Western Ukraine vs. Poland: A Failed Attempt at Galician Statehood. West Ukrainian People's Republic

Artem Davidenko, Vasil Mikhailishin, for Khvili

How many theories do you know about why Russians are not very liked in Western Ukraine? If you search well, you can find many explanations. Most of them differ from each other primarily by the flight of imagination of the authorsand main villains, but it is unlikely that any of them will be able to surpass the theory about the Austrian General Staff.

In short, Austria wanted to weaken its dangerous neighbor, the Russian Empire, which became especially reasonable for Vienna during the First World War, when both countries were on opposite sides of the front line. And what could be better than to undermine the foundations of the unity of the Romanov Empire - to quarrel"fraternal peoples" , the pillars on which the Russian state rests. Without thinking for a long time, the insidious Austrian General Staff began to implement a cunning plan and came up with the Ukrainian language, Ukrainian culture, and the very word "Ukraine". True, history does not tell how the cunning Habsburgs managed to teach a language invented just yesterday to millions of people. And how it happened that this very language has been used for a long time in worship services, in literature and folklore, no one explains either.

There are many such pseudoscientific theories, and all of them are good only with a superficial acquaintance. Ukraine and Ukrainians were "invented" by all and sundry: Poles, Germans, Freemasons, Jews, Americans. But, however, always with one goal - to destroy Russia and quarrel the "fraternal peoples." Nothing, of course, is known about these plans either in Warsaw, or in Masonic lodges, or in Tel Aviv, Berlin or Washington. Ukrainians will also laugh at these theories - even their grandmothers sang lullabies to their children in Ukrainian. Therefore, these stories can afford the luxury of claiming to be scientific only in one country.

Today, thousands of Russians travel to Western Ukraine on business and as tourists, and, imagine, they return home safe and sound, and take fresh positive impressions with them. But you can’t argue with the facts - according to sociological surveys, it is in Western Ukraine that the largest number of people consider Russia an unfriendly state, it is here that the number of supporters of the EU and NATO is steadily growing, and it is here that nationalist parties with anti-Russian rhetoric have the greatest support. The situation was the same before the events of 2014.

So what's the deal? Why do Western Ukrainians “dislike” Russians so much? If we discard all pseudoscientific theories and arm ourselves with facts, the reasons will seem much more prosaic than intricate fictions about the insidious Austrian General Staff. This issue is quite complex and one article will be too little to reveal all its problems. We'll try to give simplified in presentation, but at the same time not simplifying the facts answer.

To this end, we will briefly go through the history of Western Ukraine as part of Austria-Hungary, Poland and the USSR in search of an answer to the question of when and why the image of Russians as an enemy was formed, with whom Western Ukraine had the most tense relations, and why in 1939 Lvov met Red Army with flowers.

Western Ukraine within the Austrian Empire

The phenomenon of "Western Ukraine" in its modern borders appeared after the three partitions of the Commonwealth in the second half of the 18th century. Galicia, Northern Bukovina and Transcarpathia were part of the Austrian Empire, all other Ukrainian lands were part of Russia. This division was finally consolidated after the defeat of Napoleon in Europe and the Congress of Vienna in 1815.

Western Ukraine as part of the states 1815-1914

At that time, the national identity of Ukrainians was only in its infancy. If you had a chance to ask a resident of Galicia who he is, you would hardly hear "Ukrainian". Most likely "Rusin" or "Uniate" or even "local". Approximately the same would have happened in the rest of the territory of modern Ukraine (replace only "Uniate" with "Orthodox"). You will be surprised, but you would hear the same in Europe - in Germany, Italy and even France. Decades will pass before the states build a unified system of education and, accordingly, national mythology.

It was much more difficult for Ukrainians, because they did not have a state and no one created a single national mythology. This was done by separate multidirectional circles of intellectuals. The most influential were the Mokvophiles (Russophiles) and the Narodovtsy (not to be confused with the Narodniks in the Russian Empire). The Muscovites saw the future of Western Ukrainians in an alliance with Orthodox Russia, the Narodovtsy in Ukrainian (Rusyn) autonomy, which should be created in Galicia.

Both currents did not appear at the same time. Muscovites were active from the very beginning of X IX century. Their ideas of unity with Orthodox Russia were understandable to the majority of the population, which at that time identified itself primarily on a religious basis. Greek Catholicism, which was then professed by the majority of Ukrainians in Galicia and Bukovina, was opposed to the Catholicism of the Poles, and, accordingly, sought support from Orthodoxy. Mussophiles even began a movement to delatinize the Greek Catholic Church in order to bring it as close as possible to the Orthodox.

But in the 1860s, a new trend began to gain popularity - the Narodovtsy. It appeared as a response to the activity of Muscovites and promoted completely different ideas. Narodovtsy also advocated the unification of all Ukrainians in one state - an independent Ukraine.

And here we cannot fail to mention another problem that Western Ukrainians immediately encountered. After all, not only they considered Galicia their own - the Poles declared their rights to it. And let's say right away that the positions of the Poles were much stronger - after all, they made up the majority of the intelligentsia, the administrative apparatus, and in general, they could boast of centuries-old state traditions.

Both the Muscovites and the Narodovtsy saw the Poles as their main opponents. The Poles could not allow either the annexation of Galicia to Russia, which was demanded by the Muscovites, or the national Ukrainian autonomy, which the Narodovites were striving for. Therefore, a paradoxical, but at the same time logical situation developed: Western Ukrainians considered the enemy not the Austrians, as the main "enslavers", but the Poles, with whom they essentially shared the same fate of the people without a state. For example, a significant fact: during the so-called "spring of nations" in 1848, a revolution broke out throughout the Austrian Empire, the Poles too started a national uprising in Galicia. The Ukrainians, on the other hand, behaved like a conservative force that advocated the preservation of the Austrian Empire.. It is here that the roots of the theory about the Ukrainian nation as the brainchild of the Austrian General Staff grow. In fact, everything was much simpler - the Ukrainians could not allow the strengthening of the Poles in Galicia and therefore supported the force that could contain this strengthening.

The influence of the Poles increased even more after the transformation of the Austrian Empire into the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1867 after the defeat in the Austro-Prussian war. The monarchy weakened and the Polish aristocracy in Galicia took advantage of this, reaching the highest level of autonomy for the crown region. Of course, it was the Poles who played the first fiddle in his political and economic life.

This led to the strengthening of the national movement of Ukrainians in Galicia. In the 1890s, the Narodovtsy created the majority of political parties. Muscovites have lost their popularity over time. Some have compromised themselves with espionage and subversive activities paid for by Russia, others have gone over to Ukrainian national-democratic positions. By the beginning of World War I, the Narodovtsy movement, organized into political parties, dominated the political life of Western Ukrainians.

World War I

During the First World War, Muscovites again launched their activity. True, now as an openly subversive trend of collaborators - Austria-Hungary could well call them "invented by the Russian General Staff." Created by Muscovites in August 1914, the "Carpatho-Russian Liberation Committee" openly campaigned for the surrender of Galicia to the Russian army, and during the occupation of the region by Russia in September 1914 - June 1915 actively cooperated with the occupation authorities. After the Austro-German offensive in May-August 1915, the Muscovites were either interned in the Talerhof camp by the Austro-Hungarian authorities or fled east along with the retreating Russian army.

But the best inoculation against Moscophilism in Galicia was the actual policy of the occupation authorities in 1914-1915.

First, the Russians were actively fighting the Greek Catholic Church. Local priests were removed from worship, arrested and expelled. In particular, they expelled the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Metropolitan Andriy Sheptytsky. In their place, Orthodox priests were sent from Russia, church parishes were forcibly transferred to Orthodoxy. During the occupation in Galicia, from 86 to 113 priests of the Russian Orthodox Church worked in parishes.

Secondly, the practice of taking hostages has become common. The hostages were taken mainly by representatives of the elite of society - bankers, entrepreneurs, cultural figures, and the intelligentsia. Most of them were accused of espionage and sent to the Russian outback to the settlements.

During the retreat of the Russian army, an order was issued to resettle the male population of Galicia to Russia so that men could not be mobilized into the Austro-Hungarian army. Although this measure could not be implemented on a large scale, more than 100 thousand men in 1915 ended up on the territory of Volyn controlled by the Russian Empire.

Such a policy canIt doesn’t seem very tough - for us, who know from the course of history about mass executions, concentration camps, gas chambers and other delights of totalitarian regimes. But for people in Western Ukraine in 1914, this was all new. Therefore, sympathy for the Russians among the majority disappeared.

It is obvious that the Narodovtsy, who immediately supported Austria-Hungary from the beginning of the war, won much more favor with the Austrians, as well as popularity among the Galicians. The authorities allowed and welcomed the creation of Ukrainian national units (Legion of Ukrainian Sich Riflemen). Here, too, the myth of Russian propaganda about the Austrian General Staff is growing - they say they created an army of Galicians to fight against the "fraternal people". In fact, the Austrians limited the patriotic zeal of Western Ukrainians. More than 10,000 Ukrainians responded to the call of the Narodovtsy from the Main Ukrainian Rada to form the Legion, but it was allowed to create a unit of only 2,500 people. Again, the Poles prevented, who used all their influence in the empire to limit the size of the “Ukrainian army”.

The Legion of Sich Riflemen successfully fought at the front and never experienced a shortage of volunteers to make up for losses. In July 1917, in the battle near Konyuhi, the Legion, almost in full force, was captured. Paradoxically, this defeat opened a new page in the glorious history of the archers - namely, their participation in the Ukrainian revolution of 1917-1921.

Ukrainian revolution

In February 1917, a revolution broke out in Petrograd. The people are tired of constant shortages, unnecessary deaths and impoverishment. Emperor Nicholas II abdicated, power was in the hands of the provisional government.

But the paradox was that the revolution, which began as a protest against the war, did not put an end to the war itself.In July, the last big Russian offensive in the First World War began, named after the head of the Provisional Government, the "offensive of Kerensky". It was during this offensive that the Sich Riflemen were captured.

At this time, a revolution also began in Kyiv, but with a national tinge. In March, the Ukrainian Central Rada began its work under the leadership of Professor of History Mikhail Grushevsky. The leaders of the Rada were very careful in their ambitions - they fought not for an independent Ukrainian state, but only for the national-territorial autonomy of Ukrainians as part of a "democratic federal Russia." They also decided not to create a Ukrainian army - they were going to live in peace with Russia. Separate armed detachments from former front-line soldiers were created with great difficulty by the force of enthusiasts.

History has punished the Central Rada for this mistake. In October 1917, the Bolsheviks came to power under the slogan "Freedom to the peoples!" start building a new empire. In December, the Reds captured Kharkov and proclaimed the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic - with an eye on all of Ukraine.

But back to the Sich Riflemen. After the proclamation of the Ukrainian People's Republic in November 1917, Western Ukrainian prisoners of war were released and they formed the Galicia-Bukovina hut of the Sich Riflemen. Since December, he has found his permanent commander - Yevgeny Konovalets, who providedsupply, training and ideological attitude of archers.

It was the policy of the Central Rada that led to the fact that a small hut (about 400 people) was almost the most combat-ready unit in the Ukrainian army in January 1918 . They resisted the Reds, who were advancing on Kyiv, suppressed the Bolshevik rebellion in Kyiv, guarded the Central Rada after the evacuation from the capital.

After the hetman's coup in April 1918, Konovalets and many archers went underground and returned to the arena of the Ukrainian revolution only in November, under the banner of the Army of the UNR Directory. They are remained faithful to her until the final defeat of the Ukrainian revolution in 1921.

In Galicia, meanwhile, the revolution was also ripening. In October 1918, it was clear to everyone that Germany and Austria-Hungary would lose the war. Everywhere on the territory of the empire, national movements arose in support of the independence of their peoples from Austria. The Ukrainians were no exception either - in November, the centurion of the Sich Riflemen Vitovsky, with a small detachment, captured key buildings in Lvov, flying a yellow-blue flag. The same thing happened in other large cities of Western Ukraine. The Western Ukrainian People's Republic (ZUNR) was proclaimed, which was supposed to extend to the territory of Galicia and Northern Bukovina.

