Mykhailo Drahomanov: Anarchist echoes from Ukraine’s past

Olenin had entered into the life of the Cossack village so fully that his past seemed quite foreign to him. As to the future, especially a future outside the world in which he was now living, it did not interest him at all. When he received letters from home, from relatives and friends, he was offended by the evident distress with which they regarded him as a lost man, while he in his village considered those as lost who did not live as he was living. He felt sure he would never repent of having broken away from his former surroundings and of having settled down in this village to such a solitary and original life. When out on expeditions, and when quartered at one of the forts, he felt happy too; but it was here, from under Daddy Eroshka’s wing, from the forest and from his hut at the end of the village, and especially when he thought of Maryanka and Lukashka, that he seemed to see the falseness of his former life. That falseness used to rouse his indignation even before, but now it seemed inexpressibly vile and ridiculous. Here he felt freer and freer every day and more and more of a man. The Caucasus now appeared entirely different to what his imagination had painted it. He had found nothing at all like his dreams, nor like the descriptions of the Caucasus he had heard and read. ‘There are none of all those chestnut steeds, precipices, Amalet Beks, heroes or villains,’ thought he. ‘The people live as nature lives: they die, are born, unite, and more are born—they fight, eat and drink, rejoice and die, without any restrictions but those that nature imposes on sun and grass, on animal and tree. They have no other laws.’ Therefore these people, compared to himself, appeared to him beautiful, strong, and free, and the sight of them made him feel ashamed and sorry for himself.

Leo Tolstoy, The Cossacks

To read Mykhailo Drahomanov’s detailed articles and essays from the latter half of the 19^th century on the history of Ukraine, Russia, Germany, Poland, on anarchist-federalist pan-Slavism and the place of nationalism in broader radical democratic politics, the failures of “western” social-democrats before the political violence of “eastern” Europe, and at this time when Russia is invading Ukraine yet again, is of great value. This is not of course because history repeats itself, or because we would agree with everything that he wrote today, but because the depth and sensitivity of his understanding provides what the French Annales historians called la longue durée, a perspective that helps to understand the present events in ways otherwise impossible; especially when the media is saturated with the words of suddenly “humanitarian” politicians and “geopolitical experts”.

If “one of the most treasured aspects of the political culture of Ukraine, historically – the legacy of the Cossack hetmanate of the 17th century – was anarchism” (The Guardian), it is not amiss to endeavour to understand the sources and vicissitudes of this political culture beyond the usual, though important, references to the Makhnovschina.

Mykhailo Drahomanov (1841-1895) was an ethnographer, geographer, political theorist, journalist, political activist and anarchist. What we share below is a short selection of his writings from the larger collection posted by The Anarchist Library and originally published in English, in The Annals of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the U.S., Vol. II, Spring, 1952, No. 1 (3).

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A Geographic and Historical Survey of Eastern Europe

This is the second chapter of Drahomanov’s most extensive political writing, “Historical Poland and Great Russian Democracy.” (First published in Volnoye Slovo in 1881, it was republished as a book in 1882.) In the original, the title of this chapter is “Geographic and Ethnographic Relations in Eastern Europe and Polish and Great Russian Centralism.” Our translation was made from the reprint which appears in the first volume of Collected Political Works (Paris, 1905). There are no cuts. [ed.]

The history of each nation is conditioned by its geography. Fortunate are those nations which chance to occupy favourable lands, clearly-defined ones whose characteristics and possibilities are easily understood even when the population is still on a rather primitive level. But it is a misfortune for a nation to live in a country where the geography gives it a complex task, one which can be coped with only by means of a highly evolved consciousness, acute understanding, and persistence. Such rather “difficult” countries fell to the lot of almost all the Slavs, especially those who occupy the great plain of Eastern Europe extending to the lower Elbe in the west, i.e. the Poles, Byelorussians, Ukrainians, and Great Russians. The plain like character of the country leads its inhabitants to extensive expansion. The rivers are the only unifying factors, but their tributaries are connected so that passage from one river basin to the next is easy. This is the reason why ethnic frontiers are not clear cut.

Looking at the map of the rivers, mountains, and swamps of this part of Europe, it is at once evident that it is naturally divided into regions, formed mainly by river basins: the Oder and the Vistula, the Niemen, the Western Dvina, the Dnieper with the Dniester, Lake Ladoga, and the Volga. Ten or eleven centuries ago there was a corresponding distribution of tribes here: the Poles on the Oder and the Vistula; the Lithuanians on the Niemen; the Krivichi (Byelorussians) on the upper Dnieper and the upper Dvina; the Polyany and their kinsmen (the ancestors of the Ukrainians) along the middle Dnieper and in its neighbouring regions. The Ladoga basin and the upper Oka were settled by Slavic colonists who, moving south and east and becoming mixed with the various Finno-Altaic and Turanian tribes, formed the numerous Great Russian people. The rivers also determined the routes of communication and the inter-tribal connections. These were: the Neva-Volga line from Novgorod to Bolgar (now the Petersburg-Astrakhan line); the Dvina-Dnieper and the Niemen-Dnieper lines (now Riga or Königsberg to Kiev); and the lines from the Oder and the Vistula to the Dnieper and the Dniester (now running from Stettin and Danzig through Warsaw, Krakow, and Lviv to Odessa, with a branch through Brest and Pinsk to Kiev and a continuation to Galatz). The finding of Persian, Arab, Greek, Frankish, and Anglo-Saxon coins in these regions has helped us trace the divisions and connections among these basins.

But in almost each of these river basins and along each of these communication lines, nature had placed some source of difficulty. For instance from the bend of the Niemen, near Grodno, to Torun on the Vistula and along the Netze River, there is a series of virtually impassable marshes and small lakes which separated the Poles on the Polish plain from their Pomeranian kin. Therefore a political union between them was never durable. Both by land and sea the Pomeranians were in closer touch with the west than with their relations in the south. Later, they were invaded by the Germans from the west and converted into “German Pomeranians,” thus cutting the Poles off from the Baltic Sea between the Oder and the Vistula. To the east of the Vistula there are similar marshes which completely blocked Polish colonization toward the sea and allowed the colonization of the country beyond the swamps by the Lithuanians who lived along the Niemen and by the Lithuanian tribe of Prussians whom the first Polish princes and kings tried in vain to conquer. The desire to crush the Lithuanians, reinforced by militant Catholicism, induced these Polish princes to seek the aid of the Teutonic knights, who planted in the Lithuanian soil of Prussia the seed of a State which was in time to crush Poland itself. Expanding further along the sea, the Germans also seized Riga at the mouth of the Dvina, a river which starts in Byelorussian territory, later crosses the line of swamps and small lakes, and flows into the territory of the Latvians (a people of the Lithuanian group). The rivalry between the Byelorussians of Polotsk and the Latvians, between the Latvians and the Estonians, and between the Poles and the Lithuanians facilitated the strengthening of the Germans who had occupied the entire southern coast of the Baltic Sea and seized the exit points of the great inter-basin communication lines: Danzig,Königsberg, and Riga. Relations on the Baltic coast were thus complicated to the clear disadvantage of the Poles, Lithuanians, and Byelorussians. A satisfactory solution was beyond their creative power.

A difficult situation also arose at the southern terminals of these lines, along the coast of the Black Sea. Nomads were attracted from the east over the steppes, and several times cut off Ukrainian colonization from the Black Sea. From time to time they almost succeeded in rendering the Dnieper insignificant as a great international route of communication, scarcely leaving open the secondary line from Danzig to Warsaw, Halych, Lviv, and Galatz. The Poles attempted to take the control of this route from the Ukrainians, who had been weakened by the influx of nomads.

Thus the geographic and historic conditions of the countries between the Baltic and the Black Seas were such that the peoples between them, being pushed back from the sea coasts, were shoved against one another. Under German pressure from the west the Poles pushed toward Ukrainian Galicia as early as the 10^th and 11^th centuries; the Ukrainian Volhynians, who had been driven from the steppes of the Black Sea in the 12^th and 13^th centuries, waged a war of annihilation against the Yatvyags (a Lithuanian tribe who lived along the Niemen) and the Lithuanians, who were also pressed by the Poles. This mutual pressure of the peoples in the Dnieper-Niemen-Vistula territory proved disastrous for all of them after the Poles, in the middle of the 14^th century, finally lost Pomerania and the Oder territory to the Germans and began to seek compensation in the east.

In the meantime, the tribes on the east European plain temporarily managed to establish relations among themselves which were fairly advantageous for them and for civilization in general. From the 13^th century on, close federative ties were established between the Niemen Lithuanians and the Dvina-Dnieper Byelorussians; in the 14^th century the Pripet-Dnieper and the Desna Ukrainians entered this union. This federation under the descendants of the Gedimin succeeded in driving the Tatars from the Bug-Dnieper province of Podolya and extended Slavic colonization to the Black Sea itself, to the land of the old Ukrainian tribes of the Tivertsi and Ulychi. Here, at the beginning of the 15^th century, Khadzhibey (the present port of Odessa) was already sending grain to Byzantium. At that time the Italian colonies on the Black Sea were flourishing and the Hanseatic League cities, which were at the height of their power, had close relations with the Byelorussian cities via Riga.

The extensive territory under the Gedimin dynasty, which had a significant development of free city life and sufficiently natural borders (the basins of the Niemen, Dvina, and Dnieper), was a model of a civilized Byelorussian-Ukrainian State. It supported the freer and more cultured elements in the Great Russian cities of Ryazan, Tver, and Novgorod, which were threatened by Moscow, which even the Great Russian scholar Professor Buslayev calls a half-savage, half-Tatar military camp. If similar conditions had lasted for two or three centuries, the whole fate of eastern Europe would have been entirely different, and surely happier, than it was. But the equilibrium was destroyed by the Polish movement eastward and by the seizure of the Black Sea coast by the Turks. This latter had a significant influence on the final consummation of the Union of Lithuania and Poland in 1569. To this day nearly all Polish historians and politicians call this a fraternal union of three peoples, the Poles, Lithuanians, and Ruthenians. In reality the Lithuania of that time already contained three peoples, the Lithuanians properly speaking, the Byelorussians, who were incorrectly called Lithuanians, and the Ruthenians or Ukrainians. It is even more important to note that the Union of 1569 was really the dissolution of the federative Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which had been founded by the Gedimin dynasty, and the subordination of the southern, Ukrainian part to Poland, while the Grand Duchy, although preserving autonomous rights, was left with only the Lithuanian and Byelorussian territories. Ukraine-Rus (the provinces of Volhynia, Kiev, and Chernihiv) was directly annexed to Poland without any national autonomy or separate representation. The fatal political Union of 1569 was followed by the equally ill-starred Church Union of 1596.

With these Unions the Polish politicians of the time took upon themselves a task which was completely beyond Poland’s power. In the first place, having annexed such a broad territory to the Polish Crown, and having put the Ukrainian provinces under its direct control, they had to be responsible for the political needs of the territory, beginning with its defence, chiefly against Turkey. In the second place, Poland was expanding into a territory whose social structure was completely unlike its own, which contained only two classes outside the cities, the nobles and the serfs. At first, the nobility ot the Lithuanian State, especially the Ukrainian petty nobility, were satisfied with receiving the rights of the Polish nobles, which gave them the same legal status as the Polish lords. But in Ukraine there was a growing new military class, the Cossacks, who wanted their rights to be equal to those of the nobility. And after the Cossacks came the peasants, who, especially in the areas close to the steppes, were far from being as subjugated to the nobles as those in Poland. They considered themselves equally worthy of freedom. The Polish government was forced either to extend the legal rights of the nobles to the entire population of Ukraine, or else to attempt the immediate subordination of the great mass of the people to a small minority. King Stefan Bathory attempted to settle the problem by ennobling 6000 families from the mass of the Cossacks, and turning the rest into peasants who should be the serfs of the nobles. But only confusion came out of this project, which for a long time both Polish and Russian writers have called a beneficent gift of rights to the Cossacks. The old nobility did not recognize the equal rights of their new comrades; those Cossacks who had not been registered among the 6000 did not want to be turned into commoners, and the peasants still wanted to be Cossacks, that is, free and self-governing people. This is the source of the series of Cossack-Polish wars from the end of the 16^th to the middle of the 17^th century.

As a crowning blow, the religious Union was an attempt not only to Catholicise but also to Polonise the millions of Orthodox Byelorussians and Ukrainians. This project was undertaken at a time when regular school education was being established in the cities of Lviv, Vilna, Lutsk, Ostroh, Kiev, etc. The spirit of this education was influenced by the Renaissance and Reformation in Western Europe and it awakened, especially among the Orthodox burghers, a national consciousness and memories of national independence. A significant portion of the population in Lithuania and Byelorussia had become Protestant. It is evident that the political Union of Byelorussia and Ukraine with Poland could have endured only if it had been truly federal, insofar as federation was possible between aristocratic Poland, the still checkeredly feudal Lithuania with Byelorussia, and the comparatively democratic Ukraine. But the Polish politicians wanted not federation but assimilation, and thus they prepared the later downfall of both the Union and Poland itself. This policy increased Poland’s false orientation toward the east and inattention to its more natural ties with Silesia, Bohemia, and Hungary, where at this time a German element, which was to renew the attack on Poland, was taking root.

As an inevitable reaction against Poland’s impractical program of centralization in Lithuania, Byelorussia, and Ukraine, there appeared a centrifugal tendency. Dynastic and Orthodox traditions, and the need for an ally caused the centrifugal elements to turn their eyes toward Muscovy. When Poland first began to put pressure on Lithuania, the Severians wavered and then turned to Moscow. The Catholic character of Jagellonian policy, although weak at the outset, gave Ivan III of Moscow a pretext to call his war against Novgorod a crusade, since this city-republic had elected a Lithuanian prince. In the 14^th century Pskov and Novgorod had already elected Lithuanian princes several times, without, of course, arousing any fear for the integrity of the Orthodox faith. After the Church Union of Brest, Moscow appeared the natural haven for the Orthodox intelligentsia, for the Ukrainian Cossacks and peasants, and for the Byelorussian burghers. Negotiations with Moscow for the liberation of the entire Ruthenian people from the “Polish bondage” and their acceptance under the suzerainty of the tsar began long before the time of Bohdan Khmelnytsky and the Articles of Pereyaslav in 1654. The first practical step in the process of unifying Ukraine and Muscovy was taken when Ukrainian settlers moved into the uninhabited territory nominally belonging to Muscovy which lay to the east of the Polish frontier. The new Slobidska Ukraine [The present province of Kharkiv [ed.]] thus formed made Ukraine and Muscovy next-door neighbours. Then finally in Pereyaslav the Cossack Ukraine accepted the “alliance and protection of the eastern tsar.” Poland’s own clumsiness pushed this vast land into the hands of its future powerful competitor.

But now it was Moscow’s turn for clumsiness, for it was also unable to change its traditional pattern of behaviour when dealing with the new province. The Poles had tried to measure Byelorussia and Ukraine with the yardstick of their aristocratic republic and of Catholic administrative intolerance; the Muscovites began to use the yardstick of their boyar monarchy and of Orthodox ritualistic intolerance.

