In Ukrainian history, the experience of World War I, significant and traumatic as it was, is usually overshadowed by the discussion of subsequent and somewhat contemporaneous events – in particular the story of the Ukrainian People’s Republic. Carried away by their nation-building narratives, modern historians tend to forget that this polity claimed full independence in January 1918, precisely in order to be among the signatories of the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty, which ended the war on the Eastern Front. The war’s role in the shaping of twentieth-century Eastern Europe becomes greater still if one includes the notions of mass mobilization in the name of a nation, and ethnicity as a marker of loyalty – both of which were introduced in this region during World War I.
Mark von Hagen’s excellent small book helps the reader to appreciate this conflict’s importance for Ukraine. He shows that the war did not just lead to the collapse of multinational empires, which gave Ukrainian nationalists a chance to build their state. Rather, imperial belligerents themselves prepared the ground for the future European order by promoting ethnic solidarity as a means of destroying each other. Both the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires tried to undermine each other by flaunting the notion of an autonomous and united postwar Poland, but it did not occur to the imperial bureaucrats that the future Polish state would be independent and not part of their empires. The Ukrainian case was more complex. The tsarist government wanted to reclaim Austria’s Ukrainian lands on the basis of ethnic criteria, but as “Russian” ethnic territories, while the Central Powers wanted a puppet Ukrainian state carved out of the Russian Empire, but not including Austria’s own Ukrainian lands. What both sides achieved in their conflicting efforts was the “militarization of the empires’ nationality problem” (P. 14) in general and the Ukrainian problem in particular. Ethnicity became a mobilization tool, and the notion that peasants on both sides of the Russo-Austrian border belonged to the same nationality became common currency. These were the ideological foundations of modern Ukraine.
Even before the war broke out, the prominent Russian right-wing politician Petr Durnovo warned against the annexation of Eastern Galicia, because this would encourage “Little Russian separatism” in Russian Ukraine (P. 19). He was proven wrong in the short run, as there were no signs of this when the Russian army occupied the region during August and September 1914. The official Russian rhetoric was that of reclaiming “a Russian land from time immemorial” (P. 20), but there was never a consistent government program of cultural absorption. The first governor of the region, Sergei Sheremetev, actually relied on pro-Russian, upper-class Poles to administer the land. The second governor, Georgii Bobrinsky, who is often presented in Ukrainian historiography as an ardent Russian nationalist and fervent assimilator, was in fact under constant attack from the right for his lack of missionary zeal. He had a long-standing conflict with the Synod’s plenipotentiary to Galicia, Archbishop Evlogii, who pushed for more radical measures against the Uniate Church, but was eventually removed by the tsar. There were closures of Ukrainian newspapers, deportations of some nationalist activists, and (very late in the process) attempts to introduce the Russian language in courts and schools. Yet, Bobrinsky insisted on 75 percent of parishioners voting to “return” to Orthodoxy before an Orthodox priest could be sent to a parish vacated by a Uniate cleric who had fled. This did not advance religious conversion very far. The Russian administration also managed to antagonize its natural allies in Galicia, the local Russophiles, by refusing to appoint them to any positions of influence. Instead, unqualified and inept bureaucrats were imported from Russia.
After the Russian army retreated from Galicia, in the summer of 1915, a group of conservative émigré Ukrainians from Switzerland, led by Count Mykhailo Tyshkevych, sent a telegram to Nicholas II proposing a new Ukrainian policy for imperial Russia. Tyshkevych suggested making Tsarevich Aleksei hetman of Ukraine, printing portraits of him dressed in the Ukrainian costume, and publishing an official newspaper in Ukrainian. This innovative approach, a precursor in some sense of the Bolshevik nationality policy in Ukraine, was not something the last tsar would even contemplate, but his minister of the court, Count Vladimir Fredericks, sent a polite reply in French: “His Majesty has commanded me to thank you, and also the group of Ukrainians gathered in Switzerland, for the feelings expressed in your telegram” (P. 76). Providing that Fredericks rendered the tsar’s words faithfully, this was the first recorded occasion of a Russian ruler uttering the word “Ukrainians.” Yet no different or more decisive nationality policy materialized after the Russian troops entered Galicia for the second time in June 1916. If anything, Governor Fedor Trepov ran his military administration, which was free from an explicit political agenda. Durnovo’s prophecy came true only after the February Revolution, when the Provisional Government appointed a prominent Ukrainian activist from Kiev, Dmytro Doroshenko, as the new regional governor of Galicia and Bukovyna.
