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previous: Foreword This webpage reproduces a chapter of Twentieth-Century Ukraine by Clarence Manning published by Bookman Associates New York, 1951 The text is in the public domain. This page has been carefully proofread and I believe it to be free of errors. If you find a mistake though, please let me know! next: Chapter 2

 p13  I

The Ukrainian Revival before 1914

The publication of Ivan Kotlyarevsky's Eneida in 1798 is usually regarded as the beginning of the modern Ukrainian national movement. The travesty of the old Latin epic of Virgil attributed to Aeneas and his followers escaping from the sack of Troy the characteristic thoughts and actions of a band of Zaporozhian Kozaks escaping from the destruction of the Sich by Catherine the Great of Russia in 1775, the year of the opening of the American Revolution. It drew heavily upon the author's knowledge of Ukrainian life, customs and traditions and it revived a vein of patriotism and of pride in national heritage that had lain dormant for nearly a century.

It appeared twenty-three years after the final destruction of the Sich, the traditional center of Ukrainian political life, and thirty years after the Russian Empress had abolished the mechanism of the hetman state, the last formal Ukrainian organization. There was thus a definite political gap between the old and the new; and the Russian attitude was such that the new movement was forced to confine itself for some decades to struggling for a national culture.

The Eneida not only appealed to the traditions and instincts of the people, but introduced the vernacular Ukrainian into literature. Kotlyarevksy for the first time broke with that  p14 artificial combination of Church Slavic, Polish and Russian that was the conventional written language among noble and intellectual Ukrainians. The discarding of this antiquated and rigid mode of expression brought the new literature near to the speech of the people, to their folk poetry, their dumy — the tales of adventure and heroism of the Kozaks of the Sich — and made them responsive to all the literary currents that were flowing from the West of Europe. It thus paved the way for the Ukrainians to develop a modern literature and take their place in the general stream of Western and European civilization and culture.

The Eneida was parallel to those works in the other languages of Eastern and Central Europe which marked the passing of the old order and initiated the modern national movements. All of these were at first literary rather than political. This was fortunate, for the movements were able to take root and gain strength under the very eyes of the authorities, whereas the slightest hint of political activity would have caused them to be tracked down and exterminated before they could have been fairly launched. As it was, Kotlyarevksy was able to call attention to much of the Ukrainian past and do it in what seemed to the watchful Russians a harmless way.

This is not the place to recount the ancient history of the Ukrainians.⁠1 In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Kiev, Christianized from Constantinople, was one of the great cities of Europe. Its grand princes, such as Yaroslav the Wise and Volodymyr Monomakh, ranked among the leading sovereigns of the day. The state soon fell upon evil times. In 1169 its capital was pillaged by Prince Andrey Bogolyubsky of Suzdal, the original capital of the Moscow princes, and later it was mercilessly ravaged by the Tatar and Mongol invasions. Finally all vestige of independence was lost and Ukraine came to form part of that heterogeneous state which passed into history as Poland. Then came the Kozaks, bold and fearless warriors, who in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries dared to raid  p15 the outskirts of the Turkish capital of Constantinople and became a menace to the King of Poland.

In 1654 the Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky made an alliance at Pereyaslav with Tsar Alexis of Moscow.⁠a The consequences were disastrous, for the tsars divided the country with Poland along the line of the Dnieper River and unilaterally abrogated one condition of the alliance after another. Finally in the latter part of the eighteenth century Catherine the Great not only wiped out the hetman regime and the Sich but she introduced the complete Russian system of administration and reduced the population to serfdom in the Russian manner. The richer land­owners, many of whom had been Kozak officers, found it to their advantage to be completely Russianized, to accept the Russian language and the manners of the St. Petersburg court and to forget their Ukrainian past.

With all Ukrainian political institutions wiped out, the Russian government set to work to annihilate all distinctive elements in Ukrainian life. The name of Ukraine was abolished and there was only a grudging toleration of a somewhat confused region which passed under the name of Little Russia. The language of the Ukrainian people was blandly called a mere peasant idiom unworthy of serious consideration or development. The surviving Ukrainian customs were ridiculed as non-Russian and backward, while at the same time the government vehemently insisted that there was no recognizable difference between Ukrainians and Great Russians. When the incompatibility of these two views was pointed out, the government simply branded all interest in Ukrainian affairs an Austro-German intrigue which was to be repressed by severe measures.

