Ivan L. Rudnytsky, Essays in Modern Ukrainian History, 1987.
Lypynsky's Political Ideas from the Perspective of Our Time Viacheslav Lypynsky's treatise, Lysty do brativ-khliborobiv (Epistles to Brethren Farmers) (Vienna 1926), contains an exposition of both his political philosophy and his practical political program. In this paper I shall address myself to the latter. Without examining his theoretical views on society, state, and history, I shall concentrate on Lypynsky's ideas about concrete issues in Ukrainian politics. The half-century that separates us from Lypynsky allows for a critical evaluation of his legacy. To paraphrase the title of Benedetto Croce's study of Hegel, I wish to inquire into "what is living and what is dead" in Lypynsky from the perspective of our time.
Lypynsky wrote Lysty in the years 1919-26. It is obvious that Ukraine and the world at large have since then undergone tremendous changes. In approaching Lysty today, the reader will encounter a number of topics which are bound to appear hopelessly dated. To give just one example, Lypynsky wished to base Ukrainian statehood on the khliboroby, a class of sturdy yeomen farmers. But, as we know only too well, an independent landowning peasantry has long been destroyed in the Soviet Union, including Ukraine. Moreover, owing to massive industrialization, the majority of Ukraine's population is no longer rural but urban. It would, therefore, be easy to jump to the conclusion that Lypynsky's precepts, whatever historical interest they may possess, have become quite irrelevant to our present-day world.
The thesis of this paper is that, on closer examination, Lypynsky's ideas retain their relevance and validity to a high degree. They must, however, be translated into the idiom of our time, that is, critically reinterpreted in the light of present conditions. Of course, we will also have to identify the points on which we are obliged to register our disagreement with Lypynsky. In the powerful "Vstupne slovo dlia chytachiv z vorozhykh taboriv" (Foreword to Readers from Hostile Camps), Lypynsky challenged his political adversaries to an honest combat of ideas. Without wishing to be counted among his adversaries, we cannot but try to respond to this challenge to the best of our ability.
Before embarking on a discussion of specific issues, we should remind ourselves that Lypynsky is, after all, not as distant from us in time as might appear. He formulated his program from the perspective of his experience of the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917-21. But the historical epoch which started for Ukraine in 1917 is still in progress. Lypynsky's central problem was Ukrainian statehood -- an analysis of the reasons why the recent bid for independence had failed, and a search for the ways by which the lost independence could be regained and made secure. The solution of this fateful problem still lies in an uncertain future. From this point of view, we are Lypynsky's contemporaries, because his problem is also our own problem.
Social Pluralism
What, then, is Lypynsky's most enduring contribution to the problem of Ukrainian statehood? From among his many brilliant insights, I would single out the perception that the structure of the future Ukrainian state, if there is ever going to be one, will necessarily have to be pluralistic. In those countries whose political culture is Western, pluralism is usually taken for granted. In Ukrainian thought, however, Lypynsky's stress on pluralism represented a radical innovation. The nineteenth-century populists' vision of Ukrainian society was monistic, in the manner of Rousseau. They viewed "the people" (narod), identified with the peasantry, as a homogeneous mass; whatever rose above the narod they condemned as parasitic, morally tainted, and essentially non-Ukrainian. Populist historians, from Kostomarov to Hrushevsky, glorified elemental peasant revolts, but were suspicious of state-building efforts of Ukrainian elites. During the inter-war period, among Ukrainians outside the USSR the ideology of populism was largely superseded by that of integral nationalism. Nationalism was in many ways a reaction to and an antithesis of populism. But the political philosophy of integral nationalism, too, was monistic, and in this respect at least it carried on the populist tradition. It only replaced the concept of an undifferentiated "people" with that of a monolithic "nation." Both populism and integral nationalism adhered to the conception of a homogeneous society, with no allowance for a variety of social strata and political trends.
