Enlightened and Counter-Revolutionary: Revisiting the Origins of Galician Ruthenian Nation-Building

Abstract

This article offers an alternative focus for the study of the Ruthenian (Ukrainian) nation-building in early Austrian Galicia. It portrays elite Greek Catholic churchmen who made political claims about a self-standing Ruthenian nation already in the first decade of the nineteenth century. It argues that their political innovations were enabled by the ambitious state-building projects implemented in the second half of the eighteenth century by the Austrian government, most importantly new seminaries that cultivated an ethos of state service among Catholic clergymen. The early Ruthenian nationalism espoused by Greek Catholic prelates neither aspired to mobilize masses nor ascribed much importance to language rights, the kernel of nationalist struggles in later periods. It was rather a polemical device deployed to legitimize their rejection of the Polish national allegiance, associated with dynamically evolving republican traditions. By locating the Galician Ruthenian case in a regional comparative perspective, the article outlines the broader significance of this interpretation, interrogating some received wisdoms about the so-called non-historical nationalisms of Central and Eastern Europe.

A dozen years ago, Polish was the dominant language among educated Ruthenians. Did they all love us because of this? If you know the works of Harasiewicz, Zubrzycki, and others, which were written at the time when the Ruthenian priests spoke Polish and yet teem with hatred of all things Polish, you must agree that the Polish language will not guarantee us the friendship of the Ruthenians.

Walerian Kalinka, Lviv, 1883¹

In this article, I sketch a new interpretation of the origins of Galician Ruthenian nation-building. Rather than following tradition and focusing my account on the young awakeners that walked onto the stage in the late 1830s, I deal here with the elite churchmen and their conservative understanding of the Enlightenment coming into shape in the last decades of the eighteenth century. My protagonists are not completely absent from the available historiographical picture, but they typically occupy only tertiary roles as elements of the necessary background to the well-known Romantic heroes of the high nineteenth century. Extending our perception of the nation-building process several decades back in time is important, but I also wish to offer a less deterministic way of conceptualizing the beginning of modern Ruthenian nationalism in Galicia, one that allows for more historical contingency but also freedom of choice for individual actors.

I could start my story in a number of places: Lviv, Przemyśl, Rome, Vienna, Warsaw, and Zamość. Yet, this article begins in the village of Senechiv in the Carpathian Mountains, in June 1809.² At that time, Senechiv was situated in the mountainous frontier between Galicia and Hungary. Both countries belonged to the Austrian Monarchy and in that particular region Ruthenian highlanders populated either side of the border, but in the spring and summer of 1809 Galicia was occupied by the army of the Duchy of Warsaw, one of Bonaparte's satellite states, whereas Hungary remained under the control of the Habsburg military.³ The situation along the contact line must have been tense. Amid incertitude and suspicion, two strangers were intercepted in Senechiv and sent to the town of Stryi, about two days away, for interrogation by Warsaw's provisional authorities in occupied Galicia. The men in question were Antonii Anhelovych (1756–1814), recently promoted as Galicia's first Greek Catholic Metropolitan, and his vicar general and most trusted confidant Mykhailo Harasevych (1763–1836).⁴

Were they plotting something ominous against Warsaw's occupying forces, perhaps passing vital intelligence to the Austrian side? Did they try to cross the mountains to the Habsburg-controlled zone? Should we see it as a Galician re-enactment of Louis XVI's ill-fated flight to Varennes in June 1791 or maybe a prefiguration of Pius IX's successful escape to Gaeta in November 1848?⁵ Or was it all just a terrible misunderstanding resulting from the anti-Ruthenian prejudice inherent in the post-Commonwealth nobiliary culture?⁶ Were the two prelates simply enjoying a short countryside repose from the stressful atmosphere of occupied Lviv? Available testimonies are conflicting and we will probably never know for sure, but the Austrian government remained steadfast in its belief that both prelates espoused exemplary loyalty in that difficult situation and should be rewarded accordingly. Anhelovych, who was noble by birth and had already been elevated as Metropolitan of Galicia, was granted the Grand Cross of the Order of Leopold, whereas Harasevych was named commander of the Order of Leopold and ennobled as Baron von Neustern.⁷ As I explain below, we can easily understand why the pro-French Polish leaders viewed Anhelovych and Harasevych with so much suspicion. It is more challenging to reconstruct the choices and motivations of the two Ruthenian prelates. The exploration of this problem will be the narrative engine of the present text.

Both Anhelovych and Harasevych were born under Polish-Lithuanian rule before the first partition, belonging to a church whose leaders had always been loyal to the Commonwealth and for good reason: Poland-Lithuania was the cradle and protectress of the Ruthenian Uniates.⁸ Yet, at least since the second half of the 1790s, both prelates proved vocal and constant supporters of the Austrian government; Anhelovych had even published a few polemical brochures denouncing Bonaparte's conduct in European politics (mostly in Polish).⁹ After the arrival of the Duchy of Warsaw's troops in Galicia, they made a consistent effort to avoid meeting the demands of the occupation authorities, such as swearing allegiance to Bonaparte or substituting his name in Galicia's Greek Catholics' prayers for that of the Austrian emperor. Even if neither of the two prelates did anything actively hostile toward the French-sponsored forces, they were clearly unhappy about Warsaw's takeover of Galicia. In January 1810, the Duchy's Council of Ministers concluded that the Metropolitan Anhelovych was “hateful of the Polish name” (nienawistny imieniowi Polaków).¹⁰

Why did they not follow tradition and obey the representatives of the Duchy of Warsaw who fashioned themselves as restorers of Poland-Lithuania's independence? In order to understand the two men's political trajectories and the socio-cultural process that enabled them, we need to bring together several threads, each of which is quite well developed in historiography, but functions in isolation from the others: (1) the construction of a unified Austrian state; (2) Habsburg church policies; (3) the evolution of the Uniate Church in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; and finally, (4) the French Revolution and its impact on Europe as a whole.

Traditionally, the history of Galicia's Greek Catholic Church is approached either as a chapter of Ukrainian nation-building or an episode in the efforts to recreate the unity of European Christians. This is not necessarily wrong and scholars working within these traditions have made significant contributions. My central concern in dealing with this topic is in fact the question of nation-building, but I believe that in order to get it right, we need to be able to look beyond it. My proposal here is to reconstruct the social and cultural dynamics of Galicia's Greek Catholics, first and foremost, in their Habsburg context. Thus, in the second section, I will sketch the situation of the Uniate Church in Poland-Lithuania during the eighteenth century and then move on to explain the relevant policies of the Austrian monarchs. This will serve as a basis from which to offer my interpretation of how these state-imposed innovations changed the circumstances and the sense of belonging of the Ruthenian ecclesiastic elite. Lastly, I will locate my argument in a regional comparative perspective to illuminate the broader significance of my points. First, however, a cursory picture of the relevant historiographical landscape is in order.

Historiographical Landscape

Although we seldom care to admit it, the way in which we construe the nation-building trajectories of the so-called small or non-historical nations of Central and Eastern Europe is heavily dependent on the self-celebratory narratives honed by nationalist intellectuals in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. According to them, their nations had existed continuously since at least the Middle Ages, even if most of them had subsequently lost their political independence and their nationally minded elites, falling into a centuries-long slumber. Then, the awakeners walk onto the stage in the nineteenth century to launch national movements and thereby resurrect the sleeping beauties. Initially, they focus on cultural activities, especially those concerning spoken vernaculars, but with the passage of time, they switch to more explicitly political struggles.¹¹

Various scholars and public intellectuals had been challenging such narratives since at least the 1880s, the most successful among them, the so-called modernists who gained the upper hand in the academic debates at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s. For them, nations are epiphenomena of capitalism and modernization, which can be presented in a simplified formula as “rotary printing press + railway = nation-building.” Hence, for these scholars the long history of dormant nations makes no sense whatsoever, as nations by definition could not have existed before the nineteenth (or at best eighteenth) century.¹² A marxist historian from Hungary exclaimed in the second half of the 1970s: “The sense of nationality . . . was only just emerging. It had not slumbered in Eastern Europe; it had not existed!”¹³

