Himka - The Ukrainian Idea in the Second Half of the 19th Century
Stefan Lemieszewski
Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 3.2 (2002) 321-335
Review Essay
The Ukrainian Idea in the Second Half of the 19th Century
John-Paul Himka
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Aleksei Il?ich Miller, "Ukrainskii vopros" v politike vlastei i russkom
obshchestvennom mnenii (vtoraia polovina XIX veka). St. Petersburg:
Aleteiia, 2000. 282 pp. ISBN 5-89329-246-4.
Anatolii Kruhlashov, Drama intelektuala: Politychni idei Mykhaila
Drahomanova. Chernivtsi: Vydavnytstvo "Prut," 2000. ISBN 966-560-008-7.
When in 1654 Hetman Bohdan Khmelnyts?kyi led his Cossack host under the
protection of the tsar's "high hand," two peoples came into contact who had
some things in common, while others markedly differentiated them. Turning
their backs to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Cossacks made a point
of emphasizing what they shared with the people of the Muscovite state. They
both called themselves Rus? and they confessed the same Holy Orthodox faith.
But both understood that they were far from identical. The Muscovites
translated Cossack documents, even when written in what was supposed to be
the same Church Slavonic language that they used. The spoken vernaculars
were much more distant. The two versions of Orthodoxy met each other
uneasily. The Cossack officers and their churchmen were influenced by Polish
and Latin culture and thought politically in terms of the pacta conventa and
the republican constitution of the Commonwealth. The Muscovites knew little
of the Western learning, and autocracy lay at the base of their political
culture.
Over the next century and a half, the Cossack population was more thoroughly
integrated into the Russian polity. The Cossacks' churchmen worked out a
conception of how they fit into this enlarged Russia: they were the Little
Russians, and the people who formed the core of the state which they entered
were the Great Russians - together they made up all Rus?. The Little Russian
churchmen dominated the Orthodox hierarchy and did much to homogenize the
religious culture of the two branches of Rus?. In the latter half of the
18th century, Catherine II, rationalizing the administration of her huge
realm, dismantled all the vestiges of Little Russian autonomy. With the
destruction of both the Crimean Khanate and Poland-Lithuania, she no longer
needed the Cossacks. They could serve the state like any other Russian
subjects. [End Page 321]
The passing of the old Cossack order provoked a wave of nostalgic
regionalism. A travesty of the Aeneid in the Little Russian vernacular, with
Cossacks taking the place of Vergil's Trojans, filled with local lore and
local humor, was an instant success when it was published in 1798. It
touched off a lively literary movement in the vernacular, which flourished
especially in the region just east of the main Cossack territories, in
so-called Sloboda Ukraine, a place where Cossacks had settled under
Muscovite rule even before 1654. Here in Sloboda Ukraine, in Kharkiv, a
university was founded in 1805, so there was a concentration of
intellectuals who could breathe life into the new movement. They put out
literary almanacs and periodicals with titles like Ukrainskii al?manakh,
Ukrainskii sbornik, Ukrainskii vestnik, and Ukrainskii zhurnal. The
"Ukrainian" in these titles indicated that they were based in Sloboda
Ukraine, but soon the word caught on to describe the new Little Russian
movement as a whole.
Roughly at the same time, in 1793-95, as a result of the second and third
partitions of Poland, Russia acquired the Right Bank of the Dnipro, where
the Little Russian vernacular was also spoken and where Cossacks had also
once held sway. From here the greatest exponent of the Ukrainian movement
hailed - the painter, freed serf, and national poet Taras Shevchenko. He
gravitated towards the newly founded St. Vladimir University in Kyiv, as did
other intellectuals of the same persuasion. The Russian government looked
favorably on their activities. It was felt that their regional Little
Russian movement could be an effective antidote to Polish agitation in the
Right Bank. Indeed, the Poles had erupted in rebellion in 1830-31, and the
university in Kyiv was founded in 1834 precisely to combat their influence.
The atmosphere in Kyiv was politically charged, and the Ukrainian activists
also began to discuss political questions. Shevchenko wrote some powerful
and politically risqu?i> poetry. His friend, the historian Mykola
Kostomarov, drafted a manifesto clearly inspired by a Polish messianic text,
which predicted that Ukraine, tormented by its neighbors, would one day rise
up to renew in all of Slavdom the spirit of liberty and equality. Kyiv would
become the capital of a Slavic federation. One member of the group denounced
the others to the police, and they were arrested as the Cyrillo-Methodian
Brotherhood in 1847. Except in the case of the poet Shevchenko, whose verse
contained some insulting remarks directed at the tsar and his family, the
members of the Brotherhood received relatively light sentences.
The Ukrainian movement lay low for a while, but with the great reforms of
the 1860s it entered the cultural and political arena again. The latter half
of the 19th century was a critical period in its fortunes. For the
Ukrainophiles, as they were now known, it was a time of self-definition and
of conceptualization; but it was also a period when the Russians, in
government and in society, discussed and [End Page 322] defined their own
attitude to the movement. The contours of the Ukrainian question were
becoming more evident.
