ON JULY 18, 1863, THE MINISTER OF THE INTERIOR OF THE Russian Empire, Petr Valuev, spelled out the new imperial policy on the development of the East Slavic languages. He did so in a seemingly routine document—an instruction to the censors—whose significance was heightened by the sovereign’s approval. Known subsequently as the Valuev circular, the instruction would have a strong impact on Russian nation-building. The very fact that the minister of the interior was involved in defining the empire’s language policy indicated that by now, in the opinion of St. Petersburg officials, the development of non-Russian languages and cultures could pose a threat to the security of the tsarist realm.
Valuev’s circular was directed mainly against the Ukrainian intellectuals, whose efforts to introduce their language into churches and schools he regarded as part of a Polish intrigue to undermine the empire. “That phenomenon is all the more deplorable and deserving of attention,” stated the circular, “because it coincides with the designs of the Poles and is all but obliged to them for its origin, judging by the manuscripts received by the censors and by the fact that most of the Little Russian compositions actually come from the Poles.” Valuev claimed that the “adherents of the Little Russian nationality” were turning to the common people for political reasons. He noted that many of them had already been investigated by the government and were being accused by their own compatriots of “separatist designs hostile to Russia and fatal for Little Russia.”
The circular directed the censors’ attention to the development of publications in Ukrainian (Little Russian), ranging from writings by and for a narrow circle of intellectuals to literature for the masses. Valuev sided with the Ukrainian officials of the all-Russian persuasion. “They show quite fundamentally,” wrote the minister, “that there has never been, is not, and cannot be any separate Little Russian language, and that their dialect, spoken by the common people, is the selfsame Russian language, only spoiled by the influence of Poland; that the all-Russian language is as comprehensible to Little Russians as to Great Russians, in fact much more comprehensible than the one now being devised for them by some Little Russians and, in particular, by the Poles—the so-called Ukrainian language.”
The Valuev circular aimed to prevent the distribution of Ukrainian-language texts among the peasantry and common folk. It prohibited the publication of educational and religious texts in Ukrainian, with the sole exception of belles lettres. Although the circular was introduced as a temporary measure, it had profound effects on the development of the Ukrainian culture and identity. In 1863, when Valuev signed his circular, thirty-three Ukrainian-language publications had appeared in print; by 1868, when he stepped down as minister, their number had been reduced to one. The government had effectively arrested the development of the alternative Rus’ language, literature, and high culture in the western borderlands envisioned by Ukraine’s leading political thinker of the time, Mykola Kostomarov. Nor did any Belarusian-language publications appear after 1863.
“IN OUR TIME, THE QUESTION OF WHETHER ONE CAN OR SHOULD write in South Russian, which is to say, in Ukrainian, is decided by practice itself,” argued the publishers of Osnova (Foundation), the Ukrainophile journal published in St. Petersburg in Russian in 1862. What they still found questionable was the “practical significance of the people’s speech in teaching and preaching.” This was an understatement. In fact, bringing the Ukrainian language into the church and school had become the main political goal of the Ukrainophile movement. The Russian socialist writer and critic Nikolai Chernyshevsky endorsed that program when he welcomed the appearance of the first issue of Osnova: “Teaching the Little Russian people in the Little Russian language and developing popular Little Russian literature is, in our view, the goal toward which it will be most convenient and useful for the Little Russians to strive initially.”
The Ukrainophiles had been busy implementing that program long before it was formulated in print. By 1862, there were six Ukrainian primers on sale in the cities of the empire, one of them compiled by Taras Shevchenko, another by Panteleimon Kulish. Mykola Kostomarov was collecting funds among the Ukrainian and Russian public in St. Petersburg to publish more books in Ukrainian for the common folk, and a Ukrainian translation of Scripture was making its way through the Scylla and Charybdis of the Russian government and church censorship. The government was at a loss, lacking a clear idea of what to do with Ukrainian-language publications. The old restrictions on the activities of the Cyrillo-Methodian Brotherhood had been removed, and the peasants were being set free, but the question of how to educate the masses hung in the air. In 1859, the government had prohibited the publication or import of Latin-alphabet texts written in the Slavic languages, seeking to prevent Polish cultural expansion, but what to do with texts in the Russian “dialects,” which now also included White Russian (the first grammar of Belarusian appeared in 1862), was anyone’s guess.