This attitude of the Russian imperial government was shared to the full by the radical Russian intelligentsia. Belinsky, universally acclaimed for his liberal ideas, could not heap sufficient scorn upon the poems of Taras Shevchenko and used his pen to show that the peasant dialect spoken in "Little Russia" was not entitled to literary development.⁠2 His successors  p16 followed his example, and during the entire century the government and the revolutionists joined forces against the Ukrainian revival.⁠3

In 1905 the Russian Academy of Sciences at last admitted that Great Russian and Ukrainian were two distinct Slavic languages,⁠4 but this advanced point of view was deprived of real meaning in the reaction that followed the unsuccess­ful revolution of that year.

It goes without saying that political action was altogether prohibited. Throughout the nineteenth century the whole empire was ruled by the bureaucracy. There were no popular elections, and the only rudimentary step toward elective government was taken with the organization of the zemstvos to handle certain local affairs. It is safe to say that up to the Revolution of 1905 there was no legal organ for the development of Ukrainian experience in public affairs and few or no means whereby the Ukrainians could secure such experience, unless they were content to serve as Russians in the Russian political machine. There were no schools where instruction was given publicly in the Ukrainian language, there were no news­papers printed in Ukrainian; and almost the only books available were those printed in Lviv and other cities of Western Ukraine and smuggled across the border in a steady stream.⁠5

Of the younger and more radical Ukrainian intelligentsia, the vast majority joined the Russian revolutionary movements. On the one hand they thus gained à knowledge of Russian political techniques; on the other there were all too frequently drawn into the Russian orbit and suffered denationalization as surely as did the more conservative who bowed to the bureaucratic system.

The natural wealth of Ukraine was a significant factor in Russian plans; the coal and iron mines of the Donets basin played an important role in the industrialization of the empire. The commercial and industrial centers which were built during the nineteenth century on Ukrainian territory were settled  p17 chiefly by Great Russians who were encouraged to emigrate there, while Ukrainians who obtained posts in government service were shifted to remote sections of the land where they would be isolated amid a non-Ukrainian population. This deliberate transfer of the population created in the country definite Russian and later Soviet centers which played an important role in the modern period.

There was a slight change after the Revolution of 1905, inasmuch as the first Duma contained a number of representatives of the Ukrainians and of minorities who sympathized with them.⁠6 Permission was granted to publish news­papers in Ukrainian and for a while it seemed as if the Ukrainians might obtain the same rights as some of the other nationalities of the empire. But the first Duma was soon dissolved and in later elections the laws were so changed that the Ukrainians lost almost all representation.

Despite the attitude of the Academy of Sciences, the Ukrainians felt with especial rigor the force of the reaction that followed the collapse of the revolutionary wave. They were refused permission to open schools where Ukrainian would be the language of instruction and censor­ship was tightened over Ukrainian books and news­papers. However, for the first time in Russian history, there was a definite Ukrainian press. The Literary and Historical Messenger was moved from Lviv to Kiev. In a word, following this revolution, there did develop a distinct Ukrainian movement on a broader scale than had been possible earlier, even though it was hampered at every turn.

During the nineteenth century the revival spread to the Ukrainians living under Hapsburg rule in Western Ukraine.⁠7 This area fell into three categories, depending on the provincial boundaries of the Hapsburg Empire: Galicia, Bukovina and the area of the Carpathian Mountains. Of these Galicia contained the largest part of the Western Ukrainian population, which had passed under Hapsburg rule after the dismemberment  p18 of Poland in the eighteenth century.

Conditions here were very different and there was a definite social pressure exerted to induce the Ukrainians (or Ruthenians, as they were called after the Latin name of the area) to declare themselves Poles. Serfdom was abolished in 1848 but the dominating class was Polish and in accordance with Hapsburg policy, the Poles were favored by the central government in Vienna.

