Empires still nominally at peace, each was doing its best to sponsor
a movement that would redound to its advantage in case of war.
Neither one was willing to take any action or embark upon a course
that would benefit the Ukrainians themselves. Austria would not
establish a separate Ukrainian province which could appear openly in
the Parliament and speak freely for the Ukrainian citizens of the Dual
Monarchy. Russia would not grant such privileges to the Ukrainians in
her own land as would prevent them from looking across the border.
She regularly repressed Ukrainian meetings held on the anniversary of
the death of Shevchenko, even in St. Petersburg, and continued the
monotonous list of arrests and annoying restrictions on all Ukrainian
activities. Even such a man as Milyukov could not fail to see that
the policy of the government was working to strengthen a movement
for Ukrainian separatism, at the very moment when it was trying to
Russianize the Ukrainians of Galicia, Carpatho-Ukraine and Bukovina.
In this crisis the Ukrainians showed their lack of political maturity.
They had been so absorbed in the struggle to lay the foundations for
their survival and revival that they had had no opportunity to prepare
their position before the outside world. Their great writers and
thinkers were less well known abroad than were the leading figures
of any other great people. They did not have the control of a single
university which would make them known to the world of scholars. They
did not have any outstanding figures, known abroad, to plead their
cause before neutral opinion and they did not realize that their claims
would be evaluated in foreign lands in accordance with the national
prejudices of those countries toward the two great Empires which were
quarreling over their possession.
Hence it was that when the crisis actually broke in 1914, Ukraine was a
land of mystery to all except a very few scholars. There was no voice
raised in her behalf as that of Paderewski for Poland or Masaryk for
Czechoslovakia. Lying within the initial theatre of war and destined
to be ravaged by armies on both sides, the Ukrainians had little to
do except to trust to the justice of their cause and hope that somehow
and in some way they would attract the attention to their problem that
it deserved. For years the neighboring peoples had been waiting for the
day to come. They had made preparations, often more as an intangible
dream than as stark reality but they could, in the crucial moment, put
these preparations into action. They could rely upon distinguished
sons to win them a hearing everywhere. Rich emigrants could come to
their assistance. The Ukrainians had nothing of this. Franko might
look forward to the independence of his people with the downfall of
the Empires, but even he could hardly think of the way to put his
country’s cause before the world. Ukraine entered the First World War
as the forgotten nation, but the century and a quarter since the new
revival started had changed it from an inchoate mass of serfs, as it
was at the time of the extinction of the old traditions, into a fairly
well concentrated group of people with a strong core and a strong
self-consciousness that could not be ignored and that would not perish
without striking a blow in its own behalf.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
_THE FIRST WORLD WAR_
On August 1, 1914, Germany declared war upon Russia and the First World
War was on. The tensions and controversies that had been growing in
bitterness beneath the surface all through the nineteenth century now
exploded with unparalleled force. The future was to be anybody’s guess,
for the increasing magnitude of the struggle soon overflowed the bounds
that had been set for it in the thoughts of the leaders of the various
countries, and the most fantastic dreamer could not have imagined the
strange changes that were to take place in an area that seemed to the
outside world fixed and determined for centuries.
In such a turmoil the Ukrainian problem was involved from almost
the first day of the struggle. In Austria, without any delay, the
government arrested and interned all the leaders of the Ukrainians who
had been in any way sympathetic to Russia. Their institutions were
closed, and their publications stopped, for Austria-Hungary had no
intention of allowing them to be the focus of a movement on behalf of
the enemy.
