for freedom of conscience, of the press, of thought and speech. All
this meant merely the application to the whole of Russia and especially
to Ukraine of those commonplaces of personal and civic liberty that had
been achieved in the England of the day and were the common demand of
all the thinking youth of Europe. They then went further and visualized
an independent Ukrainian republic, which was to form part of a great
Slavonic federation. This federation was not to be dominated by any one
country but was to be a real federation, expressing the ideas of free
and independent citizens.
It is easy to see that their ideas were influenced by the little that
they knew about the United States. It is easy to see how far they were
from the reactionary ideas of Pushkin, but they were not dominated by
thoughts of hatred or antagonism. The interesting point was that while
Belinsky and various other authors were arguing in St. Petersburg and
Moscow for the same liberties for the Russians, these men dared to
assert that the Ukrainian language could be developed as well as could
the Great Russian and had equal claim to be studied and used by the
people, by writers and by scholars.
Not one of the men who formed the Society was connected in any way
with any military organization. They were for the most part typical
of the university youth. Some of them came from the smaller noble
families which had not been completely Russianized but which still
retained traditions of the past. Shevchenko was a freed serf. Not one
of them would have known or been interested in the type of political
underground conspiracy that alone could have carried their program into
execution.
Thus they could have formed no danger to the Russian state, except
insofar as that was based on the oppression of other races and on
conditions which were unhealthy and unjust. Of course they were opposed
to serfdom, but in one way or another their feelings were shared by
large numbers of the Russians, nobles and non-nobles alike. They were
taking little active part in any plans for carrying out their policy,
except in their aspirations to spread education among the people:
education in the Ukrainian language.
However when Oleksy Petrov, a student who had overheard some of the
glowing discussions in a neighboring room, reported the existence
of the society to M. V. Yuzefovich, the supervisor of history, the
latter was impressed with the idea that he had discovered a dangerous
conspiracy. He hurriedly notified St. Petersburg and orders were given
to arrest the entire group. It seemed to the mind of Nicholas I that
this was exactly what he had suspected all along and he determined to
make an example of the young men.
It was relatively easy to catch them, for they were without any
suspicion of what was coming. Shevchenko was arrested on April 5,
1847 in Kiev with several others, for they had gathered there for the
wedding of Kostomarov. Kulish, who had already received a fellowship
to study abroad in preparation for a post in the University of St.
Petersburg, was seized on his way to the border.
Trials were soon held and the vast majority received sentences of
imprisonment or exile. Shevchenko, because of the contents of his
poetry, was ordered to serve as a private in a disciplinary battalion
of the army in Central Asia and the tsar added in his own hand, “with
a prohibition of writing and painting.” He was destined to serve there
for ten years and was a broken man at the completion of his service.
These arrests broke up the society. The trials revealed very clearly
that the young men had taken no definite steps to carry out their
ideas. Yet the decrees of the Tsar and the sentences made it very
clear that the imperial regime considered it worse than treason to do
anything to remind the Little Russians of their independent past or to
indicate that in any way they were better off under the rule of the
hetmans than under the beneficent rule of the Tsar’s officials. It was
but another affirmation of the intentions of Catherine and Peter, and
it put a definite stop to any political development in Russian Ukraine
for many years.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
_THE REVIVAL IN GALICIA_
During the seventeenth century, there had gradually developed
differences in those sections of Ukraine which had remained under
Polish control after the Treaty of Andrusivo. This was largely the
result of the endless conflict between the Orthodox and the Uniats, and
was marked by the steady weakening of the Orthodox, especially after
the beginning of the eighteenth century when the great Brotherhood of
Lviv formally accepted the Union. In the eastern portions of the Polish
controlled territory, the Orthodox still retained considerable, if only
negative, power, and it was in those regions that the last revolts
against Poland took place. At times the Koliishchina had threatened to
spread westward along the Carpathians but the danger was averted and
peace was maintained.
