Ivan L. Rudnytsky, "The Role of Ukraine in Modern History," Slavic Review 22, no. 2 (June 1963): 199-216, 256-62. Republished in Ivan L. Rudnytsky, Essays in Modern Ukrainian History, 1987.
The Role of Ukraine in Modern History The Setting of the Problem
A striking difference between the historical development of the countries of Western Europe and that of those of the eastern half of the continent has been often observed. The former, particularly France and England, have enjoyed, in spite of some periods of revolutionary upheaval, a millennium of continuous growth. Germany's fate has been much less favourable, and farther to the east it is impossible to find any country which has not experienced, at one time or another, a tragic breakdown and an epoch of a national capitis deminutio, sometimes extending for centuries. Here one can consider the subjugation of the Balkan peoples and Hungary by the Turks, the crushing of Bohemia by Habsburg absolutism, and the partitions of Poland.
Ukraine is a typically East European nation in that its history is marked by a high degree of discontinuity. The country suffered two major eclipses in the course of its development. Medieval Rus' received a crippling blow from the hands of the Mongols, was subsequently absorbed by Lithuania, and finally annexed to Poland. In the middle of the seventeenth century Ukraine rose against Polish domination, and a new body politic, the Cossack State, came into existence. By the second half of the eighteenth century, however, the autonomy of Cossack Ukraine was destroyed by the Russian Empire. A new upward cycle started in the nineteenth century. The movement of national regeneration culminated in the 1917 Revolution, when a Ukrainian independent state emerged, to succumb soon to communist Russian control. This third, last great division of Ukrainian history, which lasts from the 1780s to the Revolution, and in a sense even to the present, forms what may be defined as "modern Ukrainian history."
When nationalist movements got under way in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, they were of two different types. In one, the leadership remained with the traditional upper class (nobility), into which new-comers of plebeian background were infused only gradually. Their programs were characterized by a historical legitimism: their aim was the restoration of the nation's old state within its ancient boundaries. In movements of the second type, leadership had to be created anew, and the efforts were directed toward the raising of a "natural," ethnic community to a politically conscious nationhood. These latter movements had a slower start than the former, but they drew strength from their identification with the strivings of the masses, and they were able to profit from the inevitable democratization of the social structure. When the territorial claims of nations of the two types clashed, as happened frequently, those of the second category usually prevailed in the long run. The two categories are referred to as "historical" and "non-historical" nations respectively. If these concepts are to serve as useful tools of historical understanding, the following things are to be kept in mind. "Non-historicity," in this meaning, does not necessarily imply that a given country is lacking a historical past, even a rich and distinguished past; it simply indicates a rupture in historical continuity through the loss of a traditional representative class. Second, the radical opposition that appears between these two types when they are conceived as sociological models by no means precludes the existence in historical reality of borderline cases, as for instance the Czechs.
Prima facie evidence assigns Ukraine to the category of "non-historical" nations. The modern Ukrainian nation is not simply a continuation or restoration of the Cossack Ukraine of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or, of course, even less of Kievan and Galician Rus'.1 On the other hand, one must not overlook the links that connected the nineteenth-century national risorgimento with the Cossack epoch. The modern nationalist movement started in those areas of Ukraine where the Cossack traditions were the strongest, and originally most of the leaders came from the descendants of the former Cossack officers (starshyny) class. Symbols and ideas derived from the Cossack tradition played an important role even as late as the 1917 Revolution.2
Ukrainian history of the nineteenth century may mean two different things: a history of the nationalist movement on the one hand, and a history of the country and the people on the other hand. The two are closely interrelated, but they do not coincide.
Beginning with the 1840s and until the 1917 Revolution, there was an uninterrupted chain of groups and organizations, formal and informal, that were committed to the idea of Ukraine's cultural and political regeneration as a separate nation. Combated and persecuted by tsarist authorities, the movement was irrepressible. At times it demonstrated a great vitality (as in the 1870s); at other times it seemed to have gone into hibernation (as in the 1880s). It would be a fruitful task, which has not yet been fully accomplished by historical scholarship, to trace the course of the Ukrainian nationalist movement, somewhat as the course of the Russian revolutionary movements has been traced by Jan Kucharzewski and Franco Venturi.
It is clear, however, that until the eve of the 1917 Revolution, Ukrainian nationalism retained the character of a minority movement. (This refers to Russian Ukraine only; the situation was different in Austrian Galicia.) The peasant masses were, until 1905, little touched by the nationalist movement. Thoroughly Ukrainian in all their objective, ethnic traits, they had not yet adopted a modern national consciousness, and generally remained politically amorphous. The members of the upper classes were mostly Russified and, except for those engaged in the Ukrainian movement, regarded themselves as belonging to the Russian nation. The question arises whether under such circumstances the student is entitled to include in "Ukrainian history" everything that happened on Ukrainian soil.
A memoirist has noted the following observation. If the train from Kiev to Poltava which carried delegates for the unveiling of the monument to the poet Kotliarevsky in 1903 had crashed, this would have meant, it was said jokingly, the end of the Ukrainian movement for a long time; nearly all the leading personalities of the movement travelled in two cars of that train.3 But how is one to explain a movement that at the turn of the century had only a few thousands of self-professed adherents, by 1905 began to assume a mass character, and after another twelve years erupted, in 1917, as a nascent nation of over thirty million? The answer can be only this: there were at work among the population of Ukraine other forces which, without being identical with the nationalist movement, were pointed in the same direction, and finally, as if drawn by an irresistible attraction, merged with it. The nationalist movement played the role of the catalyst, and in this sense it was extremely important. But we cannot historically explain the origins of the modern Ukrainian nation if we concentrate on the nationalist movement alone. We must also take into account various other forces: for instance, the activities of the Ukrainian zemstvo or those of the Ukrainian branches of "all-Russian" revolutionary organizations, from the Decembrists, through the populists, to the Marxist and labour groups at the turn of the century.4 All of them made their contributions to the formation of modern Ukraine. Moreover, a closer scrutiny shows that these movements, though not endowed with a fully crystallized Ukrainian national awareness, usually possessed it in an embryonic stage in the form of a "South Russian" sectionalism, or "territorial patriotism."
Thus it may be stated that the central problem of modern Ukrainian history is that of the emergence of a nation: the transformation of an ethnic-linguistic community into a self-conscious political and cultural community. A comprehensive study of this subject would have to include an investigation into the factors that shaped the nation-making process, either by furthering or by impeding it. The interrelation with all the other forces active on the wider East European scene would have to be taken into account.
The character of modern Ukrainian history changes definitely after 1917. The making of the nation was basically completed during the revolutionary years 1917-20.5 For the last four decades the central issue of Ukrainian history has been the nation's struggle for survival under foreign rule and for the restoration of its liberty and independence. The struggle was -- and is to the present day -- primarily directed against Soviet Russia. But in the inter-war period it was, in the western portion of Ukraine's territory, directed also against Poland, and during the years of World War II against Nazi Germany as well.
Methodological Approaches
In studying Ukrainian prerevolutionary history, stress ought to be placed primarily on socio-economic developments and on the evolution of social thought; a politically oriented historical investigation would be relatively unproductive.
