If Russia had an Empire was Ukraine a Colony ?

During 1989-1991 eight of Ukraine's thirteen political parties referred to the country as an exploited colony in their programs.^[1] After 1991 literary critics using “colonial discourse analysis” applied the term “post-colonial” to independent Ukraine implied that it had been a colony previously.^[2] Political analysts also label pre-1991 Ukraine a colony. They note the woeful legacy of Russian rule in Ukraine, the threat posed by its dependency on Russian energy, and draw attention to similarities between Ukraine and former “Third World” colonies.^[3] But they do not regard “neo-colonialism” as an issue after 1991 and do not approach Ukrainian-Russian relations in terms of “Dependency Theory”.^[4] This reflects the view that in the XXI century political independence does not require economic self-sufficiency and that domestic development requires integration into the world economy, specialized production, and foreign capital investment.
Historians differ over whether the colonial paradigm is applicable to Ukraine and whether its development was promoted due to interaction with Russia or, inhibited because of its political subordination. The first survey history of Ukraine to refer to it as a colony under tsarist rule was published in Soviet Ukraine 1922.^[5] By 1932 soviet histories were noting that although Russian capital played a role in developing its Ukrainian colony it had been more significant historically as a force that had squeezed Ukrainian merchants and traders out of the internal market by the 1850s. These texts attributed the key role to development that did occur to internal evolution and western European capital and, explained that Ukraine had been an economic colony by virtue of its imbalanced development.^[6] War-time histories of Ukraine, reflecting a temporary official indulgence of aspects of non-Russian nationalism, still distinguished between a capitalism that developed Ukraine and tsarist policies that made it a colony but, did not characterize the national Ukrainian petty-bourgeoisie as “anti-colonial” or “progressive” as had the earlier surveys.^[7] The post-war view characterized tsarist Ukraine as a “semi-colony” which experienced “progressive” economic development under Russian rule despite forced integration into the empire and tsarist political oppression. While the “liberal” version of this interpretation mentioned that Ukraine’s political status impeded its economic development, the “hard-line” version claimed that only its heavy industry was adversely effected and stressed that Ukraine benefited from its place in the imperial division of labor. Both versions labeled western Ukraine an Austrian “colony” and tended to blame foreign capital rather than “Russia” for “exploitation” and the fact the economy did not develop more than it did.^[8]
Ukrainian historians living abroad and most of their counterparts in the country after 1991, did not link economic development to a national bourgeoisie but did consider tsarist Ukraine a colony. Russian political domination, they stress, resulted in imbalanced underdevelopment. Discriminatory investments and tariff rates, high taxes and low government spending, overdeveloped agriculture and extractive industries, underdeveloped finishing, manufacturing and processing capacity, left most Ukrainians rural and unskilled on the eve of the revolution.^[9] The first survey to incorporate the idea that Soviet Ukraine was a colony appeared abroad in 1986^[10] but few others shared this opinion. In Ukraine since 1991 one historian has asserted that all soviet republics became Bolshevik colonies after 1922 and that communist economic policies had been catastrophic for all of them, while a high-school textbook specifically identified Soviet Ukraine as a colony and its party organization as a colonial administration serving the interests of an “occupation regime”.^[11] Most authors, however, either reserve judgment on the relationship between Ukrainian economic development and Russian political domination after 1917 or, do not label the imbalance between industrial, consumer and agricultural development they describe as “colonial”. The general consensus is that the arbitrary centralized nature of the Soviet economic system was the cause of Ukraine's socio-economic shortcomings and that within the USSR the price of Ukraine's development had been too high.^[12]
One Ukrainian historian since independence has drawn attention to ambiguities in Ukraine's relations with Russia and to the impact of internal and geographical considerations on its development before 1917. He notes that tsarist Ukraine was not a colony according to the established definition and that its backwardness relative to western Europe must be understood as part of a broader regional problem whose roots lie in an international division of labor that emerged in the sixteenth century. Ukraine's natural fertility meant that the country would have had a niche as an agricultural rather than manufacturing region in the world market even if tsarist manufacturing and railroad policies had not been consciously “colonialist”. Soviet Ukraine, vaguely mentioned as “an imperial province”, is not discussed in similar terms.^[13]
After 1991 Russian historians also drew attention to Ukraine's ambiguous status under Tsars and commissars.^[14] Although subjected to “Russification” prior to 1917, they note, Ukrainians had lower per capita direct taxes, and got slightly higher government expenditures than did Russians in ethnic Russian provinces – who were neither responsible for central policies nor better-off because of them. Under the Tsars protectionism benefited the entire empire and Russian provinces became industrial centers because of geographical circumstances rather than policy. These naturally determined differences persisted after 1917 despite the party's attempts to balance development in non-Russian regions. Before and after 1917 Ukrainian territories had centers of heavy industry, Ukrainians occupied important positions in central institutions, dominated local administration, and suffered no more than anyone else. If the USSR was an empire, it was unique because its non-Russian “colonies” both provided raw materials to, and developed at the cost of, the central Russian “metropole”.^[15]
