Framing the Ukrainian Peasantry in Habsburg Galicia, 1846−1914 by Andriy Zayarnyuk (review)

Among the regions of today’s Ukraine, Galicia has been the one to receive the most scholarly attention. In part, this is because it was the area of the country where the national and peasant movements most closely followed the patterns found in other parts of Central and East Europe. Before 1991 the historiography was dominated by the split between Soviet historians’ concentration on the social question, and the diaspora’s interest in the national question. Despite this, it was also common to argue that national and social identities, with Ukrainian peasants opposing Polish landlords, reinforced one another. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, many Ukrainian historians, in a reaction against the earlier prescribed approaches, largely abandoned social history for political history.

Andriy Zayarnyuk’s monograph on the nineteenth-century Ruthenian peasantry not only seeks to reintroduce the social aspect to this narrative but also tries to examine both national and social identities as constructs created by discourse. His work is therefore a two-pronged critique of Marxist and nationalist interpretations that charts how the discourses of nation and social class intertwined to create a Ukrainian peasant movement before the beginning of the Great War. He achieves this through interlocking micro-histories of the districts of Sambir and Staryi Sambir and the career of the peasant activist Ivan Mykhas also keeping an eye on province-wide developments. His research draws upon an impressive corpus of documents from the L’viv archives, unpublished personal papers and manuscripts, and journal and newspaper articles.

The monograph consists of seven substantial chapters, organized chronologically and thematically. The first chapter examines the failed 1846 revolt by the Polish gentry, and the second chapter discusses the 1848 Revolution. In the third chapter, Zayarnyuk examines the debate over common land and enclosure in the following decades by looking at court cases in the Sambir region and discussions in the Galician Diet. The fourth chapter analyzes the relationship between local Ruthenian activists and the peasantry in the 1860s and 1870s, including the societies founded by the former to enlighten the latter. The fifth chapter introduces the new generation of Ruthenian activists that emerged in the 1880s. The sixth chapter narrows the focus, with a study of one particular activist, Ivan Mykhas, and the seventh, concluding, chapter again broadens the focus, with an attempt to reconceptualize the nature of the Ukrainian movement in Galicia in the two decades before the outbreak of the Great War.

The result is a study that dispels a number of common myths. For example, in his examination of the 1846 Polish Uprising, Zayarnyuk disputes that Ruthenian peasants massacred the Polish revolutionaries. In general, the peasants held back from participating but were not hostile. However, in looking for a scapegoat for their failure, the revolutionaries blamed the Ruthenians and created a myth of betrayal. This, in turn, led to the Ruthenians’ exclusion from the Polish national project.

Zayarnyuk also challenges ideas of social and national solidarity among the peasants. Contrary to nationalist interpretations, he points to a gulf between the Ruthenian national activists and the peasants during and after the 1848 Revolution. The activists’ worldview was shaped by their experience of enlightened absolutism; they combined a desire for liberal rights with Habsburg loyalism alongside the paternalist desire to turn the peasants into good citizens. They did not make demands for the alleviation of the social grievances of the peasantry nor did they act on peasants’ complaints regarding land use. In the debate over servitudes, that is, the peasants’ rights to communal land, they adopted the same language of liberalism used by the Polish landlords. This profoundly weakened the Ruthenian leaders: they had no alternative to the “hegemonic discourse,” nor could they mobilize the peasantry. When political parties emerged in the 1860s led by members of the Greek Catholic clergy, the peasants did not automatically accept their leadership. The conflict between the Ukrainophile and Russophile concepts...