possible only through the concept of internal colonization.96 Gogol’s work also showed that Ukraine, like parts of Great Russia itself, could be represented as both its heartland and “internal colony,” reflecting an ambiguous imperial geography. That geographic ambiguity applied in equal measure to the Russian-Ukrainian encounter in the long nineteenth century, for no borders separated Ukraine from Russia. Nothing prevented loyal Ukrainians from becoming colonizers themselves, like the Protestant Scots and Anglo-Irish who ruled the British maritime empire together with their English counterparts. Indeed, countless Ukrainians (“Little/Southern Russians”) were in the vanguard of Russia’s imperial expansion and colonization, often occupying the highest offices in the metropolitan center and on the farthest peripheries. It seems, then, that the issue of Ukraine’s colonial status has often been misplaced. 97 We should look for it elsewhere, or from a different perspective. Perhaps the most conspicuous case for Ukraine’s colonial treatment by the imperial center was that the Russian government did not see any Ukraine at all. In the imperial government’s view, it was not

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a real territorial entity, nor were its native people a distinct nationality. Instead, Ukraine’s territory was seen through the prism of several different regions – New Russia, Little Russia, Southwestern Region – while its people, officially called Little or Southern Russians, were considered an inherent part of the all-Russian nation – that is, Russians too.98 It is this invisibility of Ukraine and Ukrainians in the eyes of the government that spoke more than anything else to their colonial status. Thus it was not so much economic exploitation as blind cultural negation and political repression that made Ukraine into some sort of colony, whether internal or not, and whether or not the Russians themselves perceived it as one.

So c i ety at th e c r oSS r o a dS On the eve of the twentieth century, society in Russian-ruled Ukraine was changing: it was becoming more mobile, more educated, more urban – and less Ukrainian. Was the last of these characteristics the result of a skewed modernization, or Ukraine’s colonial status? What was old and what was new in that society? And what about it remained Ukrainian? To answer these questions, we need to look at various social and ethnic divisions of Ukraine’s diverse society on the eve of the twentieth century. Despite the multiethnic label frequently applied to it, Ukraine had a dominant nationality, numerically if not politically. In 1897, ethnic Ukrainians were 71 per cent (17,373,525) of the country’s total population (24,411,593); they lived in the nine “Ukrainian” provinces, as well as in several districts of what were then the neighboring provinces of Bessarabia and Kursk and today lie within the borders of Ukraine (excepting four northern districts of Chernihiv province now part of Russia). Ethnic Ukrainians also lived elsewhere: in the Kingdom of Poland (335,000), the Caucasus (1,300,000), Siberia (223,000), and Central Asia (102,000). In total, there were about 22,300,000 ethnic Ukrainians in the Russian Empire.99 There were also numerous other minorities, about whom more will be said in the last section of this chapter. According to the imperial census of 1897 (the only one taken), the size of the major ethnic communities in Ukraine, as defined by native language, varied considerably from province to province, as reflected in table 7.5. The share of minority groups in the population of Ukraine was four times higher than in neighboring Great Russian provinces.100 Despite the presence of minorities in all the “Ukrainian” provinces, most

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Table 7.5 | Nationalities in Russian Ukraine per province (in percentages), ca. 1897* Province

Ukrainians

Russians

Jews

Poles

Germans

Taurida

42

28

4

0.7

5

Kherson

53

21

12

1

5

Chernihiv

66

22

5

0.1

0

Katerynoslav

69

17

5

0.6

4

Volhynia

70

3

13

6

5.7

Kyiv

79

6

12

2

0.4

Kharkiv

81

17

0.5

0.2

0.4

Podolia

81

3

12

2.3

0.1

Poltava

93

3

4

0.1

0.1

* For an excellent visualization of census data, also given by province, see: Ukrainian Census (1897) – Wikipedia (accessed 6 November 2021).

Sources: N.A. Troinitskii, ed., Pervaia vseobshchaia perepis’ naseleniia Rossiiskoi imperii, 1897 g., vol. 8: Volynskaia guberniia (St Peterburg: Tsentr. Stat. komitet Min-va vnutrennikh del, 1904); vol. 13: Ekaterinoslavskaia guberniia (1904); vol. 16: Kievskaia guberniia (1904); vol. 32: Podol’skaia guberniia (1904); vol. 33: Poltavskaia guberniia (1904); vol. 41: Tavricheskaia guberniia (1904); vol. 46: Khar’kovskaia guberniia (1904); vol. 47: Khersonskaia guberniia (1904); vol. 48: Chernigovskaia guberniia (1905).

Ukrainians lived in ethnically homogenous rural communities and small towns; in that sense, we can speak of both the (ethnic) Ukrainian society and the (multiethnic) society of Ukraine. The tensions between these two societies were most evident in urban areas. Whether resulting from a skewed industrialization, a “resource curse”, or colonial aspects of its situation in Russia, urbanization in Ukraine did not favor ethnic Ukrainians: instead, it made them invisible. Beginning with the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, Ukraine’s cities – those most tangible sites of rapid modernization – began to

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Table 7.6 | Population of Russian Ukraine’s largest cities, 1800–1914 Cities

ca. 1800

ca. 1860

ca. 1880

1897

ca. 1914

Odesa

6,000

113,000

217,000

404,000

669,000

Kyiv

19,000 (1797)

71,00

116,424 (1874)

247,723

506,000 (1916)

Kharkiv

9,900 (1801)

57,639

101,175 (1879)

173,989

244,710

Zhytomyr

5,419 (1798)

38,400 (1863)

54,827 (1884)

65,895

86,430

Katerynoslav

2,194 (1792)

19,000

46,876 (1885)

112,839

211,070

?

32,000

?

92,012

104,000

n/a

164 (1870)

5,494 (1884)

28,076

54,701 (1917)

Mykolaiv

Iuzivka

Sources: Lindner, Unternehmer und Stadt, 40; Paul Robert Magocsi, A History of Ukraine: The Lands and Its Peoples (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 342; Patricia Herlihy, “Ukrainian Cities in the Nineteenth Century,” in Ivan L. Rudnytsky, ed., Rethinking Ukrainian History (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1981), 136.

grow in size and absorb ever more people. Between 1863 and 1897, Ukraine’s urban population more than doubled, to 3 million people, or 13.2% of Ukraine’s total population. However, despite that impressive growth, the proportion of urban dwellers was still among the lowest in Europe, and significantly lower than in Great Russia, where that was 15%. By contrast, in England, then the most urbanized country in Europe, urban residents accounted for 72% of the population. In 1900, the population of England’s three largest cities after London – Liverpool with 685,000, Manchester with 600,000, Birmingham with

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Table 7.7 | Urban population of Ukraine by region, 1897 Region

Total population

Total urban population

% of total

Right Bank

9,567,010

914,970

9.6

Left Bank

7,568,321

851,090

11.2

South/Steppe

6,295,056

1,319,331

21.0

23,430,387

3,085,391

13.2

Ukraine overall

Source: Krawchenko, Social Change and National Consciousness, 8.

Table 7.8 | National composition of Ukraine’s urban population by region, 1897 Region

Total urban population

Ukrainians

% of total

Russians

% of total

Jews

% of total

Others

% of total

Right Bank

914,970

247,778

27

229,894

25.1

363,153

39.6

74,145

8.1

Left Bank

851,090

457,080

53.7

225,277

26.5

146,687

17.2

22,046

2.6

South/ Steppe

1,319,331

231,225

17.5

594,847

45.1

320,619

24.3

172,640

13.1

Ukraine overall

3,085,391

936,083

30.3

1,050,018

34

830,459

27

268,331

8.7

Source: Krawchenko, Social Change and National Consciousness, 10.

522,000 – was considerably greater than that of Ukraine’s then largest city Odesa, which was 404,000, below even the fourth largest, Sheffield, with 409,000. Also, Glasgow, Scotland’s industrial center and the second largest city in Great Britain, already had more than 761,000 residents. However, by 1914 this picture had changed: now the populations of both Odesa and Kyiv surpassed that of Sheffield (see table 7.6)

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and approached the top three cities of the “premier league” – Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham (London continued to top urban Europe’s “champions league,” trailed by Paris, Vienna, and Berlin). By 1914, four of the ten largest cities in the Russian Empire – Odesa, Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Katerynoslav (today Dnipro) – were located in Ukraine, which had become one of the most rapidly urbanizing lands in eastern and central Europe. But, these few large cities notwithstanding, the geographic distribution of urban residents in Russian-ruled Ukraine remained strikingly uneven, as is evident in tables 7.7 and 7.8. It is readily apparent that Ukraine’s most highly urbanized regions – the south and southeast, or historic New Russia – were also the most ethnically diverse. Those were also the regions where the proportion of ethnic Ukrainians was the smallest, especially among urban dwellers. In the heart of the Donbas – imperial Russia’s growing industrial powerhouse and modern Ukraine’s demographic time bomb in the making – the proportion of ethnic Ukrainians was the lowest. For instance, ethnic Ukrainians were the majority in the overall population of the Bakhmut district of Katerynoslav province (58%),101 but they were a small minority of its industrial workers and miners, only one-quarter of whom were natives of Katerynoslav province (15.8% from the Bakhmut district, and another 8.6% from the rest of the province). Of those industrial workers and miners, 71% were migrants from other regions, with 67% from Great Russia itself.102 By 1917, the year that Iuzivka was officially designated a city, this pattern had become even more pronounced: Ukrainians were just 13% (7,086) of the city’s population, well below Russians (31,952) and Jews (9,934).103 Not only were ethnic Ukrainians grossly underrepresented in the few large cities and new industrial regions, they also were the least urbanized community in Ukraine: slightly more than 5% lived in towns and cities, compared to 45% of Jews and 38% of Russians. Nearly half of all “urban” Ukrainians lived in the towns and cities of Poltava, Chernihiv, and Kharkiv provinces; there they formed a majority (53%) of those living in the smallest towns (below 10,000 inhabitants), which were essentially large villages. By contrast, in the provincial capital city of Kharkiv, only 26% of the population were Ukrainian speakers. In sum, the bigger a city was, the smaller the proportion of Ukrainians in it, a situation that hardly suited the modern age. Why was this so? Towns and cities simply did not have much to offer any uprooted peasants who ventured there. The cultural differences between the city and the countryside were substantial, and rising. It was at this time that stereotypes

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of the “backward” Ukrainian village and the “modern” Russian- or Polish- or Yiddish-speaking city were formed. The Russian Bolsheviks would see the cities as being progressive, because that was where the Russian (and russified) “mobile” proletariat lived and worked, as opposed to the countryside, the domain of the “reactionary” peasantry. To the peasants themselves, cities seemed at best alien and at worst dangerous. With modernization, major financial, industrial, and cultural resources were increasingly concentrated in cities, especially in a few larger ones, where more and more nobles and landowners settled, bringing their aristocratic way of life with them. It was strangers from the city – that is, Russian-speaking bureaucrats and armed gendarmes – who descended on villages to tax and pacify the locals. Thus, for the peasants the city was not so much a place of opportunity as of threat. This is just what Vasyl' Shakhrai, a leading Ukrainian Bolshevik, had to say about perception of the city among Ukrainian villagers: The city rules the village and the city is “alien.” The city draws to itself all the wealth and gives the village nothing in return. The city extracts taxes, which never return to the village in the Ukraine. In the city one must pay bribes to be freed from scorn and red tape. In the city are warm fires, schools, theatres, and music plays. The city is expensively dressed as for a holiday, it eats and drinks well, many people promenade. In the village there is, besides hard work, impenetrable darkness and misery, almost nothing. The city is aristocratic, it is alien. It is not ours, not Ukrainian. It is Great-Russian, Jewish, Polish, but not ours, not Ukrainian.104 The social historian Bohdan Krawchenko used Michael Hechter’s framework of internal colonialism, initially applied to Britain’s “Celtic fringe,” in explaining what went wrong with urbanization in Russian-ruled Ukraine. Commenting on the dominant trend in colonial economies to specialize on the production of “a narrow range of primary products or raw materials for export,” Hechter stressed that in internal colonies, cities served, above all, as “way stations in the trade between colonial hinterlands and metropolitan ports.”105 Krawchenko saw Odesa as a prime example of a “way station” benefitting from the export of Ukrainian cereals. Unfortunately, the rural countryside surrounding it did not see much, if any, benefit from the fortunes amassed by Odesa’s merchants, many of them foreigners and nearly all dealing in smuggled or imported goods, to the detriment of local manufacturing.

314

Ukraine, 1876–1914

The dependent nature of Ukraine’s urban development was also evident in the fact that foreign capitalists and high officials in St Petersburg were much more concerned with the export of raw materials from Ukraine than with support for local producers of finished goods. It was the extractive economy that provided a major stimulus for urbanization in Ukraine. The economy of new or recently industrialized cities was dependent mostly on the extraction of raw materials, thus exacerbating Ukraine’s notorious “resource curse” that besides its black soil was now known to include things hidden deeper in soil – fossil fuels and minerals. Curse as it was for some, it became a blessing for others, particularly the multitude of migrants from across the empire attracted by the job opportunities that Ukraine’s growing cities created. Most of the newcomers came from Great Russia. As for the new urbanites who had migrated from within Ukraine, they were most likely ethnic Russians, Jews, or Poles, flocking to larger cities from the small towns and villages that experienced prolonged economic decline in the second half the nineteenth century. The largest cities best reflected the ongoing ethnic and social changes in late imperial Ukraine. Tables 7.9 and 7.10 show the situation as captured by the imperial census of 1897. Looking at the data of these tables, what can be said to have been new in Ukraine’s society on the eve of the new century? One can argue that the largest group of newcomers on Ukraine’s social scene were industrial workers. However, because most of them were born peasants, in most statistical surveys they are invisible. In the imperial census of 1897, as in earlier statistical surveys, ascribed social estate (Russian soslovie) was used as the main criterion of social vision and division (in both social reality and imagination).106 As can be seen from tables 7.9 and 7.10, the population of Ukraine’s largest cities was hardly fully “urban,” since peasants and soldiers (most of whom were of peasant descent) equaled or even outnumbered actual townspeople, or “burghers” (meshchane), particularly in Kyiv and Kharkiv. Another remarkable pattern is evident: the more “Jewish” a city was, the larger the proportion of actual urbanites in it (Odesa, Zhytomyr, and Katerynoslav). One can go even further and say that it was the presence of Jews that made a community in Ukraine “urban.” The case in point is Odesa, which had the largest number of Jewish residents as well as the highest proportion of burghers (meshchane) among the empire’s large cities, excepting Warsaw. Many of these burghers did indeed engage in “modern” activities, but they differed markedly from the economically successful, politically influential, and culturally liberal European “bourgeoisie.” Aside from a

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Table 7.9 | National composition of selected cities, in thousands and percentages, 1897

Cities

Russians

Ukrainians

Jews

Poles

Belarusians

Others

Total

Odesa

198,232 (49)

37,925 (9.4)

123,311 (30.5)

17,395 (4.3)

1,267 (0.3)

19,500 (4.8)

403,815 (100)

Kyiv

134,278 (54)

55,064 (22)

29,937 (12)

16,579 (6.7)

2,797 (1)

4,302 (1.7)

247,723 (100)

Kharkiv

109,914 (63)

45,092 (26)

9,848 (5.6)

3,969 (2.3)

612 (0.3)

2,594 (1.5)

173,989 (100)

Zhytomyr

16,944 (25.7)

9,152 (13.8)

30,572 (46)

7,464* (11)

36 (0)

1,727 (2.6)

65,895 (100)

Katerynoslav

47,140 (41.7)

17,787 (15.7)

39,979 (35)

3,418 (3)

1,383 (1.2)

1,646 (1.4)

112,839 (100)

Mykolaiv

58,023 (63)

7,760 (8.4)

17,949 (19.5)

2,612 (2.8)

191 (0.2)

5,477 (6)

92,012 (100)

Iuzivka

23,822† (84.8)

n/a

3,168 (11.3)

?

?

1,086 (3.8)

28,076 (100)

* Another source has Poles as 20% of the population of Zhytomyr in 1904. † This figure probably includes Ukrainians. More precise data on Iuzivka has been unavailable. By contrast, data for Bakhmut district, which included Iuzivka, can be found in materials on Katerynoslav province in the 1897 census.

Source: Lindner, Unternehmer und Stadt, 41; Vseobshchaia perepis’ naseleniia Rossiiskoi imperii 1897, vols 8, 13, 16, 46, 47.

small group of wealthy merchants, the urban classes in much of imperial Russia, comprised largely of humble burghers and artisans, were culturally, socially, and economically marginalized. On top of that, they became the target of vile ridicule by Russian journalists and writers, many of whom used the terms meshchane and meshchanstvo to indicate Philistinism and narrow-mindedness. The growing professional

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Table 7.10 | Social composition of selected cities, in thousands and percentages, 1897 Social estates

Odesa

Kyiv

Kharkiv

Katerynoslav

Zhytomyr

Hereditary nobles

11,661 (2.9)

18,704 (7.5)

8,975 (5)

3,895 (3.4)

5,620 (8.5)

Personal nobles and officials

10,647 (2.6)

12,605 (5)

7,715 (4.4)

3,164 (2.8)

2,892 (4.4)

Clerical estate

1,814 (0.4)

3,772 (1.5)

1,914 (1.1)

1,435 (1.3)

857 (1.3)

Venerable citizens

4,513 (1.1)

5,067 (2)

3,680 (2.1)

1,133 (1)

619 (0.9)

Merchants

4,965 (1.2)

5,064 (2)

3,585 (2)

2,364 (2)

888 (1.3)

Burghers

232,561 (57.5)

97,801 (39.4)

58,572 (33.6)

61,940 (55)

44,063 (66.8)

Peasants

109,553 (27)

96,985 (39)

85,114 (49)

37,470 (33.2)

9,937 (15)

Without estate/ unknown

47 (0)

2,587 (1)

1,623 (0.9)

296 (0.2)

437 (0.6)

Foreigners

19,422 (4.8)

4, 302 (1.7)

1,751 (1)

1,068 (0.9)

355 (0.5)

403,815

247,723

173,989

112,839

65,895

Totals

Source: Lindner, Unternehmer und Stadt, 42.

class and urban intelligentsia largely originated from the nobility, the raznochintsy (“people of various ranks”), and – increasingly and perhaps surprisingly – the peasant rather than burgher estate (one would be hard-pressed to name more than a few prominent Ukrainian intellectuals or public figures coming from that unfairly reviled social estate).

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Ukraine’s large cities could also be seen as multiethnic islands surrounded by an “alien” sea – that is, a countryside populated predominantly by Ukrainian peasants. Yet, as we have seen, this peasant sea had hardly any influence on the urban islands within it, beyond feeding their cosmopolitan residents or occasionally threatening them with crime, pogroms, or riots. It should not be surprising, then, that as these cities became less Ukrainian, the “urban” professions, such as medicine, law, higher education, and engineering, were increasingly dominated by non-Ukrainians – above all by Russians, Jews, Poles, and Germans. Administrative posts, too, were held mostly by Russians, Germans, and Poles.107 Russians, as well as Germans, were also highly overrepresented among the higher echelons of the military and police. Ethnic Ukrainians who succeeded in entering the liberal professions and general administration were likely to self-identify as “Russians,” as reflected in the census of 1897. By contrast, most Ukrainians continued to work in agriculture or in the lowest-paying urban jobs, while more mobile minorities dominated the white-collar urban job market. That picture remained so constant that it seemed immune to change. Ukrainians continued to be the least urbanized community in Ukraine: of every 1,000 urban residents, only 98 were Ukrainians, compared to 112 Germans, 203 Poles, 371 Russians, and 727 Jews.108 As shown above, the Ukrainian presence was weakest in the south and southeast, the most urbanized regions of Ukraine, and strongest in the Poltava and Kharkiv provinces, regions of small towns and relatively low levels of urbanization overall. At century’s end, the peasantry remained not only the largest social group but an absolute majority of Ukraine’s population: 84% in 1897. By all available accounts, the specifically Ukrainian community in late imperial Ukraine appeared to be socially incomplete and economically disadvantaged, in comparison to the socially diverse and economically mobile society of late imperial Ukraine, which included various “mobilized diasporas” (in John Armstrong’s sense). Did Ukrainians make inroads into the modern professions? In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, education did radically expand the pool of skilled professionals in Ukraine. Although never becoming a legally defined occupational group in the empire, several categories of professionals – for instance, lawyers and doctors – acquired some corporate rights and a certain ethos. Another word, however, came to encompass those engaged in mental labor in Russia – intelligentsia – but that word referred above all to educated individuals with keen social awareness who took a critical view of the government. It emphatically

318

Ukraine, 1876–1914

excluded government officials, unless they secretly wrote novels or belonged to a political underground. While professionals and the intelligentsia were not identical groups or categories, both defined themselves by service to society rather than to the state per se.109 Moreover, radical members of the intelligentsia dominated the leadership of virtually all professions in imperial Russia.110 Both formally trained professionals and self-proclaimed members of the intelligentsia benefitted from the empire’s expansion of secondary and postsecondary education. In Ukraine they were nearly all graduates of its three universities, hundreds of classical high schools (gymnasia), and dozens of commercial and technical colleges. By 1914, there were more than three hundred gymnasia and about forty technical (“real”) secondary schools in Russian-ruled Ukraine.111 About 27,000 students were attending nineteen institutions of higher learning, and another 7,600 were enrolled in sixty-one specialized secondary schools.112 The Ukrainian provinces could boast a fairly sizable class of people with postsecondary degrees: according to the 1897 census, 24,000 men and women had higher education and 7,000 were graduates of commercial or technical colleges. Together they were just 0.2% of Ukraine’s total population, which today seems miniscule but at the time was a higher proportion than in many other parts of the empire. Ukraine was also home to 22.7% of Russia’s teachers, 19% of its medical personnel, 22.5% of its lawyers and notaries, and 13.6% of its scholars, writers, and artists.113 There was even a quasi-university for women in Kyiv, formally titled “Higher Courses for Women” (Vysshie zhenskie kursy; 1878– 89, 1906–17). By the time of the 1917 revolution, several thousand young women had been educated there. Although only a minority of them found work in the male-dominated professional world, by all accounts the number of women working in professional occupations in imperial Russia was higher than in Europe. One notable graduate was Oleksandra Iefymenko (1848–1918). Born in Russia, Iefymenko married an exiled Ukrainian radical populist and later moved to Ukraine with him. There she developed a professional interest in Ukrainian ethnography and history and became a regular contributor to Ukraine’s premier historical journal, Kievskaia starina (Kyiv Antiquities; 1882– 1907). In 1906, she published the first survey of Ukrainian history, Istoriia ukrainskogo naroda (A History of the Ukrainian People), which, according to Andreas Kappeler, “remains to this day the best Russianlanguage history of Ukraine.”114 Iefymenko was the first woman scholar in the Russian Empire to become a professor at an institution of higher

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learning (“Higher Courses for Women in St Petersburg,” 1907–17) and the first woman in eastern and central Europe to be awarded a doctorate in history (honoris causa, Kharkiv University, 1910). Higher education remained one of few long-standing preserves of noble privilege in late imperial Ukraine, although increasing numbers of non-nobles were among the students as well. As the ranks of the intelligentsia expanded, its social profile became more diverse and also more humble. Although the intelligentsia had its origins in the late-eighteenth-century nobility, by the early twentieth century nobles comprised only 20 to 25 per cent of its new members. More and more of them were now raznochintsy, “people of various ranks” (essentially, educated non-nobles), which would lead to the popular, albeit mistaken, identification of the intelligentsia as social radicals. The latter group encompassed village school teachers, agronomists, struggling artists, beginning writers, and dissident journalists. In effect, it was the lowest level of the intelligentsia that provided the all-Russian revolutionary movement with its most radical and fearless adepts. In this regard Vladimir Ulianov (aka Lenin), son of a well-to-do school inspector and a graduate in law, was something of an exception among the social radicals, where a person like Joseph Dzhugashvili (aka Joseph Stalin), son of a poor shoemaker from Georgia and himself an Orthodox seminary dropout, was the norm. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the most plebeian members of the intelligentsia, often the sons and daughters of peasants, were also the social core of the Ukrainian national movement. A prominent example was the taboo-breaking writer and unabashed socialist Volodymyr Vynnychenko. A poor peasant’s son, Vynnychenko never finished university, owing to his passion for revolution and resulting stints in prison – revolutionary “credentials” that would help him become head of the Ukrainian revolutionary government in 1917. Another famous example was Vynnychenko’s old comrade and one-time rival Symon Petliura, the theater critic who would become the unlikely military commander of the Ukrainian People’s Republic. Petliura, a burgher’s son, was expelled from an Orthodox seminary for revolutionary activity, as Stalin had been a couple of years earlier. As another Ukrainian revolutionary statesman recalled: “to find a Ukrainian who was a second-generation intelligent was rare. Most had just emerged from the village.”115 Not only were the newest members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia of very modest social origins; they also made up a very small minority of the intelligentsia in Ukraine. Citing from the 1897 imperial census

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Ukraine, 1876–1914

and 1917 Kyiv city census, Bohdan Krawchenko attributed that situation to the preponderance of impoverished peasants in Ukraine’s social structure and an elitist and Russian-speaking educational system. In 1897, only 16% of lawyers, fewer than 25% of teachers, and 10% of writers and artists belonged to the Ukrainian nationality, defined by native language. Of the 127,000 people listed in the census as engaged in non-physical labor, less than a third were Ukrainian; only among those holding positions in zemstvos and other local institutions (clerks, secretaries, agronomists, and the like) did Ukrainians, at 57%, constitute a majority. Of people with some secondary or higher education (258,000), only 18% declared themselves to be Ukrainian.116 As late as 1917, only 11% of Kyiv’s student population gave Ukrainian as their nationality. All these figures reflect the numerical weakness and low social capital of the Ukrainian national movement. Other factors may have been the Ukrainian national idea’s low level of attraction and its largely cultural expression, which alienated the intelligentsia’s most radically minded members. Krawchenko notes two other structural weaknesses within the Ukrainian intelligentsia. First, few Ukrainians belonged to the educated upper middle class, and of those few who were engaged in non-manual labor, three-quarters were “para-professionals” found among the modest rural intelligentsia. Second, the Ukrainian intelligentsia and the professional class were disproportionately concentrated on the Left Bank: 45% of Ukrainian civil servants and over 40% of teachers lived in the provinces of Chernihiv, Poltava, and, to a lesser degree, Kharkiv. In other parts of present-day Ukraine, the proportion of Ukrainians in the liberal professions and civil service was insignificant. On the positive side, Ukrainians who did serve in administrative positions (just 6% of educated Ukrainians, excluding those serving in zemstvos or on city councils), frequently used their offices to the benefit of Ukrainian activists and underprivileged communities.117 What helped these conscientious bureaucrats were patron-client networks, rampant corruption, and the poorly defined chain of command in the imperial bureaucracy, from the top down. Ukrainians also proved to be marginal in the area considered the engine of modernity in the post-reform Russian Empire, namely, commerce. In contrast to the pre-reform era, when commercial pursuits were the domain of old-school guild merchants, from the 1860s they were joined by enterprising nobles and professionals, including bankers, lawyers, university professors, brokers, and industrialists. We have already noted several entrepreneurial families whose wealth derived

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largely from grain production and sugar processing in Ukraine, among them the Tereshchenkos, Symyrenkos, Iakhnenkos, Kharytonenkos, and Brodskys. These families were originally from diverse social backgrounds – serfs, Cossacks, or Jewish burghers. As their descendants rose to join the merchant class, some were even ennobled (e.g., the Tereshchenkos). Over time, what united these families was not their social origins, ethnicity, or religion but rather their “bourgeois” economic activities and growing social and cultural aspirations. Most became generous patrons of the arts, charities, and education. In daily life, these families – Jews and Christians, Ukrainians and Russians – often mingled together in business offices, theater halls, salons, and charitable institutions. How large a group were they, and did they form a distinct Ukrainian bourgeoisie? Merchants were the core of this commercial class. Unlike the bourgeoisie elsewhere in Europe, in the Russian Empire merchants were a legally defined social estate with a distinct subculture, often passed down from one generation to the next. Typically, a merchant’s son began his career as a “store boy” at age thirteen or fourteen, transitioned from servant to shop assistant five or six years later, and then in his mid- to late twenties became a merchant himself (usually with start-up capital of three to four thousand rubles). From the mid-nineteenth century that career path was typical among Russian merchant families that settled in Ukraine. When compared to the general population, the growth of the merchant class was especially impressive: between 1815 and 1833, Ukraine’s general population increased by 16%, whereas the merchant class grew by 77%.118 By 1861, Odesa, Kyiv, and Kharkiv had become the leading trade centers in Ukraine. The merchant class was growing, thanks largely to the third guild that united small-scale merchants, most of whom came from the ranks of entrepreneurial peasants and burghers: joining the merchant guild freed them from hated military recruitment. After the abolition of the third guild in 1863 in the context of other social reforms, the number of guild merchants in European Russia (excepting Poland and Finland) began to drop: from 235,700 male merchants in 1863 to 116,400 in 1897.119 As the laws governing Russia’s economy were liberalized, more and more business people opted not to join a merchant guild. However, merchants still dominated commerce in most of Ukraine: in 1897, the number of officially registered merchants and their family members in the nine “Ukrainian” provinces numbered 67,709. The largest merchant communities were in Kyiv (5,064), Odesa (4,965), Kharkiv (3,585), Katerynoslav (2,364), Kremenchuk

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(1,527), Berdychiv (1,446), Mykolaïv (1,424), Poltava (1,192), and Ielysavethrad (1,047). Merchants accounted for 2.19% of Ukraine’s total urban population (3,085,000), a higher proportion than the average in Russia overall, which was 1.3%. In several smaller cities which were centers of trade fairs and interregional trade, the proportion of merchants exceeded Ukraine’s average: 2.42% in Kremenchuk, 2.68% in Romny, 2.7% in Berdychiv, and 3.57% in Pavlohrad. In Ukraine, most merchants and their family members were Jewish (37,863 – 56%), followed by Russians (19,626 – 30%) and Ukrainians (4,672 – 7%). Among its guild merchants there were also smaller communities of Germans (1,971), Tatars (1,457), Armenians (663), Poles (494), and Greeks (424). Jewish merchants dominated in every province except Kharkiv, where Russians, distantly followed by Ukrainians, were more numerous: 3,965 Russians (64.2%) and 1,126 Ukrainians (18.2%) vs. 748 Jews (12%). Ukrainian merchants were the majority only in a few district centers of Kharkiv province, among them Okhtyrka, Bohodukhiv, and Izium. In the city of Kharkiv, however, Russian merchants remained dominant, as they were from at least the early 1800s.120 The prevalence of Jews among merchants cannot be explained by the economic proclivities of local Jews alone: another and more plausible reason was social pressure. For a discriminated minority like Jews in Ukraine, membership in a merchant guild allowed circumventing many legal curtailments on things like choice of residence and freedom of movement. There is considerable evidence that Jewish merchants were instrumental in supplying cash to local trade fairs and accelerating economic growth in the Ukrainian provinces overall. Why were Ukrainian merchants eclipsed by their Russian and Jewish peers? Setting aside social mysticism and stereotypes such as Ukrainians’ inherent lack of entrepreneurial skills, several reasons are possible: Ukraine’s proverbial black soil curse (mystical economics, of a sort); the predominance of corvée prior to 1861; the historical weakness of towns and burghers in Ukraine (a legacy of Poland-Lithuania); the tsarist government’s preferential treatment of Russian merchants; and the lack of available credit. Of course, there were exceptions, evidenced by the wealth and social influence of the above-mentioned Ukrainian capitalist families, which easily rivaled those of many Russian and Jewish merchants. Also, the traders and captains of industry did not all belong to the merchant class. For instance, the “Little Russian Columbus” Oleksandr Pol' was not a merchant but a landed noble, as were a number of wealthy entrepreneurs engaged in international trade

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in Odesa. Many traders and industrialists came from the professional classes, ranging from lawyers to university professors. On the eve of the twentieth century, less than one-third of entrepreneurs (those paying the special “industrial tax”) were merchants by social estate.121 Late imperial Ukraine’s proverbial “capitalists” were in fact a very heterogeneous and modern class that united people of different ethnicities, social backgrounds, and occupations. A final question: was there a Ukrainian “national bourgeoisie” in the sense that Marxists used the term? Even in Soviet Ukraine, some academics were uneasy about that concept. In the 1930s, a young historian named Oleksandr Ohloblyn, later an émigré in the US, preferred to write about the “Ukrainian territorial bourgeoisie” (my italics – Sb ). This class, he claimed, defended Ukraine’s economic interests in the face of the central government’s unfavorable economic policies (e.g., choosing to construct railroad lines that tied Ukraine to Russia, against the interests of local traders and industrialists). However, Ohloblyn did mention “a new Ukrainian national bourgeoisie” on the eve of the 1905 revolution, one represented by “radical-democratic” parties: The Ukrainian national bourgeoisie not only protested against the economic policy of the Russian Empire with respect to Ukraine but also made national-political demands, putting Ukraine’s autonomy or even independence on the agenda. One should not, of course, exaggerate an objective revolutionary role by this national Ukrainian bourgeoisie. Because it was economically weaker than the territorial Ukrainian bourgeoisie, it could not act as strongly or as independently.122 According to Ohloblyn, the societal basis for a national bourgeoisie was “certain layers of Ukrainian townspeople and the upper crust of the peasantry.” In the early twentieth century, a leading ideologist of that alleged national bourgeoisie was the historian and civic activist Mykhailo Hrushevs'kyi, who demanded a sovereign economic policy for Ukraine. Ohloblyn tried hard to prove the existence of the Ukrainian national bourgeoisie by showing its difference from the Ukrainian territorial bourgeoisie: while the latter supported some demands for Ukraine’s autonomy for purely economic reasons, the former “raised the question of Ukraine’s economic autonomy in its entirety, using it as a basis for their plans of the national liberation of Ukraine.” In other words, for a national bourgeoisie Ukraine’s economy was a national problem, rather than a territorial one. 123

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Not everyone was as convinced about the role of a national bourgeoisie. Ohloblyn’s contemporary, the economist Dmytro Bovanenko, was among those who had doubts. Bovanenko also did something unorthodox for a Soviet scholar: he praised a “Jewish bourgeoisie” for its role in protecting the internal market of late imperial Ukraine. “The Jewish bourgeoisie brought to Ukraine the habits, skills, and agility, the connections with the world market, and above all it was in the vanguard of the European capital that was moving eastward … The Jewish bourgeoisie played a prominent role in Ukraine’s international relations and strongly resisted the advance of Russian capital in Ukraine,” wrote the young economist, who soon would perish in the Gulag.124 At the same time, Bovanenko had a low opinion of the Ukrainian “national bourgeoisie” as economically and numerically weak, and placed in a “colonial position.” Both Ohloblyn and Bovanenko, like a majority of their colleagues, were forced to reckon with the Soviet Marxists, who preached the existence of the Ukrainian national bourgeoisie and, by extension, Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism, a term used by Soviet ideological warriors continuously from the 1920s. It seems, however, that a Ukrainian national bourgeoisie, as a Marxist class “in itself” and “for itself,” never actually existed. What did exist was a network of a few dozen wealthy families of various social backgrounds that contributed immensely not only to Ukraine’s cosmopolitan society but also to Ukrainian national culture and the Ukrainian political movement. Omeljan Pritsak was among the first historians of Ukraine to draw attention to the wealthy Ukrainian merchants, industrialists, and landed nobles who sponsored Ukrainian culture and the national movement in Russia and Austria during the long nineteenth century. In his famously revisionist article on the occasion of the celebration of Mykhailo Hrushevs'kyi’s centennial, Pritsak argued for reassessing the role of these wealthy patrons, especially in light of the dismissive attitudes toward them held by leading populists, including Hrushevs'kyi himself.125 Pritsak reminded us that behind every cultural or political achievement in Ukraine stood a wealthy patron. He noted two wealthy aristocratic landowners from Chernihiv and Poltava provinces, Vasyl' Tarnovs'kyi (1810–1866) and Hryhorii Galagan (1819–1888), who financed almost all Ukrainian literary publications in the mid-nineteenth century. Platon Symyrenko (1821–1863), son of Fedir Symyrenko, co-founder of the Brothers Iakhnenko and Symyrenko business empire, sponsored the 1860 edition of Kobzar, Taras Shevchenko’s seminal poetic collection. Platon’s brother Vasyl' Symyrenko (1835–1915) supported

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the Ukrainian movement continually, co-founding the Shevchenko Scientific Society in Lviv in 1873 and sponsoring the publication of Kievskaia starina, as well as other cultural and political journals. Another sponsor of the Shevchenko Scientific Society was Countess Ielyzaveta Myloradovych-Skoropads’ka (1832–1890), aunt of the tsarist general Pavlo Skoropads'kyi, later hetman of the Ukrainian state. The entrepreneurial landowner Ievhen Chykalenko (1861–1929) nearly singlehandedly funded Rada, the most important of Ukrainian political periodicals and the only Ukrainian-language daily published in Russian Ukraine (1906–1914). A number of so-called capitalists also supported expensive public projects – museums, schools, theaters, cultural venues – that benefitted both ethnic Ukrainians and the wider community. The industrialist and landowner Oleksandr Pol', obsessed with the legacy of the Zaporozhian Cossacks as much as with iron ore deposits, founded the Archeological-Historical Museum in Katerynoslav. In keeping with Vienna-style liberalism, Kyiv’s Municipal Museum (aka Museum of Antiquities and Arts) was a joint venture of several wealthy families of Christian and Jewish background, including the Tereshchenkos, Khanenkos, and Brodskys. These same families also helped fund the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, the liberal and technocratic alternative to Kyiv University, known as a bastion of Russian nationalists and imperial conservatives. Another beneficiary was the Kyiv Literacy Society, financed largely by the “sugar king” Lazar’ Brodsky and headed by a renowned Ukrainophile, Volodymyr Naumenko. Instead of thinking in terms of a Ukrainian national or even territorial bourgeoisie, we would do well to envision local, often ad hoc arrangements between various types of “bourgeoisie” and the nobility – that is, the propertied classes – whether in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Katerynoslav, Odesa, or other cities. Such arrangements often produced interethnic alliances in a shared public sphere. Money was uniting wealthy people and at the same time also setting them apart from their poorer compatriots, be they Ukrainian, Russian, or Jewish.

li ve fa St, d i e y o Un g : b i r th , d ea th , fa mi ly , a n d g e n d e r What united the rich and the poor was death. Yet even in that people were not equal, for death came from different causes and at different ages, distinguishing the rich from the poor, men from women, peasants from

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townspeople, boys from girls, Jews from Gentiles.126 Death, especially death in the city, marked a gruesome dark side of urban modernity: high mortality rates and low life expectancy. In the 1860s through ’80s, the mortality rate in Ukraine fluctuated between 32 and 35 deaths per 1,000 people; by the mid-1890s, it had gradually decreased to 31.7 per thousand. Another telling statistic is that over the period 1867–1914, the average annual number of deaths per thousand in Ukraine was 29.8, which was consistently lower than the average of 33.7 per thousand in European Russia overall. The highest mortality rates were found in the most industrialized provinces of Great Russia – Vladimir, Samara, Moscow, Nizhnii Novgorod, Perm’ – evidence that backbreaking factory work as well as life in unsanitary urban conditions killed faster than traditional agricultural work, regardless of how “backward” or “unmodern” the latter seemed to be. Town air brought freedom, but also an early death. Among the nine “Ukrainian” provinces, the highest mortality rate during those decades was in Kharkiv province (32.7 per thousand), the lowest in Taurida (27.6) and Poltava (28.4).127 Curiously, newly industrialized Katerynoslav province had a relatively low average mortality rate (31), which fell even lower (to 26 and then 22) during the apex of industrial development in the region between 1896 and 1913. Death affected not only certain regions but certain ethnic and religious communities differently. Death rates increased as one moved from west to east and from south to north across the empire, from 14 to 17 deaths per thousand in the Baltic regions to more than 40 in the Urals. It is difficult to establish death rates for particular nationalities; more readily discernable are those for particular religious communities. For instance, the 1897 census contains data establishing the following mortality rates for European Russia’s major religious communities (in deaths per thousand):128 Orthodox – 34.8; Muslims – 27.7; Catholics – 22.3; Protestants – 21.0; Jews – 17.0 The relatively low death rates of the empire’s Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, many of whom lived in what today is Ukraine, undoubtedly lowered death rates of “Ukrainian” provinces. But the main reason that the mortality in Ukraine fell so significantly in the new century – to 26 cases per thousand between 1901 and 1910, and 22.7 per thousand between 1911 and 1914 – lay elsewhere. That was the dramatic drop in the rate of infant deaths, which had decimated the populations of Ukraine and Russia for decades. Before the twentieth century, babies died in extraordinarily large numbers, particularly in the second half of their first year, when infants were no longer fed largely with maternal

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milk. In 1896–1900, for instance, on average 199 of every thousand newborns did not live more than a year.129 As late as 1908–10, despite a considerable decline in infant mortality in the early twentieth century, deaths of children before the age of five accounted for three-fifths of all deaths in European Russia. According to other data, in 1901 Russia had 27.2 infant deaths for every one hundred newborns, the worst under-one mortality rate of any country in the world except Mexico. Only in 1907–11 was there a significant decrease in European Russia’s infant mortality, to 24.4 per hundred newborns.130 During that same time, five of the nine “Ukrainian” provinces – Taurida, Podolia, Volhynia, Katerynoslav, and Poltava – had the lowest infant mortality rates in European Russia, that is, 162 to 179 per thousand newborns (16–18%); only the four Baltic provinces had lower ones.131 In parallel with overall mortality rates, the highest infant mortality rates (ca. 30% and above) were in central and northern Russia, especially in the Perm', Nizhnii Novgorod, Vyatka, Tver', Simbirsk, and Moscow provinces that were the traditional hubs of industrial production. The children of urban workers continued to die in greater numbers than the children of peasants and other social groups. In both urban and rural areas small children were often neglected by parents who were more concerned about their own survival and that of their older children who could already work. Some observers commented that despite the proliferation of cheese-making in the countryside in the early 1900s, many peasant families produced milk and butter for sale while their infants starved to death. An important factor in such situations was women’s literacy: the higher percentage of literate women in a given province, the lower its under-five mortality rate.132 Of course, both children and adults died of various causes – biological, economic, social, cultural, hygienic, and others. For centuries, famines and infectious diseases had been especially virulent killers. In Ukraine as late as in 1911–13, diphtheria killed 22,000 people, measles over 20,000, an unspecified typhus over 11,000, typhoid fever over 6,000, smallpox over 3,000, and spotted fever over 2,000;133 these figures actually showed considerable improvement over the numbers of deaths in previous decades. Nonetheless, the prevalence of these diseases remained worse in Ukraine than in other regions of European Russia, as table 7.11 shows. Males and females tended to die at different ages, depending on their socioeconomic situations. For instance, urban working-age males were almost twice as likely to die as their peers in the countryside. Overall,

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Table 7.11 | Communicable diseases in Ukraine per 10,000 people, 1910–14 Typhoid

Typhus

Dysentery

Diphtheria

Ukraine

41.2

10.9

29.6

45.9

European Russia

23.4

5.4

22.6

20.4

Source: Kononenko, Ukraine and Russia, 228.

working males also lived two years less, evidence that living (and working) conditions for urban workers were often more lethal. Male deaths prevailed over female deaths in another crucial cohort, that is, among infants under the age of one: between 1867 and 1881, there were 388.4 male infant deaths per thousand, in comparison to 350.7 female infant deaths. That ratio remained essentially unchanged in 1908–10, even as the overall infant mortality rate increased: 397.3 male deaths and 363.4 female deaths per thousand.134 In almost all other age groups, female deaths predominated, a fact which had social and cultural reasons. If cities proved especially deadly for working men, the countryside was more lethal for women, despite its generally healthier way of life. In the countryside women died owing to harsh living conditions, hard work, and the lack of health care. The mortality rate among females was higher at every age, whether in childhood, maturity, or old age. In the countryside, female mortality was higher than male mortality; that difference increased between the age of 10 and 14 and remained high until the end of life.135 The lives of Ukrainian women, their bodies often emaciated and exhausted by hard work, were shorter than those of Russian and European women. Curiously enough, for reasons unknown, the mortality rate of Jewish women in the cohort aged 21 to 50 was substantially higher not only from that of Jewish men but also from that of the Christian population.136 The high mortality rate among Ukrainian women can be explained by the heavy agricultural and household duties they were expected to perform (more than twenty), especially in wealthier rural households.137

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Table 7.12 | Birth rates in the Ukrainian provinces per 1,000 people, 1861–1913 Province

1861–65

1876–80

1896–1900

1911–13

Katerynoslav

55.5

52.4

55.2

47.7

Kharkiv

53.1

49.7

50.4

43.9

Taurida

49.0

49.6

47.5

42.8

Kherson

53.5

44.9

48.1

39.8

Chernihiv

54.9

46.1

47.2

39.7

Volhynia

46.9

48.6

48.0

39.5

Kyiv

46.7

51.3

47.7

37.5

Podolia

45.7

47.9

46.2

36.7

Poltava

53.8

46.3

45.0

36.5

Source: A.G. Rashin, Naselenie Rossii za 100 let (1811–1913): Statisticheskie ocherki (Moscow, 1956), chap. 6, tables 122 and 123.

Another factor might have been that daily life and work on the individual peasant farms typical of Ukraine required more physical energy than in the collective land tenure – obshchina, or repartitional commune – so widespread in Great Russia138 However, it appears that women’s lives and work in Great Russia actually differed little from that in Ukraine. The overall rate of death in Ukraine was more than balanced by high rates of birth, as reflected in table 7.12. The birth rate in Ukraine was consistently higher than in Europe: ca. 50 per thousand in the 1860s, compared to 40 per thousand in Austria and Prussia, 35–36 in Italy and Great Britain, and just 27 in France. Even on the eve of World War I, Ukraine’s average birth rate of 40–42 per thousand was surprisingly high. In the average number of births per thousand, between 1861 and 1913 the most “fertile” province in Ukraine – Katerynoslav, with an average birth rate of 52.9 per thousand – ranked seventh among European Russia’s fifty provinces. In Ukraine it was followed by the provinces of Kharkiv (49.2), Taurida

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(47.7), Volhynia, Kyiv, and Chernihiv (47.2 in each), Kherson (46.6), Podolia (45.7), and Poltava (44.8). Like nearly everywhere in the world in the late nineteenth century, economic growth and rapid urbanization slowed the high birth rate in Ukraine, from 44 to 40 per thousand, even as the absolute number of births continued to rise, from 1,243,300 in 1906 to 1,260,000 in 1911. Despite the notable decline in Ukraine’s birth rate between 1860 and 1910, from 50 to 40 per thousand, it remained much higher there than in Europe; by contrast, on the eve of the World War I, the birth rate in Germany was 27–28 per thousand, in Great Britain and Sweden 23–24, and in France 18–19.139 These vital statistics also varied according to different religious communities: around 1910, the highest birth rates were among the Orthodox and Muslims (47 per thousand), followed by Catholics (30.5), Protestants (22.3), and Jews (21.7).140 These figures also shed light on why the three right-bank provinces, each with a high percentage of Jewish residents, had lower birth rates as well. However, they do not explain why Poltava province, populated almost exclusively by ethnic Ukrainians, had the lowest birth rate in Ukraine. A very likely factor was the acute shortage of land in this agrarian heartland of Ukraine, as well as a continuous emigration of people of childbearing age to newly colonized lands in the Caucasus and beyond the Urals. In general, the declining birth rates of the early twentieth century were brought about by various socioeconomic and cultural changes: the growing well-being of some groups (peasant entrepreneurs among them), the impoverishment and emigration of other groups (landless peasants, Jews), rapid urbanization (in cities people always had fewer children), and the recurrent famines and poor harvests that adversely affected birth rates in the countryside. There was a visible correlation between years of famine (especially the larger ones in 1891, 1906, and 1911) and falling birth rates in Ukraine. And yet, as we have seen, until the beginning of World War I Ukraine continuously topped the list of European countries with the highest birth rates. In the early 1900s, another key indicator – the cumulative fertility rate, or average number of children born per woman over her lifetime – was also extraordinarily high in Ukraine: between 6.5 and 7.5, among the highest in the world.141 These high birth rates, alongside equally high marriage rates, assured that Ukraine’s natural population increase exceeded that of most European countries, despite high infant mortality and accelerated emigration from Ukraine (i.e., peasants departing for Siberia, Central Asia, and the Far East, as well as Jews going overseas). The dramatic interplay of high birth rates and

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death rates led to a rapid change of generations in Ukraine that had direct bearing on politics, economy, and culture. In effect, many people had no choice but to live fast and die young. Low life expectancy was yet another indicator that put Russian-ruled Ukraine at the bottom of European quality-of-life rankings. In the early 1900s, the average life expectancy at birth for male newborns was fifteen years lower and for female newborns seventeen years lower than in Denmark, Sweden, France, the United States, Germany, or Italy. In Ukraine only 57 of 100 fifteen-year-old boys lived to 60; in England that figure was 58, and in Sweden 66. In the late 1890s, less than two-thirds of newborns in Ukraine lived past the age of 5. Death did not much loosen its grip on those who survived childhood; half of males died before turning 32, and half of females before 36.142 Remarkably, however, these figures were better than the averages in European Russia, where for males they were 29 and for females 31.143 For those who survived infancy and childhood – the most dangerous periods in life – average life expectancy increased: to 44.5 years for males and 43.7 years for females. Only for the cohort of older males did the death rate began to resemble that of the equivalent cohort in Western countries, primarily because, for men at least, living and working conditions in rural Ukraine, where the majority of the population still lived, were nevertheless better than the urban squalor of male industrial workers in the West.144 If a person was fortunate enough to survive childhood and adolescence, he or she was almost certainly married by age 25 (most males between 18 and 25, and most females between 16 and 23), owing to economic necessity and a traditional culture that frowned upon unmarried adults, especially women.145 In many parts of Ukraine a woman who was still single at 20 was considered an “old maid” (zastarila). In this respect, Ukraine did not differ much from European Russia, where in post-reform decades 84 to 86% of all brides were younger than 25 and more than half – 57 to 59% – were younger than 20; the corresponding figures for grooms were 67 to 69% and 37–38%. A significant minority of men (17 to 20%) married at 30 and older, but only a small minority of women (7 to 9%) married at that age. Those figures remained essentially unchanged in the new century: as late as 1910, an absolute majority of brides (85.5%) and most grooms (67%) were 25 or younger, testimony to the persistence of traditional culture and values in much of European Russia, including Ukraine. To be sure, these marriage patterns were more dominant in the countryside than in the multiethnic cities and towns. For instance, in the countryside 56.7%

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of brides were 20 or younger, in towns 43% were, and in large cities just 35.5% were. In the cities men married at a later age as well. For instance, 52% of bridegrooms aged 26 and older lived in major cities, and only 30.7% in the countryside.146 Unsurprisingly, Jews, the most urbanized community in Ukraine, tended to marry at a later age than the overwhelmingly rural Ukrainians: 76.4% of Jewish brides and 42.9% of Jewish grooms were not yet 25, percentages considerably lower than for the general population.147 In fact, in European Russia the mean age of marriage varied significantly from one community to another. For instance, for Orthodox Christians the mean age was 24.2 for males and 21.3 for females; for Catholics, that was 29.1 for males and 23.3 for females; for Protestants, 28.5 for males and 24.6 for females; and for Jews, 27.5 and 24.1 respectively (data for 1896–1904).148 The more industrialized and urbanized an area, the later the age at which its residents got married. That was a consequence not only of increased access to postsecondary education and professional careers but also of urban poverty and competition for jobs (especially among Jews), which tended to oblige young men and women to defer marriage. In this respect, how different was the Russian Empire, including Ukraine, from other European countries? Russia as a whole had by far the largest share of early marriages, in the same range as the Balkan nations of Serbia and Bulgaria. For example, in the 1870s and early ’80s, bridegrooms younger than 20 comprised 38% of all husbands-to-be in Russia, compared to only 3.4% in England, 2.4% in France, and 0.1% in Sweden. The figures for brides under the age of 20 were 58.9% in Russia, compared to 21.2% in France, 14.4% in England, and 5.5% in Sweden. In the early 1900s, the percentage of bridegrooms under the age of 21 in European Russia remained among the highest in Europe: 30.2%, second to Serbia (37.6%) but much higher than in Belgium (5.3%), England (4%), Holland (3.6%), and Germany (0.6%). For brides under 21 the percentages were similar to those of thirty years before: 54% in Russia, 57% in Serbia, 20.5% in Belgium, 16.4% in Germany, 13.9% in England, and 13.3% in Holland.149 As Ukraine’s population increased, so did the number of marriages, from 160,000–200,000 marriages annually in the second half of the nineteenth century to 250,000 annually on the eve of World War I. Most marriages took place in the countryside, where, ca. 1897, the absolute majority (86.8%) of Ukraine’s population lived. At that time, only one-tenth of all marriages were initiated in urban areas; that proportion grew to 15.4%, by 1910, which essentially simply reflected

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the general increase in urban residents. The overall marriage rate, that is, the annual number of marriages per 1,000 inhabitants, continued to be very high in Ukraine – during several prewar decades it fluctuated between 8 and 10%,150 which was among the highest in Europe, behind only Serbia, Rumania, Bulgaria, and Hungary. Particularly in the countryside, nearly every adult man and woman in Ukraine was married: fewer than 5% of men and a slightly higher percentage of women remained single until the age of 45–49. The percentages of married women 15 years of age and older was particularly high in three Ukrainian provinces: 69.3% in Kharkiv, 68.8% in Katerynoslav, and 68.3% in Taurida province, percentages that were among the highest in European Russia.151 The older a person was, the more difficult it was to find a spouse. In the countryside, older men and women were often called “gray” or “worn-out” (pidtoptani), a label that made marriage hopes all but hopeless. The age difference between a husband and wife was usually no more than three or four years, particularly among rural Ukrainians.152 That difference tended to be considerably higher in repeat marriages, which normally followed the death of a previous spouse (given that divorce was extremely rare). Between 1886 and 1910, about 15% of men and 10% of woman married a second time (Jewish second marriages were much more common – up to 41.7 % in the late 1860s).153 As in other family matters, second marriages reflected gender inequality: while widowers tended to marry previously unmarried (that is, younger) brides (true of 55% of all male second marriages), most widows (70%) married men who were themselves widowers (and thus older). Overall, widowers were 3.4 times as likely to remarry as widows were: in 1897, there were 89.7 remarriages per 1,000 widowers, in contrast to only 26.1 remarriages per 1,000 widows. Males also had the option of acquiring a second family without getting divorced or legally remarrying, which was quite common among male peasants who left their villages for cities in search of work.154 Incidentally, by the end of the century more peasant women, too, were leaving rural life in search of work in urban areas, which allowed them to live more independently, if also straining family relations. While gender differences in marital custom and practice hardly varied over time, around the mid-nineteenth century family configuration itself changed, as the nuclear family became predominant among ethnic Ukrainians as well as minorities in Ukraine. Extended family ceased to share a household economy, and now when a son married, he usually separated from his parents, built a separate house, and led his own

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household. Two married brothers now very rarely lived under the same roof, which had been quite common in times past.155 In other respects, however, Ukraine retained a traditional society. Almost every family, irrespective of ethnicity, had children, and most had a good many of them. Only 7% of all marriages were childless. In the popular perception, childlessness was a punishment for sins. To avoid that stigma, many childless couples opted to adopt a child, often their kin or an orphan from their own village. Another characteristic of traditional, essentially patriarchal rural society was life-long marriage, without the option of divorce. Although divorce was allowed by law, it was a very costly and lengthy process and therefore almost exclusively the prerogative of the upper classes and, predominantly, men with money and connections. Like marriages, divorces were administered by the religious confession to which a couple belonged. They were rarest among Catholics, owing to the Catholic Church’s notoriously restrictive stance on the issue. Jewish divorces, regulated by rabbinic authorities according to Jewish law, were the easiest to obtain – for men, that is.156 The Orthodox Church allowed divorce in theory but in practice made it nearly impossible to obtain for the great majority of its faithful. Peasants thus believed that a marriage was for life, as serfdom had been prior to 1861. In the early twentieth century, the actual divorce rate in Ukraine was just 0.6% per 100,000 people.157 However, in the next decade among the empire’s Orthodox that rate more than tripled, from 1.41 to 4.20 divorces per 1,000 marriages (i.e., from 1,171 to 8,714 divorces overall) between 1900 and 1914. The main reason was the church’s relaxation in 1904 of its rules regarding adultery.158 Particularly revealing of the more lax attitudes toward divorce and new opportunities for an urban Orthodox person to obtain one was that in St Petersburg, Moscow, and Kyiv the rate of divorce exceeded that for the empire as a whole. In Kyiv, for instance, the divorce rate grew from 0.79 to 8.30 divorces per 1,000 marriages (i.e., from 21 to 212 divorces) between 1900 and 1914.159 In the Ukrainian countryside, however, the old ways persisted: leaving a family for any reason other than one’s own demise remained unacceptable. Public opinion unequivocally condemned anyone who did, which in practice meant that married women had no alternative to putting up with domestic abuse. To make matters worse, for most religious authorities domestic violence was not sufficient reason for a legal divorce. Gradually, however, the state itself began to grant women legal separation in “exceptional cases of abuse and neglect”; in the late nineteenth century, it approved more than 40% of cases in which women petitioned for divorce against their husbands’ will.160

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In family matters overall, secular law diverged only slightly from religious norms. The Russian state legally recognized only marriages that took place in places of worship and before two witnesses. Irrespective of religious denomination, proof of marriage was a notation in the parish clerical registry (known as the “metric book”). While the state tolerated different marriage arrangements for different religious communities and treated Orthodox marriages separately from those of other Christians and non-Christians, imperial law contained norms that applied to all (or nearly all) imperial subjects. One norm concerned marriage age. At the time of marriage males had to be at least 18, while females could marry at 16. Contrary to the religious customs of the Muslim and, to a lesser degree, Jewish communities, allowing marriage at a far earlier age, Russian law banned it, except for the people of Transcaucasia, where marriageable age was considered to be 15 for males and 13 for females.161 Despite the prevalence of conservative traditions throughout Ukraine, imperial law required the mutual consent of the persons getting married and specifically forbade any coercion in that regard by parents or guardians. It also declared illegal any marriage resulting from violence. At the same time, any marriage performed without parental consent was considered illegal as well. Much of imperial civil law instituted after the mid-nineteenth century was the product of enlightened jurists, and some of its norms empowered wives and brides. For instance, one law permitted an adult daughter (22 and older) to take her parents to court if they forbade her to marry (it was in force only in Left-Bank Ukraine, however, owing to peculiarities in civil law). Particularly notable were norms regulating property (land, real estate, personal goods) held by marriage partners. Wives could legally own property independently of their husbands, since each spouse could accumulate property in his or her own right. A crucial achievement of the empire’s liberal jurists was institution of the “right to several property,” which regarded husband and wife as independent actors in terms of property ownership. Not only could a wife possess, mortgage, or sell property on her own: she was entitled to inherit a portion of her husband’s property, both movable and immovable, as well. She could also conduct trade or engage in commerce and conclude business agreements on her own. These imperial legal norms were more advanced than those in the West, where norms were influenced by the Napoleonic Code, with its legal concept of femme couverte, which did not recognize a married woman as an independent property owner. In her memoirs, the Ukrainian women’s rights advocate Zinaïda Mirna

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(1875–1950), elaborating on this progressive side of Russian law, recalled: “At a time when a European woman’s husband was the guardian and caretaker of her property, Russian law did not deprive married women of the right to their dowry and did not establish joint property ownership. Each spouse could own and accumulate personal property, and both could dispose of their assets as rightful owners. This economic independence of women from men affected mutual relations between the sexes in Ukraine, for a Ukrainian woman never experienced the kind of dependency on men that so humiliated a European woman.”162 While many norms of civil law were indeed enlightened, a few remained as vestiges from less enlightened times. There were laws preventing people older than 80 from getting married, declaring a fourth (or subsequent) marriage illegal, and banning marriages between the Orthodox and non-Christians (if the latter did not convert to Orthodoxy). Although forced marriages were prohibited by law, in reality unequal marriages concluded against the will of the bride were not unusual. “An old man of 80 can marry a 16-year old girl, and these ugly anomalies are not prevented by law, which makes them a direct mockery of any ideals,” commented the pioneering academic and women’s rights advocate Oleksandra Iefymenko.163 Aside from the all the usual trepidations of unequal marriage – a gray area in law – girls and young women generally had much less freedom than males in choosing their marriage partners; they were also more dependent on obtaining parental blessing, a major source of intergenerational conflicts within families. Several older legal provisions overtly discriminated against women. For instance, a wife was required by law to obey her husband, respect him, and otherwise please him, as well as to follow when he changed his place of service or residence. A wife needed her husband’s permission to have a separate residence or get a passport. Finally, a husband’s permission was needed for any married woman to be employed.164 Even following the deaths of their fathers and husbands, women were constrained or treated unfairly, this time in matters of inheritance. Women could come into a full inheritance only if there were no direct male heirs. Otherwise, the sister of a living brother could inherit only a one-fourteenth share of any real estate and only one-eighth of movable property (one-fourth in the case of German colonists in southern Ukraine165). A widow could inherit only one-seventh of her deceased husband’s real estate and one-fourth of his movable property. Only in 1912 did women become equal to men in terms of inheriting movable property; however, women remained unequal to men in terms of

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inheriting real estate. One discriminatory norm affected upper-class women in particular: if a noblewoman was married to a commoner, she could not pass her noble status down to their children; a nobleman in a comparable mésalliance could ennoble both his wife and their progeny.166 Also, until the end of the Old Regime in Russia, women were not full citizens, in that they could not take part in public administration or local self-government. Much of this legal and political discrimination stemmed from widely-held misogynist views. As one liberal Kyiv journalist noted in 1860, “in their views of women, most members of our society has not gone far from Turgenev’s [character] Iefrem, who thought that ‘a wife is given to a man for pleasure.’ While our high society considers a woman to be something of a toy for a man, the lower classes treat her on a par with a draft animal.”167Another source of discriminatory legal norms was the official teaching of the Russian Orthodox Church, which did not accord women independent agency.168 When it came to interfaith marriages, secular law was in line with the Church. Although the Orthodox were allowed to marry other Christians (Catholics and Protestants), such marriages were thoroughly regulated by the state. For instance, in a law enforced from the 1830s and connected with Russia’s expansion into the western borderlands, non-Orthodox brides and grooms entering into marriage with an Orthodox partner had to sign a document stating that they would raise their children in the Orthodox faith. The Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine continued jealously to guard its exclusive right to raise the progeny of mixed Orthodox-Catholic marriages until the very end of the tsarist regime.169 Actually, such interfaith marriages were uncommon; those that did exist were registered mostly on the Right Bank and usually involving the nobility. Not only were interfaith marriages quite rare: outside major cities, ethnic borderlands, and industrial areas such as the Donbas, interethnic unions between members of the Orthodox faith were unusual. Most rural communities were endogamous, because a common language, shared lives, traditional culture, local demographics, and customary law greatly limited the possibility of meeting people beyond one’s own ethnic group. Characteristically, rural Orthodox Ukrainians, Russians, and Greeks resided in separate, homogenous communities and shunned mixed marriages. Jews, in particular, were known to marry locally, often relatives.170 The situation was different in large cities like Kharkiv, Kyiv, Odesa, and Katerynoslav: there varied social groups and ethnicities could and did mingle, making them more open to interethnic marriages. Nonetheless, the overall

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number of interethnic marriages in Ukraine (including the more multiethnic southern provinces) remained very low. In 1897, for example, only 6,000 marriages could be classified as interethnic, accounting for just 2.7% of all marriages then in existence in Russian-ruled Ukraine.171 In the countryside that figure was still lower. Only in a few mixed Russian-Ukrainian villages did interethnic marriages reach 3%.172 By all accounts, Ukrainian-Russian, Ukrainian-Belarusian, or UkrainianGreek marriages were rare in much of rural Ukraine. Most instances of interethnic marriage were between people already assimilated in the culture of their spouse. As one might expect, German and Swedish colonists in southern Ukraine almost always married their own compatriots (and marriages between colonists and non-colonists were strictly regulated by the colonist administration).173 By late imperial times, society in Ukraine was indeed increasingly multiethnic, but that society did not penetrate conjugal bedrooms. Ukraine was a bulwark of the traditional family and traditional values. Its patriarchal social system was maintained jointly by the imperial state and the Church (Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant among Christians, and rabbinic authorities among Jews) well into the twentieth century. One historian has explained the survival of traditional values even after 1917 by referring to the example of the Ukrainian rural family: The model of Ukrainians’ marital behavior included high marriage intensity, the broad proliferation of early marriages, seasonal fluctuations in the marriage rate according to the agrarian and religious cycles, and the broad application of the “marriage for life” model, that is, a marriage ended only with the death of one of the spouses – all of this being typical of the preindustrial society. This marital model survived through the first decades of the twentieth century, even though the society had already embarked on a path of industrialization, which required a change of that model. Nonetheless, marital law, which was based on the principles of religious morals, in practice remained unchanged until the “great revolutionary upheaval” of the 1920s.174 Regardless of varied social and cultural developments, the peasant family in Ukraine changed only slowly. For decades that entity has been seen as the locus of national identity, morals, and culture by society itself and by scholars, who “idealized and romanticized a puritanical view of peasant life.”175 In reality, however, the traditional family included less

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appealing bedfellows – gender inequality, domestic violence, and rampant illiteracy. Recently students of Ukrainian women’s history have questioned the pervasive idea of the inherent “matriarchal nature” of Ukrainian culture and society, as a self-serving myth sometimes applied to show that historically women had a privileged status in Ukraine. The anthropologist Oksana Kis' has convincingly identified and dismantled five myths concerning a women’s position in Ukraine’s traditional family and rural society.176 First is the myth of full gender equality in the Ukrainian family accorded by customary law. Contrary to widely held yet mistaken belief, it was the man (usually the husband) and not a woman in the household who had the decisive voice in all its major matters, from the sale of a cow to the marriage of the couple’s children.177 Also, the man was almost always the exclusive source of violence in a family, at times subjecting women to bloody beatings. A second myth is that marriage was based on romantic feelings. Research conducted by Kis' shows that most marriages in Ukraine were arranged by the parents (a practice typical of all its ethnic and religious communities), and newlyweds often first saw each other on their wedding day. A third myth is the cult of premarital chastity. In reality, young girls and boys in various parts of Ukraine regularly socialized with each other at vechornytsi (“evening gatherings”), which included a ritual bedding down together as a way of training for future family life. Girls risked losing their virginity and were often physically pressured by the boys to engage in erotic and sexual games.178 A fourth myth, an idealized image of motherhood, clashed with the real life of married women, who were often pregnant and on average gave birth seven to twelve times. Unwanted children, for whom mothers could not or would not provide sufficient care and nutrition, were born in large numbers, contributing to massive infant mortality rates. Mothers lamented the death of an adolescent (understood to be capable of doing work) as a loss of additional family income, but not the death of an infant. Finally, contrary to the fifth myth, an absolute majority of women in Ukraine (mostly peasants, as we know) were illiterate. In the late nineteenth century, only 4% of women could read, compared to 11–12% of men. As in many other traditional societies, rural parents in Ukraine did not favor education for girls, preferring that they work in the fields or at home: indeed, it was usually mothers who were most vocal in insisting that their daughters be kept out of school. So much for the traditional Ukrainian family and its values.179 In nineteenth-century Ukraine marriage was a sacred union between a man and a woman, and there was no place for open homosexual

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relations in the traditional culture. Homosexuals, at times quite open ones, might find some refuge in the Orthodox Church, the army (especially elite guard regiments), the urban aristocracy, and, especially, bohemian society (artists, actors, and writers). In late imperial Russia, homosexuality was perceived above all as an “aristocratic vice,” and therefore sexual scandals involving influential gay men were rarely publicized, let alone persecuted. For instance, Prince Vladimir Meshcherskii (1839–1914), an ultra-conservative journalist and personal friend of Tsar Alexander III, was involved in several scandalous gay liaisons, prompting the pious philosopher Vladimir Soloviev to award him the scatological title “Prince of Sodom and a Citizen of Gomorrah.” Whether thanks to the underground “principality” of Sodom and Gomorrah or to the tsar of Russia, the prince was consistently shielded from public downfall. By contrast, men of lower social standing were sometimes exiled or jailed (for up to eight years, if minors or children in the care of the accused were involved). During the Silver Age homosexuality became a topic of intense debate in the intellectual salons of St Petersburg and Moscow, spurred by the gay-themed writings of Vasilii Rozanov, Mikhail Kuzmin, Father Pavel Florenskii, and Viacheslav Ivanov. This was also a time of an overall “sexualization” of educated society, disillusioned with politics after the ill-fated 1905 revolution.180 Disparate sources, including police reports and memoirs, speak of a vibrant underground gay scene in pre-revolutionary St Petersburg and daily rituals of gay sex-trade on Nevsky Prospect, in the Zoological Garden, in public baths, and so on. Among the murderers of the notorious Grigorii Rasputin brought into the public eye were the gay and hardly closeted Prince Felix Iusupov and his British lover (although the murder itself had little to do with homosexuality). Aside from some anecdotal evidence, often based on hearsay and speculations, almost nothing is known about Ukraine’s queer community prior to 1917. One widely-publicized scandal involved Boris Iuzefovich, son of the highly placed imperial official Mikhail Iuzefovich. A reactionary figure just like his father, Boris was arrested in a homosexual dragnet in Moscow around 1875 and became a defendant in a sensational trial covered in the tabloid press.181 There were a number of documented instances of homosexual relations among students of imperial universities, elite boarding schools, and Orthodox seminaries and academies. For instance, a student of the Kyiv Theological Academy in the 1890s recalled a love triangle involving him and two other students.182 There was also the curious case of Nicolai de

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Raylan, a trans-man born in Odesa in 1872 to a local noble family who in the early 1900s was a Russian consular official in Chicago.183 The scholar Ahatanhel Kryms'kyi (1871–1942) was a rising star of Ukrainian modernist poetry before becoming a renowned authority in Oriental studies. Like the gay authors André Gide, E.M. Forster, and Mikhail Kuzmin had done earlier, in 1896–98 Kryms'kyi journeyed to the Middle East in search of erotic liberation and artistic inspiration. The young Ukrainian poet and scholar found Lebanon in particular to be “both a culturally unprejudiced convenience and a real space that nurtured this homosexual ‘dissident’s’ sexuality and creativity.”184 The result was Kryms'kyi’s collection Pal' move hillia: Ekzotychni poeziï (Palm Fronds: Exotic Poems), published in Lviv in 1901: one of its poem has the poignant title “Impious Love, Excerpts from the Lyrical Novel of a Poor Degenerate.” We can only speculate about what happened in Beirut, for after returning to Russian-ruled Ukraine Kryms'kyi could not express his homosexuality openly either in public life or in print (he even attempted to obfuscate his published poetry’s homoerotic content). However, his 1905 novella Andrii Lahovs' kyi, which is a hallmark of modernist fiction, contains a barely veiled allusion to his hero’s queerness, and no doubt also to his own: “I am the product of contemporary civilization, I am a degenerate, I am a decadent, I am a fin-de-siècle man, I am a neurasthenic.”185 A plausible same-sex romantic affair involved two of Ukraine’s leading female writers and intellectuals: Lesia Ukraïnka (1871–1913) from Russian Ukraine and Ol’ha Kobylians’ka (1863–1942) from Austrian-ruled Bukovyna. The nature of their fourteen-year relationship, as reflected in their correspondence (only the letters of Lesia Ukraïnka have survived), has long been subject to interpretation and debate. Irrespective of what label is attached to their relationship, the surviving letters are full of expressions of love and tenderness, such as the evocative phrases “someone and someone else gehoren zusammen [belong together]” and the playful “someone loves somebody else,”186 suggesting that these two remarkable creative women broke with conservative tradition in their lives as well as in their art. Overall, however, most traditions pertaining to family life died hard. Some aspects, such as family structure, birth rates, and domestic economic activity, were in fact changing; others, such as marriage age, family relations, and high infant mortality, either changed very slowly or not at all. On the eve of the twentieth century there were also wide socioeconomic changes affecting the intimate lives of the common

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people in both the countryside and urban spaces. More and more people were migrating or doing seasonal labor, which put a strain on family relations, leading to the break-up of more families (although formal divorces remained rare), subjected more women to sexual exploitation, and eroded traditional morals. At the same time, as people became more and more mobile, young men and women were becoming freer of the constraints of traditional patriarchal society. That mobility also gave itinerant rural people more space for erotic experimentation and self-exploration, boosted their social opportunities, and exposed them to different lifestyles and modern ideologies (from Marxist socialism and Bundism, to populism and nationalism).187 Whether for better or for worse, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the lives of people in every class of society were changing as never before.

th e we St i S th e b eS t ? oil b o o m, r Ural Po v erty , a n d e m i g r a t i o n The West is the best – that is, according to iconic song lyrics of the 1960s. As we shall see in this section, however, the West – in our case, Ukraine’s West – was not much better than the East, especially not for its most vulnerable people: land-starved and starving peasants, industrial workers, Jewish luftmenshen, and many others like them. Peasants and Jews found a radical solution to the scarcity of land and jobs, namely, emigration. But whereas Ukrainian peasants in the Russian Empire increasingly moved to the east, to Siberia, Central Asia, and ultimately to the Far East, Jews moved west, away from Russia. Likewise, peasants and Jews in the Habsburg Empire went west, most of them overseas, to the United States, Canada, Brazil, and Argentina. Emigration was as much an existential as a social issue. One keen Marxist observer spoke of some positive sides of emigration while also blaming the Austrian government for the impoverishment (“proletarianization”) of the Ukrainian peasants: No matter how sad and regrettable the emigration of Ruthenian peasants is in the social life of “the Ruthenians,” … it also has, nonetheless, some positive sides. Just like the storm that has blown suddenly, destroying fields, cutting through forests and flooding valleys and meadows with torrents of water, and yet, after it passes, rejuvenates all of nature, refreshes the soil, cleanses the air, clears the horizon, and allows free eyes to see far and wide across the clean

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space, so does emigration: it has shaken the entirety of Galician society, purified and refreshed its suffocating and sleepy atmosphere, stirred it and forced it to look at itself from afar, and touch those painful wounds that have tormented it for so long! … Thus, in order to remove these abnormal economic relations in Galicia [that have led to the proletarianization of the peasantry – Sb ] and to stop the emigration, one has to remove the very reason that engendered them. This reason is obvious, and it is nothing else than Austria’s contemporary political order – Austria’s political centralism. Owing to that, Galicia is falling victim to all the economically stronger crownlands of Austria, and particularly the Austrian capital. Owing to it, all of Galicia’s productive strength is paralyzed, and wasted with it are the various sources of earnings that our peasant needs but lacks. Herein lies the reason for such massive emigration of Galician peasants. Herein, too, lies the reason for the lack of culture in Galicia, with its antediluvian ideas, its rule of the nobility, and its worthless political opportunism. Austrian centralism – that is the heavy shackles of our economic servitude, and that is the formidable obstacle in the way of our cultural development.188 The Ukrainian-Galician writer Vasyl' Stefanyk was much less explicit in criticizing Habsburg authorities and far more lyrical in depicting the peasant leaving his native village for Canada, never to return. Indeed, leaving was a symbolic death, and the journey overseas was not only literally but mystically passage to the other world. Even before boarding the ship that would carry him away, the would-be emigrant was already a “Dead Man” (echoing the protagonist of Jim Jarmusch’s eponymous film). In anticipation of his imminent departure-death, Ivan Didukh erects a stone cross on a hill to commemorate himself and his wife, who will soon be gone for good. Their ceremonious send-off resembles a funeral procession. As Ivan and his wife finally reemerge from their house, ready to head for the railroad station, their guests realize they are paying their last respects to the couple. Dressed to the nines (in “lordly” clothes) after having renounced their peasant attire, Ivan and his wife indeed look as though they have already left this world. Their drastic change in appearance provokes a hysterical reaction from the guests: “The entire company broke into sobs. It was as though a cloud of tears hanging over the village had burst, as though human misery had broken through a dam on the Danube – that is how they wept.”189 Stefanyk’s novella The Stone Cross depicting all this was published in

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1900, during the first wave of peasant emigration from Galicia. But that sorrowful story did not deter real Ivan Didukhs from leaving in still greater numbers. Between the 1880s and 1914, more than eight hundred thousand Galicians – Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews – went overseas.190 Many of them expected to return; some even kept a packed suitcase under their beds for decades, ready for the return journey. But in reality only a small percentage of Ruthenians ever came back: their “return-rate” to their homeland was 12 per cent, the second lowest among all peoples of east-central Europe.191 Who or what was to blame for these waves of peasant emigration? Was it the local landowners and the Austrian government, as some on the left believed? In the second half of the nineteenth century, after Galicia – or, in fact, its Polish landowning elites – gained autonomy, Vienna could no longer be arbiter of conflicts between the province’s various ethnicities and social classes. At the same time, local landowners were unwilling to improve the economic conditions of peasants or to promote industries other than agriculture. In many ways Galicia was still untouched by modernity, with the feudal lord and the former proprietary serf personifying its traditional society. As had been the case for centuries, Polish “lords” owned huge landed properties and paid few to no taxes while enjoying a host of old and new privileges, among them exclusive rights to 90% of the forests and a monopoly on the production, distribution, and sale of alcohol. Other noble privileges also directly interfered with many aspects of the peasants’ daily lives. For example, nobles enjoyed the right to nominate priests to serve vacant parishes. Hunting was now reserved exclusively for nobles, whereas peasants could not even protect their gardens from wild intruders, ranging from rabbits to boars. Peasants, not landlords, were obliged to pay for road maintenance. In 1866, the Galician Diet removed about 5,000 manorial estates in the province from the autonomous village communes, thus exempting manors from all communal taxes and depriving peasants of any income generated by these estates. Landlords were also no longer required to support village schools.192 The result was widespread illiteracy: 86% of village council members were illiterate in 1887 (still a smaller proportion than among Ukrainians under Russian rule). As late as 1905, only 24% of male Ruthenian peasants aged 24 and above were literate, compared to 95% of German and Czech males. As in any traditional society, arable land remained the main source of wealth and political influence in Galicia. Latifundia owned by the magnates accounted for 40% of the province’s territory; these very

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wealthy landowners, who were just 0.4% of eligible voters, controlled over 28% of the seats in the Galician Diet. When deputies representing the Roman Catholic Church, the two universities at Cracow and Lviv, and Galicia’s cities per se are included, Polish elites in fact controlled 54% of diet seats. From 1877 to 1889, not a single peasant deputy was elected.193 Polish landowning aristocrats’ disproportionate influence in the province was detrimental not only to Ruthenian and Polish peasants but to the modern economy overall. In the words of the Galician Ukrainian writer and radical activist Ivan Franko, the Polish nobility had “always carried a disdain for industry, trade, and commerce.”194 Vienna, too, was content with the old agrarian order and continued to treat its easternmost province as a sort of “internal colony” and market for ready-made goods produced in the industrialized western provinces of Bohemia, Silesia, and Lower Austria.195 Raw materials accounted for up to 90% of all exports from Austria’s western Ukrainian lands, an economic situation similar to that of Russian-ruled Ukraine. Likewise, railways facilitated the export of raw materials from Galicia and the import of commodities from the western provinces into Galicia. The construction of railways in Habsburg Galicia did not lead to the rise of heavy industry there, as it did in the Ukrainian lands of the Russian Empire, but it did effectively eliminate locally made goods from the market and render much of manufacturing in Galicia unprofitable. The tangible misery of people in Galicia seems to have outweighed the abstract benefits of living under the Austrian constitutional regime. Although Galicia’s land was productive (46% of it was farmland, over 25% was forest, and almost 25% was pasture and meadow),196 far too many people were trying to make a living from it: more than 80% of Galicians were still directly engaged in agriculture. After the emancipation of serfs in 1848, the size of peasant plots continually diminished, owing to the division of land among all adult sons in the large and growing rural population. After 1848, the average size of a peasant plot decreased by about one-third, from 15.5 acres to 11.8 acres in the late 1850s. By 1899, about 80% of peasant households had less than 5 acres of land. Those with the smallest plots (an acre or less), who could not survive from farming alone, increased to a staggering 17% of all peasant landholdings.197 Industries not based on agriculture were few. Those that did exist had to do with the extraction or processing of raw resources, like salt (Galicia produced 64% of all salt in the empire), lumber (most was processed outside of Galicia), or oil

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(the province’s only “modern” industry; refineries were mostly located elsewhere, however). Agriculture-based enterprises such as the distilling of alcohol, milling of flour, and brewing of beer accounted for onethird of Galician factories, but because these were not considered truly “industrial” enterprises, they were not subject to the purview of factory inspectors and thus did not figure in statistical surveys of local industry. Galicia continued to experience an almost Malthusian curse of overpopulation. Despite the large numbers of people who emigrated, between 1869 and 1910 Galicia’s population grew by 45%, to approximately eight million people. The Austrian half of the empire’s most populous and largest province, it accounted for approximately one-quarter of its total population. Population density there was among the highest in the empire overall: by 1869, 65% of Galicia’s districts had a population density above the imperial average, surpassed only by some districts in England, Italy, Belgium, Holland, and Germany. In fact, the Galician countryside was likely the densest region in Europe.198 This was not the fashionable density of today’s metropolitan areas but a miserable density of rural poverty, lending Galicia the humiliating moniker Golicja i Głodomeria (“Land of the Naked and the Hungry”), a pun on its official title as the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria. The moniker was coined by the Poles, but it was the Ruthenians who were in fact Galicia’s naked and hungry. The Poles were largely accurate, albeit uncharitable, in mocking their Ruthenian neighbors as chłopy i popy: until the very end of the nineteenth century, Ruthenian society did indeed encompass mainly peasants and priests. After the mid-nineteenth century, the Ruthenian peasants, increasingly alienated from their Polish landowners, found themselves under the all-encompassing tutelage of the Greek Catholic clergy. One Polish traveler through Galicia in the mid-nineteenth century captured this dependence of peasants on priests vividly: The influence of the priest in general and his position within his flock is most significant … The priest is the indisputable authority in the village, and no important matter happens without his knowledge. This is the result of his daily contact with each and every parishioner, his knowledge of their temperament and relations, his closeness to life and custom itself. For this the local peasant considers the Ruthenian priest as someone close, as a member of his lineage and ancestry. The opposite is true in regards to the gentry: even though the gentleman was born on the same piece of land,

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fed with Ruthenian buckwheat, a Ruthenian through and through, he nevertheless dresses differently and appears to the peasant to be aloof and alien.199 The clergy’s growing influence over the peasants in daily life soon translated into political influence, as the Ruthenian (Ukrainian) movement began to seek a mass constituency. Owing partly to the early Austrian support of the Greek Catholic Church and partly to the peculiar structure of Ruthenian society, Greek Catholic priests quickly embraced the role of social and national leaders of their largely peasant Ruthenian community. Priests continued to engage in social and political matters even after a secular Ruthenian leadership began to arise, especially in the countryside, where there were very few or no secular activists. As John-Paul Himka has noted, the very tradition of social activism came directly from the Austrian Enlightenment championed by Joseph II. But aside from the conspicuous and genuine “Austrianism” of Greek Catholic priests, their religious identity had two other, conflicting sources. Himka writes: “The Greek Catholic had an Orthodox face, Roman Catholic citizenship, and … an enlightened Austrian soul.”200 In other words, the face of a Galician Greek Catholic did not fit well with his soul, to say nothing of his citizenship. Beyond basic civic engagement (such as the founding of communal granaries), many priests were confused about how to deal with other, deeper matters, including spiritual and national ones. As shown earlier, in chapter 6, some priests figuratively chose a face over their soul and citizenship, but that ended badly with the show trial of the Russophiles in 1882: while keeping their faces, some literally lost their citizenship. As the century drew to a close, more and more priests embraced a pro-Ukrainian stance and an explicitly national-populist mind-set. That trend would later accelerate under the leadership of the Greek Catholic metropolitan Andrei Sheptyts'kyi (1901–1944), the Galician Ukrainians’ spiritual leader. On the eve of the twentieth century, however, it was the village priests, adherents of national populism, who became the new faces of the Greek Catholic Church and the Ukrainian nation in Galicia, to the extent that the Church risked becoming merely the instrument of a secular movement (which Metropolitan Sheptyts'kyi would endeavor to prevent). Father Mykhailo Zubryts'kyi (1856–1919) is the foremost example of an activist priest of that era. Born into a peasant family with some nobiliary roots, he married into a clerical family and became

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an ordained priest himself, one who also became a famous national activist, acclaimed ethnographer, and correspondent with leading intellectuals (among them Ivan Franko; they were students together at a gymnasium in Drohobych). For thirty years Zubryts'kyi made a living as a modest country priest in the village of Mshanets', deep in the Carpathian Mountains and far from any major urban center. His clerical post may have been modest, but Father Mykhailo Zubryts'kyi himself did not shy away from being a vocal advocate of both his local village and the Ruthenian-Ukrainian nation as a whole. A believer in the emerging social sciences, the ambitious parish priest sought to foster social discipline, moral conscience, and national consciousness among his rural parishioners. In his view, Polish landlords, Jewish innkeepers and creditors, and vodka were the main culprits standing in the way of the peasants’ progress. A true son of the Austrian Enlightenment as well as the positivist age, Father Zubryts'kyi saw his mission as being of service to the people, a stance shared with members of the secular intelligentsia. The following sentiment could readily have been written by a Russian radical populist like Nikolai Chernyshevskii, but in fact it was Father Zubryts'kyi, the Galician Greek Catholic priest from a remote village, who wrote these words in 1887: “Every sincere and wise man must tell himself once and forever: from the whole of my heart, with all my powers, I wish to work to raise up our people, to liberate them from [the] slavery of darkness and economic decline, and to put them on the same level with other nations that have already advanced far ahead [of us].”201 One way for Father Zubryts'kyi to realize his populist mission was to expand the Prosvita society’s network of reading clubs among both literate and illiterate peasants. Thanks to his incessant energy, his mission became not just possible but a resounding success. In 1898, in the district of Staryi Sambir, which included the village of Mshanets', the number of reading clubs shot up to eleven, with 630 members (including 183 women), compared to the seven clubs, with 102 members (all males), in the much larger neighboring district of Sambir, where the clergy was more conservative.202 In 1910, the village of Mshanets' had the highest reading club membership (103) of sixty-five localities in the two districts, second only to the town of Staryi Sambir.203 Father Zubryts'kyi himself often presided over the club’s Sunday meetings, where he would read aloud to his parishioners. Curiously, among the peasants’ favorite literary works (other than popular almanacs and agricultural guidebooks) were the biographies of Hetman Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi and

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US president Abraham Lincoln.204 The hetman’s biography symbolically linked the Ruthenian peasants with a national community – past and present – whereas that of the American president allowed the former serfs to join an international community alongside recently liberated slaves. The descendants of Ruthenian serfs apparently felt an affinity with America’s Black slaves and perceived both Khmel'nyts'kyi and Lincoln as liberators of people oppressed by the proverbial “slavery of darkness.” As the number of Prosvita reading clubs continued to grow, newly literate peasants became the greatest victory over darkness for national populists, clerical and secular alike. By 1900, Prosvita-run reading clubs comprised three-quarters of all reading clubs in eastern Galicia (1,100), far outpacing the rival Kachkovs'kyi Society, which was both more conservative and increasingly pro-Russian in outlook.205 One social process that Father Zubryts'kyi could not control was the emigration of peasants overseas. Instead, he undertook meticulously to document, with the precision of a professional anthropologist, both the positive and negative consequences that emigration had on the villagers back home, using his native village of Mshanets' as the basis of his study. First, he noted that regardless of whether the villagers returned home or not, they sent back remittances (usually through banks in Leipzig and Budapest) which increased considerably the standard of living and aspirations of the families left behind in Mshanets'. Second, having the option of leaving for America emboldened some rebellious young villagers to challenge parental authority in the choice of a bride. “These days when a fellow turns eighteen, he announces at home that he’s leaving for America. If his parents are against it, he starts talking about girls and wanting to propose but having no means. He goes on like this until the parents acquiesce [to his decision].”206 One young fellow blackmailed his parents into allowing him to marry a bride of his choice by declaring that if they didn’t consent to his choice, he wouldn’t marry at all and would instead “go to Hameryka”: apparently the threat worked. Zubryts'kyi acknowledged that emigrants who did return to the village from America often came back without having acquired any useful new skills to “improve their household economy,” because beyond working and going to saloons “they don’t see anything, nor learn anything.” However, he did note one big benefit connected to Hameryka, namely, increased rates of literacy among those seeking to emigrate – a personal success for Father Zubryts'kyi, naturally, as their teacher and pastor – because that increased chances of finding better-paying work overseas.