People who go into raptures over the “Russian unity” established in 1773–95 by the Moscow-Petersburg tsardom on the ruins of Poland, though with the loss of Galicia, should ask themselves why this unity was not created in 1654–57 when all of Ukraine was in revolt against Poland and was for Moscow, and when the Byelorussian cities, including Vilna, opened their gates to the Muscovite tsar. The reason was none other than that Moscow — was Moscow, and could not conceive of any other way of life than the Muscovite one. In the first place Muscovy, like the Russia of today, was always bloated rather than solidly built. The statements of the representatives of the southern provinces made in the Zemsky Sobor of 1642 have always been applicable. “Our ruin comes less from the Turks and Crimean Infidels than from the long drawn out procedures in dishonest Muscovite courts and offices.” Therefore, Moscow was financially incapable of solving the problems raised by unification. Moreover, the Muscovites could not bring themselves to befriend the peoples whom they had helped to liberate from the foreign rule of first Poland and then Turkey. The stupidity of the Muscovite politicians at the moment when Ukraine was asking their protection was evident in the manifesto of Tsar Aleksey Mikhailovich to the Orthodox inhabitants of Poland and Lithuania on entering their boundaries in 1654: “And you, Orthodox Christians, having been freed from the evil ones, should now spend your lives in peace and happiness; and since the Lord God has put you on the right way, demonstrate outwardly that your religion is different from that of the Poles — before our imperial arrival shave the forelocks from your heads”

Guided by this stupid ritualism, which we see again now among the Muscovite pseudo-Slavophiles, how could the Muscovites cooperate with other peoples in everyday life, let alone understand the political and cultural interests of those who were uniting with them? And indeed, hardly had the Muscovite army joined forces with the Ukrainian Cossacks, than we hear of complaints that the Muscovites were cutting off their “forelocks” and mocking them in many ways. In addition to this inadaptability we see a servile monarchical cast of mind exhibited — for instance the Moscow envoy, Kunakov, was distressed in principle, even though Russian interests were not involved, that Bohdan Khmelnytsky dared to answer the Polish king simply: “Thou speakest well, oh king!” and then “showed neither homage nor courtesy in his words nor in any other thing.” This servile devotion to the monarchy was deeply wounded when the Ukrainians, who had given their allegiance to the tsar, dared to claim that they were — “free subjects” and not “eternal subjects” of the tsar. The natural corollary of this slavish mentality was the effrontery of those privileged slaves closest to the tsar. For instance Voyevoda (Governor) Khitrovo said the following to the Cossacks about their elected officer: “Your colonel is an (unprintable words). I have been sent here by the tsar; I am higher than all others, and you (unprintable words) are all subdevils.”

The inevitable relationship of the agents of despotic governments to the countries given them to govern must also be remembered. As Voyevoda Prince Baryatinsky said: “I shall soon go back to Moscow, and after I leave, no grass will grow in Kiev.” If we keep all this in mind, we have no difficulty in understanding why “Russian unity” could not be achieved in the time of Khmelnytsky and why, only four or five years after the entrance of Ukraine “into the alliance and protection of the eastern tsar,” the Serb Krizanic found enrooted among the Ukrainians the “political heresy, that to live under the exalted Moscow tsar is bitterer than Turkish slavery or the Egyptian bondage.” This is why, even before the controversy between Moscow and Poland for the possession of the Dnieper had been settled, parties appeared there who preferred the evils of Poland which they had already experienced, or those of Moslem Turkey, to Orthodox Moscow.

Ukrainian historians do not spare their ancestors, and they criticize aristocratic ideas among the Cossack liberals and federalists from Vyhovsky to Mazepa, but, thanks to the censor, they are unable to balance the picture of the shortcomings of the anti-Moscow parties with one of the “beauties” of Moscow policy, particularly its treachery toward the Zaporozhe and the common people, who supported Moscow out of hatred for their rulers, even when these were liberal. Russian historians are delighted when Ukrainian democrats “debunk” those whom Muscovites consider as traitors. They do not think it necessary to apply any kind of logical criteria in these cases, however; for them everything that opposes the tsar and centralization is bad, and everything produced by them is good. In their opinion, therefore, only the Ukrainians, especially the unstable Cossacks, were guilty of all the blood that was shed from the time of the death of Khmelnytsky until the fall of Mazepa.

Yet another fact is not taken into consideration, although the data are given by the eulogist of Moscow, S. M. Solovyov. The Byelorussian burghers were not professional soldiers or rebels by nature, but a hard-working people — call them capitalists if you like — and not uneducated. At first, the Byelorussian cities willingly went over to Moscow. Individually they concluded agreements similar to those made by the Cossacks in the name of the whole Ukraine. For example in 1652 the inhabitants of the city of Mogilev obtained guarantees of the following privileges: freedom to govern themselves according to the Magdeburg law as before; to wear their customary clothes; not to do military service; not to be resettled elsewhere; to be exempt from the quartering of soldiers; to elect officials to supervise the receipts and expenditures of the city; to maintain schools according to the Kievan model, etc. (Solovyov, History of Russia, Vol. X, p. 321). Similar stipulations were also made by other Byelorussian cities. And what happened? After only a year the Byelorussians said that “instead of something better, they had fallen into greater bondage.” The cities began to “commit treason” one affer another, and the people of Mogilev staged a Sicilian Vespers, destroying the Muscovite garrison of seven thousand men in 1661. In 1708 Peter the Great, who had himself first said to the Mogilev mayor that “then Moscow had been bad” took revenge on the city for this by ordering his soldiers, Tatars and Kalmuks, to burn it from its four corners.

At first the Byelorussian peasants also willingly rose up against Poland. Their Polish contemporaries complained that: “The peasants are very hostile; everywhere they are surrendering to the tsar, and causing more harm than Moscow itself; we must be prepared for something like a Cossack war.” And indeed, very soon whole districts in the Mogilev province became Cossackised. But the Moscow government, which hoped to secure permanent possession of the territory, preferred dealing with unorganized serfs, who had no rights, to dealing with Cossacks. Therefore it halted the spread of the Cossack movement in Byelorussia, using old Polish laws and treaties which excluded Cossacks from this land.

So we see that the “violent and head-strong” Ukrainian Cossacks were not the only ones who could not live in harmony with Moscow, and that it was not the “instability” of the Ukrainians, but the despotism and obtuseness of Moscow which rendered the partition of Poland impossible in the 17^th century. Since at that time “partition” would have meant only the amputation of the non-Polish lands, which Poland seemed unable to govern, perhaps it would have been the salvation of the independent existence of the truly Polish territory. However, since the Muscovite politicians were unable to retain the sympathies of the populations of Lithuania, Byelorussia, and Ukraine, they had to enter into negotiations with the Poles about how to share the disputed territories, thus jointly subduing the Cossacks, who were unwilling to surrender to either Warsaw or Moscow.

Finally, in 1667, the two governments concluded a treaty whereby Moscow renounced its claims to Byelorussia and the Right Bank Ukraine in return for a free hand in the Left Bank Ukraine. The first consequence of this treaty was the yielding of the Right Bank Ukraine to the suzerainty of Turkey. This was supplemented by Russia’s ingeniously absurd treaties with Turkey and Poland, according to which half of the Right Bank Ukraine (almost all of the present-day province of Kiev and part of Podolya) was to be turned into an uninhabited buffer zone between the three powers, so that each of them could get along undisturbed with the rest of its possessions, and not be disturbed by the recalcitrant Cossacks. This partition of Ukraine was a mortal blow to its independent development, which Poland, Moscow, and Turkey each crushed in its own way. The Ukrainians subject to each power tried to pull away and of necessity turned their eyes toward one of the neighbouring States. For example, the hero of the Right Bank Ukraine, Paliy, was oriented toward Moscow, while his contemporary Mazepa, Hetman of the Left Bank, was oriented toward Poland.

War and political centralization ruined the schools and condemned the nation to ignorance. As a result both of this and of the denationalisation of the upper classes, the ranks of the intelligentsia were diminished, and more and more the integrity of the national-political ideal was lost. At the same time the peasant masses were falling under the Polish and Muscovite systems of serfdom. Up to the 19^th century, Ukrainian national consciousness lay dormant. Then it was rediscovered by a handful of poets and scholars who gained wider support only after the liberation of the peasants in Galici and Bukovina in 1848, and in the larger, Russian Ukraine in 1861.

In Byelorussia the Muscovite-Polish-Swedish wars had completely laid waste the cities and wiped out the Protestants, the most cultured element for the persecutions of Tsar Aleksey Mikhailovich completed the work begun during Tsar Ivan IV’s occupation. Thus it was easy for the Polish government, to whom this territory had been returned, to colonize these cities with Jews, and to replace the bourgeois Protestant schools and institutions with aristocratic Jesuit ones, reducing the Byelorussians to a peasant people dispersed among the forests of the countryside.

Poland, although deprived of the Left Bank Ukraine and Kiev, could still rejoice in the fact that it had gotten away cheaply from the crisis brought about by the Cossack wars. It regained the greater portion of the disputed lands, which, moreover, had been purged of the opposition by Poland’s competitor. For yet another century Poland was to rule Byelorussia and the Right Bank Ukraine without much hindrance, if one does not count the peasant and haydamak (Jacquerie) uprisings in the southeast. But, as a matter of fact, the recovery of these lands proved disastrous for Poland. The Cossack revolution had induced many Poles to regard their government’s policies critically, and perhaps would have shown them the necessity for far-reaching internal reforms. Now, however, they no longer seemed urgent, and Polish society became somnolent and allowed the oligarchy, the Jesuits, and the Jews to run Ukraine, Byelorussia and Samogitia (ethnic Lithuania), and, of course, Poland itself. The Poles were incapable of firmly repressing Ukraine or even Byelorussia, which was still more ruined. They were finally unable to prevent the seizure of these by Moscow, which chose its moment to make use of the Ukrainians’ and Byelorussians’ burning hatred of the Polish State.

Poland’s lack of an integrated national and political program in Ukraine and Byelorussia, and the mistakes in its policy, profited the Muscovite State, which became more and more aggressive. It was natural that after the annexation of Ukraine the scholars of Kiev should open the prospect ol seizing all the heritage of Saint Vladimir. Later, as another result of the annexation of Ukraine, the voices of the Balkan Christians began to reach Moscow more often, both through the Ukrainians and directly, inviting Moscow to take up the role of the destroyer of Turkey. But here also Moscow lacked a broad political and social program capable of attracting and consolidating such large and heterogeneous countries, even though they were dissatisfied with the previous order. Moscow preferred to swallow them bite by bite, and believed that hatred of the Turks was sufficient bait without providing a constructive political and social program. Instead of developing a statesmanlike and progressive policy, Moscow cherished a narrow one of military and diplomatic aggrandizement. Having somehow reinforced the Russian element on the Baltic coast, which had been weakened previously by the “wise” destruction of Novgorod by those two terrible centralizers, Ivan III and Ivan IV, and having thus reasserted itself on the bank of the Neva, Moscow turned toward Turkey and Poland. In the wars with Turkey, Moscow moved slowly. The devastation of Ukraine, resulting from the treaties of the end of the 17^th century and from the destruction of the Zaporozhian Sich in 1709, long rendered Moscow unable to base its expansion on the movement of Ukrainian colonization. However, in general, the progress in this direction was satisfactory to the Ukrainian people who, after an interruption of three hundred years, were again able to reach the Black Sea.

Poland fell an easy prize; Russia’s only problem there was the retention of as much of it as possible when forced to cede some to western competitors. But that is what diplomacy is for. As might have been expected, Moscow did not obtain the entire booty; the partition gave Poland’s former vassal, Prussia, a good slice of Slavic lands, and the queen of Hungary, whose grandson became emperor of Austria, received part of the heritage of Saint Vladimir, Galicia. But not a few provinces were “returned” from Poland to Moscow, although (a new triumph of logic!) in these it was decided to bribe the Polish nobility by the confirmation or even augmentation of the serfdom of the “reunited Orthodox population”! In any case, with these annexations an empire was created in Eastern Europe which “surpassed in size the Roman Empire at its height.” This empire was founded on the ruins of the Lithuanian-Polish federation, and was possible solely because of the failure of this federation.

It is clear that such a huge empire, founded on brutal military and diplomatic aggrandizement, could be neither free nor well-managed. When in the 16^th century, by fair means or foul, the dukes of Moscow brought under their sceptre all the Great Russian populations, they at least felt the necessity for some sort of good administration of their old and new patrimonies, and they were obliged to convene the Zemsky Sobors (National Assemblies). It was these assemblies which preserved the national independence of Great Russia during the Time of Troubles. Of course in time the Moscow tsars, like the other European sovereigns, decided to try to do without these advisers, who were always inconvenient for a regime with autocratic aspirations, since they naturally strove to control the monarchs. And in fact at the end of the 17^th century the Zemsky Sobors met less and less frequently, just as parallel assemblies were losing their importance in all the other great European States except England, where Parliament had established its power through two revolutions. But nowhere in Western Europe did the monarchs succeed in completely annihilating all trace of representative institutions. Nor would they have done so in Muscovy if the State had remained homogeneous and had not become so aggressively imperialistic. We see abortive efforts to resist in the aristocratic Boyar liberalism, which attempted to limit the power of Empress Anna Ivanovna, and in the idea of popular consultation current in merchant and Raskolnik (dissenter) circles at the end of the 17^th and beginning of the 18^th centuries.

However, the Zemsky Sobors were eliminated, and popular consultation by the government became more difficult because of three new factors: the increasing number of non-Great Russian provinces which, moreover, were on a higher cultural level than the “home” provinces; the placing of Ukrainians and Byelorussians in the bishoprics, thus decapitating the Moscovite Old Believer opposition movement; and the increasingly composite national character of the ennobled bureaucracy. The rapid expansion of the Muscovite tsardom into the Petersburg empire naturally made the State suffer more and more from a hypertrophy of the departments of war and foreign affairs, which have always been the ones most reluctant to submit to public control. Bureaucratic administration and political dictatorship became inevitable in this vast empire. At first the administration was still somewhat decentralized, adapting to the disparate situations in the newly annexed countries, or rather to the diseased conditions in each which could be exploited in the interests of political centralization. For example, Peter the Great’s administration gave preference to the aristocratic German element in the Baltic provinces over the native Estonians and Latvians, who had begun to revive under the Swedish rule. At the same time the Petersburg government exploited the animosity of the Little Russian populace against the Cossack elders, but it did this not by increasing the rights of the common people, but by imposing Great Russian officials upon them. Likewise Catherine II considered it necessary to protect the Polish aristocracy in newly annexed Byelorussia in order to combat the influence of the democratic patriotism which Kosciuszko inspired there, and to remove this tempting Byelorussian example of relative freedom from the neighboring Great Russian peasants. As a slight concession to liberal currents, a parliamentary constitution was given to Finland and Congress Poland for a time, in order to deepen the gulf between Finland and Sweden and that between Russian Poland and the Polish lands in Prussia and Austria. But this was done only to hinder the further development of autonomous institutions in Finland and to abolish them completely in the Polish kingdom shortly afterwards. Little by little, as political centralization triumphed and autonomistic currents lost their centrifugal force, the bureaucracy was able to push through a program that was resolutely centralizing, levelling, and Russifying. The German Catherine II was a conscious advocate of this policy. She instructed the procurator-general, Prince Vyazemsky: “Little Russia, Livonia, and Finland are provinces governed according to privileges which have been granted them; to revoke these all at once would hardly be proper. However, to call them foreign countries and treat them as such would be more than just an error, it would be sheer stupidity. These provinces, as well as the province of Smolensk, are to be Russified by the easiest means possible, and they must cease yearning for the forest like wolves in captivity.” In our time we see that these words are still the slogan of the Katkovs, Samarins, and Aksakovs, and the basis of a whole series of State measures of a centralizing and Russifying character.

Among these measures there were several which had a democratic tinge. Indeed, many think that a bureaucratic-centralized dictatorship is better able to promote the interests of the common people than is autonomistic liberalism, which favours the interests of aristocracy. To disprove this we have no need to refer to examples from pre-reform Russia of help given by the dictatorship to the aristocracy in the Baltic and Lithuanian provinces, in Ukraine, Crimea, the Caucasus, and in the Asiatic Southeast of Russia. The examples of Greece and Rome, of France, and of present day Russia are enough to show clearly that Caesarism, wearing a demagogic mask, combats the aristocrats only until they surrender their political independence and become the servants of the absolute power. As soon as this happens, the autocrat is ready to betray the people to the now tamed aristocracy, or to create a new imperial aristocracy of its own. We have seen how short-lived was imperial Russian “populism” in the Polish Kingdom and in the western provinces after the uprising of 1863. Moreover, it is questionable whether even these concessions would have been made without the liberal democratic movement which appeared in both Russia and Poland before 1863.