Not having an independent state or even such a semi-independent autonomous body politic as, for instance, the Poles possessed in the Congress Kingdom, the Ukrainians were unable to participate in politics on a governmental level: they were not directly connected with the great world of diplomacy and military affairs. The international order established in Ukrainian lands in the last third of the eighteenth century by the Russian annexation of the Black Sea coastal areas as well as of the Right Bank (i.e., of the territories west of the Dnieper), and by the annexation of Galicia to the Austrian Empire, remained basically unchanged until 1914. This long period of stability made any idea of international change seem remote and unrealistic to contemporaries.6
Conditions in the Russian Empire were such that an overt political life on a non-governmental level was also impossible, at least until 1905. In this respect, Ukrainians in Austria had a great advantage over the majority of their compatriots, who lived under Russian rule. After the 1848 Revolution, Galician Ukrainians took part in elections, possessed a parliamentary representation, a political press, parties, and civic organizations. In Russian Ukraine political strivings could be expressed only through illegal channels, namely, through underground groups, whose activities were necessarily of limited scope. In the long run it was, however, inevitable that changes of social structure and intellectual trends were to have political effects.
The two great stages in prerevolutionary Ukraine's social development were the abolition of serfdom in 1861 and the rise of modern industrialism toward the end of the century. Neither movement was limited to Ukraine but rather was common to the Russian Empire as a whole. Still, the Ukrainian lands possessed certain socio-economic peculiarities of their own, and the idea, generally held by Western scholars, of Ukraine's complete integration into the economic fabric of the empire, "like Pennsylvania's in the United States," is incorrect. The Ukrainian peasantry had never known the system of the "repartitional commune," and they were undoubtedly more individualistically minded than the Great Russian muzhiks. Ukrainian agriculture was connected through the Black Sea ports with the world market; most of Russia's agricultural exports came from Ukraine. The rapid development of Ukrainian mining and heavy industries was due to a massive influx of foreign investments. The economic connections of Ukraine were in many respects closer to the outside world than to Central Russia.7
Agrarian overpopulation and the harsh lot of industrial workers led to a sharpening of social tensions in Ukraine. A characteristic of the Ukrainian scene, a phenomenon to be found also in other "non-historical" countries, was the overlapping of social and national conflicts. The great landowners, capitalists, and industrial entrepreneurs were predominantly members of the local Russian, Polish, and Jewish minorities, or foreigners. Thus the coming revolution was to be simultaneously a social and a national one. The Ukrainian national movement was not limited to any one social class. It had individual supporters among members of the upper classes, and it reached into the class of industrial workers. Still, it found the strongest response among the middle strata: the prosperous peasantry, the rural intelligentsia and semi-intelligentsia, the emerging native petty bourgeoisie of the towns. Close links existed between Ukrainian nationalism and the co-operative movement, which was growing at great speed in the years preceding World War I. The larger cities retained a predominantly Russian character, and this was to be a great handicap to Ukraine during the Revolution. But, judging by the example of other countries with a similar social structure, the "Ukrainization" of the urban centers would have been a question of time.8
The impact of the economic policies of the Russian government on Ukraine must also be considered. Some economic historians active during the early Soviet period (M. Slabchenko, M. Iavorsky, O. Ohloblyn, M. Volobuiev) used the term "colonialism" to define Ukraine's position in relation to the former Empire. This concept, borrowed from the Marxist arsenal, was not altogether well chosen. Tsarist Russia possessed genuine colonies, such as Transcaucasia and Turkestan, 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 nany respects faster than that of the Great Russian center. Nevertheless, the economic policies of the government were mostly adverse to Ukrainian interests. Ukraine, for instance, carried an excessive load of taxation, since the revenues collected in Ukraine did not return to the country but vere spent in other parts of the empire. The construction of railroad lines, which was dominated by strategic considerations, as well as the existing system of freight rates and customs duties, failed to take Ukrainian needs into account. Contemporaries were well aware of the issue. It is loteworthy that the industrial groups of the "South'' -- who were of non-Ukrainian background and had no connections with the nationalist movement -- tended to form regional syndicates and associations for the defence of the area's economic interests, neglected by the government of St. Petersburg.9
The other major field of prerevolutionary Ukrainian history was social thought. It is a well-attested historical rule that in countries that lack political liberty there exists a tendency toward an "ideologization" of politics and, simultaneously, toward a politicization of cultural and intellectual life. Where civic strivings cannot be expressed through overt, practical activities, they are diverted toward the realm of theoretical programs and ideologies. Under such circumstances, creators and carriers of cultural values tend to develop a strong feeling of civic vocation. This applies to both the Russian and Ukrainian nineteenth-century societies, but there was an important difference between the two. The Russians, as members of an independent and powerful nation, even if subordinated to a despotic regime, had few grievances of a specifically national nature. Thus the mental energies of Russian intellectuals were mostly concentrated on the construction of social or theocratic utopias. Ukrainian intellectuals, on the other hand, were bound to vindicate the claims of their country as a separate national entity.
The magnitude of the task facing Ukrainian intellectuals can hardly be exaggerated. The consistent policy of the tsarist government -- which, in this respect, found full support in Russian public opinion, including its left wing -- was to deny the very existence of a Ukrainian nationality. Those elements of the Ukrainian heritage which could be assimilated were declared to belong to the "all-Russian" nation, of which the "Little Russians" were a tribal branch; the other elements of the Ukrainian heritage, which were unfit for such an expropriation, were systematically suppressed and obliterated. For instance, determined to relegate the Ukrainian language to the level of a peasant dialect, the Russian government imposed in 1876 a general prohibition of all publications in Ukrainian. Against these tremendous pressures, Ukrainian linguists and ethnographers defended the idea of a Ukrainian ethnic individuality on an equal footing with the other national groups of the Slavic family; Ukrainian historians, from Kostomarov to Hrushevsky, demonstrated the continuity of their country's past development from prehistoric times to the present.
A national consciousness implies not only a system of ideas of a more or less rational, cognitive nature but also an emotional commitment, which is more likely to be stimulated by poets and writers than by scholars. It is not fortuitous that the representative hero of nineteenth-century Ukraine was not a statesman or a soldier, but a poet -- Taras Shevchenko. His historical significance is not to be measured by purely literary standards. The Ukrainian community saw and continues to see in him a prophetic figure, whose inspired word touches and transforms the very hearts of his people.
As far as the Ukrainian political program is concerned, its foundations were laid in 1846-7 by a circle of young intellectuals in Kiev, known under the name of the Cyrillo-Methodian Society. Gradually revised and elaborated, it remained the platform of the the Ukrainian movement until the Revolution. Its classical exposition is to be found in the writings of the outstanding Ukrainian thinker of the second half of the nineteenth century, Mykhailo Drahomanov. Divergencies of views between individuals and groups were inevitable, but there was in the Ukrainian movement a far-reaching consent on essentials. These included: a strong insistence on radical social reform, but without the spirit of fierceness and exclusiveness of many Russian revolutionaries; emphasis on political liberty and Western-style constitutionalism; a program of federalist reconstruction of the Empire as a means of satisfying Ukrainian national aspirations without necessitating a complete break with Russia. However, from the 1890s on, there existed an alternative program of separatism and state sovereignty of Ukraine. It gained the acceptance of the Galician Ukrainian community, but in Russian Ukraine the majority of the spokesmen remained faithful to the traditional federalist programme. They depended on the hope that a future democratic Russia would be able to divest itself of the tsarist traditions of imperialism, centralism, and national oppression. The final conversion to the idea of Ukraine's independent statehood was effected in 1917, under the impact of experiences with Russian "revolutionary democracy." The evolution of Ukrainian political thought from federalism to separatism resembles the development of the Czech national program from Palacky to Masaryk.