Most modernists saw themselves as constructivists questioning “self-evident” wisdoms about the objective existence of nations throughout history.¹⁴ They tried to show that nations came into being as political constructs promoted by specific interest groups in nineteenth-century Europe. The contribution of these scholars is substantial: most importantly, they created a new momentum of critical scholarship, reinvigorating academic debates, and undermining the “commonsensical” essentialist view of nations. At the same time, modernists had difficulty formulating consistently constructivist interpretations focused on the agency of historical actors, as they moved within the framework of modernization theory or Marxism, both strongly deterministic. Consequently, they reproduced several normative tropes resembling the earlier nationalist historiography that they had tried to overcome: they espoused a static vision of “pre-modern” and rural communities, akin to Romantic fantasies and neglectful of the now well-documented alternative channels of communication;¹⁵ their narratives privileged movements focused on language rights; they struggled with conceptualizing the role played by the political traditions and institutions with roots going back to the early modern period; they gradually ceased to research the period before the nineteenth century, transforming it into a sort of prologue or a necessary mise-en-scène section for the study of truly modern nationalisms;¹⁶ and perhaps most importantly, they presented nation-building as a seemingly inevitable process predetermined by the expanding forces of modernity and unfolding in clear-cut stages, such as the ones sketched by Miroslav Hroch.¹⁷

With the passage of time, historians started to grapple with some of the problems listed above. In a seminal article published toward the end of the twentieth century, John-Paul Himka explored the contingencies of Galician Ruthenian nation-building in a truly magisterial fashion, but even there he could not avoid the vocabulary of stadial history, mentioning “a larval stage” and “a protonational sense of community.”¹⁸ Soon after, Gary Cohen, Jeremy King, Pieter Judson, and Tara Zahra transformed Habsburg Bohemia into a laboratory for the study of nation-building in a new key: instead of arguing about the actual moment when the real modern nations came into being, they focused on the ways in which local actors appropriated, inflected, and resisted hegemonic lexicons of liberal nationalism for their own purposes.¹⁹ At the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, Andriy Zayarnyuk and Michał Łuczewski implemented a similarly flexible and localized way of seeing things in the Galician context.²⁰ Although I focus here on an earlier period and a very different set of actors, their work is a major source of inspiration for my research.

Still, the bulk of available scholarly literature on Galician Ruthenian nation-building remains under the sign of normative stages of lineal development. Although many historians sketch the early Austrian period as an indispensable background, they focus on the 1830s as the crucial turning point and take for granted that language issues constitute the kernel of nationalist activities (because of this many also explore the work of Ivan Mohylʹnytsʹkyi and the Przemyśl circle in the 1810s).²¹ This is a standard story of Romantic völkisch belles lettres and liberal populist politics.²² There is little place in it for conservative elite churchmen, like Harasevych or Anhelovych, not even as nation builders' antagonists, because in this perspective, all relevant conflicts need to be easily translatable into ethnonational differences. In other words, the enemies of Ruthenian national activists should be Polish, although it is not even clear what exact criteria one can use to delimit the two nations in the first half of the nineteenth century. According to the logic of objectively given ethnic essence, the main litmus test is language use, but in an environment in which all even vaguely educated actors were bi- or plurilingual, determining every individual's “mother tongue” proves a hopeless pursuit. In practice, the national difference between Poles and Ruthenians is most often mapped onto the opposition between Latin and Greek Catholics.²³

People like Harasevych or Anhelovych easily defy both modernist and nationalist assumptions. Although it is justifiable to suppose that they had a good command of the vernacular Ruthenian spoken in Galicia (what we would classify today as one of southwestern Ukrainian dialects) and it cannot be excluded that this was indeed the first language they had mastered at home (although nothing certain can be known about it), they clearly preferred to use German, Latin, and Polish in their professional lives. As I will argue later, my protagonists made significant claims about their Ruthenian nationality and their not belonging to the Poles, yet it would be far-fetched to reconstruct their identities beyond their public personas. Their nationalism was indeed entangled with the dynamic social transformations kicked off by the Austrian government in the late eighteenth century, a process one could attempt to classify as modernization, but it had very little to do with capitalism or mass politics, let alone with liberalism.

Old-school nationalists described such elite ecclesiastics as members of the Ruthenian nation simply by virtue of their belonging to the Greek Catholic Church and their vaguely documented command of the vernacular. No additional explanations were needed, because historians of this tradition took the existence of the dormant Ruthenian nation for granted. At the same time, nationally minded scholars active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century judged the churchmen of Anhelovych's cohort as imperfect Ruthenians who had failed to pursue opportunities for national awakening, most importantly by neglecting the development of a Ruthenian vernacular.²⁴ Because of this, older historians considered them marginal in comparison with the real heroes of the awakening who happened conveniently to be more marketable as selfless young liberals. For the modernists, similarly, Josephinist prelates may serve as a background story to the actual nineteenth-century nation-building, a sort of preface.²⁵ The only historian who actually focused his whole research on the first generations of Greek Catholic clergymen educated in Austrian schools and the resulting social transformation was Amvrozii Androkhovych (a disciple of Kyrylo Studynsʹkyi's), but his high-quality work has fallen into oblivion: to the best of my knowledge his last monograph, devoted to the Greek Catholic General Seminary of Lviv, survives in one copy kept in the Library of the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv.²⁶ Androkhovych is the invisible giant on whose shoulder this article is perched.

Nevertheless, two contemporary historians based in Lviv, Marʹian Mudryi, and Vadym Adadurov, did not shy away from studying these figures in the context of nation-building. I will focus here on the latter, as he devoted a number of his publications to Antonii Anhelovych and the politics surrounding his elevation to the post of Galicia's Greek Catholic Metropolitan. Among others, Adadurov tackled the topic of the elite ecclesiastics' national identity.²⁷ Inevitably, his work must serve as a recurring point of reference for my own study. Adadurov has resolutely rejected the stance of the traditional nationalist historiography that claimed Anhelovych and Harasevych to be natural-born members of the Ruthenian nation. Instead, he adopts a constructivist approach, in which national identity depends on acts of identification that make patent one's Zusammengehörigkeitsgefühl or sense of belonging. On this basis, he concludes that it is anachronistic to see Anhelovych as a Ruthenian (in the modern nationalized sense of the term), because he was first and foremost a member of his estate and a subject of the Austrian monarch. Adadurov characterizes Anhelovych's identity as pre-modern feudal, taking for granted the sharp rupture between the ancien régime and modernity.²⁸

It is evident that Adadurov has made a significant contribution, both in factual and theoretical terms, and one that will remain useful for several generations. Yet, my own position differs from his on several counts, as I believe that he has overemphasized the contrast between the allegedly pre-modern Austria of that time and the modern order of things that was to follow. As a Catholic bishop in the late eighteenth century, Anhelovych was not a medieval-style vassal of his monarch, but rather a citizen and servant of his state and fatherland. What is more, he was also expected to serve as a leader of his people. Secondly, Adadurov tries to determine the true identity of his protagonist, which is a very elusive goal, so eventually he limits himself to studying Anhelovych's public statements. This, I believe, is the right thing to do, but we should not treat it as an inevitable but sorry concession caused by the dearth of available sources. I would argue instead that we can proudly adopt it as a full-blown methodological stance. Rather than focusing on identity, an important concept to be studied but a clumsy analytical tool itself, we should explore the polemical claims about national groups and acts of identification with them, as made by historical actors in contentious situations.²⁹ Thus, the study of nationalism becomes, first and foremost, a domain of intellectual history. We do not need to search for the true identities or the actual ethnic essence of nations, be it language or anything else, but simply focus on the political institutions and intellectual devices that enabled the choices of historical actors. This should help us to better capture both the contingency of the overall process and the crucial role of individual agency.

