Editorial Kritika & Kontext
The monothematic issue of the journal Kritika & Kontext (No. 62), published on its 30th anniversary, is devoted to nations, states and minorities after the disintegration in 1918 of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy that had shaped and defined the region since 1526.
It is more than a hundred years since this pillar of Central Europe collapsed and, on its ruins, new states emerged – some old ones were restored, parts were added to existing states, while new minorities emerged in individual nation-states. Critics considered this multilingual and multinational empire a “prison of nationsâ€, while admirers saw the Habsburg Monarchy (since 1867 the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy) as a guarantee of the security and protection of its subjects. As FrantiÅ¡ek Palacký, a prominent Czech historian and politician, wrote in 1848: “if Austria did not exist, we would have to invent itâ€.
After the collapse of the four-hundred-year-old monarchy, each successor state introduced an official doctrine legitimizing the new status quo. There was simply no mood nor the necessary conditions for an objective evaluation while each new state was busy telling its own story while building its own national edifice. It seems that the time for sober reflection never came, especially after Central Europe was engulfed first by the Nazi and then – except Austria –by the Communist regimes.
Although there is an extensive scholarly literature on the Habsburg Monarchy as well as the period after its disintegration, the general account of that era has been shaped through textbooks and official legitimizing narratives within the individual successor states. It has been further skewed by the evolving ideological outlook in the countries that formerly comprised the Monarchy. This issue of K&K thus does not set out to enter academic debate, but rather to offer reflections by individuals, most of them not historians, who grew up in Central Europe and experienced the evolving discourse and perception of that major event of early 20th century, one that has shaped the fate of the region to the present day.
Co-editor, Slovak historian DuÅ¡an KovÃ¡Ä and I have approached dozens of intellectuals, historians and artists, inviting them to reflect on the status of their nations, nationalities or minorities after 1918. Specifically, we asked them to pose themselves this equivocal, open-ended question: “After the break-up of Habsburg Monarchy in 1918, what did we gain, what did we lose?â€
The following reply is by Mykola Riabchuk from Lviv – a city that was part of the Monarchy, then of Poland and the Soviet Union, and now of defiant Ukraine.
Samuel Abrahám, editor and publisher of Kritika & Kontext
1.
In the early days of October 2008, the West Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi celebrated a remarkable jubilee – its 600th birthday or, rather, the 600th anniversary of the first written reference to the place in a historical document. The timing was appropriate since the city and the entire region had suffered from heavy flooding the previous July, and some of the government money reserved for the celebrations proved helpful in the city's subsequent recovery and repair of the damage.
The festivities were boisterous: both the president and speaker of parliament headed a pilgrimage of dozens of MPs and several ministers, local mayors and foreign ambassadors, delegations from twin cities and, notably, journalists and popstars. Thousands of citizens came to the city's stadium under heavy rain to watch a concert by the still-popular (in Ukraine) Toto Cutugno; others attended the opening of a monument bearing the legend “To my native city†in eight different languages (a reference to the city's historical multiculturalism); while the smartest denizens moved on to the central square to indulge in a piece of a special 300-kilogram jubilee cake.
Perhaps the only event that was not covered properly and did not attract mass attendance was a modest ceremony to mark the placing of the founding stone for a monument to the former ruler of the city of Chernivtsi, its wider region and of the entire Habsburg Empire: Franz Joseph I. The true significance of that moment came to the fore a year later once the monument had been built and was officially opened in the presence of its Ukrainian initiators, the city's mayor, the head of Ukraine's parliament – himself a native of Chernivtsi – Arseny Yatseniuk (who sponsored the project), the Austrian ambassador, a Carinthian delegation and, last but not least, the grandson of the last Austrian emperor, Karl Habsburg-Lothringen.
In his inauguration speech, Yatseniuk framed the event as a restoration of historical justice – referring to a previous monument to Franz Joseph erected in Chernivtsi in 1899 to celebrate 50 years of his accession to the throne, but dismantled in 1918 by the then-new Romanian authorities. However, the restoration of historical justice that Yatseniuk lauded had a broader meaning. “Ukraine and the Bukovina regionâ€, he said, “were part of the [Habsburg] empire, and it was during the existence of this empire that a very serious development took place here. Chernivtsi began to develop as a national cultural centre – starting with the opening of the university [in 1875] and ending with four Ukrainian-language schools, Ukrainian newspapers and, in general, an economic, social, and political movement.†It was at this time, Yatseniuk noted, that the Lviv–Chernivtsi railway was constructed, the electrical power station built, the city's trams launched, water supply and sewage systems developed, the city theatre and cathedral erected, and that this formerly backward province of the Ottomans and their Moldovan vassals entered, slowly but steadily, the modern age.
