13_Prelude to Chaos

This is the thirteenth #generalhistory note, following 12_Industrial Developments.

Revolution

• On January 9th, 1905, in St. Petersburg, 20,000 workers and their families marched to the Tsar’s palace, carrying his portrait and demanding protection from brutal business bosses and the election of a constitutional assembly.
• The last time a constitution had been demanded from the Tsar (December 1825), the military officers behind the request were killed by artillery fire. Thus, the authorities believed that violence would once again solve the problem.
• As the demonstrators approached the palace, the army opened fire, killing more than a hundred people on the spot and injuring around five times as many.
• This massacre sent shockwaves throughout the Russian Empire, reaching Ukraine within three days. Kyiv quickly became a focal point of revolutionary unrest: workers at the South Russian Machine Building Factory declared a strike, followed by metalworkers in Yuzivka and the rest of the Donbas.
• There was now far more pressure on the regime to implement the demands than anyone would have predicted based on the rally in St. Petersburg.
• The villages soon joined the revolt, with peasants raiding noble estates and cutting down forests owned by the aristocracy. They demanded that the government issue a manifesto transferring noble lands to them.
• Initially, the regime responded with more violence, using the army to crush resistance.
  • One example of brutality was the killing of sixty-three peasants in the village of Velyki Sorochyntsi (Poltava gubernia).
• Over time, the government began to lose the unconditional support of the army.
  • In June 1905, the crew of the battleship Potemkin, stationed in the Black Sea, mutinied after being served rotten meat. The crew killed several of their officers and took control of the ship, sailing to various Black Sea ports in search of support for their rebellion. Their leader, Matiushenko, would eventually be executed for treason but became a symbol of revolution.
• The revolutionary movement reached its peak in October, when a strike shut down the railway system and crippled the Russian Empire’s ability to function. 120,000 workers in Ukraine and 2 million across the empire walked off the job.
• Tsar Nicholas II, no longer able to withstand the unrest, changed tactics and offered concessions. In his manifesto issued on October 17, he granted basic civil rights and introduced universal male suffrage and elections to the Duma (which he promised to align with on new laws).

Aftermath

• In many Ukrainian cities, jubilation over the October Manifesto ended in pogroms, which killed hundreds of people (mainly Jews), injured thousands, and destroyed tens of thousands of homes and businesses.
• The reason for this was the conservative (pro-monarchy) perception of Jews as the perpetrators of the revolution—though grievances against them reached much further into the past.
• One such incident occurred in Kyiv, where pogroms began after a celebration condemned the Tsar’s manifesto as insufficient and mere damage control. The crowd attacked the city prison, released political prisoners, and called for the emperor to be hanged.
• The following night, gangs of criminals, migrant workers, and Orthodox zealots began attacking Jews, whom they blamed for the unrest. Twenty-seven people were killed, 300 injured, and around 1,800 Jewish homes and businesses were destroyed.
• Kyiv was emblematic of the rest of Ukraine, and the attackers typically came from similar backgrounds: migrant workers who had to compete with Jews for jobs and felt discriminated against. Jews also served as convenient scapegoats, allowing the attackers to display their loyalty to the empire’s principles by targeting them. In villages, peasants pillaged Jewish properties, emboldened by the lack of consequences.
• Despite what these groups believed, the main opponents of the manifesto were not predominantly Jewish. They were activists from several political organizations, including:
  • Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks, a radical splinter group of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, who sought to overthrow the regime entirely.
  • The Mensheviks, a more moderate faction of the same party.
  • The Russian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries.
• Most of these parties were "all-Russian" in orientation—they believed in one indivisible workers’ movement and, by extension, one indivisible Russian Empire. The Socialist Revolutionaries were the only major group willing to make concessions to the empire’s national minorities. They recognized cultural autonomy and envisioned a federal structure for the Russian state.
• However, that was not enough to stop the nationalities from forming their own parties.

Ukrainian Political Parties

• Since the 1890s, Ukrainians had been founding their own political parties in both the Russian and Austrian Empires—a trend consistent with broader developments in Europe at the time.
• The first Ukrainian party based in the Russian Empire was created in 1900 by activists from Poltava and Kharkiv. It was called the Revolutionary Ukrainian Party, and its members were local students who refused to join all-Russian parties. Their program (Independent Ukraine) was written by Mykola Mikhnovsky and declared national liberation as the party’s primary goal.
• This marked a turning point in Ukrainian political thought, though its full impact would be postponed until the First World War, as the party soon split over the question of prioritizing nationalism versus socialism.
• During the Revolution of 1905, most Ukrainian politicians pursued autonomy within a federalized Russia, stopping short of demanding outright independence. This was evident in the rise of Spilka, which had emerged from Mikhnovsky’s party but took a multi-ethnic, social-democratic direction with close ties to the Russian Social Democrats. By April 1905, it had gained 7,000 members.
• After the revolution and the October Manifesto, the political landscape shifted again. The Ukrainian political scene split between:
  • Spilka, which attracted socialists and social democrats
  • The Ukrainian Radical Democratic Party, which attracted Ukrainophile liberals and cooperated with the Constitutional Democratic Party
  • Monarchist organizations such as the Union of the Russian People, which attracted those loyal to their Little Russian identity
• All three parties tried to appeal to the Ukrainian masses by claiming Taras Shevchenko as their predecessor. However, only the Ukrainian liberals addressed the public in Ukrainian. This became possible in February 1905, after 40 years of restrictions, when the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences lifted the ban on Ukrainian-language publications. The trend accelerated in October 1905, when official restrictions were dropped entirely. By December, two Ukrainian-language newspapers were already in print.
• In September 1906, Ukrainian liberals began publishing Rada, their first daily newspaper. The first academic journal followed a year later.
• By 1907, there were nine Ukrainian-language newspapers with a combined print run of 20,000 copies. This was just the beginning: other genres quickly gained popularity, especially illustrated humorous brochures (850,000 copies sold between 1908 and 1913) and poetry (600,000 copies).
• In 1906, the first elections to the Duma took place. Spilka did not participate, and the Radical Democrats performed well. Upon arriving in St. Petersburg, they formed the Ukrainian Club to advocate for regional interests. Forty-four of the 95 deputies from Ukraine joined. It mattered little, however, as the Duma was dissolved after two months for being too radical.
• The second Duma was elected in early 1907, this time with Spilka's participation. It received the second most votes after the monarchists. Ukrainian deputies formed a second parliamentary caucus with 47 members. Its main initiative was the introduction of the Ukrainian language into public schools. Still, the Duma was short-lived—dissolved by the Tsar due to the decline in revolutionary activity.
• Ukrainian representatives modeled much of their political activity on lessons learned from their Habsburg-Ukrainian counterparts, continuing the symbiotic relationship between the two movements.