In 1861, when the Ukrainophiles approached Metropolitan Arsenii (Fedor Moskvin) of Kyiv for help in distributing Shevchenko’s primer, he turned to the government for advice. The Censorship Committee recommended that he turn down the request, arguing that publications in Little Russian could produce a schism between the two Slavic peoples and undermine the stability of the state. But generally, in the eyes of the censors, the Ukrainophile project was a pipe dream: they assumed that it would wither if they left it alone. No restrictions or prosecutions were needed, but one had to beware of providing it with government support. The change in government policy that led Valuev to issue his circular was set off by a letter sent to the Third Section of the Imperial Chancellery in March 1863, shortly after the start of the Polish uprising. It was unsigned but penned on behalf of a group of unidentified Little Russian Orthodox clerics who demanded a ban on the publication of a Ukrainian translation of the Gospels then being reviewed by the Holy Synod in St. Petersburg.
The letter was forwarded to the governor general of Kyiv, Nikolai Annenkov, who supported the petitioners’ request. He was concerned that the translation would elevate Ukrainian from a dialect to the status of an independent language and produce political repercussions. Annenkov wrote: “Debate continues in the literature on the question of whether the Little Russian dialect is only a particular feature of the Russian language or an independent language. Having obtained the translation of Holy Scripture into the Little Russian dialect, the supporters of the Little Russian party will attain, so to speak, recognition of the independence of the Little Russian language, and then, of course, they will not stop at that but, basing themselves on the uniqueness of the language, will start making claims for the autonomy of Little Russia.”
Annenkov’s opinion was reported to Emperor Alexander II, who instructed the head of the Third Section to contact the appropriate officials in the central government. This meant that the emperor himself considered the concerns expressed by the governor general of Kyiv legitimate and his proposal worth consideration. The matter was passed on to Valuev, who in turn contacted the Holy Synod. As a result, the plans to publish the Ukrainian translation of the Gospels, prepared by the Ukrainian cultural activist Pylyp Morachevsky, were canceled, and publications in Ukrainian intended for the popular masses were banned. The new policies were spelled out in the Valuev circular of July 18, 1863. In the months leading up to the circular, Valuev apparently underwent an evolution, turning from a reluctant executor of the tsar’s will into a strong supporter of the prohibitive measures the circular introduced. It took him three months to report to the Third Section that he fully agreed with the governor general’s proposal in Kyiv to ban the publication of the New Testament in Ukrainian. But once he made his decision, Valuev stood by it.
In the Russian government of the 1860s, Petr Valuev was a liberal—a cautious reformer who wanted to strengthen the autocracy by creating a rudimentary system of popular representation on an ad hoc basis. Valuev’s hand on the question of Ukrainian publications was forced by a media campaign organized by the Third Section at the suggestion of Nikolai Annenkov, the same governor general of Kyiv who had proposed harsh measures against the Ukrainophiles. The key figure in that media campaign was an academic turned journalist, Mikhail Katkov. An intellectual who was at home with the conservative leaders of the Slavophile movement, Katkov had at first taken a condescending and even indulgent attitude toward the Ukrainian project, thinking that it was doomed to fail. But his position changed radically with the outbreak of the Polish uprising.