But the Poles interfered again. They took up the active construction of their state, and of course they did not forget about Galicia, which they considered their own. After stubborn resistance, the Ukrainian Galician Army, and with it the ZUNR, was defeated until June 1919. The military retreated across the Zbruch River, where they joined the UNR Army, which then fought off the Bolsheviks and the Whites.

The Ukrainian Galician Army managed to fight both in alliance with the Ukrainian People's Republic (July-November 1919), and together with the Whites of A. Denikin (November 1919 - January 1920), and even as part of the Red Army (January - April 1920). But there was never any alliance with the Poles - until the end of the Ukrainian revolution of 1917-1921, the Galicians considered the Poles to be the main enemy. Warsaw Anti-Bolshevik Pact between UNR leader Symon Petliura andhead of the CommonwealthJozef Pilsudski was perceived by the Galicians as a betrayal by Kyiv.

Second Polish Republic

The First World War was not only the last breath of the four great empires - Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, German and Russian - but also gave birth to new countries. This fate did not bypass the Poles, who have long dreamed of their own state. In 1918, one of the points of the Paris Peace Conference, which decided the fate of the post-war world, provided for the creation of the Polish state - the Second Commonwealth.

But the creation of new countries raises one of the most painful questions for all states - the issue of borders. It was necessary, of course, to use the unique historical moment and get as much territory as possible in the chaos that reigned then. And given the fact that especially the border lands in Europe are ethnically heterogeneous, there were more than enough reasons to grab part of the territories from a neighboring state.

The first head of the revived Poland, Jozef Pilsudski, understood this, saying that the borders of Poland in the West depend on the decisions of the Entente (the coalition that won the First World War, led by France and Great Britain), and the borders in the East depend on itself. oh Warsaw s. As a result, the Poles defeated the Western Ukrainian People's Republic, repelled the offensive of the Bolsheviks and entrenched themselves in these lands, as they thought, forever.

Western Ukrainians found themselves in a new political reality - now they are citizens of Poland, and the capital of their new homeland is Warsaw. But not only Ukrainians were held hostage by the Polish dream of their own state, since 30% of the population of Poland were not Poles - 15% were Ukrainians, and the remaining 15% were Belarusians, Germans, Lithuanians, etc. Considering these facts, the national question in the Second The Polish Republic, of course, could not but be relevant.

Officially in Poland, the right of Ukrainians to realize their interests through local self-government bodies was secured, and the rights of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Ukrainian language were also guaranteed. But, it never came to fruition. And although Poland in the early 1920s. and seemed outwardly democratic state, one of the leitmotifs of its national policy was the assimilation of the Ukrainian population.

And it all started in 1921 with the adoption of the Constitution, which did not provide for the national minorities the scope of rights and freedoms that they originally expected. A year later, elections to the Parliament were to be held, which almost all Ukrainian parties, as well as the clergy, called for a boycott. The Polish government saw this as nothing more than the subversive activities of Soviet Ukraine and began to diligently arrest Ukrainian politicians.

The aggressiveness of the Polish policy towards Western Ukraine is explained, first of all, by Warsaw's lack of confidence in its ability to retain these territories, the population of which quite recently fought against those who are now in their power. The situation really did not develop in the direction of a peaceful scenario. The policy of Polonization (implantation of Polish culture and language) and the distribution of land in regions with a predominantly Ukrainian population to Polish military personnel caused protests by the Ukrainian population, including against military service.

But against the backdrop of worsening Polish-Ukrainian relations and with the direct support of the USSR, the Communist Party of Western Ukraine (KPZU) operated in Poland. Sympathy for the Soviet Union and the idea of ​​joining the USSR enjoyed good popularity in the 20s, but almost completely disappeared after the news of forced collectivization, mass repressions and the Holodomor in the Ukrainian SSR. And the leaders of the KPZU themselves were later almost all recalled to the USSR and sentenced to death on trumped-up cases.

But the ideas of resistance to the Poles were not presented only by the communists - in Poland, as well as in the territory of neighboring Czechoslovakia and Austria, Ukrainian nationalist organizations begin to emerge. For example, in 1920, the Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO) was created in Prague, headed by Yevgeny Konovalets, the core of which was the former Sich Riflemen. The organization was engaged in sabotage and subversive activities and political assassinations, among which there was an unsuccessful attempt on Jozef Pilsudski. In retaliation, 5,000 people were arrested and the authorities began to pursue a so-called "pacification" policy, searching Ukrainian villages for "UVO militants". In response to these actions, the nationalists switched to the tactics of individual terror, emphasizing their anti-Polish and anti-Bolshevik orientation.

So, for example, the assassination attempt by OUN member M. Lemik on the Soviet consulate officer O. Maylov was widely publicized - the purpose of the first was to protest during the trial against the Soviet Union's suppression of the artificial famine in Ukraine.

But not only the OUN represented the political interests of the Ukrainians. For example, the most popular was the Ukrainian National Democratic Association (UNDO) of an anti-communist and democratic persuasion, which set the goal of creating a Ukrainian state, but rejected violence as a method to achieve goals. However, the actions of both Ukrainians and Poles only exacerbated an already difficult situation, making it even more difficult through attempts to enlist the support of external players. The conflict potential increased, and the positions of both sides became more and more radical.

On September 1, 1939, German troops invade Poland from the West, and 17 days later the Red Army invades the Commonwealth from the East. The young Polish state, which hardly had time to celebrate its twentieth anniversary, found itself caught between a rock and a hard place.

Partition of Poland between the Third Reich and the USSR

But what was a tragedy for the Poles, not without reason, was considered by the Ukrainians of Poland as a new historical chance, which fate rarely likes to scatter. A month after the start of hostilities, they already found themselves in new political realities that could change, as it seemed then, their lives for the better.

Today it may seem like a fantastic scenario, but Lvov welcomed the Red Army with joy. Twenty years of extremely difficult relations with the Poles and the arrival of “brothers and Soviet Ukraine” created an atmosphere of hope for long-awaited changes for the better, although most of the intelligentsia were extremely skeptical about such a turn of events.

Red Army in Lvov, 1939

Lviv residents greet the Red Army

The music played for a while

The euphoria passed quickly. Stage one is culture shock. Untidy-looking "liberators", who found themselves outside the USSR for the first time, greedily bought goods that were in short supply in the Union, causing fair surprise for the local population. Not only "capitalists hostile to the working class", but also ordinary people suffered from expropriation and frequent cases of robbery; and the public use by the families of Soviet officers of night “ducks” as containers for milk and nightgowns as evening dresses became a byword throughout the occupied territory.

The second stage is the legalization of annexation. Of course, it was necessary to fasten the new borders with the will of the local population, which the Soviet government always did well. On October 22, 1939, elections were held in which, according to official statistics, 93% of the population took part and 91% supported the proposed candidates. The formed People's Assembly of Western Ukraine in unison thanked Stalin for the "liberation" and turned to the First Secretary of the CP (b) U Nikita Khrushchev with a request to officially include the territory of Western Ukraine into the Ukrainian SSR.

The third stage is repression. The first to be deported were former Polish officials and policemen. One of the events most famous for its tragedy took place in the spring of 1940 - in the forest near Katyn (Smolensk region), more than 20,000 Polish soldiers were shot by the NKVD. The turn of the Ukrainians also came: the activities of organizations not controlled by the Soviets were terminated, political parties were liquidated, all those who, in the opinion of the Bolsheviks, could pose at least some danger, were persecuted. The only major political force in opposition to the Bolsheviks was the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, which was forced to go underground.

Not a trace of past gratitude to the "liberators" remained. Prisons were filled at a fast pace, forced collectivization was carried out, death sentences were handed down, and in less than two years hundreds of thousands of people were taken to Siberia - the exact number of their victims is not known to this day. The details of Stalinist repressions began to be investigated as early as the 80s, when a mass grave of victims of the NKVD was discovered near Kyiv near the village of Bykivnya. But even today, no one will say for sure, neither how many were killed then, nor how many such "Bykiven" are located throughout Ukraine.

Victims of Soviet atrocities

The arrival of the Germans

Soviet power in Western Ukraine did not last long - two years later, on June 22, 1941, the Third Reich attacks the former ally, with the help of which it had recently redrawn the borders of European states. A few weeks later, Western Ukraine was completely occupied by the Wehrmacht. At first, many Ukrainians were happy to meet the Germans - even before the attack of the Third Reich on the USSR, thousands of people were forced to flee from Western Ukraine to Nazi-occupied Poland. In addition, Ukrainian nationalists pinned their hopes on the Germans for the revival of the Ukrainian state and at first saw them as allies in the fight against the communists and the Poles.

On June 30, 1941, the German battalion "Nachtigal", which consisted mainly of Ukrainian nationalists, took Lvov together with parts of the Wehrmacht. On the same day, the Act of the Restoration of Ukrainian Statehood was proclaimed on Rynok Square in the presence of the general public and church representatives. But these plans ran counter to the German vision of the future of Ukraine, and therefore, already on July 5, many OUN leaders, including Stepan Bandera, were arrested, some were shot.

The Germans gave a clear signal that the creation of the Ukrainian state, even if it was a union state, was not part of their plans. When Nachtigal found out about the arrest of the OUN leaders, the military demanded their release, for which the battalion was withdrawn from the front to the rear, and soon disbanded. The future commander-in-chief of the UPA, Roman Shukhevych, managed to avoid arrest, and most of the Nachtigall soldiers later formed the backbone of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).

So, in 1941, it became clear that neither the Poles, nor the Communists, nor the Nazis promised anything good for the Ukrainians, however, the hopes for an independent state still smoldered. There were also people who were ready to fight for them. Repressions against the civilian population by the German occupation administration led to the fact that local self-defense units began to be created, for which the Nazis were enemy No. 1.

The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists led the process of creating armed detachments to fight the Germans. From disparate groups in Volhynia and Galicia, self-defense units began to be created, which united in 1943 in the UPA known to us. Before the Bolsheviks came to these lands, the UPA took part mainly in the battles with the Nazis, setting itself the goal of complicating, and ideally, stopping the exploitation of Ukrainian villages by the Germans.

With the transition of the territories of Western Ukraine under the control of the USSR, the UPA switches to the fight against the communists, who again showed the local population what deportations, collectivization and mass repressions are. The memory of the recent crimes of the Bolsheviks rallied thousands of people in the UPA, ready to prevent a repetition of the tragedy of 1939-41 at any cost. The rebels organized acts of sabotage, and under their guns were all those who collaborated with the Bolsheviks - the heads of village councils, workers of district party committees, local activists and others. And the local population's support for the actions of the UPA and their general hatred of the Bolsheviks made life much more difficult for the occupiers.

Western Ukraine as part of the states since 1945

To fight the insurgents, special groups of the NKVD, the so-called agent-combat groups (ABG), were created. The main tactic of the ABG was to carry out provocative actions under the guise of the UPA - disguised NKVD-ists killed people, looted and burned houses in order to discredit the insurgent movement.

What now?

After World War II, Germany went through a full course of denazification - the Nuremberg trials and subsequent courts punished Nazi criminals, in the post-war years, democracy was instilled in Germans in every possible way, and the German economic miracle was one of the proofs that a strong hand of a dictator is not necessary for economic progress. To prevent a relapse into dictatorship, the German Constitution even included Article 20, which enshrines the right of Germans to revolt against a government that is destroying Germany's democratic foundations. The payment of reparations to the affected parties once again showed an admission of guilt and demonstrated a desire to at least somehow atone for it, and the apogee of this policy was, of course, gesture personally injured his from the Nazis German Wow Chancellor Willy Brandt who knelt in front of the monument to the victims of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Thanks, among other things, to repentance and redemption, Germany today is associated primarily with progress and economic power, and not with the terrible events of World War II.

A more ambiguous situation has developed today in Ukrainian-Polish relations. If we do not take into account the frankly biased and radical positions of some both Polish and Ukrainian historians who blame only the other side for all the troubles, Ukraine and Poland as a whole manage to take the path of reconciliation, although so far without any special results. Also in about the second half of the 90s, the then presidents Kuchma and Kwasnevsky made a symbolic reconciliation of the two peoples, but on a personal level of perception of the conflict, this did not change much. Today, after a long break, the dialogue between the Ukrainian and Polish Institutes of National Remembrance has resumed regarding the most acute and controversial moments of bilateral relations. After all, objective history is history written by two sides.

