John-Paul Himka

HABSBURG Reviews 2003/23 August 27, 2003

Structures of Nineteenth-Century Ukrainian History

Andreas Kappeler. Der schwierige Weg zur Nation: Beiträge zur neueren Geschichte der Ukraine. Wiener Archiv für die Geschichte des Slawentums und Osteuropas 20. Wien, Köln, Weimar: Böhlau Verlag, 2003. 214 pp. Tables, maps, notes, bibliography. EUR 29,90 (paper). ISBN 3-205-77065-X. Reviewed for HABSBURG by John-Paul Himka, Department of History and Classics, University of Alberta

Gathered in this volume are twelve studies on nineteenth-century Ukrainian history, some of them published in collections that are neither indexed in the databases nor easily found in North American libraries. The author, Andreas Kappeler, hails from Switzerland, but he is now a professor of history at the University of Vienna and had previously been a professor at Cologne. Not all, but many of the pieces in this volume are written in a structuralist and comparativist mode, drawing on the framework and methods developed by the Czech historian Miroslav Hroch.[1] With the stock of various structuralisms rather low in academia at the moment, it is eye-opening to see how productive this approach can be in the hands of a skilled practitioner.

"Ein 'kleines Volk' von 25 Millionen: Die Ukrainer um 1900" (pp. 21-35) examines to what extent Ukraine fits the ideal type of a "small people" identified by Hroch. In the plain sense, of course, Ukraine was not a small nation, not with a population of 25 million. But here "small" refers to a particular type of nation; in the past it might have been called "nonhistorical," but Kappeler rejects this name because of its loaded Hegelian content. (In studies written later Kappeler employs the designation "nondominant ethnic group" to express the same typological species.) The "small" nation is one that exhibits three "deficits": of a tradition of statehood, of a social elite, of a high culture.

Analyzing the Ukrainians against this grid, Kappeler concludes that they were a mixed type, relatively advantaged in comparison to nations that conformed more closely to the ideal. Ukrainians had a tradition of at least partial statehood in the form of the Cossack hetmanate that existed on the Left Bank of the Dnipro river from the mid-seventeenth until the late eighteenth century. Although included within the boundaries of the Russian state, the hetmanate displayed many of the features of statehood, including the production of a traditional elite from the Cossack officer class and a dynamic high culture whose influence was felt far beyond Ukraine.

In spite of these features, the Ukrainians' national movement proceeded at a slower pace than that of many nations of the pure small type. Why? Kappeler answers this question, referring to some other cases for comparison, thus: 1) the political context of the Russian empire, particularly the lack of freedom of press and association, impeded social communication and mobilization, 2) the pressure of assimilation and attractiveness of Russian culture, 3) the fragmentation and regional heterogeneity of its large population. With regard to the latter point, Kappeler remarks that the quantitative largeness of the Ukrainian people was a cause of its qualitative smallness. In this same essay Kappeler makes a few more typological observations. Divided between the Habsburg Monarchy and the Russian empire, Ukrainians were not only a "secessionist" type movement, but also a "unificatory" movement like the Germans and Italians.

Two paradigmatically Kappelerian pieces compare the Ukrainian movement in Russia with that in Austrian Galicia and the Ukrainian with the Lithuanian movement: "Die ukrainische Nationalbewegung im Russischen Reich und in Galizien: Ein Vergleich" (pp. 70-87) and "Die ukrainische und litauische Nationalbewegung im Vergleich" (pp. 88-98). In the first of these comparisons, Kappeler makes much use of the Hrochian ABCs, that is the three stages of a national movement that Hroch distinguished: A, the cultural (or in Paul R. Magocsi's even more descriptive term "heritage-gathering") phase; B, the organizational phase; and C, the political phase. Kappeler argues that the Ukrainian movement in Russia entered the B stage and was pushed back to the A stage by the state three times before it finally secured itself in the B stage in the 1890s. By contrast, the Galician movement in these same 1890s morphed into phase C.

Less schematically put, the Ukrainian movement in Russian Ukraine was even smaller than the Russian social-revolutionary movement in Ukraine in 1905-07 and was still not a mass movement by the eve of World War I. But in Galicia it was a mass movement by then. This seems all the more anomalous when one considers that parts of Russian Ukraine were industrialized, which should have fostered the development of the movement.