Differences among academics concerning Ukraine's “colonial” status under Russian rule are reflected in Ukrainian society. Nationally conscious Ukrainians accept that “Russian colonialism” existed, explains Ukraine’s poverty and they regard their nation’s past struggle against it as proof of its heroism. Post-war leftist intellectuals in western Europe and America, as is known, successfully disseminated the idea that pre-war European empires exploited colonies and created a sense of guilt for this among the educated within former “imperialist” countries during the last half of the XXth century. They succeeded in obtaining private and public funds and created institutions with a vested interest in making “retribution” to “colonial victims” in the “Third World”.^[16] In the Ukrainian context, center and right parties would be the most likely to invoke colonialism in support of claims for “reparations” and/or policies aimed at a “post-colonial decolonization” of Ukrainian minds. As of 1991 only one had formally done so, however, and it is doubtful whether any such moral claim for compensation for past losses from Russia would win much public support. At least a century of mass interaction and intermarriage within a Russian dominated state has led many Ukrainians and Russians to regard themselves as closely related historically. Such individuals do not see the USSR as an empire but as a joint enterprise that should not have been dismantled and wax indignant at suggestions of “Russian colonial domination”. In their opinion, both peoples played a key role in creating a community that harmonized local-ethnographic and supra-national political identities, in defending it from Nazi Germany and, in building it into a world nuclear power. Ukrainians and Russians interacted, both changed in the process and, if some intellectuals were unjustly persecuted or, there were regional disparities between the two republics, this was not intolerable and hardly amounted to “colonialism”.^[17] Two eastern Ukrainian delegates who during a session of parliament in 1996 condemned the above-mentioned textbook that labeled the Soviet period an “occupation” as mendacious and called on the government to withdraw it from schools, reflected this point of view.^[18]
In view of the differences of opinion concerning Ukraine's “colonial” status under Russian rule, and its implications for our understanding of the country's past and present, this paper attempts to situate “colonialism” in modern Ukrainian thought. It establishes when educated Ukrainians began using this word in reference to their country's status under Russian rule and what they meant by it. It examines when Ukrainians began to envisage “Ukraine” as a national-economic unit, asks how they understood the relationship between its political subordination and its material progress and, attempts to determine when they began to see a relationship between economic development and national identity.

Colonialism: Absolute Good, Necessary Evil or Immiseration without Progress?
“Colonialism” is a loaded term not only morally and politically but legally because it implies that secession by a peripheral territory from a country called an empire is legitimate and just in a way that secession of peripheral territories from countries called national states is not. This modern understanding, in turn, is based on the arbitrary assumption that the passage of time can legitimate the historical subjugation of a territorially adjacent people to a political center but not the historical subjugation of an alien population living in a part of the world separated by water from such a center.^[19] Thus, despite explicit opposition in principle to all secessionist claims in its 1960 “Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples”, the UN did not regard “decolonization” as infringement on territorial integrity in practice, and, through the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s in the name of the right to national self-determination, it condoned secession of territories from European metropoles – if they were overseas. This selective application of principles reflected the interests of its national-state members. Because most all of them were multi-ethnic their governments refused to recognize secession based on claims of national self-determination as an absolute principle or right in international law since any territorially contiguous minority living within their borders could then claim it.^[20]
At the beginning of the twentieth century critics of British, French, German, and Dutch policies in their overseas possessions began to use the term “colonialism” to refer to an illegitimate control of one foreign group over another that obstructed its material development. This was not its commonly accepted meaning as the contemporary dictionaries defined it as resettlement. Until the establishment of the League of Nations Mandate System in 1919 public opinion considered colonial issues a matter of internal policy, while rule over colonies was legal in terms of international law – which did not apply to colonies.^[21] After WWII colonies became subjects in international law and the legality of “colonialism” was disputed. In addition, the pejorative connotation of imposed control resulting in economic exploitation initially given the word by intellectual critics had become part of its accepted definition in all languages and Cold War rivals hurled it at each other as a term of abuse. In 1955 the Bandung Conference condemned foreign “colonial exploitation” and alien rule as a denial of fundamental human rights as did the 1960 UN Declaration.
Europeans had criticized the activities of their governments in overseas possessions on ethical grounds since the XVI^[22] century and took interest in the socio-economic consequences of their countries' rule there towards the end of the nineteenth century.^[23] Faced with the establishment in 1871 of the German Empire as a united self-sufficient territory protected by tariffs, British and French observers began to call on their governments to adopt similar policies and use surplus domestic capital to turn their overseas possessions into fields of trade, investment and raw materials. Advocates and opponents differed about whether or not this neo-mercantilist protectionism would benefit less developed dependencies in the short-run by providing them with guaranteed markets and sources of capital but, both sides agreed that European rule in the long run would develop them. Against the background of this debate public interest in the subject became particularly intense between 1899 and 1906 as news arrived in Europe of the Boer War, the partition of China, the Italian invasion of North Africa, German massacres in West Africa (Namibia) and the horrors in the Belgian Congo. In their attempts to explain the relationship between these events in overseas territories and European governments thinkers began to use the terms imperialism and colonialism.
