Transcript of a lecture delivered at the Canadian Institute for Ukrainian Studies, 19 November 1982. Published in Ivan L. Rudnytsky, Essays in Modern Ukrainian History, 1987.
Viacheslav Lypynsky: Statesman, Historian, and Political Thinker
Ivan L. Rudnytsky
Viacheslav Kazymyrovych Lypynsky (1882-1931), born Wladyslaw Lipinski, was the son of a wealthy landowner in Right-Bank Ukraine in the province of Volhynia. The Lypynsky or Lipinski family had emigrated from Mazowia, Poland, and settled in Ukraine in the eighteenth century. The decisive event in Lypynsky's life occurred when he was in his last grade of secondary school. He proposed to the Polish Student Organization to which he belonged—these student organizations were illegal at the time in Russia—that it merge with the Ukrainian Student Hromada (Community). When this idea was rejected by his colleagues, he left the Polish organization and became a member of the Hromada, and from the age of seventeen or eighteen he declared himself to be Ukrainian.
To understand this event, one has to see it against a certain historical background. In the three Right-Bank provinces of Ukraine —Kiev, Volhynia, and Podillia—the landed nobility had been Polish since the time of the Polish partitions, marking a continuation of the old historical Commonwealth. This Polish element constituted about ten per cent or less of the population of the area. Throughout the entire nineteenth century, there were symptoms of Ukrainophile tendencies among the local Polish minority which expressed themselves in various ways —the so-called Ukrainian school of Polish Romantic poetry, political factions, and so forth. Many of the upper-class Polish families of the region were originally of Ukrainian (Ruthenian) origin, descendants of the old Rus' aristocracy or boyars who from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries had become Roman Catholic and hence Polonized, but still retained regional allegiances to the Ukrainian home country.
For the most part, these Ukrainophile Poles tried to balance their two allegiances—Ukrainian territorial or regional patriotism and Polish na-tional consciousness. They envisioned a future restored independent Poland as a federation composed of three entities —Poland proper, Lithuania, and Rus'-Ukraine. Only in exceptional cases would individual representatives of that trend take the decisive step and identify themselves fully with the Ukrainian nationality. A number of such instances occurred in the 1860s involving the well-known khlopomany (peasant-lovers) group. Its outstanding member was Volodymyr Antonovych, who later became the leader of the Ukrainian national movement in the Russian Empire at its peak in the 1870s—80s. The other member of that group was Tadeusz Rylski (Tadei Rylsky), the father of the twentieth-century Soviet Ukrainian poet Maksym Rylsky. This was the unusual tradition to which Lypynsky consciously belonged.
There is one difference, however, between Lypynsky and his predecessors, the khlopomany of the 1860s. The khlopomany were populists—radical democrats—and envisaged their transition to the Ukrainian nationality as a breaking away from aristocratic society, a renouncing of the establishment, and an identification with the common people. This was demonstrated in the religious sphere by Antonovych, who converted to Orthodoxy from Roman Catholicism, not for spiritual reasons, for he was philosophically a positivist, but as a symbol of his identification with the common people. Lypynsky's attitude was different in that his idea was to lead over to the Ukrainian side the entire noble class of Right-Bank Ukraine, which would join the Ukrainian national movement and supply the elite which it had been lacking.
Lypynsky pursued his university studies at Cracow in history and agriculture and at Geneva, where he studied sociology. One should add that his Western European intellectual background was French. He knew the French language well and also was quite familiar with French political and sociological literature. He did not read English, and his German was probably poor; when he quoted German or English writers he would usually do this through French translations. Lypynsky did two years of military service and, as was obligatory, became a reserve officer in the Russian army. After finishing his studies and military service, he settled on his inherited estate, Rusalivski Chahary, in the district of Uman, Kiev province, and managed this estate until World War I.
From around 1908, when he was no more than twenty-six years old, Lypynsky started agitating among the Polish gentry of the Right Bank for their Ukrainization. He was able to find support among a group that had about thirty members on the eve of the war. They called themselves "Ukrainians of Polish culture" or "Roman Catholic Ukrainians." In 1909, a conference of these Ukrainians of Polish culture was held in Kiev, and Lypynsky delivered a brilliantly written programmatic address which was later published as a pamphlet, Szlachta na Ukrainie; jej udzial w zyciu narodu ukrainskiego na tie jego dziejow (Nobles in Ukraine: The Nobility's Participation in the Life of the Ukrainian People against the Background of its History [Cracow 1909]). For one year there appeared in Kiev a bi-weekly Polish newspaper entitled Przeglad Krajowy (Country Review). Although not the nominal editor, Lypynsky was its guiding spirit. The journal ceased publication because of financial difficulties. Lypynsky also contributed numerous articles to the Ukrainian press of the time, including the Kiev daily Rada (Council) and the representative monthly Literaturno-naukovyi vistnyk (Literary and Scientific Herald).
