11_Habsburg Ukraine

This is the eleventh #generalhistory note, following 10_Birth of Nationalism.

Political Organizing

• In 1848, Ukrainians under Habsburg rule founded their first political organization in Lviv: the Supreme Ruthenian Council. "Ruthenian" (or Rusyn) was the term Galician Ukrainians used for themselves.
• The council differed sharply from the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius (disbanded a year earlier). It was larger, legal, and supported by imperial authorities
• Still, their close chronology highlights a broader theme: Ukrainian identity developed along two tracks—imperial cooperation in the West and secret societies in the East—both pushing toward national self-definition (Plokhy’s framing).
• Key to this divergence was empire policy. Russia crushed the Uniate Church by "reuniting" it with Orthodoxy. Austria propped it up instead—renaming it the Greek Catholic Church and funding it.
• This turned clergy into the backbone of the national movement, especially as secular elites drifted into Polish culture.
• Ironically, both empires acted from the same motive: fear of Polish nationalism. Russia used Russification to suppress it. Austria strengthened Ukrainian identity to counterbalance Polish political strength.
• 1848 made that fear urgent. Revolutions broke out across Europe, hitting the Habsburgs hard. Ethnic groups demanded independence—especially Hungarians and Poles.
• In Galicia, Poles were furious at losing administrative control to Germanized Czechs. Jews often sided with them, seeking relief from imperial discrimination.
• Poles made up ~40% of Galicia, Ukrainians ~50%. A Polish win would’ve subordinated the Ukrainian population—ripe conditions for Austrian manipulation.
• So Ukrainian elites appealed directly to the emperor: loyalty in exchange for protection from Polish domination. After the revolution was crushed, the Austrian governor took their side.
• The result: the Supreme Ruthenian Council was created. A Ukrainian-language newspaper—the Galician Star—launched. Count Franz Stadion (Galicia’s governor) was explicit: all of this aimed to "paralyze Polish influence and get backing for Austrian rule in Galicia."
• It worked. The Ruthenian Council directly countered the Polish National Council. Their demands clashed—Poles wanted autonomy for Galicia, Ukrainians wanted to split the region to preserve their demographic majority.
• Neither got what they wanted. But Polish agitation still forced reforms: serfdom was abolished, peasants got political rights.
• That unexpectedly benefited Ukrainians—the majority of Galicia’s peasantry—and gave them political leverage.
• In the 1848 provincial assembly, Ukrainians held 16 of 25 Galician seats and all 5 in Bukovyna. It was their introduction to electoral politics and political self-organization.
• In 1851, once the revolutionary moment passed, the Supreme Ruthenian Council was dissolved. But the movement didn’t die—many shifted to the St. George’s Circle.
• The Circle pushed a clear ethnonational agenda: Ruthenians as a distinct nation loyal to the empire. The main threat was Polish nationalism. Austrians were allies. Russian Ukrainians barely factored in.
• But the Ruthenian identity project had internal divisions. Three ideological paths emerged—reflected in the lives of the Ruthenian Triad (three romantic nationalist writers).
• All three were early national awakeners, believed Galician Ukrainians were part of a broader Ukrainian nation, and were obsessed with history.
• That changed during 1848. Ivan Vahylevych joined the pro-Polish Ruthenian Congress—earning accusations of betrayal. Shashkevych (died before 1848) became the founding figure of Galician Ukrainian literature. Yakiv Holovatsky turned Russophile—arguing Ukraine belonged to a greater Russian nation.
• These views came to define three lasting ideological orientations: Ukrainian, pro-Polish, and Russophile.
• The “alphabet wars” reflected these divides in writing systems. Options: Church Slavonic, civic Cyrillic, or Latin alphabet. Austrians and Poles pushed for Latin—but civil society resisted, sticking with Cyrillic-based options.

Across the Border

• Across the imperial divide, the dynamic was mirrored—Russian authorities banned the Latin alphabet to counter Polish influence.
• The initiator of this ban argued bluntly: Galician authorities were “turning Russians into Poles” through the Latin script—and the same could happen in Russia.

"The Peasants of the western gubernias, encountering books here that are written in the Little Russian language, but in Polish letters, will naturally have a greater preference to learn the Polish alphabet than the Russian one." —Novytsky, The Gates of Europe_A History of Ukraine, p. 166

