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tween and the policy of reaction in Galicia was implemented by a Pol-
ish count, Agenor Goluchowski, who placed local Polish nobles in key posts in
the Austrian administration.
42
Because the revolution had set Polish gentry
and Ukrainian peasants against each other, and because its aftermath revealed
the limits of Austrian support, after leading Greek Catholics were drawn
to Russia. The appeal of Russia peaked around , when Vienna granted in-
formal autonomy to Galicia on terms favorable to the Polish aristocracy. Of
course, Greek Catholic Russophiles after were never simple “Russians,”
any more than their Polonophone predecessors before had been simple
“Poles.” Russophiles in Galicia argued that contemporary Russian had been
created by scholars from Ukraine in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
and could therefore serve as the literary language of all East Slavs.
43
They re-
garded their eastern Galicia as a member of a larger family of East Slavic na-
tions.
Since the Uniate (Greek Catholic) Church had been totally removed from
the Russian empire in , Galician priests who flirted with the Russian em-
pire were of necessity flirting with Orthodoxy. Vienna supported the Greek
Catholic Church as part of a Catholic bulwark of its power in its borderlands
with Russia. In , a leading Russophile persuaded a village of Greek Catho-
lics to petition Austrian authorities for permission to convert to Orthodoxy.
“Ukrainophiles,” advocates of the use of the local vernacular and the distinct-
ness of local people from Russians, gained more support from Vienna. The Vat-
ican also treated Ukrainophilia as a lesser evil than Russophilia, and favored
Ukrainophile over Russophile priests. A similar shift flowed from the secular
politics of the s. After the Ukrainian representation in the Austrian Reich-
srat (parliament) dropped from seventeen to three after the elections,
much of he Greek Catholic elite saw the sense of reaching out to the peasantry.
Some of them drew the further conclusion that the local vernacular, the Ukrai-
nian language, was the best means to this end. In , electoral success demon-
strated the political utility of the Ukrainian language.
44
Within the shell of nineteenth-century Austria, Greek Catholic priests
shifted from the use of Polish as the vehicle of high culture in Galicia (roughly
–), to an identification with Russia which allowed them to distance
themselves from the Poles (roughly –), and then finally to modern ap-
peals on behalf of a “Ukrainian nation” divided between Austria and Russia (af-
ter ). The center of their concerns shifted from the religious practice of lo-
cal Greek Catholics, to the social condition of the peasant masses, to national
justice for millions of “Ukrainians.” By the time Andrei Sheptyts’kyi was
The Embattled Ukrainian Borderland
124
named metropolitan of Galicia in , his idea of Greek Catholicism as a na-
tional church was plausible. Leo Sheptyts’kyi had proposed to Empress Maria
Theresa that Greek Catholicism be accorded equal status with Roman Catholi-
cism in Austria; his illustrious descendant Andrei proposed that a Ukrainian
Greek Catholic Church would confer upon his flock of three million equal na-
tional status with Roman Catholic Poles. In the last quarter of the nineteenth
century, the Greek Catholic Church opened hundreds of schools, most of them
teaching in the vernacular (Ukrainian). These schools were increasingly na-
tional in their orientation.
45
As metropolitan, Sheptyts’kyi democratized the
Church itself.
GALICIA: UKRAINE (CIRCA 1900)
Galician Ukrainophilia was thus structurally similar to, if more modest than,
the Russophilia it supplanted. Both Russophilia and Ukrainophilia indulged in
linguistic dreams of unity. Russophiles used a bizarre mixture of Galician di-
Early Modern Ukraine
125
Fig. . Andrei Sheptyts’kyi ( –
), Greek Catholic metropolitan.
Sheptyts’kyi did much to connect
Greek Catholic faith and Ukrainian
politics in Galicia. The label
“nationalist” still seems not to fit
a man who had Polish brothers
and sheltered Jews from the
Final Solution.