The most systematic and internationally influential indictment of the practices most now associate with these two words was written by John Hobson in 1902 who observed that despite exploitation, which would continue until an international supervisory authority was established to prevent it, imperial rule did bring development to colonies.^[24] This conclusion reflected the established liberal view of industrial capitalism in colonies as a necessary evil as well as Marx's beliefs on the subject. His comments were not detailed investigations and scattered as they were in his principal published books, correspondence and newspaper articles they cannot be considered a theory. They amount to the opinion that except in Ireland, where British policy intentionally stifled manufacturing, the capitalism introduced by imperial powers into pre-capitalist colonial societies was “progressive” and liberating.^[25] Marx deplored the brutal disruptive consequences of this foreign domination but thought that regions left outside its reach would stagnate in backwardness – like peasants in national states not forced by fearful expropriation to urbanize and modernize. Like Adam Smith and Hobson, Marx believed that participation in the world market would force all into development. And although near the end of his life was prepared to admit that capitalism might have different forms in different countries, he does not seem to have revised his belief that the final liberation of colonized peoples depended on anti-capitalist revolution in Europe -- rather than on their own anti- imperialist revolutions against empires.^[26] Bernard Shaw, who defended British rule in South Africa and Eduard Bernstein, who defended of German policies in China shared similar attitudes about the right of the advanced to develop the backward. Analogously the 7th congress of the Second Socialist International condemned all “colonialism” unequivocally in 1907. It did not, however, call for secession because socialists thought that Europe was so powerful that any such political initiative by a colonized peoples would achieve nothing.^[27] That same year Karl Kautsky, Europe's most authoritative Marxist thinker between 1895 and 1914, qualified his mentor's opinions on the subject when he noted that imperial rule introduced improvements in colonies only when they helped increase levels of extraction.^[28] This qualified notion of development despite dependency was later expounded theoretically in Europe by Rudolph Hilferding (Finance Capital, 1910) and Rosa Luxemburg ( The Accumulation of Capital, 1913).
Lenin in his Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) revised this point of view. He claimed that in its “monopoly” stage capitalism was no longer “progressive” and that in colonies it had become an obstacle to rather than a condition of industrialization. Implicit in this reasoning was that colonialism brought immiseration without progress and that secession from European empires and their economies through national anti- imperialist revolutions led by a “progressive” bourgeoisie was both possible as well as a precondition of industrial development in colonies. As of 1920 this reasoning underlay Soviet policy towards Asian and African countries where Moscow instructed national communist parties to oppose peasant land seizures, help the “anti-imperialist national bourgeoisie” take power, and through participation in coalition governments encourage them to follow a pro-Soviet foreign policy. That same year the 10th Congress of the Russian Communist Party endorsed the idea that economic underdevelopment and inequality underlay “national” and colonial problems and, reversing established Marxist opinion, asserted that revolution in colonies was not dependent on anti-capitalist revolutions in Europe. In 1928 the Comintern declared that in colonies “imperialism” was economically regressive.^[29] Lenin at one point seemed to justify Ukrainian secession from Russia in similar terms. In a speech delivered in 1916 he referred to Russia “sucking out everything” from an undeveloped Ukraine and giving nothing in return – a statement which can be construed as an admittance of economic colonialism. But this speech was never subsequently cited or published in the Soviet Union^[30] nor did it reflect what he wrote about tsarist colonialism specifically in Imperialism. Although Russia had reached the stage of “monopoly capitalism”, he claimed in that work, it remained heavily enmeshed in pre-capitalist elements. This implied that in the Russian empire capitalism was still “progressive” and secession would be economically regressive for non-Russians – who were therefore supposed to take part in the empire-wide anti-capitalist revolution and not stage independent anti-imperialist revolutions. He developed this line of thought in an important article on nationalism written that same year which classified countries into three groups according to the strength of their “bourgeois-democratic” national movements. Presuming that they were stronger in eastern Europe than in Asia or Africa – without explaining how he concluded that tiny groups like the Society of Ukrainian Progressivists (TUP) were supposed to be more influential than the Indian National Congress – Lenin argued that socialists should support “anti-imperialist national revolutions” led by “progressive” petite bourgeoisie in India or Ireland, while in tsarist Ukraine their task was to “unite” the workers of the oppressed and oppressor nations. Although he considered Ukraine and other dominated prewar eastern-European territories “oppressed nations”, rather than “colonies”, he saw the difference as only one of degree: colonies had no capital while oppressed nations did.^[31] Lenin believed that “after the revolution” former oppressed workers would “gravitate irresistibly” towards union and integration with socialist states and explicitly wrote that his advocacy of “the right of nations to self-determination” did not mean he supported the secession of non-Russian territories from the tsarist empire.^[32] This position reflected the argument found in his Development Of Capitalism in Russia (1899), written from the point of view that capitalism was a necessary evil. Incorporating frequent references to southern Ukraine, Lenin argued that the export of capital outside a metropolis was “progressive” because it developed capitalism in annexed regions and created large integrated economic units with a rational division of labor.
