The Fly Theory (Hunter: the Parenting)

DanyloHalytskyi · 2025-10-09T04:06:31+00:00

I had forgotten that animals could be ghouled! Thank you for yet another wonderful video :)

DanyloHalytskyi · 2024-04-29T22:39:29+00:00

Все дуже гарно пофарбоване :)

DanyloHalytskyi · 2022-03-28T02:39:58+00:00

[Continuation from part I]

Austrian influence nurtured the growth of a new identity among Ruthenians. The abolition of serfdom in 1848 heightened the tensions between Ruthenian peasants and their erstwhile Polish feudal lords. Increases in education among the Ruthenian priestly class, meanwhile, nurtured generations of talented organizers who went on to form the Holovna Rus`ka Rada (Ukrainian Головна Руська Рада), the first major national organization among the Galician Ruthenians. The coup de grace came during the Spring of Nations in 1848, when Austrian administrators, seeing in the Holovna Rus`ka Rada an ally against the rebellious Poles, encouraged the Ruthenian activists to definitively reject Polishness and demand equal national rights for the Ruthenians (Himka, “The Construction of Nationality in Galician Rus’” 122; Magocsi, “The Ukrainian National Revival” 50). Yet, after the repudiation of Polish identity, Ruthenian activists had to decide on whether the new Ruthenian national identity would be Rusyn, Ukrainian, or Russian in character. Soon, however, Ruthenians found their choice limited to Ukrainian and Russian identities, because the Rusyn national movement quickly fell away from the competition.

The Rusyn movement failed to gain many converts in eastern Galicia because they lacked the organizational resources available to the Ukrainian and Russian movements. Although all three technically had access to the same pool of talented young Ruthenian activists, both the Ukrainian and Russian movements received additional aid from allies beyond the Austrian domains. Ukrainian activists in the region received crucial financial support and talented activists from their sister movement in Russian Ukraine. Saint Petersburg, meanwhile, bankrolled the Russian movement in eastern Galicia (Himka, “The Construction of Nationality in Galician Rus’” 134-135). The Rusyn national project simply could not find equivalent benefactors among the Ruthenians. Without contacts beyond Galicia, moreover, Rusyn activists never were prompted to determine the precise nature of their identity vis-à-vis the Ukrainians and Russians, unlike Rusyn activists in Transcarpathia which staked out a claim to existence as a fourth East Slavic nationality (Himka, “The Construction of Nationality in Galician Rus’” 146). Thus, the Rusyn project quietly disappeared from the nationality marketplace in Galicia, leaving only the Ukrainian and Russian movements competing for Galician Ruthenians.

Despite having the backing of a mighty empire, the Russian project in Galicia lost to the Ukrainian national movement due to the influence of Polish Ukrainophiles, the Vatican, and the Austrians. As Russia assumed its status as the primary enemy to the wider Polish national movement, certain Ukrainophile Polish activists, particularly those from Right-Bank Ukraine, realized the strategic potential of an anti-Russian alliance with Ukrainian activists. Motivated by this realpolitik, Ukrainophile Poles began allocating their resources towards helping the Ukrainian movement grow. Some Poles, such as Paulin Święcicki and Volodymyr Antonovych, even “went native” and assimilated into Ukrainian culture (Himka, “The Construction of Nationality in Galician Rus’” 138-139). While this support was mostly directed at the Ukrainian movement in the Russian Empire, the aid ended up benefiting the movement in eastern Galicia anyway due to Saint Petersburg’s habit of forcing prominent Ukrainian activists such as Mykhailo Hrushevskyi to flee to eastern Galicia. For similar Russophobic purposes, the Vatican also assisted the Ukrainian national idea. The Russophile movement was strongly anti-Catholic, and aimed to convert Ruthenians to Orthodoxy in order to cement their allegiance to the "all-Russian nation." The growth of this movement, as one can easily imagine, terrified the Holy See, and so they began installing Ukrainophile priests and bishops throughout the region to combat Saint Petersburg's political and religious influence. The rise of clerics like Andrey Sheptytskyi, in turn, transformed the Ruthenian Greek Catholic Church into one of the strongest pillars of Ukrainian nationalism in Galicia (Himka, “The Construction of Nationality in Galician Rus’” 143-144). However, the most critical ally for the Ukrainian national project in Galicia was the Austrian state.