Then came the divisions of Poland and most of the areas in which the
Union had secured an undisputed supremacy passed into the hands of
Austria-Hungary. Soon after, the latter seized from Turkey northern
Bukovina, which was still largely Orthodox and had formed the northern
section of Moldavia, long a storm centre.
The Ukrainians living in the Carpathian Mountains formed part of the
Kingdom of Hungary. These people had suffered from the vicissitudes of
the past centuries and little is known of their early history or of
their appearance in the area where they still dwell.
In his historical novel, _Zakhar Berkut_, Ivan Franko gives a
picture of the early democratic life of these villagers in the time
of the Tatar invasions but it is not certain whether or not they ever
formed an independent state. In all probability the central authority
in these mountain valleys was not well developed in the Middle Ages.
The various valleys paid more or less feudal allegiance to the rulers
of Ukraine but the mountain passes were closed several months in the
year by snow and with the confused conditions in Galicia and the
struggles between Poland and Hungary, the region was more or less
forgotten.
The people were Orthodox and apparently formed part of the see of
Peremyshl but the bishops rarely visited them. Education was on a
far lower level than anywhere else in Ukraine and the revival of the
sixteenth century had little or no effect upon the mountaineers.
Hungarian rule, which had been established in the fourteenth century,
weighed heavy upon them. Peasants and clergy alike were serfs,
illiteracy was widely prevalent and almost the rule, and the physical,
economic and intellectual conditions left everything to be desired.
Apparently also in the fifteenth century an Orthodox bishop was settled
at Mukachevo, but this again did not mean much. The monasteries
had lost most of their wealth in the disturbances of the preceding
centuries and the bishops had to live on fees collected from the
ordination of young priests and the annual contributions that they were
compelled to make for the support of the central organization. It was
the same situation that had come up elsewhere in the Ukrainian lands
but there was really no centre to maintain any education and things
went constantly from bad to worse.
It was an ideal situation for the spreading of the religious Union.
One of the landowners, Homonai, introduced it on his estates in the
seventeenth century. He won over the priests and monks, but the
peasants, as they had done so often, refused to accept it. However,
the idea took root and by 1640 a considerable number had more or less
formally adhered, so that in 1649 it was possible for the adherents to
hold a meeting at Uzhorod and formally request to be accepted under the
same terms as had been satisfactory fifty years before at Brest. The
Pope acknowledged this in 1652.
As can be seen from the above, the struggle for the Union or the
Orthodox faith in Carpatho-Ukraine, as everything else in the area,
was far less centralized, far less standardized, and the villages
maintained a certain independence in their misery, for the Hungarian
system of administration had grouped the area into several counties
with little possibility of cooperation or mutual help.
There were times, however, when the temper of the people flared up to
white heat and revolts broke out or were threatened. Thus, for example,
at the time of the outbreak of the Koliishchina in the province of
Kiev, around 1770, there was marked unrest in this area. The peasants,
some of whom apparently did not know that they had accepted the Union,
turned against their landlords and the Uniat priests and there were
repeated on a small scale those disorders that marked the disturbances
in the East. There were the same rumors that the Orthodox ruler of the
east was going to come to their assistance and, as elsewhere, no help
ever came, and the authorities put down the revolt and the unrest with
an iron hand.
The Empress Maria Theresa of Austria and her son Joseph II were made
uneasy by these troubles. They were already looking with greedy eyes
at the southwestern sections of Poland and of Western Ukraine, and it
did not seem a wise policy to allow disorders to spread among people
related to those whom they were desirous of annexing. Besides that,
the old feuds as to the relative rights of Austria and Hungary became
involved in the picture and once peace had been restored, the rulers
began to look around to see what could be done.