The Embattled Ukrainian Borderland
126
Fig. . St. George’s Cathedral, Lwów. Lwów was a seat of three separate Catholic rites:
Greek, Roman, and Armenian. This cathedral was Sheptyts’kyi’s seat as Greek Catholic
metropolitan of Galicia.
alects, Church Slavonic, and elements of literary Russian; Ukrainophiles wished
to treat Galician dialects as a Ukrainian language, with little knowledge of di-
alects further east. Both Ukrainophilia and Russophilia were territorially ambi-
tious. Galician Ukrainophiles and Galician Russophiles alike used an unknown
but massive group of Slavs to the east to bolster confidence and solidify claims.
These similarities help us to see how many individuals could shift from Rus-
sophilia to Ukrainophilia without enduring a sense of contradiction.
The Ukrainophile orientation had an elective affinity to other ambitious and
idealistic projects of Slavic nationalities under Austrian rule. The nineteenth-
century shifts in national orientation in Galicia were, for example, no more strik-
ing than those of Bohemia.
46
Just as Czechs dreamed of enlisting the Russian
empire and the rising Balkan nations as counterweights to German power, so
Galician Ukrainians imagined their eastern neighbors as an answer to local Pol-
ish rule. Like the Czechoslovak (and Yugoslav) ideas, the Ukrainian idea was a
tempered Pan-Slavism: a Pan-Slavism close enough to nationalism to win local
support, and close enough to realism to nurture some hope of eventual success.
The Ukrainian idea bore a family resemblance to the contemporary aspira-
tions of some Poles in Austria to turn Galicia into a “Polish Piedmont” which
would eventually unify the rest of the partitioned Polish nation. The Italian
kingdom of Piedmont, of course, began the unification of Italy (more or less
complete in ), which preceded the unification of Germany (complete in
). A difference between Poles and Ukrainians in Galicia was that Poland
was seen by everyone as a historical nation, like Germany and Italy, with a tra-
dition of statehood.
47
Poles aspired to recreate the Commonwealth as it existed
in the increasingly warped mirror of their increasingly modern nationalist imag-
inations; Ukrainians sought to break the looking glass, melt the fragments, shape
something new.
Andrei Sheptyts’kyi’s Polish origins are emblematic of the novelty of the
Ukrainian idea; his continued presence in Polish life reminds us of the impor-
tance of the Poles in the Ukrainian idea’s crystallization at the end of the nine-
teenth century. Poles were for Ukrainian activists models, rulers, and rivals.
Poles were models in that the Polish nation seemed to have great autonomy
within Austria. Poles were rulers in that this autonomy conferred real power
upon Polish aristocrats: more than percent of high administrative posts in
Galicia were held by Poles. Poles were rivals in that Polish political forces keyed
to modern nationalism, such as the National Democrats, sought to spread Pol-
ish culture as national culture throughout Galicia. This left Ukrainian activists
confronting not only government by Poles, but a national movement deter-
Early Modern Ukraine
127
mined to create a Polish civil society and (eventually) a Polish national state in
Galicia. In fact, loyal Polish aristocrats and the Polish nationalists were them-
selves in opposing camps, and took different stances on a number of issues, in-
cluding the Ukrainian question.
The early s found Polish officials in Galicia executors of a general Aus-
trian policy favoring the Ukrainophile over the Russophile orientation. A com-
mittee composed of Polish noblemen decided to standardize the Ukrainian lan-
guage according to the Ukrainian vernacular orthography rather than the various
systems favored by the Russophiles. Polish gentry also dominated the commit-
tee that filled the new chair of East European history in Lwów with Mykhailo
Hrushevs’kyi (–), a Russian subject. Austrian imperial policies as exe-
cuted by loyal Austrian Poles in Lwów/Lemberg/L’viv established a link to
Kijów/Kiev/Kyiv. In Kyiv, the main problem for Ukrainians was the Russian
censor, and many Ukrainophiles were Poles. Hrushevs’kyi, the student of a
Ukrainian historian of Polish origins, Volodymyr Antonovych, was surprised
to find that Poles in Galicia were hostile to the Ukrainian cause.