So why did Galicia take the lead? Kappeler answers that the following factors favored Galicia: 1) emancipation of the serfs occurred earlier there, in 1848 instead of 1861; 2) there was an earlier diffusion of literacy, and that in the Ukrainian language; 3) the local Greek Catholic church had a national character; 4) Austria introduced a constitution and basic civil rights in the 1860s.

In the comparison of the Lithuanians and Ukrainians, Kappeler points to some striking similarities. Both groups had some tradition of statehood in the past as well as some vestiges of a national elite. In both cases the majority of the nation lived in Russia, but there was a minority that lived in a state to the west with a different, more liberal political constitution than Russia. The Russian state imposed restrictions on publishing in the vernacular language in both cases in 1863. Both nations were agrarian, being composed of about 90 percent peasants.

Among the more important differences that Kappeler identifies is the degree of literacy. According to the 1897 census of the Russian empire 48.4% of ethnic Lithuanians could read (of whom only 17% could read in Russian) but only 18.9% of the Ukrainians could read (almost all in Russian). Partially this reflects Orthodoxy's neglect of women's education: 32.4% of the Ukrainian men could read. But it is also important that the Lithuanian clergy developed a Lithuanian-language school system in the first half of the nineteenth century, and they retained it underground during the decades of repression.

After surveying the history of both national movements over the long nineteenth century, Kappeler draws a number of conclusions, some of which reinforce conclusions he had already arrived at in previous studies: 1) Groups with weak social differentiation and mobilization, mainly composed of peasants, have a delay in their national movement as a consequence. 2) The existence of a nationally active clergy (or elementary school teachers) is of great significance for non-dominant ethnic groups. The church's organizational network can be utilized as a link between city and country. 3) On the other hand, the existence of vestiges of a regional nobility was not of much consequence. 4) Of central importance was the degree of literacy, making national communication possible. 5) For national communication the ability to publish was of great significance, hence the importance of the Prussian Lithuanians and Galician Ukrainians who published works that could not be published in Russia.

On the other hand, this comparison of Ukrainians and Lithuanians seems to undercut a result of the comparison of Galician and Russian Ukrainians: the importance of the political factor, i.e the Russian political context. The autocratic system and language prohibitions affected the Lithuanians as much as the Ukrainians. So why were the Lithuanians able to mobilize peasants before 1905 and create a national mass movement while the Ukrainians were not? Partially this can be accounted for by the higher level of literacy and a nationally active clergy.

An important precondition for a national mobilization of the peasants lay in the agrarian situation and the time of emancipation from serfdom. The Lithuanian peasants had an advantage here, especially in the Suvalkija region, where they became legally free earlier and had in part achieved a somewhat higher level of prosperity. The importance of this factor is shown by the origin of the majority of national patriots from this region.

Another important difference is confessional. Roman Catholicism did not differentiate Lithuanians from the Poles, but it did from the Russians. Orthodoxy linked Ukrainian peasants with the tsarist state against the Poles and the Jews, something that the authorities instrumentalized from time to time.

Also, in an era of increasing literacy, language differentiation grew increasingly important. Lithuanian was undeniably a separate language, and rural Lithuanians rarely came in contact with Russians. True, there was the attraction of Polish culture and language, but its assimilatory power decreased after the 1863 uprising. Ukrainians were never discriminated against as individuals, as long as they used the Russian language; this was different than the situation for Lithuanians and for Galician Ruthenians and more like the situation of the Belarusians or of the Occitanians in France and Catalans in Spain.

Another study in this vein is "Die Formierung einer ukrainischen nationalen Elite im Russischen Reich 1860-1914" (pp. 99-122). It undertakes a prosopographic analysis like Hroch's of Ukrainian national activists in the Russian empire, their education, occupations and regional origin. Of course, the activists were overwhelmingly members of the intelligentsia. They came disproportionately from three gubernias: Poltava, Kyiv and Chernihiv. The nationally mobilized activists were not only a small segment of the whole polyethnic society of Ukraine, but even of the intelligentsia itself. They were not as a rule a part of the elite, who would have found it difficult to make Ukrainian loyalty primary.

Not as Hrochian, but decidedly comparativist is "Mazepisten, Kleinrussen, Chochols: Die Ukrainer in der ethnischen Hierarchie des Rußländischen Reiches" (36-53). Kappeler here examines the place of the Ukrainians in three different hierarchies.