For the purposes of this text, I propose to define nationalism as an elite ideology legitimizing power with a reference to the nation, an imagined community described primarily in a relational manner that is represented as being on a par and competing for status with other European peoples.³⁰ In this approach, the difference between pre-modern national thought and modern nationalisms is blurred not by claiming direct lineal continuities between the two stages or insisting on the ethno-linguistic essence of nationality, but rather by emphasizing that all identification labels of this kind and resulting definitions of belonging, modern and pre-modern alike, are contingent constructs, promoted by specific interest groups in particular situations and in relation to the existing power structures.³¹

As Larry Wolff notes, “  . . . nations are not ascribed according to nature, but rather by the crystallizing of distinct national meanings around formerly overlapping labels . . . . the early modern imperial matrix also conditioned the ascription, affirmation, and fluctuation of still volatile identities.”³² The clear-cut opposition between inheritance/continuity and rupture/invention of national identities is a cul-de-sac, as cultural products are neither made from scratch nor ossified, but repeatedly reassembled from the items at hand.³³ Nation-building has neither a clear starting point nor does it ever end, as the circumstances constantly change and there is no single scenario of development that is more genuine or correct than others (although, of course, some may be more likely). As Mykhailo Hrushevsʹkyi reflected in 1906, it had been possible for the Greek Catholic Ruthenians of the Habsburg monarchy to evolve into a nation completely separate from the Orthodox Christian Ukrainians in the Russian Empire, just as it had happened to Croats and Serbs. It was a result of the political choices and concerted efforts of scores of intellectuals and activists that there did not emerge such two separate nations in the Galician-Ukrainian case.³⁴

Hrushevsʹkyi's Croat-Serb analogy is a counterfactual speculation, but it is true that until the end of the nineteenth century, Greek Catholic intellectuals in Galicia continued to make conflicting claims about the national belonging of the Ruthenian community. Some defined it as an ethnographic variety of the post-Commonwealth Polish-Lithuanian nation that should regain independence in its pre-1772 borders. Others saw it as a branch of the one and indivisible East Slavic nation of the Holy Rusʹ, encompassing also the Orthodox Ukrainians, Muscovites/Russians, and Belarusians. The group that proved most successful in the long run argued that because of their dialectal proximity, Galician Ruthenians formed one national community with the Orthodox Ukrainians across the Zbruch river, but were completely separate from the remaining Eastern Slavs (Belarusians and Muscovites/Russians). Later, there would also emerge a movement claiming to represent yet another nation, named Rusyns, limited only to the Greek Catholic and Orthodox Eastern Slavic inhabitants of the Carpathians. “Of the making of nationalities there is no end.”³⁵

A Church in Its Contexts

Galicia's Greek Catholic Church was an offshoot of the Uniate Church in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The latter, in turn, was a somewhat paradoxical institution, at the same time, an Ecclesia triumphans and an Ecclesia dolens. Uniates formed a Church triumphant, because they had successfully defeated their Orthodox rivals in the Commonwealth, reducing them to a position of a tolerated provincial minority. Uniates' domination was sealed at the Synod of Zamość in 1720 which can be seen as the culmination of their peculiar confessionalization. Zamość brought Eastern-rite Catholics of Poland-Lithuania under closer papal supervision, stabilizing their structure and customs as a combination of Western and Eastern elements, a vizioso miscuglio or corrupt mishmash, as a bishop championing a stricter alignment with the Byzantine tradition characterized it in the late eighteenth century.³⁶ The Uniate church elite acquired the familiar outlook of cultured Central European prelates of the Baroque era and felt completely at home in the Commonwealth.³⁷ Official documents would occasionally refer to the Uniates as natio or gens Ruthena (or Roxolana), but in the eighteenth century, this did not necessarily imply that they were perceived as a completely separate nation: rather, that they formed a specific variety within the broader Polish-Lithuanian community.³⁸ Similarly, many families of noble landowners who had long belonged to the Latin Catholic Church and used Polish in their everyday life would in some situations present themselves as Ruthenians, meaning that they held land estates in the Ruthenian provinces, identified with the regional interests, and traced their heritage to the princes and knights of the medieval Rusʹ.³⁹

At the same time, the rank-and-file Uniate clergymen remained universally scorned as poorly educated, economically disadvantaged, and legally handicapped peasant priests.⁴⁰ A barely translatable Polish-language saying summarized this situation in the following manner: “Bóg stworzył popa dla chłopa, a plebana dla pana” (God created a Uniate priest for the peasant and a Latin Catholic parson for the gentleman).⁴¹ To add insult to injury, Rusʹ as a whole was associated with superstition, savagery, and rebellion. In accordance with the negative stereotype prevalent in the Polish-language culture both before and after the definitive collapse of the Commonwealth, Ruthenian commoners were depicted as benighted and rebellious half-savages, whereas the clergymen of the Greek rite were almost always suspected of acting in the interest of power-hungry monarchs and of inciting the peasantry's hatred toward the nobility and Latin Catholics.⁴²

In 1809, this negative picture provided the basic interpretive framework through which pro-French Polish officials and military commanders filtered their experience of encounters with Galicia's Greek Catholic leadership. Yet, despite all the resulting tensions and wounds, the Uniate church elite had proven exemplarily loyal to the Commonwealth and had fully identified with this polity prior to 1795, as their main enemy, the Orthodox Church, was sponsored aggressively by the Russian Empire.⁴³

I will give here just one characteristic example of this persistent sense of belonging to the Polish-Lithuanian polity. In 1789, there erupted a grande peur in the Commonwealth, as the nobility feared that the Russian government planned to incite a rebellion of Ruthenian peasantry in collusion with the Uniate clergy. There followed a widespread persecution of Ruthenian serfs and their parish priests, including several death sentences. Mykhailo Harasevych knew about it and would later use those facts in a very peculiar way in his own Latin-language Annals of the Ruthenian Church (Annales Ecclesiae Ruthenae), but here I am more interested in Feodosii Brodovych, archpriest of the Uniate cathedral chapter of Lutsk and author of The Image of Violence Fiercely Inflicted upon a Helpless Innocence. This text served Harasevych as the main source of information on the anti-Ruthenian panic of 1789, but Brodovych's perspective is very different from that of the Galician annalist. Despite the absurd injustice of the accusations and the harrowing suffering of scores of helpless clergymen and peasants, Brodovych did not reject the Commonwealth as such, but rather told a story of a tragic misunderstanding caused by a combination of deep-seated nobiliary prejudice against Rusʹ and anti-clerical trends of the radical Enlightenment. In his account, Ruthenians are innocent children of the same fatherland and the text ends with a lament for the partitioned Poland-Lithuania. Although Brodovych sees this political catastrophe as a divine punishment for the injustices of the nobility, at no point does he distance himself from the Commonwealth. Even in adversity, he continued to see Poland-Lithuania as his country.⁴⁴

Two additional aspects need to be mentioned here, as especially relevant in the context of Habsburg Galicia. First of all, thanks to its low status, Uniates' was a cheap church with an extremely dense network of parishes.⁴⁵ Another important characteristic was the privileged position of the Basilian Order, a corporation of well-educated monks who enjoyed a monopoly on higher ecclesiastical offices, including that of the bishop. For this reason, they used to be called ordo praelaticus and sometimes Latin Catholics would even convert to the Greek rite and become Basilians in pursuit of career opportunities.⁴⁶ These factors (conflict with the regular clergy, dense parish network, cultural and social proximity to the people, low status, and openness to state-sponsored social mobility) combined to put the Ruthenian parish priests in a position that corresponded very closely with the expectations of the Austrian government concerning the role of the secular clergy in the society at large. At least from the 1770s on, Vienna made a consistent effort to limit the influence and numbers of monks, whereas the secular parish priests were meant to become closer to their flocks, to serve as conveyors of information between the government and the popular masses, especially the rural ones.⁴⁷

Austria's arrival in Galicia in 1772 was doubtless a new opening in many respects, but we should be wary of the Habsburg officials' Enlightenment rhetoric that presented this land as a barbarous country, a tabula rasa that just begged to be civilized by upright men from Vienna and Prague.⁴⁸ When it comes to the Greek Catholic Church, the government acted cautiously, building on policies that had been in the making for a number of years and relying on the expertise of Ruthenian intermediaries from the Kingdom of Hungary, like Mykhailo Shchavnytsʹkyi.⁴⁹ Initially, Galician Ruthenians were by no means central to Vienna's understanding of the Uniate question. Austrian treatment of Galicia's Greek Catholics in the 1770s and 1780s was shaped by two trends, each of them with its own temporality. The older one was the Habsburg monarchs' sponsorship of the Uniates in the Realm of St. Stephen.⁵⁰ It needs to be understood within the context of the seventeenth-century Counter Reformation and the pacification following the Treaty of Satu Mare of 1711. The other one originated with Maria Theresa's effort to effectively transform her diverse hereditary lands, this Monarchische Union der Ständestaaten, into a unified state. The start of this process is usually identified with the so-called Haugwitzian Revolution of 1748/49.⁵¹

In the 1770s, Austrian rulers had been promoting the cause of Greek-rite Catholicism in the Kingdom of Hungary for over a century. They learned there that it was relatively easy to persuade large numbers of Orthodox clergymen to accede to the Union, but it was much harder to keep them loyal to it over a longer term. To achieve the latter, it was necessary to incentivize them by offering a realistic prospect of social ascent tied to the condition of remaining within the Catholic communion. Otherwise, the Union would mean losing the freedom resulting from the status of a tolerated and protected minority enjoyed by the Orthodox, without gaining anything in exchange. One of the indispensable conditions to raise the status of the Uniate clergymen and their Church was to provide them with quality education without which they could not expect to command respect in an ancien-régime society.