All history demonstrates that only freedom and self-government can permanently guarantee the consistent progress of democratic policy. The 19^th century produced Poles, as well as Great Russians, who wanted to apply the principles of freedom and democracy to the policies of their countries. The trouble was that they were unable to adapt either principle to the real conditions in those border lands of pre-partition Poland and present-day Russia.

To be able to apply freedom and democracy it is necessary to liberate oneself from the traditional political ideas and prejudices of both the Poles and the Great Russians and to make study the basis of policy instead of instincts, traditions, and prejudices. In this particular case it is above all the study of the peculiarities of those countries we have discussed here which is essential.

Moscow did not consider the possibility of attracting the Protestants in Lithuania and Byelorussia to their side, although as far back as the 16^th century these had made alliances with the Orthodox against Catholic policy.

…

The Lost Epoch: Ukrainians under the Muscovite Tsardom: 1654–1876

This study was intended for the sixth issue of Hromada, Drahomanov’s periodical in Geneva. The collapse of this publication prevented the article from being printed there. It is not known why Drahomanov did not publish it elsewhere, perhaps in a Galician paper. Possibly he wished to study additional sources and never found the time to do so. Possibly the reasons were tactical; Drahomanov may not have wished to alienate further the Russian revolutionaries by publishing this critical history of Russian-Ukrainian relations. In any case, “Lost Epoch” remained unfinished, and was not published during Drahomanov’s lifetime.

Our translation was made from proofs which had been set up for the sixth issue of Hromada. (We are indebted to Mr. Svitozor Drahomanov for his permission to use photostats of these.) We have omitted some of Drahomanov’s polemics against the Russian and Ukrainian historians and publicists, as well as the details of his analysis of the Articles of Pereyaslav, 1654.

The part which we have presented was to have been the introduction to the whole study. In the further chapters Drahomanov wished to investigate the social structure and the political institutions of the various lands of the Cossack Ukraine in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, and their degeneration under the pressure of Muscovite centralism. However, only the chapter on the autonomous territory of the Zaporozhian Host was ever completed.

To weep over the past and wish for its return is always useless, especially for us, the servants of the Ukrainian people. We know that what we ultimately want has never yet been achieved, and will only come about at some distant future when the human race is far wiser than it is now. On the other hand, we must look back to find out why our lot is as bitter as it is, in order to avoid repeating the mistakes of our predecessors. The Ukrainians must take a good look backward and review the two hundred and twenty years that have passed since 1654 when, under the leadership of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the Ukrainians came under the protective arm of the “Eastern Tsar of Muscovy”….

The first thing that strikes one in comparing Ukraine of today with Ukraine in the days of Khmelnytsky is that then there was a Cossack State, today there is none. Learned folk who write history, foreigners as well as some Ukrainians, usually say that this change was necessary. A Cossack way of life is not for civilized man. The Cossack State appeared when the lot of the Ruthenian people was bitter indeed, when they were enslaved by both the Tatars and the Poles. The Cossack organization served its purpose; it defended Ukraine from invaders as long as it was able, until the time when the powerful brotherly Muscovite Tsardom entrenched itself in the north. Then the Cossacks united with the Russian Empire, which took over their historic mission of protecting Ukraine, and transferred them to the Kuban, where they were still needed to wage war against the infidels. Another type of government had to be organized in Ukraine, say these learned folk, one that would suit the country in times of peace when industrial, commercial, and scholarly pursuits take precedence over warlike ones. They say that only the stubborn fighters, enamoured of chivalrous exploits, the shiftless, adventurers, or traitors goaded on by foreign agents were really against the Moscow government and its administration in Ukraine.

Discussing the “fine” way of life that was created in the steppes of the lower Dnieper by the Empress Catherine, who gave away lands to the aristocrats and to German colonists, Professor Solovyov of Moscow states that the Zaporozhian Cossacks pleaded to be allowed to retain their lands, but that to permit this would have amounted to turning “New Russia into a desert.” In other words, the Empress had no choice but to destroy the Zaporozhe by force of arms. These are the ideas our children are taught in the schools, and they retain them, unable to find out whether they are true or not, whether these mad Cossacks really were determined to turn the land into a desert. Is it true that all good things were brought by the tsars who had to exterminate these brigands, and that we really live in the happiest of conditions? …

Long ago intelligent Ukrainians ceased to weep over the old Cossack ways and the Hetmanate. Somehow Ukrainians are not in the habit of boasting about their own ancestral traditions, probably because their independence and aristocracy disappeared so long ago, and there has been no one to teach them to take pride in their glorious past. For one brief moment, in the thirties and forties of this century, when enlightened Ukrainians began finding out about their heritage, a handful of people bragged loudly about the glories of Cossack Ukraine, but they were quick to discover the stains on the escutcheon….

We are ready to agree with this critical attitude. It is proper that peaceable pursuits replace warlike exploits in the steppes. But let us consider whether we have made much progress in these peaceable pursuits, and whether we have obtained even half of that for which we fought the Poles and the Tatars. Although, as is the case with all peoples, some of our forefathers loved fighting for its own sake, or fought the “unbelievers” because they were “unbelievers,” these were not the main reasons for the eternal warfare on the steppes. Our ancestors were forced to gallop over the steppes to defend their land from Turk and Tatar invasions, which, after all, were the principal obstacle to the development of peaceful pursuits in Ukraine. And these Cossack exploits did not prevent Ukraine from being the land from which Muscovy, in the times of Peter the Great’s grandfather, his father, and of Peter himself, drew its teachers and clergy. Russian scholars admit this, but they fail to draw the logical conclusions. They are not so hostile to military exploits, either, when they are the exploits of tsarist armies, even for instance in Prussia and Switzerland where, God knows why and for whom, but certainly not for the defence of the homeland, Peter’s successors sent soldiers, Ukrainians among them.

Let us look at the conditions in Ukraine after the Cossack way of life was abolished and see what we obtained in its place. If Ukraine did not entirely waste these last two hundred years, was it because the old order was abolished and a new introduced from Moscow and St. Petersburg? We shall leave aside the pertinent question of why, if the Cossack way of life was a menace to peaceful life in our land and in the Russian State, the Cossack organization was suppressed only in Ukraine, and not in the Don region also. Aren’t the steppes of the Don just as essential to “peace and enlightenment” as those of the Dnieper and the Dniester? The answer is not difficult: the Don is more closely related to the Muscovite Empire, and more loyal, though if the truth be told, the Don was also deprived of some of its freedom, for it also rose in rebellion on occasion. We are not jealous of the “quiet Don.” May it prosper, may it nurture the grain of freedom that still remains until the day when the seed grows into a flourishing tree. It will then recall that once upon a time when both the Don and the Dnieper were self-governing, they knew more about each other than when both were ruled by offices in St. Petersburg, and not by their own Cossack councils. They will recall that there was a time when the Ukrainian kobzars (minstrels) sang “glory to the Zaporozhian and to the Don hosts with all the folk, for many years, till the end of time,” (from the epic about Ataman Kishka and his escape from a Turkish prison).

But let us pass on to our own affairs to find out what we gained during these two hundred years, after the “disastrous” old ways perished, and the new, supposedly European, but really Muscovite ones, were introduced.

In our time no European is to be found who thinks that a country can prosper under an arbitrary government, and without the cooperation of those governed, or that it can be governed well by bureaucratic officials appointed from above by an absolute monarch. Almost everyone agrees that a large country cannot be governed by decrees coming from a far-away capital, where the opinions of those governed are not known. Even in the Russian Empire, zemstvo and city self-government have been introduced, so that at least minor matters can be regulated by the inhabitants rather than by officials who are one place today and another tomorrow.

If these ideas are correct, what advantages has Ukraine obtained from two hundred years of rule by Moscow? Shall we find it in the cruelties of Peter I, in the greed of Menshikov and Biron’s Germans, in the madness of Paul I, or is it in the bestialities of Arakcheyev and the cool, calculating despotism of Nicholas I? The Ukrainians cannot even say that these were “our own dogs,” fed and raised by us. In our annals there is no Ivan IV. These despots from St. Petersburg, these perverters of human nature, did not even consider the Ukrainians as their kin. At every occasion they oppressed us with even more venom, and less pity for the “stubborn Khakhols” [Russian derogatory word for Ukrainians, [ed.]] than they did their own people. Or shall we say that because the “Little Russian brethren” suffered, the Russians profited, they whose forefathers had promised to aid them, even at the expense of life itself, when Khmelnytsky gave his allegiance to the “Eastern Tsar”? Why destroy those local laws, the old elective offices which once existed in Ukraine, when all civilized people are of the opinion that self-government and elective offices are essential? Thus two hundred years of history were lost, and of these more than a hundred were years of intolerable suffering until the tsars succeeded in putting an end to the traditional Ukrainian ways.

Everything the Russian government did in Ukraine from the days of Khmelnytsky until the destruction of the Zaporozhian Sich in 1775 was aimed at the dissolution of the Ukrainian order. What cunning on the part of the boyars from Moscow and the officials from St. Petersburg, what suffering on the part of the Ukrainian peasant, how much pressure on the Ukrainian nobility until it learned to kow-tow — all this to discover at last that these “new” ways are worse than useless! …

[In the original, the text of the Articles of Pereyaslav, 1654, under which the Cossacks accepted the suzerainty of the Tsar of Moscow, follows here.]

We do not consider the Articles of Pereyaslav as the ultimate in statesmanship. Today we seek more than simply to re-establish what our ancestors have lost since then. The treaty was drawn up by the Cossacks and was concerned with the Cossacks’ welfare. To them, Ukraine was not all the territory inhabited by the Ukrainians (Ruthenians or Little Russians, as they were then called), but only that where, according to agreements with Poland, the Cossacks lived. Ukraine did not extend to the San River in Galicia in the end to the Dunajec River and the Tisa in the Carpathians, but only to the Sluch River, i.e. it comprised the provinces of Chernihiv, Kiev, and Bratslav….

The nobles in Khmelnytsky’s chancellery and “the Father of the Cossacks” himself also a nobleman, did not forget to include in the Articles of Pereyaslav provisions that the nobility should “preserve its possessions as they were under the Polish kings, and that noblemen should continue to be elected to the country and city courts, as it was under Poland.”

As was the case with the Cossacks and the nobility, rights and freedoms were granted to the clergy and the monks, who were allowed to retain the privileges they had obtained under the Polish kings, including their lands and the peasants thereon. The burghers were allowed to choose their mayors and city councillors. Thus, according to the Pereyaslav treaty, the old inequalities were perpetuated. Little thought was given to the well-being of those poor devils, the peasants. The thirteenth article of the treaty is the only one that might be interpreted as having them in mind, for it reads that “the rights accorded to clergy and lay persons by the kings and princes must not be touched” — only nobody had ever granted any rights to the peasants. They remained provisionally free only on the lands from which the Polish nobles fled. Since these lands were not recognized as their property, gradually they were once again brought into a state of “obedience”…. The development was toward a new serfdom, and the Moscow government not only did nothing to stop it, but actually nurtured the evil seeds in the Cossack order and destroyed the seeds of good latent there.

In the Pereyaslav Articles there were, however, some sound ideas on a kind of government toward which all enlightened people aim today. The agreement stated that foreigners should not meddle in the country’s affairs, that every office be elective, that nobody be punished without trial, and that Cossacks, nobles, and burghers each be judged by their peers. The nation’s freedom was thus at least partly guaranteed against the abuses of tsarist despotism….

When we compare the rights which were guaranteed to the Ukrainian Cossacks with the despotism that existed in the Muscovite tsardom, there is no doubt that the Cossack constitution had more in common with the free European constitutional governments of today than the Muscovite tsardom had, or even than the present Russian Empire has.

Everybody knows that the liberties of the English people grew up from a very modest beginning. Comparing the rights which the English lords obtained from King John in 1215 in the Magna Charta, we find that they were not much more extensive than the freedoms of our Cossacks as fixed in 1654, and that at first they benefited a smaller group of people than did those of the Cossacks.

The English Charter was drawn up after an uprising against the king. That is why on some points it is much clearer with regard to the rights of subjects against the king, especially in matters of taxation: there was to be no taxation without the consent of parliament. But when it comes to personal and communal liberties, the English Charter is no more explicit than ours…. In the English Charter also it was principally the rights and freedoms of the barons, lords, and knights which were guaranteed. Gradually full rights were extended to the whole gentry, who corresponded to our Cossacks, and still later to the burghers; now they are the rights of the entire English people. Throughout Europe it was the nobility which first obtained rights which later were extended to most of the people. It is true that the increasing equality of the rights of all the inhabitants did not proceed at the same rate as the progress of liberty itself. Those lower on the social scale, the townsmen and the peasants, were often willing to aid the king in abridging the rights of the aristocracy so as to free themselves from their masters. This in turn gave rise to a bureaucratic type of rule, for a time replacing, though not entirely, the elective. Some measure of the old representative traditions remained, here and there a diet or assembly, to be renewed and strengthened later on. Countries where such old representative traditions and institutions remained the longest were the best able to reconstruct their constitutions into modern liberal ones, where the power of kings and their officials is limited, not only in local affairs, but also nationally, being dependent on the consent of elected bodies. In these modern liberal States we find that not only the lords, but everyone, is safeguarded against arrest and punishment without trial (which is still not the case in Russia), and that every individual has the right of free speech, publication, and movement.

Two hundred years ago Ukraine was in a rather advantageous position because, as a result of the wars against the Tatars and the uprisings against Poland, it was able to retain a free native military class and elective institutions, at a time when in most of Europe the army had ceased to be a chivalrous order and had become mercenary, owing obedience only to kings and princes, and when bureaucratic rule had replaced the elective. In addition, because of the wide open spaces and the colonization of the steppes, most of the peasants were de facto free. But those were also the days when Europe had already evolved republican governments in Holland and Switzerland, and for a time also in England. There, it is true, the monarchy was restored, but of such a kind that absolutism and arbitrary rule became impossible. The old English freedoms bore fruit. The king could not govern without the consent of Parliament, nor could he in any way abrogate the rights of individual Englishmen.

When our Ukraine united with Muscovy, liberty was based not only on the ancient traditions of local self-rule, as for instance in the pre-Tatar city-republics of Pskov and Novgorod, where princes were elected and dismissed according to “old custom.” No, two hundred years ago ideas concerning the rights of man were encouraged by education and the reading of books about Greece and Rome. The progress of civilization caused the diminishing of serfdom in Europe. In Ukraine, the people had just put an end to it in a revolutionary uprising against the Polish lords.

That is why it is quite imaginable that in Ukraine the traditional chivalrous freedoms might have been fused with the new rights of men for which so many enlightened people in Europe were then striving. It could have been expected that the freedoms which had developed organically would be reinforced by rational thought. For instance, the example of Holland was known, a country which had freed itself from the Spanish kings, just as Ukraine had freed itself from the Polish kings.

We can say with assurance that if, after the separation from Poland, Ukraine had become an independent principality or kingdom, or even a Cossack republic, in time the predominance of the ruling classes over the common people would have nonetheless increased, as was the case everywhere. But without foreign pressure from Moscow, the Ukrainian nobles would hardly have been able to destroy the traditional popular freedoms in the course of a hundred years, for only 130 years after the Articles, the fall of the absolute monarchy in France was universally known.

The traditional Ukrainian liberties which were reaffirmed under Khmelnytsky were destroyed by the old-fashioned oppressive regimes of the countries to which the fate of Ukraine was linked: aristocratic Poland and autocratic tsarist Russia. In the latter, Ukraine met not only a way of life patterned by the nobles, as was also the case in Poland, but also with an absolutist autocracy not much better than that which existed in Turkey.

