The government responded by firing at the demonstrators. Bad news was coming from the Far East, where the army of the mighty Russian Empire was losing the war with tiny Japan: on January 2, Russian troops had left Port Arthur. Revolutionaries were becoming bolder, and the demonstration before the tsar’s palace was taken as proof of that. The decision was made to show strength and resolve by using the army to disperse the demonstrators and stop the revolution that they were thought to be demanding. As the soldiers began to shoot, dozens of people were killed and hundreds wounded. The event, which became known as “Bloody Sunday,” shattered the highly idealized relations between the tsar and his people—the leader of the demonstration, Father Gapon, would call the tsar a beast and cry for vengeance. The events of January 9, 1905, in St. Petersburg launched the first Russian Revolution.
In the following days the St. Petersburg workers, already on strike, were joined by workers all over the empire. The peasants followed suit, refusing to pay their debts to the state and the landowners and rising in revolt. A mutiny on the battleship Potemkin in the summer of 1905 carried the wave of disturbances into the army and navy. As early as February 1905, Nicholas ordered his interior minister to prepare a convocation of the Duma—the precursor of the first Russian parliament—which was to be given not legislative but advisory functions. Elections to the Duma were announced in August. But society remained dissatisfied, and the disturbances continued. On October 17, 1905, in the midst of an all-empire workers’ strike, Nicholas issued a manifesto granting his subjects basic civil rights, introducing universal male suffrage, giving the Duma legislative powers, and pledging that no new law would be adopted without the Duma’s consent.
The Russian Empire was launched on a new era of mass politics that saw workers’ rebellions, peasant revolts, military mutinies, and the birth of parliamentarism, which challenged the absolute power of the tsars. The regime managed to survive the revolutionary upheaval but had to change its modus operandi, looking for new sources of legitimacy and support. Nowhere was that more obvious than in the sphere of nationality policy, where the imperial throne required the ideological backing of Russian nationalism.
THE REVOLUTION THAT BEGAN WITH WORKERS’ DEMONSTRATIONS and strikes awakened the leaders of non-Russian political parties throughout the empire. As always, the Poles were in the lead. In the former Kingdom of Poland, which had become one of the main industrial hubs of the empire in the decades leading up to the revolution, workers’ strikes were accompanied by the destruction of imperial symbols. The workers were followed by the students, who went on a prolonged strike, demanding the return of Polish-language education in the former kingdom.
The conservative Polish elites wanted equality—in particular, the introduction of local and municipal self-government—which had long been instituted in other parts of the empire but not in Polish-dominated areas, where the imperial government did not trust the upper social strata. The more radical leaders insisted on broad autonomy for the former Kingdom of Poland. That was the program of the Polish National Democrats, led by Roman Dmowski. His main political rival, the head of the Polish socialists, Józef Piłsudski, wanted a new uprising and complete independence.
The outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in February 1904 had given Polish politicians new opportunities to advance their agendas. While St. Petersburg fought the Japanese over their influence in Manchuria and Korea, the western parts of the empire grew ever more restless. Piłsudski traveled to Japan to ask for support, and in the summer of 1905 his followers led a workers’ uprising in Łódź, the center of the Polish industrial region and working class. The uprising was crushed, but the idea of territorial autonomy for the imperial regions found support among Russian liberals in the Duma and would become a major factor in reformulating the Russian national question during the Revolution of 1905–1907 and afterward.
If Poland gained autonomy, where would its borders be? That question was on the minds of many Russian politicians and intellectuals, especially leaders and supporters of the government campaign of previous decades to Russify the Polish lands. This time the center of attention was not Right-Bank Ukraine or western Belarus but the Kholm (Chełm) region of the former Kingdom of Poland, which constituted the eastern perimeter of Lublin and Siedlce provinces. The region had originally belonged to the Rus’ princes and was settled by people who had been defined since the nineteenth century as Little Russians or Ukrainians, but after centuries of Polish rule it had become an ethnic, religious, and cultural borderland.
The event that launched the Kholm crisis and kept the city’s name in newspaper headlines for the next seven years came on April 17, 1905, the first day of Orthodox Easter. It was the proclamation of an imperial edict on freedom of worship—one of the decrees that attempted to appease society in the face of growing civic unrest. The edict, which stated that subjects of the tsar could now freely choose their religion and, more importantly, leave the Russian Orthodox Church if they chose, with no political penalty, created a religious upheaval in the Kholm region, where thirty years earlier the authorities had forcibly converted hundreds of thousands of local Ukrainians from Uniate Catholicism to Orthodoxy. Government officials in St. Petersburg had foreseen that turn of events. Preliminary estimates suggested that anywhere between 100,000 and 150,000 people, or roughly one-third of the nominal Orthodox in the region, would bid farewell to the Orthodox Synod in St. Petersburg and pledge allegiance to the pope. The forecast was on the mark, as recent estimates put the actual number of converts exactly between the two projected figures.