It is important to take notice of the ideological terms in which Ukrainian thinkers defined their nation's opposition to the Russian Empire. The first to formulate the issue was the former leader of the Cyrillo- Methodian Society, Mykola Kostomarov: he contrasted the Kievan tradition of liberty and individualism with the Muscovite tradition of authoritarianism and of the subordination of the individual to the collective.10 Stripped of Kostomarov's romantic terminology, the problem was repeatedly restated by later Ukrainian publicists and political theorists. They saw Ukraine, because of its deeply ingrained libertarian attitude, as an organic part of the European community of nations, of which despotic Muscovy-Russia had never been a true and legitimate member. "Most of the national differences between Ukraine and Muscovy can be explained by the fact that until the eighteenth century [i.e., until the establishment of Russian rule] Ukraine was linked to Western Europe. In spite of the handicaps caused by the Tatar invasions, Ukraine participated in Europe's social and cultural progress."11 These words of Drahomanov, a left-wing liberal and socialist, are paralleled by those of a conservative thinker, V. Lypynsky: "The basic difference between Ukraine and Moscow does not consist in language, race or religion,.. . but in a different, age-old political structure, a different method of organization of the elite, in a different relationship between the upper and the lower social classes, between state and society."12 Ukrainian thinkers believed that the emancipation of their country, whether through federalism or separatism, would accelerate the liberalization of Eastern Europe as a whole. According to their conviction, the centralistic structure of the empire was the base on which tsarist despotism rested. The break-up of this monolithic unity, whose maintenance required a system of universal oppression, would release the creative, libertarian forces of all peoples, not excepting the Russians.
An investigation of Ukrainian pre-revolutionary intellectual history should not omit those scholars of Ukrainian origin who worked at Russian universities, published their works in Russian, and are therefore usually regarded as Russian. Let us name but a few of these men: the philosophers P. Iurkevych (Iurkevich) and V. Lisevych (Lesevich); the economists M. Ziber, M. Iasnopolsky, and M. Tuhan-Baranovsky (Tugan-Baranovsky); the sociologist M. Kovalevsky; the jurist B. Kistiakovsky; the linguist O. Potebnia; the literary scholar D. Ovsianiko-Kulikovsky; the military theorist M. Drahomyrov (Dragomirov). The list could easily be expanded. The question arises: with what right can these "luminaries of Russian science" be claimed for the Ukrainian intellectual tradition? In studying the lives of these men we find that while skirting an overt identification with the Ukrainian cause, which would have been catastrophic for their careers, they remained in touch with the nationalist movement, as its "secret disciples." If that were all, their Ukrainian connection would be of only biographical relevance. More important is the fact that the structure of thought of these scholars betrays their Ukrainian bias, although it is often expressed in a subtle way, not immediately perceptible to an outsider. One example which illustrates the point must here suffice. It refers to F[edor Herasymovych] Mishchenko (1848-1906), the brilliant student of ancient history who was particularly concerned with the questions of Greek communal self-government and federalism. According to a recent Soviet study, "in this stubborn insistence on the federalist principle we can detect the influence of the ideas of Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism."13
The emergence of the modern Ukrainian nation may be understood as the outcome of an interaction of social forces and ideas. The social transformation taking place in Ukrainian lands in the course of the nineteenth century prepared the people for the acceptance of the nationalist ideology elaborated by several generations of intellectuals. The policy of tsarist Russia consisted in containing the activities of the intellectual circles while upholding a system of paternalistic supervision over the masses, which was to protect them from "contamination" and to keep them in a state of perpetual civic infancy. This policy was relatively successful in that the formation of the modern Ukrainian nation was delayed for decades. But it could not be prevented, as the emergence of an independent republic in 1917 was to prove.
Regional Variations
Pre-revolutionary Ukraine did not possess territorial unity. In each of the two great empires, Russia and Austria-Hungary, several Ukrainian lands with strongly developed sectional traits may be distinguished. An historical investigation into the origins of the modern Ukrainian nation must take these regional variations into account.
We may differentiate between those principal Ukrainian lands in which the nationalist movement had taken root in the prerevolutionary era and those which were passive in the process of nation-making. We shall call the latter category marginal Ukrainian lands. The difference between the two was not determined by size, as some of the principal territories (e.g., Bukovyna) were smaller than some of the marginal group.
Limitations of space do not permit a discussion of the marginal lands, which included the Kuban territory of Northern Caucasia, the Chelm (Kholm) area in the Congress Kingdom of Poland, and Carpatho-Ukraine (Subcarpathian Ruthenia) in Hungary. There are the following principal Ukrainian territories: in Russia, the Left Bank, Slobodian Ukraine, Southern Ukraine, and the Right Bank; in Austria, Galicia and Bukovyna. Since Ukrainian history is so often approached from a centralistic Moscow-St. Petersburg perspective, an attempt will be made to give special attention to those Ukrainian lands which do not fit into the framework of Russian history and which for this reason are often overlooked by Western scholars.
Left-Bank Ukraine (i.e., the Ukrainian territory east of the Dnieper) corresponded with the area of the former autonomous Cossack State, the so-called Hetmanate. Vestiges of the old institutions survived here until the reign of Nicholas I: the governor-generalship of Little Russia was dissolved in 1835, and the traditional Ukrainian civil law abolished in 1842; the self-government of the towns, based on the Magdeburg Law, had been suppressed in 1831. The Left-Bank nobility, descendants of the Cossack officer class, repeatedly attempted to revive the autonomous order. The Napoleonic invasion of 1812 and the Polish insurrection of 1830 offered opportunities, and these autonomist strivings survived into the 1840s. However, in contrast with Poland and Hungary, historical legitimism was not to remain the platform of Ukrainian nationalism. The Left-Bank nobility did not possess enough strength and solidarity to determine the course of the nation's renaissance. As a corporate entity the class loses importance after the middle of the century. Ukrainian nationalism took shape, ideologically and organizationally, under the auspices not of historical legitimism but of populism. Nevertheless, the Left-Bank provinces of Poltava and Chernihiv continued to be the geographical core of the Ukrainian movement. No other section of Ukraine provided such a large proportion of nationalist leaders, and here the movement had succeeded in making considerable headway among the masses some years before the outbreak of World War I.
The Ukrainian cultural revival found its first important centre further to the east, in Slobodian Ukraine (Slobozhanshchyna). In the seventeenth century this territory belonged to Muscovy, but was largely uninhabited. It was settled by refugees from Dnieper Ukraine, who brought with them the Cossack system. The Cossack regiments of Slobodian Ukraine remained under the direct control of the central government, and did not share in the turbulent political history of the Hetmanate. But Kharkiv, the capital of Slobodian Ukraine, was to become in 1805 the seat of the first modern university in Ukrainian lands. This was achieved with contributions from the local gentry and burghers.14 In the 1820s and 30s, a group of writers and scholars connected with Kharkiv University laid the foundations of Ukrainian vernacular literature and of Ukrainian ethnographic and folkloristic studies. The motive was non-political, but the enthusiasm for the "folk," inspired by the Romantic school of Kharkiv, was to become a constituent element of modern Ukrainian nationalism, one of an importance hardly inferior to the traditions of political autonomy which originated in the Left Bank.