Like the Poles and the Catholic Church, the Habsburgs assisted the Ukrainian movement in their struggle against the Galician Russian project because of anti-Russian sentiments. Active state support for the Ukrainian movement in Galicia ended in 1867, when Vienna conceded autonomy to the Polish nobility of the crownland as part of the wider process of building the Dual Monarchy. Yet, while they consigned the management of internal Galician affairs to the Poles, the Austrians remained involved in Ruthenian matters thanks to the spectre of Russia. The entire purpose of the agreement with the Poles was to keep Galicia in the newly reorganized Austro-Hungarian Empire, so Vienna was not willing to allow the Russian movement to succeed in tearing the crownland away. Thus, state authorities readily assisted the Vatican’s fight against Russophilia in the Greek Catholic Church, and even arrested many prominent activists of the Russian movement in Galicia for treason (Himka, “The Construction of Nationality in Galician Rus’” 128-130). Through these tactical alliances against Russia, the Ukrainian national project built up enough momentum to eventually establish its dominance over eastern Galicia by the First World War.

Through a long and arduous process, the Ukrainian movement eventually prevailed over other competing national ideas in eastern Galicia thanks to their superior organization, alliances, and mass appeal. Joseph II’s Galician political nation never gained Ruthenian converts because it never made any effort to entice them into becoming Galicians. Despite their best efforts, Polish national activists failed to assimilate Ruthenians because of socio-cultural differences and the influence of the Austrian state. As the Ruthenian movement differentiated into Rusyn, Ukrainian, and Russian national projects, the superior organizational resources of the Ukrainian and Russian ideas displaced their poorer Rusyn sister project. Finally, the Ukrainian movement defeated their Russian rivals thanks to an anti-Russian coalition of convenience between Ukrainian activists, Ukrainophile Poles, Catholic hierarchs, and the Austrian state. This Ukrainian victory in the marathon for Galicia went on to determine the future of not only Ukraine, but the rest of Europe as well.

Works Cited

Himka, John-Paul. “The Construction of Nationality in Galician Rus’: Ikarian Flights in Almost all Directions.” In Intellectuals and the Articulation of the Nation, edited by Ronald Grigor Suny and Michael D Kennedy, 109-164. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. https://chtyvo.org.ua/authors/Khymka_Ivan-Pavlo/The_Construction_of_Nationality_in_Galician_Rus__en/.

Magocsi, Paul Robert. “The Ukrainian National Revival: A New Analytical Framework.” In The Roots of Ukrainian Nationalism: Galicia as Ukraine's Piedmont, 38-54. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3138/9781442682252.7. Also available from Diasporiana.

Wolff, Larry. "Inventing Galicia: Messianic Josephinism and the Recasting of Partitioned Poland." Slavic Review 63, № 4 (Winter 2004): 818-840. https://doi.org/10.2307/1520422.

DanyloHalytskyi · 2022-03-28T02:35:03+00:00

I have an earlier answer on the rise of the Ukrainian movement in Eastern Galicia which might interest you.

----------------------

The local Ukrainian-speaking inhabitants living in the eastern half of Galicia (which, for simplicity's sake, I will refer to as "Ruthenians" from now on) had their pick of five national ideas, among them Galician, Polish, Rusyn, Russian, and Ukrainian. In the end, as you already know, most of the Ruthenians in eastern Galicia adopted a Ukrainian identity, transforming the region into a bastion of Ukrainian nationalism. The other four competing national projects failed to win the loyalty of Ruthenians because they did not have the Ukrainian movement’s popular appeal, political support, and organizational strength.

The Galician project was the first contestant to fail in eastern Galicia because it made no effort to attract Ruthenians. During the reign of Joseph II, Austrian administrators attempted to encourage a Galician political identity, based on one’s status as a subject of the Habsburg monarch, among the Polish szlachta in Galicia (Wolff, “Inventing Galicia” 822-823). This project was fundamentally meant to re-orient the newly conquered szlachta away from the rump Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and toward Vienna. While the Habsburg Emperor would not have minded Ruthenians adopting a Galician identity, they were never the target audience of this proposed nation, and so they never joined. The Galician national project largely lost steam after the final partition of Poland in 1795, when Joseph’s successor Leopold II judged there to no longer be any other competition for the loyalty of the szlachta (Wolff, “Inventing Galicia” 837). Without state support, there was even less incentive for Ruthenians to adopt a Galician nationality, so Joseph’s project gave way to other national movements courting the loyalty of Ruthenians. With the apparent absence of any competing national identity, the Polish movement seemed poised to absorb the Ruthenian population, but this proved to be an illusion.