We cannot say that the Muscovite or Great Russian people is incapable of being free. In earlier times free cities existed in the North as they did in the Kievan Rus, later Ukraine. It is unimportant in this connection whether the original inhabitants of Pskov and Novgorod were Ukrainian colonists or not. In any case in the 14^th century, when these city-republics were at the height of their power, they were already Great Russian. The Don and Ural Cossacks, whose governments were almost the same as that of the Ukrainian Zaporozhian Cossacks, were also Great Russian.

The Great Russians have retained an old custom whereby the land is owned by the villages and re-divided periodically. This custom has probably continued because Russian territory is very extensive and there was plenty of land for everybody. Also, although the Great Russians are as old as other European nations, all of the settlements are of recent origin, for the people were always obliged to move from one place to another in their flight from the Tatars, the Poles, or their own government. Each time it was a community which occupied the new land, cut down the forests, etc. Few peoples are as capable at organizing cooperatives with elected leaders as are the Russians. However, in Muscovy such democratic ways have remained only on the local level, in the small villages, settlements, and cooperatives. In national affairs, in matters involving the country as a whole, Russia has long been in the hands of the absolute tsars and the bureaucracy. At the lowest level, in the villages, Muscovy is still a land where the people have retained the old art of self-government. At the top, as a State, Russia is as old as France, for example. The dynasty of the dukes and tsars of Muscovy continued uninterrupted for a long period, and it was an indigenous one, not Lithuanian or Polish as in our country. The Church hierarchy was also indigenous, and it taught the people to obey the tsars, as the anointed of the Lord. Moreover, at first the Tatars supported the dukes of Moscow, and after these rebelled against the Tatars, the people’s homage was only increased, and the admonishments of the popes to obey intensified. The Great Russian people continued to spread out over its immense land where each village was so far from the next that unity was only preserved by the idea of Little Mother Moscow and Little Father Tsar. The Great Russian people forgot that for all the people of Russia, including the Great Russians, Moscow was and is not a heart but a spider.

Moscow’s history, like that of France from the 12^th century to the 18^th, is the story of the increase of the power of the monarch over the traditional communal liberties, of that of the centralized appointed bureaucracy over elected bodies. We thus have the development of a strange and not always understood aspect of government and national life in Russia: in the villages, at the local level, where tsarist bureaucrats did not dominate, we have self-rule and a community spirit similar to that of the cantons of Switzerland; above the village level we have tsarist absolutism and arbitrary bureaucracy of a type never seen in Europe, not even in the days when the kings and bureaucrats were at their mightiest, under Louis XIV of France and the Fredericks of Prussia. There is another great difference between Muscovy and France or any other West European country. In Europe the pursuit of knowledge helped keep at bay royal absolutism by encouraging people to investigate what is worthwhile in other regimes. Muscovy, far from the countries of old civilization, in the midst of forests and steppes, remained in a semi-barbarous stage, its learning limited to ecclesiastical literature. In these volumes the Russian people read not about the republics of Greece and Rome, but about the biblical kingdoms. They saw not the examples of the Italian city-republics or of England, Holland, and Switzerland, but of the khanates of the Khazan and Astrakhan Tatars.

Throughout Europe in the 16^th and 17^th centuries the kings got stronger and tried to destroy the old self-government in their lands, but nowhere was there so mad a murderer as Ivan IV. While the European kings were curtailing the elective offices of the aristocracy, they were at least reducing serfdom among the common people. The tsars of Russia legalized serfdom in their country at a time when it was disappearing in Europe….

It is this sort of an empire that our Ukraine joined in 1654, when it was a free and reborn land. It is true that some seeds of evil, such as the beginnings of serfdom were present, and that the idea of freedom had not been deeply rooted enough by education to show the people how to remain free.

No wonder that during the years when Ukraine was united to Muscovy with its autocratic tsar and legal serfdom and without education, Russian despotism gradually brought about the destruction of Ukraine’s freedom. Moscow’s boyars helped reintroduce serfdom in Ukraine, while education and enlightenment were halted, all the more so since the few educated Ukrainians were scattered over the whole of the new empire. A wall of tsarist and bureaucratic despotism was erected to prevent the free political ideas which were then current in Europe, and which Ukraine had always welcomed, from penetrating. Even if the Ukrainian people had been able to stage an uprising against the increasing enslavement in their own country, they would have met with opposition not only from those among their compatriots who benefited from serfdom, but also from the Russian government, its army, and even the Russian people, who considered disobedience to “our tsar” treason on the part of the Ukrainians.

Instead of encouraging the good that was in the Ukrainian Cossack way of life, we see it trampled on by the Russian tsars from the days of Khmelnytsky to Catherine II. The evil was cunningly nourished.

…

Germany’s Drive to the East and Moscow’s Drive to the West

This was published in Volnoye Slovo, the Russian magazine which Drahomanov edited in Geneva (in nos. 30 and 31, 1882). The original title was “Germanism in the East and Muscovitism in the West.” Our translation was made from the reprint in the second volume of Collected Political Works (Paris, 1906). The cuts are unimportant; they are chiefly quotations from German publicists, showing the chauvinistic spirit of the German socialists.

The German race has been moving to the east for more than ten centuries, and has swallowed up or subjugated more than one Slavic people. The Muscovite State, especially since the 17^th century, has moved to meet the Germanic Drang nach Osten, and, having become Russia, finally collided with the militant German State of Prussia and its rival-ally Austria along the entire western frontier. Since as early as the 18^th century, the rivalry between Russia and Austria (which in this respect was already supported by Prussia) for influence in the Balkan peninsula has been evident. Among the German public the idea of the necessity of subjugating the Danubian-Balkan lands to German influence is very widespread. From the extensive literature in which this idea is expressed, we will point out only a few examples, taking them from authors of various parties and of significant reputation.

We are sorry that we do not have at hand the collected works of List, the honoured founder of national economy in Germany, and therefore we must deprive the reader of the instructive opportunity to become acquainted with the force, not only of his ideas, but also of his expression on the question with which we are dealing. We will present his thoughts on the basis of Roscher’s exposition in The History of National Economy in Germany, pp. 987–988, keeping his references to the complete collected works of his predecessor. List takes as the basis of his economic calculations for the German nation the political union of Central Europe under Prussian hegemony. Even the “littoral states,” that is Holland, Denmark, and the countries up to the Balkan mountain range should take part in this alliance, so that a Germany would be created bordering on four seas: the North, Baltic, Adriatic, and Black (Collected Works, II, 211). Such a Germany would be a threat to France and Russia, who therefore appear dangerous to the German economist in that they both seek to enlarge their own “incomplete nationalities” by the incorporation of German lands (II, 442). “Worry and a genuine revulsion as regards Russia take especial hold of List,” says Roscher. “He compares it to a ferocious beast which only lies quietly while digesting the food upon which it has gorged itself (strictly speaking — prey, Frass), or while refreshing itself by sleep, or while lying in wait for a new prey. If this beast should, by a strange quirk of nature, obtain a human head, then it would become even more terrible, for it would be able to follow its bestial instincts with more skill and consistency and with apparent moderation.” (II, 315). In Roscher’s The Principles of National Economy we read: “Our emigrants to Russia, America, Australia, and Algeria depart from the fatherland with everything they have, and for the most part they are lost to us; they become consumers and producers for alien peoples who are often our rivals and enemies. The matter would turn out quite differently if we were to send the German settlers to German colonies which could be established, for example, in the fertile but sparsely populated parts of Hungary, in Poland and the Polish provinces of Prussia, and finally, in those parts of Turkey which in the future, God willing, will become the inheritance of Germany. Here, by means of colonization, it might be possible to found a new Germany which would surpass the old one in size, population, and wealth, and which would form with it the most reliable rampart against any danger from the Russians and the Poles. We would be able to avail ourselves of this land, for the exclusive use of our national economy, exactly as the United States makes use of the Mississippi valley and the Far West.” (Roscher, op. cit., Russian transla-l, Vol. I, Sect. 2, 323).

In 1863 the Socialist Ferdinand Lassalle wrote to Rodbertus, the former minister, that he had read with pleasure, in a pamphlet by a Prussian, the words: “I hope that I shall live until that time when Germany will receive the Turkish inheritance, and when legions of German soldiers or workers will stand at the Bosphorus.” As regards the non-Germanic peoples who thus would be under the German soldiers or workers, the famous demagogue expresses himself in this way: “No, I am not at all an adherent of the principle of nationality. I demand the rights of nationality only for the large civilized nations, and not for the races whose entire right consists in that of being assimilated by the former.” (Letters of F. Lassalle to C. Rodbertus-Jagetzow, 56–57).

Lassalle’s words show that the German Socialists were far from renouncing a militant attitude toward their neighbours to the southeast. And in reality, many of the German Social Democrats as well, even members of the International, reveal a completely chauvinistic nationalism with regard to the Slavs, as was particularly evident during the last Slav War against Turkey. We refer the reader especially to the speeches and pamphlets of Liebknecht (The Eastern Question, or Shall Europe be Cossackized and The Eastern Debate in the Reichstag). At first sight it would appear that people such as Liebknecht stand for “international interests as against the principle of nationality, which divides peoples.” They are against Russian despotism, which oppresses all peoples, especially Poland, the restoration of which these men demand in the interests of the freedom of all Europe. And one might find that their sympathies and antipathies, though they are somewhat one-sided and expressed rather strangely, are in any case basically humanitarian in principle. But after carefully reading these speeches and comparing them with the actual living conditions of the peoples between the Elbe and the Black Sea, it becomes clear that in these Socialists and internationalists there lives the same old spirit of the Henry the Fowlers and Henry the Holies and other destroyers of the Slavs.

These gentlemen are against Russia, but in equal measure they are for Austria and even for Turkey. Austria is dear to these strange internationalists as part of a “mighty dam which the Germanic world has erected from the North Sea to the Adriatic against the Slav.” These humanists consider the Turkish oppression of the Slavs to be a fiction and declare that “not one Southern Slav can be shown who would actually aspire to freedom.” Of all the Slavs, an exception is made only for the Poles, but obviously only because the Poles are the enemies of Russia. In this judgment of course democrats such as Liebknecht fail to see that behind Poland there are the non-Polish peasant peoples such as the Lithuanians, Byelorussians, and Ukrainians, and that there is just as little reason to give them to a restored Poland as to keep them under the despots of Russia. The conditional sympathies toward Poland of men such as Liebknecht give one good grounds to suspect that were Poland to become independent with its own policy, and be not merely a weapon in the German Drang nach Osten, then even the Liebknechts would regard it in the same way as do the Roschers, that is as a field for German colonization which was slipping from their hands. And in fact, each day we see in the German press, especially that of democratic-progressive leanings, the shedding of tears over Poland when they deal with Russia, and outcries against the Poles when they treat Posen, for example.

All of this shows how little good will the Slavic peoples can expect even from the democratic-progressive parties, including a significant portion of the Social Democrats, who even recently still shared the point of view of the Lists, fulminating not only against Russian tsarism, but also against Russian “nihilism,” and calling such people as Herzen and Bakunin tsarist agents. Herzen gives an excellent description of this mixture of the spirit of the Saxon emperors with the new cosmopolitanism and socialism of the German revolutionaries…. Considering List’s idea that Russia would become even more dangerous if it developed a “human head,” we do not consider it superfluous to repeat here the words of Herzen: “There are limited minds with narrow national hatreds; they hate without reasoning. Read the articles of the German democrats who brag of their cosmopolitanism, and then observe closely their malicious hatred of everything Russian, of everything Slav…. If this hatred were accompanied with a desire for Russia and Poland to be free, for them to break their chains, I would understand this. This is not at all the case. Just as the medieval people, hating the Jews, did not wish their improvement, so every step in our progress as a State only redoubles the hatred of these limited, tightly sealed minds.” Describing the German emigrants of the Revolution of 1848, Herzen says (Works, Vol. VII, 311–312) “All the German revolutionaries are great cosmopolitans, they have outgrown the nationalist point of view — and all are filled with the most annoying, the most stubborn patriotism. They are prepared to accept a universal republic, to wipe out the borders between States — however Trieste and Danzig must belong to Germany.” (In order not to lengthen this article we omit examples of the curious way in which the German liberals and revolutionaries of 1848 regarded not only the Slavs, but also Italy, which apparently, on the basis of cosmopolitan-cultural considerations, should have subordinated to Austria)….

In view of such an attitude on the part of Germans of various parties toward their eastern neighbours, it is not surprising that from time to time there arises in all of Europe talk about a forthcoming battle between Germans and Slavs for the possession of the land between the Elbe, the Adriatic, and the Black Sea. Such a battle is in fact not impossible. True, there are people who find that it will be prevented by the triumph of socialism in Germany as well as in Austria and Russia; and that even if before this political clashes were to lead to an extension of the German political or even ethnographic borders to the detriment of the Slav States and peoples, the basic interests of the nations would suffer little from this. Without any doubt, the abolition of despotism in Russia and the destruction of its centralization (if not of the alliance of peoples now enslaved by it) and the restoration of the autonomy of the Polish provinces (of course of the truly Polish provinces, and not of the historical Polish State) are a pressing necessity for the further progress of Europe. But this work of liberation must be done in the interest of the peoples of Russia and by their own forces. Only thus can it be accomplished with success. History has shown that when such a project is undertaken from the outside, no good comes of it. Harm is done not only to those liberated, but also to the liberators, and even to the idea of freedom itself. Thus when the French, in the course of the Great Revolution, undertook to liberate their eastern neighbours through military campaigns, they betrayed themselves and the idea of revolution to Napoleon! The same would happen to the Germans if they, even if led by the Lassalles and the Liebknechts, not to mention the Bismarcks, were to undertake the destruction of Russia and the restoration of Poland. This is all the more true since Lassalle’s statement about the German soldiers at the Bosphorus and Liebknecht’s about the “dam erected by the German world against the Slav” show that far more nationalistic chauvinism and expansionistic ferment of an inevitably monarchistic nature is left among the German liberators than even among the French Jacobins of the period of the Great Revolution.

That is why there is no ground for people with socialist ideas to look optimistically at the near future of relations in Central Europe, or to place their hopes in German Social Democracy. The Socialists of the Slav nationalities, especially Germany’s close neighbours, the Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles, Czechs, and Slovenes, must organize the demos of their peoples for independent battle against their local social and economic feudal lords, a large proportion of whom are German. In this way, the fruits of battle would be preserved for these peoples, and not lost to outside “benefactors.” Only such an independent organization of Socialist parties among Germany’s neighbours will guarantee the success of socialist ideas among these peoples. At the same time, to use the image of Liebknecht, “a mighty dam” will be created against chauvinism and feudalism even among the German masses, a dam which will also be useful for them, for it will safeguard them against the domination of Napoleons and Bismarcks…. There is no doubt that just as the unification of Italy and Germany, by setting limits to French expansionism, encouraged the development of peace-loving and cosmopolitan ideas in France, and drew the French toward internal problems, so the transformation of Austria, Russia, and the Balkan countries into political federations in which each people would have the opportunity to develop freely, would halt Germany’s militaristic aspirations in the east, and would benefit the population of Germany itself.

Unfortunately many, even in Slav countries, think far more about the possibility of halting German expansion exclusively by a similar military power, such as Russia, than about a lasting organization of the peoples threatened by Germany. In this they mistakenly cite the examples of Piedmont and Prussia as having halted the expansionist aspirations of France. These hopes placed in Russia, the mystical notions about the clash between Russia and Prussia as the representatives of two worlds (which we find equally on the German and the Slav sides), and the insufficient comprehension of the expansionism of the Germans to the east, all arise from an inadequate analysis of the Germanic movement to the east and of the role of the Russian State toward its western border areas and neighbours.

