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8 7 3 The Little Russian Idea and the Imagination of Russian and Ukrainian Nations In the 1870s, developments on both sides of the Russo-Austrian border created new challenges for the Little Russian lobby. Over the course of that decade, a radical populist movement emerged in Russia, which saw educated youth fan out across the countryside to acquaint themselves with the needs and desires of peasant communities. Unlike the Little Russian activists who conducted agitation in rural areas, however, the all-Russian populist movement of the sixties and seventies strongly defined itself against the imperial state; some activists turned to terrorism and violence in an effort to topple the tsarist order.1 Meanwhile, in Austrian Galicia, criticism of the Valuev decree gradually evolved into comprehensive critiques of the imperial state. Building on the organizational infrastructure created by Little Russian activists—who had forged contact between elites in the right bank and Galicia and insisted that the peasant masses on both sides of the border belonged to the Little Russian branch of the Rus′ nation—young Galician activists reinterpreted their ideas in a new key. Claiming the Haidamaks, Shevchenko, Kulish, and Kostomarov as heroes of a Ukrainian nation distinct from the Great Russian heartland, Galician activists called on the toiling masses to free themselves not only from putative Polish and Jewish domination but also from the Russian autocracy.2 Little Russian activists fiercely debated how to respond to these developments. One camp, led by Iuzefovich and Shul′gin, expressed horror at efforts to turn the populist ideas and local patriotism that the Little Russian lobby had long championed against the imperial state. In the early seventies, its members redoubled their efforts to align the Little Russian idea with the autocratic state. Another camp, elaborating on a critique that had first emerged in the aftermath of the Valuev decree, expressed 1. Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution (New York, 1960); S. I. Svitlenko, Narodnytstvo v Ukraini 60–80-kh rokiv XIX stolittia (Dnipropetrovsk, 1999). 2. On this new current in Galician intellectual life, which historians have often labeled “populist,” see O. Terlets′kyi, Moskvofily i narodovtsi v 70-ykh rr. (Lviv, 1902); Magocsi, Roots. For examples of Galician radicals’ attempts to claim Little Russian heroes for the Ukrainian national cause, see Rus′, 28 March 1867, 1; Pravda 9 (Lviv, 1876). These efforts outraged Dragomanov, who insisted that Little Russian culture had consistently aimed to strengthen and mobilize, not destroy, a fundamentally indivisible nation of East Slavs. See “Shevchenko, Ukrainofili i sotsializm” (1879), reprinted in Vybrane, 327–429. 88 c h a p t e r t h r e e dissatisfaction about the ongoing centralization of imperial governance, distancing itself from the state. The debate between these two camps initially centered on the tactics that Little Russian activists should use and did not question the notion that “northern” and “southern” Rus′ were indivisible parts of a unitary East Slavic civilization. However, by the midseventies, Shul′gin and Iuzefovich would escalate the conflicts emerging in the Little Russian lobby, denouncing their rivals to the imperial authorities and charging that they were colluding with Galician activists in “Ukrainophile” plots to undermine the integrity of the empire. Although local officials denied these allegations, the MVD and Tsar Alexander II acted decisively to restrain this perceived threat. In 1876, they issued new limitations on the use of the Ukrainian language and punished the individuals whom Iuzefovich and Shul′gin had identified as turncoats. This chapter reconstructs the disputes that divided Little Russian activists, follows the efforts of imperial officials to manage these conflicts, and considers how internal tensions and external intervention altered the behavior of the lobby and its relationship with the state between the 1870s and ’90s. Noting the intensifying efforts of imperial officials to police discussion of local culture in this period, historians have conventionally seen these years as a time of repression that witnessed the final parting of ways between right-bank activists and imperial state.3 This chapter suggests an alternative way of understanding the evolving relationship between center and periphery , between state and society. It acknowledges that the ability of obscure provincial activists such as Shul′gin and Iuzefovich to gain the attention of the empire’s most prominent bureaucrats—and to convince them to intervene in what had begun as a local dispute—reflects a growing wariness among many officials about the nationalizing experiment under way in the southwest. However, the fact that high-ranking bureaucrats proved so responsive to...

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