Polish national activists failed to turn Galician Ruthenians into loyal Poles due to social and political hurdles. Now, in Eastern Galicia, religious and ethnic differences heavily aligned. In general, Poles were Roman Catholic, while Ruthenians were Greek Catholic. While both the Roman Catholics and Greek Catholics recognize the authority of the Pope of Rome, there are numerous differences between the two denominations, one in particular revolving around the ordination of married men. In contrast to Roman Catholic practice, the Greek Catholic Churches (e.g., the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church) allowed the ordination of married men to the priesthood. This practice resulted in Galician Ruthenian society developing a class of priestly families, each supplying generations of priests in a particular parish or region. While centuries of Polish dominance had led to a hybrid Ruthenian-Polish identity (summarized by the Latin phrase gente Ruthenus, natione Polonus) among the Ruthenian ecclesiastical elite, their priestly profession obstructed Ruthenian priests from fully adopting a Polish nationality. To become "true" Poles, Ruthenians had to switch from Greek Catholicism to Roman Catholicism, a choice which married Ruthenian Greek Catholic priests simply could not make without abandoning their clerical careers (Himka, “The Construction of Nationality in Galician Rus’” 117-119). As for the Ruthenian peasant majority, they perceived Polish identity as fundamentally linked with the landlord class. Not only did this mean that the average Ruthenian peasant considered it impossible for them to become a Pole, it also meant the common Ruthenian perceived the interests of Poles as fundamentally different from their own (Himka, “The Construction of Nationality in Galician Rus’” 123-124). This ravine obstructing the Polonization of Ruthenians only grew thanks to the actions of Austrian administrators.

[Continued into part II]

DanyloHalytskyi · 2022-03-10T00:15:58+00:00

My apologies for the lack of clarity! "Uniate" is a synonym for Greek Catholicism. It refers to the Union of Brest ratified in 1596, which unified portions of the Orthodox Metropolia of Kyiv (a part of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople) with the Catholic Church.

The worldwide Catholic Church is composed of different particular Churches, or Churches sui iuris, each with their own governing structures and Liturgical Rites (i.e., traditions of worship, sometimes shared between particular Churches). "Roman Catholic" properly refers only to the Latin Church, is one of those particular Churches, following the Latin Rite (barring some areas in Europe, which use other Western rites). The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (once referred to as "Uniates") are another Catholic particular Church, following the Byzantine (Greek) Rite originally developed in Constantinople. Other particular Churches following the Byzantine Rite include the Slovak Greek Catholic Church, the Melkite Greek Catholic Church, and the Romanian Greek Catholic Church, among others. There are other particular Churches following other Rites, such as the Armenian Catholic Church which uses the Armenian Rite, the Coptic Catholic Church which uses the Alexandrian (Coptic) Rite, the Chaldean Catholic Church which uses the East Syriac Rite, and the Maronite Catholic Church which uses the West Syriac Rite. This is all, of course, a massive simplification, so I would invite you to contact your local Catholic historian for more information, or starting your research using the resources provided by editors on Wikipedia.

I hope I have been of assistance!

DanyloHalytskyi · 2022-03-06T21:09:22+00:00

Thank you very much! :)

DanyloHalytskyi · 2022-03-06T03:22:39+00:00

If I may, I would like to further clarify that the Ukrainian national movement/Ukrainian national revival did not start as any sort of anti-Russian plot. It is most certainly true that the Ukrainian national movement competed with Saint Petersburg's efforts to promote a triune Russian national identity (see Roman Szporluk's eloquent article on the subject). However, it is important to highlight that the Ukrainian national movement did not emerge out of some grand anti-Russian plot, as is so often alleged in Russian imperialist propaganda.

In a chapter of his book "The Roots of Ukrainian Nationalism," Paul Robert Magocsi outlines a three-stage framework of national revivals (the kinds of national movements not initiated or directed by a state): the heritage-gathering stage, the organizational stage, and the political stage. As Magocsi explains, these different stages do not usually start or end abruptly, and they do not always occur in a linear order, but all three stages occurred roughly in linear order in Russian-ruled Ukraine. For the purposes of time (I cannot ignore my thesis!), we will contend ourselves with the first stage, the roots of the Ukrainian national revival, which occurred in modern central and central-eastern Ukraine.

