Chapter NINE: Changing Conditions

With the opening of the reign of Alexander II and the amnestying of the leaders of the Society of Saints Cyril and Methodius, a new era seemed to have opened for Ukraine. The authorities were not unsympathetic to the use of the Ukrainian language and while they were sternly resolved to resist and suppress any movement toward separation and toward the demand for the restoration of the ancient rights of Ukraine, they did not seem averse to the development and use of the Ukrainian language among the people. Steps were taken to print text books in Ukrainian for Ukrainian schools. Institutions for the education of the people were planned and some were started and it looked as if a new and happier era was dawning.

It was possible to think of establishing Ukrainian journals openly without resorting to subterfuges that they were intended for archaeological and ethnographical purposes. Now was the time when Bilozersky and Kulish founded the _Osnova_ in St. Petersburg and in Kiev and Kharkiv and elsewhere in Ukraine other papers were speedily called into existence.

It was a false dawn. In 1863 came the Polish revolt and although Ukraine took no part in it as a whole and many of the Slavophile leaders were cooperating with them in their endeavors, the idea spread throughout the official circles that the Ukrainians were somehow involved in the Polish movement, an idea carefully fostered by the Poles. The result was the beginning of a far-reaching policy of repression which was to nullify many of the gains that had already been made.

The Sunday Schools that had been established in Kiev and other points in Ukraine were suppressed and the various journals were compelled to suspend. Then in 1863, Count Valuyev, the Minister of the Interior, issued a statement that there never was, is not, and cannot be any separate Ukrainian or Little Russian language. He ordered the censors to prevent the publication of anything in it that had a spiritual content, textbooks or books intended for elementary instruction. This allowed only works of belles-lettres to be published and even this was a mere subterfuge, for it was not long before the censors were able to consider these too as popular books and under that clause of the order, the way was open to silence entirely the Ukrainian writers.

The new literature seemed destined to be crushed in its cradle. Even though for a time in the early seventies there was a slight lessening of the restrictions, the tsar in 1876 issued a more far-reaching order which forbade the printing of Ukrainian books except in the Russian spelling, the importation of books printed abroad, and theatrical performances in Ukrainian, and even the printing of musical texts with Ukrainian words. Of course the term Little Russian was constantly used, for every mention of Ukraine was to be banned.

This was a death blow to literature, and although at various times during the next thirty years before the Revolution of 1905, many of these provisions were quietly shelved, yet the Ukrainian authors in Russian Ukraine were effectively debarred from publishing their works at home. They had only one possibility left, and that was to turn to Galicia as Kulish and his friends had been doing from the end of the sixties.

The situation there had also changed greatly. At the time of the Union of Brest in the sixteenth century, the Kozaks and the Brotherhoods of the various cities had fought stubbornly against the establishment of the Uniat Church, for they regarded it as a forerunner of Polonization. They feared from practical experience that the division in the Orthodox ranks would lead only to increased pressure from the government to give up their special characteristics. They were essentially correct in this idea. During the remaining centuries of independent Poland, the Ukrainians in that country lost most of their gentry and educated classes and only the parish clergy remained to plead the cause of the people.

After the fall of Poland, the situation changed. Western Ukraine under the rule of the Hapsburgs underwent a special development. The Emperor Joseph II, one of the enlightened despots of the day, decided it would be proper to improve the low educational level of the Galician intelligentsia which was chiefly represented by the clergy. As a result, immediately after the occupation of Galicia, Maria Theresa opened in Vienna a seminary for Uniat priests. She had earlier made certain arrangements for education among the Ukrainians in the Carpathian sections of Hungary. Now in various mild ways, she endeavored to improve the conditions and the educations of all the Ukrainians in her territory. In 1784 there was established a University in Lviv and it was ordered that certain subjects be taught in the native language, that is the mixture of Church Slavonic which was commonly employed before the time of Kotlyarevsky.

It was not long before the Polish magnates were able to renew their control and increase their influence at the court of Vienna and this led to ever new restrictions on the life of the Ukrainians or Ruthenians, as they were consistently called in Austria-Hungary. Yet the germ of a national renaissance had been established and the hopelessness that had prevailed was steadily mitigated. Willing or not, the leaders of the Uniat Church saw themselves forced into an attitude of loyalty to the Hapsburgs and of opposition to Polish domination in the province of Galicia. That very movement which in the sixteenth century had meant Polonization now at the end of the eighteenth came to stand for opposition to Polish influences and this shaped the entire life in Galicia for the next century.