Southern Ukraine (the steppes) consisted of the former territory of the Zaporozhian Sich and the possessions of the Crimean Tatars and Turkey. In the eighteenth century this was still largely an uninhabited "no man's land," and until well into the nineteenth century the territory preserved the character of a frontier country. Besides Ukrainians, the territory attracted numerous other settlers: Russians, Germans, Greeks, Bulgarians. No other section of Ukraine had so many ethnic minorities as the South. The Ukrainians of the steppes and of the Black Sea coast, most of whom had never known serfdom, displayed a spirit of self-reliance and enterprise. It was no accident that during the Civil War peasant anarchism, represented by Nestor Makhno, found many supporters in the South. The South's participation in the nationalist movement was relatively small; its contribution to the making of modern Ukraine was predominantly economic. Under the Old Regime the Right Bank was economically, as well as politically, connected with Poland, while the Left Bank and Slobodian Ukraine were turned toward Muscovy. The frontier on the Dnieper separated the western and the eastern half of the Ukrainian ethnic area. This changed with the opening of the Black Sea ports. Now the trade of both the Right and the Left Banks became oriented toward the South. This was a decisive step toward the economic integration of Ukrainian lands and toward the formation of a unified Ukrainian national economy. The South also became, from the 1880s on, the scene of a mighty development of mining and heavy industry in the Donets and Kryvyi Rih basins, which induced some writers to call that territory -- with some exaggeration -- a "Ukrainian America." The South became the economic center of gravity of modern Ukraine.
The historic individuality of the Right Bank (territory west of the Dnieper) was determined by the fact that even after the Russian annexation of 1793 the Polish nobility remained the socially dominant element in the land, and to a large extent preserved this position until 1917. Indeed, the landowners as a class rather profited by the change of the regime, since their domination over the peasantry was more effectively backed by the police and army of an absolute monarchy than by the inefficient administration of the late Commonwealth. The magnates, masters of huge latifundia, adopted an attitude of loyalty toward the Empire. The middle and petty gentry, on the other hand, did not abandon hopes for the restoration of the Polish state, stretching to its historical frontier on the Dnieper. The two insurrections of 1830 and 1863, which originated in Congress Poland, spilled over into Right-Bank Ukraine. The local Polish conspirators made attempts to win the Ukrainian peasants to this cause, using the Ukrainian language in their proclamations and promising that in the future reborn Poland Ukraine-Rus' would form an autonomous body. This agitation met no favourable response. The memories of old Poland were hateful to the Ukrainian masses, who had not forgotten the Cossack wars and to whom the very word "Poland" was a symbol of oppression. The spokesmen of the young Ukrainian nationalist movement consistently rejected Polish claims to the Right Bank, as this implied a partition of Ukraine between Russia and Poland. This may be regarded as a striking example of the incompatibility of "historical" and "ethnic" nationalism. The inability of the Poles and the Ukrainians to settle their differences and to evolve a common policy toward Russia fatefully determined the further development of both nations.15 In spite of this failure the Polish-Ukrainian entanglement in the Right Bank had some positive aspects from the point of view of Ukraine's progress toward nationhood. Polish influence in nearly half of Ukrainian ethnic territory served as a counterbalance to Russian domination. Throughout the nineteenth century the western part of Ukraine remained a zone of tension, where Russian and Polish forces competed for supremacy. In the long run, this strengthened Ukrainian self-awareness as a nation distinct from both Poland and Russia. The Polish nobility of the Right Bank consisted in large measure of the Polonized descendants of the old Ukrainian aristocracy, and even the originally Polish families had, in the course of generations, become acclimatized to the Ukrainian environment and felt strong "territorial patriotism." For instance, Polish writers from that area used local motifs and formed a "Ukrainian school" in Polish literature; some of them were bilingual and belonged as much to Ukrainian as to Polish literature. Polish-Ukrainian scholars made valuable contributions to the study of the country's history and ethnography. The Ukrainian community definitely rejected the program of a "Jagiellonian federation," dear to the hearts of the Polish-Ukrainian minority; still, certain concepts formulated by the publicists of the Right Bank had an impact on the growth of Ukrainian political ideologies.16 Some members of the Polish minority in Ukraine, "not wishing to be alien colonists in their native land" (to use an expression of one of them), crossed the borderline separating the two nationalities and identified themselves fully with the Ukrainian cause. They were few, but from their number came some of the outstanding leaders of modern Ukrainian nationalism. Being thoroughly Western in their cultural background, they led the Ukrainian movement away from the Russian connection.17
In turning to the Ukrainian territories of the Habsburg Empire, we shall first mention Bukovyna. This small land, acquired from Moldavia by Austria in 1774, had a diverse population. The Ukrainians predominated in the north, the Romanians in the south; there were also numerous Germans and Jews and a sprinkling of Armenians and Gypsies. German served as a lingua franca among Bukovyna's motley inhabitants. The easternmost university with German as a language of instruction was at Chernivtsi, the capital of Bukovyna; the city itself seemed a cultural outpost of Vienna. Some local Ukrainian writers started their literary careers in German. On the eve of World War I the Ukrainians of Bukovyna enjoyed more favourable conditions of national development than those of any other territory: they had achieved a share in the province's government proportionate to their numbers.
Perhaps the most striking feature in the rebirth of Galician Ukraine was the unique role played by the Greek Catholic (Uniate) Church. "This is the only national church which is not a state church, the only one which, while a branch of the Church Universal, is, at the same time, entirely national. . . . Even unbelievers love the national church, which they regard as a vehicle of incomparable efficacy in the political struggle."18 The Eastern Rite drew a clear-cut demarcation line that separated its adherents from the Poles, and the allegiance to Rome was a bulwark against Russian influence.19 At the beginning of the nationalist movement, the clergy provided a ready-made leadership for the Ukrainian community. This was clearly displayed during the 1848 Revolution, when the Galician Ukrainians (Ruthenians, in the terminology of that time), guided by their bishops and priests, made their political debut. Of utmost sociological importance was the fact that the Greek Catholic clergymen were married, and formed a quasi-hereditary class; in their style of living they resembled a lesser gentry.20 In later times, toward the end of the century, this ecclesiastical hegemony was felt to be inadequate to the needs of a modern society, and was increasingly resented; this led to a strong anti-clerical, secularist trend. But the lay intelligentsia, who gradually assumed the leadership of the nationalist cause, were largely sons of clerical families. A handicap of the Ukrainian movement in Galicia was the poverty and economic backwardness of the land, and even more crippling was the circumstance that political power had rested, since the 1860s, in Polish hands. In a settlement comparable to the Austro-Hungarian Compromise, the Viennese government turned over the administration of Galicia to the Polish ruling class, sacrificing the interests of the Ukrainian nationality.21 The Poles used their dominant position to block, by all possible means, the progress of the Ukrainian community. For instance, Polish resistance prevented the creation of a separate Ukrainian university, although at the University of Lviv (Lemberg) there were several Ukrainian chairs. Still, Austria was a constitutional state, and this enabled the Galician Ukrainians to apply civic self-help. In this they achieved signal successes. The country was covered with a dense and ever-expanding network of economic, educational, and gymnastic associations, branching out to every village. The peasant masses, who owed to this work not only an improvement of their living conditions, but also a new feeling of human dignity and civic pride, became deeply imbued with the nationalist spirit. The discipline and militancy of the movement were hardened through stubborn, protracted political warfare against the dominant Polish administration. Gradually, the balance of forces between the two communities began to shift. A turning point was the introduction of universal manhood suffrage by the Austrian electoral reform of 1907; a large Ukrainian representation appeared for the first time in the Vienna Parliament, and the central government was forced to adopt a new policy toward the Polish-Ukrainian dispute. Polish control over the Ukrainian majority in eastern Galicia could no longer be maintained, short of physical violence, and the reform of the province's constitution appeared to be only a question of time.22 In contrast with Russian Ukraine, where the nationalist movement, although advancing quickly, had not yet succeeded in encompassing the whole people, the Galician Ukrainians were already, before 1914, a fully crystallized national community.