The movement of the Germans to the east and their clash with the inhabitants, who are primarily Slavs, does not represent a mystic struggle between cultural principles. This is only a part of a general movement on the European continent in which the Slavs themselves participate, one determined by the most tangible conditions, which can be expressed graphically by statistical data. It is a stream of colonization from the more to the less densely populated countries. The expansionist aspirations which every State has are usually most successful when they coincide with the direction of colonization of its people. In this way both the French people and France as a State had their Drang nach Osten, which has been halted recently by the stopping of the increase of population in France. For these very reasons of population pressure, the Franks pressed upon the Saxons and the Bavarians, and these upon the Slavs and the Lithuanians. For the same reasons, among the Slavs, the Poles pressed upon the Lithuanians, Byelorussians, and Ukrainians; the Ukrainians upon the Khazars and the Polovtsi and other steppe peoples between the Dnieper and the Don; and the Great Russians upon the Finnish and other tribes of the Volga area, and further on to the east as far as the Pacific Ocean. In this movement the power of the State very often only gave the final seal to the phenomenon which was accomplished by means of colonization.

The expansion of the Muscovite State in the west is of a quite different character. This expansion, transforming a Muscovy hardly known to Europeans into a huge Russian empire, occurred with such amazing rapidity in the course of some 150 years (1654–1815), that it dazzles observers who do not at once realize its causes. However, understanding it will lead to comprehension of much that is both historically and practically important. Since in this case there was no colonization, the causes are usually supposed to be either an extreme talent for aggrandizement and the diplomatic skill of the Muscovite State, that mystical ability to “gobble up” about which German patriots speak with horror, and not without envy, or else the mystical gravitation of the peoples of the western half of Russia toward the Muscovite centre, a gravitation about which Muscovite patriots boast as the result of their military and diplomatic talents. However, the incorporation of Ukraine, Byelorussia, the Baltic provinces, and Lithuania into the Russian State can by no means be explained by the theories of the German or the Muscovite patriots. In essence it is the result of nothing other than the eastward pressure of more western peoples: that of the Germans on the Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians; of the Poles on the Lithuanians, Byelorussians and Ukrainians; and that of the Turks on the northern shores of the Black Sea, which they took from the Ukrainians at the end of the 15^th century. Seeking to understand the details of the military-diplomatic history of the annexation by Muscovy of the whole western half of Russia, one is amazed chiefly by the lack of ability of the Muscovite strategists and diplomats. Continually the Poles and the Turks, the Swedes and the Germans beat or deceived them, but just the same, the result was an amazing extension of their State. Obviously an underlying cause must be concealed here, and this is nothing other than the above mentioned movement to the east of the States and peoples more to the west of the lands incorporated into Muscovy. In the 16^th and 17^th centuries this pressure was strong enough to produce a class stratification along national lines which in turn destroyed the national unity and the energy necessary for self-defence in Lithuania and the Baltic provinces, and in Byelorussia and Ukraine aroused sharp reaction against the aristocratic and imperialistic elements moving in from the west. At the same time, the eastward moving groups were not sufficiently strong (the Germans because of the distance from their homeland, the Poles because of their natural weakness and of the necessity to fulfil a double role: defence in the west and aggression in the east) to assimilate the native elements and to make a solid barrier against Russia’s attempts to extend its borders in the direction opposite to that of its natural stream of colonization. A study of the history of Pan-Slav ideas among the western Slavs, from Juraj Krizanic (17^th century) to the present, shows that these ideas were a reaction against the aspirations of the Germans, Hungarians, Turks, and Greeks to dominate the Slavs. Similarly, an unbiased study of the history of the peoples of Russia’s western borders shows that Muscovite Pan-Russism was a reaction to Polish hegemony, especially since the second half of the 16^th century. Up to that time, Ukrainians such as Prince Constantine Ivanovich Ostrozhsky very faithfully fought against the Muscovites when these attempted to detach the provinces populated by Byelorussians and Ukrainians from the Polish-Lithuanian-Ruthenian federation to which they belonged.

The formation of this federation was largely caused by the need of defence against a German movement to the east which weakened the antagonism which had long existed between the members of this federation, and which, together with clericalism, originally caused the Poles to summon the Teutonic knights to the mouths of the Vistula and the Nieman. Many centuries later the heirs of the Teutonic knights gave the initiative for the final divisions of Poland. We will remind our readers of facts which are usually overlooked in a general history of Russia, namely that in the 13^th century Polotsk was several times seized by Germans from Riga until it united with the Lithuanian State; that at the end of the 14^th century the Teutons approached Brest and occupied not only Kaunas, but also Grodno, until they were beaten back near Grünwald by the combined forces of the Poles, Lithuanians, and eastern Russians (1410).

Now we ask the reader to imagine what would have been the national and social fate of the population occupying the huge pentagon between the Baltic Sea, the Western Dvina, the upper Dnieper, and the Pripet, had Polotsk, Grodno, and Brest, as far back as the 14^th and the beginning of the 15^th century, remained under the Teutonic knights! It is doubtful whether the Great Russians would have kept for themselves that window into Europe which they required, a window which Novgorod represented in earlier times and which, after its destruction by the so practical and far-seeing (sic!) Moscow, had to be replaced with tremendous efforts by St. Petersburg.

The unification of Lithuania with Byelorussia in the 13^th-14^th centuries and then of Lithuania, Byelorussia, and Ukraine with Poland in the 15^th-16^th centuries halted the German Drang nach Osten in the regions of the Dvina, the Vistula and the Nieman, but the mouths of these rivers remained under the Teutons. The fate of the Polish and Lithuanian peoples in the west was already decided to their disadvantage. Moreover, within this union lay the seeds of its destruction, although from the end of the 15^th century there was yet another reason for its existence: the necessity for Ukraine to defend itself from a new eastward drive, that of the Turks from the mouth of the Danube to the northeast, which induced the Ukrainians to strengthen the union with Poland in 1569. For a long time the Poles had their own Drang nach Osten toward Lithuania, Byelorussia, and Ukraine, which manifested new strength after the union of 1569. It is this Polish Drang, in addition to the pressure of the Turks and the Tatars, which rendered the complete independence of Ukraine impossible, and made it seek an alliance with Muscovy. The idea of such an alliance was already current in the 1620’s, and was realized in the Pereyaslav Articles of 1654. Both the Ukrainians and the Muscovites, in word as well as thought, envisioned the enlargement of the minimum Cossack Ukraine (to the Sluch or Horyn River) by the annexation of all the Ukrainian and Byelorussian (Ruthenian in the terminology of the time) lands, including Lviv and Vilna, from the Polish State.

The narrow-mindedness of the Moscow politicians, skilfully exploited by the Poles, was the chief reason why these projects were not accomplished in the 17^th century. When Ukraine turned to the tsar of Muscovy with a proposal to be accepted into “an alliance and protection,” Moscow was faced with the question, not of the conquest of new regions, but of cooperation with its new partner, which was politically autonomistic, democratic, and even revolutionary, and in the religious sphere, dissident. But autocratic, aristocratic, and clerical Moscow did not understand its task. Obviously it could not do so in the 17^th century if it still has not been able to up to the present. It carried on a policy of conquest, or one of legitimism and conservatism; it entered into diplomatic compromises with conservative Polish elements; combated the “revolutionary” elements in the areas which were united to it; and thereby delayed the separation of Poland’s non-Polish provinces until the end of the 18^th century, when it had to yield Ukrainian Galicia to the heirs of the Holy Roman Empire. At the same time, the successors of the Teutonic knights took possession of nearly all the spoils lost by belligerent Germanism in the battle of Grünwald. Muscovite politicians showed still less understanding of their role in the Baltic provinces. As far back as the 16^th century the Muscovite sovereigns began to press in this direction, continuing that policy of pure conquest which brought it to die fratricidal destruction of Novgorod and Pskov, these Great Russian outposts in the region of the Baltic Sea, and the conductor of culture into Russia. Already in the Livonian War of Ivan IV the possibility appeared of basing the Muscovite Drang nach Westen upon an uprising of the Latvians and Estonians against their Teutonic conquerors. But the Muscovites burned and plundered, and took as many Latvians and Estonians into captivity as Germans, arousing a general horror which aided the Teutons who, with the help of Poland, drove them from Livonia. When in the 18^th century Peter I repeated the offensive of Ivan IV, he at first followed the example of his “Terrible” predecessor. The idea of obtaining support from the native element was suggested to him, of course not by a Latvian or Estonian, but by the Baltic German Patkul, the representative of those German nobles who were dissatisfied with Swedish rule. Sweden had taken Livonia away from Poland and, with true political wisdom, began to strengthen its position in the new provinces by granting protection to the masses. In this they would have succeeded had it not been for the Muscovite invaders. These preferred to recognize and strengthen the privileges of the German feudal lords. Since the time of Catherine II this policy has been superseded by one of “Russification” for which here, as in all of western Russia, there is no basis.

This lack of understanding on the part first of Moscow and then of St. Petersburg of the role in the west, this Muscovite militarism, legitimism, aristocratism, clericalism, and national centralism are the cause of all the failures of Russia’s western policy, including even its policy toward the “Eastern Question,” which for Russia is strictly a western one. These are the real reasons for the successes of what in Moscow is referred to as Polish or German “intrigue.” From these arise such errors as the Vilna agreements of 1656 and the Andrusovo treaty of 1667; the Ostsee capitulations of Peter the Great; the divisions of Poland with Prussia and Austria instead of a possible federated union of all three Russias and Lithuania with Poland; the participation of Russia in the Holy Alliance and its opposition to the uprising of the Greeks; the support of Turkey against the Egyptian uprising; the suppression of the Rumanian movement in 1848; the League of the Three Emperors with its consequences including the Berlin Treaty of 1878; the protection given to the Battenberg coup d’etat in Bulgaria, etc.

As we move toward the present we see, in addition to the unconscious errors committed by following the narrow old-Muscovite road, an ever-increasing, deliberate desire among Russian politicians to copy their western policy from Prussia’s eastern policy. This desire is of course supported by the perfidious counsel of the Prussian court. Among the errors of the latter type is the system of Russification adopted in the western half of Russia after the Polish uprising of 1863–64, which was a logical consequence of the policy of preserving old-Muscovite absolutism throughout the empire, even after a clear demonstration of the general desire to throw this off. This recalcitrance led logically to the overthrow of the Bulgarian Constitution, which was a tempting example to the Russian Zemstvos, and to the Battenberg coup. The chaos which this created in the Balkan peninsula (reminiscent of the chaos which the Andrusovo treaty and the despotic rule of the voyevods created in Ukraine of the 17^th century) again turned out to be extremely advantageous to German-Austrian policy beyond the Danube. In all of these affairs, Muscovite patriots like Mr. Katkov and nationalists like Mr. Aksakov became excellent performers in an orchestra led, to a certain extent, by Prince Bismarck.

There is nothing more unnatural for Great Russia, nor anything more useful for militant Germanism, than Muscovite attempts to play in the western part of Russia, including Poland, the role which the Prussians play in their eastern, primarily Polish provinces. We leave aside the fact that the Polish provinces constitute a very small proportion of the German State in comparison to the relation of the Polish, Lithuanian, Byelorussian, Ukrainian, and other non-Great Russian provinces to the whole of European Russia. It is enough to remember the fundamental fact that the Germanisation of the eastern provinces of Prussia is based on German colonization moving to the east, whereas Great Russian colonization has not, does not, and cannot move to the west. Recent data on the resettlement of colonists from the central Russian provinces show that the Great Russians are in no condition to colonize even the sparsely populated southern steppes, not even the eastern parts between the Don, lower Volga, and the Caucasus. More and more, these steppes are being settled by Ukrainians, so that when the Territory of the Don Cossack Host is given civil status, undoubtedly the Great Russian element will be submerged by a wave of Ukrainian peasants, who even now surround it on almost all sides and have penetrated into the most privileged ranks of the Don Cossacks. Statistics show that even from the province of Ryazan, for example, colonists are moving, not to the lower Don, nor to the Kuban, nor to the province of Stavropol, but to Siberia. This process is determined by basic climatic, ethnographic, and other geographical factors which are more powerful than any artificial political calculations. Formerly, Great Russian dissenters emigrated into western areas to escape oppression by their government, but now no one emigrates there voluntarily except petty officials. Artificial attempts made after the last Polish uprising to settle Great Russian peasants here ended ridiculously, or even sadly; indeed, like any bureaucratic undertaking they could not have ended otherwise. Moreover, it is generally recognized that the measures adopted for the crowding of the Poles out of agriculture in the western territory resulted solely in the increase of German landowning here….

If Prince Bismarck is really a far-sighted statesman, and if the power of the Hohenzollerns and the triumph of Germanism between the four seas washing the shores of Central Europe is his aim (and other, internal, aims are not evident), then the present situation in Russia and its policy toward the western borderlands will play into his hand until he chooses the moment to provoke Russia into a war, destroy its best armies, occupy Warsaw, Vilna, Riga, and then Brest and Dünaburg, and incorporate them into Germany. The percentage of Germans in these provinces is not much lower than in Posen, so that personnel for German administration in them will be at hand, as will a German-Jewish bourgeoisie.

If the Germans remain within these limits and do not march against Moscow as Napoleon did, they will be able to rule there and the whole Pripet and upper Dnieper and Western Dvina basin will pay a levy to the masters of the Baltic Sea, while the Austrian ally will secure the Adriatic for Germanism. Then the Slavs will retain only the Black Sea for the Ukrainians and the White Sea and the Caspian for the Great Russians, which, let us hope, will never be taken from them. But Providence destined the White Sea more for polar bears than for people, and the exit from the Black Sea lies only through the Bosphorus. What will happen to this in the event of the triumph of Germanism in the Balkans and the Adriatic is a question!

Of course, from the objective-historical point of view, reinforced by social-democratic hopes, we can await the future with philosophic tranquillity: “It will come anyhow!” But until the sun of universal Socialism rises, the non-Germanic peoples between the Elbe, the Aegean Sea, and the Dnieper will be in a somewhat difficult position. Therefore it would be desirable if the present influential classes of these peoples, particularly in Russia, would form parties which would understand the situation and find remedies against the danger threatening their peoples.

Nowhere does one speak so much about a national Slav policy as in Russia, and we have the right to demand that such a policy be formulated. At present, we must testify that the policy which is presented in Moscow does not at all deserve this name; it is simply an apish Byzantine-Oriental-Muscovite imitation of Hohenzollern Germanism, completely unsuited to the western areas of Russia.

We do not feel ourselves called upon to write programs for other peoples, but we cannot help suggesting certain practical proposals which proceed from an understanding of the position of Germanism in the East and Moscovitism in the West, both in the past and at present. A grass-roots, original national Slav party in Great Russia must ba aware of the inability of the old Muscovite policy of tsarist bureaucratic autocracy, of hieratic Orthodoxy, and of the Great Russian centralism to rule Great Russia itself, and of the impotence of this policy to overcome Polish influence in Byelorussia, Lithuania, and the Right Bank Ukraine, to combat German feudalism in the the Baltic provinces, and to halt the thrust of militant Germanism toward the Vistula and Nieman and the corresponding Austro-German movement into the Balkan countries. Therefore such a party, in the interests of Russian unity and of having friendly political bodies in the west, should insist on basing Russia’s whole western policy, both internal and foreign, upon the support of native democratic elements in these countries, that is, of Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Byelorussian, Ukrainian, and, in ethnic Poland, of Polish elements. It should insist upon the creation, in all of Russia, of political institutions which would guarantee the unhindered development of all the peoples, non-Great Russian as well as Great Russian, with a corresponding foreign policy. It would be a moderate policy, but clearly one of democratic federal liberalism and progress, instead of traditional aristocratic-centralizing absolutism and conservatism, its patches of mandarin demagogy notwithstanding.

At the present, the following would be a minimum of such a policy:

In all of Russia:

1. The establishment of political freedom, that is, of personal inviolability, of freedom of speech, opinion, and association, of local self-government and state-wide representation, accompanied by:
2. Democratic agrarian and tax measures.

