IT WAS A HUGE DISASTER AND A BAD OMEN FOR THE MONARCHY. Festivities organized to celebrate the coronation of the new Russian emperor, the twenty-eight-year-old Nicholas II, turned into a stampede that killed close to 2,000 men, women, and children.
On May 18, 1896, an estimated half million people gathered on the Khodynka Field near Moscow to celebrate the ascension of a new Romanov to the throne. Many were attracted by the promise of gifts from the tsar that included bread, sausage, and sweets. When the officials began to give out the gifts, the crowd rushed toward the shops, crushing everything in its way and stampeding those who fell—the field was full of ditches covered with wooden boards that gave way under the pressure. The young emperor wanted to cancel the celebrations, but his courtiers insisted that they go on. Most of those who gathered at the Khodynka Field were attracted not by the promise of food and drink at the tsar’s expense but by the possibility of getting a commemorative cup with the double-headed eagle—the imperial coat of arms—depicted on it. The cups were put on display in Moscow shops on the eve of the celebrations, and enthusiasm for the monarchy ran high in Russian society. Once the corpses were removed, the crowd greeted the arriving emperor by singing of “God Save the Tsar,” a hymn that had become known as the “people’s song.” The monarchy had survived the accident almost without a scratch.
The imperial regime was not so lucky in surviving another instance of popular adoration of the tsar and belief in his power to change the lives of his subjects for the better. It took place eight and a half years later, on Sunday, January 9, 1905. On that day, close to 20,000 St. Petersburg workers and members of their families marched from the outskirts of the city to the tsar’s winter palace (now the Hermitage Museum) in the center. Singing the “people’s song,” they carried Orthodox icons and portraits of the emperor. They did not ask for free food packages. But a petition prepared by the leader of the march, the Orthodox priest Grigorii Gapon, read: “We working men of St. Petersburg, our wives and children, and our parents, helpless, aged men and women, have come to you, О Tsar, in quest of justice and protection.” The factory workers wanted civil rights, higher wages, an eight-hour workday, and the right to strike. They also wanted responsible government. “Demolish the wall between yourself and the people, and let them govern the country together with you,” read the petition.
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.
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 revived, 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 Belarusian 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.
If anything, the outbreak of the Great War in August 1914 would strengthen the unity of that virtual nation and create conditions for its expansion beyond the borders of the empire.