Stalin wrote nothing on dependency and development in general or how they interrelated in tsarist Ukraine specifically but, appears to have believed that while non-Russians were politically oppressed up to 1917, they experienced economic progress. In January 1918, for the first time, he declared the non-Russian “bourgeois nationalists” in the former tsarist empire “reactionary” and ineligible to claim the “right of self-determination”.^[33] And while Lenin rejected this distinction two months later, stressing that “communism cannot be imposed by force”, Stalin’s idea appeared in speeches made by Bolshevik leaders in Ukraine that summer to justify their rule.^[34] In 1920 Stalin explained that Russia and its “border regions” were economically interdependent and that the Soviet government would oppose any attempt on their part to secede as "counter-revolutionary” because without Russia they would inevitably fall victim to an "imperialist” power – by which he meant a western European state.^[35] In statements made between 1921 and 1924 that placed Ukraine on the same level of industrial development as central Russia Stalin implied that it was not a colony.^[36] The prominent bolshevik historian Mikhail Pokrovsky did not consider Ukrainian provinces to have been tsarist colonies either because they were not culturally primitive and did not serve as a market for capital or source of raw materials. The Malaia sovetsakaia entsiklopediia did not mention Ukraine in the entry for Colonies, but did label Ukraine a “Russian colony” in the entry for Ukraine.^[37] Stalin's centralization and repressions seemed to vindicate those who had opposed Soviet rule from its inception arguing that it was imperial Russian colonialism reborn. Neither their opinion, nor Stalin's policy reversals after 1929, however, influenced a sizable group of sympathetic foreign liberals, socialists and Asian-African nationalists who continued to believe Soviet rhetoric about balanced Republican development. Understanding “capitalism” according to Lenin's Imperialism as the cause of an “imperialism” and “colonialism” that impoverished the “Third World”, they did not regard “socialist” Bolshevik Russia as a participant in twentieth-century “neo-imperialism” despite its territorial acquisitions – which it held until 1991. These individuals and influential organizations such as the League Against Imperialism (1929), The Congress of Peoples Against Imperialism (1948), the Movement for Colonial Freedom (1949), the American Committee on Africa (1953), either ignored or justified Moscow’s exercise of hegemonic power in Eurasia, imagined “colonial exploitation” a thing of the past in that part of the world, and focused their attentions on American and European “imperialism”.^[38] When the Ceylonese President at the 1955 Bandung Conference proposed that there was a Soviet colonialism that had be abolished just like any other, Nehru interjected that the subject was not on the conference agenda and closed the issue.^[39] World opinion did not consider the 1960 UN “Declaration on the Granting of independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples” applicable to the USSR.
Among those influencing thinking about dependency and development in the dependencies themselves was the early nineteenth-century neo-mercantilist critic of British power Friedrich List. He stressed that humanity was divided into nations – not amorphous “communities” as Smith wrote – that the economy was supposed to benefit the nation, and therefore, that nations had to use political measures to develop the economy and diffuse wealth, because free trade did not. List himself shared the prevailing opinion on the right of the major European nations to develop the rest of Europe and the world for their own good. Nevertheless, the dominated in the rest of Europe and world adopted to their own needs his idea that manufacturing and controlled trade, not agriculture and free trade, represented the true founts of prosperity.^[40] In Europe it was the Czechs who first declared that even small poor nations had the right to be politically independent and industrialized.^[41] Irish nationalists, who regarded their country as the continent's oldest colony, began to examine the impact of English rule on Irish development from this neo-mercantilist perspective in the early 1900s and the first attempt at a definitive study of the subject appeared between 1919 and 1921. It argued British legislation stunted Irish manufacturing and left the mass of the population in misery.^[42] Outside Europe during the 1860s educated Indians in the world's largest colony were perhaps the first to link political nationalism with economic development and their reflections about the condition of their country might be regarded as precursors of Lenin’s later indictment of imperial rule as immiseration without progress – a view closer to List than Marx. Doubting the expressed benevolence of British rule and aware that poverty was a more pressing concern for the population than constitutional issues, some Indians began to blame foreign rule for their country's plight. They politicized economic issues and added exploitation and social subjugation to their list of national grievances. The major studies which appeared in the 1880s, and a number of important works published in London during the early 1900s, argued that Britain kept India poor because it unjustifiably “Drained” a part of its total annual product without any giving any return, and that the state should promote economic development.^[43]
Ukraine as Colony Before 1917
Juridically no ruling power except Nazi Germany had ever considered its Ukrainian territories “colonies”. Before 1917 Ukrainian territories were integral parts of larger unified states ruled by centralized bureaucracies rather than distinct administrative units ruled by a separate bureaucracy. Tsarist officials did not consider “Little Russians” different ethnically from the nominal ruling “Russian” nationality and they were not subject to separate laws that would have identified them as legally different from any other group. As such, Ukraine might be compared to Ireland, Algeria or Korea (Chosen) – areas which the ruling imperial power considered part of the home country and whose populations it sought to assimilate. The Habsburgs regarded the eastern part of Galicia as a legitimately regained crown-land, while Poles between 1917 and 1939 considered their western Ukrainian provinces as legally part of “historical Poland”. Notwithstanding those who considered Siberia a colony, most educated Russians before 1917 imagined “Russia” as a country that “colonized itself” rather than somewhere else. They did not elaborate an “anti-imperialist” or “anti-colonialist” body of thought, did not consider themselves “imperialist” and, those who distinguished a “Russian metropole” from a non-Russian “periphery” would have differed about where to draw the line between the two. Some began to regard the resettlement of Slavic peasants eastwards as a “colonization” of the sort that western Europe was doing overseas at the turn of the century but, no one used this term or “colony” in reference to Russia’s Ukrainian territories.^[44] What today academics would call Russian empire building, Russians regarded as statebuilding.