The other more immediate aspect was that after the loss of Silesia, Maria Theresa was desperate to catch up with her archenemy, the king of Prussia. She sought to transform her loose monarchy into a unified wohlgeordnete Polizeistaat that would efficiently promote the pubblica felicità or gemeinschaftliche Glückseligkeit of her subjects.⁵² As she lacked competent officials, she implemented a reform of universities that would train a new army of state servants. Even this was not enough, for the Monarchy was too vast and diverse. In order to convey the government regulations to the populace all over her dominions and to gather intelligence on the ground, the Queen needed a functionary in every village. There was only one organization that came close to this ideal: the Catholic Church. It was, then, necessary to carry out a thorough Verstaatlichung of the church structure, to transform it into a tool of state.⁵³ From now on, Catholic priests were to be not only sacerdotes but also a special class of Staatsbeamte: this meant the emergence of a completely new kind of priest and higher church official. It was necessary to inculcate clerics with a sense of duty toward the Austrian Monarchy. With this purpose in mind, the Abbot of Břevnov Franz Stephan Rautenstrauch sketched the necessary reform of priestly education in his Outline for the Establishment of Theological Schools in the Imperial-Royal Hereditary Lands.⁵⁴

In this perspective, the key caesura is not so much 1772, the year of the first partition of the Commonwealth, as 1773, when the abolition of the Jesuit Order marked a symbolic end of the Baroque pietas austriaca. Perhaps more importantly, the confiscated Jesuit property allowed the Habsburg government to fund its ambitious initiatives. It is symptomatic that the first state-run educational establishment for the Austrian Greek Catholics was located in Vienna in a former Jesuit building. This was the so-called Barbareum, controlled throughout its short existence by a coalition of priests from northern Croatia and Transylvania. This circumstance illustrates well that it was intended to be, first and foremost, a solution to the problems encountered by Maria Theresa in her efforts to sponsor her Uniate subjects in the Kingdom of Hungary, rather than an attempt to win over the new ones from Galicia. Even more striking is the fact that the Barbareum was the first school in the whole Monarchy established from scratch after the formulation of F. S. Rautenstrauch's plan (three years before Melchior Blarer's well-known Brno seminary).⁵⁵

It is impossible to overestimate the importance of the Barbareum for the topic of this article. The opportunity to study there was a formative experience for a number of Galician Ruthenians. Vienna, a predominantly German-speaking city of 200,000 inhabitants, must have been a devastating culture shock for boys and young men who came from small localities of Red Rusʹ (for example, both Anhelovych and Harasevych were sons of parish priests, the former born and brought up in the village of Hryniv, the latter in that of Iaktoriv). Seeing the Habsburg rulers and their court for themselves must have made a strong and lasting impression on such provincials. The University of Vienna provided a completely different kind of education focused on the necessity of being useful to the state. Lastly, the seminary itself was a networking hub where the Greek Catholics from all over the Monarchy could get to know each other and central government officials like F. S. Rautenstrauch. As a result, the Barbareum became a veritable forge of the new Galician Ruthenian ecclesiastic elite.⁵⁶

This extremely successful establishment was in many ways a prototype of Joseph II's general seminaries, but, somewhat ironically, it was closed down precisely because of their emergence. Upon learning that many diocesan and monastic schools avoided implementing F. S. Rautenstrauch's plan, Joseph II decided to abolish all the hitherto existing training institutions for clerics and to replace them with a highly centralized network of state-run seminaries that would offer a standardized education all over the Austrian lands.⁵⁷

This programme is a typical example of Enlightenment hubris corresponding closely to the high-handed treatment of Galicia as a savage tabula rasa by the state officials such as Count Pergen or the emperor himself. Yet, in its dealing with the country's Greek Catholics Vienna exercised exemplary caution. First, against one of the basic tenets of the seminary reform, it allowed two parallel institutions in Lviv, one for the Latins, and the other for the Ruthenians and Armenians. Additionally, the government funded special chairs in philosophy and theology to be taught in Ruthenian to those students who would not be able to understand lectures in Latin. While local Greek Catholic bishops fought to delay the closure of the less demanding diocesan seminaries under their control, young and ambitious Barbareum graduates, such as Antonii Anhelovych, Mykhailo Harasevych, Kostiantyn Sabatovsʹkyi, Mykhailo Shchavnytsʹkyi, or Mykola Skorodnynskyi became the most dedicated enforcers of Josephinism in Galicia.

Galicia's Greek Catholic clergy was perhaps the only milieu in which the General Seminary reform was not rejected, but in fact embraced as an improvement. Consequently, Lviv's was the only General Seminary in the whole Monarchy that was not closed down after Joseph II's death—on the explicit request of Galicia's Greek Catholic ecclesiastic elite. This unique success story of Josephinism winning hearts and minds of elite churchmen can be attributed to the concessions, thanks to which the emperor's radical ideas were adjusted to the local realities, but also to the influence of the Barbareum graduates who owed their ascent to the new order imposed in the province by Vienna.⁵⁸

Farewell to the Commonwealth: A New Sense of Belonging for the Ruthenian Elite

What did all this mean for the Ruthenian Greek Catholic churchmen? In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, ascent within the ecclesiastical hierarchy depended on nobiliary patronage and, in any case, clergymen who did not belong to the Basilian Order were seriously handicapped from the start. Secular parish priests were universally disdained as the pastors of coarse Ruthenian peasants. Whereas for the Latin Catholic churchmen, the policies of the Austrian Staatskirchentum meant a serious limitation of their freedom and were perceived as debasing, to their Greek-rite counterparts they offered substantial boons. First, they would all obtain a standardized education of relatively high quality. Second, talented and ambitious individuals could even get a chance to study in Vienna. As already mentioned, this was not merely an educational opportunity, but a real civilizational shock for young men originating from Galician villages and small towns. Next, Greek Catholic secular clergymen saw that the Hofburg sidelined the powerful Basilian monks, their hitherto invincible rivals. This meant that secular clerics could hope to rise through the ranks on the basis of their talent and hard work, which had been very unlikely in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Finally, having finished their studies, even those who would not have great ecclesiastic careers were no longer lowly peasant priests but representatives of a powerful state apparatus, which meant many additional duties but also a new sense of belonging and a much higher degree of self-esteem, not to mention the financial security provided by the Congrua from the Religionsfonds.

Mental adjustment to these favorable circumstances was not all that easy for the Greek Catholic clergymen, especially those belonging or aspiring to the social elite. Galicia's upper strata were shaped by their Polish-Lithuanian heritage, meaning that they were predominantly Polish-speaking; either noble landowners themselves or at least unwaveringly deferential to this group; if not necessarily hostile toward than at least distrustful of the Austrian bureaucracy (and vice versa); and still strongly influenced by the old-style republican culture and politics of the Commonwealth (which continued to exist across the border for the next twenty-three years). Pro-Habsburg enthusiasm was not exactly rewarded in this social environment.⁵⁹ What career strategies would the Ruthenian priests employ to take advantage of the new situation and how would they explain their new position to themselves and to those around them?

