The Gates of Europe by Serhii Plokhy

Author:Serhii Plokhy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2015-10-28T20:05:43+00:00

The key figure in the transfer of the Galician experience to Dnieper Ukraine was a forty-year-old professor of Ukrainian history at Lviv University, Mykhailo Hrushevsky. An alumnus of Kyiv University, Hrushevsky came to Galicia in 1894 and established himself as the leading Ukrainian academic on either side of the Russo-Austrian border. He began writing his multivolume History of Ukraine-Rus’, the first academic work to establish the Ukrainian historical narrative as completely distinct from the Russian one. He also served as president of the Lviv-based Shevchenko Scientific Society, turning it into an equivalent of the national academy of sciences that Ukraine did not yet have. Once he heard about the formation of the Ukrainian Club during the First Duma, Hrushevsky left his students in Lviv and moved to St. Petersburg to edit the club’s publication and serve as adviser to the Ukrainian deputies. In the next few years, Hrushevsky moved the journal Literaturno-naukovyi visnyk (Literary and Scholarly Herald ), which he had been editing in Lviv, to Kyiv, where he also founded the Ukrainian Scientific Society, modeled on the Shevchenko Scientific Society in Lviv.

Hrushevsky claimed that the “liberation of Russia”—the goal of the broad liberal coalition that had emerged in the Russian Empire on the eve of the revolution—was unattainable without the “liberation” of Ukraine. He sought a democratic and autonomous Ukraine within a democratic federal Russian state. He called on the Ukrainian intelligentsia to join Ukrainian political parties instead of sacrificing their national agenda in the service of “all-Russian” goals. Hrushevsky also aimed to prevent a possible alliance of Russian liberals with Polish nationalists at the expense of Ukrainian political and cultural goals. He argued that there should be no separate deals when it came to nationalities, all of which should be treated equally. He feared that a Russo-Polish agreement on the introduction of the Polish language in the schools of the former Poland-Lithuania would entail the exclusion of the Ukrainian language from the school system. The Polonization of the Ukrainian peasantry would thus replace the Russification of the Ukrainian countryside in the western provinces of the empire. As things turned out, the threat did not materialize.

Hrushevsky’s Galician experience very much informed his concern. The Ukrainian National Democratic Party dominated Ukrainian politics there. Created in 1899 with the help of Hrushevsky and his close ally Ivan Franko, Ukraine’s best-known Galician writer, it united Ukrainophile populists and socialist radicals. The national democrats declared Ukrainian independence as their ultimate aim (before Mikhnovsky’s Revolutionary Ukrainian Party), but their immediate goals included the division of Galicia into Ukrainian and Polish territories and equality of ethnic groups in the empire. None of this sat well with the Polish political parties. The Polish National Democratic Party, led by Roman Dmowski, sought to assimilate Ukrainians into Polish culture, while the Polish socialists, led by the future head of an independent Polish state, Józef Piłsudski, argued for a federal solution to the Ukrainian question. There was little room for compromise between the Polish and Ukrainian visions of Galicia.

Polish-Ukrainian

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