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IN RUSSIA AND AUSTRIA

I'm not sure that I can account for it but it seems to me a quite remarkable fact that after two centuries of almost unimaginable violence while notionally ruled by the Poles this part of the world is relatively pacified throughout most of the nineteenth century. A large part of the explanation is of course Catherine's defeat of the Tatars and incorporation of their territory at more or less the same time as the Polish partitions.


The yellow areas here are the territory taken from the Tatars and Ottomans at the end of the eighteenth century and collectively known as 'Novorossiya.'

The division of classes in the territories taken from Poland, now known as 'Malorossiya' - 'Little Russia' - still resembles the old order - Polish, therefore Catholic, landowners; Orthodox peasants; Jewish middlemen. This, together with Belarus to the North, and Moldavia to the South West, was still the part of the world with the largest Jewish population and of course towards the end of the century we have the famous 'Russian' - in fact Ukrainian, Belarusian or Moldovan - pogroms but these, terrifying as they were at the time, are still - at least in the nineteenth century - on a small scale compared to what had been happening in the Polish territories in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

What Russia gained in the Polish partitions was the more anarchic, Cossack element of the people destined, in the twentieth century, to live in a distinct Ukrainian state. The more stable population in the West, in Galicia with its capital, Lviv, was taken by Austria and this marks an enormous improvement in their lives, or at least in the lives of the Uniates. For a start they cease to be called 'Uniates', a name which had already become derogatory, indicating an inferior, half-in-half sort of Catholic. The Austrian Empress, Maria Theresa, declared that there should be no distinction drawn between Latin rite and Eastern rite Catholics who were now renamed as 'Greek Catholics'. In Austria, the Greek Catholic Church flourished mightily and became the organising centre for the development of a distinct 'Ruthenian' identity. In the second half of the century, the Church launched a comprehensive programme of educating the peasantry through reading clubs, which then became the means - quite contrary to the Church's intentions - by which National Populist and Socialist intellectuals were able to get access to them. (6)

(6) See the essay by John-Paul Himka: 'The Greek Catholic Church and Nation-Building in Galicia, 1772-1918', Harvard Ukrainian Studies, Vol.8, No.3/4 (December 1984), pp. 426-452.

One thing that emerges clearly from the story so far is the existence of two quite distinct political entities - Galicia, centred on Lviv, which is now part of Austria, and on the other hand what might be called Ukraine proper, the old borderland, centred on Kiev, which is now part of Russia. The distinction existed even when both were notionally part of Poland, with Galicia as a relatively stable entity, Ukraine as a very turbulent entity. Looked at purely from the religious point of view (not the only angle from which it could be looked at) both sides could now be reasonably content. The Greek Catholic Church had a well respected place in Catholic Austria; the Orthodox Ukrainians were now living in an Orthodox country - still the only Orthodox country outside the Ottoman Empire. It's true that the Orthodox still living in Austria were having a harder time and there was a tendency within the Greek Catholic Church which aspired to becoming more like Russian Orthodoxy - the more or less contemporary Anglo-Catholic tendency in the Church of England comes to mind. They were regarded with great suspicion and eventually suppressed. Also, the Greek Catholic Church in Russia was suppressed (or, as the Orthodox would like to put it, restored to Orthodoxy) in 1839. But this concerns more the history of Belarus than of Ukraine. 

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