The scholarship of recent decades has lead to profound changes in East European studies, reflected by the appearance of a large number of works that have explored new issues and adopted new methodologies. World War I and the Ukrainian question in the Habsburg and Romanov empires is an example of just such a topic that has received new treatment. Alexandra Bakhturina’s book aims to make an important contribution to both these subjects. It is the first monograph ever devoted exclusively to the politics of the Russian empire in occupied Galicia during the First World War and the work stresses more than once that it is based on unique archival materials which have never before been explored.
During World War I, Galicia witnessed both the greatest victories (the Galician campaign, August 1914; Brusilov breakthrough, June-August 1916) and the greatest defeats (summers of 1915 and 1917) of the Russian army. As a result, the Russian administration was established twice in Galicia. In 1915, Russia lost all of Galicia, but regained most of it in 1916 (the attempt to capture Lviv was not successful). In the first two parts of the book, Bakhturina deals with the Russian occupation of 1914-1915 and with the second occupation in the third and final part. The second section is devoted completely to the attitude of the Russian authorities toward the Greek Catholic Church in Eastern Galicia, with all other aspects of the politics of Russia’s first occupation in the first section. Bakhturina consistently follows a pattern of providing a broad context before treating individual Russian policies in occupied Eastern Galicia. Thus, in the Introduction she gives a short account of the history of Galicia and in the first section she provides short surveys of the history of the Ukrainian question in the Habsburg and Romanov empires, of the Russophile movement in Eastern Galicia and its connections to Russian nationalists and rightist circles in the Russian empire. In the second part she does the same, giving a short account of the history of the Uniate church, its emergence in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and its further fate in the Habsburg and Romanov empires. In the third section, Bakhturina devotes a separate chapter to the Polish question in 1916, describing the moves and plans of Berlin, Vienna and Petrograd and putting the problem of Eastern Galicia in the much broader context of wartime plans to reshape the map of Eastern Europe.
Unfortunately, the author missed an important fact in the provision of all this context – the First World War was not the first time when Russian troops occupied Galicia and the Russian empire claimed its own rights to it. There were several previous attempts, including during the Napoleonic era, in 1809, when Russia, as an ally of Napoleon against the Habsburgs, occupied Galicia and Emperor Alexander I claimed that the entire territory or at least part of it should belong in his realm.^[1] The Russian emperor considered it a Polish territory. However, at the beginning of the 20th century, the ideological basis of Russian claims to Galicia had changed, as Bakhturina demonstrates well. In the discourse of the “All-Russian” nation (consisting of Great, Little and White Russians),^[2] which was dominant at that time, the so-called Prikarpatskaya Rus’ (meaning Eastern Galicia, Northern Bukovina and Hungarian Rus’) was viewed as the last part of the national territory, of the Riuriks dynasty legacy, which remained to be united with other Russian lands in the Russian Empire. These claims were also partly based on the existence of the Russophile movement in Eastern Galicia, the activists of which adhered to the conception of one Russian nation stretching from Kamchatka to the Carpathians.^[3]
Bakhturina devotes much attention to the views of Russian rightists and nationalists on Galicia to show another aspect of the problem, no less important. By acquiring Galicia, they hoped to achieve the final solution of the two internal problems which threatened the integrity of the Empire – the Polish and the Ukrainian questions. In the last five decades of the Habsburg monarchy, Galicia became known as a Polish and Ukrainian “Piedmont”, due to the more favorable conditions for national development in the Habsburg monarchy than in other empires (Russian and German in the Polish case and Russian in the Ukrainian case). Besides being the source of the Polish and “Mazepists” threat, Galicia was also the base of the Greek Catholic church, viewed by some as a threat to Russia. In the eyes of the imperial elite, the annexation of Galicia was quite popular both from a Russian nationalist perspective (the final unification of all Russian lands and the liquidation of “Mazepism”) and from the Russian imperial perspective (liquidation of the main source of two internal problems). These views, of course, were never expressed publicly by any Russian official, but were openly expressed in secret documents.
Entering into the war, the Russian government did not have any clearly developed plans for its policies in Galicia. Several were developed during the first months of the war and the author’s analysis of these policies allows us to distinguish different approaches to the conquered territory among two groups. Both were strategically aimed at conquering Galicia and absorbing it into the Empire. However, there was a harsh distinction in tactics. Both groups agreed that Western Galicia should belong to the Polish Kingdom (Tsarstvo Pol’skoe) and Eastern Galicia should be integrated into the Empire on the same basis as all other provinces. This meant the Russification of the educational system, the liquidation of Ukrainian and Polish institutions, implementation of the Russian legal code, “reunification” of Uniates with the Orthodox church, etc. One group of ruling elites insisted on realization of these measures immediately, not waiting to the end of war and beginning of the postwar re-division. The other group preferred a more cautious approach, arguing that any profound changes in the rear of the Russian troops was undesirable, thus the whole local order should be left untouched until a future, final settlement. Supporters of the second approach were not adverse to the preservation of Ukrainian institutions, schools and periodicals.
The radical approach, which dominated only during the first occupation, had supporters mostly among rightist, nationalist circles; the pragmatic approach was supported by some liberals (not all of them, because there were liberals who were nationalists at the same time: Peter Struve, for example), but also among some non-liberals (General Brusilov). Both solutions had their supporters and sympathizers among the military and bureaucracy in the Russian capital and occupied Galicia. Using archival materials, the author describes in detail the struggle between the two sides at the time of the first occupation. What type of administration should be established – military or civic? As a result of political conflict, a mixed form of administration emerged with no clear division of competence and subordination. Not surprisingly, this situation resulted in muddle, mutual competition and interference between various branches of occupation government.