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Father Zubryts'kyi’s personal political ambitions proved somewhat less successful: he ran for the Galician Diet in 1901 but was defeated by the Polish establishment’s candidate, in part because of opposition to clerical candidates among Ukrainian Radicals. Nonetheless, Zubryts'kyi was hugely successful in mobilizing peasants in Mshanets' and other villages for the Ukrainian national cause, in large part by casting all local injustices – from the lack of salt in the peasants’ diet to the arbitrary rule of district captains – as being national ones. By “nationalizing” one village at a time, Father Zubryts'kyi and activist priests like him were building an entire nation, parish by parish. Zubryts'kyi saw the village as a cell of the nation and applied that analogy in explaining the model of a nation to his parishioners and other peasants.207 An intermediate result of nation building in the countryside was the creation of a national peasantry as the main class of Galician Ukrainian society. In an in-depth study of Galician Ukrainian villagers, Andriy Zayarnyuk has shown how, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Ukrainian national leaders set out to create a nationally conscious peasant class. The peasants comprising this new class were imagined to be “civilized,” “organized,” “conscious,” and “well integrated into the capitalist economy.”208 However, as the peasants’ resentment toward the new capitalist “sharks” grew, often along with anti-Jewish sentiment, mostly over the market price of agricultural products, their economic antagonism toward Polish landowners decreased, even as the latter remained their main political enemy. A series of agrarian strikes in the early 1900s against large landowners became a demonstration of “peasant power” and proved a great success for the Ukrainian movement. Among Galician Ukrainians, two major political parties – the National Democrats, successors to the national populists, and the virulently anticlerical Radicals – competed for the political representation of what they saw as “the cohesive peasant class,” the backbone of Ukrainian society. The peasantry, as a homogeneous class of small agricultural owners and producers, was thought to be the best antidote to the alienating force of capitalism, a vision similar to that of radical populists and, later, socialist revolutionaries in Russia, although without their utopian belief in the commune. In Galicia, the nearly mystical links were presumed to exist between the peasantry and the nation and they were enhanced by the view that peasant landholdings were the nation’s “sacred property.” As such they defined the contiguous boundaries of the imagined

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nation, which lacked political borders. Furthermore, any economic differences in the countryside were deemed secondary to the national unity of peasants newly empowered by the national movement. On the eve of the twentieth century, national activists and the peasants themselves came to believe in the unique national and economic mission of Ukrainian peasants in Galicia. Not only were the peasants “the oldest, the most important, and the most necessary estate on Earth”; now they were also a politically mobilized class that would not sell their “rights and morality for sausage” and instead sent their “radical deputies to the diet, to the parliament, and to the district council,” as newly composed folk songs proudly declared.209 In the process of making the peasantry “national,” Ukrainian-Galician politicians and parish clergy also reached out to the petty gentry, a good number of whom had not yielded to becoming Poles, most likely owing to their lack of means and proximity to the Ruthenian peasants. Proud of their noble origins but in everyday life often indistinguishable from the peasantry, the petty gentry of the Greek Catholic faith began to embrace Ukrainian national identity in the early 1900s. Despite some attempts to maintain a distinct social identity (like going to “gentry casinos” as alternatives to the “peasant” reading clubs run by Prosvita), by and large the petty gentry was gradually integrated into the newly created peasant class, although many retained a snobbish attitude toward their non-noble neighbors. Voluntary associations like the reading clubs and economic cooperatives completed the creation of the politically mobilized peasantry that comprised the main constituency of all Galician Ukrainian politicians. But choosing right and morality over proverbial sausage came at high cost: a great many Ukrainian peasants in Galicia became proud of their newly discovered national mission, but they also continued to be desperately poor. The most successful local response to widespread rural poverty was the cooperative movement that swept the Ruthenian countryside in the early twentieth century. While the reading clubs created a public space in which villagers could learn that they were in fact Ukrainians and respectable farmers (seliany) rather than simply humble peasant folk (khlopy), it was the cooperatives that brought them direct economic benefits. Cooperatives were seen as an alternative to capitalism and the most effective way to alleviate peasants’ economic woes. Their implicit goal was to safeguard the economic interests of Galician Ukrainians against “alien” intermediaries, such as Polish landowners and Jewish traders. “What do we do to liberate the people from the

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economic dependence on the Poles and their accomplices, the Jews, and protect them from denationalization and spiritual corruption?” asked the Ukrainian author of the article “Cooperation and education” in 1914.210 Anti-Polish and anti-Jewish considerations aside, the cooperatives did provide entrepreneurial peasants with cash from the sale of their products, in a manner similar to the fair trade organizations of today. They were also important in bringing more sausages, milk, and butter to peasants’ own tables, while at the same time boosting cattle breeding and dairy farming; the latter were relatively novel sources of livelihood that began to develop in Galicia only in the 1860s and ’70s. The first large peasant organization, Village Farmer, was founded in 1899 by village priests; by 1909, it boasted over eighty affiliate branches. In 1910, a large umbrella organization called the Provincial Auditing Union encompassed 390 credit and cooperative enterprises, including 53 agricultural ones.211 One of its component members, the Provincial Union of Ruthenian Dairy Cooperatives, or Maslosoiuz, became a symbol of business success for Galician Ukrainian peasants. Founded in 1905 in Stryi, a region well suited to cattle breeding and dairy farming, Maslosoiuz facilitated the production and sale of dairy products – butter, above all – across Galicia. By 1910, Maslosoiuz had 235 collective and private members and generated 2291.06 crowns in profit.212 In the end, thanks to butter, these enterprising peasants did not have to choose between sausage and morality. As Greek Catholic priests were forming the “conscious” class of Ukrainian peasants in eastern Galicia, Polish nobles and priests were undertaking a comparable effort in the western part of the province, endeavoring to integrate Roman Catholic peasants as a distinct class into a modern Polish nation. In western Galicia, too, a cooperative movement that included “agricultural circles” and village stores provided Polish peasants with more sausage, butter, and cash, which in turn gained the cooperatives more and more members. On the eve of World War I, the agricultural circle movement boasted over 82,000 peasant members belonging to some 2,000 separate village “circles.”213 However, this success threatened the livelihoods of Jewish merchants and made antisemitism a “basis for cross-class alliances” in the Polish society of Galicia.214 Thus, at the turn of the new century, the two opposing nations, one Ukrainian and the other Polish, both antagonistic toward Jews, took form in the Galician countryside, at times in a single village with mixed populations. More remarkable was that the Ukrainian peasants had organized before their Polish neighbors did;

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also, they had tested their newly acquired strength in a series of agrarian strikes and during regular election campaigns, particularly from the 1890s. In the course of heated political campaigns and outbreaks of electoral violence, Ukrainian peasants were more likely to join voluntary associations: for instance, during the “bloody” elections of 1897, the Prosvita Society registered 1,333 new members, more than double the average in the years 1892–95; that increase in new members was surpassed only in 1904 and 1907 (1,359 and 1,379, respectively), at the height of a struggle for democratization of the right to vote.215 It was during this time that patriotic Ukrainian Christmas carols first included proud self-designation of Ukrainians as haidamaky, in reference to social bandits who attacked Poles and Jews in eighteenth-century Ukraine.216 The universal male franchise was finally introduced in 1907. During the first elections to the imperial parliament held on the basis of the new law, the Ukrainian radicals managed to reach a historic agreement with local Zionists. By its terms, Ukrainians living in urban districts with a weak Ukrainian presence agreed to vote for Jewish candidates, while in the countryside where most Ukrainians lived Zionist-leaning Jews agreed to support the Ukrainian radicals. The expanded franchise further intensified the fight for Galicia and turned peasants into the newest political subjects. The mere presence of peasants having land in certain areas was now a basis for delineating the extent of Ukrainian and Polish national borders. But whereas Ukrainian peasants lived almost exclusively in eastern Galicia, Polish peasants were scattered throughout the province, giving the Polish elites a pretext to claim all of Galicia on demographic and ethnographic grounds, in addition to the usual historical ones. A certain series of socioeconomic and demographic policies set these two “village nations” further apart, even though spatially it intermingled them as never before. The redistribution of manorial lands, which might have been of benefit to poor Ukrainian peasants, in fact benefitted mostly Roman Catholic (Polish) peasants, particularly as colonists from more overpopulated western Galicia began to move eastward in massive numbers. During the last decade of the nineteenth century, 85,379 Polish peasants arrived in eastern Galicia, followed by another 93,292 in the next decade. It was these newcomers who received most of the 276,000 parcelled hectares of formerly manorial land; only 38,000 hectares accrued to local Ukrainian peasants.217 Colonial policies like this one compelled Ukrainian peasants to hold on to their landholdings as their “only treasure,” and also forced some of the poorest of them from the land and overseas.

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If anything had the potential to benefit all major communities in the area, it was the discovery of oil in eastern Galicia in the 1850s. Oil can make many people happy, but not everywhere and not all the time. In Galicia in the early twentieth century, oil made happy only a relatively small number of people, many of whom were not even natives of the region, while many more became more miserable despite or even because of their proximity to the supposed riches of oil. Nonetheless, such flattering metaphors as “the Polish Baku,” “eastern Europe’s Pennsylvania,” and “Galicia’s El Dorado” were routinely applied to Galicia’s oil empire, centered around the town of Boryslav. In the 1860s Boryslav had fewer than 500 residents; by 1898 its population had grown to 12,000. As Alison Fleig Frank has pointed out, in 1909 Galicia was the third-largest oil-producing region in the world, accounting for 5% of world production. Additionally, from the mid-nineteenth century until 1910, it was ranked among the world’s top five oil producers, and only after World War I was it displaced from the top ten.218 Obviously, Galicia was not an exclusively agricultural province. But how deeply did oil affect Galicia’s diverse society, and did the wealth derived from oil reach its numerous poor communities? Oil was not free from politics, of course, and its production soon became a matter of Polish landowning elites defending Galicia’s provincial autonomy from what they saw as Viennese centralism. What helped the local landowners’ cause was that, like in the US but unlike in most other countries, in Galicia oil was considered to be the private property of the owners of the plot on which it was found. In the oil basin, that gave rise to an unlikely alliance between wealthy Polish estate owners and Ruthenian and Jewish owners of small plots, all of whom were determined to defend their exclusive right to whatever lay in their land. The diversity in those who owned this land corresponded to the diversity in those who wanted to invest in it, among them French, British, and Belgian nationals, as well as North Americans offering innovations in extraction and technical expertise. However, oil industry was never consolidated in Austrian Galicia, for no dominant or unifying cartel like American Standard Oil in the United States emerged there. Vienna itself did not exercise much control over the production or sale of petroleum. It did not place limits on its extraction that might have mitigated the overproduction and price drops that plagued the unregulated industry, especially after 1905. In the end, a chaotic market in which scores of companies and individual producers coexisted with little to no consolidation proved detrimental to the existence of a Galician oil

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empire. The interests of autonomous Galicia were protected at the cost of an undeveloped industry and continuing lack of basic infrastructure. Consequently, Galicia never became a state like Saudi Arabia or Qatar today, in which abundant natural oil deposits benefit society as a whole. Alison Frank gives us this summary of its seventy years of existence: “the Galician oil industry failed to bring lasting wealth or significant improvements in the quality of life of the vast majority of those touched by it. Contemporaries agreed that the actual benefits brought by oil to Galicia fell far short of its potential.”219 Oil failed to generate universal well-being in Galicia, but it did change the composition of eastern Galicia’s workforce by creating the semblance of an industrial working class, although not a revolutionary one in Marxist terms, nor in fact a coherent class, contrary to what Soviet historians would later argue. Officially, in 1897 Galicia had only 11,944 employees in the oil and wax industry across the over 130 towns and villages where oil was extracted; however, there were also thousands of additional day laborers not included in the official rolls.220 These workers had wildly different skills, ideologies, and backgrounds and nearly nothing in common. Peasants who came to the oil fields in search of temporary work shared the workplace with highly skilled drillers educated in technical colleges. They were also of different ethnicities – Ukrainians, Poles, or Jews, primarily – which made class solidarity more difficult to develop. In a report of 1892, a Galician factory inspector described these oil-workers/peasants thus: The work conditions in Borysław [Boryslav] are extremely unfavorable. The workers are mostly itinerant, or peasants who flow in from time to time in order to make a little money in Borysław and work for a few isolated shifts. In comparison, there are very few stable workers. Most workers are on a very low cultural level, can read and write only in the rarest cases, have no housing of their own, and are satisfied to spend the nights in the highly deficient taverns, in which an inordinate number of people find shelter.221 But despite working conditions that relentlessly spawned floods of blood, sweat, and tears, the oil fields provided a unique, if temporary, opportunity for poor peasants to supplement their meager incomes from agriculture with wages from the oil industry, and thereby kept some from emigrating overseas. For comparison, in 1897 a peasant could expect to earn 30 to 50 kreutzer a day during the harvest and just

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15 to 25 kreutzer a day in winter as a day laborer on a large estate; yet he could earn 50 to 70 kreutzer a day as an unskilled laborer in the oil and wax mines of eastern Galicia.222 Contrary to the Socialist expectations, the diverse workforce in industrial oil was not only difficult to mold into a Marxist proletariat but proved to be a volatile group readily divisible along religious and ethnic lines. Rather than being concerned with unified socialist action, the workers often succumbed to alcohol-fueled personal fights and antisemitic violence. Many also took full advantage of the oil fields’ reputation as centers of debauchery, lust, and hard drinking. These vices, rather than economic opportunity, became the prism through which contemporary writers and journalists viewed Galicia’s “Oil Empire,” or “the Galician Hell,” as one Polish author put it. The Ukrainian writer Ivan Franko depicted the life of peasant workers in and around Boryslav as a grim world of economic exploitation, moral depravity, and physical degradation, to the extent that the unfinished novel he titled Boryslav Smiiet’sia (Boryslav Laughs; 1881) could well have been named “Boryslav Vice.” There, as in his most famous novel, Boa constrictor (1878), Franko depicted how Boryslav descended into a center of misery and vice owing to rampant capitalist oil drilling and mining. Boryslav, wrote Franko, “devours the young generation, forests, time, health, and morality of whole communities, the entire masses.”223 Who was responsible for all these economic, moral, and ecological ills? Some of Franko’s characters blame Jews, who are portrayed as the exclusive, ruthless, and villainous agents of capitalism, which has sparked debate over the author’s own alleged antisemitism.224 In fact, Franko met Theodor Herzl in Vienna in February 1893, and he later wrote a positive review of Herzl’s pioneering Zionist treatise, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State; 1896).225 Acknowledging Franko’s “ambivalent” views about Jews, Iaroslav Hrytsak notes that while Franko favored granting Jews full political rights, he criticized them as harmful economic actors and demanded that they be stripped of the right to buy agricultural land.226 Nonetheless, Hrytsak concludes, Franko’s few writings that can be considered “antisemitic” were marginal in the context of his overall body of work, which is sympathetic to Jews. Regarding the negatively portrayed Jewish characters in Franko’s Boryslav cycle, George Grabowicz has argued that their depiction there was based not on the writer’s innate antisemitism but on a perception of “the economic sphere – and on an archetypal contrast of city and countryside,” as well as on the “confrontation of labor and capital.”227

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If Franko’s depiction of the horrific lives of workers in Boryslav were fully accurate, capital probably could not have attracted any labor there. In fact, much of what socialist-leaning Franko describes in Boryslav Laughs did not actually take place. In any event, there was never any shortage of skilled or unskilled workers in “the Galician Hell.” Even if thousands of worker-peasants deserted the oil fields, many others flocked to replace them, as happens in some developing countries today, where backbreaking work conditions do not deter many new workers, most coming from the countryside. In many respects, the oil fields reflected Galicia’s overall social profile as one of the poorest provinces in Austria-Hungary, with very low per capita income (only Dalmatia and Bukovyna fared worse) and the empire’s lowest literacy rate in the decade preceding World War I. Many local observers, whether Polish, Ukrainian, or Jewish, believed Galicia’s ills to have been caused by Vienna’s “colonialism.” Galicia was hardly a colony of Vienna, but Galicia’s provincial hell had as many circles as Dante’s classical Inferno.

imPer i a l Pec k i ng o rd er : Pe o P l eS o f Uk r a i n e Contrary to the popular view, a multiethnic society does not equal multiculturalism. Societies encompassing multiple ethnic and religious communities have always existed, but multiculturalism is a relatively new ideology of modern statecraft, first implemented in Canada and Australia in the 1970s. How did multiple ethnic communities live together or alongside one another before the age of enlightened multiculturalism – for instance, during the centuries of enlightened and not so enlightened despotism? Imperial Ukraine – that is, the Ukrainian lands as they existed under two empires – exemplifies how such society functioned and at times malfunctioned, descending into interethnic violence. In the twentieth century, Ukraine became a true laboratory of modernity’s dark forces, having found itself in the heart of what Tim Snyder has named “the Bloodlands,” a blood-soaked expanse in which ethic cleansings, genocides, and state terror showed all too well what humanity was capable of inflicting on itself. For the moment, let us set aside our knowledge of what happened in the 1930s and ’40s. Was there something about imperial society in Ukraine that somehow explained, or perhaps even anticipated, the horrors of the twentieth century? As we well know, during the age of empires, Ukraine encompassed a number of different ethnic and religious communities which together did not constitute a harmonious society. In practice these communities

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more or less existed and operated together through government agencies and from economic necessity, while each community performed its own economic, political, and cultural functions. When these functions collided, that is, when two or more communities began to compete in a particular sphere, then the melting pot rapidly turned into a powder keg. It is in those circumstances that anti-Jewish pogroms and peasant riots broke out. One can attribute the whole Ukrainian national movement in the Russian Empire to the same collision of functions, for that movement was increasingly directed against the Russians’ dominance in administration, education, and policing. In these public service areas and careers, open expressions of Ukrainian identity were all but prohibited until 1905 and even beyond. That said, the Russian imperial government remained largely “color-blind” when it came to the ethnicity or nationality of its citizens. As late as the 1880s, the notoriously conservative Russian statesman Konstantin Pobedonostsev dismissed talk about the multinational character of Russia: “The Austrian Emperor might speak about his peoples, but we have only one people.”228 In keeping with that view, the first and only imperial census, conducted in 1897, did not contain an entry or question about nationality. Instead, Russian officials, especially those in the military and other strategic ministries and services, continued to use religion as the main determinant of a person’s identity and loyalty. However, as we shall see, both Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism were becoming more and more inadequate as the defining element of collective identity in the modern world, especially for practical purposes, such as matters relating to discrimination under the law. In other words, was someone to be discriminated against as a Pole or a Jew based on religion (Catholic or Jewish), spoken language (Polish or Yiddish), socioeconomic standing (landless noble or innkeeper), or ethnicity (a nebulous category determined by elements ranging from a person’s religion to surname)? The idea of dividing Russia’s diverse population into separate religious, linguistic, and ethnic/national groups thus had both academic and practical purposes. In the process, ethnicity or nationality became an important if as yet not well defined category, despite the objections of conservatives like Pobedonostsev who clung to their vision of a premodern world. To illustrate the ethnic pecking order in Russian-ruled Ukraine, I will focus primarily on Russians, Jews, Poles, Germans, and Greeks, whose numbers are shown in table 7.13. How were these different communities spread across the lands comprising Russian-ruled Ukraine? While Ukrainians predominated in its

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Table 7.13 | Nationalities in Russian Ukraine, 1897 Nationality

Number

Percentage

Ukrainians

17,373,525

71.0

Russians

2,785,000

11.4

Jews

1,979,263

8.1

Germans

540,425

2.2

Poles

391,217

1.6

Greeks

80,000

0.3

Others

1,262,163

5.5

24,411,593

100.0

Total

Source: N.A. Troinitski, ed., Pervaia vseobshchaia perepis’ naseleniia Rossiiskoi imperii, 1897 g., vol. 8: Volynskaia guberniia (St Peterburg: Tsentr. Stat. komitet Min-va vnutrennikh del, 1904); vol. 13: Ekaterinoslavskaia guberniia (1904); vol. 16: Kievskaia guberniia (1904); vol. 32: Podol’skaia guberniia (1904); vol. 33: Poltavskaia guberniia (1904); vol. 41: Tavricheskaia guberniia (1904); vol. 46: Kharkovskaia guberniia (1904); vol. 47: Khersonskaia guberniia (1904); vol. 48: Chernigovskaia guberniia (1905).

agrarian heartland, ethnic Russians were especially numerous in the south and east (with its large cities of Odesa, Mykolaïv, Kherson, Katerynoslav, and Kharkiv, as well as the newly industrialized Donbas and Kryvbas regions) and also in the Ukrainian-Russian borderland in the north. Jews were no longer confined to Right-Bank Ukraine: they had established sizable communities in the south, especially in Odesa and Katerynoslav. Poles continued to live predominantly in Right-Bank Ukraine, although increasingly more Poles also moved to the city of Odesa and the industrial regions of southeastern Ukraine. Finally, Germans and Greeks tended to live in the three southern provinces of Taurida, Kherson, and Katerynoslav; there was also a sizable German community in Volhynia. The largest population of non-Ukrainians – ca. 2,485,000 – lived in the south (the Katerynoslav, Kherson, and Taurida provinces), followed by a second-largest population of ca. 2,090,000 in the southwest (the Kyiv,

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Volhynia, and Podolia provinces). Most areas of Left-Bank and Sloboda Ukraine were more ethnically homogenous; there Russians were the second largest community after Ukrainians and numbered about a million, or 13.7 per cent of the total population. This picture remained essentially unchanged up to the Russian revolution in 1917.229 Given the traditional identification of Russians with Orthodoxy, a Russian was readily distinguishable from a Pole, German, or Jew. But it was another matter to distinguish ethnic Russians from Ukrainians. Officially Russians and Ukrainians were regarded as one and the same people, however complex the inner workings of that identification might be. If a distinction between Ukrainians and Russians appeared in statistical sources at all, it could be only on the basis of language (often labeled as “dialect”) or place of origin. Defined through language, Russians were the largest nationality in the Russian Empire and the second largest in Ukraine, where, scattered throughout Ukraine, they numbered 2,785,000 in 1897.230 On the Right-Bank, incorporated into the Russian Empire from Poland in the late eighteenth century, Russians were a small minority (only 0.3% in 1834, and 4% in 1897), and most were government officials, military personnel, or teachers. In other parts of Ukraine, Russians were more numerous and socially diverse. For example, in southern and eastern Ukraine, particularly in the Kherson, Katerynoslav, and Taurida provinces, Russians comprised more than 21% of the population and lived in both urban and rural settings. Originally, they were mostly peasants who began migrating to New Russia in the late eighteenth century. Russians and assimilated Ukrainians constituted the majority or plurality (their proportions are virtually impossible to establish) in all cities and towns outside RightBank Ukraine and the Poltava and Kharkiv provinces, including the largest ones – Odesa, Kyiv, and Kharkiv. By 1897, ethnic Russians together with russified Ukrainians and Belarusians made up the largest portion (34%) of Ukraine’s urban population.231 What did Russians do for living in Ukraine? In large part that depended on where they lived, but in some occupations Russians predominated throughout Ukraine. One of these areas was governance. Most governors-general, civil governors, and chiefs of police posted in Ukraine were ethnic Russians born and raised in Great Russia. Even in Left-Bank Ukraine, with its powerful and numerous nobiliary class descended from Cossack officers, only a small minority of provincial governors were Ukrainians.232 Of the fourteen governors-general who governed in Kyiv between 1832 and 1914, just one was Ukrainian;

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three were Germans, and the rest were Russians. Ethnic Russians also dominated in secondary and post-secondary education. There is no reliable data on individual schools or on the universities in Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odesa, but Russians or thoroughly russified Ukrainians apparently comprised the majority of teachers and professors at all these institutions. A professional Russian educator, especially a gymnasium teacher in Right-Bank Ukraine, was often the primary agent of Russian influence in the borderlands, and one often surrounded by non-Russians of dubious loyalties. Russians in Ukraine were a quite urbanized community: more than 42% lived in towns and cities. While many urban Russians were, in fact, peasants who worked in various crafts, engaged in trade, or served in the military (47% of “Russians” living in Kyiv, for instance, were peasants by social estate),233 others were of various social estates: nobles and officials, military officers, merchants, skilled artisans, professionals, or members of the intelligentsia. Overall, by 1916 Russians were Ukraine’s most diverse community in terms of occupation and class: 60% lived from agriculture, 21.5% worked in industry, 4.4% were employed in the private sector, 3.5% served in administration, 3% worked in trade, 2.3% lived from capital or real estate or did professional work (in the fields of medicine, law, pharmacy, education, etc.), 2% were employed in transport, and 1.4% served in the military.234 Russians of varying social estates working in areas other than governance, education, and the military tended to reside in distinct communities. For instance, noble Russian landowners first gained a footing in southern Ukraine during the colonization of what was then called New Russia in the second half of the eighteenth century. The Russian government then began distributing lands (on a more limited scale) to Russian military personnel and courtiers in Sloboda Ukraine and parts of Left-Bank Ukraine. Until the early 1860s, there were hardly any Russian landowners in Right-Bank Ukraine, and more than 90% of land in the nine provinces formerly ruled by Poland still belonged to Poles. It took the Russian government decades to redistribute noble-held land in the region by confiscating the properties of suspected Polish rebels and applying discriminatory laws prohibiting the sale of lands to Catholic nobles. As a result, by 1897 “Russian,” or, rather, Orthodox landowners fully prevailed over Polish ones in the provinces of Kyiv and Podolia. Unlike noble Russian landlords, who were present in considerable numbers everywhere in Ukraine, Russian peasants lived more compactly and in only a few regions. They lived largely in southern Ukraine (New

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Russia) and along the Ukrainian-Russian ethnic border in northeastern Kharkiv and eastern Katerynoslav provinces. Prior to 1861, a majority were serfs, brought there by Russian landowners. Around one-third of the Russian peasants in Ukraine were the religious dissidents called Old Believers (166,000 on the eve of the twentieth century), who lived in separate villages primarily in the northern part of Chernihiv province. Russian peasants accounted for 6 or 7 per cent of Ukraine’s total peasantry. Contacts between Ukrainian and Russian peasants were limited largely to trade, and intermarriages between them were rare (almost unheard of, insofar as the Old Believers were concerned). The majority of Ukraine’s industrial workers, particularly in the Donbas, were recruited Russian peasants, hundreds of thousands of whom came from Great Russia in the 1890s and early 1900s. Rarely assimilating into Ukrainian culture, in 1917 these workers would become the backbone of the Russian Revolution in Ukraine. For all the ubiquity of the corrupt Russian official or arrogant noble landowner who are so often the subjects of celebrated Russian fiction, the most visible Russian was a member of the merchant class. Russian merchants were found throughout Ukraine, except in the three Right-Bank provinces, where Jews jealously guarded their monopoly in commerce and business. The visible Russianness of merchants came from the fact that many were Old Believers, known for their distinctive appearance, traditional dress, and general characteristics (e.g., oldfashioned haircuts, bushy beards, business acumen, social conservatism, and sobriety). As early as the 1830s, Russian merchants dominated over Ukrainian merchants (52.6% to 22.2%); in the second merchant guild that dominance was especially great (76.9% to 15.4%).235 In the 1830s and ’40s the imperial government offered tax breaks and concessions encouraging Russian merchants to settle in Ukraine, and by the mid-nineteenth century they controlled trade and manufacture in much of the country. Contrary to the government’s designs, however, Russians failed to edge Jews out of the business sphere,236 which many in the government considered a humiliating failure. Russians could find certain consolation in their dominance among the intelligentsia in Ukraine, in the spheres of education, law, the arts, and science – a fact made weightier by the ideological battles raging in late imperial Ukraine. For the government, the statistics were indeed reassuring: according to the 1897 census, half to a majority of Ukraine’s lawyers, teachers, writers, artists, and others engaged in some sort of intellectual work were self-declared Russians. Most never embraced

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a distinct Ukrainian identity, and many actively rejected it. Ukraine produced some of Russia’s most beautiful minds, but they were not very mindful of Ukraine itself. Among them was the Kyiv-born Russian philosopher and subsequent political émigré Nikolai Berdyaev (1874– 1948), a believer in Russia’s spiritual mission who would influence French existentialist philosophers. In the midst of the revolutionary turmoil of 1917, Berdyaev indignantly declared “the Ukrainian separatist movement” the most alarming and outrageous factor “in the ongoing plunder and breaking of Russia” and called it a “betrayal of the Russian idea.”237 Mikhail Bulgakov (1891–1940), arguably the most famous Russian author to be born in Ukraine was notoriously hostile to Ukraine’s culture and politics. In his famed novel The White Guard (written 1922–24), Bulgakov assumed the viewpoint of a middle-class Russian living in Kyiv in scornfully depicting the Ukrainian revolution in the city as a “bloody operetta” and “a tragicomedy of vast and devastating scope.”238 Ironically, Bulgakov’s godfather, Nikolai Petrov (1840–1921), who was Russian-born and a professor at the Kyiv Theological Academy, became a pioneering scholar of early modern Ukrainian literature: remarkably for that time, he even referred to it as being “Ukrainian” rather than the official “Little” or “Southern” Russian. There were other prominent Russians whose professional lives were wholly or partially associated with Ukraine, among them the composer Sergei Prokofiev, the biologist Ilia Mechnikov (Élie Metchnikoff), and the public manager and statesman Sergei Witte (from a Russian-German family, he lived in Ukraine as a teenager). While by and large these individuals did not consider Ukraine a separate country and identified as Russian rather than Ukrainian, contemporary Ukraine is hardly imaginable without their rich contributions to its arts, scholarship, and institutions. Russians in Ukraine did not regard Ukrainians as a real nationality, but they did recognize the existence of minorities such as the Poles and Jews. Poles were perceived as a threat to Russians’ political and social dominance in the region, whereas Jews were seen as an economic threat. Poles were feared because of their grip on land, Jews were feared because of their ever-growing number and alleged economic alliance with Polish nobles. Thus, as part of the messy demographics of the empire’s borderlands, Jews and Poles were lumped together in the minds of many Russians as a double threat. After Russians, Jews were the second largest and most visible minority in Ukraine. It was their economic successes and rapid population growth that first alarmed the

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Russian merchants who were the Jews’ economic competitors and later also the government and its supporters amid the public. By 1800, the Jewish population in imperial Russia was 22.8% of the Jewish population worldwide. A high birth rate and low mortality led to a constant increase in the Russian Empire’s Jewish population, from 1.5% in 1800 to around 5% in 1880. By 1900, five of the world’s ten largest urban settlements of Jews were in Russia, and the cities of Odesa and St Petersburg were major centers of modern Jewish life and culture. The Russian government soon became overwhelmed with its new Jewish subjects, for it knew little about the people behind numbers – about real Jews and their lives in small towns. However, at least initially, after the partitions of Poland in the 1770s and ’90s, when Russia acquired the lands on which the majority of Jewish settlements were located, the Jews were treated favorably. Catherine II considered Jews to be useful merchants and artisans and hence ascribed her new subjects to the urban estates of merchants and burghers (even though most lived in rural communities). She also banned any official use of zhid as the term for Jew, regarding it as offensive, and replaced it with the more bookish evrei (lit., “Hebrew”). Even as the Russian state’s policies towards Jews started to become more hostile (from 1794, when a double tax on Jews was imposed), antisemitic ideas circulating in the West such as blood libel and the ritualistic killing of Christians were absent in Russia. During the nineteenth century, however, attitudes became more hostile, and a couple of “blood libel” trials were held in the Russian Empire (by comparison, in constitutional Austria-Hungary there were twelve such trials between 1867 and 1914).239 Astoundingly, in Saratov in 1853 the exiled Mykola Kostomarov, the historian and dissident who has been active in the SS Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood, wrote a strange report to the local governor “proving” that Jews were at times killing Christians for ritualistic purposes. In a subsequent trial, the local Jews who had been accused were promptly exonerated, and the Saratov governor subsequently forbade Kostomarov to do any more “research” on blood libel. According to the 1897 census, there were almost two million Jews in Ukraine, that is, 8% of its total population and 12.6% of the population of Right-Bank Ukraine. Initially, as a demographic legacy of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Jews in Ukraine lived almost entirely on the Dnipro’s right bank. But by the early twentieth century Jewish communities were to be found throughout Ukraine, and Jews had become the third largest nationality, behind Ukrainians and Russians.

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Almost half of all Jews lived in urban areas, and in some towns they comprised more than 70% of the population. In ca. 1897, cities with the highest percentage of Jews were Katerynoslav (35%), Odesa (30.8%), and Mykolaïv (19.5%). From 1804, Jews were officially required to reside within the so-called Pale of Settlement, which stretched across the lands of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth – present-day Right-Bank Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, Belarus – as well all other provinces in Ukraine except for Kharkiv. Catherine II herself had set limits on where Jews could reside in 1791, partly in response to pressure from Russian merchants in Moscow fearful of Jewish competitors. The government excluded the ethnic Russian provinces from Jewish settlement, while permitting it in southern Ukraine (New Russia), where Jews were encouraged to settle as farmers and even acquire land. As a result, by 1897 there were 23,000 Jewish families (including ca. 43,500 males; around 100,000 people in total) engaged in farming in New Russia.240 Most Jews opted out of farming, but there was a successful program of Jewish agricultural colonization in southern Ukraine, especially in comparison to attempts to form a class of Jewish farmers in nineteenth-century America and Palestine. In fact, until the rise of the kibbutz movement in Palestine in the 1930s and ’40s, southern Ukraine hosted the largest Jewish farming communities in the world. Leon Trotsky, the future revolutionary, opponent of Stalin, and inspiration of kibbutz members, was born to a family of Jewish colonists in Kherson province. Remarkably, in contrast to more traditional Jewish communities elsewhere in Ukraine, at home the young Trotsky spoke a mixture of Russian and Ukrainian, known today as surzhyk. However, the vast majority of east European Jews continued to live in small towns called shtetls. They engaged largely in non-agricultural pursuits, spoke Yiddish, and practiced Hasidism, a mystical trend of Judaism that originated in Right-Bank Ukraine (in Podolia) at the end of the eighteenth century. According to Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, the shtetl (Yiddish for “small town”) was an “East European market town in private possession of a Polish magnate, inhabited mostly but not exclusively by Jews and subject to Russian bureaucracy.”241 These privately-owned towns flourished because they held a monopoly on liquor trade, hosted an annual fair or even several fairs throughout the year, and did some manufacturing. It was Jews who made the town prosperous and its owner happy. Therefore, a shtetl was the “marriage of convenience” between Jewish entrepreneurs and Polish magnates. However, after the Polish November Uprising of 1830–31, the Russian

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authorities resolved to break up that marriage by either replacing Polish owners with Russian ones or transferring the towns over to the state treasury (for debts or on account of the Polish owners’ political disloyalty).242 Two things made a shtetl different from a village: an economy centered specifically on the marketplace, and a population that consisted of merchants and burghers rather than peasants. Some shtetls were as small as neighboring villages; others, like Berdychiv, were larger than most other towns. More important, in Russia the shtetl was widely regarded as a Jewish-Polish joint venture long after the marriage between Jews and Polish landlords was broken and well beyond repair. These real and alleged links between the Jews and the Poles caused a great deal of anxiety within the Russian government and led to its adoption of anti-Jewish policies. When did this actually take place? As noted above, Catherine II was not an avowed antisemite. Nor was her notoriously reactionary grandson and successor Nicholas I, who introduced some measures that could be viewed as anti-Jewish but were in fact anti-Polish: Jews became collateral damage in the prolonged RussianPolish conflict over the borderlands, which ran sometimes cold and at other times hot. For a long time the Russian authorities did not know how to treat Jews, whose social structure was so different from that of other settled or nomadic peoples of the empire. Unlike the settled peoples, Jews did not have a landed nobility, nor did they hold (or work) the land, although a good number served as administrators of Polish landed estates. A majority of Jews were engaged in trade, moneylending, banking, crafts, and operating small shops and businesses. Also, contrary to Catherine II’s opinion and expectations about the “usefulness” of Jews, many of them not only lacked a secure source of income but were so poor that they were called luftmenschen, and they would indeed have had to live “off air” were it not for Jewish charities. Jews were certainly a distinctive component of society in Ukraine. Its most numerous groups were merchants, artisans, and clerics, and the least numerous were farmers – the latter were only 3.2% of all Jews in European Russia. Artisans made up 33% of the Jewish population within the Pale of Settlement.243 The majority of Jews, up to 60%, engaged in some kind of trade: they ranged from the wealthiest merchants who belonged to the first and second guilds (and could defy the social and geographic restrictions imposed on Jews as a whole), to small shopkeepers, moneylenders, and resellers of agricultural goods.244 Exceptionally prominent was the “sugar king” Lazar’ Brodsky, one of the wealthiest men in late imperial Ukraine and the unrivaled leader

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of the Kyiv Jewish community. As opportunities became open to them in the late 1850s, increasing numbers of young Jews were educated in Russian state schools and universities or in modern Jewish schools by “enlightened” rabbis, producing a sizable Jewish secular intelligentsia and professional class. The proportion of Jews in classical high schools (gymnasia) increased dramatically: from 3.3% in 1865 to 12% in 1880. Within the Pale of Settlement, it was even higher, at 19% (in the Odesa school district alone, it reached one-third). Jews also flocked to imperial universities, where their numbers were soon substantial: 3.2% of all students in 1865; 8.8% in 1881; 14.5% in 1886. The university in Odesa became arguably the most “Jewish” university in the world: one-third of its students were Jews.245 Jewish graduates of universities and colleges became professionals allowed to reside outside of the Pale of Settlement, and before long they were joined by certified artisans, first-guild merchants, retired soldiers, and pretty much any Jew with a “useful” profession. All in all, according to the 1897 census, 314,000 Jews officially lived beyond the Pale; they accounted for only 7% of all “Russian” Jews, yet as a group were three times the size of the Jewish population of the Netherlands or France (106,000 and 95,000, respectively).246 In the Habsburg Empire, where Jews were allowed to live wherever they wished, nearly 42% (872,000 of the total Jewish population of 2,084,000) continued to live in overpopulated Galicia.247 Many prominent Jews were beneficiaries of the Russian liberal reforms and the mobility they made possible. In addition to Leon Trotsky – the graduate of a classical gymnasium in Mykolaïv who chose revolution over farming – there was also his consistent opponent Ze’ev Jabotinsky (1880–1940), an Odesa gymnasium dropout who became a Jewish nationalist thinker and leader of right-wing Zionists. Another was Sholem Aleichem (1859–1916), the most famous Yiddish writer to emerge from Russian-ruled Ukraine, once a student at the district school of Pereiaslav, east of Kyiv. These exceptional intellectuals and professionals – archetypal “Mercurians” – made possible what Yuri Slezkine has famously called the “Jewish century.” What nearly all of them had in common was a secular education provided by the state. Ukraine’s most famous Jew, however, is not a real person but the fictional character Tevye the Dairyman, protagonist of a series of short stories by Sholem Aleichem first published in 1894, more than a decade after the first wave of pogroms (1881). Aleichem gives the most vivid depictions of Jewish life in small shtetl – Tevye’s native (and fictitious, like him) Anatevka. Both Tevye and his shtetl were immortalized in the

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celebrated Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof (1964) and the film version by Norman Jewison (1971). Sholem Aleichem’s lesser known novel Bloody Hoax, set in Kyiv in the wake of the notorious Mendel Beilis trial of 1911–13, depicts a more complex relationship between the Jews and Gentiles, in a time following the devastating pogrom of 1905. All of Sholem Aleichem’s subsequent fiction takes place against the background of the continuing threat of pogroms. What caused the waves of anti-Jewish violence in late imperial Russia? Aside from the traditional antisemitism among the Christian masses, there were more modern sources of antisemitism. Jews were seen as a symbol of modernity and thus became a focus of all the phobias and fears associated with the economic uncertainty and social displacement modernity brought about. As Aleksei Miller has observed, in the early 1880s fear of the future spread through the empire, fed by increasing capitalist pressures, and it was this fear that fueled the anti-Jewish violence in the next few decades. Jews were viewed, paradoxically, as both capitalist exploiters and dangerous revolutionaries, hence the attacks against them as both enemies of the common folk and enemies of the tsar by right-wing mobs. Jewish wealth was indeed on the rise in the late nineteenth century, and Jews completely dominated the merchant class within the Pale of Settlement, to the point that not a single Gentile remained among first-guild merchants in the Chernihiv and Podolia provinces. At the same time, for the authorities the number of Jewish revolutionaries was growing alarmingly high: by the late 1880s, 35 to 40 per cent of all political radicals in Russia were Jews.248 The government responded with discriminatory measures targeting Jews in the legal and economic realms, while right-wing mobs and xenophobic politicians took matters in their own hands and targeted Jewish lives and properties on the streets. The government did not organize the pogroms, as many once believed, but it blamed their Jewish victims for the violence that the mobs inflicted on them. In 1882, after the wave of pogroms that swept much of Ukraine, including Kyiv, in 1881, the government issued so-called Temporary Rules, which reflected an increasingly dominant belief on the right that Jews were detrimental to the peasants among whom they lived. Consequently, the authorities prohibited Jews from taking up residence in the countryside (excepting those who already lived there) or selling alcohol to the peasants – all in the name of ending the “Jewish exploitation” of the peasantry. At the same time, several hundred shtetls were reclassified as villages, so as to empty them of Jews,

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who were no longer allowed to settle among peasants. As a result, Jews were crammed into towns, where they had to compete among themselves and with Christians for jobs and markets, which only increased the threat of new pogroms. Some statesmen, like Sergei Witte and Petr Stolypin, tried to abolish legal discrimination against Jews. But during the three decades preceding the 1917 Revolution, the notoriously weakwilled Tsar Nicholas II sided with the powerful antisemitic lobby and effectively blocked any significant legislation in that regard. Threatened by pogroms and poverty, almost two million Jews left Russia between 1881 and 1914, most of whom (78.6%) headed for the United States.249 Russia’s loss was America’s gain. The first and longest lasting beneficiary of this new Jewish exodus on a Biblical scale was probably Hollywood. Jews who left Ukraine during those years include Louis B. Mayer (born Lazar Meir in Dymer, Kyiv province), future film mogul and co-founder of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios (mgm ) in 1924; the maternal ancestors of Silvester Stallone, who came from Odesa; and the paternal grandparents of Dustin Hoffman, who emigrated to Chicago from Bila Tserkva. In contrast to the emancipated Jews of Austria and Germany, Russian Jews – who were in fact former Polish Jews – were not Kaisertreu (loyal to the monarchy) but, to use Aleksei Miller’s term, increasingly Pushkintreu (devoted to Russian culture). Symbolically, it is noteworthy, for instance, that it was a Jew from Odesa who published the first Italian translation of Pushkin’s works in 1855. The Jewish parents of Boris Pasternak, the author of Dr Zhivago, born in Moscow in 1890, were originally from Odesa and benefitted from prestigious imperial schools. Jews were increasingly opting for Russian culture, at the expense of not only the Polish or German culture once favored by upwardly mobile Jews but also native Jewish (Yiddish) culture. Only in the 1920s did a new generation of Jewish scholars and artists choose to take part in Ukrainian culture and society, a choice that during the Stalinist Terror would cost some of them their lives. Unlike Jews but like Russians, Poles in Ukraine represented a ruling nationality that largely retained their dominance in the economy and society through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. An absolute majority of Ukraine’s Poles lived on the Right Bank, where they comprised between 6 and 9% of the population. Initially, until the Russian authorities undertook anti-Polish measures in the 1830s and ’40s, nearly all local Poles were nobles, although 90% of them were landless – an aberration in the Russian Empire, where hereditary

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nobility was linked to landownership. Yet in the empire’s formerly Polish areas, the nobility constituted a share of the total population ten times greater than it did in ethnic Russia! In the aftermath of the Polish November Uprising of 1830–31, it was the numerous landless nobles whom the government made into scapegoats. Between 1832 and 1850, nearly 340,000 were stripped of their nobiliary status and reclassified as “smallholders,” or odnodvortsy, and state peasants. Eventually many of these déclassé nobles were linguistically and culturally, if not religiously, assimilated into the majority Ukrainian population. According to some estimates, on the eve of the January Uprising of 1863 there were about 480,000 Poles in Russian Ukraine, accounting for 9% of the population of Right-Bank Ukraine.250 Poles also comprised absolute majorities among nobles in Right-Bank Ukraine: 82% in Kyiv province, 85% in Podolia province, and 89% in Volhynia province.251 Who was officially considered a “Pole”? That varied. The answer depended in part on self-designation but also on ethnic and religious classifications instituted at different times and usually by imperial bureaucrats. Normally, in Russia’s “western provinces” a Pole was someone who was Roman Catholic, spoke Polish in daily life, and claimed noble origin. In reality, however, criteria could include such factors as the place of one’s upbringing, the religion of one’s parents, “national environment,” and, not least, a person’s “Polish views and tendencies,” as put by Russia’s minister of appanages.252 Of course, such criteria gave local imperial officials much leverage in defining who was a Pole, in a manner that may recall Vienna’s antisemitic mayor Karl Lueger, who once reportedly declared “I decide who is a Jew.” At times merely having a Polish-sounding last name (ending, usually, with the suffix -ski/-cki) was sufficient for a person to be persecuted. For instance, Sergei Witte recalled a case in the 1880s of a railroad employee in Odesa named Katul’skii who was fired for his alleged Polish descent: as it turned out, the hapless fellow was not a Pole but the son of an Orthodox priest.253 Aside from Roman Catholicism and form of surname, nobiliary status was often a Pole’s most stereotypical characteristic in Russia’s “western provinces.” However, many Polish nobles, both those with land and without, had no documents testifying to that status, and some did not speak Polish: were they, too, always seen as Poles and hence subject to discrimination? In fact, a good number of Roman Catholics living in the Russian Empire neither spoke Polish in their daily lives nor considered it to be their native language. In addition to German-speaking

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Catholics in southern Ukraine (180,000 in 1911), there were many Ukrainian-speaking Catholics in Right-Bank Ukraine, perhaps descendants of déclassé nobles stripped of their nobility in the 1830s and ’40s. According to the 1897 census, more than 330,000 Ukrainian-speaking Roman Catholics could not be counted as Poles based on ethnographic criteria.254 Were these Ukrainian-speaking Catholics viewed differently from their Polish-speaking co-religionists? In the 1860s and ’70s, several Russian state officials, supported by the influential Moscow-based journalist Mikhail Katkov, attempted to reclassify local “Russian-” (in fact, Ukrainian- and Belarusian-) speaking Catholics as “Russians.” However, in actual judicial practice in the borderlands, the traditional conception of Russianness as being equated with Orthodoxy prevailed, and by the 1880s, plans to introduce use of Russian and Belarusian in Catholic church services were largely abandoned. As it turned out, there could be no such thing as “Russian Catholics.” Consequently, in the empire’s “western provinces” Catholics were increasingly seen as Poles, especially when it came to such sensitive matters as the purchase of land in the former Polish territories, inheritance rights, or interfaith marriages. Catholics – at first nobles and then also peasants – became a discriminated minority, on a par with Jews. For instance, in 1865, already suffering from cultural and religious discrimination, Poles were prohibited from buying or renting land in the empire’s western lands; in 1886, the prohibition was extended to Russians who might be acting as straw men for Poles. In 1893, the Kyiv governor-general went so far as to forbid Polish landowners to bequeath their landed estates to anyone other than a spouse or a child; otherwise, estates were to be sold into “Russian hands.”255 In one famous case, dating as late as the 1890s, a distinguished Russian general of Polish descent could not inherit an estate in Lithuania because it was not bequeathed directly to him; highly-placed friends in St Petersburg then advised him to convert to Orthodoxy so as to bypass the law.256 In Volhynia, even loyal German and Czech colonists were pressured by the Kyiv governor-general to convert to Orthodoxy so as to prove their fealty to Russia and distance themselves from the disloyal Poles. In part incidents like these took place because there was no legal definition of “Pole,” beyond vague associations with the “Polish” szlachta and Catholicism. And because many déclassé nobles were socially indistinguishable from peasants, in the mid-1880s Catholic peasants, too, became targets of discriminatory measures. For instance, in 1901 a measure confirmed by the Cabinet of Ministers prohibited Catholic

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peasants from acquiring more than 60 desiatynas (162 acres) of land per household; it was intended to prevent people who could not prove nobility from imitating a nobiliary way of life. In dealing with the issue of Poles and Catholicism, as in dealing with Jews, Tsar Nicholas II showed himself to be a capricious despot with xenophobic tendencies. As late as 1905, the tsar brooded over the issue of “how to draw a line between the sermon of Catholicism and the sermon of Polonism.”257 In the end, no line between them was drawn, and the Russians drove Poles and Catholics from landownership in Right-Bank Ukraine and Belarus, as well as in Lithuania (although with less success). Yet in 1897, across all nine former Polish provinces, slightly more land (about 50%, in contrast to more than 90% in the early 1860s) still belonged to Catholics rather than to the Orthodox, now owners of 43%. In the three Right-Bank provinces the government was more successful: here Orthodox landowners by far outnumbered Catholic ones (70% to 18%) and were numerous even among the wealthiest landowners.258 Nonetheless, given their relatively small share of the overall population, Poles were still highly overrepresented among large landowners in Right-Bank Ukraine. Also, while many of the new Russian landowners were absentee owners, Poles were often the actual masters of these estates, having leased them – illegally – from their owners. The estates of many wealthy Polish landowners, especially those who owned sugar refineries, were self-sustained economic and cultural units, far removed from the modest households of the Russian officials posted to the region. One such magnate, Kyiv-born Karol Jaroszyński (1878–1929), known as the “Russian Vanderbilt,” was one of Russia’s most powerful men and by far its wealthiest Pole. In addition to numerous estates in Right-Bank Ukraine, he owned or co-owned fifty-three sugar refineries, twelve banks, two of the most elegant hotels in Kyiv (including the famed Hotel Europe at 2 Khreshchatyk St) – and many other properties. In 1916, his fortune was put at 26.1 million rubles in cash, 300 million in promissory notes (vekselia), and 950 million rubles in gold and real estate. Overall, Polish capital in Ukraine, including real estate and cash, was put at two billion rubles, an immense sum at the time.259 And this despite ongoing discrimination against Poles as a community! Polish resilience was legendary, and while not many could be like Jaroszyński, Poles continued to be highly visible in the economy, society, and culture of Russian-ruled Ukraine. Poised between privilege and oppression, Poles could be found in all walks of life, from wealthy rural

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landowners to the industrial proletariat of Donbas. A large majority of Poles in Ukraine, some 90%, continued to live in Right-Bank Ukraine, most linked to the soil and its agrarian riches, from wealthy landowners and their estate managers, to technicians employed in sugar refineries, to landless nobles and villagers. That remained true right up to the empire’s twilight: in 1917, almost half of all Poles in Ukraine (46.8%) still engaged in agriculture, and many thousands of Polish nobles still clung to their landed properties.260 In their centuries-old stronghold of Right-Bank Ukraine, Poles dominated not only among the landed nobility but also among owners, engineers, and technicians of food-processing industries, including sugar refining, distilling, and flour milling, the engines of capitalism in the countryside. But not every Pole lived from the land. Defying discrimination, Poles remained unusually ubiquitous in public and private service, in the army (among middle-ranking officers), and in education (as secondary school teachers and university professors). It was in these and other markedly non-agrarian occupations – often outside the three Right-Bank provinces – that more and more Poles found employment. Thanks to urbanization and industrialization, Polish colonies formed in the large urban centers of the south and east, that is, Odesa, Mykolaïv, Kherson, Katerynoslav, Donbas, and the Crimea. In New Russia, the proportion of Poles grew from 0.1% in the early 1800s to 2% by the century’s end.261 Around 1900, for instance, there were 17,837 Poles (Polish-speaking Catholics) living outside of the Right Bank – in Chernihiv (3,138), Poltava (3,773), Kharkiv (5,648), and Katerynoslav (5,278) provinces.262 On the eve of World War I, in the heart of industrial Donbas, local Catholic parishes had 1,800 Polish parishioners in Iuzivka; 2,235 in Luhansk; and 1,534 in Ienakiieve. The city of Katerynoslav, the industrial and commercial center of the region, boasted the largest Polish community: 3,418 people in 1897, and 7,827 in 1912 (judging by parishioners at the local St Joseph’s Catholic parish).263 Kharkiv, the capital of eastern Ukraine, was home to even more Poles: 3,969 at the end of the century. In southeastern Ukraine, most Poles were part of the newest social groups – industrial workers, managers, and professionals – and figured in almost equal measure among both proverbial exploiters and those whom they exploited. Characteristically, on the eve of the 1917 revolution more than 24% of Poles in Ukraine were employed in the industrial sector as owners, engineers, designers, managers, and workers; together they formed the second largest group of Poles, after those working in agriculture. One should add that Polish industrial workers,

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in contrast to their Ukrainian and most Russian counterparts, were largely skilled machinists, metalworkers, railroad engineers, and the like; together such workers were about one-quarter of Polish workers and artisans in tsarist Russia. Professionals – doctors, teachers, pharmacists, lawyers, etc. – made up 15.7% of the “Polish” workforce in Ukraine, followed by bureaucrats (3.9%) and merchants (2.2%); the remaining Poles (7.3%) were an assorted group that included clergymen, domestic servants, and beggars.264 Polish professionals were particularly in evidence in the large industrial centers of eastern and southern Ukraine. For instance, a dozen or so railroad engineers of Polish descent were crucial in building and managing the Kharkiv (from 1907, Southern) Railroad in the 1870s and ’80s. Polish capitalists, engineers, and managers, many coming from the Russian-ruled Kingdom of Poland (aka Congress Poland), had pioneering roles in the metallurgical and machine-building plants newly constructed in southeastern Ukraine. Ignacy Jasiukowicz, for instance, was head engineer at the Belgian-funded Dnipro Metallurgical Works based in the steel town of Kam’ians'ke; in 1902 he was elected head of Prodameta, a monopolistic syndicate that by 1914 controlled 85% of the market for metallurgical products in the empire. As late as 1913 Poles were 35% of the population of Kam’ians'ke, and some six hundred Polish steelworkers and fifteen engineers formed a majority of the initial workforce at the town’s largest plant, the Dnipro Metallurgical Works.265 Early in the twentieth century, 40% of the members of the Society of Polish Technicians, representing the brightest Polish minds in technology, were based in Ukraine.266 To a large extent, the industrial wonder taking place in southeastern Ukraine at the end of the nineteenth century was a product of Polish expertise, capital, and labor. On the educational front, despite the purges of 1863 Polish professors remained omnipresent at the three universities of Russian-ruled Ukraine – in Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odesa – particularly in medicine, sciences, and technology. In the early twentieth century, at least three dozen Polish apothecaries and pharmacists were in operation in the Left Bank and southeastern Ukraine, in addition to the twelve Polish pharmacists at work in Odesa alone.267 Polish developers and architects were employed by Russian provincial and municipal administrations in Ukraine’s largest cities, including Kyiv, Katerynoslav, and Kharkiv.268 The most prominent Polish architect, Władysław Horodecki (Vladyslav Horodets’kyi, 1863–1930), has justly been compared to Barcelona’s art nouveau genius, Antonio Gaudi. Born

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to a Polish noble family in rural Podolia, Horodecki became closely associated with the city of Kyiv, where he lived and worked from 1889 to 1920. He designed a dozen structures for the city, ranging from the neoclassical Kyiv Municipal Museum and a neo-gothic Catholic cathedral (both major landmarks today), to the city’s sewer system and residential toilets. His most iconic, weird, and “Gaudian” creation was his own residence, the so-called House with Chimaeras (1901–03), a six-story art nouveau monster of a house, cast wholly in concrete – and lots of it (including the frogs, rhinos, dolphins, and mermaids resting on the roof and facades). Another Pole from Ukraine became one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century. Kazimierz Malewicz (1879–1935), better known by his name’s russified form, Kazimir Malevich, was born in Kyiv and raised in the Ukrainian countryside. A founder of the Suprematism movement and the avant-garde painter who created the notorious “Black Square” (1915), Malewicz left Ukraine in 1896 to become a celebrity in the artists’ haunts of Moscow and St Petersburg/Petrograd. But he never lost touch with Ukraine, where he lived again in 1927–30 and contributed greatly to the revival of the arts during the period of ukrainization. At the dawn of the new century, the most visible Poles in Ukraine were no longer feudal lords and sugar magnates but doctors, pharmacists, engineers, architects, artists, scientists, and, last but not least, industrial workers. The distinguishing feature of the new Polish communities in the industrial southeast, one that also differentiated them from Poles in the agrarian belt of Right-Bank Ukraine, was the fact that they were usually immigrants from Congress Poland: for instance, according to the 1897 census 70% of Poles living in Odesa (12,400 of 17,400 resident Poles) were born in Kongresówka, as the Poles, in typical lovehate fashion, called their truncated ethnic heartland.269 In fact Odesa, Ukraine’s largest city, boasted the empire’s largest Polish urban community after those in Congress Poland, Wilno (Vilnius), and St Petersburg. Odesa was an opportune place for Poles of various social backgrounds, and together they were a solid 4% of the city’s population. The largest groups there were those serving in the military (33%), service sector employees (23.2%), workers and managers at manufacturing and construction projects (14%), and investors and rentiers (5%). Others were transport workers (4%), traders (3.2%), state officials (2.7%), doctors (1.7%), teachers (1.6%), and even prostitutes (12 people). Urban Poles worked in every occupation and belonged to various social estates, ranging from peasants (46%) to burghers (25%), to nobles and officials

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(20.1%).270 And, in any case, rigid social categories did not convey the occupational and economic diversity of Odesa’s Polish community, which constituted a modern society in itself. Unlike Poles and Jews, but like Russians, Germans were a relatively late addition to the ethnic mosaics of Ukraine. Germans first arrived in southern Ukraine in large numbers in the late eighteenth century, at the invitation of the Russian rulers Catherine II, Paul I, and Alexander I. Among the first to arrive were the Mennonites, a religious minority persecuted in Europe, who settled in the heart of Zaporozhia, at the site of the first Cossack sich (stronghold) on Khortytsia Island. Early in the nineteenth century, Germans arrived from states devastated by the Napoleonic wars, which included Baden, the Rhine palatinate, and Württemberg. These people were largely economic migrants, who settled further south, in the provinces of Kherson, Katerynoslav, and Taurida (north of the Crimean peninsula); by 1897, they numbered 283,000, and on the eve of World War I, they numbered 489,000 and lived in 966 homogenous colonies. Germans thus became a major ethnic minority in the south, comprising 4.5% of the population in Kherson province, 3.83% in Katerynoslav province, and 5.4% in Taurida province. Finally, in the 1860s through 1880s, the imperial government invited Germans, mostly Lutherans from Congress Poland, to migrate to Volhynia; by 1897, their number in that province was 171,000, with the largest group, 60,000-strong, living in the district of Zhytomyr.271 The next largest German community was in Kyiv province (14,707 in 1897), and nearly a third of it lived in the city of Kyiv. Germans and Mennonites were expected to become ideal colonists, able to teach the Ukrainian and Russian peasants around them how to become better farmers and artisans. And they largely fulfilled these expectations, as the southern steppe once again served as a “laboratory of modernity” for imperial modernizers. Until the outbreak of World War I, the German and Mennonite communities remained models of farming and husbandry, ones for the Slavs to emulate. They enjoyed the right to self-government, German-language schooling, tax privileges, and, at first, exemption from military service (that changed in 1871). The majority of Germans were farmers; only a minority engaged in urban pursuits. According to data from 1916, per 1,000 Germans, on average 577 were engaged in agriculture, 62 were employed in private sector (as managers on rural estates or in urban factories), 43 lived off capital and rents, 41 engaged in trade, 32 served in administration (provincial and municipal), and only 2 worked in industry.272

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Besides farming and highly skilled crafts like watchmaking, Germans excelled in teaching, policing, and governance (especially the Baltic Germans, a “mobilized diaspora” par excellence). The imperial government rarely doubted the loyalty of its German subjects, at least until the outbreak of world war in 1914. For instance, between 1832 and 1914, three of the fourteen Kyiv governors-general – the highest imperial officeholders in Right-Bank Ukraine – were of German background. Likewise, among forty-one civil governors of Volhynia, at least eight were of German origin – that is, 19.5 per cent, a proportion much higher than that of Germans in the population of Ukraine or the empire as a whole. Among the many police officers of German descent was Boris Giubennet (born Christoph Bernhard von Hübbenet), who long served (1866–82) as head of the city of Kyiv’s notorious police force. In municipal government, two of the city’s seventeen mayors between 1837 and 1917 were Germans, and a good number of municipal councilors of German descent were influential behind the scenes. Finally, stereotypical German occupations in the empire were in science, law, medicine, and technology: Ukraine’s universities were filled with German academics, residents were treated by German physicians, and factories across Ukraine were run by German engineers and managers. Germans were renowned for their loyalty to Russia’s ruling dynasty, yet some notable Germans also embraced Ukraine as their homeland. Among them, in Katerynoslav there was the scientist, entrepreneur, and archaeologist Oleksandr Pol' (Alexander Pohl), whom we met earlier in this chapter. Dubbed the “Little Russian Columbus,” Pol' was also an ardent student of the legacy of the Zaporozhian Cossacks. Otto Eichelmann (1854–1943), like Pol' a graduate of the German-language university in Dorpat (Tartu), became professor of international law at Kyiv University. Elected to Kyiv’s city council, Eichelmann became known for his liberal views and opposition to the city’s dominant political clique of Russian monarchists and right-wing populists. After the outbreak of the Ukrainian Revolution in 1917, Eichelmann worked for several Ukrainian governments and drafted a constitution for the Ukrainian People’s Republic. Even after emigration to Czechoslovakia, he continued to cooperate with Ukrainian institutions. Our final example is scientist Borys Paton (1918–2020), the longest-serving head of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, who was a grandson of a Lutheran diplomat in Russian imperial service. Yet another minority with a clear place in Ukraine’s pecking order were Greeks. They had appeared on Ukrainian territory long before Slavs, the

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presumed autochthons, came out of the woodwork. Although relatively few in number in nineteenth-century Ukraine, Greeks remained prominent in several regards, especially as merchant communities in several cities and towns. The earliest Greek settlements appeared in the Crimea during the times of classical antiquity, and until the late eighteenth century these were the largest and most significant centers of Greek life on the territory of present-day Ukraine. There were also smaller Greek communities in the towns of medieval and early modern Ukraine, most notably in Polish-held Lviv and in the Ukrainian Cossack state, particularly in the town of Nizhyn (later referred to as “Greek town”). Invited to Nizhyn by Cossack hetmans, there Greek merchants established the largest and wealthiest Greek community in Left-Bank Ukraine. Known for their high mobility, Nizhyn’s Greek merchants managed to attain complete autonomy – that is, exemption from paying taxes or billeting troops, as well as governance by a separate magistrate – while being just 6 to 7% of the town’s overall population (then around 12,000).273 In Kyiv, which until 1835 was a self-governing city under medieval Magdeburg law, Greeks (some originally from Nizhyn) had a crucial role as wealthy merchants and influential plutocrats presiding over the municipal community as a whole. Even during subsequent decades of tighter imperial control over the city, individual Greeks, usually wealthy merchants or their heirs, held high office in Kyiv’s municipal and provincial administrations. Kyiv province’s most popular governor was Ivan Funduklei (in office 1839–52), son of a wealthy Greek merchant who had come to the Russian Empire from Istanbul. The governor was a very wealthy man: in addition to a fortune inherited from his father, he acquired lucrative landed properties in Kyiv province and the Crimea, where he produced sugar and wine, respectively. Most important, unlike most other imperial administrators, who were notoriously corrupt, Funduklei was an unusually upright civil servant. Rather than embezzle public funds, he spent his personal fortune repairing Kyiv’s shaky infrastructure and supporting various charitable causes, especially education. Today this son of a Greek immigrant is remembered as one of Kyiv’s greatest benefactors. If judged by the number and prominence of its Greek residents, the largest “Greek” city in Russian-ruled Ukraine was undoubtedly Odesa. Many of the Greeks living there were wholesale merchants involved in the international grain trade. In 1910, Greeks were just 1.8 per cent of the city’s population, but that 10,000-strong Greek community included many individuals of high socioeconomic status, befitting

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Odesa’s well-deserved reputation as a wealthy maritime metropolis.274 Owing to his fabulous wealth as well as his incessant civic engagement and unrivaled penchant for philanthropy, one man in particular stood out. Grigorii Marazli (Grigorios Maraslis; 1831–1907), born into wealth and privilege in Odesa, expanded his father’s vast business empire, built on the grain trade, into industry and real estate. He also became involved in municipal politics, first as a deputy to the city council and then as longtime mayor (1878–95). An effective city leader and exceptionally generous benefactor, Marazli eclipsed most other mayors of large imperial cities. He is credited with personally funding the city’s grand Museum of Fine Arts, the empire’s first bacteriological station, and the Odesa Public Library. A proud Greek, he also built schools and published books in Greek – in a series called the “Maraslis Library” – to benefit his compatriots in Greece and across the Ottoman Empire. Odesa as a world-famous liberal metropolis where business intermeshed with culture is to a large degree the product of Grigorii Marazli’s managerial skills and fortune. While the affluent Greeks of Odesa and Kyiv lived and worked in a cosmopolitan world beyond Greek communal life, their much poorer brethren preserved centuries-old ways of life in homogenous communities in and around Mariupol, a crucial port on the Sea of Azov. Referred to as Azov Greeks, most were immigrants from the Crimea lured to the mainland by Catherine II living in compact communities in Mariupol and twenty-three neighboring villages. Split evenly between the Greek-speaking Romeiis and the Turkic-speaking Urums, local Greeks were mostly peasants engaged in animal husbandry and crafts. Around 1821, the population of the Mariupol district consisted almost entirely of Greeks; however, by 1884 Greeks were only 34 per cent of the district’s total population of 161,044.275 Unlike Greek communities elsewhere in the empire, the Azov Greeks resisted assimilation well into the twentieth century, perhaps owing to their more confined way of life. Yet even among the Azov Greeks there were those who broke away from the norm of raising livestock in a tight-knit community. One who chose a different path was Arkhip Kuindzhi, an artist of Urum descent (barely literate in Russian), who became a great admirer of meditative Ukrainian nights and renowned in the history of art as one of world’s supreme painters of moonlight. Aside from a few well-known families of Greek descent that traced their presence in Ukraine to their ancestors’ service in the eighteenth-century Hetmanate (among them, the Kapnists, the Tomaras,

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and the Konstantynovyches), there were also individuals like Mykola Arkas (1852–1909). The son of a Russian imperial admiral who served as the military governor of Mykolaïv, and grandson of a Greek political émigré who settled there and taught history and ancient languages, Mykola Arkas combined the navy career of his father with the peaceful pursuits of his grandfather. After graduating from university, he served as an aide-de-camp to the commander-in-chief of the Black Sea Fleet. Perhaps owing to the influence of his Ukrainian mother, Arkas developed a lifelong passion for Ukrainian folk music and composed an opera, “Kateryna,” based on Taras Shevchenko’s eponymous poem. An active Ukrainophile, he founded a chapter of the Prosvita Society in Mykolaïv. His most prominent achievement was putting together a richly illustrated History of Ukraine-Rus' (1908). An amateurish work, it was nonetheless a successful early attempt at writing a popular history of Ukraine in a national populist spirit – to the displeasure of the decidedly scholarly historian Mykhailo Hrushevs'kyi, known to have tolerated competition badly, especially when it came from a dilettante. Mykola Arkas’s son, also named Mykola, proved his loyalty to Ukraine differently, by enlisting as a colonel in the army of the Ukrainian People’s Republic. Given the age-old Greek tradition of philanthropy (the word itself is of Greek origin) and historic links between Greeks and Ukrainians, it is hardly surprising that one of the most generous benefactors in the Ukrainian community of North America today is the entrepreneur John Temerty, who was born in the Donbas and has Greek roots. Having discussed Ukraine’s ethnic diversity at some length, it is not unreasonable to pose a potentially provocative question: Was there a pecking order in Ukraine’s apparent multiethnic disorder? While some communities were certainly overrepresented in certain fields of endeavor – for instance, Ukrainians in agriculture and Jews in trade – there was no caste-like order in its society overall. Russians, Poles, Jews, Greeks, Germans, and Ukrainians could be found in almost every occupation and social estate. However, that did not mean the social system was chaotic, democratic, or open to talent irrespective of an individual’s ethnicity, social background, religion, or gender. One would be very hard-pressed to find a Jew in the imperial administration, or more than a very few Germans among seasonal miners in the Donbas. It would be just as rare to find a Jewish peasant beyond the colonist communities in New Russia or a Ukrainian among the guild merchants of Berdychiv.

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Given all this, can we speak of a privileged or ruling nationality in late imperial Ukraine? Was there a nationality – or, perhaps, nationalities – that exploited the “natives” in the way that the Protestant British did in India, or in Ireland? Assuming that there was a pecking order in the multiethnic society of Russian-ruled Ukraine, let us begin by looking at those who were at the bottom of it. The first community to have experienced discrimination in the empire was the Jews, and toward the empire’s end their plight only worsened, indeed, so much that they began to leave in droves overseas. Granted, there were some fabulously wealthy Jews, like the Brodsky family, who mingled with highly-placed Gentiles in business and leisure. Economic endeavors were certainly one area in which Jews could not only compete with but prevail over Gentiles. But the small group of Jewish plutocrats able to circumvent most (but not all) limitations on geographic and social movement stood in stark contrast to others in the Jewish community who were disadvantaged in every possible way. Then it was Poles’ turn to experience full-scale discrimination. Polish nobles and, later, Polish peasants were subject to a whole series of prohibitions and limitations. If being a Catholic landed noble had once by default defined someone as part of the ruling class in Right-Bank Ukraine, after 1831, and especially after 1863, that status was disadvantageous, as on the Right Bank fewer and fewer Polish Catholic nobles were to be found among those employed in administration, civil service, or education. Who were the exploiters in this somewhat Hobbesian world of late imperial Ukraine? Was it Russians, Poles, Germans, or perhaps even Jews, as contemporary antisemites believed? In theory, being Russian, Orthodox, noble, and male were sufficient characteristics to assure an individual both privileged status and a leading part in governing the empire (being wealthy and well-connected were an added bonus). Russians did indeed hold a near-monopoly of power, and the empire’s predominantly Russian governors-general, civil governors, police officials, and the like were responsible for numerous acts of repression against Ukrainians, Jews, Poles, and political dissidents of all kinds, including Russian ones. Yet it should be remembered that these “Russians” also included a good many Ukrainians – most often direct descendants of Cossack officers – who were officially viewed not as a distinct minority, let alone nationality, but as an integral part of the “all-Russian nation” (to use Aleksei Miller’s term). It was often not ethnic Russians but loyal Little Russians who feverishly pushed for the implementation of anti-Ukrainian policies such as the Valuev Circular of 1863 and Ems Decree of 1876.

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Furthermore, most power-holding and decision-making Russians of that time were not Russian nationalists in the present-day sense; rather, they were dynastic loyalists for whom empire stood above nation. The ruling class in Ukraine also included German Protestants – both those with nobiliary status and ones without – who were omnipresent in the professional (and, especially, professorial) class. Polish noble landowners, too, were not extinct as a species after 1863. A dwindling but nonetheless still wealthy and prominent group of Polish magnates retained enormous properties on the Right Bank, and they were often backed by powerful friends in St Petersburg (as was the case with the Kyiv-born tycoon Karol Jaroszyński). The imperial state claimed that, above all, it cared for the well-being of “Russians” (Orthodox East Slavs), but in reality it cared much more about preserving the dynasty and a stratified social order, built on peasantry at the bottom and nobles at the top. Hence, until at least the last years preceding World War I, the government largely avoided siding with the Russian nationalists who wanted to disenfranchise Polish landowners in the “western provinces,” which might have sparked wider social turmoil. Until 1905, all commoners – peasants, townspeople, and workers – irrespective of ethnicity or religion, were subject to legal and social discrimination. At the same time, a degree of cultural and religious discrimination was applied to certain minorities per se – that is, to Jews, Poles, Russian Old Believers, and Ukrainians who no longer wanted to be “Russians” – and in some cases that discrimination lasted until 1917. A Marxist would add that the working class was also exploited by the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie. From another perspective, it was evident that the average Russian was no better off than the other people – the average Jew, Volga Muslim, Pole, Ukrainian, or Siberian native – over whom the “Russian nation” supposedly ruled. Nor can we call any particular ethnic group, whether Russians, Jews, Poles or Germans, a community of exploiters. Instead, the imperial state relied on multiethnic elites whose members were united by common social interests and were tied more to the government than to their own ethnic communities. These multiethnic elites ruled the empire in the name of Orthodox Russia, in the process exploiting and/or oppressing Russian commoners and various minorities alike. In the end, Ukrainians were no more oppressed than the empire’s other ethnic groups were. True, in the Darwinian world of Russian political economy, certain “colonial” features worked against the Ukrainian peasants, among them the industrialists’ importation of an

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ethnically Russian workforce into southeastern Ukraine, specific tariffs imposed from St Petersburg, and the prevalence of agriculture to the detriment of other economic activity in the Ukrainian heartland – its infamous “black soil curse.” However, no social or ethnic group deliberately prevented Ukrainians from “conquering” cities or joining modern professions. It was Ukrainian national leaders who interpreted the Ukrainians’ social and economic disadvantages as resulting from national oppression. Those leaders were correct in one crucial respect, however: separating socioeconomic issues from political and cultural ones – ranging from the ban on Ukrainian-language publications to the absence of Ukrainian-language schools – was very difficult, if not impossible, to do. Those issues became even more interwoven on the eve of World War I.

