Lost Kingdom

by Serhii Plokhy

  The Polish-run universities and schools turned out to be something more than institutions of general education. They also popularized Polish culture and spread anti-imperial ideas, as became obvious in 1830, when the University of Vilnius became a recruiting ground for the Polish insurrection. In May 1832, the imperial authorities closed the university (it would not reopen until the fall of the Romanov dynasty) and dissolved the Vilnius educational district. But shutdowns and prohibitions could take the empire only so far. The void left by the closure of the Polish institutions had to be filled with imperial ones. In November 1833, Nicholas I approved Sergei Uvarov’s proposal to open a new university in the city of Kyiv, which Pushkin had feared a few years earlier might fall into Polish hands. In fact, if one did not count the Kyivan Cave Monastery and Orthodox churches, the city was already dominated by Polish culture. Visitors heard more Polish spoken in the streets of Kyiv than Russian or Ukrainian. In Kyiv province there were 43,000 Polish nobles as against slightly more than 1,000 Russian ones, and it was Poles who defined the public face of Kyiv.

  The first attempt to open a Russian university in Kyiv was made in 1805, when Petro Zavadovsky sought to convince the city’s metropolitan to help him turn the Kyivan Academy into a university. The minister did not get much support from the hierarch. Also nonsupportive were the Polish nobles, the only group with enough money to fund the institution. One of the best Polish educators of the period, Tadeusz Czacki, was working hard to obtain donations from the nobility for a Polish institution of higher learning. To avoid competition with Kyiv, he called it a gymnasium rather than a university and proposed to open it in the Volhynian town of Kremianets. Backed by the curator of the district of Volhynia, Adam Czartoryski, and donations from Polish nobles, Czacki succeeded in opening the Kremianets school, which became a lyceum in 1819. The lyceum, a hotbed of insurgency during the uprising of 1830, was swiftly closed by the authorities. Kyiv’s time had come. The lyceum’s library, which had close to 35,000 volumes, its chemical laboratory, and its botanical garden were shipped to Kyiv for the new university. Some of the professors also came along.

  The story of the Polish lyceum was effectively over, while that of the Russian university in Kyiv was about to begin. It was named after St. Volodymyr, the tenth-century prince who was regarded as the founder of the Russian state and its first Orthodox ruler. The opening took place on July 15, 1834, St. Volodymyr’s Day according to the Orthodox calendar. In symbolic terms, the imperial authorities were reclaiming Volodymyr’s city. In his decree on the opening of the university, Nicholas I called Kyiv “precious to all Russia, the cradle of the holy faith of our ancestors and first witness of their civic individuality.” The minister of education, Count Uvarov, dubbed the university a “mental fortress.” There was no doubt whom it was supposed to protect, and who the enemy was. According to the minister, the new university was “to smooth over, as much as possible, the sharp characteristics whereby Polish youth is distinguished from the Russian, and particularly to suppress the idea of a separate nationality among them, to bring them closer and closer to Russian ideas and customs, to imbue them with the common spirit of the Russian people.”

  The first rector of the university was Mykhailo Maksymovych, a native of the former Hetmanate. He came to Kyiv from Moscow University, where he had been a professor of botany. A man of many talents, at Uvarov’s personal request he now took on the much more politically important position of professor of Russian philology. Maksymovych’s appointment exemplified the strategy chosen by St. Petersburg to Russify the educational system in the newly annexed territories. The foot soldiers of the new policy—and, indeed, some of their field commanders—were cadres from the former Hetmanate. This seemed an obvious choice: they knew the local language, culture, and conditions, and they were as anti-Polish as one could imagine at the time.

  In time, however, the government’s reliance on natives of the Hetmanate would become problematic. By the late 1840s, the inhabitants of that region would acquire a national agenda of their own, presenting an unexpected challenge to the empire. For the time being, however, the Ukrainians from the former Hetmanate did their best to fight Polish influences.

