Ivan L. Rudnytsky, "Franciszek Duchinski and His Impact on Ukrainian Political Thought," Harvard Ukrainian Studies, 3-4, pt. 2 (1979-80): 690-705. Reprinted in Ivan L. Rudnytsky, Essays in Modern Ukrainian History, 1987.
Franciszek Duchinski and His Impact on Ukrainian Political Thought
Franciszek Duchinski is a nearly unknown historical figure. Even the few scholars who have taken an interest in him in recent decades have failed to recognize his role in Ukrainian intellectual history. Yet in fact, as this study contends, Duchinski had a major influence on the shaping of modern Ukrainian political thought.
Franciszek Henryk Duchinski1 was born in 1816 to an impoverished Polish szlachta family of Right-Bank Ukraine.2 He attended secondary schools in Berdychiv and Uman, run by the Carmelite and Basilian orders, respectively. In 1834 he settled in Kiev, where for the next twelve years he made a living j6s a tutor in the homes of Polish aristocrats. Duchinski developed a strong attachment to the ancient Ukrainian capital; in later years, he regularly signed his Polish works "Franciszek Duchinski Kijowianin," or, in French, "Duchinski de Kiew." In 1846 he left the Russian Empire surreptitiously on a Greek ship sailing from Odessa. Having arrived in Paris, Duchinski attached himself to the "uncrowned king of the Polish emigration," Prince Adam Czartoryski. In Czartoryski's paper, Trzeci Maj (1847-8), Duchinski published, besides several programmatic articles, news about the arrest and trial by tsarist authorities of the members of the Cyrillo-Methodian Society in Kiev.3 Duchinski belonged to the circle of Prince Czartoryski's "Ukrainian" collaborators; the two other members were Michal Czajkowski (1804-86) and Reverend Hipolit Terlecki (1808-88), both remarkable personalities in their own right. Like Duchinski, they were descended from the Right-Bank Polish-Ukrainian gentry and shared with him a pronounced Ukrainophile orientation.4 During the 1848 revolution Duchinski acted as Czartoryski's agent in Italy and also visited Serbia. He moved to Istanbul in 1849, where he was to remain through 1855. In 1849 Duchinski conceived the idea of founding a Ukrainian journal dedi-cated to fostering Ukrainian-Polish co-operation against Russia. The journal was to be published on the island of Corfu (then a British possession) and smuggled to Galicia via Hungary, and to Russian Ukraine via Odessa. However, Prince Czartoryski refused to endorse the plan. During the Crimean War, Duchinski worked in a civilian capacity for the British forces in Turkey. He returned to Paris in 1856. The next decade and a half comprised the most productive years of his life. He published profusely in Polish and French, gave a series of public lectures (at the Cercle des Societes Savantes and the Polish Higher School in Paris), and established contacts with French scholars and men of letters. These activities were cut short by the demise of the Second Empire. Duchinski then moved to Switzerland, where he became director of the Polish National Museum in Rapperswil near Zurich in 1872. From Switzerland, he visited Galicia a few times. Contemporaries described him as honourable, gentle, and considerate in his personal dealings, but dogmatic and rigid in his theoretical conceptions.5 His works testify to industry and considerable erudition. However, as a self-taught man with a one-track mind, he was by no means a sound scholar. Duchinski did not hesitate to bend facts to make them conform with his preconceptions.
Franciszek Duchinski died on 13 July 1893,6 at the age of seventy-seven. He is buried at the Polish cemetery in Montmorency, France. His tombstone bears an epitaph in Ukrainian written in the Latin script —a fitting symbol of the man's dual Polish-Ukrainian allegiance.7
A posthumous edition of Duchinski's Polish works was planned in five volumes, of which only three appeared.8 The loss is perhaps not to be regretted, because he was an extremely repetitious writer who had the habit of inserting summaries of and excerpts from his earlier writings in subsequent ones. Duchinski's output also included several books and numerous articles in French, as well as a few pieces in German and in Ukrainian.9
These writings were based on a racial philosophy of history.10 Duchinski divided all mankind into two great branches —the "Aryans," or Indo-Europeans, and the "Turanians." To the latter group he assigned the Finno-Ugrians, Turks, Mongols, and Chinese, and even the Semites, African Negroes, American Indians, and Australian Aborigines. The main difference between the two racial families consists, according the Duchinski, in the Aryans being sedentary agriculturalists, whereas the Turanians are more or less nomadic. This racial contrast extends to all aspects of social and cultural life and is ineradicable. Unsurprisingly, Duchinski attributed all attractive features—e.g., love of freedom and capacity for intellectual creativity—to the Aryans, and the opposite features to the Turanians.