8 Politics and Culture between Empire and Nation

the wo r ld (S) o f fi n-d e-Si è c l e a n d b e y o n d In Ukraine the fin-de-siècle was as much about struggling peasants, bellowing oxen, and disputes between village neighbors over the borders of their plots as it was about heated urban (and urbane) disputes over Nietzsche, decadent sensibility, and homoerotic poetry.1 During the latter part of the nineteenth century, aesthetic and intellectual modernism coexisted with populism in the arts and in politics. Ukrainian literature was still largely about peasants – its imagined audience – but not for peasants, most of whom could not read. But neither this literature nor the countryside itself were as stagnant or somnolent as they might have seemed to a city dweller’s condescending gaze. The best literary works written at the time reflected and at times even anticipated the rapid social and cultural changes taking place in rural life. That literature, whether good or bad, had one overwhelming problem: in Russia, it was illegal, since the Ems Decree of 1876 had banned, among other things, the publication or importation of any Ukrainian-language fiction. Not many aspiring writers chose to write in Ukrainian, since that meant living life not only in obscurity but also under the constant threat of police persecution. Those few individuals who chose to write in Ukrainian often produced works that prioritized not aesthetic value but social use, in the spirit of an all-encompassing populism. As these writers saw it, literature’s use to society was to raise awareness amid the reading public – mostly fellow writers, students, and rural intelligentsia – about the miseries endured by country folk through realistic depictions of people and nature. In other words, their writings were realist fiction with a strong populist bent, focusing on the post-reform Ukrainian country-

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side. That literature also substituted for politics in a world in which all public expressions of Ukrainian identity were either prohibited or viewed with suspicion as politically seditious. It is hardly surprising that the three leading prose writers in Russianruled Ukraine at this time – Ivan Nechui-Levyts'kyi (1838–1918), Panas Myrnyi (1849–1920), and Mykhailo Kotsiubyns’kyi (1864–1913) – came from relatively modest social backgrounds, particularly in comparison to their more genteel predecessors. Nechui-Levyts'kyi, son of a country priest, studied at the Kyiv Theological Academy and taught at secondary schools on the fringes of the empire. Panas Myrnyi, the penname of Panas Rudchenko, was the son of a petty clerk and a provincial district school graduate who became a provincial clerk like his father and later outdid him by attaining the higher standing of “active state councillor.” Partly to avoid persecution and partly from reticence, Panas hid under the pseudonym Myrnyi for his entire creative career and shunned literary acclaim. Kotsiubyns’kyi, by a good margin the youngest of the three, was also the son of a petty official, although his mother was from a noble landowning family and had attended a prestigious school in St Petersburg. In his youth the future writer was apparently expelled from an Orthodox seminary for populist activism (some scholars believe he never actually enrolled there) and received no formal education beyond attendance at a modest church school; nonetheless, he eventually became an office clerk and statistician in the Chernihiv zemstvo. We also know that Kotsiubyns’kyi was somehow able to vacation at a fashionable Italian health spa on the Isle of Capri, where he became a close friend of the Russian writer Maxim Gorky, a founder of literary socialist realism. The work that perhaps best reflected the ideological and aesthetic preoccupations of Ukrainian writers in the last quarter of the nineteenth century was Poviia (Loose Woman), a novel by Panas Myrnyi written in the early 1880s. Breaking away from the prudishness typical of much of Ukrainian literature, the novel dealt explicitly with social inequality and sexual exploitation. Its plot revolved around an inexperienced peasant girl, Khrystia, who after the death of her mother is obliged to become a servant at a house in the city, where she is seduced by a tenant and becomes a kept woman. When the jealous landlady finds out about the relationship, she throws the girl out of the house and before long Khrystia is forced into prostitution. For a time she seems to be living a prostitute’s dream, for she becomes the lover of a wealthy man; she addresses him as “Daddy” and even hopes to settle in the countryside

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as a respectable lady. When a property deal of her lover’s turns sour and the man hangs himself, she gets dragged down into a spiral of sexual humiliation and physical degradation and winds up on the streets, afflicted with syphilis. In the end, she loses everything to the disease (including her nose) and dies before what was her parental house, now a Jewish-owned tavern. In this work, as in much of Ukrainian literature, the city is a dangerous and fatal place for the naïve villager, and especially so for a woman. Reminiscent as it was of some “naturalist” writings by Guy de Maupassant, Myrnyi’s novel differed in one key respect. While the French writer famously celebrated sex and eroticism, in the terrifying world portrayed by Myrnyi they were the dangers that preyed upon any young female peasant who left her parental home, particularly for the city. In its depiction of the capitalist city’s corrupting influence on a young country girl, Poviia more closely resembled Sister Carrie, the naturalist masterpiece of the American writer Theodore Dreiser; that book was published in 1900, a few years after Panas Myrnyi began publishing his novel in serial form.2 Dreiser’s Chicago, like the unnamed provincial capital in Panas Myrnyi’s novel, was for many a city of opportunities, but it proved deadly to young women from the countryside. Both novels depicted a sad modern predicament, unembellished by a modernist urban imagination. Although other major novels of the time were not as gloomy, nearly all gave sympathetic depictions of the plight of peasants, who were viewed as the backbone of Ukrainian society and were, as a sociologist might put it, the main reference group for local writers. Arguably the most diverse oeuvre came from the pen of Ivan Nechui-Levyts'kyi. His work, devoid of trendy fin-de-siècle decadence, let alone “modernism,” was nonetheless modern in that it addressed the most pressing social issues facing Ukrainians of various classes of society but above all the peasantry: these included the growing divisions in the countryside, the collapse of the traditional family, the moral cost of a sugar-boom economy to poor villagers, growing disparity between city and country, and the role of Kyiv as both the capital of modernity in Ukraine and its centuries-old holy city. In his writing Nechui-Levyts'kyi applied the tools of populist and realist fiction, generously sprinkled with the spirit of Romantic nationalism, and used language that often imitated folk songs and folk tales. In other words, his realism was modern yet not modernist. The most ambitious of his many works, both thematically and ideologically, was his early novel Khmary (Clouds; 1874). Although hardly a fin-de-siècle phenomenon by any measure, the

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novel impressively tackled the early challenges of urban modernity in Russian-ruled Ukraine. By doing so, Nechui-Levyts'kyi, a reclusive man of quirky personal habits, unwittingly became the first sociologist of Kyiv and the city’s growing social, national, and ideological divides. For instance, a main protagonist in Khmary, the Ukrainophile student Radiuk, a radical populist, positivist (idolizing Darwin, Spenser, Renan, Feuerbach, and Proudhon), and ardent champion of women’s rights, questions why “women should not be doctors and lawyers.” It is unclear to what extent Nechui-Levyts'kyi himself shared that view, however, and his novels Mykola Dzheria (1878) and Kaidasheva sim’ia (Kaidash’s Family; 1879) were much less “ideological.” Mykola Dzheria deals with the rebellious life of a freedom-loving serf – a sort of home-grown rebel with a cause – whereas Kaidasheva sim’ia depicts the fragmentation of a traditional family in the post-reform countryside. A self-proclaimed expert on anything related to Ukrainian culture, Nechui-Levyts'kyi argued against incorporating any outside influences in its national literature, especially not from Russian literature, which he called “useless [as a model] for Ukraine.”3 From the standpoint of conservative Romanticism, he also argued for a pure national vocabulary without neologisms or foreign borrowings, especially not any coming from Galicia.4 He also prohibited his editors to correct his folksy but stiff language. It was reaction against Nechui-Levyts'kyi’s literary dominance, in addition to inspiration coming from Europe, that motivated young Ukrainian writers, another contingent of rebels with a cause, to develop new themes and language. What was the Ukrainian response to the European fin-de-siècle and its cultural icons, among them Oskar Wilde, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Arthur Schnitzler, Knut Hamsun, and Maurice Maeterlinck? Putting the question more broadly, what kind of modernism, if any, could exist in a country that was experiencing very uneven modernization, with most of its population continuing to live in the countryside, and one in which the prime agents of modernity were foreigners, “mobilized diasporas,” and recent immigrants? Ukraine’s early response to European-wide modernism might be called “rural modernism” – an embrace of modernist aesthetics within the traditional context of the Ukrainian countryside, often expressed in populist language and ideas. What, then, was the populist culture against which a new generation began cautiously to rebel in the 1890s? In general, it was a culture marked by ritualism, focused on the “people” (meaning peasants), with authors and readers taking responsibility for the nation’s fortunes, and best represented

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by the prophetic poet Taras Shevchenko. Influenced by Russian radical populists such as Dobroliubov and Pisarev, Ukrainian opponents of modernism viewed literature in utilitarian terms and judged works of art by their supposed social benefit – or lack thereof. Ironically, not the “original” populists from Russian-ruled Ukraine but Ivan Franko from Austrian-ruled Galicia became the most vocal advocate of the populist agenda in literature, whether despite or owing to his radical politics. Franko once called Paul Verlaine, a star of the Decadent movement, a “good-for-nothing” and referred to his poetry as alcohol-induced ravings.5 In 1895, Franko openly allied with the populists and prescribed the role of the intelligentsia, and writers in particular, to be servants of the people: The intelligentsia should above all be an intelligentsia – a community of people … with a genuine feeling for the people; hence the intelligentsia should identify with, blend with the people (zlytysia z narodom), should become in their midst their brother, an equal, one of their own, should become a worker just like they are, should become for them a lawyer, a doctor, a teacher, an advisor, and a guide in economic matters, as well as a good neighbor and helper in any need. The intelligentsia should live with the people and amidst the people – not as a separate group but as their integral part. [The intelligentsia] should be an example for the people through its own work and life, not through some moral priestly sciences. Like a kind of a cultural and educational ferment, [the intelligentsia] should penetrate the entire people’s organism and set it in more active motion and on the course of progressive growth.6 It is the crisis of this populist agenda in culture and politics that became the most conspicuous feature of the Ukrainian fin-de-siècle. The ensuing conflict between two artistic mindsets, the populist and the modernist, could also be expressed in a series of binary oppositions: nationalism vs. cosmopolitanism, Ukrainianness vs. Europeanism, populism vs. intellectualism, realism vs. aestheticism, the masculine vs. the feminine, patriarchy vs. feminism, etc.7 The first intellectual to transition from one mindset to another – from populist realism to symbolism and impressionism – was probably Mykhailo Kotsiubyns’kyi, who in the first decade of the twentieth century became the Ukrainian writer most recognized in Europe: remarkably, between 1906 and 1911, his stories were translated into German, Hungarian, Romanian, Estonian,

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Latvian, Swedish, Czech, Polish, and Russian. Described by a later critic as “one of the foremost writers in Ukrainian literature, attuned to the spirit of the fin-de-siècle,”8 Kotsiubyns’kyi was an autodidact who debuted in the early 1890s as a writer of short populist fiction about peasant life. A decade later, however, he was holding the work of populist writers like Panas Myrnyi and Nechui-Levyts'kyi in low regard (albeit never publicly dismissing them), and by the turn of the century he had resolutely joined the “modern” camp. From Arthur Schnitzler, Vienna’s quintessential fin-de-siècle writer, Kotsiubyns’kyi adopted the internal monologue, preoccupation with one’s own inner self, and the vision of life as a game.9 But he applied these literary techniques very cautiously, so as not to alienate the “wide circles of readers” who were still “under the influence of realism” and “nearly hostile to modern literary trends,” as he wrote Ol’ha Kobylians’ka, explaining why he declined to publish one of her writings in his almanac.10 Nonetheless, Kotsiubyns’kyi was first to exhort his fellow Ukrainian writers, in 1903, to focus their attention on one another or themselves (the “intelligent reader,” in his words), rather than on rural folk.11 To this Panas Myrnyi, the old guard of populist realism, sarcastically responded that there was no intelligentsia in Ukraine, so one should continue to write as before, that is, to represent “only what life itself presents.”12 However, Kotsiubyns’kyi remained unmoved and undeterred. Kotsiubyns’kyi’s engagement with the style of lyrical impressionism actually began in the late 1890s, with his short story collection V putakh shaitana i inshi opovidannia (In Satan’s Clutches and Other Stories; 1899) and his études exotiques, “Na kameni” (On the Rock; 1902) and “Pid minaretamy” (Under the Minarets; 1904). The orientalist Ahatanhel Kryms'kyi found his “Orient” in the homoerotic poetry in Lebanon. The ex-populist Kotsiubyns’kyi placed his “Orient” of bloody heterosexual passions, primeval culture, and ominous nature closer to home, in Bessarabia and Crimea, among “exotic” Moldovan and Tatar peasants, and found himself no longer satisfied with populist and realist depictions of society and nature. In later works, he returned to writing about peasants but in a radically new way: in composition his best works were now said to be like paintings or musical works.13 For instance, his unfinished “socialist” novella Fata morgana (1903– 10) mixed realist and impressionist modes of writing in depicting social conflicts over land ownership in the countryside, which in reality was as elusive as the dreams of peasants were delusive, that is, a mirage, or fata morgana. The novella Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1911),

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Kotsiubyns’kyi’s masterpiece and most famous work, thanks in part to Sergei Parajanov’s renowned 1964 film, presented his impressionist vision of an exotic community of Hutsul highlanders in the Carpathian Mountains, incorporating folk legends and pagan demonology. Consistent mixing of modernist themes with folklore and myth became a hallmark of Ukrainian literature of the time. That literary recipe was applied most famously and elegantly in the dramatic poetry of Lesia Ukraïnka (1871–1913). Not a declared modernist, she rejected “subjectivism,” originating in a fashionable and superficial interpretation of Nietzsche, equally with decadence and art for art’s sake, and allied instead with the “neo-Romantics.” However, in contrast to the traditionalists and populists, she was steeped in not only Ukrainian folk tradition but also contemporary European literature. While searching for modern forms and always being attuned to the politics of the day, Lesia Ukraïnka did not impugn the social mission of Ukrainian literature. But in her politics, she differed from the Ukrainian movement’s populist leadership. Symbolic of that was her preference for the word “nation” (natsiia) over the traditional “people” (narod), the word by which populists usually referred to peasants. She also valued the intelligentsia as the nation’s “brains” and believed in the autonomous role of art, an affront to two of the populists’ sacred cows: their mystical belief in the “people” and utilitarian vision of artists as servants of that people. In 1897, Lesia Ukraïnka voiced her audacious cultural stance in an article criticizing populist patriarchy, which signified an immediate modernist turn in Ukrainian literature and politics.14 Whatever their aesthetic beliefs, Ukrainian writers simply could not afford to distance themselves from pressing social and political issues, for, in general, they had no ivory towers on the horizon. An exception was the few months a year on the Isle of Capri that the fortunate Kotsiubyns’kyi was able to enjoy. Lesia Ukraïnka, too, managed to find a personal ivory tower, in Egypt and the Caucasus, in particular, where she spent the last years of her long and fatal battle with tuberculosis. Tragically, these two Ukrainian writers, the most innovative of their generation, died prematurely in the same year. Their chronic illnesses may have been responsible for the keen self-awareness and subtle psychologism inherent in their works, which deal with illness, violence, death, and demonology and offer little in the way of humor or comic relief. Life may be tragic, but art is liberating and worth living for: that was a stance well in line with modernist sensibility. Lesia Ukraïnka was born Larysa Kosach to a family of privilege, wealth, and culture in Volhynia. Her parents were both members of

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Left-Bank nobility. Her mother, Ol'ha, sister of Mykhailo Drahomanov, was herself a prolific writer, under the penname Olena Pchilka. Her father, Petro, had been an original member of Kyiv’s Old Hromada in the early 1860s. After the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, Petro Kosach had an illustrious career in imperial service, overseeing peace mediators between former serfs and landlords, and was even elected a district marshal (leader) of the nobility, still overwhelmingly Polish at the time. Ostensibly the Kosach family, wealthy and owning a good deal of land, remained loyal to the empire; yet ideologically, if not socially, the family belonged to the Ukrainian intelligentsia. Their daughter was home-schooled and soon proved a child prodigy: she published her first poem at age thirteen. Like many Ukrainian writers, she could not separate literature from politics: for her, being a Ukrainian writer necessarily and by default made one a political activist, as reflected in her chosen penname of “Lesia Ukraïnka.” Being the niece of Mykhailo Drahomanov was an added responsibility. As she recalled, her uncle wanted “both my [civic – Sb ] work and my thought to grow and live and that I withdraw neither from literature nor from politics.”15 She fulfilled her uncle’s expectations. In 1891, during her first visit to Galicia and Lviv (she would return repeatedly, in 1894, 1895, 1901, 1902, 1903), she engaged with local radicals and social democrats, including her fellow writer and poet Ivan Franko and the journalist Mykhailo Pavlyk, and she remained a lifelong socialist. But it was literature, not politics, that was her life’s passion. Lesia Ukraïnka’s best dramatic poems, including Kassandra (1907), Lisova pisnia (Forest Song; 1911), and Kaminnyi hospodar (The Stone Master; 1912), were inspired by classical antiquity and European dramatists ranging from Molière and George Byron to Henrik Ibsen and Gerhart Hauptmann. Her dramas addressed a dilemma simultaneously political, aesthetic, and existential: How was literature possible in the philistine world, and, more broadly, how could a free human spirit persevere in the face of a tragic fate, conformity, and oppression? The answer Lesia Ukraïnka found did not sit well with everyone, and especially not with fin-de-siècle decadents and hedonists bent on experiencing fleeting moments of enjoyment. That answer, proclaimed in one of her most famous poems, was more akin to classical stoicism – contra spem spero (“I hope against hope”). Lesia Ukraïnka’s Lisova pisnia, which she herself called a “symbolicrealist drama,” is one of the most singificant works of pre-revolutionary Ukrainian literature. On the surface, it seems to be a nostalgic ode to the

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mysterious beauty of the Volhynian forests, populated by mythological creatures intent on inflicting bodily and spiritual harm on hapless humans who have long lost touch with nature. It turns out, however, that it is humans who bring real harm and inflict that on forest inhabitants, in as much a metaphysical as ecological sense (something we recognize only too well today and the poet already knew then). Combining myth, folklore, and literary images, the poem relates an interspecies love affair between a human, the young pipe player Lukash, and a forest nymph, Mavka, folk sister of Dvořák’s Rusalka. At first their romance flourishes, and they begin living together in a house built by Lukash’s nature-loving uncle. Soon, however, it becomes clear that Mavka is not cut out for household duties, and, betrayed by Lukash, she is forced to return to her mythological world. Mavka is later transformed into a dry willow tree yet continues to love Lukash, who has become a werewolf. After much soul-searching, Lukash again plays his pipe to the willow who is Mavka, and, under the power of his music, she regains her supernatural beauty one last time. As he rushes to embrace her, the lovers are engulfed by white blossoms tumbling down from the surrounding trees. The poem ends with Lukash alone, leaning against a birch, a rapturous smile still on his face, apparently having frozen to death—or perhaps not that at all? A recent winner of the Noble Prize for literature famously wrote “Death is not the end,” and through her mythological heroine, Lesia Ukraïnka seems to affirm that message, as if speaking directly to us: “No, I’m alive! I’ll live eternally/I have that in my heart which cannot die!”16 What, exactly, is it that “cannot die”? Love, no doubt, but also other things, such as the human spirit and art, with their liberating power to transcend the triviality of everyday life and death itself – a message neo-Romantics and the more high-minded modernists shared equally. The message, simply put, was that artists should not get engrossed in housekeeping, or their Muse might turn into a dry willow. It is this primacy of art and beauty, along with its incipient ecological message, that makes Lisova pisnia similar to the works of the European fin-de-siècle and early modernism (Maeterlinck, for instance, famously contrasted the beauty of art with the idiocy of daily routine). Even stronger “modernist” features of Lesia Ukraïnka’s politics and poetics were her genuine if somewhat self-conscious feminism and the centrality of strong female characters in her major dramatic poems. Among them is the titular stoic oracle in Kassandra, the early Christian zealot Priscilla in Rufin i Pristsilla (who choses her new faith

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over her pagan husband), and, especially, the scheming Donna Anna in Kaminnyi hospodar. The last of these is a version of the famed Don Juan tale featuring a striking reversal of gender roles, as though Don Juan and Donna Anna have traded places. Here it is the proud and egotistical Donna Anna who drives the plot forward, rather than Don Juan, still a modernized “knight of liberty” but also a victim of his own passions: having manipulated the womanizer into wooing her, Donna Anna turns him into a subservient and humiliated man. Here Don Juan seems to resemble a member of the early twentieth-century intelligentsia raised on Ibsen and Nietzsche (so a Ukrainian literary critic supposed in1930), but he is in fact a failed Nietzschean, a man who has betrayed his fiancée, Dolores, and then betrays himself. In the end, it is the strong woman Donna Anna, a reflection of strong heroines in dramas and novels by Ibsen, Hamsun, and Hauptmann, who triumphs – only to be punished by her suddenly resurrected husband, the Commander. A golem-like figure, made of stone, he crushes both Donna Anna and his murderer and usurper, Don Juan, in a clear modernist allusion to Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The “Ukrainian” Don Juan’s real offense was also quintessentially modern: the former “knight of liberty” is punished for having betrayed his own freedom-loving and anarchist individuality and embraced feudal values, which are seemingly carved in stone and embodied in the image of the Stone Master. A more ideological reading of Kaminnyi hospodar pertaining directly to the dilemmas of the contemporary Ukrainian national movement is also possible: it can be read as a struggle between the idea of taking over the existing state apparatus – nation building aimed at attaining statehood – and the anarchist rejection of statehood altogether, in keeping with long-standing populist tradition.17 As we shall see, this dilemma would still be present at the time of revolution in 1917. Ukrainian modernism was preoccupied with nationalism, socialism, and feminism in almost equal measure, but the three “-isms” were often poorly defined and very difficult to separate, especially in the work of leading female writers. Much of modernism is routinely associated with male writers, some of whom expressed overtly misogynist views. However, in the apt observation of the scholar of gender and modernism Marianne Dekoven, modernism “had mothers as well as fathers.”18 In Ukraine, Lesia Ukraïnka and several of her female companions were such “mothers.” Part of what was known in the West as the “first wave of feminism,” they famously expressed themselves on the issue of women suffrage.

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Dekoven describes this type of “New Woman” associated with early feminism as being “independent, educated, (relatively) sexually liberated, oriented toward more productive life in the public sphere than toward reproductive life in the home.”19 And despite the stereotype of literary modernism as a “masculinist movement,” Dekoven writes, “a closer look at Modernism through its complex deployments of gender reveals not only the centrality of femininity” but also that “women writers were just as instrumental in developing” modernist aesthetics “as the great male writers usually credited with inventing Modernism.”20 Female writers defined basic modernist devices on a par with their male colleagues, including: aesthetic self-consciousness and self-reflection; simultaneity, juxtaposition, and montage/fragmentation; paradox, ambiguity, and uncertainty; and dehumanization. In fact, it can well be said that female writers played a leading role in Ukrainian modernist literature. For women, modernism certainly became a powerful tool in their struggle for a new place in family and society, as well as the best way to undermine the dominance of men in populist discourse. Some men clearly felt emasculated by the unprecedented presence of women in modernist literature and criticism, and feared loss of their uncontested positions as leaders in the national movement overall, hence their fierce attacks on both modernism and female authors. In response, the “new women” increasingly associated gender with wider social and national issues. Their struggle for their own rights (feminism) went hand in hand with the struggle for the liberation of Ukraine (nationalism) and its oppressed people (socialism) – battles to be waged through literature, direct political action, and educating the peasants and urban poor. This was precisely the kind of “modernism” that appealed to Lesia Ukraïnka and her fellow writer and ardent correspondent from Austrian-ruled Bukovyna, Ol’ha Kobylians’ka (1863–1942) (leading some to speculate that they were romantic partners). Kobylians’ka is recognized as a gifted author of Ukrainian modernist fiction and its first psychologist. Her writings sparked an acute conflict between literary generations, exacerbated by the misogyny of male critics who saw the creators of literature as a single, harmonious national family in which male authors were the symbolic fathers – or, at least, elder brothers. Kobylians’ka did not buy any of this: instead, she disrupted the populist pecking order by pitting modernist/feminist “daughters” against populist “fathers.” For instance, her novellas Liudyna (A Person; 1891) and Tsarivna (The Princess; 1895) featured cultured, self-reflective, and emancipated women oppressed in a philistine, provincial society

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replete with weak-willed patriarchal men with “pale faces.” Similarly, her Valse mélancolique (1898), called a “manifesto of Ukrainian finde-siècle modernism,”21 carried an overt feminist message, infused with a fashionable Nietzschean pessimism, in a sensual narrative driven by music; it also scandalously alluded to a “melancholic” lesbian relationship between three female protagonists. In Kobylians’ka’s works, much of human behavior, including sexuality, is dictated by biology, in keeping with Charles Darwin’s concept of evolution by natural selection (aka “survival of the fittest”). The young female writer from Chernivtsi, a multiethnic Bukovynian city open to the newest intellectual trends, was in fact a self-professed Darwinist.22 The sexuality in Kobylians’ka’s fiction was still shockingly new, particularly in her short story “Pryroda” (Nature; 1897), which featured the first explicitly sexual scene in Ukrainian literature – between a middle-class woman and an uneducated Hutsul – in a plot starkly similar to that in D. H. Lawrence’s scandalous novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). In contrast to much populist fiction, Kobylians’ka’s best and most famous novel, Zemlia (The Land; 1902), showed the fatal “power of land” over people brutalized by their dependence on this dark force of nature. In applying a nature vs culture paradigm and depicting various kinds of violence – fratricidal, paternal, sexual, economic – in the countryside, Kobylians’ka demolished the populist patriarchal myth about the peasantry as the embodiment of all national virtues that was central to Ukrainian culture at the time. Reaction from the “fathers” was swift and harsh, as if a force of nature in itself. In 1898, Mykhailo Hrushevs'kyi (a first-rate historian but second-rate writer) dismissed Kobylians’ka’s writings prior to Zemlia as a lengthy female diary. In 1902, Serhii Iefremov (1876–1939), a rising force in populist literary criticism, led an ad hominem attack on Kobylians’ka’s modernism and feminism as part of a bizarre general assault on “symbolists, decadents, aesthetes, magnificists [sic!], instrumentalists, and magicians.”23 Ironically, Iefremov, the self-proclaimed defender of the honor and position of “the fathers” in Ukrainian literature, was thirteen years younger than the target of his harangues. Among other things, Iefremov accused the author of Tsarivna and Zemlia of having received a “one-sided German upbringing,” ignoring “real life,” writing in an “awkward style” filled with “barbarisms,” offending common sense, upholding the cult of beauty, and, worst of all, scorning “the people (narod)” as a “soulless crowd.”24 Ivan Franko joined in the fray: calling the Bukovynian writer “a remarkable phenomenon in

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Ukrainian contemporary literature,” he praised her depiction of nature and daily life and completely ignored her feminist themes and female characters.25 In effect, Iefremov and his populist peers were expressing triumph over their modernist and mostly female rivals. Unsurprisingly, the highest praise a male author could then give a female colleague was to call her “the only man in greater Ukraine today,” as Ivan Franko said of Lesia Ukraïnka in praise of her early poetry. Despite the dismissive reactions or awkward silence of most male writers, a vibrant feminist literary and journalistic scene continued to exist in Ukraine. In addition to Lesia Ukraïnka and Ol’ha Kobylians’ka, in the early twentieth century nearly two dozen other female writers working in Russian and Austrian Ukraine produced literary works with elements of modernism and feminism.26 These women ventured beyond the relative comfort of their middle-class homes to enter the hazardous world of critical journalism, community activism, and radical politics. One of their early achievements was the pioneering feminist almanac Pershyi vinok (First Garland; 1887), coedited by Olena Pchilka, mother of Lesia Ukraïnka, and Natalia Kobryns’ka (1851–1920), daughter of a Greek Catholic priest from Austrian Galicia. Alongside essays on theoretical and ideological aspects of feminism, the almanac published fiction and poetry by Ukraine’s leading female authors. It published Kobryns’ka’s short story “Madame (Pani) Shumyns'ka,” the story of a matriarch who devotes her life to the priest who is her husband (an arranged marriage) and family, expecting her sons to become priests and her daughters the wives of priests, only to find herself late in life alienated from her adult children. In the new “spirit of the times” (the story’s alternative title), one son leaves his clerical career for academe and the youngest daughter rebels against the established household order, rearranging furniture her own way and delving into secular books – “demon’s instruments,” in her pious mother’s view. Worst of all, and a final blow to the patriarchal world of Madame Shumyns'ka, a granddaughter announces that she intends to become a school teacher. Olena Pchilka’s novella Tovaryshky (Girlfriends) is much more upbeat. It is told from the perspective of emancipated girls who prefer secular education in Europe, followed by professional careers, to the deceptive safety net – i.e., trap – of patriarchal domesticity. Early in the story, a bookish girl explains to her simple-hearted mother that humans evolved from apes and then shocks her even more by announcing her intention to study medicine in Zurich. At the novella’s climax, the daughter returns to her village as a university-educated physician

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and saves the life of a peasant woman from butchery by incompetent midwives, winning the admiration of local peasants. In juxtaposing a modern female’s expertise against the ignorance typical of peasant folk, the author expresses an essentially feminist and implicitly anti-populist viewpoint closely linked to other “national” issues, ranging from russification and criticism of the populists’ “narrow nationalism” to the establishment of ties with Galician Ukrainians. More than two decades later, these issues were still on the agenda of female writers, as shown, for instance, in the underappreciated drama Kryla (Wings; 1913) by Liudmyla Staryts’ka-Cherniakhivs’ka (1868– 1941). Influenced by Ibsen’s pro-feminist dramas, especially A Doll’s House, in Ukraine admired not only by female writers like Lesia Ukraïnka and Ol’ha Kobylians’ka but also by Vasyl' Stefanyk, who wrote realist short stories about long-suffering peasants, Kryla tells the story of a love triangle in the context of middle-class family life. At the outset the drama seems to focus on the banal adultery committed by the protagonist’s bourgeois husband, but the real drama lies in the conflict between a modern woman’s role as a mother and being a human striving for selfrealization – in her case, as a writer. The drama concludes on a pessimistic note, without finding appropriate space for creative women either in the proverbial “doll’s house” (“nests are made of rubbish,” says the betrayed wife) or in a wider philistine society. Of course, female writers could not resolve the acute issues facing Ukrainian women on the eve of World War I. However, they were far better attuned to various cultural, social, and political themes and situations than men were. In summarizing the contribution of female writers to fin-de-siècle and modernist Ukrainian literature, Vira Aheieva has said that they brought to it subtle psychological analysis; developed a series of new images of women that could be called the femme modern; and placed their female protagonists in a variety of new settings, from society salon and urban café to university lecture hall and art club.27 Solomiia Pavlychko observed that what was feminist and the feminine both inspired and became synonymous with “the modern” in fin-de-siècle Ukrainian literature. “Female authors of this critical time,” wrote Pavlychko, “not only refuted the patriarchal images of impersonal women that dominated the national culture during the nineteenth century but also destroyed the myth of female passivity, weakness, and primordial male action, as well as cast doubt on everything, from the existing societal norms to the linguistic tradition.”28 That the first modernists in Ukraine were women may have contributed to the failure of the early modernist movement, defeated as it was

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by mainstream cultural and social institutions staffed with men holding populist and, with few exceptions, patriarchal outlooks. But modernism in Ukraine was not yet dead. In the early twentieth century there were new attempts at launching a modernist movement in Ukrainian literature, this time by young men, among them Mykhailo Iatskiv (1873–1961) of Galicia, a promising author of expressionist miniatures, and Hnat Khotkevych (1877–1938) of Kharkiv, an original writer of “poetic prose.” However, these timid attempts at modernism failed as well, for neither writers nor critics were ready to reject the prevailing cultural tastes for realist fiction with a component of populist verve. Arguably the most daring and most successful modernist experiments appeared in the works of writers and, especially, critics grouped around a journal with an unlikely title for a modernist project, namely, Ukraïns’ka khata (Ukrainian Hut), published in Kyiv between 1909 and 1914. The cover of the journal’s first issue featured picturesque cows and a peasant hut, but that was a deliberate, visual pun on what the reader would expect but acutally not find inside: here there would be no mention of livestock or peasants, in contrast to the populist almanacs usually replete with agricultural themes and imagery. Instead, the journal featured the works of young Ukrainian writers as well as translations of works by established European modernists – among them Maurice Maeterlinck, Knut Hamsun, and Heinrich Mann. Its publication may well be regarded as the largest effort to implant contemporary European culture in pre-revolutionary Ukraine. As a literary and critical venue the journal was more important than the works of the young authors associated with it, as explained in one scholar’s summary of the journal’s intellectual agenda: [Ukraïns’ka khata] wanted to merge aesthetic values and social purpose, but it privileged the former over the latter. It also privileged the mind above the body, the spiritual above the material, and the internal above the external. The resulting literature emphasized the power of emotions over reason and of myth over science. Embedded within this discourse was a critique of the nineteenth century’s faith in progress, and of the bourgeois decadence and ennui of urban life. They called themselves Modernists but recoiled from modernity, preferring the mystery, wonder, beauty, and solitude of the wilderness to the city and its crowds … Dreams, fantasies, hallucinations, and madness were recurring themes. All of this entailed a rejection of Positivism and mass society; and a quest for new values and a new type of human being.29

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The group’s leading light, Mykola Ievshan (1889–1919), was perhaps Ukraine’s most original literary critic. A committed Nietzschean, like most other adepts of early modernism (though many lacked firsthand knowledge of the ideas of the German ideologue and critic of modernity), Ievshan lived in Austrian-ruled Galicia yet was closely tied to the Kyiv-based modernist journal. The young critic opposed the old ways of the populists, whom he called “hopeless philistines,” in favor of a “new national culture” centered on modernism, which he expected to liberate “individuality.” Combining Nietzschean elitism, romantic messianism, and socialist idealism,30 Ievshan specifically rejected the populist and allegedly anti-individualistic views of old-school Ukrainophiles. “The new culture should be national and should come from the depth of the people’s soul, but it cannot be Ukrainophile,” wrote the iconoclastic Ievshan in 1911. “We need more scope, more recklessness, more intoxicating frenzy: so we can finally get rid of the remnants of the shopkeeper’s sobriety of our fathers and fall in love with the scope of all that is great and beautiful. In that lies the sole value and beauty of any broader motion that leads to the liberation of individuality.”31 Hence, Ievshan believed, the true artist should be solitary and take a stand against society and the “crowd.” In Ukraine, he maintained, such true artists were Ol’ha Kobylians’ka, Mykhailo Kotsiubyns’kyi, Lesia Ukraïnka, and Vasyl' Stefanyk.32 Nietzschean loners and individualists aside, the projected new culture had yet another pillar. That pillar was nationalism, which, according to another critic in the Ukraïns’ka khata group, “must encompass the life of the entire nation and not just one separate class – the peasantry.”33 Individualism and nationalism, coupled together and transversing class and party lines, were to substitute for the two main values in populist culture: the primacy of the community over the individual and the peasantry as the backbone and archetype of the Ukrainian nation. In other words, the young modernists believed in “the individuality of nations and the nationality of individuals.”34 Things went amiss once again, however, and the new culture of national individuals “reckless” and “frantic,” as put by the maverick critic Ievshan, did not take flight. The aspiring modernists seemed to be afraid of their own modernity. At the same time, as observed by Solomiia Pavlychko, populist culture underwent its own “modernization,” but one that failed to drop its aesthetic mainstays – realist fiction and a utilitarian view of art. In the years preceding World War I, few artists in Ukraine managed to stand alone, unaligned with any aesthetic

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camp. One who did, defying labels and straddling two different political and cultural epochs, was Volodymyr Vynnychenko (1880–1951), the leftist revolutionary and modernist (?) writer who would become a leader of the Ukrainian revolution in 1917. Any consideration of pre-revolutionary culture and politics in Ukraine must include this unique and at times controversial figure. Volodymyr Vynnychenko’s revolutionary credentials are uncontested (his political views precipated several arrests), but his characterization as a modernist writer is a matter of debate. Vynnychenko’s literary breakthrough came in 1902, when he was a law student at Kyiv University, with the publication of his short story “Krasa i syla” (Beauty and Strength; 1902). In this and his other early short stories, written in a bold style including elements of naturalism and impressionism and with an abundant use of a patois mixing Ukrainian and Russian (today called surzhyk), the new enfant terrible of Ukrainian literature appealed to the youngest and widest of audiences (an early and lifelong admirer was Nikita Khrushchev, not otherwise known to have appreciated modernist aesthetics). Vynnychenko’s heroes – many of them in fact antiheroes – were workers, members of the lumpenproletariat, petty criminals, violent psychopaths, and rebels with and without a cause, and his themes went far beyond the usual populist didacticism, in works “tinged with explicit sexual tensions and wry humor.”35 There was abundant depiction of violence, in a much more naturalistic manner than was usual in writings of the time. For instance, in one grusome scene in “Krasa i syla,” the petty criminal Andrii savagely beats Motria, the mother of his child, kicking her in the stomach, torso, and back. Yet the story ends with Motria marrying her tormentor, having chosen him over his passive rival Il’ko, who never laid a finger on her but also never had the guts to defend her from Andrii’s abuse. Fatal sexual attraction and the triumph of the strong over the weak are recurrent themes in Vynnychenko’s prose, making his works very popular in some quarters and loathsome in others. Even his relations with the young modernists from Ukraïns’ka khata were complex, to put it mildly. The journal published some of his prose writings, but it also contained scathing critiques of his literary output, particularly their representation of sex, calling it “degenerate” and “unnatural.”36 Critics published in the journal also decried Vynnychenko’s individualism as “vulgarized, hypertrophied, and ethically repulsive.”37 Vynnychenko’s Marxist ideas also did not sit well with most Ukrainian writers, modernist or populist.

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Such negative reviews did not deter Vynnychenko from questioning the normative moral code, attacking ubiquitous hypocrisy, and being “honest with himself” in a growing output of plays and novels. One of his most notable novels from this time is aptly titled Chesnist’ z soboiu (Honesty with Oneself; 1911). Through its various subplots, and by tackling such issues as prostitution, sexual freedom, and marital fidelity, the writer conveys his main idea: attaining liberation from oppressive and hypocritical morals, marital and social alike, by revolutionizing his characters as well as the very language in which they are depicted, discarding patriarchy, and, above all, practicing honesty with oneself and others. In one major plot twist, a sexually unsatisfied wife hires a male prostitute at a hotel, and later she leaves her impotent, “intellectually licentious” husband for a rebellious artist who rejects hypocrisy both in family and public life. A potentially immoral act (like theft) is morally justifiable if it leads to a selfless goal (like saving one’s sister from prostitution) and as long as one is honest with oneself in performing it.38 One should think and say what one feels, and act accordingly: this was Vynnychenko’s existential view of life, which shocked moralists but inspired radicals, from artists to revolutionaries. Whether modernist or not, and regardless of whether his moral stance was at all viable, the author of Chesnist’ z soboiu was the most consistent taboo-breaker in pre-revolutionary Ukrainian literature. The culture of fin-de-siècle and modernism in Ukraine differed in many ways from their European counterparts, but they also had considerable similarities, from exploration of sexuality and rising feminism to emphasis on the irrational and subconscious, to recreational drug use among bohemian artists (first ether, apparently, and then cocaine).39 By all accounts, before 1917 modernists played a limited role in Ukrainian culture, but they did have a striking afterlife, particularly those modernists affiliated with the Kyiv-based Ukraïns’ka khata. Trevor Erlacher has reminded us that they “set the stage for the revolutionary struggle for a Ukrainian state” and played a prominent role in that struggle (Mykola Ievshan died from typhus while serving as an officer in the Ukrainian Galician Army in 1919). The modernists also “laid the intellectual ground for the more radical forms of Ukrainian nationalism that appeared in the 1920s and 1930s.”40 Volodymyr Vynnychenko, too, assuming a leading role in the Ukrainian Revolution and becoming head of an autonomous government, put some of his taboo-breaking ideas into practice.

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t h e d Ub i o US b le S Si ng o f i l l i t e r a c y As the number of writers continued to increase, so did their literary output and the number of formal and informal literary groupings with diverse aesthetic and ideological leanings. But what about their numbers of readers? How many people could read, and of those who could, what did they actually choose to read? In his famed study, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917, Jeffrey Brooks addressed what Russians read in the post-reform period, focusing primarily on popular literature and a “mass readership” obviously limited to the portion of the “mass” able to read. Although literacy rates in the empire overall were rising – from 21% in 1897 to an estimated 40% on the eve of World War I – among peasants literacy remained low: 25% in the 1910s.41 For Ukrainian writers, a readership was even more difficult to come by, given that illiteracy was rampant in the population of Ukraine and among ethnic Ukrainians in particular. Those who could read usually did not read anything in Ukrainian, let alone works of Ukrainian fiction. As Bohdan Krawchenko noted, despite the efforts of zemstvo institutions and the intelligentsia to spread literacy in the countryside, thus allowing Ukrainian national activists to gain a foothold in the village, the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians remained illiterate. It seems that Ukrainians had higher rates of literacy in the mid-eighteenth century than they did in the early twentieth, owing to the loss of statehood and the inefficiency of the Russian educational system. According to the 1897 census, only 18% of Ukraine’s population could read, 5% less than the average for European Russia. Worse still, only 13% of ethnic Ukrainians were literate, and in rural areas illiteracy at times stood at 91 to 96% (depending on province).42 In fact, ethnic Ukrainians were just half of the literate population in their own country. Ukraine’s overall statistics rose when ethnic minorities are taken into consideration, for Russians were twice and Jews three times as literate as the Ukrainians living there. However, those figures could not compensate for the high rate of illiteracy among ethnic Ukrainians, especially where Ukrainian writers and politicians were concerned, since very few Russians or Jews read the works of Ukrainian writers or joined Ukrainian political parties. Mass illiteracy remained a formidable obstacle, preventing Ukrainian national activists from effectively mobilizing the Ukrainianspeaking masses, something that would become vitally urgent in the revolutionary year of 1917.

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Why did ethnic Ukrainians lag so far behind others in literacy? Was that perhaps the result of some devious colonial intent on the part of the Russian government? One reasonable answer might echo an answer to the question of why ethnic Ukrainians were so underrepresented in the modern urban professions and workforce in general. The government did not prevent ethnic Ukrainians from pursuing such occupations or from acquiring basic literacy skills, any more than it did ethnic Russians or Jews. However, it did not help them much either. While the government did not favor Jews, Germans, or even Russians over Ukrainians in education, in general it simply had little interest in educating the masses, whatever their identity or nationality. In Russia, per capita expenditure on education was among the lowest in the world, and compulsory education was never introduced (owing to the state’s minimal capacity to provide it). Also, Ukrainian society’s very structure – the prevalence of peasants tied to the black soil – did not favor any such effort. We know that the ratio of pupils to teacher often reached staggering proportions – up to 250 to 1 in Podolia. Even more damning, two-thirds of school-age children in Ukraine had never set foot in a classroom (1915), and of those who did, only 10 per cent attended more than two years.43 The majority of peasants could not afford to buy school materials or pay school fees. Most of all, parents could not afford the loss of manpower that occurred when their children went to school. Social class was another crucial factor, as more well-off peasants and the urban middle classes had more resources and reason to educate their children. “Since the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians were both peasant and poor,” writes Krawchenko, “it was not surprising that studies showed Ukrainian peasant children exhibiting little interest in education: their rate of truancy was higher than that of Russian or Jewish children, they had the lowest rate of school attendance, and hence the lowest marks.”44 Another reason for Ukrainians to shun Russian imperial schools – whether state- or church-funded – had to do with language. Aside from a few dozen Sunday schools, or private ones operated by the Ukrainian intelligentsia, schools operated primarily in Russian and Church Slavonic, languages that for some reason were neither spoken nor understood by the vast majority of “Russians” in Ukraine (who in fact were ethnic Ukrainians and Ukrainian-speaking monoglots, children particularly so). In secular schools, all lessons, including instructions and explanations, had to be in Russian, and until 1917 no Ukrainian subjects at all were included. In 1897, about 55 per cent of primary schools

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in Russian-ruled Ukraine (on the Right Bank, where zemstvos were introduced only in 1911, it was 69 per cent) were “parochial-church schools,” where nearly half the school day was devoted to reading Holy Scripture and learning prayers in cryptic Church Slavonic.45 The government made it clear that the main purpose of such schooling was “to uphold the teachings of the Orthodox faith and Christian morality in the people.”46 Taught in a language they barely understood, local children learned little and quickly forgot what they were taught. Consequently, many of yesterday’s pupils lapsed back into illiteracy. Writing about his pupils in the early 1900s, a teacher in Poltava recalled, “I have seen how almost all, having completed school, in one to three years forgot how to write and read.” Others claimed that Russian-language schools “demoralized youth” and bred “hooliganism.”47 The virtual absence of Ukrainian-language schools had another predictable outcome: little knowledge of literary Ukrainian meant that a sizable Ukrainianspeaking and Ukrainian-writing intelligentsia could not possibly emerge before 1917. In the absence of legitimate grammar policing by official academic institutions or schools, those who could and did write in Ukrainian were obliged to oversee and correct one another. Also, the peasants themselves came to hold Ukrainian in low esteem, as the language of the uneducated, while increasingly perceiving Russian as the language of upward social mobility and urban culture. Remarkably, if one considers the forces of modernization in Ukraine from another perspective, the widespread illiteracy can be viewed as a blessing in disguise. First, a modern economy and the professions favored those in society who were mobile, educated, and skilled, among whom Ukrainians were rare. Second, the sole language of administration, public offices, education, and most urban culture – the language of “progress,” so to speak – was Russian. Third, rapid industrialization brought a mass of Russian migrants and other non-Ukrainians to the rapidly developing and urbanized parts of Ukraine, as new technical wonders like the railroads linked Ukraine to Russia as never before. Consequently, for large segments of Ukraine’s population, the Ukrainian language and traditional culture began to signify the opposite of everything progressive and modern and be closely associated with village poverty and the “idiocy of rural life.” In that sense, Ukrainians in Russia were becoming like the Irish or Scottish Highlanders in Great Britain: a nationality that had lost its native language, viewed at best as an exotic curiosity from the past and at worst as a relic of backwardness in

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the present. Yet Ukrainians never quite became like modern-day Celts, for they did not lose their language or their folk culture. What saved Ukrainians from that fate was the same illiteracy that was to blame for Ukraine’s intrinsic social and cultural ills. For all its cultural disadvantages and deficiencies, Ukrainian society did have a reading public, including readers who consumed poetry and prose by Ukrainian authors. What did these people read? Aside from religious literature (such as lives of saints), popular almanacs, and brochures with practical agricultural advice, most widely read were undoubtedly the writings of Taras Shevchenko, who after his death in 1861 acquired legendary stature as a prophet of the people. However, the first bestseller in modern Ukrainian literature, read by educated people in both Ukraine and Russia, had appeared much earlier; that was Ivan Kotliarevs'kyi’s burlesque travesty Eneïda (The Aeneid; 1798), a work mixing the low genre of travesty with sentimental drama. Its readers included domestic servants, petty landowners and officials, merchants, and members of the incipient intelligentsia.48 Decades later, the Romantics devised the image of the “people’s poet,” able not only to speak in the language of the “people” (i.e., peasants) but also directly and intuitively to an imagined audience, as if reflecting the people’s “spirit.” In the early 1840s, when Shevchenko was at the height of acclaim, his poetry already appealed to a very wide audience, from wealthy landowners to their own serfs – something that troubled the poet, a renowned critic of social exploitation and inequality. After his death, Taras Shevchenko’s social message outweighed all others, to the extent that some commentators (including his longtime friends Mykola Kostomarov and Panteleimon Kulish) began to call him the “peasants’ poet,” which implied that he wrote primarily for peasants in a language taken from the “people” rather than shaped in “big cities, in self-glorifying academies.” Kulish, with all the fervor of a committed populist, referred to Shevchenko as a mouthpiece of the “rural illiterate folk with its unpublishable language.”49 However, the poet himself saw his readers and his mission differently, and he was probably well aware that much of his poetry was too complicated for an average peasant, even a semi-literate one, to comprehend. Tamara Hundorova has argued convincingly that Shevchenko imagined himself to be an artist for middle-class Ukrainians, emphatically not the aristocracy (which he saw as irrevocably discredited) or the peasantry alone (for him, too narrow an audience). The future national prophet made his stance clear

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in 1857: “Does our tiny high society have any significance in terms of nationality? None, it seems. By contrast, the middle class is an enormous and, unfortunately, semi-literate mass – half the people, the heart of our nationality.”50 Shevchenko’s prophetic appeal continued to cross social lines. His poetry circulated not only in print but in many handwritten copies, thus reaching “educated and even poorly educated Ukrainians,” as one Russian critic recalled in the late 1850s. Another critic added that Shevchenko “is referred to as our poet by people of all ranks, estates, and classes.”51 Was that true of peasants, too? Unfortunately, we have no evidence that they read, let alone bought, Ukrainian-language literature, including any by Shevchenko, before the end of the nineteenth century. Even then, as the writer and lexicographer Borys Hrinchenko witnessed in 1892–93, peasants enjoyed “listening to” only a few of Shevchenko’s most romantic and folkloric poems – the early ballads “Kateryna” (1838), “Prychynna” (The Bewitched Woman; 1837), “Topolia” (The Poplar; 1839), and “Utoplena” (The Drowned Maiden; 1841).52 In the countryside, actual readers of Ukrainian poetry and fiction were long limited to teachers, scribes, priests’ sons, sextons, and other members of the “village intelligentsia.” While the literary tastes of Ukrainian society at this time have been difficult to determine, there is some research about what peasants and the urban poor read when they could. Those who could read clearly preferred so-called lubok literature. A Russian analogue of pulp fiction or the penny dreadful, the booklets in which lubok was published were the most popular literary amusement in the empire from at least the mid-eighteenth century. They were mostly anonymous renditions of renowned fairy tales, cheesy melodramas, horror stories, or adventure novels, with titles like The Sorcerer and the Knight, The Bloody Ghosts without Heads, The Night with Satan. Of the 1,362 lubok titles published in Russia between the 1820s and 1910s, the largest component comprised fairy tales and folk tales (22%), followed by stories about knights (13%) and war (9%).53 These lubok booklets had enormous print runs: in the mid-1880s, for instance, between two and five million copies were printed annually, mostly on secular topics.54 Understandably, many enlightened minds were not happy with the people’s literary tastes – they rarely are. Leading writers, educators, and scholars made a concerted effort to develop alternative reading material that would lure readers away from their beloved lubok. An alternative soon appeared, in the form of so-called people’s books, a

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more dignified but infinitely less entertaining version of the lowbrow lubok. Usually these were richly illustrated popular guides to various spheres of practical knowledge and domestic economy, such as science, agriculture, hygiene, medicine, and the like, whose purpose was to enlighten rather than entertain. None other than the Russian literary heavyweight Leo Tolstoy got involved in this enterprise. Tolstoy himself oversaw publication of works of fiction (including his own): “for the people,” complete with illustrations by renowned painters like Ilia Repin and Vasilii Surikov.55 As a result, from the 1880s the book market in Ukraine was flooded with cheap popular books published primarily in Russian: they accounted for about half the book market in the empire and easily outsold all other types of literature. The huge print runs of the “people’s books” (50,000 in 1901) were ten times that of an average scholarly publication and five times that of fiction not intended for a mass audience.56 Even so, most peasants and unskilled workers in Ukraine never touched a book – certainly not a work of fiction, let alone a work of Ukrainian fiction. The situation prompted a few concerned intellectuals to undertake the ambitious, even Herculean, task of enticing non-readers – peasants, urban workers, and miners – into doing something that had seemed absurd: reading and then discussing “serious” prose and poetry. Iuliia Il’chuk tells the fascinating story of three such attempts, by a Jew, a Russian, and a Ukrainian, respectively. All three were teachers in eastern Ukraine (in the Kharkiv and Katerynoslav provinces), where their adult students were primarily Ukrainians but also Russians and Jews of both genders and varied ages. In this cosmopolitan trio of pedagogues, all of whom were also known to be radical populists, the most experienced was Khrystyna Alchevs’ka (1841–1920), a pioneer of adult education known for her work with the urban poor, especially women, in Kharkiv, where she ran a school for over fifty years. Alchevs’ka, who was of Russian descent, has gone down in history as the educator who did most to promote modern Ukrainian literature, particularly after 1905: one volume of her three-volume catalogue titled What People Should Read lists 153 recommended works by some forty Ukrainian authors, among them Ivan Kotliarevs'kyi, Taras Shevchenko, Marko Vovchok, Panas Myrnyi, Lesia Ukraïnka, and Mykhailo Kotsiubyns’kyi (we do not know how often she actually assigned these works to her students, or how they reacted). Teachers in her rural school encouraged readers (local peasants) to choose a work of fiction from the lists and, having read it, to give their opinion of it; as a result 4,184 books are

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known to have been read and commented on by peasant readers.57 Most books on the reading lists were Russian classics, with the occasional Ukrainian one, but there were also translations of works by Western authors, like Ibsen’s Doll House (although that drama proved wholly incomprehensible to peasant readers). An additional challenge for largely monoglot Ukrainian speakers was to understand complex prose in literary Russian. Nonetheless, Alchevs’ka apparently considered her experiment a great success: to her mind, rural readers proved capable of understanding “serious” prose and even of embracing a cosmopolitan imperial identity. The alleged readiness of peasants to embrace an imperial identity through Russian literature particularly alarmed Alchevs’ka’s younger contemporary and one-time protégé, Borys Hrinchenko (1863–1910), who is known today primarily for his monumental dictionary of the Ukrainian language (Slovar ukraïns' koï movy, 4 vols, 1907–09). Hrinchenko began to teach at Alchevs’ka’s village school in Oleksiïvka, Katerynoslav province, in 1887. A committed populist and nationalist, and translator of works by European modernists such as Ibsen and Schnitzler, Hrinchenko excluded Russian literature from the curriculum he taught his peasant pupils, the same men and women who were reading Russian classics with Alchevs’ka. Instead, he assigned only works by Ukrainian writers. Initially, he was far less successful than his mentor and older colleague, for his pupils were taken aback that he spoke Ukrainian not only with them but also with his wife and even “gentlemen.” They found his use of their own “boorish” language inexplicable and began to suspect that their teacher was “not educated at all” (zovsim ne vchenyi), in contrast to their true teacher, the Russianspeaking Alchevs’ka. One peasant mother even complained to the authorities that the boorish-speaking teacher would spoil the language of her offspring, whom she wanted one day to join the ranks of “gentlemen.” Hrinchenko, on his part, became resentful of Alchevs’ka for “denationalizing” the peasants (as well as some miners from southeastern Ukraine) by distributing so many works of Russian literature among them, even calling her a “turncoat.”58 He charged that the only reading material available in the whole region were “works by Muscovite writers,” Russian “people’s books,” and the peasants’ perennial favorite, the Russian-language lubok literature sold en masse by itinerant peddlers. The Russian writer Maxim Gorky shared an instance of how Russian peasant traders distributed these publications in Ukraine: in 1897, at a fair in Ukraine, a peasant from central Russia selling soap,

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combs, and knives offered Gorky as reading material not only accounts of the lives of saints and a lubok but also “a very entertaining story of the death of Mr. Ivan Ilich, a work by Count Tolstoy.”59 Ukrainian writers and publishers stood no chance against the combined forces of a canny Russian peddler and the formidable Leo Tolstoy. Soon, however, Hrinchenko’s nationalist zeal paid off in a small victory over Tolstoy: he managed to establish a reading circle that read and discussed solely Ukrainian-language publications. The works that most appealed to peasant readers proved to be Panas Myrnyi’s realist short stories set in the countryside; least popular were works depicting the life of the urban intelligentsia, a world totally alien to rural people. Building on his experience in the peasant microcosm of Oleksiïvka, Hrinchenko came up with a simple but brilliant idea: since no Ukrainian mass readership existed, one had to be created from scratch. What in Moscow and St Petersburg was achieved by well-funded “literacy committees” operating jointly with commercial publishing houses and the symbolic capital provided by Tolstoy, Turgenev, and the like, Hrinchenko set out to do almost single-handedly. He resolved first to entice potential peasant readers with entertaining lubok-style booklets written in Ukrainian (he favored historical tales about the Cossacks), and only then offer a systematic library of good literary fiction and nonfiction. In the process Hrinchenko himself became a writer, translator, and publisher of every literary genre, from the lubok-style Tale about Turkish Captivity (a reworking of a Cossack ballad), to adaptations of Ukrainian fairy tales and folk songs, to the collected works of Taras Shevchenko and Mykhailo Kotsiubyns’kyi, in addition to his own. In the genre of popular nonfiction, Hrinchenko apparently favored works featuring geographic and climatic extremes, as suggested by the titles “Geography: A Tale about the Good People (about Finns),” “Amidst the Arctic Sea,” and “The Great Sahara Desert.” Other genre favored by ordinary folk were biographies of historical celebrities (e.g., Joan of Arc, Johannes Gutenberg), American political heroes (e.g., “Two Glorious Men: Johannes Gutenberg and James A. Garfield,” “John Brown, First Fighter for the Liberation of American Slaves”), and modern Ukrainian writers (Ivan Kotliarevs'kyi, Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnov’ianenko, Ievhen Hrebinka). Remarkably, Ukrainian national activists in both Austrian Galicia and Russian Ukraine offered their peasant audiences biographies of Abraham Lincoln, John Brown, and James A. Garfield, three Americans who opposed slavery and were murdered, two of them by supporters of slavery. In reading about them, the peasants, former

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serfs, must have felt some empathy for the former slaves and those who had stood by them. Additionally, any book about Joan of Arc surely symbolized the struggle against foreign tyranny. By his careful selection of books to entice a Ukrainian mass readership in the making, Hrinchenko also sought to offset creeping russification. By linking a fledging Ukrainian national identity directly to the outside world, he was in effect deflecting his readers from the perilous allure of Russian culture and identity. We shall soon find out whether Hrinchenko and his like-minded colleagues had any success in creating a mass readership for Ukrainian literature. Before addressing print runs and prices, let’s look at a third example of popular reading, as described by Iuliia Il’chuk. S.A. An-sky, born Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport (1863–1920), was a Russian-Jewish revolutionary and Yiddish writer who was also inspired by Alchevs’ka’s work with adult readers. For his target audience, however, An-sky chose a far more challenging group than women in Kharkiv or peasants in Oleksiïvka: he went on a dangerous mission to talk about literature with the intimidating miners of the Donbas. Surprisingly, he not only survived unharmed (for seven years, remarkably) but established good rapport with them. But at the beginning his listeners were quickly bored by his readings at the miners’ barracks from the complex works of authors like Pushkin, Turgenev, and Dostoyevsky and often interrupted them with energetic urgings “to have a drink, just for company.” Later An-sky switched to reading to them from “people’s books” with realistically “vivid scenes” from peasant and working-class life to which his readers could easily relate. He discovered that the miners were far more avid listeners and readers than peasants were, and subsequently some of them even went on to read works by Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, and Nekrasov themselves. An-sky also took note of peculiarities in the understanding and misunderstanding of literature he assigned to miners and peasants alike; most of it was middle-brow realist prose in Russian by writers like Vasilii Savikhin and Iakov Gololobov, occasionally interspersed with short stories by classic authors like Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Korolenko. In contrast to miners, for whom reading material offered escape from their tedious and alienating work deep underground, peasants generally relished being outdoors and working their land. In reading material they sought not so much fleeting entertainment – which many peasants considered sinful – as didactic lessons and positive examples, much like what they expected from church sermons.60 Hence they viewed works of fiction in moral and ethical terms and were genuinely puzzled by any fine

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lines separating reality from fiction, especially in realist prose (they even mistook book illustrations as photographic depictions of actual people). What peasants and miners shared as readers was preference for literary material that depicted lives just like their own, as if that “life” (zhiteiskaia) fiction were in fact about their own daily lives. The conclusion An-sky drew from his close association and readings with peasants and Donbas miners was that the needs of the “popular reader” (narodnyi chitatel’) were very different from those of the educated one: the popular reader expected books to provide serious answers to the grim question of “how should one live?” The peasant or miner did not need the typical “literarure of the intelligentsia.” In fact, he “couldn’t care less about ‘sauces,’ or refined aestheticism,” wrote the populist educator An-sky. “He needs a book about life, literally one which would address the needs of his life and mind.”61 In other words, from books the peasant demanded nothing less than wise instruction about how to live. What kind of wisdom could that reader expect from Ukrainian books? What could educators, writers, and publishers offer to the masses? How successful were the intellectual elites in including peasants and workers in a new mass readership – above all, a readership for Ukrainian literature? What kind of literature were peasants ready to actually purchase with their hard-earned money? One way to answer these questions is to establish the popularity of particular works of fiction through study of their print runs and prices. One scholar has recently done just that, by focusing on and calculating Ukrainian-language publications during the decades prior to 1917.62 Tetiana Karoieva has found that Hrinchenko, the indefatigable champion of popular literature in Ukrainian, was essentially on the right track in endeavoring to supply the potential Ukrainian mass reader first with lubok-style entertainment and only then with a more refined literary product. As we shall see, the common people of both Russian-ruled Ukraine and Austrian-ruled Ukraine were drawn to much the same literature, which helped to create a common national space across the political borders that divided them.

wh en Uk r a i ne learn e d t o r e a d : no n-r ead erS i n t o r e a d e rS Paradoxically, it was not the Ukrainian national intelligentsia but Russian lubok publishers who first initiated the creation of a Ukrainian mass readership. Even before Hrinchenko came up with the idea of supplying lubok literature to Ukrainian peasants, a few Russian publishers

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of such material had already reached out to the Ukrainian masses, for solely commercial reasons. In the early 1880s, a number of publishers in Moscow and St Petersburg began to produce Russian-language works with a Ukrainian historical and literary connection (“Ivan Stepanovich Mazepa, the Ukrainian Hetman,” “Natalka from Poltava: A Tale from a Little Russian Life,” “A Witch from beyond the Dnipro”). There had also emerged an entire Gogol-exploitation industry, in the form of numerous and often anonymous lubok renditions of his main Ukrainian-themed works. His novel Taras Bulba appeared in nearly twenty variants, under different and at times utterly exotic titles, from the recognizable “Taras Bulba, or the Betrayal and Death for a Beautiful Maiden” to a totally unexpected “Egor Urvan, Otaman of the Zaporozhian Host,” or “The Brigand Taras Chernomor.” Equally popular was Gogol’s gothic horror story “Strashnaia mest’” (A Terrible Vengeance), which appeared in twelve renditions, under titles such as “The Terrible Sorcerer, or the Bloody Vengeance: An Ancient Tale from a Cossack Life.” The print runs of these mongrelized publications were huge: for instance, “The Terrible Sorceror” was first printed in 30,000 copies, followed by one of 60,000 copies, far exceeding the average print run of Gogol’s original works, which was ca. 25,000 (extraordinary in its own right!). It was not coincidental that many products of popular fiction had demonic themes. “The power of the book was demonic as well as divine,” as Jeffrey Brooks has written about the common reader’s view of books. “The nineteenth-century village was a milieu from which demons, spirits, and witches were never entirely absent – a world in which Christianity was tempered with pagan survivals.”63 Undoubtedly sensing huge possibilities in developing a Ukrainian book market, the same publishers began to produce hundreds of lubok titles in Ukrainian on both demonic and divine topics. That commercial step was made possible by the lifting of some of the empire’s draconian measures against the Ukrainian language. In 1881, the government permitted the printing of Ukrainian-language folk songs, folk tales, fairy tales, anecdotes, and the like. Evidently the government did not consider such folksy material to be potentially seditious, and as a result the Ukrainian lubok marketplace experienced an initial, veritable boom. Kyiv, alongside St Petersburg and Moscow, became a major center of a new publishing industry geared toward the common reader. One of Moscow’s enterprising publishers of lubok literature opened a separate publishing house in Kyiv that, ironically, outlived his original press in Moscow. Another Moscow mogul of lubok literature, Ivan Sytin,

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also took advantage of the nascent Ukrainian-language marketplace and published more than a hundred titles. One of his favorite authors was Oleksandr Piven’ of Kuban', a noted gatherer of Ukrainian folk songs, jokes, and anecdotes: between 1905 and 1909, Sytin and Piven’ together published 21 titles, with a combined print run of 180,000 copies! Typically, such a publication was given a catchy, folksy, and rhymed title, aimed at the widest and least pretentious of audiences: for example, Smiis’, rehochys’ ta za boky berys’ (Laugh, Cackle, and Split Your Sides Open), or Sim kyp brekheniok: Torbyna smikhu liudiam na potikhu (Seven Packs of Fibs: A Sack of Laughter for People to Enjoy). At times the anonymous “sacks of laughter” contained literary work by respected writers – Ivan Kotliarevs'kyi, Taras Shevchenko, Borys Hrinchenko, etc. There were no clear boundaries between kitschy lubok and actual works of literature printed as “people’s books.” As early as the 1880s, some publishers of low-brow entertainment began to print works by the most well-known Ukrainian writers. Taras Shevchenko was, of course, the most recognizable name. By then, literate common people already had access to several of Shevchenko’s poems published in Kyiv and St Petersburg: “Naimychka” (The Hired Girl; 1885), “Nevol’nyk” (The Slave; 1886), and “Kateryna” (1887). After Shevchenko and Ivan Kotliarevs'kyi, most popular were Petro HulakArtemovs'kyi and Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnov’ianenko, two writers known for their comical, sentimental, and folksy style: print runs of their work exceeded 3,000 copies, more than was usual for books of fiction. Yet the serious writer, regardless how well known, could not compete with the omnipresent lubok. The low-brow reading material continued to prevail, owing to its cheap price, wide distribution (through street vendors and numerous fairs, both urban and rural – at one time numbering 3,978), and, especially, unrivaled entertainment value. People wanted to have their fun and were ready to pay for it. Even the book storehouse of the reputable academic and literary journal Kievskaia starina was filled with lubok-style literature. By the second decade of the twentieth century, lubok print runs had become truly gargantuan, as shown in table 8.1. A remarkable aspect of mass literary entertainment’s commercial success in those years was that in number of titles lubok literature lagged far behind “serious” genres, but by aggregate print runs it was the single largest industry, averaging10,000 copies per publication (see table 8.2) and up to 40,000 copies of the most popular titles! By the second decade of the twentieth century, the secular printed word had secured a

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Table 8.1 | Ukrainian lubok literature, 1908–13 Year

Number of titles

Total print run

1908

10

99,000

1909

14

133,000

1910

10

111,000

1911

9

160,000

1912

20

173,760

1913

20

171,000

Total for 1908–13

83

848,560

Sources: Karoieva, “Pidpryiemtsi v zabezpechenni ukraïnomovnoho chytannia v Rosiis’kii imperiï, 1881–1916,” 98; M.A. Nyzovyi, “Tematychnotsil'ovi aspekty ukraïns'koho dorevoliutsiinoho knyhovydannia (1901–1917 rr.),” Visnyk Kharkivs'koï derzhavnoï akademiï kul' tury: Zbirnyk naukovykh prats' 37 (2012): 160–71.

firm place in Ukraine’s popular culture. For the whole period between the early 1880s and 1913, the figures are even more impressive: almost 350 Ukrainian-language lubok publications had a total print run of about two million copies,64 sufficient to provide every literate Ukrainian speaker – of whom there were some 2,250,000 in 1900 – with at least one copy of lubok fun. Who published these books? As in the case of lubok literature, most publishers of higher quality literature were driven by commercial interests and expected to profit from the emerging Ukrainian-language book market. Most were not ethnic Ukrainians and had offices in St Petersburg and Moscow as well as in Ukraine. One of the most prolific was Władysław Idzikowski (1864–1944). A Pole living in Kyiv, Idzikowski owned a large bookstore and adjacent library, as well as a publishing house that brought out about a hundred Ukrainian-language titles, mostly fiction or works relating to music (including compositions by Mykola Lysenko, Ukraine’s leading composer and a national activist).

Table 8.2 | Genres and print runs of Ukrainian literature, 1908–13 (totals) Genre

Number of titles

Total print runs

Average print run per edition

Poetry

162

585,938

3,616

Prose

174

389,125

2,201

Dramatic works

154

330,223

2,144

Translations

113

292,969

2,592

Academic and essays

194

466,838

2,406

Ethnography

14

26,500

1,892

History

9

10,133

1,125

Economy and law

9

19,000

2,111

Textbooks

7

22,408

3,201

Popular science

85

386,572

4,547

Children’s literature

12

104,000

8,666

Reference

59

275,687

4,672

Religion

13

42,587

3,275

180

133,000

738

Miscellaneous

19

39,446

2,076

Lubok literature

83

848,560

10,223

Agriculture

37

135,692

3,667

Medicine, veterinary science

3

9,400

3,133

1,327

4,118,078

3,103

Music

Totals

Source: Nyzovyi, “Tematychno-tsil'ovi aspekty ukraïns'koho dorevoliutsiinoho knyhovydannia (1901–1917 rr.),” 164.

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Even Aleksei Suvorin (1834–1912), a founder of a Russian publishing empire in St Petersburg not known for pro-Ukrainian sympathies, jumped on the bandwagon of the Ukrainian book industry. In a series of classics in Russian and foreign literature for a popular audience aptly titled “Cheap Library,” Suvorin published three editions of Ivan Kotliarevs'kyi’s celebrated Eneïda and two editions of his popular vaudeville Natalka-Poltavka; Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnov’ianenko’s Russianlanguage comic novel Pan Khaliavskii; and Oleksa Storozhenko’s gothic fairy tale Marko Prokliatyi (Marko the Damned), all of which appeared in St Petersburg between 1888 and 1894. One bestseller in Ukrainian literature that did compete with the lowbrow lubok was Taras Shevchenko’s seminal collection of poetry titled Kobzar. In 1886, Suvorin himself published an illustrated edition featuring an introduction by Dmytro Iavornyts'kyi, an eminent expert on Ukrainian antiquities. Most successful, however, was the first complete and uncensored edition of the Kobzar, published in St Petersburg in 1907 by a group of Ukrainian intellectuals. The initial print run of 10,000 copies sold out within three months, despite its relatively high cost of 1 ruble 50 kopeks; a second print run of 25,000 copies sold out as well (excepting a few hundred copies belatedly confiscated by the police).65 The boom year for the publication of Shevchenko’s writings was 1911, when their copyrights expired: in just that one year, his oeuvre appeared in 56 publications, 44 of them in Ukrainian. Some of Shevchenko’s works also appeared as free supplements to popular Russian journals, such as Shkol’naia biblioteka (School Library), and thereby entered schools. Other good news for Ukrainian readers was a growing network of bookstores and libraries with Ukrainian-language and Ukrainian-themed books, expanding catalogues, and wider distribution systems. After 1905 there would appear a dozen bookstores that included “Ukrainian” on their signboards or specialized in Ukrainian books. In 1906, the first of these, appearing in Kyiv under the aegis of the journal Kievskaia starina, was simply renamed “Ukrainian Bookstore.” In 1912, one with the same name opened in Kharkiv. By that time, Ukraine’s major cities had acquired twelve such bookstores: three in Kyiv and the others in Kharkiv, Poltava, Odesa, Zhytomyr, Katerynoslav, Ielysavethrad, and elsewhere. The catalogue of Kharkiv’s “Ukrainian Bookstore” was particularly impressive: its list of titles ran 112 pages. Ukrainian book publishing appeared to have finally outgrown its lowly origins in the hack works of lubok literature and now seemed lucrative to mainstream publishers and booksellers. Moreover, it was no

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longer necessary to buy Ukrainian books in order to read them, for such books were accessible at local libraries. Whereas before 1905 only a very few academic libraries could legally hold books written in Ukrainian, now more and more libraries in cities, towns, and villages boasted of holding Ukrainian books. One could also listen to Ukrainian books being read aloud at “readings for the people” organized by various academic, educational, and charitable organizations. The most ambitious of these organizations was the Prosvita Educational Society, established in 1905 by members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia (Hrinchenko among them) and named after the prime institution of Ukrainian civil society in Galicia. The Kyiv chapter of this Prosvita organization was particularly active in publishing: over five years it produced thirty-four books (in 163,760 copies) for the common people. It seemed that Ukrainians were at last following Hrinchenko’s decades-old cultural agenda. The society’s library in Kyiv held what was arguably the largest collection of Ukrainica in the world – over 10,000 volumes. Other chapters succeeded in building networks of rural reading rooms, with particular success in the Podolia and Katerynoslav provinces. By mid-1907, there were at least thirty-five Prosvita chapters across Ukraine, with some operating dozens of village reading rooms.66 Even the most dedicated work of Ukrainian national activists could not have achieved this book publishing breakthrough without the essential role played by print capitalism. The market responded quickly and furiously to the demands of the Ukrainian mass readership that it itself had helped to create. This was especially true after 1905, the year of the notorious “Bloody Sunday” massacre in St Petersburg (more about this below), but also of the October Manifesto suspending the most discriminatory tsarist policies toward the Ukrainian language. Although lubok publications was still the largest single genre of Ukrainian-language literature (around 20.6% of all copies published), the literary field was now diversifying and catering to the needs of various classes of Ukrainian society. Most importantly, the danger of losing literate Ukrainian commoners to russification had receded, for now such readers had access to a sufficient number of publications in their own native language. For the Ukrainian intelligentsia, there was also the good fortune that political reform was finally catching up with the increase in print capitalism, which, as we have seen, had been remaking readership in Ukraine since the early 1880s. Good fortune could also run out, however, and that happened to the Ukrainian intelligentsia and other lovers of the Ukrainian spoken and printed word. The tsarist government reverted to its old anti-Ukrainian

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policies: in 1910–11, all branches of the Prosvita Educational Society (ca. 40) were closed, and the following year came the directive that all Ukrainian-language books be removed from the free “people’s libraries.” But there was more bad news to come. It turned out that the undeniable successes of Ukrainian activists in book publishing and expanding the readership of Ukrainian literature had their limits – made all the more palpable by the tsarist government’s ramping up of repression. Those limits had other reasons than repression, however. Some were rooted in demography, others in economy, still others in the strategic failures of the Ukrainian national activists. Ironically, Ukrainian book publishing became a victim of its own success: owing to its increased volume, there were now simply too many books, especially in contemporary fiction and scholarship, for too few readers. There was also growing discontent among some writers, especially those of more highbrow literature, at the lack of cultured readers. For instance, Mykhailo Kotsiubyns’kyi complained – with some exaggeration, no doubt – that “we do not have a reader,” while pointing out the unsold copies of the best works of Ukrainian literature and dismissing any call for a new, writer-owned publishing house. “Gather even the finest names,” he added sarcastically, and “that wouldn’t mean much to our wider public. But why should I write for only a handful of people, and even pay for it myself, if in the end no one reads me?”67 Kotsiubyns’kyi’s frustration reflected the sobering truth that there was no appreciable qualitative or quantitative growth in Ukrainian readers: at best, their number was perhaps a couple of million, most of whom were semi-literate peasants with more urgent things to tend to than reading for pleasure. If they read at all, it was primarily lubok literature and occasionally “people’s books,” mostly something on religious or moral issues (gospels, prayer books, lives of saints), biographies of historical celebrities, or practical guides on how to cut glass, cure a sick cow, and the like. The potential audience for modern fiction was even narrower. In 1900 there were just 46,040 Ukrainian speakers with more than a primary education,68 and probably only a minority of these read modern Ukrainian writers and poets. Consequently, most print runs of works of Ukrainian fiction were small, rarely over 3,000 copies, and even they were hard to sell. Most living authors were little known to the mass readership, making it risky for commercial publishers to print their prose or poetry. There was also the problem of price. While the price of lubok publications averaged between 1.5 kopeks for booklets of 8 to 10 pages and 15 to 20 kopeks for thicker ones – the 1901 edition

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of Kotliarevs'kyi’s 248-page Eneïda, for instance, cost 15 kopeks – the books of modern Ukrainian authors usually cost much more, between 1.5 and 2 rubles,69 making them unaffordable to most Ukrainian speakers, and peasants in particular. Tetiana Karoieva has estimated that in order for a peasant family of three to be able to buy books regularly, its annual income had to be around 400–500 rubles, whereas the budget of most peasant families was ca. 150 rubles.70 Also, as seen above, Russian-language publications, from the lowliest lubok to serious fiction, were much cheaper and more readily available, given their larger print runs and wider distribution by ubiquitous itinerant peddlers. Least accessible, in both price and content, were scholarly publications in either Russian or Ukrainian. For instance, Volodymyr Antonovych’s classic Russian-language study Monografii po istorii Zapadnoi i Iugo-Zapadnoi Rossii (Monographs on the History of Western and Southwestern Russia; 1885) cost 2 rubles, while Mykhailo Hrushevs'kyi’s brand new Iliustrovana istoriia Ukraïny (Illustrated History of Ukraine; 1913), intended to be a popular survey, cost between 2 and 3 rubles, which was hardly affordable to a popular audience. Hrushevs'kyi himself admitted that an academic or literary work could normally be expected to find between two and three thousand buyers among the intelligentsia, whereas a less expensive book “for the people” might sell somewhat more, between three and five thousand copies.71 Unsurprisingly, lubok literature continued to outsell everything, with average print runs of 8,000 to 7,000 copies. Thus the greater cost, smaller print run, and often complex content of much of contemporary prose and poetry made Ukrainian literature, for all practical purposes, inaccessible to the mass reader. The intelligentsia itself made strategic blunders, in that it failed to reach out to the masses in simple and compelling works that addressed their situation and provided their desired content. Instead of offering them proverbial “wisdom for living,” Ukrainian intellectuals long ignored the needs of the less educated people who were their primary readership. As Karoieva puts it, they “set out to educate the reader after their own fanciful patterns, not taking into consideration the realities of life.”72 In those circumstances, writers of modern and modernist fiction found themselves in a literary vacuum: on the one hand, the mass reader was not ready to consume their complex and innovative work, and on the other, very few well-educated readers were able and willing to read modern Ukrainian belles lettres. The situation seemed very much a stalemate: the market for mass literary products was well saturated but could not grow because of

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Ukraine, 1876–1914

a lack of primary schools, while the market for “serious” works of Ukrainian fiction could not grow because of the advanced russification of the educated middle classes. Ukrainian writers and intellectuals could not effectively reach literate peasants because of small print runs, high book prices, and the complex content of their works; at the same time, they could not break through the “Great Wall” of Russian culture that surrounded the most educated minds in cities and towns. Indeed, why should anyone pay extra for a Ukrainian-language book by an obscure author when much cheaper Russian-language books by known literary icons were readily available in both urban and rural areas? Too expensive and too obscure for peasants, shunned as “boorish” or just useless by most Russian, Polish, and Yiddish speakers, works of Ukrainian fiction continued to be written by and for the limited circle of the Ukrainian intelligentsia. To widen that circle, to tear down the Russian cultural wall, and to be heard by the illiterate and semiliterate masses, were imperative tasks for the Ukrainian intelligentsia if it was to turn its vividly imagined but seriously incomplete community into a modern nation. How did that intelligentsia’s counterpart in Austrian Galicia work to turn a mass of Ukrainian non-readers into a national readership, and what did neophyte readers there read? As we saw in chapter 6, the impoverished population of Galicia was among the least educated in the Habsburg Empire, yet the literacy level there was still considerably higher than it was in Russian Ukraine. In contrast to the tsarist empire, in 1872 the Viennese government made school attendance in Galicia mandatory, and afterward the illiteracy rate steadily decreased, from 77% in 1880, to 68% in 1890, to 56% in 1900. Nonetheless, in some villages where schools had existed for forty years or more illiteracy remained high, at around 90%. Even in the early twentieth century there were more than 2,000 communities – mostly Ukrainian-populated – in Galicia that had no school at all.73 In addition, Galicia had the worst ratio of secondary schools to inhabitants: one per 107,000 people as late as 1906–07. As in Russian Ukraine, in Galicia Ukrainians were disproportionately illiterate compared to other communities, with very little access to post-primary let alone higher education. Overall, however, Ukrainian peasants in Galicia had more access to education and the printed word in their native language than did their compatriots in Russian Ukraine. Although the reading preferences of common readers in Galicia did not differ much from those of their brethren in Russian Ukraine, Galicia’s

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higher levels of literacy and absence of official prohibitions on the use of Ukrainian in publishing and education, as well as the incomparably more active role of parish priests in promoting Ukrainian-language literacy, set Galician Ukrainian common readers apart. Thanks to the aggressive role of national activists in publishing and education, by the end of the nineteenth century the Ukrainian mass readership in Galicia had largely formed into a mobilized political community. One civic organization in particular managed to penetrate even the most isolated peasant communities by efficiently responding to their literary tastes and needs. The Prosvita (“Enlightenment”) Society was founded in Galicia in 1868 by a group of national populists, most of whom were sons of parish priests and knew what was of interest to peasants. From the outset, Prosvita’s main goal was to publish as many books, brochures, almanacs, and calendars for peasant use as possible. By 1914, it had produced 553 titles in a total of over four million copies.74 That number exceeded the total of Ukrainians, literate and illiterate, in Galicia, which was ca. 3,627,000 in 1914. Competition between various factions of the intelligentsia also forced writers, publishers, and journalists to pay heed to the needs and desires of the masses. In general, peasants favored booklets, calendars, almanacs, and miscellaneous collections containing anything from fiction, which was least popular, to household advice, which was much anticipated. In one example that built on the peasants’ interests and expectations, in 1908 the Prosvita Society launched a book series titled the “Household Library.” Among its bestselling titles were The Tending of Fruit Trees and Bushes, The Making of Concrete Roofs, and a treatise on beekeeping. The series went on to include eight books, with a total print run of 23,000 copies (ca. 2,875 copies per title). No market for literary amusement comparable to the Wild West of lubok and commercial publishing in Russian Ukraine developed in Galicia. Perhaps in part that was because Galician Ukrainian priests, educators, and other benefactors of people from the ranks of the secular intelligentsia acted in consort to assure that in reading, enlightenment took precedence over entertainment. In belles-lettres the peasants were offered a strict literary diet consisting mostly of the classics of Ukrainian literature: prose by Ukrainian Romantics and populist realists from Russian Ukraine – Kvitka-Osnov’ianenko, Kostomarov, Shevchenko, Kulish, Marko Vovchok, Nechui-Levyts'kyi – liberally supplemented by the poetic works of local Galician Romantics like Markiian Shashkevych (even if the peasant population was not yet ready for that kind of literature). Shevchenko became the central figure of adoration for Galician

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Ukraine, 1876–1914

Ukrainian peasants, and the intelligentsia deliberately nurtured his cult by helping to produce numerous “people’s books” about him and his writings, including a secular hagiographic brochure titled “The Life of T. Shevchenko,” intended to be “the most beautiful adornment of Ruthenian homes.”75 Shashkevych, a romantic poet who died young (in 1843), was cast as Shevchenko’s local equivalent, symbolizing a resurrected Ukrainian Galicia. Most importantly, in Galicia peasants seemed to be more influenced by their priests than they were in Russian Ukraine. Religion, morals, and social discipline continued to be among the populace’s favorite topics and were widely promoted by clerical and secular leaders. A bestseller of that kind was a brochure by a Reverend Stepan Kachala, titled What Ruins Us and What Can Help (1869), which went through three editions; it called on peasants to stop drinking and instead put their money in mutual aid funds and food surpluses at communal warehouses and silos. As late as 1904–05, the Prosvita Society urged peasants to enjoy religious stories printed in mass publications, such as The Story of the Lives of St Borys and St Hlib, The Life of St Cyril and St Methodius, The Life of the Holy Martyr and Physician Panteleimon, The People’s Big Book of Prayers, and, even more ubiquitous, The Ruthenian People’s Book of Prayers. That peculiar vision of mass literature prompted the notoriously anti-clerical Ivan Franko to comment wryly, in reference to the title about St Panteleimon, that the peasant could infer from it that “in case of illness, it is better to turn to a witch doctor or healer who offers words alone than to an actual physician.”76 Religious hagiography was accompanied by biographies of a range of political and cultural figures, from Spartacus to Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi, Benjamin Franklin to Ivan Kotliarevs'kyi, Abraham Lincoln to Markiian Shashkevych. How did the clerical and secular educators from the Prosvita Society view their peasant audience? They certainly wanted them to be pious, economically viable, socially disciplined, and proud of their past – specifically the newly imagined past that linked them directly, and somewhat miraculously, to the Zaporozhian Cossacks and hetmans. Hence the common reader was bombarded with books and pamphlets teaching him to love “the history of Ukrainian land,” with titles like How the Zaporozhians Waged War, The Hetman’s Matchmakers, Two Sieges of Lviv, The Treaty of Pereiaslav, Bohdan [Khmel'nyts'kyi]’s Glory, and Hetman Mazepa. Other publications intended for a mass readership taught peasants what it meant to be a “good farmer,” or a good woman: the latter was above all someone who cooked well (“you should cook well, tastily, and thriftily”). The master of the household was to be a

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progressive farmer open to “practical novelties” – that is, someone who “uses machines,” engages in the selection of plants and cattle, keeps accounts, uses his time and does his work wisely (according to the motto “vigilance, frugality, and progress should always be your guides”).77 At the same time, in recognition of a mounting concern for gender equality, Prosvita’s publications exhorted men not only to treat women with regard but also to respect their personal aspirations, be that in performing domestic service or getting a “professorship”: “Today new times have come, today even a peasant woman should know something more than just prayers and household economy,” stated one popular 1910 calendar. “And it may be that a girl will have to leave her village for the city, for instance, to become a domestic servant – and if she is literate, then anyone will hire her and pay her better. And why can’t she become a professor? Is that road closed to peasant girls? Not any more! The walls that separated peasants from lords have come down at last!”78 A new and growing peasant readership was being cultivated through the ever denser network of village reading rooms that sprang up in the early twentieth century: by 1914, they already numbered an impressive 2,944.79 In addition to offering books, the reading rooms subscribed to major newspapers that further cemented the national and political awareness of the common reader: between 1880 and 1899, the total print run of the Ukrainian periodical press in Galicia soared – from 236,000 to 834,450 copies.80 Newspapers were now available to any peasant household, through direct subscription or making use of libraries and reading rooms. Finally, Prosvita introduced a revolutionary way of distributing books among peasants: every month it sent a book to each of its paying members (at less cost for peasants). Between 1877 and 1914, Prosvita issued 305 book titles for its members, in a total of 2,551,265 copies.81 Prosvita thus created its own loyal (and paying!) readership and transformed itself from a modest educational society into a mass organization with ever more ambitious goals. How did peasants respond to Prosvita’s reading lists and the tutelage of clerical and secular activists? A look into the life of one particular village community can give us a clearer picture of how rural non-readers became national readers. The village of Mshanets' was fortunate to have as its local parish priest Father Mykhailo Zubryts'kyi, whom we met in chapter 6. Frank Sysyn has shown how this prolific heritage gatherer, journalist, and Prosvita activist became an unlikely revolutionary in singlehandedly spearheading a “reading revolution” in his remote village and the surrounding mountainous area.82 Prior to Zubryts'kyi’s