Most of the book is based on unexplored archival materials, thus most of the book introduces new facts. Certain historians are still denying the fact that the Galician Russophile movement was financed by the Russian government before World War I. Bakhturina provides concrete numbers and recipients of this “charitable help.” Attempts by the “Ukrainian Piedmont” to find a compromise with the Russian empire in the first two decades of the 20th century are especially interesting. The first was in 1908, when Metropolitan Andrei wrote to Tsar Nicholas II, vainly trying to persuade him that the Uniate church was not a threat to his monarchy. The second was in 1916 when a group of Galician Ukrainian leaders appealed to the Russian Foreign Ministry with a request to not persecute the Ukrainian national movement in the case of a second occupation and to comply with their demands, which were less than the demands usually presented to Vienna. In turn, they promised to be loyal as the “territorial unification of Ukraine” was their ultimate goal. The author provides not only new facts, but also a new general evaluation of the Russian occupation of Eastern Galicia. If most contemporary scholars treated Russian policies and its system of occupation administration as a chain of mistakes following a completely misguided concept, then the author claims that nothing especially repressive or horrible actually happened. Bakhturina provides a very sober, rarely emotional, account of the activities of the Russian occupation administration, which of course creates the image of objectivity. Yet an important question remains: if the Russian occupation was not so oppressive and forcible conversions to Orthodoxy were rare, as the author argues, then why did the Russian cadet Pavel Miliukov call the first a “European scandal” in a session of the State Duma and why was the Bishop of Krasnoyarsk, Nikon, so indignant by the character of the second that he felt himself obliged to publicly protest against forced conversions in the pages of Birzhevye vedomosti in June 1915. Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich complained of forcible conversion from another point of view: so many trains were given to the transportation of Orthodox priests from Russia to Galicia that they interrupted the delivery of ammunition. One Russian scholar who later studied the same archival collections as Bakhturina arrived at the conclusion that some of them provide “devastating” material for a critique of Russian conduct in Eastern Galicia in 1914-1915.^[4]
Bakhturina disclaims the “strictly negative appraisals” of the contemporaries and periodicals because they are not “confirmed by numerous sources”. (P. 228) Bakhturina refuses to recognize as adequate and objective the Russian sources which contradict her view because, in her opinion, the criticism contained in the sources is mostly directed at the occupation administration’s internal political struggles and interdepartmental competition.
There are other elements of the book which indicate that the author has taken an uncritical attitude to the sources. Bakhturina often mechanically adopts their terminology, which I would call “historically incorrect.” Bakhturina’s description of the prewar Galician history and history of the Uniate church are based exclusively on the sources with a single orientation – publicist (however, the author labels them as “historical”) works of the Galician Russophiles and Russian authors of the nationalist or imperial perspective of the second half of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. With her account based on publications of this kind, she begins to mechanically call Galician Ruthenians as “Galician Russians” (for example, Pp. 44-45) and Ukraine as southwestern Russian lands or western Russian lands (P. 114). She labels the forcible liquidation of the Greek Catholic Church in the Russian empire by Nicholas I in 1839 as a “reunification” with Orthodoxy, adopting the terminology and attitude of the works published in the 1860-80s in Russia, which she draws on to describe the prewar history of the Uniate church. These works probably are not the best choice for studying and understanding a history of Ukraine and are certainly outdated.
Bakhturina does provide some references to Ukrainian literature and mentions one of Ivan Franko’s articles (1906), asserting that he considered the local Eastern Slav population of Galicia as Russians forcibly detached from the motherland (P. 10), which is totally contradictory to the actual content of the article. But a more interesting case is her reference to the English-language literature. They carry largely a decorative character. She devotes a whole paragraph to the analysis how Paul Magocsi treats the history of Galicia in his book Subcarpathian Rus’ (1978) , without noting that this book has nothing to do with the history of Galicia (P. 14).^[5]
The main shortcoming of the book stems from its unbalanced treatment of the problems being examined. Bakhturina has a problem defining the primary and secondary questions in Galicia regarding the activities of the local and central authorities. To her, the problem of timber or the Drohobych oil refinery was evidently more important for the occupation authorities than the Ukrainian or the Jewish question.
In general, the book does not provide the consecutive account on how the Ukrainian problem in Eastern Galicia was treated by Russian local and central authorities, by liberals and nationalists. These problems do not appear in the book because these attitudes were not always clearly defined in the official documents of the time.
Finally, the author failed to consult Ukrainian archives, without which a comprehensive history of the “politics of the Russian empire in Eastern Galicia during World War I” is impossible. There are numerous collections on the topic in the Central State Historical Archive in Kyiv^[6] and Lviv,^[7] and some very interesting materials in the Archive of the Institute of Manuscripts of the National Library of Ukraine (collections of Semen Ansky, Dmitro Doroshenko and Yulian Yavorskii).^[8]
To conclude, Alexandra Bakhturina’s book is the first monograph concerning one of the important periods of Ukrainian-Russian relations and, as such, it has solidly secured itself an important place in the historiography of the problem. However, the judgment of the book – whether first and good or first and poor – will be defined by the works of other scholars on the topic, which, hopefully, will appear.