48
His appoint-
ment, the result of a brief political conjuncture in Galicia, had lasting national
consequences for all Ukraine. Hrushevs’kyi’s arrival in L’viv from Kyiv in
provided intellectual support to the Ukrainophile orientation in Galicia. His
lectures in the Ukrainian language lent it credibility as a means of scholarship
and enlightenment.
The first volume of his History of Ukraine-Rus’, the most important text in
the construction of a Ukrainian historical narrative, followed in . Its most
substantial innovation was the elaboration of a coherent history of Ukraine, be-
ginning with Kyivan Rus’. The methodology that allowed this achievement
drew from Kyivan populism: the people, along with the polities, were presented
as actors in history. In this way a conjuncture of imperial politics brought to
L’viv a historical vision that could resist all imperial claims. By refuting the Rus-
sian historiographical claim that Moscow had inherited ancient Kyivan tradi-
tions, Hrushevs’kyi provided the basis for a political challenge to the Russian
claim to all Ukraine. By treating the common people as part of history, Hru-
shevs’kyi undermined the traditional distinction between “historical” and “un-
historical nations,” the basis for the Polish claim to Galicia. In the nineteenth
century, nations were thought to be “historical” if their elites could be associ-
ated with a state tradition. Once history was redefined to include the people,
that fact that Galicia had been a Polish crownland, or that Ukrainian elites had
accepted Polish civilization, was no longer dispositive.
49
Hrushevs’kyi was a
novice in Galician politics, but implications of his work for the local Ukraino-
The Embattled Ukrainian Borderland
128
phile cause were immediately apparent. Galician Ukrainian activists already
knew that if the people were treated as constitutive of the nation, eastern Gali-
cia was a Ukrainian land. The Russian imperial census, published in , al-
lowed Galicians to imagine a far larger Ukraine to their east.
Although Austrian imperial concessions of the early s directly and indi-
rectly strengthened the Ukrainophile orientation, Ukrainian activists came to
see them as inadequate. Especially after the scandalous electoral manipulations
of and , they were thinking increasingly in national terms, and na-
tional status demands equality with rivals. As we have seen, Ukrainian activists
wished for what Polish officials exercised (power) as well as what Polish na-
tionalists sought (a mass nation). In other words, Ukrainian activists matched
their demands to what they saw as Polish successes in Galicia and their goals to
those of Polish nationalists. Immediate Ukrainian demands to Vienna were a
partition of Galicia and Ukrainian autonomy in the eastern part; proportional
representation in the Galician and Austrian parliaments; and the Ukrainiza-
tion of Lwów University. The long-term goals were the creation of a Ukrainian
nation and the establishment of a Ukrainian state with “ethnic” borders.
50
These harder edges of the Ukrainian idea came from a new generation of secu-
lar activists, no longer only Greek Catholic priests but their sons or daughters,
Early Modern Ukraine
129
Fig. . Mykhailo Hrushevs’kyi
(–), historian. His scheme of
East European history, inspirational
in Ukraine, has not yet been generally
assimilated by scholars.
sometimes even the children of the Ukrainian peasantry educated in post-
Austria.