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arrival in Mshanets' in 1883, only a few villagers could read, having been taught by a mysterious traveler who had been to Orthodox monasteries in Russian Ukraine and brought church books written in Church Slavonic. In 1891, a primary school opened in Mshanets', but the villagers avoided it, most likely because the teacher required pupils to sing Polish patriotic songs, which local people took as an affront to the whole village, in which there were no Poles. The situation typified post-1867 Galicia, in which primary education was a battleground between Polish and Ruthenian interests. It was the populist priest Father Zubryts'kyi who led a campaign to remove the offensive teacher, who was prone not only to demonstrations of Polish patriotism but also bouts of hysteria (she was seen beating her head against a cupboard). By then a Prosvita reading room had been set up in the village, although most residents were illiterate. So Zubryts'kyi together with his son began the practice of reading to their villagers; in the evening, after church services they also taught reading to the village youth. As time went by, those who managed to acquire literacy read to others in their family, furthering the reach of printed material. Initially, few books were available; of those that were, favorites contained stories about Inuits, tales about Hans Egede, the apostle of Greenland, and a globe and map of “UkraineRus'.” By 1907–09, the Prosvita branch in Mshanets' had grown to 103 members, most of whom were literate (and male). Its library of 201 books had been taken out 350 times by an ever increasing circle of new readers. As among Ukrainian villagers elsewhere, the books most popular in Mshanets' were ones about Hetman Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi and Abraham Lincoln, and Shevchenko’s Kobzar, as well as historical fiction by the Galician writer Andrii Chaikovs’kyi and various anthologies and calendars. The reading revolution in the village came about because becoming literate was closely linked to peasants’ economic advancement, rather than just a matter of leisure or entertainment. It is not by happenstance that in Mshanets' the Prosvita reading room opened in the building that housed a cooperative store. Another impetus for acquiring literacy was the migration of labor to the United States, which in Mshanets' began around 1900. Initially, Ruthenian migrants had the highest rate of illiteracy (63%) of any migrants from the Habsburg Empire,83 but that gradually changed. “Above all,” explains Sysyn, “the migration to America demonstrated the advantages that the literate villagers had in negotiating the long journey and keeping contact with the village as they strove to earn the money to buy more land.”84 The desire to

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improve agriculture at home, the wish to migrate to America in search of better paying jobs, and the need to communicate with the families left behind were at the forefront of spreading literacy in the Galician Ukrainian countryside. In Russian Ukraine, these factors were largely absent, as were compulsory education and Ukrainian-language schools. Contrary to priests’ expectations, the spread of literacy among the common people often also led to the rise of secularism. That trend could be observed across Europe, particularly among the urban working classes, and was also noticeable in Russia and, to a lesser degree, in the Ukrainian-inhabited lands of Austria-Hungary. In Russian Ukraine secularization was not so much the work of anti-clerical enlighteners or secular entertainers as it was the outcome of the failure of the official church and the state to restrain the soaring exploitation of the masses by industrial and agrarian capitalists. The secularizing trend is reflected in the repertoire of popular literature published at the time. We can see how in Russia, judging by the literature commercially published for the common reader, the share of “spiritual” books rapidly declined in the early twentieth century. People did not so much stop reading religious books as they became unwilling to pay for them, preferring to spend money instead on popular fiction and the lubok. A look at titles published by Russia’s commercial firms in 1911 shows that religious texts constituted only 11% of the total number of copies, compared to 64% for fiction.85 Most religious books were published by the Church in defiance of marketplace trends. The only readers of religious literature still increasing in number were Ukrainian peasants, and they wanted nothing to do with the Russian Orthodox Church. Who were these stalwart new people of the book engaged in their own reading revolution, and why did they part ways with the dominant Russian Orthodoxy? By the second half of the nineteenth century, clerical and secular authorities alike were aware of warning signs that the Orthodox Church was in trouble. Fewer churches were being built, particularly in the newly industrialized regions, and fewer people were attending church services or heeding calls to come to confession (and admonishments like avoiding sex during periods of fasting). The Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine was itself partly to blame, for its priests – increasingly ethnic Russians – were appointed by the religious authorities rather than elected by local communities, which further contributed to the faithful’s alienation from the clergy. In addition, until 1906, scripture in the Ukrainian language was not allowed. To make matters worse, most priests sided with the authorities in their punishment

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of rebelling peasants and striking workers. These conditions, together with the overall crisis of a mainstream Orthodoxy unable to satisfy peasants’ socioeconomic and spiritual needs, fostered the spread of various religious “sects,” especially the so-called Stundists (from German die Stunde, “the hours”), a local incarnation of evangelical Christians. Until the Revolution of 1905, the Stundists and all other non-traditional Christian groups were persecuted by both the Orthodox Church and the police, which together waged what one historian has called “a real cultural war against the religious dissenters.”86 By the 1890s, the new evangelical sects in the Ukrainian countryside were prevailing over the “Old Believers,” the traditional Russian religious dissidents. According to some estimates, by 1917 the Russian Empire as a whole had 20 million religious dissidents, of whom 6 million were other than Old Believers; many of the new dissidents lived in Ukraine. In Kherson province, it was likely that over half of the rural population belonged to Stundist sects; in Kyiv province, entire villages joined the Stundist movement during the 1890s.87 Mass evangelical movements of “spiritual Christians,” among them the Shalaputs (akin to the indigenous Russian sects of Khlysty and Skoptsy) and the German-influenced Stundists, spread rapidly within the rural communities of southern and central Ukraine, preaching versions of Christianity extraneous to Russian Orthodoxy. The Stundists’ message was reminiscent of the Protestant Reformation in the West, and their sect increasingly resembled that of the Baptists. The Stundists’ most receptive audience was found among upwardly mobile Ukrainian peasants disillusioned with the Russian Orthodox Church. The Orthodox peasants who joined the evangelical sects did indeed become changed men and women – in spiritual outlook, lifestyle, domestic life, and, last but not least, in their reading habits. These born-again Christians insisted on reading and interpreting biblical texts in their native language, whether Russian or Ukrainian, thus making literacy essential in their daily lives. They also championed modern childcare, schooling, and hygiene; also, in stark contrast to “normal” peasants, Stundists in Ukraine eschewed drinking, smoking, and beating wives or children. Like a German colonist, the Stundist liked to wear a watch and endeavored to “plan his time,” as one Russian newspaper with ethnographic precision described this new kind of religious peasant.88 Just as important, the Stundists showed themselves to be enterprising and prosperous farmers, as if in illustration of what Max Weber famously ascribed to the power of Protestant ethics. Although the Orthodox Church constantly raised

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alarms about the loss of the most pious and prosperous of its faithful to the new popular Reformation, some highly placed officials praised the Stundists as modern model citizens. In a letter of 1903 to the Ministry of the Interior, the Kyiv governor-general Mikhail Dragomirov (Mykhailo Drahomyrov) essentially proposed legalizing the Stundists, noting that Stundist peasants from Volhynia could all speak, read, and write in both Ukrainian and good literary Russian. They also composed prayers based on Holy Scripture, set to the melodies of folk songs: some of them could even read sheet music! In refuting accusations that the Stundists were involved in anti-government activities, the benevolent administrator (the only Ukrainian to serve in the region’s highest office) stated that “the first priorities of their teaching are obedience, meekness, and loyalty to the authority and the law.”89 That alleged loyalty to authority may have stemmed from an unexpected source – service in the imperial army. The most prominent religious dissenters, as many as one-third of their leaders, were retired soldiers who encountered literacy and new cultural trends while serving in the reformed imperial army. There they had acquired the habit of reading the Bible, as well as current newspapers (a less strange coupling if one considers that Hegel referred to the latter as “the realist’s morning prayer”). Thus the army unwittingly became a major school for evangelical preachers and secular realists. As an example of a model Stundist community, Sergei Zhuk, a historian of the movement, focused on the village of Liubomyrka in Kherson province (today in Ukraine’s Kirovohrad oblast). Originally, the village had two taverns, where local peasants spent their free time drinking and smoking. After over half of the village households embraced the Stundist movement, the peasants not only broke with their old habits but went so far as to petition the local administration to close the taverns, and that indeed happened. With the money they now saved, the villagers funded a local school library, allocating the impressive sum of 100 rubles per year for the purchase of books. According to one witness, the school was one of the best he had ever seen in the countryside of Russian Ukraine: aside from religious literature, the library had books on history, nature, geography, and science. The villagers of Liubomyrka, having become literate, pious, and industrious, were now at the epicenter of the reading revolution taking place in Stundist communities across southern and central Ukraine, with effects felt far beyond the communities of religious dissenters themselves. As organizers and teachers at new peasant-founded and peasant-funded schools, the Stundists promoted a culture of the written word that reached

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throughout rural Ukraine. Rather than teaching in Church Slavonic as was the custom in Orthodox schools, Stundist teachers used books in Russian and Ukrainian, thus preparing their peasant pupils for life in the modern world rather than in a conservative utopia concocted by the Russian Orthodox Church. More important, these unorthodox educators, unlike their colleagues in the urban intelligentsia, understood what peasants required from their schooling. As Zhuk put it, “by developing the culture of reading and practical schooling, the Stundists, who by 1900 made up a significant part of the rural population in the provinces of Kherson and Kiev [Kyiv], contributed to the modernization of the Ukrainian countryside and to the formation of ‘human capital,’ in the sense of skills, education, and various rational social practices.”90 Unfortunately, this modernization from below by religious dissenters was met with the brutal force of tradition, marshaled by the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian police state. For all its power rooted in tradition, the Russian Orthodox Church was losing touch with a great many people from all walks of life – from the urban intelligentsia to nobles and officials to peasants and workers. For every religious thinker like Nikolai Berdyaev who remained infatuated with the Middle Ages, there were now dozens of atheists and agnostics like Vynnychenko and Trotsky. Until the mid-nineteenth century, the Church viewed cities and their residents as being more religious than villages, and its clergy was more concerned about the lack of religious education among rural than urban dwellers (there were far fewer churches in the countryside than in cities). Later in the century, these perceptions began to change, with cities increasingly seen as hotbeds of secularism, atheism, and vice of various kinds that corrupted urban residents in droves, including industrial workers, the radical intelligentsia, and even nobiliary officials. The gathering of data on churches in cities and towns revealed that the larger or more populous an urban area was, the higher its ratio of residents to churches – statistics that greatly alarmed Orthodox Church authorities. Worst in this respect were the industrial provinces of southern Ukraine, so-called New Russia. For instance, in 1904, Katerynoslav had 6,023 residents for every church in the city; in Odesa, the ratio was 4,946 per church; in Oleksandrivs’k it was 3,615; in Ielysavethrad – 3,436; and in Mykolaïv – 2,676 (compared to 3,168 in Kharkiv, 2,740 in Kyiv, 1,400 in Poltava, 1,404 in Zhytomyr, 1,438 in Chernihiv, and 1,003 in Kam'ianets'). The ratio was even higher in industrial communities without city status: in Iuzivka, there were 6,673 residents per church.91

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Also, there were notably fewer Orthodox monasteries in the industrial south than elsewhere in Ukraine: only three in Katerynoslav province, five in Taurida, and three in Kherson. At the same time, however, much of Ukraine’s heartland, particularly Podolia, Volhynia, and the city of Kyiv, remained loyal to the Orthodox Church (although there the influence of Ukrainophile priests was on the rise). Admittedly, some clerics may have exaggerated the strength of the sectarian movement in order to draw more resources from the government, but for the Orthodox Church the trends were nonetheless troubling. As the cities grew larger and became more multiethnic – developing into what social historians call “migrant cities” – the former peasants who were now industrial workers were rapidly losing their traditional religiosity, in part because of their weakened ties to their village communities. When some of these workers returned home, they also “contaminated” local peasants with their religious indifference or even, still worse, outright atheism and social radicalism, the sometime consequences of secular education. What did the Church do to counteract the spread of urban “vices” and rural dissent? It resolved to shield the peasants whom it still saw as the bearers of traditional Orthodox values from the corrupting force of “migrant cities” and the new “sects” by founding more churches and persecuting its religious competitors. It soon became apparent, however, that simply providing more places of worship would not suffice to ensure the triumph of Russian Orthodoxy. In 1903 a newspaper report about a village in Kherson province related that “a chapel situated just 20 meters from a church is left to the mercy of fate and is used only as a place of respite by drunken peasants and for other needs of passersby.”92 There were many more chapels used primarily by drunks and passersby answering the call of nature. Repression against the “spiritual Christians” was the Church’s own answer to its call of duty. In 1885, for instance, the head of the Orthodox eparchy in Katerynoslav issued a decree exiling all “sectarians” who did not return to Orthodoxy after being admonished to do so. Other measures were as bizarre as they were draconian: a decree issued in 1900 forbade priests to conduct memorial services for Leo Tolstoy, the famed advocate of religious dissenters’ rights, ten years before he died! A resolution of 1903 called on the police to confiscate icons “painted in the wrong manner” that might “lead people into temptation” – that is, to join a sect93 (reflecting, too, a long-standing concern about poorly executed icons). Church libraries were flooded with dogmatic and polemical

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literature targeting the enemies of Russian Orthodoxy: secular liberals, Ukrainian “separatists,” Old Believers, Stundists, Baptists, and other “sectarians.” Instead of setting up schools with modern curriculums and libraries themselves, the Orthodox Church authorities attacked those run by “spiritual Christians.” In the end, the Russian Orthodox Church failed to appeal to industrial workers and peasants in much of Ukraine. While urban workers increasingly embraced revolution and evidenced fewer and fewer signs of religious observance, growing numbers of Orthodox peasant communities were being swayed by a “popular Reformation” that seemed to be persecution-proof. In the contest for a new reading public and new consumers of popular culture, the official church was losing. Those spheres were being shaped by secular schools (funded in large measure by liberal zemstvos), commercial publishing, and individual needs and concerns that were more in line with the teachings of “spiritual Christians” than with Russian Orthodoxy. By contrast, in Austrian-ruled Ukraine the influence of the dominant Greek Catholic Church remained paramount, for it managed to find adequate answers to the national and social concerns of its faithful. Granted, before 1914 Ukraine was hopelessly divided along social, cultural, religious, and ethnic lines, let alone political borders, and there were very few signs that the Ukrainian reading public and political community would feature so prominently in the revolutionary events of 1917. But the contingent combination of print capitalism, Ukrainian nationalism across the Russian-Austrian border, and popular religiosity, among other forces, worked progressively to undermine the monopoly of imperial institutions and to dismantle the “Great Wall” of Russian culture brick by brick. What follows is the story of how politics finally caught up with culture – that is, the story of the making of modern Ukraine through the unmaking of its overlords and adversaries: autocratic Russia, the all-Russian nation, and historic Poland, all of which set claims on Ukrainian territory and its people.

between th ea ter an d t e r r o r iS m “If you want to work for the Ukrainian people, become the foremost scholars and write your works in Ukrainian. Then even foreigners will learn the Ukrainian language to read your works. But now the most useful for the Ukrainian idea is the Ukrainian theater.”94 These words of Pavlo Zhytets'kyi, a veteran of Kyiv’s Old Hromada, reflect the modest aspirations of the Ukrainian national movement during the 1880s, a

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decade of unprecedented repression of any show of Ukrainian identity, and a time when working in or for the theater was the most daring work an activist could undertake. Admittedly, culture often took on the role of politics in Ukraine, owing to the prolonged periods of reaction in the Russian Empire. This was especially true in the 1880s and ’90s, when explicitly political activities (including debates) were prohibited. In such conditions, theater was far more than just entertainment. Not everyone was a dedicated theatergoer, of course, and not everyone was happy with the state of Ukrainian theater at the time, much of it represented by the folksy satirical plays of Ivan Karpenko-Karyi. In the 1890s, some leading Ukrainian intellectuals dismissed the populist and largely low-brow theater productions that were wildly popular with multiethnic urban audiences across Ukraine. Lesia Ukraïnka’s mother, the writer Olena Pchilka, wrote to her daughter: “those troupes should come up with something better, because the public begins to grasp that Sadovs'kyi [a popular actor and theater entrepreneur – Sb ] and tutti quanti are just fools, and the public no longer wants to applaud their folksy sheepskin (smushevym) hats.”95 Nonetheless, populist drama of the kind that so offended Olena Pchilka’s sensibilities would long remain the canonized example of Ukrainian national theater – indeed, until recent times. Yet a growing number of young people in Ukraine, particularly in the Russian Empire, and whether theatergoers or not, were showing that they needed more in life than theater. Many joined the ranks of the radicals who launched a campaign of political assassinations as a way to bring about the fall of tsarist government. In fact, several natives of Ukraine (among them Andrii Zheliabov and Mykola Kybal’chych) were implicated in the most notorious acts of political terrorism in Russia. On the other hand, it is also true that virtually all politically active and nationally conscious Ukrainians rejected violence. Most were members of hromadas, clandestine groups of moderate nationalists, or zemstvos, the imperial institutions of local self-government that included many liberal landowners, and where Ukrainophiles often found employment (as doctors, statisticians, teachers, agronomists). It was hromadas and zemstvos rather than terrorist cells (Dostoevsky’s spaces of “the possessed”) that became the political habitat of Ukrainophiles in the late nineteenth century. Like the supporters of Gandhi in British India, proponents of the Ukrainian idea in Russia acted under the banner of non-violence. Terrorism and political violence became the tactical weapons of Russian revolutionaries, for whom the issue of Ukraine was

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increasingly secondary to that of Russia per se, to the point of indifference if not outright hostility. This is not to say that the Ukrainians had no allies among the Russian intelligentsia. But those allies were to be found mostly among liberal professionals rather than hardcore revolutionaries, a fact that would come back to haunt Ukrainian national activists during and after the revolution of 1917. In fact, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Russian-ruled Ukraine was becoming the arena of struggle between adherents of mutually exclusive imperial, revolutionary, and national projects. How did advocates of Ukrainian identity deal with the Russian Empire and an official all-Russian nation, on one hand, and liberal, revolutionary Russia, on the other? How could a disadvantaged community withstand pressures from both a despotic state and the rivaling political communities within it? That is the story of a populist nationalism whose strength was greatly miscalculated by both the Russian government and Russian revolutionaries. Being Ukrainian in Russia had become increasingly risky. Any public expression of Ukrainian identity was subject to reprimand, dismissal, arrest, or even exile, in the wake of the grievous Ems Decree (18 May 1876), forbidding the importing of Ukrainian-language books from abroad, the staging of theatrical productions, and the holding of public events in Ukrainian. Use of Ukrainian was permitted only for the publication of historical and ethnographic works, and even then it had to be in Russian orthography. From 1876 through the 1880s, most senior members of the original hromadas limited their civic engagement to personal academic and literary pursuits. Nonetheless, before long the literary output of Ukrainian-language authors rebounded and, remarkably, rose to exceed pre-1876 levels, as table 8.3 shows.96 Even more impressive was the growing number of nonfiction books and other publications geared to a mass audience (15 titles in 1882– 83; 83 in 1896–1904), which by the terms of the Ems Decree should have been banned.97 Did that reflect Ukrainians’ successful repudiation of an imperial decree, or was it the result of the decree’s lax implementation, as was typical of legal practice in Russia? Both factors might have been in play. “As a whole,” writes Johannes Remy, “the Ems Decree did not fulfill its purpose of preventing the development of either Ukrainian literature, or Ukrainian nationalism.”98 Although Remy is certainly right about the decree’s failure to eradicate Ukrainian literature, let alone “Ukrainian nationalism,” the Ukrainians’ situation was not rosy. It is undeniable that the overall

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Table 8.3 | Recovery of Ukrainian publishing, 1881–1904 Years

1881– 84

1884– 88

1889– 92

1893– 96

1897– 1900

1901– 04

Titles

71

100

101

117

172

227

Source: Johannes Remy, Brothers Or Enemies: The Ukrainian National Movement and Russia from the 1840s to the 1870s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 222.

repression, at times brutal and at times erratic, stymied the modernization of Ukrainian culture and society. Telling is that for many years the Ukrainophiles’ only major public project was the Russian-language journal Kievskaia starina uniting professional, semi-professional, and amateur scholars associated with the hromadas. The unofficial organ of the Old Hromada of Kyiv, the publication was financed by three patriotic Ukrainian moguls: Vasyl' Symyrenko, Vasyl' Tarnovs'kyi, and Ievhen Chykalenko. True, there were a few undeniable accomplishments, among them the construction of a new monument (in the form of a cross) at Taras Shevchenko’s gravesite in Kaniv and the publication of a new edition of his Kobzar (1884). However, the wealthy sponsors’ major project, Kievskaia starina, had little appeal beyond an academic audience, and it struggled to find a wider and paying readership: during the twenty-five years of its publication, the journal never had more than 800 individual subscribers. In 1902, its situation was such that the journal’s editor, Volodymyr Naumenko, a leading Ukrainophile of the younger generation, was led to comment sarcastically that the Ukrainophiles seemed to rely on the state’s repression to hide their own insignificance: “For twenty years I have been saying that we only have some strength because the authorities forbid us everything, and a true debacle would happen if they suddenly told us to write whatever we want – we would lose all our dignity.”99 This may reflect the self-serving humility of a man conscious of having a unique mission, but Naumenko was genuinely concerned about the Ukrainophiles’ limited social base and low public profile. Another misfortune was a reversal in the Old Hromada’s relationship with

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Mykhailo Drahomanov. In 1876, it had turned to him to inform Europe about Ukraine and provided funds to support that one-man enterprise. In 1886, owing to Drahomanov’s unrelenting criticism of its cautious stance from Geneva, the society broke off relations with him and dissociated itself from his political ideas and activities. Overall, until the early 1890s the Ukrainian movement in Russia was limited to an apparently apolitical, cultural Ukrainophilism obliged to retreat into the domesticity and privacy of family life. As the Swiss historian Fabian Baumann has recently shown, in the late nineteenth century a close-knit network of related families – the Lysenkos, Staryts'kyis, Antonovyches, and Shul’hyns, among others – constituted Kyiv’s Ukrainian intelligentsia, and Ukrainophilism was largely a familial affair.100 In recreating the family histories of Kyiv’s major Ukrainophiles in what can be viewed as a series of Bildungsromane, Baumann viewed their private lives as a “niche” that permitted Ukrainian nationalism to survive tsarist repression. The Austrian consul in Kyiv held a similar view, and in 1893 he reported about the double life of many Ukrainophiles: “The art of hiding their innermost thoughts and feelings is highly developed and almost innate in the Little Russians ... In public life, the Little Russians never reveal their national ideals; in the struggle for existence, they strive to attain any available post, behaving correctly in office but remaining true to their national ideals. I personally know many civil servants and teachers whose behavior in office is considered praiseworthy but who reveal a less than government-friendly disposition in their intimate circle.”101 Unsurprisingly, much work on public projects took place in private. For instance, Kyiv’s Old Hromada typically met on Saturdays at the homes of its members, among other things to work jointly on a Ukrainian dictionary. The historian Volodymyr Antonovych, notorious for hiding his “innermost thoughts,” gave renowned “secret lectures” about Cossack history at private apartments, and the composer Mykola Lysenko hosted concerts featuring Ukrainian folk songs at his home. These private settings provided a relatively safe space for political discussions. Baumann has aptly termed this modus operandi of the Ukrainian intelligentsia “the nationalization of private lives.” It was long assumed that the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine was indifferent or hostile to Ukrainian culture and the Ukrainian national movement. During the nineteenth century, the official Church did become fully integrated into the bureaucratic apparatus of the autocratic state, and it was complicit in the persecution of religious and

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political dissidents. Yet, for all its faults, the Church was also an important agent of cultural and social change in post-reform Ukraine. As recent studies by Ricarda Vulpius and Heather Coleman have shown, its individual priests, the sons of priests, and graduates of Orthodox academies and seminaries, were among the most zealous champions of Ukraine. They included the priest’s son and Kyiv seminary graduate Teofan Lebedyntsev, publisher of Kievskaia starina (his brother Petro became archpriest of Kyiv’s famed St Sophia Cathedral and a noted “heritage gatherer”); the writer Ivan Nechui-Levyts'kyi, son of a priest known to deliver sermons in Ukrainian and graduate of Kyiv Theological Academy;102 his literary colleague Mykhailo Kotsiubyns’kyi, apparently expelled from the seminary at Chernihiv; and Symon Petliura, another seminary expellee as well as one-time theater critic, who become the leader of the Ukrainian Revolution. Unless they were priests themselves, these individuals were not necessarily close to the Orthodox Church, but they benefited from the education and institutional network it provided. There were also some regional differences in the Church’s attitude towards Ukraine. For instance, church-affiliated writers in RightBank Ukraine continually argued against any substantial influx of clerics from Great Russia; at the same time, they defended indigenous Orthodox practices against Russian critics who accused local priests and their faithful of distorting “true” Orthodoxy under Catholic and Uniate influence. The two Lebedyntsev brothers, in particular, were lifelong advocates of so-called Kyiv Christianity. For their public platform, they made use of the two periodicals of which they were editors, Teofan of Kievskaia starina and Petro of Kievskie ieparkhial'nye vedomosti (the latter was a church bimonthly catering to the provincial clergy).103 Ricarda Vulpius has argued that despite the numerical dominance of priests with an all-Russian or Russian nationalist outlook, across central Ukraine – in the Kyiv, Poltava, Chernihiv, and especially Podolia provinces – Ukrainophile clergymen had considerable influence.104 These Ukrainophile priests kept seeking retraction of the ban on the use of Ukrainian in sermons and parish schools that the Church had dutifully enforced since 1863. After 1905, they became more vocal, particularly on the pages of Ieparkhial'nye vedomosti and especially in its Podolia and Kyiv editions. In 1906, making use of that publication as a “partial public sphere of mass media,” Hryhorii Hrushevs’kyi, a relation of the famed Ukrainian historian, boldly called on priests to use the Ukrainian language and thus gain the devotion and respect of their peasant parishioners. In 1909, another of

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Mykhailo Hrushevs'kyi’s relatives, also a priest, was removed from his parish for propagating Ukrainophile views among the peasant faithful.105 After 1905, some pro-Ukrainian priests, particularly in Podolia (where police had long considered the local clergy “extremely unreliable”), joined the regional chapters of the Prosvita Society that were a counterweight to officially supported Russian nationalist organizations. One such priest from Podolia was even elected to the Second State Duma, where he passionately argued for the introduction of Ukrainian in primary education and the establishment of Ukrainian chairs at the universities in Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odesa – all to no avail. One success, albeit on a smaller scale, was won by the newly appointed bishop of Podolia, Parfenii (Pamfil Levyts’kyi), who proudly considered himself a Ukrainophile:106 in 1907 he managed to get the Orthodox synod to permit Ukrainian-language classes to be held in the local seminary (albeit as an extracurricular activity). Parfenii’s crowning achievement was the publication in Moscow of a Ukrainian-language New Testament (each Gospel separately), of which he was a chief editor, over the course of 1905–12. Approved by the Synod, and commissioned in part by the British and Foreign Bible Society, the work was a new translation based on previous efforts by secular Ukrainian scholars, among them Pylyp Morachevs’kyi and Panteleimon Kulish. Although the mass reader proved in no rush to buy gospels in Ukrainian, the publication was a great success, especially in a book size of thirty-twomo, with 93,578 copies of the four gospels sold by 1916 (excluding copies in other formats).107 What would also become evident later, especially in the wake of the Revolution of 1917, was a growing constituency of laypeople and clergy advocating at first for an autonomous and subsequently for an autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church (which bishops, however, were more reluctant to join).108 More important, the Ukrainophile movement within the official Church had strong populist and democratic overtones, in parallel with the secular movement. Other than the restricted academic arena, the “partial public sphere” of periodicals like Kievskaia starina and Ieparkhial' nye vedomosti, and the “nationalized” domesticity of private homes (both secular and clerical), the only legally allowed places of civic engagement were the zemstvos. There Ukrainophiles and liberals from various social estates could come together in public and work on a number of pressing social, economic, and cultural issues. The zemstvos, arguably the most viable of all new institutions in post-reform Russia, were introduced in

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most of Ukraine in 1865–66. They became unique experiments in local administration that included elements of participatory democracy, remarkable in a country without a constitution, parliament, or rule of law. Zemstvos were the places where liberal and populist intellectuals could put into practice their ideas about educating the “people” and improving their daily lives, following fashionable positivist prescriptions such as the concept of “organic work,” first popularized by a new generation of scholars turned activists in Congress Poland. The zemstvos were elected institutions consisting of provincial and district assemblies (decision-making bodies), each of which elected executive boards for a specific province and its districts. Momentously, at a zemstvo assembly a former serf could, for the first time in Russia’s political history, sit beside his former master. However, its representative principle was undermined by elections held on the basis of land ownership and three curiae – the wealthiest landowners and industrialists, the urban “bourgeoisie,” and the peasantry; as a result, nobiliary landowners were greatly overrepresented among zemstvo delegates and especially in its leadership. Delegates from the nobility cast more than half the votes in provincial zemstvo assemblies. In the 1860s, for instance, of the 2,055 members of provincial zemstvos, noblemen and officials accounted for 74.2%, merchants 10.9%, peasants 10.6%, and clergy 3.8%.109 Moreover, noblemen heavily dominated executive boards at both the provincial and district level. In 1903, 83% of the members of district zemstvo boards in the Ukrainian provinces belonged to the nobility, 9.3% to the peasantry, and 7.7% were “others” – mostly professional people. In Kherson province, district boards consisted entirely of the nobility.110 By their participation in the zemstvos, the nobility provided the government with a safety net against the dangers of an unmanaged democracy. In additional checks, the minister of the interior ratified the appointment of the heads of provincial zemstvo boards, and the provincial governor approved the elections of all members of district boards. In addition, all zemstvo decisions had to be ratified by the governor or the minister, and elected zemstvo clerks belonged to the imperial civil service. The zemstvo can be viewed as a tentacle of the imperial Leviathan, but in fact it was more like an artificial limb that did not fit well with an antiquated body politic. The elected zemstvos were intended to accomplish what the imperial state was too understaffed, too incompetent, or simply unwilling to do via its notoriously corrupt officials. The zemstvos’ Sisyphean tasks varied from managing property and building roads, to introducing improvements in agriculture, trade, and industry,

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to overseeing public health, sanitation, primary education, insurance, fire prevention, and so on. One arena that underscored how local leadership and democratic self-government could perform better than the imperial state was the battle against illiteracy in the countryside. By the early twentieth century, the zemstvos were administering about 80% of all primary schools in the empire. These schools had a much better reputation than those administered by the Ministry of Education, let alone the archaic parish schools. We should not disregard churchrun schools altogether, for they did play a role in education (if only in Church Slavonic and Russian) and community life in late imperial Ukraine, especially on the Right Bank, where there were as yet no zemstvos. However, zemstvos were undoubtedly more effective in promoting and spreading literacy among the common people. In 1897, the literacy rate in the zemstvo provinces was 19.9%, compared to 16.9% in the non-zemstvo provinces. In 1898, there were 3,117 zemstvo-run schools in Russian Ukraine outside the three Right-Bank provinces (where zemstvos were introduced only in 1911). By 1910, there were 4,700 zemstvo-run schools, with 460,000 pupils and 8,458 teachers; however, their regional distribution was uneven and depended on a district’s levels of prosperity and social activism. For instance, in 1914, Taurida province had 827 zemstvo schools, Kherson province 1,087, Kharkiv province 1,248, and Katerynoslav province 945. In Right-Bank Ukraine, where such schools were a novelty, there were 149 zemstvo schools in Kyiv province in 1912 and just a few in the Podolia and Volhynia provinces.111 Admittedly, the zemstvos did not resolve the issue of illiteracy in Ukraine, nor did they fully replace the autocratic state’s presence in people’s economic and social lives. However, as reformed institutions of local self-government, zemstvos became schools of activism and beacons of liberalism, as well as places of employment for many thousands of liberal, radical, and decidedly Ukrainophile members of the intelligentsia. In fact, around 1900 Ukrainians constituted a majority (57%) of those holding positions in zemstvos and other local institutions; there they worked as teachers, clerks, secretaries, statisticians, physicians, agronomists, and the like. Both the elected members and salaried employees of the zemstvos were deeply entrenched in their local economies and societies, and they frequently developed a greater loyalty to their region and its inhabitants than to the imperial center. The zemstvos did in fact become the empire’s leading liberal institution. Over several decades spanning the late nineteenth and early twentieth

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centuries, liberalism, the ideology that ultimately failed in Russia, held sway over large segments of educated professionals – academics, lawyers, doctors, economists, and teachers – many of whom were active in the zemstvos. A few life stories reflect how zemstvos in Ukraine – and one in particular – became a unique refuge for landowners, professionals, and raznochintsy with liberal and Ukrainophile views, and how these courageous individuals attempted to shape an all-Russian constitutionalist movement as an alternative to both revolutionary terrorism and a terrorizing autocracy. One such individual, already familiar to us, was Mykhailo Kotsiubyns’kyi. In 1898, when he was already gaining renown as a writer, Kotsiubyns’kyi went to Chernihiv to assume a post as head clerk at the local zemstvo executive board while also editing the Chernihiv provincial zemstvo’s official journal. He soon found his work in the statistical bureau of the provincial zemstvo almost unbearably tedious; but that day job paid his bills better than the income from his books, so he remained at his post. At the zemstvo the Ukrainophile Kotsiubyns’kyi was surrounded by like-minded people, and before long he became the magnet for other Ukrainian intellectuals active in Chernihiv and its hromada. The local police began to suspect that the writer had joined a secret anti-government group, along with other zemstvo members and employees. Also in the group was Kotsiubyns’kyi’s fellow writer Borys Hrinchenko, who was employed as a clerk by the Chernihiv provincial zemstvo (1894–1900), where he was responsible for tax assessments of agricultural lands and real estate. Passionate about literature rather than statistics and taxes, Kotsiubyns’kyi and Hrinchenko were not cut out to be modest zemstvo clerks. Although they had no appreciation of statistics as a progressive social science, the field was attracting many other radically minded scholars, who saw the study of numbers as part of a social mission to improve the lives of the common people. Conservatives may have stopped short of openly accusing statisticians of stirring up trouble, but it is hardly surprising that the zemstvos, their ranks filled with liberal troublemakers, became the main institutional champions of regional statistics. The data collected by the zemstvos were in fact valuable and far-ranging, from the value of land and real estate to the food needs of the local population to general data on education, healthcare, industry, and trade. The Chernihiv zemstvo stood in the vanguard of statistical research in imperial Russia, developing what became known as the Chernihiv type of zemstvo statistics that was later adopted in other regions of the

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empire. One pioneering statistical project was a soil study based on surveys of individual landowners, which resulted in an accurate mapping of the soil in Chernihiv province. Methods of assessing industries and urban real estate developed by Chernihiv statisticians were also adopted elsewhere in the empire. At times, statistics were conjoined with ethnography, as in the study of Jewish leaseholders in Chernihiv province by the prominent zemstvo statistician Vasilii Varzar. The life of Varzar’s close associate Oleksandr Rusov (1847–1915) exemplified the twists and turns of a zemstvo career in late nineteenth-century Ukraine. An ethnic Russian born in Kyiv, Rusov consistently combined his belief in the progressive mission of statistics with loyalty to the country of his birth, Ukraine. Surprisingly, his passion for numbers developed in harmony with his populist interest in Ukrainian culture and ethnography. Together with Varzar and other colleagues, in 1874 Rusov founded the innovative zemstvo statistical bureau in Chernihiv province. Rusov’s zemstvo credentials were impressive and impeccable: he worked in the Nizhyn district zemstvo (1878–80), supervised data gathering in zemstvos of the Kherson and Kharkiv provinces (1882–92), developed an economic survey of Chernihiv province (1893–98), and directed the statistical bureau of Poltava province (1899–1902). Amazingly, he also left his mark on all the main projects undertaken by the Ukrainophiles: he belonged to Kyiv’s Old Hromada, was a founding member of the Southwestern (Kyiv) Branch of the Imperial Russian Geographic Society, helped organize the milestone Kyiv census of 1874, and in 1875–76, while in Prague, prepared the first uncensored two-volume edition of Taras Shevchenko’s Kobzar, together with the ethnographer Fedir Vovk. A noted fan of Ukrainian music, Rusov also wrote studies of the kobza player Ostap Veresai (1874), torban players (1892), Ukrainian carols (1907), and the composer Mykola Lysenko (1903). Rusov’s remarkable legacy of civic engagement and scientific inquiry lived on in his two sons, who were both committed national activists and accomplished scholars. The lives of Kotsiubyns’kyi, Hrinchenko, and Rusov give us clear indication of how closely connected leading Ukrainian activists and intellectuals were to the zemstvos. These post-reform institutions nurtured the careers of aspiring political leaders and social scientists by serving as genuine public spaces for debates on urgent issues and laboratories for social innovation. Along with individual careers, zemstvos nurtured a civil society that was precariously sandwiched between an unapologetic autocracy and a looming revolution. Zemstvo liberals and constitutionalists were imperial Russia’s only chance at non-violent social reform.

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As we have seen, Chernihiv’s provincial zemstvo was a particularly nurturing environment, and it is not coincidental that it spurred the career of the man who would become the Russian Empire’s foremost liberal politician. Ivan Petrunkevych (1843–1928) was the son of a wealthy Ukrainian landowner in Chernihiv province whose convictions and circumstances obliged him to lead the tumultuous life of a liberal in an autocratic state. After studying law at St Petersburg University, Ivan Petrunkevych returned to Chernihiv and became active in local self-government. A staunch advocate of the rule of law, he continually pushed the envelope of what was permissible to say and do in public, and he suffered the resulting consequences. In Chernihiv, Petrunkevych soon became a leading member of the zemstvo assembly (he was elected by peasant voters and served in 1868–79), as well as a justice of the peace. Most of his time was spent confronting the local authorities who interfered in the zemstvo’s every project, from running a public school (which was forced to close within a year) to providing medical facilities. Concurrently, a wave of political terror swept the empire: on 24 January 1878, the Russian radical Vera Zasulich attempted to assassinate the governor of St Petersburg by shooting him twice with a revolver, and on 4 August, Ukrainian-born Sergei Kravchinskii had more success with a dagger, stabbing the head of Russia’s secret police to death on the streets of the capital. Petrunkevych, who called himself a “complete constitutionalist,” did not condone these terrorist acts, but he sympathized with the radicals and even sheltered some of them, thereby saving their lives and freedom. The year 1878 marked a turning point in the career of the provincial liberal and in the plight of provincial liberalism. That year, the Old Hromada of Kyiv attempted to mediate between the revolutionary populists and zemstvo liberals by arranging a secret meeting between Petrunkevych and the proponents of terrorism in Kyiv. At that meeting, held on 3 December, the liberals tried to convince the radicals to suspend all acts of political violence. Petrunkevych argued that the hiatus would allow zemstvo liberals to pave the way for an open protest against the oppressive government at zemstvo assemblies, which, in turn, would lead to popular demands for fundamental reform and the proclamation of a constitution. Such hopes were not wholly baseless, especially in light of the Russo-Turkish war of 1878–79, which resulted in the liberation of Bulgaria by Russian troops and its subsequent emergence as a democratic and constitutional state. Why should Russians not hope for and obtain a constitution as well? Iehor Hordiienko, the

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city of Kharkiv’s mayor and a senior member of the Kharkiv provincial zemstvo, published an essay in that vein in the journal Hromada founded by Mykhailo Drahomanov and printed in Geneva. Addressing the Russian government, Hordiienko appealed to the tsar to grant his subjects a constitution, as he had “given to the Bulgarians.” The Poltava zemstvo, too, called on the government to join forces with the zemstvos in a constitutional project.112 In a moment rare in Russian history, the liberals were confident that they could win against both the despotic state and impatient revolutionaries. But Russia was not Bulgaria, and the liberals’ hopes faded away as the imperial state resolved to crack down on terrorists and liberals alike. From Kyiv Petrunkevych returned home only to be arrested and, in April 1879, deported from Ukraine. Remarkably, this happened not because of his secret negotiations with terrorist radicals but owing to his public involvement in an “Appeal” of the Chernihiv zemstvo. Its text, which Petrunkevych read aloud at an assembly of the zemstvo on 23 January 1879, criticized the government and called for fundamental social and political reforms. The reading was interrupted and cut short by the chairman of the assembly, and soon thereafter Petrunkevych was detained for “protesting against Russia’s government and state system” (as recorded by the chief of police). The state’s victory proved to be pyrrhic one, for in the court of public opinion the liberals were the ones who won. Prior to being arrested Petrunkevych had managed to publish abroad a brochure titled The Immediate Tasks of the Zemstvos (1879), which was a more radical version of the “Appeal” of the Chernihiv zemstvo. The brochure’s title was misleading, for in it Petrunkevych focused not on the zemstvos per se but on a complete overhaul of Russia’s political system. Speaking for the liberals, he expressly refused to cooperate with the government in its struggle against the revolutionaries (years later, when the revolutionaries finally took over the state, ironically they had no scruples about eradicating their onetime allies, the liberals). Meanwhile, in the latter part of the nineteenth century an angry liberal armed with the printed word seemed to the government no less dangerous than an angry terrorist armed with a dagger or gun. And in fact, with its damning indictment of the government’s record, Petrunkevych’s pen proved mightier than a terrorist’s weapons: The welfare of the people was blighted by the war and we need many years to heal the open sores. The poverty of the poorest classes, the weight of taxes, popular ignorance, the embezzlement of public

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funds, the misappropriation of state property, squandering of public resources, financial bankruptcy, persecution of students, the frequent resort to political denunciations, administrative exile by the hundreds – such is the picture of Russia. There is no reason to expect that the government will overcome these problems. On the contrary, it has proved itself unable to deal with the situation of its own making. In begging us for help it has proved its impotence in the struggle with a small but energetic party. Now it is society’s turn.113 Intended as a call to action by the entire zemstvo movement, the brochure exhorted liberals to unite around specific goals, including control over state expenditures, “freedom of speech and person, an end to administrative exile and arbitrariness in administration, independence of the peasant estate from the police,”114 and, finally, demanded that the government observe its own laws. Its classic liberal insistence on the rule of law in the spirit of a European Rechtsstaat was augmented by the quintessential demand of Russian liberals: the convocation of a constituent assembly that would force the government to adopt a constitution. How the liberals could achieve such goals remained unclear. Petrunkevych’s liberal exhortations would prove too radical for the paper tigers of Russian liberalism, which feared the very word “constitution.” Nonetheless, the Chernihiv zemstvo continued its defiance: in the winter of 1880–81,more than a year after Petrunkevych had been deported, its liberal members voted him back into office and even petitioned the government to permit him to assume his duties (to no avail, of course). Before being plunged into the darkness of counter-reforms, zemstvo liberals had a swan song in the form of the first all-zemstvo congress, organized in part by the soon-to-be-deported Petrunkevych. Meeting in secret on 1 April 1879 in Moscow, at a private apartment, the congress was chaired by Maksym Kovalevs’kyi, a Ukrainian-born academic and professor of law at Moscow University (later editor in chief of the first encyclopedia of Ukraine, titled The Ukrainian People in Their Past and Present and published 1914–16). Of the twenty-two known participants, four (including Petrunkevych) represented the rebellious Chernihiv zemstvo; others present were representatives of the Ukrainian and Polish intelligentsias, showing that liberalism in Russia, as in Europe, was a cosmopolitan affair. The congress backed Petrunkevych’s key demands for a constitution and constituent assembly, but the cautious participants stopped short of creating an empire-wide zemstvo organization, which the government had prohibited.

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Although the liberals largely acted within imperial law while working at public careers in the zemstvos and in academe, the police state took brutal steps to stop them in their tracks. Only decades later, in the wake of the Revolution of 1905, would it become possible for liberals to come out of the political woodwork and become a legally organized force and political representatives of civil society. Until then, liberalism in Russia and Ukraine was like Schrödinger’s cat – neither dead nor alive. As for Petrunkevych, he himself was definitely alive. Following administrative exile to Russia’s interior (1879–86), he returned to Chernihiv and was again elected to the provincial zemstvo. Not everyone welcomed his return: the province’s governor immediately signaled that his presence at the zemstvo was undesirable. Petrunkevych refused to resign, because, he later stated, that would have amounted to “social and political suicide.”115 Less than two months after his return to Ukraine, Petrunkevych was again deported, for “propagating liberal ideas.” Years later, the unrepentant liberal resurfaced as a leader in a district zemstvo in Tver' province (1890–1905) and co-founder of two major liberal organizations – the illegal Union of Liberation (1903) and the Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) party (1905; in 1909–15, he served as chairman of its central committee). By this time Petrunkevych had reinvented himself as a Russian liberal (after all, he was now committed to a zemstvo in Tver'), and friction between Russia’s mainstream liberals and Ukrainian national activists was on the rise. Cosmopolitan liberalism of the kind championed by the Kadet party found only a few adepts among members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia; most of them opted to adhere to Ukraine-centered political groups, but they continued to rely on each other in tactical alliance. Petrunkevych can be considered the most iconic figure in the history of Russian and Ukrainian liberalism. Until his death as an émigré, in Prague, he adhered to the all-Russian liberal cause. His volatile biography also symbolized the strengths and weaknesses of the liberal project in tsarist Russia. Liberalism’s strength was rooted in the zemstvo organizations scattered across the empire, which provided enthusiastic liberals with a ready institutional network. Liberalism’s weakness stemmed from its alienation both from the government and from the radicals dismissive of what they saw as ineffectual legal means and increasingly supportive of direct action and terrorism. Finally, because liberalism was essentially a middle-class ideology, an underdeveloped urban bourgeoisie deprived liberals of their natural social base. The failure of liberalism in Russia meant no rule of law, no clearly defined

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administrative rules, and no fully codified law could develop in imperial Russia. That extended to the lack of a true bureaucratic system: as Marc Raeff famously put it, imperial Russia was “a Reglamentsstaat but never became a Rechtsstaat.” Apparently, in imperial Russia revolutionaries were better prepared to deal with the autocracy than liberals were or ever would be. The Ukrainian national intelligentsia found itself in an even more delicate situation. On the one hand, the Ukrainophiles continued to be harassed by the government and its allies among Russian nationalists; on the other hand, Ukraine was not high on the agendas of all-Russian liberals and revolutionaries. Yet the Ukrainophiles simply could not afford to stand alone by refusing to collaborate with the all-Russian opposition groups, whether liberal or radical. In addition to Petrunkevych there were other natives of Ukraine, including noted Ukrainophiles, who joined the Kadet party in the early twentieth century. Among them was the philologist and editor of Kievskaia starina Volodymyr Naumenko; his co-editor, the historian Mykola Vasylenko; and the Chernihiv lawyer and Prosvita organizer Illia Shrah. In 1914, the Kadet party’s leader, the ethnic Russian Pavel Miliukov, spoke out in the State Duma against the tsarist government’s prohibition of celebrations of the hundredth anniversary of Taras Shevchenko’s birth which was a major grievance of Ukrainian activists. The Kadet party would play an important role in the Russian Provisional Government of 1917, when it would propose that Russia become a democratic republic. Yet many Kadets opposed demands for Ukraine’s political autonomy, a stance that forced some Ukrainians to leave a party that valued “people’s freedom” over the distinct peoples’ freedom. The romance between Ukrainian national activists and terrorist-minded radicals was even more short-lived. The Ukrainian national movement in the Russian Empire did not cultivate its own terrorists, and it refrained from causing bodily harm to its opponents. We already know of attempts by Ukrainophiles in Kyiv’s Old Hromada to mediate between zemstvo liberals and the radicals. There were also some personal ties between Ukrainophiles and radicals who later embraced terrorism. One original member of the Old Hromada, Oleksandr Lonachevs'kyi-Petruniaka – a giant of a man, with a name Gogol himself might have coined – maintained close ties with so-called Kyivan or Southern rebels. In the mid-1870s this radical group planned to incite an anti-government uprising by “going to the people” and agitating among the peasants of Kyiv province. It was Lonachevs'kyi-Petruniaka,

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director of a trade school in Kyiv’s Podil district, who in 1878 organized the escape of some of the rebel group’s leaders, among them Lev Deich, later a member of the revolutionary group Land and Liberty. Then there was Andrii Zheliabov (1851–1881), who became a radical-minded Ukrainophile in the early 1870s and ended life on the gallows as a terrorist implicated in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. If his premature death was typical of a practicing revolutionary, his early engagement with the Ukrainophiles was not. Born to a peasant family in the Crimea, Zheliabov was a student at Odesa University when he was expelled for trying to radicalize student protests. In the early 1870s he appeared in Kyiv province and began to associate with the city’s Old Hromada and simultaneously “going to the people” – that is, mingling with and reaching out to the peasantry. By “going to the people,” revolutionary populists intended to incite popular revolt against the government. It was probably at this time that young Zheliabov, hoping to merge Ukrainophilism with revolutionary populism, befriended Mykhailo Drahomanov, then a rising star among both the Ukrainophiles and Russian liberals. However, as the Italian historian of the Russian revolutionary movement Franco Venturi has noted, Zheliabov’s own life reflected a growing strife between the liberal intelligentsia and the revolutionaries. Between his several arrests in 1873 and 1875, Zheliabov found time to marry the daughter of Semen Iakhnenko, a former mayor of Odesa and member of the famed Iakhnenko clan. Zheliabov’s father-in-law, who enjoyed his reputation as a liberal, was related to the wealthy Symyrenko family, which used its fortune to support the Ukrainophile movement and constitutionalism. But when Zheliabov asked his wife to share his ideas, which were increasingly hostile to the bourgeoisie, and take part in his populist activity, she reportedly refused and their marriage disintegrated. After Zheliabov was arrested, tried, and hanged, his wife resumed her maiden name and, to make their story even sadder, agreed that their son, also named Andrii, should disavow his father’s surname as that of a criminal of the state.116 Whether posthumous revolutionary fame compensated for loss of family and personal infamy was a question that any aspiring terrorist now had to consider. In a letter to Drahomanov, whom he clearly admired, Zheliabov had voiced the dilemma facing many young people in Ukraine: they were genuinely devoted to their native country but unimpressed by a largely apolitical Ukrainophilism. To achieve their ultimate aims, they saw no other choice but to join the all-Russian revolutionary groups that were

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ready to deal with the tsarist body politic head-on, by physically removing its head and most notorious members (police and civil officials). Zheliabov recalled his own experience in Odesa, where he had first witnessed the local hromada’s “flowering” and “its vigorous beginnings” while slowly beginning to merge with the Russian revolutionary current in “real unity, even more than a federation.”117 But then the hromada’s more respectable members, awaking to reality, cut off les liaisons dangereuses with the revolutionaries. This perceived timidity on the part of the Ukrainophiles was the main reason that Zheliabov left the Ukrainian camp and founded “People’s Will,” the revolutionary group committed to assassination of the tsar. “Where are our [Ukrainian] Fenians and Parnell?” Zheliabov asked Drahomanov rhetorically, alluding to the Fenian Brotherhood of Irish revolutionaries and the Irish nationalist politician Charles Stewart Parnell. Drahomanov gave a literal, ad hominem response to that question in one of his polemical articles, but by that time his revolutionary friend had perished. Instead of asking where the Ukrainian Fenians and Parnell were, wrote Drahomanov, Zheliabov should have become one himself, for in Ukraine there were no people like them. Remarkably enough, the man who designed the hand grenade that would actually kill the tsar was an ethnic Ukrainian: Mykola Kybal’chych, a priest’s son, born in Chernihiv province and educated at an engineering school in St Petersburg. Kybal’chych’s social origins might make him seem a perfect candidate for membership in a hromada or zemstvo, but his vision of society, acquired from the imperial capital’s populist intelligentsia, estranged him from Ukrainian ethnographic nationalism and middle-class liberalism. For him, nothing could rival an imminent revolution, and no collection of folk songs or new public school could deflect from the aim of murdering the tyrant. Of the several Ukrainians who targeted Tsar Alexander II, one stood out. Dmytro Lyzohub (1849–1879), scion of a wealthy and aristocratic Ukrainian family from Chernihiv province, was educated partly in Ukrainian (his father twice hosted Taras Shevchenko and befriended Mykola Kostomarov) and partly in French, in Montpellier, France. Venturi has called him an “ascetic” socialist, for upon his return to Russia Lyzohub abandoned any idea of having a career, lived in utter poverty, himself never married and discouraged his comrades from doing so. He himself also never harmed anyone: instead, he helped others do so – by being the single biggest sponsor of revolutionary terrorism in Russia, providing between 185,000 and 250,000 rubles to the

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cause. His death on the gallows in Odesa in 1879 did nothing to stop more terrorist attacks; if anything, it made the tsar’s violent death two years later nearly inevitable, for his fellow revolutionaries were absolutely determined to revenge it. The most publicized political murder in the history of Russian-ruled Ukraine occurred without ethnic Ukrainians taking part and had nothing to do with Ukrainian nationalism. Ironically, the murder happened inside a theater, no longer a haven from radical politics and terrorism. The victim, Russia’s prime minister, Petr Stolypin, was an avowed Russian nationalist, and that played a part in his murder in Kyiv in 1911. Stolypin was shot twice – first in the arm, then fatally in the chest – inside Kyiv’s famed opera house in a dramatic scene reminiscent of the murder of another famous statesman, US president Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theater in Washington, dc . Unlike Lincoln’s murderer, the actor John Wilkes Booth, Stolypin’s assassin, Dmitrii Bogrov, was not a disgruntled reactionary. On the contrary, he was an anarcho-communist from a wealthy and liberal Jewish family (the fact that he was also a police informer gave rise to persistent suspicions that extreme rightwing elements in the government were complicit in the murder of the conservative reformer Stolypin). The Ukrainian national movement could claim some responsibility for one political murder, and it was one for which many otherwise peaceful Ukrainians took great pride. Curiously, it occurred not in autocratic Russia but in constitutional Austria. In 1908, a Ukrainian student assassinated the Polish viceroy of Galicia, Andrzej Potocki, in retaliation for the murder of a Ukrainian peasant during the contentious 1907 elections to the provincial diet. In reporting about the assassination, Lviv’s Ukrainian newspaper, Dilo, expressed a certain satisfaction: “It has happened! History will record this as the first act of political terror in constitutional Austria.” Potocki’s murderer, twenty-year-old Myroslav Sichyns’kyi, was a member of the Ukrainian Social Democratic Party, but no group stood behind the murder. By all accounts, it was the solitary act of a mentally disturbed individual; nonetheless, it was a harbinger of more bloodshed to come. In the murder’s wake Galician Ukrainian villagers began to sing a song with the refrain, “Long live our Sichyns’kyi – and may Potocki rot!” and many newborns were named Myroslav after the assassin. Sichyns’kyi himself got a death sentence that was commuted to life in prison, but in 1911 he managed to escape. After staying abroad in Europe for a while, in 1914 he moved to the US, where he later co-founded the

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pro-Soviet Socialist Party of America (after Lviv came under Soviet rule after World War II, he revisited the city of his juvenile crime of political passion). Most Ukrainian national activists did not see terrorism as a viable way of dealing with political differences (at least, not until the 1920s). But by the end of the nineteenth century it was clear that with the new political challenges facing them, apolitical Ukrainophilism of the kind epitomized by Antonovych-led Ukrainophiles from the Old Hromada had become irrelevant. Theater may have become the dominant form of mass entertainment, and newer, thicker editions of Shevchenko’s Kobzar may have seemed a great contribution to the national cause, but for a new generation hungry for large-scale action, that was no longer enough. The young men and women who came of age in the late 1880s and early ’90s craved more tangible social and political change. What could be done to retain these youth in the national community – and away from the appeal of the terrorism emanating from all-Russian revolutionaries? What or who could make the Ukrainophiles relevant again? Would the Ukrainian national movement enter what Paul R. Magocsi has called the political stage, and when? Finally, how was Ukraine affected by the unprecedented turmoil that broke out in St Petersburg on “Bloody Sunday” in January 1905 and its reverberating aftershocks?

“ PeoPle d o no t ex i St f o r St a t eS” “Peoples do not exist for States, but States for peoples. The peoples of multinational States do not exist for the interests of one or two [ruling] peoples, but for themselves. A State has the duty to satisfy the requirements of all its peoples, not only those of the privileged ones.”118 These were the words of Mykhailo Drahomanov in 1882, strong words clearly reflecting his liberal worldview, wary of any large state impinging on people’s freedoms. Drahomanov’s journalism and advocacy completely changed Ukrainian political thought and action. In fact, it was he who made them political. Omeljan Pritsak and John Reshetar, benefiting from hindsight, listed long-term advantages that followed from Drahomanov’s exile, as unfortunate as that time was for him personally. The two historians argued that his forced emigration from Ukraine and eventual move to Geneva signified the beginning of the new fourth or Geneva stage in their geography-based “dialectics” of Ukrainian nation building. Drahomanov went to Switzerland in 1876 and there, with the financial

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support of Kyiv’s Old Hromada, began to publish the first Ukrainian political journal, Hromada, along with brochures designed to develop Ukrainian political thought and inform Europeans of Ukrainian issues in Russia.119 “He was the first to appreciate the true content and the political essence of Shevchenko’s works,” Pritsak and Reshetar concluded. “Drahomanov’s contribution was to insist that the Ukrainian movement could not remain apolitical and purely cultural, that all political movements in the Ukraine had to have a Ukrainian national character, and that the Ukrainian nation had a right to complete equality.”120 Drahomanov was indeed a major deviation from the largely apolitical Ukrainian hromada movement of the 1870s and ’80s. He was the best thing that happened to it during those years, and the Ukrainophiles’ best hope for retaining radicalized young people within the movement. In his intense correspondence with Antonovych and other leaders of the Old Hromada, the émigré in Geneva continually insisted on the necessity of politicizing the Ukrainian movement. Initially a historian engaged in historical and ethnographic research at Kyiv University, after his dismissal and involuntary emigration Drahomanov gradually evolved into an astute political thinker and prolific journalist – a public intellectual, to use our contemporary jargon. In the West he became a major voice for Russia’s Ukrainians and Russian liberals, and in Austrian Galicia he acquired a growing following among the most radical and anti-clerical segment of Ruthenian-Ukrainian youth: indeed, Ivan Franko and Mykhailo Pavlyk became his first and lifelong disciples. A true liberal, Drahomanov tried to maintain links with zemstvo activists and constitutionalists in Russia, and although he consistently rejected terrorism as a course of political action, he did engage with revolutionary terrorists. He published and wrote for Vol’noe slovo (Free Word), an organ of Russian zemstvo liberals that featured a series of anti-tsarist articles, but his support for Russian revolutionary populists was more conditional. While he never rejected revolutionary tactics outright, Drahomanov argued that the political struggle against the tsarist regime should also rely on legal means. Individual terror, in particular, was not only morally wrong, he maintained, but, more important, politically futile. On the one hand, terrorist acts like the assassination of the tsar and his henchmen could be understood and even excused, for that “has forced all of [Russian] society to reflect on the reason for these assassinations.” On the other hand, it was “inadmissible to glorify assassination, to present it as a pattern to be imitated, or to elevate it to the rank of a system … Even if we leave aside the moral aspect of

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the matter, these killings have a negative political effect. They strike the government, but they do not overthrow it, and they offer nothing new in its place.”121 At first encounter Drahomanov’s thought may seem eclectic, for it did indeed combine several different elements – democratic and socialist, nationalist and cosmopolitan, Slavophile and pro-European, among others. However, as Ivan Lysiak Rudnytsky convincingly argued, Drahomanov’s seemingly disjoined system was an organic unity centered on one grand idea – liberalism. The liberal idea deeply ingrained in his thinking was what made Drahomanov’s self-professed socialism so different from both its European Marxist and Russian populist avatars. He designed his own version of socialism, one suitable, he believed, to specifically Ukrainian conditions. Socialism was to become part of a larger and more complex political enterprise: the reconstruction of Russia and Ukraine along the lines of decentralization, federalism, social reform, and national self-determination. However, individual freedom was to be the principal check on any state or nation building. Therefore, the liberal’s task was to “always intervene to enlarge the freedom of every person, in word and deed – equally so for the freedom of races, associations, communities, and regions – this through the limitation, wherever possible, of the power and the authority of the State.”122 As both a political theorist and realist, Drahomanov put individual freedom and human dignity above all else, a hierarchy of values at odds with much political thought in Russia and Ukraine. The growth of liberty for individuals, communities, and countries entailed the concomitant diminution of state power. Thus Drahomanov’s ultimate goal was anarchy, meaning “the lack of government.” He conceived that condition as resulting in a free citizenry and the free association of individuals and communes, at the time a broadly imaginable but hardly realizable ideal. In more practical terms, and under the influence of the French social theorist Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Drahomanov gravitated towards federalism as an optimal form of cooperation between smaller and larger communities and the only way to overcome the atomization of society. Hence he was a great admirer of Switzerland, the United States, and above all Britain, which he saw as countries based on successful federalism. Drahomanov’s federalist manifesto “Free Union” of 1884 boldly intended to set out a constitution for the Russian Empire. Using the examples of Switzerland and the US, Drahomanov proposed division of Russia into self-governing regions (oblasts), determined according

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to considerations of ethnicity, economics, and geography. Ukraine, for instance, was to be split into three oblasts: Kyiv (Right-Bank Ukraine), Kharkiv (Left-Bank Ukraine), and Odesa (southern Ukraine, also incorporating Bessarabia and the Crimea). In these regions all ethnic minorities would enjoy a variety of rights. Each region-oblast would have its own sphere of legal competence, totally independent of the federal government, and all legal conflicts within it would be submitted to its own highest court. Curiously, in case of a coup d’état in the federal center, all power would devolve to local self-governments: that, in fact, is what happened in Russia after the Bolshevik coup of 1917. Drahomanov’s unconventional federalist ideas were applauded by Max Weber: the main light of German sociology agreed with the Ukrainian émigré from Geneva that the unitary structure of the Russian Empire was a major obstacle to its liberal transformation. Drahomanov similarly proposed the federalization of Austria-Hungary, along ethnic lines and on the basis of universal suffrage. Unlike classic liberals who overlooked a range of social and national issues, Drahomanov was a deeply social thinker and self-styled socialist. Specifically, he acknowledged the overlapping of national and social divisions in most eastern European societies or so-called plebeian nations. Although sympathizing with the struggling masses, he nevertheless always stood fast for liberal principles – freedom of the individual, decentralization of power, and the rule of law – over one-sided socialist demands. To his liberal mind, without the protection of individual freedoms life in a socialist utopia would be a nightmare, something we know now and Drahomanov foresaw back then. As Ivan Lysiak Rudnytsky appropriately described him, Drahomanov was an “ethical socialist” for whom social justice was congruent with political independence and personal freedom, hence his criticism of Russian populists and revolutionaries, with their dismissal of political freedom and their dictatorial aspirations and cynicism (“the end justifies the means”), a volatile combination that bred terrorism and total disregard for individual human life. In this readers today might see the prescient warning of a nineteenth-century liberal with a strong social conscience against twentieth-century totalitarianism, regardless whether it emerged from the right or the left. One of Drahomanov’s most urgent and far-sighted political messages concerned treatment of ethnic and religious minorities within the nationalized space. In 1891, nearing the end of his life, he urged his compatriots at all costs to avoid nationalist hatred towards their neighbors, be they Russians, Poles, or Jews:

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Our nationalism is not nearly so pacific. Only listen to the hate with which our people sometimes speak of the Russians, Poles, and Jews. Reflect on what might happen to men of these races living on Ukrainian soil if our nationalists should come to power. What sort of forcible Ukrainization would be prescribed for them! This misanthropic nationalism is also harmful to us, for it aggravates the hostile feelings of our neighbors. Nowadays one must try to lessen hatred among nations even during war time, as the Red Cross organization does within its sphere.123 Elsewhere he added a personal note: “my love for my own people does not give me the right to attack Russians, Poles, or Jews.” Despite this declaration, his Russian revolutionary opponents at times accused Drahomanov of having xenophobic attitudes, particularly toward Jews. But his own message was clear: the kind of Ukraine he wanted had to be based on individual and communal rights guaranteeing protections to all minorities within its borders. It is this inclusive vision that resonated with Drahomanov’s political descendants who would lead the Ukrainian Revolution in 1917. However, it must be admitted that these newly minted statesmen were not always able to rein in popular xenophobia, as would become painfully clear during the devastating waves of anti-Jewish pogroms that took place in the spring and summer of 1919. Drahomanov’s overall influence on the Ukrainian national movement was substantial, if not immediate. The effects of his political tutelage were first evident in Galicia in his own lifetime. There, in 1890, a group of his disciples headed by Ivan Franko and Mykhailo Pavlyk formed the first Ukrainian political party, called the Ruthenian-Ukrainian Radical party, whose explosive mixture of anti-clericalism, nationalism, and socialism scandalized the local Greek Catholic establishment (see chap. 6). In Russian-ruled Ukraine, Drahomanov’s political influence was more delayed and diluted, owing to the worsening relationship between the émigré in Geneva and Old Hromada leaders, combined with continual tsarist repression. Nonetheless, in 1891, a group of students and activists from Kharkiv and Kyiv made a pilgrimage to Taras Shevchenko’s grave near Kaniv and there, in an abundance of neoromantic enthusiasm, founded a clandestine “Taras Brotherhood” in homage to the prophetic poet and national symbol. From the little we know about it, the brotherhood apparently called for the liberation of Ukraine from Russian rule, full autonomy for all the peoples of the Russian Empire, and social justice for all, which in general

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reflected Shevchenko’s poetics as well as Drahomanov’s politics. The young devotees of Shevchenko and Drahomanov, among them Borys Hrinchenko and Mykola Mikhnovs’kyi, wanted to merge poetics with politics and thus make the Ukrainian idea relevant for the new generation witnessing the rise of revolutionary terrorism and the crisis of the mainstream Ukrainophilism. In a “Declaration of Faith” published abroad in the Lviv-based newspaper Pravda in 1893, the politicized “young Ukrainians” spoke out in defense of the Ukrainian language, moral politics, and federalism: We should seek that the Ukrainian language become dominant all over Ukraine: in families, in all affairs, both in private and in public; in community, in literature, and even in relations with all other peoples that live in Ukraine. So all of us, conscious Ukrainians, should speak Ukrainian in the family, in the community, and everywhere where we could be understood … We should work in a spirit of order based on such a moral and scientific ideal in which there is no place for dominant and subordinate nations; in which the Ukrainian nation, like any other, enjoys equal rights. Therefore, we should be devoted supporters of a federative order in those states to which the Ukrainian land is attached.124 While the Taras Brotherhood itself failed to reach most of its ambitious goals – for its members, staying out of prison was in itself a measure of success – it was crucial in pulling novice Ukrainian activists into the age of mass politics (even if in Russian Ukraine before 1917 such politically mobilized “masses” were far from massive). It was this brotherhood that influenced Kyiv’s Old Hromada to transform itself into the more “political” General Ukrainian Non-Party Democratic Organization (aka the Ukrainian General Organization). A clandestine umbrella organization of national activists with the usual emphasis on cultural matters, it was founded in Kyiv in the fall of 1897 on the initiative of Old Hromada leaders, including Oleksandr Konys’kyi (son-in-law of the zemstvo liberal Ivan Petrunkevych) and Volodymyr Antonovych (recently retired from Kyiv University). Many of the organization’s initial members – among them, Borys Hrinchenko, Mykola Mikhnovs’kyi, Illia Shrah, and Mykhailo Hrushevs'kyi – also belonged to hromadas or the Taras Brotherhood. With about 150 members in 1901, most of the organization’s efforts were devoted to book publishing and running the bookstore affiliated with Kievskaia starina.

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There were no major new initiatives or changes in strategy, and the organization was more a rebranding of the hromada movement than a reshaping of the Ukrainian political scene. At the same time, the influx of young blood intensified the existing modi operandi in various ways, from engagement with students, zemstvos, and cooperative movements to helping persecuted activists to agitating for the use of the Ukrainian language in schools. The organization’s biggest show of strength came in 1903, when it oversaw the Ivan Kotliarevs'kyi jubilee in Poltava, a massive event that drew thousands of intellectuals and national activists to the city (see chap. 2). But that show of strength was deceptive. As those who took part in the event said in jest themselves: if, God forbid, the train carrying them and the festive national crowd to Poltava had crashed, the “entire revival of the Ukrainian nation” would have been cut short. To the engineer’s credit, the train did not crash, and in 1904 the emboldened Ukrainian General Organization reimagined itself once more. This time the organization cast aside its shy “Non-Party” status and became an actual political party, renaming itself the Ukrainian Democratic party (later the Ukrainian Democratic Radical party) and thus entering the age of political partisanship. The Democratic Radicals were the Ukrainian analogue of the Russian Constitutional Democrats, that is, Kadets, and after the 1905 revolution the two parties would become allied. The Democratic Radicals’ agenda included demands for Ukraine’s national autonomy within a federated Russia, as well as radical economic and social reforms, but stopped short of calls for social revolution. Theirs was a classic Russian and Ukrainian liberalism with a strong social component, in contrast to Western liberalism. In the end, the Ukrainian Democratic Radical party opted not to place any of the flamboyant adjectives – social, socialist, labor, revolutionary – on its banners. Some younger Ukrainophiles, inspired by both Drahomanov and the Russian revolutionaries, pushed the envelope further. The Revolutionary Ukrainian party (rUP ) was born as a group of young Ukrainian radicals’ response to pressures from both the right – the tsarist government and its conservative allies – and the left, that is, all-Russian revolutionaries who wanted also to represent Ukraine. Established in February 1900, rUP was the first party to claim to represent primarily the interests of ethnic Ukrainians, that is, peasants and the rural proletariat (realistically) and urban workers (wishful thinking). Unlike the liberals in the Democratic Radical party, the young members of rUP made no attempt to disguise the inevitable – that is, imminent revolution. They anticipated it, and they expected

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that revolution to come sooner rather than later. But, in opposition to the Russian revolutionaries, they sought their own revolution, not one dominated by all-Russian concerns that ignored Ukraine’s distinctive needs. It was significant that rUP was founded in Kharkiv, that borderland metropolis that combined its legacy as the storied “capital” of Ukrainian culture with a growing reputation as the hub of all-Russian political activism. Kharkiv was certainly an exceptionally open-minded city, in which Ukrainian nationalists, cosmopolitan liberals, and Marxist socialists all found political niches and social bases. rUP itself was a microcosm of this political pluralism. Ukrainian revolutionaries were typically young men: two-thirds of rUP members were not yet twenty-five, and nine in ten were under the age of thirty.125 More important, they belonged to the first generation born into a modern Ukrainian identity: for example, rUP ’s founding members included Dmytro Antonovych, son of the Old Hromada’s longtime leader Volodymyr Antonovych, and Mykhailo Rusov, son of the prominent hromada member Oleksandr Rusov. Unfortunately, it is unknown how many actual supporters of a Ukrainian revolution there were, since the party operated underground and had no formal roster. We know of only 116 confirmed members and another 75 individuals who might have been members. We also know, however, that rUP ’s following among students, the intelligentsia, and the peasantry was increasing.126 Initially rUP tried to compete with Russian radical populists by advocating political terrorism and armed struggle against the tsarist regime and large landowners. While no known terrorist acts were committed on behalf of their party, rUP members enthusiastically supported the wave of agrarian strikes and peasant riots that in 1902 swept the provinces of Poltava and Kharkiv and were rural precursors to the largely urban revolution of 1905. Curiously, the party’s ideological manifesto was written not by a founding member but by a fellow traveler: the Kharkiv-based lawyer Mykola Mikhnovs’kyi, a former member of the Taras Brotherhood. It was his impassioned speech at the Taras Shevchenko anniversary celebrations in Poltava and Kharkiv that was solicited by rUP ’s founders as its first publication and printed in Lviv under the title Samostiina Ukraïna (Independent Ukraine; 1900). In contrast to the romantic nationalists, who usually ignored legal arguments, Mikhnovs’kyi called for a “single, unitary, indivisible, free, independent Ukraine from the Carpathians to the Caucasus,” based on the “restoration ... of rights defined in the Pereiaslav constitution of 1654 and the dissemination of its authority throughout the entire territory of the

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Ukrainian people in Russia.” But it was not Mikhnovs’kyi’s legalese or even his call for an independent Ukraine – regardless of how isolated in the context of the largely federalist discourse of the day – that made his brochure remarkable. That was its unapologetically militant and nationalistic tone: We declare that what rightfully belongs to us but was taken away by force, we will take back accordingly by force. Our nation has long been misled, but today it rises to the struggle … We will no longer endure the domination of foreigners nor contempt in our own land. We are numerically small, but we are strong in our love for Ukraine! … Just as in the past, let the cowards and apostates go to the camps of our enemies. Their place is not among us. We shall declare them enemies of our native land. All those in the entire Ukraine who are not for us are against us. Ukraine for Ukrainians! As long as even one enemy foreigner remains in our territory, we have no right to lay down our weapons. Let us remember that glory and triumph is the destiny of fighters for the people’s cause. Forward! May every one of us remember that when he fights for the people, he must care for the entire nation, in order that they not perish as a result of his carelessness. Forward! For we cannot place our hope in anyone else, or look back.127 How were Ukrainians supposed to fight against their enemies, and what were the weapons that they had “no right to lay down”? That Mikhnovs’kyi in his exalted text did not say. What was clear, however, was his declaration that the national independence of Ukraine should take precedence over social justice: this caused strife within the party and eventually forced it to split into varied factions. Disillusioned with rUP’s perceived lack of ideological stamina, Mikhnovs’kyi in 1902 established the small, conservative, and nationalist Ukrainian People’s party. Among other things, it deemed Russians, Poles, Jews, Hungarians, and Romanians enemies of the Ukrainian people, called for the expulsion of all foreigners, and condemned fraternization and marriage with non-Ukrainians. It was also responsible for the first act of political – or rather poetic – terrorism in the name of Ukraine: a failed attempt in 1904 to blow up a statue of Alexander Pushkin in Kharkiv. The accusation against the Russian romantic poet was nothing less than “tendentiously misinterpreting the historical events of the entire world,” a charge that could have been applied to most of the world’s poets.

