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previous: Chapter 4 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 6

 p56  V

The Republic of Western Ukraine

The Russian invasion of Eastern Galicia in 1914 had devastated the most developed portion of the Ukrainian lands, but after the Russian troops had been expelled in 1915, Ukrainian understanding of the issues of the war had definitely increased. Russian excesses had ended once and for all the old Muscophile faction, and its leaders had withdrawn with the Russian armies. Wherever these armies had penetrated, they had brought home to the population the differences that existed between the Great Russians and the Ukrainians. At the same time the presence of Eastern Ukrainian units in the Russian forces had revealed to the Western Ukrainian villagers their essential unity with their brothers under tsarist rule.

By 1917 it was clear to all the nationalities of the empire that Austria-Hungary would not emerge from the war as a unit. On December 3​1 the Ukrainian Student Organization in Vienna was even able to state that the future of their countrymen lay in union with the Ukrainian National Republic being formed in Kiev. The other Ukrainian organizations were perhaps less outspoken. Some of the older politicians still hoped for the creation of a Ukrainian section of the Hapsburg Empire but they were rapidly falling into a minority and when on July 22, 1918, the Austrian parliament repudiated the promise given to the Ukrainian delegates at Brest-Litovsk and  p57 were sustained by the Germans, practically all hope for a peaceful solution was abandoned and action was begun on plans to set up a new regime.

President Wilson's address on January 8, 1918, setting forth his Fourteen Points, among them the self-determination of all nations, had given impetus to this development. Yet the leaders were aware of a new danger, that of falling under Polish control, for they realized that Polish propaganda at home and abroad regarded Eastern Galicia as Polish territory and that the Poles had been more success­ful than they in making friends among the Western Powers.

The summer of 1918 was a strange period. The Austro-Hungarian armies were still fighting on the various fronts but all of the nationalities were almost openly making their plans for an independent existence. By autumn representatives came and went, meetings were held to arrange for the formation of new governments, and the officials of the empire seemed not to notice.

By September 14, when the Allies rejected the idea of a separate peace for Austria-Hungary, even the officials of the empire lost hope. On October 16 Emperor Charles in a last attempt ordered a reconstruction of the empire on national lines but by this time no one paid attention. One and all were determined upon independence.

On October 18 a Ukrainian National Rada​2 was established at Lviv under the presidency of Dr. Evhen Petrushevych. It embraced all the Ukrainian representatives in the provincial diets and parliament and representatives of all political parties. It at once issued a call for the formation of a republic to include all the Ukrainians within the Hapsburg Empire, including those in Eastern Galicia, northwestern Bukovina and northeastern Hungary. It summoned the minorities to send their deputies to the new government and to aid in preparing a constitution providing for universal, equal, secret and direct suffrage on the basis of proportional representation, with the right of national cultural autonomy and the right of the minorities to participate  p58 in the government. It very carefully, despite some protests, omitted the question of its relation­ship to the Ukrainian National Republic, which was still under the regime of Hetman Skoropadsky.

There will be noticed at once a striking difference between this movement and that of the previous year in Kiev. In Lviv there was no period of hesitation. From the moment when the Rada was established, its goal was absolute independence and the Rada applied all of its energies to determining how this was to be brought about.

The process of disintegration within the old empire gained momentum. On October 16 the Hungarians broke their bonds with the Austrians. On October 18 the Czechs declared their independence of Hapsburg rule. On October 31 the Poles raised their standard in Krakow and planned to take over the whole of Galicia.

On the same day, the Rada asked the governor general of Galicia, Count Huyn, to turn over Lviv to the Ukrainians. He declined but made it plain that he would take no counteraction, and that night the Ukrainian military raised their flag over the city. By morning the new government was in control.​3

Yet if the break with the old order was peaceful — a mere recognition of changed conditions — the new state was faced immediately with difficulties with the revived Poland, which dreamed of restoring the position she had held in the Middle Ages in Eastern Europe. Poland's great asset was the experience which her leaders had gained during the years when they had been active in the affairs of the Dual Monarchy. The Western Ukrainian Republic, in contrast, was handicapped from the start by the dearth of men who had served in the more responsible posts in either the civil service or the army. There were a large number of lesser functionaries and officers; there were few men trained and experienced in the higher echelons. The military forces consisted of that part of the Riflemen of the Sich who had not gone to East Ukraine and some disorganized reserve units, whose ranking officers  p59  had returned to their homes. The leaders of the new state soon saw that maintaining their independence was to be a greater task than winning it.​4

They were not mistaken. On the same day that the Ukrainian flag was raised in Lviv, the Poles of the city rose in revolt. Lacking men trained in street fighting, the Ukrainians were unable to dislodge the Poles from their center of resistance and for three weeks the struggle went on. Neither side possessed any important supplies of heavy weapons. Both had only rifles, machine guns and grenades, but the contest was none the less intense.​5

Meanwhile the Western Ukrainian Republic assumed control of one city after another throughout Eastern Galicia, as the news of the open establishment of the republic swept the country. Everywhere there was counteraction by the Poles. On November 11 a small Polish force, raised in Krakow, recovered Peremyshl and on the 19th a group of about one hundred and twenty officers with eight guns and twelve hundred men, set out by train for Lviv. They succeeded in running through the Ukrainian lines and the addition of even this small force turned the tide. They recovered the greater part of the city, and on November 22 the Western Ukrainian government left Lviv and moved to Ternopil and later to Stanyslaviv.