Two fine books have appeared dealing with the development of the Ukrainian
national idea in the latter part of the 19th century. One is by Aleksei
Il?ich Miller, who divides his time as a teacher and researcher among the
Institute for Scientific Information in Humanities of the Russian Academy of
Sciences (INION), the Institute of Russian History of the Russian State
Humanities University (RGGU), and the History Department of the Central
European University in Budapest. The other is by Anatolii Kruhlashov, head
of the Department of Political Sciences and Sociology in the Faculty of
History at the Iurii Fed?kovych National University of Chernivtsi. Miller's
book concerns the policies of the Russian government, local as well as
imperial, towards the Ukrainophile movement, particularly in Kyiv, from the
early 1860s through the early 1880s, that is, roughly coinciding with the
reign of Alexander II; it also examines the closely related issue of the
reaction to the Ukrainian movement in the Russian periodical press.
Kruhlashov's book is about a leader of that movement, Mykhailo Drahomanov,
who was active from the early 1860s until his death in 1895. He was a man at
odds with the Russian authorities, so much so that he left the country in
1875 and never returned. He also frequently found himself at odds with
Russian public opinion of all stripes. Miller's and Kruhlashov's books are
about antagonists. Each writes with a scholarly, and often critical,
sympathy towards his subject.
Miller's book is influenced by Western scholarship, not so much the
scholarship on his particular subject, which is not so distinguished in the
West, but by literature with wider implications. Not just cited, but
integrated into his study are theoretical works on nationalism, English- and
German-language studies of Russian, Soviet, and Ukrainian history, and
modern historical and socio-scientific classics on related themes. Authors
he cites include Immanuel Wallerstein, Anthony Smith, Ronald Suny, and Roman
Szporluk. This is a book that connects Russian scholarship with trends in
North American and European scholarship. 1 At the same time, this book also
relates to post-Soviet reflections about what constitutes the Russian
nation. The last sentence of Miller's monograph is: "The history we have
narrated, of the project of a large Russian nation and its failure, is over,
but echoes of these ideas and topics, in new conditions and in new forms,
can be clearly discerned even today" (239). [End Page 323]
Kruhlashov's book is even more firmly rooted in the present-day concerns of
his environment. 2 Kruhlashov cites Western authors, but only those who
wrote directly on Drahomanov. 3 He does not refer explicitly to the modern
literature on nationalism, although it is clear from the way he presents
certain points that he is familiar with it. His framework is the set of
concerns of intellectuals in post-Soviet, independent Ukraine.
Miller's Ukrainskii vopros is partly a book about the nationalization of the
mind of Russian civil servants. He quite rightly notes that European
dynasties in general only slowly and usually reluctantly accommodated
themselves to nationalisms that came from below, and the Romanovs in
particular took the whole 19th century to nationalize. The "official
nationalism" that emanated from the top had connections with Russian
nationalism as a social movement, but they were distinct phenomena,
sometimes reinforcing each other, sometimes conflicting (11-12). The
confusion that existed at the highest levels was reflected in local Russian
officialdom as well. Some civil servants thought in national terms, while
others did not. There's a good illustration of this point in Miller's book.
The minister of internal affairs, Petr Aleksandrovich Valuev, issued a
circular in 1863 (text in Miller, 240-41) that placed some restrictions on
the publication of works in the Little Russian language. 4 The minister of
education, Aleksandr Vasil?evich Golovnin, tried to have the circular
repealed, arguing, among other things, that russificatory measures taken
with relation to the Finns in the 1840s had produced negative consequences.
For Valuev, the very act of comparison between the Finns and the Little
Russians showed how little Golovnin understood about the state's interests.
For Valuev the issue was who was to be included in the Russian nation and
who was not; for Golovnin this was not an issue that registered (116-17).
[End Page 324]
The second half of the 19th century was the time of transition. When the
authorities repressed the Cyrillo-Methodian Brotherhood in the 1840s, they
still thought that they were dealing with last vestiges of "Little Russian
particularism," not with the beginnings of modern Ukrainian nationalism
(58). 5 This misunderstanding would become less common by the 1860s. The
catalyst that accelerated the process of mental change was the Polish
agitation and then insurrection of 1861-64: the government was learning to
respond in national terms. Public opinion was quicker to understand things
nationally than officialdom was. The publicist Mikhail Nikiforivich Katkov
was an important intermediary in this regard. He readily cooperated with
those Russian officials who were interested in exposing the dangerous
potential of Ukrainophilism. In 1863, while Russia was at war with Polish
insurgents, Katkov publicly implied that the effort to create a separate
Little Russian literary language was much more dangerous than even the
Polish rebellion (108). As Miller puts it, "in 1862-63 the conflict [with
the Ukrainophiles] was for the first time conceptualized in national
categories, not within the narrow circle of the members of the
Cyrillo-Methodian society and high Petersburg bureaucrats, but within a wide
spectrum of public opinion" (111).