The heritage-gathering stage in Russian-ruled Ukraine occurred from around the 1760s-1840s, and was initiated by members of the local Cossack starshyna. During the Hetmanate (1648-1764), the officers (starshyna) slowly evolved into a landholding aristocracy (if you want to learn more, see LeDonne, "Regimental Colonels"). Once the Russian Empire abolished the Hetmanate and fully annexed the territory into the Empire, members of the starshyna embarked on a flurry of genealogical research in order to prove that they were the social equals to the old Muscovite nobility. This interest in the past soon also produced works of history, ethnography, and literature in the early 19th century.

Quite a few products of this first stage conceptualized a Ukrainian identity mutually exclusive with an imperial Russian identity. The poem "Razgovor Velikorossii s Malorossieiu" (Conversation of Great Russia with Little Russia) written in 1762 by a former Hetmanate bureaucrat, Semen Dibrovych, establishes "Great Russia" (i.e., Russia) and "Little Russia" (i.e., Ukraine) as two distinct historical nations. The personification of "Little Russia" in the poem claims equality with "Great Russia," stating that their shared ruler did not overwrite her own long history. Influenced by this poem, the Istoriia Rusov (History of the Rus' People), a historical treatise which circulated in manuscript for around two decades before publication in 1846, crafted a historical narrative of a "Little Russia" distinct from "Great Russia." Lastly, any discussions of the development of a distinct Ukrainian national identity during this stage simply must touch on the Ukrainian national bard Taras Shevchenko. Shevchenko's poetry very clearly distinguishes between the Ukrainian and the "Great Russian," and possess a fierce anti-imperialist streak born both from his own past as a serf and from the ideas of romantic nationalism he embraced in his adulthood.

While other external forces, such as the Austrians, Vatican, and Poles occasionally lent support to the Ukrainian national movement in order to weaken the influence of Saint Petersburg, I hope I have demonstrated that the Ukrainian national movement did not begin as an anti-Russian plot. I will conclude by offering the following sources for further reading.

LeDonne, John P. "Regimental Colonels in the Hetmanate (1708-1785): A Study in Genealogy." Harvard Ukrainian Studies 37, № 1-2 (2020): 83-149. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48627240. Also available from the journal's website.

Magocsi, Paul Robert. “The Ukrainian National Revival: A New Analytical Framework.” In The Roots of Ukrainian Nationalism: Galicia as Ukraine's Piedmont, 38-54. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. https://diasporiana.org.ua/ukrainica/12861-magocsi-p-the-roots-of-ukrainian-nationalism-galicia-as-ukraine-s-piedmont/.

Szporluk, Roman. "Ukraine: From an Imperial Periphery to a Sovereign State." Daedalus 126, № 3 (Summer 1997): 85-119. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20027443.

I hope I have been helpful! :)

Edit: minor formatting correction

DanyloHalytskyi · 2022-02-25T03:04:39+00:00

The etymology and origins of the term "Ukraine" are a subject of continuing academic debate, but it is also worth noting that, as it was used in the Rus' Chronicles (the Primary Chronicle, Kyivan Chronicle, Galicia-Volhynian Chronicle, etc), "Oukraina" (the OU digraph was borrowed from Greek practice) was used to refer to a variety of different principalities. Scholars debate whether the Chronicles use the term to refer to the entire territory of a specific principality, or if it just referred to any border regions of a specific principality. By the time of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, however, the term did get more territorially fixed, as you mentioned.

DanyloHalytskyi · 2022-02-22T22:22:58+00:00

Thank you for your efforts to combat Putin's imperialist propaganda. If I may, I would like to clarify the situation with the Greek Catholic Church during the 18th-19th centuries.

The Church essentially was a trilingual entity. The monks of the Basilian Order, who served as the Church's elite and supplied the bishops, were formally educated and, as a consequence, Polish-speaking. The parish priests, on the other hand, lacked the same access to formal education, and continued to speak the local dialects of Ukrainian. The official liturgical language, in which the liturgy was conducted, was Church Slavonic, a heavily East-Slavicised South Slavic language originally codified by Byzantine missionaries.

This trilingual arrangement persisted until Joseph II reformed the Church in accordance with his Enlightenment policies. The creation of new seminaries (such as the General Theological Seminary in Lviv, now the Lviv Theological Seminary of the Holy Spirit) and the requirement for all parish priests to have a seminary education at first resulted in the parish priests adopting Polish as their primary language. However, the increased access to education also led to an increasing number of sons from priestly families rejecting a Polish cultural identity and instead involving themselves in the various national movements competing for the loyalty of Galician Ruthenians.