This paean to Habsburg rule largely reflected the positive perception of the Austrian imperial legacy in both Chernivtsi and western Ukraine in general: slightly idealized, but also mildly ironical, even tongue in cheek – a good-natured father-figure, too remote and too busy to provide any help, but for the same reason also basically harmless. All the criticism of this rule notwithstanding, for Ukrainians who had never had a state of their own, it was really the best government they ever had: suffice to compare it with every other government that had ruled Ukraine throughout its history.
2.
The gentle, sometimes nostalgic image of the Habsburg empire persisted in all of western Ukraine that experienced Habsburg rule, except for the westernmost region of Transcarpathia, which was administered from Budapest by an increasingly chauvinistic and repressive Hungarian kingdom. There is no dearth of “imperial†symbols in the city of Lviv – either on the labels of beer and other products, or on the menus and shields of the city's restaurants – though the general attitude toward the Habsburg past is more restrained and ambivalent than in Chernivtsi. The call to erect a monument to the late emperor does not evoke much enthusiasm here, either from citizens or local businesspeople, nor does the well-known historical backwardness of the province (proverbially referred to as “bieda galicyjska†– “Galician povertyâ€) give way here to an image of a cultural paradise where literature and philosophy were discussed “with ardourâ€, or a city filled with disciples of “philosophers, political thinkers, poets, artists, composers or mysticsâ€, where people read “in the streets, in parks, in forests, and by the shores of the Prutâ€, as the Chernivtsi-born writer Rose Ausländer (1901–1988) recollected her native city in exile.
There is quite a dose of postmodernist irony in the romantic descriptions of both Lemberg (Lviv) and Czernowitz (Chernivtsi) by contemporary authors:
Located halfway between Kyiv and Bucharest, Krakow and Odessa, Chernivtsi was the secret capital of Europe, where the sidewalks were swept with bouquets of roses and there were more bookstores than bakeries, dogs bore the names of Olympian gods and hens scratched verses by Hölderlin in the sand.
And:
The imaginary city of Lviv lay amid picturesque green hills, completely preserving the architecture and structure of the city, probably from the Middle Ages. From the open windows, harpsichord music or at least good symphonic rock rang out non-stop, and girls with long hair and wreaths on their heads were waiting for me in the grass near the fountains. In the imaginary Lviv, they spoke only Ukrainian, except for the old witches and sorceresses who allowed themselves some Latin or Greek. Also, everyone there knew Antonych's poems by heart, and wandering minstrels gave concerts in the open air every evening. Under the city there was an extensive system of passages and rooms; inexhaustible reserves of wine, gold, fabrics and old prints were stored there. In general, it was a city of endless mystery…
The real Lviv and the true Galicia were soberly pictured and severely deconstructed throughout the past two centuries by Ukrainian authors, including Yuriy Andrukhovych, whose mock panegyric to “imaginary Lviv†is quoted above. But the strongest criticism of Habsburgian Lviv and Galicia came from German, Jewish and, to a certain degree, Polish authors, who had less sentiment and leniency toward the region's vices and the policies of its Viennese rulers. In István Szabó's great film “Colonel Redl†(1985) two episodes say more about Habsburg Galicia and the plight of the Ukrainians (Ruthenians) there than volumes of panegyrics. In the first, the interlocutors describe the easternmost region of the empire, where the eponymous colonel is assigned to serve at the borderland outpost, as a wild, semi-oriental land of Ruthenians, Poles, Jews, smugglers and Russian agents (all of them treated as broadly equivalent).
In the second, more significant episode, the Archduke discusses with his aids the details of a “special operation†– the false-flag disclosure of an alleged Russian spy at the very top of the imperial establishment with the stated goal of outraging public opinion, to shake the lethargic society and invigorate patriotic feelings in the declining empire. They list, one by one, the members of different nationalities of the multiethnic state, looking for the most suitable scapegoat, and conclude that neither Germans, nor Jews (after the Dreyfus affair), nor Hungarians, nor Croats, nor Czechs, nor Poles can be touched for various reasons. Colonel Redl, a Ruthenian, appears the only suitable candidate because his ethnicity appears “almost-Russian†and Russia claims Ruthenians as kin – but also, and most importantly, because nobody on earth cares about this God-forsaken tribe.
Szabó's film – or, actually, John Osborne's play made into a movie – differs substantially from the real events. But, as often happens, artistic intuition is more perspicacious in revealing historical truth than a straight documentary. With the Russian and Habsburg empires collapsing by the end of the Great War, both Ruthenians in western Ukraine and Ukrainians in the larger part of the country were sacrificed by the victorious allies to new masters – the Poles in one case and the Bolsheviks in the other. Neither the Ukrainian National Republic, proclaimed in January 1918 in Kyiv, nor the West Ukrainian National Republic, proclaimed in November 1918 in Lviv, got any external support or recognition from the Entente, and ultimately fell to much stronger and better-equipped rivals.