Educated Ukrainians began to use the terms “colony” and “colonialism” in reference to their provinces in the early 1900s. But the idea that this territory was economically disadvantaged and underdeveloped can be traced to landowners in the 1820s who had begun wonder why political association with Russia was not bringing “Little Russia” (Chernihiv, Poltava and Kharkiv provinces) prosperity and development. Thirty years later this regional dissatisfaction had intensified and those who thought that tariffs and rail construction had favored their counterparts in the central Russian provinces became particularly interested in the nature of the relationship between the capital and its southern provinces.^[45] The first important study reflecting this concern was written by the Ukrainian economist Mykola Iasnopolsky, in 1871 who demonstrated that “South Russia”, into which he included southern Russian provinces with large Ukrainian populations as well as “Little” and “South-West” Russia (Kiev, Volyn and Podillia provinces), was less developed socio-economically than “North Russia”. While “South Russia” remained an agricultural area despite its geographical position, rich natural resources and large population, “North Russia” thanks to its greater influence on government economic policy, had been able to get more resources to develop manufacturing. Because the country's leaders were not fully aware of the real interests of regions outside the capital, their policies favored the North more than South even though an economically developed South would benefit the entire country.^[46]
Iasnopolsky continued his work into the 1890s, when Moscow-region businessmen and Russian economic nationalists, who claimed that the industrial development of central Russia would ultimately benefit all parts of the empire, strongly supported Witte’s policies of high taxation and low public spending.^[47] In an important two-volume study he demonstrated that the fiscal system distributed taxation and expenditures very unevenly throughout the empire – which he subdivided into administrative not national regions, according to established official norms. In the first volume he related regional financial burdens to a policy that taxed consumer goods rather than rather incomes and made the rich pay less than the poor.^[48] In the second volume he argued that differences in expenditures between St. Petersburg and the rest of the country were greater than those found in European national states between capitals and provinces because Russia was more centralized. Political decentralization and regional autonomy, he concluded, were necessary to achieve an equitable distribution of taxation and expenditures conducive to balanced future development.^[49]
Iasnopolsky analyzed his subject using mid-nineteenth century French, German, and Austrian “historical economist” writings on national state finances. Critical of the free-trade “liberal economists’” indifference to historical circumstances and the political dangers of economic inequality – though they were not socialists – these writers argued that the richest provinces in national states became rich because excessively centralized governments distributed taxation and revenues inequitably to benefit their capital regions. The proposed solution involved self-administration and decentralization – which would supposedly result in more balanced and rational spending and development because money was best be spent where it was raised.^[50] But although this work was later cited to prove Ukraine's exploited “colonial” status the author did not write it from a nationalist perspective. He did not mention political domination and compared “Russia” with national states rather than empires. He made no separate generalizations about either “Ukraine” or “Russia” and demonstrated that central Russian provinces outside the Moscow and Petersburg areas were not better-off financially than non-Russian regions.