Whereas Sheptyts’kyi represents the transformations of old elites (Greek Cath-
olic clergy and Polish gentry), the poet Ivan Franko (–) is taken to rep-
resent a new kind of secular intelligentsia arising from the Ukrainian soil. His
pedigree reminds us, however, that the political idea of ethnic nationalism was
conceived by elites before it was accepted by peasants: and that the elites often
failed to meet “ethnic” definitions of nationhood themselves. Franko’s father
was a village blacksmith, and of German origin; his mother was of petty Polish
noble origin. In he was sent to study in a German-language school of the
Basilians, a Greek Catholic order concerned to preserve the connection of their
church with the Latin West. More important than his childhood or “ethnic”
origins were his confrontations with Polish culture, Russian politics, and Euro-
pean ideologies in the final quarter of the nineteenth century. In he met
the historian Mykhailo Drahomanov (–), an exile from Russian Ukraine
who had just lost his professorship in Kyiv. Drahomanov persuaded young in-
tellectuals such as Franko that their Russophilia should be sublimated into
brotherhood with the Ukrainian people. In the s, thanks to a public trial
and writings in Polish, Franko became a famous socialist in L’viv/Lwów. In
he co-founded a peasant Radical Party oriented toward the socialist trans-
formation of Galicia, and its separation into eastern (Ukrainian) and western
(Polish) districts. In he broke loudly with Polish politics (writing in Ger-
man) and with Ukrainian politics (writing in Polish). Already a friend of Hru-
shevs’kyi, Franko now became his protégé. On Christmas Eve, , the two
men and the other leaders of a new National Democratic party published an
appeal to all classes of Ukrainian society for the general endeavor of national
sovereignty. While Franko continued to believe that an elite must organize pol-
itics, his views of the ideas that should guide elites had undergone an important
change.
51
By , Franko was an advocate of Ukrainian independence within what he
and others of his generation called “ethnographic” borders. Like Franko, many
of the leading Galician Ukrainian national activists in had been socialists
ten years before. This was exceedingly common in the Europe of the day, not
least in Poland. (The founder of Polish National Democracy, Roman Dmow-
ski; its youth organizer, Zygmunt Balicki; and its social theorist, Stanislaw Grab-
ski, had all been socialists in their youth.) The general connection between the
seemingly contradictory ideas of socialism and nationalism is that of idealistic
faith in the yet untried people; the particular impulse that pushed Ukrainian
The Embattled Ukrainian Borderland
130
activists from socialism to nationalism was real competition with the Poles.
Ukrainians influenced by Drahomanov believed that Ukrainian socialism would
arise from the Ukrainian people, Polish socialism from the Polish people, and
so on. This version of the socialist faith in the masses led inevitably to the ques-
tion as to just who the masses were. In this way the invention of Ukrainian and
Polish “ethnic groups” was no stranger than, and indeed flowed logically from,
the prediction that the Ukrainian and Polish masses would lead a revolution.
Since the Ukrainian people was constituted almost entirely of peasants, it was
easy to conflate the revolutionary idea of the people with the new scientific idea
of an “ethnic group.” The Russian imperial census, which inquired about
language, created the mental map of a great land of ethnic Ukrainians to Gali-
cia’s east. The idea of a Ukrainian “ethnic group” also provided a natural de-
fense against Polish socialists who presumed that socialism would mean a re-
vival of the old Commonwealth, and against Polish nationalists who based
their claim to Galicia on culture rather than numbers.
52
In Galicia, these conclusions of the secular intelligentsia were reached by
, just as Sheptyts’kyi began to transform the Greek Catholic Church into a
democratic instrument of Ukrainian national revival. Social, religious, and lin-
guistic differences of early modern origin were now recast in modern national
terms by both radicals and churchmen. The peasantry was not part of the na-
tion in the early modern Commonwealth; the definition of a modern Ukrai-
nian peasant nation marked the Pole as exploiter and alien. The Greek Catholic
Church was a survival of the early modern Commonwealth; it became a major
instrument in the creation of a modern Ukrainian nation. Roman Catholicism,
at the same time, came to signify Polish nationality as well as religious belief and
practice. Much of the vocabulary of Ukrainian literature arose from Ukraine’s
early modern contact with Poland, but the codified vernacular was seen by all
as a Ukrainian national language. It followed that Polish was no longer the lan-
guage of cultural exchange, and it was demoted to the status of one national
language among many.