Meanwhile, on the Austrian side, the imperial authorities consulted “their” Ukrainian leaders early on about the occupation regime they would establish in eastern Ukraine. The Foreign Ministry appointed Count Emanuel Urbas as special adviser for Ukrainian affairs. He then held discussions with community leaders in the palace of the Uniate Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, where plans were made to create an autonomous Ukraine, possibly headed by a hetman, under the rule of the Austrian emperors. Unlike the situation in Russia, religious conversion in the occupied territories was not considered, but the creation of an autocephalous (independent) Orthodox Church was. The Austrians, however, soon grew wary of Ukrainian aspirations, in part because for the first three years of the war the only Ukrainian ethnic territory they ever managed to occupy was the impoverished Russian province of Volhynia. (Khelm Province was considered Polish, and no Ukrainian political experiments were allowed there.) The Austrian authorities allowed Ukrainian activists to propagandize among the POWs, but this task could only be given to socialist Ukrainian émigrés from the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine, and not to Galician political leaders, who were conservative and far removed from the concerns of peasant conscripts from the Russian Empire. The Union proved too successful for its own good when its radical ideas of a united democratic Ukraine began resonating in Galicia as well. In January 1915, the Austrians forced the Union to move to Constantinople, where it came increasingly under German control. Since the Germans at that time favored socialism over nationalism as a tool for destroying the Russian Empire, Ukrainian socialists from the Union ended up helping to transfer German funds to Alexander Helphand (Parvus), who supplied Lenin with the infamous “German gold” (P. 58).
Yet, when the German and Austrian armies finally occupied most of Russian Ukraine after the conclusion of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty in February 1918, they ended up replicating in the occupied land the political regime they were familiar with – a monarchy. After a brief and frustrating period of coexistence with the Ukrainian socialist government, during which the Germans reportedly even considered inviting to Ukraine a delegation of German and Austrian Social-Democratic parliamentarians to help bring Ukrainian socialists to their senses (P. 92), the German military submitted for Wilhelm II’s approval the candidacy of General Pavlo Skoropadsky for the hetman’s office (P. 93). The subsequent story of a miscarried conservative political experiment under occupation conditions is well known. Still, in his subtle reading of contemporary sources, von Hagen throws new light on the Skoropadsky regime and its German protectors, especially in his discussion of the hetman’s state visit to Germany in September 1918. For example, what topic could have dominated the talks between the hetman and Wilhelm II – Ukrainian food deliveries to Germany, the new country’s international position, or the spread of socialism in Europe? It was the fate of Nicholas II and his family (P. 102). If anything, Skoropadsky seemed to be more attuned than the German emperor to the new world of revolution and nation building. After observing from his train car the familiar signs of a revolutionary mood among the German soldiers, he asked his diplomat for the names of prominent German socialists worth getting to know (P. 102).
Rich in detail and extremely thought-provoking, von Hagen’s book manages to deliver much more than one would expect from a work that is only 114 pages long. One might take issue with the author’s decision not to standardize the spelling of place names, but to use instead the version that the occupying authorities employed at the time. Such an approach results, for example, in the same city being referred to in the space of two pages as Kyiv/Kiev, Kyiv, and Kiew (Pp. 87-88). This actually adds more historical flavor to the text because all the names in question are mutually recognizable. (It should be noted, however, that Darnytsia, where Austrian Slavs were kept in a large POW camp, as the reader learns on p. 36, was located near Kyiv, not Odesa.)
One sentence near the end of this book devoted to the “constructive” aspect of foreign occupations encapsulates the ambiguous nature of all Ukrainian national projects during the revolutionary period. In the Introduction, von Hagen for once sounds a bit like a Ukrainian nationalist when he explains that “the story of occupations in Ukraine, of course, did not conclude with the end of World War I, but continued with Bolshevik, White Army, and Polish regimes until the Treaty of Riga once again divided the Ukrainian population between two states, the Polish Republic and the Soviet Union” (P. 3). But when the author says in the last chapter that the Ukrainian Rada was “no longer in occupation of Bolshevik-held Kyiv” (P. 99), this slip of the tongue – or, perhaps, an intentional wordplay – makes one envision differently the familiar black-and-white picture of oppressed natives and oppressive foreign occupiers. In thinking through the material presented by von Hagen, the reader arrives at the idea that the very notions of Ukraine and Ukrainians were being defined as the assorted foreign powers and domestic competitors for power fought for the allegiances of ordinary people and control of their land.