Lypynsky sharply criticized monistic, reductionist ideologies which, by excluding large segments of Ukraine's population as either so-called class enemies or alleged ethnic aliens, in fact perpetuated the nation's incompleteness, and hence its perennial statelessness. He defended the notion that Ukraine must evolve a differentiated class structure, encompassing all strata that are essential for the existence of a mature nation and an independent state. This was to be achieved partly by the rise of new elites from the popular masses, and partly by the reintegration of the alienated old elites. Lypynsky pointed out that the strata which populists and integral nationalists rejected as non-Ukrainian contained some of the economically most productive, best educated, and politically most experienced elements of the country's population.
In Ukrainian state-building processes Lypynsky assigned a preeminent, though by no means exclusive, role to the khliboroby, a somewhat archaic and poetic term for farmers. His khliboroby corresponded fairly closely to the stratum which communist propagandists called kulaks in Russian or, in Ukrainian, kurkuli. Within the context of the revolutionary era, this conception made political sense. Ukraine's population was still overwhelmingly rural, and prosperous farmers, those who had benefited from the recent Stolypin reforms, undoubtedly represented the economically most progressive force within the agrarian sector of society.
It might appear that Lypynsky's argument has been made pointless by the Soviet collectivization of agriculture. However, Lypynsky himself envisaged a possible future situation in which the urban and industrial sectors would become dominant in Ukrainian society. He thought that under such circumstances the industrial working class and its "labour aristocracy" would be called to assume political leadership. He referred approvingly to the contemporary example of England, where the Labour Party had formed the government for the first time in 1924.
The main point of Lypynsky's reasoning, and the one which retains enduring validity, was the thesis that the Ukrainian struggle for independence ought to be socially based on those classes -- agrarian, industrial, or both -- which control material production, possess economic clout, and have, so to say, "a stake in the country." In this emphasis on production and economic power Lypynsky approached Marxism, with which he was actually charged by his integral-nationalist critics. (But, contrary to Marxists, he ascribed an independent function also to the military, "the power of the sword," which in his theory was not merely a reflection of economic forces.) The populist conception of the Ukrainian struggle for social and national liberation was that of a movement of the dispossessed masses, that is, primarily of the impoverished, semi-proletarian segment of the peasantry, led by the intelligentsia. In response, Lypynsky asked ironically: what would have been the prospects of the American Revolution if it had been a revolt of the Indians and Negro slaves led by religious missionaries? The American Revolution could succeed only because it was based on the substantial elements of colonial society and involved the former colonial elites.
Because intellectuals lack direct access to and control of levers of economic and military power, Lypynsky considered them ill-suited for political leadership and exercise of governance. This critique of the intelligentsia should not, however, be misinterpreted as a fundamental anti-intellectualism. Lypynsky believed that intellectuals have a vitally important function to fulfill, namely that of creators and guardians of cultural values and formulators of socio-political ideologies. But when intellectuals grasp after power, they only become untrue to their proper vocation, while aspiring to a role for which they lack the needed prerequisites.
The Problem of the Nobility
Lypynsky was convinced that Ukraine's struggle for independence could not succeed without the support of a part of the historical nobility. The large place which this topic occupies in his thinking was doubtless existentially conditioned. He was a scion of the Right-Bank szlachta, and his early, pre-World War I activity was devoted to efforts to reintegrate that Polonized stratum into the Ukrainian national community. The underlying motive was a strong sense of noblesse oblige. It was Lypynsky's belief that noblemen had a moral duty to serve their native country, and not the interests of a foreign metropolitan power. At the same time, he hoped that by fulfilling their duties as citizens of Ukraine, noblemen would vindicate the right of continued existence for their class. Lypynsky was primarily concerned with the Right-Bank Polonized zlachta, but his concept applied equally to the Left-Bank Russified dvorianstvo, which was descended from the Cossack officer stratum (starshyna) of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Hetmanate.
The whole issue has become obsolete, because the nobility in Ukraine has been completely swept away by the course of events. Still, we are entitled to ask two questions: what significance did Lypynsky's conception possess within the setting of his time? And can it, with proper adjustment, in some way still be relevant under present conditions?