At the same time, in Russian Ukraine, the Russian government for its
part at once suppressed all Ukrainian activity. The newspapers that
had been published in Kiev and elsewhere with governmental permission
were closed and the patriotic enthusiasm played into the hands of the
Russian nationalists, who had long been displeased at the Ukrainian
development. From 1914 until the Revolution there was steadily
increasing agitation to eliminate everything Ukrainian from the Russian
Empire, and leaders of all parties vied with one another in discovering
new methods of upsetting and preventing Ukrainian work. The ostensible
excuse was that the Ukrainians were really Russians and that it was
German influence and money that was developing the Ukrainian culture,
language and national consciousness. It would take too long to recite
all the devices that were invoked. Authors desiring to publish in
Ukrainian were ordered to give three copies of their manuscripts to the
censors in advance of publication. Then these were examined and held
up, changes were made, and the publication was prevented. The leaders
of the Ukrainians were arrested and moved further into the country so
that they could have no possibility of working and of corresponding
with the enemy. Requirements were made that all Ukrainian articles
should be published only in the Russian orthography. Ukrainian work
in Eastern Ukraine was brought to as complete a halt as the Tsarist
government could accomplish.
At the same time the Russian armies invaded Eastern Galicia and
on September 3, 1914, within a month after the beginning of the
war, they occupied the city of Lviv. It was now the turn of the
pro-Russian faction. The Russian Governor General of Galicia, Count
A. G. Bobrinsky, intended to wipe out the entire Ukrainian movement
and willingly listened to the denunciations of the Ukrainians offered
by the pro-Russian party. Ukrainian libraries and reading rooms were
closed, Ukrainian co-operatives and other institutions were brought
to an end, and everything was done to prove to the people that they
were Russians and nothing else. Even Prof. Hrushevsky, who was seized
at his summer home in the Carpathians, was sent to Nizhni Novgorod
on the Volga under arrest, although the Russian Academy of Sciences
later arranged to have him moved to Moscow where he could work in the
libraries. He was followed into arrest and exile by thousands of the
intellectual leaders of Galicia.
It was not only the secular institutions that were affected. The
Russians decided to wipe out the Uniat Church. Many of the priests had
fled before the approach of the Russian armies. Those who remained were
forced to return to Orthodoxy, exactly as Russia had done in all of the
territory which she had taken from Poland during the last century and
a half. As a result, relations between the peasantry and the Russians
became even worse than between the Russians and the Poles in the
western part of Galicia. Archbishop Sheptitsky, the head of the Uniat
Church, was arrested and sent into Russia and was not allowed to return
to his home for years.
Finally the Tsar himself visited Lviv and other centres in the
spring of 1915, and in well chosen words declared that Galicia was
now an inherent part of Russia and would remain so. The Russians
spread over the entire province up to Krakow. They occupied much
of Carpatho-Ukraine and threatened to go through the passes of the
mountains into the plains of Hungary.
This was the high watermark of the Russian advance into
Austria-Hungary. At the end of April, 1915, the German armies of
General Mackensen broke the Russian line on the Dunajec River and
compelled a general retreat. This meant more misery for the inhabitants
of Western Ukraine. Naturally the pro-Russian Ukrainians hurried to get
out of the province. In addition to them, the Russian armies gathered
up as much of the population as they could and started them, willingly
or unwillingly, with their families and their cattle on a long march
into Russia to a place of safety. Thousands of displaced Ukrainians
were thus gathered in prisons and concentration camps in and around
Kiev and countless thousands were moved by train to Kazan, to Perm and
on into Siberia. The enforced migration was the largest of its kind
in Ukrainian history, even exceeding the depopulation of the country
during the Ruin of the seventeenth century.
When they reached their destination, the Russians continued to maintain
the theory that they were only Russian and hence it was unnecessary
for them to found Ukrainian schools for the children, to establish
Ukrainian relief committees or to maintain any organizations in their
new homes. They were given none of the privileges that were extended to
the Poles or other nationalities uprooted in the same eastward retreat
of the Russian armies, and it was intended that they should vanish
without a trace into the Russian mass.
A later offensive by General Brusilov in 1916 recovered for Russia a
small area in the southeast, but of course the advance of the armies
on Ukrainian territory only revived the oppression of the population.