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Mikhnovs’kyi’s insistence on turning Ukraine into an ethnically homogenous state had one predictable effect: it turned people away from him and his ideas. By 1902 rUP had transitioned from the revolutionary nationalism of Samostiina Ukraïna to an agrarian socialism emphasizing both national and social liberation. During that year’s agrarian strikes, rUP members worked to politicize the Ukrainian peasantry and rural proletariat through dissemination of revolutionary literature written in Ukrainian, including several periodicals, thirty-eight brochures and books (including translations of socialist writings by August Bebel, Paul Lafargue, and Karl Kautsky), and many proclamations. To that end the rUP found allies among the now abundant number of non-Ukrainian socialist parties in Ukraine, including the Russian Socialist Revolutionary party, Jewish Workers’ Bund, Russian Social Democratic Workers’ party, and Polish Socialist party. In 1903 rUP adopted a draft program similar to the German Social Democratic party’s Erfurt Program, which envisioned a transition to socialism through legal rather than revolutionary measures. Simultaneously, rUP replaced its fiery demand for an independent Ukraine with that for Ukraine’s national-territorial autonomy within a federated, democratic Russia, an emphatic departure from the ideas of the nationalist firebrand Mikhnovs’kyi and a return to the “ethical” socialist and federalist visions of Drahomanov. rUP’s conversion from a socially conscious nationalist party into a nationally conscious socialist party was accomplished in 1904, when the party shifted its focus away from the peasantry to the urban proletariat, became more centralized, recruited many new students, workers, and peasants, and expanded its influence to Right-Bank Ukraine, southern Ukraine, and the Kuban'. In terms of party unity, this success proved a Pyrrhic one. Nationalism, in particular, once again became an issue for the party, which had been moving to the left but apparently not quickly or far enough for some of its members. In January 1905, several impatient party members, headed by Mariian Melenevs’kyi, left the “bourgeois” rUP and joined the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ party (its Menshevik wing, rather than the more radical Bolsheviks), forming the autonomous Ukrainian Social Democratic Union, or “Spilka.” It viewed social revolution as a multiethnic enterprise that resolutely trumped nationality issues, a vision shared by most Marxists (other than so-called Austro-Marxists) and, most adamantly, by Russian social democrats, whose constituents in Ukraine were predominantly Russian workers in the east and south of the country. The

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Russian parties fared much worse among ethnic Ukrainians, especially in the countryside, and that was where Spilka, tasked with mobilizing the Ukrainian-speaking rural proletariat, was expected to be useful. By this time, Ukraine’s underground political scene was saturated with partisan messages catering to specific social and ethnic groups, from the Ukrainian intelligentsia and peasantry (rUP , Spilka) to Jewish artisans (Bund) to Russian industrial workers and peasants (Russian social democrats and socialist revolutionaries), among others. That scene was perhaps even too diverse, with political supply far exceeding demand, at a time when the overall population remained too illiterate and, usually, too indifferent to take in nuanced political messages. Also, the autocratic government made party organization and activities difficult to undertake. Despite a limited social base and government repression, in the early 1900s the Ukrainian national movement finally transitioned from “culture” to “politics,” reaching what Magocsi has called the political stage (although one might argue that it never quite graduated from a prior “organizational” stage). On 22 January 1905, “politics” itself suddenly turned everything political: on that day, in St Petersburg, there was a disastrous confrontation between the tsarist regime and a workers’ protest which became known as Bloody Sunday and was the prelude to the Revolution of 1905. In popular consciousness, the dramatic events of 1905 are often represented with the image of a brutal police crackdown on peaceful protesters on Odesa’s famous Boulevard Stairs, later known as the Potemkin Stairs. This cinematic image did indeed come from cinema – from one of the most famous films ever made, Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 masterpiece Battleship Potemkin (hence the name of the famous stairs today). In Ukraine, the events of 1905 were as much rural as urban, with various “short” actions clashing with each other in a rhythm reminiscent of Eisenstein’s montage style, famously defined as a “collision of independent shots.” In reality, events took place in similar fashion, as anti-tsarist protests were giving way to anti-Jewish pogroms and anti-revolutionary mob rule. Odesa and Kyiv became sites of the most notorious anti-Jewish violence in the empire, where the line between protest and pogrom could hardly be drawn, but there was probably even more such violence in rural areas. For all the bloody terror then unleashed by Russian nationalist mobs – the so-called Black Hundreds – various revolutionary, liberal, and nationalist groups in Ukraine greatly benefited from the events of 1905. The person widely blamed for precipitating Bloody Sunday, the day that tsarist troops opened fire on a peaceful workers’ demonstration,

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was a Ukrainian by birth. Hryhorii Hapon (Georgii Gapon) was born in Poltava province and graduated from Poltava’s theological seminary. Having settled in St Petersburg, he became a skillful organizer of the government-friendly workers’ movement. That Sunday, 22 January 1905, he stood in the lead of the workers’ fatal demonstration. Hapon was not a Ukrainian nationalist: on the contrary he was alleged to be a police agent, the reason he was executed by the revolutionaries a year later. But what happened in St Petersburg did not stay in St Petersburg. In the fallout from the Sunday massacre, Ukraine was soon at the epicenter of mass protests that became a baptism by fire and a test of strength for the recently formed political parties. Workers across the empire went on strike, including in Ukraine’s largest cities – Kharkiv, Katerynoslav, Kyiv, Odesa, and Mykolaïv. By mid-April, striking workers numbered some 810,000, of whom 170,000 were in Ukraine, primarily in the industrialized south and east.128 In some cities, armed conflict broke out between the striking workers and the police. In December 1905, workers on strike in Kyiv’s industrial suburb of Shuliavka went so far as to proclaim a “workers’ republic” and demand the abolition of absolute monarchy, freedom of speech and assembly, self-determination for Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews, and an immediate end to Jewish pogroms. The short-lived “republic” was run jointly by workers and political operatives from the Kyiv Council, or Soviet, of Workers’ Deputies. Similar councils were set up in the major industrial centers of Katerynoslav, Luhansk Mariupol, Mykolaïv, Odesa, Oleksandrivs’k (today Zaporizhzhia), and Iuzivka (today Donetsk). These councils were dominated by the Russian social democrats (primarily Mensheviks) and socialist revolutionaries who had established a near monopoly on the workers’ constituencies, effectively shutting the competing Ukrainian parties out of the process. The revolution also spread to the military, in particular to the Black Sea Fleet. In June 1905, the crew of the battleship Potemkin famously mutinied in Odesa harbor; among the mutineers was Oleksandr Kovalenko, co-founder of the Revolutionary Ukrainian party. But its role and that of other Ukrainian political parties in the revolution was very limited, especially in large cities like Odesa. The mutiny there happened during revolutionary turmoil, as a series of political demonstrations, manifestations, and riots – including the empire’s worst anti-Jewish pogrom – swept the city. Any demonstration of mass discontent, even one under a socialist banner, threatened to unleash the demon of antisemitism lurking in highly heterogeneous and socially

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stratified Odesa. The sudden arrival of the Potemkin during the night of 14 June intensified the ongoing anti-government protests and rioting: by the next morning, nearly 2,000 people had been shot dead by tsarist troops or killed in the fire that ravaged the harbor.129 Local antisemites blamed Jews for inciting the riots and resulting casualties, and Jews were prominent among the 133 revolutionaries later arrested or exiled after the June days of wrath. Jews were also highly visible during major disturbances that took place on 16 October: they were 197 of the 214 persons arrested that day.130 But it was another event that led to the outbreak of pogrom. Word came of the government’s issuance of an “October Manifesto” (on 17 October 1905) bestowing political freedoms and civil rights throughout Russia, and the news brought thousands of people out on the streets to celebrate. Jews fraternized with non-Jews in what at first seemed an unprecedented instance of interethnic unity. But the civic holiday quickly turned into yet another anti-government protest, amidst reports that the demonstrators, many of them Jews, had ripped down portraits of the tsar and turned on the police (two were killed). Then an antisemitic mob, including many of the previous day’s protesters now roused by vodka, attacked Jews and their properties. According to the most conservative estimates, at least 400 Jews and 100 non-Jews were killed; approximately 300 others, a majority of them Jews, were injured, and 1,632 Jewish houses, apartments, and stores were plundered.131 Events in Kyiv followed the same scenario: there, as in Odesa, a rightwing mob turned violent in reaction to rumors that Jews had desecrated the tsar’s portrait. News of the October Manifesto had precipitated an initially peaceful celebration that quickly became a raucous demonstration. In Kyiv, as in Odesa, a mass anti-government riot could hardly be distinguished from an anti-Jewish pogrom, as many workers took part in both. While much of this urban discontent seemed spontaneous, albeit amplified by rumors and alcohol, in many instances it was intentionally channeled by Russian and Jewish revolutionaries and, in the case of the anti-Jewish pogroms, by the Black Hundreds, with some assistance from the police. By comparison, the discontent in the countryside was more instinctive and unplanned, as though following the traditional course of a peasant jacquerie. Another distinction was that the presence of Ukrainian revolutionaries was much more noticeable in villages than in cities. Waves of rural discontent, with attacks on landowners’ estates, occurred in Left-Bank Ukraine and Kharkiv province (there the sugar

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magnate Tereshchenko alone lost property valued at a million rubles), were also agrarian strikes, largely in southern and Right-Bank Ukraine. The only force able to compete with Russian socialist revolutionaries in the countryside was the social democratic Spilka, which had become a part of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ party. Spilka worked closely with the Russian Mensheviks and the Jewish Workers’ Bund; during 1905–07, it built an organization in Ukraine’s villages and small towns that proved stronger and more popular than its rivals in the rUP and the Ukrainian Social Democratic Workers’ party (USdrP ) that succeeded it. During the Revolution of 1905, Spilka’s 3,000 to 7,000 members organized and led numerous rural strikes and riots across Ukraine. At the same time, through its organ Pravda (1905) and propagandistic brochures in Ukrainian and, increasingly, in Russian, Spilka waged a fierce ideological battle against the USdrP and managed to gain the support of many former cells of the rUP . The rivalry between the two parties, both born of rUP , became acrimonious. One contemporary wrote about the “constant and bitter struggle” between the two, and Spilka’s leaders did not hide their intention to “prevent the bourgeois democratic elements remaining in the rUP from manipulating the Ukrainian workers for their own ends.”132 Spilka, the more left-leaning of the two, had the widest mass appeal of any Ukrainian party, including liberal and socialist ones. That translated into enviable electoral gains in the elections to the First and Second Russian State Dumas, the most “revolutionary” achievements of the 1905 revolution. Spilka got fourteen delegates to the Second Duma (5 March–15 June 1907), whereas USdrP got only one. As yet, there was little demand for a specifically Ukrainian version of social democracy. Meanwhile, the socialists in Spilka who had drifted away from Ukrainian national issues (including the issue of language) were doing quite well within the broad sphere of Russian social democracy. At the Fifth rSdrP Congress, held in London in May 1907, Spilka’s ten delegates accounted for a fourth of the party’s delegates from Ukraine.133 Spilka’s rapid rise continued until mass arrests in 1907 brought the party to near collapse and several of its leaders were exiled to Siberia. It comes as no surprise that Russian revolutionaries, both social democrats and socialist revolutionaries, were especially well entrenched in the Donbas, a region with the highest share of Russian industrial workers in Ukraine. Although better paid than their peers in the northern parts of the empire (including St Petersburg), miners and steelworkers

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in the Donbas were prone to mounting strikes, as they did in the 1880s and ’90s, the revolutionary years 1905–06, and again between 1911 and 1914. Strikes in the Donbas accounted for nearly 72 per cent of all strikes in Katerynoslav province during 1905 and 1906.134 While steelworkers tended to be more disciplined and organized, miners were much more connected to the countryside, rendering their protests more akin to spontaneous peasant riots. As in Kyiv and Odesa, a wave of anti-Jewish pogroms occurred in the Donbas in October 1905, as striking miners and workers suddenly turned against local Jews during celebrations of the October Manifesto (in Iuzivka alone at least twelve Jews lost their lives).135 Not only Jews but also foreign specialists – Belgian, French, and British – were targeted by riotous workers in the Donbas in 1905.136 Until the early twentieth century, political parties’ influence in the region was negligible, particularly among miners. Then social democrats, socialist revolutionaries, and anarchists began to establish cells among the region’s miners and steelworkers and gradually to politicize their new constituents. In December 1905, a protest in the town of Horlivka turned violent as thousands of armed and rioting miners, railroad workers, and steelworkers chanted “The tsar is scum!” The political violence spread throughout the Donbas, and the bodies of hated managers and police officers continued to turn up with unsurprising regularity – the work of socialist revolutionaries and anarchists. Remarkably, the Bolsheviks were a rather weak force in the region until the fall 1917, outstripped by the Mensheviks and socialist revolutionaries from both Russian and Ukrainian political parties. Despite the relative weakness of the existing political parties, particularly Ukrainian ones, the years just after 1905 saw a rapid uptake in legal Ukrainian identity in Russia, followed by an equally abrupt fall in 1909–10. Magocsi has even spoken of the Ukrainian national movement’s slipping from the political stage back into the heritage gathering one in the years before the outbreak of World War I, when renewed repression by the government was buttressed – and, in parts of Ukraine, encouraged – by triumphant Russian nationalists. That period also witnessed the painful yet inexorable estrangement of Ukrainians from a “liberal Russia” that in part had turned to the right (for instance, Petr Struve now viewed Russia as a “nation in the making”)137 and in part proved too timid to defend its Ukrainian allies from attacks by a vengeful tsarist government and its opportunistic cronies (although the Kadets, too, were viciously attacked). The 1905 revolution and its aftermath amplified another rift, no less bitter and even more far-reaching, between the

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Ukrainian and Russian socialist camps. That internecine feud would turn deadly in the wake of the Russian revolution of 1917, as former socialist comrades killed one another with shocking ease and brutality. Even so, the decade following 1905 saw a precipitous increase in the public visibility of the Ukrainian national movement. Its achievements were unprecedented, even if many proved temporary. To the surprise of many political partisans, and despite the bad blood between the Ukrainian movement’s diverse ideological camps– social democrats, socialist revolutionaries, constitutional liberals, radical nationalists – their adherents learned to collaborate with one another, if reluctantly. All of them, including the “anti-bourgeois” Ukrainian social democrats, now realized that national identity was an important and potentially powerful mobilizing factor in mass politics. However, considerable differences between the major Ukrainian political groups remained. For instance, USdrP leaders dismissed what they called the “Ukrainian bourgeois renaissance,” even expelling one prominent member for “collaborating with the bourgeois press” (specifically with the liberal daily Hromads’ka dumka, later Rada).138 The moderates and liberals had a narrow but actual social base – zemstvo activists and the intelligentsia – whereas the socialists had a potentially broad – peasants and workers – but as yet unactualized one (even in Kyiv, most politicized workers chose Russian parties). Ukrainian moderates and liberals may have lacked the street credentials of their socialist rivals, but they enjoyed an intellectual respectability and, often, financial resources others could not match. They were also first to take advantage of the revolution. In the summer of 1905, the Ukrainian Democratic party – a preserve of zemstvo liberals and old-school Ukrainophiles – set forth what Olga Andriewsky has called “a blueprint for the creation of an autonomous Ukraine within the framework of a Russian federal state.”139 Essentially, this “blueprint” was an elaboration of Drahomanov’s old ideas, now neatly put forward in a series of demands for Ukraine’s autonomy, as well as civil liberties, economic justice, and even gender equality. While an autonomous Ukraine still belonged to the realm of fantasy, other things generations of Ukrainophiles had dreamed about were materializing more quickly. Despite conservative opposition within the government, which as late as May 1905 argued against repealing the Ems Decree, the October Manifesto immediately changed the entire legal and political framework in which Ukrainian activists operated. Issued by Tsar Nicholas on 17 October 1905, it was a clear victory for the government’s liberal ministers, headed by Sergei Witte, and entailed

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major change in imperial policies towards ethnic and religious minorities, including Ukrainians. In addition to calling for elections to Russia’s first parliament, the State Duma, the manifesto pledged to grant people of the empire basic civil liberties, including inviolability of person, freedom of conscience, and freedom of speech, assembly, and association (it would later turn out that in Russia the person was not in fact “inviolable,” and many “freedoms” would be rescinded). The manifesto did not specifically mention the Ems Decree or its abolishment – or Ukrainians, for that matter – so it was unclear whether they now existed legally or not. There was also the question of the Ukrainian language: could it now be used in print, in school, and onstage, or not? Such questions never got official answers, and individual decisions regarding them were left to the discretion of local governors, who could allow or ban a book, play, periodical, public lecture, or event depending on their personal attitude, mood, taste, and ideology. In other words, “each branch of the Russian administrative apparatus, in effect, was left to formulate its own policy towards the Ukrainian national movement.”140 Ukrainians took to reading the manifesto in their own way, and before long Ukrainian-language papers and magazines were springing up across Ukraine, covering everything from beekeeping and agronomy to literature and politics to satire – some two dozen periodicals in all, where before 1905 there were none. A miraculous achievement was publication of the first Ukrainian-language daily in the Russian Empire. Founded in December 1905 in Kyiv by liberal Ukrainophiles, and funded in large part by the wealthy landowner Ievhen Chykalenko, Hromads' ka dumka, later renamed Rada, became the single most important and emphatically non-partisan voice of the Ukrainian community in Russia. It was also one of the very few public venues in which older liberals like Oleksandr Rusov and Mykola Lysenko shared space – if in newsprint alone – with social democrats like Mykola Porsh, Symon Petliura, and Volodymyr Vynnychenko. The periodical also indicated the limits of the Ukrainian movement: it had only 5,000 subscribers, far fewer than the expected 10,000 to 20,000, obliging Chykalenko to continue to foot its publishing costs. In the long run, Rada nevertheless proved enormously important, in that it gradually created a loyal (and, later, paying) audience that, in turn, became a nucleus within Ukrainian civil society that defied growing political partisanship. Another non-partisan, cultural, and all-Ukrainian effort was the campaign to establish university chairs of Ukrainian language, literature, and history at imperial universities. That campaign was initiated

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by two social democratic students at Kyiv University, who collected some 1,500 signatures (from half the student body) on a petition asking for chairs in Ukrainian language, literature, history, and law. The petition was then published in Rada, which began also to collect signatures from its readers, many of them ineligible to become university students themselves. By May 1907, Rada had received 227 petitions from all across Ukraine, with a total of ca. 9,000 signatures (including those of peasants), in support of the Kyiv students’ initiative.141 This public outpouring failed to move the university’s rector, who presided over the most conservative and anti-Ukrainian faculty in the empire. He snubbed the students in one short sentence: the university in Kyiv was a Russian university. Yet, in the end, that whole sequence of events would prove to be not a failure but a success in disguise. As Andriewsky put it: “the university chairs campaign had been a stunning success, far beyond anything that either the Kiev [sic] students or the editors of Rada might have dreamed. What had begun as a local effort by a small group of nationally-conscious students had blossomed into a national campaign … that had clearly captured the imagination of the Ukrainian student youth, the future village teachers, medical assistants, engineers, doctors, priests, and agronomists of Ukraine.”142 Also, what proved infeasible in Kyiv was possible elsewhere. Oleksandr Hrushevs’kyi, brother of the renowned Mykhailo, was allowed to teach Ukrainian history at Odesa University, while philologist Mykola Sumtsov taught Ukrainian literature at Kharkiv – and both did so in Ukrainian. And, as a bonus, there was the publication, in 1907, of the first uncensored edition of Taras Shevchenko’s Kobzar, which followed the appearance of the first Ukrainian-language Bible the previous year. The crowning achievement of the Ukrainian politically mobilized community was, perhaps, the participation of Ukrainian deputies in Russia’s State Duma. That experience changed the very definition of “politics” in Russia, by introducing legal competition in the political sphere – imperfect, to be sure, but absolutely different from what had existed previously. The duma not only provided a safe space for political debate but one that allowed its deputies, many of whom were peasants, to express, negotiate, and even acquire national identity. By taking part in the State Duma, deputies of peasant background from different parts of Ukraine first realized what and how much they had in common, a discovery that could only be made in the remove of St Petersburg, the imperial capital. It was the intelligentsia, however, that helped these same peasant deputies to acknowledge and perform their

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national identity through joint participation in a Ukrainian caucus. The national cause was advanced by the fact that the parliamentary club was also open, for meetings and debate, to Ukrainians outside the duma, enabling the participation of seasoned “lobbyists” and intellectuals then residing in St Petersburg, including Oleksandr Rusov, Oleksandr Lotots’kyi, and Mykhailo Hrushevs'kyi. Such revolutionary social encounters in the political nucleus of the empire mitigated the fact that the Ukrainian deputies failed to achieve any of their main goals – Ukraine’s autonomy, introduction of the Ukrainian language in education and administration, and land reform. It was the liberals from the Ukrainian Democratic Radical party who provided leadership for the Ukrainian caucuses in both the First and Second Dumas. Weakened by arrests and dismissive of the duma as an effective elected body, the Ukrainian socialists joined their Russian comrades in boycotting the elections to the First Duma (10 May–21 July 1906). As a result, only one Ukrainian political party sent deputies to St Petersburg: the UdrP and its liberals. And that result had come about only because its candidates joined the ticket of the liberal Russian Constitutional Democratic party, aka Kadets, which, with its 7,000 known members, was a dominant force in Ukraine. The Ukrainian caucus in the First Duma fluctuated between thirty-eight and forty-four members, more than half of them peasants and workers unaffiliated with any party. The Second Duma (5 March–15 June 1907) was much more partisan, for this time the socialists had resolved to stand for election. That decision yielded phenomenally successful results: this time, 222 of the 520 deputies elected were socialists. Again the majority of deputies from Ukraine were peasants – 54 of 102 – and, again, a majority joined the Ukrainian caucus. Taking the name Ukrainian Labor Group, the caucus came to include 47 deputies, almost all of whom were part of the Trudovyky (“Toilers”) faction, which encompassed the duma’s neo-populists, or that of the socialist revolutionaries.143 Notably, the 14 members of Spilka who were elected adamantly refused to join the UdrP-led caucus, labeling it “petit bourgeois.” This first parliamentary experience, albeit short-lived and ineffective, mobilized the Ukrainian national movement across party lines. Still critical of what they perceived as the “petty-bourgeois” politics of the Ukrainian caucus, the Ukrainian socialists came to appreciate the very existence of the Ukrainian deputies as the best rebuke to those believing “the Ukrainian people have disappeared from the historical horizon as a nation,” as Mykola Porsh stated in April 1907.144 Although Porsh’s

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party, the USdrP , suffered mass arrests, repressions, and desertions, and after its March 1907 congress became defunct, its surviving members embraced the cause of Ukraine’s autonomy and rejected the idea of joining the party of the Russian socialists, rSdrP . A tactical alliance with Russian revolutionaries seemed appropriate, and even necessary, but the Ukrainian socialists nonetheless resolved that Ukraine required its own revolution. In the meantime, Tsar Nicholas II’s despotic inclinations decisively surpassed his infamous indecisiveness, and the Russian government attempted to revert to living like it was the 1880s, the duma’s financial authority notwithstanding. The renewal of political repression affected not only the usual suspects – socialists and anarchists – but all supporters of democratic Russia, including the Ukrainian liberals and moderate nationalists. Elections to the next two dumas – the Third (1907–12) and Fourth (1912–17) – were based on a new and undemocratic law that accorded half of deputy seats to the landed nobility. Of course, there could be no Ukrainian caucus in either of these two dumas, dominated as they were by conservative agendas. Democrats, liberals, and socialists were obliged to retreat from the political scene as Russian chauvinists and monarchists went on the offensive against Jews, Poles, and “Ukrainian separatists,” particularly in Kyiv and Right-Bank Ukraine. The conflict between the empire and non-Russian nationalisms reached its zenith in the years preceding the outbreak of World War I. During that time the empire came to embrace Russian nationalism, the relative latecomer to the political stage that became a surprisingly aggressive actor in the early twentieth century. Nothing better illustrated the new love affair between the empire and Russian nationalism than Kiev (Kyiv) Club of Russian Nationalists. Established in 1908 with the goal of promoting Russian national consciousness and defending Russian interests against “Polish pressure and Ukrainophilism,” by the summer of 1911 it claimed 1,500 members,145 and it was actively discrediting prominent Ukrainophiles. The Club included leading members of another organization, the Union of Russian People, that was notorious for its antisemitic and extreme right-wing views, which boasted of having 117 chapters with more than 20,000 members in Kyiv province alone.146 Initially supported by the Russian Orthodox Church and local authorities, these reactionary forces soon found an even more powerful backer in the conservative reformer Petr Stolypin, Russia’s prime minister in 1906–11. Stolypin’s opportunistic alliance with Russian nationalists dealt a harsh blow to all national minorities. Following his

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draconian decree of 1910, banning the registration of any new “foreign” (that is, non-Russian) societies and publishing houses, Ukrainian political life retreated underground, as did much of public life. In 1911, Stolypin proclaimed that “the historical task of Russian statehood is the struggle against a [Ukrainian] movement that seeks the rebirth of an old Ukraine and Ukraine’s Little Russian order based on autonomous national-territorial principles.”147 In the new crusade against Ukraine, most institutions suspected of promoting “Ukrainophilism,” including the Prosvita Society, were shut down; Ukrainian-language books were to be removed from bookstores; concerts and most public events were also banned. This wave of wholesale repression says much about how tenuous the connections between Russia and liberalism always were, and how impervious the Russian government was and continued to be to the rule of law and democracy. Was Ukrainian public life and civil society as a whole forced to return to the “heritage gathering” of old? In fact, heritage gathering had never ceased, and academics, especially those in the humanities, continuously had prominent roles in Ukrainian politics. But by the time the imperial government and Russian reactionaries entered their illiberal alliance around 1907, Ukrainian national activists of all stripes, including inveterate “heritage gatherers,” had been irreversibly “politicized.” So had many workers and peasants. Some had learned to combine their vital socioeconomic concerns with more abstract national interests during the revolutionary year 1905 and the subsequent electoral campaigns to the State Duma. Ukrainian political parties were now banned, but Ukrainian political leaders – those not imprisoned or exiled, that is – remained active. Many were now part of the non-partisan political and civic “Society of Ukrainian Progressives” (tUP , established 1908) that coordinated the activities of about sixty hromadas in Ukraine as well as the two in St Petersburg and one in Moscow.148 The society’s main goal was to defend the gains of the Ukrainian movement and demand more rights, such as the use of Ukrainian in education, administration, courts, and the church. Its central political demand (in a nod to Drahomanov) was autonomy for Ukraine by constitutional means. Up to 1917, the tUP organization presided over much of the Ukrainian movement in Ukraine, coordinating the work of various legal cultural and educational clubs, most notably the Ukrainian Scientific Society in Kyiv (headed by Mykhailo Hrushevs'kyi from 1908). It also owned the major Ukrainian bookstore in Kyiv, once the home of Kievskaia starina and thus symbolic of tUP ’s connection with the Old Hromada. However, owing to

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the recent political developments, the Ukrainian progressives relied on the daily Rada to be their unofficial mouthpiece. Since the organization had no deputies in the Third or Fourth State Dumas, tUP had to rely on its prior friendly contacts with Russian liberals from the Kadet party and a few renowned scholars, like the philologist Aleksei Shakhmatov, who recognized Ukraine’s political and cultural aspirations. Kadet members in Kyiv openly embraced Ukrainian identity, which ultimately forced Petr Struve, who rejected the existence of a Ukrainian nationality, to leave the party in 1915.149 A burgeoning wave of far-right denunciations was making many Ukrainian intellectuals and political leaders increasingly impatient with Russian liberals, and some were accusing the latter of indifference or, worse, tacit support of the denunciators. Angered by Petr Struve’s public turn to the right and the Kadet party’s feeble response, in 1912 Serhii Iefremov, a member of tUP , indignantly demanded that “every Ukrainian” think deeply and decide “which culture to choose, which side to join.”150 It was reported that even the socialist leader Mykola Porsh, who had recently considered joining the rSdrP , was urging Ukrainian activists to renounce any alliance with the progressive Russian intelligentsia and reiterating Mikhnovs’kyi’s nationalist mantra: “those who are not with us are against us.”151 Finally, tUP officially warned “progressive” Russia that unless it supported Ukrainian demands, Ukrainians would cease to cooperate with Russian liberals. Of most significance here was not the looming break between Ukrainian and Russian “progressives,” but the fact that Ukrainians across the political spectrum were finally agreeing on something. They still disagreed on the kind of Ukraine they wanted, but now they all knew what they did not want: to exist within an autocratic Russia in which only a very fine line separated liberals from imperialists, a “multinational state” that, to paraphrase Drahomanov, existed only for the benefit of “one or two privileged peoples.”

the Un/ S o lved Ukrai ni a n d i l e m m aS: e Pi l o gUe We took a cab and were approaching the monument of the hetman Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi. Daniel poked the cabbie in the back, asking him what kind of monument it was. “That one?” “Yes.” “That’s some Ukrainian general.”

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“Why do you say he’s Ukrainian?” “Because if he were Russian like us, he would be sitting up straight on the horse. This one is leaning to one side. A miserable general!” Panasenko suddenly jumped up, grabbed the cabbie’s belt and shook him, shouting: “What? Miserable? Ah, you blasted Russian! Don’t you know that all your Russian generals aren’t worth the soles of his boots? Ha? This is the hetman of Ukraine! Do you hear?”152 In “A Zealous Friend” (1907), the short story excerpted above, the devoutly socialist Vynnychenko depicts a humorous yet politically charged scene around the Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi monument in Kyiv, unveiled to the public in 1888. Panasenko, a “zealous” Ukrainian, engages in a heated exchange with a Russian cabbie about the monument’s ideological and historical merits. He clearly represents the 1905 generation of Ukrainians, for whom the monument was the single most visible symbol of the Ukrainian presence in the otherwise russified city, where even cabbies spoke Russian and, indeed, were ethnic Russians. Still, the revolutionary events of 1905 had changed much in Kyiv’s political and cultural scene. Ukrainians had already learned how to demand their rights, including use of the Ukrainian language in public, even though the city’s monumental spaces continued to “speak” in Russian imperial and national idioms. But people’s identities were slow to change. As much as national identity mattered to the likes of Panasenko, it remained of little importance to the broad masses of Ukraine’s population, whatever their individual ethnic origin. National indifference remained the norm, and nationalism was still a minority faith, to use the metaphor Andrew Wilson has applied to the post-Soviet Ukraine of decades later. If anything, until 1917 the anti-Ukrainian sentiments of Russian monarchists and chauvinists seemed to dominate the public space in much of Ukraine. When Volodymyr Antonovych, long the leader of Kyiv’s Ukrainophiles, died in March 1908, his public burial procession was harassed by both the police and the right-wing element that seemed to rule the city streets. One witness recalled: The funeral procession was akin to the procession to Calvary. Nearly all the wreaths decorated with red flowers … were transported in secret, thoroughly covered. On all sides patriots from the Black Hundreds let forth a stream of provocative cries that

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accompanied us along the way as we silently followed the remains so precious to us. At the cemetery itself, by the open grave, stood a crowd of police bastards ready to throw themselves on anyone who dared to utter a farewell address to the deceased. The tsarist kite did not release its enemy from its claws until the very grave. Our brilliant scholar, our friend, and our protector … was a prototype of our long-suffering Ukraine.153 The aggression of Russian nationalists and tsarist police on display at the funeral of a foremost Ukrainophile reflected the growing incompatibility between the empire and the all-Russian nation, on the one hand, and emboldened Ukrainian activists claiming to represent a sovereign Ukrainian nation, on the other. The idea of a sovereign Ukraine, whether autonomous or independent, threatened to unmake not only eastern Europe’s old imperial order but also its emerging national hierarchies. Ukraine thus found itself in the midst of a dramatic clash between empires and nations old and new, and the unresolved Ukrainian issue – now transnational in effect – would remain a major source of political instability long after the continental empires’ collapse in 1917 and 1918. Until then, mounting inter-national and inter-imperial tensions played out in both Russian- and Austrian-ruled Ukraine. The idea of an autonomous or independent Ukraine was a greater threat to Russia than to Austria-Hungary, because to the first, the fate of both the empire and its ruling “all-Russian nation” was at stake. Neither old-school Russian imperialists (like Valuev) nor the new breed of Russian nationalists (like Petr Struve) could accept the existence of a distinct Ukrainian nation, for that was totally incompatible with their concept of Russianness. Simultaneously, a Ukraine as imagined by Ukrainian intellectuals and national activists almost inherently clashed with the historical Polish nation in its pre-1772 borders. For over a century, the Polish national project in Russia had been severely damaged by the Russian military and then held back by a series of repressive policies. Ukrainians were in the vanguard of the Russian imperial struggle against the Poles and, indeed, had benefited greatly from the geopolitical consequences of the Russo-Polish conflict. The symbolic and territorial “unmaking” of historical Poland created an opening for Ukrainians to form a buffer of sorts between an advancing Russian empire and a retreating Polish nation. First, however, Ukrainians had to face the increasingly aggressive Russian nationalists who wanted to transform the empire from a pre-national dynastic state into a modern

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nation-state of Russians. Many Russian nationalists were perplexingly complacent about comparing Russia to officially multinational Austria. “The Russian state was created by the great efforts and sacrifices of the Russian people and now in Russia two-thirds of the population is Russian … In this we see the greatness and the winning advantage of Russia over the Habsburg Empire, where the ruling nation, the Germans, constitute less than one-quarter of the entire population of the state,” wrote a pro-government journalist from Kyiv in 1911.154 This statement was written as if millions of Ukrainians, Jews, Poles, and other national groups did not live in the empire. Anyone in Ukraine who was Orthodox was, of course, regarded as being Russian, and those few who maintained otherwise were pejoratively called “Ukrainophiles” and seen as traitors to Russia. To combat them, as well as Poles and Jews, Russian nationalists from the Union of the Russian People (founded 1905) set up a dense network of local chapters in Right-Bank Ukraine. These chapters were often headed by Orthodox priests and peopled by ordinary Ukrainian peasants who generally did not subscribe to Russian nationalism, beyond a generic loyalty to the tsar and “Rus'’.” Despite vicious attacks in the press and physical intimidation, the Ukrainian movement not only survived but gained momentum after 1914. Ironically, the peasants who were nurtured politically by Russian nationalists and Orthodox priests would become a mass constituency for Ukrainian political parties in 1917. One area in particular became a microcosm of the intense encounter between the empire and modern Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian nationalisms. The historic Kholm region was a part of Russian-ruled Congress Poland where, around the turn of the century, formerly Uniate Ruthenians – that is, Ukrainians and Belarusians – comprised more than half the population. Although for Russia the Kholm region never became quite what Bosnia became for Austria – that is, in the short run a symbol of imperial prowess, and in the long run a harbinger of disaster – it similarly represented both the limits of imperial control and the rising might of nationalism, often underpinned by religious identity. In 1875, the Russian authorities outlawed the Uniate Church in the Kholm region, mandating that the clergy and faithful convert to Russian Orthodoxy. Only a minority of priests complied, and, in defiance of the autocratic imperial government, a sizable minority of the Uniate faithful refused to join the Russian Orthodox Church. In the wake of this Russian cultural takeover of the region, many anti-Polish Greek Catholic priests from Galicia enthusiastically joined in abolishing

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the Uniates by converting to Russian Orthodoxy and migrating to the Russian-controlled territory, while others left Kholm for Galicia, including a grandfather of the historian Ivan Kryp’iakevych, Mykhailo Hrushevs'kyi’s most famous disciple. At the same time, a considerable number of teachers from central Ukraine, including Hrushevs'kyi’s own father, moved to the Kholm region and there disseminated Ukrainian populist ideas among the peasantry and students of local schools. Concurrently, another development was underway: between 1905 and 1908, a sizable number of officially Orthodox believers – 170,000 of 450,000 – converted to Roman Catholicism, which resulted in another upsurge of polonization, particularly among younger people.155 The clash between Polish and Russian nationalisms reached its peak in 1912 with the creation of a separate Kholm province from the Ruthenian-majority areas of the existing provinces of Lublin and Siedlce, an idea of the Russian conservatives and nationalists in the Third State Duma. The new province was soon subjected to an aggressive russification echoing the repressive measures of the 1860s and ’70s, which closed jobs in education to both Poles and Ukrainophiles. In the end, however, the crusaders for Russian Orthodoxy lost the battle for the soul of the borderland Kholm region, with its intertwined religious and national identities. Poles not only retained their influence there but expanded it through the mass conversion of the Orthodox (former Uniates) to Roman Catholicism. Owing to assimilation, the Ruthenian Orthodox population of the Kholm region dropped from 37% in 1905 to 26.2% in 1908, as the Roman Catholic population rose from 33.4% to 56%. Naturally, these new Catholics were more likely to identify with Poles than with Ruthenians, Russians, or Ukrainians. Ultimately, what took place in the Kholm region was Polish nationalism’s greatest victory over the Russian Empire and Russian nationalism and the initial, humiliating defeat of that empire and its privileged nation on supposedly “Russian” land. Only several decades later, after the invasions of Poland by Nazi Germany and Soviet Union, would the region’s Ukrainians assert themselves in Kholm, the newly contested “bloodland,” only to be driven from it by Soviet and Polish communist forces between 1944 and 1947. During the 1880s, a flare-up in imperial competition between Russia and Austria had a direct effect on Ruthenian–Polish national relations in Galicia. The Austrian government backed the Polish crackdown on Russophiles, which by default opened a window of opportunity for proUkrainian national populists. By the 1890s, Polish–Ruthenian relations

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had already crossed the Rubicon, in the sense that Ruthenians of all stripes, especially the Ukrainophiles among them, could now boast of a seasoned political class and an expanding constituency of politically mobilized peasants, developments that came as a huge shock to the Poles. After 1900, the success of the Prosvita Society and its reading rooms, on the one hand, and the formation of a committed Ukrainian elite of both priestly and peasant origin, on the other, made unchallenged Polish rule in Galicia exceedingly illusory. The Polish establishment then exacerbated the situation with a grave mistake: it threw its support behind a new generation of Russophiles, the novokursnyky (“New Liners”), which it perceived as posing a lesser threat to Polish dominance in the province; that act of Polish political desperation only strengthened the Ukrainian party while compromising the Russophiles in the eyes of the Ruthenians. By retaining power at all costs and rejecting most proposals for power-sharing with the Ukrainians, the Poles rendered the violence that plagued Galicia in the first decades of the twentieth century all the more inevitable. The Russians, too, stumbled over foolish support of the wrong people in Galicia, for they greatly miscalculated the Russophiles’ strength. Ukraine thus became a graveyard of both the all-Russian nation and the historic Polish nation: they were unmade on either side of the Austrian-Russian border, as international borders themselves became porous in the wake of World War I. The war greatly amplified the tensions between empires and nations in eastern Europe, including the longtime rivalry between AustriaHungary and Russia over dominance in the region. Indeed, it was the multifaceted conflict between the European empires, on the one hand, and the nationalisms that had been embraced by imperial governments in Russia and Germany, on the other, that led to the outbreak of war in July 1914. Ukraine would be very much in the center of that bloody war. As Dominic Lieven succinctly put it, “As much as anything, World War I turned on the fate of Ukraine.”156 Another historian of the war on the eastern front, Mark von Hagen, underscored the significance of borderlands like Galicia in studies of war aims, imperial projects, and the impact of occupation regimes on national consciousness. It is hardly surprising that Ukrainian politicians from all major political parties in Galicia – national democrats, radicals, social democrats – declared their unequivocal loyalty to the Habsburg Empire and joined the Supreme Ukrainian Council. When the council called for volunteers to serve alongside the Austrian army in a special Ukrainian formation, the Sich Riflemen, in the fight against the Russians, some 28,000

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responded (though only 2,500 were selected to serve). A number of leading Ukrainian activists from Russian Ukraine also chose to support the Austrian side. Emigrating to Vienna and Lviv, to facilitate the fight against Russia they formed the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine and later worked to promote Ukrainian national consciousness among prisoners of war from Russian Ukraine held in Austria. The Austrians responded with promises to support the cause of a free Ukraine in alliance with Austria and Germany. Among the scenarios considered by the Austrian government was a proposal drafted by the Greek Catholic metropolitan Andrei Sheptyts'kyi to create an autonomous Ukraine under a Habsburg protectorate and headed by an appointed hetman. The plan was even briefly realized in 1918, when the German and Austrian authorities then occupying Kyiv installed the regime of Hetman Pavlo Skoropads'kyi, a former tsarist general turned Ukrainian conservative statesman. But the Russians were first to enter enemy territory – namely, Galicia – which, in the words of General Aleksei Brusilov, commander of the invading Russian army, they regarded as “a Russian land from time immemorial, populated, after all, by Russian people.”157 Russia occupied the Austrian provinces of Galicia and Bukovyna twice – in September 1914 to June 1915, and then again in June 1916 to January 1918. The first Russian occupation, in particular, was marked by widespread xenophobia and spy mania, worsening the treatment of local Germans, Poles, and Jews, as well as Ruthenians who openly embraced Ukrainian identity. Many Russian nationalists, including some Orthodox dignitaries, wished to see the political “reunification of Rus'” paralleled by a spiritual reunification of the Uniate (Greek Catholic) and Russian Orthodox churches. To that end, they attempted to forcibly replace Uniate clergy with Orthodox priests from Russia and to russify schools and the press. In von Hagen’s estimation, “It was religious policy perhaps more than anything else that turned many once-loyal Russophiles and potentially neutral Galician peasants against the Russian occupiers.”158 The Russians learned from some of these mistakes, for during their second occupation of Galicia and Bukovyna they tried to abstain from hardline religious policies and manifestations of Russian nationalism. By then, however, it was too late to overcome the hostility generated by the previous Russian occupation regime. In sum, the Russians had only strengthened Ukrainian national identity in the region. The war directly affected nationality issues in all the continental empires, “internationalizing” those issues as the rivaling great powers

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intervened on behalf of particular nationalities in the name of “liberating” them from foreign oppression.159 The war further politicized Ukrainian identity on either side of the Austro-Russian border, which proved especially threatening to the Russian Empire. The Germans and Austrians, in turn, encouraged Ukrainian nationalism and that of other minorities in Russia. Yet it was not nationalism per se that brought down the Russian Empire. Rather, as von Hagen explains, “the practices of wartime regimes accelerated trends toward relocating identities and loyalties around national symbols by raising the stakes that followed from those identities.”160 These identities and loyalties existed in anticipation of an appropriate moment to disrupt the old order. That moment came in February 1917 with the revolution that broke out in Russia in the midst of its second occupation of western Ukraine. The revolution would precipitate a series of national revolutions in the empire, including in Kyiv in March 1917, and result in a radical remaking of eastern Europe’s political map. The fact that Germany and Austria-Hungary ultimately lost the war, despite victory in the east, sealed the fate of a sovereign Ukraine, whether the socialist-led Ukrainian People’s Republic or the conservative Ukrainian State headed by Skoropads'kyi. In itself, however, it did not cause the ultimate demise of the Ukrainian national project. One can argue that the creation of the Soviet Union in 1922 as a federation of Soviet and Socialist republics, including a Ukrainian SSr , reflected the triumph of new nations over old empires. After all, to use Yuri Slezkine’s provocative metaphor, the giant “communal apartment” of the new Soviet state had a separate room for a Ukrainian SSr , whose geographic shape would have more relation to the ethnographic and historical visions of Ukrainian nationalists than Russian Bolsheviks. To be sure, the Soviet Union was not a true federation, and there was no full equality between the nationalities in the Bolsheviks’ one-party state. Given that, was the very creation of Soviet Ukraine evidence of the Ukrainian national movement’s failings in the early twentieth century? How are we to assess Ukrainian political culture during that turbulent time? Let us begin with the last question. As I have outlined elsewhere,161 in the long nineteenth century Ukrainian political culture was defined by several dilemmas or series of tensions, including between politics and culture, socialism and nationalism, and federalism and independence. These dilemmas not only reflected the preoccupations of the Ukrainian national leaders but also revealed a growing chasm between empires and nations and, later, on the eve of and after World

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War I, between competing nationalisms and new ideologies in eastern Europe. Throughout this period, Ukraine continued to serve as eastern Europe’s major laboratory of modernity, one that shaped the historical experiences of people from the region’s different communities for decades to come. By the beginning of the twentieth century even the most cautious leaders of the Ukrainian movement realized that to remain relevant they had to embrace “politics.” In the preceding decades, the dilemma of politics and culture had defined the Ukrainian national agenda and stood at the center of polemics between the émigré Drahomanov and Kyiv’s Old Hromada. Drahomanov believed that the avoidance of “politics” and pressing social issues would deprive the Ukrainian national movement of potential members for whom social injustice and Russian autocracy were of much greater concern than Ukrainian folklore and theater. Perhaps Drahomanov, speaking from abroad, demanded too much from the Old Hromada leadership, which, after all, lived under constant police surveillance. In the long run, however, he proved right: a good number of Ukrainian-born youths, whether of Ukrainian, Russian or Jewish origin, saw the Ukrainophiles of the Old Hromada as, if not reactionaries, then certainly armchair liberals out of touch with people’s needs, and so opted instead to join the Russian revolutionary movement and its radical politics. Prominent figures in the all-Russian radical and revolutionary movement born in Ukraine included Andrii Zheliabov, Mykola Kybal’chych, Dmytro Lyzohub, Ivan and Volodymyr Debohorii-Mokriievych, Pavlo (Pavel) Axelrod, and Leon Trotsky. Some had early ties with the hromadas and then parted ways with the cautious and “cultural” Ukrainian movement. Ukrainian national activists were also failing to make strides among the urban working classes, particularly in the industrial southeast of Ukraine, leaving it largely to Russian-oriented revolutionaries. That would become a major reason behind the failure of the Ukrainian Revolution during 1917–21. The failure to broaden the Ukrainian national movement’s social base reflected its leaders’ limited political imagination. Not only did Ukrainian populist leaders fail to attract industrial workers: they were also unable to effectively mobilize the Ukrainian peasants, most of whom remained uninvolved in politics until 1917. Although the new political generation of Ukrainian activists (those who stood behind rUP ) quickly adopted a fashionable political vocabulary, with references to “social democracy,” “labor,” “proletariat,” they could not readily free themselves of

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the ideological legacy of their hromada-affiliated fathers – that is, from fixation on an idealized “people,” understood as ethnically Ukrainian peasants, surrounded by socially and ethnically alien Russians, Jews, and Poles. The lack of developed institutions, a Ukrainian-minded bureaucracy, or civil society in Ukraine, together with the Ukrainian intelligentsia’s numerical weakness amid a mass of illiterate people and continuous repression by the Russian government, worked to thwart the development of Ukrainian political culture. Even so, one could always look on the bright side of life. This is what Ivan Lysiak Rudnytsky meant when, looking at the successes of the Ukrainian national movement in the decade prior to 1914, he referred to that period as “probably the happiest one in all of modern Ukrainian history.”162 The new political quality of the Ukrainian movement was embodied in the mass demonstrations that took place in Kyiv on 10–11 March of 1914, marking the centenary of Taras Shevchenko’s birth. As one organizer of the event recalled: … it was an impressive review of the growth of Ukrainian national forces. The demonstrations also gave evidence of profound changes in the structure of the Ukrainian liberation movement. It was no longer … an ethnographic-cultural trend, expressed in amateur theatrics, embroidery, and sentimental melodramas … New forces had joined the Ukrainian national liberation movement, turning it into a genuine mass movement in the full meaning of the term.163 Ukrainian political culture greatly benefited, too, from the intensification of Austro-Russian conflict on the eve of 1914 and the existence of Galicia, with its highly developed Ukrainian political class and civil society, where Ukrainians were showing how compatible a new nation could be with a modern empire. However, Ukraine also found itself under pressure from three sources: Russian imperialism, and two nationalisms – the Russian in Russian Ukraine, and the Polish in Galicia (in addition to Hungarian nationalism in Subcarpathian Rus'/ Transcarpathia and Romanian nationalism in Bukovyna). Habsburg Galicia had aligned with Polish nationalists in 1868, and the Russian Empire with Russian nationalism in the early twentieth century. But the Poles and Russians had not only challenged the Ukrainian movement: they had also stimulated it. Also, the clash between the two empires had placed the Ukrainian question at the center of affairs in eastern Europe and, ultimately, also shaped modern Ukrainian political culture.

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A particular challenge facing Ukrainian national activists was how to accommodate two seemingly contradictory demands – those of socialism and those of nationalism. By the early twentieth century, Ukrainian national identity had triumphed among the Greek Catholics of Galicia, and any political party claiming to represent Ukrainians, including socialist ones, had to accommodate nationalist demands as well. In Russian-ruled Ukraine, however, the ideological options of most Ukrainian activists differed: they had to combine fashionable socialism with much less fashionable Ukrainian nationalism, which in the early twentieth century was still a minority faith there. An added problem was that unlike Russian revolutionaries, whose socialism was rooted in reality – that is, the working class – Ukrainian socialists had yet to find a receptive audience. As Bohdan Krawchenko has noted: “The Russian intelligentsia in Ukraine jealously guarded their privileged contact with the working class and opposed any introduction of the national factor into the industrial milieu.” Ukrainian socialist parties looked bizarre without a working class. “In the decades before the revolution,” Krawchenko adds, “part of the [Ukrainian] intelligentsia turned to the peasantry, the other continued to search for a social base larger than themselves without ever really finding one.”164 Confusion between nationalism and socialism began to plague Ukrainian political groups in Russian Ukraine in the early twentieth century. From the outset, rUP was confronted with the dilemma of whether national or social liberation should have priority. Could national independence or autonomy be achieved before the social liberation of the working classes? Could Ukrainians be more easily mobilized around national grievances or around social issues? In order to remain relevant, while pointing to the national oppression of Ukrainians Ukrainian activists also had to adopt the rhetoric of social justice. Ideally, they had to reinterpret social issues as national ones, and vice versa. In practice, however, political parties were forced to choose their priorities between social issues and national issues. For the Russian Marxists, as for Marx himself, national issues were of secondary importance, and nationalism in general was to be downplayed. Unsurprisingly, the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ party (founded 1898), with its Bolshevik and Menshevik wings, did not know what to make of national issues. Before long, it rejected national-cultural autonomy for non-Russians, on the belief that nationalism was a bourgeois tool to secure dominance over the working classes. The influence of Russian Marxism led to the separation of Spilka from rUP , with nationalism seen by the

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“separatists” as a divisive force. In 1905, rUP changed its name to the Ukrainian Social Democratic Labor party, or USdrP , but it continued awkwardly to combine socialism, in form, with nationalism, as content. It also included people with very different ideological inclinations, e.g., the “Marxist” Volodymyr Vynnychenko and the “nationalist” Symon Petliura. The USdrP struggled to find support in Ukraine’s cities. The fact that pro-Russian Spilka proved far more successful in attracting the Ukrainian masses in urban and rural areas pointed to the perennial weakness of Ukrainian grassroots socialism. Nonetheless, other players competed for the allegiance of ordinary Ukrainian people, including the more traditional and peasant-orientated populists, who, modeling themselves on an existing Russian party but strongly supporting the cause of Ukrainian national autonomy, after 1905 created the Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries. Unsurprisingly, in the course of the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917–21, the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries would become the most numerous and influential party. In January 1919, the extreme left of the party, the so-called Borot’bisty (adopted from the daily Borot' ba, meaning struggle), entered into an alliance with the Bolsheviks and their Soviet Ukrainian government. In the 1920s, these “national Communists” (most notably Oleksandr Shums'kyi) would become major promoters of ukrainization in Soviet Ukraine. The political market in Russian-ruled Ukraine was split along national, ideological, and social lines. Until at least 1917, the radical left continued to be dominated by all-Russian political parties, the Social Democrats and the Socialist Revolutionaries, whose membership consisted largely of ethnic Russians and Jews and turned increasingly to the use of terrorist tactics. Given that, it is no surprise that the period’s most sensational act of political terrorism, the murder of Russia’s prime minister, Petr Stolypin, in Kyiv in 1911, was committed not by a Ukrainian but by a Russian revolutionary of Jewish descent. The conservatives, especially those on the far right, were represented by Russian monarchist and chauvinist organizations that were aggressively anti-Ukrainian and antisemitic, such as the Kyiv Club of Russian Nationalists (founded 1908). Aside from Mikhnovs’kyi’s marginal Ukrainian National party, Ukrainian conservatives did not have a conspicuous presence on the political stage until 1917, when the Ukrainian Democratic Agrarian party emerged. This conservative and nationalist group emphasized independence for Ukraine, preservation of private property and middle-sized landholdings, the mandatory state purchase of lands owned by large landowners, and the permanent leasing of

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these lands to poor peasants. The party included notable political mavericks, including Mykola Mikhnovs’kyi himself; Viacheslav Lypyns'kyi (Wacław Lipiński), a Ukrainian-Polish historian known for his advocacy of the role of nobilities in Ukrainian history; and Dmytro Dontsov, later the ideologist of Ukrainian integral nationalism. Not only parties but also individuals vacillated between socialism and nationalism. In Austrian-ruled Galicia, the political views of Ivan Franko, the foremost Galician-Ukrainian poet, scholar, journalist, and political activist, evolved from socialism to democratic nationalism. In Russian-ruled Ukraine, Marian Melenevs’kyi, founder of the social democratic Spilka, later joined more nationalist-orientated organizations. The most famous convert from Marxism to nationalism was probably Dmytro Dontsov, whose ideas later laid the groundwork for the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. The early twentieth century called on political activists to strike some sort of compromise between socialism and nationalism, as if that were the magical formula required for political success. It took not mere chemists but true magicians to come up with the successful formula. Ultimately, it was not Ukrainian national politicians but the leader of the Russian Bolsheviks, Vladimir Lenin, who synthesized the winning formula of political success, promising land to peasants, plants to workers, autonomy to nationalities, and peace to everyone (and was therefore known as “the magician” among his less imaginative comrades). The indispensable secret ingredient in Lenin’s formula was a disciplined army. For the Bolsheviks, recognition of some national demands was a ploy to gain support among nationalities. Among Ukrainian national politicians, autonomy for Ukraine was the most consistent demand for years before 1917. Most Ukrainian national activists agreed that a free Ukraine could not coexist with an autocratic Russia, whether tsarist or Bolshevik. “In order to create Ukraine, one must destroy Russia” – these words by Heorhii Andruz’kyi, allegedly a member of the SS Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood, were written around 1850 by a mentally troubled person, but they expressed a view shared by other radical Ukrainians. Autocratic Russia’s opposition to a free and democratic Ukraine was as staunch then as it is today, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, as ongoing Russian aggression against Ukraine has made painfully clear. But what a “free Ukraine” meant in the long nineteenth century was very far from clear. Until 1917, most Ukrainian activists did not call for the destruction of Russia, at least not publicly.

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Most proposed a milder solution: Russia’s federalization and democratization. By contrast, most Ukrainian activists in Austria openly called for the Ukrainian lands’ secession from Russia and unification with Austrian-ruled Ukraine in a separate administrative unit under the Habsburgs. Thus, any “free” Ukraine would require not only the reconfiguration of two empires (to the extent of dismantling imperial Russia). It would also undermine and negate the concepts of the “all-Russian nation” and the “historical Polish nation.” How were national communities made and unmade? As we saw in earlier chapters, the making of Ukraine as a national community began in the political imagination of intellectuals, often in the form of scholarly and literary activities without any explicit political meaning. Such were the activities of heritage gatherers and the early Romantics from the late eighteenth century through the 1840s. Toward the end of that period, members of the SS Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood included more conscious “makers” of Ukraine and “unmakers” of Russia. Mykola Kostomarov’s solution to the uneasy coexistence of Ukraine and Russia was the federative idea, which he saw as a native and ancient Slavic tradition. On the one hand, his personal psyche required some kind of a compromise between the traditional idea of Rus' and an emerging Ukrainian identity; on the other, for him federalism became the political solution to the rising demands of nationalisms in eastern Europe. Taras Shevchenko, who was certainly more radical than Kostomarov, continually contrasted a freedom-loving Ukraine against a despotic Russia, and, in essence, he “unmade” the empire through his art and personal politics. He inspired generations of Ukrainian activists – populists, nationalists, and socialists – to strive to “unmake” imperial Russia in political reality. During his own lifetime Shevchenko’s radical anti-imperialist position and his heroic biography were certainly exceptional, but after the mid-nineteenth century many recognized that without Ukraine, neither the “all-Russian nation” nor the Russian Empire was possible. Concurrently, the link between empire and “all-Russian nation” was becoming increasingly vital to the tsarist government, which, after the Polish January Uprising of 1863, sensed a great danger to both. Yet major Ukrainian intellectuals and notable Ukrainophiles were reluctant to break openly with the empire, its public sphere, and the dominant Russian culture. Mykola Kostomarov, his fellow historians Volodymyr Antonovych and Dmytro Bahalii, the linguist Oleksandr Potebnia, and the legal scholar Oleksandr Kistiakivs’kyi, among other

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Ukrainian-born scholars, held chairs at Russian imperial universities and used Russian in their public and, often, private lives. Shevchenko himself belonged to Russian imperial institutions – most notably, he had been an academician of the Imperial Academy of Arts since 1860. Hence it is understandable that generations of Ukrainian intellectuals accepted federalism as the natural and obvious answer to the challenge of combining nationalism with continuing engagement in the empire’s public sphere and its imperial culture. As Ivan Lysiak Rudnytsky put it, federalism was “an attempt to strike a balance between national and imperial interests.”165 By advocating federalism, Ukrainian activists hoped to connect the idea of Ukraine’s national liberation with that of a democratizing and decentralizing Russia. Ultimately, they wanted the Russian Empire to become a federation of free nations, each enjoying cultural rights and political self-government. Federalism remained the dominant geopolitical ideal of Ukrainian political leaders until the dissolution of the Russian and Habsburg Empires in 1917–18. Mykhailo Hrushevs'kyi was probably the last major Ukrainian federalist to inherit the populist and federalist ideas of the three major intellectuals of nineteenth-century Ukraine: Kostomarov, Antonovych, and Drahomanov. Hrushevs'kyi expressed his federalist credo from the very outset of the revolution. His agenda, calling for the broadest socioeconomic, political, and cultural autonomy for Ukraine and stopping just short of full independence, was the basis for the policies of the revolutionary Ukrainian government, the Central Rada, in 1917. As Hrushevs'kyi wrote: The political goal of the Ukrainians is a broad national-territorial autonomy for Ukraine within a federated Russian Republic … The Ukrainians demand that one region, one national territory be formed from all Ukrainian lands … of the Russian state … The Ukrainian territory ought to be organized on the basis of a broad democratic civic self-government, and representation must not be by curiae. This system of self-government ought to extend from the bottom – the “small zemstvo unit” – to the top – the Ukrainian Diet [soim]. The Ukrainian territory ought to be able to settle at home its own economic, cultural, and political issues; it ought to keep its own armed forces, and dispose of its roads, revenue, land, and natural resources; it ought to possess its own legislation, and administration, and judiciary. Only in certain matters, common to the entire Russian state, should Ukraine accept the decisions of the

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central parliament, in which the proportion of Ukrainian representatives ought to be the same as that of the Ukrainian population to that of the population of the whole Russian Republic.166 Before 1917, the idea of Ukraine’s independence as an alternative to federalism was held by only a small minority of Ukraine’s population. Curiously, the idea of an independent Ukraine was first elaborated from two opposing ideological positions: the Marxism of Iuliian Bachyns'kyi (in 1895) and the nationalism of Mykola Mikhnovs’kyi (in 1900), the first from Austrian-ruled Galicia, and the second from Russian-ruled Kharkiv. Ivan Franko became a supporter of the idea of Ukraine’s independence around 1900, and before the outbreak of World War I two young intellectuals from Russian-ruled Ukraine, Viacheslav Lypyns'kyi and Dmytro Dontsov, became public supporters of it as well. Nonetheless, before 1917 those who supported the idea of Ukraine’s independence continued to be a small minority, particularly in Russian-ruled Ukraine, whose depth and breadth of political thought could not rival that of the federalists. Still, the ideological, strategic, and tactical differences between the dominant federalists and the supporters of independence should not be overestimated. The idea of Ukraine’s autonomy and its practical realization as championed by Hrushevs'kyi and most other Ukrainian political leaders in 1917 “unmade” the Russian Empire as much as the idea of Ukraine’s independence did. To virtually all Russian politicians on the right and for most on the left, any step beyond a Ukrainian cultural autonomy was unacceptable. To them, federalism itself threatened to “unmake” Russia as both state and nation. As Serhii Plokhy has shown, Mykhailo Hrushevs'kyi’s entire scholarly and political career contributed to the unmaking of imperial Russia, beginning with the appearance of the first volume of his groundbreaking and potentially empire breaking History of UkraineRus' (Lviv, 1898).167 Concurrently, Hrushevs'kyi’s opus magnum was also an “unmaking” of historic Poland and a refutation of any ongoing Polish claims to Ukraine. In this sense, Russian and Polish fears were fully justified. For Ukrainian intellectuals and political activists from Kostomarov to Drahomanov to Hrushevs'kyi, federalism did not contradict or negate the idea of Ukrainian national independence – it was, instead, the most rational and feasible way to achieve that independence. And when, in January 1918, the political situation changed with the invasion of the Bolsheviks, Ukrainian federalists would and did embrace the concept of independence.

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Tragically, the unmaking of empires and dominant nations as it played out in reality in and after 1917 caused unimaginable suffering to countless people across ethnic and social lines – Ukrainians, Poles, Jews, Germans, Mennonites, peasants, town-dwellers, and nobles among them. How much agency did people in Ukraine have in the grand processes of making and unmaking of nations and empires? More precisely, were intellectuals and leaders like Mykhailo Hrushevs'kyi successful in facing up to the major challenges brought on by modernity and thus alleviating Ukraine’s history of suffering? If the measure of success is what happened in 1917 – the collapse of the tsarist empire and the revolution, in fact revolutions, of that year – and the nation building that took place in Ukraine over the years that followed, then the answer would have to be an emphatic yes. The evil empire collapsed and the nation – in fact, the Ukrainian, Polish, and Jewish nations – triumphed. If one considers the growth in Ukrainian national identity among broader circles of the population, then the answer is an equally emphatic yes. However, if success is measured in terms of the achievement of long-lasting statehood, communal peace, and a more just society, then the answer becomes complicated. On the one hand, the proverbial laboratory of modernity did indeed produce something entirely new: a Communist regime, with its original version in Ukraine (especially in the 1920s), offering unparalleled social mobility, women’s rights, nationality rights, an artistic avant-garde, and a remodeled space. The fact that the Bolsheviks created a distinct Soviet Ukraine was in itself evidence of the strength of Ukrainian national identity and indicative of its growth during the preceding years of nation building. The subsequent achievements of the ukrainization policy and the equal promotion of minority rights in the 1920s can also be attributed in part to the legacy of those who first imagined and then worked to materialize a Ukraine of their cultural, social, and political dreams. On the other hand, in the early 1920s Ukraine would again be divided after a brutal civil war that poisoned interethnic relations to an even greater degree than was the case before 1914. Alas, Ukraine did not cease to suffer; on the contrary, its suffering intensified and would reach an almost unimaginable level in the 1930s. Major historical dilemmas remained unresolved, which certainly contributed to that suffering, especially during and after the failure of the Ukrainian Revolution. In this sense, the creation of Soviet Ukraine was indeed a result of the Ukrainian national movement’s failings in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. There were also other, much more powerful factors

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at play, ones beyond the control of the most imaginative intellectuals and politicians: the autocratic and repressive Russian imperial regime; Ukraine’s colony-like status; rampant social inequality; the Russian socialists’ hostility toward their Ukrainian comrades; the lack of international support for the Ukrainian cause (particularly on the part of the Allies); and, finally, military intervention by Russian monarchist and Bolshevik armies. Of course, Ukraine’s historical experience cannot be reduced to the history of ethnic Ukrainians, the Ukrainian national movement, or the failure – if it was that – of the Ukrainian Revolution. Above all, however, it was the ideas, politics, and art of Mykola Kostomarov, Taras Shevchenko, Volodymyr Antonovych, Mykhailo Drahomanov, Lesia Ukraïnka, Ivan Franko, Mykhailo Hrushevs'kyi, and men and women like them that created modern Ukraine and made possible the very subject “the history of Ukraine.” Perhaps its central meaning in the “long” nineteenth century was simply that during this period Ukraine emerged from an inexorable laboratory of modernity as a timely alternative to timeworn empires. Neo-imperialist fantasies of twenty-first century autocrats, no matter how obsessional, will not reverse the course of history.

Timeline

1762–96 Reign of Catherine II of Russia. 1765–80 Reign of Maria Theresa of Austria. Co-ruled with her son Joseph II (Holy Roman Emperor 1765–90). Both are viewed as “enlightened” monarchs who launched a series of wide-ranging reforms. 1772 First Partition of Poland: Galicia is added to the Habsburg Empire as a new crownland. 1775 Liquidation of the Zaporozhian Host by imperial Russian authorities following the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–74. Massive colonization of southern Ukraine, now referred to as “New Russia.” 1781 Final liquidation of the Hetmanate, the Ukrainian Cossack State on the Dnipro’s Left Bank; its lands later become the Chernihiv and Poltava provinces. 1781 Edict of Toleration in the Habsburg Empire, granting legal equality to the three Catholic rites in Galicia (Roman, Greek, Armenian). 1781–82 Joseph II declares the abolition of peasants’ personal dependence on landlords and limits the amount of corvée (forced labor) the latter could impose. 1783 After abolishing the Crimean Khanate, Russia annexes the Crimea. Catherine II legalizes serfdom in Ukraine. 1784 Lviv University, the oldest in Ukraine, is established by Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II. 1785 Catherine II issues a Charter to Towns, replacing the traditional autonomy of Ukraine’s towns, based on medieval Magdeburg law, with the Russian centralized system. 1787 Catherine II journeys from St Petersburg to Crimea through Ukraine; en route she visits the city of Kyiv, meets King Stanisław August of Poland in Kaniv, and hosts the Habsburg emperor Joseph II in Kherson.

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1789 The French Revolution begins. 1790 Catherine II lays the foundation for the Pale of Settlement that prohibits Jews from residing in Great Russia; it will be formally established in 1804. Except for Sloboda Ukraine, which will later become Kharkiv province, Russian-ruled Ukraine becomes part of the Pale. 1790–92 Reign of Leopold II, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Hungary and Bohemia. 1791 Vasyl' Kapnist secretly visits Prussia on behalf of Ukrainian autonomists. 1792–1806 Reign of the last Holy Roman Emperor, Franz II. In 1804 he becomes hereditary emperor of Austria, which he rules as Franz I until his death in 1835. 1793 Second Partition of Poland: most of Right-Bank Ukraine is annexed by Russia. 1795 Third Partition of Poland: the rest of Right-Bank Ukraine is annexed by Russia and becomes the Kyiv, Volhynia, and Podolia provinces. 1796–1801 Reign of Paul I of Russia. Some Ukrainian autonomists believe him to be sympathetic to their cause. 1798 Eneïda, the first poetic work in the Ukrainian vernacular, written by Ivan Kotliarevs'kyi, is published in St Petersburg. 1801–25 Reign of Alexander I of Russia. 1802 Russian-ruled Ukraine is divided into nine provinces: Kyiv, Podolia, Volhynia, Chernihiv, Poltava, Kharkiv (Sloboda Ukraine), Kherson, Katerynoslav, Taurida. 1804–06 Napoleon abolishes the Holy Roman Empire; most Habsburgruled territories in central and eastern Europe join the newly established Austrian Empire. 1805 Kharkiv University, the first in Russian-ruled Ukraine, is founded; it is financed largely by the local Ukrainian community. 1812 Napoleon invades Russia. Ukrainians remain loyal to the imperial government, and many enthusiastically support Russia’s war effort. 1815 After the Napoleonic Wars, the Congress of Vienna establishes a new political order in Europe; for decades, much of the continent will be ruled by conservative and reactionary statesmen, including Austrian chancellor Prince Klemens von Metternich. The congress also creates an autonomous Kingdom of Poland headed by Russian tsar Alexander I. 1817 The Russian government closes the famed Kyiv Mohyla Academy. Two years later the Kyiv Theological Academy will open in its place. 1818 The first grammar of the Ukrainian language, by Oleksii Pavlovs'kyi, is published in St Petersburg.

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1820s Handwritten copies of the historico-political pamphlet Istoriia Rusov begin to circulate in Ukraine (first mentioned in print in 1825). 1825 The Decembrists attempt to overthrow the absolutist regime in Russia; radicalized nobles from Ukraine take part in the rebellion without making autonomist demands. 1825–1855 Reign of Nicholas I of Russia. 1827 Mykhailo Maksymovych publishes Malorossiiskie pesni, a seminal collection of Ukrainian folksongs in Moscow that becomes an intellectual framework for Ukrainian Romantic ideology. 1830–31 The Polish “November Uprising” sweeps much of Right-Bank Ukraine. Ukrainian peasants support the Russian authorities; some attack Polish insurgents. 1832 The Russian government creates the imperial office of Kyiv governor-general, uniting the Kyiv, Volhynia, and Podolia provinces under his authority. 1834 Tsar Nicholas I opens St Vladimir University in Kyiv as part of the anti-Polish campaign in the southwestern borderlands. 1835–48 Reign of Ferdinand I of Austria. 1837 The poetry collection Rusalka Dnistrovaia is published in Buda (Hungary) by a group of Ukrainian Romantic poets from Austrianruled Galicia. 1838 Having recognized the extraordinary talents of twenty-four-year-old Taras Shevchenko, a group of Russian artists and intellectuals redeem him from serfdom. 1839 The Uniate Church is abolished in Russia’s western provinces, including Right-Bank Ukraine. 1840 While studying at the St Petersburg Academy of Arts, Taras Shevchenko publishes his poetry collection Kobzar, initiating his status as Ukraine’s national poet. 1843 The Kyiv Archeographic Commission is established by the Russian government to supervise historical and archaeological research in Kyiv and the Southwestern Region. 1845–47 The Brotherhood of SS . Cyril and Methodius operates in secret in Kyiv. Uncovered by the police, its members and associates (including Mykola Kostomarov, Panteleimon Kulish, and Taras Shevchenko) are arrested and sentenced variously. 1848 Revolutions sweep across Europe; the spring of 1848 becomes known as the Springtime of Peoples. In Galicia, local Austrian authorities support Ruthenians against Poles (who are seen as disloyal) and serfdom is abolished. Local Ruthenians unite around the Supreme Ruthenian Council,

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the first legal Ukrainian political organization. Karl Marx publishes the Manifesto of the Communist Party in London. 1848–1916 Reign of Franz Joseph I of Austria. 1849–59 Epoch of conservative reaction in Austria; it is called Bach’s Absolutism, after Baron Alexander von Bach, Minister of the Interior from 1849 to 1859. 1854–56 British, French, and Ottoman forces confront Russia’s army in the Crimean War, and Russia suffers a devastating defeat. 1855–81 Reign of Alexander II of Russia. 1858 Political exiles, including Kulish, Kostomarov, and Shevchenko, are allowed to return to European Russia. Some settle in St Petersburg, where they found a cultural club called Hromada and launch the journal Osnova (1861–62), which publishes important Ukrainian scholarly and literary writings. 1859 Mykola Kostomarov is invited to teach Russian history at St Petersburg University. 1861 Tsar Alexander II emancipates the serfs in the Russian empire, introducing the age of the Great Reforms. Taras Shevchenko dies in St Petersburg; his reburial in Ukraine is the first mass gathering of Ukrainian national activists and intellectuals in the empire. The first railway in Ukraine links Lviv with Vienna. 1862 Volodymyr Antonovych, former leader of Polish democratic youth (chłopomanie, “peasant-lovers”), publishes “My Confession,” in which he publicly rejects Polish identity and embraces a Ukrainian one; he becomes a founding member of the Hromada in Kyiv (later called the Old Hromada). 1863 The Polish “January Uprising” begins in Warsaw and spreads to parts of Right-Bank Ukraine. Most Ukrainians oppose the Polish insurgents. Suspecting Ukrainian activists of disloyalty, Russia’s minister of the interior, Petr Valuev, issues the so-called Valuev Circular, banning Ukrainianlanguage publications for a mass audience and declaring the non-existence of the Ukrainian language. 1865 A third university in Russian-ruled Ukraine is founded in Odesa. 1866 Austria suffers defeat in its war against Prussia and loses its leading role in the German lands. 1867 An Austro-Hungarian Compromise (Ausgleich) creates the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary: Galicia and Bukovyna remain within Austria, Subcarpathian Rus' (Transcarpathia) is in Hungary. Galicia is granted semi-autonomous status, which in effect restores the power of the local Polish elites and prompts some Ruthenian leaders to join the pro-Russian camp.

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1870 John Hughes, a Welsh entrepreneur, arrives in southeastern Ukraine and founds a metallurgical plant at a site that becomes the town of Iuzivka (today Donets'k). 1871 Prussia unites most German lands in the German Empire. 1873 The Russian government opens the Southwestern Branch of the Imperial Russian Geographic Society in Kyiv; it quickly becomes the main scholarly center for research in Ukraine’s ethnography, history, and statistics. The Taras Shevchenko Society (from 1892, the Shevchenko Scientific Society) is founded in Lviv jointly by Galician and Russian Ukrainians. 1874 A pioneering census of Kyiv’s population is conducted by the Southwestern (Kyiv) Branch of the Imperial Russian Geographic Society. 1875 Franz-Josefs University opens in Chernivtsi; it is the easternmost German-speaking university in Europe and the fifth university in Ukraine. 1876 The Ems Decree is signed by Tsar Alexander II: it further restricts the use of the Ukrainian language and is followed by the persecution of Ukrainian activists. Mykhailo Drahomanov is forced to leave for Europe; funded by Kyiv’s Old Hromada, he sets up a printing press in Geneva that disseminates liberal and socialist ideas to Ukrainian and Russian audiences. 1877–78 A Russo-Turkish war in the Balkans leads to the rise of pan-Slavicism and Russian nationalism. The Congress of Berlin (13 June–13 July 1878) recognizes Bulgaria as an independent principality within the Ottoman Empire; it also allows Austria-Hungary to occupy Bosnia and Herzegovina, exacerbating tensions between Europe’s great powers. 1878 A quasi-university called “Higher Courses for Women” opens in Kyiv; it functions until 1889 and again in 1906–17. 1881 Tsar Alexander II is assassinated by revolutionary populists, initiating a prolonged period of reaction. A wave of anti-Jewish pogroms sweeps Ukraine, instigated by Russian monarchists blaming Jews for the tsar’s murder. 1881–94 Reign of Alexander III of Russia. 1882 Trials of Russophile priests and activists suspected of high treason take place in the Habsburg Empire amid the rise of Austro-Russian frictions. As the influence of the Russophiles wanes, pro-Ukrainian national populists gain momentum. 1882–1906 Kievskaia starina, a major scholarly and literary journal, is published in Kyiv (and predominantly in Russian) by a group of local Ukrainophiles; it will be followed by the journal Ukraïna (1907).

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1884 A railroad links the Donbas with the Kryvbas, contributing to the dramatic growth of heavy industry in the southeast. Mykhailo Drahomanov publishes the treatise “Free Union,” intended as a constitution for the Russian Empire. 1886 A rift opens between Mykhailo Drahomanov and Kyiv’s Old Hromada. 1887 The groundbreaking feminist almanac Pershyi vinok (First Garland), co-edited by Olena Pchilka and Natalia Kobryns’ka, is published in Lviv. 1888 A controversial monument to Hetman Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi is unveiled in Kyiv. 1890 An initiative called New Era attempts to broker a political deal between the Polish ruling class and Ukrainian national populists in Galicia. The first Ukrainian political party, called the Ruthenian-Ukrainian Radical party (rUrP ), is founded in Lviv. 1891 The Taras Brotherhood, a clandestine group of Ukrainian students inspired by Mykhailo Drahomanov, calls for the liberation of Ukraine from Russian rule. 1894 Mykhailo Hrushevs'kyi relocates from Kyiv to Galicia as professor of Ukrainian history at Lviv University. 1894–1917 Reign of Nicholas II, the last tsar of Russia. 1895 The young Galician-Ukrainian radical Iuliian Bachyns'kyi publishes the pamphlet Ukraïna irredenta, which argues for Ukraine’s independence from a Marxist point of view. Drahomanov dies in Sofia, Bulgaria. 1897 The Russian Empire’s first and last population census is held. It shows that 93% of Russia’s ethnic Ukrainians are peasants; they in turn are 84% of Ukraine’s total population (24,411,593). Ethnic Ukrainians are ca. 71% of the population of Ukraine. Ukraine’s largest minorities are Russians (11.4%), Jews (8.1%), and Germans (2.2%). Ukraine’s largest city is Odesa (pop. 404,000), followed by Kyiv (247,723), and Kharkiv (173,989). 1898 Mykhailo Hrushevs'kyi publishes the first volume of his monumental Istoriia Ukraïny-Rusy (History of Ukraine-Rus'). 1890s Driven by a hunger for land and overpopulation in Galicia, Ukrainian peasants from Austria-Hungary begin to immigrate to North America. Ukrainian peasants from Russian Ukraine migrate to the North Caucasus, Central Asia, Siberia, and the Far East. 1900 Mykola Mikhnovs’kyi, a nationalist lawyer from Kharkiv, formulates the idea of Ukraine’s independence in the brochure Samostiina Ukraïna (Independent Ukraine). Young Ukrainian socialists in Russia found the Revolutionary Ukrainian party (rUP ). 1901 Andrei Sheptyts'kyi is appointed Metropolitan of the Greek Catholic Church in Austrian-ruled Galicia.

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1902 Alexander (Oleksandr) Pol' establishes the Regional Museum of Katerynoslav; Dmytro Iavornyts'kyi, famed local historian of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, is appointed its first director. 1905 Revolution breaks out in St Petersburg and quickly spreads to other parts of the Russian Empire. Sailors of the battleship Potemkin mutiny in Odesa. The October Manifesto announces liberal and democratic freedoms that legalize Ukrainian identity. Ukrainian political parties and civic organizations are allowed to exist. Ukrainians participate in the elections to the First and Second State Dumas. Revolutionary radicalism leads to the rise of Russian nationalism and widespread anti-Jewish violence. 1906 Stolypin reforms are launched in the countryside: they aim to break up traditional peasant communes and support profitable individual farming. 1907 Universal male suffrage is introduced in Austria, which enhances the strength of Ukrainian political parties in Galicia and Bukovyna. The first uncensored edition of Taras Shevchenko’s Kobzar appears in Russia, published in St Petersburg. 1908 A Ukrainian socialist student, Myroslav Sichyns’kyi, assassinates the Polish Galician viceroy Andrzej Potocki. Austria-Hungary formally annexes Bosnia and Herzegovina over international objections. 1911 Russian-Jewish anarchist Dmitrii Bogrov assassinates Russian prime minister Petr Stolypin in Kyiv’s opera house. 1912 Russian nationalists succeed in creating a separate Kholm province from Ruthenian-majority areas in two provinces of the former Kingdom of Poland. 1913 Mendel Beilis is acquitted of ritual murder, concluding an infamous trial that began in 1911. 1914 The outbreak of the “Great War” – World War I.

Notes

Preface 1 Serhiy Bilenky, Romantic Nationalism in Eastern Europe: Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian Political Imaginations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 9. 2 Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), xxi. 3 Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 23–4. 4 Mark Von Hagen, “Does Ukraine Have a History?” Slavic Review 54, no. 3 (Autumn 1995): 670.

cha Pter one 1 Quoted in H.M. Scott, ed., Enlightened Absolutism: Reform and Reformers in Later Eighteenth-Century Europe (New York: Red Globe, 1990), 19. 2 Quoted in Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia 1600–1947 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 252–3. 3 Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy from Peter the Great to the Abdication of Nicholas II (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006), 59. 4 Larry Wolff, “‘Kennst du das Land?‘ The Uncertainty of Galicia in the Age of Metternich and Fredro,” Slavic Review 67, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 279. 5 On this “inventing” and the Habsburg idea of “Galicia,” see Larry Wolff, The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).

498

Notes to pages 13–24

6 Here and elsewhere I use the term “Ukrainians” as a generic reference to the Ukrainian-speaking (and largely Orthodox or Greek Catholic) population of present-day Ukraine, whether the “nationally conscious” minority or the nationally indifferent “silent majority.” In discussing specific identity issues or situations, or an identity antithetical to that of nationally minded Ukrainians (who in the nineteenth century were often called Ukrainophiles), I at times use other terms, such as “Little Russians,” “loyal Little Russians,” “Ruthenians,” “Polish Ruthenians,” etc. 7 Roman Szporluk, “Ukraine: From an Imperial Periphery to a Sovereign State,” in idem, Russia, Ukraine, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 364–5. 8 Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press Press, 1994), 135. 9 Paul Robert Magocsi, Ukraine: An Illustrated History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 165; M. Lazarovych and N. Lazarovych, “Etnohrafichna spetsyfika ta sotsial'no-profesiina stratyfikatsiia natsional’nykh menshyn Ukraïny naperedodni natsional’noï revoliutsiï 1917–1921 rokiv,” Ukraïns' ka nauka: Mynule, suchasne, maibutnie 17 (2012): 79. 10 This is the infamous model behind modern prison construction: see Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 195–228. See also fn. 11 below. 11 Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience (Cambridge: 2011), 134–5. 12 Natalia Polons’ka-Vasylenko, Zaporizhzhia XVIII st. ta ioho spadshchyna, vol. 1 (Munich: Dniprova khvylia, 1965), 108. 13 Count Louis-Philippe de Ségur as quoted in Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, 130. 14 Pavel Sumarokov, Puteshestvie po vsemu Krymu i Bessarabii v 1799 godu (Moscow: Univ. tip., 1800), 5–6. 15 Statistical information from: Serhii Chornyi, Natsional' nyi sklad naselennia Ukrainy v XX storichchi. Dovidnyk (Kyiv: Kartohrafiia, 2001); V.M. Kabuzan, Ukraintsy v mire. Dinamika chislennosti i rasseleniia, 20-e gody XVIII veka–1989 god: Formirovanie ėtnicheskikh i politicheskikh granits ukrainskogo ėtnosa (Moscow: Nauka, 2006); A.G. Rashin, Naselenie Rossii za 100 let (1811–1913 gg.). Statisticheskie ocherki (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe statisticheskoe izd., 1956). 16 If this category is understood to include judicial and military officials, the number of civil servants in Russia in the late eighteenth century was more than 30,000.

Notes to pages 25–34

499

17 Waltraud Heindl, Josephinische Mandarine Bürokratie und Beamte in Österreich, vol. 2, 1848 bis 1914 (Vienna: Böhlau, 2013), 31. Cf. John Deak, Forging a Multinational State: State Making in Imperial Austria from the Enlightenment to the First World War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015). 18 Exact numbers are hard to come by. The historian Frederick Starr noted that Russia’s problem was “undergovernment,” and that the proportion of civil servants per capita at the time of the Great Reforms was about a quarter of that in France and England at mid-century. See Frederick Starr, Decentralization and Self-Government in Russia, 1830–1870 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 48–9. 19 Boris Mironov, Sotsial’naia istoriia Rossii, vol. 2 (St Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2000), 203. Stephen Velychenko gives different ratios: 1:122 in Britain, 1:137 in France, 1:163 in Germany; 1:198 in Austria, and 1:914 in Russia. See his “The Bureaucracy, Police, and Army in Twentieth-Century Ukraine: A Comparative Quantitative Study,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 23, nos 3–4 (1999): 69, 88. 20 For a brief overview of the number of officials in Russian history, see Liubov’ Pisar’kova, “Mnogo li chinovnikov bylo v Rossii?” Otechestvennye zapiski 2, 17 (2004): http://www.strana-oz.ru/2004/2/mnogo-li-chinovnikov-bylo-vrossii (accessed 1 November 2020). Cf. Hans-Joachim Torke, “Das Russische Beamtentum in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts,” Forschungen zur osteuropäischen Geschichte 13 (1967): 7–345. 21 Walter M. Pintner, “The Social Characteristics of the Early NineteenthCentury Russian Bureaucracy,” Slavic Review 29, no. 3 (September 1970): 434–5. 22 Iryna Vushko, The Politics of Cultural Retreat: Imperial Bureaucracy in Austrian Galicia, 1772–1867 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 2. 23 Cited in Wolff, Idea of Galicia, 16, 22. 24 Cited in Vushko, Politics of Cultural Retreat, 127. 25 Cited in Isabel de Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 61. 26 On the complex interethnic and social situation in Right-Bank Ukraine, see Daniel Beauvois, Le Noble, le Serf et le Révizor: La noblesse polonaise entre le tsarisme et les masses ukrainiennes (1831–1863) (Paris: Editions des Archives contemporaines, 1985), and Trójkąt Ukraiński: Szlachta, carat i lud na Wołyniu, Podolu i Kijowszczyźnie, 1793–1914 (Lublin: Wyd. Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej, 2005).

500

Notes to pages 40–8

cha Pter two 1 On Ukrainian empire builders, see the comprehensive monograph of David Saunders, The Ukrainian Impact on Russian Culture, 1750–1850 (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1985). Cf. Steven Velychenko, “Empire Loyalism and Minority Nationalism in Great Britain and Imperial Russia, 1707–1914: Imperial Institutions, Law, and Nationality in Scotland and Ukraine,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 39, no. 3 (July 1997): 413–41. 2 On Desnyts'kyi, see A.H. Brown in William Butler, ed., Russian Law: Historical and Political Perspectives (Leiden: Springer, 1977), 117–41. 3 Volodymyr Kravchenko, “Provintsiini poshuky kolektyvnoï identychnosti: Vypadok Slobids'koï Ukraïny,” in Vadym Adadurov and Volodymyr Sklokin, eds, Impers’ki identychnosti v ukraïns’kii istoriï XVIII–pershoï polovyny XIX st. (Lviv: Vyd. Ukraïns'koho katolyts'koho universytetu, 2020), 147, 164. 4 Volodymyr Sklokin, Rosiis’ka imperiia i Slobids' ka Ukraïna u druhii polovyni XVIII st.: Prosvichenyi absoliutyzm, impers’ka intehratsiia, lokal' ne suspil’stvo (Lviv: Vyd. Ukraïns'koho katolyts’koho universytetu, 2019), 218. 5 Ibid., 221–2. 6 Oleksander Ohloblyn, “Berlins'ka misia Kapnista 1791 roku,” in idem, Liudy staroï Ukraïny ta inshi pratsi (Ostroh and New York, 2000), 281–303; idem, Liudy staroï Ukraïny (Munich: Dniprova khvylia, 1959), 90–2. 7 Filipp Vigel', Zapiski, 2 vols (Moscow: Artel' pisatelei “Krug,” 1928), 1:353. 8 Vadym Adadurov, “Napoleonida” na skhodi Ievropy: Uiavlennia, proekty ta diial' nist' uriadu Frantsiï shchodo pivdenno-zakhidnykh okraïn Rosiis' koï imperiï na pochatku XIX stolittia, 2nd ed. (Lviv: Vyd. Ukraïns’koho katolyts'koho universytetu, 2018), 198–210. 9 Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 238–9. 10 N.V. Storozhenko, “K istorii malorossiiskikh kozakov v kontse XVIII i nachale XIX veka,” Kievskaia starina 59 (November 1897): 143. 11 Maksymovych’s speech on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of his scholarly work is cited in Iubilei Mikhaila Aleksandrovicha Maksimovicha (1821–1871) (St Petersburg: Tip. V.V. Prats, 1872), 61. 12 Zenon Kohut, Russian Centralism and Ukrainian Autonomy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 265–6. 13 Velychenko, “Empire Loyalism and Minority Nationalism.” 14 Cf. T. Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism, 2nd expanded ed. (London: Routledge, 1981).

Notes to pages 50–68

501

15 Cited in Serhiy Bilenky, “The Clash of Mental Geographies: Poles on Ukraine, Ukrainians on Poland in the Time of Romanticism,” Polish Review 53, no. 1 (2008): 91. 16 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 6–7. 17 Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 1. 18 Dmytro Doroshenko, “Sviato vidkryttia pam’iatnyka I. Kotliarevs'komu v Poltavi vlitku 1903 roku,” Narodna tvorchist’ ta ethnohrafiia 5–6 (2003): 41–2. 19 “Kotlyarevsky and His ‘Aeneid,’” Ukrainian Weekly 10, sec. 2, no. 36 (26 September 1942), 1. As quoted in Anastasiya Andrianova, “Aeneas among the Cossacks: Eneïda in Modern Ukraine,” in Adam J. Goldwyn, ed., The Trojan Wars and the Making of the Modern World (Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet, 2015), 108. 20 Andrianova, “Aeneas among the Cossacks,” 91–110. 21 C.H. Andrusyshen and W. Kirkconnell, trans., Eneida: Excerpts, in The Ukrainian Poets, 1189–1962 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963), 2–3. 22 Marko Pavlyshyn, “Rytoryka i polityka v Eneïdi Kotliarevs' koho,” in idem, Kanon ta iconostas: Literaturno-krytychni statti (Kyiv: Chas, 1997), 295–7. 23 Paul Robert Magocsi, “The Ukrainian National Revival: A New Analytical Framework,” in idem, The Roots of Ukrainian Nationalism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 38–54. 24 Cited in Kohut, Russian Centralism and Ukrainian Autonomy, 258. 25 Cited in Serhiy Bilenky, Romantic Nationalism in Eastern Europe: Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian Political Imaginations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 201. 26 Cited in Faith Hillis, Children of Rus' : Right-Bank Ukraine and the Invention of a Russian Nation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), 43. 27 Serhii Plokhy, “Ukraine or Little Russia? Revisiting an Early NineteenthCentury Debate,” Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes 48, nos 3–4 (September–December 2006): 335–6. 28 Ibid. 29 Cited in Omeljan Pritsak, “V. Lypyns’kyj’s Place in Ukrainian Intellectual History,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 9, nos 3–4 (December 1985): 254. 30 Cited in Andreas Gardt, “Nation und Sprache in der Zeit der Aufklärung,” in idem, ed., Nation und Sprache: Die Diskussion ihres Verhältnisses in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2000), 194.

502

Notes to pages 69–86

31 Iakov Markovych, Zapiski o Malorossii, eia zhiteliakh i proizvedeniiakh (St Petersburg: Pri Gubernskom Pravlenii, 1798), 36. 32 Ibid. 33 Taras Koznarsky, “Kharkiv Literary Almanacs of the 1830s: Shaping Ukrainian Cultural Identity” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2001), 33. 34 Markovych, Zapiski o Malorossii, 58. 35 See Maksymovych’s letter to the Galician scholar Denys Zubryts'kyi from 1840, republished in Mykhailo Maksymovych, Lysty, ed. Viktor Korotkyi (Kyiv: Lybid', 2004), 119. 36 Cited in Bilenky, Romantic Nationalism in Eastern Europe, 91. 37 Plokhy, “Ukraine or Little Russia?” 348. 38 Volodymyr Kravchenko, Ukraïna, imperiia, Rosiia: Vybrani statti z modernoï istoriï ta istoriohrafiï (Kyiv: Krytyka, 2011), 87–133. 39 Cited in Koznarsky, “Kharkiv Literary Almanacs,” 53. 40 Ibid. 41 Kravchenko, Ukraïna, imperiia, Rosiia, 127–9. 42 Cited in Ludwik Janowski, Uniwersytet Charkowski w początkach swego istnienia (1805–1820) (repr., Kharkiv: Maidan, 2004), 61. 43 Ibid., 55. 44 Cited in Koznarsky, “Kharkiv Literary Almanacs,” 64. 45 Ibid., 145. 46 Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnov’ianenko, Tvory, 8 vols (Kyiv: Dnipro, 1980), 8: 156. Also cited in Bilenky, Romantic Nationalism in Eastern Europe, 282–3. 47 Janowski, Uniwersytet Charkowski, 109; Mikhail Sukhomlinov, comp., Materialy dlia istorii obrazovaniia v Rossii v tsarstvovanie imperatora Aleksandra I (St Petersburg: A.S. Suvorin, 1889), 124. 48 Kravchenko, Ukraïna, imperiia, Rosiia, 70. 49 Vosstanie dekabristov: Dokumenty i materialy, vol. 4 (Moscow and Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1929), 254–5. 50 Pavel Pestel’, “Russkaia Pravda,” in Vosstanie dekabristov: Dokumenty, vol. 7, “Russkaia Pravda” P.I. Pestel’a i sochineniia, iei predshestvuiushchie, ed. M.V. Nechkina (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1958), 121. 51 S.G. Volkonskii, Zapiski (St Petersburg: Sinodal’naia tip., 1901), 400. 52 Pamiętnik Piotra Wysockiego (Warsaw: Wyd. Wojskowej Akademii Technicznej, 2006), 35–6. 53 https://www.myslenedrevo.com.ua/uk/Lit/G/GulakArtemovkyP/Verses/ Horatius9Oda.html (accessed 10/11/2020).