These universal-historical concepts became Duchinski's intellectual frame of reference for treating the issues that were his real concerns. He was obsessed with the problem of Polish-Russian relations, in which he assigned Ukraine a crucial role. In an autobiographical passage, Duchinski states that the formative experience of his youth had been the Polish insurrection of 1830-31, which happened when he was only thirteen. But, he wrote, "since that time, war [against Russia] and [the problem of] Rus' [i.e., Ukraine] have been the content of our life." He became strongly convinced that "Rus' means a stronger and more valorous Poland, and that Poland's [future] rising will not succeed unless it starts in Rus'.'"1
Duchinski interpreted the Polish-Russian conflict in racial terms. For him, Poland represented the Aryan, and Muscovy-Russia the Turanian race. A corollary of this was the thesis of the racial (and hence cultural and political) unity of Poland and Rus'-Ukraine. According to Duchinski, Aryan Europe extends as far as the Dnieper valley. This European sphere includes Ukraine (to which he consistently applied the historical name of Rus'), Belorussia, Lithuania, the Baltic provinces, the region of Smolensk, and the territory of the former republic of Great Novgorod. Farther east lies the alien Turanian world, which corresponds geographically with the Volga River valley. Duchinski strenuously denied the Slavic character of the Russian people: "The Muscovites are neither Slavs nor Christians in the spirit of the [true] Slavs and other Indo-European Christians. They are nomads until this day, and will remain nomads forever."12 He maintained that the Muscovites are in essence more related tcvthe Chinese than to their Ukrainian and Belorussian neighbours. Inversely, the latter are closer to the Irish and Portuguese, or to the European settlers in the Americas, than to the Muscovites.
It is a great error, Duchinski asserted, to begin the history of Muscovy with the Slavs of Kiev and Novgorod instead of with the Finnic tribes of the Volga valley. Contrary to what Russian historians say, there has never been a mass migration of Slavs from the Dnieper to the Volga, and the Tsardom of Muscovy cannot be considered a continuation or a legitimate heir of the Kievan Rus' state. The adoption of the name "Russia" by the rulers of Muscovy is a historical usurpation. The Finnic and Tatar inhabitants of Muscovy, it is true, have gradually taken on the Slavic language under the impact of the Riurikid dynasty and the church, but they have retained their original racial character, as evidenced by their migratory habits, communism (a reference to the Russian repartitional village commune), autocratic form of government, and religious sects. The Russian Empire will never become federative, because the Turanians lack the rooting in the soil and the sense of local and regional patriotism that are the preconditions for federal arrangements.
Duchinski represented the history of Ukrainian-Russian (in his terminology, Ruthenian-Muscovite) relations as a continuous confrontation, beginning with Volodymyr the Great (who subjugated the Volga tribes), through the sack of Kiev by the Suzdalians in the twelfth century, and down to Mazepa's times and his own. The wars of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth against Muscovy were a direct continuation of the preceding conflicts of the Ruthenians of Kiev and Novgorod with Suzdal and Moscow. It is untrue that the Muscovites rule over Little Russia (i.e., Left-Bank Ukraine) with the free consent of that country. Actually, the Treaty of Pereiaslav, concluded between Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky and tsarist envoys in 1654, established only a loose link between Little Russia and Muscovy, analogous to the relationship between the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia and the Ottoman Porte. "The Muscovites rule over the Little Russians as a result of their victory over the latter at the Battle of Poltava, in 1708 [sic]."13
As a reverse side of this alleged perennial Ukrainian-Russian conflict, Duchinski postulated an organic unity of Ukrainians and Poles. A proof of this, he said, was in the very name of the Poliany, the Slavic tribe of the Kiev region, which he considered identical with the name of the Poles. The original unity of the Slavs of the Vistula and the Dnieper had been temporarily disrupted by the Varangian Riurik dynasty and Tatar invasions, but it was fortunately restored in the fourteenth century under the auspices of the Jagiellonian dynasty. Contrary to appearances, the Poles and Ukrainians are not separated either by language or religion. The Polish and Ukrainian languages are closer to each other in spirit than is Polish to Czech or Ukrainian to Russian. The Holy See recognized the Catholicity of Old Rus' Christianity by accepting the canonization of the Kievan saints—Olha, Volodymyr, Antonii, and Teodosii. The Ruthenians have always inclined toward union with the Roman church, but this natural trend has been interfered with by Moscow. Duchinski pushed the concept of Polish-Ukrainian unity to its logical conclusion:
It is necessary to incorporate into Polish history the entire historical past of Lithuania and Rus'.... The medieval history of Poland, prior to the unification of her people in the fourteenth century, belongs today to all inhabitants of Poland in the same manner as the provincial histories of the duchies and kingdoms which existed in France until the fifteenth century belong today to all Frenchmen.14Duchinski dealt ingeniously with historical facts not easily reconcilable with his vision of a providential Polish-Ukrainian harmony. This was especially true of his explanation of the great Cossack uprisings against Poland in the seventeenth century: the Cossacks were not genuine Slavs but Slavicized Tatars, and the Cossack brigands actually oppressed the Ukrainian peasantry.15 However, Duchinski immediately forgets the "Turanianism" of the Cossacks whenever instances of their resistance to Moscow occur, and he mentions favourably Mazepa's revolt against Peter I. Thus for Duchinski the Cossacks were evil Turanians when they fought Poland, but good Aryans when they opposed Muscovy.