On June 21, 1863, about a month before Valuev signed his circular, Katkov added his voice to the discussion on prohibiting Ukrainian-language publications in an article with a telling title, “The Coincidence of Ukrainophile Interests with Polish Interests.” In complete agreement with the adherents of pan-Russian Orthodoxy in Iosif Semashko’s camp, Katkov accused the Ukrainophiles of being instruments not only of Polish but also of Jesuit intrigue. In doing so, Katkov not only politicized the question of Ukrainian-language publications but in fact criminalized it, opening the door to the politically damaging treatment of the Polish-Ukrainian connection in Valuev’s circular. More importantly in the long run, Katkov provided intellectual foundations for the repressive policies vis-à-vis the Ukrainian cultural and political movement that would be adopted by the imperial government and last for decades. Katkov argued that “Ukraine has never had its own history, never been a separate state; the Ukrainian people are an authentic Russian people, an indigenous Russian people, an essential part of the Russian people, without which it can hardly remain what it is now.” Although he recognized linguistic and cultural differences between the branches of the “Russian nation,” he considered them only locally significant. If the big Russian nation was to develop and prevail, the cultivation of local dialects would have to be arrested.
Comparing the Russian Empire to France, Italy, and Germany, Katkov concluded that the differences between the local dialects of the “Russian” groups were slighter than those within the West European nations. Throughout the “Russian land,” he argued, the Russian traveler could understand local speech without much difficulty. As Katkov saw it, the unity of the one and indivisible Russian nation was based on the unity of its literary language. He attacked Kostomarov’s idea of two Rus’ nationalities: “Outrageous and ridiculous sophistry! As if there could be two Russian nationalities and two Russian languages; as if there could be two French nationalities and two French languages!” He attacked Kostomarov and the Ukrainophiles in the strongest possible terms: “Out of nothing there suddenly appeared heroes and demigods, objects of worship, great symbols of a nationality that is being newly created. New Cyrils and Methodiuses with the most outlandish alphabets made their appearance, and the phantasm of some nonexistent Little Russian language was loosed upon God’s creation.”
The argument Katkov developed in the debate on the prohibition of Ukrainian publications would constitute the basis for the imperial authorities’ handling of the Ukrainian question for generations to come. He was the first public intellectual to establish a close bond between language, ethnicity, national unity, and the strategic interests of the Russian state. While continuing to blame differences between the Eastern Slavs on Polish and other foreign subjugation, as the creator of the pan-Russian historical narrative, Nikolai Ustrialov, had done in his historical writings of the 1830s and 1840s, Katkov brought ethnic and linguistic elements into the discussion. He did so not to distinguish Great and Little Russians from each other, as Mikhail Pogodin had done in his debate with Mykhailo Maksymovych on the ethnic identity of Kyiv in the 1850s, but to bring them together as one linguistic, ethnic, and cultural entity for the sake of the unity of the Russian state.
Russian censors and political and cultural commentators such as Katkov placed their recommendation to ban Ukrainian-language publications in a broad international context, pointing to similar challenges facing the German, French, and British governments with regard to their own unofficial languages and dialects, including Occitan in France and Scottish Gaelic and Irish in Britain. But the comparison serves to emphasize the difference in the policies adopted by the Russian and West European governments. Whereas the British and French did not limit the development of “rival” languages with restrictive measures, instead relying on their school systems to promote the use of official languages, the Russian authorities resorted to repression, “forgetting” about any positive action that would have required the investment of major resources, such as developing a system of Russian-language elementary schools throughout the empire. They would maintain this cheap but one-sided policy, losing their battle on the same linguistic terrain as the one on which the Germans, French, and British had won theirs.
THE FIRST VISIBLE CRACKS IN THE OFFICIAL POLICY OF SUPPRESSING the Ukrainian language appeared in the early 1870s, a decade after the Valuev circular had appeared. If they had been applied broadly, the strictures in the circular could have wiped out Ukrainian-language publications in the Russian Empire, as happened in 1868, when only one Ukrainian title appeared in print. But Valuev’s resignation that year allowed Ukrainian-language publications to make a comeback. It began slowly, but in 1874 alone thirty-two publications were approved by the censors, only one less than in 1862, the last “pre-circular” year. With Valuev gone, the censors were freer to decide whether Ukrainian-language books were literary works, which were allowed, or fell into the prohibited category of books for the common folk. Academic publications, which fit neither category, fell through the cracks. Besides, some censors could be persuaded to turn a blind eye to possible violations, sometimes with the help of bribes, as was the case with Ilia Puzyrevsky in the Kyiv office, which cleared the lion’s share of Ukrainian-language books proposed for publication in the 1870s.