A completely different situation has developed with Russia. Neither Beria nor Stalin are now alive, and the Soviet Union collapsed. But, unfortunately, imperial thinking, imperial mythology, pain for the "lost power" and the rehabilitation of the killers of millions of people not only lives in today's Russia, but is also successfully cultivated. Realizing that part of the population of Ukraine had not found a new identity after the collapse of the Union, the Russian propaganda machine began to offer them its own, imposing myths about the “three fraternal peoples”, “Holy Russia” and the “Russian world”. Not to do this business without creating the image of the enemy - "decaying West", "aggressive NATO", "mean State Department." At the level of Ukraine, the top three "enemies" include Mazepa, Petliura and, of course, Bandera. And the stronghold of all these “alien and hostile” ideas to Ukrainians is Western Ukraine, which learned the tragic lesson of the 20th century better than all other parts of our country. about our Russian "brothers" and, certainly, earlier than others, she said goodbye to her Soviet past. In the meantime, we are trying to find ourselves in this new world, in Moscow they are talking about the aggressiveness of Lviv at a time when the “little green men” are occupying Crimea. Shelling the cities and villages of Donbass, in Russia Western Ukrainians are called Bandera, fascists and Russophobes. And “in mourning those who died in the civil war in Ukraine,” a new convoy of “Grads” is sent from Moscow across the border. It's all so Russian.

Despite the fact that the Ukrainians formally represent an independent ethnic group, there are still certain differences between the Westerners and the rest of the representatives of the Square, and often significant ones. In many ways, these differences are due to the influence of other countries with which different regions of Ukraine are neighboring.

Language is not the same everywhere

Residents of Lviv and Dnepropetrovsk can be easily distinguished by their dialect - they make different stresses in the same words, pronouncing them with the intonation inherent in a certain region: “listopaAd” and “leaffall”, among Dnepropetrovsk residents - “we brought”, and among Lviv residents - "we brought." This difference is especially noticeable when using verb forms.

The southeast of Ukraine is adjacent to Russia, so the Russian language is more popular there. Neighborhood with Moldova, Slovakia, Hungary, Belarus, Romania and Poland leaves an imprint on the language palette of the inhabitants of the western regions of the country. Accordingly, the language of the Westerners is replete with words borrowed from these neighbors.

Geography influences character

According to scientists, Ukrainians belong to one anthropological type, but it is divided into several subtypes. According to the Ukrainian scientist Serhiy Segeda, most of the "average" Ukrainians have a typical appearance, and its "shades" have historically long been erased. However, the psychotypes of residents of different regions of Ukraine still differ.

Southerners are joyful and emotional

Ukrainian psychologist Sergei Steblinsky classified the residents of Nezalezhnaya depending on the regions in which they live.

He believes that the character of Ukrainians is seriously influenced by the climate of the area and its location. So, the southerners are happier and more emotional than the rest. This is noticeable at least on the example of Odessans. Southerners living by the sea are witty and enterprising. Moldavians, Romanians and Bulgarians are considered their distant relatives.

Westerners are irreconcilable

Residents of Western Ukraine, living in mountainous areas, have a hardened, persistent character. Highlanders are characterized by intransigence, a heightened sense of justice. Outwardly, they are most different from other Ukrainians - Westerners, as a rule, are very short in stature, and their eye color is darker than that of other representatives of the ethnic group. The alleged ancestors of immigrants from Western Ukraine are the Balkan peoples.

Middle peasants are averaged

Everything about the inhabitants of the Central part of Ukraine is average, including appearance. In this habitat, the paths of various tribes once crossed, and among the middle peasants there are even descendants of Turkic-speaking peoples.

The population of this area is characterized by a controversial character, which is characterized by mood swings.

Northerners are gloomy rational skeptics

The cold climate leaves its mark on the character of the inhabitants of the northern regions of Ukraine. Outwardly, they are fair-haired, of medium height, with a massive chin and frowning eyebrows. The inhabitants of Polissya are the descendants of the northern peoples who lived in the Mesolithic and Neolithic eras.

Northerners are emotional, cheerful and determined. These are people with an active lifestyle. Upper Dnieper Ukrainians are considered descendants of the Ilmen-Dnieper peoples who once inhabited the northwestern European part of modern Russia.

Yaroslav Shimov

The westernmost regions of modern Ukraine - Galicia, Bukovina and Transcarpathia - until 1918 were the easternmost provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. For almost a century and a half (and Transcarpathia - much longer) they were under the scepter of the Habsburgs, whose domestic and foreign policy in the 19th - early 20th centuries could not but influence the formation of the ideology of Ukrainian nationalism and the development of national culture and language not only in these areas, but and, to a certain extent, all of Ukraine. Galicia went to the Habsburgs as a result of the first (1772) and third (1795) sections of the Commonwealth (Austria did not participate in the second section). Bukovina in 1774 was conquered by Austria from Ottoman Turkey and annexed to Galicia; it was separated into a separate province in the middle of the 19th century. Characteristically, Maria Theresa, during whose reign the first partition took place, opposed the destruction of the Polish-Lithuanian state and with great chagrin yielded to the pragmatic arguments of her son and co-ruler Joseph II. " Only the weakness of the Turks, the fact that we could not count on the help of England and France, the fears of a possible war with Russia and Prussia, the poverty and famine that fell upon our lands, forced me to take that unrighteous step, which stained my reign and poisoned my days' complained the queen. However, as the long-time rival of the Habsburgs, the Prussian King Frederick II, noted with characteristic causticity, “ she cried, but she took her» . The relative liberalism of the Habsburg regime, whose policy in the territories of the former Commonwealth was noticeably softer than Russian or Prussian, may be explained to some extent precisely by the fact that "Galicia and Lodomeria" were annexed to the Danube monarchy for purely geopolitical reasons. In any case, the Habsburgs did not look for ideological justifications for this step. For Prussia, participation in the partitions was a continuation of the long-standing German strategy of “onslaught to the east”, and the Russian Empire claimed that it was returning the lands of Western Russia, once captured by Lithuania and Poland.

At first, due to the ethnic, cultural and linguistic affiliation of the nobility of Galicia, this province was perceived in the Habsburg Empire as Polish. As for Transcarpathia, already at the beginning of the 13th century it became part of the Kingdom of Hungary, where the dominant role has long been assigned to the Hungarian culture. The East Slavic population of these lands - the descendants of the inhabitants of the Galicia-Volyn principality, which was part of Kievan Rus, at that time did not recognize themselves as a single ethnic group. They have formed only a local, i.e. associated with the place of residence, linguistic and confessional identity (in this region, starting from the 17th century, the Greek Catholic (Uniate) religion prevailed). According to the well-known Czech researcher Miroslav Groch, this situation is quite typical of Central and Eastern Europe, where a "foreign" ruling class dominated ethnic groups that occupied a compact territory, but had neither their own nobility and political institutions, nor a long literary tradition.

The question of the (self-)name of the East Slavic population of the provinces that ceded to Russia and the Habsburg Empire as a result of the divisions of the Commonwealth is both clear and rather confusing. We are talking about those about whom the Austrian traveler and diplomat Sigismund Herberstein wrote back in the 16th century: “ ... This people, speaking the Slavic language, professing the faith of Christ according to the Greek rite, calling themselves in their native language Russi, and in Latin called Rutheni » . But even at the time of Herberstein in various East Slavic lands, the word Russi(Russian) Ruthenians had a different meaning, which, moreover, changed over the centuries. In the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Commonwealth in the 14th-17th centuries, the ethnonym "Ross" - "Rusyn" - "Russian" served to designate a regional and/or confessional affiliation within a broader state-political community. In the Muscovite state and the Russian Empire that grew out of it, the word “Russian” began to denote, first of all, territorial and political belonging to Russia, citizenship.

Russ/Rosses/Rusyns, who lived in different areas of the vast region inhabited by them, since the time of Kievan Rus were subjected to various ethnocultural and political influences: Balto-Germanic in the northwest, West Slavic in the west and southwest, Turkic in the south, Finno-Ugric and Turkic-Mongolian in the northeast. The diversification of the ethnic community under consideration is, in principle, not unified from the very beginning, because the inhabitants of the ancient Russian state, as you know, belonged to different tribes - gradually led to the formation of three East Slavic peoples: Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian. It is important to note that the process of formation of the respective nations in all three cases began relatively late and, in a certain sense, has not been completed to this day. The already confusing question of the origin of Russia-Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, as well as the ethnonyms "Rusyn", "Russian", "Ukrainian", "Belarusian", etc., is complicated by deliberate ideologization. The author of this article, speaking about the Eastern Slavic (Orthodox and Greek Catholic) population of Galicia, Bukovina and Transcarpathia, mainly uses the ethnonym "Rusyns", since it is the most neutral from the political and ideological point of view. In addition, just like that (in German Ruthenen) called the representatives of this people in the Habsburg Empire.

Until the middle of the 19th century, the national movement of the Eastern Slavs in the Austrian Empire could not be regarded as an independent socio-political factor. We can only talk about the modest achievements of the Greek Catholic (Uniate) Church and the emerging Ruthenian intelligentsia in the field of public education, as well as in the development of local writing and literature. For the few (due to the low level of literacy) Rusyn readers, under the patronage of the Uniate Church, liturgical and other literature was published in the so-called "Slavic Russian" language. It was a dialect that had little in common with the living speech of the Rusyns, in fact, the Church Slavonic language interspersed with local vocabulary, which the activists of the Ukrainian national movement later called "pagan". From among the priests and theologians came the first Galician publicists and enlighteners.

In 1836, Markian Shashkevich, who studied at the Greek Catholic seminary in Lvov, wrote a treatise in which he argued that Ruthenian texts should be written in Cyrillic, and criticized attempts to use the Latin alphabet for this purpose, guided by the rules of Polish orthography. Shashkevich, together with Ivan Vagilevich and Yakov Golovatsky (the so-called " ruska", or " Galician Triytsya”) published a collection “ Mermaid Dnistrovaya". It included folk songs, ballads, Shashkevich's own stories and translations from Serbian and Czech. It was the first publication in a language close to the spoken Ruthenian (Western Ukrainian) dialects and using not the Church Slavonic alphabet, but the secular Cyrillic script (“citizen”). In general, the issue of the codification of local dialects and the creation of a literary language on their basis was considered by the figures of national revival in Galicia, Bukovina and Transcarpathia to be one of the most important until the end of the 19th century.

The revolution of 1848-1849 gave a strong impetus to the national movements of all the peoples under the rule of the Habsburgs. In March 1848, as a result of mass demonstrations in Vienna, the regime of Chancellor Clemens Metternich was overthrown. Unrest spread to the provinces. Galician Poles created Rada Narodova(National Council), which demanded wide autonomy from the imperial government. The hierarchs of the Greek Catholic Church and the few Ruthenian intelligentsia saw the rise of the Polish movement in Galicia as a threat to their interests. By that time, very tense relations had developed between the Polish and Ruthenian populations in this province - however, the causes of tension were social rather than national. When an uprising broke out in Krakow in 1846, inspired by Polish revolutionaries who came from the nobility, the surrounding Galician peasants rose up against the landowners, becoming in fact allies of the Austrian government. The "Galician massacre" claimed the lives of more than two thousand Polish landowners and their families. In some districts, such as Tarnovsky, almost 90% of the estates were looted and burned. The authorities punished the particularly cruel participants in this jacquerie, but some of its leaders received promotions and even awards.