Notes to pages 91–113

503

chaPter three 1 Seweryn Goszczyński, „Kilka słów o Ukrainie i rzezi humańskiej. Przedmowa do ‚Zamku Kaniowskiego,’” in idem, Dzieła zbiorowe, 4 vols (Lviv: Wyd. Z. Wasilewski, 1911), 3: 381. 2 Serhii Plokhy, “Ukraine or Little Russia? Revisiting an Early NineteenthCentury Debate,” Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes 48, nos 3–4 (September–December 2006): 345. 3 Spirydon Ostaszewski’s introduction to his collection of fairy tales “Pivkupy kazok” (1850), as reprinted in Roman Kyrchiv, ed., Ukraïns’koiu muzoiu natkhneni (Kyiv: Radians’kyi pys’mennyk, 1971), 174–5. 4 Kraszewski as cited in Daniel Beauvois, Shliakhtych, kripak i revizor: Polska shliakhta mizh tsaryzmom ta ukraïnskymy masamy (1831–1863), trans. from the French by Zoia Borysiuk (Kyiv: raU , 1996), 172–3. 5 David Moon, “The Inventory Reform and Peasant Unrest in Right-Bank Ukraine in 1847–48,” Slavonic and East European Review 79, no. 4 (October 2001): 654. 6 Ibid., 668, 671. 7 Ibid., 691. 8 Ivan L. Rudnytsky, “Franciszek Duchiński and His Impact on Ukrainian Political Thought,” in idem, Essays in Modern Ukrainian History (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1987), 197. 9 Maslov’s travelogue is cited in my Imperial Urbanism in the Borderlands: Kyiv, 1800–1905 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 37. 10 Cited in ibid., 36. 11 Ibid., 90. 12 Cited in ibid., 94 13 Cited in ibid., 83–4. 14 Anna Procyk has studied the ideological and personal links between the Brotherhood of SS . Cyril and Methodius and various groups comprising Young Europe. See her “Polish Émigrés as Emissaries of the ‘Risorgimento’ in Eastern Europe,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 25, nos 1–2 (Spring 2001): 7–29. Cf. idem, Giuseppe Mazzini’s Young Europe and the Birth of Modern Nationalism in the Slavic World (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019). 15 “Knyhy buttia ukraïns’koho narodu,” in Kyrylo-Mefodiïvs’ke tovarystvo, 3 vols (Kyiv: Naukova dumka, 1990), 1:167. 16 Mykola Kostomarov as cited in my Romantic Nationalism in Eastern Europe: Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian Political Imaginations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 288.

504

Notes to pages 114–34

17 Roman Szporluk, “Ukraine: From the Imperial Periphery to a Sovereign State,” in idem, Russia, Ukraine and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 361–95. 18 See Michael Berick, “Neko Case’s Amazing Coincidence,” Entertainment Weekly (7 February 2005), http://ew.com/article/2005/02/07/neko-casesamazing-coincidence/ (accessed 11 October 2020). 19 Omeljan Pritsak, Shevchenko-prorok (Kyiv: Instytut skhodoznavstva im. A. Kryms’koho nanU , 1993). 20 Taras Shevchenko, Song Out of Darkness. Selected Poems, trans. Vera Rich (London: The Mitre, 1961), 33. Available at: http://sites.utoronto.ca/elul/ English/218/Shevchenko-Selections-218.pdf (accessed 13 July 2021). 21 Cited in John-Paul Himka, “Dimensions of a Triangle: Polish-UkrainianJewish Relations in Austrian Galicia,” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 12 (1999): 25. 22 Cited in John-Paul Himka, “The Construction of Nationality in Galician Rus': Icarian Flights in Almost All Directions,” in Ronald Grigor Suny and Michael D. Kennedy, eds, Intellectuals and the Articulation of the Nation (Ann Arbor, mi: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 113–4. 23 Cited in Iaroslav Hrytsak, Narys istoriï Ukraïny: Formuvannia modernoï ukraïns’koï natsiï XIX–XX st. (Kyiv: Heneza, 1996), 50. 24 Cited in ibid., 48. 25 Cited in Ivan L. Rudnytsky, “The Ukrainians in Galicia under Austrian Rule,” in idem, Essays in Modern Ukrainian History (Edmonton, 1987), 319. 26 Ibid. 27 Cited in Paul Robert Magocsi, A History of Ukraine: The Lands and Its Peoples, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 436.

cha Pter foUr 1 Here and elsewhere, such references to Russia should be understood to refer to the Russian Empire. 2 Statistics from: G. Troinitskii, Krepostnoe naselenie v Rossii, po 10-i narodnoi perepisi (St Petersburg: Tip. Karla Vul'fa, 1861), 80–5; Volodymyr Pashuk, Zarobitchany Pravoberezhnoï Ukraïny (druha polovyna XIX st.) (Lviv: Instytut ukraïnoznavstva im. I. Krypiakevycha nan Ukraïny, 2001), 13, 18; Vasyl' Veryha, Narysy z istoriï Ukraïny (kinets' XVIII–pochatok XX st.) (Lviv: Svit, 1996), 90. 3 A. Baraboi, “Pravoberezhnaia Ukraina v 1848 godu,” Istoricheskie zapiski Instituta istorii an sssr (Moscow), 34 (1950): 13.

Notes to pages 135–51

505

4 Alexander Nikitenko, Up from Serfdom: My Childhood and Youth in Russia, 1804–1824 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 9. 5 Ibid., 85. 6 A.G. Rashin, Naselenie Rossii za 100 let (1813–1913): Statisticheskie ocherki (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe statisticheskoe izd., 1956), chap. 1. Cf. David Moon, The Russian Peasantry, 1600–1930: The World the Peasants Made (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 100. 7 Moon, Russian Peasantry, 100–1. 8 Patricia Herlihy, “Ukrainian Cities in the Nineteenth Century,” in Ivan L. Rudnytsky, ed., Rethinking Ukrainian History (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1981), 137. 9 Daniel Brower, The Russian City between Tradition and Modernity, 1850– 1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 23. 10 Konstantyn Kononenko, Ukraine and Russia: A History of the Economic Relations between Ukraine and Russia (1654–1917) (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1958), 199. 11 Oleskandr Donik, “Promyslove pidpryiemnytstvo dvorianstva Ukraïny v XIX st.: Uriadova polityka, osoblyvosti rozvytku, haluzevi napriamky,” Ukraïns' kyi istorychnyi zhurnal, 2007, no. 5, 30. 12 K.H. Voblyi, Narysy z istoriï rosiis' ko-ukraïns' koï tsukro-buriakovoï promyslovosty, vol. 1, pts. 1–2 (Kyiv: Vseukraïns'ka akademiia nauk, 1928), 1:178. 13 Ibid., 198. 14 Ibid., 178, 207, 213; pt. 2:47. 15 Ibid., pt. 2:89. 16 Aleksandr Ogloblin (Oleksander Ohloblyn), Ocherki istorii ukrainskoi fabriki: Predkapitalisticheskaia fabrika (Kyiv: Gosudarstvennoe izd. Ukrainy, 1925), 88–9. Cf. Voblyi, Narysy z istoriï, 1:212. 17 Ibid., 207. 18 Voblyi, Narysy z istoriï, 1, pt. 2:45. 19 Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy from Peter the Great to the Abdication of Nicholas II (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006), 193. 20 Cited in: https://meduza.io/feature/2018/02/19/eto-rabstvo-krestyan-mozhnobylo-bit-stydnye-voprosy-o-krepostnom-prave (accessed 12 October 2020). 21 Data on peasant discontent from Istoriia selianstva Ukraïïns' koï rsr , 2 vols (Kyiv: Naukova dumka, 1967), 1:327–5. 22 Ivan Nechui-Levyts'kyi, Zibrannia tvoriv, 10 vols, 3 (Kyiv: Naukova dumka, 1965): 125.

506

Notes to pages 152–67

23 Cited in: https://meduza.io/feature/2018/02/19/eto-rabstvo-krestyan-mozhnobylo-bit-stydnye-voprosy-o-krepostnom-prave (accessed 12 October 2020). 24 Cited in W. Bruce Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform: Russia’s Enlightened Bureaucrats 1825–1861 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1982), 49. 25 Cf. Wortman, Scenarios of Power, 194. 26 Statistics from Daniel Field, “The Year of Jubilee,” in Ben Eklof, John Bushnell, and Larissa Zakharova, eds., Russia’s Great Reforms, 1855–1881 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 47. Cf. Roxanne Easley, “Opening Public Space: The Peace Arbitrator and Rural Politicization, 1861–1864,” Slavic Review 61, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 721. 27 Istoriia selianstva, 1:371, 375. In the 1860s the largest number of disturbances took place in Right-Bank Ukraine: they numbered 2,079, or 77.2 per cent of the total in Ukraine. See ibid., 378, and the map on p. 381. 28 Easley, “Opening Public Space,” 711–2. 29 See Daniel Field, “The Year of Jubilee,” 46. 30 Ibid., 48. 31 Istoriia selianstva, 1:359. 32 Magocsi, History of Ukraine, 340, 343. 33 Field, “The Year of Jubilee,” 42. 34 Data quoted from Fedor A. Petrov, “Crowning the Edifice: The Zemstvo, Local Self-Government, and Constitutional Movement, 1864–1881,” in Eklof and Zakharova, eds, Russia’s Great Reforms, 198–9. 35 Cited in Wortman, Scenarios of Power, 211. 36 See Marc Raeff’s assessment of historiography on this issue in his “Bureaucratic Phenomena of Imperial Russia, 1700–1905,” American Historical Review 84, no. 2 (1 April 1979): 405. 37 Ibid., 411. 38 Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, Social Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997), 90. 39 See Michael Confino, “On Intellectuals and Intellectual Traditions in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Russia,” Daedalus 101 (1972): 117–8. Cf. Wirtschafter, Social Identity in Imperial Russia, 89–90. 40 Christopher Ely, Underground Petersburg: Radical Populism, Urban Space, and the Tactics of Subversion in Reform-Era Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2016), 49. 41 Harley D. Balzer, “Introduction,” in idem, ed., Russia’s Missing Middle Class: The Professions in Russian History (Armonk, ny , and London: M.E. Sharpe, 1996), 9.

Notes to pages 167–77

507

42 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London and New York: Verso, 2006), 196. 43 On these stages, see Paul Robert Magocsi, “The Ukrainian National Revival: A New Analytical Framework,” in idem, The Roots of Ukrainian Nationalism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 38–54. 44 Volodymyr Antonovych, “Memoirs,” in Serhiy Bilenky, ed., Fashioning Modern Ukraine: Selected Writings of Mykola Kostomarov, Volodymyr Antonovych, and Mykhailo Drahomanov (Edmonton and Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 2013), 218. 45 Oleksii Ias’, “Tsei zahadkovyi ‘kul’t’ hromady… Intelektual’nyi svit Volodymyra Antonovycha,” Den' (15–16 January 2010), nos 4–5: http:// incognita.day.kyiv.ua/czej-zagadkovij-kult-gromadi.html (accessed 19 October 2020). 46 Antonovych, “Memoirs,” 218. 47 Cited in Viktor Dudko, “Zhurnal ‘Osnova’ iak proekt peterburz'koï ukraïns’koï hromady,” Humanitarna osvita v tekhnichnykh vyshchykh navchal’nykh zakladakh 13 (Kyiv, 2006): 3–17; also available online: http://www. historians.in.ua/index.php/en/statti/456-viktor-dudko-zhurnal-osnova-iakproekt-peterburzkoi-ukrainskoi-hromady (accessed 12 October 2020). 48 Cited in ibid., 10. 49 See Johannes Remy, Brothers or Enemies: The Ukrainian National Movement and Russia from the 1840s to the 1870s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 101; cf. Alexei Miller, The Ukrainian Question: The Russian Empire and Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century (Budapest and New York: ceU Press, 2003), 83–5. 50 Reginald Zelnik, “The Sunday-School Movement in Russia, 1859–1862,” Journal of Modern History 37, no. 2 (June 1965): 152. 51 The first Sabbath school opened in Odesa ten months before the first Sunday school was founded in Kyiv. See Tobias Grill, “Rabbis as Agents of Modernization in Ukraine, 1840–1900,” in Martin Schultze Wessel and Frank E. Sysyn, eds, Religion, Nation, and Secularization in Ukraine (Edmonton and Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 2015), 73. 52 Data from the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine: http://www.encyclopediaof ukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages%5CS%5CU%5CSundayschools.htm (accessed 27 November 2018). 53 G.I. Marakhov, Pol’skoe vosstanie 1863 g. na Pravoberezhnoi Ukraine (Kyiv: Izd. Kievskogo universiteta, 1967), 46. 54 Zelnik, “The Sunday-School Movement,” 154, 159. 55 Cited in Ihnat Zhytets'kyi, “Kyivs'ka hromada za 60-kh rokiv,” Ukraïna: Naukovyi dvokhmisiachnyk ukraïnoznavstva 1 (1928): 100.

508

Notes to pages 180–91

chaPter five 1 Kostomarov, “Avtobiografiia,” in his Istoricheskie proizvedeniia: Avtobiografiia (Kyiv: Lybid’, 1989), 568. 2 Drahomanov, “Autobiographical Sketch,” in Bilenky, Fashioning Modern Ukraine, 281–2. 3 On Sierakowski and his ties to Ukraine, see H.I. Marakhov, “Vydatnyi pol's'kyi revoliutsioner-demokrat: Do 100-richchia z dnia zahybeli Syhysmunda Serakovs’koho,” Ukraïns' kyi istorychnyi zhurnal, 1963, no. 3, 115–6. 4 G.I. Marakhov, Pol'skoe vosstanie 1863 g. na Pravoberezhnoi Ukraine (Kyiv: Izd. Kievskogo universiteta, 1967), 82. 5 Ibid., 96. 6 Ibid., 207. 7 Alexander Poushkin [Pushkin], The Captain’s Daughter, in idem, Russian Romance, trans. Ekaterina Telfer (London: H.S. King, 1875), 137. 8 Marakhov, Pol'skoe vosstanie 1863 g., 191–4. 9 Ibid., 211. 10 Ibid., 210. 11 Ibid., 239; Daniel Beauvois, comp., La bataille de la terre en Ukraine (1863– 1914): Les Polonais et les conflits socio-ethniques (Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1993), 7–19. 12 Stephen Velychenko, “The Bureaucracy, Police, and Army in TwentiethCentury Ukraine: A Comparative Quantitative Study,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 23, nos 3–4 (1999): 71, 75. 13 The number of rebels from all parts of historical Poland-Lithuania who ended up in Siberia together with their families may have been 80, 000, or perhaps even as high as 100,000. See Marakhov, Pol’skoe vosstanie 1863 g., 241. 14 Marakhov, Pol'skoe vosstanie 1863 g., 5, 101. 15 On Krasovs'kyi’s life in Ukraine based on his police file, see J. Remy, Brothers or Enemies: The Ukrainian National Movement and Russia from the 1840s to the 1870s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 126–9, 270 n. 45. 16 The saying and Krasovs'kyi’s satire are cited in Remy, Brothers or Enemies, 127–8. 17 Cited in Ivan L. Rudnytsky, “Polish-Ukrainian Relations: The Burden of History,” in idem, Essays in Modern Ukrainian History (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1987), 62. 18 Cited in Remy, Brothers or Enemies, 132. 19 Ibid., 133.

Notes to pages 192–203

509

20 Mikhail Katkov, “21 June 1863” (editorial), in idem, Sobranie peredovykh statei “Moskovskykh vedomostei”… 1863 god (Moscow: S.P. Katkov, 1897), 327. 21 Ibid., 328. 22 Ibid., 330. 23 An English translation of the circular can be found in Alexei Miller, The Ukrainian Question: The Russian Empire and Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century (Budapest and New York: ceU Press, 2003), 263–4. 24 Miller, The Ukrainian Question, 109. 25 These measures are listed in M. Dolbilov and A. Miller, eds, Zapadnye okrainy Rossiiskoi imperii (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2006), 212–4, 268, 288–9. 26 Ibid., 292–3. 27 Ibid., 226. 28 Remy, Brothers or Enemies, 175. 29 See Drahomanov, “Autobiographical Sketch,” in Bilenky, Fashioning Modern Ukraine, 295. 30 Istoricheskie pesni malorusskogo naroda, 2 vols (Kyiv: Tip. M. Fritsa, 1874– 75); Malorusskie narodnye predaniia i rasskazy (Kyiv: Izd. Iugo-Zapadnogo Otd. Russk, geograf. o-va, 1876). On the political importance of the first collection, see Viktor Korotkyi, “Itoricheskie pesni malorusskogo naroda” za redaktsiieiu V.B. Antonovycha ta M.P. Drahomanova. Persha kolektyvna zahal’noukraïns’ka pratsia z politychnym pidtekstom (New York: Almaz, 2021), esp. 18, 35–6, 94. 31 See the entry on Ziber by Illia Vytanovych in the online Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine: http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/2display.asp?link Path=pages\Z\I\ZiberMykola.htm. 32 Faith Hillis, who coined the term “Little Russian lobby,” does not place it in opposition to the Ukrainophiles but, instead, emphasizes similarities between the two groups. However, it seems that by the early 1870s, overt hostility had developed between the two camps, even though the Ukrainophiles could not part ways publicly with the powerful “Little Russian lobby.” Nonetheless, Hillis is certainly correct about continuing personal links between those associated with the conservative “Little Russian lobby” and radical “Ukrainophiles.” 33 Drahomanov, “Autobiographical Sketch,” 298. 34 The writer was Nikolai Rigel’man, a personal friend of several prominent Ukrainian intellectuals who was nevertheless critical of the Ukrainian national movement; quoted in Miller, The Ukrainian Question, 165.

510

Notes to pages 204–19

35 The words of Sylvester Gogotskii, a Hegelian philosopher at Kyiv University; cited in ibid., 168–9. 36 Ibid., 181. 37 For an English translation of the document, see ibid., 267–9. 38 I.S. Turgenev, Izbrannye sochineniia (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia lit-ra, 1987), 456. 39 Ibid., 458. 40 Ibid., 477. 41 Martin Malia, “What Is the Intelligentsia?” Daedalus 89, no. 3, (Summer 1960): 442. 42 Ivan Nechui-Levyts'kyi, “Khmary,” in idem, Tvory v dvokh tomakh, vol. 1 (Kyiv: Dnipro, 1985), 215 (my translation – Sb ). 43 Ibid., 294. 44 See Oleksii Ias’, “Kontseptsiï heneratsiï: Kul'turne pokhodzhennia, mizhdystsyplinarni vymiry, instrumental’ni mozhlyvosti ta piznaval'ni limity,” in Academia Terra Historiae: Studiï na poshanu Valeriia Smoliia, 2 vols, 2: Prostory istoryka (Kyiv: Instytut istoriï Ukraïny nan Ukraïny, 2020), 25. 45 Alexander Herzen, “Eshche raz Bazarov” [1869], cited in V.I. Krasikov, Sotsial’nye seti russkoi filosofii XIX–XX vv. (Moscow and Berlin: DirektMedia, 2014), 95. 46 Historian Mykola Chubatyi credited Shevchenko and Kostomarov with being the symbolic “founding fathers” of Ukrainian historiography, whereas Antonovych and Drahomanov belonged to its second generation. See Ias’, “Kontseptsiï heneratsiï,” 34. 47 M.P. Drahomanov, Vybrane (Kyiv: Lybid', 1991), 216. 48 Ibid., 403– 4. 49 Ibid., 402. 50 Ibid., 386. 51 Ibid., 379. 52 Ibid., 220. 53 Kostomarov’s rant against the nihilists can be found in his Istoricheskie proizvedeniia: Avtobiografiia (Kyiv: Kievskii universitet, 1989), 558–60. 54 Vasyl'’ Ulianovs'kyi, “Syn Ukrainy,” in Volodymyr Antonovych, Moia spovid’: Vybrani istorychni ta publitsystychni tvory (Kyiv: Lybid', 1995), 17. 55 Serhy Yekelchyk, Ukraïnofily: Svit ukraïns’kykh patriotiv druhoï polovyny XIX stolittia (Kyiv: kiS , 2010), 19–20. 56 Ibid., 26. 57 Ibid., 31. 58 Iryna Vushko, The Politics of Cultural Retreat: Imperial Bureaucracy in Austrian Galicia, 1772–1867 (New Haven, ct : Yale University Press, 2015), 238.

Notes to pages 220–38

511

59 Paul R. Magocsi, A History of Ukraine: The Land and Its People, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 447. 60 Cited in Magocsi, A History of Ukraine, 448.

cha Pter S ix 1 Cited in P.R. Magocsi, A History of Ukraine: The Land and Its People, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 436. 2 John-Paul Himka, “The Greek Catholic Church and Nation-Building in Galicia, 1772–1918,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 8, nos 3–4 (December 1984): 435. 3 Cited in Jan Kozik, The Ukrainian National Movement: 1815–1849 (Edmonton: Candian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1986), 17. 4 Istoriia L’vova, 3 vols, 2: 1772–zhovten’ 1918 (Lviv: Tsentr Evropy, 2007), 41–43, 184. 5 Himka, “The Greek Catholic Church,” 433. 6 Adam Światek, Gente Rutheni, natione Poloni: Z dziejów Rusinów narodowości polskiej w Galicji (Cracow: Księgarnia Akademicka, 2014), 34. 7 Stepan Kaczała, Polityka Polaków względem Rusi (Lviv: Nakł. autora, 1879), 291. 8 David M. Althoen, “That Noble Quest: From True Nobility to Enlightened Society in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, 1550–1830” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2000), 147. 9 Światek, Gente Rutheni, natione Poloni, 311. 10 Ibid., 65. 11 Ibid., 71–2, 502. 12 Anna Veronika Wendland, Die Russophilen in Galizien: Ukrainische Konservative zwischen Österreich und Rußland 1848–1915 (Vienna: Verlag der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2001), 123. 13 Naumovych’s credo first appeared in Slovo, 1866, no. 83; it was cited in O.A. Monchalovskii, Zhytie i deiatel’nost’ Ivana Naumovicha (Lviv: Russkaia rada, 1899), 65. 14 Wendland, Die Russophilen in Galizien, 273–4, 294. 15 Paul Robert Magocsi, “The Kachkovs'kyi Society and the National Revival in Nineteenth-Century East Galicia,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 15, nos 1–2 (June 1991): 65–6. 16 Ibid., 68. 17 Ibid., 70. 18 For slightly different data, see Andriy Zayarnyuk, Framing the Ukrainian Peasantry in Habsburg Galicia, 1846–1914 (Toronto and Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 2013), 320, 392.

512 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29

30 31

32 33 34

35 36

37

38 39 40 41

Notes to pages 238–51

Magocsi, “The Kachkovs'kyi Society,” 65. Wendland, Die Russophilen in Galizien, 295. Magocsi, “The Kachkovs'kyi Society,” 75. Wendland, Die Russophilen in Galizien, 195–7. Cited in ibid., 212. Ibid., 219. Zayarnyuk, Framing the Ukrainian Peasantry, 378–9. Slavic Review 62, no. 4 (2003): 846. M.P. Drahomanov, “Protsess postydnoi vo vsex otnoshenniakh” (1882), in idem, Sobranie politicheskikh sochinenii, 2 vols (Paris: Osvobozhdeniia, 1906), 2:626–8. Ibid., 635. Words of the radical populist Ostap Terlets'kyi, as cited in Ivan L. Rudnytsky, “Ukrainians in Galicia under Austrian Rule,” in idem, Essays in Modern Ukrainian History (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1987), 332. Kaczała, Polityka Polaków względem Rusi, 290–1, 363. In fact, a Shevchenko cult took hold among Galicia’s youth. See Ostap Sereda, “‘As a Father among Little Children’: The Emerging Cult of Taras Shevchenko as a Factor of Ukrainian Nation-building in Austrian Eastern Galicia in the 1860s,” Kyiv-Mohyla Humanities Journal 1 (2014): 159–88. [Danylo Taniachkevych,] Pys’mo narodovtsiv rus' kykh do redaktora polytychnei chasopysi ‘Rus’ iako protest i memoriial (Vienna: Sommer, 1867), 3–4. Ibid., 10–11. Cited in the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine: http://www.encyclopediaof ukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages%5CP%5CR%5CProsvita.htm (accessed 31 January 2019) Ibid. Ibid: http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages %5CS%5CH%5CShevchenkoScientificSociety.htm (accessed 1 February 2019). Cited in Ann Sirka, The Nationality Question in Austrian Education: The Case of Ukrainians in Galicia 1867–1914 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1980), 79. Ibid., 80. Ibid., 92–3. Ibid., 213. On the immediate outcomes of New Era, see Ihor Chornovol, Pol' s' ko-ukraïns’ka uhoda 1890–1894 rr. (Lviv: L’vivs’ka akademiia mystetstv, 2000), chap. 3.

Notes to pages 253–67

513

42 Mykhailo Drahomanov, “Autobiographical Sketch,” in Serhiy Bilenky, ed., Fashioning Modern Ukraine: Selected Writings of Mykola Kostomarov, Volodymyr Antonovych, and Mykhailo Drahomanov (Toronto and Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 2013), 292–3. 43 Ibid., 293. 44 From Franko’s letter to Drahomanov of 26 April 1890, in Lystuvannia Ivana Franka ta Mykhaila Drahomanova (Lviv: lnU im. Ivana Franka, 2006), 350. 45 Iuliian Bachyns’kyi, Ukraïna irredenta, 3d ed. (Berlin: Vyd. ukraïns’koï molodi, 1924), 7, 10, 17, 95, 110, 170. 46 Cited in ibid., 177. 47 Ibid., 223. 48 Cited in Chornovol, Pol' s' ko-ukraïns’ka uhoda, chap. 4, n. 776. 49 Hrytsak, Istoriia, 80. 50 Cited in Rudnytsky, “Ukrainians in Galicia,” 328. 51 Ibid. 52 “Russophiles,” in the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine: http://www. encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages%5CR%5CU%5 CRussophiles.htm (accessed 12 December 2021). 53 Istoriia L’vova, 2:10–12. 54 Ibid., 32. 55 Ibid., 203. 56 Ibid., 2:21, 23. 57 Ibid., 28. 58 Ibid., 175. 59 See pictures and postcards from the old albums online: https://photo-lviv.in.ua/ staryj-lviv-u-lystivkah/ (accessed 12 December 2021). 60 Istoriia L’vova, 2:192. 61 Ibid., 199. 62 Ibid., 29. 63 Ibid., 183. 64 Cited in Harald Binder, “Making and Defending a Polish Town: ‘Lwów’ (Lemberg), 1848–1914,” Austrian History Yearbook 34 (January 2003): 66. 65 Cited in ibid., 73. 66 Istoriia L’vova, 2:233. 67 Yaroslav Hrytsak and Victor Susak, “Constructing a National City: The Case of Lviv,” in John J. Czaplicka and Blair Ruble, eds, Composing Urban History and the Constitution of Civic Identities (Baltimore and London: Woodrow Wilson Center, 2003), 146. 68 Ibid.

514

Notes to pages 268–76

69 Patrice Higonnet, Paris: Capital of the World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 157. 70 Cited in Markian Prokopovych, Habsburg Lemberg: Architecture, Public Space, and Politics in the Galician Capital, 1772–1914 (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2008), 163. 71 Ibid., 222. 72 Ibid. 73 Istoriia L' vova, 2:313. 74 Binder, “Making and Defending a Polish Town,” 72. 75 Istoriia L' vova, 2:230–1. 76 Binder, “Making and Defending a Polish Town,” 71. 77 See Adam Świątek, Gente Rutheni, Natione Poloni: The Ruthenians of Polish Nationality in Habsburg Galicia (Toronto and Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 2019), 97. 78 For instance, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century many “enlightened” Jews who had long been German-speaking switched to speaking in Polish. Also, symbolically, around the turn of the twentieth century the German name of the Jewish Progressive Temple in Lviv was replaced by a Polish name, and sermons there were delivered in both German and Polish. See Tobias Grill, “Rabbis as Agents of Modernization in Ukraine, 1840–1900,” in Martin Schultze Wessel and Frank E. Sysyn, eds, Religion, Nation, and Secularization in Ukraine (Edmonton and Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 2015), 79.

chaPter S even 1 Aleksandr Nikitenko, Up from Serfdom. My Childhood and Youth in Russia, 1804–1824, trans. Helen Saltz Jacobson (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 79. 2 Istoriia selianstva Ukraïns' koï rsr , 2 vols (Kyiv: Naukova dumka, 1967), 1:396. 3 V. Molchanov, “Material’ne stanovyshche naselennia huberns’kykh tsentriv Pravoberezhnoï Ukraïny naperedodni Pershoï svitovoï viiny,” Problemy istoriï Ukraïny XIX–pochatku XX st., 9 (Kyiv, 2005), 169–71; cf. Zarplaty i tseny v Rossiiskoi imperii: http://www.liveinternet.ru/users/2021656/post93586818/ (accessed 12 October 2020). 4 Istoriia selianstva, 1:386–7, 389. 5 Bohdan Krawchenko, Social Change and National Consciousness in Twentieth-Century Ukraine (Houndmills, Basingstoke, etc.: Palgrave Macmillan, 1985), 22.

Notes to pages 276–84

515

6 Istoriia selianstva, 1:394. 7 Konstantyn Kononenko, Ukraine and Russia: A History of the Economic Relations between Ukraine and Russia (1654–1917) (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1958), 50. 8 Peter Gatrell, The Tsarist Economy 1850–1917 (London: Batsford, 1986), 132–3, 135. 9 Istoriia selianstva, 1:493. 10 Ibid., 1:496. 11 Cited in Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 163. 12 Pervaia vseobshchaia perepis' naseleniia, vol. 16: Kievskaia guberniia (St Petersburg: Tsentr. Stat. komitet M-va vnutrennikh del, 1904), 260. 13 Ibid., vol. 33: Poltavskaia guberniia (St Petersburg: 1904), 288. 14 Istoriia selianstva, 1:398. 15 Istoriia robitnychoho klasu Ukraïns' koï rsr , vol. 1 (Kyiv: Naukova dumka, 1962), 354. 16 Patricia Herlihy, Odesa: A History, 1794–1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 242. 17 Ibid., 244. 18 The data on migration are from Volodymyr Borysenko, Kurs Ukraïns' koï istoriï: Z naidavnishykh chasiv do XX st. (Kyiv: Lybid’, 1998), 507. 19 Istoriia selianstva, 1:496. Cf. Vadim Koukouchkine, From Peasants to Labourers: Ukrainian and Belarusan Immigration from the Russian Empire to Canada (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), 27. 20 A. Khomenko, Naselennia Ukraïny 1897–1927 rr. (Kharkiv: Tsentral'ne statystychne upravlinnia UrSr , 1927), 15, 19. 21 Cited in Gatrell, The Tsarist Economy, 65. 22 Krawchenko, Social Change and National Consciousness, 18. 23 The first railroad on the territory of present-day Ukraine was the strategically important line constructed in 1861 to link Austrian-ruled Lviv with Vienna via Przemyśl (Peremyshl') and Cracow. 24 Cited in K.H. Voblyi, Narysy z istoriï rosiis' ko-ukraïns' koï tsukro-buriakovoï promyslovosty, vol. 2 (Kyiv: Vseukraïns'ka akademiia nauk, 1930), 78. 25 Karl Schlögel, Ukraine: A Nation on the Borderland (London: Reaktion Books, 2018), 145. 26 Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 178. 27 The government-owned railroads in Ukraine also yielded the world’s highest profit margin: see Kononenko, Ukraine and Russia, 205, 210.

516

Notes to pages 284–90

28 Adam Gopnik, Through the Children’s Gate: A Home in New York (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2007), 160. 29 Plokhy, Gates of Europe, 178. 30 Oleskandr Donik, “Promyslove pidpryiemnytstvo dvorianstva Ukraïny v XIX st.: Uriadova polityka, osoblyvosti rozvytku, haluzevi napriamky,” Ukraïns’kyi istorychnyi zhurnal, 2007, no. 5, 30. 31 Voblyi, Narysy z istoriï, 2:159, 162. 32 Istoriia robitnychoho klasu, 1:215. 33 Ibid., 1:344. 34 Ivan Nechui-Levyts'kyi, Mykola Dzheria, trans. Oles Kovalenko, with editorial revisions by Maxim Tarnawsky (Electronic Library of Ukrainian Literature), 28: http://sites.utoronto.ca/elul/English/218/ Mykola-Dzheria.pdf. 35 Kononenko, Ukraine and Russia, 125. 36 Ibid., 127. 37 One pud equals 16.8 kilos. 38 Gatrell, The Tsarist Economy, 171, 184. 39 Rossiia nakanune Pervoi mirovoi voiny: Statistiko-dokumental' nyi spravochnik (Moscow: Samoteka, 2009), 38–40. 40 Cited in Theodore H. Friedgut, Iuzovka and Revolution, vol. 1, Life and Work in Russia’s Donbas, 1869–1924 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 194. 41 Ibid. 42 Volodymyr Kulikov, Pidpryiemstva i suspil'stvo v zavods' kykh i shakhtars’kykh poselenniakh Donbasu ta Prydniprov’ia v 1870–1917 rr. (Kharkiv: KhNU imeni V.N. Karazina, 2019), 121. 43 Friedgut, Iuzovka and Revolution, 1:19, 194. 44 In 1897, Iuzivka’s population may have included about a thousand foreigners, equal to ca. 4% of its population. On the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution, Iuzivka was home to, among others: 101 British people, 70 Germans, 50 Austrians, 39 Czechs, 19 Spaniards, 13 French, and 13 Italians. See Friedgut, Iuzovka and Revolution, 1:200; Kuromiya, Freedom and Terror in the Donbas, 15. 45 See Ruslan Marmazov’s pioneering report on the origins of football in the Donbas, published in Komsomol' skaia pravda, 16 April 2003. 46 Kulikov, Pidpryiemstva i suspil' stvo, 69. 47 According to various estimates, early in the Donbas operations only some 5 to 12% of miners were locals; the rest were predominantly from Russia. Only at the dawn of the twentieth century did the proportion of local people, mostly Ukrainians, increase to 26.7% of miners and 21% of workers overall. After

Notes to pages 290–5

48 49 50 51

52 53 54

55 56

57 58 59 60 61

62

517

peaking at 13% in 1917, by the early 1920s the proportion of Iuzivka’s population that was Ukrainian had dropped dramatically to around 7%. This was largely because during the turmoil of the Civil War, local Ukrainians returned to their nearby villages, whereas Russians had no such recourse and were obliged to stay in their “village” of Iuzivka. See Susan Purves McCaffray, “Origins of Labor Policy in the Russian Coal and Steel Industry, 1874–1900,”Journal of Economic History 47 (December 1987): 957. See also: Istoriia robitnychoho klasu, 1:229; and Friedgut, Iuzovka and Revolution, 1:200. Dmitrii Kornilov, “Iuzovka i ukraintsy,” in: http://infodon.org.ua/uzovka/23 (accessed 12 October 2020). McCaffray, “Origins of Labor Policy,” 957. Kulikov, Pidpryiemstva i suspil' stvo, 350–1. Hiroaki Kuromyia, “Donbas Miners in War, Revolution, and Civil War,” in Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds, Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class, and Identity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 138–58. McCaffray, “Origins of Labor Policy,” 955. Istoriia robitnychoho klasu, 1:220. Susan Purves McCaffray, “The Association of Southern Coal and Steel Producers and the Problem of Industrial Progress in Tsarist Russia,” Slavic Review 47, no. 3 (1988): 465–6. Gatrell, The Tsarist Economy, 154; Kononenko, Ukraine and Russia, 148. Rainer Lindner, Unternehmer und Stadt in der Ukraine, 1860–1914: Industrialisierung und soziale Kommunikation im südlichen Zarenreich (Konstanz: Uvk , 2006), 197 Ibid., 207. Cited in Dnipropetrovs' k: Vikhy istoriï (Dnipropetrovs'k [Dnipro]: Hrani, 2001), 85. Ibid., 88. Lindner, Unternehmer und Stadt, 73. Katerynoslav was renamed Dnipropetrovs’k in 1926, in part to honor a Bolshevik named Hryhorii Petrovs’kyi who once worked at the Alexander South-Russian (Briansk) plant. The name was “a portmanteau word fusing the Dnieper’s [Dnipro’s – Sb ] appellation and the name of the high-ranking Soviet official.” See Andrii Portnov and Tetiana Portnova, “The ‘Imperial’ and the ‘Cossack’ in the Semiotics of Ekaterinoslav-Dnipropetrovs’k: The Controversies of the Foundation Myth,” in Igor Pilshchikov, ed., Urban Semiotics: The City as a Cultural-Historical Phenomenon (Tallinn: tlU , 2015), 230. Lindner, Unternehmer und Stadt, 92–3.

518

Notes to pages 295–303

63 Cited in Chris Ford, “Reconsidering the Ukrainian Revolution 1917–1921: The Dialectics of National Liberation and Social Emancipation,” Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe 15, no. 3 (December 2007): 303. 64 Voblyi, Narysy z istoriï, 2:60–1. 65 Istoriia robitnychoho klasu, 1:216–7, 224, 337. 66 There were 163,894 industrial workers in Ukraine in 1893. See Voblyi, Narysy z istorï, 2:56. 67 Istoriia robitnychoho klasu, 1:335. 68 Ibid., 1:341–2. In the Russian Empire as a whole, factory workers and miners became the second largest category of wage earners, exceeded only by agricultural workers, i.e., peasants (4,500,000). See Gatrell, The Tsarist Economy, 85, with data from A.G. Rashin, Formirovanie rabochego klassa Rossii (Moscow: Sotsekgiz, 1958). 69 http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/picturedisplay.asp?linkpath=pic\I\N\ Industry_Table2.jpg#TopPosition (accessed 12 October 2020). 70 Gatrell, The Tsarist Economy, 166, 178–4. Cf. I.S. Koropeckyj, Development in the Shadow: Studies in Ukrainian Economics (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1990), 32. 71 Gatrell, The Tsarist Economy, 46. 72 Voblyi, Narysy z istoriï, 2:62. 73 Gatrell, The Tsarist Economy, 46, 159. 74 I. Koropeckyj, “Industry” in the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine: http:// www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages%5CI%5 CN%5CIndustry.htm (accessed 12 October 2020). 75 Lindner, Unternehmer und Stadt, 167. 76 Kononenko, Ukraine and Russia, 189. 77 Istoriia robitnychoho klasu, 1:218–9. 78 Gatrell, The Tsarist Economy, 178–80. 79 Lindner, Unternehmer und Stadt, 169. 80 Gatrell, The Tsarist Economy, 144. 81 Ibid., 183. 82 Rossiia nakanune, 52–4. 83 Vladimir Lenin, The Development of Capitalism in Russia [1899], chap. 8: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1899/dcr8viii/viii8v.htm (accessed 12 October /2020). For the Russian original, see https://www. marxists.org/russkij/lenin/1899/03/len03v08.htm (also chap. 8). The phrase “internal/inner colonization” was actually first used by the Prussian authorities in the medieval period with respect to Polish and Baltic lands that were to be colonized by German settlers. See Alexander Etkind, Internal

Notes to pages 304–12

84 85

86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97

98

99

100

101

102

519

Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 21. Cited in Ford, “Reconsidering the Ukrainian Revolution 1917–1921,” 282. Ivan L. Rudnytsky, “The Role of Ukraine in Modern History,” in idem, Essays in Modern Ukrainian History (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1987), 15. Koropeckyj, Development in the Shadow, 59. Ibid., 12. Kononenko, Ukraine and Russia, iv. Ibid., 188. Ibid., 211–2. Ibid., 229. On exact proportions of export and import see Koropeckyj, Development in the Shadow, 28–30. Etkind, Internal Colonization, 2. Ibid., 26. Ibid., 169. Ibid., 14–5. In one very influential take on “internal colonialism,” Michael Hechter argued that the lack of sovereignty in places like Ireland or Wales “fostered a dependent kind of development which limited their economic welfare and threatened their cultural integrity.” See Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), xiv. Bohdan Krawchenko applied Hechter’s framework to Ukraine in his Ukraine: Social Change and National Consciousness in Twentieth-Century Ukraine. This imperialist rhetoric has recently been adopted by Russia’s president Vladimir Putin in attempts to justify his country’s war of aggression against Ukraine. S.V. Markova, “Sotsial'no-demohrafichna kharakterystyka ukraïns'koho sotsiumu naprykintsi XIX–na pochatku XX st.,” Osvita, nauka i kul' tura na Podilli, 20 (Kam’ianets'-Podil's'kyi, 2013), 503. M. Lazarovych and N. Lazarovych, “Etnodemohrafichna spetsyfika ta sotsial'no-profesiina stratyfikatsiia natsional'nykh menshyn Ukraïny naperedodni natsional'noï revoliutsiï 1917–1921 rokiv,” Ukraïns’ka nauka: Mynule, suchasne, maibutnie 17 (2012): 72. On the data, see Hiroaki Kuromiya, Freedom and Terror in the Donbas: A Ukrainian-Russian Borderland, 1870s–1990s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 41. Friedgut, Iuzovka and Revolution, 1:196.

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Notes to pages 312–23

103 Ibid., 1:200; Kulikov, Pidpryiemstva i suspil’stvo, 172. 104 Cited in Ivan Maistrenko, Borot’bism: A Chapter in the History of the Ukrainian Revolution (Stuttgart: ibidem, 2012), xix. 105 Cited in Krawchenko, Social Change and National Consciousness, 7. 106 On these concepts used by Pierre Bourdieu, see Elliot B. Weininger, “Foundations of Pierre Bourdieu’s class analysis,” in Erik Olin Wright, ed., Approaches to Class Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 82–118. 107 Those who served in the zemstvo administration were an exception. If its many employees are included in the number of public servants, the proportion of Ukrainians becomes much higher: it rises to about 46% of the ca. 22,500 government, zemstvo, and municipal administrators. See Stephen Velychenko, “Local Officialdom and National Movements in Imperial Russia: Administrative Shortcomings and Under-government,” in John Morison, ed., Ethnic and National Issues in Russian and East European History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 80. 108 Lazarovych and Lazarovych, “Etnodemohrafichna spetsyfika,” 202–3. 109 Kendall E. Bailes, “Reflections on Russian Professions,” in Harley D. Balzer, ed., Russia’s Missing Middle Class: The Professions in Russian History (Armonk, ny , and London: M.E. Sharpe, 1996), 52. 110 Harley D. Balzer, “Introduction,” to idem, ed., Russia’s Missing Middle Class, 10. 111 https://histua.com/knigi/narisi-z-istorii-ukraini/osvita-i-shkilnictvo (accessed 12 October 2020) 112 Krawchenko, Social Change and National Consciousness, 35–6. 113 Volodymyr Borysenko, Kurs ukraïns' koï istoriï: Z naidavnishykh chasiv do XX st. (Kyiv: Lybid‘, 1998), 505. 114 Andreas Kappeler, Russland und die Ukraine: Verflochtene Biographien und Geschichten (Vienna: Bohlau, 2012), 340. 115 Cited in Krawchenko, Social Change and National Consciousness, 35. 116 Ca. 19% of 235,000 individuals, according to Velychenko, “Local Officialdom and National Movements,” 80. 117 Velychenko, “Local Officialdom and National Movements,” 81–2. 118 O.M. Donik, “Chysel’nist’ ta etnichno-konfesiinyi sklad kupetstva Ukraïny v XIX–na pochatku XX st.,” Ukraïns' kyi istorychnyi zhurnal, 2009, no. 5, 73. http://dspace.nbuv.gov.ua/bitstream/handle/123456789/5248/06-Donik.pdf?sequence=1 (accessed 12 October 2020). 119 Ibid., 74. 120 Ibid., 76. 121 Ibid.

Notes to pages 323–30

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122 Oleksandr Ohloblyn, “Problema ukraïns'koï ekonomiky v naukovii i hromads’kii dumtsi XIX–XX v.,” Ukraïns' kyi istorychnyi zhurnal, 2018, no. 4, 199. 123 Ibid., 200. 124 Cited in Donik, “Chysel'nist' ta etnichno-konfesiinyi sklad kupetstva,” 83. Bovanenko’s article appeared in 1927, a year before Ohloblyn’s. 125 O. Pritsak, “U stolittia narodyn M. Hrushevs'koho,” Lysty do pryiateliv 14, nos 56–7 (New York, 1966): 1–19. The German historian Rainer Lindner has recently written about the business and charitable activities of the Kharytonenko family: see Lindner, Unternehmer und Stadt, 177–84. 126 I am grateful to Alex Averbuch for his helpful comments on this section of chapter 7, particularly regarding Jewish marital practices, gender, and homosexuality. 127 A.G. Rashin, Naselenie Rossii za 100 let (1811–1913): Statisticheskie ocherki (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe statisticheskoe izd., 1956), 184 –90. 128 S.A. Novosel'skii, Smertnost' i prodolzhitel' nost' zhizni v Rossii (St Petersburg: Tip. Min-va vnutrennikh del, 1916), 144. 129 Markova “Sotsial'no-demohrafichna kharakterystyka,” 505–6. 130 Rashin, Naselenie Rossii za 100 let, 192–3. 131 Ibid., 196–7. 132 Ibid., 201. 133 Markova, “Sotsial'no-demohrafichna kharakterystyka,” 505. 134 Rashin, Naselenie Rossii za 100 let, 203. 135 Markova, “Sotsial'no-demohrafichna kharakterystyka,” 506. 136 ChaeRan Y. Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia (Hanover, nh : Brandeis University Press, 2002), 53, 288 (appendix A.3). 137 Oksana Kis', Zhinka v tradytsiinii ukraïns’kii kul’turi (druha polovyna XIX– pochatok XX st.), 2nd ed. (Lviv: Instytut narodoznavstva nan Ukraïny, 2012), 167–9. 138 Markova, “Sotsial'no-demohrafichna kharakterystyka,” 507. 139 Boris Mironov, Istoriia v tsifrakh (St Petersburg: Nauka, 1991), 133. 140 The Jewish population was usually undercounted, due in part to “disorderly” record-keeping, not by imperial officials but by the Jewish communities themselves, in part as a way to avoid higher taxation and conscription duties. The unregistered deaths and increased emigration of Jewish males from Russia in the late nineteenth century also contributed to the underreporting of Jews for military service. See Eugene M. Avrutin, “The Power of Documentation: Vital Statistics and Jewish Accommodation in Tsarist Russia,” Ab Imperio 4 (2003): 274–5, 286, 291, 293.

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Notes to pages 330–4

141 It was highest among the Orthodox and lowest among Protestants and Jews. See: Markova, “Sotsial'no-demohrafichna kharakterystyka,” 504; Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce, 60. 142 Markova, “Sotsial'no-demohrafichna kharakterystyka,” 506. Cf. Mironov, Istoriia v tsifrakh, 134. 143 Rashin, Naselenie Rossii za 100 let, 205. 144 Markova, “Sotsial’no-demohrafichna kharakterystyka,” 506–7. 145 L.I. Sliusar, “Evoliutsiia shliubu v Ukraïni: XVII–pochatok XX storichchia,” Demohrafiia ta sotsial' na ekonomika 2 (16) (2011): 63. 146 Rashin, Naselenie Rossii za 100 let, 173–4 (tables 129 and 130). 147 Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce, 12, 291 (table A.8). 148 Ibid., 60. Freeze uses data presented by the famed Russian statistician Sergei Novosel'skii in his Obzor glavneishikh dannykh po demografii i santarnoi statistike Rossii (St Petersburg: Izd. K.L. Rikkera, 1916), 26–53. 149 Rashin, Naselenie Rossii za 100 let, 178 (table 137). 150 Sliusar, “Evoliutsiia shliubu v Ukraïni,” 66–7. These and subsequent marital statistics reflect the situation in Russian-ruled Ukraine overall, without reference to particular ethnic communities. 151 Rashin, Naselenie Rossii za 100 let, 180 (table 139). 152 Markova, “Sotsial'no-demohrafichna kharakterystyka,” 505. 153 Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce, 62. 154 Sliusar, “Evoliutsiia shliubu v Ukraïni,” 70. 155 Ibid., 64. 156 Until the 1860s, the Jewish divorce rate was astronomical in comparison to that of the non-Jewish population: ca. 1860, it was 1,472 times higher (sic!) among Jews than among the Orthodox population. Densely populated Kyiv province had an especially high rate of Jewish divorces (401.6 divorces per 1,000 marriages), three times the Jewish average in the empire overall. Later in the century Jewish divorce rates tended to drop, in contrast to those for Gentiles, which were rising. But even in 1897, the number of divorcées among Jewish women (0.9%) was much higher than it was among Orthodox and Polish Catholic women of marriageable age (0.1%). Another trend was the growing intervention of the Russian state in Jewish family affairs, especially at the end of the century. Often it was Jewish women who, in contravention of Jewish customs, turned to the state in efforts to overturn rabbinical rulings on divorces. See Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce, 4–5, 129, 134–7, 146, 153–4, 304 (table A.23). 157 Roman Chmelyk, Ukraïns’ka selians’ka sim’ia druhoï polovyny XIX– pochatku XX v.: Struktura i funktsiï. Avtoreferat dysertatsii na zvannia kandydata istorychnykh nauk (Kyiv, 1995), 17.

Notes to pages 334–8

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158 William G. Wagner, Marriage, Property, and Law in Late Imperial Russia (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 70, 95. 159 Ibid., 99–100. 160 Ibid., 90–2. Most women who petitioned the government for formal marital separation were from the peasant or low urban classes. 161 Sliusar, “Evoliutsiia shliubu v Ukraini,” 66. 162 Cited in L.O. Smoliar, ed., Zhinochi studiï v Ukraïni: Zhinka v istoriï ta siohodenni (Odesa: Astroprynt, 1999), 81–2. Cf. Wagner, Marriage, Property, and Law, 66–7. 163 Cited in Smoliar, ed., Zhinochi studiï v Ukraïni, 77. 164 Ibid., 78. 165 Iuliia Malits'ka, “In the Forge of Empire: Legal Order, Colonists, and Marriage in the Nineteenth-century Northern Black Sea Steppe,” in Ulrike Lindner and Dörte Lerp, eds, New Perspectives on the History of Gender and Empire: Comparative and Global Approaches (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), 66. 166 Smoliar, ed., Zhinochi studiï v Ukraïni, 80. 167 Cited in ibid., 84. 168 See William G. Wagner, “’Orthodox Domesticity’: Creating a Social Role for Women,” in Mark D. Steinberg and Heather J. Coleman, eds, Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 123. 169 Leonid Gorizontov found an anti-Catholic catechism issued in 1916 by the Kharkiv eparchy of the Russian Orthodox Church that specifically rejected Orthodox-Catholic marriages unless their progeny would be raised Orthodox. See Gorizontov, Paradoksy imperskoi politiki: Poliaki v Rossii i russkie v Pol’she (Moscow: Indrik, 1999), 92. 170 Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce, 26–7. 171 Chmelyk, Ukraïns' ka selians' ka sim' ia, 16. See: http://cheloveknauka.com/ ukrainskaya-selskaya-semya-vtoroy-poloviny-xix-nachala-xx-v-struktura-ifunktsii#ixzz5p3wtHU2t . Cf. Spil’na istoriia: Dialoh kul' tur (Lviv: zUkt s, 2013), 160: http://uamoderna.com/images/materialy_dokumenty/Posibnik/ simja.pdf (accessed 12 October 2020). 172 V. Shcherbyna, “Vplyv shliubno-simeinykh stosunkiv na simeine vykhovannia v umovakh Pivdnia Ukraïny XIX stolittia,” Khersons’kyi derzhavnyi universtytet: Zbirnyk naukovykh prats' . Pedahohichni nauky 51 (2009): 36. 173 Malits’ka, “In the Forge of Empire,” 72–4. 174 Sliusar, “Evoliutsiia shliubu v Ukraïni,” 70. 175 Maria Mayerchyk, “Inventing ‘Heterosexuality’ through Ethnographic Knowledge Production: Tradition of Premarital Sleeping Together (the Late

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178

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181 182 183

184

Notes to pages 339–41

Nineteenth and the Early Twentieth Centuries),” in Sertaç Sehlikoglu and Frank G. Karioris, eds, The Everyday Makings of Heteronormativity: CrossCultural Explorations of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality (Lanham, md : Lexington Books, 2019), 32. A succinct summary of the research done by Kis' is available at https://www. nihilist.li/2014/11/12/p-yat-mifiv-pro-stanovishhe-zhinki-v-traditsijnijukrayins-kij-kul-turi/ (accessed 12 October 2020). For a full version of her historical analysis of the status of women, see Kis', Zhinka v tradytsiinii ukraïns’kii kul’turi. Curiously, in traditional Jewish culture the roles of husbands and wives were often reversed: while men (the bookish mitnagdim, in particular) studied the Torah, women were the main breadwinners and decision-makers. Hence an image of the “feminized” or effeminate Jewish man spread among Gentiles, contrasting sharply with the modern “bourgeois” ideal of masculinity. Among traditional Jews themselves, stereotypical brash masculinity was often associated with “coarse” Gentiles. See Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce, 35, 64; Lori Hope Lefkovitz, “Passing as a Man: Narratives of Jewish Gender Performance,” Narrative 10, no. 1 (January 2002): 93, 96–7. It seems that most nineteenth-century Ukrainian ethnographers reinterpreted vechornytsi and ritual “sleeping together” as “decent” and “chaste” in order to confirm “the national-romantic canonical image” of the peasantry. See Mayerchyk, “Inventing ‘Heterosexuality,’” 34. See also Iryna Ihnatenko, “Seks ta rozmovy pro nioho v ukraïns'komu seli XIX–pochatku XX stolittia”: https://genderindetail.org.ua/season-topic/seksualnist/sex-ta-rozmovi-pro-nogo-v-ukrainskomu-seli-hih-pochatku-hh-stolittya-134390.html (accessed 12 October 2020). M.E. Kruhliak, “Homoseksualizm u Rosiis'kii imperiï na pochatku XX st.: Prychyny poiavy, formy vplyvu,” Visnyk Natsional' noho universytetu “Iurydychna akademiia Ukraïny imeni Iaroslava Mudroho,” Sotsiolohiia 3 (30) (2016): 168. Faith Hillis, Children of Rus' : Right-Bank Ukraine and the Invention of a Russian Nation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), 92, n.18. Kruhliak, “Homoseksualizm u Rosiis’kii imperiï,” 171. Ira Roldugina, “Nikolai de Raylan, russkii trans-muzhchina v Amerike (1872–1906)”: https://telegra.ph/Nikolaj-de-Rejlan-russkij-trans-muzhchina-vAmerike-1872-1906-02-11 (accessed 19 December 2021). Alexander Averbuch, “Orientalism and Homoerotic Desire in the Poetry of the Ukrainian Modernist: Ahatanhel Kryms'kyi in Lebanon,” Slavic and East European Journal 62, no. 2 (2018): 320.

Notes to pages 341–7

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185 Cited in Vira Aheieva, Zhinochyi prostir: Femistychnyi dyskurs ukraïns' koho modernizmu (Kyiv: Fakt, 2003), 56. 186 Cited in Svitlana Nebylovych, “Lesia Ukraïnka ta ïï podruha Ol’ha Kobylians’ka: Zhinocha liubov chy druzhba?” Artefact: https://artefact.org.ua/ literature/lesya-ukrayinka-ta-yiyi-podruga-olga-kobilyanska-zhinocha-lyubovchi-druzhba.html (accessed 20 October 2020). 187 ChaeRan Y. Freeze shows how the radical political groups that sprang up in the late nineteenth century across European Russia permitted young people (Jewish and Gentiles alike) to free themselves from tight parental and communal control, mix in private and public, engage in free love, and enter into interfaith marriages. See Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce, 23. 188 Iuliian Bachyns'kyi, Ukraïna irredenta, 3rd ed. (Berlin: Vyd. ukraïns'koï molodi, 1924), 34. 189 Vasyl Stefanyk, Maple Leaves and Other Stories, trans. Mary Skrypnyk (Kyiv: Dnipro, 1988), 69. 190 Alison Fleig Frank, Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 11. Ukrainians emigrated overseas from Russia as well but in much smaller numbers: by 1908, only about 10,000 had settled in Canada. See Vadim Koukouchkine, From Peasants to Labourers: Ukrainian and Belarusan Immigration from the Russian Empire to Canada (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s, 2007), 40. 191 Raymond Pearson, National Minorities in Eastern Europe: 1848–1945 (New York: St Martin’s, 1983), 96–8. 192 These exemptions and other noble privileges are listed in Frank, Oil Empire, 39. 193 Ibid., 38–9. 194 Cited in ibid., 13. 195 Paul Robert Magocsi, Galicia: A Historical Survey and Bibliographic Guide (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), 139. 196 Frank, Oil Empire, 28. 197 Keely Stauter-Halsted, The Nation in the Village: The Genesis of Peasant National Identity in Austrian Poland, 1848–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 22–3. 198 Frank, Oil Empire, 29. 199 Władysław Zawadzki, Obrazy Rusi Czerwonej (Poznań, 1869). Cited in Adam Świątek, Gente Rutheni, Natione Poloni: The Ruthenians of Polish Nationality in Habsburg Galicia (Edmonton and Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 2019), 90.

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Notes to pages 347–56

200 John-Paul Himka, “The Greek Catholic Church and Nation-Building in Galicia, 1772–1918,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 8, nos 3–4 (December 1984): 438. 201 Cited in Andriy Zayarnyuk, Framing the Ukrainian Peasantry in Habsburg Galicia, 1846-1914 (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 2013), 244. 202 Ibid., 319. 203 Ibid., 395–8. 204 Ibid., 324. 205 Ibid., 320. 206 Mykhailo Zubryts'kyi, “Emihratsiia selian do Pivnichnoï Ameryky (Dopys z Starosambirshchyny),” in idem, Zibrani tvory i materialy u triokh tomakh, vol. 3: Hazetni publikatsiï, etnohrafichni ta arkhivni materialy (Lviv: Litopys, 2019), 767. 207 Frank E. Sysyn, “Father Mykhailo Zubryts'kyi: Chronicler of the Boiko Highlands,” in Zubryts'kyi, Zibrani tvory i materialy u triokh tomakh, 3:67. 208 Zayarnyuk, Framing the Ukrainian Peasantry, 337. 209 Cited in ibid., 362–3. 210 Cited in Piotr Wawrzeniuk, “Agents of ‘True Emancipation’: Ukrainophile Ruthenian Cooperatives in Eastern Galicia, 1904–1914,” in idem, ed., Societal Change and Ideological Formation among the Rural Population of the Baltic Area, 1880–1939 (Huddinge: Södertörns högskola, 2008), 116. 211 Ibid., 104. 212 Ibid., 110. 213 Stauter-Halsted, Nation in the Village, 117. 214 Ibid., 133. 215 Zayarnyuk, Framing the Ukrainian Peasantry, 381. 216 Ibid., 363. 217 Ibid., 352. 218 Frank, Oil Empire, 4. 219 Ibid., 15. 220 Ibid., 109. 221 Ibid., 116. 222 Ibid., 124. 223 Ivan Franko, Boryslav (short stories), in idem, Zibrannia tvoriv u 50 tomakh, vol. 14 (Kyiv: Naukova dumka, 1978), 276. 224 See, e.g., Alois Woldan and Olaf Terpitz, Ivan Franko und die jüdische Frage in Galizien: Interkulturelle Begegnungen und Dynamiken im Schaffen des ukrainischen Schriftstellers (Vienna: Brill Deutschland, 2015).

Notes to pages 356–62

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225 Ivan L. Rudnytsky, “The Problem of Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Nineteenth-Century Ukrainian Political Thought,” in idem, Essays in Modern Ukrainian History, 309. 226 Yaroslav Hrytsak, “A Strange Case of Antisemitism: Ivan Franko and the Jewish Issue,” in Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz, eds, Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 235. 227 George Grabowicz, “Ivan Franko and the Literary Depiction of Jews: Parsing the Contexts,” in Woldan and Terpitz, Ivan Franko und die jüdische Frage, 74. 228 Cited in Gorizontov, Paradoksy imperskoi politiki, 105. 229 In the south (Katerynoslav, Kherson, and Taurida provinces), the minority (that is, non-Ukrainian) population included ca. 1,340,000 Russians, 477,000 Jews, 228,000 Tatars, 282,000 Germans, and 155,000 Romanians. In the southwest (Kyiv, Volhynia, and Podolia provinces), the numbers were ca. 1,190,000 Jews, more than 322,000 Poles (possibly 700,000 or more if Ukrainian-speaking Catholics are included), about 408,000 Russians, and more than 170,000 Germans. Slightly different figures are given in Volodymyr Ustymenko’s “Sotsial’na struktura natsional’nykh menshyn ta ïkh pravovyi status iak chynnyk mizhetnichnykh protyrich ta konfliktiv,” Problemy vyvchennia istoriï Ukraïns’koï revoliutsiï 1917–1921 rokiv: Zbirnyk naukovykh statei (Kyiv), 7 (2012): 201–2. 230 If one excludes the four northern districts of Chernihiv province, which were populated primarily by ethnic Russians and are not within the present-day borders of Ukraine, that figure falls to 2,473,259 people, or 10.4% of the country’s population. 231 Magocsi, Ukraine: An Illustrated History, 160. 232 For instance, of the twenty-one governors of Poltava province between 1800 and 1917, only three (14%) were from Ukraine. The situation on the RightBank was similar: of the thirty-four governors of Kyiv province, only four (11.7%) were Ukrainians and two others (an ethnic Russian and an ethnic Greek) were born in Ukraine. 233 Serhiy Bilenky, Romantic Nationalism in Eastern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 273. 234 Lazarovych and Lazarovych, “Etnohrafichna spetsyfika,” 83. 235 “Rosiiany v Ukraïni,” in Volodymyr Kibiiovych, ed., Entsyklopedia ukraïnoznavstva, vol. 7 (Paris and New York: Molode zhyttia, 1973), 2614. 236 According to the 1897 census, 30% of merchants in Ukraine were Russians, well below Jews, who at 55.9% were the majority, but far surpassing

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239

240 241 242

243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254

255 256 257 258

Notes to pages 363–72

Ukrainians, who were 6.9%. See Donik, “Chysel'nist' ta etnichno-konfesiinyi sklad kupetstva Ukraïny,” 74, 76. Nikolai Berdiaev (Berdyaev), Internatsionalizm, natsionalizm i imperialism (Moscow: Izd. G.A. Lemana i S.I. Sakharova, 1917), 10, 20. Taras Koznarsky, “Three Novels, Three Cities,” in Irena Makaryk and Virlana Tkacz, eds, Modernism in Kyiv: Jubilant Experimentation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 118, 121. Aleksei Miller, “Imperiia Romanovykh i evrei,” in idem, Imperiia Romanovykh i natsionalizm (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2006), 98, also n. 8 there. Ibid., 109 –10. Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, The Golden Age Shtetl: A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 2. But this process was very slow: by the 1870s the government had managed to appropriate only 56 of the 378 shtetls in Right-Bank Ukraine and to transfer another 40 to 50 shtetls to Russian owners. See ibid., 35. Lazarovych and Lazarovych, “Etnohrafichna spetsyfika,” 84. Ibid., 83. Miller, “Imperiia Romanovykh i evrei,” 128. Ibid., 105. John-Paul Himka, “Dimensions of the Triangle: Polish-Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Austrian Galicia,” Polin 12 (1999): 25–48. Miller, “Imperiia Romanovykh i evrei,” 138, 140. Ibid., 140. I. Lisevych, “Pol's'ka natsional'na menshyna v Naddniprians'kii Ukraïni (1864–1917 rr.),” Ukraïns' kyi istorychnyi zhurnal, 1997, no. 2, 44. A.F. Smirnov, Vosstanie 1863 goda v Litve i Belorussii (Moscow: Izd. Akademii nauk SSSr , 1963), 301. Cited in Gorizontov, Paradoksy imperskoi politiki, 102. Ibid., 110. As a result, in some districts of Podolia province the proportion of Roman Catholics among Ukrainian speakers exceeded 20%; in the province overall that proportion was 7.8% (in Volhynia, 5%; in Kyiv, 1.2%). M. Dolbilov and A. Miller, eds, Zapadnye okrainy Rossiiskoi imperii (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2006), 289. Gorizontov, Paradoksy imperskoi politiki, 106. Ibid., 108. In all nine provinces, however, Catholics were still 51% of all owners of large estates – that is, of 200 desiatynas (540 acres) or more – whereas Orthodox were 44%. See Dolbilov and Miller, Zapadnye okrainy Rossiiskoi imperii, 292.

Notes to pages 372–86 259 260 261 262

263 264

265 266 267 268

269 270 271

272 273 274 275

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Lisevych, “Pol's'ka natsional'na menshyna,” 45. Lazarovych and Lazarovych, “Etnohrafichna spetsyfika,” 84. Ibid., 77. Marek Mądzik, Mariusz Korzeniowski, Krzysztof Latawiec, and Dariusz Tarasiuk, Polacy na wschodniej Ukrainie w latach 1832–1921 (Lublin: Wyd. Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej, 2014), 28. Ibid., 118. I. Lisevych, U zatinku dvohlavoho orla: Pol' s' ka natsional' na menshyna na Naddniprians' kii Ukraïni v druhii polovyni XIX st.–na pochatku XX st. (Kyiv: Instytut istoriï Ukraïny nan Ukraïny, 1993), 18, 38. Kulikov, Pidpryiemstva i suspil’stvo, 173. Lisevych, U zatinku dvohlavoho orla, 38. Ibid. Also Mądzik et al., Polacy na wschodniej Ukrainie, 91–2. For instance, for many years Stanisław Antoni Charmański served as head engineer in the building department of Katerynoslav province. Among other things, he designed the home of a local scholarly society, a district court, and a reconstructed Catholic church. His brother Zdzisław Charmański, an architect, lived in Kharkiv, where he designed parts of the exterior of Kharkiv Drama Theater. Lisevych, U zatinku dvohlavoho orla, 37. Ibid. Statistics from Paul Robert Magocsi, Ukraine: An Illustrated History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 165; also from Lazarovych and Lazarovych, “Etnohrafichna spetsyfika,” 79. Lazarovych and Lazarovych, “Etnohrafichna spetsyfika,” 85–6. Valerii Smolii, ed., Hreky na ukraïns’kykh terenakh: Narysy z etnichnoï istoriï. Dokumenty, materialy, karty (Kyiv: Lybid’, 2000), 75. Valeri Tomozov and Oleksii Ias', Hrets' ki storinky ukraïns' koï istoriï: Populiarnyi vyklad (Kyiv: Lybid’, 2013), 150 –1. Smolii, ed. Hreky na ukraïns' kykh terenakh, 76.

chaPter eight 1 I thank Maxim Tarnawsky for his helpful comments on this part of chapter 8, particularly his insights regarding Ivan Nechui-Levyts'kyi, Mykhailo Kotsiubyns’kyi, and the fin-de-siècle and modernism in Ukrainian literature. 2 On gender violence in Ukrainian literature, see Oxana Shchur: https:// genderindetail.org.ua/season-topic/genderne-nasilstvo/nasilstvo-yakezavedeno-ne-pomichati-v-ukrainskiy-literaturi-134073.html (accessed 11 January 2020).

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Notes to pages 387–95

3 Cited in the entry on Nechui-Levyts'kyi by Bohdan Kravtsiv (Krawciw) and Oleksa Horbach (Horbatsch) in the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine: http:// www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages%5CN% 5CE%5CNechui6LevytskyIvan.htm (accessed 11 January 2020). Cf. Maxim Tarnawsky, The All-Encompassing Eye of Ukraine: Ivan Nechui-Levyts' kyi’s Realist Prose (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 52–3. 4 Tarnawsky, The All-Encompassing Eye of Ukraine, 14, 71–4. 5 Solomiia Pavlychko, Dyskurs modernizmu v ukraïns' kii literaturi (Kyiv: Lybid’, 1999), 46. 6 Cited in ibid., 30. 7 Ibid., 68. 8 George Luckyj, ed., in Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, trans. Marco Carynnyk (Littleton, co ; Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1981), 7. 9 Iaroslav Polishchuk, I kata, i heroia vin liubyv… Mykhailo Kotsiubyns’kyi. Literaturnyi portret (Kyiv: Akademiia, 2010), 234–40 10 Cited in Pavlychko, Dyskurs modernizmu, 64. 11 Ibid., 103–4. 12 Ibid., 104. 13 Bohdan Rubchak, “The Music of Satan and the Bedeviled World: An Essay on Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky,” in Kotsiubynsky, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, 90–1. 14 Pavlychko, Dyskurs modernizmu v ukraïns' kii literaturi, 42. 15 Cited in Myroslav Popovych, Narys istoriï kul' tury Ukraïny, 510. 16 Spirit of Flame: A Collection of the Works of Lesya Ukrainka, trans. Percival Cundy (New York: Bookman Associates, 1950), 237. 17 See the 1930 study by Ievhen Nenadkevych, “Ukraïns' ka versiia svitovoï temy pro don Zhuana v istorychno-literaturnii perspektyvi”: https://www.lukrainka.name/uk/Studies/DonJuan/JuanImage.html (accessed 25 August 2020) 18 Marianne Dekoven, ““Modernism and Gender,” in Michael Levenson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 175. 19 Ibid., 174 20 Ibid., 175. 21 Pavlychko, Dyskurs modernizmu v ukraïns' kii literaturi, 83. 22 Marko Pavlyshyn, Ol’ha Kobylians’ka: Prochytannia (Kharkiv: Akta, 2008), 61–6. 23 Sergei Iefremov, “V poiskakh novoi krasoty,” Kievskaia starina, no. 10 (1902), 104. 24 Ibid., no. 11, 235, 236, 245, 263.

Notes to pages 396–404

531

25 Franko’s letter of criticism as cited in Pavlychko, Dyskurs modernizmu v ukraïns’kii literaturi, 65–7. 26 Vira Aheieva, Zhinochyi prostir: Femistychnyi dyskurs ukraïns' koho modernizmu (Kyiv: Fakt, 2003), 12. 27 Ibid., 307. 28 Pavlychko, Dyskurs modernizmu v ukraïns' kii literaturi, 87. 29 Trevor Erlacher, “Ukrains’ka khata and the Political Implications of AntiUkrainophilism,” unpublished paper presented at the 2019 aSeeS Convention in San Francisco, 9. 30 Maxim Tarnawsky, “Mykola Ievshan: Modernist Critic?” Journal of Ukrainian Studies 25 (Summer 2000): 1–2, 34. 31 Mykola Ievshan, “Borot'ba generatsii i ukraïns'ka literatura,” in idem, Krytyka. Literaturoznavstvo. Estetyka (Kyiv: Osnovy, 1998), 53. 32 Mykola Ievshan, “‘Suprema Lex’: Slovo pro kul'turu ukraïns'koho slova,” in ibid., 60. 33 Cited in Pavlychko, Dyskurs modernizmu v ukraïns' kii literaturi, 130–1. 34 Erlacher, “Ukrains’ka khata and the Political Implications of AntiUkrainophilism,” 10. 35 Danylo Husar Struk’s entry on Vynnychenko in the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine: http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath= pages%5CV%5CY%5CVynnychenkoVolodymyr.htm (accessed 18 November 2019). 36 Cited in Erlacher, “Ukrains’ka khata and the Political Implications of AntiUkrainophilism,” 4. 37 Ibid. 38 Danylo Husar Struk, “Vynnychenkova moral'na laboratoriia,” Suchasnist’ (Munich), 1980, nos 7–8, 104. 39 Vira Aheieva, “Iak morfii, kokaïn i hashysh zminiuvaly heroïv ukraïns'koï literatury”: https://www.bbc.com/ukrainian/blogs-49840965 (accessed 22 November 2019). 40 Erlacher, “Ukrains’ka khata and the Political Implications of AntiUkrainophilism,” 2. 41 Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 4. 42 Bohdan Krawchenko, Social Change and National Consciousness in Twentieth-Century Ukraine (Houndmills, etc.: Macmillan, 1985), 23. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid., 24. 45 http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages%5 CP%5CA%5CParochialschools.htm (accessed 26 August 2020). Cf. Iuliia

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46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

55 56 57 58 59 60

61 62

63 64 65 66 67 68

Notes to pages 404–18

Il’chuk, “Iak ukraïns’kykh selian vchyly chytaty: Chytats’ki eksperymenty Kh.D. Alchevs’koï, B.D. Hrinchenka i S.Ia. An-s’koho na mezhi XIX–XX stolit’,” Ukraina moderna 22 (2015): 167. Cited in Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, 47. Cited in Krawchenko, Social Change and National Consciousness, 24–5. Tamara Hundorova, “Shevchenko i ioho chytachi na tli retseptyvnoï istoriï ukraïns’koï literatury,” Ukraina moderna 22 (2015): 55. Cited in ibid., 58. Cited in ibid., 68. Ibid., 62. Ibid., 64. Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, 361. S.A. An-skii (An-sky), Narod i kniga: Opyt kharakteristiki narodnogo chitatelia (Moscow, 1913): http://az.lib.ru/a/anskij_s_a/text_2_literatura_intelligentzii-oldorfo.shtml (accessed 29 November 2019). Istoriia knigi web portal http://maxbooks.ru/sbooks/barenb58.htm (accessed 27 November 2019). Il’chuk, “Iak ukraïns'kykh selian vchyly chytaty,” 168. Ibid., 170. Ibid., 174. Cited in Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, 105. S.A. An-skii (An-sky), Narod i kniga: Opyt kharakteristiki narodnogo chitatelia (Moscow: L.A. Stoliar, 1913): http://az.lib.ru/a/anskij_s_a/text_4_narod_o_ knige-oldorfo.shtml (accessed 29 November 2019). Ibid. Tetiana Karoieva, “Pidpryiemtsi v zabezpechenni ukraïnomovnoho chytannia v Rosiis'kii imperiï, 1881–1916,” Ukraïna moderna 22 (2015): 93–115. My discussion of Ukrainian publications in the Russian Empire is based largely on data in this article. Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, 31. Karoieva, “Pidpryiemtsi v zabezpechenni ukraïnomovnoho chytannia v Rosiis'kii imperiï, 1881–1916,” 99. Ibid., 100. Olga Andriewsky, “The Politics of National Identity: The Ukrainian Question in Russia, 1904–12” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1991), 122–3. Polishchuk, I kata, i heroia vin liubyv… Mykhailo Kotsiubyns’kyi, 97. Ukrainians (which the 1897 census defined as speakers of Ukrainian) comprised only 18% of people with secondary and higher education in Ukraine, who numbered 258,477 in total; most better educated people spoke Russian, Polish, and/or Yiddish and rarely, if ever, read Ukrainian publications.

Notes to pages 419–28

533

69 Karoieva, “Pidpryiemtsi v zabezpechenni ukraïnomovnoho chytannia,” 106–7. 70 Ibid., 107. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid., 111. 73 Anne Sirka, The Nationality Question in Austrian Education: The Case of Ukrainians in Galicia, 1867–1914 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1980), 80. 74 Alla Serediak, “Halyts’kyi selianyn i ukraïns'ka knyzhka naprykintsi XIX– pochatku XX st.: Na prykladi vydan’ Tovarystva ‘Prosvita,’” Ukraïna moderna 22 (2015): 117. 75 Cited in Roman Holyk, “Chytannia dlia narodu: Vydannia ‘Prosvity,’ stereotypy masovoï kul'tury i mental'nist' halychan pershykh desiatelit XX st.,” Ukraïna: Kul’turna spadshchyna, natsional’na svidomist’, derzhavnist’ 19 (2010): 218. 76 Cited in Serediak, “Halyts'kyi selianyn i ukraïns'ka knyzhka,” 121. 77 Holyk, “Chytannia dlia narodu: Vydannia ‘Prosvity,’” 228–9. 78 Cited in ibid., 229. 79 Serediak, “Halyts'kyi selianyn i ukraïns'ka knyzhka,” 123. 80 Ibid., 133. 81 Ibid., 131. 82 Frank Sysyn, “The Reading Revolution in the Ukrainian Countryside: Mshanets, 1870–1914,” Ukraïna moderna 22 (2015): 139–66. 83 Raymond Pearson, National Minorities in Eastern Europe: 1848–1945 (New York: Macmillan, 1983), 97–8. 84 Sysyn, “The Reading Revolution in the Ukrainian Countryside,” 161. 85 Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, 67. 86 Sergei Zhuk, Russia’s Lost Reformation: Peasants, Millennialism, and Radical Sects in Southern Russia and Ukraine, 1830–1917 (Washington, dc : Woodrow Wilson Center, 2004), 3. However, in contrast to Zhuk, other historians avoid presenting Orthodoxy as inept and reactionary and are skeptical about the numerical strength and popular appeal of Protestants in Russian Ukraine. See Heather J. Coleman, Russian Baptists and Spiritual Revolution, 1905–1929 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 13–27. In a review of Zhuk’s monograph in the Journal of Modern History 78, no. 3 (September 2006): 778, Nadieszda Kizenko emphasizes that there was “a burst of energy and creativity within Orthodoxy itself.” 87 Zhuk, Russia’s Lost Reformation, 7. 88 Cited in ibid., 215. 89 Cited in ibid., 214. 90 Ibid., 226.

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Notes to pages 428–36

91 Viktoriia Konstantinova, Sotsiokul' turni aspekty urbanizatsiinykh protsesiv na pivdni Ukraïny (druha polovyna XIX–pochatok XX stolittia) (Zaporizhzhia: aa Tandem, 2011), 50–2. Cf. Goroda Rossii v 1904 godu, 290–5. 92 Cited in Konstantinova, Sotsiokul' turni aspekty urbanizatsiinykh protsesiv, 61. 93 O.M. Ihnatusha, “Reaktsiia Rosiis'koï pravoslavnoï tserkvy na modernizatsiinyi vyklyk novoievropeis'koho suspil’stva: Ukraïns’kyi aspect (XIX–pochatok XX st.),” Naukovi pratsi Istorychnoho fakul’tetu Zaporiz' koho derzhavnoho universtytetu 15 (2002): 91, 94. 94 Pavlo Zhytets'kyi as cited in Serhiy Bilenky, ed., Fashioning Modern Ukraine: Selected Writings of Mykola Kostomarov, Volodymyr Antonovych, and Mykhailo Drahomanov (Toronto and Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 2013), xxxi. 95 Cited in Solomiia Pavlychko, Dyskurs modernizmu v ukraïns' kii literaturi (Kyiv: Lybid’, 1999), 54. 96 In the 1870s the number of Ukrainian publications fluctuated between 32 in 1874 and 17 in 1876. See Johannes Remy, Brothers or Enemies: The Ukrainian National Movement and Russia from the 1840s to the 1870s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 169. 97 Remy, Brothers or Enemies, 222. 98 Ibid., 222–3. 99 Cited in Fabian Baumann, “Niche Nationalism: Kiev’s Ukrainophile Milieu under the Ems Ukaz,” unpublished paper presented at the 2019 aSeeS Convention in San Francisco, 4. 100 Bauman’s Dynasty Divided: A Family History of Russian and Ukrainian Nationalism, focusing on the Shul’hyn/Shul’gin family, is forthcoming from Cornell University Press in 2023. 101 Cited in idem, “Niche Nationalism,” 4. 102 Tarnawsky, The All-Encompassing Eye of Ukraine, 21. 103 Heather Coleman has devoted several articles to this topic, including “History, Faith, and Regional Identity in Nineteenth-Century Kyiv: Father Petro Lebedyntsev as Priest and Scholar,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 34, nos. 1–4 (2015–16): 34–72; and “Shcho take Kyïvs'ke Pravoslav’ia? Parafiial'nyi klir i mistseva relihiina praktyka Kyïvs'koiï ieparkhiï v XIX st.,” Kyïvs' ka akademiia 16 (2015): 179–87. 104 Ricarda Vulpius, “Ukrainische Nation und zwei Konfessionen: Der Klerus und die ukrainische Frage 1861–1921,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 49, no. 2 (2001): 245. 105 Ibid., 248–50.

Notes to pages 436–51

535

106 Andrii Starodub, “Preosviashchennyi Parfenii (Pamfil Andriiovych Levyts'kyi) i zhurnal ‘Kievskaia starina,’” Kyïvs' ka starovyna 1 (2012): 108. 107 Idem, “Vydannia ukraïns'koho perekladu Ievanheliia (1905–1912) (za materialamy arkhivu Moskovs'koï synodal'noï drukarni),” Problemy istoriï Ukraïny XIX–pochatku XX st., 6 (Kyiv, 2003), 338. 108 Vulpius, “Ukrainische Nation und zwei Konfessionen, ” 253–4. 109 Fedor Petrov, “Organy samoupravleniia v sisteme samoderzhavnoi Rossii: Zemstvo v 1864–1879 gg.,” in Velikie reformy v Rossii 1856–1874: Sbornik statei istorikov Rossii i SShA (Moscow: Izd. Moskovskogo universiteta, 1992), 203–31. 110 See the entry “zemstvo” in the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine: http://www. encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages%5CZ%5CE%5 CZemstvo.htm (accessed 24 December 2019). 111 See the entry on “zemstvo schools” in the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine: http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages%5CZ%5 CE%5CZemstvoschools.htm (accessed 24 December 2019). 112 Petrov, “Organy samoupravleniia v sisteme samoderzhavnoi Rossii,” 203–31: https://uchebnikfree.com/russia-history/petrov-organyi-samoupravleniyasisteme-5960.html (accessed 27 August 2020). 113 Cited in Feodor Petrov, “Crowning the Edifice: The Zemstvo, Local SelfGovernment, and the Constitutional Movement, 1864–1881,” in Ben Eklof, John Bushnell, and Larisa Zakharova, eds, Russia’s Great Reforms, 1855– 1881 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 206. 114 Ibid. 115 Cited in S.M. Naidis, “I.I. Petrunkevich: V Rossii i emigratsii,” Novyi istoricheskii vestnik 1 (2003): http://www.nivestnik.ru/2003_1/5.shtml (accessed 27 August 2020). 116 Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 645. 117 Cited in ibid., 646. 118 Cited by Ivan L. Rudnytsky, “Drahomanov as a Political Theorist,” in his Essays in Modern Ukrainian History (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1987), 215. 119 Omeljan Pritsak and John Reshetar, “The Ukraine and the Dialectics of Nation-Building,” Slavic Review 22, no. 2 (June 1963): 252. 120 Ibid., 253. 121 Cited in Ivan L. Rudnytsky, “Drahomanov as a Political Theorist,” 224. 122 Cited in ibid., 205.