The answer is not simple, as the circumstances of every individual differ. Initially, the government was forced to make do with priests who had been shaped in the Commonwealth and thus saturated with its political culture. This does not mean they were necessarily disloyal to Vienna, but their loyalty was of a different type than what the Austrian government sought in the 1770s and 1780s. Bishops Lev Sheptytsʹkyi or Maksymiliian Rylo accepted the partition and tried to come to terms with the Habsburg rulers on the basis of their experiences with the elective kings of Poland-Lithuania. There, the king was a symbolic head and the supreme patron in a dense and complicated network of dependencies which included also irremovable aristocratic ministers, regional magnates, and middling landowners (a situation somewhat similar to that of the Habsburg lands before the reforms of the 1740s).

The old bishops understood well that in Austria the monarch had a much stronger position than in Poland-Lithuania, but they were not able to completely discard their earlier experience. In this context, Petro Biliansʹkyi, the first Greek Catholic bishop nominated by the Austrian government, is an interesting transitional case. As a commoner by birth and a secular priest, he would have had very slim chances of achieving the rank of bishop under the Commonwealth.⁶⁰ This was exactly why the Austrian government selected him: to showcase that it would not follow the old ways and to create a church official who should be fully dependent on and loyal to the state. Still, Biliansʹkyi, a person shaped before the partition, was somewhat of a disappointment, as he remained overly focused on cultivating local aristocratic interests and administering the part of his diocese which remained on the Polish-Lithuanian side of the border.⁶¹ It was only with the arrival of the next generation of priests, trained in the new state-run establishments, that Vienna eventually got suitable collaborators who were not only willing to be respectful subjects of the Austrian monarchs but also able to serve the Austrian state as Lehrer und Führer des Volkes (a term from F. S. Rautenstrauch's publications).

Later in their careers, these new pastors would have to deal with close supervision of their activities by Galicia's central administration. Perhaps nothing illustrates the epochal change better than the letters addressed by the bishops and diocesan administrators to the Excelsum Gubernium, an abstract yet strong presence, embodied in austere functionaries of diverse social backgrounds, including numerous commoners along with the old and new nobility.⁶² The explicitly personalized and multidirectional network of power relations characteristic of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had been replaced by a centralized structure emanating from Vienna (or at least pretending to be organized in this way).

Characteristically, for virtually all of Galicia's Greek Catholic elite ecclesiastics a stint as lecturer at the state-run General Seminary of Lviv served as the stepping stone to a further career. These figures included: Mykhailo Shchavnytsʹkyi, a graduate of the Barbareum from Upper Hungary; Mykola Skorodynsʹkyi, Biliansʹkyi's successor as bishop of Lviv; Antonii Anhelovych, bishop of Przemyśl and later the first Greek Catholic Metropolitan of Galicia; Mykhailo Harasevych, vicar general of Lviv; and eventually Mykhailo Levytsʹkyi, bishop of Przemyśl, the second Greek Catholic Metropolitan, and the last Primate of the Catholic Church in Galicia (of all three rites, the position was discontinued after Levytsʹkyi's death). State-run seminaries were not only training grounds producing the new kind of priests but also testing grounds where the government could select suitable candidates for higher ecclesiastic offices. Thus, the new Austrian system constituted a social lift allowing for careers that would have been very unlikely within the framework of the nobiliary patronage predominant under the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Whereas all of the above-mentioned prelates were sons of parish priests, Anhelovych and Skorodynsʹkyi happened to be of petty noble stock, while Shchavnytsʹkyi, Biliansʹkyi, Harasevych, and Levytsʹkyi were mere commoners by birth (only Shchavnytsʹkyi was not ennobled by the emperor).

The social transformation undergone by the protagonists of this paper was not unique: rather, they were part and parcel of the fledgling intelligentsia or Bildungsbürgertum. Mykhailo Harasevych's stint as editor of the Polish-language Dziennik Patriotycznych Polityków (Journal of Patriotic Politicians) together with his tumultuous marriage to a Latin Catholic noblewoman may be interpreted as an attempt at building an alternative non-ecclesiastic social position of an intelligentsia type more in line with the values predominant in Polish-language society.⁶³ But in the 1790s, symbolic and material resources for such an endeavour were too scarce for an individual of such modest origin to succeed completely on his own. State-supported church structures were a much more viable option.

Although it would be an exaggeration to say that the work for the Austrian government was condemned as such by the Polish-language elites of Galicia, it is clear that an unwavering loyalty to it was neither typical nor incentivized in this environment. Rather, some sort of nostalgia for the partitioned Commonwealth and passive sympathy for an emerging Polish irredentism was the norm. Greek Catholic church leaders were inheritors of the Ruthenian Uniate elite who had fully identified with the Polish-Lithuanian nobiliary polity and cherished it as the protectress of their Church. How could the Galician Greek Catholic prelates detach themselves from the Polish-Lithuanian political tradition which conflicted with their new social position as representatives of the Austrian monarchical government?

The case of Antonii Anhelovych suggests that the catalyst of this process was the French Revolution, presented all over Europe as a catastrophe that threatened peace, order, and the Christian religion. In the course of the late 1790s and early 1800s, Polish irredentism came to be closely associated with French expansion in Europe, so the rejection of the latter should logically result in reservations toward the former.⁶⁴ As already mentioned, Anhelovych authored several Polish-language texts denouncing Bonaparte's aggressive politics. As bishop of Przemyśl, in a letter to the deans of his diocese circulated in January 1797, he made a case for Austrian patriotism, echoing Joseph von Sonnenfels's concept of Vaterlandsliebe, which he must have encountered while a seminarian in Vienna. According to Sonnenfels, love of fatherland is a rational, yet passionate, extension of Eigenliebe, an appreciation of security and advantages offered to each of us by the state in which we live.⁶⁵ After briefly mentioning that the enemy threatens to eradicate religion and destroy social order (standard stock of anti-French propaganda of that time), Anhelovych enumerates in his letter all the boons bestowed upon the Greek Catholic parish priests by “the Most Graceful Austrian Government.” His conclusion is that the Ruthenian shepherds’ properly understood self-interest should converge with the effective defense of the fatherland, meaning Austria.⁶⁶

A decade later, Anhelovych had no qualms about denouncing his rival Father Iordan Mitskevych, a procurator (or representative) of the Ruthenian Basilian Order in Rome, as a Polish patriot. To substantiate his denunciation, he passed to the Austrian government the kind letter sent to that monk in the late 1790s by Jan Henryk Dąbrowski, the commander-in-chief of the Bonaparte-sponsored Polish Legions in Italy. This was an exceptionally incriminating item. It was written in Polish by a general of an enemy army on the official paper featuring the name of the Cisalpine Republic together with the easily recognizable symbols of the French Revolution and the slogan: “Freedom. Love of the Fatherland. Equality” (Wolność. Miłość Ojczyzny. Równość). What is more, Dąbrowski offered assurances that he considered Mitskevych “a good and honest Pole” (iest dobrym i poczciwym Polakiem). Anhelovych explained that this document illustrated Mitskevych's political position: in the light of the then imminent restoration of Poland (als stünde bei den dermaligen Verhältnissen die Wiederherstellung des Königreichs Pohlen bevor), the procurator wanted to see the Galician Metropolitanate occupied by a Basilian “from the Polish nation” (aus der pohlnischen Nazion). Apart from opposing the interests of the Austrian Monarchy, it would also exclude the candidacy of Anhelovych.⁶⁷

The rift between the Basilian monks and the fledgling secular church elite went back to the 1740s.⁶⁸ The Austrian government espoused a strong prejudice against the religious orders and rejected any limitations on the monarchs’ rights to select their bishops (such as the resolutions of the Synod of Zamość), so it is only natural that Vienna consistently selected non-Basilian candidates like Anhelovych himself. In this context, Anhelovych's most striking innovation lies in the way he conflated the traditional conflict between the regular and secular clergymen with the new political struggle between the allegedly anarchic revolution and the rational Enlightened monarchy as well as the postulated national difference between Poles and Ruthenians.

