Lost Kingdom

by Serhii Plokhy

  The Constitutional Democrats gained strong support from the Polish and Jewish intelligentsia in the western borderlands and were the only party open to the autonomist aspirations of the minorities. The party was popular in the Ukrainian provinces, and many pro-Ukrainian activists joined its ranks, but the party program, published in Kyiv in 1905, made no mention of Ukraine or the Ukrainian question. The Constitutional Democrats were prepared to accommodate the autonomist aspirations of the Poles and Finns but distanced themselves from the similar aspirations of Ukrainians and other nationalities.

  In a number of polemical articles published in 1911 and 1912, one of the leaders of the party, Petr Struve, formulated his (and, as many believed, his party’s) position on the Ukrainian question. He first presented his views on the issue in January 1911, responding to an article by a Zionist leader and native of Odesa, Vladimir Jabotinsky, who questioned Struve’s treatment of the Russian Empire as a Russian nation-state. With only 43 percent of the population consisting of Great Russians, Russia was nothing but a multiethnic empire, argued Jabotinsky. Struve, who included the Ukrainians and Belarusians in the Great Russian camp, disagreed: for him, the key was not ethnicity but culture. Struve considered Russia to be a work in progress, like the United States and Great Britain. The Russian nation that Struve had in mind was to be held together not by ethnicity but by culture—Russian culture. He insisted that that culture was not Great Russian but all-Russian, and thus included the Little and White Russians along with Great Russians as core members.

  The Ukrainian activists, who had welcomed the demise of the concept of an all-Russian language in the memorandum issued by the Imperial Academy of Sciences, now found a more formidable obstacle to the development of their nation in Struve’s vision of an all-Russian culture. In May 1911, Struve’s journal, Russkaia mysl’ (Russian Thought), published a letter from Struve’s old acquaintance Bohdan Kistiakovsky, a prominent Ukrainian lawyer who disagreed with Struve and argued for the distinctiveness of the Ukrainian language and culture. In January 1912, Struve responded to Kistiakovsky with a long exposé of his views on the subject. Struve wrote: “I am profoundly convinced that vis-à-vis the all-Russian culture and the all-Russian language, the Little Russian or Ukrainian culture is a local or provincial culture. This status of the ‘Little Russian’ culture and the ‘Little Russian’ language has been determined by the whole course of Russia’s historical development and can be changed only by the complete collapse of the historically shaped structure not only of Russian statehood but also of Russian society.” He went on to define the threat more precisely: “If the ‘Ukrainian’ idea of the intelligentsia strikes root among the people and inflames them with its ‘Ukrainianness,’ that threatens the Russian nation with a huge and unheard-of schism.”

  While Struve warned against that scenario, he did not consider it likely. He envisioned a two-level structure of imperial culture, the higher one to be served by the “all-Russian” language and culture, the lower one by local cultures, including that of Little Russia. Of the two options that he envisioned for the Ukrainian and Belarusian cultures—functioning either as local or as fully developed high cultures—Struve considered the first option more realistic. Ukrainian and Belarusian high cultures had yet to be developed, he maintained. Meanwhile, their languages could be used for elementary education of the masses, who would gain access to high culture and advanced education through the medium of the Russian language.

  This was a throwback to the decade after the Edict of Ems, when Mykhailo Drahomanov had seen the Ukrainian language function in the imperial educational system as auxiliary to Russian, and Struve was happy to present some of his arguments as corollaries to Drahomanov’s thinking about the all-Russian language and culture. But the times when Ukrainian activists would accept a subordinate position for their language and culture were gone. The Edict of Ems was no longer in force, and Struve’s position soon began to create difficulties for the Constitutional Democratic leaders, who relied on the support of Ukrainophile activists. They officially dissociated themselves from Struve’s concept of all-Russian culture, declaring that it represented only his private opinion.