One could be tempted to label Duchinski a nationalist Pole who wished to restore Polish dominion over Ukraine and to entice Ukrainians into Poland's struggle against Russia. However, this interpretation would not do justice to his position. There can be no doubt that he sincerely loved his Ukrainian homeland, and that he believed in an equal partnership and fraternal union of the Slavs of the Vistula with those of the Dnieper. Duchinski deprecated Polish ethnic nationalism as "Mazovian provincialism."16 He envisioned future Polish-Ukrainian relations on the model of the Union of Hadiach (1658), which was an attempt to transform the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth into a tripartite federation by the addition of a Ruthenian Grand Duchy. However, in contrast to the seventeenth-century arrangement, the future autonomous Rus'-Ukraine would also include Galicia. "The rise of the Ruthenian nationality in Galicia is a natural phenomenon, and it cannot be stopped by any force."17 Duchinski tried to dispel Polish apprehensions that the Ukrainian national movement was a threat to historical Poland. He trusted that a free Ukraine would be drawn irresistibly toward union with Poland, and argued that "the easiest means to disarm the Ruthenians in their struggle against Poland and to tying them closer to Poland is to recognize their independence."18 f
Duchinski was a sympathetic, even enthusiastic, observer of the contemporary Ukrainian national revival. One finds in his writings frequent references to the historical and political treatise Istoriia Rusov (written c. 1820 and published in 1846), "in which Little Russia's hatred of Moscow is depicted in strong colours";19 to the activities of Ukrainian writers and scholars, e.g., the publication of Cossack chronicles; and to the efforts of the nobility in the Chernihiv and Poltava provinces to preserve the traditional code of civil law, the so-called Lithuanian Statute, in opposition to the centralizing policies of Nicholas I. Duchinski was the first to advertise in the Polish emigre press the suppression of the Cyrillo-Methodian Society. At times, it is true, Duchinski's statements about the Ukrainian movement were exaggerated, but this was the result of his wishful thinking. Thus he assured his French readers: "Gogol and Shev-chenko are not Muscovites at all. They are Little Russians, and they were the first and among the most ardent in protesting against Muscovite domination of Little Russia. They dreamed of the complete independence of that country."20 This is a fairly correct definition of Shevchenko's national-political position, but hardly of Gogol's!
In his historical-political theory Duchinski advocated the idea of an all-European federation led by France and directed against Russia. To facilitate the formation of such a European community, he wished to defuse the smouldering German-Polish hostility. According to Duchinski, there exists no basic racial incompatibility between the Germans and the Poles. For centuries the two peoples lived peacefully side by side, and past conflicts involved only individual German states (such as the Teutonic Knights and the Prussia of Frederick the Great), not the German nation as such. Unfortunately, German-Polish relations became exacerbated after 1848, but this tension will cease "once the Poles and the Germans comprehend the dangers which threaten them from the East."21
In Duchinski's own words, his entire life's work was inspired by one guiding idea, which he formulated in an appeal addressed to the peoples of Europe: "On to the Dnieper! on to the Dnieper! forward to Kiev, ye peoples of Europe! There is the point of your solidarity, because there the Little Russians are resuming their struggle against Moscow in defence of their European civilization. ... "22
Duchinski's views make up a curious tissue in which obvious fallacies and doctrinaire distortions are interspersed with genuine insight. To sort out these various strands would transcend the scope of the present paper. Instead, I shall consider Duchinski's theory as an ideology whose historical impact can be assessed irrespectively of how it stands up to a scientific critique.