Anhelovych found Dąbrowski's letter to Mitskevych in the papers of Ieronim Striletsʹkyi who had died in 1804 as the parish priest of St. Barbara's church in Vienna. This temple remained the center of Greek Catholic life in the Habsburg capital even after the closure of the Barbareum in the 1780s (and continues to fulfil this function until today). Striletsʹkyi himself was a Basilian monk, but he was also a graduate of the Barbareum. As the first head of the St. Barbara parish, he occupied one of the most visible and influential positions a Greek Catholic clergyman could ever dream of in the Austrian Monarchy (former nineteenth-century parish priests of St. Barbara included the influential Bishop of Przemyśl Ivan Snihursʹkyi and Galician Metropolitan Spyrydon Lytvynovych). In other words, he was clearly no revolutionary and enjoyed the full trust of the Habsburg government.⁶⁹ Yet, for some reason, he did not find it convenient to share Dąbrowski's letter to Mitskevych with the authorities. Most probably, we will never be able to ascertain Striletsʹkyi's motivations for his potentially incriminating decision, but there was actually nothing unusual about it in the broader context of the post-Commonwealth realities. Even if many members of the social and intellectual elites of the former Poland-Lithuania had serious doubts about the French Revolution and Napoleon Bonaparte, informing on someone's communications with the Polish independence warriors must have been seen as a shameful transgression by most in that environment. How could one justify such an abrupt break with predominant values and norms? How could one explain this to oneself, to the people around him, to the society at large, and not least to the Austrian government? To an uninitiated state official from Bohemia or Lower Austria, Polish-speaking Greek Catholic prelates might have seemed more Polish than some of the French-speaking Galician aristocrats who nevertheless identified with the Polish-Lithuanian nobiliary nation. Were the Greek Catholic leaders just sell-outs who could be relied upon only as long as they were rewarded with promotions and funds?

According to Prince Metternich's well-known assessment, Polonism was just another name for the destructive spirit of revolution.⁷⁰ Conservatives, like the Austrian Field Marshal Prince Adam K. Czartoryski, the Privy Councillor Count Antoni J. Lanckoroński, the Head of the Imperial Court Library Count Józef M. Ossoliński, or the Latin Archbishop of Lviv Kajetan I. Kicki, were very unhappy about the alliance with France, but as Poles, they had little room for manoeuver. Public opinion would have never forgiven them for acts of overt resistance against the alleged liberators sponsored by Bonaparte. In turn, the leadership of Galicia's Greek Catholic Church found a creative solution. They chose to downplay their community's links to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, links nobody had doubted or questioned throughout the five serene decades following the Synod of Zamość. Anhelovych and Harasevych chose to rebrand themselves as belonging to a completely separate nation that just happened to live together with Poles for a couple of bumpy centuries. This required, among other things, a wholesale reassessment of history. In his later Annals of the Ruthenian Church, Harasevych (or his editor) offered his own rather original interpretation of the Commonwealth's grande peur of 1789 that stood in stark contrast to Feodosii Brodovych's Polish-Lithuanian patriotism. The writer of the Annals accused the reformist republicans at the Polish-Lithuanian Four-Year Diet of deliberately directing public ire against the Uniate Ruthenian clergy in an elaborate scheme against the King Stanislaus Augustus. Characteristically, he described these Enlightenment reformers as a “potent faction imbued with Gallic or revolutionary principles.”⁷¹ He thus echoed (or prefigured) Metternich's identification of the (post-)Commonwealth Enlightenment nationalism with the spirit of the European revolution.

If Galicia's Greek Catholics were not Polish, then who were they? Habsburg governments and their bureaucrats strove to fashion Austria as a unified state, but they had never claimed that there was a single Austrian nation. The Austrian Monarchy presented itself as a common home to several brotherly peoples.⁷² To give just one example, in the manifesto published in April 1809 by Archduke Ferdinand d'Este, commander-in-chief of Habsburg forces in Galicia, we read:

The world sees already as Austrians, Hungarians, and Bohemians hurry from all directions to the fraternal banner (Austryacy, Wegrzyni, Czechy śpieszą pod Bracką chorągiew), and as, enlivened by the internal feeling of national honor and love of fatherland (nacyonalnego honoru i miłości oyczyzny), they swear certain defeat to every enemy. These noble hosts have already formed for the battle.

Now, it is your turn, faithful Galicians! Although younger brothers of the great and happy union of Austria's Peoples (młodsi Bracia wielkiego i szczęśliwego związku Ludow Austryi), you are tightly and internally united with the whole. Turn your gazes here. Where can one enjoy more freedoms than under the sweet and fatherly Rule of Our Dignified Monarch? Where is private property better protected? Where is the common weal more augmented? And even though Austria fights very costly wars, are not her subjects counted among the richest and happiest? Here, you are not being misled with any deceptive promises of a distant happiness, but all of you enjoy the fatherly care (oycowska opieka) and so you live truly happy.⁷³

Several elements deserve our attention here. First, Austria is clearly a monarchy of many peoples united by a strong bond of family love. This bond, however, does not annul the specificity of each group: different peoples are brothers, sons of the same Landesvater, the Habsburg emperor. If we accept Caspar Hirschi's argument that nationalism is relational, that it is a way of imagining your community as being on a par with other communities and competing with them for status, then the Austrian Monarchy, fashioned by its government as a shared arena of brotherly peoples, becomes a perfect breeding ground for nationalist allegiances. Second, Archduke Ferdinand's argument again echoes Joseph von Sonnenfels's Vaterlandsliebe: you should love Austria, because it offers you freedom, security, and prosperity. Enlightenment reasoning remains entrenched in the official propaganda of the Austrian state, even in the face of the French Revolution. Third, the Austrian commander addressed Galicians, but we should not make too much of it. This label had never been a consistently pursued identity project. Hardly anybody believed in the existence of a separate Galician nation on a par with say Russians, Germans, or Poles. At best, it was a goal to be achieved somewhere in the future, but for the moment it was just a vague administrative term denoting the inhabitants of this province, with the pride of place ascribed to its noble landowners, who overwhelmingly identified as Poles.⁷⁴

At the same time, the cutting-edge Austrian scholarship did recognize that, apart from the Poles, there was in Galicia yet another nation with its own history, language, and customs: Ruthenier, Russniaken, Kleinrussen, or simply Russen. In the 1790s, Johann Christian von Engel, a German-speaking historian from the Hungarian part of Spiš, published his twin histories of the Cossack Ukraine and Galicia (Halitsch und Wladmir), as part of the Halle series on world history (Die Allgemeine Welthistorie durch eine Gesellschaft von Gelehrten in Teutschland und Engelland ausgefertiget). In 1804, Joseph Rohrer, a native of Vienna but brought up in Tyrol and later turned professor of political science and statecraft in Lviv, released his two-volume Essay on the Slavic inhabitants of the Austrian Monarchy (preceded by his works on Austria's Germans and Jews). Rohrer presented the Ruthenians of Galicia and northeastern Hungary as one of the most numerous Slavic peoples of the Monarchy. His findings were mirrored by the observations of other Austrian scholars of that time, like Franz Kratter and Belsazar de la Motte Hacquet.⁷⁵

Let us sum up: Anhelovych and Harasevych wanted to distance themselves from the nobiliary Polish-Lithuanian nation and its traditional republicanism morphing into revolutionary irredentism; the Austrian government understood its state as populated with many different peoples and prominent contemporary scholars discerned Ruthenians among them; nobody in government circles would treat an act of identifying with the Austrian or Galician nation as very convincing. Therefore, Anhelovych and Harasevych needed some other national label to explain to their Viennese interlocutors why they could be trusted more than Galicia's landowning elites and why they should be respected more than the upstart careerist sell-outs or itinerant adventurers so common in the late-eighteenth-century halls of power.⁷⁶

Caspar Hirschi, whose work is focused on the Holy Roman Empire in the later Middle Ages and early Renaissance, argues that nationalism was initially an ideology of those members of the intellectual elite who felt insecure because they came from low social origins.⁷⁷ This was exactly the situation of the new leadership of Galicia's Greek Catholic Church. Anhelovych and Harasevych were Quentin Skinner's “innovating ideologists” who sought “to legitimize questionable forms of social behaviour” by showing that “a number of favourable terms can somehow be applied to their seemingly questionable actions.”⁷⁸ To achieve rhetorical success they had to present their argument with the help of a lexicon understandable to their conversation partners, the government decision-makers in Vienna who casually employed the vocabulary of Austria's faithful brotherly peoples. The new generation of Greek Catholic prelates needed a people of their own that would be separate from the Polish-Lithuanian nobiliary nation, but older and more tangible than the postulated Galician aggregate of 1772/95. It was not the Austrian government that invented the Ruthenian nation, but its interlocutors among the Greek Catholic ecclesiastic elite who took up this label, because they wanted to fit into the “the great and happy union of Austria's Peoples.”