The fact that nineteenth-century Ukraine lacked territorial integration was a sure sign that a Ukrainian nation, in the full meaning of the word, did not exist at that time. But there were many symptoms indicating that the historical trends of the various sections were converging.
All parts of Ukraine (excepting the "marginal" lands) passed through the same stages of growth, which might be labelled the "Age of Nobility," the "Populist Age," and the "Modernist Age." No full presentation of this periodization scheme will be attempted here.23 But one or two points might be stressed. During the first epoch, which lasted approximately until the middle of the century, the leadership of the society rested with the nobility of Cossack descent on the Left Bank and in Slobodian Ukraine, with the Polish-Ukrainian nobility on the Right Bank, and with the Greek Catholic clergy, which also formed a sort of hereditary gentry, in Galicia. Populism was strongest in the Ukrainian lands east of the Dnieper, where it partly overlapped with Russian revolutionary populism; but analogous currents existed also in the Polish-Ukrainian society of the Right Bank, in the shape of the khlopomany (peasant-lovers) movement, and in Galicia, where its first wave was represented by the narodovtsi (national populists) of the 1860s and 70s, and the second by the Radicals of the 1880s and 90s.
As time went on, co-operation among various Ukrainian lands increased steadily. The founding of the first modern nationalist organization, the Cyrillo-Methodian Society, in 1846 was the result of an inter-penetration of the autonomist tradition of the Left Bank with Slobodian Ukraine's cultural revival. The integrating economic function of the South has been mentioned. By the turn of the century, the old sectional differences among the Ukrainian lands in the Russian Empire had either disappeared or lost most of their importance.
Differences remained between Galicia and Dnieper (Russian) Ukraine as a whole, and they were deep enough to create considerable political friction during the Revolution. Nevertheless, the relations between Dnieper Ukraine and Galicia offer eminent examples of inter-regional cooperation. Galicia was intellectually rather arid. The ideas which inspired the Ukrainian rebirth in Galicia came almost without exception from Dnieper Ukraine. The work of outstanding leaders of east Ukrainian origin, such as M. Drahomanov and M. Hrushevsky, was closely associated with Galicia and had profound, durable impact there. On the other hand, after the ukase of 1876, which suppressed all overt Ukrainian activities in the Russian Empire, Galicia became the sanctuary of the entire Ukrainian nationalist movement. Works of eastern Ukrainian writers were published in Galicia and smuggled into Russian Ukraine. Tangible nationalist achievements in Galicia served as an encouragement and model to Ukrainian patriots under Russian rule. Galician Ukrainians, while fighting for equality of rights with the Poles, were thinking not only of themselves: they believed that their homeland was destined to become the "Piedmont" of a future independent Ukraine.
No issue facing the Ukrainian people in the nineteenth century was more portentous than the dilemma of choosing between assimilation in an all-Russian nation or assertion of separate national individuality. The far-reaching Russification of Ukraine was an obvious fact, and it could not be explained entirely by the repressive measures of the tsarist government. Russia radiated the tremendous prestige of a great power and of a brilliant imperial civilization. Many Ukrainians, dazzled by this glory, were eager to participate in it. How humble and pitiful appeared what the Ukrainian patriots dared offer in opposition to the splendid juggernaut! How preposterous was the disproportion of forces between those which stood at the disposal of a huge and despotic state and those of a handful of dreamers, armed with nothing but faith! Little wonder that the spokesmen of the Ukrainian movement instinctively adopted a protective colouring and tried to appear as harmless as possible. They often presented their cause as a non-political, cultural regionalism, comparable with the Provencal Felibrige. When formulating a political program, they did not go beyond the demand of a federalistic reorganization of the Russian Empire, which, after all, might have been acceptable to some Russians. Ukrainian patriots were, certainly, sincere in these protestations of political innocence. But the tsarist administration saw the situation in a different light: firmly convinced that the rebirth of Ukraine presented a deadly threat to the future of Russia as a great power in Europe, it waged a war of annihilation against even the most innocuous expressions of Ukrainian nationalism, while at the same time offering to "loyal Little Russians" tempting opportunities of career, recognition, and material rewards. The spell of Russia reached those Ukrainians living outside the frontiers of the Empire. In Galicia there existed, in the second half of the nineteenth century, a pro-Russian current. The Galician Russophiles (called "Muscophiles" by contemporaries) favoured the adoption of Russian as the language of literature.24 At one time the majority of the land's intelligentsia seemed to lean to the Russophile side. The contest between the Russophiles and the nationalists dealt with apparently trivial questions of language, grammar, and orthography, but in truth the entire future of the Ukrainian cause hinged on the outcome. Galicia was the proving ground where the partisans of national abdication and of national self-assertion measured their strength. The issue was of course relevant to the whole Ukrainian people, but only outside Russia could the contest be waged overtly, and by means of persuasion, without the tsarist police officer appearing on the scene. To both Galician currents came aid from beyond the frontier: the Russophiles received subsidies from St. Petersburg, while the nationalists had the moral support of Dnieper Ukraine. In a slow, tenacious effort the Russophile group was pushed back, gradually reduced to an impotent faction, and at last completely absorbed by the growing nationalist movement. This was a turning point in the history of Russo-Ukrainian relations, and the effects were soon felt also in Dnieper Ukraine. The trend toward Russification was reversed. By 1917 the entire Ukraine was swept by the torrent of national revolution. hr>
Notes 1. It is significant that the Third Universal (Manifesto) of the revolutionary Ukrainian parliament, the Central Rada, which proclaimed the formation of the Ukrainian People's Republic (20 November 1917), and the Fourth Universal, which declared Ukraine a sovereign state completely separate from Russia (22 January 1918), avoided any reference to historical rights and were completely based on the principle of democratic self-determination. Since the president of the Rada and the originator of these two acts was the dean of Ukrainian historians, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, this omission was not fortuitous. It reflected an essential trait of the ideology of the Ukrainian movement.
2. A parallel situation may be found at the transition from the first to the second epoch of Ukrainian history. The Cossack state was not a direct continuation of the Kievan state, but neither was it without connections with this predecessor. The Ukrainian ("Ruthenian," in the nomenclature of the time) gentry, burghers, and clergy, among whom the traditions of Kievan Rus' remained alive even under Polish domination, provided the Cossack military organization with a religious-political program, and partly also with a leading personnel, which lifted the anti-Polish revolt of 1648 to the level of a war of national liberation. This is the point in which the Ukrainian Cossacks radically differed from similar Russian communities of frontiersmen, the Don and Ural Cossacks.
3. Ie. Chykalenko, Spohady (1861-1907) (New York 1955), 337.
4. Limitations of space do not permit bolstering these statements with proper references. Two short examples must suffice: the memoirs of V. Debagorii-Mokrievich and the first part of those of I. Petrunkevich, the former for a presentation of revolutionary populism, and the latter for one of zemstvo liberalism, in Ukraine of the 1870s. Both men were of Ukrainian descent, but regarded themselves as members of the Russian nation, and wrote in Russian. Nevertheless, they were quite aware that the people among whom they were working differed in many essential respects from the Great Russians and had to be approached in a different way. An unmistakable Ukrainian aura pervades these reminiscences.
5. Only in some backward areas, such as Carpatho-Ukraine (Subcarpathian Ruthenia), was the crystallization of a modern national consciousness delayed until the 1930s.
6. It is, however, to be noted that each of the major international conflicts in which the Russian Empire was involved -- the Napoleonic, Crimean, Balkan, and Japanese wars -- had definite repercussions in Ukraine. In each case movements arose which attempted to take advantage of Russia's predicament for the betterment of Ukraine's position.