The Habsburg government made it clear that it was ready to use the national and social contradictions in Galicia for its own political interests. The governor of Galicia, Count Franz Stadion, trying to prevent the transformation of Galicia into a "Polish Piedmont" - a springboard from which the restoration of an independent Polish state could begin, encouraged the Ruthenian movement. As the Ukrainian-Canadian historian Orest Subtelny notes, Shtadion “ attracted and supported in every possible way ... the timid Western Ukrainian elite, hoping to use it as a counterbalance to the more aggressive Poles» . It was not without his support that the Golovna Ruska Rada (Main Rusyn Council) was created, headed by the Greek Catholic Bishop Grigory Yakhimovich. The newspaper "Zorya Galitska" began to appear in Lvov. On May 15, 1848, she published an appeal by the Rada, which supported the constitutional reform of Emperor Ferdinand I. The appeal put forward demands for administrative autonomy and the free development of national culture and language for the Ruthenians of Galicia - “ parts of the great Ruthenian (Russian) people who speak the same language and number 15 million people» .

The Golovnaya Rada Manifesto is considered the first official document in which the idea of ​​a community of the Ruthenian population of the Habsburg monarchy and the people of Ukraine-Little Russia, which was part of the Russian Empire, is carried out. But neither in this nor in subsequent documents and publications of the Rada, which existed until 1851, we will not find the names "Ukraine" and "Ukrainians". The leaders of the Rada diligently emphasized that they represented only Rusyns, Ruthenen, a people different from Russians ( Russen), and from the Poles, giving no reason to suspect the East Slavic population of the provinces bordering Russia, either in irredentism or in support of the Polish movement. Simultaneously with the Rada, the Russky Cathedral arose in Galicia, an organization that promoted the idea of ​​close Rusyn-Polish cooperation, in fact declaring the Rusyns Poles professing Eastern (Greek) rite Catholicism. The organ of the Council - the newspaper "Russkiy Diary" - was edited by one of the members of the "Galician trinity" Ivan Vagilevich. The cathedral, which, however, did not receive such popularity as the Rada, was supported by the Poles.

Representatives of the Golovnaya Rada, dominated by the hierarchs of the Uniate Church, also resorted to religious argumentation in defining Rusyn identity. They emphasized that, despite their common cultural roots and linguistic affinity, Rusyns should not be identified with Russians (Great Russians) - adherents of Orthodoxy, i.e., in the eyes of Catholics and Uniates, "schismatics." The interests of the Rusyns for the time being coincided with the interests of Vienna - perhaps that is why the Habsburg policy towards them was quite liberal. In 1847, 32 Ruthenian publications were published in Galicia, in 1848 - already 156 (although this record was not broken over the next 30 years). In addition to Zorya Galitskaya, which was published until 1857, other Ruthenian periodicals began to appear. The network of Rusyn elementary schools grew rapidly, and a department of the Rusyn language and literature was opened at the Faculty of Philosophy of Lviv University.

During the revolution of 1848-1849, the Ruthenian population remained loyal to the Habsburg monarchy. Pro-Russian sentiments spread among part of the Rusyns after the troops sent by Nicholas I to help Franz Joseph I to suppress the Hungarian revolution arrived in Galicia, Bukovina and Transcarpathia. However, the enthusiasm with which the locals greeted the Russian army did not prevent the well-known Rusyn activist from Transcarpathia, Adolf Dobriansky, who was elected to the Hungarian parliament in 1848, to strongly reject accusations of pan-Slavism. " Hungarian freedom is dearer to us than Russian autocracy, just as the mild climate of Hungary is preferable to the Siberian winter.", - he said. Gradually, the harsh policy of the Hungarian authorities aimed at assimilation of ethnic minorities - both during the years of the revolution of 1848-1849, and after the formation of the two-pronged Austria-Hungary in 1867 - pushed some leaders of the Rusyn national movement away from Budapest, making them staunch Russophiles (the same Dobryansky later emigrated to Russia). At the same time, the Magyaronic direction was also growing stronger, whose supporters considered the assimilation of the Ruthenians a way of familiarizing themselves with a more developed Hungarian culture and had nothing against their people turning into "Hungarians of the Greek Catholic faith."

So, the revolutionary upsurge of 1848-1849 contributed to the fact that the cultural and educational activities of the Ruthenian intelligentsia in Galicia, Bukovina and Transcarpathia took shape organizationally and turned into a national-political movement. Two trends competed in it: one was loyal to the Habsburgs, the other, "Muscovite", was oriented towards Russia. (The polonophilia of the Russky Sobor activists gradually almost vanished.) By the 1970s and 1980s, Ukrainophile views began to spread rapidly among Ruthenian activists, primarily among young people. Representatives of this direction were called "people people". Rejecting the possibility of a compromise with the Galician Poles, they could not accept the main ideologeme of the “Muscovites”, who considered the Rusyns a part of the Russian people. "Narodovtsy" identified local Rusyns with Ukrainians-Little Russians, insisting that both are a single ethnic group, which differs in language and culture from Russian. Now the formation of the Rusyn national identity depended on the success of the implementation of one or another national-political project. Each of these projects was based on a certain - Russian or Ukrainian - interpretation of the origin of the Rusyns and their ethno-cultural identity.

The national policy of the Habsburg government, as well as the policy of tsarist Russia towards the Ukrainian national movement, which originated in Little Russia, also had a noticeable influence on the competition between “Muscovites” and “Narodovites”. At the beginning of his reign, Alexander II adhered to a moderately liberal course and did not seriously oppress the Little Russian “Ukrainophiles”. But later, after the defeat of the January uprising of 1863–1864, which engulfed not only the Kingdom of Poland, but also part of the territory of Lithuania and Belarus, St. Petersburg moved to harsh repressive measures against activists who promoted the Ukrainian language and culture. In 1876, the "Ems Decree" was issued, which forbade the publication of literature in the Ukrainian language on the territory of the empire. However, "p The policy of the authorities in the Ukrainian question suffered from the absence of any solid activity of a non-repressive nature. The authorities failed to establish an effective system of primary education in Russian, to effectively use other assimilation tools available to them» . Since the Russification measures were not very successful, the social base of the Ukrainian movement on the territory of the empire could not be eliminated.

The repressive course of the Russian government contributed to the fact that the center of the Ukrainian national movement moved to Galicia. Over the years, such figures as Mikhail Dragomanov, Mikhail Grushevsky and Dmitry Dontsov moved there. As Drahomanov noted in his "Letters to the Dnieper Ukraine", " Russian Ukrainians enter into closer ties with Austrian ones, appear in Bukovina and Hungarian Rus (Transcarpathia), where no Ukrainophile has ever set foot before, Ukrainian libraries are created in Vienna, in Chernivtsi, numerous Ukrainian books are brought to Hungarian Rus, where no one has seen them before» . The fairly liberal policy of the Austrian authorities does not prevent the emergence of Ukrainian educational and scientific societies (Enlightenment, the Taras Shevchenko Society), which are rapidly expanding their range of activities. Cooperatives and mutual lending societies appear. So, the Lviv society "Prosvita" by 1906 had 39 branches in Eastern Galicia. From 1869 to 1914 it opened 1,700 reading rooms and published 82 titles of books with a total circulation of 655,000 copies.

In the last years of the 19th century, the growing strength of Galician Ukrainophilism took on distinctly leftist, socialist tones, which added to its popularity, mainly among the intelligentsia and youth. In 1890, the Ukrainian Radical Party emerged, among the founders of which was the classic of Ukrainian literature Ivan Franko. Five years later, one of the activists of this party, Yulian Bachinsky, published his essay “Ukraina irredenta” (“Independent Ukraine”), in which for the first time the idea of ​​political independence of the Ukrainian people was openly proclaimed. Bachinsky states that this idea " finds support among the Galician-Ukrainian intelligentsia and the proletariat» . The work of Bachinsky - by the way, who called himself a Marxist - is assessed by many of today's Ukrainian historians as " one of the building blocks that should form the basis of the state building of Ukraine has been creatively used in the course of the formation of a sovereign Ukrainian state in modern conditions» . In 1900, in Lvov, a brochure was published by a native of Ukraine-Little Russia, a Russian citizen Nikolai Mikhnovsky "Independent Ukraine", which put forward a radical program for the creation of " one, united, indivisible, free, independent Ukraine from the Carpathians to the Caucasus» .

The ideas of creating an independent Ukrainian state threatened the integrity of both the Romanov Empire and the Habsburg monarchy, so not only the Russians, but also the Austrian authorities could not help but worry. But nevertheless, for St. Petersburg, the spread of these ideas was a much greater danger than for Vienna, if only because the Russian Empire included a much larger part of the lands with a Ukrainian population than Austria-Hungary. Note that, unlike Russia, in the Habsburg monarchy, at least in its Austrian part, which included Galicia and Bukovina, there was no dominant, “titular” ethnic group; the ruling dynasty, German in language and culture, associated itself not with the Germans or any other of the peoples of the empire, but with the empire as a whole. The national policy of the Habsburg authorities (in “big” Austria, but not in Hungary!) was not repressive, but at the same time, Vienna skillfully played on the contradictions between the Polish and Ukrainian national movements.

In Russia, and in the ruling circles of the empire, and among part of the Russian public, under the last three tsars " it was widely believed that the state bureaucracy (primarily in the western regions of the empire. - Y. Sh.) is called upon to constantly fulfill the mission of defending the Russian people from the threat of denationalization and economic exploitation by the Poles, Germans and other peoples» . Since Ukrainians and Belarusians, according to the official ideology, were also considered part of the Russian people, the “fight against denationalization” in Ukrainian and Belarusian lands often turned into Russification. As already mentioned, the assimilation policy of the Russian authorities was neither flexible nor consistent. Therefore, it was doomed to failure - despite the fact that the "enemy" was not so terrible: both the Ukrainian and Belarusian national movements until the beginning of the 20th century were represented by relatively small groups of local intelligentsia and youth of various ranks. The question of the awakening of the national self-consciousness of the peasant majority, of whether a national identity would be formed on the basis of local or regional, still remained open.

Both Ukrainophilism and Russophilism in Galicia, Bukovina and Transcarpathia became factors in the domestic policy of not only the Habsburg Empire, but also the Russian Empire. As relations between Russia and Austria-Hungary deteriorated (mainly due to the clash of their interests in the Balkans), both powers had to reckon with these currents more and more. At the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th century, the vast majority of Galician and Bukovinian Ukrainophiles were loyal to the Austrian authorities and the imperial house. Their immediate political goal was to grant administrative and cultural autonomy to the eastern part of Galicia, where the Ruthenian population prevailed, and they still considered the local Poles their main opponent. As the American historian Timothy Snyder rightly points out, for Ukrainian activists, the Poles were a model, rulers and rivals. A model is how they managed to achieve significant autonomy within Austria. The rulers - because ... power was concentrated in their hands: more than 90 percent of the highest administrative posts in Galicia were in the hands of the Poles. They were rivals, as Polish political forces associated with modern nationalism, such as the National Democrats, sought to spread Polish culture as a single national culture throughout Galicia.» .

Ivan Franko insisted that the Poles " must once and for all abandon the idea of ​​recreating “historical” Poland on non-Polish lands and accept, as we do, the idea of ​​ethnic Poland» . This was not easy to achieve, since in 1867-70 the imperial government made several important concessions to the Galician Poles, uniting the western part of Galicia (where the Polish population predominated) with the eastern (with a predominance of Ruthenians) and approving a series of measures that provided for the Polonization of the higher education system in the province. Since 1869, the Polish language has enjoyed official status in Galicia ( Landessprache). Since, until the beginning of the 20th century, the political interests of the Galician Poles were represented by people from the ranks of a large landed aristocracy, “socially close” to the imperial court and Austrian aristocrats, the Polish political influence in Vienna was incomparably stronger than the Ruthenian.

The Ukrainian movement in Galicia, Bukovina and Transcarpathia had another notable rival: the Russophile current in these provinces had thousands of activists in its ranks, had its own network of scientific and educational societies and cultural centers. In the last quarter of the 19th century, the influence of pagans with its Church Slavonic basis was still strong among Russophiles, but gradually most of them tended to use the Russian language, at least in written texts. The Austrian authorities treated the “Muscovites” much harsher than the Ukrainian activists, seeing them as agents of Russian influence. Indeed, St. Petersburg provided support to Russophile circles in Galicia - in particular, by financing the Slovo newspaper published in Lvov. However, we must, following the Russian historian Alexei Miller, admit that “ high-ranking officials… the newspaper was expected not so much to strengthen Russian influence in Galicia as to counteract Ukrainophilia in the Southwestern Territory… Plans for the annexation of Galicia never completely disappeared from the agenda in St. ready to take advantage of any opportunity to implement them» .