Particularly in the western part of Russia:

1. In the Baltic provinces, agrarian reform at least equivalent to the Irish Land Act and the equalization of national rights of the Latvians and Estonians with those of the Germans.
2. In Lithuania, Byelorussia, die Ukraine, and Bessarabia — the granting of the right to use the national languages, at least in the elementary schools and courts of the magistrates of the peace.
3. In Poland — the granting of the right to use the national language in all courts and schools.

In foreign policy, in so far as it depends upon Russian initiative, the first demand of such a national party should be:

1. The removal of any support to absolutism in Bulgaria or to Austria’s aggressive aspirations beyond the Sava River.

Russia’s adoption of this policy, the only rational one, would have an immediate effect on the countries to the southwest. The Polish movement in Prussia would receive powerful support from liberated Warsaw, just as the Ruthenian movement in Austria-Hungary would receive active assistance from the Russian Ukraine. This assistance, and the warnings of the Russian Poles, who would have achieved spiritual equilibrium, would exert a salutary and sobering influence upon Polish chauvinists in Galicia. The establishment of healthy relations between the Poles and the Ukrainians would deprive the German centralists in Austria of their present role of arbitrator of disputes between these nationalities, whereby they exploit now the Poles, now the Ruthenians, to the detriment of Slav federalism. Finally, the establishment of a normal order in Bulgaria would influence Eastern Rumelia and Macedonia favourably and would encourage the Pan-Bulgarian movement. The reconciliation of the nationalities and the triumph of federalism in Austria would strengthen the movement for the establishment of a Balkan federation, which alone can give a correct solution of the so-called Eastern Question in the true interests of the peoples of the Balkan peninsula and of general European harmony. All of this together would halt the militant movement of Germanism to the east decisively, leaving to the German colonists only the cultural role which undoubtedly belongs to them.

The near future will show whether a party with such aspirations can be formed in Great Russia. But we think that these measures are only the minimum of that which is desired by the conscious representatives of the peoples inhabiting the western half of European Russia, from the Estonians in the north to the Bessarabian Rumanians in the south. We believe that they will unite in action on a democratic-federalist basis. Russia’s neighbors, especially the Slavic nations, should support this movement in their own interests. Finally, among the western European peoples, all lovers of peace and enemies of national hatreds, all who do not wish either Turkey’s or Berlin’s or Moscow’s despotism, or Austria’s hypocrisy, should support the liberal federal-democratic movement among the peoples of Russia and in the countries close to it.

This movement alone will bring both peace and progress to eastern Europe. Anything which deviates from it will be at best a series of fragmentary and contradictory experiments!

…

Panslav Federalism

This was published under the title “Federalist Panslavism” in L’Alliance Latine (The Latin Alliance) (Grenoble, No. 2, 1878). Since then the article has not been reprinted or included in a collection of Drahomanov’s writings. This translation was made from a copy of the article in the possession of Mr. Svitozor Drahomanov.

The Latin Alliance was an organ of the Provencal movement. In this article Drahomanov shows the analogies between Ukraine and Occitania (southern France). Drahomanov took a lively interest in all symptoms of the rebirth of the provincial or plebeian nations of Europe. In the Russian magazine Vestnik Yevropy he published a long article, “The Neo-Celtic and Provencal Movements in France” (Nos. 8 and 9, 1875). In 1872 he visited one of the leading Provencal poets, Joseph Roumanille (1810–1891), in Avignon. In 1878 he participated in an assembly organized in Paris by Provencal patriots. This was the occasion for the article “Panslav Federalism,” which Drahomanov prepared in the form of an open letter to the president of the assembly, Xavier Ricard, who was also editor of the Latin Alliance.

The fact that Drahomanov saw analogies between the Ukrainian and the Provencal movements does not mean that he placed both on the same level. He said that the Provencal poets did not have “one tenth of the social and political elements which one can find in Shevchenko.” The Provencal movement was limited to a literary dilettantism. The Provencal patriots did not go so far as to regard themselves as a distinct nationality and to demand that Provencal be given equal rights with French in newspapers, scholarly works, and prose in general, and in the schools and public offices. Drahomanov sympathized with all decentralist efforts, including the Provencal felibres, but he warned the Ukrainians from taking the same stand, i.e. limitation of their aims to cultural regionalism without any political platform. In fact Drahomanov probably did more than any other individual to help the Ukrainian movement overcome the “Provencal” tendencies (an apolitical literary, ethnographic and local historical dilettantism) evident in certain circles in the 19^th century.

The Languedoc Lands in the Latin Alliance and the Ukrainian Lands in the Slav Alliance; Letter to Mr. Xavier Ricardi, July 29, 1878

…. You have asked me for an article on my country for your magazine. May I outline the analogies which exist between our respective motherlands.

I belong to a Slav nation. By ethnographers it is called Ruthenian, Little Russian, or Ukrainian (better Ukrainian), and is composed of seventeen million people in southern Russia and the eastern part of Austria-Hungary.

Thus our nationality is divided between two empires, Russia and Austria-Hungary, as the Languedoc nationality is divided between France and Spain. There are other resemblances in the literary and political history of these lands.

Therefore, it is not surprising that our Ukraine has produced a literary and political movement similar to that manifested, first in the study of Languedoc texts, then by Felibrisme, and finally by Lauseta and the Latin Alliance. From the beginning of the 19^th century, and particularly since 1840, Ukrainian patriots have been working, not only for local autonomy and the revival of literature in the language of the country, but also for the alliance of all the Slav peoples, since our country is in the middle of the Slav world just as yours is in the middle of the Latin.

It is clear that the union of the Latin peoples cannot be achieved without profound changes in the institutions of the Latin States. The past has already given us two examples of the political unity of the Latin peoples, and one of their religious unity; these were the Roman empire, the empire of Napoleon I, and the medieval papacy. All these have been judged and condemned by history, that is, by the conscience of the peoples.

There is no possibility of a more or less durable union of France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Belgium if these States remain in their present political condition. It is clear that the Latin Alliance can only be achieved through a triumph, in all the Latin countries, of the ideas and tendencies expressed by the word federalism. The Latin Confederation will only be possible after a transformation of the institutions, and even of the political and social habits, of all Latin peoples. This transformation must be effected under the influence of the ideas of personal, corporative, communal, provincial, and finally, national autonomy.

These are the bases for the union of the races!

From its foundation your Alliance has accepted these ideas. It is noteworthy that the most ardent champions of the Latin Alliance are precisely the sons of a branch of the Latin race which does not have a State, an aristocracy, a Church, or even a national bourgeoisie, and is thus forced to demand liberty from the States which dominate it; that is, first cultural autonomy, then administrative and political autonomy.

Similar phenomena are to be found in the Slav world. Recently Panslavism has been much discussed. It is often thought that Panslavism, i.e. the idea of the union of the Slav peoples, is only an invention of the tsarist government, with its Byzantine-Muscovite Orthodoxy, and is only the fruit of its dreams of conquest. This is an error. It is true that tsarist policy has greatly profited from the Slav idea, but we should note that it was not invented by the servants of the tsars, and that it is by no means identical with their despotic State’s policy of expansion.

The idea of Panslavism was born among the nationalities which have lost their status as nation states and become the “minors” of the family. It is here that it has found its most devoted apostles as well as its most fervent proselytes. Thus it is more a defensive doctrine; above all it is dedicated to the idea of liberty.

The conception of the alliance of the Slav peoples dates from the 16^th and 17^th centuries when the southern Slavs (Bulgarians and Serbs) finally lost their liberty and their religious and political autonomy under the Turks and the Greek clergy (Phanariotes).

At that time Turk domination menaced not only Ukraine and Hungary, but also Poland. At the same time the domination of the German aristocracy and bureaucracy began to weigh heavily upon the western Slavs, such as the Czechs in Bohemia, the Slovenes in Styria, Carinthia, etc., particularly after the Thirty Years War, when the Protestant element was crushed in those Slav States and provinces which accepted the Habsburgs as their kings and dukes.

From that time on the western and southern Slavs, their very existence menaced, began to turn their eyes toward the north and east, first toward Poland, then to Moscow, in order to seek a centre of gravity, the centre of the Slav political union.

It should be noted that the first theoretician of Muscovite Panslavism in the 17^th century, Juraj Krizanic, was a Serb by birth. He did not stop at propagandizing the idea that the Slavs might find protection from Moscow, the only completely independent Slav State, but also drew up projects of liberal and democratic reforms for this despotic and boyar State. The ideas of this precursor of 19^th century Panslavism cost him exile in Siberia.

At the same time that Krizanic was writing his projects, the Cossacks of Ukraine voluntarily united with the Tsarist empire, thus forming the “Empire of all the Russias,” i.e. of Great Russia or Muscovy, Little Russia or Ukraine, and White Russia or Lithuania. Through this union the Muscovite State extended to the Black Sea, and was drawn into the anti-Turk policy. It entered into more direct relations with the Slavs of the south and west, and embraced the nascent ideas of Panslavism.

When the Panslav idea was given definite form in the 19^th century, it was once again members of oppressed nationalities who played a major part: Kollar and Safarik, Slovaks; Palacky and Havlicek, Czechs; Gaj and other Serbo-Illyrians; Hutsa-Venelin and Bodyansky, Ukrainians, were the precursors and masters of Khomiakov, Aksakov, Gilferding and the others known as the Moscow Slavophiles.

This Moscow school has greatly harmed the development of Panslavism for it introduced a spirit of narrow national pride, of Byzantine religious intolerance, and of political servility. This is why Moscow Slavophilism did not receive any sympathy from progressive circles in Russia. Even in Great Russia the most enlightened writers of the last thirty years, called Westerners because of their constant polemics against the religious and political orientalism of the Muscovite school, have constantly combated the Panslav doctrines as well. Frequently they went further and denied that Slav interests had any value for the Russian people. After 1848 the forerunners of the Socialist movement in Russia, the most advanced of the Westerners such as Bakunin and Herzen, were the only Great Russians who tried to form a party which would be liberal, rationalist, democratic and Slavophile all at once. But most of the Russian public, which was so eager to follow their doctrine of opposition to the dominant system in Russia, remained just as indifferent to their Socialist Panslavism as to that of their “friendly enemies,” Aksakov and others.

Recently one of the leaders of the Moscow Panslav school, Gilferding, complained publicly of the glacial indifference to the Panslav idea on the part of Moscow society, and turned toward Ukraine as the land destined to become the natural center of Panslavism for “All the Russias.”

In spite of the feebleness and exhaustion of Ukraine (this oppressed land englobed in a State of unlimited centralism), Gilferding was right in speaking in this manner, not only for the future, but also for the present.

Because of its geographic position, its ethnographic character, its past and its historic destiny, Ukraine has more resemblances to and connections with the southern and western Slavs than does Muscovy, i.e. northern and eastern Russia. The Ukrainian territory is connected more or less directly to that of the Poles, the Slovaks, the Serbs and the Bulgarians, not to mention those non-Slav races whose destiny is closely linked to that of the Slavs, i.e. the Rumanians and Magyars or Hungarians.

Before the 18^th century, when Ukraine was more or less independent, it was in close touch with its neighbours. This was strengthened both by some analogous institutions and by a continuous exchange of ideas. Not to speak of the Poles, with whom the Ukrainians were so closely connected, the Czechs counted the Ukrainians as among their Hussite brothers in arms. That is why Tabor became the model for the strategic fortifications of the Zaporozhians. The Christian subjects of Turkey (Serbs, Bulgarians, and Greeks) fraternized with the Ukrainian Cossacks in their maritime expeditions against the Turks, who had Christian prisoners of all nationalities as galley slaves on their ships. The Serbs often joined the ranks of the Cossacks or came to study in the schools of Kiev. In the 16^th and 17^th centuries there was an exchange of hospodars (dukes) and Cossack chiefs, priests, teachers, painters and architects even with Latin Rumania. In Moldavia the Ukrainian literary language (Old Church Slavonic adapted to the spoken idiom) was often used as the official language.

After the 18^th century, even though Ukraine was almost completely absorbed by Muscovite centralism and detached from its southern and western neighbours, it still gave the first Slavists to Russia (Hutsa-Venelin, Bodyansky, Sreznevsky, Hryhorovych, etc.). The idea of Ukrainian national regeneration had hardly begun when it was joined to that of a Slav alliance. But there is a deep chasm between this and Muscovite Slavism.

In 1846 the poet and historian Kostomarov and the national poet Shevchenko formed a society in Kiev called the Brotherhood of Sts. Cyril and Methodius, with tendencies toward a democratic and federalist Panslavism. Shevchenko wrote a poem on Hus, whom he celebrated as a “holy heretic.” From this time on, every step toward the regeneration of Ukraine has also been a step toward the propagation of Panslavism. The many obstacles placed in its path by the Russian government, which wishes to prevent any internal progress and all external relations, have slowed down the development of Ukrainianism and of federalist Panslavism, but they have not been able to stop these ideas.

Slavic sympathies jn Ukraine were clearly shown during the last Serbian revolution. As soon as the peasants in Herzegovina started their insurrection in July, 1875, money was sent to them from Kiev and Odessa. Ukrainian volunteers, one may even say conscious Ukrainian patriots, were the first to arrive in Herzegovina, well ahead of Chernayev and the other emissaries of the Slav committees in Moscow, who, a year later, did all they could to disfigure the popular anti-Turk movements in Serbia and in Russia by giving them their stamp and their specific spirit. The anti-Turk movement in Ukraine is easily comprehensible in the light of the popular traditions of the Cossack wars. But the imbecility of the Russian government which banned Ukrainian literature in 1876, and the ignorance and bad faith of the centralist press, caused this enthusiasm to be lost.

In any case, it was the soldiers from the southern provinces who first crossed the Danube and the Balkans, and who paid for the mistakes of the imperial generals with their blood. Correspondents from all the Russian newspapers have admitted that the Ukrainians could understand the Serbs and the Bulgarians more easily than could the Great Russians. There is no doubt that this contact of the Ukrainians with their southern Slav brothers will have an influence on them, and contribute much to their fraternization.

The southern Slav press, particularly the Serbian, has frequently acknowledged the devotion of the Ukrainians to the cause of the independence of the Slavs, not only from the Turkish yoke, but also from Muscovite tutelage. It has also expressed its gratitude to the Ukrainians for their idea of Panslavism, a true idea of brotherhood, that is, of federalism.

In spite of all assertions to the contrary, it is the federalist idea which has come triumphant from the last Russian-Turkish war. Even the semi-official papers of Moscow and St. Petersburg, which are of necessity servile and mercenary, have understood that the centralist panslavism of the tsars and Muscovite Slavophiles has lost all its popularity, not only among the Serbs (who are already independent), but also among the Bulgarians. This was inevitable, thanks both to the political faults and bad faith of the Russian government, which neither wished nor was able to liberate the Serbs and the Bulgarians, and to the total lack of tact of the agencies through whom the Slav Committees in Moscow worked in Serbia in 1876. The agents who accompanied the army in Bulgaria (such as Prince Cherkasky, that bureaucrat with the despotic air) had the same effect on the Bulgarians. In addition, this Turkish War has exposed all the faults of Russian imperial despotism and bureaucratic centralization, so that the ideas of freedom and federation have every chance of success in Russia. Moreover, this war has placed even the most remote representatives of the Muscovite people in contact with the southern Slavs, and has shown them the importance of Slav interests for themselves. We hope that it will now be impossible to deny these interests, as did the Muscovite Westerners on the very eve of the war, even for those who rarely leave their newspaper offices, or for the bureaucrats in the centres of northern Russia — St. Petersburg and Moscow.

For the Ukrainians — patriots, democrats, and autonomists, Slavophiles and Westerners by nature and necessity — this state of affairs opens up a vast field of activity, both in Russia and beyond its frontiers.