In respect to the first question, Tocqueville's remarks about the fate of the old French nobility are noteworthy:
It is indeed deplorable that instead of being forced to bow to the rule of law, the French nobility was uprooted and laid low, since thereby the nation was deprived of a vital part of its substance, and a wound that time will never heal was inflicted on our national freedom. When a class has taken the lead in public affairs for centuries, it develops as a result of this long, unchallenged habit of pre-eminence a certain proper pride and confidence in its strength, leading it to be the point of maximum resistance in the social organism. And it not only has itself the manly virtues; by dint of its example it quickens them in other classes. When such an element of the body politic is forcibly excised, even those most hostile to it suffer a diminution of strength.'Lypynsky assumed that Ukrainian society was bound, in any event, to retain a "plebeian" character, that is, to be basically peasant, proletarian, and petty-bourgeois. The access of a limited number of persons of noble background would not have changed this state of affairs. But it might have transmitted a modicum of traditional political culture to the raw and inexperienced leaders of the Ukrainian liberation movement -- a quality which they conspicuously lacked. The Anglo-Irish gentry gave Ireland Parnell (an example cited by Lypynsky); the Swedish-Finnish aristocracy gave Finland Mannerheim (who, like Pavlo Skoropadsky, was a tsarist general before the Revolution); the Polish-Ukrainian aristocracy gave Ukraine Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky (Count Roman Szeptycki). If one considers the incalculable services to the Ukrainian cause of that single individual, one is entitled to wonder whether the participation of more men of Sheptytsky's type could not have made the difference between victory and defeat in Ukraine's struggle for independence. It is, therefore, difficult not to agree with Lypynsky that the Ukrainian populist intelligentsia committed a grave error in repulsing rather than trying to attract Ukrainophile members of the historical nobility. Such Ukrainophile tendencies undoubtedly existed among both the Russified and Polonized wings of that class, but met with little encouragement.Contrary to what his opponents have sometimes said, Lypynsky did not dream of preserving the old, pre-revolutionary social order and obsolete class privileges. He fully accepted the need and inevitability of far-reaching social changes. But he thought that the nobility could serve as a link between the "old" and "new" Ukraine, and thus supply an element of continuity in the life of a nation whose development was characterized by a high degree of discontinuity:
Our objective is not the conservation of the noble class, and even less a return to the status quo ante.... Nobody knows better than we that the mass of our Russified and Polonized nobility has already to a large extent become degenerate, and that the last Mohicans of the noble-Cossack era of our statehood must at last disappear in the same way as their predecessors, the last Mohicans of the Varangian-princely era. Such is the stern law of nature. But it is also a law of nature that sound seeds can grow only on a mature tree. Before an old tree dies, it must deposit into the soil sound seeds from which a fresh, reborn life will sprout. (75)2Lypynsky contended that only those revolutions can succeed whose leadership includes a dissident segment of the old elite. He derived this conception from his studies of the Khmelnytsky period in seventeenth-century Ukraine; it was the participation of Ruthenian nobles which lifted the Cossack revolution above the level of a mere jacquerie and made possible the establishment of the Ukrainian Cossack state.The experience of universal history seems to bear out Lypynsky's contention. It would be easy to adduce supporting examples from the experiences of the English, American, French, and Chinese revolutions, and of a number of national-liberation revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Lypynsky himself referred to the Russian Revolution:
Ulianov would probably not have become Lenin if in his veins, and in the veins of his fellow-believers and associates -- the Chicherins, Bukharins, Kalinins, Kamenevs (the chief of the general staff, not Nakhamkes) -- there did not run the blood of the old Muscovite service nobility, which by the oprichnina and terror saved and rebuilt the Muscovite state under Grozny, during the Time of Troubles, under Peter the Great, and which is now saving and restoring it for the fourth time under the banner of Bolshevism. (39)It is a matter of common knowledge that during the Civil War more former tsarist officers served with the Red Army than with the White Armies of Kolchak, Denikin, and Iudenich, and that the Soviet state apparatus incorporated from the very beginning numerous members of the old regime's administrative personnel. We can, therefore, agree with Lypynsky's thesis that the Bolshevik leadership derived its sure instinct for power and political know-how from the elite of imperial Russia.What is the relevance of these historical insights for the problematic of the Ukrainian struggle for independence under present conditions? Assuming the correctness of