Dynasty Divided

Front matter

A FAMILY HISTORY OF RUSSIAN AND UKRAINIAN NATIONALISM a a i ims EL

FABIAN BAUMANN

DYNASTY DIVIDED

Introduction

. At the Crossroads: The Search for the Little Russian Soul, 1830s-1876

. Niche Nationalism: Kiev's Ukrainophiles, 1876-1914

. Patriarchs and Patriots: The Rise of Russian Nationalism, 1876-1914

. Triumph and Tragedy: Nationalists in War and Revolution, 1914-1920

. Living off the Past: Nationalists Write Their Lives in Interwar Europe

Conclusion

Notes 237 Bibliography 291 Index 319

205 230

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Like all authors, I have incurred many debts in the years leading up to the publication of a longtime project. This book began more than seven years ago at the University of Basel, where Benjamin Schenk was an exemplary adviser: always open to new ideas, always willing to read drafts at short notice, always ready to help me place my research within the historiography. As my co-adviser, Alexei Miller contributed his encyclopedic knowledge of nineteenth-century imperial politics and repeatedly pushed me to sharpen my arguments. Faith Hillis generously hosted two very productive stays at the University of Chicago, in 2018 and 2021-2022, and offered extremely helpful feedback on several drafts of my manuscript. Andreas Kappeler was the first to encourage me to pursue biographical research on nationalism and has been extraordinarily supportive ever since. My work would have been impossible without the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation, which funded my research with a four-year Doc.CH grant as well as a two-year Postdoc.Mobility grant, and also financed the Open Access publication of this book. The Basel Graduate School of History and its coordinators, Roberto Sala and Laura Ritter, provided a welcome institutional frame and office space for my research.

In Basel, I was lucky to work alongside a brilliant and supportive group of graduate students and postdocs, profiting from countless conversations over beer and Turkish meals at Pinar restaurant. Many thanks to Boris Belge (whom I kept asking for detailed feedback down to the level of single sentences), Carla Cordin, Lenka Fehrenbach, Nadine Freiermuth Samardžić, Jörn Happel, Anne Hasselmann, Charlotte Henze, Bianca Hoenig, Alexis Hofmeister, Martin Jeske, Henning Lautenschlager, Sandrine Mayoraz, Sophia Polek, Rhea Rieben, and Alexandra Wedl, as well as Romed Aschwanden, Andreas Gehringer, Sarah Hagmann, and all the members of the Friday writing group.

x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Colleagues in several countries supported my work with advice on archives and sources, feedback, and constructive criticism. I am grateful to Olena Betlii, Serhiy Bilenky, Anton Chemakin, Heather Coleman, Franziska Davies, Trevor Erlacher, Felix Frey, Iaroslav Hrytsak, Georgiy Kasianov, Michael Khodarkovsky, Anton Kotenko, Fabian Lüscher, Iryna Makedon, Olha Martynyuk, Mariya Melentyeva, Olena Palko, Aleksandr Reznik, Stephan Rindlisbacher, Martin Rohde, Ostap and Viktoriia Sereda, Joshua Teplitsky, Oleksii Tolochko, Gregory Valdespino, Ben van Zee, Alexa von Winning, and Ricarda Vulpius, as well as the participants of workshops in Basel, Munich, Tübingen, Chicago, Regensburg, Halle, Oldenburg, and Kiel.

Three descendants of the Shul'gin/Shul'hyn family kindly provided me with information about their ancestors and photographs from their private collections: Olena Leontovych in Kyiv, Bohdan Pazuniak in Philadelphia, and Olga Matich in Berkeley. Dozens of librarians, archivists, and administrative staff in Ukraine, Russia, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Slovenia, France, and the United States fulfilled my many requests, found dusty volumes on half-forgotten shelves, and filled out the paperwork that I needed for my research. Among the most resourceful of them were Oleksandra Buz'ko and Nataliia Mykhailova at the Archive ofthe Archaeological Section of the Academy of Sciences in Kyiv, Dar'ia Moskovskaia at the Gor'kii Institute for World Literature in Moscow, Anne-Marie Dowhaniuk at the Shevchenko Society in Sarcelles, and Agnes Weidkuhn at the Department of History in Basel.

