gained, for when the unrest had subsided, the Austrians conveniently
forgot all the promises that they had made a few months earlier. In
1849, with the danger passed, they again turned the control of Galicia
over to the Poles and in both Carpatho-Ukraine and in Bukovina, where
the Russophile movement had grown strong, they turned against all of
its leading representatives. The Ukrainian newspapers were largely
abolished and the power passed back into the hands of those classes who
had little use for the vernacular language of the people.
The reaction after 1848 roughly coincided with the arrest of Shevchenko
and the crushing of the Society of Saints Cyril and Methodius
in Russia. Yet the revival up to that period had shown striking
differences in Eastern and Western Ukraine. In Russia it had been a
lay revival, with special emphasis upon the development of a modern
literature in the face of a determined government, which insisted
upon the unity of both Russians and Little Russians. Any thought of
political action was in the beginning useless, and prison or Siberia
was the fate of every one who dared to advocate national recognition.
Under Austrian rule, the Uniat Church had taken the lead in the
movement. It had developed into an anti-Polish but government-favored
policy, which only too readily admitted the racial and cultural
differences between the Poles and the Ruthenians. Unfortunately, there
were no outstanding political leaders to profit by this opportunity.
Before the triumph of reaction the Ruthenians were most hampered by the
stubborn conservatism of their own people who refused to face the fact
that it was necessary to modernize the language.
Actually the two Ukraines had become widely separated areas with
differences in religion, in the goal of their efforts, and in their
weapons of struggle. There was little knowledge on either side of
what the other was doing and perhaps even less appreciation. Yet in
both regions, and in Bukovina and Carpatho-Ukraine, the Ukrainians
had awakened from their long slumber. Something was stirring, but the
trend to cooperation was still very weak and it was only the Congress
of Ruthenian Scholars that had even mentioned the possibility of joint
action, even in the cultural and linguistic spheres, so well had the
enforced separation done its work. Everything seemed lost as 1850
approached, but the new dullness was not of long duration.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
_PROGRESS IN RUSSIA_
The arrest and exile of the members of the Society of Saints Cyril and
Methodius brought to a halt the first phase of the Ukrainian revival
in the Russian Empire. It had been the work of a group of brilliant
idealists who had ignored many of the practical difficulties in the way
of their cause under the influence of the Romantic movement. There was
no romanticism and hardly any sense of realism in the response that was
delivered by the government of Nicholas I, who had been born before
Kotlyarevsky had commenced the revival with the _Eneida_, and who
could, from his childhood, obtain information from the men who had
actually suppressed the last vestiges of the Hetman state.
With the accession of his son, Alexander II, in 1855, conditions
changed. Alexander started his reign with at least an appearance of
liberality and issued a wide amnesty to persons who had incurred the
displeasure of his father. Most of the members of the Society were
released and allowed to resume work in St. Petersburg. Even Shevchenko,
who had been singled out for special treatment because of his attacks
on the Imperial Family, was released and he too joined his former
friends in the Russian capital. As a result, by the end of the fifties,
the former members of the Society of Saints Cyril and Methodius had
come together again and were prepared to resume their work under
conditions as they then existed.
Kulish, one of the members of the group, started the work with the
appearance of the _Memoirs on South Rus’_ in 1856, but he was
refused permission to edit a journal in his own name because of his
former connection with the Society of Saints Cyril and Methodius and
the exile which he had suffered in consequence. Yet it would be wrong
to assume that the new agitation was conducted only by the handful of
people who had formed the former group.
In Kiev and Chernihiv other Ukrainians, subject to the limitations that
were imposed upon them by the Imperial government, tried to work for
their people. Popular schools, usually held on Sunday, were opened to
teach the illiterate peasants their own language. New writers appeared,
such as Marko Vovchok, the pen-name of Maria Markovich, whose husband
had been one of the members of the Society. Provincial newspapers
appeared, societies were established for the purpose of glorifying
Ukrainian culture, thinly camouflaged under the name of South Russia,
and many other activities were started.