First is the hierarchy of political loyalty/reliability. When first incorporated into the Russian realm as Cossacks, the Ukrainians were considered unreliable because of their shifting alliances (Poland/Russia/Crimean Tatars/Ottoman empire) and nomadic, turbulent lifestyle: the Cossack hetman Ivan Mazepa became emblematic of political disloyalty. But by the mid-eighteenth century the Little Russians were well integrated and their loyalty unquestioned. The "Mazepist" label did, however, resurface in the late nineteenth century in connection with the formation of a separatist Ukrainian national movement.

Then Kappeler looks at the hierarchy of estates. Nationalities who, like the Russians, had a landholding elite were treated as equal (Baltic Germans, Poles, Finnish Swedes, Bessarabian boyars), although some privileges could be taken away for disloyalty (Poles). In the second place were elites that did not quite correspond to the Russian nobility, e.g., the Left Bank cossacks. They could either achieve nobility status, as the upper layer of the officer class did, or sink down to the status of free peasant. At the bottom of the hierarchy were groups that consisted almost entirely of peasants, e.g., Belarusians or Right-Bank Ukrainians.

Finally Kappeler examines cultural circles. The outer circle was the inorodtsy, mainly nomads and Jews, who were marginalized, discriminated against and considered incapable of integrating. The next circle moving inwards was the non-Orthodox Christians. Then came the Orthodox non-Slavs: Georgians, Bessarabian Romanians and missionized, formerly animist indigenous peoples. Orthodox Eastern Slavs formed the inner circle. Although the Ukrainians and Belarusians were more repressed as ethnic groups, individuals faced less discrimination than individuals of other nationalities. The farther away an ethnic group was from the inner circle, the more discrimination it faced, but its ethnic substance was less endangered.

Kappeler here also offers judicious reflections on the question of colonialism in the Russian empire, particularly noteworthy at a time when students of Ukrainian literature are more and more applying postcolonialist analysis in their work. Kappeler says we must be careful when applying the term "colonialism" to the tsarist empire. Most of the Asian regions of the empire were incontestably colonies, either economic colonies like Turkestan or settler colonies like Siberia. The ethnic groups living here were situated on the lower rungs of the estate and cultural hierarchy, at a great territorial, social, cultural and racial distance from the Russian imperial center. On the other hand, the areas in the northwest of the empire -- Finland, the Baltic provinces and Poland -- were indeed ruled from the center, yet they were economically and culturally more developed than the Russian center and therefore cannot be designated colonies.

An important difference from the colonial empires of the West is that in the estate-structured Russian empire there was no binary division into an imperial Russian upper stratum and non-Russian lower strata. Although the majority of the political and military elite was Russian or Russified, the Russians as a people were not systematically privileged, but on the contrary they were sometimes disadvantaged.

Ukraine was not a classical colony of the Russian empire. For that it was lacking the spatial, cultural and racial distance and the legal discrimination of Ukrainians vis-à-vis Russians. Although in the relation between the Russian center and Ukrainian periphery there were without doubt elements of economic dependence and exploitation as well as cultural discrimination, there is too much that speaks against the application of the concept "colony." For example, the tsarist center treated Ukraine as a part of Mother Russia and the Ukrainians were not treated worse than the Russians as citizens. To avoid conceptual inflation, Kappeler advises, the term colonialism should be restricted to classical colonialism, which is not applicable to Ukraine.

In his most recent work, on the late-nineteenth-century historical journal Kievskaia starina, Kappeler departs from the emphases on comparative structures as presented above. Two articles are included in our volume: "Die Kosaken-Aera als zentraler Baustein der Konstruktion einer national-ukrainischen Geschichte: Das Beispiel der Zeitschrift Kievskaja Starina 1882-1891" (pp. 123-35) and "Nationale Kommunikation unter erschwerten Bedingungen: Die Zeitschrift Kievskaja Starina (1882-1891/1906) als Organ der ukrainischen Nationalbewegung im Zarenreich" (pp. 136-50).

In these essays the author acknowledges the influence of Karl Deutsch and his emphasis on the importance of social communication. Kappeler examines the political significance and mobilizing potential of this thick journal for the intellectual elite. He no longer seems to think of it as a phase-A, cultural phenomenon, as is implied in his study comparing the Russian and Galician Ukrainian movements. Now he sees it as an example of "national communication under difficult conditions." I take this as an indication that Kappeler is rethinking his subject. His previous contributions to nineteenth-century Ukrainian history stand up well, I believe, even in a poststructuralist climate, but I look forward to reading more results from this new turn.

Note: [1]. Miroslav Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe: A Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups among the Smaller European Nations (Cambridge et al.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985, new edition New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2000).

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