THE UKRAINIAN QUESTION TheThe UkrainianUkrainian QuestionQuestion The Russian Empire and Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century by Alexei Miller Central European University Press Budapest New York © 2003 by Alexei Miller First published in Russian as “Ukrainskii vopros” politike vlastei i russkom obshestvennom mnenii (vtoraia polovina XIX v.) in 2000 by Aleteia Published in 2003 by Central European University Press An imprint of the Central European University Share Company Nádor utca 11, H-1051 Budapest, Hungary Tel: +36-1-327-3138 or 327-3000 Fax: +36-1-327-3183 E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.ceupress.com 400 West 59th Street, New York NY 10019, USA Tel: +1-212-547-6932 Fax: +1-212-548-4607 E-mail: [email protected] Authorized translation by Olga Poato All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the permission of the Publisher. ISBN 963 9241 60 1 Cloth Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Miller, A. I. (Alexei I.) [“Ukrainskii vopros” v politike vlastei i russkom obshchestvennom mnenii (vtoraia polovina XIX v.). English] The Ukrainian question : the Russian Empire and nationalism in the nineteenth century / Alexei Miller ; translated by Olga Poato. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN (Hardback) 1. Ukraine—History—1775-1917. 2. Nationalism—Russia—History. 3. Ukraine—Relations—Russia. 4. Russia—Relations—Ukraine. 5. Russia—Politics and government—1855-1881. I. Title: Russian Empire and nationalism in the nineteenth century. II. Title. DK508.772.M5513 2003 947.7’07—dc21 2003013589 Printed in Hungary by Akadémiai Nyomda, Martonvásár To the memory of my parents Contents Preface . ix Acknowledgements . xi Introduction . 1 Theoretical principles of nationalism studies important for this book . 2 Comparative–historical context . 11 The “All-Russian nation” project . 20 On terminology . 30 Chapter 1 Russia and Ukrainophilism in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century . 49 Chapter 2 The First Years of Alexander II’s Reign and Latent Ukrainophilism . 61 Chapter 3 The Advancement of Ukrainophilism in the 1860s. Osnova and the Russian Press . 75 Chapter 4 The Imperial Authorities and Ukrainophilism, 1862 to 1863. The Genesis of the Valuev Circular . 97 Chapter 5 The Valuev Circular in Government Structures and Public Opinion . 117 Chapter 6 Government Policy after the Valuev Circular . 127 viii CONTENTS Chapter 7 Strengthening the Russian Assimilation Potential in the Western Borderland . 139 Chapter 8 The Kiev Period of Ukrainophilism (1872–1876) . 155 Chapter 9 The Ems Edict . 179 Chapter 10 The “Execution” of the Ems Edict . 191 Chapter 11 The Consequences of the Ems Edict . 199 Chapter 12 The Subsidy for Slovo. Galician Rusyns in the Policy of St. Petersburg . 211 Chapter 13 The 1880–1881 Crisis of Power and the Attempt to Abolish the Ems Edict . 221 Conclusion . 247 Appendix 1 . 263 Appendix 2 . 267 Sources and Literature . 275 Glossary . 289 Index of Names . 291 Preface Since the early 1990s, a great number of books have been published in English that have “Russia and Ukraine” or “the Russian–Ukrainian encounter” in their titles. The majority of these books are devoted to current political issues, but a fair share of the publications is about his- tory. They invariably note that a special role in imperial policy toward Ukraine was played by the Valuev Circular of 1863 and the Ems Edict of 1876, whereby the tsarist government imposed a host of prohibi- tions on the publication and circulation of books and other printed materials in the Ukrainian language. Up to the present day, however, the circumstances under which these documents were adopted and the reasons why they remained in force longer than any other prohibitive measures of their kind—namely, until the revolution of 1905—have been a matter of more or less educated guesswork. This book provides a response to these questions. Using archival documents, it recon- structs in minute detail, sometimes on a day-by-day basis, the process of the adoption of administrative decisions that eventually resulted in these prohibitions. This reconstruction is of interest not only to histo- rians of Russian–Ukrainian relations, but also to those who are study- ing more generally the mechanisms of imperial government and nation- ality policies in the late imperial period. The book traces in detail the public polemic over the “Ukrainian question”—that is, it provides important material for those interested in the way public opinion influenced bureaucratic decision making in the Romanov empire. The book also offers a new perspective on one of the central questions of late imperial history, that of the correlation between the empire and the nation in Russian public thought. The book shows why the “Ukrainian and Belorussian questions” occupied a special place in Russian nationalist thought, and why this resulted x PREFACE in special conditions for the development of Ukrainian