7. An early Ukrainian Marxist, Iuliian Bachynsky, developed in his essay Ukraina irredenta (1895) the thesis that while the industries of Congress Poland were working for and dependent on the Russian market, Ukrainian industry was rather competitive with that of central Russia. From this he drew the prognosis that Ukraine was more likely than Poland to secede from Russia. This reveals the shortcomings of a purely economic interpretation of historical events, and for this Bachynsky was criticized by such outstanding contemporaries as M. Drahomanov and I. Franko. Still, the facts pointed out by Bachynsky were certainly significant.
8. One may recall that Prague and Riga preserved well into the nineteenth century a predominantly German outlook.
9. The greatest wrong which tsarist Russia committed against the Ukrainian people in the field of socio-economic policies was the introduction of serfdom in 1783. As long as the Cossack officers showed an inclination toward political separatism, the tsarist policy was to pretend the role of "defender" of the common people against the local upper class. Later, when the danger of separatism had diminished, the interests of the peasantry were sacrificed in order to reconcile the Ukrainian gentry with the loss of their country's political autonomy. Russian-style serfdom was introduced in Ukraine at a time when it was already on the way toward extinction in other parts of Eastern Europe, and when even in Galicia it was being restricted by the policies of the Austrian "enlightened despots," Maria Theresa and Joseph II.
10. Cf. Kostomarov's essay, "Dve russkiia narodnosti," originally published in the St. Petersburg journal Osnova, no. 3 (1861).
11. M. P. Drahomanov, Vybrani tvory (Prague 1937), 1:70. The passage quoted is from his "Avtobiohrafiia," originally published posthumously in 1896.
12. V. Lypynsky, Lysty do brativ-khliborobiv (Vienna 1926), xxv.
13. M. V. Nechkina, ed., Ocherki istorii istoricheskoi nauki v SSSR (Moscow 1960), 2:307. [Thucydides Istoriia, vols. 1–2. Translated by F. Mishchenko and revised by S. Zhebelev. Moscow, 1915. Mishchenko, F. G. Opyt po istorii ratsionalizma v drevnei Gretsii, part 1: Ratsionalizm Fukidida v Istorii Peloponnesskoi voiny. Kiev, 1881. Mishchenko, F. G. Fukidid i ego sochineniia, fasc. 2. Moscow, 1888.]
14. The founders of Kharkiv University came from a circle influenced by the ideas and example of the philosopher and spiritual reformer Hryhorii Skovoroda (1722- 94).
15. The case of Finland might be used here as an illuminating contrast. The upper classes of Finland were Swedish. But they did not try to bring the country back, in the name of "historical rights," under the rule of Sweden. Rather they united their forces with those of the native Finnish majority for the common defence of the liberty of the homeland. This co-operation was to be eminently beneficial to both Finland and Sweden, and to the Swedish-Finnish minority as well.
16. An example of this is the idea of a Polish-Ukrainian political writer, F. Duchiriski, according to whom the Russians were not really a Slavic people, since they were of Ugro-Finnic stock which had become linguistically Slavicized; this implied a deeper ethnic difference between the Russians and the Ukrainians than the close affinity of the two East Slavic languages would suggest. This conception, whatever its scholarly merits, enjoyed considerable popularity in Ukrainian circles.
17. Three men merit mention in this context: Volodymyr Antonovych (1834-1908), historian and archaeologist, the founder of the "Kievan historical school," the leader of the secret organization Hromada and of the Ukrainian movement in Russia during the most difficult period of reaction in the 1880s and 90s; Viacheslav Lypynsky (1882-1931), eminent historian, political philosopher, and conservative leader; and the Metropolitan Andrii Sheptytsky (1865-1944), for forty-four years the head of the Greek Catholic Church in Galicia and the outstanding Ukrainian ecclesiastical figure of the century.
18. S. Smolka, Les Ruthenes et les problemes religieux du monde russien (Berne 1917), 225 and 228.
19. The Uniate (Greek Catholic) Church had been suppressed in Right-Bank Ukraine by the Russian government in 1839. Tsarist Russia at all times showed an implacable hostility to Ukrainian Catholicism of the Eastern Rite, and this attitude has been inherited by Soviet Russia.
20. In works of fiction dealing with the Anglican clerical milieu, for instance, in Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield, one encounters an atmosphere strikingly similar to that which used to prevail in the patriarchal homes of the Galician priests. There was, however, one major difference: the clergymen of the Church of England were the social allies of the English aristocracy, while those of the Greek Catholic Church stood in radical opposition to Galicia's Polish aristocracy.
21. The crownland "Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria" also included, besides the territory of the Old Rus' principality of Halych (from which its name was derived), an ethnically Polish area, west of the river San. In the Ukrainian, eastern part of Galicia there existed, as in Right-Bank Ukraine, a socially privileged Polish minority of landowners and town dwellers. In the province as a whole the numerical strength of the Polish and the Ukrainian groups was approximately equal, but the aristocratic character of the Austrian constitution and Vienna's policy favoured the Polish element. From 1848, and to the last days of the monarchy, the Ukrainians strove for a partition of the province on ethnic lines, but in vain.
22. A new electoral law for the Galician Diet was adopted early in 1914, but the outbreak of the war prevented its implementation. The Ukrainians were to receive some 30 per cent of the seats in the Diet and a share in the autonomous provincial administration. This still fell short of what the Ukrainians demanded on the basis of their numerical strength, but the Polish monopoly of power was at last broken.
23. The writer has tried to do this in the article "The Intellectual Origins of Modern Ukraine," Annals of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the U.S. 6, no. 3-4 (1958). See pp. 123-41 of this volume.
24. The Russophile movement emerged in the 1860s as a reaction to the hegemony which the Poles had achieved in the province. It was also fed by conservative sentiments which saw a special value in the traits of the cultural heritage common to all Eastern Slavs: the Slavonic liturgy, Cyrillic script, Julian calendar, and the traditional name of Rus', which could easily be identified with Russia.
A commentary on this essay by Arthur E. Adams appeared in the original publication (Slavic Review 22, no. 2 (June 1963), 217-23). Rudnytsky's rejoinder follows.
Reply I am grateful to the commentators for their thoughtful consideration. Professor Arthur E. Adams compliments me for my "courageous assessment of the insignificance of Ukraine as a political entity prior to 1917." I am appreciative of the compliment, but I am sorry to say that it is based on a misapprehension of my point of view. As the problem is a historically important one, I will try to restate my argument.
The strength of a political movement must be measured in relative terms, taking into account specific circumstances. If one uses Western standards, all non-governmental, societal political forces in nineteenth-century Russia may easily give the impression of being "insignificant." This refers not only to Ukrainian nationalism but also to Russian revolutionary and oppositionist movements, all of which had a narrow stratum of active supporters. This was the outcome of a system in which a despotic, hypertrophic state faced an atrophied, politically inarticulate, and cowed society. The outward expressions of the pre-1917 Ukrainian national movement may have been modest, and the number of persons actively engaged in it limited. Still, its strength should not be underestimated by a historian. Its vitality was proven by the fact that it survived systematic repression by a powerful state; and it always bore within itself the potential for a radical transformation of the political structure of Eastern Europe as a whole.