This was the period on the eve of the emancipation of the serfs and it
looked as if the new Emperor was going to open a new period in the life
of his country. The first years of the reign of Alexander II indeed
marked an era of good feeling, and there were wide hopes among almost
all classes of society that he would wipe out all the dark memories of
the strict reign of his father.
It was under this hope that in 1860 there was founded in St. Petersburg
the journal _Osnova_, (_the Basis_). Kulish was really responsible for
it, although the nominal editor was his brother-in-law, Bilozersky, one
of the lesser members of the Society. It called to its staff of writers
and assistants all of the leaders of the younger generation, and for
about a year there seemed to be a new spring in the Ukrainian movement
in Russia.
Then trouble began again. Kulish, Kostomarov, and Shevchenko, the
leaders of the older generation, still endeavored to continue in the
paths of the Society. In one of his articles Kostomarov referred to
the dreams of the Ukrainians for membership in a great Federation of
Slavs. This was, however, exceptional. The experiences of exile and
growing caution with increasing age forced the writers to follow a more
sober policy of emphasizing the necessity for educating the peasants
and for promoting a modest cultural program.
At the same time, Russian society itself had travelled far from the
optimistic hopes that had swayed it during the Romantic period. In a
sense, the Society of Saints Cyril and Methodius had been a belated
child of that great idealistic movement that had swept over the Slavs
in the thirties and had been inspired and nourished by the Czech
writers of the period. It formed also a transition from the high hopes
of the Decembrists of 1825 to the sentimental dreams of the forties.
Now at the end of the fifties, the mood of the public had turned
again. The intellectual leadership of Russia was in the hands of the
intelligentsia, who were much interested in the social reforms that
were sought for and were little interested in the general fate of
Russia or of any particular part of it. It was the period of _Fathers
and Children_ of Turgenev, the volume that launched on Russian
society the character of Bazarov and the philosophy of nihilism, the
idea that nothing was good that could not be justified by natural
science and by reason.
As a result, the younger men of the _Osnova_ cared very little for
the more idealistic and sentimental sides of the journal. There was no
one to control the contents of the magazine and to win the respect of
the entire mass of people who were interested in the cause of Ukraine.
Shevchenko was dying and within a year the _Osnova_ came to an
untimely end. Yet it had done its work in transferring the cause of
Ukraine from the older to the younger generation, even though the two
differed in many important particulars.
For the moment the government, under the spell of the liberation of
the serfs, was disposed to tolerate all this activity. Kulish was
even encouraged to prepare a Ukrainian translation of the Imperial
decree providing for the liberation of the serfs. It seemed as if the
Ukrainians might be allowed to establish schools where the children
would be taught in their native tongue. The success of the cultural
program of the young Ukrainian leaders seemed assured. Of course in all
this there was no open political action, for it must not be forgotten
that at this period there was no opening for political life anywhere in
Russia. There was nothing that corresponded to political parties, to
elections or to free political discussion. There was even no organized
group among the Russians which aspired or voiced their aspirations for
such procedure, so that there was necessarily a vagueness about the
real goal of all this cultural activity that has been used at a later
time by the enemies of Ukraine to dub it mere literary nationalism.
Suddenly everything changed. In 1863 there came another revolt among
the Poles in Russia. It was a heroic but desperate venture which was
doomed in advance to failure. At the same time there were repeated the
sad words of Shevchenko, “Poland fell but it ruined us.” A very few
of the most Polonized Ukrainians joined in the movement. The Poles
themselves complained that they did not receive Ukrainian support, but
they succeeded in inspiring the fear in the Russian government that
the movement to restore a free Poland would automatically involve the
separation of all Ukraine from Russia. The leaders of the Empire now
reversed the policy that they had taken in 1847. At that time they
were afraid that the Ukrainians would long to go back to their days
of practical independence and would throw off the Russian yoke. Now
they became convinced that the Ukrainians would give up any hopes of
winning their own liberty and would be glad to be lost in a Polish
state.