As Miller sees it, the Valuev circular of 1863 did not do too much damage to
the Ukrainophile movement. Publishing was slowed down, to be sure. In the
seven years following the circular, as many books appeared in Ukrainian as
had appeared in 1862 alone. The years 1865-66 were particularly bad, with no
Ukrainian books at all published in the empire (137). A few activists were
also exiled from Ukraine at this time (130). Yet some of the most prominent
Ukrainophiles, namely Panteleimon Kulish and Vasyl? Bilozers?kyi, were
working for the government in this same period, restoring order in Poland
after the suppression of the insurrection; others, such as Mykola Kostomarov
and Drahomanov, were also invited into government service in Warsaw at this
time, but were uninterested.
The Ukrainophiles became very active again in the 1870s. Key moments were a
lively discussion in the St. Petersburg and provincial press, initiated by
Drahomanov in Vestnik Evropy in 1872, about whether the restrictions on
Ukrainian publishing should be lifted; also the formation of a branch of the
Imperial Russian Geographical Society in Kyiv in 1873, which quickly became
a [End Page 325] hotbed of Ukrainophilism; and in 1875 the Ukrainophiles,
and Drahomanov in particular, gained control of a daily newspaper, Kievskii
telegraf. The opponents of the Ukrainophiles, who included some officials,
journalists associated with Katkov and some influential Little Russians,
reacted forcefully to this revitalization of Ukrainianism. The campaign
against the Ukrainophiles was conducted with particular vehemence in the
summer of 1874 against the background of mass arrests of participants in the
"movement to the people." The Ukrainophiles were also tarred with the
revolutionary populist brush, one opponent even claiming that their
agitation would result in a Cossack-style popular insurrection (175). The
response of the government was harsher and more effective than it had been
in 1863. Drahomanov was fired from his post at Kyiv University and driven
into emigration. The Ems ukaz of 1876 (text in Miller, 242-44) placed more
serious restrictions on publication in and other public usage of the Little
Russian dialect. 6 Although this was not a total ban on Ukrainian-language
publication, it was severe enough to drive much of Ukrainian publishing
activities abroad, mainly to the Habsburg monarchy, where Ukrainians also
lived, but also to Switzerland, where Drahomanov made his base in the late
1870s and 1880s.
These repressive measures were, in Miller's view and in the view of a number
of contemporary Russian officials as well, counter-productive. Writing in
1881, Aleksandr Mikhailovich Dondukov-Korsakov, governor-general formerly of
Kyiv and then of Kharkiv, argued that the Ems ukaz only increased the
authority of the Ukrainophiles, who could easily use it to buttress their
case that Ukrainian culture was persecuted in Russia: after all, the ukaz
even banned theatrical performances and songs in Little Russian. Its
prohibitions on publication only succeeded in making Lviv, Chernivtsi, and
Vienna the centers of Ukrainian publishing, and this not without the support
of the Austrian government (210). Placing his study in a wide comparative
context, especially comparing Russia with England and France, Miller argues
that a modernizing assimilationist program would have been much more
effective than these half-hearted repressions in creating a large Russian
nation that included the Ukrainians/Little Russians. In his view the
expansion of the railway system, the introduction of universal conscription
in 1874, migration processes and urbanization were much more effective
instruments of Russification than the repressive legislation of 1863 and
1876 (187-96). If modernization had been more rapid, if the state had been
more penetrative (233-34) and, particularly, if the educational system had
been expanded, in the Russian language of course (150-51), things could have
turned out very differently. It was not so much that the Ukrainian movement
succeeded, Miller concludes, as that the Russian assimilatory efforts failed
(235). Drahomanov himself lends support to this hypothesis. As Kruhlashov
points out, [End Page 326] Drahomanov sometimes worried that the
democratization of Russia, which he championed, would not aid the Ukrainian
movement, that instead "Muscovite people" might find it easier in the new
circumstances to assimilate more Ukrainians; Ukrainian culture would
survive, but as a "country cousin" (Kruhlashov, 395). Although Drahomanov
expressed himself largely in political rather than sociological terms, it is
clear that he was thinking along the same lines Miller is.
The past is always much more messy than the sorted-out narrative which we
historians, especially national historians, like to present. It is one of
the virtues of Miller's book that it messes things up again. In the
Ukrainian national narrative, the Valuev circular and Ems ukaz are presented
as the results of an uneven conflict between a Russian government bent on
suppressing the Ukrainian language and other manifestations of Ukrainian
distinctiveness and the Ukrainians, struggling to preserve their nationality
against difficult odds. In Miller's account, lines are not so clearly drawn.