In the late 1850s and 60s Duchinski acquired a following among a group of French intellectuals, including Elias Regnault, Charlier de Steinbach, M. Brulle (dean of the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Dijon), the historian Henri Martin (author of a popular textbook of French history), and the traveller, geographer, and ethnographer Auguste Viquesnel.23 To their number must be added the politician and economist Casimir Delamarre (1796-1870), a regent of the Bank of France and publisher of the newspaper La Patrie, who "became a zealous apostle of Duchinski's ideas."24 In 1868 Delamarre published a pamphlet addressed to the Legislative Body (Corps legislatif) of the French Empire in which he proposed that the Chair of Slavic Language and Literature at the College de France be renamed the Chair of "Slavic Languages and Literatures"; the plural was "to destroy [Russian] Pan-Slavism in its principle."25 Delamarre's initiative was crowned with success. The Legislative Body discussed his proposal and adopted a favourable resolution. On 20 November 1868, Napoleon III signed a decree changing the name of the Slavic chair. The next year, Delamarre published a second pamphlet, this time devoted specifically to the Ukrainian question, entitled Un peuple europeen de quinze millions oublie devant l'histoire.26 This was a petition to the French Senate calling for a reform in the teaching of history in secondary schools. A new syllabus was to be adopted which would stress the difference between the Ruthenians and the Russians, and the non-Slavic nature of the latter. In the introduction to the German translation of the pamphlet, C. de Steinbach paid Duchinski the following tribute: "If we in France have for the past twelve or fifteen years known more than people elsewhere about this subject ['the truth about the eastern parts of Europe'], we owe this exclusively to the researches of Mr. Duchinski. ... ""
Duchinski's successes in France were short-lived. The effects of his propaganda were wiped out by the debacle of the Second Empire in 1870. Defeated and humiliated by Bismarck's Prussia-Germany, the French could no longer indulge in dreams of hegemony on the continent, or of intervention in the affairs of Eastern Europe. Pro-Polish sympathies, traditional in France, evaporated. French public opinion began rather to look toward Russia as a potential ally against Germany. Also, the rise of scholarly Slavic studies in the last quarter of the century discredited Duchinski's ideas. The noted French Slavic scholar, Louis Leger (1843-1923), who for many years occupied the Slavic chair at the College de France, dismisses Duchinski with a few contemptuous phrases, without mentioning him by name.28
Duchinski's theory enjoyed a certain popularity in Poland in the late nineteenth century, but there, too, its impact was only transitory. Intellectually Duchinski belonged to the age of Polish Romanticism. He was out of tune with the na?W positivist mood which swept Polish society after the failure of the 1863 uprising. His dilettantism and lack of academic respectability became a source of embarrassment to Polish intellectuals, among whom the term Duchinszczyzna (Duchinskianism) acquired ironic overtones. Even the editors of the posthumous publication of his works felt compelled to insert a disclaimer in the preface: "Duchinski is no scholar in the precise meaning of the word. 29 As to his political program, it must be kept in mind that Duchinski was an heir to the tradition of the historical Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; Ukraine was his homeland, and he could not envisage a Poland without Ukraine. The growth of Polish ethnic nationalism (which Duchinski deplored) and the gradual withdrawal of interest from the former eastern borderlands made his theory irrelevant for Polish society.
The one national community on whose intellectual development Duchinski exercised a profound, long-range impact was that of Ukraine. Certain concepts widespread in modern Ukrainian society can be traced back to him, although their original authorship is not remembered.
Let us identify the points of contact between Duchinski and the Ukrainian national movement of his time. In 1870-72 he contributed several serialized articles and shorter pieces to the Ukrainian newspaper Osnova, published in Lviv.30 The articles, which he signed Kyianyn (A Kievan), rehashed Duchinski's perennial ideas.31 At the same time, in the early 1870s, Duchinski maintained contacts with a group of Galician Ukrainian students at the Zurich Poly technical Institute.32 Educated Ukrainians also read Duchinski's Polish writings and knew about the repercussions and polemics they evoked in the Polish and Russian press.
It ought to be made clear that Ukrainian receptivity to Duchinski's message was selective. That part of it which pertained to Ukrainian-Polish relations did not strike a responsive chord in Ukrainian minds. The entire course of the Ukrainian national revival in Galicia, from 1848 until World War I and beyond, was determined by the struggle, of ever increasing intensity, against Polish dominance in the province. Rare attempts at compromise, such as the one initiated in 1869 by Iuliian Lav-rivsky, the publisher of Osnova, invariably miscarried.33 Relations between Poles and Ukrainians in the Russian Empire were less acrimonious than in Galicia. But the Polish minority in Right-Bank Ukraine was represented by the region's landed nobility, while the Ukrainian movement, which had a populist colouring, identified itself with the interests of the peasantry. No responsible Ukrainian spokesman, either in Russian Ukraine or Galicia, ever endorsed the platform of a restored Polish Commonwealth with an autonomous Ukraine as a component. Duchinski's favourite idea of a Polish-Ukrainian federation could not, therefore, withstand the test of reality.
In turning our attention to the other side of Duchinski's theory, that dealing with Ukrainian-Russian relations, we encounter an altogether different situation. His thoughts on that subject found a receptive audience among certain segments of Ukrainian society.
Among the ideological issues which the Ukrainian national movement had to face in the nineteenth century, perhaps none was more important than defining the Ukrainians' attitude toward Russia. The problem had an obvious practical urgency: a policy had to be evolved toward the Russian imperial state, whose presence weighed so heavily on all aspects of Ukrainian life. On a theoretical level, an answer had to be found to the question in what relation Ukrainians and Russians stood toward each other as peoples—whether they formed an essential national unity with only minor tribal and dialectal differences, or were two totally distinct national organisms, or whether some intermediate view should be taken. Virtually all Ukrainian social thinkers of the age wrestled with this problem, and their search for national identity was gradually moving toward an ever more radical assertion of Ukraine's distinctiveness as an ethnic and historic entity.