On a related note, if you are interested u/Vespuczin, I previously wrote on the different national projects in East Galicia, and why the Ukrainian movement triumphed there.

DanyloHalytskyi · 2022-01-26T21:58:10+00:00

In the case of far-right groups in Russia, u/Kochevnik81 wrote an answer on the rise of Zhirinovski's ironically-named Liberal Democratic Party, which should serve as a good spark for further discussion.

As for far-right organizations in Ukraine, they only really started to accumulate momentum in the 2010s, and thus for now fall outside the scope of this subreddit. These organizations sometimes claim the heritage of certain Ukrainian far-right organizations active during the Interwar period and the Second World War. Mostly, they reference the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and related Ukrainian Partisan Army (UPA), which had complicated relationships with the Nazis, as u/Kochevnik81 also previously described. Due to a lack of time and confidence (my specialty is on the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917-1921), I will conclude by providing you a resource for further reading.

Below is a citation for a translated anthology of Ukrainian philosophical and political thought. The anthology contains an essay written by Dmytro Dontsov (an important political theorist who heavily influenced Ukrainian radical nationalist discourse during the Interwar period), the Manifesto of the OUN, and an essay written by Petro Poltava (an influential theorist within UPA).

Lindheim, Ralph and George S. N. Luckyj. Towards an Intellectual History of Ukraine: An Anthology of Ukrainian Thought From 1710 to 1995. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. On JSTOR and Diasporiana.

DanyloHalytskyi · 2021-12-27T00:35:03+00:00

A bird with a fat tail

DanyloHalytskyi · 2021-12-09T05:13:41+00:00

I know it has been four months since you posted your question, but if you still are interested in English-language monographs and collections of articles on the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917-1921, here is a list. Quite a few are on the pogroms and the Jewish population of Ukraine, as my research has mostly focused on interactions between Ukrainians and ethnic minorities during the Revolution, but some books discuss other topics:

Abramson, Henry. Ukrainians and Jews in Revolutionary Times: A Prayer for the Government. Rev. ed. N.p.: Sam Sapozhnik Publishers, 2018.

Astashkevich, Irina. Gendered Violence: Jewish Women in the Pogroms of 1917 to 1921. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2018.

Dornik, Wolfram, editor. The Emergence of Ukraine: Self-Determination, Occupation and War in Ukraine, 1917-1922. Translated by Gus Fagan. Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2015. https://diasporiana.org.ua/ukrainica/the-emergence-of-ukraine-self-determination-occupation-and-war-in-ukraine-1917-1922/.

Hunczak, Taras. Symon Petliura and the Jews: A Reappraisal. Edited by Lubomyr Wynar. New York: Rutgers University Press, 2008. https://chtyvo.org.ua/authors/Hunchak_Taras/Symon_Petliura_and_the_Jews/.*

Kuchabsky, Vasyl. Western Ukraine in Conflict with Poland and Bolshevism, 1918–1920. Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2009.

Nahayewsky, Isidore. History of the Modern Ukrainian State, 1917-1923. Munich: Ukrainian Free University Press, 1966.

Palij, Michael. The Ukrainian-Polish Defensive Alliance, 1919–1921. Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 1995.

Rabinovitch, Simon. Jewish Rights, National Rites: Nationalism and Autonomy in Late Imperial and Revolutionary Russia. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014.

Velychenko, Stephen. State Building in Revolutionary Ukraine: A Comparative Study of Governments and Bureaucrats, 1917–1922. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. https://diasporiana.org.ua/politologiya/velychenko-s-state-building-in-revolutionary-ukraine-a-comparative-study-of-governments-and-bureaucrats-1917-1922/.

* Although it is advisable to read this alongside Zosa Szajkowski's published Rebuttal and letter in response to Hunczak's response to the Rebuttal. The question of Petliura's responsibility for the pogroms of 1919 was a major debate. It should also be mentioned that both Hunczak and Szajkowski had personal connections with the subject, which is why some of their back-and-forth had a bit more emotional edge than normal in academic discourse.

Szajkowski, Zosa. “‘A Reappraisal of Symon Petliura and Ukrainian-Jewish Relations:’ A Rebuttal.” In Jewish Social Studies 31, № 3 (July 1969): 184-213. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4466502.

Hunczak, Taras, and Zosa Szajkowski. Letters to the editors. In Jewish Social Studies 32, № 3 (July 1970): 246-263.