  The official position of the Constitutional Democratic Party on the Ukrainian question was formulated by none other than its leader, the prominent historian Pavel Miliukov. In 1912, in preparation for elections to the Fourth Duma, he had visited Kyiv and met with the Ukrainian leaders, including Hrushevsky, to discuss an electoral alliance. What Miliukov offered the Ukrainian leaders in 1912 was the principle of cultural autonomy: the right of citizens of all nationalities to develop their culture and use their language in dealings with the state. That meant the Constitutional Democratic Party’s support for the introduction of the Ukrainian language in the educational and judicial systems. Hrushevsky assured Miliukov that the Ukrainian movement was not pursuing separatist goals: “We are not guided by the aspirations of aggressive nationalism and do not think that the Ukrainian nationality will assume a position of sovereignty.” He did not budge, however, on the issue of territorial autonomy and federalism, indicating the Ukrainian activists’ goal of “restructuring everything on federalist foundations.” That was the goal for the future, he told Miliukov.

  Cultural autonomy—the intermediate goal of Hrushevsky and his supporters and the biggest concession that Miliukov was prepared to offer in order to accommodate Ukrainian aspirations—became a common platform on which they would work together on the eve of World War I. Their cooperation was symbolized by a speech that Miliukov would deliver in the Duma in February 1914, protesting the government’s decision to prohibit a celebration of the centenary of Taras Shevchenko’s birth in Kyiv.

  THE MAIN POLITICAL COMPETITORS OF MILIUKOV’S CONSTITUTIONAL Democrats and the Ukrainian activists in the pre–World War I era were the Russian monarchists and nationalists, who effectively dominated the Third and Fourth Dumas. In the western provinces, the Russian nationalists had originally mobilized against the threat posed to the regime by the Polish landowning class. By the turn of the twentieth century, the political and cultural Russification of the western borderlands was under way, but Polish landowners remained the true masters of the region. Their influence became fully apparent in the elections to the First Duma, when they managed to elect significantly more deputies than their own votes could account for; meanwhile, Russian nationalist candidates in the region were defeated by the combined Polish and liberal vote.

  It was the desire to prevent the Polish nobility from using the new electoral system to its advantage in the elections to the Second Duma that prompted the Russian nationalists to launch their own electoral campaign. Their problem was not only the traditionally high level of political mobilization of the Polish regional elite—some of its members came all the way from Paris to vote—but also the fact that the electoral law privileged large landowners. The small landowners, who were mainly Ukrainian peasants, could fight back only by combining their votes. The Russian nationalists had to go to the peasants and organize them if they were to overcome the Polish landowners. They soon managed to find an infrastructure and organizational base in the Russian Orthodox Church, which was engaged in an ongoing struggle with its Catholic competitor, as well as in numerous nationalist organizations established in the region with church and government support.

  The most popular Russian nationalist organization to come into existence during the Revolution of 1905 was the Union of the Russian People. The first rally the Union organized in Moscow attracted close to 20,000 people. In December 1905, Nicholas received a delegation of leaders of the Union and gave his blessing to its activities. Backed by the authorities, the Union played a key role in mobilizing support for the monarchy under the banner of modern nationalism. According to the Union’s statute, “the good of the motherland lies in the firm preservation of Orthodoxy, unlimited Russian autocracy, and the national way of life.” Count Sergei Uvarov’s formula of the 1830s—autocracy, Orthodoxy, and nationality—had been re
vived, now inspiring not only imperial bureaucrats but also rank-and-file subjects.

  The Russia represented by the Union was not limited to Great Russians. “The Union makes no distinction between Great Russians, White Russians, and Little Russians,” read the statute. In fact, the western provinces, and Ukraine in particular, became the Union’s main base of operations. Its largest branch, located in the Ukrainian province of Volhynia, was centered on the Pochaiv Monastery. According to a report of 1907, the Union counted more than 1,000 chapters in Volhynia, with a membership of more than 100,000. If one trusts the report, compiled by the governor of Volhynia, that province alone accounted for one-quarter of the Union’s membership throughout the empire. Not far behind were other Right-Bank Ukrainian provinces, especially the Kyiv gubernia.