But whereas the central government believed that it could not avoid paying that price in order to bring imperial policy into line with current standards of religious toleration, regional officials and Orthodox clergymen who had dedicated their lives to propagating Orthodoxy and Russian identity felt betrayed. Among those who felt that way was the Orthodox bishop of Kholm, Evlogii (Georgievsky), an ethnic Russian. He expressed his frustration in a letter to the general procurator of the Holy Synod, the government official overseeing the Russian Orthodox Church and its affairs. That post was occupied by Konstantin Pobedonostsev, one of the architects of the policies of Russification and Orthodoxization in the borderlands. Evlogii wrote: “The very credit of our priests has been undermined. For thirty years they repeated to the people that the Kholm-Podliashie [Podlachia] country will always be Orthodox and Russian, and now the people see, on the contrary, the complete, willful takeover of the enemies of the Orthodox Russian cause in that country.”
Soon after he sent the letter, Evlogii and his supporters went to St. Petersburg to meet with Pobedonostsev and discuss how to deal with the threat to Russian interests in the region. They wanted to redraw the borders of the imperial provinces, dividing the Kholm region from the lands of the former Kingdom of Poland. The new Kholm province was to have a “Russian” core consisting of more than 300,000 ethnic Ukrainians—those who had said Little Russian was their native language in the 1897 census. Officials in the Ministry of the Interior got busy planning for the administrative change. The bill was sent to the Duma. Debates on the measure continued until 1912, leading eventually to the creation of a new province and mobilizing Russian nationalist forces in parliament and beyond.
The Kholm debate brought together Ukrainophiles and proponents of Russia, one and indivisible, in common cause against Polish influence, but their alliance was situational and limited to a single goal. In almost every other case, Ukrainophiles and Russian nationalists found themselves engaged in a life-or-death struggle for the future of a land that both considered their own. The language issue had traditionally been central to the Ukrainophile agenda. In December 1904, with the war against Japan going badly and social discontent rising precipitously, the imperial government had agreed to revisit the question of the prohibitions imposed on Ukrainian-language publications by the Edict of Ems. Once again, discussion focused on translation of the Gospels, but this time the atmosphere was different. The president of
the Imperial Academy of Sciences himself, Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, advocated the abolition of the ban on publishing the Scriptures in Ukrainian.
In March 1905, a commission of the Academy of Sciences also discussed the issue of ending the ban on Ukrainian-language publications generally. The discussion was held at the behest of the government, which also solicited the opinions of the universities of Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odesa. All four institutions advised lifting the restrictions, with the Academy of Sciences making the strongest statement. Its memorandum, prepared by the philologists Aleksei Shakhmatov and Fedor Korsh and signed by many other liberal academicians in April 1905, not only recommended doing away with the ban but also opened the door to the recognition of Ukrainian as a separate language.
The authors of the Academy of Sciences’ memorandum did not say explicitly that Ukrainian was a separate language, but their reasoning left little doubt that it was on a par with Russian. They achieved that effect by discarding the notion of an “all-Russian language.” The academics claimed that the efforts of Russian authors to bring their literary language closer to the vernacular “had already made the all-Russian literary language fully Great Russian by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and our literary speech, the speech of the educated classes and written language of every kind, should be considered fully Great Russian.” The authors of the memorandum used not only historical and linguistic but also political arguments to make their case. “A state that does not know how to guarantee one of the most elementary civil rights—the right to speak and publish in one’s mother tongue—arouses neither respect nor love in the citizen but a nameless fear for his existence,” wrote Shakhmatov and Korsh before delivering their ultimate warning: “That fear gives rise to dissatisfaction and revolutionary aspirations.” Their timing was perfect: shocked by the revolutionary upheaval of the previous few months, the government was prepared to listen.
The memorandum was published in a limited number of copies (exclusively for government use) in April 1905 and immediately had a major impact on political debates within the Russian Empire and beyond its borders. The lifting of restrictions on Ukrainian-language publications began in February 1905, with permission to publish religious texts in Ukrainian, for which Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich had lobbied. All prohibitions were abolished with the introduction of new censorship regulations in the spring of 1906. By that time the abolition was a mere formality, given that the prohibitions on Ukrainian-language newspapers had been done away with in October 1905, the month that also saw the publication of the tsar’s manifesto granting his subjects basic civil rights, including “freedom of the word.” By the end of the year, three Ukrainian-language newspapers were being published in the empire, one in Kyiv and two in Poltava province.
Among the beneficiaries of the changes in official language policy were Belarusian activists. In September 1906, the first Belarusian daily, Nasha dolia (Our Destiny), began publication in Vilnius. After being closed for its radical leftist content, it was replaced in November 1906 by the more centrist newspaper Nasha niva (Our Field), which would continue publication until 1915. It formed a new Belarusian literary canon and helped popularize Belarusian-language literature. Between 1906 and 1915, the number of books published in Belarusian increased from almost zero to 80 titles, attaining a cumulative print run of 220,000 copies.
Although these figures represented a breakthrough for the Belarusian language and literature, they were very modest in comparison to publications in other languages of the empire. In 1911 alone there were 25,526 titles published in Russian, 1,664 in Polish, and 965 in Yiddish and Hebrew. The Ukrainians trailed those front-runners with 242 items. The Belarusians, who had never waged a prolonged struggle against the discrimination of their language or mobilized around that issue, were even further behind.