nationalism in the Russian Empire. This is a historical study, but, to the extent to which it touches on the history of ideas and the imagined geography of nation and national territory, it will also be useful for an understanding of con- temporary problems, since many of the ideas and images of the nine- teenth century have survived, in a modified form, to the present day in Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian and Polish political thought. Acknowledgements I would like above all to thank Professor Andreas Kappeler of Vienna University and Professor Alfred J. Rieber of Central European Univer- sity—not only did they provide invaluable organizational assistance, but were the first attentive and critical readers of the manuscript, thereby substantially contributing to its improvement. It is understood of course that they are not responsible in any way for the errors that may persist despite their efforts. A great number of people have helped me in the course of this project, both in collecting material and by offering valuable advice and criticism in discussing individual chapters. I would like to men- tion with gratitude Iurii Pivovarov, Sergei Volkov, Ostap Sereda,Yaroslav Hrytsak, Iurii Shevtsov, Roman Solchanik, Viktor Dudko, Aleksandr Samarin, Oleg Ken, Ricarda Vulpius, Benjamin Schenk, Philipp Ther and to apologize to all others whom I have not mentioned. The staff of the St. Petersburg and Moscow archives in which I had to work deserves a special commendation—all of them were very attentive to my needs. Fine conditions for the work on the book were provided thanks to the financial and organizational support of The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation whose grantee I was in 1998–99. The Collegium Budapest provided me with equally good oppor- tunities to prepare the English edition. I would like to thank for their help Sergei Dobrynin and Tatiana Trokhina, and, of course, Olga Poato who did the English translation of this text. My very special gratitude is to Tatiana, my wife, for her patience and sacrifice. Introduction The only book on the policies of the Russian imperial authorities with respect to the “Ukrainian question” was written in the late 1920s by Ukrainian historian Fedor Savchenko.1 He, along with other colleagues of M. S. Grushevskii, who returned to the Soviet Union in 1924 and became chief of the Ukrainian history section of the History Division of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, did much at the time to research the subject.2 Savchenko’s book was, in a sense, the sum total of this work—it included a large body of documents, most published for the first time, and touched, with varying degrees of detail, on all the key episodes of that story. Reprinted in 1970 in Munich—the Kiev edi- tion had by then become a rarity—the work of Savchenko defined the concept of the subject for historians working in adjacent areas. As a matter of fact, Savchenko was thought to have “closed” the subject. It was only in the late 1980s that British historian David Sounders returned to the study of state policy with regard to the Ukrainian national movement in the early 1860s. For instance, he put forward such questions as why the authorities resorted to these particular re- pressive measures, largely unique in terms of their nationality policies, what they sought to achieve, and what they feared. The Savchenko book did not give any definitive answers to these questions. This is partially explained by the fact that Savchenko erroneously believed many of these questions to be self-evident. But there was another rea- son as well. It is not hard to detect that Savchenko was writing his book in a hurry, which considerably affected both its analytical component and the clarity of the arrangement of his material. Savchenko had serious reasons for such haste in the late 1920s—the Soviet policy of “Ukrainization” was coming to an end, and he correctly believed that in the near future not only the publication of such a book would be- come impossible, but he himself might become a victim of the terror. 2 THE UKRAINIAN QUESTION This is exactly what happened: in 1934, Savchenko, like almost all the other colleagues of Grushevskii, was arrested, sent to the Solovki camp, and executed along with many other Ukrainian intellectuals in 1937. But Sounders, too, had to limit himself to hypothesizing. The problem was that he, like Savchenko, worked only with a part of the documents, which were divided between the Moscow and St. Peters- burg archives. Thus, the first task of the present study has been to bring together the entire body of relevant sources and to reconstruct as com- pletely as possible the process of decision making on the “Ukrainian question.” 3 In addition, I have tried to follow the polemic around this question in the most popular and influential publications, the polemic which, contrary to the claims of some researchers,4 remained very lively until the early 1880s.