For one thing, he shows that government officials were deeply divided over
how to handle the Ukrainian question. As general governor of Kyiv in the
1870s, Dondukov-Korsakov was the patron of the Kyiv branch of the
geographical society and a firm opponent of the Ems ukaz. In the 1860s, as
we have seen, Minister of Education Golovnin had also opposed restrictions
on publishing in the Little Russian language, as did later the curator of
the Kyiv school district P. A. Antonovich. Most of the officials who
prepared the recommendations that resulted in the Ems ukaz tried to make it
milder, and only the last-minute intervention of the man who actually
presented the report to the tsar made the Ems ukaz as repressive as it was
(Miller, 178-80). In 1880, when the general governor of Kyiv, M. I.
Chertkov, wanted to present a memorandum on the Ukrainian question to a
revizor from St. Petersburg, he had it drafted by one of his staff, Ivan
Rudchenko, who happened to be a convinced Ukrainophile, the brother of the
eminent Ukrainian writer Panas Myrnyi. Needless to say, the
Chertkov-Rudchenko memorandum recommended lifting the restrictions the Ems
ukaz placed on Little Russian (206-7). There was hardly a united front in
the Russian government. This was not just a matter of officials who thought
in national terms and others who did not. Dondukov-Korsakov, who favored a
flexible, liberal policy towards the Ukrainophiles, was nonetheless a
convinced advocate of the assimilation of the Little Russians (210).
That there were ethnic Ukrainians among the opponents of Ukrainophilism is
not a revelation, but Miller's book makes clear just how important their
role was. The restrictions imposed on the Ukrainian language in 1863 were
presented by Russian officials as emanating from the wishes of the majority
of Little Russians themselves. The Kyiv censor committee first formulated an
argument that was soon to be incorporated verbatim into the Valuev circular:
that the very idea [End Page 327] of using the Little Russian dialect in
schools was something that made most Little Russians indignant and that the
Little Russians themselves insist that "there was not, is not and cannot be
a separate Little Russian language," that "their dialect, used by the common
people, is the same Russian language, only corrupted by Poland's influence
upon it" (109, 240-41). In the mid-1870s, the division between Ukrainophiles
and their Little Russian opponents became very bitter. Deep personal
animosities developed in the struggle for control over the geographical
society, which both factions had entered at first. The anti-Ukrainophile
forces gathered around the daily Kievlianin, which faced competition from
the Ukrainophiles' Kievskii telegraf. The conflict was not only ideological,
but financial: Kyiv could barely support two newspapers (161). Kievlianin
attacked the Ukrainophiles intemperately, accusing them of separatist
tendencies and hinting that they should be arrested (164-64). The Little
Russian Nikolai Rigel?man took the anti-Ukrainophile polemics into the
mainstream Russian press in 1875 with a long article entitled "Contemporary
Ukrainophilism" in Katkov's Russkii vestnik. This was followed shortly
thereafter by another expos?enned by Sil?vestr Sil?vestrovich Gogotskii
(Hohots?kyi in transcription from Ukrainian). 7 It was these articles that
attracted the attention of highly placed officials in St. Petersburg and set
in motion the chain of events that led to the Ems ukaz (168-71). The main
recommendations of the Ems ukaz were formulated by another anti-Ukrainophile
Little Russian, Mikhail Vladimirovich Iuzefovich (174-75, 180).
One gets the impression from Miller's account that the Ukrainophiles
constituted the more dynamic group within Kyivan educated society in the
1860s and early 1870s, but that their Little Russian opponents found
stronger allies in Russian government circles. Hinted at, too, is that by
the 1880s both groups of Little Russians were being left behind by a new
generation that was more interested in populism than in national projects of
any sort (220).
Both Miller and the historical actors he describes noted that the
repressions in the Russian empire had the effect of transferring the focus
of Ukrainian publishing and activism to Austria, and particularly to the
crownland of Galicia, where about 3 million Ukrainians or, as they were then
known, "Ruthenians" lived. This is a quite intriguing aspect of the
development of the Ukrainian idea that Miller leaves out of his account
here. Having worked fruitfully in the past [End Page 328] on Galician
Ruthenian history, 8 he was well qualified to have pursued it. It is
intriguing, because something seems to have happened to the Ukrainian idea
while sojourning in Austria: it became more separatist, more exclusivist.
The censor's office (Glavnoe Upravlenie po delam pechati), in a memorandum
preparing the way for the Ems ukaz, had noted that the Ukrainophiles in
Galicia speak about "a South Russian nation of 15 million as though it were
something completely separate from the Great Russian tribe" (176). It does
not seem that the Ukrainophiles in the Russian empire had quite the same
conception of a complete separation. 9
Take Drahomanov, for example. From the point of view of anti-Ukrainophile
Russian officialdom and Little Russian publicists, there was perhaps no more
audacious separatist than he (168-69, 181, 215). Yet in the early 1870s,
precisely when he was the object of so many attacks from the
anti-Ukrainophiles, Drahomanov held the view that Ukrainians should be
bicultural, both all-Russian and Ukrainian. When he expressed that view in
an article written for the Galician press, the editors sat on his manuscript
for four years because they didn't approve of his conception of how Russian
and Ukrainian culture interrelated (Miller, 158; see also Kruhlashov, 254).