  What accounted for the truly impressive number of Union members in the western provinces was that, as in Volhynia, individual chapters were organized and led by priests, who enlisted their parishioners into the Union. A police report described its functioning in Volhynia as follows: “The members are local Orthodox parishioners, as well as semiliterate and even completely illiterate people in the villages, who show no initiative themselves. The heads of the Union’s local branches, mostly elected from among parish priests, instill patriotic feelings in the population by conversing with the peasants and preaching to them in order to strengthen Russia’s foundations.”

  The translation of religious loyalty into loyalty to the empire and the adoption of an all-Russian identity by the Ukrainian peasantry was only one reason for the Union’s success in the region. But its success was also rooted in the growing social and economic demands of the peasantry. The average landholding in Volhynia and Podolia amounted to only nine acres, compared to forty acres in the southern provinces. Land hunger drove peasants to leave the region for eastern parts of the empire. But those who stayed were prepared to mobilize in support of their economic interests, and the Union of the Russian People provided a ready framework.

  Orthodox priests and propagandists of the Union were there to point to the main “culprits” of the peasants’ troubles: Polish landowners and Jewish middlemen to whom the peasants sold their produce. According to a police report on Union activists, “sowing enmity among the peasants toward all non-Russians and landowners, those individuals impressed upon the peasants the need to join the Union, which alone was in a position to make the peasants’ dreams come true by endowing them with lands forcibly taken from the landlords, freeing them from all dependence on the government, etc.”

  The peasants clearly regarded branches of the Union as institutions representing their interests, and on a number of occasions they refused to follow the orders of government officials, saying that they would follow only those given by leaders of the Union. This metamorphosis of the Union into an instrument of agrarian revolution caused concern among the authorities, who became less interested in nationalist mobilization of the masses in support of the monarchy and more concerned with the task of maintaining order and stability in the borderlands. Police officials ordered their underlings in the provinces to close chapters of the Union if that became necessary.

  The symbolic union between the monarchy and the peasants, glued by xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and Russian nationalism, was beginning to crack only a few years after its establishment in the midst of the 1905 revolution. The stumbling block was the land issue. The leaders of Russian nationalist organizations, often large landowners themselves, wanted the authorities to buy land from the landowners and distribute it among the peasants, but government funds were insufficient for that purpose. Russian nationalism was becoming mired in the agrarian question. In a country inhabited mainly by peasants, that was a major impediment to those seeking to turn patriarchal loyalty to the tsar into national feeling. Years later, Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the most radical (Bolshevik) faction of the Russian Social Democrats, discovered a silver lining in the activities of the Russian nationalist organizations, to which he referred in general as “Black Hundreds”: “The Black Hundred political organization first united the peasants and involved them in organizing. And those aroused peasants made Black Hundred demands one day and demanded all the land from the landowners the next.”

  For the Russian nationalists from the western provinces, the list of enemies and competitors was not limited to Poles and Jews but also included activists of the Ukrainian movement, which had gained strength from the Revolution of 1905. In 1907, those opposing the recognition of Ukrainian as a distinct language published a number of brochures, written by the philologists Timofei Florinsky and Anton Budilovich, seeking to prove that Ukrainian was nothing but a branch of the all-Russian language. The battle became heated in 1911 when Prime Minister Petr Stolypin was assassinated in Kyiv. Elections to the Fourth Duma were coming up, and it was also the year in which Petr Struve began his polemics on the Ukrainian question. Leading Constitutional Democrats, meanwhile, noted the growing popularity of Ukrainian parties and slogans among the urban intelligentsia of the Ukrainian provinces.

  In November 1911, the Kyivan club of Russian nationalists, the largest such club in the empire, held a discussion about a number of papers dealing with the importance of Little Russian folklore, tradition, and patriotism in the worldview and ideology of Russian nationalism. This was a sticky issue, given the origins of the Russian nationalist movement in Ukraine as a reaction to the Ukrainian/Little Russian awakening of the 1840s. The debate showed that the Russian nationalists in Kyiv were not prepared to give up their claim to the local political, cultural, and even linguistic tradition. One of the leaders of the club, Anatolii Savenko, professed his love for Ukraine as part of his Little Russian identity. He wrote, “I am a Little Russian, and nothing Little Russian is foreign to me. I ardently love my homeland, Ukraine, and in essence I am a Ukrainophile in the old sense of the word. The nature of Ukraine, her history, language, and everyday life, are dear to me.” He concluded his testimony with a quotation from Taras Shevchenko.