Lypynsky was one of the early Ukrainian samostiinyky (partisans of state independence) at a time when most spokesmen of the Ukrainian movement in Russia supported a program of federalist autonomy, that is, home rule for Ukraine within a democratized Russian Empire. In Galicia, the concept of independence had already gained considerable ground prior to 1914, but in Russian Ukraine there were only a few individuals who were separatists. In March 1911, there took place in Lviv, on the Austrian side of the boundary, a secret conference initiated by Lypynsky of a group of Ukrainian emigres from Russia. These were men from Dnieper or Russian Ukraine who had been overly compromised by their involvement in the 1905 revolution and then, after the victory of the reaction, had had to go abroad and found themselves in Austria, Germany, or elsewhere in Western Europe. Among the participants in this secret meeting were some figures who later became well-known, such as Andrii Zhuk, Volodymyr Stepankivsky, and the left-wing social democrat Lev Iurkevych. At the meeting, Lypynsky proposed the establishment of a political organization dedicated to the struggle for Ukraine's independence in the event of war. The international situation was already clouded; since 1908, there had been general talk about the possibility of war between Russia and the Central Powers. Lypynsky's project was actually implemented in 1914 by the founding of the Soiuz Vyzvolennia Ukrainy (Union for the Liberation of Ukraine), an organization of Eastern Ukrainian emigres who worked in the camp of the Central Powers during the war. As the war found him in Russia, however, Lypynsky himself did not participate.
Lypynsky's scholarly work was proceeding at the same time as his publicistic and political activities. He published several scholarly papers in the Zapysky (Proceedings) of the Shevchenko Scientific Society and, in 1912, there appeared a sizeable volume in Polish, Z dziejow Ukrainy (From the History of Ukraine), edited by Lypynsky and largely written by him. All the papers deal with problems of seventeenth-century Ukrainian history before, during, and after the Khmelnytsky era and centre on one major problem—the role of Ruthenian nobles in the national struggles of seventeenth-century Ukraine and especially their par-ticipation in the Khmelnytsky revolution. The work immediately made a strong impression on the scholarly community, and Lypynsky was elected a full member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society.
In 1914, upon the outbreak of the war, Lypynsky was mobilized by the Russian army as a cavalry reserve officer and participated in the East Prussian campaign of the summer and autumn of 1914. This was a major military disaster for Russia that culminated in the battle of Tannenberg, where the invading Russian army was surrounded and destroyed by the Germans. Lypynsky was able to escape from the encirclement, but contracted pneumonia, which led to tuberculosis; from that time on, he was never again completely well.
At the outbreak of the revolution, Lypynsky was stationed with a reserve military unit in Poltava, and in 1917 we find him as one of the founders of a political organization, Ukrainska democratychna khlibo-robska partiia (Ukrainian Democratic Agrarian Party); he drafted the party's program. This group was interesting in that it was the only Ukrainian political party in 1917 which did not have the adjective "socialist" in its name. The two main principles of the Democratic Agrarian Party were those of Ukrainian statehood and the preservation of the private ownership of land—the latter in contrast to the revolutionary platform of the socialization of land. The Democratic Agrarian Party stood in opposition to the leftist regime and the policies of the Central Rada. Lypynsky was not involved in Skoropadsky's coup d'etat of 29 April 1918, learning about it only after the fact. However, he approved of the new right-wing Skoropadsky regime, and was appointed its envoy to Vienna. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was on its last legs, but was still technically a great power. Lypynsky's most important diplomatic accomplishment was his management of the ratification of the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty between Ukraine on the one hand and Germany, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria on the other. The peace treaty was not ratified by Austria-Hungary because of the Galician issue. In a secret appendix to the Brest-Litovsk treaty, Austria had undertaken to divide the province of Galicia along ethnic lines into Polish and Ukrainian sections and to create a separate autonomous province of Ukrainian eastern Galicia. Under Polish pressure the Austrian government had second thoughts and reneged on this promise, preventing ratification of the peace treaty.