Repressions against Russophiles, in particular the trial of several pro-Russian activists in Galicia in the early 80s, and a significant increase in Ukrainophilism (“ folklore”) led to a gradual weakening of the “Muscovite” orientation in the Rusyn movement. Many pro-Russian Galicians emigrated to Russia, while Ukrainophiles, on the contrary, moved from Little Russia to Galicia, joining the local Ukrainian national movement. And although until the First World War "Muscovitism" remained a noticeable factor in the life of the region, already from the beginning of the twentieth century, and especially after 1907, when universal suffrage was introduced in Galicia, "Muscovites" in their opposition to the "Narodovites" were forced to seek allies. These allies were sometimes unexpected: for example, during the election campaign of 1907-1908, activists from pro-Russian circles in Galicia collaborated with the Polish national democrats and the local conservative Polish administration.

It should be noted, however, that the severity of the national question in Eastern Galicia, Bukovina and Transcarpathia was not the same. At the turn of the 19th-20th centuries, a harmonious balance gradually developed between the various ethnic communities in Bukovina. This provision was consolidated by the electoral reform of 1911, according to which each community was provided with proportional representation in the local legislature (not counting the seats "played out" in free general elections). The Bukovinian electoral system was considered as a possible model for solving national problems in other polyethnic provinces of Austria-Hungary.

In Transcarpathia, the national identity of the Ruthenians was seriously threatened by the Magyarization policy pursued by the Hungarian government and supported by the Magyarons. If in 1907 there were 23 primary schools in Transcarpathia with instruction only in the Rusyn language, then the very next year they were all closed, only 34 bilingual (Rusyn-Hungarian) schools survived. The rest of the education system was completely Magyarized. Since 1898, a loyalist People's Committee of Hungarians of the Greek Catholic confession has been operating in Budapest. But along with the movements of the Magyaron, pro-Russian and Ukrainophile orientations in Transcarpathia, there were also supporters of the independent identity of local Rusyns, which was not identical to either Great Russian, Ukrainian or Hungarian. One of the leaders of this movement, Augustin Voloshin, complained in 1909 that “ the terrible maladies of Ukrainianism and radicalism that spread in Galicia led to a split and pushed the Rusyn away from his church, his language, and even from the Rusyn name itself» .

In Galicia, in early 1908, the results of elections to the local legislative assembly (Landtag, or Sejm) were made public, which brought unexpected success to the Russophile parties - despite the Ukrainophiles having won a landslide victory in the elections to the Imperial Council (Reichsrat) a few months earlier. Activists of the Ukrainian movement accused the authorities of falsifying the voting results. The conflict turned into a tragedy: on April 12, 1908, Ukrainian student Miroslav Sichinsky shot the imperial governor in Galicia, the Polish aristocrat Andrzej Potocki. Interethnic and political tension in the region was growing. This was also facilitated by the further deterioration of relations between Austria-Hungary and Russia after the 1908–1909 Bosnian Crisis. The Ukrainian movement in Galicia increasingly shifted to anti-Russian and at the same time loyalist, pro-Habsburg positions. Its leaders believed that a victory by Austria-Hungary, allied with Germany, in a possible war against Russia could lead to the formation of a Ukrainian state - or at least to the granting of Ukrainians broad national autonomy under the scepter of the Habsburgs. Therefore, in a statement adopted in December 1912 following a meeting of representatives of the Ukrainian political forces in Galicia, it was directly stated: “ In the name of the future of the Ukrainian people on both sides of the border, in the event of a war between Austria and Russia, the entire Ukrainian community will unanimously and decisively take the side of Austria against the Russian Empire as the greatest enemy of Ukraine» .

Before the war, the pro-Russian movement also intensified. In response, the Austro-Hungarian authorities intensified their persecution. At the beginning of 1914, in Hungary, several Rusyn activists of the “Muscovite” trend appeared before the court. Count Vladimir Bobrinsky, a well-known Russian Duma politician, a representative of the right, acted as one of the witnesses for the defense at the trial. He used his trip to support Russophile sentiments in Austria-Hungary and to popularize the Russian position on the issue of Galicia, Bukovina and Transcarpathia. In an interview with one of the French newspapers, Bobrinsky said that among the Rusyns " no need for propaganda. They themselves know that they are Russian» . Of course, this was not entirely true: a certain part of the Ruthenian population really considered themselves Russians, but by no means a smaller proportion identified themselves with Ukrainians; Finally, there were many who had not yet decided on their ethnic self-identification. Actually, one of the main problems of national self-determination of the indigenous population of Eastern Galicia, Bukovina and Transcarpathia was precisely that this process was extremely politicized and complicated by the intervention of both the Austrian and Hungarian political elites and Russia, i.e., external in relation to to this region of power. All this eventually led to the tragedy that broke out here during the First World War.

In 1914–1916, Galicia became one of the main theaters of war. In August-September 1914, an attempt of the Austro-Hungarian offensive deep into the territory of Russia bogged down, then the Russian troops launched a counterattack, as a result of which they occupied most of Galicia and Bukovina. The Russian occupation administration restricted teaching in the Ukrainian language, took certain measures against Ukrainian activists and against the Uniate Church, which was seen as a conductor of Austrian influence. In particular, he was interned and then exiled to Russia, where he was until the spring of 1918, the Greek Catholic Metropolitan, an outstanding church and cultural figure Andrei Sheptytsky. However, the repressive measures used by Russia cannot be compared with the persecution that the Austro-Hungarian authorities subjected to true and imaginary "Muscovites". Waves of repression swept across Galicia, Bukovina and (to a lesser extent) Transcarpathia, first during the retreat of the Habsburg troops, and then after, with the support of their German ally, Austria-Hungary in 1915 ousted the Russians from most of the territory occupied by them a year earlier. Hundreds of death sentences handed down by courts-martial for collaboration with Russian troops and administration were carried out. Thousands of people, including the elderly, women and children, were deported to the concentration camps Thalerhof (near Graz in Austria) and Theresienstadt (now Terezin in the Czech Republic). According to various sources, from 15 to 30 thousand people were kept in Talerhof in 1914-1917, at least three thousand prisoners died. Only in May 1917 did the new Emperor Charles I, to his credit, order the closing of the Thalerhof camp, which had tarnished the reputation of the Habsburg monarchy in the last years of its existence.

The events of the first two years of World War I had a profound negative impact on Rusyn (Western Ukrainian) society. Repressions, both Austro-Hungarian and Russian, were accompanied not only by mutual attacks by Ukrainophile and Russophile activists, but by the mass extradition of national-political opponents to the military authorities of the opposing powers. In 1915, along with the retreating Russian troops, Galicia and Bukovina were also left by active "Muscovites" with their families - more than 25 thousand people in total. Austro-Hungarian repressions completed the job: the pro-Russian political movement in Galicia, Bukovina and Transcarpathia practically disappeared. Of course, the revolutionary events of 1917 and subsequent years in Russia also played their role here: the Orthodox empire of the Romanovs ceased to exist, and with it the political and cultural center of attraction for Galician and Bukovinian Russophiles disappeared. Bolshevik Russia already evoked completely different feelings ...

As for the Ukrainian movement in Galicia and Bukovina, it very actively contributed to the military efforts of the Habsburg monarchy. Already in the first days of the war in Lvov, with the permission of the Austrian authorities, a Head Ukrainian Rada(Main Ukrainian council). At the same time, a group of Ukrainian activists - emigrants from the Russian Empire organized the Union of Freedom of Ukraine (SVU, Union for the Liberation of Ukraine). In May 1915, the Golovna Rada was transformed into the Zahalna Ukrainian Rada (General Ukrainian Council), which included 24 representatives of Galicia, 7 of Bukovina and 3 SVU activists. The leading role in the Rada was played by the deputies of the Austrian parliament Kost Levitsky and Mykola Vasilko. The maximum program that guided these figures was formulated in one of the Ukrainian propaganda brochures published in Vienna in 1915: “ All Ukrainians, who cannot be silenced by the fist of the Russian autocracy, spoke out only for the creation or restoration of an independent Ukrainian state. (…) It is clear that at the time of the collapse of Russia, an independent Ukrainian state would have arisen. Ukraine is too big to be annexed to Austria or to another state» . At the call of the Rada, the Legion of Ukrainian Sich Riflemen was created, which fought as part of the 25th Corps of the Austro-Hungarian Army. About 28,000 volunteers registered to join the Sich, but the Austrian command limited their number to only 2,500.

The main rivals of the Ukrainian nationalists were the activists of the Polish national movement. The Poles blocked the demand of the Ukrainians for the division of Galicia and the provision of its eastern part with wide autonomy. The Polish elite of Galicia associated with the expected victory of Germany and Austria-Hungary hopes for the restoration of an independent Poland. Indeed, since 1915, when German troops occupied most of the Kingdom of Poland, which was part of the Russian Empire, the leaders of the Central Powers bloc discussed the future structure of the Polish state. It was possible that a monarch from the Habsburg or Hohenzollern dynasty would rule it. The restoration of the Kingdom of Poland was officially announced by a joint Austro-German manifesto on November 5, 1916. The decision on the borders of this state and who will lead it was postponed until the post-war period. A day earlier, Franz Joseph I signed a decree granting autonomy to Galicia - without dividing it, which meant consolidating the political dominance of the Poles in the entire province.

Vienna's decision provoked violent protests from Ukrainian activists. November 6 already Zagalna Ukrainian Rada adopted a resolution expressing dissatisfaction with the fact that the conditions for granting autonomy were not discussed with representatives of the Ukrainian people and that the government had broken promises made to a number of Galician-Ukrainian leaders that Galicia would be divided into two provinces. The Zahalna Rada proclaimed that from now on, in order to achieve its political goals, the Ukrainian movement in Austria-Hungary would rely primarily on its own forces. There were changes in the leadership of the Rada: it was headed by K. Levitsky's rival, Evgen Petrushevich. In the last two years of the existence of the Habsburg Monarchy, the Ukrainian movement gradually became radicalized. This is noticeable, first of all, in the speeches of the Galician-Ukrainian deputies of the Reichsrat, again convened by the young emperor Charles I in the spring of 1917. However, the complete break of the Ukrainophiles with Vienna occurred only when the Habsburg monarchy actually ceased to exist.

On November 7 (20), 1917, the Ukrainian People's Republic (UNR) was proclaimed in Kyiv, initially as an autonomous part of Russia. On January 25, 1918, the government of the republic, the Central Rada, declared the complete independence of Ukraine. In March 1918, the Bolshevik government of Russia concluded the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the powers of the Central Bloc. Article 6 of this treaty meant recognition of the independence of the newly formed Ukrainian state, although de facto the Rada only partially controlled the territory it claimed. The position of Ukrainian activists in Austria-Hungary became somewhat ambiguous: after all, Eastern Galicia, the most important center of the Ukrainian national movement, remained part of the Habsburg monarchy, whose authorities did not consider the possibility of transferring this province to Ukraine. Many Galician figures rushed to the UNR to take part in the work of its state institutions. However, the vicissitudes of the military-political struggle led to a split in the Ukrainian movement. So, the "Sich Riflemen" supported the Central Rada in the fight against the pro-German regime of Hetman Skoropadsky, who came to power in the spring of 1918 (apparently, the author, firstly, confuses the Austrian "Ukrainian Sich Riflemen" and the "Kyiv" "Sich Riflemen", created under the Central Rada from Austro-Hungarian volunteer prisoners of war. Secondly, the author may confuse the events of the "Hetman's coup "in April 1918, during which the entire Ukrainian Kyiv garrison was disarmed, including the Sich, and the "Rebellion of the Directory" in the autumn of the same year, supported by the "Sich Riflemen" restored by the hetman - Dmitry Adamenko). Later, during the Civil War in Ukraine, the units that had combat experience as part of the Austro-Hungarian army turned out to be almost the most combat-ready formations of the troops of the Directory - the Ukrainian government headed by Symon Petliura, which waged war simultaneously with the Bolsheviks, White Guards and - until spring 1920 - with Poland.