The Ukrainophiles were growing ever bolder, declaring that the entr’acte in the development of their movement was over. The key figure on the Ukrainophile side of the new debate was a young and ambitious historian, Mykhailo Drahomanov. A professor of ancient history at Kyiv University, Drahomanov spent the early 1870s in Europe, studying his subject and nationality problems on the continent. He celebrated the publication of a few Ukrainian-language titles in the Russian Empire as a sign of good things to come and believed that the reforms of Alexander II would promote public activism. Soon Drahomanov found himself a target of a new attack on the Ukrainophiles.
As in 1863, Mikhail Katkov supported and endorsed the attack: in February 1875, he published in his Russian Herald a long article by Nikolai Rigelman, the head of the Kyiv Slavic Benevolent Society. Rigelman took particular issue with a recent article by Drahomanov that had appeared in Galicia under the title “Russian, Great Russian, Ukrainian, and Galician Literature,” where Drahomanov suggested that along with the common Russian literary language and high culture, their Great and Little Russian counterparts should also be developed, mainly to provide for the educational and cultural needs of the common folk. Rigelman smelled a rat.
He accused Drahomanov of providing nothing but a smoke screen for the continuing development of a separate Little Russian language and culture. “You, Messrs. Ukrainophiles, are so concerned about your people, so afraid of its ignorance, and want to enlighten it. For that purpose you choose such a circuitous route: you want to forge its dialect into a learned literary language, to create a whole literature that would divide it from the Russian people of 60 million; that is, you want to create a spiritual particularism for it in the Russian world.” He concluded: “As for true Russians, as well as Slavs with any understanding of their true interests, they should fight you with all their might.”
And fight they did. In May 1875, three months after Rigelman’s article appeared in Katkov’s Russian Herald, the deputy minister of education sent a letter to the head of the Kyiv educational district, attaching a copy of Drahomanov’s article and Rigelman’s criticism and asking for the names of Ukrainophile professors. This led to Drahomanov’s dismissal from the university. But the leader of the Kyivan proponents of Little Russian identity, a retired military officer and educational official named Mikhail Yuzefovich, and his supporters wanted total victory. Yuzefovich sent his complaints directly to the head of the Third Section, General Aleksandr Potapov. Whatever he said in his letter, which has not yet been found by researchers, it made a strong impression on the head of the secret police, who reported Yuzefovich’s concerns to the tsar. In August 1875, Alexander II ordered the creation of a Special Council to examine the continuing activities of the Ukrainophiles and the publication of Ukrainian literature. In addition to Potapov and the general procurator of the Holy Synod, the council included the ministers of the interior and education and, last but not least, Yuzefovich himself.
The Special Council, which began its deliberations in April 1876, interpreted the continuing activities of the Ukrainophiles as an attack on the unity of the tripartite Russian nation. The journal of the council’s proceedings included the following passage:
Also obvious is the ultimate goal toward which the efforts of the Ukrainophiles are directed: they are now attempting to separate the Little Russians by the gradual but to some extent accurate method of separating Little Russian speech and literature. Allowing the creation of a separate popular literature in the Ukrainian dialect would mean establishing a firm basis for the development of the conviction that the alienation of Ukraine from Russia might be possible in the future, however distant. If the government were to take an indulgent attitude to the currently developing feeble impulse to separate the Ukrainian dialect by elevating it to the status of a literary language, then it would have no basis not to allow the same separation for the dialect of the Belarusians, who constitute a tribe as significant as that of the Little Russians. Ukraine, Little Russia, and Western Russia, inhabited by Belarusians… constitute one great political body inseparable from and united with Russia.
The council’s position was informed by ideas first expressed in 1863 by Mikhail Katkov. They included the interpretation of the Ukrainophile movement as both a Polish intrigue and a threat to the unity of Russia, posed both directly and through the example offered to the Belarusians. Katkov’s thinking prevailed once again among the liberals and pragmatists in the imperial government. Not only Slavophile activists, such as Pogodin, or nationalist journalists, such as Katkov, but also key ministers were rallying to the defense of the indivisible Russian nation.
