Ukrainian nationalism (, ) is the promotion of the unity of Ukrainians as a people and the promotion of the Ukrainian state. The origins of modern Ukrainian nationalism emerge during the Cossack uprising against the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky in the mid-17th century. Ukrainian nationalism draws upon a single national identity of culture, language, ethnicity, geographic location, politics (or the government), religion, traditions, and belief in a shared singular history.
History
Zaporozhian Cossacks The Cossacks played a strong role in solidifying Ukrainian identity during the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Zaporozhian Cossacks lived on the Pontic–Caspian steppe below the Dnieper Rapids (Ukrainian: za porohamy), also known as the Wild Fields. They have played an important role in European geopolitics, participating in a series of conflicts and alliances with the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire.
The Cossacks emerged as protectors against Tartar raids but were given greater rights as their influence grew. Cossacks revolted as the Polish Kings tried to enforce Catholicism and Polish language on the people of Ukraine. Precursors to the Ukrainian state emerged as Bohdan Khmelnytsky (c. 1595–1657), commanded the Zaporozhian Cossacks and led the Khmelnytsky Uprising against Polish rule in the mid-17th century. Khmelnytsky introduced a government based on a form of democracy which had been practised by Cossacks since the 15th century.
After a conflict between Ottoman-Polish and Polish-Muscovite Principalities, the official Cossack register decreased. This, together with intensified socioeconomic and national-religious oppression of the other classes in Ukrainian society, led to a number of Cossack uprisings in the 1630s. These eventually culminated in the Khmelnytsky Uprising, led by the hetman of the Zaporizhian Sich, Bohdan Khmelnytsky.
Cossack Hetmanate As a result of the mid-17th century Khmelnytsky Uprising, the Zaporozhian Cossacks briefly established an independent state, which later became the autonomous Cossack Hetmanate (1649–1764). It was placed under the suzerainty of the Russian Tsar from 1667, but was ruled by local hetmans for a century. The principal political problem of the hetmans who followed the Pereyeslav Agreement was defending the autonomy of the Hetmanate from Russian/Muscovite centralism. The hetmans Ivan Vyhovsky, Petro Doroshenko and Ivan Mazepa attempted to resolve this by separating Ukraine from Russia.These conflicts created the conditions for Ukrainian nationalism as Bohdan Khmelnytsky spoke of the liberation of the "entire Ruthenian people". Following the uprisings and establishment of the Hetmanate state, Hetman Ivan Mazepa (1639–1709) focused on the restoration of Ukrainian culture and history during the early 18th century. Public works included the Saint Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv, and the elevation of the Kyiv Mohyla Collegium to the status of Kyiv Mohyla Academy in 1694.
During the reign of Catherine II of Russia, the Cossack Hetmanate's autonomy was progressively destroyed. After several earlier attempts, the office of hetman was finally abolished by the Russian government in 1764, and his functions were assumed by the Little Russian Collegium, thus fully incorporating the Hetmanate into the Russian Empire.
On 7 May 1775, Empress Catherine II issued a direct order that the Zaporozhian Sich was to be destroyed. On 5 June 1775, Russian artillery and infantry surrounded the Sich and razed it to the ground. The Russian troops disarmed the Cossacks, and the treasury archives were confiscated. The Koshovyi Otaman, Petro Kalnyshevsky, was arrested and incarcerated in exile at Solovetsky Monastery. This marked the end of the Zaporozhian Cossacks.
Russian and Habsburg Empires
An intense period of Russification began for the areas of the Hetmanate. After 1785 the Romanov dynasty made a conscious effort to assimilate the Ruthenian and Cossack elites by granting them noble status within the Russian Empire. This led to a decline of the Ukrainian language among ruling elite. Ukrainian language and culture was preserved through folk stories and songs.Wilson 78 After the three partitions of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the regions of Galicia (Halychyna) and Bukovina became part of the Habsburg Empire. Ukrainians living within the Austrian state did not face the same cultural repression and were influenced by the nationalism that spread after the French Revolution and the American Revolution.
After the Revolutions of 1848 in the Austrian Empire, the Ruthenian Council tried to establish a Ukrainian nation but this effort was thwarted. National identities developed among Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Carpatho-Rusyns.
Ukrainophilism The Ukrainophilism movement developed in the Russian Empire from the 1860s–1880s, named as such after Ukrainian activists who self-identified as Ukrainophiles (ukrainofily or ukrainoliubtsi). Clandestine societies called hromadas began to be set up in the late 1850s by the Ukrainian intelligentsia in Tsarist Russia. They had the aim of promoting national consciousness through self-education and exhibited a shared emphasis on promoting the Ukrainian language and reading Ukrainian literature, especially the works of Taras Shevchenko.
Because of police persecution and the transience of their members, most hromadas only existed for a few years. The term acquired a negative connotation in the 1890s and 1900s when it began to be used by the next generation of nationalist thinkers, such as Borys Hrinchenko and Mykola Mikhnovsky, to describe Ukrainians whose national consciousness had not developed past an ethnographic appreciation.