Throughout the winter the republic dominated most of Eastern Galicia with the exception of the railroad from Peremyshl to Lviv which the Poles succeeded in holding. The Ukrainians also maintained a more or less desultory siege of Lviv but they were confronted with steadily increasing Polish forces, as the Western Allies and especially France poured in more supplies and enabled the Polish army to grow along conventional lines. Finally in the spring, the Polish divisions which had been in France under General Joseph Haller arrived; despite the orders of the Allied missions they were thrown into the struggle and they finally forced the Western Ukrainian army to retire eastward.

 p60  The forces of the republic in Bukovina were little more fortunate. On November 3 the Ukrainians occupied Chernivtsy, the capital. It was not for long, for on Armistice Day, November 11, a detachment of the regular Romanian army entered the city and overthrew the Ukrainian Regional Committee which had been formed under Omelyan Popovych.​6

In the third part of Western Ukraine, the region of the Carpathians, there was even more confusion. Under the old Hungarian system it had not been possible to establish a working agreement between the residents of the various counties and the disorder was abetted by the isolation of many of the mountain valleys in which the Ukrainian population lived. Meetings were held in the three centers of Preshov, Uzhhorod and Hust but the great masses of the mountaineers were not so well organized as elsewhere. In addition to that, there was more Hungarian interference. Far too many of the semi-intellectuals of the region still sympathized with the Hungarians and the split between the nationalists and the Muscophiles was far deeper than in any other section. The Czechs also put in a bid for control of the territory on the basis of an understanding between President Masaryk as chairman of the Czecho­slovak National Committee abroad and the American Ruska Narodna Rada, a gathering of Carpatho-Ruthenians in Scranton, Pennsylvania.​7 This was similar to the famous Pittsburgh Agreement between Masaryk and the Slovaks in the United States and it was used in the same way to advance Czech claims.

The movement was slow in starting. There was a meeting in Hust on January 21, 1919, which voted to join Western Ukraine but this was already almost academic in view of the loss of Lviv to the Poles. Agitation continued, however, and finally, on May 5, with the republic almost in ruins, the Ukrainians of Carpatho-Ukraine voted to become an autonomous part of the new Czecho­slovak Republic.

It is obvious from all this that the vital part of the Western Ukrainian Republic was the region of Eastern Galicia. It was the most developed section of the new state and it had the  p61 most compact and organized Ukrainian population. Since it was only there that the state could hope to take root, the loss of Lviv was a crushing blow.

The Allied missions did their best to put a stop to the fighting but their efforts were fruitless. France stood solidly on the side of Poland, and Great Britain and the United States, convinced that the war was over, were already thinking of demobilizing their armies. Thus alone of the peoples of the old Hapsburg empire, the Ukrainians found it impossible to get a sympathetic hearing from the victorious Allies.

They went on, nevertheless, to carry out their real desire. The Republic of Western Ukraine formally voted to unite with the Ukrainian National Republic on January 3, and on January 22 the Ukrainian National Republic in imposing ceremonies accepted the union, declaring that "from today the Ukrainian people, liberated by the mighty effort of their own strength, is able to unite all the energies of her sons for the building of an undivided, independent Ukrainian State, for the good and happiness of the Ukrainian people."​8

Once again the Ukrainian people were united as they had not been since the fall of the Kiev state in the thirteenth century. Yet this union was not consummated in a time of peace. It represented the spontaneous desire of the people but it was begotten under the shadows of two conflicts, that of the Western Ukrainians against the Poles, and that of the Eastern Ukrainians against the Bolsheviks and the White Russians, neither of which would recognize the new state.

---

The Author's Notes:

1 Velyka Istoriya Ukrainy, p790.

2 op. cit., p791.

3 For the Polish explanation of this occupation as aided by the old government, see A. Przybylski, Wojna Polska, 1918‑1921 (Warszawa, 1930), p24.

4 Velyka Istoriya Ukrainy, p792 f.

5 Przybylski, op. cit., pp45 ff. Velyka Istoriya Ukrainy, p798 ff.

6 Velyka Istoriya Ukrainy, p832.

7 R. W. Seton-Watson, A History of the Czechs and Slovaks (London, New York, 1943), p324. Velyka Istoriya Ukrainy, p833 f.

8 Czubatyj, op. cit., pp37 ff.

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