  If the Russian nationalists in Kyiv were proclaiming their profound attachment to Ukraine, what was their view of the leaders of the Ukrainian movement? They referred to the latter as “separatists” and, more and more often, as Mazepists, after the name of the Cossack hetman Ivan Mazepa, who had led an uprising in 1708 against Peter I and joined the advancing armies of Charles XII of Sweden. In 1909, the empire had lavishly celebrated the bicentennial of Peter I’s victory at Poltava—a commemoration that helped focus public attention on Mazepa and eighteenth-century separatism. In reality, most Ukrainian political leaders of the pre–World War I era did not see national independence as their goal and worked instead for Ukrainian autonomy within the Russian Empire. But the Russian nationalist ideologues were looking ahead. “The Mazepists are well aware that if the notion of Little Russians as a wholly independent people enters public consciousness, then ineluctable historical evolution will do the rest,” wrote Savenko. According to him, the outcome might be a schism within the Russian nation and a fratricidal war that would destroy the empire.

  While portraying the Ukrainian movement as a major threat to the unity of the Russian nation and state, the Russian nationalist leaders also pointed to its weaknesses: it was limited to students and intellectuals, with little following among the popular masses, especially the peasantry. After 1905, Ukrainian activists made inroads into the countryside, opening Prosvita cultural societies modeled on those in Galicia and conducting a campaign of socialist propaganda among the peasants. They also launched Ukrainian-language newspapers for the peasantry. But with the end of the active phase of the revolution in 1907, Ukrainian influence in the village was severely curbed by the government, while Russian nationalism swept the countryside, achieving a popularity that the non-Russian parties could only dream of.

  THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION OF 1905 RAISED THE HOPES OF non-Russian activists, most of whom considered the social and national liberation of their peoples to be closely connected issues. In the Ukrainian and Belar
usian cases, radical social demands and national aspirations went hand in hand, as most younger activists of both movements held socialist views. Their opponents exploited that fact to discredit Ukrainian activists in the eyes of the authorities and shut down the first Belarusian-language newspaper. The revolution allowed the Ukrainians to organize in the Duma, mobilize their supporters in parliamentary elections, raise the banner of autonomy and federalism, launch magazines and newspapers, and spread their ideas among the intelligentsia of the empire’s western provinces.

  But activists of the Ukrainian—and especially of the Belarusian—movement garnered little understanding and less support from the mainstream Russian political parties. Even the liberal Constitutional Democrats, the most sympathetic of the Russian parties to the aspirations of the non-Russians, were split on the “Russian question” between adherents of Struve and the more pragmatically oriented group represented by Miliukov. Struve needed the Ukrainians and Belarusians as part of a larger Russian cultural nation to realize his vision of turning the Russian Empire into a “normal” European state. Miliukov, for his part, opted for a civic model of the Russian nation that would allow sufficient autonomy for the development of non-Russian cultures. But even Miliukov and his supporters offered no more than symbolic support for the main tactical goal of the Ukrainian movement of the time—the introduction of the Ukrainian language into the school system. The Duma never passed the bill that would have allowed teachers to use Ukrainian in the classrooms of the Ukrainian provinces of the empire.

  By 1914, it looked as if the monarchy had successfully survived the revolution and adjusted itself to the new political and economic realities. The transition to constitutional monarchy had been made, a parliament established, and a way discovered to fill it with deputies generally loyal to the regime. The non-Russian nationalities were taken under control after receiving some cultural concessions, and Russian nationalism had created an unprecedented bond between the monarchy and most of its subjects. Fears that allowing the Ukrainians and Belarusians to publish in their languages would split the East Slavic core of the empire never materialized. Popular support for one indivisible Russian state and nation was as strong as ever and was gaining new ground in the traditionally troublesome western provinces.