In this period, Kruhlashov characterizes him as "an all-Russian liberal with
Little Russian peculiarities" who only later evolved into a fully Ukrainian
activist (Kruhlashov, 293) But even in the later, more Ukrainian phase of
his career, Drahomanov continued to write in the Russian language as well as
Ukrainian and to become involved in all-Russian political projects. His
Galician disciple Ivan Franko, who felt the need later in life to criticize
his former mentor, accused Drahomanov of being always ready to subordinate
Ukrainian interests to those of all-Russian democracy (Kruhlashov, 20).
Integral nationalists in interwar Western Ukraine simply denounced
Drahomanov as a Russophile (Kruhlashov, 41-44) There was something different
about the way the Galicians understood Ukrainian nationality, as indeed
something totally different from, exclusive of, Russian nationality, while
Ukrainophilism in Russia was not so radically binary. The metamorphosis of
[End Page 329] Ukrainianism in the Galician environment stands as an
important topic 10 that as yet has not been researched at all.
As noted at the outset, Kruhlashov's book is quite different from Miller's
even though it treats roughly the same period and concerns a person who has
the most entries in Miller's index. This is because Kruhlashov's project is
different. Miller was interested in exploding some comfortable topoi in the
narrative of the Ukrainian question in Russia and also in rethinking the
development of the Ukrainian national idea in terms of two competing
projects: building a Ukrainian nation and building a large Russian nation
that included the Ukrainians and Belarusians. But Miller's concerns are
peripheral to what Kruhlashov aims to accomplish. At one level, Kruhlashov
is doing very solid, traditional intellectual history. As he says in his
introduction, not Drahomanov but his ideas are the heroes of this work (5).
Throughout the book, readers familiar with Drahomanov will be impressed by
the many hitherto unnoticed nuances of Drahomanov's thought Kruhlashov
succeeds in bringing out. He calls his book "the drama of an intellectual,"
because he sees Drahomanov as engaged in a heroic struggle to put forward a
vision of a new future while he runs into obstacle after obstacle: the
inertia of social traditions, overwhelming political opposition, the fog of
myth and custom, the force of an opposing state (11). Aside from this level,
however, there is another, which frames the whole work and the kind of
questions it pursues. What Kruhlashov is primarily engaged in is a major
reassessment of Drahomanov from within the context of independent Ukraine.
In particular, he is looking for a usable Drahomanov.
The book opens with a long (and valuable) account of the previous
historiography on Drahomanov (16-101). 11 This sets the stage for the major
corrective project that Kruhlashov undertakes. Although Kruhlashov
differentiates his position from that of most of his predecessors, including
Drahomanov's contemporaries and the greatest Western specialist on
Drahomanov, Ivan L. Rudnytsky, he chiefly attempts to distance himself from
Soviet historiography. The Soviet position [End Page 330] on Drahomanov
wavered a great deal, 12 but essentially between two poles. When out of
favor, Drahomanov was depicted as a petty bourgeois nationalist who, in
Lenin's immortal words, "expressed the views of a peasant ... ignorant and
sluggish ... attached to his dung heap," a man "who richly deserved the
fervent kisses" he received from the national-liberal Petr Struve. 13 In
moments of greater tolerance, Soviet Ukrainian historians could write about
Drahomanov in a more positive way, but then they had to remake him in a way
that was useful for Soviet Ukrainian nationhood. This Drahomanov was a
socialist, a firm opponent of Ukrainian nationalism, and a proponent of
Russian-Ukrainian friendship. Aside from the fact that both of these Soviet
constructions of Drahomanov are, to say the least, exceedingly tendentious,
neither fits with the new post-Soviet Ukrainian nationhood that is still in
the process of definition. Kruhlashov is painting a much more realistic
portrait of Drahomanov, but one which can hang in the newly remodeled
national pantheon.
Thus in the excellent section on Drahomanov's views on religion (180-212),
Kruhlashov makes a point of demonstrating that Drahomanov was not a militant
atheist. In his conclusions he calls Drahomanov one of the first Ukrainian
or Russian social-political thinkers ever to promote the ideal of a civil
society (458).
A major question for Kruhlashov, naturally, is: to what extent was
Drahomanov a socialist? He shows that Drahomanov had little interest in or
understanding of economic questions. They usually played an auxiliary role
in his theories, in which social and political themes were much more
prominent (102, 107). The point is that Drahomanov's socialism, such as it
was, was not firmly grounded in economic theory. Drahomanov was indeed a
self-proclaimed socialist (or hromadivets? to use the peculiar Ukrainian
political terminology he invented), but Kruhlashov makes a convincing case
that socialism should be understood as a phase in Drahomanov's development.
Drahomanov was at his most socialist in the 1870s and early 1880s (130).