To see the difference between the modern definitions triumphant in Galicia
and the historical debates that continued in Lithuania, let us return for a mo-
ment to the legacy of the Romantic poet Mickiewicz. In , Mickiewicz pro-
vided terms of reference common to Ukrainians and Poles, just as he did for
Lithuanians, Belarusians, and Poles. For example, some Ukrainian nationalists
unsure of Sheptyts’kyi’s reliability and conviction called him a “Wallenrod.”
The reference is to the Mickiewiczean hero who claims to be of one nationality,
Early Modern Ukraine
131
then betrays his fellows in the name of another. Some Ukrainians feared that
Sheptyts’kyi, having become the head of the local Greek Catholic Church,
would turn out to be a Pole. In Lithuania, “Wallenrod” was a positive example
for conspirators. In Ukraine, a “Wallenrod” was a traitor. Moreover, the Mick-
iewiczean idea of a “Wallenrod” most pertinent to Ukrainian-Polish relations
in is importantly different from the Mickiewiczean “Fatherland” central
to Polish-Lithuanian-Belarusian contests. The “Fatherland” presumes complex
loyalties; “Wallenrod” (on this interpretation) presumes a national essence.
53
Franko’s personal attitude to Mickiewicz makes this point more starkly.
Franko’s turn away from Polish culture, and rejection of cooperation with
Poles, was expressed in his denunciation of Mickiewicz as a “Poet of Treason.”
Rather than treating Mickiewicz as part of a shared canon from which exem-
plars could be drawn, Franko cast the poet as a source of Polish nationalism.
This was to accept the terms of Polish integral nationalism, that the nation
comes from below, by rejecting of one of its idols, the nationalized Mickiewicz
of Polish National Democracy. It was also to reject historical conversations still
ongoing in old Lithuania. In Lithuania, Mickiewicz stood for the vitality of an-
cient institutions, portrayed in Konrad Wallenrod and elsewhere. As we have
seen, the emerging Lithuanian myth portrayed as the end of Lithuanian
culture. Lithuanian statehood, however, survived until , and important
Lithuanian institutions lasted well into the nineteenth century. The
Lublin Union did not create political institutions to secure Ukraine within the
Commonwealth. By and large, Lithuanian activists in accepted the need
to prove that theirs was a historical nation, that their modern peasant constit-
uents inherited a historical polity. By intellectual demonstrations, they trans-
formed Mickiewicz’s “Lithuania! My Fatherland!” into Kudirka’s folkish “Lith-
uania! Our Fatherland!” Ukrainian activists went a step further, and treated the
people themselves as the object of history. This resolved tensions, and opened
wide vistas. If Ukraine was its people, a Ukrainian state should extend wherever
they were found.
54
The Embattled Ukrainian Borderland
132
Chapter 7 Galicia and Volhynia
at the Margin (1914–1939)
133
Before the First World War, it appeared that the Ukrainian cause in
Austrian Galicia had greater hope for success than the Lithuanian
cause in the Russian empire. Whereas there were fewer than two mil-
lion speakers of Lithuanian, the Ukrainian “ethnic group” was
counted in the tens of millions. Unlike Lithuanians in the Northwest
Territory of the Russian empire, Ukrainians in Austrian Galicia voted
in parliamentary elections, formed legal political associations, and
published legally in their native language. Democratic politics crystal-
lized modern national identifications within the Habsburg domains,
and manhood suffrage placed a powerful tool in the hands of advo-
cates of peasant nations such as Ukraine. The idea that “ethnicity” was
a better argument than “tradition” was confirmed as democratic prac-
tice corroded the traditional position of the Galician Polish gentry.
Secular elites had begun to propose Ukrainian national indepen-
dence, as churchmen transformed the Greek Catholic Church into a
national institution. During the First World War, in which Austria
fought Russia, Vienna persecuted Galicians it regarded as pro-Rus-
sian, indirectly aiding the Ukrainian cause. Galician Ukrainian politi-