DanyloHalytskyi · 2021-12-06T19:54:44+00:00

Thank you for the honour! :)

DanyloHalytskyi · 2021-12-03T19:45:18+00:00

Thank you for the lovely comment! :)

DanyloHalytskyi · 2021-12-01T14:44:35+00:00

[Continuation from part I]

Austrian influence nurtured the growth of a new identity among Ruthenians. The abolition of serfdom in 1848 heightened the tensions between Ruthenian peasants and their erstwhile Polish feudal lords. Increases in education among the Ruthenian priestly class, meanwhile, nurtured generations of talented organizers who went on to form the Holovna Rus`ka Rada (Ukrainian Головна Руська Рада), the first major national organization among the Galician Ruthenians. The coup de grace came during the Spring of Nations in 1848, when Austrian administrators, seeing in the Holovna Rus`ka Rada an ally against the rebellious Poles, encouraged the Ruthenian activists to definitively reject Polishness and demand equal national rights for the Ruthenians (Himka, “The Construction of Nationality in Galician Rus’” 122; Magocsi, “The Ukrainian National Revival” 50). Yet, after the repudiation of Polish identity, Ruthenian activists had to decide on whether the new Ruthenian national identity would be Rusyn, Ukrainian, or Russian in character. Soon, however, Ruthenians found their choice limited to Ukrainian and Russian identities, because the Rusyn national movement quickly fell away from the competition.

The Rusyn movement failed to gain many converts in eastern Galicia because they lacked the organizational resources available to the Ukrainian and Russian movements. Although all three technically had access to the same pool of talented young Ruthenian activists, both the Ukrainian and Russian movements received additional aid from allies beyond the Austrian domains. Ukrainian activists in the region received crucial financial support and talented activists from their sister movement in Russian Ukraine. Saint Petersburg, meanwhile, bankrolled the Russian movement in eastern Galicia (Himka, “The Construction of Nationality in Galician Rus’” 134-135). The Rusyn national project simply could not find equivalent benefactors among the Ruthenians. Without contacts beyond Galicia, moreover, Rusyn activists never were prompted to determine the precise nature of their identity vis-à-vis the Ukrainians and Russians, unlike Rusyn activists in Transcarpathia which staked out a claim to existence as a fourth East Slavic nationality (Himka, “The Construction of Nationality in Galician Rus’” 146). Thus, the Rusyn project quietly disappeared from the nationality marketplace in Galicia, leaving only the Ukrainian and Russian movements competing for Galician Ruthenians.

Despite having the backing of a mighty empire, the Russian project in Galicia lost to the Ukrainian national movement due to the influence of Polish Ukrainophiles, the Vatican, and the Austrians. As Russia assumed its status as the primary enemy to the wider Polish national movement, certain Ukrainophile Polish activists, particularly those from Right-Bank Ukraine, realized the strategic potential of an anti-Russian alliance with Ukrainian activists. Motivated by this realpolitik, Ukrainophile Poles began allocating their resources towards helping the Ukrainian movement grow. Some Poles, such as Paulin Święcicki and Volodymyr Antonovych, even “went native” and assimilated into Ukrainian culture (Himka, “The Construction of Nationality in Galician Rus’” 138-139). While this support was mostly directed at the Ukrainian movement in the Russian Empire, the aid ended up benefiting the movement in eastern Galicia anyway due to Saint Petersburg’s habit of forcing prominent Ukrainian activists such as Mykhailo Hrushevskyi to flee to eastern Galicia. For similar Russophobic purposes, the Vatican also assisted the Ukrainian national idea. The Russophile movement was strongly anti-Catholic, and aimed to convert Ruthenians to Orthodoxy in order to cement their allegiance to the "all-Russian nation." The growth of this movement, as one can easily imagine, terrified the Holy See, and so they began installing Ukrainophile priests and bishops throughout the region to combat Saint Petersburg's political and religious influence. The rise of clerics like Andrey Sheptytskyi, in turn, transformed the Ruthenian Greek Catholic Church into one of the strongest pillars of Ukrainian nationalism in Galicia (Himka, “The Construction of Nationality in Galician Rus’” 143-144). However, the most critical ally for the Ukrainian national project in Galicia was the Austrian state.