This dynamic is clearly visible in a memorandum on the situation of the Greek Catholic Church in Galicia submitted by Anhelovych to the government in Vienna, most probably in 1806 at the time when the fate of the Galician Metropolitanate was being decided. I know this text only second-hand from an exchange between Austrian officials, itself badly damaged by the 1927 Justizpalastbrand. It is legible, however, that Anhelovych lobbied here for the interests of his own very specific group, that is the elite secular clergymen, whom he considered the only legitimate representatives of the Greek Catholic Church as a whole. Even though his actual focus is on internal church affairs, he does not hesitate to use arguments of another kind to strengthen the case for the importance of his ecclesiastical community: “the majority of [Galicia's] population and of its indigenous people, the Ruthenian nation,” identifies itself with the Greek rite, he states. Now, Anhelovych's reference to the Ruthenian nation and its primacy in Galicia may be completely instrumental and subordinate to the cause of elite ecclesiastics' elevation within the hierarchical framework of the Austrian state, but this fact alone does not annul the long-term significance of his polemical innovation.⁷⁹

Another example from the same year originates with Mykhailo Harasevych. In a thanksgiving address submitted to Emperor Francis II/I in June of 1806 on the occasion of the reestablishment of the Galician Metropolitanate, he claimed to speak for “the Ruthenian clergy and the Ruthenian people,” a community that no other could surpass in its loyalty to the House of Austria.⁸⁰ As Vadym Adadurov rightly notes, Greek Catholic church leaders continued to see the dynasty as the central element of the political order. They also envisioned their nation as composed of two clearly delimited estates, the common people guided by the hierarchically organized clergy.⁸¹ This, however, does not imply that we can reduce their understanding of the world to the label of “pre-modern feudal.” The House of Habsburg served as the central embodiment of the bureaucratic Austrian state until its very end in the late 1910s, yet it would be a misunderstanding to conclude that the Monarchy remained a feudal relic in twentieth-century Europe. Similarly, the acceptance of a social hierarchy, based on estates (or other), does not preclude a vision of a self-standing nation. Harasevych and Levytsʹkyi, to name only the two most prominent examples, were commoners by birth and there is no reason to believe that they saw estates as permanently enclosed units that forever determined individuals' fates. Rather, the very meaning of the category of estate was changing, because in early-nineteenth-century Austria it had to coexist with the concept of universal citizenship enshrined in the ABGB.⁸²

It would be an exaggeration to advertise Harasevych's address as Galician Ruthenians' “we-the-people” moment. Rather we should understand the whole process in question as a gradual reconfiguration of accents, leading to the eventual politicization of the label “Ruthenian.” The address of 1806 is a document that allows us to zoom in on an early stage of this transformation and see how the “Ruthenians” are being reshaped as a self-standing community on a par with other nations, most importantly the rebellious Poles. In this particular text, the kernel of Harasevych's innovation lies in the fact that he presents his people as participating in a sort of tournament of patriotism in the shared arena of the Austrian state, where they successfully compete for the title of the most loyal and dedicated nation. Anhelovych further extends this horizon in his brochures, depicting Austria as a member of the European family of independent states, all of them endangered by an insatiable French imperialism embodied in a man who never keeps his word.

I believe that we should see the efforts made by Harasevych and Anhelovych as, first and foremost, polemical devices serving to distance the Greek Catholic ecclesiastic elite from the taint of revolutionary Polonism. Whether it was based on a deep national sentiment is not so important. We will never know. What matters is that these two leaders introduced to the Austrian public sphere a new national identification, one that was to have a complicated but fruitful future. By the summer of 1836, when Mykhailo Harasevych's obituary appeared in the Wiener Zeitung (but still before the release of the Ruthenian Trinity's Rusalka Dnistorivaia), the existence of the Galician Ruthenian nation (Ruthenisch-Galizische Nation) seemed an obvious fact that did not require any additional explanations.⁸³ Although initially a polemical tool employed by a narrow ecclesiastical elite, this label appealed also to broader numbers of Greek Catholic parish priests and cantors. It corresponded with their lived experience of being treated as inferior in comparison with their Latin Catholic counterparts and it allowed them to escape the burden of being classified by the state as rebellious Poles.

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, the label of “Ruthenians” was primarily a name associated by default with the Byzantine-Slavonic rite and the heritage of medieval Rusʹ. Other than that, it was defined very vaguely in opposition to the ascending revolutionary Polishness (and let us not forget that many adherents of the latter option were Greek Catholics and self-aware descendants of the knights and princes of Rusʹ).⁸⁴ Harasevych himself had difficulty conceiving a historical narrative that would not be focused on his Church, but this does not mean that he was necessarily incapable of seeing beyond it. Let me give just one example. For the Enlightened Greek Catholic prelate that he was, the seventeenth-century Cossack wars must have been an awkward topic, yet the passage on this issue in his Annals of the Ruthenian Church opens with an intriguing reflection on the Polish-Ruthenian competition for historical respectability: “Poles like to extol their national patriotism, for which they demand admiration from other nations. When subject to Poland, the Ruthenians defended their liberties and national laws against the Poles with no less effort.”⁸⁵ There can be no doubt that at this point the writer of the Annals understood the label “Ruthenians” as denoting a separate people that could be contrasted with the Poles and other nations, not just a mere synonym for the Greek Catholic faithful. There is only one problem here (from the point of view of my argument): it cannot be excluded that these words were added later in the nineteenth century by Mykhailo Malynovsʹkyi who had been organizing Harasevych's papers for publication.⁸⁶ Malynovsʹkyi, however, was himself a typical product of the Greek Catholic Staatskirchentum and he submitted the manuscript to the censors in the late 1830s, so it is legitimate to see this thought, at the very least, as a logical conclusion of a longer-term intellectual process that had its roots in the activities of Anhelovych and Harasevych.

For Galician Ruthenians of their generation language politics remained irrelevant, although the activities of the so-called Przemyśl circle testify that toward the end of their lives, it was gradually gaining significance.⁸⁷ In any case, Francis II/I remained suspicious even of unmistakeably pro-Habsburg outbursts of national sentiment, as the example of Joseph Hormayr shows us.⁸⁸ Consequently, Galicia's Ruthenian church elite was not encouraged to fill the national label they had taken up with more meaning. Characteristically, Harasevych's historical work languished in manuscript form until 1862, because the government feared that it could injure the Latin Catholic public opinion in Vormärz Galicia.⁸⁹ It was to be the work of the Ruthenian clergymen and secular intelligentsia born at the beginning of the nineteenth century to endow the political device of this national label with tangible cultural content and effective emotional appeal. When this eventually started to happen, the Greek Catholic church establishment saw it as an insolent attempt to undermine its monopolistic prerogative to define what made a good Ruthenian. It is no accident that Rusalka Dnistrovaia was banned by a Ruthenian Greek Catholic censor nominated by the Metropolitan Mykhailo Levytsʹkyi. But this is a completely different story.⁹⁰

Tyroleans of the East or the Wealth and Poverty of Historical Comparisons

In the nineteenth century, some would refer to the Galician Ruthenians as Tyroleans of the East.⁹¹ This is an interesting if problematic comparison: the rationale behind it is that just like the Tyroleans (but unlike the Poles) Ruthenians espoused exemplary loyalty to the House of Austria. In this sense, Anhelovych and Harasevych can be seen as the most Tyrolean among the Ruthenians of Galicia. There is, however, at least one problem here: in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Tyroleans were by no means loyal and obedient subjects of their monarch. During Joseph II's rule, the Princely County of Tyrol was one of the hotbeds of the conservative resistance to his Enlightenment reforms, especially those concerning church affairs. At that time, Anhelovych and Harasevych, graduates of one of Austria's model state seminaries, eagerly imposed the very policies so hated in the Alpine region.