During the early stages of the Ukrainian national revival, from the beginning through the middle of the nineteenth century, Ukrainian intellectuals did not, as a rule, perceive the Ukrainian-Russian relationship as an irreconcilable ethnic antagonism. Ukrainian patriotism often co-existed in their minds with the notion of a broader all-Rus' identity which encompassed both Ukrainians (South or Little Russians) and Muscovites (North or Great Russians).34 This concept, which tried to strike a balance between loyalties to Ukraine and to Russia as a whole, found its clearest formulation in the programmatic essay by Mykola Kostomarov (1817-85), Dve russkiia narodnosti (The Two Rus' Nationalities), published in 1861.35 Kostomarov contrasted the Ukrainian tradition of individualism and libertarianism with the Great Russian tradition of collectivism and authoritarianism, and he concluded that the relationship between the two branches of the Rus' people was essentially complementary. Kostomarov later recapitulated his convictions in the following statement: "... the Little and the Great Russians complement each other by their specific traits, evolved under the influence of history and geography, and they ought to seek their true common good in a close union and interaction of the two principal nationalities [of Rus']."36 A twentieth-century historian has said of Kostomarov's "The Two Rus' Nationalities" that the article "was very popular and was for a long time regarded as 'the gospel of Ukrainian nationalism.' "37
But there also existed in Ukrainian society another, alternative trend—at first, only an emotional undercurrent—which can be described as separatist. It was given stirring expression by the bard of the Ukrainian renascence, Taras ShofCchenko. The separatist trend was beset by serious intellectual difficulties, however: it ran against the established opinion of a close ethnic kinship between the Ukrainians and the Russians, rooted in the shared legacy of Old Rus' and bolstered by their common Orthodox religion. It is significant that even the Istoriia Rusov, which so eloquently voiced protest against the subversion of Cossack Ukraine's autonomy by Muscovite autocracy, frequently referred to the Russians as "people of the same origin and the same faith."38 Duchinski's theory offered a means of overcoming this intellectual difficulty. This explains its appeal to those Ukrainians who were groping for arguments supporting their distinct national identity.
Anti-Russian ideas derived from Duchinski could not be aired openly in publications which appeared under tsarist censorship. We know, however, that they had some followers in Dnieper Ukraine, for instance, the writer and civic activist Oleksander Konysky (1836-1900).39 Concepts of this type could surface only in Austrian Galicia. They frequently appeared in the press of the populist-nationalist (narodovtsi) movement, especially in polemics against the local Russophiles (moskvofily); the latter advocated the notion of "one Russian nation from the Carpathians to the
Pacific." Writing in 1889, Mykhailo Drahomanov (1841-95) noted regretfully that "Galician official Ukrainophiles have for some time begun to broadcast Duchinski's refurbished theory in their popular literature, thinking that by this means they serve the interests of Ukrainian nationality."40 A good specimen of such propagandistic literature was the pamphlet by Lonhyn Tsehelsky (1875-1950), Rus'-Ukraina a Moskovshchyna-Rossiia (Rus'-Ukraine and Muscovy-Russia), published in 1900 by the Prosvita society and circulated in tens of thousands of copies throughout the Galician countryside.41 According to a memoirist, the purpose of the brochure was "to popularize among our people the name 'Ukrainian' and 'Ukraine,' and to overcome moskvofil'stvo by a demonstration of the historic, ethnic, ideological, and cultural differences between the two peoples."42
Mykola Kostomarov and Mykhailo Drahomanov, the two outstanding political thinkers of nineteenth-century Ukraine, opposed the spread of Duchinski's theory on intellectual as well as political grounds. As conscientious scholars, they could not agree with Duchinski's distortions of historical truth. Thus Kostomarov argued:
The Great Russians are no Finns, but Slavs, because they do not know any Finnic dialect, but speak a Slavic language. Finnic blood, it is true, has entered Great Russians, but it has been assimilated by Slavic blood. The admixture of the Finnic race has not been without some influence on the material and intellectual makeup of the Great Russian people, but the Slavic element remains dominant. We cannot call the [German] inhabitants of Mecklenburg Slavs only because their ancestors were once Slavs. . . .43Drahomanov insistently objected to cliches about national character and to ascribing to race certain features of Russian life which, in fact, were conditioned by historic and social factors and hence were not innate, but amenable to change.44 About the issue of the degree of kinship between the Ukrainians and the Russians, Drahomanov demanded that it be approached with an open mind. He thought that, at the current level of knowledge, the problem was not yet ready for an unequivocal answer: "there is room either for a theory of a total distinctiveness of the Ukrainians from the Great Russians or for a pan-Russian theory."45Kostomarov and Drahomanov also opposed Duchinski's teachings for political reasons. As convinced federalists, they believed that the cause of the Ukrainian people's national and