On May 18, 1876, Alexander II, vacationing at the German spa of Bad Ems, signed a decree prepared by the Special Council that became known as the Edict of Ems. It began with a resolution to “put a stop to the activity of the Ukrainophiles, which is a danger to the state.” The prohibitions imposed by the Valuev circular were made permanent and new ones introduced. The edict banned the import of all Ukrainian-language publications into the empire and prohibited the publication not only of religious texts, grammars, and books for the common people, but also of belles lettres addressed to the upper strata. This measure was intended to arrest the development of Ukrainian literature on all levels. Existing Ukrainian-language publications were to be removed from school libraries. But the prohibition went beyond the written word: also banned were theatrical performances, songs, and poetry readings in Ukrainian, “which are in the nature of Ukrainophile manifestations at the present time.” The only exception was for the publication of folklore, but it had to be done in Russian orthography.
Alexander II also ordered repressive measures against leading Ukrainophiles. Drahomanov and another Ukrainophile leader, Pavlo Chubynsky, were to be exiled from Ukraine, and the Kyiv branch of the Imperial Geographic Society—the locus of intellectual and cultural activity in the city and the hotbed of the Ukrainophile movement—closed, along with the newspaper Kyivan Telegraph. The heads of the Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odesa educational districts were ordered to watch for unreliable Ukrainophiles on their faculty and report them to the authorities. New teaching positions were now to be filled exclusively by Great Russians, while Little Russians were to apply for positions in Great Russian schools and universities. This was an all-out attack on the Ukrainophile movement and its current and potential members. The treatment of Drahomanov and Chubynsky was not as harsh as that of the members of the Cyrillo-Methodian Brotherhood, but the approach was much more systematic and broader in scope than ever before. It was no longer limited to a handful of rogue intellectuals, as in 1847, or to restrictions on publishing, as in 1863, but aimed against Ukrainian cultural expression in general, both written and spoken.
THE EDICT OF EMS HAD A SINGLE PURPOSE—TO ARREST THE development of the Ukrainian cultural and political movement. What it offered was a mix of repressions, prohibitions, and restrictions. There was no positive program to build up an alternative all-Russian project; consequently, no additional funds were allocated for the development of Russian-language schools, publications, or societies. The only exception was the section of the edict dealing with the newspaper Slovo (Word), which was published, of all places, in Lviv, the capital of the Galician province of neighboring Austria-Hungary. Russia was “to support the newspaper Slovo, which is being published in Galicia with an orientation hostile to that of the Ukrainophiles, by providing it at least with a constant subsidy, however small, without which it could not continue to exist and would have to cease publication,” stated the edict. The measure was justified as a response to Polish propaganda. The authors of the edict added, in parentheses: “The Ukrainophile organ in Galicia, the newspaper Pravda [Truth], which is completely hostile to Russian interests, is published with significant assistance from the Poles.”
The subsidy, which amounted to 2,000 guldens, was suggested by Yuzefovich and approved by the tsar. It was the first time that the Russian imperial government had decided to allocate resources abroad not to support fellow Slavs but to influence a contest between two trends in the Slavic movement beyond the borders of the empire and support the Russophiles in their conflict with the Ukrainophiles. The dominant population of Galicia, or Red Rus’, called itself “Rusyn” (in present-day English, “Ruthenian”) and was considered by Russophile authors to be Russian, or, more specifically, Little Russian. That view began to gain ground after the publication in the empire of a Russian translation of Pavol Šafárik’s Slovanský národopis in 1843. It was certainly the view of Mikhail Pogodin, who had visited Galicia, established close ties with local Russophile activists, and provided financial support for their activities. The Slavic Benevolent Society, especially its Kyivan branch, which was headed by Nikolai Rigelman, worked for the same cause, channeling mostly private funds to the region, but the government showed little interest until the signing of the edict of 1876.