Lypynsky's reasoning, the following conclusion imposes itself logically: an independent Ukrainian state could be reborn only with the active support of a significant segment of the Soviet Ukrainian "service nobility," that is, of those Ukrainian nationals who occupy positions of responsibility in the Communist Party, the administration and the economic management of the Ukrainian SSR, and the Soviet Army. Their situation resembles that of the nineteenth-century "Little Russian" nobles: they serve the imperial system and are to a considerable extent Russified. Yet, whether one likes it or not, they form the actual elite of contemporary Ukrainian society. There are reasons to assume that, despite outward conformity, many among them do not lack a sense of Ukrainian identity, and that they harbour grievances against the Moscow overlord. Extrapolating from Lypynsky's argument, one would have to say that a wise and statesmanlike policy on the part of the nationalist emigres would consist in fostering dissident tendencies in the ranks of the Soviet Ukrainian elite. If, on the other hand, emigre nationalists were to damn indiscriminately all members of that establishment as renegades and traitors, they would only repeat the mistakes of the populists in their dealings with the historical nobility.
Political and Religious Pluralism
Lypynsky's social pluralism was complemented by political pluralism. His point of departure was the firm conviction that there is not and can never be a paradise on earth, a perfect social and political order. The future Ukrainian state, too, will be no Utopia; it will inevitably commit a full measure of mistakes, abuses, and injustices. The task of the opposition will be to strive for their correction. Therefore, "in our hetmanite Ukraine there will always be room for His Majesty's opposition alongside His Majesty's government" (xl). Furthermore, by exercising pressure on the establishment, the opposition prevents it from becoming complacent and stagnant. A legally recognized opposition is the mechanism which assures a continual rejuvenation of the national elite by an influx of fresh blood.
Most illuminating for Lypynsky's understanding of political pluralism is his discussion with Osyp Nazaruk concerning the strategy to be adopted in regard to representative Ukrainian leftists. Nazaruk, a recent convert to the Hetmanite ideology, urged Lypynsky to "kill" (figuratively) such false prophets as Drahomanov, Franko, Hrushevsky, Vynnychenko, and "even Shevchenko, as a propagator of ideas about society and the state." Lypynsky replied:
Shevchenko, Franko, and Drahomanov are revolutionaries. I think it pointless to combat some of their harmful ideas by debunking their revolutionary authority. There shall always be Ukrainian revolutionaries who will, quite rightly, draw inspiration from them. The trouble is not at all that we have revolutionaries. The trouble is that we have only revolutionaries. In order to heal this lethal one-sidedness of the nation, we need conservatives with a positive program, and not merely with a negation of the revolutionaries. The formation of such positive conservative political thought is, in my judgment, much more important than a struggle against Shevchenko, Franko, and Drahomanov. Moreover, this struggle is hopeless without the existence of a strong Ukrainian conservative organization. People must get their ideas from somewhere. As long as they have only the above-mentioned writers, they will draw on them, no matter how much one might criticize them. There is only one remedy: to produce writers who employ a different mode of thinking, a different tactic, a different style, and, above all, a preponderance of reason and will over romanticism and mindless emotions.3In sum, Lypynsky's conservatism did not by any means imply the suppression of other, non-conservative Ukrainian ideological trends and political parties. He was quite willing to find something positive even in Ukrainian communists, provided that for them "Communism is for Ukraine, and not Ukraine for communism" (xl). What he actually desired was, first, to overcome the "lethal one-sidedness of the nation" by strengthening the hitherto underdeveloped right-wing, conservative side, and, second, to co-ordinate the several contending trends within a unified political system under a rule of law common to all.To round out the picture, it should be mentioned that Lypynsky was also a pluralist in matters of church politics. Personally a faithful Roman Catholic in his ancestral Latin rite, he considered religious pluralism a permanent feature of Ukrainian life. He advocated parity for all denominations, although he thought that, on historical grounds, the Orthodox church had a rightful claim to be the prima inter pares among Ukrainian churches. Lypynsky was convinced that civilized politics presuppose Christian ethical principles, but he rejected with indignation all attempts to equate nationality with any specific denomination ("only an Orthodox can be a good Ukrainian," "only the Greek Catholic Church is the true Ukrainian national church," etc.). Lypynsky strongly opposed clericalism, the formation of political and civic organizations along denominational lines, and, generally, the mixing of political and ecclesiastical concerns, which, in his opinion, ought to be kept separate.