After Joseph's death, his brother and successor Leopold II managed to pacify the Tyroleans by revoking the most hated laws, but the situation remained far from the harmonious collaboration between the Austrian government and the Ruthenian career prelates that we observe in Galicia. The myth of Tyrol's Habsburg loyalism crystallized only in 1809 during the dramatic uprising led by Andreas Hofer against Bavarian rule sponsored by the French. As with Joseph II, Tyroleans had been enraged by the reforms imposed upon them by Bavaria's Enlightened minister Maximilian von Montgelas. And even though this time they rebelled to return under the Habsburg sceptre, the emperor in Vienna remained reluctant about their newly found love for his dynasty and eventually abandoned them to their fate after the treaty of Schönbrunn. When in the early 1810s the Tyrolean intellectual Joseph von Hormayr languished in the fortress of Mukachevo for attempting to incite another unauthorized rebellion, Anhelovych and Harasevych were being rewarded with honours for their unwavering loyalty in 1809.⁹²

Tyroleans' vehement hatred toward Josephinist reforms allows us to appreciate one characteristic of the Galician Greek Catholic leadership that must not be overlooked: even in their opposition to the French Revolution and Napoleon, they did not reject the Enlightenment as such, but instead stuck to its conservative elitist version. They remained cautious Josephinist prelates, much closer in their mindset to Joseph von Sonnenfels than Joseph de Maistre.⁹³

I will not explore this comparison further, since it is clear that there are more contrasts than analogies here. Tyrol's case does, however, show at least one relevant similarity with that of Galician Rusʹ: the importance of French revolutionary imperialism as the catalyst of the conservative turn in building communities around the Habsburg banner. This leads me to my next point: every such comparison has a real but limited value. It will reveal some aspects of the phenomenon in question but obscure others. For this reason, I would like to suggest here a procedure that I would provisionally label “many-sided asymmetrical comparison.” In this text, there is not enough room for its full elucidation, so I will only sketch it with the broadest strokes.

My comparison could start with the early Czech and Slovak awakeners who were contemporaries of my protagonists. Josef Dobrovský, one of the most recognizable figures of that period, was also deputy head of the General Seminary in Olomouc. Anton Bernolák, the first codifier of a modern Slovak language standard, was a graduate of the General Seminary of Prešporok (today's Bratislava). Despite obvious biographical parallels, a closer look would reveal that their focus and motivations differed substantially from those of Harasevych and Anhelovych. Both Dobrovský and Bernolák concentrated on language issues, wishing to advance Enlightenment and stem their ideological and confessional adversaries: Protestants (the latter) and Baroque Catholics (the former).⁹⁴ A much closer analogy for Galicia's Greek Catholic prelates can be built with the leaders of the Greek Catholic Wallachians (Romanians) in Transylvania, who also fought to elevate the status of their Eastern Christian community vis-à-vis the recognized nationes of Saxons, Magyars, and Szekelys. As a result, they embarked upon a fruitful collaboration with Josephinist decision-makers in Vienna and several of them (Samuil Klein, Gheorghe Şincai, Petru Maior, Ion Budai-Deleanu, Samuil Vulcan) either studied or taught at the Viennese Barbareum, where their paths crossed with those of the Galician Ruthenians. All this notwithstanding, their political gains proved much more modest than those of the Galician churchmen.⁹⁵ Another suggestive case for comparison in the Austrian Monarchy is Dalmatia, where Fra Andrija Dorotić participated in the resistance against Napoleon's rule in the Illyrian Provinces. Although born and educated under the Republic of Venice, he became an active supporter of the House of Austria, which he saw as the only force capable of defending his country and religion from the godless French.⁹⁶ Outside the Habsburg lands, possible comparisons include the way in which Finland's Swedish-speaking elites chose to distance themselves from Sweden and its liberal framework to win the trust of their new masters in Saint Petersburg;⁹⁷ and the Landespatriotismus of the Little Russian landowners, in which many historians want to see the key link between the political tradition of the early modern Cossack republic and nineteenth-century Ukrainian nationalism.⁹⁸

This most cursory survey of possible historical comparisons allows us to see that my account of Galicia's Greek Catholic elite is not completely outlandish, as analogous developments could be observed in other contexts as well. All these cases are political in one sense or another, yet none of them offers a mirror image that would repeat all the major aspects of the Galician Ruthenian story. Although perhaps in some situations it would be possible to find such twins, this is not necessarily the main goal of historical comparisons. Rather, they should allow us to think in higher orders about structures and processes, appreciating both similarities and differences across the spectrum. My succinct outline of available asymmetrical comparisons suggests that even though we can clearly discern similar patterns of development across time and space, we do not need to think about nation-building as following (or deviating from) one prescribed model. What we deal with here is the Wittgensteinian Familienähnlichkeit or family resemblance. It is a series of cases that share a number of overlapping similarities, but none of these features is common to all the items in the group. In other words, although the cases are clearly related, there does not exist one common trait that could be treated as the essence of the series as a whole.

Instead of blindly relying on grand schemes that promise to reduce everything to a few taxa, we should rather seek to reconstruct the Lokalvernunft behind each phenomenon. Stiff comparative models, such as Miroslav Hroch's canonical ABC schema, although sometimes helpful as heuristic devices, are a fundamental distortion of the complex realities we try to study. As such, they should be applied with utmost caution and alongside clear-eyed acknowledgments of their limitations.

Conclusion

If nation is a claim-making concept, then nationalism can be reduced to an ideology in which invocations of the nation and its interest serve as the central legitimizing instrument. My argument in this article is simple: late-eighteenth-century Greek Catholic prelates from Galicia espoused a form of Ruthenian nationalism, as they forcefully denied belonging to the post-Commonwealth Polish-Lithuanian nation (unmaking it, in Roman Szporluk's terms).⁹⁹ They did so, because they did not want to be associated with the republican values championed by France, then the main patron of the Polish-Lithuanian irredentism. In this way, the Greek Catholic prelates sought to cement their new social position, owed to the tasks ascribed to Catholic churchmen by the Habsburg government. Their main interlocutors were the decision-makers in Vienna who imagined Austria as a great union of peoples. Galicia's Greek Catholic leaders needed to adopt a national label that would distance them unequivocally and convincingly from the Poles.

This kind of nationalism may seem very thin, almost hollow, as its specific content was vague and it did not have much to offer in terms of emotional appeal to the masses. We could characterize its proponents with the help of the disparaging label used in the mid-1870s by Mykhailo Drahomanov: “individuals of the Austro-Seminarian-Ruthenian nationality” (individuumy avstro-bursako-russkoi narodnosti).¹⁰⁰ One might question the longer-term significance of such a phenomenon, but I would argue that even if my readers do not wish to classify it as nationalism, instead preferring to name it otherwise, this idea constitutes an important link in the longer process of Ukrainian nation-building in Galicia. My protagonists acquainted the Austrian government and public with the label “Ruthenian” as a signifier for a self-standing community understood as completely separate from the Poles (who, in turn, continued to claim the whole legacy of the Commonwealth, including Rusʹ and its culture). Whoever came after Anhelovych and Harasevych would find this part of the job done and could focus on other tasks, such as the development of the national language or assembling the canon of national heroes.

If my interpretation of the specific Galician case proves defensible, Hroch's model with its procession from purely cultural/linguistic activities toward more strictly political ones would turn out to obscure an important dimension of the process in question and erase from the record several decades of development.¹⁰¹ As John-Paul Himka concluded long ago, “in spite of the complexity and variety of factors entering into the process, the primary determinant of the construction of a national culture was political.”¹⁰² Language issues and culture wars centered upon them are not necessarily the defining feature of the early stages of nation-building in Central and Eastern Europe, but rather a mobilizing device adopted by later cohorts of activists in the specific context created by the popularity of the post-Herderian thought and the legal avenues offered by Article 19 of the 1867 Staatsgrundgesetz über die allgemeinen Rechte der Staatsbürger. Their polemical success in the second half of the nineteenth century was so overwhelming that it almost completely obscured those earlier protagonists and processes that did not position the language question in the center. By the early 1880s, when Walerian Kalinka reminded his audience of the work of Mykhailo Harasevych and Denys Zubrytsʹkyi, it was almost universally accepted that the struggle for language rights constituted the kernel of nation-building.¹⁰³ This, however, does not mean that such figures as Anhelovych and Harasevych had not made significant contributions and that we should not see them as important links in the development of the national movement as a whole. From the very beginning, the gesture of identifying as Galician Ruthenians was all about politics, not only Galician, but also Austrian and European.