In the autumn of 1918, when the defeat in the war and the internal crisis led to the uncontrolled collapse of Austria-Hungary, Ukrainian activists in Galicia were ready to take power in the province. On November 1, the Western Ukrainian People's Republic (ZUNR) was proclaimed in Lvov, which was supposed to include not only Eastern Galicia, but also part of Bukovina and Transcarpathia. In the future, the reunification of the ZUNR with the Ukrainian People's Republic was envisaged. This caused fierce opposition from the Poles, who wanted to include all of Galicia in the new independent Poland. The Polish-Ukrainian war began, which lasted several months. She claimed the lives of a total of about 25 thousand people. As a result of the hostilities of 1918-1920 and the redistribution of territories following the results of three wars - the First World War, the Civil War and the Soviet-Polish War, Galicia and part of Bukovina became part of Poland, the other part of Bukovina went to Romania, and Transcarpathia - to Czechoslovakia. In 1940, Transcarpathia was briefly annexed to Hungary, and after World War II and a new revision of borders in Central and Eastern Europe, almost all Ruthenian (Western Ukrainian) lands, which were under the rule of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy until 1918, became part of the Ukrainian SSR. But these events are beyond the scope of this article.

Staying under the scepter of the Habsburgs, in their multinational and multicultural empire, had a great influence on the development of the Ukrainian national movement and self-consciousness. But it would hardly be correct to consider the formation of the Ukrainian nation as a process with a predetermined result. The modern nation, according to the definition of M. Groh, is " a large community of people, equal to each other and connected by a combination of ties that have often been formed over centuries - linguistic, cultural, political, geographical, economic and other X" . The Ukrainian nation was not something given in advance - it is wrong to think that in order to "awaken" the corresponding identity in millions of people, only the efforts of a small group of nationally oriented activists were required. The "Project Ukraine" was formed in the process of transition from a traditional agrarian society to a modern society on a vast culturally and historically heterogeneous territory, which, moreover, from the second half of the 17th century was ruled by several powers: the Muscovite State and its successor - the Russian Empire, the Commonwealth and the Habsburg empire.

It so happened that it was on the territory of the latter in the second half of the 19th - early 20th centuries that conditions were most favorable for the development of the Ukrainian national movement. Ukrainian identity competed with alternative national-cultural and state-political projects: the Little Russian regional identity within the framework of the “all-Russian” national and state identity; its mirror reflection - the Ukrainian identity within the framework of the "general Polish" identity; Russian identity for the Rusyns of Galicia, Bukovina and Transcarpathia and, finally, an independent Rusyn identity, different from both Polish and Russian, and from Ukrainian. The fact that the Ukrainian version of nation building proved to be the most successful was the result of a combination of a number of historical factors. A combination of the moderate national policy of the Habsburgs in Galicia and the rigid one of the Romanovs in Ukraine-Little Russia played a special role.

Participation in the political life of Austria-Hungary at the level of the Reichsrat, the legislative assemblies of Galicia and Bukovina, local governments allowed representatives of the Ukrainian national movement and their electorate to gain valuable democratic experience. But we should not forget that the Austrian authorities skillfully used the principle of "divide and rule." The national policy of the Habsburgs, on the one hand, contributed to the growth of inter-ethnic tension in relations between Ukrainians and Poles, on the other hand, did not prevent the fierce struggle of Ukrainophiles and Russophiles in the Ruthenian movement (while the authorities supported the former). During the First World War and later, the smoldering conflicts that arose in previous decades led to tragedies. During the Second World War, Western Ukraine became infamous not only for the genocide of Jews, which was carried out by the Nazi invaders and their local accomplices, but also for the tough confrontation between the partisans of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and the Polish Home Army, during which both sides, but primarily the UPA, resorted to ethnic purges. The tragic final chord was the first post-war years, when the west of the Ukrainian SSR and the southeast of Poland turned into an arena of mass repressions and deportations organized by the new communist authorities.

The turbulent history of the region after 1918 largely contributed to the fact that the Habsburg era with its long decades of peace, progressive economic development (although Galicia, Bukovina and Transcarpathia were among the least developed provinces of the empire) and relative internal political stability became in the historical memory of the inhabitants of present-day Western Ukraine a kind of "golden age". The Habsburg heritage of Ukraine, however, needs not idealization, but careful and, if possible, unbiased study. Undoubtedly, to some extent it also influences the current situation in the west of Ukraine, determining political preferences, socio-psychological stereotypes and cultural specifics of the region. Without much exaggeration, we can say that the diversity and diversity of modern Ukraine bring it closer to the long-vanished Danubian monarchy. Whether today's Ukrainians will be able to preserve this diversity without sacrificing national-state unity, time will tell. In any case, the inhabitants of both the west and the east of Ukraine should remember the simple and wise motto inscribed on the coat of arms of Franz Joseph I - "Viribus unitis" ("Joined efforts").

Notes

Although in 1809 the northwestern regions of Galicia were included in the Duchy of Warsaw created by Napoleon, and in 1815, by decision of the Congress of Vienna, in the Kingdom of Poland, which became part of the Russian Empire, the Habsburgs retained most of the territory of the province.

Cit. Quoted from: Magenschab H. Josef II. Revolucionar Bozi milosti. Prague, 1999. S. 104.

However, it was not exclusively Magyar in linguistic terms: until 1844 in Hungary, Latin remained the main language of legal proceedings, parliamentary debates, administrative acts, etc. The first scientific work devoted to the Slavs of Transcarpathia was also written in this language - the treatise of the court librarian A.F. Kollar "On the origin, history and life of the Rusyns of Hungary" (1749).

Grokh M. From national movements to a fully formed nation: the process of building nations in Europe // Nations and nationalism. M.: Praxis, 2002. S. 123.

Herberstein S. Notes on Muscovy. M.: Publishing House of Moscow State University, 1988. S. 58.

The question of the origin of the names "Russia", "Ukraine", "Russians", "Little Russians", "Ukrainians", etc., as well as the historical, political and ideological vicissitudes that accompanied the use of these historical and geographical concepts and ethnonyms, is considered in detail, for example, in the monograph: Mylnikov A.S. The picture of the Slavic world: a view from Eastern Europe. Ideas about the ethnic nomination and ethnicity of the XVI-XVIII centuries. St. Petersburg: Petersburg Oriental Studies, 2000.

For more details on the role of the Uniate Church, see, for example, in the article: Khimka I. P. Religion and nationality in Ukraine in the other half of the 18th-20th centuries // Kovcheg. Scientific collection of church history. Lviv, 2004. V. 4. S. 55–66.

See: Wandycz P.S. The Lands of Partitioned Poland, 1795-1918. Seattle & London, 1996. P. 135.

Piedmont is a historical region that played a leading role in the unification of Italy.

Subtelny O. Ukraine: history. Kiev, 1993. Cit. via: http://www.unitest.com/uahist/subtelny/s53.phtml.

Cit. Quoted from: Levitsky K. History of the political thought of Galician Ukrainians, 1848-1914. Lviv, 1926. Part I. S. 21.

Irredentism is the desire of an ethnocultural minority to reunite with an ethnic community living on the other side of the border, which in many cases is the titular ethnic group for the neighboring side.

Magocsi P. R. A History of Ukraine. Seattle, 1998. P. 413.

Pop I. Podkarpatska Rus. Prague, 2005. S. 78.

Western outskirts of the Russian Empire / Ed. M. Dolbilov, A. Miller. M.: NLO, 2006. S. 284.

Drahomanov M. Leaves to the Naddnipriansk Ukraine. Kolomiya, 1894. Cited. via: www.ukrstor.com/ukrstor/dragomanov_listy4.htm.

Magocsi P. R. Op. cit. P. 442.

Ukrainian Suspili-Political Thought in the 20th Century / Ed. T. Gunchak, R. Solchanik. New York, 1983. T. I. C. 33.

Yartis A. Ukrainian national idea in the scientific and theoretical recession of Yulian Bachinsky // Bulletin of Lviv University. Series: philosophy. science. 2002. VIP. 4. S. 318.

Mikhnovsky M. Samostiyna Ukraine. Lviv, 1900. Cited. by: http://www.ukrstor.com/ukrstor/mihnowskij-samostijnaukraina.html

Since 1867, the Habsburg Empire was divided into two parts, which enjoyed great independence in internal affairs: the Kingdom of Hungary (“the lands of the crown of St. Stephen”) and the “lands represented in the Imperial Council”, commonly referred to as Cisleitania (i.e. “according to this side of the Leith" - the river that divided both halves of the empire in one of the sections of the border) or - conditionally - "Austria". The “lands represented in the Imperial Council” included, in addition to Austria proper, also Bohemia, Moravia, Galicia, Bukovina, present-day Slovenia and some other territories. Both parts of the empire, in addition to the person of the monarch, were united by a single army and foreign policy.

Novak A. The struggle for the outskirts, the struggle for survival: the Russian Empire of the XIX century. and Poles, Poles and the Empire (a review of modern Polish historiography) // Western outskirts of the Russian Empire. S. 457.

Snyder T. The Reconstruction of Nations. Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999. New Haven & London, 2003. P. 127.

Cit. Quoted from: Rudnytsky I. L. The Ukrainians in Galicia under Austrian Rule // Austrian History Yearbook. 1967 Vol. 3.Pt. 2. P. 407.

So, the Polish aristocrat, governor in Galicia (1888), Count K. Badeni, served in 1895-1897 as prime minister of the Austrian part of the dual monarchy, and the son of another Galician governor, Count A. Golukhovsky, was in 1895-1906 the Minister of Foreign Affairs Austria-Hungary.

Miller A. "The Ukrainian Question" in the Politics of the Authorities and Russian Public Opinion (second half of the 19th century). St. Petersburg: Aleteyya, 2000, pp. 250–251. Pop I. Op. cit. S. 98.

Magocsi P. R. Op. cit. P. 456.

The annexation by Austria-Hungary in 1908 of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which had been ruled by the Habsburg monarchy since 1878, while nominally remaining part of the Ottoman Empire, caused a diplomatic crisis of European proportions.

Levitsky K. History of the political thought of Galician Ukrainians, 1848-1914. Lviv, 1927. Part II. S. 634.

Cit. by: Susta J. Svetova politika v letech 1871-1914. Praha, 1931. Sv. 6. S. 305.

For more information about Talerhof, see, for example: War crimes of the Habsburg Monarchy 1914-1917: Galician Golgotha. Trumbull, Conn., 1964; Vavrik V. R. Terezin and Talerhof. New York, 1966; Cervinka V. Moje rakouske zalare. Prague, 1928; Kwilecki A. Lemkowie: Zagadnienie Migracji i Asymilacji. Warszawa, 1974, etc.

Levitsky subsequently described in detail the activities of Ukrainian organizations in Austria-Hungary in his multi-volume work: Levitsky K. History of the Volunteer Enchantments of Galician Ukrainians at the Time of Light War. Lviv, 1929-1930.

Tsegelsky L. Samostiyna Ukraine. Viden, 1915. S. 4, 9.

For details see: Abbott P., Pinak E. Ukrainian Armies 1914-1955. Oxford, 2004. P. 7-8.

See, for example: Zahradnicek T. Jak vyhrat cizi valku. Cesi, Polaci a Ukrajinci 1914-1918. Prague, 2000. S.61.

Hroch M. Na prahu narodni existence. Prague, 1999. S 8.

The First World War placed the national question on the agenda with particular perseverance. The slogans of freedom of peoples and the right to self-determination were used by both sides. On January 5, 1918, US President Wilson, in his annual message to Congress, announced a program for a peaceful settlement of the situation in Europe after the end of the war, in which the right of nations to self-determination was discussed. This right must be applied primarily to the Habsburg Empire - Austria-Hungary.