As a result they decided to renew their efforts to wipe out the last
vestiges of Ukrainian separatism and to end the Ukrainian language.
Count Valuyev, the Minister of the Interior, declared that there never
was, is not and never will be a separate Little Russian language but
that it was only a peasant dialect of Great Russian. To that end he
gave an order that henceforth there should be allowed to be printed in
Ukrainian only those books which fell in the field of belles-lettres.
Publication of all books in the Little Russian language which had
religious content, textbooks and in general books intended for
elementary reading should be forbidden. Valuyev pretended that Great
Russian was intelligible to every literate person and that there was no
reason why the illiterate masses should not begin their education in
it. He also pretended to think that the writings of the early Ukrainian
authors were on the same par as peasant dialect stories in any language
and so he ostensibly left a loophole, but since these books could be
put in simple form for the masses, the censors interpreted his ideas to
hold that works in belles-lettres might be used as elementary readers
and therefore they could not be published. As a result there were some
years in which no work in Ukrainian appeared at all.
It would be interesting to know if this outburst of fear of separatism
was in any degree aided by the American Civil War, then at its height.
It was at this time that the Imperial Russian Government sent a fleet
to New York, perhaps to serve as a counterweight to any possible
interference by Western European powers on behalf of the South, and
such authors as Dostoyevsky were making allusions to the bloody
struggle that was going on in the New World. The establishment of the
United States had had a great effect on Russian educated thought a half
century earlier and perhaps some of the Russian officials now were
apprehensive of trouble.
At all events the sixties defined precisely the attitude that the
Russian government was to take toward Ukrainian cultural aspirations
for the rest of the nineteenth century, until the Revolution of 1905.
The various Ukrainian journals were suppressed. Some of the writers
were sent to Siberia for several years. Others, such as Kulish,
ultimately made their way to Galicia and lived in virtual exile, while
their books, published there in Lviv, were smuggled into Russia to keep
alive the spark of Ukrainian freedom.
It was difficult for the Imperial regime to maintain a consistent
policy for long. In a few years there came a slight relaxation of the
more stringent rulings of the censorship and some Ukrainian books
were published. The seventies were the great period of the Narodniki,
when the educated youth became convinced of their mission to go to
the people, disguise themselves as peasants and try to educate their
unfortunate brothers. Under such conditions it was only natural that
the same movement was attempted by some of the younger Ukrainians, that
there came similar publications intended for clandestine use by the
Ukrainians who sought thus to keep their adherents from being submerged
in the corresponding Russian movement. At the same time there can be
no doubt that many of the more zealous partisans of social reform,
especially in St. Petersburg, tended to join the Russian illegal
movements and for a time at least lost any special interest in the fate
of Ukraine in their zeal for humanity.
At the same time there was founded in 1872 the Southern Branch of the
Geographical Society and around this there gathered a large number of
Ukrainians, writing scientific articles in Russian but emphasizing
those aspects of South Russian life that were most alien to the general
Russian traditions. They helped to place the knowledge of Ukrainian
culture on a firmer basis, even though some of the more socially minded
sneered at their efforts as of no immediate importance.
These young men, largely at the University of Kiev, formed themselves
into a society, the Hromada, which worked vigorously along purely
scientific, ethnological and philological lines. They included Prof. V.
Antonovich and later Mykhaylo Drahomaniv, by far the most brilliant of
the scholars of this generation.