There can be little doubt that Lypynsky's ideas about the need for political pluralism and the importance of a legally recognized opposition retain their validity for the present and the future. A post-communist Ukraine would have to possess a pluralistic political structure lest it become another dictatorship. Pluralism is considered a hallmark of liberal democracy. And yet, paradoxically, among all Ukrainian political thinkers it was the anti-democrat Lypynsky who was the most consistent pluralist.
Monarchy and Legitimacy
Lypynsky's monarchism is the most questionable part of his program from our contemporary point of view. We are bound to wonder why this exceptionally intelligent man so passionately defended the concept of a monarchical structure, in the form of a hereditary hetmanate, for the future Ukrainian state.
There exists an intimate connection between Lypynsky's pluralism and his monarchism. Precisely because the Ukraine which he envisaged was to be socially and politically differentiated, this plurality called for a counterbalancing principle of unity. Without a unifying central point, without a universally recognized authority, there was the acute danger that conflicting social forces and rival political movements might split the Ukrainian body politic into chaotic fragments. Unfortunately, Ukrainian history shows only too many instances of such self-destructive feuds.
Lypynsky's historical researches convinced him that one of the principal reasons why the seventeenth-century Ukrainian Cossack state did not establish itself permanently was the failure of Bohdan Khmelnytsky's plans to make the hetmancy hereditary. The elective nature of the supreme office detracted from its authority, facilitated the spread of anarchic factionalism, and provided foreign powers with easy opportunities to intervene in internal Ukrainian affairs. Lypynsky applied this "lesson of history" to the contemporary Ukrainian situation.
Lypynsky believed that a state cannot be created without the use of physical, military force. States are born out of wars and revolutions. But force alone is not enough. What is equally necessary is that the government, which uses force, be legitimate, that its authority be based on a principle which is accepted by all, not only by the ruling minority but by the popular masses as well. Historically, it was the monarchical institution which provided the principle of legitimacy in the building of states and nations. "All great European nations were united by monarchies. Without a monarchy, would the unification of Germany, France, Italy, or the rebirth of smaller nations such as Bulgaria, Romania and Norway be conceivable? Why should we be an exception?" (47).
