Galician Villagers and the Ukrainian National Movement in the Nineteenth Century

The conception of this book can be located and dated with preCISIOn. It was conceived in the library of the University of Lviv in February 1976. At that time I was researching my doctoral thesis on the socialist movements in Galicia, and needed to consult a newspaper for the Ukrainian peasantry entitled Batkivshchyna. I noticed immediately that there were two types of article appearing in the paper. There were the earnest, lucid, somewhat dull and paternalistic articles contributed by the editor and other highly educated people in the city, explaining the world to the peasants and exhorting them to vote correctly, establish reading clubs and cooperative stores and acquire an education. And then there were the other articles, enlivened by exaggeration, dialect-laden and juicy language and a rustic humour. These talked of a different world, inhabited by hard-pressed church cantors, tyrannical village mayors, good and bad priests, grasping Jewish tavern-keepers, righteous country school teachers and drunk and sober, ignorant and educated, opportunistic and self-sacrificing peasants. The setting and origin of these articles were the Ukrainian villages of Galicia. The authors were in large part peasants, but also village notables ranging from the lowly cantor to the pastor. They wrote about the progress of the national movement and the conflicts it engendered in particular villages. They boasted, lamented, praised, slandered and described.The articles fascinated me. ordered almost all the issues of Batkivshchyna in the university library and scanned the items of correspondence from the countryside. I began to see certain patterns emerging and decided then that I would return to this source in the future to study the grass-roots national movement. The return resulted in the present study.The present study also represents part of a larger project conceived in the course of my doctoral research and may be regarded as another installment in a series of works interpreting the rise of social and national consciousness in Austrian Galicia from the perspective of social history. The earlier installments are the doctoral thesis, and later book, on the Polish and Ukrainian socialist movements, 1860-90, and a series of shorter studies on such topics as the priest-peasant relationship and naive tsarism. In the future Three institutions funded the research for this monograph. The Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies awarded me a grant in 1978, which allowed me to employ two research assistants, Yarema Kowalchuk and Nestor Makuch. The Institute, especially its former director, Dr. Manoly R. Lupul, also encouraged this project while I was on staff in 1978-81 and while I was Neporany Postdoctoral Fellow in 1982-4. Dr. Bohdan Krawchenko, the current director, has been most solicitous in bringing this work into print. The Institute also put at my disposal the skills of Peter Matilainen, who gave technical asssistance with computer word processing, and Lida Somchynsky, who typed part of the manuscript. Myroslav Yurkevich of the Institute read the manuscript and proposed valued improvements. The International Research and Exchanges Board (lREX) gave me emergency support in 1982 which allowed me to conduct research in Vienna. In 1983 IREX not only provided me with a generous stipend, but also arranged for my wife and me to spend six months in the Ukrainian SSR. I especially appreciated the conscientiousness and interest in my work displayed by programme officer Oksana Stanko. The Canadian Foundation for Ukrainian Studies awarded me the Neporany Postdoctoral Fellowship, which gave me twelve months to devote to research and writing in Canada, 1982-4. The Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the US, particularly Dr. Eugene Lashchyk, invited me to present a series of five lectures based on this study at its annual seminar in Hunter, New York (August 1984); the seminar led to the clarification and revision of parts of the manuscript. Students and auditors of my course "Topics in Ukrainian History" at the University of Alberta (fall 1986) critically read and discussed chapter three and other parts of this work. Anonymous reviewers for the Social Science Federation of Canada offered valuable criticisms. This first case study of how the East European peasantry was drawn into national politics focuses on the Ukrainians of Galicia (17721914). On the basis of first-hand testimony by peasants and rural notables, it demonstrates that the peasants' political consciousness was forged by serfdom, reforms initiated by the state, and the penetration of a money economy. This book breaks new ground on related issues, including the connection between class and national consciouness, the reasons for a sharp exacerbation of the peasantry's antagonism toward Jews, the new role of generational differences in the village, and the place of rural women in the national movement. Front Matter....Pages i-xxxvi Serfdom and Servitudes....Pages 1-58 The Cultural Revolution in the Village: Schools, Newspapers and Reading Clubs....Pages 59-104 Village Notables as Bearers of the National Idea: Priests, Teachers, Cantors....Pages 105-142 The Awakening Peasantry....Pages 143-215 Conclusions....Pages 217-222 Back Matter....Pages 223-358 A case study of how the East European peasantry was drawn into national politics which focuses on the Ukranians of Galicia, 1772-1914. It demonstrates that the peasants' political consciousness was forged by serfdom, and reforms initiated by the state and the penetration of a money economy. By John-paul Himka. Includes Index. Bibliography: P. 330-343.