Until then, developments in Galicia had been considered a matter for the imperial Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Russian diplomats had advised their superiors to stay away from involvement in the region. In 1866, ten years before the Edict of Ems, and in the midst of Austria’s disastrous Seven Weeks’ War with Prussia, the Russian ambassador in Vienna, Ernst Shtakelberg, advised the foreign minister, Prince Aleksandr Gorchakov, against the possible partitioning of Austria and annexation of the province to Russia. As defeat in the Austro-Prussian war forced the Habsburgs to turn their empire into a dual monarchy and share power with the Hungarians on the national level, and with Poles and other nationalities in local administration, Galicia came under de facto Polish control, arousing great discontent among the Ruthenian elites.
Once again, Shtakelberg advised caution. He argued against a media campaign in defense of the Ruthenians in order to avoid directing “Austria’s attention to the Ruthenians, who might perhaps drop into our hands like ripe fruit as a result of the Vienna cabinet’s careless toleration of Polonism.” Prince Gorchakov agreed with the ambassador’s reasoning. Although the Slavophile media in the Russian Empire sided with the Ruthenians against the Poles, the government once again did nothing. Shtakelberg was right in predicting the evolution of Ruthenian attitudes toward the monarchy. The transformation of the Habsburg Empire into a dual monarchy in which Hungarians wielded power along with Austrians, and the appointment of a Polish governor to rule Galicia on behalf of Vienna, were widely regarded by the Ruthenian elite as a betrayal, making a turn toward Russia and Russian identity almost inevitable.
The movement that came to be known as Muscophile or Russophile was born. Among its leaders was Bohdan Didytsky, the editor of Slovo, the movement’s official mouthpiece. Didytsky was an alumnus of the University of Vienna, where he had studied Slavic languages and literatures under the supervision of Franz von Miklosich (Franc Miklošič), a close colleague of another prominent Slavist, Jernej Bartol Kopitar. (It was in a review of one of Kopitar’s works that Nikolai Nadezhdin had first formulated the idea of a tripartite Russian nation in 1841.) Didytsky was originally attracted to Ukrainian literature under the influence of Ivan Kotliarevsky’s Eneïda—the first major literary work written in vernacular Ukrainian in Russian-ruled Ukraine, but then, fascinated by the writings of Pushkin and Gogol, had opted for the Russian solution of the Ruthenian identity problem, seeing the Austrian Ruthenians as part of the Russian rather than the Ukrainian nation.
In 1871, in the wake of the constitutional reforms, another Russophile, Adolf Dobriansky, produced a political program for the Russophile movement that was adopted by its leading body, the Rus’ Council. For Dobriansky, the Rus’ nation (russkii narod) that the council represented and on whose behalf he spoke was not limited to Galician Rus’ but also included the Ruthenians of Bukovyna and Transcarpathia, as well as Ruthenian settlements in the Austrian Balkan possessions. Dobriansky insisted that the Ruthenians of Austria-Hungary not only constituted one nation but were also part of a larger Russian nation: “Our Ruthenian people of 3 million, living under the Austrian scepter, is just one part of one and the same Russian (russkii) people, Little, White, and Great Russian, and has the same history as they do, the same traditions, the same literature, and the same folk customs; consequently, it has all the characteristics and conditions of complete national unity with the whole Russian people and is therefore in a position (in that regard) to realize and proclaim its true national status.”
Dobriansky pledged his allegiance to the Habsburg Empire, dismissing Polish accusations that by claiming membership in a larger Russian nation the Ruthenians were casting doubt on their loyalty to the Habsburgs. Dobriansky, however, saved most of his polemical zeal for his fellow Ruthenians, particularly those who had lost their way and subscribed to the Ukrainian project. Commenting on the foundations of the Ukrainophile movement, he wrote: “The Ukrainian question, presented in its current form, is based on the historical argument of the former independence of Cossack Ukraine and is more closely defined by the antiquity of the Little Russian dialect and the independence of recent Little Russian literature. Its ultimate goal is the independence of Ukraine.” He considered the Ukrainophiles’ historical and linguistic argument flawed and their political program of either joining a pan-Slavic federation or gaining complete independence a threat to the international order.