The problem of the legitimacy of power has been discussed by two twentieth-century Western theorists, the Spaniard Jose Ortega y Gasset and the Italian Guglielmo Ferrero. It is worthwhile to compare their ideas on that subject with those of Lypynsky. Ortega wrote:
Concord, the kind of concord which forms the foundation of stable society, presupposes that the community holds a firm and common, unquestionable and practically unquestioned, belief as to the exercise of supreme power. And this is tremendous. Because a society without such a belief has little chance of obtaining stability. . . . Each of the European nations lived for centuries in a state of unity because they all believed blindly—all belief is blind -- that kings ruled "by the grace of God." ... When the peoples of Europe lost the belief, the kings lost the grace, and they were swept away by the gusts of revolution.4Ferrero's argument runs along similar lines. According to him, European civilization has produced two great principles of legitimacy, the monarchic-hereditary and the democratic-elective. Both have proved capable of serving as foundations of stable political systems. Since the time of the French Revolution the monarchical principle has gone into decline, leading to the downfall of monarchy in most countries by the end of the First World War. However, the disappearance of monarchy was not followed, in most cases, by the establishment of a stable and legitimate democracy, for which the respective peoples were not ready. The vacuum of authority left behind by the collapse of monarchies was filled by regimes Ferrero terms "revolutionary" or "totalitarian," and whose first examples he sees in the Jacobin and Napoleonic dictatorships. Such regimes claim to represent the popular will. But their pretended democratic character is a sham, because they cannot face the test of free elections and the existence of an overt opposition. Revolutionary regimes try to compensate for the lack of authentic democratic legitimacy by appeals to an exclusive and militant ideology and to the personal charisma of infallible leaders, by engaging in foreign military adventures, and finally by the systematic repression of all dissident elements. Revolutionary or totalitarian regimes are necessarily terroristic, because the rulers, sensing the illegitimacy and instability of their authority, live in constant fear of society, and society lives in fear of the rulers.5Lypynsky's views fully coincide with those of Ortega and Ferrero in respect to the legitimizing function that the monarchical institution used to fulfill in the past. A basic divergence is to be found in the evaluation of the present and the prospects for the future. Both Ortega and Ferrero thought the only workable solution to the problem of legitimacy of power in our times to be democratic. Lypynsky denied this. His pessimistic assessment of democracy undoubtedly reflected the failure of Ukrainian and Russian democracy in 1917, as well as the sorry performance of Western liberal democracies which won the war against conservative-nonarchical imperial Germany, but conspicuously failed in the creation if a viable and stable post-war order. Lypynsky was strongly dedicated to the idea of the rule of law. Therefore, he could not but reject the "revolutionary," that is, dictatorial and totalitarian, solution to the problem of the structure of power represented in Ukrainian politics by the ommunist and integral-nationalist movements. The only remaining option, and the one he passionately embraced, was to uphold the time-proven principle of monarchical legitimacy.
To avoid any possible misunderstanding, it must be emphasized that Lypynsky was no partisan of absolute monarchy. He most definitely rejected absolutist monarchical regimes, such as tsarist Russia's, calling them "hereditary dictatorships." "Of course, we do not want the old tsarist autocracy, this semi-Asiatic, democratic [i.e., populist] despotism, which in moments of danger saved itself with the help of the mob, by pogroms" (42). The type of monarchy he advocated was "restricting by law and restricted by law," in other words, a constitutional monarchy. He repeatedly referred to the example of England as the model of a regime Ukrainians should try to emulate. He believed that the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Hetmanate was evolving toward this type of political system.
Lypynsky was not blind to the plain fact that the spirit of the age was altogether inhospitable to the idea of hereditary authority, the principle of monarchical legitimacy:
A new monarchy, a new dynasty, cannot be created at a time when the press and literature dominate life. Founders of monarchies and dynasties, "God-given" leaders of nations, cannot appear in an age in which the epic sense of life has vanished. Epic heroes (bohatyri) are not being born with the friendly assistance of the cinema and newspaper reporters. (89-90)Lypynsky hoped that this difficulty could be overcome by an appeal to tradition -- bot the creation of a new dynasty, but the restoration of a dynasty whose claims were hallowed by historical precedent. Under the given conditions, this meant support for the Skoropadsky cause: a member of that family had already occupied the hetman's office in the eighteenth century, and a descendant of the same family had recently validated these historical rights by assuming the hetmancy in 1918.Lypynsky did not idealize Pavlo Skoropadsky's regime; he was aware of its weaknesses and criticized some of its policies. But he asserted that the 1918 Hetmanate, despite its shortcomings, was the closest approximation to a desirable form of government for Ukraine, and, by the same token, the best chance to establish a viable Ukrainian state during the revolutionary era; he denied that the rival leftist regime of the Ukrainian People's Republic had such potential. Therefore, when the hour of Ukrainian independence struck again, Ukrainian patriots would, according to Lypynsky, have to continue the work begun in 1918 by recreating a constitutional monarchy under the legitimate Skoropadsky dynasty.