Religiously and culturally there was another difference. Most of the Western Ukrainians were Catholics of the Eastern Rite and from the time when the Hapsburgs had taken over the province, they had provided much-needed opportunities for the education of the clergy. This gave the movement a far more clerical tinge than in Eastern Ukraine and it tended to perpetuate the artificial Church Slavic language. In fact, it was not until well along in the century that the clerical and conservative supporters of Church Slavic were defeated and the way was opened for the development of the vernacular tongue.

This came about when the nationalists were called upon to struggle with the Muscophiles who advocated the introduction of Great Russian and looked to Russia for protection. Very few of this group either knew any Great Russian or were aware of the linguistic complications involved in the ideas which they were so passionately advocating. It was in the time of Michael Drahomaniv and Ivan Franko, in the seventies and eighties, that the nationalist and vernacular cause definitely triumphed; but even later there were outbreaks of Muscophilism.

In Galicia the Ukrainians had far better opportunities to acquaint themselves with the problems of government and public service than in Russia. Though rarely considered for the higher administrative posts, they could look forward to minor positions in the Hapsburg service. They could enter the learned professions as Ruthenians. They could form their own  p19 political parties and although the elections were often controlled, they succeeded in pla­cing a goodly number of candidates even against Polish efforts.

In Galicia, then, there was no question of the existence of a Ruthenian group. It was treated by the Poles as inferior but its identity was undisputed. The people had at least a modicum of protection and opportunity.⁠8 In Russia, on the other hand, the autocratic government sternly denied the Ukrainians their identity and employed every means to deprive them of self-expression.

In Bukovina the Ukrainians were in much the same situation as in Galicia.

In the third section, the region of the Carpathians, conditions were less favorable, for this formed part of the kingdom of Hungary. Under the Hungarian system of administration the territory was divided into several counties, each of which was dependent directly upon Budapest. The Hungarian system made it much more difficult for minority groups to work together across county lines. Education was at a low level and what there was, was directed to turn the young men into patriotic Hungarians. The Russian invasion in 1848 had greatly strengthened those factions who were Muscophile in tendency and the nationalist movement was perhaps weaker here than in the other provinces. Yet the trend was definitely toward better living conditions and by the beginning of World War I the Ukrainian population of this mountain area was already becoming more self-confident and self-assured.

There was one outstanding hurdle that all Ukrainian leaders, whether in Russia or in Austria-Hungary, had to face, and it was something that confronted all the oppressed peoples of Eastern Europe. Any change in their political status was dependent upon forces outside of themselves. It was evident to all that the two empires in which they were enclosed could not be overthrown by popular revolt. They could improve their educational, social and economic conditions but the time  p20 for armed uprisings was definitely past. Europe was on the surface more peaceful than it had been for centuries and although the coffee houses buzzed with gossip about the imminence of a great war, the fact remained that the rulers of Europe had been able to solve almost every crisis that had arisen since the time of the French Revolution without plunging the continent into a major struggle. It was only in such a major struggle that one could hope for the downfall of either of the two empires.

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The Author's Notes:

1 For a brief history of Ukraine, see C. A. Manning, The Story of the Ukraine (New York, 1947), and M. Hrushevsky, A History of Ukraine (New Haven, 1941).

2 See V. G. Belinsky, "The Gaydamaki," Polnoe Sobraniye Sochineniy (St. Petersburg, 1904), VII, 214 ff.

3 See Hrushevsky, op. cit., p496.

4 See Hrushevsky, op. cit., p511.

5 See C. A. Manning, Ukrainian Literature, Studies of the Leading Authors (Jersey City, 1944), p69.

6 Seven Ukrainians were elected from the one guberniya of Volyn.

7 See Hrushevsky, op. cit., chap. XXI.

8 Poland, ed. Bernadotte E. Schmidt (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1945), pp68 ff.

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Thayer's Note:

a What exactly was agreed upon at Pereyaslav is at the core of the relations between Ukraine and Russia, whether an alliance, a protectorate, or as Russia chose to view it, a total Ukrainian surrender: viewpoints that continue to inform the situation down to our own time, discussed in a book which is onsite in its entirety, Alexander Ohloblyn's Treaty of Pereyaslav 1654.

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