Lypynsky considered the anti-Skoropadsky uprising of November 1918 a national calamity, but in spite of his misgivings about the Directory of the restored Ukrainian People's Republic, his sense of obligation kept him at his diplomatic post in Vienna until June 1918, when he finally resigned. Thus, after having been a prominent Ukrainian diplomat, Lypynsky became a political emigre until the end of his life.
From 1919 until his death, Lypynsky continued to live in Austria, except for a one-year stay in Berlin. For health reasons, he lived in small mountain towns. By the 1920s his material circumstances had become very difficult, to the point where he lived in virtual penury. In 1920 Lypynsky founded a monarchist and conservative political organization, Ukrainskyi soiuz khliborobiv-derzhavnykiv (Ukrainian Agrarian Statist Union), becoming its leader and ideologue. Also in 1920, Lypynsky's major historical monograph, Ukraina na perelomi 1657-59 (Ukraine at the Turning Point 1657-59) was published. It is actually a revised and expanded version of an essay from Z dziejow Ukrainy which deals with the final period of Khmelnytsky's life and policies after Pereiaslav. From 1920 to 1925 Lypynsky edited several volumes of a journal entitled Khliborobska Ukraina (Agrarian Ukraine), the ideological organ of the hetmanite movement. His major political treatise, Lysty do brativ khliborobiv (Epistles to Brethren Farmers), was serialized in the journal. A book edition of the Epistles came out in 1926. Although Lypynsky's health was steadily deteriorating, he also conducted a huge correspondence which remains unpublished to this day. He had literally hundreds of correspondents throughout the entire world and directed, as it were, the hetmanite movement by letter, as he was living in a small isolated Austrian town and had only one secretary.
In 1927, Lypynsky went to Berlin on Skoropadsky's invitation. Skoropadsky had used his connections in German governmental circles to obtain funding for the creation of a Ukrainian Scientific Institute, and Lypynsky was invited to occupy the chair of Ukrainian history. This Berlin venture was disastrous to Lypynsky in various respects. First of all, the foggy Berlin climate led to the drastic deterioration of his health. In addition, the physical proximity to Skoropadsky and his entourage increased personal and political friction. In brief, the root of his conflict with the ex-Hetman was that Lypynsky believed the Hetman should be a symbolic figure who would represent the hetmanite movement but would not be the actual political leader. Lypynsky felt that he himself should direct the movement, either personally or through a man who had his confidence. Skoropadsky was not willing to let himself be confined to the role of a figurehead and engaged in various practical political actions which did not meet with Lypynsky's approval. In 1930 Lypynsky openly broke with Hetman Skoropadsky and declared the Ukrainian Agrarian Statist Union dissolved. He died a few months later, on 14 June 1931, in a sanatorium in the Wienerwald suburb of Vienna. Lypynsky wished to be buried on Ukrainian soil, and his two brothers, who lived in Vol-hynia—at that time a Polish province—took the body for burial to the village of Zaturky, where Lypynsky had been born. According to recent information, the tomb still exists.
Having briefly outlined Lypynsky's life, I shall try to sketch a portrait of his character. It is very clear that he was a brilliant man, of outstanding and precocious intelligence. A major historical work of Lypynsky's, Z dziejow Ukrainy (From the History of Ukraine), which had a tremendous impact on Ukrainian historiography, appeared when he was thirty years old. It is not unusual to be a great mathematician or a great musician at an early age, because creativity in these fields depends on innate genius, and one who has a mathematical mind can make breakthroughs before the age of twenty. But history is a science or discipline of mature minds which requires a broad knowledge of human affairs. One French theorist of historiography said half-jokingly that the historian comes of age when he is seventy. Thus, to publish a fundamental historical work at the age of thirty is most unusual.
Lypynsky also had what is called an intuitive mind. What does this mean? There are various ways to work as a scholar—for instance, to accumulate as much empirical evidence as one can and then to draw cautious generalizations and conclusions. This is the sound way in which a normal scholar or scientist functions. But there is another way, that of intuitive insight, where a person is able to make discoveries or see deeply into issues and problems despite a rather slender empirical foundation. This was the case with Lypynsky. It would be easy to point out that, as a historian, he was to some extent an amateur, and this applies also to his sociological and political writings; he did not have the encyclopedic knowledge expected of a professional academic who spends his entire lifetime reading and writing. Nevertheless, he had original ideas, and this is perhaps more valuable. He was a master of style in both Ukrainian and Polish, and the form of his writings indicates an inborn aesthetic sense rarely found in scholars.