Yet even this scientific work, published for the most part in Russian,
still seemed suspicious to the Imperial government. Anything which
demanded any cultural rights for the Ukrainian people or mentioned
differences between the Great Russians and the Ukrainians or Little
Russians or South Russians seemed to be dangerous separatism. This was
the more striking because the scholars of Moscow and St. Petersburg
at the same time were emphasizing the great differences between the
cultures of Moscow and Kiev in the past, were emphasizing that the
culture of Kiev was often more Polish than Russian and were teaching
their own students, with governmental approval, that the Kievans
who came to Moscow in the seventeenth century were to all intents
and purposes foreigners who were ill received by the masses of the
Muscovites. At the same time the force of public opinion among the
radical intelligentsia was emphasizing the fact that Russian literature
belonged to the areas around the capitals. It is interesting that
except for Count Alexis K. Tolstoy, who advocated the point of view
that Kiev represented the European side of the Russians, there were
practically no novels written during this entire period depicting
the life of the people of Ukraine. After the death of Gogol in 1852,
it was possible to rummage into the highways and byways of Russian
literature without becoming aware that Kiev and its adjoining regions
even existed as part of the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century.
It is fair to say that never, even in the most stringent period of
Muscovite isolation, was Russian literature so confined to Great
Russian territory as in the Golden Age of the Russian novel and of the
intelligentsia, that is the period between 1840 and 1881.
In 1875, a former friend of Kostomarov, one M. Yuzefovich, reported
to authorities on the separatist tendencies of this work of the Kiev
Hromada. As a result a commission was appointed consisting of him, the
Ministers Timashev and Tolstoy and the Chief of the Gendarmes, Potapov,
to study the dangerous situation that prevailed in “Little Russia.” The
committee reported that, “the entire literary activity of the so-called
Ukrainophiles must be considered as an attempt on the national
unity and wholeness of Russia, only hidden by plausible forms.” As
a result, the Tsar issued an order on May 18, 1876, forbidding the
importation of books printed abroad in the Little Russian dialect and
also forbidding the printing and publishing in the Empire of original
works and translations in this dialect with the exception only of:
“(a) historical documents and monuments; (b) works of belles-lettres,
but with the proviso that with the printing of historical monuments
there must be kept the correct orthography of the originals; in works
of belles-lettres there must not be allowed any deviations from the
generally accepted Russian orthography and that the permission to print
works of belles-lettres should be given not otherwise than after the
examination of the manuscripts in the Central Administration of the
Press; and (c) forbidding various theatrical presentations and readings
in the Little Russian dialect and also the printing of such a text to
musical notes.”
It is well to note the emphasis laid upon spelling in this decree. In
the seventeenth century Great Russian had been taught from Ukrainian
Church Slavonic grammars, as that of Smotritsky, and the students had
been taught to make the necessary corrections in pronunciation. Once
practice had brought to these letters the Russian values during the
intervening centuries, the acceptance of the Russian pronunciation
made difficulties for the pronunciation of Ukrainian words. Kulish had
prepared a new alphabet which retained the Cyrillic script but which
was suited to Ukrainian and this was being generally accepted by the
modern Ukrainian authors. It was to resist this influence that the
government decided not only to bar the new literature, but even where
it allowed it, to bar the new alphabet and thus create another obstacle
to the spread of the “Little Russian dialect.”
The result might have been foreseen. Some of the more timorous souls
dropped away from literature and consented to write in Great Russian.
The others who were more determined, worked the harder to enter
Galicia and to profit by the relative freedom there. The decree merely
furnished more fuel to the fire and instead of ending the Ukrainian
movement it caused it to take even more extreme forms.
Yet some of the Russian authorities in Ukraine themselves felt that
some of these rules and still more their methods of application were
only adding to the difficulties of the situation. The prohibition
of printing songs with a Ukrainian text for example cut hard at the
rendering of songs which all agreed were of superior quality. Plays
produced in Russian in Ukrainian villages did not satisfy the popular
demand and the habit grew of allowing Ukrainian plays to be produced,
provided that the company would also produce at the same time some
Russian piece.