Their failure was not the Habsburgs' fault. Rather, it was the fault of Entente leaders who declined to apply Woodrow Wilson's principles of national self-determination to 30-million-plus Ukrainians. Ukraine was treated as a non-entity, “not even a nationâ€, as a notorious Russian president would put it 90 years later, paving the way for the genocidal war that he continues to wage against Ukraine's very existence.
3.
Ukrainians' mixed feelings about the Habsburgs are not related to World War I, when they got a chance to create their own army under the auspices of the emperor – the Legion of Sich Riflemen that would eventually become the most effective Ukrainian military unit during the unsuccessful 1918–1921 war of national liberation against both Poles and Russians. Ukrainian grievances relate to an earlier period, when the Habsburgs privileged Poles, in 1869 giving them broad autonomy in Galicia, in particular in its eastern, predominantly Ukrainian part, thus further marginalizing Ukrainians politically, socially, culturally and economically.
There was “nothing personal†in this privileging, just business. The Habsburgs did not rule the empire as a nation-state, and did not try to Germanize their subjects, having neither the demographic capacity for such a project nor the proper nationalistic zeal. It was still a traditional dynastic empire that tried to accommodate different ethnic groups on its territory, giving them native schools and even publishing military statutes in a dozen “minority languages†(as we would call them today), but not thinking in national categories or ascribing to them any peculiar symbolism. Their policies were pragmatic, fully in line with the Enlightenment notion of a well-managed empire.
In Galicia, they outsourced power to the Poles as a stronger, better-off and more educated group; in Bukovina, they bet on the Romanians who dominated the region as landlords and filled the ranks of local bureaucracy. The only difference was that the huge Jewish minority in Bukovina opted for gradual Germanization, thereby supporting the shaky balance between local Romanians and Ukrainians, and placing some constraints on the Romanianization of the province. In Galicia, Jews opted for gradual Polonization (the “party of Mickiewicz†had won over the “party of Schillerâ€, as historians semi-jokingly described the shift) and thereby strengthened Polish cultural dominance over the province, adding to Poles' already established pre-eminence in politics and the economy.
Ukrainians (Ruthenians) had good reason to feel marginalized in the local society and underrepresented in all institutions. This generated resentment directed not so much against Austrians in remote Vienna (who occasionally played the role of good cop in Polish-Ukrainian quarrels – much to the indignation of Poles), but against local Poles (and Jews, who were often seen as Polish proxies), and set ticking a dangerous time-bomb that exploded in 1918–1919 in the Polish-Ukrainian War, and led to further repercussions in the 1930s and, especially, the 1940s.
On 1 November 1918, at the very end of World War I, Ukrainians summoned the National Council in Lviv and proclaimed the West Ukrainian People's Republic (WUNR). This tried to pursue the most legitimate path possible: the Council consisted of all Ukrainian representatives from both houses of the Austrian parliament and from the provincial diets in Galicia and Bukovina. The equal rights of all citizens regardless of their ethnicity or religion or social status were confirmed and all civil servants of the Habsburg empire were invited to stay and continue working in their positions. Unlike their revolutionary, left-leaning brethren in Kyiv, West Ukrainians were comparatively conservative, legalistic, and “Habsburgianâ€. Their primary principle was “noli nocere†– do no harm through excessive haste or radicalism. They clearly favoured the old regime – its laws, cadres and institutions – as a guarantee of a smooth transition to the new independent state.
They encountered, however, hostility from Poles, who were not eager to accept supremacy by, or equality with, Ukrainians, whom they broadly considered to be not just a lower class but also a lower race. This was a typical attitude among those imperial minorities who perceived any loss of traditional privilege as discrimination against them – either in traditional colonies or, later, in the former “republics†of the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia. This hostility turned into sabotage and armed rebellion, supported eventually by ethnic kin who arrived en masse from the ethnic mainland. Even though Ukrainians in Galicia made up a clear majority of the population, they were heavily underrepresented in big cities, in particular Lviv, where they constituted only 20% of the population versus 50% of Poles and 30% of Jews (who took a mostly pro-Polish or neutral position in this rivalry). Demographic preponderance and military support from the allies gave the Poles a huge advantage and ultimately brought them victory over the WUNR and the incorporation of the disputed West Ukrainian lands into the newly established (or re-established, as they contend) Polish republic.
West Ukrainians never accepted the legitimacy of this move, even though it was ultimately approved by the Entente powers. The Ukrainians' primary argument was that World War I created a new geopolitical reality in which Woodrow Wilson's liberal principles, in particular nations' rights to self-determination, should have priority over some semi-mythical “re-establishment†of premodern political entities that had in fact disappeared centuries ago. In the search for a compromise between different principles and arguments, the Highest Council of the Paris Peace Conference decided on 21 November 1919 to grant Eastern Galicia to Poland for a period of 25 years, after which a plebiscite was to be held there. In the meantime, it obliged the Polish government to give territorial autonomy to the region – something that was never ratified nor, of course, ever implemented.