Perceptive contemporary observers were able to assess the political significance of the Ukrainian problem. Here are the comments of a German traveler, Johann Georg Kohl, who visited Ukraine in the 1830s:
Such is the aversion of the people of Little to those of Great Russia that it may fairly be described as a national hatred, and the feeling has rather strengthened than diminished since the seventeenth century, when the country was annexed to the Moscovite empire.... Before their subjection, all the Malorossians were freemen, and serfdom, they maintain, had never been known among them. It was the Russians, they say, that reduced one-half of the people to slavery. During the first century after the union, Little Russia continued to have her own hetmans, and retained much of her ancient constitution and privileges, but all these have been swept away by the retrograde reforms of the last and present century.... To this day, the battle of Poltava is remembered throughout Little Russia with feelings similar to those with which the battle of the White Mountain is remembered in Bohemia.... Should the colossal empire of Russia one day fall to pieces, there is little doubt but the Malorossians will form a separate state. They have their own language, their own historical recollections, seldom mingle with their Moscovite rulers, and are in number already more than 10,000,000.1It is noteworthy that these striking observations and predictions were made before the emergence of modern Ukrainian nationalism as an organized movement. The following excerpts are from a report which the Austrian consul in Kiev, Eduard Sedlaczek, submitted to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Vienna in 1893:
The Little Russian national movement continues to grow, although the greatest caution is being observed.... I know personally many a civil servant and teacher whose attitude in office is regarded as blameless who, however, in an intimate circle betrays a frame of mind far from friendly toward the government.... The present time is characterized by a substantial increase in studies on Little Russian history and ethnography, published in Russian. This is the natural outcome of censorship, which deals severely with Little Russian publications.... These [informal] groups, which are spread throughout the entire country, have a purely literary and scholarly outlook, and so offer nothing palpable to the police, but in fact they serve to strengthen the Little Russian patriotic awareness.2This report illustrates the condition of the Ukrainian movement during the era of reaction. To obtain a notion of the impressive progress it was able to achieve in the subsequent twenty years, there is no better witness than S. N. Shchegolev, a member of the Russian Black Hundred. He was the author of a thick work on Ukrainian nationalism, published in 1912, which has been called "a handbook for the police."3 Regardless of the author's tendency and purpose, the book is rich in factual information drawn from the contemporary press. The reader gets the distinct impression that all of "South Russia" was, on the eve of the First World War, honeycombed by the activities, overt or covert, of the Ukrainian national movement. A study of Shchegolev's work reveals the deep roots out of which blossomed the Ukrainian "miracle" of 1917; it also shows the erroneousness of the view of Professor Adams, according to whom the Ukrainian revolutionary parliament, the Central Rada, was "a tiny and isolated group of nationalist intellectuals." In reality the Rada was the crest of a powerful mass movement.4 The Rada's main problem and difficulty was not lack of popular support, as Professor Adams implies, but, quite to the contrary, the inadequacy of leadership: the national elite was neither numerous enough nor sufficiently experienced politically to master the spontaneous rising of the masses and to grasp power firmly in a large country under complicated and trying internal and international conditions.
In writing my paper, I deliberately limited myself to the prerevolutionary epoch. Professor Adams' contribution, however, is mainly devoted to the Revolution of 1917-21. This puts me in an awkward position. I lack space to offer a concerted discussion of the history of the Ukrainian Revolution, while, at the same time, I cannot leave some of Professor Adams' statements unchallenged.
Professor Adams' conception of the Ukrainian Revolution is basically one of a wild and chaotic peasant revolt, of a jacquerie. This picture, which may have been induced by his scholarly interest in the Makhno movement of southern Ukraine, is an extremely one-sided one, almost to the point of caricature. I do not think of denying the existence of those anarchistic features, but they were not the dominant ones in the history of the Ukrainian Revolution.
Let us, for instance, refer to the conservative regime of 1918, headed by Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky. According to Professor Adams, Skoropadsky was simply a "puppet of the Germans." I contend that this view is a gross oversimplification. General Skoropadsky, a scion of a family distinguished in Ukrainian annals, returned during the Revolution to the service of his homeland, in very much the same manner as his former comrade-in-arms, General Mannerheim, returned to the service of Finland. Skoropadsky played an important role in the events of 1917 in Ukraine, long before the coming of the Germans. It is true that the Hetmanate of 1918 needed German protection for its survival, but it also found support among the conservative and moderate Ukrainians.5 During its short duration, the Hetmanate could show a number of creditable achievements, including the foundation of two Ukrainian-language universities, in Kiev and Kamianets-Podilskyi, and of an Academy of Sciences, of which the present Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR is a lineal continuation. Skoropadsky's political life did not end with the fall of the Hetmanate. Actually, he gained moral stature during the years of exile, and a considerable segment of the Ukrainian community outside the borders of the USSR continued to look upon him, during the inter-war period, as the legitimate pretender to Ukraine's throne. All this is not intended as an apologia for Skoropadsky or the regime headed by him in 1918, but is meant as a warning against simplistic cliches in the treatment of the history of the Ukrainian Revolution.
The failure of the Ukrainian Revolution is obvious: it did not succeed in giving permanence to an independent, democratic national state. A perceptive student, however, whose vision is not limited to success and failure, might feel the obligation to weigh the causes of this failure and to try to discern what, in spite of defeat, the permanent achievements of the Ukrainian Revolution have been.
Among the new nations emerging in Eastern Europe at the end of World War I none had greater handicaps than Ukraine. The country's normal development had been warped and retarded by the dead hand of Russian tsarism. There was, in 1917, a staggering backlog of unfulfilled tasks, which had to be shouldered all at once, whereas other stateless nations had been able to solve these preliminary problems gradually, over decades. For instance, there did not exist in old Russia one single school with Ukrainian as the language of instruction. Ukraine was faced simultaneously with the task of creating a network of elementary schools and of forming an independent government, an army, and a diplomatic service. One may also add that imperial Russia, in whose shadow the majority of the Ukrainian people had lived for such a long time, was a very poor training place for self-government and civic maturity. There was a standing joke in Ukrainian circles: "Why won't Britain annex us as a colony? Then we would be ready for independence in ten years." The social tensions in the country were acute. In Ukraine, in contrast with Great Russia, the movement of social protest did not flow in orthodox Bolshevik channels; still, it offered favourable ground for subversive propaganda coming from Moscow, and it impeded the consolidation of the democratic Ukrainian People's Republic.
Internationally, Ukraine had first to shoulder, in 1917, the unwelcome heritage of the war against the Central Powers, then, in 1918, the burden of the German occupation, and finally, in 1919, to face the lack of recognition and the political hostility of the victorious Entente. Isolated and deprived of any outside support, Ukraine had to sustain a war on three fronts: against Soviet Russia, against the White Army of General Denikin, and against Poland. The Polish-Ukrainian struggle merits special mention, as it is usually overlooked by Western historians, who approach the Ukrainian Revolution as a part of the Russian Civil War. The Polish-Ukrainian conflict was by no means a local affair affecting Galicia only; it exercised a fateful impact on the whole development of the Ukrainian cause. Galicia was the section of Ukraine with the highest level of national consciousness. In civic discipline and public order the territory compared favourably with all the other East European countries of that time, and the population was impervious to communist propaganda. It was the intention of the Ukrainian leaders to use Galicia as the stronghold and the base in the struggle against Soviet Russia. This was prevented by the Polish attack, which diverted the best Ukrainian forces from the anti-Bolshevik front in the critical months of the winter and spring of 1919. On the other hand, the political obtuseness and rigid centralism of the White Army prevented the coalition of all anti-communist forces. Despite these tragic circumstances, Ukraine offered a stubborn, protracted resistance and kept on fighting. Viewed in this light, even "peasant anarchism," by which Professor Adams has been so impressed, may be understood as an elemental groping of the Ukrainian masses after liberty, independence, and a just social order.