With time, however, he used the word socialism with less and less frequency,
instead employing euphemisms like social struggle, social progress, and
social question. This linguistic distancing, Kruhlashov proposes, was linked
to Drahomanov's distancing himself from the doctrine. He did not reject
socialism outright, but as a goal he saw it receding into the distance
(135). Towards the end of his life Drahomanov did not consider [End Page
331] the socialist ideal to be on the agenda for either his generation or
for the generation of his disciples. In light of this, Kruhlashov asks, can
Drahomanov be blamed (or congratulated) for inspiring the socialist movement
in Ukraine at the end of the 19th and early 20th century? (138).
Kruhlashov devotes a special brief section to Drahomanov's attitude towards
Marxism (139-41), an easy topic, since Drahomanov had little use for it. As
to revolution, Drahomanov favored it in the 1870s, particularly after his
exile from Russia, but overall his thought was dominated by evolutionary
solutions. Like many men of his time, Drahomanov considered Darwin's
evolutionary theories to be the most important scientific discoveries of the
19th century, and he felt they also applied to progress in human society. He
distrusted quick, all-encompassing solutions to the major problems of the
state and society (148-80). In his political theory and practice, ethics
played an unusually large role. In particular, he opposed the idea that the
ends justify the means. A good cause demands cleans hands, he used to say.
In Kruhlashov's opinion, the history of the 20th century has proven
Drahomanov right on this score (352).
After extricating Drahomanov from the historical stream that led to
Bolshevism, Kruhlashov turns his attention to the problem of Ukrainian
nationalism. Drahomanov was definitely one of the people in late
19th-century Russia who thought in national terms. He believed in the
reality of nations. To him they were not artificial constructions or
creations of the imagination. They were historical actors, subjects in the
creation of human history (223). He had a generally positive attitude to the
awakening of nationalities, which he considered part of humanity's evolution
towards liberty and enlightenment (233). He recognized that nationalists
could be stupid and aggressive, but nonetheless, he reasoned, "with regard
to the main problem, political liberty, every nationalist is a liberal"
(Kruhlashov wryly notes that this was an optimistic assessment) (243).
Kruhlashov in the main approves of Drahomanov's liberal nationalism. He
does, though, question a statement Drahomanov made about the superiority of
"cosmopolitanism" to "nationalism" (253). He deals at some length with
Drahomanov's interest in the Slavic Idea (256-91), which Kruhlashov defends
as an indispensable and fruitful phase in the formation of the Ukrainian
national ideology (257). Even when Drahomanov was most enthusiastic about
Slavic mutuality, Kruhlashov says, Drahomanov thought as a Ukrainian, not as
a Russian (274), and with time and experience he moved away from the Slavic
Idea to focus more on the Ukrainian Idea in particular (288-90). Kruhlashov
also defends Drahomanov against the charge of "Little Russian ambivalence"
(rozdvoienist?), i.e., that he did not sufficiently differentiate himself as
a Ukrainian from the Russians. Quite the contrary, says Kruhlashov: in his
essays on Russian topics, Drahomanov more than once emphasized that he was
not a Russian, but a [End Page 332] Ukrainian (344-45). (On the very next
page, however, in a totally different connection, Kruhlashov quotes
Drahomanov referring in 1879 to "Rus? people, Muscovite as well as
Ukrainian" [rus?kykh liudei, moskovs?kykh, iak i ukrains?kykh].)
Kruhlashov has more work to do when it comes to explaining Drahomanov's
record on the issue of Ukrainian independent statehood. Kruhlashov puts it
delicately: "Indeed, he was not among those whom without qualification we
can name as a prophet of Ukrainian independent statehood in as much as
Drahomanov defended the idea of the federative statehood of Ukraine" (434).
Kruhlashov devotes special sections of his monograph to Drahomanov's
federalism (413-34) and to answering the question: Why did Drahomanov not
become an ideologue of Ukrainian independence? (434-50). Of course, these
are issues of considerable importance in a country that has been independent
for only ten years. Does Drahomanov belong among the intellectual
progenitors or not?
In the interwar era integral nationalists accused Drahomanov of imbuing the
Ukrainian movement with federalist ideas, which resulted in a lack of
clarity at a critical moment, i.e., during the revolution of 1917-20, and
thus prevented the achievement of statehood. Kruhlashov rejects this
exaggerated view outright. He makes the good point that Baltic and Czech
national leaders were also federalists, but ended up with independent states
after World War I (463-64). He also reminds us that Drahomanov was the first
political thinker to define the ethnic borders of Ukraine (436); he was one
of the first concrete imaginers of Ukraine, its mental cartographer. In the
main, however, Kruhlashov takes another fruitful tack in explaining
Drahomanov's preference for federalism over independent statehood. He shows
the logic of the situation that led to the dominance of federalist thinking
throughout the Ukrainian movement in the late 19th and early 20th century.
