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The Role of the Ukraine in Modern History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Ivan L. Rudnytsky
Ivan L. Rudnytsky*
Affiliation:
La Salle College
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Abstract

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Type
Discussion
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , June 1963 , pp. 199 - 216
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1963

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References

1 It is significant that the Third Universal (Manifesto) of the revolutionary Ukrainian parliament, the Central Rada, which proclaimed the formation of the Ukrainian People's Republic (November 20, 1917), and the Fourth Universal, which declared the Ukraine a sovereign state completely separate from Russia (January 22, 1918), avoided any reference to historical rights and were completely based on the principle of democratic self-determination. Since the president of the Rada and the originator of these two acts was the dean of Ukrainian historians, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, this omission was not fortuitous. It reflected an essential trait of the ideology of the Ukrainian movement.

2 A parallel situation may be found at the transition from the first to the second epoch of Ukrainian history. The Cossack State was not a direct continuation of the Kievan State, but neither was it without connections with this predecessor. The Ukrainian (“Ruthenian, ” in the nomenclature of the time) gentry, burghers, and clergy, among whom the traditions of the Kievan Rus’ remained alive even under Polish domination, provided the Cossack military organization with a religious-political program, and partly also with a leading personnel, which lifted the anti-Polish revolt of 1648 to the level of a war of national liberation. This is the point in which the Ukrainian Cossacks radically differed from similar Russian communities of frontiersmen, the Don and Iaik (Ural) Cossacks.

3 (1861-1907) (New York, 1955), p. 337.

4 Limitations of space do not permit bolstering these statements with proper references. Two short examples must suffice: the memoirs of V. Debagorii-Mokrievich and the first part of those of I. Petrunkevich, the former for a presentation of revolutionary Populism, and the latter for one of zemstvo liberalism, in the Ukraine of the 1870's. Both men were of Ukrainian descent, but regarded themselves as members of the Russian nation, and wrote in Russian. Nevertheless, they were quite aware that the people among whom they were working differed in many essential respects from the Great Russians and had to be approached in a different way. An unmistakable Ukrainian aura pervades these reminiscences.

5 Only in some backward areas, such as the Carpatho-Ukraine (Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia), was the crystallization of a modern national consciousness delayed until the 1930's.

6 It is, however, to be noted that each of the major international conflicts in which the Russian Empire was involved—the Napoleonic, Crimean, Balkanic, and Japanese wars—had definite repercussions in the Ukraine. In each case movements arose which attempted to take advantage of Russia's predicament for the betterment of the Ukraine's position.

7 An early Ukrainian Marxist, Iulian Bachynsky, developed in his essay Ukraina irredenta (1895) the thesis that while the industries of Congress Poland were working for and dependent on the Russian market, Ukrainian industry was rather competitive with that of Central Russia. From this he drew the prognosis that the Ukraine was more likely than Poland to secede from Russia. This reveals the shortcomings of a purely economic interpretation of historical events, and for this Bachynsky was criticized by such outstanding contemporaries as M. Drahomanov and I. Franko. Still, the facts pointed out by Bachynsky were certainly significant.

8 One may recall that Prague and Riga preserved well into the nineteenth century a predominantly German outlook.

9 The greatest wrong which tsarist Russia committed against the Ukrainian people in the field of social-economic policies was the introduction of serfdom in 1783. As long as the Cossack officers showed an inclination toward political separatism, the tsarist policy was to pretend the role of “defender” of the common people against the local upper class. Later, when the danger of separatism had diminished, the interests of the peasantry were sacrificed, in order to reconcile the Ukrainian gentry with the loss of their country's political autonomy. Russian-style serfdom was introduced in the Ukraine at a time when it was already on the way toward extinction in other parts of Eastern Europe, and when even in Galicia it was being restricted by the policies of Austrian “enlightened despots, “ Maria Theresa and Joseph II.