THE APPEARANCE OF A UKRAINIAN-AND BELARUSIAN-LANGUAGE press coincided with the beginning of the parliamentary period in the history of the Russian Empire. In the 1906 elections to the First Duma, the Ukrainian provinces of the empire elected sixty-two deputies, and forty-four of them joined the Ukrainian parliamentary club, agreeing to promote the Ukrainian political and cultural agenda in the capital. The Belarusian deputies attempted to do the same. “Infectious foolishness,” wrote one of Russia’s most popular journalists and a leading Russian nationalist, Mikhail Menshikov. “The Belarusians, too, are following the khokhly in speaking of a ‘circle’ of their own in the State Duma. There are Belarusian separatists as well, you see. It’s enough to make a cat laugh.” The Belarusians failed to create their own club and, depending on their political orientation, supported either the liberal or the Russian nationalist agenda promoted by other parties and caucuses.
The Ukrainian agenda in the Duma was formulated largely by Mykhailo Hrushevsky, a professor of history at the University of Lviv and a leading figure of the Ukrainian movement in Austrian Galicia. An alumnus of Kyiv University, he closely followed political and cultural developments in Russian-ruled Ukraine and refused to renounce his Russian citizenship. He arrived in St. Petersburg in the spring of 1906 to edit the Ukraïns’kyi visnyk (Ukrainian Herald), the mouthpiece of the Ukrainian parliamentary club. The Herald was published in Russian, reflecting not only the everyday speech of most members of the club but also the need to disseminate the Ukrainian viewpoint and political agenda among the Russian or Russian-speaking parliamentarians and public. By the time the First Duma met for deliberations in May 1906, the program of the Ukrainian movement, as formulated by Hrushevsky, had advanced from introducing Ukrainian as the language of instruction in schools to achieving territorial autonomy for Ukraine.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the idea of Ukrainian independence had gained support in Austrian Galicia, and in 1900 it was introduced in Russian-ruled Ukraine as the program of the short-lived Ukrainian Revolutionary Party. But Hrushevsky and the mainstream Ukrainian leaders regarded autonomy, not independence, as their political goal. As far as Hrushevsky was concerned, Ukrainian needs could only be met through a federal restructuring of the empire. He placed the question of Ukrainian territorial autonomy within the broader context of the “liberation of Russia”—a broad liberal movement seeking to turn the Russian Empire into a constitutional state. For Hrushevsky, the Ukrainian question was not part of the Russian ethnic question (he adduced the opinion of the Imperial Academy of Sciences on the nonexistence of an all-Russian language as a political argument) but an aspect of the empire’s nationality problem in general, equal in importance to the Polish and Finnish questions—the leaders of those peoples were demanding broad autonomy within the empire—and deserving of the same kind of resolution.
Not surprisingly, Hrushevsky and his followers in the Duma found a sympathetic ear among representatives of other non-Russian regions of the empire. Thus, the Ukrainian deputies joined the parliamentary “Union of Autonomist Federalists,” which included members of various nationalities. It was a curious group of deputies that extended from Russian Cossack autonomists, who insisted on regional rights irrespective of nationality, to non-Russian federalists who wanted a federation of nationalities within the framework of the Russian Empire. The Polish deputies, organized in their own circle (koło), demanded autonomy for their former kingdom. Hrushevsky was ready to follow suit. He prepared a parliamentary resolution on Ukrainian autonomy but was unable to present it, as the imperial authorities dissolved the First Duma on July 8, 1906, only seventy-two days after its opening.
The tsar found the ideas and actions of the deputies destructive. “The representatives of the nation, instead of applying themselves to the work of productive legislation, have strayed into spheres beyond their competence and have been making inquiries into the acts of local authorities established by ourselves, and have been making comments on the imperfections of the fundamental laws, which can only be modified by our imperial will,” read the tsar’s manifesto on the dissolution of the Duma. The Ukrainian deputies were able to form a
caucus of forty-seven in the short-lived Second Duma (February–June 1907), where they again raised the banner of Ukrainian autonomy. But the change of electoral legislation accompanying the dissolution of the Second Duma—the tsar found it even less agreeable than the first—favored large landowners and made it difficult to elect Ukrainophile deputies, who were often supported by peasants, to the Third Duma.
Neither the Third Duma (1907–1912) nor the Fourth (1912–1917) had a Ukrainian caucus. That put an end not only to Ukrainian autonomist plans but also to much more modest attempts to bring the Ukrainian language into the public sphere. In 1908, a Duma majority rejected a proposal to introduce the Ukrainian language into the school system and, in 1909, to allow its use in the courts. The Ukrainophile leaders had no choice but to work with and through the other parties, if not to advance their agenda, then at least to protect the achievements of the revolutionary period. They invested their hopes mainly in the Constitutional Democrats, a party of liberal representatives of the Russian urban intelligentsia.
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