In critically assessing Lypynsky's monarchist conception, I shall discuss it on two levels, from the perspective of the era of the Ukrainian Revolution (which, of course, was Lypynsky's perspective) and from that of the present generation.
There is considerable evidence that throughout the nineteenth and into the early years of the twentieth century monarchical loyalism of a spontaneous and naive kind was widespread among the Ukrainian people. It centred on the alien Romanov and (in Galicia) Habsburg dynasties, Lypynsky was probably right in asserting that the Ukrainian masses had little understanding of statehood as an abstract concept; for them the state had to be personified in a living father-figure. It was, therefore, sensible to try to divert this feeling of allegiance, released by the abdication of the last tsar, toward the personified symbol of Ukrainian statehood. Also, the memories of the Cossack age were still very much alive among the population of east-central Ukraine. Thus it could seem reasonable to anchor the reborn Ukrainian state in the tradition of the old Cossack body politic.
On the other side of the argument stands the fact that the mainstream of the Ukrainian Revolution was undoubtedly populist and socialist. The regime of the Ukrainian People's Republic was more broadly based than Skoropadsky's Hetmanate. A native monarchical tradition did not exist in Ukraine; the Hetmanate of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was, after all, elective and semi-republican. Thus Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky's quasi-dynastic claims did not suffice to endow his rule with an aura of legitimacy. Only massive popular support could have legitimized Skoropadsky's regime. To achieve this would have required a leader of extraordinary genius and charisma, a second Bohdan Khmelnytsky. It is not to detract from the real merits of Skoropadsky to say that he was not a statesman of such stature. The general political constellation of the time must also be taken into account. With the fall of imperial Germany, the victory of the liberal-democratic Entente in the West, and the Bolshevik revolution engulfing Russia and spilling over into Ukraine, it is difficult to see how a conservative-monarchical regime could possibly have survived in Ukraine. It is noteworthy that two other recently reborn East European states, Poland and Finland, which originally were planned as institutional kingdoms, switched to the republican form of government.
There was much justice in Lypynsky's acerbic critique of Ukrainian "revolutionary democracy," that is, of the left-wing parties which formed the governments of the Ukrainian People's Republic during the Central Rada and Directory periods. But Lypynsky erred in thinking that these faults were congenital to the democratic character of the Ukrainian People's Republic. They should be rather diagnosed as "infantile disorders" resulting from the immaturity and political inexperience of the Ukrainian national-liberation movement -- a legacy of tsarist autocracy which denied training in self-government and responsible citizenship to the peoples under its domination. This interpretation is corroborated by the experience of the Western Ukrainian People's Republic, established in the territory of the former Austrian province of Galicia. The Western Ukrainian state adhered basically to the same democratic-populist philosophy as the Ukrainian People's Republic in east-central Ukraine. What made the difference was that the Galician Ukrainians had gone through the school of Austrian constitutionalism. The government of the Western Ukrainian People's Republic enjoyed the unquestioned allegiance of the entire Ukrainian population and successfully maintained law and order throughout the territory under its control. Western Ukraine was free of the scourges that afflicted Dnieper Ukraine: agrarian riots, anti-Jewish pogroms, and otamanshchyna (freelance military chieftains, or otamany, with their detachments). Lypynsky explicitly recognized the legitimate nature of the government of the Western Ukrainian People's Republic. This means that, even on Lypynsky's own terms, a stable and legitimate Ukrainian democratic regime was not impossible in principle.