October 1, 1918 p., When the autumn session of the imperial parliament began in Vienna, its deputies began to speak in favor of concluding an immediate peace with the Entente. This issue was closely related to the existence of empire in one form or another. On October 7, 1918, the Polish Regency Council issued a Manifesto to the Polish Nation, in which it proclaimed the creation of an independent Polish state on all lands populated by Poles. An interparty government was announced and preparations were made for elections to the Legislative Seimas.

The emergence of the Polish government prompted Ukrainian action. On the initiative of the Ukrainian Parliamentary Representation and the People's Committee of National Democrats, members of both chambers of the imperial parliament from Galicia and Bukovina held a joint meeting on October 10. E. Levinkiy, on behalf of parliamentary representation, proposed to convene a national constituent and exercise the right of national-state self-determination. Meanwhile, on October 16, an imperial manifesto was published, according to which Austria-Hungary was to become a federal state. The manifesto authorized the formation of national councils, which were supposed to act as spokesmen for the people's will before the central government. So, the ongoing Ukrainian preparations for the convocation of constituents have acquired a legal basis.

On October 18, a meeting of representatives of the Ukrainian lands of Austria-Hungary was held at the People's House in Lviv. They were attended by 69 people, including 26 ambassadors to the imperial parliament from Galicia and Bukovina, two members of the imperial chamber of lords, 21 ambassadors from the Bukovina and Galician Seims, representatives from the political parties of Galicia (Ukrainian National Democratic Party, Ukrainian Social Democratic Party of Galicia and Bukovina, Christian-social, etc.). The most famous people of the region were represented - Metropolitan Sheptytsky, Bishop G. Khomishin, Vice-President of the Austrian Parliament Y. Romanchuk, Chairman of the Ukrainian Parliamentary Representation E. Petrushevich, Chairman of the People's Committee of the UNDP K. Levitsky, writer V. Stefanik, Chairman of the UNDP of Bukovina Vasilkov and others

Representatives from the Transcarpathian Ukrainians could not arrive in Lviv and reported by letter that Hungarian Ukraine solidarizes with Galicia and wishes to become part of the Ukrainian state.

The assembly was constituted as the Ukrainian National Council (UNRada) and proclaimed itself empowered to express the will of the Ukrainian people for self-determination and the formation of a national state. National Democrats prevailed in the VN Rada, which predetermined the moderately centrist character of Western Ukrainian parliamentarism. Cornet distinguished it from Eastern parliamentarism - painted in socialist colors.

The Chairman of the Ukrainian Parliamentary Representation, E. Petrushevich, was declared the chairman of Unradi. The UNRada adopted the "Proclamation" declaring the entire Ukrainian territory of Austria-Hungary a national state.

Meanwhile, the Habsburg Empire was falling apart. On October 19, the Czech National Council declared the independence of the Czechoslovak region. On October 21, the German national assemblies called for the creation of an independent Austro-German state. On October 19, the UNRada decided to create delegations of ambassadors from the Austrian parliament, regional diets and one representative from political parties each: in Vienna, headed by E. Petrushevich, in Lvov, with K. Levitsky, and in Chernivtsi, with Popovich. They were to take power from the Austrian officials.

When it became known that the Polish Liquidation Commission was going to take power in Lvov on November 1, the Lvov delegation decided not to wait for either the general meeting of Unradi (scheduled for November 3) or the state act from Vienna on the transfer of power. Appointed to the chairman of the Military General Commissariat, the centurion D. Vitovsky assured that the troops were ready for an armed uprising and the seizure of power. October 31 in the second half of the day D. Vitovsky and the ataman of the Sich archers S. Goruk sent orders to the district military teams to seize power no later than the night.

In Lvov, the General Command had only 1,410 shooters and 60 foremen at its disposal. To take possession of a city with a predominantly Polish population of two hundred thousand, this was not enough. It was also unknown how the Austro-Hungarian garrison would behave. At 4 a.m. on November 1, the Ukrainian armed forces began their march. In an hour they disarmed the police, interned the highest officials of civil and military authority, and seized all the vital centers of the city. A blue-and-yellow flag was hoisted on the tower of the town hall. Without losing a single rifleman, the General Command brought the city under its control. Austrian and Hungarian military units declared neutrality. In total, in all regions of Eastern Galicia, the transfer of power took place without armed clashes and casualties. The Austrian and Hungarian garrisons were disarmed without offering resistance. The UNR established control over the territory before the end of the day on November 2.

The situation on the western frontier was different. On November 1, Polish troops suppressed the performances of Ukrainian units in Yaroslav, Lyubachev, Novy Sanchi. In Przemysl, hostilities between Ukrainian and Polish troops continued until November 12, then the Ukrainians left the city. In the Lemko region - the territory between San and Poprad, two republics arose. The center of the first was Vislok of Bolshoy Syanotsky district, and the second - the villages of Florintsi and Gladysha. The Vislotsky republic gravitated towards Lviv, and Florinska (Zakhidyolemkivska) sought to join Russia.

The executive delegation of the UN Council in Chernivtsi was constituted on October 29, 1918 Even earlier, on October 25, the Ukrainian Regional Committee was formed in the city, headed by A. Popovich. The committee organized on November 3 in Chernivtsi a mass assembly (up to 10 thousand participants), which called for the accession of Northern Bukovina to the Ukrainian State. It was about the territory of four counties with predominantly Ukrainian settlements, as well as about the Ukrainian parts of Chernivtsi and Seretsky counties, the Ukrainian communities of Storozhynetsky, Radovetsky and Kimpolunsky counties.

Formed in Chernivtsi, the Romanian National Council announced the indivisibility of the region and its intention to annex it to Romania. And on November 6, the Ukrainian Committee was able to agree with A. Onchul, who headed the Romanian Council, on the division of Bukovina on an ethnographic basis. However, the redeployment of the Sich Riflemen from Bukovina to Lviv left the region without problems before the Romanian aggression. On November 11, the troops of neighboring Romania captured Chernivtsi. Within a week, the whole of Bukovina was occupied.

Meanwhile, on November 9, the UN Rada approved the composition of the government - the Provisional state secretariat. K. Levitsky became the chairman of the government presidium and the state secretary of financial affairs. L. Tsegelsky was appointed Secretary of State for Internal Affairs, V. Paneyko for Foreign Affairs, S. Golubovich for Legal Affairs, D. Vitovsky for Military Affairs, S. Baran for Land Affairs, and S. Fedaka for Food. At the same meeting of the UNR, after a long discussion on the proposal of V. Ohrimovich, the name was approved - the Western state and the coat of arms in the form of a golden lion on a blue background.

On November 13, the UNRada adopted the "Temporary Basic Law on the State Independence of the Ukrainian Lands of the Former Austro-Hungarian Monarchy." Before the election of the Constituent Assembly, the legislative power was in the hands of the Ukrainian National Council, and the executive power was in the hands of the State Secretariat. The definition of the republican character of the Western state forced the UNR members present at this meeting to return to the problem of the name again. At the suggestion of Mikhail Lozinsky, the final name of the state was adopted - the West Ukrainian People's Republic (ZUNR).

The final stage in the formation of the authorities was the Unradi law of January 4, 1919 on the separation of the Ukrainian Council. The UNRada had its own president - E. Petrushevich, but the powers of the latter were extremely limited. The selection became a kind of collective president with the greatest possible powers: the appointment and dismissal of members of the government, the right to amnesty and pardon, the approval of laws. The Division consisted of 10 people: the President of the ZUNR E. Petrushevich, four of his deputies - L. Bachinsky, S. Vitik, A. Popovich, A. Shmihelsky, members - A. Gorbachsvsky, G. Duviryak, M. Novakivsky, T. Okunev sky, S. Yurik.

After taking control of Lviv on November 1, the Ukrainians considered the case to be completely won. They began to go home, and on November 3, only 648 fighters remained in the city. It was a mistake that the Poles were quick to take advantage of. By recruiting the local Polish population, mostly student youth, they quickly increased their ranks. Street fighting broke out in the city, which continued with varying success for almost a month. On the night of November 22, Ukrainian troops were forced to leave the center of Lviv, settled on its northern, eastern and southern outskirts. At the end of November 1918, the Ukrainians retreated to the Podbortsy-Lisiniki-Vinniki-Chizhki line.

The loss of Lviv forced the leaders of the ZUNR, first of all, to take up the organization of their own army, the basis for its formation was the legion of Ukrainian Sich Riflemen, replenished with recruits. On November 13, 1918, the UNRada issued a law on mobilization. There was not enough command personnel of the highest qualification in the army. Therefore, it was necessary to recruit former Austrian officers, mainly Galician Germans, who showed themselves well during the hostilities - Lieutenant Colonel A. Kravs, canceling A. Bizants, Vlobkovits, A. Wolf and others. A talented staff officer was also assigned to the service in the UGA officer M.Kakurin, general A.Grekov, colonel D.Kanukov from the former Russian army. In early December 1918, the command of the Ukrainian Galician army, which was being created, was taken by the combat general M. Omelyanovich-Pavlenko, who had been left with Great Ukraine. Colonel of the Russian army E. Mishkivsky was approved as the chief of staff. It was he who, in a short time, created a completely modern army consisting of three corps of four brigades each. The brigade consisted of 3-5 infantry kurens, technical and support departments. Kuren had three rifle and one machine gun hundreds. One hundred consisted of three chotas. By the spring of 1919, the army had a fully formed appearance, and its composition reached 125 thousand soldiers.

At first, the battles between Ukrainian and Polish formations had a local and spontaneous character, only in the 1st half. December 1918, when the fighting took on a significant scale, and the forces of both sides consolidated, the Ukrainian-Polish front was formed. In February-March 1919, the UGA carried out the Vovchukivsk offensive, the ultimate task of which was to liberate Lvov and reach the line of the river. San. The first stage of the operation, which involved the capture of the Przemysl-Lviv railway, was successfully carried out.

At this time, the military mission of the Entente, headed by General Barteleny, arrived in Galicia for negotiations with the Ukrainian government. On demand, the offensive was stopped. On February 25, an armistice was signed between the Ukrainian and Polish sides. The Entente mission proposed to establish the Ukrainian-Polish border along the line, which was later called the "Bertheleni line". Ukrainian this line seemed incorrect, carried out in the interests of the Poles, so they rejected the proposals of the Entente mission and in early March hostilities resumed. The fights went on with varying success. The Poles managed to concentrate a group of General Aleksandrovich against the Ukrainian units exhausted by monthly battles, thanks to which Lviv was unblocked, and the Vovchukiv operation for the UGA ended unsuccessfully.

From April 1919 the initiative in the conduct of the war gradually passed to the Polish side. An important role in this turning point was played by the 80,000-strong army of J. Galler, formed from the Poles in France at the expense of the Entente. In mid-May, bloody battles began at the front, the Poles advanced, and the UGA troops were forced to retreat to the east, some of them were interned by the Czechoslovaks in Transcarpathia. At this time, the Romanian troops began to capture the southeastern counties of Pokuttya.

After the loss of the Drohobych oil region, the UGA was forced to retreat to the southeast and at the end of May found itself in a dead end, where the Zbruch flowed into the Dniester. In addition to the Polish, Romanian and Bolshevik troops were nearby. At that moment, obviously, the Poles believed that they had finally broken the resistance of the UGA, therefore they transferred several divisions of the army of J. Galler to the west. For a while, the fighting at the front subsided, and this allowed the Ukrainian to reorganize its army, which received a new commander, General A. Trekovaya. He convinced the ZUNR government of the possibility of conducting an offensive operation, which later went down in history as the Chertkovsky Offensive.

Having broken through the Polish front line at Yagolnitsa, three Galician corps launched an offensive against Chertkov-Terebovlya-Ternopil, Bugach-Berezhany and Galich. The successful offensive caused a wave of upsurge among the Ukrainian population, up to 90 thousand volunteers agreed to the army, but due to a lack of weapons, only a sixth of them were taken into the troops. The Ukrainian offensive lasted three weeks. During this time, the Poles regrouped their forces and on May 28, 1919 launched a counteroffensive. Before that, on June 25, 1919, the Supreme Council of the Entente gave Poland permission to occupy all of Eastern Galicia and withdraw its troops to the Zbruch line. The Ukrainian formations, exhausted in battles, began a retreat, which ended in mid-July 1919 with their transition to the left bank of the Zbruch, where the UGA united with the UNR Active Army.