10 Cf. Kostomarov's essay «, » originally published in tlie journal (St. Petersburg), No. 3, 1861.

11 M. , I (Prague, 1937), p. 70. The passage quoted is from the Autobiography, originally published posthumously in 1896.

12 (Vienna, 1926), p. xxv.

13 CCCP, II (Moscow, 1960), 307.

14 The founders of the Kharkov University came from a circle influenced by the ideas and the example of the philosopher and spiritual reformer Hryhoryi Skovoroda (1722-94).

15 The case of Finland might be used here as an illuminating contrast. The upper classes of Finland were Swedish. But they did not try to bring the country back, in the name of “historical rights, ” under the rule of Sweden. Rather they united their forces with those of the native Finnish majority for the common defense of the liberty of the homeland. This cooperation was to be eminently beneficial to both Finland and Sweden, and to the Swedish-Finnish minority as well.

16 An example of this is the idea of a Polish-Ukrainian political writer, F. Duchiński, according to whom the Russians were not really a Slavic people, since they were of Ugro- Finnic stock, which had become linguistically Slavicized; this implied a deeper ethnic difference between the Russians and the Ukrainians than the close affinity of the two East Slavic languages would suggest. This conception, whatever its scholarly merits, enjoyed a considerable popularity in Ukrainian circles.

17 Three men merit mention in this context: Volodymyr Antonovych (1834-1908), historian and archaeologist, the founder of the “Kievan historical school, ” the leader of the secret organization Hromada and of the Ukrainian movement in Russia during the most difficult period of reaction in the 1880's and 1890's; Viacheslav Lypynsky (1882-1931), eminent historian, political philosopher, and conservative leader; and the Metropolitan Andrii Sheptytsky (1865-1944), for forty-four years the head of the Greek Catholic Church in Galicia and the outstanding Ukrainian ecclesiastical figure of the century.

18 Stanislas, Smolka, Les Ruthènes et les problèmes religieux du monde russien (Berne, 1917), pp. 225 and 228.Google Scholar

19 The Uniat (Greek Catholic) Church had been suppressed in the Right Bank Ukraine by the Russian government in 1839. Tsarist Russia at all times showed an implacable hostility to Ukrainian Catholicism of the Eastern Rite, and this attitude has been inherited by Soviet Russia.

20 In works of fiction dealing with the Anglican clerical milieu, for instance, in Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield, one encounters an atmosphere strikingly similar to that which used to prevail in the patriarchal homes of the Galician priests. There was, however, one major difference: the clergymen of the Church of England were the social allies of the English aristocracy, while those of the Greek Catholic Church stood in a radical opposition to Galicia's Polish aristocracy.

21 The crownland “Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria” also included, besides the territory of the Old Rus’ principality of Halych (from which its name was derived), an ethnically Polish area, west of the river San. In the Ukrainian, eastern part of Galicia there existed, as in the Right Bank Ukraine, a socially privileged Polish minority of landowners and town dwellers. In the province as a whole the numerical strength of the Polish and the Ukrainian groups was approximately equal, but the aristocratic character of the Austrian constitution and Vienna's policy favored the Polish element. From 1848, and to the last days of the monarchy, the Ukrainians strove for a partition of the province on ethnic lines, but in vain.

22 A new electoral law for the Galician Diet was adopted early in 1914, but the outbreak of the war prevented its implementation. The Ukrainians were to receive some 30 per cent of the seats in the Diet, and a share in the autonomous provincial administration. This still fell short of what the Ukrainians demanded on the basis of their numerical strength, but the Polish monopoly of power was at last broken.

23 The writer has tried to do this in the article “The Intellectual Origins of Modern Ukraine, ” Annals of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the U.S., Vol. VI (1958), No. 3-4.

24 The Russophile movement emerged, in the 1860's, as a reaction to the hegemony which the Poles had achieved in the province. It was also fed by conservative sentiments which saw a special value in the traits of the cultural heritage, common to all Eastern Slavs: the Slavonic liturgy, Cyrillic script, Julian calendar, and the traditional name of Rus', which could be easily identified with Russia.