Lypynsky considered himself primarily a man of action. He aspired to be a political leader, a statesman. He looked upon his work as a scholar and publicist as subsidiary to his political vocation, but a decisive political role was denied him, and his enduring contribution proved to be his writings. He was a man of puritanical moral rectitude, intolerant of meanness and pettifogging, which made it difficult for him to become a full-time politician. On the other hand, he evoked respect, even among his adversaries. He was certainly a man of great civic courage who was able to go against the stream. Lypynsky was also a passionate man. In his earlier years, the passion was controlled by a strong will, but by the mid-1920s there is evidence that his personality deteriorated under the impact of illness. (In connection with the changes in personality brought about by tuberculosis, one is reminded of Thomas Mann's novel, The Magic Mountain.) One symptom of Lypynsky's decline was that he became less and less able to control his temper. Although many of the conflicts which pervaded his last years had some objective grounds, Lypynsky's irascibility greatly contributed to them. To conclude, I will quote an opinion of a follower of Lypynsky, the Galician journalist Osyp Nazaruk, with whom—as with many others—Lypynsky quarrelled before his death. In an obituary published in a Lviv newspaper, Nazaruk wrote: "The Polish nobility of the eastern borderlands (szlachta kresowa) produced in that age [the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries] four men of genius: Joseph Conrad-Korzeniowski, Jozef Pilsudski, Felix Dzerzhinsky, and Viacheslav Lypynsky."
As a historian Lypynsky was primarily a student of the seventeenth-century Khmelnytsky revolution. There are three traditional interpretations of the Khmelnychchyna. The standard Polish view was that the Cossack revolts against Poland were revolts of barbarians against a superior civilization. The Ruthenians, who were obviously culturally inferior-Asiatic barbarian people, so to speak—could not live in a civilized European country such as the Polish Commonwealth. The Russian view of the historical meaning of the Khmelnychchyna was that it paved the way for vossoedinenie, the reunification of Little Russia with Great Russia, and thus for the founding of the modern Russian Empire. The Treaty of Pereiaslav is seen as the preparatory step for the reign of Peter the Great, which is true. The traditional Ukrainian interpretation of nineteenth-century populist historians such as Kostomarov, Antonovych, Lazarev-sky,- and the last and greatest of the populists, Hrushevsky, is that the Khmelnychchyna, like the earlier Cossack revolts and the subsequent haidamak uprising of the late eighteenth century, must be seen as an elemental striving of the Ukrainian masses for a just, free social order.
To these three traditional interpretations Lypynsky added a fourth one: he saw the Khmelnytsky revolution as the first step toward the creation of a Ukrainian body politic, a Ukrainian state. As a seventeenth-century state, it had to be a stratified corporate society like all other European states and countries of the age, although it had certain local peculiarities. The other major point of Lypynsky's interpretation is his stress on the major contribution made by Ruthenian nobles, who joined the Khmelnytsky revolution in considerable numbers and actually provided its leadership. He was able to demonstrate empirically that most of Khmelnytsky's associates were Ruthenian nobles who merged with the Cossack officers' stratum, the starshyna.
Lypynsky's strength as a historian lies in his sociological insight and in his acute awareness of Ukraine's international position between Poland, Muscovy, and the Ottoman Empire. Lypynsky's impact on Ukrainian historiography was very great, especially if one considers that he was an amateur historian. He was the founder of the statist school (derzhavnytska shkola) in Ukrainian historiography, which largely dominated the Ukrainian historiographical scene outside the Soviet Union during the inter-war period. Among the members of that school—a school of course not in a technical sense, since those influenced by Lypynsky were not his formal pupils—were Stepan Tomashivsky, the medievalist and church historian, Dmytro Doroshenko, Myron Korduba, Ivan Krypia-kevych, and the most interesting historian of the Ukrainian revolution, Vasyl Kuchabsky. In the 1920s Lypynsky also exercised influence on Soviet Ukrainian historiography, and the Soviet Ukrainian historians visibly influenced by Lypynsky include Oleksander Ohloblyn, the legal historian Mykola Vasylenko, and especially the recently deceased Lev Okinshevych.