Until the Russian revolution, there could be no talk of any Ukrainian
movement in the Russian Empire. Milyukov, it is true, once brought to
the attention of the Duma the sad condition of these Western Ukrainians
in Russian exile and prison camps but he aroused no enthusiasm, for
liberals and reactionaries alike insisted that the Ukrainians were
Russians and that there was no Ukrainian question at all.
On the other hand the return of the Austro-German armies to Galicia
after the Russian retreat brought back the status quo in the province.
The Ukrainian institutions were reopened, where they had not been
completely destroyed by the Russian occupation. At the outbreak of the
war there had been established at Vienna a Society for the Liberation
of Ukraine by various refugees from Russia. This endeavored to keep
the Ukrainian question before the eyes of the Austrian authorities in
the hope that the Central Powers would create an independent Ukraine
out of any territory that might be detached from Russia. This was
broadened in 1915 to form a General Ukrainian Council to consider all
phases of the Ukrainian question and to oppose the activities of the
Poles of Galicia. Like the Polish Legions of Pilsudski, the Ukrainians
established the Sichovi Striltsi (The Riflemen of the Sich) and
organized two regiments, although the development of the Austro-German
policy prevented these from playing any important part in the war.
On November 23, 1916, the Emperor Francis Joseph gave orders to prepare
a decree establishing Galicia as a Polish state, with almost as much
independence as had been planned for the Kingdom of Poland, to be set
up by the Germans out of Polish territory taken from Russia. This
was a severe blow to the Ukrainians, for they had hoped that Galicia
would be divided and that the Ukrainian section would receive special
recognition. It was not to be, but the Ukrainians protested sharply
against the idea of adding the province of Kholm to the Polish lands.
Yet they became bitterly disillusioned, for they realized that even
during the strain of a War which was placing greater and greater
burdens upon all the citizens of the Dual Monarchy, the blighting hand
of the Hapsburgs was still working against them and preventing, as in
the past, any final settlement of the position of the province. The
activity of the Polish National Committee in the lands of the Entente
seemed to the authorities a greater menace than the domestic feeling
of the Ukrainian peasants and as these had been unable to get an
effective hearing throughout the world and were the object of a vicious
propaganda by Russia, it hardly seemed worthwhile to the government at
Vienna to give much thought to the already devastated province.
Thus the weary years of war dragged along and still nothing was done
to improve the condition of the Ukrainians or to satisfy in any degree
their legitimate aspirations. They were still as they had been in the
past--the forgotten members of the Hapsburg dominions. They could pay
taxes and serve in the army, but whenever there came any talk of a
readjustment of conditions in the Empire, they were overlooked. They
had won what they had through profiting by the fears of the government
as to Polish intentions but they were discarded as soon as a working
agreement was made between the government and the Polish aristocrats.
The Hapsburg Empire was in this pursuing its usual policy, for it was
a cardinal principle of the government of Francis Joseph to support
in every way the noble classes against all other elements of the
population, up to the point where they menaced the integrity of the
Empire and the delicate balance that had existed since the settlement
of 1867. The loss of the old Ukrainian aristocracy which had been
Polonized centuries earlier was now keenly felt by the people, for they
lacked those aristocratic spokesmen who could penetrate to the inner
circles of the Viennese court and plead their cause in a way that would
appeal to the Emperor. When Francis Joseph died and was succeeded by
his nephew, the Emperor Karl, at the end of 1916, it was too late to do
more than outline a new policy, but already the Empire was obviously
collapsing and the Ukrainians were almost openly looking forward to the
creation of their own independent state.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
_UKRAINIAN INDEPENDENCE_
In February 1917 the position of the Russian government became more
difficult. Rasputin had been murdered and an atmosphere of gloomy
foreboding spread over the entire nation. Unrest began to spread
and before any one realized what was happening, there broke out in
Petrograd the revolution.
This opened, by a strange coincidence, on February 25/March 10, the
anniversary of the death of Shevchenko. Under the enthusiasm of the
revolution, the ceremonies commemorating the great poet, which had
always been an occasion for tsarist repressive measures, were held on
a larger scale than ever before. On the next day, a regiment composed
largely of Ukrainian soldiers was one of the first to go over to the
Revolution as a mass and soon the glad tidings of the abdication of
the Tsar swept over the country. Of course it was received joyfully in
Ukraine but there was at first no clear idea of what this downfall of
the Romanovs was actually going to mean in practice.