• The fear: once peasants mastered the Latin alphabet, they'd read Polish texts and absorb their worldview.
• Peasants were the key concern. With emancipation looming in 1861, they were gaining legal freedom—but not land. Unlike their Austrian counterparts, they had no route to electoral politics. This made them dependent and ideologically vulnerable.
• That year’s Polish uprising triggered a harsher crackdown. The Russian state launched a cultural purge in the name of national unity. Ukrainian-language publishing—especially in education and religion—was banned.
• This 1863 policy, known as the Valuev Directive (after the Interior Minister), targeted the "Little Russian dialect" in both Latin and Cyrillic.
• The immediate result: Ukrainian-language publications fell from 33 to 1 by the time Valuev left office.
• Initially pitched as a temporary measure, it hardened into permanent policy in 1876 with the Ems Ukase. This decree banned all Ukrainian publishing, outlawed importation of Ukrainian books, and even censored public song and theater performances.
• The bans were covert—never formally announced to the public—and while some cultural restrictions (like plays and songs) were loosened in the 1880s, the core publishing prohibitions stayed in place into the 20th century.
• The logic behind them was clear: Ukrainian identity was treated as a direct threat to Russian statehood.
• Ukrainian elites responded differently:
  • Mikhail Yuzefovich represented the loyalist line. Patriotic toward “Little Russia,” he initially shielded figures like Kostomarov. But by 1857, convinced they were separatists, he flipped—arguing even the Valuev Directive didn’t go far enough. He believed it inadvertently unified Ukrainophiles across the border. The Tsar agreed—and funded an anti-Ukrainophile newspaper in Galicia.
  • The Ukrainophiles, by contrast, formed the Kyiv Hromada. Figures like Pavlo Chubynsky (author of Ukraine Has Not Yet Perished) and Mykhailo Drahomanov (Kyiv University professor) opposed imperial suppression but didn’t call for independence—at least not initially.
• The Ems Ukase radicalized this moderate camp. Drahomanov was expelled from Kyiv University, left the empire, and settled in Geneva. There, he became the most influential Ukrainian thinker of the 19th century.
• Drahomanov fused socialism with federalism—arguing for a Europe-wide federation that included a clearly defined Ukrainian entity. He made that case in The Books of the Genesis of the Ukrainian People.
• His movement was the first organized Ukrainian effort after the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius—and the first to seriously affect Austrian Ukraine.
• Yuzefovich’s fear was true: repressive bans forced Ukrainian writers in the Russian Empire to shift their audience westward. Galician readers became their primary market. The Ems Ukase intensified this trend—cultural exchange deepened.

Split in the Movement

• The influence from Russian Ukraine reached Galicia just as its own movement fractured.
• By the 1870s, Galician Ukrainians were split into two main camps: Russophiles and Ukrainophiles. The old Ruthenians—loyalist, monarchist, and clerical—were fading.
• The split was triggered by the 1867 constitutional reform. Austria, having lost wars to Italy and Prussia, federalized:
  • Hungary gained its own parliament.
  • Poles and Croats gained autonomy.
  • Ukrainians, who had remained loyal, were excluded.
• The Poles were effectively rewarded for prior rebellion. Ukrainians, who had long counted on imperial favor to restrain Polish domination, were sidelined.
• This disillusionment killed off the moderate Ruthenian strategy. Into the vacuum stepped the Russophiles, led by Ivan Naumovych.
• Their argument: Ukrainian identity inside the Habsburg Empire had failed to check Polish influence. Only alliance with Russia—a Slavic, Orthodox empire—could succeed. They called themselves Little Russians.
• Their linguistic pitch was bold: Ukrainian was just a dialect of Russian. Allegedly, a Ukrainian could master “Great Russian” in an hour.
• In practice, their language became an artificial fusion of Russian and Church Slavonic. It was unintelligible to ordinary Galician Ukrainians—and alienating.
• Still, the Russophiles gained ground fast. By the late 1860s, they controlled most Ukrainian institutions in Galicia and Bukovyna (though they were blocked in Transcarpathia by Hungarian authorities).
• Russia encouraged this. The Tsarist government issued stipends and scholarships to Russophile students, fueling Austrian fears of subversion.
• Vienna responded with repression:
  • Naumovych was arrested for treason.
  • His allies were tried, convicted, and in many cases fled to Russia.
• This created a strange symmetry:
  • In Russia, the state targeted Ukrainophiles for rejecting the pan-Russian identity.
  • In Austria, the state targeted Russophiles for embracing it.
• Out of the crackdown, a new group gained prominence: the Ukrainophiles.
  • Their roots went back to Markian Shashkevych and the Ruthenian Triad.
  • They rejected both the Russophile fantasy and the clerical conservatism of the Ruthenians.
  • Their core claim: Galician Ukrainians were part of a trans-border Ukrainian nation, not a Russian one.
  • They built their base in Prosvita (the Enlightenment movement), publishing, organizing, and building popular support.
  • In 1873, they founded a scholarly society named after Taras Shevchenko—a signal of cultural continuity with Kyiv.
• Support from Russian Ukrainians followed:
  • Kyivan Ukrainophiles helped Galicians publish Ukrainian-language newspapers and journals.
  • This support shifted the balance—by the 1880s, Ukrainophiles had gained control of major institutions in Bukovyna.
• The exchange was mutual:
  • Galician Ukrainophiles offered Kyivan activists an intellectual lifeline—one free of tsarist censorship.
  • In turn, the radicalism and cultural vision of the Galicians pulled their Russian counterparts further from the pan-Russian idea.

New Situation

• By the 1890s, Ukraine remained territorially split between the Russian and Austrian empires—but something fundamental had changed.
• Religion, once the defining link between Ukrainians across the border, had faded in importance.
• Nationality had taken its place.
• For the first time, there was a serious, organized belief in a shared Ukrainian national identity across the imperial divide.
• The only open question: was this part of a larger Russian nation—or something independent?
• Two competing political identities now spanned the border:
  • Pan-Russianism, supported by Russophiles and the Russian state.
  • Pan-Ukrainianism, supported by Ukrainophiles and a growing civil society.
• Both camps built networks, published material, and recruited activists in an environment transformed by:
  • Industrialization
  • Urbanization
  • Mass literacy
  • Modern politics
• The stage was set for a new generation of ideological battles—and eventually, political revolution.

Continuation

Continues in 12_Industrial Developments.

Sources

This information was gathered from The Gates of Europe_A History of Ukraine (Pages 161-173).