As Drahomanov himself saw it, there were only two alternatives for the
satisfaction of Ukrainian national demands: either dismantling the Russian
and Austrian states enough to pry Ukraine away from them, or else working
towards the federalization of these states. He considered the latter to be
by far the more realistic alternative. The two states Ukraine would have to
be wrested from were powerful empires. The Ukrainian movement was
ideologically and organizationally weak, especially in Russia. As the
evidence of the folk songs Drahomanov collected indicated, the Ukrainian
popular masses longed for a vague freedom, but expressed no desire to
establish their own state. Starting a separatist movement prematurely would
simply result in the brutal suppression of the Ukrainian movement, crippling
it for a long time to come. Moreover, as Ivan L. Rudnytskty pointed out, the
last quarter of the 19th century was a time of peace and stability in
Europe, not a favorable time for a separatist project. [End Page 333]
Kruhlashov concludes that it is senseless to demand from a 19th-century
thinker solutions appropriate to 20th-century situations (438-49).
In Kruhlashov's analysis, however, Drahomanov did have an exaggerated
attachment to federalism. His ultimate ideal for all of humanity was a
universal federation, although as he got older he wrote less and less about
such distant goals and concentrated on more pragmatic politics (383-84). In
his concluding assessment of Drahomanov, Kruhlashov says that in spite of
his immense contributions to the Ukrainian movement and in spite of
mitigating factors, his national politics were flawed by his dogmatic
absolutization of federalism (462).
What results from Kruhlashov's efforts to find both the real Drahomanov and
the Drahomanov suitable for independent Ukraine? Aside from the most
reliable and most detailed account of Drahomanov's political thinking, we
get a much more complex Drahomanov than had existed in the literature
previously. A particularly successful aspect of Kruhlashov's investigation
is his continual probing for changes in Drahomanov's views over time. More
than any previous student of Drahomanov's thought, Kruhlashov is attuned to
its evolution. In the conclusion to his monograph he brings together the
insights on this topic scattered throughout the book. Drahomanov started
out, he says, as a Little Russian patriot with Russian liberal and
democratic ideas. In the 1860s and first half of 1870s, however, his views
underwent both social and national radicalization. In his first years in
emigration, i.e., in the second half of the 1870s, this radicalism went even
further as Drahomanov experimented with anarcho-federalism and a more
radical socialism. As of the 1880s Drahomanov's politics grew more
temperate; he developed a synthesis of European liberalism and social
democracy applied to specifically Ukrainian conditions. From the late 1880s
on he worked up his own more original program, based on a liberal,
democratic nationalism and supplemented with elements from European
radicalism (466).
Both books move forward our understanding of the history of the Ukrainian
idea in the late 19th century. They also open some new questions and suggest
directions for the historiography. Miller's views are revisionist with
regard to Ukrainian historiography, and they should provoke some rethinking
or reaction from that quarter. Also, to return to a point already made,
Miller's review of the history of the Ukrainian idea in Russia begs for a
complementary study of the evolution of that idea in Austria. There exist
numerous excellent works on the Ruthenian/Ukrainian national movement in
Galicia, 14 but what is needed is a [End Page 334] study of how that idea
itself changed when it moved outside the Russian environment. Kruhlashov's
book on Drahomanov has succeeded in clarifying the content and evolution of
his political thought. One would now like to see an equally successful
biography of this interesting and influential figure. Kruhlashov has strewn
through his monograph many insights into Drahomanov's personality and
activities, but it awakens an appetite for something more substantial. Such
a biography should include an exploration of Drahomanov's Ukrainianness in
relation to his Russianness as an indication of the assumptions and content
of Ukrainophilism in the mid-19th century.
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Dept. of History and Classics
University of Alberta
Edmonton AB T6G 2H4 Canada
jph...@yahoo.com
John-Paul Himka is Professor of History at the University of Alberta,
Canada. He is the author of Socialism in Galicia: The Emergence of Polish
Social Democracy and Ukrainian Radicalism (1860-1890) (1983), Galician
Villagers and the Ukrainian National Movement in the Nineteenth Century
(1988), and Religion and Nationality in Western Ukraine: The Greek Catholic
Church and the Ruthenian National Movement in Galicia, 1867-1900 (1999). He
is currently exploring prenational culture in Ukraine by examining texts and
images connected with the Last Judgment and produced before 1800.
Notes
1. For a summary of the methodological premises underlying his work, see
Alexei Miller, "Shaping Russian and Ukrainian Identities in the Russian
Empire during the Nineteenth Century: Some Methodological Remarks."
Jahrb?f?chichte Osteuropas 49: 2 (2001), 257-63.
2. Kruhlashov publishes on current Ukrainian affairs, especially Ukraine's
place in international relations. See, for example, Anatolii Kruhlashov,
"Intehratsiini oriientyry Ukrainy: Deklaratsii ta realii," in Ievropa: Idei
ta protsesy. Materialy naukovoho sympoziumu 4-5 chervnia 1998 r., ed. Iu. I.