Being the most closely allied with the Muscovites (the most numerous Slav race and the one dominant in Russia) the Ukrainians should be the natural intermediaries between Russia and the southern and western Slavs. At the same time, being the people which has suffered the most from political and national centralism, and finally, being the most numerous of the provincial nationalities in the Russian empire, the Ukrainians should always act in the interest of liberal institutions and of the ideas of local and national autonomy. It is to be hoped that this situation will be used to spread the ideas of autonomy and federal alliance, at least among the Slavs. Only this idea can succeed in the work where the despotic empire of the Tsars failed, with equal dishonour, both under Plevna and at the Congress of Berlin. It is natural that die provincial or minor nationalities, who have the most to gain from the federalist idea at home, should also press for it in questions of foreign policy.

It is in this way that the provincial nationalities may render the greatest service to those great works which the dominant nationalities have not had the force to accomplish. Here I have spoken only of the people of the Languedoc and Ukraine, but there are other analogies in the Latin, Slav, Germanic, and Celtic world.

Thus these minors, these peoples of Languedoc, these Bretons, Welsh, Irish, Flemish, these different groups of Slavs, and let us even add the Rumanians and Greeks, who have not achieved complete independence and whose little States are menaced by their greedy neighbours, and perhaps the Danes and the Dutch may also be mentioned, these peoples must become aware of their historic role alongside of the peoples who have created great centralized States in which the principal nationality is always somewhat privileged at the expense of the others. Their role is the propagation and support, in all possible ways, of the ideas of federalism, democracy, and free thought, which have so often been neglected in the large centralized States.

In conclusion let me say that the minor or provincial nationalities must increase their force by the constant interchange of aspirations, by a moral alliance, and by constant mutual assistance.

…

The Centralization of the Revolutionary Struggle in Russia

This was first published in Volnoye Slovo in Geneva (No. 37, 1882), under the title “Narodnaya Volya on the Centralization of the Revolutionary Struggle in Russia.” Our translation follows the text in the second volume of Collected Political Works. We have omitted certain details of Drahomanov’s polemic against Narodnaya Volya.

No matter what one thinks of the principles and actions of the group of Russian revolutionaries with Narodnaya Volya [The Will of the People] as its organ, it cannot be denied that it is of great importance as the most active of the numerous anti-government forces at the present time. By its energy alone it attracts the most fervent elements of opposition in Russia. Although the literary exposition of the political ideas of this group has always been of less importance than its actions, these are nevertheless capable of fascinating a certain part of society, the young people in particular. This fact directs attention to the political theories and plans expounded in Narodnaya Volya as ones which to a large degree determine the practical activity of some of those who are striving to overturn the existing order in Russia.

Therefore it is particularly important not to overlook two articles in the latest issue, No. 8–9, of Narodnaya Volya: the leading article and the one following. Here this paper presents (with a clarity not often encountered in the recent Russian revolutionary press) its views on the organization of the revolutionary movement in Russia and the immediate plans of the Narodnaya Volya Party.

The following words from the leading article are especially interesting in this connection:

Our immediate task now is the organization of a plot to overthrow the present State system. At the present time the work of the Narodnaya Volya Party is primarily directed toward uniting all active opposition forces, welding them into a firm centralized organization capable of assuming the initiative for rebellion at the crucial moment, and capable until such time of engaging in successful conspiratorial activity, no matter what the persecution by the government. Successful completion of this task is possible if fighting forces are concentrated only at those points where each step will draw us nearer to the goal, where every action will be of importance in the near rather than the remote future. For this reason we are grouping active, consciously revolutionary forces in the government centres, including those on the periphery, in proportion to their importance, and are engaging in organizational work only among those elements which will play a direct part in the coup d’etat.

The practical necessity for such an arrangement arises from the fact, among others, that rural upheavals, movements from the border areas, without an insurrection in the administrative and industrial centres, are always quickly suppressed and have almost no effect on the cause of popular liberation. The drawbacks of this method will constantly increase with the modernization of the technical refinements at the disposal of the central government, while the living conditions of the people will prevent them from organizing. Moreover, organization of the peasant forces does not enter into our consideration. Although the increased popularity of the party because of terrorist incidents has cleared the way for direct action among the people, we consider it essential to limit our activity in this respect to explaining the true meaning of our demands and to protecting the peasantry from the reactionary intrigues of the enemies of the people at the moment of rebellion. This will ensure the success and duration of the coup d’etat.

Thus far the notion of metropolitan centralism is somewhat obscured by the reservation: “we group the active, consciously revolutionary forces in the government centres, including those on the periphery,” etc., but further on, at the end of the article, this centralism appears in all clarity. Narodnaya Volya speaks frankly of the “provisional government” by its party. At the same time the paper hopes that in the economic field the role of this provisional government will be strictly formal (we should call it superfluous). To use Narodnaya Volya’s words there is a “favorable mutual relationship between political and economic factors in Russia,” allegedly consisting in the fact that “at the same time that the Social Revolutionary Party inflicts blows on the government authority, hatred of the ruling, privileged caste will increase among the people, as will a persistent striving for a radical change in the economic structure.” This favorable mutual relationship permits Narodnaya Volya

to hope that when the revolutionary organization is able to effect a political coup, the people will know how to bring about an economic revolution and then the provisional revolutionary government which has seized power will only have to sanction the economic equality won by the people from their age-old oppressors and exploiters….

Narodnaya Volya continues:

But if circumstances prove less favorable, the provisional government will, along with the political emancipation of the people and the establishment of new political institutions, carry out an economic revolution; it will destroy the right of private ownership of land and the means of large-scale production. Then the true representatives of the politically and economically emancipated people will appear in the Zemsky Sobor [National Assembly] which will be convened, and life will begin to be regulated by the unmanipulated will of the people.

At the conclusion of the second article we find similar ideas in almost the same words, with the addition of a few objections to decentralist strivings, which the author rejects at least for the present and the immediate future, stating decisively that:

for the entire period of struggle up to the first lasting revolutionary victory, we consider the strictly centralized type of organization the best, and the only one leading to the goal.

The author of the article makes the following objections to opponents of the principle of centralization:

It is often said that the Narodnaya Volya Party neglects the local peculiarities of the Russian periphery and that it strives to subordinate the other nationalities to the Great Russians. It is unnecessary to prove that as a socialist party the Narodnaya Volya Party is alien to all national partiality and considers all who are oppressed and dispossessed as its brothers and comrades, irrespective of origin; that the use of racial hostility, and even more its augmentation, does not at all enter into our plans; that we will not take such a step regardless of the temporary advantage it might be expected to bring our party.

The other aspect of the national question concerns the future condition of the nationalities which have become crystallized in the course of history. It is self-evident that we do not deny to any nationality the right to complete political independence, leaving to its good will to enter into whatever relations it pleases with the other nationalities.

But we maintain that the unified, friendly efforts of all the component parts of the State must be directed against the common enemy; disunity in the struggle will weaken our forces and postpone victory. We also insist that the triumph of revolutionary and socialist principles can be consolidated only if common efforts are not limited to destructive work, but are continued in the creative work as well, i.e. in the elaboration of a constitution by an all-Russian Zemsky Sobor, which will replace the provisional revolutionary government and will have jurisdiction over the territory of the entire State. Only after the consolidation of the revolutionary gains, after the firm establishment of the common bases of the new system, should individual nationalities be granted the right to determine their political relationship with the entire State. Otherwise the dark forces of reaction will certainly find their Vendee, from which they will launch a campaign against the dismembered revolution.

It is not difficult to see how this most active group of Russian revolutionaries arrived at the centralist ideas expounded above after the anarchical and federal ideas current among them not long ago, nor is it difficult to identify the foreign political elements which abetted the final formation of these notions. Even ignoring the inevitable influence of national traditions on revolutionaries, we see that the centripetal tendency in Russian revolutionary circles is strengthened by the present conditions of political life in Russia, which make every sort of legal opposition difficult, and incline revolutionaries toward tight conspiracies and dictatorship. However, in recent times the “terrorist” character of the Narodnaya Volya group necessarily makes it even more centralistic. Add to this the influence of the examples of the French Revolution of 1792–93 and the ideals of the German Social Democrats, which were formed when Germany strove for political unity, and you will easily be able to explain the origin of those statements in the St. Petersburg revolutionary paper which we have copied above.

But although they are entirely natural under such circumstances, it is our profound conviction that such ideas, accompanied as they must be by certain acts, bear within them the seeds of phenomena extremely dangerous both for the revolutionary elements in Russia and for this entire country. In the centralist tendencies expressed in this quotation from Narodnaya Volya we see one of many signs in support of our often expressed fear that the present ferment in Russia and the more extensive revolutionary movement which may follow it may not have any more results, in proportion to the effort expended, than did the great French Revolution. For after Jacobin centralism — to which we should deny even the name of revolutionary — became supreme, it was properly speaking already the beginning of the counter-revolution, which ended in the establishment of Bonapartism.

Before beginning our criticism of Narodnaya Volya’s views on the centralization or decentralization of the revolutionary cause in Russia, we must investigate, of necessity briefly, Narodnaya Volya’s opinions, or better its hopes, with regard to the possibility of a simultaneous political and social-economic revolution in Russia at the present moment. These hopes by no means seem as justified to us as to the writers in Narodnaya Volya. Examples from the world over show that even with a far greater degree of development and organization than that of the unskilled working masses in Russia, the peoples have not yet brought about such radical changes in the social-economic order as those expected by Narodnaya Volya. Of course the peasants in Russia now talk about the general redistribution of the land, but they think of this in the most fantastic way, and in most areas expect it on the order of the tsar. It is still a long, long way from this dream to real redistribution, and even further to the replacement of private ownership of land and factories and to the organization of the national economy in accordance with the ideal of the socialists (without which economic inequality would immediately reappear)…. It is clear that if one can (and in our opinion one must) expect popular disturbances in Russia at the present, they will not at all be the kind that would bring about a radical change in the social-economic system, which has not been done away with anywhere. They will rather be like those during the French Revolution, for example, which frightened the government, disorganized the existing political system, and made it easier for the best organized forces of opposition to seize power under the pretext of “re-establishing order.” The present anti-Jewish riots in the south of Russia are already beginning to have a similar meaning. They, it would seem, show that at the present stage of development and organization of the masses in Russia the insurrections of the people cannot be either progressive or positive in character. And one should not forget that the anti-Jewish riots are taking place in a region where the peasants have not been crushed completely by an age-old serfdom and are the least conditioned by the Muscovite traditions which have shaped the character of the ancient Muscovite State.

In any event, even if matters were to go as far as general uprisings of the peasants, with the seizure of lands and factories, it is hard to understand why it would be necessary to have the sanction of the central provisional government. If such a seizure did not take place, then no decree of the provisional government could dictate it, for generally such radical changes in ideas and ways of life cannot be brought about by decree.^[221] Even permanent governments lack the strength for this, let alone provisional ones. A provisional revolutionary government in Russia which relied only on the capitals, St. Petersburg and Moscow, even supposing that it had on its side all the factory workers there and even part of the army (i.e. the guards), would not have the strength to enforce a radical economic change on the entire population of Russia, or even, in the language of Narodnaya Volya, “to explain to the people the true meaning of our demands and to protect the peasantry from the reactionary intrigues of the enemies of the people,” In order not to be carried away by such dreams it suffices merely to compare the population of the capitals with that of the rest of Russia.

On the basis of all that has been said, we think that those Russian socialists who have made up their minds that a political revolution is necessary for the direction of a social-economic change would be acting more rationally if they were not carried away by the hopes of the possibility of the simultaneous success of both, and especially by the dreams of the possibility of guiding the course of the social-economic change by measures of central provisional governments (decrees, commissars, and similar imitations of the implements of the conservative bureaucracy). They should direct their efforts toward a real political change, i.e. toward the establishment of real political freedom which would make possible both a future organization of workers, urban and rural, and alliance between them and the socialists among the intelligentsia. Such freedom can only follow the weakening of centralist power, the destruction of its bureaucratic machine, and the establishment of institutions guaranteeing the rights of persons and groups and the self-government of communes and regions. It will not come about through changing the central State institutions from autocratic into parliamentary or even republican ones, especially since such changes, if they preserve the machinery of government, are rarely maintained in the form established by the centralist revolution. The governmental apparatus which is retained or even perfected by the revolution almost always turns against the revolution soon afterward.

Of course adopting our viewpoint on political and social change in Russia means accepting the views to which Russian revolutionary and even radical circles in general have become accustomed to give the unflattering epithet if “gradualism”…. But what can one do if history indicates that people progress only in a rather gradual way? Indeed, the conversion of many Russian socialists, including the most active, from “pure socialism” to the struggle for political freedom is nothing other than an admission of this gradualism. One must be completely logical and admit that in our time the gain for the popular cause will be great if Russia obtains even this political freedom alone. It would guarantee elementary human rights to the entire population and give the friends of the masses the opportunity of working systematically for their welfare.

Centralization and freedom are mutually exclusive. Ideas, such as those in Narodnaya Volya, that centralization is essential at the first moment of the revolutionary struggle and until solid results have been obtained are either sophisms with which those whom centralism would benefit now and later on silence those whom it would harm, or self-deception on the part of those who think that the course of history can be held back by their own personal good intentions.

Every political configuration, once formed, seeks to consolidate itself. Nowhere has a centralized power, with the bureaucracy and army without which it is inconceivable, ever done away with itself. In the history of centralized revolutions all changes have consisted in the passing of the retained or newly-formed machine of centralized rule from one set of hands to another, for example from the hands of a king into those of a committee and then into the hands of a dictator, etc. In Russia centralization, even revolutionary centralization, is all the more dangerous to the cause of freedom because the immaturity of the masses in this country gives the greater reason for fearing a reactionary dictatorship, even following the temporary success of a progressive revolution. This is the reason why all advocates of progress in Russia, especially the socialists, must fight the principles of authoritarianism and centralization both in practice and in theory, and strive to base all their ideas and acts, before, during and after the coup d’etat, on the opposite principles of decentralization and federation.

The opinion that federation weakens and disunites any movement is completely untrue, as is the opinion that centralization in itself constitutes strength and unity. Strength and unity accrue to the central authority only through the obedience or sympathy of the constituent parts, and in times of stress obedience alone is not enough…. But revolutionary circles which intend to form a government cannot claim obedience and consequently must count mostly upon sympathy. This sympathy will be the greater the closer the revolutionaries are to the various elements of the population, and the more even a central revolutionary government — if one proves necessary in the course of events or arises from them — is formed by the federative process from the bottom up rather than by the process of centralization from the top down. This is why those revolutions which seemed most hopeless in view of their initial weakness succeeded through decentralization and federation: this is the way the Swiss cantons repulsed their strong neighbors, this is how the united Netherlands liberated themselves from Spain and the United States of North America from England, how the juntas (provincial alliances) of Spain overcame the armies of Napoleon I, etc. It is noteworthy that even in the offensive war of 1870–71 a Germany which was federative in its way defeated a strictly united France.

It is precisely centralization that weakens social forces, reducing personal and regional initiative, isolating those near to each other and compelling them to await orders from a distant centre; it is precisely centralization that disunites, gives birth to disagreements, for it is the nature of centralization to strive for the reduction of all differences to a single pattern, to elevate secondary questions to positions of eminence, to confuse means and forms with ends, etc., and thereby to cause irritation among forces which otherwise would act in unison. All separatism is the product of centralization; disagreements among parties which are essentially close and differ only in minor matters usually result from centralizing tendencies which compel them to advance their peculiarities as something generally valid. And it is worth noting that these instincts develop with particular force in centralized countries, namely where “provisional” governments, immediately after they were formed, sought to copy the old governments, like children their elders….