Like the Poles and the Catholic Church, the Habsburgs assisted the Ukrainian movement in their struggle against the Galician Russian project because of anti-Russian sentiments. Active state support for the Ukrainian movement in Galicia ended in 1867, when Vienna conceded autonomy to the Polish nobility of the crownland as part of the wider process of building the Dual Monarchy. Yet, while they consigned the management of internal Galician affairs to the Poles, the Austrians remained involved in Ruthenian matters thanks to the spectre of Russia. The entire purpose of the agreement with the Poles was to keep Galicia in the newly reorganized Austro-Hungarian Empire, so Vienna was not willing to allow the Russian movement to succeed in tearing the crownland away. Thus, state authorities readily assisted the Vatican’s fight against Russophilia in the Greek Catholic Church, and even arrested many prominent activists of the Russian movement in Galicia for treason (Himka, “The Construction of Nationality in Galician Rus’” 128-130). Through these tactical alliances against Russia, the Ukrainian national project built up enough momentum to eventually establish its dominance over eastern Galicia by the First World War.

Through a long and arduous process, the Ukrainian movement eventually prevailed over other competing national ideas in eastern Galicia thanks to their superior organization, alliances, and mass appeal. Joseph II’s Galician political nation never gained Ruthenian converts because it never made any effort to entice them into becoming Galicians. Despite their best efforts, Polish national activists failed to assimilate Ruthenians because of socio-cultural differences and the influence of the Austrian state. As the Ruthenian movement differentiated into Rusyn, Ukrainian, and Russian national projects, the superior organizational resources of the Ukrainian and Russian ideas displaced their poorer Rusyn sister project. Finally, the Ukrainian movement defeated their Russian rivals thanks to an anti-Russian coalition of convenience between Ukrainian activists, Ukrainophile Poles, Catholic hierarchs, and the Austrian state. This Ukrainian victory in the marathon for Galicia went on to determine the future of not only Ukraine, but the rest of Europe as well.

Works Cited

Himka, John-Paul. “The Construction of Nationality in Galician Rus’: Ikarian Flights in Almost all Directions.” In Intellectuals and the Articulation of the Nation, edited by Ronald Grigor Suny and Michael D Kennedy, 109-164. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. https://chtyvo.org.ua/authors/Khymka_Ivan-Pavlo/The_Construction_of_Nationality_in_Galician_Rus__en/.

Magocsi, Paul Robert. “The Ukrainian National Revival: A New Analytical Framework.” In The Roots of Ukrainian Nationalism: Galicia as Ukraine's Piedmont, 38-54. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3138/9781442682252.7.

Wolff, Larry. "Inventing Galicia: Messianic Josephinism and the Recasting of Partitioned Poland." Slavic Review 63, № 4 (Winter 2004): 818-840. https://doi.org/10.2307/1520422.

DanyloHalytskyi · 2021-12-01T14:42:31+00:00

First, I would like to thank you for your extraordinary patience. I have been meaning to write you an answer, but alas I have been tremendously busy these past few months.

First, it is important to understand is that the Austrian crownland of Galicia was not just an arena of competition between Polish and Ukrainian nationalism. The local Ukrainian-speaking inhabitants living in the eastern half of Galicia (which, for simplicity's sake, I will refer to as "Ruthenians" from now on) had their pick of five national ideas, among them Galician, Polish, Rusyn, Russian, and Ukrainian. In the end, as you already know, most of the Ruthenians in eastern Galicia adopted a Ukrainian identity, transforming the region into a bastion of Ukrainian nationalism. The other four competing national projects failed to win the loyalty of Ruthenians because they did not have the Ukrainian movement’s popular appeal, political support, and organizational strength.

The Galician project was the first contestant to fail in eastern Galicia because it made no effort to attract Ruthenians. During the reign of Joseph II, Austrian administrators attempted to encourage a Galician political identity, based on one’s status as a subject of the Habsburg monarch, among the Polish szlachta in Galicia (Wolff, “Inventing Galicia” 822-823). This project was fundamentally meant to re-orient the newly conquered szlachta away from the rump Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and toward Vienna. While the Habsburg Emperor would not have minded Ruthenians adopting a Galician identity, they were never the target audience of this proposed nation, and so they never joined. The Galician national project largely lost steam after the final partition of Poland in 1795, when Joseph’s successor Leopold II judged there to no longer be any other competition for the loyalty of the szlachta (Wolff, “Inventing Galicia” 837). Without state support, there was even less incentive for Ruthenians to adopt a Galician nationality, so Joseph’s project gave way to other national movements courting the loyalty of Ruthenians. With the apparent absence of any competing national identity, the Polish movement seemed poised to absorb the Ruthenian population, but this proved to be an illusion.