There were many things needed, but in the mind of the rulers of
the eighteenth century, the idea of relieving the fundamentally bad
economic conditions of the area made no impression. Rather the Empress
felt that she was receiving good advice, when she was told that it
was the ignorance of the people and still more of the clergy that
was responsible for the confusion. As a result she soon turned her
attention to the founding of schools in this area. One was established
at Mukachevo for the clergy and steps were taken to improve the
condition of the priests. These were timid and minor actions but they
were destined to have great influence upon the future. Bishop Andrey
Bachinsky, who was installed at Mukachevo at almost the same moment
when the province of Galicia was falling into Austrian hands, was a
competent administrator. He gathered around him a small number of
educated priests and through his schools did what he could for the
country.
All this was not much, but when Maria Theresa took over Galicia and the
other Ukrainian lands, she had already an example before her. She felt
that she had hit upon the correct policy and it was not long before she
opened a school in Vienna for the Western Ukrainians, or the Ruthenians
as the Austrian government, following Polish practice, insisted upon
calling them. In view of the attitude of the Austrian government toward
religion, it was only natural that this education was at first made
available only for young men who were candidates for the priesthood of
the Uniat Church.
As we have seen, the Uniat Church, which had been fostered by the
Polish kings and magnates to disintegrate the Ukrainian Orthodox
Church and the metropolitan see of Kiev, had become by the course of
events inseparably connected with the Ukrainian cause in the west. Yet
it possessed at the time of the division of Poland very few educated
members, except some of the higher clergy. The parish priests and their
congregations were woefully uneducated. The church was generally
regarded as merely the church for the peasants and it was quite widely
ridiculed by the Polish-speaking nobles.
It was then an act of real charity and kindness for Maria Theresa
to endeavor to educate the clergy and to raise their intellectual
standards and equipment. It was to determine for nearly a century
the nature of the national revival in Galicia and Western Ukraine
generally. On the one hand, it bound the leaders of the Uniat Church
more closely to the Austro-Hungarian throne and put them in the
position of a welcome counter-balance to the Polish aspirations for
recovery of their lost territory and, failing that, to dominate and
play the role of an upper class under Austrian control.
On the other hand, it preserved and strengthened all those conservative
tendencies that had been inherent in the Kiev Academy during the
seventeenth century and had been even earlier a handicap to the work of
the Brotherhoods in the sixteenth. It meant the definite strengthening
of those tendencies which were opposed to the introduction of the
vernacular language. The vast majority of the educated priests and
scholars of Austria-Hungary spoke Latin more or less well. It was only
natural therefore that the Ukrainian clergy trained in the schools of
Maria Theresa laid especial emphasis on the Church Slavonic in the form
in which it had been traditionally preserved. Relatively little effort
was expended on the modernization of this language and in many ways the
writings of these men were even further from the daily speech of the
people than had been the case two centuries before, when the scholars
of Kiev sought to go back to the pure form of Church Slavonic.
It was therefore nearly fifty years before the leaders of the Ukrainian
movement in Austria-Hungary reached the point that had been arrived
at by Kotlyarevsky in Eastern Ukraine. The intellectual life of the
Western Ukrainians and their writings remained in that same artificial
form that had been prevalent everywhere before the publication of the
_Eneida_. More than that, there were many who looked askance at
the new Ukrainian system that was coming into vogue under the power of
the Tsar. They saw in the apparently new writing something which might
develop into a menace to the integrity of the Church teachings and they
opposed its introduction into the schools of the province.
Nevertheless, although the Ukrainian revival came far later than that
of many of the other peoples of the Austrian Empire, it followed the
same general pattern, with a certain amount of political activity
allowed to Ukrainians as Ukrainians, especially in the lower
administrative levels and for those few members of the group who were
not serfs but were recognized as free men.
It was not long after the provinces passed into the hands of
Austria-Hungary that there was established a theological seminary for
Uniat priests in Lviv and this was even more accessible than was the
school in Vienna. Later, in 1784, the University of Lviv was founded
and in this it was provided that there should be certain courses in
the Ruthenian language, that is, the old mixture of Church Slavonic,
Ukrainian and Polish that had been the dominant language of the Kiev
school in the seventeenth century. A preliminary school to prepare the
Ukrainians for admission to the University was established. For a while
all seemed well, but it was a false dawn.
