Excerpt from “Ukraine, the Lifeblood of Russia: Part III, the Reawakening of Ukraine” by Dr. Eugene Lewicky
From the magazine Der Deutsche Krieg, 1915 issue
Excerpt from “Ukraine, the Lifeblood of Russia: Part III, the Reawakening of Ukraine” by Dr. Eugene Lewicky
Originally published in the magazine Der Deutsche Krieg, 1915 issue
The full article can be found on my Gumroad.
The powerful liberation movement that swept across all European countries like a refreshing spring breeze at the end of the 18th century also revived Ukraine.
A part of the Ukraine to the left of the Dnieper, the so-called eastern (left-hand) Ukraine, passed to Russia in the years 1654 and 1663 in the treaties of Pereiaslav and Andrusov, the other half, to the right of the Dnieper, the right-hand Ukraine, became occupied repeatedly by Poles, Russians and Turks in turn in the 17th and 18th centuries, until finally, after the partition of Poland, this part also fell to Russia. Only Galicia went to Austria-Hungary, as did Bukovina, which went its own way over the centuries and was also incorporated into the Danube monarchy in 1777.
The Pereiaslav treaty was intended to establish a personal union between Ukraine and Moscow. But this treaty was soon trampled underfoot by the Russian tsar. Shortly after unification with Russia, the Ukrainian hetman, the freely elected head of the Ukrainian state, was forced to set up a special commission — the “Little Russian (!) College”,1 ostensibly to facilitate the administration of the country, which consisted half of Russian officials and gradually seized the whole administration of Ukraine. In 1782 this commission was also abolished, the “Little Russian provinces”2 divided into governorates and immediately incorporated into the Russian, unified state organism. As happened to Finland two and a half centuries later, so too was the Ukrainian state gradually stripped of all its autonomous rights and transformed into a Russian province. The Ukrainian Cossack organisation was also eliminated. The hetmans who could be elected were initially replaced by the nominated ones, until this dignity, which gradually sank to the same shadow of the former one, was abolished forever with a Tsarist ukaz in 1764. The last stronghold of Cossack independence, the “Zaporozhian Sich”, organised by the rapids of the Dnieper River, which, despite all the intrigues of Russian agents, did not want to surrender, was treacherously taken from the Russians in 1775, the fortress was razed and the commander-in-chief Kalnyshevsky3 interned in the Solovetsky Manastir (Solovetsk Monastery), where he had to languish in terrible solitary confinement for a full 25 years in unspeakable torment. Eventually the Ukrainian Cossack organization was completely abolished and the remnants of the Cossack army dispersed. The memory of Ukraine’s former independence would be eradicated altogether, even in the last descendants of Ukrainian hetmans. These were either exiled to Siberia or handed over to the executioner.
At the end of the 18th century the Ukrainian land was in ruins under the “caring” hands of Russian satraps,4 and that is how the Ukrainian people themselves called this period of Ukrainian decline!
And yet, new life soon blossomed out of the ruins as soon as the “spring of nations”5 came to Eastern Europe.
As early as 1789, a masterfully written parody of Virgil’s Aeneid6 was published in Ukrainian by Kotliarevsky,7 the first modern writer of the revived Ukraine, who was soon followed by many others. Marko Vovchok, Hulak-Artemovsky, Kvitka-Osnovianenko and Gogol the Elder drew from the rich treasure of Ukrainian folk poetry and Ukrainian folk life and founded modern Ukrainian literature, which is characterised by its uniqueness and the truly folkish trait that underlies it, worthily adjoining the literatures of other Slavic peoples. The novelists, such as Ivan Franko, Olga Kobylanska, the thoroughly modern and highly talented Kociubynsky, Vinnichenko and Yazkiv from the younger generation, the dramaturge Karpenko-Karyi, the poets, such as the already mentioned Ivan Franko, Olena Kosacz (Pczilka) Olesi, and many more could find their due place in any literature of European civilised peoples. But above all towers the tall figure of Taras Shevchenko, the poet by the grace of God, who mercilessly castigated the enemies of Ukraine in his political poetry and through his depictions of the Ukrainian past from the time of the Cossack liberation struggles with all their heroic figures, in beautiful Ukrainian garbed folk poetry, appeared as the true prophet of his people. The Tyrtaeus8 of the Ukrainian nation, who prophesied that it would regain its independence, had to atone for his poetry, which soon passed from hand to hand, with years of exile, during which he was prohibited from any literary activity by the Russian government.
The notorious tsarist ukaz of 1876 for a while made a break in the cultural-national development of the Ukrainian people in Russia — but in Galicia, which soon turned into the Piedmont of Ukrainian thought and Ukrainian national aspirations, it became incessantly worked on. Although the so-called settlement with the Poles of 1867 handed the Ukrainian people over to the Polish rulers of the country, the situation for the Ukrainians was more favourable insofar as they were protected by the Austrian constitution. Thousands of Volkslesehallen9 and societies were set up here, economic organisations founded, scientific institutions brought into being by their own efforts. Finally, in view of the growing national consciousness in the Ukrainian population, the pressure had to be eased here too and at least some of the Ukrainian people’s rights had to be restored. Even before the outbreak of the war, the Ukrainians in Galicia and Bukovina had twenty secondary schools of their own and several professorships at the Lemberg University, which Emperor Franz I intended for the Ukrainian population at the time, but had been illegally taken after the already mentioned Polish settlement.
The political uprising of the Ukrainian people went hand in hand with the cultural, literary and scientific work, for which the Shevchenko Association in Lemberg (Ukrainian Society of Sciences) in particular rendered outstanding services. In fact, in spite of all the violent measures taken, the tsardom never succeeded in completely wiping out political thought in the Ukrainian people. Beneath the ruins of the past, the spark of national self-confidence smoldered uninterruptedly, just waiting to burst into bright flames. As early as 1791, Count Kapnist10 went to the Prussian court to seek the help of the King of Prussia for Ukraine as an envoy of the Ukrainian nobility. The Decembrist conspiracy of 1825 was often attributed by the Russian government to the secret smuggling of Ukrainian nationalists. In 1846 the Ukrainians in Kyiv, headed by the Ukrainian historian Kostomarov, the publicist Kulish and the poet Shevchenko, founded the “Brotherhood of Cyril and Methodius”, which aimed to break away with Ukraine in the form of a Slavic federation. The association was officially dissolved and the leaders punished with banishment.
Unable to always act openly and legally in the conditions prevailing in Russia, the Ukrainian intelligentsia joined all liberation movements in Russia for national motives, and the historian of the Russian revolution, Thun, states in his history of the Russian revolutionary movement that every insurrection against the Muscovite tsardom in Russia sprang from the south of the Ukraine. Riots11 by the Ukrainian peasantry in 1905 and the mutinies of the Black Sea Fleet in 1905, 1912 and 1914 were also the work of Ukrainian nationalists and revolutionaries in an attempt to undermine Muscovite rule in Ukraine.
Thank you for reading, you can find the rest of the article on my Gumroad.
kleinrussische Kollegium
kleinrussische Gebiet
I believe the author is referencing Petro Kalnyshevsky.
A provincial governor of the Persian Empires, meant to imply despotism and tyranny.
Frühling der Völker
Tyrtaeus, famous ancient Spartan poet. Theodor Körner was referred to as the German Tyrtaeus, for example.
Literally “people’s reading halls”, I believe a kind of reading club.
I believe the author is referencing Vasily Kapnist.
Notstandsunruhen, literally “state of emergency/crisis unrest”