  Kyiv, with its new university, became a construction site of the new imperial Russian identity. Pilgrimages of Russian intellectuals and officials to that city had begun in the early nineteenth century, with travelers looking for the origins of Russian history as presented in the Rus’ chronicles. By the 1820s, little remained of Kyiv’s princely past except a few churches, so enthusiasts undertook archeological digs to uncover the city’s lost heritage. In 1832–1833, the local amateur archeologist Kondratii Lokhvitsky conducted excavations of Kyiv’s Golden Gate—the main entrance to the city, built by Prince Yaroslav the Wise in the first half of the eleventh century in an attempt to emulate the Golden Gates of Constantinople. The excavations were visited by Emperor Nicholas I himself, who gave Lokhvitsky an award for his work and provided funds for more excavations.

  At that time, Kyiv was a predominantly Polish and Jewish city. Its Russification was literally proceeding from below as ancient ruins, accurately or inaccurately dated to princely times, emerged from beneath the surface of the earth. The first rector of Kyiv University, Mykhailo Maksymovych, became among other things a guide to the world of “Russian antiquities” for scores of prominent guests, starting with Nikolai Gogol (Mykola Hohol’) and the professor of Russian history at Moscow University, Mikhail Pogodin, and ending with the future tsar Alexander II, who was accompanied by his tutor, Vasilii Zhukovsky, Russia’s best-known poet of the pre-Pushkin era.

  In 1853, the Kyiv authorities celebrated a special event in the history of their city—the unveiling of a monument to Prince Volodymyr. This was the culmination of a project that had taken twenty years: the first proposal to erect the statue had been submitted to the tsar by the governor general of Kyiv back in 1833. It was unveiled on the same day as the opening of a chain-link bridge across the Dnieper connecting the city’s Left Bank with its rebellious Right Bank. By that time, Kyiv already had a special institution charged with the task of substantiating Russia’s claim to the entire Right Bank of Ukraine. The Archeographic Commission, established in 1843 under the supervision of the governor general, went on two years later to issue its first collection of documents from local depositories that were intended to demonstrate the inalienably Russian identity of the region. In decades to come, it would issue hundreds of volumes of valuable sources that ultimately supported local inhabitants’ claims to an identity distinct from the Russian.

  WITH THE POLISH UPRISING CRUSHED, THE EMPIRE ONCE AGAIN had to address the question of the Uniate Church, which numbered 1.5 million followers, mainly in territories that had been annexed to the Russian Empire after the third partition of Poland. Most of the Uniates who lived on lands taken over in the second partition had been converted to Orthodoxy during the time of Catherine II.

  When leaders of the Polish nobility in the western provinces issued a call to arms in 1830 and 1831, it was met with understanding and even enthusiasm by many Uniate priests, with monastics offering particularly strong support. According to government estimates, close to two-thirds of those belonging to the Uniate Order of St. Basil in the Lithuanian province were Roman Catholics. Among those who fully supported the insurrection were the Basilian monks of the Pochaiv Monastery in Volhynia—a former stronghold of Orthodoxy that had converted to the Union in the early eighteenth century. The monastery’s printing shop published an appeal to the inhabitants of Ukraine, asking them to join the uprising. Not only did the monks welcome a Polish military unit to the monastery in April 1831, but eight of them joined the rebels. They rode on horseback in monastic garb, swords at their side, calling on the crowds to join the fight for the fatherland. Forty-five members of the monastery joined the insurgent ranks. The loyalty of the Uniate peasants was clearly at stake, and the government acted without delay. In September 1831, at the request of the military and civil authorit
ies, Nicholas I signed a decree dissolving the Uniate monastery in Pochaiv. Its buildings were turned over to the Orthodox Church, which opened its own monastery there. Altogether, about half the ninety-five Uniate monasteries that had existed in the empire before 1830 were shut down in the wake of the Polish uprising.