The rise to prominence of the Polish aristocracy in Galicia in the late 1860s—after the Habsburg Empire had lost the war with Prussia and reinvented itself as Austria-Hungary, making a deal with the former masters of Galicia, the Poles—provoked different responses from the Russophiles and Ukrainophiles. Whereas the Russophiles placed their hopes in the powerful Orthodox tsar and hoped to join the big Russian nation, the Ukrainophiles turned their attention to the Ukrainophile movement in Russian-ruled Ukraine, imagining themselves not as part of a 60-million-strong Russian people, as did Didytsky and Dobriansky, but as a Ukrainian people of 15 million. If the Russophiles subscribed to a conservative social agenda and were closely allied with the church, the Ukrainophiles, who were also known as populists (narodovtsi), had a more radical following that included the secular intelligentsia. They rejected both the conservative agenda of Slovo and the artificial language used by that newspaper. They wanted the literary language of the Ruthenians to be as close as possible to the one spoken by the popular masses, which they identified as Ukrainian.
The late 1860s and early 1870s saw the institutionalization of the Ukrainophile movement in Austria-Hungary. In 1868, the Ukrainophiles created a cultural society called Prosvita (Enlightenment) to disseminate their brand of Ruthenian nationalism among the peasantry. This was followed in 1873 by the establishment of a Ukrainophile literary society named after Taras Shevchenko. The initiative for the literary society and the money to make it possible came from Dnieper Ukraine—a donation from Yelysaveta Myloradovych-Skoropadska, a descendant of a prominent Cossack family that counted numerous colonels and hetmans in its ranks. Ukrainophiles in Russian-ruled Ukraine invested not only their money but also, and predominantly, their ideas in Galicia. The prohibitions on Ukrainian-language publications in the Russian Empire turned Austrian Galicia into an attractive market for Ukrainophile writers and activists. The Russian Ukrainophiles helped the Galician Ukrainophiles create new publications. Thus the Ukrainophile newspaper Pravda was established in Galicia in 1867 through the efforts of Panteleimon Kulish, one of the leading members of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius and a key figure in the Ukrainian cultural revival of the late 1850s and early 1860s. After his exile from the Russian Empire, Mykhailo Drahomanov was one of the many Ukrainophile activists who wrote for Pravda. Mikhail Yuzefovich and the authors of the Edict of Ems had good reason to be concerned about the impact of Pravda on political and social thought in Galicia and Dnieper Ukraine. They strove to undermine the influence of the newspaper and the development of the Ukrainophile movement on both sides of the imperial border by introducing new prohibitions on Ukrainian publications in Russia and funding pro-Russian publications in Galicia, but their attempts proved unsuccessful. With new prohibitions in place, more Ukrainian writers turned to the Galician press as an outlet for their works, strengthening the appeal of the Ukrainophile project in Galicia.
By contrast, the subsidy for the newspaper Slovo decreed by the tsar did not reach the Russophiles for a number of years, either through bureaucratic incompetence or owing to corruption. The editor of Slovo informed his alleged benefactors in 1879 that he had never seen the money allegedly sent to him through diplomatic channels. When the Russian government resumed its support for the Russophiles in the 1880s, it was too late. Pro-Russian activists in Austria found themselves under increasing pressure from the government: in view of growing tensions with Russia, Vienna considered the Russophiles a more serious threat than the Ukrainophiles, with their dreams of an independent or autonomous Ukraine and its place in a future pan-Slavic federation.
The Russian authorities welcomed refugee Russophiles from Austria-Hungary, which was becoming increasingly hostile toward them, but preferred to keep the ideologically motivated arrivals away from the contested lands of Right-Bank Ukraine. The Galician Russophiles were welcome in the northwestern provinces and in the Kholm region of the former Kingdom of Poland. That had been the homeland of the last large group of Greek Catholics in the Russian Empire, who by living in this area had been shielded from the Orthodox zeal of Iosif Semashko and his supporters prior to 1863. They were “reunited” with the imperial Orthodox Church in 1875.