social liberation was tied to the evolution of Russia as a whole, that is, to the transformation of the imperial state on democratic-federalist lines. (The differences between Kostomarov's and Drahomanov's versions of federalism cannot be considered here.) This imposed the need for cooperation with the liberal and democratic elements of Russian society, and precluded ethnic hatred of the Russian people. But the prospects of the federalist program depended on the response of the Russian side, and this response could not have been more discouraging. Not only did the tsarist regime remain obdurately centralist and repressive, but also the Russian leftist intelligentsia, including its revolutionary segments, displayed a constant disregard of and hostility toward the claims of the non-Russian nationalities. Ironically, the very champions of Ukrainian federalist thought, Kostomarov and Drahomanov, were frequently attacked by Russian spokesmen for their alleged "separatism." This state of affairs was bound to favour the spread of Duchinski-type ideas among Ukrainians. Drahomanov once wrote in exasperation to a Galician confidant: "This idiot Katkov has indeed succeeded in inoculating the Ukrainian national movement (ukrai-nofilstvo) with Duchinskianism."46
Drahomanov made this diagnosis in 1889. Future developments fully confirmed its accuracy. The decisive shift in Ukrainian political thinking from federalism to the idea of independent statehood occurred in Galicia around the turn of the century, and in east-central Ukraine in 1917-20, as a result of painful experiences with the Russias of Kerensky, Lenin, and Denikin.47 What Ukrainian patriots had previously perceived as a confrontation primarily with the tsarist regime they now began to see as a confrontation with the Russian state as such, irrespective of its form of government, or even as an ethnic confrontation with the Russian people. During the inter-war era, Ukrainian society outside the USSR (which comprised the Ukrainian populations in Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia, as well as the Ukrainian diaspora) became permeated by an ideology of militant anti-Russian nationalism. The most influential publicist of the interwar era, Dmytro Dontsov (1883- 1973), in his tract Pidstavy nashoi polityky (The Foundations of Our Policy, 1921) formulated the theory of an eternal struggle between Russia and Europe, and assigned to Ukraine the historical mission of being the outpost of Europe against Russia.48 There is a striking coincidence between Dontsov's and Duchinski's views on this issue, although we do not know whether the former drew directly on the latter's writings. Some other concepts of Duchinskian provenance, which were now elevated to the rank of patriotic dogma among non-Soviet Ukrainians, were the following: the thesis that the medieval Kievan Rus' state was the creation of the Ukrainian people alone and that the Russians have no legitimate claims to this legacy;49 and the stress on the presence of a non-Slavic, Finno-Ugric substratum in the ethnic make-up of the Russian people. Even after World War II the linguist and literary critic George Shevelov (Iurii Sherekh) felt motivated to rebuke the racist prejudices of his fellow Ukrainian emigres:
Why should blood links with the Finns be considered compromising for the Russians?. . . Has any other nation behaved more heroically than the Finns in recent times? . . . There is truly much that we could learn from the Finns. . . . Our contempt for the Mongols, the Semites, and the Finns is something that we have borrowed from Moscow. And the naive theory of our historical role as a bulwark of Europe against the East we have borrowed from Warsaw. ... Parochial national presumption is always ridiculous, and its consequences can only be catastrophic.50In spite of personal idiosyncrasies, Franciszek Duchinski was representative of a peculiar social type, the Ukrainophile Pole. The Polish minority in Right-Bank Ukraine produced a series of personalities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who stood on the border between the Polish and the Ukrainian nationalities. Some of the Ukrainophile Poles were actually to cross over to the Ukrainian side. Duchinski did not take this step. He always continued to consider himself a Pole, but also maintained his Ukrainian loyalties. In his old age, he stated proudly: " . . . I have not betrayed my Kievan flag, that is, the flag of an independent Little Russia. . . . "51 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. The reason they have not received due attention in scholarly literature is not difficult to discern. Ukrainophile Poles had the misfortune to fall into a "blind spot." From the perspective of Polish national history they appeared marginal and irrelevant, while, at the same time, they did not seem to belong fully to the Ukrainian historical process, at least not as it was understood by historians of the populist school.
Notes 1. This biographical account is based primarily on S. Grabski, "Zycie i dzialalnosc literacka Franciszka Duchinskiego Kijowianina," published as an introductory essay in Pisma Franciszka Duchinskiego (Rapperswil 1901), l:viii-xxxiv. Reminiscences of Duchinski's youth are to be found in his Drogi [sic] moj XXV letni jubileusz (Paris 1885). Additional information derives from M. Handelsman, Ukrainska polityka ks. Adama Czartoryskiego przed wojna krymska, (Warsaw 1937), and I. Borshchak, "Ukraina v Paryzhi.... IX. Frantsishek Dukhinskyi," Ukraina 9 (1953):701-9.