The early days of the Revolution were a period of steadily increasing
confusion. Once the strong hand of the old regime had been removed,
there came the task of putting something in its place. A Provisional
Government was set up, first under the premiership of Prince Lvov and
later of Alexander Kerensky. It was the fond dream of these men and
their associates that they could maintain the unity of the country and
they even hoped to continue the war more effectively now that the dark
forces which were supposed to be working with the Germans had been
removed.
This was not the dream of large sections of the population. The
peasants saw in the Revolution the opportunity to divide the land and
to improve their material well-being. This had been their dream in 1905
and now it seemed as if they would be able to carry it out. But there
were in Russia also large numbers of minority races and these thought
of securing their practical independence or at least of bettering
their condition through some sort of a federalized Russia. Under the
changed conditions it seemed very possible that all those schemes of
federalization which had been put forward by the Society of Saints
Cyril and Methodius and later by such publicists as Drahomaniv might
have some chance of success.
As soon as the Revolution broke out, Prof. Hrushevsky left Moscow
and made his way to Kiev. There he got in touch with the Ukrainian
Progressive Organization, which had been a secret organization in
Russia working for Ukrainian independence, and with the various
socialist parties in Ukraine. There was set up without delay the
Ukrainian Central Council (Ukrainska Tsentralna Rada) which aimed
to crystalize Ukrainian interests and take over the necessary
administrative functions in Ukraine and Professor Hrushevsky was
elected President. At this period the Rada, or at least its majority,
were far more interested in forming themselves into a government
which would become part of a federal Russian republic than in full
independence.
In the meanwhile the chaos throughout Russia continued to increase
and the Provisional Government showed itself unable to master the
situation. The various Councils of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies
were meeting throughout the country and passing resolutions which cut
directly at the power of the Provisional Government. These Councils
represented all the various radical parties and were by no means in the
beginning under Bolshevik influence. Yet they reflected the various
currents of popular thought which ranged from desires to secure the
land for the peasants to definite local class aspirations. The prime
necessity for the Provisional Government was the creation of an armed
force that would be disciplined and obedient to it, but it was exactly
this that was most neglected.
Another important problem which was never sincerely tackled was that
of the various nationalities. All around the borders of the old Great
Russian territory, from Finland in the north to Central Asia on the
east, groups of earnest patriots, to whom the problem of nationality
was even more important than were the economic problems connected
with the land, were coming into existence. In the beginning they all
stressed the fact that the future Russia would have to become a federal
state and that the old idea of a monolithic Russia had passed with the
fall of the tsar. This the Great Russians refused to accept and the
Provisional Government was fighting a losing battle in its attempts to
hold all of those groups in line. Yet it held on stubbornly and made
no attempt to do more than interpose an ineffective veto on everything
that was suggested.
Events moved rapidly in Ukraine. The Central Council called for a
demonstration in Kiev on March 19/April 1 and declared that Ukrainian
autonomy should be set up without waiting for the approval of the
Provisional Government. Then followed another series of meetings during
the next weeks. A teachers’ convention was held on Easter day and then
on April 6–8 a Ukrainian National Convention was called for, in order
to broaden the government and prepare for elections to determine the
personnel of the new administration. It was attended by over nine
hundred delegates and at once arranged to admit to its membership
representatives of the various classes of the population: the army, the
peasants, labor, professional organizations, etc.
So far, so good. The early groups which started the movement had
represented all types of social thought and it seemed to some of the
leaders that the national question was the predominant one. At the
same time, the peasants were more interested in the changes that were
coming in the agrarian situation. This was an unconscious movement that
was growing by popular demand and it was not long before the leaders of
the Rada became convinced that they would have to reckon with this new
movement. In reality there were two great movements, each running its
own course but impinging upon the other at every point.