On the contrary, the Polish government launched an increasingly discriminatory and oppressive policy vis-Ã -vis ethnic and religious minorities (which made up one-third of its population), creating a de facto apartheid regime and targeting Ukrainians in particular as the most numerous, restive and resistant group. In 1929, radicals created the clandestine Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which engaged in terrorist acts against Polish officials and the Polish state, framed as a national liberation struggle against the illegal occupation and colonization of Western Ukraine.
The Polish government responded with its own state-run terror, which was much more powerful and effective: a large-scale “pacification†of Ukrainian villages with the involvement of the armed forces; the destruction of Ukrainian churches and cultural and educational institutions; and the persecution and violent subjugation of activists and others. These hostilities culminated in 1943 in the Nazi-occupied region of Volhynia, where the newly created Ukrainian Partisan Army (UPA) carried out the ethnic cleansing of Polish settlers, resulting in a death toll of around 80,000 and provoking “retaliatory actions†(or “preventive retaliatory actionsâ€) by Polish armed underground groups that took the lives of about 30,000 Ukrainian villagers. These tragic developments still poison Polish-Ukrainian relations, since both sides tend to deny their own responsibility while emphasizing and essentializing the responsibility of their opponents.
4.
This story epitomizes the grim triumph of ethnic nationalism, which gradually eroded the multinational and largely cosmopolitan Habsburg empire, ultimately bringing it to an end in the collective European chaos of World War I. The collateral victims of those events were numerous and the damage was long-lasting. One may speculate, as senior British diplomat Robert Cooper does, that had it not been for the catastrophe of war, the Habsburg Monarchy “would have continued to develop in its haphazard way, no doubt giving more autonomy to those who wanted it but still providing the smaller states with things that mattered a lot to them. These also included roads, railways, laws, police to enforce them, courts, parliaments, education and a centralized bureaucracy to manage it all. The Habsburg Monarchy liberated its serfs some twenty years before Russia and America, and introduced universal male suffrage early in the twentieth centuryâ€.
All these, of course, occurred within the global process of modernization and would have happened sooner or later, here and there, under any other government. But what was unique about Habsburg rule, Robert Cooper avers, “was that it enabled the small nationalities to survive, keep their culture, some level of autonomy, and even to thrive with itâ€.
Ukrainians understand, probably better than anyone else, the uniqueness of the Habsburgian project: they entered the 19th century (the “Age of Nationalismâ€, as Eric Hobsbawm defined it) as parts of two different empires – the Russian, which had owned the major part of Ukraine since the 17th and 18th centuries, and the Habsburg, which had controlled only its small, western part, since the partition of Poland in 1772. The difference between the development of the two parts was striking. Western Ukraine, under the Habsburgs, gradually passed through all three stages of nation building (i.e. national identity construction), as described by Miroslav Hroch in his study of stateless nations in nineteenth-century Europe. Dnieper Ukraine, however, under much more oppressive Russian rule, managed to pass only the first stage – the Romantic discovery of the nation's cultural riches and historical glories – and remained stuck at the second stage: the induction of national self-awareness into the peasant masses by means of culture and education. It never reached the third stage of political agitation and mobilization under the slogans of national independence or autonomy. By the end of the 19th century, western Ukrainians had developed a fully-fledged civil society – the whole plethora of civic organizations that indicated the full transformation of local peasants (Ruthenians) into self-aware Ukrainians.
The more Ukrainians became acquainted with other regimes – either Russian, Polish, German or Soviet, the more they had reasons to appreciate Habsburg rule, despite all its flaws, deficiencies and injustices. Their blind and (until recently) unrequited love for the EU may have stemmed from the vague resemblance that they intuitively felt between the Union and the Habsburg Empire. As Robert Cooper puts it:
Above all, both the Habsburg Monarchy and the EU have provided a home for the small nations of Europe who would have difficulty surviving alone: in the nineteenth century, their need was to avoid being at the mercy of the less liberal German and Russian Empires. In the twentieth, belonging to a larger framework has brought both political and economic security.
This is the crux of the matter: the existential anxiety that all Central East European nations feel vis-à -vis their powerful and not-so-gentle and peaceful neighbours (as Milan Kundera observed) makes natural allies and loyal subjects of imperial liberal masters and credible protectors – either 19th-century Vienna or 21st-century Brussels. Ukrainians feel that anxiety today  better than anybody else, and praise the seemingly obsolete Habsburgs not merely as proof of their European past but also as a symbol of their European – aka EU – future.