The key to these events was to be found in the policy of Maria Theresa
and still more of the Emperor Joseph II, who reigned with her for
many years and then was sole emperor from 1780 to 1790. Maria Theresa
was devoutly religious. Joseph II, her son, belonged to the same
class of enlightened despots as did Catherine the Great of Russia.
He was interested in unifying his domains just as ardently as was
Catherine, but he had a different problem to face, for he desired to
make German and not another Slavonic language the general language
of administration. Besides that, both mother and son were suspicious
of the loyalty of the Poles, who had been just been annexed to the
Austrian domains, and it seemed a wise measure to lighten the burdens
of the Ukrainian population in an endeavor to win their loyalty.
Besides these educational reforms, Joseph had very decided ideas on the
necessity of lightening the burdens of the serfs and of abolishing most
of the abuses to which they had been subjected in the past.
All of these varying motives, often conflicting with one another,
tended to give an opportunity for the Ukrainian population in Western
Ukraine to improve their status. All the results achieved were won
during the years of the reign of Joseph II and the brief years of
Leopold II, but when Francis II came to the throne in 1792, conditions
changed.
Externally the French Revolution was then going on and Austria took
a defiant attitude toward everything that savored of liberalism in
any way. The rights of the landowners were restored throughout the
Empire and this deprived the peasants of any hopes that might have
been enkindled in them by the promises of Joseph II. Then too, there
were no signs of revolt among the Poles in the annexed provinces. This
was in a way a deliberate choice of the Polish authorities and even
during the revolt of Kosciuszko in 1794, he did his best to prevent
the spreading of the movement for a restored Poland into that part of
the territory that was held by Austria, and endeavored to concentrate
the national uprising against Russia and secondarily against Prussia.
Thus it seemed to the interest of Vienna at this moment to cooperate
with the Polish landlords in Western Ukraine and to try to limit the
spread of dissension, while Austria prepared to take her share in the
final division. Then with Poland out of the way, efforts to improve the
conditions of the Ukrainians within Austria sagged severely and during
the years that followed, the situation remained fairly static.
Yet the situation never went quite back to that prevailing before
the time of Joseph II. It is true that by 1808 the courses in the
University of Lviv and the preparatory gymnasium had faded away at
the instance of the Poles and there remained only a few parochial and
private schools where the traditional dead language was the medium of
instruction. Yet there was an increasing number of Ukrainians who were
able to secure an education in schools where German as well as Polish
was taught. All too often, however, these men acquired a contempt for
the peasant masses and sought for positions elsewhere in the Austrian
civil service, so that they did not give to their people the benefit of
their education. Many of those who remained tended to prefer Polish as
a more fashionable language and thus added to the number of able people
who were lost to the Western Ukrainian cause.
The real difficulty that prevented the Ukrainians of Western Ukraine
from more successful work was the language question and until that was
definitely settled, real progress was impossible. All the work at the
University of Lviv was carried on in the old traditional language.
None of the leaders of Western Ukraine had the vision or the energy of
Kotlyarevsky to break away from the old ecclesiastical tongue and write
in the language of the people. After the time of Joseph II, education
fell back into the hands of the clergy and they maintained that same
idea that had run through the history of the old Brotherhoods, the idea
that the people’s cause and the people’s faith could only be maintained
by emphasizing the use of the old ecclesiastical language. This never
became adapted to the civil needs of the population, high or low, and
in the early nineteenth century it had much to do with the delays in
the Ukrainian cause.