Makar et al. (Chernivtsi: Vydavnytstvo "Prut," 1998), 8-23; Anatolii
Kruhlashov, "Spokusy ta nebezpeky rehionalizatsii," in Rehiony Skhidnoi
Ievropy: Intehratsiini ochikuvannia ta konfrontatsiini nebezpeky. Materialy
Mizhnarodnoi naukovoi konferentsii, Chernivtsi, 18-19 veresnia 2000 r., ed.
Iu. I. Makar et al. (Chernivtsi: Bukrek, 2000), 14-23.
3. The most important Western publication on Drahomanov remains Ivan L.
Rudnytsky, ed., Mykhailo Drahomanov: A Symposium and Selected Writings (New
York: The Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the U.S., 1952).
4. An English translation of the Valuev circular can be found in Paul Robert
Magocsi, A History of Ukraine (Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of
Toronto Press, 1996), 369-70.
5. This first political manifestation of Ukrainophilism attracted attention
among Ukrainian scholars in both the homeland and the diaspora in the early
1990s. In late-Soviet Ukraine a substantial collection of sources on the
Brotherhood was published: P. S. Sokhan? et al., eds., Kyrylo-Mefodiivs?ke
tovarystvo, 3 vols. (Kyiv: Naukova dumka, 1990). In Canada a survey with a
selection of translated sources appeared: George S. N. Luckyj, Young
Ukraine: The Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius in Kiev, 1845-1847
(Ottawa and Paris: University of Ottawa Press, 1991).
6. Abbreviated English translation in Magocsi, History of Ukraine, 372-73.
7. In 1859 Gogotskii had written to the author of a Ukrainian bukvar?
expressing his concern that the primer seemed to imply some kind of Little
Russian independence, when, in light of Polish intrigues, it was imperative
to draw as closely as possible to the Great Russians. "Do not forget who are
our enemies," he wrote: "the Poles and Rome!" (Miller, 73-74)
8. Alexey Miller, "Galicia after the Ausgleich: Polish-Ruthenian Conflict
and the Attempts of Reconciliation," Central European University History
Department Yearbook (1993), 135-43; A. I. Miller, "Ukrainskie krest?iane,
pol?skie pomeshchiki, avstriiskii i russkii imperatory v Galitsii 1872 g.,"
in A. S. Stykalin, ed., Tsentral?naia Evropa v novoe i noveishee vremia
(Sbornik k 70-letiiu T. M. Islamova) (Moscow: Rossiiskaia akademiia nauk,
Institut slavianovedeniia, 1998), 175-80.
9. On the issue of multiple loyalties and national exclusivism, see Paul
Robert Magocsi, "The Ukrainian National Revival: A New Analytical
Framework," Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism 16: 1-2 (1989), 45-62.
10. See the interesting remarks on "Ukrainianhood" in Amir Weiner, Making
Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution
(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), 331-36. Weiner
deals with a confrontation between what might be considered the descendants
of Galician and Russian-contexted Ukrainophilism, namely Ukrainian
nationalism and Soviet Ukrainianhood.
11. This is an excellent supplement to Elzbieta Hornowa, Ocena dzialalnosci
Michal Dragomanowa w historiografii ukrai?skiej, rosyjskiej i polskiej
(Opole: Wysza Szkola Pedagogiczna w Opolu, 1967).
12. See: Zh. P. Kh[ymka], "Drahomanivs?ka spadshchyna s?ohodni,"
Suchasnist?, no. 6 (1974), 83-90; Roman Solchanyk, "Literaturna Ukraina on
M. P. Drahomanov: The First Step Towards Rehabilitation?" Radio Liberty
Research, 27 October 1981 (RL 425/81); Roman Solchanyk, "Ukrainian Writer
Calls for More Clarity on 'Controversial' Historical Figure," Radio Liberty
Research, 16 July 1986 (RL 278/86).
13. V. I. Lenin, "The Right of Nations to Self-Determination," in Lenin:
Selected Works in Three Volumes (New York: International Publishers, 1967),
1: 634.
14. Recent studies of particular interest include: Ostap Sereda, "'Whom
Shall We Be?' Public Debates Over the National Identity of Galician
Ruthenians in the 1860s," Jahrb?f?chichte Osteuropas 49: 2 (2001), 200-12;
Oleh Turii, "Konfesiino-obriadovyi chynnyk u natsional?nii
samoidentyfikatsii ukraintsiv Halychyny v seredyni XIX stolittia," Zapysky
Naukovoho tovarystva imeni Shevchenka, vol. 233, Pratsi
Istorychno-filosofs?koi sektsii (1997), 69-99; Anna Veronika Wendland, Die
Russophilen in Galizien: Ukrainische Konservative zwischen ?terreich und
Ru?and, 1848-1915 (Vienna: Verlag der ?terreichischen Akademie der
Wissenschaften, 2001).
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