At the same time the Ukrainian soldiers in the army began to demand
that they be reorganized as Ukrainian regiments with their own
commanders, their own flag, and their own units. To enforce their
demands they held a military council in Kiev at which there were
representatives of approximately one million men on April 5/18 and a
month later there was held a still larger meeting at which appeared
delegates of 1,736,000 Ukrainian soldiers from all over the Russian
Empire. This was the more remarkable inasmuch as Alexander Kerensky,
the Minister of War of the Provisional Government, definitely forbade
its holding and gave orders that the delegates should not be allowed
to go to Kiev. However, by this time the army was paying less and less
attention to the Provisional Government, which could only threaten and
bluster without accomplishing anything constructive for the country.
At the same time the task of organizing a Ukrainian press was
overwhelming. There were almost no Ukrainian newspapers before the
Revolution and under the disturbed conditions, the task of founding and
developing them and of securing their circulation in the disordered
rural areas was almost insoluble, the more so as there were scattered
Russian groups and organizations throughout the entire country which
were bitterly opposed to the new efforts.
All through the spring there went on this agitation with the Ukrainian
army and the new regiments demanding that the Rada take more definite
action, and the Russian authorities both in Petrograd and in Kiev
complaining that already too much had been done. Yet at a Convention
of the Ukrainian Soldiers and Peasants held on June 2–10 there were
insistent demands that the Council arrange for a definite Ukrainian
autonomy. On June 10/23 the Council acted and issued the First
Universal which was read by Volodymyr Vynnychenko and concluded that
“From this day on, we ourselves will create our own life.”
By this act the Rada had definitely set forth its claims to be the
government of Ukraine and it created the Council of General Secretaries
with Vynnychenko acting as Prime Minister. Yet it is noticeable that
the great majority of the Council still thought in terms of Ukraine
as a state in a Russian federation. The news created a bombshell in
Petrograd and three of the socialist ministers, Kerensky, Tsereteli and
Tereshchenko, came down to Kiev for a conference with the Ukrainian
Council. This was on the eve of the last offensive of the old Russian
army and Kerensky and his friends were desirous of smoothing out
conditions in Ukraine before the offensive was launched. At the same
time, the more conservative members of the Provisional Government
objected even to these negotiations and as soon as word reached the
capital, they definitely resigned from the cabinet.
In these conferences it was expected that Ukraine would take over the
nine provinces that comprised the country and with this in view the
Council drew up a Statute or Constitution for the governing of the
country. They added to the Council representatives of the various
minorities in Ukraine and then sent the document to the Provisional
Government. Here it was badly received and when the conservative
members returned to the cabinet, they sent a series of Instructions
to the Council which cut Ukraine in half and worked to hamper its
activities.
The continuation of these tactics brought no profit to either the
Ukrainian Central Council or the Provisional Government. They served
only to weaken and embarrass the former and brought no benefit to
the latter, for during July the Provisional Government was faced by
a revolt of the Bolsheviks under Lenin in Petrograd. Although this
was suppressed, it had its own not inconsiderable part in the general
breakdown of administration.
The six months between the Revolution and the accession to power
of the Bolsheviks was a confused and confusing period. On the one
hand the steadily weakening power of the Provisional Government was
carrying down with it the old Russia, but the leaders declined to
see this and loved to imagine that the new ideals of democracy would
ultimately straighten out all the difficulties. The Central Council was
endeavoring to go along with the Provisional Government and at the same
time to secure the rights of Ukraine. Along with this, there was a vast
majority of the peasants who were far more concerned with the solution
of the agrarian problem than they were in matters of general policy and
they envisaged freedom as meaning that there would be no government of
any kind, no taxes, and no formal organization.
This dubious situation could not continue indefinitely. Sooner or later
one side or the other would have to yield and the Council was only
weakening its own position and dignity by continuing negotiations. Yet
no one wanted to take the initiative in any decisive action.