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Notes to pages 453–66

123 Cited in ibid., 240. 124 Borys Hrinchenko, “Letters from Dnieper Ukraine,” (excerpt) in Ralph Lindheim and George Luckyj, eds, Towards an Intellectual History of Ukraine: An Anthology of Ukrainian Thought from 1710 to 1995 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 188–90. 125 Iaroslav Hrytsak, Narys istoriï Ukraïny: Formuvannia modernoï ukraïns' koï natsiï XIX–XX st. (Kyiv: Heneza, 1996), 85. 126 See the entry on rUP in the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine: http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages%5 CR%5CE%5CRevolutionaryUkrainianparty.htm (accessed 8 January 2020). 127 Mykola Mikhnovsky, “An Independent Ukraine,” trans. Zenon Wasyliw, in Lindheim and Luckyj, Towards an Intellectual History of Ukraine, 214–5. 128 “Revolution of 1905,” in the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine: http://www. encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages%5CR%5CE%5 CRevolutionof1905.htm (accessed 21 January 2020). 129 Robert Weinberg, “Workers, Pogroms, and the 1905 Revolution in Odesa,” Russian Review 46, no. 1 (January 1987): 58. 130 Ibid., 59. 131 Ibid., 53. 132 Andriewsky, “The Politics of National Identity,” 92. 133 “Ukrainian Social Democratic Spilka” in the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine: http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath= pages%5CU%5CK%5CUkrainianSocialDemocraticSpilka.htm (accessed 22 January 2020). 134 Susan Purves McCaffrey, “Origins of Labor Policy in the Russian Coal and Steel Industry, 1874–1900,” Journal of Economic History 47 (December 1987): 952. 135 Hiroaki Kuromiya, Freedom and Terror in the Donbas: A Ukrainian-Russian Borderland, 1870s–1990s (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 50. 136 Volodymyr Kulikov, Pidpryiemstva i suspil’stvo v zavods' kykh i shakhtars' kykh poselenniakh Donbasu ta Prydniprov’ia v 1870–1917 rr. (Kharkiv: KhNU imeni V.N. Karazina, 2019), 285. 137 Mariya Melentyeva, “Liberals and the Ukrainian Question in Imperial Russia, 1905–1917,” Revolutionary Russia 33 (2020): 3. 138 Andriewsky, “The Politics of National Identity,” 125. 139 Ibid., 99. 140 Ibid., 139. 141 Ibid., 156.

Notes to pages 466–79 142 143 144 145 146 147 148

149 150 151 152

153 154 155

156 157

158 159 160

161 162 163

537

Ibid., 157. Ibid., 201. Cited in ibid., 207. Faith Hillis, Children of Rus' : Right-Bank Ukraine and the Invention of a Russian Nation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), 249. Ibid., 253. Cited in Hrytsak, Narys istoriï Ukraïny, 90. “Society of Ukrainian Progressives,” in the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine: http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages %5CS%5CO%5CSocietyofUkrainianProgressives.htm (accessed 25 January 2020). Melentyeva, “Liberals and the Ukrainian Question in Imperial Russia,” 3. Cited in Andriewsky, “The Politics of National Identity,” 416. Cited ibid., 419. Volodymyr Vynnychenko, “A Zealous Friend,” trans. Theodor S. Prokopov, in idem, Selected Short Stories (Wakefield, nh : Longwood Academic, 1991), 86–94. Cited in Vasyl’ Ulianovs'kyi, “Syn Ukrainy,” in Volodymyr Antonovych, Moia spovid’: Vybrani istorychni ta publitsystychni tvory (Kyiv: Lybid’, 1995), 32–3. Cited in Andriewsky, “The Politics of National Identity,” 250. “Kholm region,” in the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine: http://www. encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages%5CK%5CH%5CKholmregion.htm (accessed 12 March 2020). Dominic Lieven, The End of Tsarist Russia: The March to World War I and Revolution (New York: Viking, 2015), 1. Cited in Mark von Hagen, War in a European Borderland: Occupations and Occupation Plans in Galicia and Ukraine, 1914–1918 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007), 20. Ibid., 37. Ibid., 21. Mark von Hagen, “The Russian Empire,” in Karen Barkey and Mark von Hagen, eds, After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building. The Soviet Union and the Russian, Ottoman, and Habsburg Empires (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 68. Bilenky, ed., Fashioning Modern Ukraine, xiii–xlvi. Ivan L. Rudnytsky, “Intellectual Origins of Modern Ukraine,” in idem, Essays in Modern Ukrainian History, 139. Mykola Kovalevs’kyi, Pry dzherelakh borot' by (Innsbruck, 1960), 162, as cited in Ivan L. Rudnytsky, “The Ukrainian National Movement on the Eve of the First World War,” in idem, Essays in Modern Ukrainian History, 375.

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Notes to pages 480–5

164 Krawchenko, Social Change and National Consciousness, 39. 165 Rudnytsky, “The Fourth Universal and Its Ideological Antecedents,” 395. 166 Mykhailo Hrushevs'kyi, Iakoï my khochemo avtonomiï i federatsiï (Kyiv, 1917), as cited in Rudnytsky, “The Fourth Universal and Its Ideological Antecedents,” 390. 167 Serhii Plokhy, Unmaking Imperial Russia: Mykhailo Hrushevs' kyi and the Writing of Ukrainian History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005).

Bibliographic Essay

Study of the history of Ukraine after the long nineteenth century has a diverse bibliography that is growing constantly and has increased markedly in the first decades of the twenty-first century. This essay includes the major publications that informed sections of this book’s preface and eight chapters. Most of these items also appear as references at places in the text where they are cited or referred to specifically. Together these publications form a distinguished body of scholarship for further study of Ukraine, its history, and its multiethnic society.

Preface: what can Ukraine teach US aboUt the modern world? Fortunately, a number of English-language surveys of Ukrainian history from the earliest times to the present, by Ukrainian and Western historians, are readily available to readers today. These include: Dmytro Doroshenko, A Survey of Ukrainian History (Winnipeg: Humeniuk Foundation, 1975); Mykhailo Hrushevsky, A History of the Ukraine (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941; Hamden, ct: Archon Books, 1970); idem, History of Ukraine-Rus' , 10 vols in 12 books (Edmonton and Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1997–2021); Iaroslav Hrytsak, Narys istoriï Ukraïny: Formuvannia modernoï ukraïns' koï natsiï XIX–XX st. (Kyiv: Heneza, 1996); Paul Kubicek, The History of Ukraine (Westport, ct: Greenwood, 2008); Paul Robert Magocsi, A History of Ukraine: The Land and Its Peoples, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010); idem, Ukraine: An Illustrated History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007); Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (New York: Basic Books, 2015); Anna Reid, Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine (London: Basic Books, 1997); Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History, 4th ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto

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Bibliographic Essay

Press, 2009); Roman Szporluk, Ukraine: A Brief History, 2nd ed. (Detroit: Ukrainian Festival Committee, 1982); Andrew Wilson, The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation, 3rd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Serhy Yekelchyk, Ukraine: Birth of a Modern Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). In languages other than English and Ukrainian, important surveys include: Frank Golczewski, ed., Geschichte der Ukraine (Göttingen: Brill Deutschland, 1993); Andreas Kappeler, Kleine Geschichte der Ukraine, 3rd ed. (Munich: Beck, 2009); Luc Pauwels and Tina Pauwels, Histoire d’Ukraine (Fouesnant: Yoran Embanner, 2015); Władysław Serczyk, Historia Ukrainy, 4th ed. (Wroclaw: Zaklad Narodowy im. Ossolinskich, 2009). There are as yet no survey histories in English specifically of modern Ukraine, although Andrew Wilson and Serhy Yekelchyk provide much information on the nineteenth century and the twentieth century in particular in their general histories. Closest to providing a history of modern Ukraine in English are Ivan Lysiak (L.) Rudnytsky’s brilliant Essays in Modern Ukrainian History (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1987), which cover topics ranging from the historical ideology of patriotic Ukrainian nobles of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to the political thought of Soviet dissidents. Timothy Snyder presented the history of modern Ukraine in a transnational context in his influential The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).George Liber focused on Ukraine’s history during two world wars in his Total Wars and the Making of Modern Ukraine, 1914–1954 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016). A few separate studies of modern historical thought and historiography have dealt with Ukraine, among them: Stephen Velychenko, National History as Cultural Process: A Survey of the Interpretations of Ukraine’s Past in Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian Historical Writing from the Earliest Times to 1914 (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1992); idem, Shaping Identity in Eastern Europe and Russia: Soviet-Russian and Polish Accounts of Ukrainian History, 1914–1991 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993); Mark von Hagen, “Does Ukraine Have a History?” Slavic Review 54, no. 3 (Autumn 1995): 658–73; Serhy Yekelchyk, “The Grand Narrative and Its Discontents: Ukraine in Russian History Textbooks and Ukrainian Students’ Minds, 1830s–1900s,” in Andreas Kappeler et al., eds, Culture, Nation, and Identity: The Ukrainian-Russian Encounter (1600–1945) (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 2003), 229–55; and Serhii Plokhy, Ukraine and Russia: Representations of the Past (Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2008), which focuses on the role of history and historians in shaping modern identities in Ukraine and Russia.

Bibliographic Essay

541

cha Pter 1: between two emPireS Enlightened absolutism is a topic that has long attracted the study of European historians. Classical studies include John G. Gagliardo, Enlightened Despotism (Arlington Heights, il: Harlan Davidson, 1967) and Leonard Krieger, An Essay on the Theory of Enlightened Despotism (Chicago, 1975). A revisionist work, Enlightened Absolutism: Reform and Reformers in Later Eighteenth-Century Europe, ed. H.M. Scott (New York: Red Globe, 1990), includes essays on Maria Theresa and Joseph II of Austria (H.M Scott and R.J.W. Evans), Frederick the Great of Prussia (Tim Blanning), and Catherine the Great of Russia (Isabel de Madariaga), among others. The many biographies of the enlightened “despots” include Tim Blanning’s acclaimed Frederick the Great: King of Prussia (New York: Random House, 2016), and his Joseph II and Enlightened Despotism (London: Longman, 1970); also Christine L. Mueller’s “Enlightened Absolutism,” Austrian History Yearbook 25 (1994): 159–83 (covers recent historiography on the topic); Isabel de Madariaga’s excellent academic study of Catherine II and her epoch (including her policy toward Ukraine), in Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981); Russia’s imperial administration and Catherine’s policies are also closely examined in John P. LeDonne’s Ruling Russia: Politics and Administration in the Age of Absolutism, 1762–1796 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984; repr. 2014). There is also a popular biography of Catherine’s infamous favorite, Prince Grigorii Potemkin: Simon Sebag Montefiore, Prince of Princes: The Life of Potemkin (London: Thomas Dunne Books, 2001). Richard S. Wortman offers an insightful analysis of rituals and symbolism behind Catherine’s “enlightened” rule in his Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy from Peter the Great to the Abdication of Nicholas II (Princeton, nj, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006). Larry Wolff’s excellent monograph Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994) shows how west European “enlighteners” imagined Europe’s “east” and in the process manufactured the concept of Eastern Europe. Wolff has also written extensively on the “invention” of Galicia by the Habsburg authorities following annexation of former palatinates of Poland-Lithuania in 1772. See his The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010); “Inventing Galicia: Messianic Josephinism and the Recasting of Partitioned Poland,” Slavic Review 63, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 818–40; and “‘Kennst du das Land?’ The Uncertainty of Galicia in the Age of Metternich and Fredro,” Slavic Review 67, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 277–300. On Russian imperial colonization of the southern Ukraine, see John P.

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LeDonne, Forging a Unitary State: Russia’s Management of the Eurasian Space, 1650–1850 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020). The rise of modern bureaucracies in the Austrian and Russian empires and their effect on Ukrainian-inhabited lands have been studied in a growing number of publications. Prominent recent works include: John Deak, Forging a Multinational State: State Making in Imperial Austria from the Enlightenment to the First World War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015); Iryna Vushko, The Politics of Cultural Retreat: Imperial Bureaucracy in Austrian Galicia, 1772–1867 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015); Waltraud Heindl, Gehorsame Rebellen: Bürokratie und Beamte in Österreich, vol. 1: 1780 bis 1848 (Vienna: Böhlau, 2013); idem, Josephinische Mandarine Bürokratie und Beamte in Österreich, vol. 2: 1848 bis 1914 (Vienna: Böhlau, 2013). On imperial Russia and Russian-ruled Ukraine, see: Frederick Starr, Decentralization and Self-Government in Russia, 1830–1870 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972); Walter M. Pintner, “The Social Characteristics of the Early Nineteenth-Century Russian Bureaucracy,” Slavic Review 29, no. 3 (September 1970): 429–43; Marc Raeff, “Bureaucratic Phenomena of Imperial Russia, 1700–1905,” American Historical Review 84, no. 2 (1 April 1979): 399–411; Stephen Velychenko, “The Bureaucracy, Police, and Army in TwentiethCentury Ukraine: A Comparative Quantitative Study,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 23, nos. 3–4 (1999): 63–103; idem, “Identities, Loyalties and Service in Imperial Russia: Who Administered the Borderlands?” Russian Review 54, no. 1 (January 1995): 188–208. There is also the fundamental German-language study of Russian imperial bureaucracy by Hans-Joachim Torke, “Das Russische Beamtentum in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts,” Forschungen zur osteuropäischen Geschichte 13 (1967): 7–345, as well as two Russian-language works: Boris Mironov’s comprehensive social history of Russia, Sotsial’naia istoriia Rossii, 2 vols, 3rd ed. (St Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2003), and Liubov’ Pisar’kova’s “Mnogo li chinovnikov bylo v Rossii?” Otechestvennye zapiski 2, no. 17 (2004): http://www.strana-oz.ru/2004/2/mnogo-li-chinovnikov-bylo-vrossii (accessed 15 October 2020).

chaPter 2: from enlightenment to romantici Sm Many Ukrainian nobles, aristocrats of Cossack descent, and commoners helped build the Russian Empire, serving as statesmen, military officers, civil servants, church dignitaries, and secular intellectuals. The best English-language study of Ukrainians’ contribution to Russia’s politics and culture is David Saunders, The Ukrainian Impact on Russian Culture, 1750–1850 (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1985). Ukrainians’ role in building the Russian

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Empire in the eighteenth century is addressed by Liah Greenfeld in her comparative study of nationalisms in Europe: Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), especially chap. 3. Stephen Velychenko looks at the contributions of Scots and Ukrainians to building the British and Russian empires, respectively, in “Empire Loyalism and Minority Nationalism in Great Britain and Imperial Russia, 1707–1914: Imperial Institutions, Law, and Nationality in Scotland and Ukraine,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 39, no. 3 (July 1997): 413–41. The emergence of modern nationalism has been hotly debated by historians, social scientists, and anthropologists. In my work I have relied particularly on the concepts and theories of nationalism appearing in the following publications: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 2d ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009); Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); idem, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). On the rise of nationalism in eastern and central Europe, including Ukraine, the seminal work is Miroslav Hroch’s Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); also Paul Robert Magocsi, “The Ukrainian National Revival: A New Analytical Framework,” in idem, Roots of Ukrainian Nationalism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 38–54; Andrzej Walicki, A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 1979); idem, The Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Nationhood: Polish Political Thought from Noble Republicanism to Tadeusz Kosciuszko (Notre Dame, in: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989); idem, Philosophy and Romantic Nationalism: The Case of Poland (Notre Dame, in: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994). The crucial period during which the enlightened rationalism and noble patriotism of the generation that stood behind Istoriia Rusov transitioned to the romantic nationalists of the 1830s and 1840s is covered in the following: Zenon Kohut, Russian Centralism and Ukrainian Autonomy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988); idem, Making Ukraine: Studies on Political Culture, Historical Narrative, and Identity (Edmonton and Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 2011); idem, “The Question of Russo-Ukrainian Unity and Ukrainian Distinctiveness in Early Modern Ukrainian Thought and Culture,” in Andreas Kappeler, Zenon E. Kohut, Frank E. Sysyn, and Mark von Hagen, eds, Culture, Nation, and Identity: The Ukrainian-Russian Encounter

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(1600–1945) (Edmonton and Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 2003), 57–86; Oleksander Ohloblyn, Liudy staroï Ukraïny (Munich: Dniprova khvylia, 1959); idem, Liudy staroï Ukraïny ta inshi pratsi (Ostroh and New York, 2000); Serhii Plokhy, “Ukraine or Little Russia? Revisiting an Early Nineteenth-Century Debate,” Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes 48, nos. 3–4 (September–December 2006): 335–53; idem, The Cossack Myth: History and Nationhood in the Age of Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). The role of Kharkiv, its university, and Sloboda Ukraine in the early stages of Ukrainian Romanticism has been explored by both historians and literary scholars: George G. Grabowicz, “Between Subversion and Self-assertion: The Role of Kotliarevshchyna in Russian-Ukrainian Relations,” in Andreas Kappeler et al. eds, Culture, Nation, and Identity: The Ukrainian-Russian Encounter (1600–1945), 215–28; Taras Koznarsky, “Kharkiv Literary Almanacs of the 1830s: Shaping Ukrainian Cultural Identity” (PhD. diss., Harvard University, 2001); Volodymyr Kravchenko, “Provintsiini poshuky kolektyvnoï identychnosti: Vypadok Slobids'koï Ukraïny,” in Vadym Adadurov and Volodymyr Sklokin, eds, Impers' ki identychnosti v ukraïns' kii istoriï XVIII–pershoï polovyny XIX st. (Lviv: Ukraïns'kyi katolyts'kyi universytet, 2020), 115–71; idem, Ukraïna, imperiia, Rosiia: Vybrani statti z modernoï istoriï ta istoriohrafiï (Kyiv: Krytyka, 2011); Ludwik Janowski, Uniwersytet Charkowski w początkach swego istnienia (1805–1820), repr. ed. (Kharkiv: Maidan, 2004); Volodymyr Sklokin, Rosiis' ka imperiia i Slobids' ka Ukraïna u druhii polovyni XVIII st.: Prosvichenyi absoliutyzm, impers' ka intehratsiia, lokal' ne suspil' stvo (Lviv: Ukraïns' kyi katolyts' kyi universytet, 2019). On the Russian Decembrists in the 1820s and their connection to Ukraine, see: Natan Eidelman, Conspiracy against the Tsar (Moscow: Progress, 1985); Susanna Rabow-Edling, “The Decembrists and the Concept of a Civic Nation,” Nationalities Papers 35, no. 2 (May 2007): 369–91; Iurii Latysh, Dekabrysty v Ukraïni: Istoriohrafichni studiï (Kyiv: Instytut istoriï Ukraïny nan Ukraïny, 2014). The Polish November Uprising of 1830–31 and its incidents in RightBank Ukraine are most fully explored in: Stefan Kieniewicz, Andrzej Zahorski, and Władysław Zajewski, Trzy powstania narodowe: Kościuszkowskie, listopadowe, styczniowe (Warsaw: Książka i Wiedza, 1992); Piotr Wandycz, The Lands of Partitioned Poland, 1795–1918 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011). There is also a recent collection of essays on the uprising by leading Polish and Ukrainian historians: Ihor Kryvosheia and Norbert Morawiec, eds, Pol's' ke natsionalne povstannia 1830–1831 rr. na Pravoberezhnii Ukraïni: Vid mifiv do faktiv (Kyiv: knt, 2017).

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cha Pter 3: the age of romantic nationaliSm On the Polish community in Right-Bank Ukraine that historically consisted primarily of nobles and former nobles (those deprived of their status after the November uprising of 1830–31), outside Polish historiography the highest authority is French historian Daniel Beauvois, who has devoted several monographs to the region’s complex interethnic relations. See: Daniel Beauvois, Le Noble, le Serf et le Révizor: La noblesse polonaise entre le tsarisme et les masses ukrainiennes (1831–1863) (Paris: Editions des Archives contemporaines, 1985), English translation: The Noble, the Serf and the Revizor: The Polish Nobility Between Tsarist Imperialism and the Ukrainian Masses (Reading, Uk: Routledge, 1991); idem, La bataille de la terre en Ukraine (1863–1914): Les Polonais et les conflits socio-ethniques (Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1993); idem, Trójkąt Ukraiński: Szlachta, carat i lud na Wołyniu, Podolu i Kijowszczyźnie 1793–1914 (Lublin: Wyd. Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej, 2005). On how Right-Bank Ukraine was imagined on the mental maps of Poles, see my Romantic Nationalism in Eastern Europe: Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian Political Imaginations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), as well as “The Clash of Mental Geographies: Poles on Ukraine, Ukrainians on Poland in the Time of Romanticism,” Polish Review 53, no. 1 (2008): 71–93. On Polish society and education in Right-Bank Ukraine, see: Leszek Zasztowt, Kresy 1832–1864: Szkolnictwo na ziemiach litewskich i ruskich dawnej Rzeczypospolitej (Warsaw: Instytut Historii Nauki Pan, 1997); Tadeusz Epsztein, Edukacja dzieci i młodzieży w polskich rodzinach ziemiańskich na Wołyniu, Podolu i Ukrainie w latach 1864–1914 (Warsaw: DiG, 1998); idem, Z piórem i paletą: Zainteresowania intelektualne i artystyczne ziemiaństwa polskiego na Ukrainie w II połowie XIX w. (Warsaw: Wyd. Neriton, Instytut Historii Pan, 2005). On Polish “Great Emigration” plans with respect to Ukraine and the role of several Polish revolutionaries from Ukraine, see: Paul Brykczynski, “Prince Adam Czartoryski as a Liminal Figure in the Development of Modern Nationalism in Eastern Europe at the Turn of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Nationalities Papers 38, no. 5 (2010): 647–69; Ivan L. Rudnytsky, “Michał Czajkowski’s Cossack Project during the Crimean War: An Analysis of Ideas,” in idem, Essays in Modern Ukrainian History (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1987), 173–87; idem, “Franciszek Duchiński and His Impact on Ukrainian Political Thought,” ibid, 187–203; Andrzej Nowak, Jak rozbić rosyjskie imperium? Idee polskiej polityki wschodniej, 1733–1921 (Warsaw: Warszawska Oficyna Wyd. “Gryf,” 1995). On the rise of Kyiv as a bulwark of the Russian Orthodox presence in the multiethnic borderlands, see my Imperial Urbanism in the Borderlands: Kyiv,

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1800–1905 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018); also my “Inventing an Ancient City: How Literature, Ideology, and Archeology Refashioned Kyiv during the 1830s and 1840s,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 32–33, pt. 1 (2011– 14): 107–26. The best English-language account of the history of Kyiv is Michael Hamm’s Kiev: A Portrait, 1800–1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). On Jewish Kyiv in a somewhat later period, see Natan M. Meir’s Kiev, Jewish Metropolis: A History, 1859–1914 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). On the complex interethnic and political relations in late imperial Kyiv, see Natan M. Meir, “Jews, Ukrainians, and Russians in Kiev: Intergroup Relations in Late Imperial Associational Life,” Slavic Review 65, no. 3 (2006): 475–501; Faith Hillis, “Human Mobility, Imperial Governance, and Political Conflict in Pre-Revolutionary Kiev,” in John Randolph and Eugene M. Avrutin, eds., Russia in Motion: Cultures of Human Mobility since 1850 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 25–42, as well as her well-researched study of Russian nationalism in Kyiv and Right-Bank Ukraine, Children of Rus' : Right-Bank Ukraine and the Invention of a Russian Nation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013). Romantic nationalism in Ukraine and its entanglement with its Russian and Polish counterparts are discussed in detail in my Romantic Nationalism in Eastern Europe. Roman Szporluk applied the critical concept of the making and unmaking of nations to Ukrainian-Polish-Russian historical relations in the groundbreaking essay “Ukraine: From an Imperial Periphery to a Sovereign State,” in his Russia, Ukraine, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 361–94. On the generation of Ukrainian romantic nationalists, particularly the Brotherhood of SS. Cyril and Methodius, see: Orest Pelech, “The State and the Ukrainian Triumvirate in the Russian Empire, 1831–47,” in Bohdan Krawchenko, ed., Ukrainian Past, Ukrainian Present (London and New York: St Martin’s, 1993), 1–17; idem, “Toward a Historical Sociology of the Ukrainian Ideologues in the Russian Empire of the 1830s and 1840s” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1976); George S. N. Luckyj, Young Ukraine: The Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, 1845–1847 (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1991). The best analysis of the intellectual and literary origins of Romantic nationalism in Ukraine is George S.N. Luckyj’s Between Gogol’ and Ševčenko: Polarity in the Literary Ukraine, 1798–1847 (Munich: W. Fink, 1971). On possible links between Ukrainian Romantic nationalists and Giuseppe Mazzini’s inspired Young Europe, see Anna Procyk, “Polish Émigrés as Emissaries of the ‘Risorgimento’ in Eastern Europe,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 25, nos. 1–2 (Spring 2001): 7–29; idem, Giuseppe Mazzini’s Young Europe and the Birth of Modern Nationalism in the Slavic World (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019).

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Of the numerous biographies of individual members of the Romantic generation and studies of their ideological, artistic, and academic contributions, the majority are devoted to Ukraine’s national poet Taras Shevchenko: Volodymyr Mijakovs’kyj and George Y. Shevelov, eds, Taras Ševčenko, 1814–1861: A Symposium (The Hague: Mouton & Co, 1962), with essays by prominent émigré literary scholars; George Grabowicz, The Poet as Mythmaker: A Study of Symbolic Meaning in Taras Ševčenko (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), the best study of the poet’s symbolic world; Pavlo Zaitsev, Taras Shevchenko: A Life (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1988); George [S.N.] Luckyj, Shevchenko’s Unforgotten Journey (Toronto: Canadian Scholars, 1996). For a discussion of Shevchenko’s role in the development of literary Ukrainian, see George Y. Shevelov, “Ukrainian,” in Alexander M. Schenker and Edward Stankiewicz, eds, The Slavic Literary Languages: Formation and Development (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 143–63; also Michael Moser and Hans Rothe, Taras Ševčenko und die moderne ukrainische Schriftsprache: Versuch einer Würdigung (Munich: Ukrainische Freie Universität, 2008). Luckyj relates the biographies of seven other writers of the century, including Shevchenko’s peer Panteleimon Kulish, in his Seven Lives: Vignettes of Ukrainian Writers in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the US, 1999); his study of Kulish also appeared separately as Panteleimon Kulish: A Sketch of His Life and Times (Boulder, co, and New York: East European Monographs, 1983). Another key member of the Brotherhood of SS. Cyril and Methodius is the subject of Thomas M. Prymak’s biographical study, Mykola Kostomarov: A Biography (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1996). The rise of the Ruthenian-Ukrainian national movement in Galicia on the eve of the Revolution of 1848 in the Habsburg Empire is discussed in: Marta Bohachevsky-Chomiak, The Spring of a Nation: The Ukrainians in Eastern Galicia in 1848 (Philadelphia: Shevchenko Scientific Society, 1967); Jan Kozik, The Ukrainian National Movement in Galicia: 1815–1849 (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1986); Ivan L. Rudnytsky, “Ukrainians in Galicia under Austrian Rule,” in idem, Essays in Modern Ukrainian History, 315–53. Polish historiography of the 1848 revolution is discussed by Lawrence Orton in his “1848 in Austrian Galicia: New Polish Studies,” East Central Europe 3, no. 1 (1976): 233–9.

cha Pter 4: the age of reform S Serfdom in Russia and Ukraine in the decades prior to the emancipation of 1861 has long been a prime area of study for historians, social scientists, and social reformers of every ideological stripe. The first comprehensive statis-

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tics on serfdom in Russia appeared in A.G. Troinitskii, Krepostnoe naselenie v Rossii, po 10-i narodnoi perepisi (St Petersburg: Tip. Karla Vul'fa, 1861) and quickly became an important historical source. The most recent study of peasantry in the Russian Empire is David Moon, The Russian Peasantry, 1600–1930: The World the Peasants Made (London and New York: Routledge, 2016). Efforts to limit the excesses of serfdom in the west were the same author’s focus in “The Inventory Reform and Peasant Unrest in Right-Bank Ukraine in 1847–48,” Slavonic and East European Review 79, no. 4 (October 2001): 653–97. Other influential studies of peasants in pre-reform Russia include Tracy Dennison, The Institutional Framework of Russian Serfdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, Russia’s Age of Serfdom 1649–1861 (Malden, ma: Blackwell, 2008); Boris Gorshkov, “Serfs on the Move: Peasant Seasonal Migration in Pre-Reform Russia, 1800–61,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1, no. 4 (Fall 2000): 627–56; Steven L. Hoch and Wilson R. Augustine., “The Tax Censuses and the Decline of the Serf Population in Imperial Russia, 1833– 1858,” Slavic Review 38, no. 3 (1979): 403–25; Jerome Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961); Olga Crisp, “The State Peasants under Nicholas I,” Slavonic and East European Review 37, no. 89 (June 1959), 387–412. Serfdom in Ukraine has been best explored in the slightly dated but nevertheless impressive work of Soviet Ukrainian historians, Istoriia selianstva Ukraïns’koï rsr, 2 vols, 1 (Kyiv: Naukova dumka, 1967). The most famous account of the life of a former Ukrainian serf is Alexander Nikitenko, Up from Serfdom: My Childhood and Youth in Russia, 1804–1824 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). Signs of economic change and rapid technical modernization were evident even before social reforms began to be implemented in the 1860s. Russia’s early industrialization is the topic of Richard Rudolph’s “Agricultural Structure and Proto-Industrialization in Russia: Economic Development with Unfree Labor,” Journal of Economic History 45, no. 1 (March 1985): 47–69. Konstantyn Kononenko writes about Russian economic pressures on Ukraine in Ukraine and Russia: A History of the Economic Relations between Ukraine and Russia (1654–1917) (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1958). The development of Ukrainian industry and economy before the age of reforms is traced in I.S. Koropeckyj, ed., Ukrainian Economic History: Interpretative Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991) – worthy of particular note are Robert E. Jones’s essay on grain trade in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and Leonid Melnyk’s essay on the role of free labor in industry during the first half of the nineteenth century. The

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same period was covered in Oleksander Ohloblyn’s much earlier Russianlanguage work, Ocherki istorii ukrainskoi fabriki: Predkapitalisticheskaia fabrika (Kyiv: Gosudarstvennoe izd. Ukrainy, 1925). The rise of Ukraine’s lucrative sugar-processing industry in the first half of the nineteenth century was explored in Kostiantyn Voblyi’s impressively detailed Narysy z istoriï rosiis' ko-ukraïns' koï tsukro-buriakovoï promyslovosty, vol. 1, pts. 1–2 (Kyiv: Vseukraïns’ka akademiia nauk, 1928). Oleksandr Donik has examined the role of entrepreneurial nobles in the nineteenth-century Ukrainian economy in “Promyslove pidpryiemnytstvo dvorianstva Ukrainy v XIX st.: Uriadova polityka, osoblyvosti rozvytku, haluzevi napriamky,” Ukraïns' kyi istorychnyi zhurnal, 2007, no. 5, 18–41. The emancipation of the serfs would not have been possible without the groundwork prepared by liberal bureaucrats and socially conscientious landed nobles. The latter’s role is studied by Terence Emmons in Russian Landed Gentry and the Peasant Emancipation of 1861 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968); the former’s contribution is explored in W. Bruce Lincoln’s studies, In the Vanguard of Reform: Russia’s Enlightened Bureaucrats 1825–1861 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1982) and The Great Reforms: Autocracy, Bureaucracy, and the Politics of Change in Imperial Russia (DeKalb, il: Northern Illinois University Press, 1990). The best English-language account of the Great Reforms – agrarian, administrative, fiscal, judicial, and military – is offered in Ben Eklof, John Bushnell, and Larissa Zakharova, eds, Russia’s Great Reforms, 1855–1881 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994). How the former serfs themselves perceived the reforms and what they wanted from the government are addressed by Roxanne Easley in The Emancipation of the Serfs in Russia: Peace Arbitrators and the Formation of Civil Society (London and New York: Routledge, 2008) and “Opening Public Space: The Peace Arbitrator and Rural Politicization, 1861–1864,” Slavic Review 61, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 707–31. On the particular case of southern Ukraine, see Leonard G. Friesen, Rural Revolutions in Southern Ukraine: Peasants, Nobles, and Colonists, 1774–1905 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008). The group of people known as the intelligentsia became prominent in the 1860s in part because of the Great Reforms. The intelligentsia’s origins are analyzed by Marc Raeff in his iconic Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia: The Eighteenth Century Nobility (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966). Martin Malia traces its origins in Russia to debates between Slavophiles and Westernizers in “What Is the Intelligentsia?” Daedalus 89, no. 3 (Summer 1960): 441–58. Michael Confino, in “On Intellectuals and Intellectual Traditions in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Russia,” Daedalus 101 (1972): 117–49,

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attempts to define the elusive term itself as it came about in Russia. Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter places the intelligentsia in the context of other social estates in her useful guide to pre-revolutionary Russia’s complex social system, Social Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997). On the differences and similarities between the concepts of the intelligentsia and professionals in imperial Russia, see Harley D. Balzer, ed., Russia’s Missing Middle Class: The Professions in Russian History (Armonk, ny, and London: M.E. Sharpe, 1996). On the activities of the Ukrainian intelligentsia in the 1860s, particularly in the Hromada movement, see Johannes Remy’s excellently researched Brothers or Enemies: The Ukrainian National Movement and Russia from the 1840s to the 1870s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), as well as Ihnat Zhytets'kyi’s classic “Kyivs’ka hromada za 60-kh rokiv,” Ukraïna: Naukovyi dvokhmisiachnyk ukraïnoznavstva 1 (1928): 92–125. On Russian reactions to that movement, see Alexei Miller, The Ukrainian Question: The Russian Empire and Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century (Budapest and New York: ceU Press, 2003). On the Sunday school movement, see Reginald Zelnik, “The Sunday-School Movement in Russia, 1859–1862,” Journal of Modern History 37, no. 2 (June 1965): 151–70. Viktor Dudko reconstructed the editorial history of the journal Osnova in his “Zhurnal Osnova iak proekt peterburz'koï ukraïns'koï hromady,” Humanitarna osvita v tekhnichnykh vyshchykh navchal'nykh zakladakh (Kyiv), 13 (2006): 3–17; see also A. Zhyvotko, Zhurnal ‘Osnova’ 1861–1862 (Lviv: Ukraïns’ka knyha, 1938). On the controversy involving Osnova and Sion regarding the former’s alleged anti-Jewish stance, see Roman Serbyn, “Sion-Osnova Controversy, 1861–1862,” in Peter J. Poticznyj (Potichnyi) and Howard Aster, eds, Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Historical Perspective, 3rd ed. (Edmonton and Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 2010), 85–110. On the activities of individual members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia in the late 1850s to early ’60s, see David Saunders, “Mykola Kostomarov (1817–1885) and the Creation of a Ukrainian Ethnic Identity,” Slavonica 7, no.1 (2001): 7–24; Vasyl' Ulianovs'kyi, “Syn Ukrainy,” in Volodymyr Antonovych, Moia spovid’: Vybrani istorychni ta publitsystychni tvory (Kyiv: Lybid’, 1995), 5–76; idem and Viktor Korotkyi, Volodymyr Antonovych: Obraz na tli epokhy (Kyiv: Mizhnarodna finansova agentsiia, 1997). Biographies of Volodymyr Antonovych, Mykola Kostomarov, and Mykhailo Drahomanov with English translations of several of their key texts can be found in Serhiy Bilenky, ed., Fashioning Modern Ukraine: Selected Writings of Mykola Kostomarov, Volodymyr Antonovych, and Mykhailo Drahomanov (Toronto and Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 2013).

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cha Pter 5: the emPi re S trikeS back The January Uprising of 1863 in Poland is examined in detail by the eminent Polish historians Stefan Kieniewicz, Andrzej Zahorski, and Władysław Zajewski in their Trzy powstania narodowe: Kościuszkowskie, listopadowe, styczniowe. The best English-language account of the uprising and its origin is Robert Frank Leslie’s Reform and Insurrection in Russian Poland, 1856–1865 (London: Praeger, 1969). On Polish-Ukrainian relations before, during, and after the insurrection, see Ivan L. Rudnytsky, “Polish-Ukrainian Relations: The Burden of History,” in his Essays in Modern Ukrainian History, 49–77. Events in Right-Bank Ukraine during the uprising are painstakingly reconstructed by G.I. Marakhov in his Pol'skoe vosstanie 1863 g. na Pravoberezhnoi Ukraine (Kyiv: Izd. Kievskogo universiteta, 1967), and “Vydatnyi pol's'kyi revoliutsioner-demokrat (Do 100-richchia dnia zahybeli Syhyzmunda Serakovs'koho),” Ukraïns’kyi istorychnyi zhurnal, 1963, no. 3, 115–6. On Polish efforts to recruit Ukrainians to fight against the tsarist troops, see Olena Bachyns’ka, “Ukraïns'ka skladova u pol's'komu natsional'nomu rusi: Z povidomlen’ rosiis'koho konsula v Galatsi 1863 roku,” Chornomors’ka mynuvshchyna: Zapysky viddilu istoriï kozatstva na Pivdni Ukraïny Instytutu Istoriï nan Ukraïny 5 (Odesa, 2010): 151–7. Repressions against alleged and actual participants in the uprising and deportations of Poles to Siberia are examined in: Andrew A. Gentes, The Mass Deportation of Poles to Siberia, 1863–1880 (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); and Daniel Beauvois, La bataille de la terre en Ukraine (1863–1914). Post-1863 repressive policies in Russia’s western provinces are best described by Theodore R. Weeks in his Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia: Nationalism and Russification on Russia’s Western Frontier 1863– 1914 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Prss, 1996); also in Mikhail Dolbilov and Aleksei Miller, eds, Zapadnye okrainy Rossiiskoi Imperii (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2006). Policies aimed particularly toward Ukraine and Ukrainophiles in the wake of the 1863 uprising are analyzed in Johannes Remy, Brothers or Enemies: The Ukrainian National Movement and Russia from the 1840s to the 1870s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016). For the genesis of the Valuev Circular of 1863 and an English translation of it, see Miller, The Ukrainian Question, 263–4. Michael Moser revisits the origins of the circular in his “Osnova and the Origins of the Valuev Directive,” East/West Journal of Ukrainian Studies 4, no. 2 (2017): 39–95. David Saunders describes the public attitudes toward Ukraine of Russian intellectuals in “Mikhail Katkov and Mykola Kostomarov: A Note on Pëtr A. Valuev’s Anti-Ukrainian Edict of 1863,” Harvard Ukrainian

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Studies 17, nos. 3–4 (December 1993): 365–83. Saunders also gives overviews of Russian policies toward Ukraine in “Russia and Ukraine under Alexander II: The Valuev Edict of 1863,” International History Review 17 (1995): 23–50, and “Russia’s Ukrainian Policy (1847–1905): A Demographic Approach,” European History Quarterly 25 (1995): 181–208. Alexander Herzen’s attitudes toward Ukrainians and Poles are described in Thomas M. Prymak, “Herzen on Poland and Ukraine,” Journal of Ukrainian Studies 7, no. 1 [12] (1982): 31–40, and in Stephen Horak, “Alexander Herzen, Poles, and Ukrainians: A Dilemma in Unity and Conflict,” East European Quarterly 17 (Boulder, co: 1983): 185–212. Fedir Savchenko provides a classical account of the Ems Decree in his Zaborona ukraïnstva 1876 r. (Kharkiv and Kyiv: Derzhavne vyd. Ukraïny, 1930; repr. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1970). More recent accounts of the Ems Decree can be found in Remy’s Brothers or Enemies and Miller’s The Ukrainian Question. To date, relations between successive generations involved in the Ukrainian national movement have been studied relatively little. The best treatment of the subject is Ivan L. Rudnytsky’s “Intellectual Origins of Modern Ukraine,” in idem, Essays in Modern Ukrainian History, 123–43. Andreas Kappeler touches on the issue in two works: “The Ukrainians of the Russian Empire, 1860–1914,” in idem, ed., The Formation of National Elites. Comparative Studies on Governments and Non-dominant Ethnic Groups in Europe, 1850– 1940, 6 (New York: Dartmouth Publishing, 1992), 105–31; and “Mazepintsy, Malorossy, Khokhly: Ukrainians in the Ethnic Hierarchy of the Russian Empire,” in idem et al., eds, Culture, Nation, and Identity, 162–81. See also Omeljan Pritsak and John Reshetar, “The Ukraine and the Dialectics of NationBuilding,” Slavic Review 22, no. 2 (June 1963): 224–55. Efforts to provide a historical-sociological analysis of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia also include N.A. Ship, Intelligentsia na Ukraine (XIX v.): Istoriko-sotsiologicheskii ocherk (Kyiv: Naukova dumka, 1991), and H.V. Kasianov, Ukraïns'ka intelihentsiia na rubezhi XIX–XX st.: Sotsial'no-politychnyi portret (Kyiv: Lybid’, 1993); the latter provides an ethnic and social profile of the intelligentsia in late imperial Ukraine. Oleksii Ias' conceptualizes a new generational history of Ukrainian historians in “Kontseptsiï heneratsiï: Kul'turne pokhodzhennia, mizhdystsyplinarni vymiry, instrumental'ni mozhlyvosti ta piznaval'ni limity,” in Academia Terra Historiae: Studiï na poshanu Valeriia Smoliia, 2 vols, 2: Prostory istoryka (Kyiv: Instytut istoriï Ukraïny nan Ukraïny, 2020), 19–42. Serhy Yekelchyk reconstructs the symbolic world of the intelligentsia in his highly original Ukraïnofily: Svit ukraïns'kykh patriotiv druhoï polovyny XIX stolittia (Kyiv: kiS, 2010).

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chaPter 6: galician exce PtionaliS m The history of the Habsburg Empire in the long nineteenth century is well explored and thoroughly studied. Among the most recent general histories is Pieter M. Judson’s innovative The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Cambridge, ma, and London: Harvard University Press, 2016). For a more canonical view of the Austrian history, see Robert A. Kann, A History of the Habsburg Empire: 1526–1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974). A highly entertaining and somewhat controversial account of Habsburg history is A.J.P. Taylor’s The Habsburg Monarchy, 1809–1918: A History of the Austrian Empire and Austria-Hungary, 2nd ed. (London: Harper and Row, 1964). On the nationality question and nationalism in Austria, see the classical study by Robert A. Kann, The Multinational Empire. Nationalism and National Reform in the Habsburg Empire, vol. 1: Empire and Nationalities, vol. 2: Empire Reform (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950); also idem and Zdeněk V. David, eds, The Peoples of the Eastern Habsburg Lands, 1526–1918 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1984). On the identity options of Galician Ruthenians and the rise of the pro-Ukrainian orientation, see John-Paul Himka, “The Construction of Nationality in Galician Rus': Icarian Flights in Almost All Directions,” in Ronald Grigor Suny and Michael D. Kennedy, eds, Intellectuals and the Articulation of the Nation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 109–65; idem, “The Greek Catholic Church and Nation-Building in Galicia, 1772–1918,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 8, nos 3–4 (December 1984): 426–52; Paul Robert Magocsi, “Old Ruthenianism and Russophilism: A New Conceptual Framework for Analyzing National Ideologies in Late 19th Century Eastern Galicia,” in idem, The Roots of Ukrainian Nationalism: Galicia as Ukraine’s Piedmont (Toronto, London, Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 99–118; idem, Galicia: A Historical Survey and Bibliographic Guide (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983). About the Polish intellectuals and politicians of Ruthenian origin known as gente Rutheni, see Adam Światek, Gente Rutheni, natione Poloni: Z dziejów Rusinów narodowości polskiej w Galicji (Cracow: Księgarnia Akademicka, 2014), English translation: Adam Światek, Gente Rutheni, Natione Poloni: The Ruthenians of Polish Nationality in Habsburg Galicia (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 2019); also David M. Althoen, “That Noble Quest: From True Nobility to Enlightened Society in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, 1550–1830 ” (PhD diss., University of Michigan Press, 2000). The Russophiles are the subject of Anna Veronika Wendland’s comprehensive Die Russophilen in Galizien: Ukrainische Konservative zwischen Österreich

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und Rußland 1848–1915 (Vienna: Verlag der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2001). About the Russophile-led Mikhail Kachkovs’kyi Society, see Paul Robert Magocsi, “The Kachkovs’kyi Society and the National Revival in Nineteenth-Century East Galicia,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 15, nos 1–2 (June 1991): 48–87. On sympathy for the Russian tsar among some Ruthenian peasants, see John-Paul Himka, “Hope in the Tsar: Displaced Naïve Monarchism among the Ukrainian Peasants of the Habsburg Empire,” Russian History 6, nos. 1–2 (1980): 125–38. The rise of the Ukrainophiles is best explained in Ostap Sereda, “‘Whom Shall We Be?’ Public Debates over the National Identity of Galician Ruthenians in the 1860s,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 49, no. 2 (2001): 200–12; see also idem, “From ChurchBased to Cultural Nationalism: Early Ukrainophiles, Ritual-Purification Movement and Emerging Cult of Taras Shevchenko in Austrian Eastern Galicia in the 1860s,” Canadian American Slavic Studies 40, no. 1 (2006): 21–47; idem, “Shaping Ukrainian and All-Russian Discourses: Public Encounters of Ukrainian Activists from the Russian Empire and Austrian Galicia (1860–70s),” in Andrzej Nowak, ed., Rosja i Europa Wschodnia: “Imperiologia” stosowana / Russia and Eastern Europe: Applied “Imperiology” (Warsaw: Arcana, 2006), 381–99; and John Paul Himka, Religion and Nationality in Western Ukraine: The Greek Catholic Church and the Ruthenian National Movement in Galicia, 1870–1900 (Montreal and London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999). Ann Sirka writes on the educational successes and challenges of Ukrainians in Galicia in The Nationality Question in Austrian Education: The Case of Ukrainians in Galicia, 1867–1914 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1980). On the issue of identity in other western Ukrainian lands ruled by Habsburgs, see Fred Stambrook, “National and Other Identities in Bukovina in Late Austrian Times,” Austrian History Yearbook 35 (2004): 185–203; Paul Robert Magocsi, The Shaping of National Identity: Subcarpathian Rus', 1848–1948 (Cambridge: Harvard University Pres, 1978), especially chaps. 2 and 3. The transformation of Galicia into the Ukrainian Piedmont is traced in P.R. Magocsi, The Roots of Ukrainian Nationalism, and in Andrei S. Markovits and Frank E. Sysyn, eds, Nationbuilding and the Politics of Nationalism: Essays on Austrian Galicia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), which also contains essays on Jewish and Polish politics. Ihor Chornovol provides a broad study of the New Era agreement between Poles and Ukrainians in Pol's' ko-ukraïns'ka uhoda 1890–1894 rr. (Lviv: L'vivs'ka akademiia mystetstv, 2000). On radicals and Marxists and their idea of Ukraine’s independence, see John-Paul Himka, “Young Radicals and Independent Statehood: The Idea of a Ukrainian NationState, 1890–1895,” Slavic Review 41, no. 2 (1982): 219–35; idem, Socialism in Galicia: The Emergence of Polish Social Democracy and Ukrainian Radicalism,

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1860–1890 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983). Theodore Bohdan Ciuciura studies the participation of Ruthenians/Ukrainians in provincial diets and imperial parliament in three articles: “Ukrainian Deputies in the Old Austrian Parliament, 1861–1918,” Mitteilungen 14 (Munich, 1977): 38–56; “Galicia and Bukovina as Austrian Crown Provinces: Ukrainian Experience in Representative Institutions, 1861–1918,” Studia Ucrainica (Ottawa), 1984, no. 2, 175–95; and “Provincial Politics in the Habsburg Empire: The Case of Galicia and Bukovyna,” Nationalities Papers 13, no. 2 (1985): 247–73. On complex interethnic relations in Galicia, see Christopher M. Hann and Paul Robert Magosci, eds, Galicia: A Multicultured Land (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2005); John-Paul Himka, “Dimensions of a Triangle: Polish-Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Austrian Galicia,” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 12 (1999): 25–48; Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, vol. 12: Focusing on Galicia: Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians, 1772–1918 (1999); Piotr Wróbel, “The Jews of Galicia under Austrian-Polish Rule, 1869–1918,” Austrian History Yearbook 25 (1994): 97–138; and Ezra Mandelsohn, “Jewish Assimilation in Lvov: The Case of Wilhelm Feldman,” Slavic Review 28, no. 4 (December 1969): 577–90. The history of Lviv and its major communities and monumental space is most fully addressed in: John Czaplicka, ed., Lviv: A City in the Crossroads of Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); Istoriia L'vova, 3 vols, 2: 1772–zhovten' 1918 (Lviv: Tsentr Evropy, 2007); Harald Binder, “Making and Defending a Polish Town: ‘Lwów’ (Lemberg), 1848–1914,” Austrian History Yearbook 34 (January 2003): 57–81; Yaroslav Hrytsak and Victor Susak, “Constructing a National City: The Case of Lviv,” in John J. Czaplicka and Blair Ruble, eds, Composing Urban History and the Constitution of Civic Identities (Baltimore and London: Woodrow Wilson Center, 2003), 140–64; and Markian Prokopovych, Habsburg Lemberg: Architecture, Public Space, and Politics in the Galician Capital, 1772–1914 (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2009).

cha Pter 7: new S ociety, old em Pire Although the work is marred by Soviet ideology and a tendentious selection of material, the daily life, geographic mobility, and social discontent of peasants in Russian-ruled Ukraine are most comprehensively explored in Istoriia selianstva Ukraïns' koï rsr, vol. 1. Peasants’ social mobility and its limits are best addressed by Bohdan Krawchenko in Social Change and National Consciousness in Twentieth-Century Ukraine (Houndmills, Basingstoke, etc.: Palgrave Macmillan, 1985), chap. 1. On the migration of peasants from Ukraine to other parts

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of the Russian Empire and overseas, see: Vadim Koukouchkine, From Peasants to Labourers: Ukrainian and Belarusan Immigration from the Russian Empire to Canada (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007); B.D. Lanovyk, Istoriia ukraïns’koï emihratsiï. 2nd ed. (Kyiv: Vyshcha shkola, 1997); Volodymyr Borysenko, Kurs ukraïns’koï istoriï: Z naidavnishykh chasiv do XX st. (Kyiv: Lybid', 1998), 506–13; and A. Khomenko, Naselennia Ukraïny 1897–1927 rr. (Kharkiv: Tsentral’ne statystychne upravlinnia UrSr, 1927). On the overall demographics and diasporic communities of ethnic Ukrainians, see V.M. Kabuzan, Ukraintsy v mire: Dinamika chislennosti i rasseleniia, 20-e gody XVIII veka–1989 god: Formirovanie ėtnicheskikh i politicheskikh granits ukrainskogo ėtnosa (Moscow: Nauka, 2006). Ukraine’s uneven economic relations with central Russia, including the issue of internal colonialism, are examined by I.S. Koropeckyj in his Development in the Shadow: Studies in Ukrainian Economics (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1990), and by Konstantyn Kononenko in his Ukraine and Russia: A History of the Economic Relations. The concept of “internal colonialism” was addressed by Michael Hechter in his study of Celtic societies: Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975; 2nd ed., London and New York: Routledge, 1999); Bohdan Krawchenko applied it to Russian-ruled Ukraine in his Social Change and National Consciousness in Twentieth-Century Ukraine. For a view rejecting the applicability of the “colony” paradigm to late imperial Ukraine, see Ivan L. Rudnytsky, “The Role of Ukraine in Modern History,” in idem, Essays in Modern Ukrainian History, 11–37. Chris Ford touches upon the issue of internal colonialism in discussing the views of Soviet Ukrainian economist Mykhailo Volobuiev in his “Reconsidering the Ukrainian Revolution 1917–1921: The Dialectics of National Liberation and Social Emancipation,” Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe 15, no. 3 (December 2007), 279–306. For the notion of “internal colonialism” through the prism of Russian literary culture, see Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). On the economy of the late Russian Empire, particularly industrialization and the role of the state and foreign capital in the development of southeastern Ukraine, see Peter Gatrell, The Tsarist Economy 1850–1917 (London: Batsford, 1986). Vincent Barnett’s The Revolutionary Russian Economy, 1890–1940: Ideas, Debates and Alternatives (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 20–49, provides a good brief overview of the major issues pertaining to the economy in the late tsarist period, with a focus on the empire’s economists (including Ukrainian-born Alexander Gerschenkron

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and Mykhailo Tuhan-Baranovs'kyi). Other notable studies of the post-reform tsarist economy include: Arcadius Kahan, Russian Economic History: The Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Olga Crisp, Studies in the Russian Economy before 1914 (London: MacMillan, 1976); and M. E. Falkus, The Industrialization of Russia, 1700–1914 (London: Palgrave, 1972). Valuable statistics of industrial production in various branches of the economy across the empire are found in Rossiia nakanune Pervoi mirovoi voiny: Statistiko-dokumental'nyi spravochnik (Moscow: Samoteka, 2009). On the rise of the Donbas, the formation of its social and ethnic demographics, and political unrest there, see Hiroaki Kuromiya, Freedom and Terror in the Donbas: A Ukrainian-Russian Borderland, 1870s–1990s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); idem, “Donbas Miners in War, Revolution, and Civil War,” in Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds., Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class, and Identity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 138–58; Theodore H. Friedgut, Iuzovka and Revolution, vol. 1: Life and Work in Russia’s Donbas, 1869–1924 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); Susan Purves McCaffray, “Origins of Labor Policy in the Russian Coal and Steel Industry, 1874–1900,” Journal of Economic History 47 (December 1987): 951–65; idem, “The Association of Southern Coal and Steel Producers and the Problem of Industrial Progress in Tsarist Russia,” Slavic Review 47, no. 3 (1988): 464–82. The most recent and most comprehensive Ukrainian-language study of industrialization in the Donbas and the Lower Dnipro Region is Volodymyr Kulikov’s Pidpryiemstva i suspil'stvo v zavods'kykh i shakhtars' kykh poselenniakh Donbasu ta Prydniprov’ia v 1870–1917 rr. (Kharkiv: KhNU imeni V.N. Karazina, 2019). On the history of the working classes in Ukraine, especially in the industrial southeast, see Charters Wynn, Workers, Strikes, and Pogroms: The Donbass-Dnepr Bend in Late Imperial Russia, 1870–1905 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). Istoriia robitnychoho klasu Ukraïns’koï rsr, vol. 1 (Kyiv: Naukova dumka, 1962), provides a comprehensive history of the industrial working class in Russian-ruled Ukraine (although it overestimates the numbers and revolutionary engagement of industrial workers). A.G. Rashin writes about the formation of the diverse working classes in imperial Russia in Formirovanie rabochego klassa Rossii (Moscow: Sotsekgiz, 1958). Robert Edelman focuses on the radicalized peasants of Ukraine in Proletarian Peasants: The Revolution of 1905 in Russia’s Southwest (Ithaca, ny, and London: Cornell University Press, 1987). The social and demographic structure of late imperial Ukraine is analyzed by Bohdan Krawchenko in his comprehensive study of Ukraine’s pre-revolutionary society and economy, Social Change and National Consciousness in Twentieth-Century Ukraine, and by S.V. Markova in her “Sotsial’nodemohrafichna kharakterystyka ukrains’koho sotsiumu naprykintsi XIX–na

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pochatku XX st.,” Osvita, nauka i kul’tura na Podilli (Kam’ianets'-Podil's'kyi), 20 (2013): 502–8. On the issue of the Ukrainian “national bourgeoisie,” see O.M. Donik, “Chysel'nist' ta etnichno-konfesiinyi sklad kupetstva Ukraïny v XIX–na pochatku XX st.,” Ukraïns'kyi istorychnyi zhurnal, 2009, no. 5, 71–96; Oleksandr Ohloblyn “Problema ukraïns’koï ekonomiky v naukovii i hromads'kii dumtsi XIX–XX v.,” Ukraïns’kyi istorychnyi zhurnal, 2018, no. 4, 175–202; and Omelian Pritsak, “U stolittia narodyn M. Hrushevs'koho,” Lysty do Pryiateliv, 14, nos 5–6–7 (New York, 1966), 1–19. An overview of Russian imperial urbanism is offered in Daniel Brower, The Russian City between Tradition and Modernity, 1850–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Urbanization, urban populations, and social trends in cities and towns across Ukraine are examined in Patricia Herlihy, “Ukrainian Cities in the Nineteenth Century,” in Ivan L. Rudnytsky, ed., Rethinking Ukrainian History (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1981), 135–55; Boris P. Balan, “Urbanization and the Ukrainian Economy in the Mid19th Century,” in Koropeckyj, ed., Ukrainian Economic History, 277–390; V. Molchanov, “Material’ne stanovyshche naselennia huberns'kykh tsentriv Pravoberezhnoï Ukraïny naperedodni Pershoï svitovoï viiny,” Problemy istoriï Ukraïny XIX–pochatku XX st. (Kyiv), 2005, no. 9, 169–71. Karl Schlögel writes a history of Ukraine through the prism of its individual cities: Ukraine: A Nation on the Borderland (London: Reaktion Books, 2018), Rainer Lindner studies urban commercial classes, focusing on southern Ukraine and the city of Katerynoslav in particular, in Unternehmer und Stadt in der Ukraine, 1860– 1914: Industrialisierung und soziale Kommunikation im südlichen Zarenreich (Konstanz: Uvk, 2006). Viktoriia Konstantinova explores urbanization and urban culture in southern Ukrainian cities in Sotsiokul'turni aspekty urbanizatsiinykh protsesiv na pivdni Ukraïny (druha polovyna XIX–pochatok XX stolittia) (Zaporizhzhia: aa Tandem, 2011). Particular cities in Ukraine are the subjects of study in: Serhiy Bilenky, Imperial Urbanism in the Borderlands: Kyiv, 1800– 1905 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018); Anna Makolkin, A History of Odessa: The Last Black Sea Colony (Lewiston, ny: Edwin Mellon, 2004); Patricia Herlihy, Odessa: a History, 1794–1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991); Andrii Portnov and Tetiana Portnova, “The ‘Imperial’ and the ‘Cossack’ in the Semiotics of Ekaterinoslav-Dnipropetrovsk: The Controversies of the Foundation Myth,” in Igor Pilshchikov, ed., Urban Semiotics: The City as a Cultural-Historical Phenomenon (Tallinn: tlU, 2015), 223–50; Dnipropetrovs’k: Vikhy istoriï (Dnipro: Hrani, 2001); Michael Hamm, Kiev: A Portrait, 1800– 1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); idem, ed., The City in Russian History (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1976), with Frederick W. Skinner on Odessa and Roger L. Theide on southern Ukraine.

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Ukraine’s statistics on birth and death rates, marriage rates, diseases, and health by gender, social class, and ethnicity can be found in S.V. Markova, “Sotsial’no-demohrafichna kharakterystyka ukraïns’koho sotsiumu”; also in: L.I. Sliusar, “Evoliutsiia shliubu v Ukraïni: XVII–pochatok XX storichchia,” Demohrafiia ta sotsial'na ekonomika, 2011, no. 2 (16), 62–71; V. Shcherbyna, “Vplyv shliubno-simeinykh stosunkiv na simeine vykhovannia v umovakh Pivdnia Ukraïny XIX stolittia,” Khersons'kyi derzhavnyi universtytet: Zbirnyk naukovykh prats'. Pedahohichni nauky 51 (2009), 35–9; Serhii Chornyi, Natsional'nyi sklad naselennia Ukraïny v XX storichchi. Dovidnyk (Kyiv: dnvP “Kartohrafiia,” 2001); Roman Chmelyk, Mala ukraïns'ka selians'ka sim’ia druhoï polovyny XIX–pochatku XX st. (Lviv: Instytut narodoznavstva nan Ukraïny, 1999). For a wider Russian imperial and international context, see Boris Mironov, Istoriia v tsifrakh (St Petersburg: Nauka, 1991); A.G. Rashin, Naselenie Rossii za 100 let (1811–1913 gg.). Statisticheskie ocherki (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe statisticheskoe izd., 1956); S.A. Novosel'skii, Smertnost' i prodolzhitel’nost’ zhizni v Rossii (St Petersburg: Tip. Min-va vnutrennikh del, 1916). On the status of women in popular culture, customary law, and church canons, see Oksana Kis', Zhinka v tradytsiinii ukraïns'kii kul'turi (druha polovyna XIX–pochatok XX st.), 2nd ed. (Lviv: Instytut narodoznavstva nan Ukraïny, 2012); William G. Wagner, “ ‘Orthodox Domesticity’: Creating a Social Role for Women,” in Mark D. Steinberg and Heather J. Coleman, eds, Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 119–45; L.O. Smoliar, ed., Zhinochi studiï v Ukraïni: Zhinka v istoriï ta siohodenni (Odesa: Astroprynt, 1999). On sex and sexuality in Ukrainian traditional culture and literature, see Iryna Ihnatenko, “Seks ta rozmovy pro nioho v ukraïns'komu seli XIX–pochatku XX stolittia”: https://genderindetail.org.ua/season-topic/seksualnist/sex-tarozmovi-pro-nogo-v-ukrainskomu-seli-hih-pochatku-hh-stolittya-134390. html (accessed 10 December 2020). The history of homosexuality in Ukraine has hardly begun to be explored, but there are a few recent publications, among them: Alexander Averbuch, “Orientalism and Homoerotic Desire in the Poetry of the Ukrainian Modernist: Ahatanhel Kryms'kyi in Lebanon,” Slavic and East European Journal 62, no. 2 (2018): 318–38; M.E. Kruhliak, “Homoseksualizm u Rosiis’kii imperiï na pochatku XX st.: Prychyny poiavy, formy vplyvu,” Visnyk Natsional'noho universytetu “Iurydychna akademiia Ukraïny imeni Iaroslava Mudroho.” Sotsiolohiia, 2016, no. 3 (30), 164–74; Svitlana Nebylovych, “Lesia Ukraïnka ta ïï podruha Ol’ha Kobylians’ka: Zhinocha liubov chy druzhba?” Artefact – 25.06.2018: https://artefact.org. ua/literature/lesya-ukrayinka-ta-yiyi-podruga-olga-kobilyanska-zhinocha-lyubov-chi-druzhba.html (accessed 10 December 2020).

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On the social and professional structure of Ukraine’s major ethnic communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Volodymyr Ustymenko, “Sotsial'na struktura natsional'nykh menshyn ta ïkh pravovyi status iak chynnyk mizhetnichnykh protyrich ta konfliktiv,” Problemy vyvchennia istoriï Ukraïns’koï revoliutsiï 1917–1921 rokiv: Zbirnyk naukovykh statei (Kyiv), 2012, no. 199–220; M. Lazarovych and N. Lazarovych, “Etnodemohrafichna spetsyfika ta sotsial'no-profesiina stratyfikatsiia natsional’nykh menshyn Ukraïny naperedodni natsional'noï revoliutsiï 1917–1921 rokiv,” Ukraïns'ka nauka: Mynule, suchasne, maibutnie (Ternopil), 17 (2012): 72–89. There is also a substantial literature on the social and professional structure of individual communities in pre-revolutionary Ukraine. On Jews, see: Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, The Golden Age Shtetl: A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014); Aleksei Miller, “Imperiia Romanovykh i evrei,” in his Imperiia Romanovykh i natsionalizm (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2006);Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Aster and Potichnyj, eds, Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Historical Perspective; I.I. Veitsblit, Rukh ievreis'koï liudnosti na Ukraïni periodu 1897–1926 rokiv (Kyiv: Instytut ievreis'koï kul'tury Vseukr. Akademiï nauk, 1930). On Russians, see: Ivan Terliuk, “Rosiiany v Ukraïni: Istorychni osoblybosti zaselennia ta formuvannia sotsial'noho i polityko-pravovoho statusu,” Visnyk L' vivs'koho universytetu. Seriia istorychna 51 (2015): 303–24; Mykola Lazarovych, “Rosiis'ka menshyna Ukraïny u XIX–na pochatku XX stolittia: Sotsial'noekonomichnyi vymir,” Ukraïns' ka nauka: Mynule, suchasne, maibutnie 19, no. 2 (2014): 84–94; V.M. Kabuzan, Russkie v mire. Dinamika chislennosti i rasseleniia (1719–1989). Formirovanie ėtnicheskikh i politicheskikh granits russkogo naroda (St Petersburg: blitS, 1996). On Poles, see Marek Mądzik, Mariusz Korzeniowski, Krzysztof Latawiec, and Dariusz Tarasiuk, Polacy na wschodniej Ukrainie w latach 1832–1921 (Lublin: Wyd. Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej, 2014); Leonid Gorizontov, Paradoksy imperskoi politiki: Poliaki v Rossii i russkie v Pol'she (Moscow: Indrik, 1999); I. Lisevych, “Pol's'ka natsional'na menshyna v Naddniprians'kii Ukraïni (1864–1917 rr.),” Ukraïns' kyi istorychnyi zhurnal, 1997, no. 2, 43–54; idem, Dukhovno sprahli: Dukhovne zhyttia pol’s’koï natsional' noï menshyny na Naddniprians'kii Ukraïni v 1864–1917 rr. (Kyiv: Instytut istoriï Ukraïny nan Ukraïny, 1997); idem, U zatinku dvohlavoho orla: Pol’s’ka natsional’na menshyna na Naddniprians'kii Ukraïni v druhii polovyni XIX st.–na pochatku XX st.) (Kyiv: Instytut istoriï Ukraïny nan Ukraïny, 1993). On Germans and Mennonites, see Ocherki istorii nemtsev i mennonitov Iuga Ukrainy (konets XVIII–pervaia polovina XIX v.) (Dnipro: Art-Press, 1999); John-Paul Himka

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and Hans-Joachim Torke, eds, German-Ukrainian Relations in Historical Perspective (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1994); John Friesen, ed., Mennonites in Russia, 1788–1988 (Winnipeg: Manitoba Mennonite Historical Society, 1989). On Greeks, see Valeri Tomozov and Oleksii Ias', Hrets’ki storinky ukraïns'koï istoriï: Populiarnyi vyklad (Kyiv: Lybid’, 2013); Valerii Smolii, ed. Hreky na ukraïns'kykh terenakh. Narysy z etnichnoï istoriï: Dokumenty, materialy, karty (Kyiv: Lybid', 2000). Socioeconomic developments in Austrian-ruled Galicia are examined in a number of publications. Alison Fleig Frank writes about oil extraction and its wider social and political implications for Galicia’s various communities in Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). On changing economic conditions in the countryside, see John-Paul Himka, “The Background to Emigration: Ukrainians of Galicia and Bukovina, 1848–1914,” in Manoly R. Lupul, ed., A Heritage in Transition (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1982), 11–31; Stella Hryniuk, “Polish Lords and Ukrainian Peasants: Conflict, Deference, and Accommodation in Eastern Galicia in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Austrian History Yearbook 24 (1993): 119–32; and Richard L. Rudolph, “The East European Peasant Household and the Beginnings of Industry: East Galicia, 1786–1914,” in Koropeckyj, ed., Ukrainian Economic History, 339–82. On the integration of peasants into the Ukrainian and Polish nations, see Andriy Zayarnyuk, Framing the Ukrainian Peasantry in Habsburg Galicia, 1846–1914 (Toronto and Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 2013), and John-Paul Himka, Galician Villagers and the Ukrainian National Movement in the Nineteenth Century (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1988), both about the Ukrainian case. On the Polish case, see Keely Stauter-Halsted, The Nation in the Village: The Genesis of Peasant National Identity in Austrian Poland, 1848–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004). Piotr Wawrzeniuk and John-Paul Himka show how cooperatives and voluntary associations strengthened Ukrainian national identity among Greek Catholic peasants: Piotr Wawrzeniuk, “Agents of ‘True Emancipation.’ Ukrainophile Ruthenian Cooperatives in Eastern Galicia 1904– 1914,” in Piotr Wawrzeniuk, ed., Societal Change and Ideological Formation among the Rural Population of the Baltic Area 1880–1939 (Huddinge: Södertörns högskola, 2008), 95–119; John-Paul Himka, “Voluntary Artisan Associations and the Ukrainian National Movement in Galicia (1870s),” in Markovits and Sysyn, eds, Nationbuilding and the Politics of Nationalism, 178– 95. On the role of the Greek Catholic Church in the promotion of Ukrainian identity among the peasantry, see John-Paul Himka, “The Greek Catholic Church in Galicia, 1848–1914,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 26, nos 1–4 (2002– 2003): 245–60; idem, “The Transformation and Formation of Social Strata

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and Their Place in the Ukrainian National Movement in Nineteenth-Century Galicia,” Journal of Ukrainian Studies 23, no. 2 (1998): 3–22; idem, “The Greek Catholic Church and Nation-Building in Galicia, 1772–1918,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 8, nos 3–4 (December 1984): 426–52; idem, “Priests and Peasants: The Greek Catholic Pastor and the Ukrainian National Movement in Austria, 1867–1900,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 21, no. 1 (1979): 1–14. On the particular case of the activist priest Father Mykhailo Zubryts'kyi, see Frank E. Sysyn, “Father Mykhailo Zubryts'kyi: Chronicler of the Boiko Highlands,” in Mykhailo Zubryts'kyi, Zibrani tvory i materialy u triokh tomakh, 3 vols, 3 (Lviv: Litopys, 2019). On Ivan Franko’s alleged antisemitic views, see: Alois Woldan and Olaf Terpitz, eds, Ivan Franko und die jüdische Frage in Galizien: Interkulturelle Begegnungen und Dynamiken im Schaffen des ukrainischen Schriftstellers (Vienna: Brill Deutschland, 2015); Yaroslav Hrytsak, “A Strange Case of Antisemitism: Ivan Franko and the Jewish Issue,” in Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz, eds., Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 228–43.

cha Pter 8: Politic S and cUltUre between emPire and nation Ukrainian literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is attracting the attention of a growing number of Ukrainian and Western scholars. Outstanding publications to date include George G. Grabowicz’s collection of essays on various themes and periods of Ukrainian literature: Hryhorii Hrabovych (George G. Grabowicz), Do istoriiï ukraïns'koï literatury: Doslidzhennia, ese, polemika (Kyiv: Krytyka, 2003). Myroslav Shkandrij places Ukrainian literature in the imperial context in Russia and Ukraine. Literature and Discourse of Empire from Napoleonic to Postcolonial Times (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001). Solomiia Pavlychko offers a pioneering study of Ukrainian modernism in Dyskurs modernizmu v ukraïns'kii literaturi (Kyiv: Osnovy, 1999). Tamara Hundorova interprets early Ukrainian modernism from the standpoint of post-modernism in ProIavlennia slova: Dyskursiia rann'oho ukraïns'koho modernizmu. Postmoderna interpretatsiia (Lviv: Litopys, 1997). Vira Aheieva examined female authors and feminism in the discourse of Ukrainian modernists in her Zhinochyi prostir: Femistychnyi dyskurs ukraïns'koho modernizmu (Kyiv: Fakt, 2003). On that topic, see also: Maxim Tarnawsky, “Feminism, Modernism, and Ukrainian Women,” Journal of Ukrainian Studies 19, no. 2 (Winter 1994): 31–41; idem, “Modernism in Ukrainian Prose,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 15, nos. 3–4 (December

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1991): 263–72. For studies of individual writers, see: Maxim Tarnawsky, The All-Encompassing Eye of Ukraine: Ivan Nechui-Levyts'kyi’s Realist Prose (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015); Yuliya V. Ladygina, Bridging East and West: Ol’ha Kobylians’ka, Ukraine’s Pioneering Modernist (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019); Iaroslav Polishchuk, I kata, i heroia vin liubyv… Mykhailo Kotsiubyns’kyi. Literaturnyi portret (Kyiv: Akademiia, 2010); Bohdan Rubchak, “The Music of Satan and the Bedeviled World: An Essay on Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky,” in M. Kotsiubynsky, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, trans. Marco Carynnyk (Littleton, co: 1981); Marko Pavlyshyn, Ol’ha Kobylians’ka: Prochytannia (Kharkiv: Akta, 2008); Volodymyr Panchenko, Budynok z khymeramy: Tvorchist’ Volodymyra Vynnychenka 1900–1920 rr. u ievropeis'komu literaturnomu konteksti (Kirovohrad, 1998). On the modernist critic Mykola Ievshan and the periodical Ukraïns’ka khata, see Maxim Tarnawsky, “Mykola Ievshan: Modernist Critic?” Journal of Ukrainian Studies 25, nos. 1–2 (Summer 2000): 33–43; also Oleh S. Ilnytzkyj, “Ukrainska khata and the Paradoxes of Ukrainian Modernism,” Journal of Ukrainian Studies 19, no. 2 (1994): 5–30. On illiteracy, its causes, and its social consequences in Russian-ruled Ukraine, see Krawchenko, Social Change and National Consciousness in TwentiethCentury Ukraine. On literacy/illiteracy in the Russian Empire overall and the market for popular literature, see Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). On adult learning in Ukraine, see Iuliia Il’chuk, “Iak ukraïns'kykh selian vchyly chytaty: Chytats'ki eksperymenty Kh.D. Alchevs’koï, B.D. Hrinchenka i S.Ia. An-s'koho na mezhi XIX–XX stolit',” Ukraina moderna 22 (2015): 167–84. On early readers of Taras Shevchenko’s works, see Tamara Hundorova, “Shevchenko i ioho chytachi na tli retseptyvnoï istoriï ukraïns'koï literatury,” Ukraina moderna 22 (2015): 53–71. On Ukrainian mass literature, its readers, and its publishers, see: Tetiana Karoieva, “Pidpryiemtsi v zabezpechenni ukraïnomovnoho chytannia v Rosiis'kii imperiï, 1881–1916,” Ukraïna moderna 22 (2015): 93–115; also M.A. Nyzovyi, “Tematychno'’tsil’ovi aspekty ukraïns’koho dorevolïutsiinoho knyhovydannia (1901–1917 rr.),” Visnyk Kharkivs’koï derzhavnoï akademiï kul'tury: Zbirnyk naukovykh prats' 37 (2012): 160–71. On the reader of popular literature and book publishing in Austrian-ruled Galicia, see: Alla Serediak, “Halyts'kyi selianyn i ukraïns'ka knyzhka naprykintsi XIX–pochatku XX st. (na prykladi vydan' Tovarystva ‘Prosvita’),” Ukraïna moderna 22 (2015): 116–38; Roman Holyk, “Chytannia dlia narodu: Vydannia ‘Prosvity,’ stereotypy masovoï kul'tury i mental'nist' halychan pershykh desiatelit' XX st.,” in Ukraïna: Kul'turna spadshchyna, natsional'na svidomist’, derzhavnist' 19 (2010): 217–44; Frank

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Sysyn, “The Reading Revolution in the Ukrainian Countryside: Mshanets, 1870–1914,”Ukraïna moderna 22 (2015): 139–66. Religiosity and the role of the Orthodox and Greek Catholic churches have been analyzed in a number of publications. Sergei Zhuk looks at the popular reformation in southern Ukraine and the massive movement away from the Russian Orthodox Church in Russia’s Lost Reformation: Peasants, Millennialism, and Radical Sects in Southern Russia and Ukraine, 1830–1917 (Washington, dc : Woodrow Wilson Center, 2004). Heather J. Coleman offers a slightly alternative view in Russian Baptists and Spiritual Revolution, 1905– 1929 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). O.M. Ihnatusha examines the attitude of the Orthodox Church to social modernization in “Reaktsiia Rosiis'koï pravoslavnoï tserkvy na modernizatsiinyi vyklyk novoievropeis'koho suspil'stva: Ukraïns'kyi aspect (XIX–pochatok XX st.),” Naukovi pratsi Istorychnoho fakul'tetu Zaporiz'koho derzhavnoho universtytetu 15 (2002): 88–98. On the spread of secularism in the large industrial centers of southern Ukraine, see Konstantinova’s Sotsiokul'turni aspekty urbanizatsiinykh protsesiv na pivdni Ukraïny. Other studies show that the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine was far from being anti-Ukrainian because many individual clerics harbored Ukrainophile views. See: Heather Coleman, “History, Faith, and Regional Identity in Nineteenth-Century Kyiv: Father Petro Lebedyntsev as Priest and Scholar,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 34, nos 1–4 (2015–16): 343–72; idem, “Shcho take Kyïvs'ke Pravoslav’ia? Parafiial'nyi klir i mistseva relihiina praktyka Kyïvs'koiï ieparkhiï v XIX st.,” Kyïvs'ka akademiia 16 (2015): 179–87; Ricarda Vulpius, “Ukrainische Nation und zwei Konfessionen: Der Klerus und die ukrainische Frage 1861–1921,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 49, no. 2 (2001): 204–56; Andrii Starodub, “Preosviashchennyi Parfenii (Pamfil Andriiovych Levyts'kyi) i zhurnal ‘Kievskaia starina,’” Kyïvs'ka starovyna 1 (2012): 108–129; idem, “Vydannia ukraïns'koho perekladu Ievanheliia (1905– 1912) (Za materialamy arkhivu Moskovs'koï synodal'noï drukarni),” Problemy istoriï Ukraïny XIX–pochatku XX st. (Kyiv), 2003, no. 6, 318–44. As the century drew to a close, the Ukrainian national movement in the Russian Empire became bolder and began to embrace “politics” despite ongoing persecution of Ukrainophiles. On its successes, especially in book publishing in the late 1880s through 1905, see Remy, Brothers or Enemies, chap. 8. On the zemstvos as the prime space for liberalism in Russia and Ukraine, see Fedor Petrov, “Organy samoupravleniia v sisteme samoderzhavnoi Rossii: Zemstvo v 1864–1879 gg.,” in Velikie reformy v Rossii 1856–1874: Sbornik statei istorikov Rossii i SShA (Moscow: Izd. Moskovskogo universiteta, 1992), 203–31, English translation: Fedor A. Petrov, “Crowning the Edifice: The Zemstvo, Local SelfGovernment, and the Constitutional Movement, 1864–1881,” in Eklof and

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Zakharova, eds, Russia’s Great Reforms, 197–214. Mykhailo Drahomanov also wrote about zemstvo liberalism: see Mikhail Dragomanov, Liberalizm i zemstvo v Rossii (Geneva, 1889). On the radical revolutionary alternative to liberalism in Russia and Ukraine, see Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). On the life and ideas of Mykhailo Drahomanov, see Ivan L. Rudnytsky, “Drahomanov as a Political Theorist,” in his Essays in Modern Ukrainian History, 203–55; idem, “The First Ukrainian Political Program: Mykhailo Drahomanov’s ‘Introduction’ to Hromada,” in ibid, 255–83; idem, “Mykhailo Drahomanov and the Problem of UkrainianJewish Relations,” in ibid, 283–99; Anatolii Kruhlashov, Drama intelektuala: Politychni ideï Mykhaila Drahomanova (Chernivtsi: Prut, 2000). Several of Drahomanov’s writings, including his letters to Kyiv’s Old Hromada, can be found in Serhiy Bilenky, ed., Fashioning Modern Ukraine: Selected Writings of Mykola Kostomarov, Volodymyr Antonovych, and Mykhailo Drahomanov (Toronto and Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 2013). On Mykola Mikhnovs’kyi, see Fedir Turchenko, Mykola Mikhnovs’kyi: Zhyttia i slovo (Kyiv: Heneza, 2006). An English translation of Mikhnovs’kyi’s pamphlet Samostiina Ukraïna (“An Independent Ukraine”) appears in Ralph Lindheim and George Luckyj, eds, Towards an Intellectual History of Ukraine: An Anthology of Ukrainian Thought from 1710 to 1995 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 201–16. On the birth of Ukrainian radical nationalism, see: Trevor Erlacher, “The Birth of Ukrainian ‘Active Nationalism’: Dmytro Dontsov and Heterodox Nationalism before World War I, 1883–1914,”Modern Intellectual History 11, no. 3 (November 2014): 519–48. On the revolution of 1905 in Ukraine, see Olga Andriewsky, “The Politics of National Identity: The Ukrainian Question in Russia, 1904–12” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1991); Edelman, Proletarian Peasants; Robert Weinberg, “Workers, Pogroms, and the 1905 Revolution in Odessa,” Russian Review 46, no. 1 (January 1987): 53–75; Revoliutsiia 1905–1907 gg. na Ukraine: Sbornik dokumentov i materialov, 2 vols in 3 pts (Kyiv: Gosudarstvennoe izd. politicheskoi literatury USSr, 1955). The best English-language study of the successes and failures of the Ukrainian national movement after the 1905 revolution is Andriewsky’s “The Politics of National Identity.” Andriewsky also provides a succinct overview of Russian policies towards Ukraine in “The Russian-Ukrainian Discourse and the Failure of the ‘Little Russian Solution,’ 1782–1917,” in Andreas Kappeler et al., eds, Culture, Nation, and Identity: The Ukrainian-Russian Encounter, 1600–1945, 182–214. On the Russian liberals’ turn to the right and the role of Petr Struve, see Mariya Melentyeva, “Liberals and the Ukrainian Question in Imperial Russia, 1905–1917,”Revolutionary Russia 33 (2020): 1–21: https://

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doi.org/10.1080/09546545.2020.1813927. On the experience of Ukrainian radical socialists, see Ivan Maistrenko, Borot'bism: A Chapter in the History of the Ukrainian Revolution (Stuttgart: ibidem, 2019). Ivan L. Rudnytsky traces continuities between the Ukrainian national movement on the eve of World War I and the 1917 revolution in “The Ukrainian National Movement on the Eve of the First World War,” in idem, Essays in Modern Ukrainian History, 375–89, and “The Fourth Universal and Its Ideological Antecedents,” ibid., 389–417. Ukraine’s role and experiences in World War I are examined in: Dominic Lieven, The End of Tsarist Russia: The March to World War I and Revolution (New York: Viking, 2015); Mark von Hagen, War in a European Borderland: Occupations and Occupation Plans in Galicia and Ukraine, 1914–1918 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007); idem, “The Russian Empire,” in Karen Barkey and Mark Von Hagen, eds, After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building: the Soviet Union and Russian, Ottoman, and Habsburg Empires (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 58–73.