In addition to these and other general considerations which speak against the centralistic doctrines of the Narodnaya Volya adherents, the particular conditions of life in Russia bear no less strong witness to the inapplicability of centralization in this country, not only in order to consolidate and preserve freedom (it seems that even the St. Petersburg Narodnaya Volya group still believe that centralization as a permanent system is incompatible with freedom), but also for a decisive revolutionary attack on the present government in order to gain freedom….

We will hardly be much in error if, on the basis of the article in this St. Petersburg revolutionary paper, we imagine that it assumes the possibility of organizing in St. Petersburg or Moscow something like the Paris Commune of 1871, more or less socialist, but with the political attributes of the Paris municipality of 1792–93, which would be the basis for a revolutionary government ruling not only over the capital, but also over all Russia. But, fortunately or unfortunately, St. Petersburg is not in Russia what Paris was in France, neither by absolute or even relative population, nor in composition (number of army officers, officials, etc.) nor in character and stage of development. An insurrection of the St. Petersburg proletariat (even assuming that it would be capable of rising against the monarchy at the present time), unsupported by insurrections in the provinces, would be of no more practical importance than an insurrection in any village. If the monarchy were to suppress this insurrection — and in the guards, the least hopeful part of the Russian military force from the viewpoint of popular revolution, it has the power to do so — and even if it were to destroy the entire civilian population of St. Petersburg, then the remainder of this immense and various country, especially peasant Russia, would hardly feel the amputation of this insignificant growth, surrounded by deserts as it is.

It is evident that central uprisings in the capitals would only have even a remote chance of success if they were at least accompanied by insurrections in all the territory around the capitals. But it must be remembered that imperial traditions in Russia are especially strong precisely in the central Great Russian areas, where they are not only stronger than in Poland, Ukraine, and the Caucasus, but also stronger than in the Lower Volga and Siberia. If there is any place in Russia where the conditions are suitable for the development of a Vendee (to use the word of Narodnaya Volya), it is in Great Russia and, perhaps, right in Moscow, but not in the border areas, especially in the west and south. There is no point in discussing Poland at length. Poland, if it could not be a Vendee, could be a refuge for the dynasty, but only if the revolution in Russia assumed a centralist and therefore inevitably a Great Russian character. In this case the Poles might well consider it advantageous to support the Romanov dynasty, just as the various peoples of Austria preferred to make a deal with the Habsburg dynasty when threatened by the centralism of the German and Hungarian liberals and revolutionaries in 1848–49. Poland will never be reconciled to the centralization of Russia. Of course at present while the revolutionary movement in Russia has a purely destructive character, the Poles, especially the young people, are able to participate in all existing Russian revolutionary circles, but neither the Polish intelligentsia nor the Polish masses will ever abandon claim to the autonomy of their country, and at the first favorable moment they will raise its banner. If, for example, a provisional government were actually formed in St. Petersburg, one which would appeal to the population of Russia to send representatives to a national assembly, the Poles would in all probability form their own provisional government and even their own sejm [parliament] in Warsaw.

As for Ukraine, since its independence was crushed in the late 17^th century and as a result a considerable part of the intelligentsia was Russianised, to their own misfortune as well as that of the masses of the Ukrainian people, it is of course not difficult to attract the Great Russianised part of the Ukrainian intelligentsia to an all-Russian centralist program. But there is no reason for expecting good to the cause of freedom in Russia to come from this desertion. Still, monarchical ideas are weaker and republican ideas stronger in Ukraine than in any other of the eastern Slavic provinces of Russia; recently the masses of the people are showing more of the spirit of protest in just this land, in the form of agrarian disorders and city movements against the police as well as the anti-Jewish riots, which at present are wild in character, but which could be given a more rational direction. But it is precisely the program of metropolitan centralism which is depriving this land of the most conscious and organized fighters for freedom! As everyone knows, it is Ukraine which has given a tremendous percentage of the members and the funds of all Russian revolutionary circles, both in the absolute and even more in comparison to the relative populations. The program of metropolitan centralism of the Russian revolutionary organizations not only proposes to continue the immoral and even shameful alienation of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, nourished by the labour of the people, from the population of its native land, but also tempts them to fruitless and ruinous activity in that country, Great Russia, which is far more capable of becoming a Vendee than this so-called border area!

However, we consider the emigration of a part of the Ukrainian intelligentsia to Great Russia, via the capitals, a matter which is inevitable and must be accepted since fate has already linked Ukraine to the State of Muscovy. This can even be in the interest of general European culture. We consider the present participation of native Ukrainians in Great Russian revolutionary circles a phenomenon analogous to the emigration of Ukrainian clergy, teachers, and scribes to Muscovy in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. As a result even more of Muscovite centralization and the destruction of such cultural centers as Novgorod and Pskov, than of the Tatar invasions, perhaps, Great Russia was left so far behind the European world that it was not even able to follow its tracks without resorting to the importation of alien stock. Here the Ukrainians are the element most closely related to the Great Russians and therefore the one more able than distant foreigners to undermine Muscovite orthodoxy and autocracy and to strengthen the forces of the native champions of progress.

But excessive emigration weakens the country from which it occurs, and that moral “absenteeism” which, supported as it is by the Russification measures of the government, has become a characteristic of the Ukrainian upper classes, paralyzes all the efforts of the Ukrainian masses to improve their material and cultural situation.

This abnormal condition of Ukraine, which we have taken as an example of the situation in many other areas of Russia — Lithuania, Byelorussia, Bessarabia and to some extent Transcaucasia — can be ended only through autonomy, which will place the masses of the people face to face with the intelligentsia and compel the latter to serve the former. Narodnaya Volya’s centralist program does not promise any such autonomy. Even for the future it does not promise anything except an all-Russian or, as Narodnaya Volya says, “general Russian” national assembly to take the place of the provisional revolutionary government after the latter has itself replaced the present imperial government. This all-Russian assembly, which of course Narodnaya Volya imagines as all powerful, (at least we have never read in the writings of Narodnaya Volya adherents any indications of limitations to the power of this future sovereign of Russia) will grant the various individual nationalities (naturally only those which this assembly considers distinct or, to use another Narodnaya Volya expression, “historically crystallized”) “the right to determine their political bond with the entire [the entire, by all means!] State,” and will make this concession “only after the establishment [naturally “ by it, the new autocrat of all the Russias] of the general principles of the new system” (again those which it will be convenient for the future assembly to recognize as such). In other words, the various nationalities now enslaved by the State, which is really Great Russian, and administered at the discretion of the imperial bureaucracy, will receive autonomy only when and to the degree the new autocratic ruler of all the peoples and regions of Russia finds convenient. Judging from what all rulers, both collective and individual, have done on earth, the peoples and lands of Russia would have to wait for this when a long time!

There can be no denying that if the present Russian autocrat, on his own initiative or under the pressure of public opinion, agreed to even the poorest sort of national assembly, composed of delegates from the present zemstvos, this would be a step forward which would be joyously acclaimed in all regions of Russia. But the first act of even this assembly would have to be the establishment of the security and freedom of persons, groups and nationalities, as well as the self-government of regions, and the establishment of inalienable constitutional rights, inviolable by anyone and anything, including the State which, in comparison with its component parts, is a fiction.

If the sons of the nations and regions of Russia have to shed their blood in revolution in order to achieve representative rule, the acquisition of an autocratic all-Russian national assembly in which hegemony necessarily reverts to the Great Russians is too small a reward. If we must fight for the creation of revolutionary assemblies, then it is more natural for the peripheral regions to form their own. These regional assemblies will take it upon themselves to establish “the common principles for the federation of the entire State” if they consider it desirable. Only the limitation of the central government by inviolable rights of vigorous regional autonomy can protect Russia from post-revolutionary reaction and the spread of Vendee-style counter-revolutionary dictatorship which, we repeat, could appear more easily in the central regions of Muscovy than in the less monarchically minded peripheries….

As for preparatory organisations for effecting a political revolution in Russia, we think that the most expedient approach would be the formation of regional revolutionary committees, which would of course enter into alliance among themselves. According to circumstances, the committees could render special aid to the committees in the capitals, but without a priori concessions to a centralist program before, during or after the revolution….

The later success of the revolution would depend largely on the skill and energy of the regional committees, while the further agreement of these committees among themselves and with the central committee, if this were found to be necessary, would depend largely on the sincere acceptance by all, including the central committee, of the principle of equality of all nationalities, historical and non-historical, as well as of the principle of the autonomy of regions, in short of the federal principle. It would also depend on the ability of the central committee to distinguish between solidarity, which is essential, and centralization, which is superfluous and even downright harmful.

…

The Program of the Review Hromada

Our translation was made from Selected Works (pp. 148–151), compared with the original text (Geneva, 1881). Omissions have been made only in the sections presenting editorial aims, at the end of the article, not in the actual political program. This program, which was drawn up in 1880, is to be distinguished from the “Introduction to Hromada” of 1877. The much longer “Introduction” was the work of Drahomanov alone. The “Program,” which we have printed here, is the joint work of Drahomanov and his friends Mykhaylo Pavlyk and Serhiy Podolynsky. Indeed, it is probable that the blueprint of this came from Podolynsky rather than from Drahomanov, but Drahomanov certainly reworked it.

We must explain briefly the history of Hromada. Since 1877 Drahomanov had been publishing this magazine, at irregular intervals. This was part of the political task entrusted to Drahomanov by the illegal Hromada group in Kiev. In all, Drahomanov had published five thick volumes. But political and personal differences arose between Drahomanov and his Kiev friends, who suspended their remittances, and the further issues were stopped. At this point Drahomanov, who was then living with Mykhaylo Pavlyk, a journalist from Galicia, was approached by Serhiy Podolynsky. Podolynsky (1850–1891), a doctor and economist, a member of the Ukrainian Hromada in Kiev, and a militant socialist, had been living in France as a political emigrant since 1878. His parents were rich, and he had at his disposition substantial means, with which he wished to finance a new series of Hromada, transformed into a bi-monthly. Although Drahomanov had certain doubts about this, he agreed to cooperate. But the project soon broke down. Under police pressure Podolynsky’s family ceased to send money. Soon thereafter Podolynsky became mentally ill, and was taken back to Russia by his parents. Only two numbers of the new Hromada, with Drahomanov, Podolynsky, and Pavlyk as editors, ever appeared.

The reader will soon spot the divergences between “Free Union” and the “Program of Hromada.” The former demands only the federalization of the Russian Empire and social reforms, the latter speaks of economic collectivism and of the complete independence of Ukraine within its ethnic boundaries. We must remember that neither work is the product of Drahomanov alone, but that both are the result of collaboration — in the first case with the group which wished to found the Free Union organization, in the second with S. Podolynsky. In both cases the collaboration left its imprint final product. Drahomanov was not a political opportunist and under no circumstances would he have signed his name to a program he could not accept. On the other hand he was not a narrow dogmatist, and the difference between “Free Union” and the “Program of Hromada” merely show the range within which his ideas moved. Certainly the fundamental ideas — the guarantee of personal rights, federalism, the national emancipation of Ukraine, and social progress — are the same in both. However, we shall probably not be mistaken in assuming that the program developed in “Free Union” lay closer to Drahomanov’s heart. The “Program of Hromada” has a “maximal” flavour, and this was not exactly to Drahomanov’s taste.

The Ukrainian publication Hromada (Community) has been published in Geneva since 1877. It has been edited at irregular intervals by M. Drahomanov. From now on a hundred page issue will appear regularly every two months under the direction of the three undersigned: M. Drahomanov, M. Pavlyk, and S. Podolynsky.

We realize how difficult it is to undertake a publication in the Ukrainian language, especially on foreign soil. We have to address ourselves to a people without political independence, divided between two great empires, Russia and Austria-Hungary, a people who therefore has no way of expressing itself about its own welfare. Moreover we, a very small group of socialists, are far from our native land, and have no chance of working directly with and among our people.

At this time, however, there is no choice but to publish our periodical abroad. The political, economic, and educational enslavement of our country by Russia and Austria-Hungary curtails the freedoms of speech and publication to such an extent that it is almost impossible for those who favour freedom for the Ukrainian people, the socialists in particular, to speak or write unhampered on topics pertaining to human welfare and progress.

Our ideas and proposals are as follows:

1. In political matters:
   1. Equal rights for men and women of all races.
   2. Inviolable freedom of speech, publication, education, assembly, and organization.
   3. Inalienable self-government for every community.
   4. Complete independence for Ukraine, organized into a federation of free communities.

We define Ukraine as the territory extending from the upper Tisa in Hungary in the west to the river Don and the Kuban land now under Russia in the east, and from the river Narev in the north to the Black Sea in the south. In this area the large majority of the peasants and workers, the really productive groups, are Ukrainians. On the other hand, the majority of the Poles, Jews, Germans, Hungarians, Muscovites (Russians), and so on belong to the allegedly upper classes, in reality the idle classes who live at the expense of the genuinely productive elements. Now these foreigners, who were sent into Ukraine by their conquering States, and those renegade Ukrainians who joined them, dominate the country economically as the wealthy, and politically as officials and administrators.

Every nation suffers under foreign rule; neither can a nation prosper when it is forced to support large segments of the population which are non-productive. In reality it makes little difference whether the Ukrainian people get rid of these because they are exploiting groups or because they are foreign elements. Whatever their nationality, they should either contribute their share of work, or else they should leave the country.

The settlements of Rumanians, Bulgarians, Serbs, Greeks, Russians, Germans, Polish artisans and peasants, Jewish tradesmen, etc., who contribute toward the well-being of the country are a different matter. They must share equal rights and freedoms with the Ukrainians. Their communities and organizations should not be coerced into adopting the language and customs of the Ukrainian commonwealth. They should have the freedom to organize their own schools, from the primary to the university level, and the freedom to join in all sorts of activities with people in their home countries. These constructive foreign elements will be the links that bind Ukraine to the neighbouring nations, with whom Ukraine should unite in a great free international federation.

In our opinion, self-government for a community consists in the right to unite with the nation it chooses, and to administer its internal affairs independently.

1. In economic matters:
   1. All the important natural resources and means of production, such as land, water, machines, and factories, should be owned by the workers and peasants, organized into cooperative associations. People should not be placed in the position of selling their labour. They should work directly for themselves.

We believe that cooperative or collective ownership and labour are much more worthwhile than a system of private ownership.

At the same time we believe that the manner in which private ownership becomes collective and the manner in which a system of cooperative labour is set up and the produce divided will have to be solved through the goodwill of each community. It is to be hoped that both theory and practice in the economic field will show the individual communities how to organize cooperative labour and a just distribution of goods, not only on the local level, but also on the national and even international levels.

1. In educational and cultural matters:
   1. We are in favour of empirical methods in the natural and social sciences, and in related fields of knowledge.

We think that science and the arts (literature, the theatre, painting, sculpture, and music) will someday replace the religions of today, which have caused and still cause so much enmity among peoples. Until education and persuasion have brought this about, all individuals and communities should have the freedom to worship as they choose, with the provision that the adherents of each faith (Christians, Jews, Mohammedans, etc.) or sect support their own churches and clergy, that nobody be taxed for the support of any church, and that all contributions for such purposes be voluntary.

Here we cannot go into details concerning the ways and methods of realizing our program. By using the printed word we show that we do not evade our part in the peaceable ways of furthering human progress. At the same time, we have no vain hopes. At no time in history were radical changes in social life brought about by peaceable means alone. Perhaps even less in Ukraine than in other countries can we expect the voluntary abdication of power by existing rulers. Therefore it will be difficult for the people of Ukraine to escape the necessity of an armed revolutionary struggle. Only such a revolution will finally transfer the natural resources and means of production into the hands of societies and communities of peasants and workers. To prevent the old ruling groups from seizing again their usurped wealth and power, it will be necessary to abolish the State army and introduce instead a Cossack militia in which every citizen will be trained to carry arms and use them when necessary….

Directors of Hromada:

M. Drahomanov
M. Pavlyk
S. Podolynsky

September 1, 1880

…

For a biography of Mykhailo Drahomanov, see here.