There was still the language question to be solved. There was no agreement among the Ukrainians as to what form they should use. Many of the more conservative classes and the clergy and devout laity insisted upon continuing the ecclesiastical language which had been handed down from their fathers and they dreaded any innovation. Another group of the younger and more progressive elements read Kotlyarevsky and the writers in the Ukrainian vernacular and argued strenuously for its adoption. A third group, completely disillusioned with the rule of the Hapsburgs and the Poles became convinced that the future of the province lay in union with Russia and they endeavored to remodel the language on the basis of Great Russian with reference to the work that was being done in the Russian Ukraine.

There was a sort of a grim humor in this struggle. There were few or no relations between the average village in Galicia and one in Russia. Thus many of the Russian Ukrainians looked more or less with envy through rose-colored glasses at the scanty signs of recognition given to the Ruthenians in Austria-Hungary. At the same time, a large number of the Ruthenians looked with equal envy at every sign of progress in Russia and sought to join themselves to the dominant party in the great Empire.

The controversy was long and bitter, for there was really a three-sided debate among the Galician leaders themselves. There were the old conservative adherents of the Church language, there were the Ukrainian nationalists, and finally there were the Moscophiles who gained influence in every period of Hapsburg repression. Yet in their relations with the outside world all three groups were faced with the same task of supporting the Hapsburgs in Vienna and of resisting Polish domination in the province of Eastern Galicia.

From the time of Markian Shashkevich (1811-1843) in Galicia and Osip Fedkovich (1834-1888) in Bukovina there was a constant stream of young men working to develop the language on the lines laid down by Kotlyarevsky. In 1848, Count Stadion as Governor of Galicia gave the Ukrainians many privileges to thwart the danger of Polish revolt. Jakov Holovatsky, a Ukrainian, became Professor of Ukrainian Literature at the University of Lviv. There was established a General Council of the Ukrainians in Galicia and on May 15 of that year appeared the first newspaper in the vernacular, the _Zorya Halitska_ (_The Star of Halich_). A Society for Enlightenment was organized on the model of the Czech Matica and Ukrainian was introduced into many schools. Serfdom was abolished and this was a long step forward. Yet it was not long before the Emperor came to an understanding with the Polish aristocratic leaders and as soon as this was done, measures were taken to check the growing Ukrainian movement and a period of repression again set in.

In the sixties, the Galicians began to find themselves and were at least in a position to organize their own journals and literary papers, even though there was a very strong Russophile party in the province. It was to these papers that the Ukrainians in Russia were forced to turn when the period of repression began there and from this time on for a half century the heart of the Ukrainian movement was to be found in the Western Ukraine in Lviv and not in Kiev and Kharkiv where the modern revival had started.

The key to the work can be found in the Society of Shevchenko which was first established in 1875 but it was more than a decade before this secured enough funds to enable it to commence publishing operations. In 1892 it was renamed the Scientific Society and in 1898 it was again reorganized as the Shevchenko Scientific Society and became for all practical purposes the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences.

Thus the movement in Western Ukraine, although it started later, was able to catch up and even to surpass in self-consciousness the movement in Russia but as we have mentioned before, the word Ukraine was always more or less suspicious to the Austro-Hungarian authorities and for a long while the people were compelled to call themselves Ruthenians. Even to the most recent times, the Poles have emphasized this difference between Ruthenians and Ukrainians and have sought to foster a division between the two groups. So have the Hungarians in their domination of Carpatho-Ukraine, where the movement after 1848 languished in the isolated valleys of the Carpathian Mountains.

Thus this well-dismembered race finally succeeded in some small degree in establishing spiritual contacts about the middle of the nineteenth century. For the first time in centuries, the scattered groups became aware of their mutual relationships, despite the religious differences. The people in Russian Ukraine were still Orthodox. Those in Austria-Hungary were primarily Uniat but the modern trend toward secular thinking and the diminution of the bitterness of the religious conflicts allowed them to work together. They could have small hope of political freedom and of political union, but there was a profound sense of social solidarity and in the peaceful years of the nineteenth century, the task of education and of social development took precedence over the old dreams of attaining liberty and freedom on the field of battle.