When the secular writings of Kotlyarevsky were first brought into
Western Ukraine, they aroused only a series of attacks on the part
of the conservative leaders who saw in them something secular and
therefore suspicious or heretical. They made their way very slowly even
among the literate classes who were bound up with the old ideas, and
were not welcomed as enthusiastically as they had been in Great Ukraine.
Indeed it was not until the end of the thirties, when Shevchenko was
already doing some of his best work, that any serious attempt was made
to introduce the speech of the people into literature. At that time
Markian Shashkevich, a young priest, wrote a series of poems in the
vernacular. They aroused a great deal of controversy and were refused
publication in Galicia but the author succeeded in having them appear
in Budapest. Still, such were the censorship laws of the time, that
while they were officially approved in Hungary, every copy that reached
Galicia was seized by the censor and police. Shashkevich died in
1843. His two closest friends, who survived him, ultimately left the
Ukrainian cause. Ivan Vahilevich after some years accepted the Polish
thesis as to the Ukrainians of Galicia, and Yakiv Holovatsky accepted a
position in the Russian Archaeological Service.
Already there had begun that linguistic feud which was to stifle the
life and thought of Western Ukraine for many years. The vast majority
of the intellectual leaders were Uniat priests and they, together
with some of the more conservative people, held out strongly for the
maintenance of the old artificial Church Slavonic language. Among the
more progressive elements there were the followers of Shashkevich, but
there were others who seriously wanted to adopt Russian as the form of
the vernacular to be followed, and these developed into the Moscophile
or Russophile party of later days. It must not be supposed however that
these people knew any Great Russian. Very few were ever able to read
any of the Russian classics which were already being written, but they
followed the most elaborate theories that almost any Ruthene would be
able to use Great Russian in one hour, if he really set his mind on
it. They refused to face any of the difficulties in their position and
simply idealized Russia because it was not Austria-Hungary, and because
it was a Slavonic country. Had they even attempted to learn Russian,
the situation would not have been so absurd.
This feeling spread quite widely in Western Ukraine and in Bukovina
and even more strongly among the Carpatho-Ukrainians, where it has
continued to the present time, especially among the more illiterate
portions of the population, and the Orthodox elements. It was a curious
mixture of a romantic idealization of Russia, a confusion of rus’-sky
and russky, and a desire to get away at all costs from the horrible and
unsatisfactory present.
As the period of 1848 drew nearer, with the growing unrest among
all the subject populations of Austria-Hungary, the situation again
changed. After 1846 it was already becoming evident that unrest among
the Poles was increasing. The government, especially Count Stadion,
the governor of Galicia, set itself to woo the Ukrainians and to
assure their loyalty. To this end there was allowed to be organized a
political society, the Holovna Rada, which aimed to be the intermediary
between the Ukrainians and the government. A newspaper the _Zora
Halitska_ (_the Galician Star_) was started, and a Congress
of Ruthenian Scholars demanded that the language should be completely
reorganized, with a uniform system of spelling for both Eastern and
Western Ukraine and that it should be freed from all Russian and
Polish influences. To further this goal, there was organized an
Educational Society, on the lines of the Czech Matica. Politically
the Congress demanded the separation of the Polish and Ruthenian
(Ukrainian) parts of Galicia, so that the Ukrainian people would be
directly under the control of the Austrian government.
The Austrian government did not look unkindly upon these demands and
for a while it seemed likely that it would take steps to carry them
out. Ukrainian lectures, this time in the vernacular, were introduced
again into the University of Lviv and Ukrainian schools were started
throughout the province. As a still further step, the government
decreed the liberation of the serfs, and thereby it struck a powerful
blow at the Polish landlords in a way well described a little later by
Ivan Franko in the _Master’s Jokes_. The same promises were made
in both Bukovina and Carpatho-Ukraine, where Adolph Dobryansky took
the lead during the revolt of Kossuth and the Hungarians. Finally he
joined the Russians when they invaded the country to help the Austrians
against the revolting Hungarians, and he carried with him many of the
intellectuals in the province.