Index

A Zealous Friend (short story), 471 “Academic Circle” (student group), 253 Adadurov, Vadym, 45 Aheieva, Vira, 397 Ajdukiewicz, Kazimierz, 273 Aksakov, Konstantin, 234 Alchevs'ka, Khrystyna, 407–8, 410 Aleichem, Sholem. See Sholem Aleichem Aleksei Mikhailovich, tsar of Muscovy, 21, 62, 165 Alexander I, emperor of Russia, 39, 49, 53, 74, 376, 490; and German colonists, 16; reforms of, 74, 133, 152 Alexander II, emperor of Russia, 164, 183, 197, 492; and abolition of serfdom, 146, 147, 152, 153, 155, 157; assassination of, 153, 166, 213, 446, 447, 493; and Ems Decree, 204, 493; Great Reforms of, 133, 140, 148; and Valuev Circular, 194–5 Alexander III, emperor of Russia, 153, 164, 165, 284, 340, 493 “Algeria of the North” (term), 16, 64

“All-Russian nation” (concept), 114, 120, 231–2, 308, 381, 430, 472, 475, 483 Althoen, David, 230 Amazons, 19 America, 18, 43, 51, 142, 349, 365, 369, 424–5, 449. See also United States; North America American Revolution, 43, 66 anarchists, 166, 463, 468 Anatevka, 367 Anderson, Benedict, 51, 167, 245 Andriewsky, Olga, 464, 466 Andrii Lahovs'kyi (novella), 341 Andrusiv truce of 1667, 112 Andruz'kyi, Heorhii, 482 Antebellum South, 36 antisemitism, 352, 356, 368, 460 Antonovych, Dmytro, 456 Antonovych, Volodymyr, 186, 207, 209, 213, 246, 257, 454, 483, 484, 487; as author of “My Confession,” 171, 492; as author of “The Views of the Ukrainophiles,” 193; biography of, 168–71, 174, 181; character of, 213–14, 434; funeral of, 471; as

568

Index

head of Kyiv branch of Russian Geographical Society, 200–1; as leader of Kyiv’s Old Hromada, 175, 197–8, 449–50; and New Era, 250–1, 254 Arcadia, 36, 98 Argentina, 342 Arkas, Mykola, 380 Armenians: in medieval GaliciaVolhynia, 11; in Austrian Galicia, 222; in Lviv, 265; merchants in Russian-ruled Ukraine, 322 Armstrong, John, 317 Asia, 15, 77, 303. See also Central Asia Athens, 74 Austria, 5, 9–10, 13, 23–6, 28, 30, 106, 128, 161, 217, 228–9, 246–7, 253, 255, 324, 329, 343, 369, 448, 473, 474, 489–92; defeated by Prussia, 219, 221–2, 492; universal male suffrage in, 495; and World War I, 476, 483 Austria-Hungary, 130, 217, 223, 249, 259, 263–4, 357, 364, 424, 452, 472, 493, 494, 495; formation of, 221, 492; in World War I, 475, 477. See also AustroHungarian Empire Austrian Empire, xi, 10, 108, 240, 261; proclamation of, 221, 490 Austrian-ruled Ukraine, xi, 23, 411, 430, 472, 483 Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, 221, 492 Austro-Hungarian Empire, 106, 123, 126, 220. See also Austria-Hungary Averbuch, Alex, 521 n.126 Azbuka i abecadło (pamphlet), 125 Azov, Sea of, 14, 141, 283, 288, 379

Bach, Alexander von, 217–18, 485, 492 Bachyns'kyi, Iuliian, 255–6, 494 Badeni, Kazimierz, 250 Bakhchisaray, 15 Bakhmut district, 312, 315 Balkans, 15, 45, 74, 98, 493 Balta, 106, 140, 284 Baltic Sea, 261, 288 Bantysh-Kamens'kyi, Dmytro, 62, 63, 67, 71, 118 Bantysh-Kamens'kyi, Mykola, 62 Baptists, 426, 430 Barvinok, Hanna, 107, 247 Barvins'kyi brothers, 244, 252 Barvins'kyi, Oleksandr, 250, 252, 254 Basilian monks, 123 Battleship Potemkin (film), 459 Bauer, Otto, 222 Baumann, Fabian, 434 Bazarov, Ievgenii (literary character), 205–6, 208, 210, 213 Beauvois, Daniel, 34 Beccaria, Cesare, 8 Beecher Stowe, Harriet, 203 Beilis trial, 368, 495 Belarus, 17, 66, 84, 106, 156; in Pale of Settlement, 365; Poles in, 235, 372; Russian language in Catholic sermons in, 196; Belarusians, 40, 156, 186, 473; in Ukraine, 315, 360 Belgians: in Donbas, 289; as factory owners, 144, 294; as investors, 301 Belgium, 29, 97, 299, 332, 346 Belinskii, Vissarion, 64, 65, 72–3, 118–19, 209 Belweder Palace, 85

Index Belz palatinate, 10, 11 Bentham brothers, 18, 20 Berdyaev, Nikolai, 363 Berdychiv: Antonovych in, 169; competing with Kyiv, 100; merchants in, 322, 388; Polish conspiracy in, 108; as a shtetl, 105, 366 Bessarabia, 280, 308, 389, 452 Bestuzhev-Riumin, Mikhail, 82, 83 Bezak, Alexander, 195 Bezborodko, Oleksandr, 38–9, 46, 48, 57, 60 Bibikov, Dmitrii, 64, 96, 101 Bible, 427; Ukrainian translation of, 203, 466 Biedermeier epoch, 263 Bila Tserkva, 35, 181, 369 Bilozers'kyi, Vasyl', 172, 173, 197 Binder, Harald, 271 birth rate, 341; among Jews, 330, 364; among Orthodox, Muslims, and Catholics, 330; per province, 329; in Russian Ukraine overall, 329, 339 Bismarck, Otto von, 221 Black Hundreds, 459, 461, 471 Black Sea, 14, 16, 18, 24, 67, 141, 260, 280, 296 Black Sea Fleet, 380, 460 Black Sea Germans, 16. See also Germans blood libel, 364 Bloody Sunday, 417, 449, 459 Bludov, Dmitrii, 153 Bodians'kyi, Osyp, 209 Bogrov, Dmitrii, 448, 495 Boh River. See Southern Bug Bohemia, 11, 28, 29, 114, 128, 262, 264, 345, 490 Bohodukhiv, 322

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Bohuslav, 91 Bolshevik party (Bolsheviks), 285, 295, 313, 480, 482, 487 Borot'bisty (party), 481 Borovykovs'kyi, Levko, 78, 209 Bortnians'kyi, Dmytro, 236 Boryslav, 354–7 Boryslav Smiiet'sia (novel), 356–7 Bovanenko, Dmytro, 324 Branicki, Franciszek Ksawery, 35 Bratslav palatinate, 13, 92 Brazil: immigration to, 342 Breslau (Wrocław), 265 Breton language, 196 Bretons, 203 Brezhnev, Leonid, 285 Britain (Great Britain), 18, 43, 48, 51, 56, 122, 158, 196, 288, 297, 313, 404, 451; birth rate in, 329–30; bureaucracy in, 22–5; large cities in, 311; Polish immigration to, 97 British and Foreign Bible Society, 436 Briullov, Karl, 117–18 Brodsky family, 146, 321, 325, 381 Brodsky, Lazar', 146, 325, 366 Brody, 146 Brooks, Jeffrey, 402, 412 Brotherhood of SS Cyril and Methodius, 108–15, 121, 147, 148, 168, 172, 193, 209, 214, 364, 482, 483, 491 Brothers Iakhnenko and Symyrenko Trading House, 145 Brower, Daniel, 139 Brown, John, 409 Brusilov, Aleksei, 476 Buckle, Henry Thomas, 244 Budapest, 104, 221, 263, 349; Buda, 11, 126, 491

570

Index

Bujak, Franciszek, 257 Bukovyna, 229, 236, 341, 357, 394, 492, 495; annexed by Austria, 11; population of, 23; in World War I, 476 Bulgakov, Mikhail, 363 Bulgaria, 74, 332, 333; constitution in, 442; Drahomanov dies in, 256, 494; liberated by Russia, 441, 493 Bulgarians, 442; in Ukraine, 15, 16 Bulgarin, Fadei, 118 Bund (Jewish Workers’ Bund), 458, 459, 462 Bunge, Nikolai, 154, 162 bureaucracy, xi, 32, 40, 300, 365, 479; as agents of modernity, 26, 263; arbitrary rule of, 163; inefficient, 164, 320; rise of, 22, 24, 37; size and composition of, 24–5, 27. See also civil service (civil servants) burghers. See townspeople (burghers) California, 21 Canada, 48, 357; immigration to, 342, 343 Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, ix, xiv capitalism, 138, 149, 291, 304; agents of, 356; alienating force of, 350; alternative to, 351; engines of, 373; industrial, 51, 163, 295; Lenin on, 303; print, 417, 430 Carpathians (mountains), 92, 235, 244, 260, 348, 390, 456 Casanova, Giacomo, 7 Caspian Sea, 121 Castle Hill (Lviv), 269, 271 Catherine II, empress of Russia, 5, 18, 31, 35, 39, 68, 113, 133, 147, 148, 149, 489; abolishes the

Hetmanate, 21, 73; abolishes the Zaporozhian Sich, 16; annexes Crimea, 14; founds cities, 15, 137; and Enlightenment, 5, 7; invites German colonists, 16, 376; and Jews, 364–6, 490; journeys across Ukraine, 19–20, 147, 489; legalizes serfdom in Ukraine, 9, 32, 43, 489; Legislative Commission of, 8, 41; and partitions of Poland, 9, 12; and Potemkin, 293; resettles Greeks from the Crimea, 379; and townspeople, 138, 489 Caucasus, 36, 49, 76, 187, 208, 390, 456; deportation of Poles to, 95, 109; migration of peasants to, 150, 280, 281, 283, 330, 494; Ukrainians in, 308 Census of 1897 (Russian Empire), 274, 308–9, 314–15, 358, 494; ethnicity of merchants in, 527n236; Jews in, 364, 367; literacy in, 402; mortality rates in, 326; Poles in Odesa in, 375; professionals and intelligentsia in, 317–20; Russians among professionals in, 364; Ukrainianspeaking Catholics in, 371; Ukrainians with postsecondary education in, 532n68 Central Asia, xii; Ukrainians in, 281–2, 308, 330, 342, 494 central Europe, xi, 221, 260, 312, 319. See also east-central Europe Central National Council (Lviv), 129 Central Rada, 484 Chaikovs’kyi, Andrii, 424 Chain Bridge, in Kyiv, 144 Charles University of Prague, 250 Charles XII, king of Sweden, 21

Index Charter to the Nobility, 9, 33 Chekhov, Anton, 164, 284 Chernihiv (city), 73, 176, 428, 435, 439, 444; (vice-royalty), 21, 61; (imperial province), 58, 59, 77, 86, 92, 98, 119, 134, 143, 156, 157, 193, 276, 279, 280, 281, 297, 308, 309, 312, 320, 324, 329, 330, 362, 368, 373, 435, 440, 441, 447, 489, 490, 527n230 Chernihiv Infantry Regiment, 81, 83 Chernihiv zemstvo, 161, 385, 439, 442–3 Chernivtsi, 395 Chernivtsi University, 250, 493 Chernyshevskii, Nikolai, 164, 165, 173, 190, 210, 212, 255, 348 Chesnist' z soboiu (drama), 401 chłopomanie (“peasant-lovers”), 168, 170, 172, 173, 175–6, 207, 246, 492 cholera, 136 Chornobyl, 169 Chubyns'kyi, Pavlo, 190, 200, 201, 205, 208 Chuhuïv, 150 chumaks, 140–1, 279, Church Slavonic language, 30, 123, 124, 125, 173, 196, 232, 233, 251, 403, 404, 424, 428, 438 Chykalenko, Ievhen, 325, 433, 465 Circassians, 280 civil service/civil servants (in Russia), 24, 25, 27, 38, 40, 53, 105, 139, 163, 164, 177, 216, 320, 381, 437, 498n16, 499n18, 542; (in Austria), 5, 23, 24–6, 262. See also bureaucracy Coleman, Heather, xiv, 435, 534n103

571

College of Foreign Affairs (St Petersburg), 41, 62 colonization, 16, 18–20, 281, 307; of Crimea, 284; internal, 303, 306, 307, 518n83; of New Russia, 17, 361, 365, 489; of the steppes, 14 colony, xii, 295–6, 300–1, 303–5, 307, 357, 487. See also internal colony Congress Kingdom. See Kingdom of Poland Congress of Vienna, 108, 490 Contract Fair (Kontrakty), 84, 99 Cooper, James Fennimore, 18 cooperatives (in Galicia), 257, 259, 270, 351–2 “Cossack nation” (concept), 31, 67, 72, 112 Cossack officers, 31, 32, 33, 42, 44, 58–61, 62, 119, 360, 381 Cossack state, 8, 21, 33, 58, 59, 378, 489. See also Hetmanate Cossacks (historic military group), 8, 33, 38, 40, 54, 59–61, 64–7, 69, 72, 77, 78, 80, 94, 98, 111, 120, 151, 215, 223, 243, 409; (social estate), 45, 97, 104, 141, 177, 278, 321. See also Zaporozhian Cossacks (Zaporozhians) Cracow (city), 231, 257, 293, 515n23; (palatinate), 10 Cracow Uprising of 1846, 127 Crimea (historical region), 14, 15, 19, 20, 36, 38, 42, 84, 138, 141, 147, 152, 280, 284, 373, 378, 379, 389, 446, 452, 489. See also Crimean Khanate; Taurida Crimean Khanate, 21, 36, 38; annexation by Russia, 14, 489 Crimean Tatars, 18, 36, 70. See also Tatars

572

Index

Crimean War of 1853–56, 98, 147, 151, 181, 284, 492 Croats, 68 Cyrillic (script), 93, 125, 196, 218, 219, 230 Czajkowski, Michał, 93–4, 97, 98, 111, 168 Czartoryski, Adam Jerzy, 35, 75, 97, Czechoslovakia, 377 Czechs, 128, 131, 167, 270; and cooperation with Ruthenians, 128; and Germans in Bohemia, 11; in Iuzivka, 516n44; in Lviv, 262 Dalmatia, 357 Danube River, 98, 187, 343 Danylo Romanovych, king of Rus', 260 Danzig (Gdańsk), 265 Darwin, Charles, 297, 387 de Sade, Marquis, 7 Dead Souls (novel), 307 Decembrists, 65, 108, 120, 146, 491; in Ukraine, 81–4, 87 Deich, Lev, 446 Dekoven, Marianne, 393–4 demographics, 22, 104, 280, 337; of the borderlands, 105, 106, 201, 363; of Germans and Mennonites, 16; of Ukraine overall, 23; peripheral, 199; of Ruthenians in Galicia, 130; of southeastern Ukraine, 291 Derzhavin, Gavrila, 42 Desnyts'kyi, Semen, 40, 41 Diderot, Denis, 7 Didyts'kyi, Bohdan, 233 Dilo (newspaper), 238, 242, 448 divorce: among Jews, 334, 522n156; among Orthodox, 333–4; among Catholics, 334

Dnevnyk ruskii (newspaper), 230 Dnipro River, 15, 19, 21, 31, 58, 75, 78, 91, 99, 105, 106, 107, 112, 144, 145, 146, 168, 175, 210, 261, 295, 412 Dnister River, 15 Dobroliubov, Nikolai, 206, 210, 212, 388 Dobrovský, Josef, 68, 126 Don River, 92, 138, 141, 244 Donbas, 279, 281, 283, 284, 285, 288, 293, 295, 300, 337, 373, 380, 410, 411; ethnic Ukrainians in, 290, 312, 516n47; football in, 289; foreign companies in, 298; in imperial economy, 291; railroad in, 283, 494; revolutionaries in, 462–3; rise of, 296, 301, 359; Poles in, 373; Russians in, 362; and South Wales, 292 Dondukov-Korsakov, Alexander, 199, 200, 203, 204–5 Dontsov, Dmytro, 482, 485 Dorpat (Tartu) University, 109, 377 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 65, 115, 148, 209, 213, 234, 306 Dr Frankenstein (literary character), 50, 57 Dragomirov, Mikhail (Mykhailo Drahomyrov), 427 Drahomanov, Mykhailo, 176, 189, 209, 257, 391, 449, 450, 454, 470, 487; as ethical socialist, 452; criticizes Galicia’s national populists, 253; on federalism, 452; forced to emigrate, 493; on individual freedom, 451, 453; influenced younger Ukrainians, 454–5, 469, 484, 494; as member of Old Hromada, 200–5; on Marxism,

Index 256; and polemics with Old Hromada, 433, 478, 494; on Polish January uprising, 180, 186; published Hromada, 202, 442; on Kostomarov, 212; on New Era, 254, 255; on Shevchenko, 211; on trial of Russophiles, 241–2, 244; published “Free Union,” 494; and zemstvo liberals, 450; and Zheliabov, 446–7 Dreiser, Theodore, 386 Drohobych, 243, 348 Druh (newspaper), 254 Druzhkivka, 289, 292 Duchiński, Franciszek, 98, 111, 168 Duchy of Warsaw, 27, 45 Dwernicki, Józef, general, 85 Dymer, 369 east-central Europe, 56, 260, 263, 270, 273, 344 Editing Commission, 154, 155, 156, 173 Egypt, 64, 390 Eichelmann, Otto, 377 Eisenstein, Sergei, 459 Eklof, Ben, 163 Elizabeth, empress of Russia, 41 emancipation of the serfs. See serfdom Ems Decree, 204, 205, 233, 257, 384, 432, 464, 465, 493 Eneïda (poem), 53–4, 60, 65, 70, 118, 125, 126, 405, 416, 419, 490 Engel, Johann Christian, 31 Engelhardt, Alexandra von, 35 Engelhardt, Vasilii, 117, 118 Engels, Friedrich, 256 enlightened absolutism, 3–6, 28

573

Enlightenment, 3–7, 9, 38, 41, 42, 48, 66, 67, 69, 76, 112, 347, 348 Erlacher, Trevor, 401 Estates of Galicia, 127 Etkind, Alexander, xii, 17, 306, 307 European Russia, 13, 83, 133, 134, 148, 281, 296, 302, 303, 304, 321, 326, 327, 331, 332, 333, 366, 402, 492, 525 evangelical Christians, 426, 427 Far East, 281, 282, 283, 330, 342, 494 Fastiv, 184 Fathers and Sons (novel), 205 February Revolution (Russia), 291, 477 feminism, 388, 392–6, 401 Ferdinand, emperor of Austria, 129, 491 Fiddler on the Roof (musical), 368 Field, Daniel, 158 Finland, 31, 83, 304, 321 football (soccer), 81, 183, 289 Foucault, Michel, 22 France, 12, 22, 23, 24, 25, 44, 45, 51, 56, 97, 122, 143, 196, 203, 219, 276, 329, 330, 331, 332, 367, 447, 499n18 Frank, Alison, 354, 355 Franklin, Benjamin, 74, 422 Franko, Ivan, 258, 345, 348, 391, 482, 487; anti-clericalism of, 422; criticizes Bachyns'kyi, 256; as Drahomanov’s disciple, 450, 453; on Galicia’s oil industry, 356–7; on Kobylians’ka, 395; on Lesia Ukraïnka, 396; and populist criticism, 388; as a Russophile, 253–4;

574

Index

as a socialist, 254; as a supporter of Ukraine’s independence, 485 Franz Joseph, emperor of Austria, king of Hungary, 217, 222, 233, 492 Frederick the Great, king of Prussia, 5–7, 9, 10 Fredro, Alexander, 267, 269 “Free Union” (manifesto), 451, 49 French Revolution, 12, 45, 111, 187, 490 Funduklei, Ivan, 378 Gaj, Ljudevit, 68 Galagan, Hryhorii, 155, 173, 197, 324 Galicia, 85, 126, 146, 203, 213, 218, 221, 229, 250, 268–9, 271–3, 347, 387, 388, 391, 396, 398, 399, 409, 417, 473, 474, 479, 480, 482, 485, 497; annexed by Austria, 6, 10, 11, 27–8, 122, 489; assassination of Potocki in, 448; Drahomanov’s disciples in, 254, 450, 453; Drahomanov criticizes national populists in, 253–4; economy in, 262, 343–5, 352; education in, 29–30, 249, 424; emigration from, 344, 494; Greek Catholic Church in, 29, 124, 230, 240, 246, 151, 261, 347, 430, 476, 494; Jews in, 123, 353, 367; language issue in, 125; New Era in, 250–2, 494; oil empire in, 354–5; Old Ruthenians in, 232; overpopulation in, 346; peasants in, 350–1, 353; periodical press in, 423; population of, 23, 123, 265; readers in, 249, 420–2; PolishRuthenian tensions in, 124, 128,

219, 220, 223, 231, 258, 475; poverty in, 31; revolution of 1848 in, 129–31, 217, 227, 230, 243; 491; Russophiles in, 234–5, 238, 244, 475; Ruthenian Triad in, 126, 230, 491; Prosvita society in, 247–8, 349; Shevchenko’s cult in, 211; trial of 1882 in, 239–41; Ukrainian political parties in, 246, 251, 257, 495; Vienna’ policies to, 222, 357; in World War I, 475–6; See also Galicia, eastern; western. Galicia, eastern, 11, 30, 129, 232, 265, 354, 356. See also Galicia Galicia, western, 97, 127, 352–3 Galician diet, 124, 222, 223, 231, 248, 254, 258, 270, 344, 345, 350; Ukrainian deputies in, 220, 243, 251, 259 Galician-Ruthenian Matytsia Society, 235 Galicia-Volhynia (principality), 11, 260 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 56, 185, 187 Gatrell, Peter, 296, 300, 302 Gaudi, Antonio, 374 Ge, Mykola (Nikolai), 164 Gellner, Ernest, 51 General Ukrainian Non-Party Democratic Organization, 454 Geneva: Drahomanov in, 211, 241, 252, 434, 442, 449–50, 452–3, 493; Ziber in, 201 gente Rutheni (concept), 229, 230, 231 Georgia (country), 84, 319 German Empire, 221, 493 German language, 29–30, 127, 130, 250, 261, 265, 268, 376, 377; replaced by Polish at Lviv

Index University, 219, 222; replaced by Polish in Galicia’s administration, 266 Germans, 11, 56, 69, 70, 128, 131, 144, 246, 257, 267, 282, 358, 381, 403, 486; in Austrian Galicia, 31, 127, 218, 220, 261–2, 265, 266, 473, 476; Baltic, 36, 47; invited to the Russian Empire, 16; in administration, 22, 317, 360–1, 377; in Kharkiv University, 75; in Kyiv University, 102; in Kyiv Hromada, 177; among merchants, 322; as professionals, 317, 377, 380; population size of, 16, 309, 359, 376, 494, 516n44, 527n229; in southern Ukraine, 16, 17, 359, 376; in World War I, 477 Germany, 68, 108, 138, 143, 158, 268, 276, 287, 299, 300, 331, 332, 333, 346, 369; civil service in, 25; Enlightenment in, 6; in World War I, 475–7; Nazi, 474 Gibbon, Edward, 118 Glasgow, 311 Glasgow University, 41 Glinka, Mikhail, 118 Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 14 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 75, 124 Gogol, Nikolai (Hohol', Mykola), 46, 47, 71, 172, 307, 410, 412, 445 “going to the people” (movement), 445, 446 Golden Charter (of Polish January uprising), 183–4, 186 Golovnin, Alexander, 194, 198 Gołuchowski, Agenor, 217–20, 222, 269

575

Gopnik, Adam, 284 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 280, 285 Gorky, Maxim, 385, 408–9 Goszczyński, Seweryn, 91, 93–4 Grabowicz, George, 120, 356 Grabowski, Michał, 93–4 grain: carried by chumaks, 279; as the largest source of foreign currency in Russia, 306; in New Russia, 21; Odesa’s Greeks in trade of, 378–9; price of, 286; production of, 138, 139, 140, 276, 284, 298, 321; trade in, 105, 106, 135, 136, 145, 262, 294 Grand Duchy of Lithuania, 12 Granovskii, Timofei, 209 Great Emigration (Polish), 35, 97 Great Reforms, 25, 141, 148–9, 150, 152, 154, 163–4, 166, 172, 173, 205, 492, 499n18 Great Russia, 137, 145, 282, 289, 291, 302, 304, 307, 310, 312, 314, 326, 329, 360, 362, 435, 490 Great Russians, 36, 44, 47, 129, 228, 229, 235, 236; as part of the all-Russian nation, 40, 194, 232. See also Russians Greece, 56, 67, 379; ancient, 15, 74, 77 Greek Catholic (Uniate) Church: abolition of it in Russia, 96, 473, 491; in Austrian Galicia, 29, 34, 124, 230, 240, 246, 251, 261, 347, 430, 494 Greek Catholics (Uniates): in the Russian Empire, 12, 474; in Austrian Galicia, 30, 123, 229, 230–2, 245, 261, 265, 271, 480 Greeks: ancient, 54, 67, 70, 74, 111; Azov, 379; among merchants, 322;

576

Index

as mobilized diaspora, 282; in Kyiv, 378; in New Russia, 16, 359; in New Serbia, 15; in Nizhyn, 378; in Odesa, 378–9; population size of, 359, 379; and Ukrainians, 380 Greenfeld, Liah, 45 Grodno (imperial province), 84 Habsburg dynasty. See Habsburgs Habsburg Empire, 23, 24, 28, 122, 130, 232, 272, 342, 367, 420, 424, 473, 475, 489, 493. See also Austrian Empire; AustriaHungary; and Austro-Hungarian Empire Habsburgs, 10, 11, 13, 28, 29, 30, 122, 219–21, 223, 233, 235, 238, 239, 244, 250, 261, 483 Hadzhibey, 17. See also Odesa Haidamaky (poem), 173 Halych, 11 Hamsun, Knut, 387, 393, 398 Hanka, Václav, 79 Hapon, Hryhorii (Georgii Gapon), 460 Hašek, Jaroslav, 122 Hasidism, 365 Haskala, 176 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 391 Havlíček Borovský, Karel, 128 Hechter, Michael, 313, 519n97 “Hej, sokoły!” (song), 93 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 67–70 Herlihy, Patricia, 138, 279 Herzen, Alexander, 187, 203, 209, 210 Herzl, Theodor, 356 Hetmanate, 8, 21, 32–3, 38, 40, 41, 42, 58, 59, 61, 62, 64–6, 72–3, 78,

92, 121, 167, 379; liquidation of, 43, 489 Higonnet, Patrice, 268 Hillis, Faith, 191, 509n32 Himka, John-Paul, 122, 123, 229, 347 History of the Rus' People. See Istoriia rusov History of Ukraine-Rus' (by Hrushevs'kyi), ix, 485 Hlibov, Leonid, 233 Hlukhiv, 40, 61, 141–2 Hobsbawm, Eric, xii, 51 Hohol', Mykola. See Gogol, Nikolai Hollywood, 369 Holodomor, ix, Holovats'kyi, Iakiv, 127–8, 235 Holy Roman Empire, 4, 221, 490 homosexuality, 340–1, 521n126 Horace, 77 Hordiienko, Iehor, 441–2 Horlivka, 463 Horodecki, Władysław (Vladyslav Horodets'kyi), 374–5 Hrabianka, Hryhorii, 61, 92 Hrebinka, Ievhen, 79, 117, 118, 126, 233, 409 Hrinchenko, Borys, 406, 408–10, 411, 413, 417, 439, 440, 454 Hromada (journal), 442, 450 Hromada, St Petersburg, 173, 175 hromadas (movement), 177, 198, 208, 243, 431–3, 450, 454, 469, 478 Hromads'ka dumka (newspaper), 464 Hrushevs’kyi, Hryhorii, 435 Hrushevs’kyi, Oleksandr, 466 Hrushevs'kyi, Mykhailo, ix, 256, 324, 395, 419, 454, 467, 469, 484–6, 494

Index Hryhorovych, Vasyl', 117 Hrytsak, Iaroslav, 240, 259, 356 Hughes, John, 283, 288–9, 291, 292, 293, 493 Hulak, Mykola, 109–10, 114, 148 Hulak-Artemovs'kyi, Petro, 76, 77, 79, 126, 413 Hume, David, 48 Hundorova, Tamara, 405 Hungarian Revolution of 1848–49, 49, 130, 131 Hungarians, 131, 167, 222, 246, 262, 457 Hungary, 10, 11, 25, 29, 126, 130, 217, 221, 260, 333, 490, 491, 492 Hyrych, Ihor, 257 Iahotyn, 120 Iakhnenko family, 145, 321 Iakhnenko, Semen, 446 Iatskiv, Mykhailo, 398 Iavornyts'kyi, Dmytro, 295 Iazychiie, 233, 242 Ibsen, Henrik, 391, 393, 408 Idzikowski, Władysław, 414 Iefremov, Serhii, 52, 395–6, 470 Iefymenko, Oleksandra, 318, 336 Ielysavethrad, 20, 145, 297, 322, 416, 428 Ienakiieve, 289, 373 Ievshan, Mykola, 399, 401 Il’chuk, Iuliia, 407, 410 illiteracy (in Austrian Galicia), 220, 249, 344, 420, 424; (in Russian Ukraine), 177, 339, 402, 404, 438 Illyrian Provinces, 45 Immediate Tasks of the Zemstvos (pamphlet), 442

577

Imperial Academy of Arts, St Petersburg, 107, 117, 118, 148, 484, 491 India, 381, 431 industrial revolution, 292, 296, 298 industrialization, 140, 295, 300, 302, 309, 338, 373; in Donbas, 291–2; unequal, 305; rapid, 404 industry (in Austrian Galicia), 223, 262, 345–6, 354–5; (in Russian Ukraine), 284, 296, 298, 322, 379, 439; foreign investment in, 301, 304; heavy, 288, 294, 302, 494; output per, 299; regional distribution of, 300; sugar-beet, 106; 141– 3, 145, 286–7; workforce in, 298, 305, 361, 376 Ingarden, Roman, 273 Innokentii (Borisov), 99 internal colony, 307–8, 345. See also colony Ireland, 257, 295, 381 Isle of Capri, 385, 390 Istanbul, 14, 38, 98, 378 Istoriia Rusov (pamphlet), 65, 66, 80, 112, 491 Italians, 16, 56, 257, 516n44 Italy, 28, 29, 69, 329, 331, 346 Iuzefovich, Boris, 340 Iuzefovich, Mikhail, 47, 191, 197, 200, 202, 204, 213, 231, 340 Iuzivka, 285, 289, 293, 460; foreigners in, 516n44; founding of, 283, 288, 493; population of, 291, 295, 310, 312, 315, 373, 428, 517n47; revolution of 1905 in, 463; Ukrainians in, 295, 312; Izium, 322

578

Index

Jabotinsky, Ze’ev, 367 Jagiellonian University (Cracow), 231, 345 Jaroszyński, Karol, 372, 382 Jasiukowicz, Ignacy Jassy agreement, 38 Jews, 13, 103–4, 174, 181, 246, 366, 368, 371, 382, 453, 457, 481, 486; (in Austrian Galicia), 10, 220, 265, 342, 352; and emigrations overseas, 344; in Franko’s fiction, 356; population statistics of, 122– 3, 265, 272; tolerance of, 5, under Russian occupation, 476; (in Russia), banned from Kyiv, 105; in cities, 105, 314, 315, 317, 365; divorce rate among, 522n156; education and literacy of, 367, 402; emigration of, 330, 369; marriage rate among, 332; occupations of, 144, 322, 362, 366, 380–1, 527n236; and Pale of Settlement, 34, 201, 490; pogroms of, 461, 463, 468, 493; population statistics of, 24, 295, 309, 311, 312, 359, 364, 494, 521n140, 527n229; in shtetls, 365 John III Sobieski, King of Poland, 267, 269 Joseph II, Holy Roman emperor, 5–7, 9, 10, 14, 19, 26, 28–30, 122, 128, 261,347, 489 Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow (pamphlet), 134, 149 Kachala, Stepan, 243, 244, 247, 252, 253, 422 Kadets, 445, 455, 463, 467. See also Russian Constitutional Democratic party

Kafka, Franz, 220, 239 Kakhovka, 279 Kalyns'kyi, Tymofii, 59 Kam’ianets'-Podil's'kyi, 83, 428 Kam’ians'ke, 285, 374 Kaminnyi hospodar (poem), 391, 393 Kaniv, 19, 151, 175, 433, 453, 489 Kapnist, Vasyl', 42–5, 57, 119, 134, 490 Kapnist, Vasyl' (Decembrist), 119, 120 Karadžić, Vuk, 68 Karazyn, Vasyl', 74–5 Karmaliuk, Ustym, 86, 150 Karoieva, Tetiana, 411, 419 Karpenko-Karyi, Ivan, 247, 431 Kassandra (poem), 391–2 Katerynoslav (city), 283, 293–5, 300–1, 310, 312, 314–16, 321, 325, 337, 359, 365, 373, 374, 377, 416, 428, 460, 495, 517n61; (vice-royalty), 17; (imperial province), 16, 134, 136, 156, 186, 276, 277, 279, 281, 285, 286, 291, 296–300, 309, 312, 326, 327, 329, 333, 360, 362, 376, 407, 408, 417, 429, 438, 463, 490, 527n229, 529n268; (eparchy), 429 Katkov, Mikhail, 191, 192–3, 196, 371 Kaunas (Kowno) (palatinate), 179 Kazakhstan, 281 Kazan University, 109 Kennedy Grimsted, Patricia, 198 Kharkiv (city), 21, 41, 42, 53, 72–3, 74, 81, 92, 137, 145, 176, 283, 284, 286, 310, 312, 314–6, 321, 325, 337, 359, 398, 410, 416, 428, 453, 456–7, 460, 494, 529n268; (imperial province), 98,

Index 134, 142, 143, 154, 156, 157, 276, 279, 296, 297, 298, 299, 309, 317, 320, 322, 326, 329, 333, 360, 362, 365, 373, 407, 438, 440, 461, 490; (eparchy), 523n169 Kharkiv Romantics, 77, 80, 110, 118, 210 Kharkiv University, 36, 73–5, 77, 78, 110, 319, 361, 374, 436, 466, 490 Kharkiv zemstvo, 161, 442 Kharytonenko family, 321 Kherson (city), 17, 18, 19, 147, 359, 373, 489; (imperial province), 16, 134, 156, 157, 276, 280, 293, 296, 297, 299, 300, 307, 309, 329, 330, 360, 365, 376, 426, 427, 428, 429, 437, 438, 440, 490, 527n229 Kherson steppes, 91 Khmel'nyts'kyi, Bohdan, hetman of Ukraine, 49, 61, 62, 77, 79, 348, 349, 424, 471, 494 Kholm (historical region), 473, 474; (imperial province), 474, 495 Khomiakov, Aleksei, 209 Khortytsia Island, 17, 376 Khotkevych, Hnat, 398 Khreshchatyk Street (Kyiv), 183, 372 Khrushchev, Nikita, 285, 400 Kiev (Kyiv) Club of Russian Nationalists, 468, 481 Kievlianin (newspaper), 202 Kievskaia starina, 318, 325, 413, 416, 433, 435, 436, 445, 454, 469, 493 Kievskii telegraf (newspaper), 202, 205 Kingdom of Poland, 35, 84, 93, 115, 197, 308, 374, 490, 495. See also

579

Poland-Lithuania; PolishLithuanian Commonwealth Kireevskii, Ivan, 209 Kis', Oksana, 339 Kistiakivs’kyi, Oleksandr, 483 Knyhy bytiia ukraïns'koho narodu, 110 Kobryns’ka, Natalia, 396 Kobylians’ka, Ol’ha, 341, 394–5, 397, Kobzar (poetic collection), 121, 173, 214, 245, 324, 416, 424, 433, 449; first edition of, 119, 491; first uncensored edition of, 440, 466, 495 Kochubei, Aleksandr, 154 Kochubei, Serhii, 288 Kochubei, Viktor, 39, 46–7, 288 Kohut, Zenon, 47 Koktebel, 284 Kollár, Ján, 126 Kolomyia, 243, 250; gymnasium in, 251 Konarski, Szymon, 108–9, 115 Königsberg, 61 Kononenko, Konstantyn, 305 Konys’kyi, Oleksandr, 247, 257, 454 Kopitar, Jernej, 126 Koropeckyj, I. S., 304 Korotkyi, Viktor, xiv Korsun, 91, 187 Kosach family, 391 Kościuszko, Tadeusz, 267; uprising, 268 Kostomarov, Mykola, 164, 167, 193, 194, 197, 209, 211, 214, 421, 447, 483, 484, 485, 487, 492; as author of Knyhy bytiia ukraïns'koho narodu, 110, 112; on blood libel, 354; in Brotherhood of

580

Index

ss. Cyril and Methodius, 107, 109–11, 113–15, 491; on nihilists, 212; on Polish January uprising, 179–80, 186; returned from exile, 147; on Shevchenko, 405; and St Petersburg hromada, 172–4 Kotliarevs'kyi, Ivan, 55, 57–9, 78; as author of Eneïda, 53–4, 77; jubilee of, 52,455 Kotsiubyns’kyi, Mykhailo, 385, 389–90, 407, 418, 439 Kovalenko, Oleksandr, 460 Kovalevs'kyi, Ievhraf, 283 Kovalevs’kyi, Maksym, 443 Kozel's'kyi, Iakiv, 40–1 Kramators'k, 289 Krasovs'kyi, Andrii, 187–9, 217 Kraszewski, Józef Ignacy, 93, 95, 267 Kravchinskii, Sergei, 441 Krawchenko, Bohdan, 275, 282, 313, 320, 402, 403, 480 Krechetnikov, Mikhail, 33 Kremenchuk, 301, 321, 322 Kremenets', 35, 108 Kremenets' Lyceum, 36, 96, 101, 109 Krichev, 17 Kronstadt, 288 Kryms'kyi, Ahatanhel, 341, 389 Kryp’iakevych, Ivan, 474 Kryvbas, 283, 293, 296, 300, 301, 359, 494 Kryvyi Rih, 283, 291, 293 Kuban', 280, 281, 413, 458 Küçük Kaynarca, treaty of, 43 Kuindzhi, Arkhip, 379 Kulish, Panteleimon, 94, 107, 177, 191, 197, 209, 211, 247, 421, 492; and Brotherhood of ss. Cyril and Methodius, 108, 147, 491; and journal Osnova, 173–4; on

Shevchenko, 211, 405; in St Petersburg hromada, 172–3; and the translation of New Testament, 436 Kulzhyns'kyi, Ivan, 77 Kursk (city), 106, 284; (imperial province), 285, 290, 308 Kvitka-Osnov'ianenko, Hryhorii, 79, 80, 118, 126, 409, 413, 416, 421 Kybal’chych, Mykola, 431, 447, 478 Kyiv (city), 19, 21, 35, 41, 78–81, 83, 84, 99–110, 115, 137–8, 141, 142, 171, 175–6, 187, 206–8, 210, 252, 284, 301, 312, 315, 316, 321, 334, 337, 368, 372, 375, 386–7, 412, 428, 459, 461, 477, 479, 481; (general governorship), 95, 100; (imperial province), 34, 35, 92, 95, 100, 142, 143, 145, 146, 150, 151, 169, 182, 183, 185, 276, 279, 297, 299, 361, 369, 370, 376, 378, 426, 438, 445, 446, 468, 522n156, 527n232; (palatinate), 13, 92; (vice-royalty), 21, 61 Kyiv Archeographic Commission, 101–2, 109, 121, 171, 191, 197, 198, 491 Kyiv census of 1874, 105, 201–2, 440, 493 Kyiv Cossack Movement (Kyïvs'ka kozachchyna), 151 Kyiv Hromada (Old Hromada), 175, 200, 202, 257, 391, 430, 433–4, 440, 441, 445–6, 449, 450, 453, 454, 456, 469, 478, 492, 493, 494 Kyiv Literacy Society, 325 Kyiv Mohyla Academy, 38, 40, 46, 58, 62, 74, 490 Kyiv Municipal Museum, 141, 375

Index Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, 325 Kyiv Theological Academy, 99, 206, 207, 340, 363, 385, 435, 490 Kyiv University, 72, 98, 101, 102, 107, 109, 121, 154, 164, 168, 169, 171, 180, 186, 194, 197, 201, 207, 325, 377, 400, 450, 454, 466 Kyivan Caves Monastery, 99, 103, 181 Kyivan Rus', 12, 47, 66, 67, 69, 78, 210, 237. See also Old Rus' Lampi, Francesco, 116 Latin script, 85, 93, 125, 196, 218, 230 Lavrivs'kyi, Iuliian, 243, 247 Lebedyntsev brothers, 435 Lebedyntsev, Teofan, 435 Left-Bank Ukraine, 21, 23, 27, 31, 33, 34, 40, 43, 45, 46, 58, 59, 61, 66, 78, 86, 134, 142, 151, 155, 158, 167, 175, 210, 236, 281, 311, 320, 335, 360, 361, 374, 378, 452, 461, 489 Leipzig, 349 Leipzig University, 41 Lelewel, Joachim, 116, 187, 189, 267 Lem, Stanisław, 273 Lemberg. See Lviv Lenin, Vladimir, 295, 319, 482; on internal colonization, 303; on raznochintsy, 116 Leopold, the grand duke of Tuscany, Holy Roman emperor, 4, 5, 490 Libelt, Karol, 166 Lieven, Dominic, 475 Limanowski, Bolesław, 266 Lincoln, Abraham, 349, 409, 422, 424, 448

581

Lincoln, Bruce, 149 Lisova pisnia (poem), 391–2 Lithuania, 12, 76, 169, 179, 183, 235, 260, 289, 365, 371, 372 Lithuanian language, 196 Lithuanian Statute, 47, 59 Lithuanians, 97, 186 Little Russia (historical region), 8, 31, 32, 33, 38, 41, 44, 46, 58, 60, 62–5, 68, 69, 72–3, 77, 83, 86, 92, 98, 99, 118, 119–120, 128, 191, 210, 308 Little Russian College, 21, 40 “Little Russian gentry” (concept), 58, 63, 167. See also nobility “Little Russian lobby,” 191, 193, 202–3, 231, 509n32 “Little Russian nation” (concept), 112 Liubomyrka, 427 Liverpool, 310, 312 Livonia, 8, 31 Loboda, Viktor, 190–1 Lobysevych, Opanas, 58 Łódź, 144, 302 Lonachevs'kyi-Petruniaka, Oleksandr, 445 London, 48, 288, 293, 310, 312, 462 Lotots’kyi, Oleksandr, 467 Lower Austria, 345 Lower Volga region, 281, 303 lubok, 406–9, 411–19, 421, 425 Lueger, Karl, 163, 370 Luhansk, 373, 460 Lviv, 104, 129, 220, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 236, 238, 243, 254, 259, 260–74, 341, 378, 391, 449, 454, 456, 476, 489, 494; as capital of Galicia, 11, 28; Hrushevs’kyi comes to, 249; Ossolineum in,

582

Index

125; railway in, 218, 492; revolution of 1848 in, 131; Shevchenko Society in, 248, 325, 493; trial of Russophiles in, 239, 241 Lviv Greek Catholic seminary, 124 Lviv Municipal Theater, 270 Lviv Polytechnical Institute, 220, 270 Lviv University, 29, 30,130, 169, 222, 248, 250, 251, 261, 272, 489, 494 Lypyns’kyi, Viacheslav, 482, 485 Lysenko, Mykola, 414, 434, 440, 465, 200 Lysiak Rudnytsky, Ivan, x, 98, 189, 256, 304, 451, 452, 479, 484 Lyzohub, Dmytro, 447, 478 Macpherson, James, 79 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 387, 392, 398 Magdeburg law, 47, 104, 137, 161, 378, 489 Magocsi, Paul Robert, xiv, 46, 56–7, 168, 232, 238, 244, 449, 459, 463 Maksymovych, Mykhailo, 47, 71–2, 99, 103, 118, 126, 167, 209, 210, 214, 491 Malevich, Kazimir (Kazimierz Malewicz), 375 Malia, Martin, 206 Malorossiiskie pesni (song collection), 71 Manchester, 144, 310, 312 manufacture (manufacturing), 143, 145, 262, 279, 283, 294, 296, 298, 305, 362, 313, 365, 366; of agricultural machinery, 303; of consumer goods, 282, 302; of finished goods, 300, 302 Marazli, Grigorii, 379

Maria Theresa, empress-dowager of Holy Roman Empire, 5, 10, 12, 25–6, 28, 122, 489 Marianne (revolutionary symbol), 122 Mariupol (city), 17, 283, 379, 460; (district), 379 Markevych, Mykola, 63–5, 71, 118, 209, 215 Markovych, Iakiv, 68–71 Marx, Karl, 202, 256, 480, 492 Marxism, xii, 256, 480, 482, 485 Maslosoiuz, 352 Maslov, Stepan, 99, 103 Masurians (Mazurzy), 258 Matejko, Jan, 267 Maupassant, Guy de, 386 Mazepa, Ivan, hetman of Ukraine, 21, 62, 79, 288, 412, 422 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 56, 108 Mechnikov, Ilia, 363 Melenevs'kyi, Marian, 458, 482 Mennonites, 16, 376, 486 Mensheviks, 460, 462, 463 merchants, 139, 160, 182, 315, 316, 320, 321, 405; ethnicity of, 322, 527n236; ethnic Russian, 105, 138, 144, 283, 284, 306, 361–2, 365; ethnic Ukrainian, 278, 324; Greek, 378; Jewish, 352, 364, 366–8, 380; number of, 322–3, 362; in Odesa, 313; Polish, 374; in zemstvos, 160–1, 437 Meshcherskii, Vladimir, 340 Metternich, Klemens von, 108, 129, 263, 490 Mickiewicz, Adam, 65, 108, 111, 116, 124, 267, 269 Mickiewicz, Władysław, 182 Middle East, 341

Index migration (emigration): abroad, 342–4, 349, 424; of Jews, 330, 342, 521n140; northeast, 40; of peasants within Russia, 279–80, 330; Polish, 35, 97 Mikhnovs'kyi, Mykola, 456–7, 458, 482, 485 military settlements, 15, 146, 150 Miliukov, Pavel, 445 Miliutin, Dmitrii, 153, 191, 194 Miller, Aleksei, 194, 368 Minsk (imperial province), 84 Mirna, Zinaïda, 335 Mliïv, 145 mobilized diasporas, 317, 377, 387 modernism, 264, 384, 386–8, 392–6, 398–9, 401, 529n1 modernization, 51, 132, 133, 144, 145, 293, 296, 309, 313, 399; of the countryside, 137, 428; forces of, 404; languages of, 292; skewed, 308; of Ukrainian culture, 433; uneven, 387 Moldova (Moldavia), 11, 141, 150 Moldavians, 16 Montesquieu, Charles Louis de, 8, 40 Moon, David, 97, 136 Morachevs'kyi, Pylyp, 436 Moravia, 11, 128 mortality: infant, 327, 330, 339, 341; in Lviv, 264; male and female, 328; among religious communities, 326, 364; in Russian Ukraine overall, 326–7 Moscow (city), 39, 46, 47, 62, 63, 66, 71, 83, 99, 102, 118, 132, 141, 145, 149, 161, 178, 193, 236, 238, 243, 246, 284, 304, 305, 334, 340, 365, 369, 371, 375, 409, 412, 414, 436,

583

469, 491; (imperial province), 326, 327 Moscow University, 41, 62, 71, 443 Mound of the Union of Lublin, 269–70 Mozart, Franz Xaver, 266 Mshanets', 348–50, 423–4 municipal reform of 1870, 161 Muraviev, Andrei, 103 Muraviev-Apostol, Sergei, 82–3 Muscovites, 44, 85, 98, 135, 246 Muscovy, 21, 111, 112, 113, 165, 245, Muslims, 326, 330 Mykhail Kachkovs'kyi Society, 235, 237–8, 247, 259, 349 Mykola Dzheria (novel), 286, 387 Mykolaïv, 17, 20, 145, 147, 162, 283, 301, 310, 315, 322, 359, 365, 367, 373, 380, 428, 460 Myloradovych-Skoropads'ka, Ielyzaveta, 248, 325 Myrhorod (Cossack) regiment, 42 Myrnyi, Panas, 247, 385–6, 389, 407 Nairn, Tom, 48 Namier, Lewis, 131 Napoleon I Bonaparte, 27, 45, 490 Napoleonic Code, 335 Napoleonic wars, 83, 376, 490 Narodnyi dim (National Home), 233, 271 narodovtsi (national populists), 242– 8, 250–3, 257 Naumenko, Volodymyr, 325, 433, 445 Naumovych, Ivan, 236, 239–40, 242 Nazi Germany, 474 Nechui-Levyts'kyi, Ivan, 151, 206–9, 217, 247, 286, 385–7, 389, 421, 435, 529n1

584

Index

Nekrasov, Nikolai, 202, 410 Nevsky Prospect, 340 New Era, 213, 250–2, 254, 256, 259, 494 New Russia, 14, 16, 18, 20, 21, 23, 27, 36, 38, 59, 138, 140, 147, 151, 162, 281, 303, 307, 308, 312, 360, 361, 362, 365, 380, 428, 489; Germans in, 17; as laboratory of modernity, 19; migration of peasants to, 150; Poles in, 373. See also southern Ukraine New Russian Society for Coal, Iron and Rail Production, 288, 292 New Serbia, 15 New Testament, 194, 436 Nicholas I, emperor of Russia, 24, 33, 49, 60, 62, 86, 87, 95, 97, 101, 103, 107, 117, 121, 146, 147, 152, 155, 164, 366, 491 Nicholas II, emperor of Russia, 369, 372, 494 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 384, 390, 393 nihilists, 206, 209, 210, 212 Nikitenko, Alexander, 135–6, 148, 274, 145, 274, Nizhnii Novgorod (city), 145, 148; (imperial province), 326, 327 Nizhyn, 41, 62, 378, 440 nobility, 22, 67, 68, 141, 148, 155, 157, 158, 172, 191, 206, 210, 230, 316, 325, 343, 366, 468; Charter to, 9, 33; and intelligentsia, 319; and interfaith marriages, 337; Polish, 28, 34, 37, 64, 84, 94, 95–6, 100, 101, 105, 124, 127, 161, 179, 182, 185, 195, 198, 201, 223, 345, 370–2, 373; in Table of Ranks, 26–7; Ukrainian/Cossack, 59–60, 63,

74, 76, 113, 248, 391; in zemstvos, 437 North America, 17, 494, 380, Northwestern provinces, 85, 94, 235 Nose (novella), 307 November Uprising. See Polish Uprisings: November of 1830–31 Novhorod-Sivers'kyi (city), 43, 59, 66; (vice-royalty), 21, 59, 61 Novitskii, Orest, 193 novokursnyky (“New Liners”), 259, 475. See also Russophiles October Manifesto, 417, 461, 463, 464, 495 Odesa, 18, 74, 145, 147, 148, 161, 162, 174, 181, 262, 305, 313, 325, 337, 359, 360, 370, 416, 428, 447, 448; in census of 1897, 494; first Sabbath school in, 176, 507n51; founding of, 15, 17; Greeks in, 378–9; Jews in, 100, 364–5, 367, 369; merchants in, 321; Poles in, 373–6; population of, 137, 138, 140, 279, 280, 310– 12, 314–16; railroad in, 106, 140, 284; revolution of 1905 in, 459– 461, 463, 495 Odesa (New Russian) University, 361, 367, 436, 446, 466, 492 Odessa. See Odesa “official nationality” (ideology), 103, 147 Ogarev, Nikolai, 209 Ohloblyn, Oleksandr, 43, 323–4 Ohonovs'kyi, Oleksandr, 244, 250 Ohonovs'kyi, Omelian, 244 oil, 303, 345, 357; discovery in Galicia, 354–5; empire, 356 Okhtyrka, 322

Index Old Believers, 138, 144, 278, 362, 382, 426, 430 Old Hromada. See Kyiv Hromada Old Regime, 51, 81, 82, 106, 121, 122, 158, 357 Old Rus', 66, 67, 174, 237 Old Ruthenians, 232–3, 235, 242, 244–5, 246 Oleksandr Pol' Regional Museum, 295, 495 Oleksandrivs'k (today’s Zaporizhzhia), 17, 428, 460 Oleksiïvka, 408–10 Olesnyts'kyi, Ievhen, 252, 267 Olizar, Gustaw, 84, 96, 182 Orenburg, 152 Orenburg fortress, 179 Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (oUn ), 231, 482 Orthodox Church/Orthodoxy, 40, 58, 59, 60, 93, 95, 96, 103, 171, 181, 196, 235, 237, 239, 240, 243, 284, 334, 336, 337, 340, 358, 360, 371, 425, 426–30, 434, 435, 436, 468, 473–4, 523n169 Orthodox Slavs, xi Osnova (journal), 171, 173–4, 197, 492 Ossian, 79, 93 Ossolineum, 125, 127, 222, 233, 272 Ostaszewski, Spirydon, 92–3 Ottoman Empire, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 21, 36, 38, 56, 379, 493 Padura, Tymko, 93, 96, 126 Pale of Settlement, 365–8, 490; established in, 34, 365 Palestine, 365 Parajanov, Sergei, 390 Parfenii (Pamfil Levyts’kyi), 436

585

Paris, 98, 142, 147, 260, 268, 293, 312 Parnell, Charles Stewart, 447 Pasicznyk, Uliana, xiv Paskevych (Paskevich), Ivan, 48–9, 86 Pasternak, Boris, 369 Paton, Borys, 377 Paul I, emperor of Russia, 13, 39, 44, 49, 82, 490 Pavlohrad, 322 Pavlovs'kyi, Oleksii, 70, 72 Pavlychko, Solomiia, 397, 399 Pavlyk, Mykhailo, 254, 391, 450, 453 Pchilka, Olena, 391, 396, 431, 494 peace mediators, 156, 158, 391, 441 peasantry, 31, 151, 153, 158, 170, 172, 177, 183, 187, 188, 210, 278, 313, 317, 362, 368, 382, 386, 395, 399, 405, 437, 446, 474, 480; in Galicia, 123, 257, 343, 350–1; in the Hetmanate, 32; in Polish January uprising, 185; on the Right Bank, 34, 86, 95, 97; stratification of, 275, 323; and Ukrainian revolutionaries, 456, 458–9 People’s Will, 447 Peremyshl' (Przemyśl), 124–5, 243, 249, 515n23 Perovskaia, Sofia, 153 Perovskii, Lev, 152 Pershyi vinok (almanac), 396, 494 Persia, 15, 84 Pestel, Pavel, 83–4 Peter and Paul Fortress, 114, 119 Peter I, emperor of Russia, 26, 32, 40, 61, 133, 148, 172 Petliura, Symon, 319, 435, 465, 481

586

Index

Petrov, Nikolai, 363 Petrovsky-Shtern, Yohanan, 365 Petrovs’kyi, Hryhorii, 517n61 Petrunkevych, Ivan, 441–5, 454 Piedmont, 219, 241, 249, 251, 257 Pinker, Steven, xii Pirogov, Nikolai, 176 Pisarev, Dmitrii, 210, 388 Piven’, Oleksandr, 413 Plokhy, Serhii, 38, 65, 66, 73, 92, 274, 285, 485 Pobedonostsev, Konstantin, 358 Pochaïv monastery, 96, 236 Podil (district in Kyiv), 107, 176, 446 Podolia (historical region), 83, 86, 169; (palatinate), 13; (province), 34, 45, 75, 85, 92, 93, 94, 95, 100, 101, 133, 134, 150, 159, 183–5, 276, 279, 286, 296–7, 309, 327, 329, 330, 360, 361, 365, 368, 375, 380, 403, 417, 429, 435, 436, 438, 490, 491, 527n229, 528n254 Pogodin, Mikhail, 209 Pol', Oleksandr, 293–4, 295, 300, 322, 325, 377, 495 Poland, 10–13, 19, 21, 27, 49, 62, 67, 84, 91, 94, 97–9, 125, 128, 168, 170, 179, 180–1, 183, 186, 189, 198, 245, 258, 260, 265, 269, 360–1, 430, 472, 474; in Books of the Genesis of the Ukrainian People, 112–4; historic, 198, 258, 430, 472, 485; partitions of, 27, 34, 35, 38, 44, 270, 272, 364, 365, 489, 490; Russian, 302, 303, 304, 321. See also Poland-Lithuania; PolishLithuanian Commonwealth; Kingdom of Poland

Poland-Lithuania, 9, 12, 13, 21, 185, 322, 508n13. See also PolishLithuanian Commonwealth; Kingdom of Poland. Poles, 11, 27, 31, 35, 51, 67, 92, 98, 101, 111, 115, 122, 129, 146, 173, 176, 188, 192, 194, 231, 239, 242–3, 246, 250, 258, 267, 282, 314, 317, 322, 346, 351, 352, 353, 358, 363, 380, 424, 453, 460, 472, 473, 475, 479, 486; in Cracow uprising of 1846, 127; discrimination and russification of, 22, 195–8, 216, 235, 381–2; in Donbas, 289, 373; emigration of, 97, 344; in Galician administration, 220, 222–3, 231, 248, 345; in Galicia’s oil industry, 355; and Kharkiv University, 75; in Kholm region, 474; in Kyiv, 103–5, 315; in Lviv, 261, 265, 266, 268–72; in Odesa, 359, 375; during the partitions, 10, 13; population size of, 123, 124, 309, 315, 359, 371; in revolution of 1848, 131, 218, 491; on the Right Bank, 36, 84, 96, 102, 156, 361, 369–70, 372–3, 527n229; in southeastern Ukraine, 359, 373–4; in uprising of 1830, 49, 85–6, 95, 100, 201; in uprising of 1863, 171, 179–185; in World War I, 259, 476 Poletyka family, 293 Polish language, 29, 76, 123, 182, 195, 220, 230, 267 Polish Uprisings: November of 1830–31, 35, 49, 84, 92, 94, 99, 116, 127, 201, 267, 365, 370, 491; January of 1863, 161, 179, 180, 181, 185, 188, 191, 195,

Index 370, 483, 492; Cracow of 1846, 127; of Kościuszko, 268 Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, 12, 13, 38, 84, 92, 169, 260, 269, 364, 365 Pollack, Martin, 273 Polovtsov, Aleksandr, 193 Poltava (city), 21, 49, 52, 53, 55, 77, 107, 157, 176, 189, 190, 322, 404, 416, 428, 455; (regiment), 40, 53; (imperial province), 58, 86, 92, 98, 99, 117, 119, 134, 138,143, 157, 161, 176, 186, 248, 276, 278, 279, 281–2, 297, 309, 312, 317, 320, 324, 326, 327, 329, 330, 360, 373, 435, 440, 456, 460, 489, 527n232 Poltava gymnasium, 189 Poltava Hromada, 191 Poltava zemstvo, 442 Porsh, Mykola, 465, 467, 470 Portugal, 4, 28 Potapov, Aleksandr, 204 Potebnia, Oleksandr, 483 Potemkin (battleship), 460, 461, 495 Potemkin villages, 19–20, 307 Potemkin, Grigorii, Prince, 16–20, 33, 44, 60, 293 Potocki family, 83 Potocki, Andrzej, 259, 448, 495 Potocki, Jan, 35 Potocki, Seweryn, 75 Potocki, Stanisław Szczęsny, 35 Potsdam, 6 Poviia (novel), 385–6 Prague, 104, 106, 260, 262, 263, 264, 265, 267, 270, 440, 444, Pravda (newspaper), 247, 248, 252, 454 print capitalism, 417, 430

587

Pritsak, Omeljan, xiv, 116, 324, 449, 450 Prodameta, 301, 374 Produgol', 301 professionals, 48, 105, 129, 163, 182, 185, 251, 262, 263, 432, 439; categories of, 317–8; and intelligentsia, 318; Jewish, 367; in municipal governments, 162; para-, 320; Polish, 373–4; among raznochintsy, 166; among Russians in Kyiv, 361; in zemstvos, 160 Prokofiev, Sergei, 363 Prokopovych, Teofan, 40 Prosvita Society (Galicia), 237–8, 247–8, 257, 259, 348–9, 351, 353, 421–4, 475; (Russian Ukraine), 380, 417–18, 436, 445, 469 Protestants, 5, 12, 105, 265, 326, 330, 332, 337, 382, 522n141, 533n86 Protsenko, Vasilii, 162–3 Proudhon, Pierre Joseph, 207, 387, 451 Prussia, 4–7, 9, 10, 22, 43, 44, 84, 106, 119, 161, 166, 220, 221, 490, 492, 493 Pugachev rebellion, 82, 97, 149 Pushkin, Alexander, 184, 238, 242, 410, 457 Rada (newspaper), 325, 464, 465–6, 470 Radishchev, Alexander, 134, 149 Radiuk, Pavlo (literary character), 207–8, 213, 217, 387 Raeff, Marc, 40, 163–4, 445 railroads, 3, 106, 146, 281, 284, 296, 305, 306, 323, 374, 404, 515n27;

588

Index

in Donbas, 283, 291–3, 494; extent of, 140, 284–5; first in Austrian Ukraine, 218, 492, 515n23; first in Russian Ukraine, 106, 140–1; production of, 298 railway. See railroads Rasputin, Grigorii, 340 Raylan, Nicolai de, 341 raznochintsy, 166, 205, 209, 316, 319, 439 Rechtsstaat, 161, 164, 443, 445 Reichstag, 129, 130 Remy, Johannes, 154, 190, 194, 432 Renner, Karl, 222 Repnin-Volkonskii, Nikolai, 46, 86, 119, 120 Reshetar, John, 449–50 resource curse, xii, 282, 285, 293, 302, 309, 314; black soil, 137, 322, 383 Revolution of 1848. See Springtime of Peoples Revolution of 1905, 276, 426, 444, 456, 459, 462 Revolutionary Ukrainian party, 455, 460, 494 Rigelman, Alexander, 62, 63, 71 Right-Bank Ukraine, 10, 11, 13, 23, 27, 34, 35, 36, 37, 50, 67, 78, 84, 85, 86, 93, 94–7, 100, 101, 106, 109, 116, 133, 134, 150, 151, 156–8, 161, 168, 169, 170, 171, 180–5, 189, 195, 196, 198, 201, 246, 274, 286, 300, 359, 360, 361, 364, 365, 370, 371–3, 375, 377, 381, 435, 438, 452, 458, 462, 468, 473, 490, 491, 492, 528n242 Rivne, 110

Roman Catholicism/Roman Catholics, 345, 358, 370, 474; (in the Russian Empire), 102, 185, 370–1, 528n254; (in the Habsburg Empire), 123, 229, 232, 265 Romanchuk, Iuliian, 244, 250, 252 Romanians, 11, 15, 236, 249, 457, 527n229 Romanov dynasty, 22 Romans, 70, 111, 292 Romantic nationalists, 42, 48, 50, 57, 68, 113, 114, 456 Romanticism, 38, 67, 78, 124, 166, 387 Rome, 5, 239, 245, 261 Romny, 322 Rostov on Don, 283 Rozumovs'kyi, Kyrylo, hetman of Ukraine, 58, 63, 119 Ruban, Vasyl', 60 Rudans'kyi, Stepan, 247 Rudnytsky, Ivan Lysiak. See Lysiak Rudnytsky, Ivan Rumiantsev, Petr, 32, 33, 38–9, 63 Rusalka Dnistrovaia (poetic collection), 126, 491 Rus'ka besida, 231 Rus'ka triitsia (Ruthenian Triad literary group), 124–6, 128, 230, 235, 271 Rus'kyi Sobor (party), 230 Rusov, Mykhailo, 456 Rusov, Oleksandr, 440, 456, 465 Russia. See Great Russia; Russian Empire “Russian Catholics” (concept), 371 Russian Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) party, 444, 467. See also Kadets Russian Empire, 19, 24, 37, 39, 69,

Index 74, 75, 76, 83, 97, 114, 117, 126, 127, 140, 145, 166, 172, 209, 229, 232, 233, 240, 249, 276, 277, 280, 287, 318, 321, 332, 345, 358, 364, 369, 432, 445, 451, 465, 472, 479, 484, 494; census of 1897 in, 274; cities in, 294, 312; civil servants in, 25; as coproduct of Russians and Ukrainians, 36, 47; emancipation of the serfs in, 492; ethnic Russians in, 36, 360; ethnic Ukrainians in, 308, 320; and Hetmanate, 21, 67; industrial revolution in, 296, 299, 302, 304; internal colonialism in, 17–8; and partitions of Poland, 13, 34; peasant migration in, 342; religious dissidents in, 426; Revolution of 1905 in, 495; Roman Catholics in, 370, 474; in World War II, 477. See also Great Russia Russian Orthodox Church. See Orthodox Church/Orthodoxy Russian Social Democratic Workers’ party, 458, 462, 480 Russian Socialist Revolutionary party, 458 Russians, xi, 12, 22, 24, 39, 44, 48, 54, 137, 138, 150, 166, 171, 172, 188, 197, 212, 272, 282, 303–8, 337, 382, 402, 403, 425, 457, 474, 475, 479, 481; and allRussian nation, 40, 46, 47, 67; in cities, 99, 100, 311, 314, 315, 360, 471; Drahomanov on, 452–3; and Galicia’s Ruthenians, 228–9, 232, 234, 235, 236, 240, 243, 246; as intellectuals, 363; in Kyiv Hromada, 177, 180, 181;

589

Maksymovych on, 71; population of, 309, 311, 359, 494, 527n229; on the Right Bank, 84, 93, 98, 102, 360, 371–2; in southern and eastern Ukraine, 290, 295, 312, 360; in trades and occupations, 144, 283, 317, 322, 358, 360–1, 363, 380–1, 527n236; in World War II, 475–6. See also Great Russians “Russian world” (ideology), 197; in Galicia, 234, 237–8, 240 russification, 138, 207, 397, 410, 417, 420, 474; administrative, 22; Drahomanov on, 203; of Poles, 216, 235; of urban areas, 138 Russkaia pravda (manifesto), 83 Russo-Belgian Metallurgical Company, 289, 292 Russophiles (in Galicia), 233–5, 237–44, 246, 247, 251–2, 254, 258, 259, 347, 474–6, 493 Russo-Turkish wars: (of 1710–11), 42; (of 1768–74), 39, 43, 489; (of 1787–92), 38; (of 1806–12), 53, 150; (of 1878–79), 441, 493 Ruthenian language, 95, 124, 125, 130, 227, 228, 232, 242 Ruthenian-Ukrainian Radical party, 254, 453, 493 Ryleev, Konstantin, 82 Ryl's'kyi, Fadei, 174 An-sky, S.A. (Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport), 410–11 Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von, 266, 273 Šafařík, Pavel Jozef, 68, 108, 126 Sambir, 243, 348

590

Index

Samostaine slovo (proclamation), 186, 188 Samostiina Ukraïna (pamphlet), 456, 458, 494 Sandomierz (palatinate), 10 Sapieha, Leon, 230 Sarajevo, 259 Sardinia-Piedmont, 219, 257 Saudi Arabia, 355 Saxony, 106 Schad, Johann Baptist, 75 Schnitzler, Arthur, 387, 389, 408 Scotland, 8, 48 Scots, 48, 307 Scott, Walter, 19 Scottish Gaelic language, 196 Senkovskii, Osip (Sęnkowski, Józef), 63–5, 118, 119 Serbia, 56, 332, 333 serfdom, 3, 4, 5, 41, 85, 87, 110, 127, 133, 137, 150, 151; abolition of (in Austria), 6–7, 30, 129, 491; abolition of (in Russia), 97, 146, 149; arguments against, 152–3, 155; introduction of, 8–9, 43, 489; on the right bank, 169, 189; Shevchenko’s liberation from, 118, 121, 136, 491; and slavery, 134 Sevastopol, 38, 145, 284 Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (novella and film), 390 Shakhmatov, Aleksei, 470 Shakhrai, Vasyl', 313 Shalaputs, 426 Shashkevych, Markiian, 124, 125, 126, 421–2 Sheptyts'kyi, Andrei, 347, 476, 494 Shevchenko Scientific Society (Shevchenko Society of Lviv), 248, 249, 251, 270, 271, 325, 493

Shevchenko, Taras, 65, 67, 71, 94, 107, 115, 116–17, 120–1, 179, 187, 209, 210–11, 216, 388, 405, 447, 454, 483, 487; and Brotherhood of ss. Cyril and Methodius, 491; and concept of Ukraine, 92; and Galicia, 233, 243, 245, 253, 271, 422; on Germans and Jews in Zaporozhia, 17; and Haidamaky, 173; in Hromada, 173–4; and Kobzar, 119, 491; returns from exile, 148, 492; reburied in Kyiv, 175, 492; reception by mass reader, 406, 407, 409, 413, 421; redeemed from serfdom, 136, 491; in St Petersburg, 117–19, 172, 484 Shevyrev, Stepan, 209 Sholem Aleichem, 367–8 Shrah, Illia, 445, 454 shtetls, 105, 365–6, 368, 528n242 Shul’hyn family, 434, 534n100 Shuliavka, 460 Siberia, 22, 76, 81, 82, 93, 95, 115, 134, 148, 149, 150, 173, 183, 185, 188, 190, 281–2, 283, 284, 308, 330, 342, 462, 494, 508n13 Sich Riflemen, 475 Sich. See Zaporozhian Sich Sichyns’kyi, Myroslav, 448, 495 Sierakowski, Zygmunt, 179, 181 Silesia,10, 128, 345 Sion (journal), 174, 240 Skalat, 236 Skal'kovs'kyi, Apolon, 18, 19 Sklokin, Volodymyr, xiv, 41, 42 Skoropads'kyi, Pavlo, hetman of the Ukrainian State, 248, 325, 476, 477 Skoropads'kyi, Ivan, hetman of Ukraine, 63

Index Skovoroda, Hryhorii, 73, 77 Slaveno-Rusyn, 125. See also Ruthenian language slavery, 3, 64, 134, 136, 146, 160, 348, 349, 409 Slavic alphabet, 108 Slavic Serbia, 15 Slavophiles, 108, 167, 176, 193, 209, 306 Slavs, xi, 67, 69, 98, 110, 111, 113, 128, 232, 376, 377, 382 Slezkine,Yuri, 367, 477 Sloboda Ukraine (historical region), 21, 41, 42, 74–8, 80, 81, 86, 110, 134, 274, 360, 361, 490; (imperial province), 21, 73, 92, 490. See also Kharkiv (imperial province) Slov’ianoserbs'k (district), 290 Slovaks, 68, 262 Slovo (journal), 233, 239, 241, 247 Słowacki, Juliusz, 36, 93, 94, 96, 267 smallholders (odnodvortsy), 95, 185, 370 Smith, Adam, 41, 48 Snihurs'kyi, Ivan, 124 Snyder, Tim, 357 Society of Ukrainian Progressives, 469 Society of United Slavs, 83, 108 Sofia, 256 Sofiïvka (Zofiówka), 35 Sokil (Falcon) Society, 271 Soloviev, Vladimir, 340 Somov, Orest, 49, 86 Son (poem), 120, 121 Soshenko, Ivan, 117 South Russian Dnepr [Dnipro] Factory, 292 South/Southern Russia, 72, 193, 304 Southern Society (Decembrist), 83–4

591

southern Ukraine, 14, 16, 18–19, 23, 38, 45, 59, 80, 138, 158, 159, 277, 288, 293, 296, 298, 301, 304, 336, 338, 361, 365, 371, 374, 376, 428, 452, 458, 489. See also New Russia Southwestern Branch of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, 200, 201, 205, 493 southwestern provinces, 85 Southwestern Region, 34, 100, 101, 105, 195, 198, 300, 308, 491 Soviet Ukraine, 304, 323, 477, 481, 486. See also Ukrainian SSR Soviet Union, 474, 477 Spenser, Herbert, 214, 387 Spilka. See Ukrainian Social Democratic Union Springtime of Peoples, 112, 122, 228, 491 Sreznevskii, Izmail, 78, 79, 80, 126, 209 St Andrew’s Church (Kyiv), 103, 107 St Michael’s Cathedral (Kyiv), 103 St Petersburg University, 136, 164, 212 St Petersburg, 8, 9, 12, 13, 18, 19, 26–7, 35, 39–41, 42, 46, 49, 53, 60–3, 68, 70–2, 77, 81--3, 147–8, 94, 100, 107, 115–8, 126, 134, 153, 154, 179, 181, 187, 189, 190, 205, 211, 284, 296, 305, 307, 314, 334, 340, 364, 371, 375, 382, 385, 409, 412, 413, 414, 416, 441, 447, 462; Bloody Sunday in, 417, 449, 459–60, 489, 490, 491, 495; Hromada in, 171–3, 175, 214, 469, 492; Shevchenko’s death in, 211; Shevchenko’s Kobzar appears in,

592

Index

119; Ukrainian civic leaders in, 467 St Sophia Cathedral (Kyiv), 102, 103, 435 St Vladimir University. See Kyiv University St George Cathedral (Lviv), 271 Stadion, Franz, 129, 131, 217, 218, 219, 227, 243 Stalin, Joseph, 95, 260, 319, 365 Stalinist purges, 304 Stanisław Augustus Poniatowski, king of Poland, 19 Stanyslaviv, 243 Staryi Sambir, 231, 348 Staryts’ka-Cherniakhivs’ka, Liudmyla, 397 Staryts'kyi, Mykhailo, 247 State Council (Russia), 35, 153, 154, 155, 194, 198 State Duma, 465–6, 469; First, 462, 467, 485; Second, 436, 462, 467, 495; Third, 468, 470, 474; Fourth, 445, 468, 470 Stavropol (imperial province), 280 Stech, Marko R., xiv Stefanyk, Vasyl‘, 343, 397, 399 steppe, 14, 16, 20, 24, 78, 137, 140, 141, 281, 298, 311, 376 steppe frontier, 14, 288 Stoianov, Oleksandr, 186 Stoianovs'kyi, Mykola (Nikolai), 154 Stolypin land reform, 277, 280, 281, 495 Stolypin, Petr, 369, 448, 468, 469, 481, 495 Storozhenko, Oleksa, 197, 216, 247, 416 Struve, Petr, 463, 470, 472 Stryi, 352

Stundists, 426, 427, 428, 430 Štúr, L’udovít, 68 Subcarpathia/Subcarpathian Rus', 229, 492. See also Transcarpathia sugar: beet industry, 106, 142, 287, 300; processing/production, 142–3, 145–6, 196, 286–8, 296–9, 302, 305, 321; refineries, 141–5, 276, 285–7, 298, 346, 372–3 Sumarokov, Pavel, 20 Sumtsov, Mykola, 466 Sunday schools, 172, 176, 177, 186, 187, 190, 198, 207, 403 Supreme Ukrainian Council, 475 surzhyk, 365, 400 Suvorin, Aleksei, 416 Świątek, Adam, 272 Swift, Jonathan, ix Switzerland, 69, 202, 449, 451 Symyrenko family, 278, 446 Symyrenko, Fedir, 145, 324 Symyrenko, Platon, 173, 324 Symyrenko, Vasyl', 433 Syniehub, Volodymyr, 192 Sysyn, Frank E., xiv, 423, 424 Szajnocha, Karol, 267 szlachta (Polish nobility), 59, 95, 371. See also nobility Szporluk, Roman, 13, 114 Table of Ranks, 24, 26, 37, 59 Taniachkevych, Danylo, 244 Taras Brotherhood, 453, 454, 456, 494 Taras Bulba (novel), 412 Tarnawsky, Maxim, xiv Tarnovs'kyi, Vasyl', 155, 173, 324 Tashkent, xii Tatars, 19, 76, 268, 322. See also Crimean Tatars

Index Taurida (historical region), 14; (imperial province), 16, 134, 157, 297, 309, 326, 327, 329, 333, 359, 360, 376, 429, 438, 490, 527n229. See also Crimea; Crimean Khanate Temerty, John, 380 Tereshchenko family, 141, 142, 145 Tereshchenko, Michel, 142 Tereshchenko, Mykhailo, 142 Tereshchenko, Nikola, 141, 462 Terlets'kyi, Ostap, 254 Tevye the Dairyman, 367 theater, 7, 53, 76, 117, 321, 240, 267, 270, 319, 321, 430–1, 435, 448, 449, 478 Third Department, 203, 204 Timashev, Aleksandr, 199, 204, 205 Tiutchev, Fyodor, 234 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 214 Tolochko, Oleksii, 67 Tolstoy, Fedor, 118 Tolstoy, Leo, 164, 234, 238, 306, 407, 409, 410, 429 townspeople (burghers), 8, 26, 41, 74, 104, 105, 135, 137–9, 177, 185, 223, 261, 278, 314–16, 321, 322, 323, 325, 364, 366, 375, 382 Transcarpathia, 11, 23, 217, 479, 492. See also Subcarpathia/ Subcarpathian Rus' transportation/transport, 105, 106, 140, 262, 264, 279, 283, 284, 305, 361, 375 Trans-Siberian railroad, 281 Trentowski, Bronisław, 166 Troshchyns'kyi, Dmytro, 39, 68, 70 Trotsky, Leon, 365, 367, 428, 478 Tsebrykov, Roman, 41, 42 Tsertelev, Nikolai, 70, 71, 118, 126

593

Tul'chyn, 35, 83 Tumans'kyi, Fedir, 61, 71 Turgenev, Ivan, 164, 205, 206, 208, 209, 234, 236, 266, 337, 409, 410 Turkey, 15, 84 Turks, 7, 19, 86, 269 Ujejski, Kornel, 269 Ukraine Has Not Yet Died (poem), 188, 190 Ukrainian Democratic Agrarian party, 481 Ukrainian Democratic Radical party, 455, 467 Ukrainian language, 48, 58, 70, 72, 80, 177, 232, 233, 244, 408, 421, 430, 435, 454, 471; grammars of, 70, 172, 177, 251, 490; marketplace, 413, 414; measures against, 154, 189, 192–4, 412, 417, 492, 493; publications/literature, 198, 204, 249, 325, 383, 384, 406, 409, 411, 414, 416, 418, 420, 432, 469; schools (education), 248, 404, 425, 436, 455, 466–7; question, 174, 465, 467 Ukrainian National Democratic party, 256 Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries, 481 Ukrainian People’s party, 457 Ukrainian People’s Republic, 319, 377, 380, 477 Ukrainian School (in Polish literature), 93 Ukrainian Scientific Society (Kyiv), 469 Ukrainian Social Democratic Union (Spilka), 458–9, 462, 480, 481, 482

594

Index

Ukrainian Social Democratic Workers’ party, 462 Ukrainian SSr , 477. See also Soviet Ukraine Ukrainian State, 325 ukrainization (policy), 375, 453, 481, 486 Ukraïnka, Lesia, 341, 390–4, 396, 397, 399, 407, 431, 487 Ukrainophiles, 195, 197, 198, 207, 209, 213,214, 215, 399, 431, 445, 449, 471, 474, 478, 498n6, 502n32; activities of, 200, 202, 433, 436, 440, 493; Antonovych on, 193–4; and domesticity, 434; Drahomanov and, 203, 211–12, 450, 455; in Galicia, 235, 237, 238, 240–4, 252, 258–9, 473–5; and Revolution of 1905, 464–5; Russian press against, 192–3, 204, 468; and Sunday schools, 198; symbolism of, 216; Zheliabov and, 446–7 Ukraïns'ka khata (journal), 398, 399, 400, 401 Ukrainskii almanakh (almanac), 79 Ukrainskii vestnik (journal), 77 Ukrainskii zhurnal (journal), 77 Ukraïna irredenta (pamphlet), 255, 494 Ulianovs'kyi, Vasyl', 213 Uman', 35, 91, 92 Uniate Church. See Greek Catholic (Uniate) Church Uniates. See Greek Catholics Union for the Liberation of Ukraine, 476 Union of Russian People, 468 United States, 36, 300, 331, 342, 354, 369, 424, 451

universal male suffrage, 258, 495 Urals, 191, 235, 284, 296, 326, 330 urbanism, 139, 272 urbanization, 137, 309, 313, 314, 317, 330, 373 USSr, 81. See also Soviet Union Utrenniaia zvezda (almanac), 79 Uvarov, Sergei, 102, 103 Vahylevych, Ivan, 127, 128, 230 Valse mélancolique (novella), 395 Valuev Circular of 1863, 191, 192, 193–4, 198, 200, 204, 257, 381, 492 Valuev, Petr, 154, 177, 191, 192, 193, 194–5, 199, 472, 492 Varzar, Vasilii, 440 Vasil'chikov, Illarion, 189, 191, 199, 200 Vasylenko, Mykola, 445 Vasyl'kiv (town), 81–2; (district), 151 Vatican, 229, 239 Venturi, Franco, 446, 447 Vernyhora, 94 Vienna, 5, 10, 11, 25, 27, 29, 124, 126, 129, 163, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 234, 238, 253, 258, 260, 262, 263, 264, 266, 269, 312, 344, 345, 354, 356, 357, 476, 490, 492 Vienna University, 124, 250 Viln'a (Vilnius) Archeographic Commission, 235 Vilnius/Wilno (city), 109, 116, 179, 185, 375 (imperial province), 84 Vilnius (Wilno) University, 18, 35, 75, 116 Virgil, 53, 54, 55, 58, 77 Vistula River, 10 Voblyi, Kostiantyn, 296

Index Volhynia (historical land), 11, 91, 93, 108, 169, 260; (imperial province), 34, 35, 45, 75, 83, 84, 85, 86, 94, 95, 96, 100, 101, 110, 133, 134, 150, 183, 185, 186, 276, 297, 309, 327, 329, 330, 359, 360, 370, 371, 376, 377, 390, 427, 429, 438, 490, 491, 527n229, 528n254; (palatinate), 13 Volkonskii, Sergei, Prince, 84 Volobuiev, Mykhailo, 303–4 Voloshin, Maximilian, 284 Voltaire, 6, 7, 40 von Hagen, Mark, xiii, 475, 477 Voronezh, 274 Vorontsov, Mikhail, Prince, 36 Vortman, Dmytro, xiv Vovchok, Marko, 133, 202, 247, 407, 421 Vovk, Khvedir (Fedir), 200, 440 Vulpius, Ricarda, 435 Vushko, Iryna, 218 Vydubychi Monastery, 120 Vynnychenko, Volodymyr Wales, 519n97; South, 288, 292 Wallachians, 16 Warsaw, 13, 49, 84–6, 94, 100, 106–7, 179, 182, 183, 185, 186, 197, 314, 492 Weber, Max, 426, 452 Welsh: people, 269, 292, 493; language, 292 Wendland, Anna Veronika, 234 Western provinces (Russia), 153, 195, 196, 370, 371, 382, 491 Westernizers, 167, 209, 306. See also Slavophiles Wilno. See Vilnius Wilson, Andrew, 471

595

Wirtschafter, Elise, 166 Witte, Sergei, 277, 363, 369, 370, 464 Wolff, Larry, 11 working class, 139, 262, 267, 283, 287, 288, 292, 294, 295, 300, 305, 355, 382, 410, 425, 478, 480; and industrial workforce, 143, 283, 294, 298 World War I, x, 122, 166, 220, 234, 259, 284, 329, 330, 332, 352, 354, 357, 373, 376, 382, 397, 399, 402, 463, 468, 475, 485, 495 World War II, ix, 244, 272, 302, 449 Wortman, Richard, 146, 155 Yanukovych, Viktor, 289 Yekelchyk, Serhy, 215 Young Europe, 108 Young Italy, 108 Zablots'kyi-Desiatovs'kyi, Andrii, 153, 154 Zaleski, Józef Bohdan, 93, 94 Zaleski, Wacław, 125–6, 218 Zaporozhia, 15, 376 Zaporozhian Cossacks (Zaporozhians), 15–20, 54–5, 62, 80, 293, 295, 325, 377, 422, 495 Zaporozhian Sich, 16–17, 55, 65, 97, 376, Zaporozhskaia starina (almanac), 79–80, 126 Zarudnyi, Serhii (Sergei), 154 Zasulich, Vera, 441 Zavadovs'kyi, Petro, 39 Zayarnyuk, Andriy, 240, 350 Zemlia (novel), 395 zemstvo schools, 430, 438

596

Index

zemstvos, 160–1, 438–40, 442, 444, 455; ethnic Ukrainians in, 320, 436; intelligentsia in, 278, 431, 437; introduced on the right bank, 404, 438 Zheliabov, Andrii, 431, 446–7, 478 Zhivopisnaia Ukraina (album), 120 Zhuk, Sergei, 427–8 Zhukovskii, Vasilii, 118, 136 Zhytets’kyi, Pavlo, 430 Zhytomyr, 18, 82, 108, 182, 310, 314, 315, 316, 376, 416, 428 Ziber, Mykola, 201–2 Zionists, 353, 367 Zoria Halyts'ka (newspaper), 130 Zubryts'kyi, Mykhailo, 347–50, 424 Zurich, 295, 396 Związek Trojnicki, 169, 170, 181 Zyblikiewicz, Mikołaj, 231