2. There is some uncertainty about Duchinski's year of birth, which in some sources is given as 1817. I accept the year given by Duchinski himself in Drogi moj XXVe letni jubileusz, v; information about the month and day of his birth was unavailable to me.
3. Trzeci Maj, no. 7, 24 January 1848, in Handelsman, Ukrainska polityka, 114. Although Duchinski lived in Kiev at the time when the Society was active, he was not personally acquainted with any of its members. Duchinski, Drogi moj XXV letni jubileusz, xxii.
4. During the Crimean War, Czajkowski organized a Cossack legion in Turkey with the aim of creating an autonomous Ukrainian Cossack state under Ottoman protection: see M. Czajkowski (Mehmed Sadyk Pasza), Moje wspomnienia o wojnie 1854 roku (Warsaw 1962). Cf. the recent biographical study by J. Chudzikowska, Dziwne zycie Sadyka Paszy: O Michale Czajkowskim (Warsaw 1971). In 1847-8 Terlecki submitted several memoranda to Pope Pius IX proposing the establishment of a Ruthenian Uniate (Eastern-rite Catholic) patriarchate, with the intention of turning the Ukrainian and Belorussian peoples away from the spiritual authority of the Russian Orthodox church. See I. L. Rudnytsky, "Ipolit Volodymyr Terletskyi — zabutyi tserkovno-hromadskyi diiach i politychnyi myslytel XIX stolittia," Ukrainskyi istoryk, no. 3-4 (39-40, 1973): 157-60. English version in this volume, 143-72."
5. Based on the vivid pen portrait in Handelsman, Ukrainska polityka, 110.
6. Grabski, "Zycie," /xxiv. The date given in Borshchak, "Ukraina v Paryzhi," 709, is 13 June 1893.
7. A photograph of Duchinski's grave is in Borshchak, "Ukraina v Paryzhi," 709. Borshchak also reproduces the text of the epitaph:
DUCHINSKOMU
ZEMLAKI
NASHI LUDE NE ZABUDUT
DOKI ZYTY BUDUT'
DUSZI TWEI, SLOWA TWOHO
BILSZ NE TRA NICZOHO.
/To Duchinski
his fellow countrymen:
our people shall not forget
as long as they live
your soul, your word.
Nothing more is needed./8. Pisma Franciszka Duchinskiego (hereafter Pisma), 1 (1901), 2 (1902), 3 (1904), all published in Rapperswil.
9. A bibliography of Duchinski's publications appears in Pisma, l:ii-iv.
10. The following account is based primarily on F.-H. Duchinski (de Kiew), Peuples Aryas et Tourans, Agriculteurs et Nomades: Necessite des reformes dans /' exposition de I'histoire des peuples Aryas-Europeens et Tourans, particulierement des Slaves et des Moscovites (Paris 1864). The three volumes of Duchinski's Pisma have also been consulted.
11. Pisma, 1:222.
12. Peuples Aryas et Tourans, 22.
13. Peuples Aryas et Tourans, 48. The incorrect date is not a typographical error, because it was repeated by Duchinski in the title of his German pamphlet: Ursachen die seit der Katastrophe von Pultava 1708 zur Entwickelung der ruthenischen Nationality das Meiste beigetragen haben. . . (Rapperswil 1872), cited in Borshchak, "Ukraina v Paryzhi," 707.
14. Pisma, 1:43.
15. Pisma, 2:277-8: Peuples Aryas et Tourans, 76-9.
16. Pisma, 1:51.
17. Duchinski's letter of 15 March 1852 to Count Wladyslaw Zamoyski, nephew and closest collaborator of Prince Adam Czartoryski. The full text of this important letter is reprinted in Handelsman, Ukrainska polityka, 148-50. The quoted passage appears on p. 150.
18. Handelsman, Ukrainska politvka, 149.
19. Ibid., 148.
20. Peuples Aryas et Tourans, 74, n. 27.
21. Ibid.. 64, n. 12.
22. Drogi moj XXV letni jubileusz, x.
23. The publications of Duchinski's French followers are listed and briefly discussed in E. Borschak (I. Borshchak), L'Ukraine dans la litterature de I'Europe occidentale (Paris 1935), Offprint from Le Monde Slave, nos. 3, 4 (1933); nos. 1, 2, 4 (1934); no. 1 (1935):89-91.
24. Borschak, L'Ukraine, 90.
25. C. Delamarre. Un pluriel pour tin singulier, et le panslavisme est detruit dans son principe (Paris 1868), cited in Borschak, L'Ukraine, 90-91.
26. Published in Paris, 1869. Excerpts from the text appear in Borschak, L'Ukraine, 93-4. I had access to the German translation, Ein Volk von funfzehn Millionen Seelen welches von der Geschichte vergessen worden ist: Eine Petition an den franzosischen Senat. by C. Delamarre (Paris, Berlin, and Lviv 1869).