Across the Imperial Border

• The key figure connecting the two parts of Ukraine was Mykhailo Hrushevsky. After graduating from Kyiv University, he moved to Lviv, where he became the leading academic on Ukrainian history. His History of Ukraine-Rus was the first major work to establish the Ukrainian historical struggle as distinct from the Russian one.
• After learning of the formation of the Ukrainian Club, he moved to St. Petersburg to serve as an adviser and to edit the club’s publication.
• His main goals were:
  • The liberation of Ukraine—meaning a democratic and autonomous Ukraine within a federal Russian state
  • The prevention of the intelligentsia sacrificing Ukraine’s national aspirations in the name of abstract unity
  • The prevention of an alliance between Polish nationalists and Russian liberals, which he feared would replace Russification with Polonization in the western provinces (a scenario that ultimately never materialized)
• This outlook was shaped by his experience in Galicia. There, the Ukrainian National Democratic Party—formed by a merger of Ukrainophile populists and socialist radicals—faced fierce opposition from Polish parties. Their goals were fundamentally incompatible:
  • The Ukrainian National Democratic Party called for the division of Galicia into Ukrainian and Polish regions, and for the equality of ethnic groups within the Habsburg Empire.
  • The Polish National Democratic Party aimed to assimilate the Ukrainians entirely, while Polish socialists supported a federal solution.
• Relations between the two ethnic groups were already strained and deteriorated further during the 1907 elections. The Ukrainians lost due to an electoral system that favored the Polish elite, and the resulting tensions escalated into violence, leaving several people dead.
• Despite these setbacks in their primary political objectives, the Ukrainian National Democrats succeeded in advancing much of their cultural and educational agenda. Most of this progress occurred in the 1890s, during a brief period of reconciliation between Ukrainians and Poles. During this time, Galician schools introduced the Ukrainian phonetic alphabet in classrooms—a move that would become a strong pillar of national identity for future generations.
• Another notable achievement was the political outmaneuvering of the Russophiles. By allying with Jewish candidates, the Ukrainian parties left the Russophiles isolated, with only Polish backing. This led to a decisive electoral defeat: Ukrainian parties won 22 seats, while the Russophiles secured only 2.

Back to the Russian Empire

• Ukrainian parties in the Russian Empire were far less successful. Their language was never permitted in schools, and the end of the 1905 Revolution ushered in a crackdown on Ukrainian organizations.
• This repression was part of the strategy of the new government, which leaned heavily on radical Russian nationalism for support. With that backing—and an electoral law designed in their favor—nationalist candidates repeatedly won elections. The propaganda they spread among the Ukrainian peasantry was intensely antisemitic and exclusionary toward anything foreign (i.e., non-Russian), appealing to the defense of Russian (or "Little Russian") interests.
• This influence manifested itself in events like the Beilis affair—in which a Jew was falsely accused of ritually murdering a Christian boy—and in the formation of hotbeds for ultranationalism and antisemitism, such as the Pochaiv Monastery.
• The results of the election to the Third Duma (1907–1911) demonstrated the appeal of such politics: 36 out of 44 deputies elected in Ukraine identified as "true Russians," a term used to denote Russian nationalists.
• The elections to the Fourth Duma produced similar results: 70 percent of the Ukrainian vote went to Russian nationalists—even though only 13 percent of the population in Ukrainian territories was ethnically Russian.
• Most of these nationalists were ethnically Ukrainian themselves, including:
  • Anatolii Savenko, the founder of the Kyiv Club of Russian Nationalists
  • Dmitrii Pikhno, head of the Kyiv branch of the Union of the Russian People and editor of Kievtalin, the organization’s mouthpiece
• By this point, radical Russian nationalism had effectively absorbed and erased the distinct features of the old Little Russian identity.

Recap

• The Revolution of 1905 marked a turning point for the Ukrainian national movement. For the first time:
  • Ukrainian activists were able to take their ideas to the masses and put them to the test
  • They were allowed to address the public in their own language
• Other results of the revolution included:
  • The formation of Prosvita clubs across Ukraine, promoting Ukrainian culture and education // Explanation for Prosvita clubs
• The Ukrainophiles of earlier generations could not have imagined such developments. Yet the end of the revolution—and the subsequent rise of Russian nationalism—effectively brought this progress to a halt.
• On the other side of the border, Ukrainian activists in Galicia succeeded in eliminating the Russophile threat but failed to break Polish dominance over the region.
• In both empires, Ukrainian movements were beginning to formulate ideas of full independence, but such aspirations still seemed impossible within the political structures that governed them.

Continuation

Continues in 14_A New Nation

Sources

This information was gathered from The Gates of Europe_A History of Ukraine (pages 187-198).