Iasnopolsky became interested in the regional impact of imperial financial policy while a student in Ukraine. He was active in the Ukrainian national movement and published his major study while activists were discussing separatism. Yet, his scholarship was uninfluenced by the novel idea popularized by Mykola Kostomarov, Panteleimon Kulish and Taras Shevchenko in the 1840s that the 3 “Little Russian”, the 3 “South-western”, and the two “New Russian” provinces of tsarist Russia constituted an ethnic-cultural unit called “Ukraine”. The conceptual implications of this idea for economic issues were thought out by others. First, by Serhyi Podolynsky who, in 1880, for the first time, separated data on the eight tsarist Ukrainian provinces from imperial statistics and aggregated them within a distinct single national economic unit called “Ukraine” – into which he also included, for the first time, Austrian ruled eastern-Galicia. On the basis of his calculations he concluded that “Ukrainian” manufacturing was developing in tandem to western Europe.^[51]
Then, in 1895, Iulian Bachynsky explicitly characterized the economy throughout Ukrainian ethnic territory as “underdeveloped”. Apparently the first to do so, he was also the first to use the term “colony” to describe Eastern Galicia's status as a market for German capital. Looking at Ukraine from the perspective of industrial capitalist colonialism as necessary evil, and probably influenced by List, he explained that development accelerated in Galicia after the Habsburg empire adopted a constitution. The spread of capitalism and markets globally, he continued, fostered economic development, bourgeois national movements and created national states. Centralist political domination could result in exploitation and underdevelopment in outlying regions but, even there, capitalism inevitably engendered manufacturing and a national bourgeoisie with an interest in political liberalization. Once they succeeded in establishing constitutional order and territorial autonomy, capitalist industrialization would evolve quickly within their still dominated territories and lead the bourgeoisie and nationalist intellectuals to realize that further development would be contingent upon secession and independent statehood.^[52] Tsarist Ukraine, analogously, was developing while being exploited by Polish and Russian capital. And, once Russia adopted a constitution and capitalism developed as much as it could, the “Ukrainian bourgeoisie” would in its turn begin the “terrible struggle” for the political independence necessary for further economic development – a struggle that would be taken over in turn by Ukrainian social democrats.^[53]
At the end of the nineteenth century Ukrainian intellectuals still differed over where “Ukraine's” borders were. Some included Galicia into “Ukraine”, some limited it to the eight tsarist provinces where “Little Russians” were an absolute majority, and others included Taurida (Crimea). Others yet included Chernomorsk, Kuban, Kursk, Voronezh and Bessarabia provinces where Ukrainians averaged only half of the population. Nevertheless, there had emerged among them the idea that there was an economic unit called “Ukraine” congruent with a ethnic-cultural unit called “Ukraine” which, as Shevchenko had first asserted a generation earlier, was oppressed by a “Russia.” Iasnopolsky had statistically documented economic disparities in the state budget between Ukrainian and Russian provinces and, Podolynsky had identified “Ukraine” as an economic unit with a capitalist economy. Bachynsky drew attention to the relationship between development, dependency, and independence, and activists had begun to debate about whether to give priority to political or economic issues. In an influential article directed against Marxist economic-determinists who ignored national issues, Ivan Franko observed, in a passage echoing List’s ideas, that the wish to abolish economic exploitation inevitably involved ridding a country of foreign as well as native exploiters. Economic realities, he continued, drove every nation “with an iron necessity” to struggle for political independence and condemned it to subjugation, pauperization and decline if it lost sight of this ideal and did not.^[54] Nonetheless, Ukrainian intellectuals still did not use the terms imperialism or colonialism when dealing with Ukrainian-Russian relations. If they mentioned “colonists” they meant non-Ukrainian settlers in Ukraine or Ukrainians immigrants in Russian provinces and, they referred to Austria and Russia not as “empires” but as multinational states.
This changed after 1905 when the first theoretical works about colonialism began to appear in western Europe and the International had condemned the practice. Within the Russian empire, censorship was eased and liberals looking at rural poverty and industrial depression concluded that high taxation and tariffs were making life worse not better. The results of the 1897 census began to be published alongside a mass of other statistical compilations about the empire while Ukrainian issues began to be publicly discussed in the Duma. Against this background a debate about the question of secession within the social-democratic Revolutionary Ukrainian Party (RUP) in 1905, which included consideration of the relationship between political status and economic development, led to the first detailed studies of tsarist Ukraine’s economy and the idea that Ukraine was a Russian colony.
In the opening article Dmytro Antonovych, a separatist, seemed to be mocking the mechanistic reasoning of those against. Economic exploitation justified political separation, he wrote, but because “Scholarship has nowhere demonstrated that the development of Ukraine’s productive forces was stopped because of its union [with Russia] ...” he continued, the party obviously could not advocate secession. In reply Mykola Porsh , who also favored separatism, but thought that in the short term the party would attract greater support if it advocated autonomy within a federated Russia, observed that national oppression impedes the development of the forces of production. But, he noted that if the forces of production do not stop developing and there are no “economic conflicts” underlying the national question, then RUP should not demand secession from the empire. Political autonomy, however, was the best remedy for the political oppression which, all agreed, did exist.^[55] In 1907 Porsh, now the leader of the Ukrainian Social Democratic Workers Party, explained in greater detail what he meant when he sought to convince skeptical social-democrats to support the autonomist position by giving it a materialist justification. Ukraine’s economy, he wrote, was being held back by a “bureaucratic subjugation” that was not a product of capitalism – which in itself could generate centralizing as well as decentralizing forces. Once the centralized tsarist autocracy had been replaced with a multinational democratic federal government this “subjugation” would disappear and, despite Ukraine’s continued economic ties with Russia, its development would no longer be impeded.^[56] Elaborating upon this distinction two years later, he explained that tsarist economic policies dictated by the Russian bourgeoisie sought “to kill” the development of capitalism among all its subjugated nationalities, much like British policy had done in Ireland and India. To support his assertion that in the short-run national territorial autonomy would promote “progressive” capitalist development in Ukraine, he observed that colonies like Canada and Australia began to prosper after Britain had granted them autonomy and, that they remained better off as parts of an empire than they would have been had they been independent, because British might offered them protection from absorption by more rapacious rivals.^[57] Understanding capitalism as a necessary evil Porsh, like others at the time, attributed Ukraine's imbalanced development to excessive centralization and repressive cultural policies, and did not use the term “colonial” in reference to Ukrainian-Russian relations. Unlike Iasnopolsky, his remedy for Ukraine’s ills was not to change central policy and, unlike Bachynsky , he made no reference to an economic dynamic that supposedly generated political independence. Porsh explained that decentralized decision making on the basis of national territorial autonomy would be conducive to the capitalist industrialization that was already under way in Ukraine.