West Ukrainian populism West Ukrainian populism emerged in the 1860s among the younger generation of the Ukrainian intelligentsia (commonly known as narodovtsi or populists) in Austrian Galicia as a reaction to the increasingly disillusioned and clerical older generation that had begun to orient itself towards Russophilism. Contacts with Ukrainophiles in the Russian Empire strongly influenced the emergence of the movement, whereafter they organised hromadas.
Prosvita societies began to be set up in the late 1860s with the aim of educating communities and developing Ukrainians' national consciousness. The populist movement later lost its socially radical elements and became more clerically conservative as its proponents aged and began to cooperate with clerics who had broken with the Russophiles. In response, a new radical populist movement emerged based on the thought of Mykhailo Drahomanov that included Ivan Franko and which founded the Ukrainian Radical Party in 1890. By the 1900s, Ukrainian activists in the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires came to view Galicia as a "Ukrainian Piedmont" with favourable political and cultural conditions from which an independent Ukrainian state could grow, drawing a parallel to the development of Italian nationalism.
USDRP In 1905, the Ukrainian Social Democratic Labour Party (USDRP) emerged out of a split in the Revolutionary Ukrainian Party. Operating clandestinely in Tsarist Russia, the USDRP was made up of nationally-conscious Ukrainian socialists, most of whom favoured national autonomy in federation with Russia over the outright independence that had been advocated by nationalists such as Mikhnovsky and Franko. Among its founding members were Mykola Porsh, Dmytro Antonovych, Volodymyr Vynnychenko, Luka Bych, Andriy Livytskyi, Dmytro Dontsov, Borys Martos, Isaak Mazepa, and Symon Petliura. In 1913, Dontsov delivered a controversial speech centred on complete separatism from Russia and an alignment with Mitteleuropa as an Austro-Hungarian protectorate, leading him to break with the USDRP.
First World War and Ukrainian War of Independence
At the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, socialist Ukrainian exiles from the Russian Empire established the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine (SVU), which engaged in propaganda as well as Prosvita education among Ukrainian POWs from the Russian army. In the aftermath of the 1917 February Revolution and the abdication of Nicholas II, Ukrainian activists established the Central Rada, with the influential historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky selected as its chairman. Under the Central Rada, Prosvita societies emerged and in April an estimated 100,000 people marched in Kyiv with blue-and-yellow flags in support of Ukrainian autonomy. Functioning as a de facto revolutionary parliament, the Central Rada promoted a nationalist message with slogans of land reform and universal peace and established a cabinet of ministers headed by Vynnychenko. The Central Rada unilaterally declared its autonomy in June after its demands were rejected by the Russian Provisional Government. Following the Bolshevik Revolution in November, it proclaimed the creation of the Ukrainian People's Republic (UPR) in federation with Russia, though it declared its independence on 22 January 1918 amid the onset of the Ukrainian–Soviet War and negotiations with the Central Powers.
In the midst of the Bolshevik capture of Kyiv in February, the UPR signed the Bread Peace with the Central Powers that recognised the authority of the Central Rada in return for grain deliveries, while the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March forced Soviet Russia to recognise the UPR. Dissatisfied with disruption caused by the Central Rada's socialist agrarian reforms, the German military administration took control of grain collection and backed a coup d'état in April that established the Ukrainian State under Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky. Skoropadsky was supported by Vyacheslav Lypynsky, the leading theorist of Ukrainian conservatism and a pro-independence monarchist. Skoropadsky introduced and promoted civic and territorial nationalism rather than its cultural and ethnic counterparts, though his cabinet was markedly Russophile and Russophone and contemporary Ukrainian activists viewed him and his officials, at best, as Little Russians.
Resumption of hostilities Political opposition to Skoropadsky materialized in the form of the Ukrainian National Union, led by Vynnychenko, which began to prepare a rebellion. With the capitulation of the Central Powers in November and the impending troop withdrawal, Skoropadsky pandered to the Allies and issued a manifesto proclaiming a federation with a future non-Bolshevik Russia. This incited the Anti-Hetman Uprising led by the Directorate under two rival members of the USDRP, the ultra-socialist Vynnychenko and the more nationalistic Petliura, and supported by the Sich Riflemen. The Directorate's forces entered Kyiv in December and re-established the UPR, while Skoropadsky's Hetmanite movement went into exile. The Directorate engaged in nation-building, establishing Ukrainian as the official language of the UPR and proclaiming the independence of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. Initially Chairman of the Directorate, Vynnychenko resigned after the fall of Kyiv in February 1919 and was replaced by Petliura. Directorate troops committed 40% of the recorded anti-Jewish pogroms during the Russian Civil War, leading to Petliura being branded in the West as a violent antisemite.
The Ukrainian National Council was established in Lviv in October 1918 and, amidst the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, declared the establishment of an independent Ukrainian state in November, forming the West Ukrainian People's Republic (ZUNR) under the national democrat Yevhen Petrushevych. Conflict broke out with Poland over control of eastern Galicia and, on 22 January 1919, the ZUNR unified with the UPR. Ukrainian forces lost eastern Galicia to the Poles and the Ukrainian Galician Army retreated eastwards to join the Directorate's forces on what little territory it still controlled.