  Nicholas I also accelerated his earlier plans to convert the entire Uniate population to Orthodoxy by devising an institutional unification of Orthodox and Uniate churches. Like many members of the Russian imperial elite, he considered the Uniate Ukrainian and Belarusian peasants to be quintessential Russians who had been forced to abandon their native Orthodox faith by Polish pressure and intrigue, which now endangered their national identity. While stationed with his military unit in the western provinces of the empire before his ascension to the throne, the future tsar had been struck by the poverty of the Uniate priests and their churches. Lacking support from the state or from Catholic landowners, some Uniate clergymen had sought ways of “returning” the Uniates to the Orthodox Church even before the Polish uprising. Nicholas found a perfect candidate to achieve that goal in the twenty-nine-year-old Iosif Semashko, a Uniate priest and member of the Spiritual College in St. Petersburg, an institution charged with supervising the activities of the Roman Catholic and Uniate churches in the empire.

  Semashko, a native of Right-Bank Ukraine, was born in 1798, a few years after the region came under Russian control as a result of the second partition of Poland. His father was a Uniate priest who had refused to accept Orthodoxy and lost his parish. As a child, the young Semashko more often attended Orthodox services in his native village than Roman Catholic ones farther away, as there were few Uniate churches remaining in his neighborhood. A talented youth, he was first sent to study at a school in the town of Nemyriv in Podolia and then at the joint Roman Catholic–Uniate seminary in Vilnius University. Both institutions were centers of Polish education and culture under the patronage of the inspector of the Vilnius educational district, Adam Czartoryski. The young Semashko had to master Polish and later remembered the privileged status of the sons of the Polish nobility at the Nemyriv school and the atmosphere of Polish patriotism and anti-Russian sentiment in Vilnius, where his reading of a Russian journal with a fellow student was regarded as an act of national treason.

  But it was not until Semashko was sent to serve as an officer of the Spiritual College in St. Petersburg that he decided to link his future with the Orthodox Church. He was impressed by the grandeur of the imperial capital and the richness of St. Petersburg’s Orthodox churches, but appalled by the patronizing attitude of the Roman Catholic clergy toward Uniates. Compelled to choose either a Polish or a Russian identity (he saw no other option), Semashko decided that he was a Russian and, as such, had to belong to the Russian church. To achieve that, he had to make his Uniate Church Russian, which meant Orthodox.

  “Immeasurable Russia, bound by one faith and one language, directed by a single will toward a blessed goal, became for me a great attractive fatherland. I considered it my sacred duty to serve it and promote its welfare,” remembered Semashko later. In 1827, he prepared a memorandum for the government outlining his plan for the gradual conversion of the Uniates to Orthodoxy, which caught the emperor’s eye and won his full approval.

  Semashko’s plan was in many ways a continuation of the official policy toward Uniates during the liberal rule of Alexander I. The forcible conversion of Uniates to Orthodoxy that had marked the rule of Catherine II was no longer practiced. The change of policy was due not only to the tsar’s ideological preference for toleration but also to the failure of the pressure applied to the Uniates to yield the desired result. Indeed, it had produced an unwanted result: rather than becoming Orthodox, some 200,000 Uniate peasants had joined the Roman Catholic Church in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In 1805, on Alexander’s orders, a special Uniate department was created within the Spiritual College, which had previously overseen the activities of Roman Catholics only. The Uniate metropolitan welcomed this official recognition of his church and, with government support, embarked on an effort to free the Uniate liturgy from Latin borrowings and influences.

  Semashko, however, wanted much more than just to stop the conversion of Uniates to Roman Catholicism. In preparation for the unification of the Uniate and Orthodox churches, he suggested the establishment of a Uniate Spiritual College separate from the Catholic one, as well as a Uniate seminary to train Uniate priests in an Orthodox spirit, thereby preparing cadres for future unification. The Uniate Basilian monastic order, which Semashko considered the main instrument of Latin and Polish influence in the region, was to be subordinated to the Uniate bishops in order to prevent Roman Catholics from joining the order. In April 1828, Nicholas I issued a decree that closely followed Semashko’s recommendations. Semashko himself was consecrated a Uniate bishop in the following year and put in charge of one of the two Uniate eparchies remaining in the empire.