Porsh referred to Russia as a “state of nations” not an empire and argued that tsarist Ukraine was unable to develop more than it did because of regressive “centralist tendencies in financial-economic politics”, not “colonialism”. These tendencies, he explained, no longer existed in western Europe where governments realized that centralist exploitation of peripheries was economically irrational and that development required decentralization.^[58] In an essay refuting a claim that Ukrainian nationality had no future because “Little Russians” had been unable to organize their own trade and manufacturing and that “capitalism spoke Russian”, Porsh, echoed the ideas of Karl Renner and Otto Bauer who had claimed that the development of the proletariat was conducive to the formation of modern nations. He explained that capitalism created nations and nationalized cities by dispossessing peasants and forcing them to migrate to towns where they had to sell their labor cheap. Their numbers ensured that these landless Ukrainian migrants would assimilate Russian immigrants, while the rise of national consciousness would eventually nationalize capitalism in towns – and good business sense was already leading Russian companies in Ukraine to advertise in Ukrainian. Industrialization involved foreign capital in all countries, he continued, and in Ukraine, where Russian capital represented only a small percentage of total foreign investments, native capital would eventually displace it and all others – as it had done elsewhere. If Russian was the dominant language in Ukraine it was because of governmental policy not “capitalism”, whose language in Ukraine would be determined by the local Ukrainian markets merchants and labor force.^[59]
Mykola Stasiuk in 1906, like Porsh, accepted the necessity of capitalist industrial development and also argued that it would be best served by autonomy within a federal Russia. Citing Kautsky rather than List on every European nation’s desire to have its own capitalist industry so it could be independent of others, Stasiuk claimed that the huge cost of any separatist war against Russia would be economically disastrous for a Ukraine that under the existing political conditions, which he labeled “oppressive” rather than “colonial”, was experiencing impoverishment without progress. Development was restricted not only by tsarist financial policies, he added, but by the western European capital that backed it because that same capital appropriated the profits rather than reinvesting them in Ukraine.^[60] Two other authors, who demonstrated that Ukraine provided a disproportionate amount of revenue, foodstuffs and raw materials to central Russia and the rest of the empire, did not use the term “colonialism” either to describe this state of affairs.^[61]
It was only in 1911 that Stasiuk explicitly asserted, for the first time in print, that there was a “Russian colonialism” that exploited and underdeveloped a “Ukrainian” national economic unit. Developing the idea found in his earlier article about tsarist Ukraine experiencing impoverishment without progress, he now specified that it was an exploited colony of industrially more advanced Polish and Russian regions not because it exported cheap foodstuffs and raw materials to them but because it provided them with a market for overpriced finished manufactured goods. Arguing against Russian nationalists who stressed that ties between central Russia and its borderlands were natural and beneficial to all, Stasiuk explained that Ukraine was not dependent on Russia because it needed Russia economically, but because Russia dominated it politically.^[62] Bachynsky’s justification of national separatism in economic terms, Porsh’s claim that capitalism was not Russifying but Ukrainizing the masses and, Stasiuk’s labelling of the policy that impeded the capitalism behind this nationalization as colonialist and Ukraine a colony, were novel at a time when most educated Ukrainians shared the populist belief that capitalist industrialization was an alien destructive force transforming their “traditional” rural society in undesirable ways. Born of disputes among Social-Democrats concerning the acceptability of national aspirations, these ideas were premised on the belief that Ukraine and Russia were not only two ethno-cultural units but also two economic units. From this perspective Ukrainian national demands were legitimate and “progressive” because they were the products of industrialization and their suppression impeded industrialization. And since Russian rule threatened the economic development that represented the necessary precondition of Ukraine’s national development in the modern world, it either had to be changed or rejected. While Porsh saw progress despite dependency and no immediate economic reason for separatism, Stasiuk was more inclined to an immiseration without progress interpretation which could be invoked as an economic justification for Ukraine’s secession from Russia. The corollary of the argument that “Russian colonialism” was impeding capitalist development in Ukraine, meanwhile, was that “modernization” was not a threat to Ukrainian identity but a precondition of its future existence. Although these arguments do not seem to have changed the opinions of Russian Social Democrats and their sympathizers, they did mark the beginnings of a new trend of thought in Ukraine that no longer envisaged Russian rule only in anti-industrial cultural-linguistic terms.^[63]