The Russophile priests and seminarians from Galicia, who had been born, raised, and educated as Greek Catholics but became Orthodox out of a desire to join the imperial Russian nation, effectively propagated imperial Russian identity among the former Uniates, who were forced to change their religion. In 1881, out of 291 Orthodox priests in the Kholm eparchy, 143—almost half—were former Greek Catholics from Galicia. Their salary from the imperial government was significantly higher than their previous income in Galicia—another incentive to leave the Galician battlefield to the Ukrainophiles and join the winning side in a Polish province of the “Russian world.”
THE INCREASING NUMBER OF RUSSOPHILE MIGRANTS FROM GALICIA indicated a simple fact: the Russian Empire was losing the battle in that Austrian province. The emerging winners were the Galician Ukrainophiles, whom the Russian authorities were unwittingly strengthening by instituting repressive measures against the Ukrainian language and culture in their own empire. Such policies had their drawbacks, and some in the imperial government understood that better than others. Among them was the new liberal minister of the interior, Mikhail Loris-Melikov. Soon after taking office in August 1880, Loris-Melikov and his advisers got busy preparing either the complete abolition of the Edict of Ems or significant modifications to it in order to ease the pressure on Ukrainian cultural activities and Ukrainian-language publications. Loris-Melikov wanted to restore trust in the government. That could not be achieved in the Ukrainian lands if the edict were left in place: its provisions made it illegal even to sing Ukrainian songs on a theater stage, which alienated many perfectly loyal members of the Little Russian elite.
Some historians have referred to this attempt to reconcile growing tensions between Ukrainian nationalism and the demands of all-Russian unity as a Scottish model. In Great Britain, the authorities had allowed the flourishing of a distinct Scottish identity and culture while ensuring the political loyalty of the Scottish elites. In the Russian Empire, an equivalent “Little Russian” solution would have accommodated Ukrainian identity and culture within a tripartite all-Russian nation. This would have involved the teaching of the Ukrainian language in elementary schools and the development of the Ukrainian language and culture alongside their dominant all-Russian (in fact, Great Russian) counterparts, leading to the creation of a bilingual educational system and a bicultural public sphere in the Ukrainian provinces of the empire. Some of the compromise ideas underlying the Little Russian educational program had been suggested by leading Ukrainophiles, including Mykola Kostomarov, and won the favor of some reform-minded officials in the 1870s and early 1880s.
Many expected that the restrictions would soon be lifted. But March 1881 brought the assassination of Alexander II—a sea change in Russian politics. Gone were not only exaggerated expectations in Russian society for movement toward a form of Russian constitutionalism, but also the no less exaggerated expectations of Ukrainian society for eliminating the ban on its language and culture. The proposals of government officials to amend the Edict of Ems were minimal, and they were indeed adopted under the new tsar. On October 8, 1881, Alexander III signed a decree permitting theatrical performances in Ukrainian with the special permission of provincial governors but forbade the creation of a separate Ukrainian theater—every Ukrainian play had to be accompanied by a Russian one.
The edict would remain in force for another twenty-four years. The continuing prohibitions made Galicia even more attractive to Ukrainophiles in the Russian Empire as a place of publication and cultural activity—a development that sealed the victory of Ukrainophile circles in Galicia over their Russophile opponents, despite Russian financial support for the latter in the 1880s. Inside the Russian Empire, the prohibitions made it completely impossible for the Ukrainophiles to find any common ground with the government and the proponents of the Little Russian idea. Over the next few decades, representatives of the Little Russian group would help turn Ukraine into a hotbed of Russian nationalism. One way or another, the times of the Little Russian compromise as a solution to the Ukrainian question were gone, and with them the hope of accommodating Little Russia in the all-Russian cultural and political space as a distinct component of a tripartite Russian nation. From then on, Little Russian intellectuals were left with only two choices—to become “true Russians,” or to embrace an independent Ukrainian identity.