Together with the army, the ZUNR wire moved beyond Zbruch. By that time, symptomatic changes had taken place in the structure of the state authorities of the ZUNR. The government - the State Secretariat - was liquidated by the decision of Vydelu Unradi, the executive power was transferred to the hands of President E. Petrushevich, who was declared a dictator. Because of this, the already complicated relations between the Directory and E. Petrushevich became even more tense. When E. Petrushevich moved to Kamenetz-Podolsky, where the UNR government was located, something like a dual power was formed here. Both Ukrainian governments failed to reconcile their interests. This continued until November 1919, when E. Petrushevich and his inner circle left for Vienna, where they tried to appeal to the world community and the Entente in the case of Eastern Galicia. The exile government of the ZUNR ceased its activities on March 15, 1923, after the Entente Council of States recognized the actual eastern border of Poland. This meant that Eastern Galicia was finally assigned to Poland, although the resolution of the Entente provided for the autonomy of the Galician lands. Consequently, in the western Ukrainian lands, the attempt to build and defend national statehood failed.

Today, Galicia may seem like an age-old bastion of nationalism. In the Russian-speaking segment of the Internet, this region is often associated with torchlight processions, a ban on celebrating Victory Day, as well as with deputies who fire minibus drivers for Russian-language songs and hang around kindergartens, demanding that kids say their names in Ukrainian. Of course, such facts took place. But often they are used to spread myths and stereotypes. As a result, the winners are the forces that seek to push their foreheads against Galicia and Donbass, receiving dividends from the war.

The real history of this original and amazingly beautiful Ukrainian region is closely connected with multiculturalism, tolerance, and the struggle for social justice. Although, for political reasons, the modern "elite" does not like to remember these pages of history.

Galician way

From the Middle Ages to the 18th century. a vast region, including modern Western Ukraine, as well as the eastern and southeastern lands of modern Poland, was called Red Russia. Like every region of such a large country as our Motherland, it had its own peculiarities of historical development. At the same time, the Rusyns (that is, “sons of Russia”), as the inhabitants of the region called themselves until the 20th century, always recognized themselves as part of the same people with the population of the Dnieper Ukraine.

Chervonnaya Rus has a rich history, in which the heroic struggle of the Galician princes against the Horde and Western (Polish and Hungarian) invaders, and long-term foreign rule took place, as a result of which Galicia was deeply, though not completely integrated into Western civilization.

The name of the region probably comes from a group of ancient Cherven cities along the upper reaches of the Western Bug, its tributaries Guchva and Luga, the upper reaches of the Styr. These included Cherven, Luchesk, Suteisk, Brody, and others. The cities were annexed to Kievan Rus by the Kyiv prince Vladimir the Great, and subsequently the Galicia-Volyn principality arose here. Its creator, the Orthodox prince Roman Mstislavich, was the first in Russia to claim the titles of the Byzantine emperor - tsar (“Caesar”) and autocrat (“autocrat”).

Contrary to the widespread myth about the rural nature of Galician culture, Chervonnaya Rus has almost a thousand-year continuous urban tradition. Since ancient times, cities have been polyethnic. Representatives of different peoples and religions lived here: Rusyns, Poles, Jews, Germans, Armenians, Czechs. The Galician princes actively invited foreign artisans and merchants to the cities, who brought the practice of urban self-government - the Magdeburg Law.

As part of the Polish-Lithuanian state - the Commonwealth - Lviv, along with Ostrog and Kyiv, was one of the centers of Orthodox culture. Features of the development of the Ukrainian lands determined the importance of the "Russian" (Orthodox) faith, which acted as a guarantor of the preservation of the "old-timer people of the Rus" in the Catholic Commonwealth.

The Orthodox Church has become synonymous with the identity of the Russian people. A fraternal movement was actively developing here - a local analogue of the European Reformation. Brotherhoods were created by Orthodox townspeople (artisans and merchants) and part of the gentry to protect the interests of the Orthodox population. They founded schools, credit unions, printing houses.

In 1574 Ivan Fedorov published the first printed books in the Slavic language in Ukraine - "The Apostle" and "The Primer" with the money of the Lvov brotherhood in Lvov.

Curiously, of all the Ukrainian bishops, only Lviv and Przemysl (Przemysl - now a city in Poland) rejected the Union of Brest in 1596, which proclaimed the unification of the Orthodox and Catholics of the Commonwealth under the rule of the Pope.

An important feature of the historical path of Galicia was the absence of the Cossack system here, although many Galicians became Cossacks. But the Cossacks were a phenomenon of the steppe and the frontier. As a result of this, Chervonnaya Rus remained under the rule of the gentry, until at the end of the 18th century. was not invaded by the Austrian Habsburg Empire.

Lviv under the red flag

The long separation of Galicia from the rest of the territory of the former Russia put forward the national question on the agenda, since the Galicians were constantly threatened by assimilation. Therefore, the top of the local society (priests, landowners, intelligentsia) gave priority to the national factor over the social one. At the same time, the working masses - peasants and hired workers - above all, strove for social justice. This first manifested itself during the Austrian Revolution of 1848-1849.

On the night of November 1-2, 1848, a red flag was raised over the Lviv City Hall for the first time in Ukraine. Events of 1848-1849 went down in history as the "Spring of Nations". The peoples of France, Prussia, Austria, Italy, Hungary massively opposed their monarchs. People demanded the convocation of parliaments, freedom of speech, assembly, and religion.

Polish cartoon from 1934. Behind the wire, according to the Poles, are Ukrainian terrorists and “separatists” (From the book: Wojciech Sleszynski. Obóz odosobnienia w Berezie Kartuskiej 1934-1939

In the interwar period, the struggle for the social and national rights of Western Ukrainians continued. The Ukrainian movement was represented by the widest range of political forces: from clerics and conservatives to ... the Communist Party of Western Ukraine. The emerging nationalist organizations immediately chose non-parliamentary forms of struggle, including terror. During the years of Ukrainization, the idea of ​​unity with Soviet Ukraine was very popular.

World economic crisis 1929-1933 led to a sharp impoverishment of the population. All over Europe, conservative, reactionary and fascist forces took advantage of this, seeking to establish dictatorial regimes under the populist slogans of restoring order with a “strong hand”. The threat of fascism, which carried the gene of world war, forced the progressive forces to look for a platform for unification.

On April 16, 1936, in Lviv, under the flag of the anti-fascist popular front, a mass anti-fascist demonstration took place, in which about 100 thousand people. The demonstration also escalated into barricade fighting, during which 46 people were killed and over 300 wounded.

The current Shevchenko Avenue in Lviv after the battles of Western Ukrainian anti-fascists with the Polish police. April 16, 1936

In May 1936, the Anti-Fascist Congress was held in Lvov, in which representatives of the intelligentsia of Poland, Western Ukraine and Western Belarus took part. Famous writers delivered anti-Nazi speeches Wanda Vasilevskaya, Yaroslav Galan, Stepan Tudor. The approved resolution called on the intelligentsia of Poland, Western Ukraine and Western Belarus to participate in the nationwide struggle against Nazism, for stopping preparations for war, for the free development of science and culture.

In Poland itself, at that time, right-wing radical parties gained at least 20% in elections, and the largest of them - National Party (Stronnictwo Narodowe) and the National Democratic Party ( Narodowa Demokracja, or endecja) had hundreds of thousands of members. Endezia consistently received the highest percentage of votes in Galicia in elections to the Sejm.

This is how the marches of the large parliamentary Polish party National

Poland's dictator Jozef Pilsudski welcomed Hitler's rise to power. On January 26, 1934, a non-aggression pact was signed between Poland and Germany.

Adolf Hitler during the funeral service for Piłsudski in Warsaw, 1935.

Ukrainian anti-fascists against General Franko

Anti-fascists from Western Ukraine resisted fascism with weapons in their hands three years before the start of World War II. In distant Spain, a military rebellion began under the leadership of General Franco against the young democratic republic. Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany came to the aid of the putschists. Thousands of internationalists from all over the world went to defend the republic. One of the first to defend Madrid in August 1936 was 37 natives of Western Ukraine who worked in the mines and metallurgical plants of Belgium and France.

Following them, another 180 volunteers went illegally from Galicia and Volhynia to Spain through the Carpathian pass Javornik on the then Polish-Czechoslovak border. Even political prisoners of Polish prisons Dmitry Zakharuk and Simon Kraevsky, natives of the Ivano-Frankivsk region, escaped from their places of detention and reached Spain to help their comrades.

In the summer of 1937, the Ukrainian company named after Taras Shevchenko was formed. She was part of the 13th International Brigade named after Yaroslav Dombrovsky, named after a native of Zhytomyr, a hero of the Paris Commune. Members of the Communist Party of Western Ukraine, among whom was the famous journalist Yuriy Velikanovich, became the ideological asset of the company.

Soldiers of the International Brigade named after Dombrovsky swear allegiance to the Spanish Republic

The commander of the company named after Taras Shevchenko S. Tomashevich wrote in the brigade newspaper: “ From the point of view of combat training, the Taras Shevchenko company ranks very high due to the experience of a significant part of the comrades who have previously served in other armies. We have Ukrainian officers, such as lieutenants Ivanovich and Litvin, we have Ukrainian sergeants and corporals...

In Spanish villages and cities, a beautiful Ukrainian song often sounds - this is the company named after Taras Shevchenko. And during difficult transitions, the battalion commander turns to Shevchenko: “Maybe the Ukrainians will sing?” A powerful song sounds, and a difficult transition becomes easier».

The Shevchenkites received their first baptism of fire in July in the battle of Brunet: the Moroccan cavalry of the Francoists was utterly defeated by the Ukrainians and Poles; enemy positions near Villa Franco del Castile and Romanillos were also captured. In those fierce battles, the company lost almost half of its personnel. Later, Shevchenko's men bravely fought near Zaragoza on the Aragonese front. In these bloody battles, miracles of heroism were shown by the company commander Stanislav Tomashevich, his deputy Pavel Ivanovich, fighters Vasily Lozovoy, Nazar Demyanchuk, Joseph Konovalyuk, Valentin Pavlusevich, Joseph Petrash and many others. Most of them died on Spanish soil.

Fighters of the International Brigade named after Dombrovsky after the Battle of Guadalajara

Historian F. Shevchenko wrote that it is “ there were people full of heroism, self-sacrifice, they shed their blood, gave their lives for the bright future of mankind. The battle path of the Taras Shevchenko company in the fight against fascism in Spain is one of the best monuments to the great revolutionary poet". According to a participant in the Spanish Civil War, Soviet General A. Rodimtsev, the number of natives of Western Ukraine in the international brigades that fought against the Nazis reached a thousand people.

At the end of 1937, a newspaper in the Ukrainian language "Fight" began to be published for soldiers, in which Taras Shevchenko's poems and stories were published, as well as publications about him. For recruits in Albacete, the newspaper "News from Western Ukraine" was published.

In December 1937 - February 1938, the Shevchenko company fought for the Sierra Quemado mountain range in a terrible snowstorm: at an altitude of 2 thousand meters, the soldiers fought off attacks during the battles for Teruel. They managed to capture a large number of weapons of the Francoists. Brothers Polycarp and Simon Kraevsky single-handedly dealt with the machine gunners, destroying two calculations and capturing their positions. In those battles, the company commander Tomashevich, political instructor Demyanchuk, sergeant Seradzsky and Polikarp Kraevsky were killed. In March 1938, the company was surrounded on the Andalusian front and four times it managed to break through the ring, despite the endless attacks of enemies on the heights near Caspe. In those battles, commander Stanislav Voropay (Voropaev) and political instructor Simon Kraevsky fell.

For the Shevchenkos, the war ended on September 28, 1938, when the Republican government of Spain published a decree on the withdrawal of the International Brigades from the country. On October 28, a solemn farewell to the International Brigades took place in Barcelona, ​​the Spaniards and Catalans showered them with flowers. And the Polish gendarmes were waiting for the survivors at home to send Bereza Kartuzskaya to the concentration camp.