There is some evidence of popularization. Drawing on Iasnopolsky, Antonovych described the exploitative nature of the taxation system in simple terms for peasants in his pamphlet Diadko Dmytro (1900).The eclectic Ukrainian National Party (1902), meanwhile, saw Ukraine and their political activities in what might be regarded as vaguely anti-colonialist terms. Its program, written by its founder Mykola Mikhnovsky, who was also the first to argue that Russian rule over Ukraine was illegitimate in international law and to organize a nationalist terrorist group in tsarist Ukraine, did not describe Ukraine as a “colony”. Yet, it placed Ukrainian issues in the context of the “oppressed peoples” of the world and specified that imperial tariff and financial policy discriminated against Ukraine in favor of Russian provinces. Mikhnovsky described Ukraine as one of the “oppressed nations” of the world fighting for national liberty under the flag of socialism. He asserted that only national liberation globally would bring social freedom, and that the expropriation of property was a necessary condition of national liberty: “the proletariat of the ruling nation and that of the subjugated nation are two different classes with dissimilar interests”.^[64] During the Second Duma of 1907, finally Ukrainian peasant delegates showed they were aware of economic disparities between Ukraine and Russia when they complained about the central government collecting more than it spent in their provinces.^[65]
“Colonialism”, however, was marginal to Ukrainian national thought – which remained basically populist and focused on linguistic-cultural rather than socio-economic issues.^[66] The UNP was a tiny uninfluential group, published articles on dependency and development were few, and the outbreak of the war left little time for proponents to think out and disseminate their views.^[67] By 1917 most activists accepted that decentralization would improve the economy but they considered economic exploitation tangential to Ukraine's predicament.^[68]
Thus, Mykhailo Hrushevsky who personally did consider Ukraine a Russian colony and in one article described Ukrainian lands as sources of raw materials and income for their respective metropoles, did not use the words colony or colonialism in his publications.^[69] Hrushevsky attached minimal significance to the relationship between nationality and economic development and saw Russian domination as a political rather than economic with no necessary connection to capitalism. In pamphlets written during the war he did not mention Russian economic exploitation of Ukraine at all and noted instead, that Russian rule had broken Ukraine's historical ties with western Europe. Nor did he draw attention to the fact that historically Ukraine had exported and imported the same products both eastwards and westwards. As spokesman for the national movement, Hrushevsky reflected the prevailing understanding of most educated Ukrainians at the time of their people not as “colonized natives” but, as an oppressed non-state nationality within an overly bureaucratized and centralized Rossiia. In the tradition of Comte and Durkheim they saw the problems of their society in legal, political, and moral, not economic terms. Representative perhaps was the opinion of Trofim Zilinsky who thought that economic oppression was less destructive of the nation than cultural oppression; which he labeled a “civilized barbarism” intended to remove the nation’s soul by destroying its morales and culture.^[70]
Because those who thought about Ukraine in socio-economic terms were few and their influence limited, pre-war Ukrainian nationalism might be regarded as closer in spirit to “traditionalist” Irish and Indian, than to “modernizing” Mexican or Chinese nationalisms. Indicatively, when western Ukrainian national leaders organized a pro-Austrian Ukrainian Information Committee to disseminate their views in the wake of the Balkan Wars (1912), they did not use "anti-colonialist” ideas in their publications. Nor did the publications of its successor, the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine (SVU), formed in 1914. Instead, they juxtaposed European “civilization” to Russia as the enemy “Asian empire”.^[71] Regardless of why they did this, it is unlikely that the absence of “anti-colonialist" ideas in this literature weakened the Ukrainian case internationally given that the established governments and public opinion to whom it was addressed considered colonialism legal and colonies as an internal affair.^[72]

Ukraine as Colony After 1917
In 1917 the Central Rada justified national political independence by reference to an act of will –the right of self determination. Its official newspaper (Selianska Spilka) made occasional reference to Ukraine’s colonial status under Russia but leaders did not explain secession as a reaction to colonial economic exploitation.^[73] By 1918 the Ukrainian National Party had fallen apart and its heir, the Ukrainian Party of Sovereignists Socialists, which had members in the non Bolshevik Ukrainian government, had dropped the internationalist – anti-colonialist perspective of its parent organization. No nationalist government used anti-colonialist ideas in its appeals to American and western European governments – which, in turn, did not view Russia as an empire with colonies.^[74] Nor did the early Bolshevik regimes in Ukraine exploit this idea. The first resolutions of the local party allotted no “progressive” revolutionary role to its bourgeoisie or nationalism and explained that Ukraine’s role as raw material supplier and finished-goods market for Russia meant that it could not be independent. “The uprising in Ukraine is developing under the slogan reestablishing the revolutionary reunion of Ukraine with Russia” stated the “Ukraine and Russia” resolution of 1918 which, foresaw Ukraine joining the communist global order as part of the Russian Republic.^[75] Party manifestos, meanwhile, focused on the class nature of its revolution.^[76] Left-wing Ukrainian SRs, SDs, and Ukrainian Bolsheviks disillusioned with the politics of Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky, on the other hand, did utilize the idea that tsarist Ukraine had been an exploited Russian colony – and differed over whether or not “the proletariat” should support or oppose the “bourgeois national state” represented by the Rada and then the Directory.^[77]