In 1882 a group of Ukrainians secured permission to print in Kiev
an archaeological journal, the _Antiquities of Kiev_, and this
was granted in a temporary relaxation of the censorship. Later it
became possible to include in it a few articles written in Ukrainian,
especially when printed in the Russian manner. All such devices were
unsatisfactory but the reign of Alexander III was a definite period
of reaction in all fields and it was not until the time of Nicholas II
that there came any marked lightening of the censorship.
The censorship in Kiev and the other cities of Ukraine was vastly
stricter than it was in St. Petersburg. Hence during these years the
centre of such publishing as was allowed was the very capital from
which the orders were coming to prevent the development of a Ukrainian
literature. It was often possible there to issue relatively cheap
editions which could be transported to the south and it was there that
the new writers like Lesya Ukrainka, Hrinchenko and Kotsyubinsky saw
their works in print. For books which could not come out there, there
was always Galicia.
In view of the conditions of Russian life, the Ukrainian revival in
Russia had to take the exclusive form of cultural work and scientific
study. There were many secret and underground groups as there were
among the Russians. In many cases the two groups fused for actual
revolutionary activity and Ukrainians were often involved in the plots
of the various Russian movements. This was a handicap for the work
of the Ukrainian leaders and it prevented a full appreciation of the
situation by the often still illiterate peasants, who on the whole took
relatively little part in the movements that were going on throughout
the entire country.
Insofar as the masses of the peasants were affected by the growing
unrest, it was rather their desire for land and for better living
conditions that moved them. They continued to speak their native
language in their homes and villages but far too many of them had not
been interested in the general development of the country. They thought
in terms of their own communities. Many of them emigrated to Siberia
and to Russian Central Asia. Others made their way abroad.
At the same time there was a renewed period of Russification. This
came from two distinct sources. As in the past, a considerable number
of the Ukrainians who found it possible to secure an education in
Russian schools tended to absorb the Russian point of view and to
separate themselves from their original background. They accepted the
theories which the government gave them, that Ukrainian was somehow a
peasant dialect and that it was more fashionable and more modern to
try to speak the ruling tongue. This was the same argument from which
Ukraine had suffered for centuries and which had been aided immensely
by the unfortunate decision in the sixteenth century to lay the main
emphasis upon Church Slavonic as the bulwark of Orthodoxy.
A second source developed however in the latter part of the nineteenth
century, when there began an extensive movement of Great Russians into
the growing cities of Ukraine. More and more Russians came to live in
Kiev and Kharkiv and the other important sites which grew up with the
building of railroads and the increase of industrial activity in the
area. Russians began to settle in the Donets basin, where there were
extensive coal deposits, and in the neighborhood of the iron mines not
too far distant. Others moved into Odesa which became the chief seaport
on the Black Sea.
All of these factors proved a severe handicap to the development of the
Ukrainian revival, but they did not hinder it and at the end of the
nineteenth century, it was already abundantly clear that there was a
large and steadily growing population which was proud of its language
and of its traditions. It was evident that Ukrainian culture had again
turned the corner and that it was a force to be reckoned with, despite
the ideas of both the Imperial government and its enemies, the Russian
radicals.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
_DEVELOPMENTS IN WESTERN UKRAINE_
After the failure of the movement of 1848, there ensued a period of
reaction and of torpor in Galicia and the other Ukrainian lands in the
Hapsburg Empire. For a brief moment it had seemed as if there might be
a general solution of the various questions involved but outside of the
formal liberation of the serfs nothing had been accomplished.
At the same time there came a period of crisis throughout the Empire.
With Russian help the revolt of Hungary had been suppressed, and for a
decade the Emperor Francis Joseph II was able to rule as an absolute
monarch and defy the wishes of all portions of the Empire. Yet even
this could not last, for at the end of that decade the Austrian armies
were badly defeated by the Italians at the battle of Solferino and
worse was to come with the battle of Sadowa in 1867, when the armies
were overwhelmed by the Prussians. The outcome of these defeats was
the reorganization of Austria-Hungary as the Dual Monarchy, which it
remained until 1918, and the granting to the Poles of the control of
Galicia.