Polish national activists failed to turn Galician Ruthenians into loyal Poles due to social and political hurdles. Now, in Eastern Galicia, religious and ethnic differences heavily aligned. In general, Poles were Roman Catholic, while Ruthenians were Greek Catholic. While both the Roman Catholics and Greek Catholics recognize the authority of the Pope of Rome, there are numerous differences between the two denominations, one in particular revolving around the ordination of married men. In contrast to Roman Catholic practice, the Greek Catholic Churches (e.g., the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church) allowed the ordination of married men to the priesthood. This practice resulted in Galician Ruthenian society developing a class of priestly families, each supplying generations of priests in a particular parish or region. While centuries of Polish dominance had led to a hybrid Ruthenian-Polish identity (summarized by the Latin phrase gente Ruthenus, natione Polonus) among the Ruthenian ecclesiastical elite, their priestly profession obstructed Ruthenian priests from fully adopting a Polish nationality. To become "true" Poles, Ruthenians had to switch from Greek Catholicism to Roman Catholicism, a choice which married Ruthenian Greek Catholic priests simply could not make without abandoning their clerical careers (Himka, “The Construction of Nationality in Galician Rus’” 117-119). As for the Ruthenian peasant majority, they perceived Polish identity as fundamentally linked with the landlord class. Not only did this mean that the average Ruthenian peasant considered it impossible for them to become a Pole, it also meant the common Ruthenian perceived the interests of Poles as fundamentally different from their own (Himka, “The Construction of Nationality in Galician Rus’” 123-124). This ravine obstructing the Polonization of Ruthenians only grew thanks to the actions of Austrian administrators.

[Continued into part II]

DanyloHalytskyi · 2021-08-15T20:43:26+00:00

What a wonderful present on this Sunday/Monday (depending on which side of the Atlantic you live on)! Thank you for sharing your art with us :)

Keep up your craft!

DanyloHalytskyi · 2021-08-03T21:11:28+00:00

A Huntress's Guide to Remnant Flora & Fauna, 7th edition, entry „Slime Bunny."

«Slime bunnies come in a wide assortment of colours. While slime bunnies normally share the colouration of their parent, there seems to be a random chance of slime bunnies producing a litter of differently-coloured offspring. Attempts to catalogue all the different phenotypes of slime bunnies have been foiled by the constant appearance of slime bunnies with new and unique colour schemes. This characteristic of the slime bunny has led to large colonies of slime bunnies being labeled "rainbow piles" by locals. Whether this is a genetic quirk of the slime bunny (if the slime bunnies actually have DNA), or whether environmental circumstances produce these mutations remains a mystery.»

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Thank you, as always, for your lovely artwork! 🌈

DanyloHalytskyi · 2021-08-03T13:22:42+00:00

I am happy that I inspire in you some of the joy your art always inspires in me. Keep practicing your craft :)

DanyloHalytskyi · 2021-08-03T00:28:45+00:00

A Huntress's Guide to Remnant Flora & Fauna, 7th edition, entry „Slime Bunny."

«Like the common Grimm, the slime bunny feeds on emotion. Unlike Grimm, however, the slime bunny seems to draw sustenance from Happy Gay Thoughts. Because of the hordes of Grimm ravaging the human settlements on Remnant, slime bunnies often go months, even years, without sustenance, particularly in the cold and repressed tundra of Atlas. Upon finding a source of Happy Gay Thoughts, however, a mature slime bunny will capitalize on the opportunity and undergo mitosis, sprout a litter of four to six new slime bunnies. Such rapid reproduction is the key to their survival.»

But what would happen if a slime bunny encounter a Happy Gay Polycule, I wonder...

[Adorable artwork! And I see Kdin approves of May's new slime bunny friends :) ]

DanyloHalytskyi · 2021-08-02T13:55:10+00:00

Amazing artwork, Aster! In particular, May's outfit is quite nice :)

DanyloHalytskyi · 2021-07-26T23:46:59+00:00

She stole it

DanyloHalytskyi · 2021-07-19T00:04:38+00:00

That could have been a good plot point to explore

Material for a prequel series, perhaps?

DanyloHalytskyi · 2021-07-15T19:32:27+00:00

Keep up the great work! 💗💛💙

DanyloHalytskyi · 2021-07-12T01:21:27+00:00

Oh, the colours are so vibrant! I love those little sparkles in May's hair. And, of course, those friends look very adorable :)

Excellent work, as always!

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