Where does all this leave us today? Since the end of World War I monarchies have been disappearing in one country after another, to the point that kings have become an endangered species in our time. This trend is not to be hailed as necessarily "progressive." In most cases, monarchies have been superseded not by stable democracies, but by dictatorships and tyrannies of the type Ferrero called "revolutionary" or "totalitarian," and Lypynsky "ochlocratic." (The Russians rid themselves of the tsar and received Lenin and Stalin. The Germans deposed the silly but rather harmless Kaiser Wilhelm and got Hitler instead. The Iranians overthrew the Shah, only to fall under the rule of the Ayatollah Khomeini.) In those countries where monarchies still exist, there may be good reasons for preserving them: out of a sense of respect and affection for tradition, and as a symbol of national continuity. It may also be advantageous to separate the office of the ceremonial head of state from that of the actual chief executive, and to keep the former non-political by removing it from partisan competition. It is not for nothing that those European countries where the institution of monarchy survives -- Britain, the three Scandinavian kingdoms, the Netherlands, Belgium -- are among those possessing the highest level of political culture and the best entrenched, most secure civil liberties. This applies also to Japan, in many respects the most advanced nation of Asia.
It is clear, however, that the institution of monarchy survives only on sufferance. By itself, it is no longer able to legitimize authority; rather, it is itself in need of being legitimized by popular will. And once a monarchy has fallen, it hardly ever can be restored, because whatever charisma it still may have possessed is gone forever. (Recent history has experienced only a single, isolated case of monarchical restoration -- Spain. It remains to be seen whether the restored Spanish Bourbon royalty will last.) In countries such as Ukraine, whose entire traditional structure has been turned upside down and completely refashioned by decades of communist rule, the prospects of monarchical restoration must be assessed as nil. The problem of legitimacy, of course, remains, but at this stage of world history it can be solved only along democratic lines. As Tocqueville correctly predicted as many as one hundred fifty years ago, the choice mankind faces is that between liberal democracy and "democratic despotism."
There are indications that Lypynsky, despite his dogmatic monarchism, had an inkling of this state of affairs. We know from his biography that shortly before his death he despaired of the Skoropadsky cause. Conflicts with the Hetman certainly played a role in this, but it seems that he was also assailed by doubts concerning the fundamental validity of his conception. This was his personal tragedy, which should not be approached without a sense of compassion. In any event, in his last writings, while continuing to advocate a hereditary hetmanate as most desirable, Lypynsky now proclaimed that the determination of the form of government of the future Ukrainian state should be a prerogative of the constituent assembly. This amounted to the admission of the democratic principle of popular sovereignty -- the principle he used to reject so vehemently.
It was Lypynsky's great, undying merit to have been the first Ukrainian political thinker to have formulated the problem of the legitimacy of authority. This problem had never been raised by pre-revolutionary democratic publicists, because they did not think in terms of independent statehood; they accepted the existing empires, Russia and Austria-Hungary, as a fact of life, and their vision of the Ukrainian national-liberation movement was that of a revolutionary ferment, a permanent opposition to these established powers. Populists and Marxists tended to be concerned primarily with socio-economic issues, and to regard questions of political structure as secondary. Communists and integral nationalists, who dominated the Ukrainian political scene during the inter-war era, were attuned to the problem of power, but wished to solve it in a revolutionary manner: by the dictatorship of a single party standing at the helm of the masses and acting with unlimited authority in their name and on their behalf. Lypynsky alone understood that, in order not to be arbitrary and tyrannical, the power of the state must be based on a principle of legitimacy and be circumscribed by it. This is what Ukrainian democrats should try to learn from Lypynsky, while proposing a different solution.
Notes
1. A. de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, trans. S Gilbert (New York 1955), 110-11.
2. Page references to Lypynsky's Lysty do brativ-khliborobiv (n.pl. [Vienna] 1926) are given in parentheses following quotations.
3. Letter of Lypynsky to Nazaruk of 18 February 1925, cited in Lysty Osypa Nazaruka do Viacheslava Lypynskoho, ed. I. L. Rudnytsky (Philadelphia 1976), xlvi.
4. J. Ortega y Gasset, Concord and Liberty, trans. H. Weyl (New York 1963), 19-20.
5. G. Ferrero, The Principles of Power, trans. T.R. Jaeckel (New York 1942).