27. Delamarre, Ein Volk, 8.
28. L. Leger, Souvenirs d'un Slavophile (Paris 1905), 20-24, cited in Borschak, L'Ukraine, 88.
29. "Od Wydawcow," Pisma, l:v.
30. The newspaper Osnov'a, which appeared in Lviv twice weekly (1870-72), must not be confused with the better-known St. Petersburg monthly of the same title (1861-2).
31. For a detailed discussion of Duchinski's articles in Osnova, see M. Vozniak, "Pid haslom 'Na Dnipro! Na Dnipro! Do Kyieva!' Frantsishek Dukhinskyi i ukrainska sprava," Dilo, 12, 13, 14, 17 April 1935, nos. 96, 97, 98 and 101.
32. References in M. P. Drahomanov, Literaturno-publitsystychni pratsi (Kiev 1970), 2:11, 183-5, 461. The one Galician known to have been acquainted with Duchinski in Zurich was Vasyl Nahirny (1847-1921), who later had a distinguished career as architect and pioneer of the Ukrainian co-operative movement.
33. On Iuliian Lavrivsky's policy, see K. Levytsky, Istoriia politychnoi dumky halytskykh ukraintsiv 1848-1914 (Lviv 1926), 118-23.
34. Cf. Iu. Venelin's penetrating contemporary analysis, "O spore mezhdu iuzhanami i severianami na schet ikh rossizma," written c. 1832 and published posthumously in Chteniia Moskovskogo obshchestva istorii i drevnostei, no. 4 (1847). I used the resume, with extensive quotations from the original, which appears in A. N. Pypin, Istoriia russkoi etnografii, v. 3: Etnografiia malorusskaia (St. Petersburg 1891) 301-7.
35. N. Kostomarov, "Dve russkiia narodnosti," Osnova (St. Petersburg), no. 3 (1861). For excerpts in English, see D. Doroshenko, A Survey of Ukrainian Historiography, in Annals of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the US 5-6 (1957): 137-9.
36. "Moe ukrainofilstvo v Kudeiare" (1875), in Naukovo-publitsystychni i polemichni pysannia Kostomarova, ed. M. Hrushevsky (Kiev 1928), 251.
37. Doroshenko, Survey, 139.
38. Istoriia Rusiv, ed. O. Ohloblyn, trans. V. Davydenko (New York 1956), 134, 158, 184, 223, 274, 308, 320.
39. Konysky, under the pseudonym "O. Stodolsky," published in Galicia a study called Etnografiia slavianshchyny (Lviv 1887) in which he described the Russians as predatory savages and explained their character by their "Finnic and Tatar blood." See Drahomanov's critical review, "Naukovyi metod v etnografii" (1888), reprinted in Rozvidky Mykhaila Drahomanova pro ukrainsku narodniu slovesnist i pysmenstvo, ed. M. Pavlyk (Lviv 1906), 3:117-28.
40. "Dobavlenie k avtobiograficheskoi zametke," in Drahomanov, Literaturno-publitsystychni pratsi, 1:77.
41. I was able to consult the second enlarged edition. Rus'-Ukraina a Moskovshchvna-Rossiia (Istanbul [actually Vienna] 1916).
42. A. Tsurkovsky in Almanakh "Molodoi Ukrainy": Spohady pro himnaziini hurtky v Berezhanakh (Munich and New York 1954), 30.
43. "Otvet na vykhodki gazety (krakovskoi) Czas i zhurnala Revue contemporaine" (1861), in Naukovo-publitsystychni i polemichni pysannia Kostomarova, 98.
44. See Drahomanov's review article, "Naukovyi metod v etnografii," cited above, n. 3.9. Similar arguments appear frequently in his writings.
45. "Chudatski dumky pro ukrainsku natsionalnu spravu" (1891), in Drahomanov, Literaturno-publitsjstychni pratsi, 2:364.
46. Letter of Drahomahov to M. Pavlyk dated 31 October 1889, in Perepyska Mykhaila Drahomanova z Mykhailom Pavlykom, ed. M. Pavlyk (Chernivtsi 1912), 5:396. The reference in the letter is to the Russian publicist Mikhail Katkov (1818-87), who was regarded as the ideologue of the reactionary and chauvinistic regime of Alexander III.
47. I discuss this transition in Ukrainian political thought from federalism to separatism in "The Fourth Universal and Its Ideological Antecedents" (see this volume, 389-416).
48. D. Dontsov, Pidstavy nashoi polityky (Vienna 1921).
49. For a recent attempt to justify this thesis in scholarly terms, see Mykola Chubaty, Kniazha Rus'-Ukraina ta vynyknennia trokh skhidnoslovianskykh natsii (New York and Paris 1964).
50. Iu. Sherekh, Druha cherha ([New York] 1978), 370-71; the passage quoted was written in 1948.
51. Duchinski, Drogi moj XXV letni jubileusz, xi.