  The Polish uprising brought the Uniate question closer to the center of the government’s concerns and, for the first time, made it the object of public attention and debate. Semashko felt that he had to speed up the realization of his original plan. In 1832, Nicholas I approved Semashko’s idea of subordinating the Uniate College, now independent from that of the Catholics, to the Orthodox Synod, but that measure was not realized. The Orthodox authorities, backed by public opinion, made it a priority to convert individual Uniate parishes rather than the entire Uniate Church to their faith. Disheartened, Semashko requested permission to convert to Orthodoxy himself, but he was prevented from doing so by the Orthodox hierarchs, who now promised to assist him in his efforts to prepare the ground for the future conversion of the entire church.

  Semashko redoubled his efforts. His promotion of the “Orthodoxization” of Uniate parishes went hand in hand with their cultural Russification. He would later assert that he had been guided by one thought: “how to turn Uniates into born-again Russian Orthodox.” Semashko busied himself convincing priests to erect an Orthodox-style iconostasis—a high screen or wall of icons separating the nave from the sanctuary—in Uniate churches that had eliminated them under Catholic influence, replacing old Uniate service books with Russian ones, and encouraging Uniate priests to grow beards, as was customary among their Orthodox counterparts. The use of Russian service books also meant introducing the Russian language into spheres where it had not previously been present. It was an uphill battle, as the priests were much more comfortable with Polish, the language in which they corresponded with Semashko. He himself was mortified by what he considered his inadequate mastery of Russian, even though he regarded himself as more Russian than many native speakers of that language.

  Semashko also conducted a campaign of anti-Polish propaganda among his priests, trying to turn their Ruthenian (Ukrainian and Belarusian) identity into a Russian one. “In order to warm the hearts of the Uniate clergy with the Russian spirit, every possible opportunity was taken to revive the memory of their origins, the Polish repressions that they had suffered, and the paternal concern of the Russian government for their welfare,” wrote Semashko in 1837. He thought his efforts were bringing some results: “The previously alien notion of taking pride in the Russian name and heritage,” he wrote, “is now treasured by a very considerable portion of the clergy subordinate to me.”

  Generally speaking, however, Semashko felt overwhelmed by the difficulties that his project encountered. The Orthodox authorities were suspicious of him as someone who opposed direct conversions and was trying to build up the Uniate Church, while the Roman Catholic clergy regarded him as their sworn enemy. More importantly, the Uniate priests whom Semashko was trying to bring back to their “Russian” roots, even if they sympathized with him, were caught between the Roman Catholic landowners, who controlled resources in the village, and the conservative peasants, who wanted no change at all. The one power Semashko had was that of appointing Uniate priests to their parishes and removing those whom he consider
ed opponents of his policy, thereby denying income to the malcontents and their families. He used that power extensively, working together with the civil authorities and the police to crush resistance among the Uniate clergy. He was a zealot who apparently had no regrets or doubts about what he was doing, and he finally obtained the full support of the authorities.

  By the mid-1830s, Nicholas I and his government had become more serious than ever in their efforts to eliminate the Uniate Church. In 1835, Semashko was invited to join a secret government committee charged with bringing about unification. Two years later, Semashko’s old idea of subordinating the Uniate hierarchy to the Orthodox Synod, which the tsar had approved in 1832, was finally implemented. Two deaths—that of an elderly Uniate metropolitan, Iosafat Bulhak, and that of a bishop who had opposed unification—resulted in Semashko being put in charge of church administration, opening the way for the realization of his old dream of the religious reunification of the Russian nation.