As a historian, Lypynsky was the antithesis of Hrushevsky, the grand old man of Ukrainian historical science. Hrushevsky started much earlier, he was older, and in the end he outlived Lypynsky. Since he was a professional historian, while Lypynsky was an inspired amateur, Hrushevsky's contributions are incomparably more voluminous. But it is noteworthy that Hrushevsky himself experienced Lypynsky's influence. The final volumes of Hrushevsky's great Istoriia Ukrainy-Rusy (History of Ukraine-Rus'), dealing with the Khmelnytsky era, are largely a polemic with Lypynsky. Partly accepting and partly rejecting his insight, Hrushevsky felt that Lypynsky was an opponent of sufficient stature to be taken seriously. To repeat, Lypynsky was a historian of the seventeenth century. He planned to write a synthesis of Ukrainian history in one book, but was not able to accomplish this. Throughout his political and journalistic writings, however, there are remarks dealing with various topics in Ukrainian history from Kievan Rus' to the 1917 revolution. Accordingly, given a familiarity with Lypynsky's writings, one can divine a comprehensive interpretation of Ukrainian history. For example, whereas most Ukrainian historians, including Hrushevsky, were anti-Normanist on the issue of the origins of the Kievan state, Lypynsky determinedly believed that the Kievan state was the creation of the Varangian or Norman element.
In examining Lypynsky as a publicist and political thinker, I shall concentrate on his Epistles to Brethren Farmers. Ukrainian publicists and ideologists usually write thin pamphlets, but Lypynsky, though an ill man and the active leader of a political faction, managed to write a treatise of six hundred pages. This is perhaps the reason why the book is relatively little known today. It was written in parts, and Lypynsky planned it as he was working at it. The first two parts are a polemical tract dealing with the issues of the Ukrainian revolution. Lypynsky offered a conservative critique of Ukrainian revolutionary democracy, that is, of the leftist regimes of the Central Rada and the Directory. These two parts were written in 1919-20, just as the Ukrainian revolution was drawing to a close. But this discussion of current topics induced Lypynsky to re-examine the foundations of his political thought, and the third part is the most important, because it contains his political philosophy. The fourth part applies his fundamental ideas to the problems of Ukrainian state-building. Finally, the introduction was written last, in 1926. Very briefly, the problem with which Lypynsky deals is that of the origin of the state and the typology of state forms. This typology is based on a political anthropology somewhat resembling that of Plato's Republic, in which the theory of the state is also founded on certain human types.
Where can we place Lypynsky as a political theorist? The writer he quotes most often is Georges Sorel. Although Lypynsky was familiar with and certainly influenced by Sorel, the two are quite different. Both theorists criticize bourgeois democracy, but Sorel does so from the left and Lypynsky from the right. He is obviously close to Pareto, and seems to have known some of Pareto's writings. He did not know Gaetano Mosca, although there are great similarities between them. He did read in French translation the sociologist Robert Michels, a German who worked in Italy and published mostly in Italian. Most of these writers —Pareto, Mosca, Michels—deal with theories of the elite, and this is the school of thought to which Lypynsky made an original contribution.
Two recent essays on Lypynsky as a political thinker and sociologist are" just the first steps in studying his thought. The late Ievhen Pyziur's essay, "Viacheslav Lypynsky i politychna dumka zakhidnoho svitu" (Lypynsky and the Political Thought of the Western World, Suchasnist 9, no. 9 (1969), 103-15), compares him with Sorel. A very fine paper by Professor Wsevolod Isajiw, to be published in the proceedings of the 1982 Harvard conference on Lypynsky, examines Lypynsky as a political sociologist. Unfortunately, Lypynsky's legacy as political thinker has not been well studied. He left many articles, a very large body of unpublished papers, drafts of treatises, and a great deal of correspondence, the interest of which is by no means merely biographical or factual, since in his letters he often dealt with theoretical problems. The publication of Lypynsky's correspondence in three volumes is in progress, and once this is completed it will be a very important contribution to the understanding of his thought.
Lypynsky's impact as political theorist was much more limited than his impact as a historian. Unfortunately, he became the patron saint of a sect, the hetmanite movement, which was gradually dwindling and becoming irrelevant, and the writers or journalists of that faction continued to quote Lypynsky without really understanding him. Ukrainian publicists and political thinkers belonging to other trends—including the nationalists, most of whom were simply incapable of grasping what Lypyn-sky was trying to say, and those belonging to democratic or leftist Ukrainian groupings —have not seriously responded to Lypynsky to this day. In the Western world, a few younger Ukrainian intellectuals and scholars have begun gradually to rediscover Drahomanov, but they have not yet become aware of the existence of Lypynsky. My view is that in the last hundred years Ukraine has produced two great political thinkers, Drahomanov and Lypynsky. They represent two poles in Ukrainian thought—the left and the right, the social-democratic and the conservative. Without the full integration of the legacy of these two men —meaning critical evaluation, not blind acceptance—progress in Ukrainian political thought is impossible.