Professor Adams is right in stressing that Ukrainian patriots also worked in the Soviet camp. Nevertheless, the Soviet regime occupies a very different place in Russian and Ukrainian history. In Russia, the victory of the Bolsheviks was over their internal opponents; Soviet Russia is, for better or worse, the legitimate heir of the traditional Russian state. The position of Ukraine is, in this respect, analogous rather with that of the "people's democracies" established after World War II. The Soviet regime was imposed on the country from the outside; the weak local communists (among whom ethnic Ukrainians formed only a minority) would never have been able to secure power in Ukraine without outside intervention. The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic represents a compromise between the fact of Russian domination and those conquests of the Ukrainian Revolution which could no longer be obliterated. It speaks for the far-sightedness and political flexibility of Lenin that he, modifying his original centralistic program, perceived the necessity of neutralizing the forces of Ukrainian nationalism by appropriate concessions.
The permanent achievements of the Ukrainian Revolution were, first, a profound "mutation" of the collective mind of the Ukrainian people, their crystallization into a modern nation, and, second, a shift in the international power structure of the eastern half of the continent. "The East European upheavals of 1917-20 have led to three great results: the victory of Bolshevism, which entered into the historical inheritance of Muscovy-Russia, the re-establishment of Poland, and the re-emergence of Ukraine as the third great force of the East European area, alongside Great Russia and Poland."6 It is noteworthy, for instance, that the changes which took place in Eastern Europe after the Second World War represent not only an expansion of Moscow's imperial sphere, but also the fulfillment of the territorial program which the Ukrainian movement advocated for generations: the consolidation of all lands of Ukrainian speech in one Ukrainian body politic. This, in turn, has brought a shift in the balance of forces between Ukraine and Russia, whose full impact only the future will be able to tell.
Professor Adams informs us that he has "often clashed with Ukrainian nationalist scholars," and he complains that "nationalistic dross has long hampered effective investigation in this area'' of modern Ukrainian history. Professor Adams graciously exempts me from this criticism, but I cannot help feeling that his complaints are out of place. Ukrainian scholars in Western lands are few, and there is little danger that they will be able to "brainwash" anyone. As far as modern Ukrainian history is concerned, it is difficult to see what "nationalistic dross" has impeded its study. Is it not rather true that Ukrainian history, modern or old, has not yet been discovered as a separate area of studies by Western scholars, and is treated, if at all, only incidentally, on the margin of Russian history? The expression "nationalist scholars," as used by Professor Adams, implies a judgment of value. I have not heard that a historian of Russian background, working in the United States, has been ever labeled "nationalistic," even if he displays obvious symptoms of Russian patriotic fervour. Why this difference in treatment? The answer, I think, is that views and interpretations traditionally expounded by Russian scholarship have received wide currency and are given credence, without questioning of their premises. Conceptions which run counter to this orthodoxy are not weighed for their scholarly validity but are automatically ruled out of court as allegedly biased and "nationalistic." I do not, of course, expect that views defended by Ukrainian historiography should be accepted uncritically; but they merit a proper hearing. A great Russian statesman, Sergius Witte, once said:
We have not yet fully realized that since the times of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great there has been no Russia, but a Russian Empire. If some 35 per cent of the population are ethnic minorities, and the Russians are divided into Great Russians, Little Russians, and Belorussians, it is impossible to conduct in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a policy which disregards this historical fact of capital importance, which disregards the national traits of the other nationalities composing the Russian Empire, their religion, language, etc.7The "historical fact of capital importance" stressed by Witte nearly half a century ago has even now not been fully digested by many American scholars in the field of East European and Slavic studies. The history of "Russia" is usually approached as one of an essentially homogeneous area rather than one of a multinational empire, comparable, in this respect, to the former Ottoman and Austrian empires. This results, I believe, in a one-sided and inadequate understanding of the East European historical process. To correct this would require a profound revision of the traditional historical perspectives, and this is opposed by the great force of intellectual inertia. "Nationalist historians," of whom Professor Adams complains, may be given credit for performing a useful function -- that of gadflies, who awaken sluggish thought from its dogmatic slumber.
The commentary of Professors Omeljan Pritsak and John S. Reshetar, Jr., raises many questions, particularly that of the classification of Ukraine as Eastern or Western, and that of historicity and non-historicity. On the first point, I am inclined to agree with Oscar Halecki that Ukraine is Eastern and European; the second question was treated in the article. These, and other issues raised by Professors Pritsak and Reshetar, are worth substantial debate at some time, but further comment does not seem appropriate in an article on modern Ukraine. The reader of the commentary will see that there are many interesting topics for discussion in the field of Ukrainian history, and I am appreciative of Professors Pritsak and Reshetar's intensive study.
Notes 1. J. G. Kohl, Russia: St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kharkoff, Riga, Odessa, the German Provinces of the Baltic, the Steppes, the Crimea, and the Interior of the Empire (London 1844), 527-9.
2. The report of Eduard Sedlaczek, drawn from the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Vienna, was published by Dmytro Doroshenko. See D. Doroshenko, "Ukrainskyi rukh 1890-kh rr. v osvitlenni avstriiskoho konsulia v Kyievi," Z mynuloho: Zbirnyk (Warsaw 1938), 1:59-70. The passages quoted are on pp. 63-5.
3. S. N. Shchegolev, Ukrainskoe dvizhenie kak sovremennyi etap iuzhnorusskago se-paratizma (Kiev 1912).
4. A test of strength of the Ukrainian movement was the election to the Russian Constituent Assembly in the late fall of 1917. "The five million votes obtained in the clear by the various Ukrainian lists constitute an impressive showing from any point of view, and must be augmented by at least another half million votes as the Ukrainian share of the joint lists agreed upon with other parties. ... In the face of such a clear-cut demonstration of strength, it is simply not possible to contend that the Ukrainian movement was a weak and artificial thing, concocted by a group of hyper-nationalistic intellectuals." O. H. Radkey, The Election to the Russian Constituent Assembly of 1917 (Cambridge, Mass. 1950), 18 and 30. The validity of this test was explicitly recognized by Lenin himself. Rosa Luxemburg, like Professor Adams, believed that the Central Rada was without a mass base, and she criticized Lenin for the "coddling" of Ukrainian nationalism. In justifying his policy Lenin referred to the results of the election to the Constituent Assembly as a proof that the Ukrainian movement was a force to be reckoned with. It is to be noted that in the eight provinces of Ukraine the Bolsheviks obtained only 10 per cent of the votes. Cf. J. Borys, The Russian Communist Party and the Sovietization of Ukraine (Stockholm 1960), 159-60.
5. The background of the Skoropadsky coup has been recently studied by Oleh S. Fedyshyn from German archival sources. It appears that Skoropadsky was not hand-picked by the Germans. The right-wing conspiracy against the socialistic Rada government was formed by Skoropadsky on his own initiative. German military authorities arrived independently at a decision to get rid of the "unco-operative" Central Rada. The two parties reached an agreement only a few days before the coup of 29 April 1918. See O. S. Fedyshyn, Germany's Drive to the East and the Ukrainian Revolution, 1917-1918 (New Brunswick, N.J. 1971).
6. W. Kutschabsky, Die Westukraine im Kampfe mit Polen und dem Bolschewismus in den Jahren 1918-1923 (Berlin 1934), 1.
7. S. Iu. Vitte, Vospominaniia (Moscow 1960), 3:274.