At Cornell University Press I was lucky to have Amy Farranto as my editor. She took an interest in my manuscript from the beginning, expertly steered it through the publication process, and patiently answered my endless questions along the way. Christine Worobec, the series editor, provided very valuable critical comments that helped me to shorten and revise my manuscript. I had two highly knowledgeable and helpful peer reviewers, subsequently revealed to be Theodore Weeks and John-Paul Himka, whose comments guided me as I polished my text before the final submission. Acquisitions assistant Ellen Labbate and assistant managing editor Karen Laun very efficiently took care of all technical issues, Glenn Novak meticulously copyedited my text, and in Leipzig, Silke Dutzmann produced beautiful maps to illustrate the text.

Finally, I want to thank my friends who listened to all my complaints, housed me during archival stays away from home, and, above all, regularly reminded me that there is more to life than nineteenth-century

I dedicate this book to my parents, Werner Baumann and Elisabeth Ackermann, who not only offered consistent moral support through the years but also read and commented on several early drafts of the text. I also want to thank my grandfather Gilbert Ackermann, my sister Hanna Baumann, my aunt Kathrin Baumann, Matthias Ebner and Kaija Knauer, the late Annie Spuhler, and my cousin Luis Ackermann, whose IT expertise repeatedly came in handy. And finally, I am extremely grateful to Zeynep Tezer, whom I would probably never have met if it were not for this project. Thank you for everything.

With the generous permission of the original publishers, this book incorporates material that has appeared in my articles “Dragged into the Whirlwind: The Shul'gin Family, Kievlianin, and Kiev's Russian Nationalist Movement in 1917," in Personal Trajectories in Russia's Great War and Revolution, 1914—22: Biographical Itineraries, Individual Experiences, Autobiographical Reflection, ed. Korine Amacher et al. (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2021), 73-92, and “Nationality as Choice of Path: Iakov Shul'gin, Dmitrii Pikhno, and the Russian-Ukrainian Crossroads," Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 23, no. 4 (2022), 743-71.

NOTEON NAMES, TOPONYMS, AND DATES

Ihave rendered Cyrillic spellings of Russian and Ukrainian in a simplified version ofthe Library of Congress system. The question whether to transliterate the names of historical figures from Russian or Ukrainian is complex and often politically charged. The Ukrainophile milieu of the nineteenth century was a bilingual society whose members used both Russian and Ukrainian, depending on context. In order to emphasize that not all Ukrainophiles were primarily Ukrainophones, I reserve Ukrainian names for those individuals whom I know to have spoken Ukrainian well or to have used it regularly in writing. This is why I write Iakov Shul'gin rather than Iakiv Shul'hyn, but spell his wife's name Liubov Shul'hyna. For their eldest son, I use Oleksander instead of Oleksandr; while this spelling is considered odd in contemporary Ukraine, it was preferred by many interwar émigrés, including Oleksander Shul'hyn himself. Where deemed useful, I give both the Ukrainian and Russian version of a name at first mention. In no case is the choice of one or another name form to be read as a definite statement on a person's “national identity.”

The same goes for place names. I render them in the language of the state that ruled them before 1914 so as to reflect che period's power relations. Therefore, I write Kiev rather than Kyiv and Lemberg rather than L'viv, Lwów, or L'vov. Exception is made where a commonly used English toponym is available (Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Warsaw), or when speaking about contemporary Ukraine. Dates before 1918 are given in the Julian calendar, which lagged twelve days behind the Gregorian calendar in the nineteenth century and thirteen days behind in the twentieth century. Soviet Russia switched to the Gregorian calendar in early 1918, but the old calendar remained in use among some anti- Soviet forces in Ukraine. Therefore, both dates are provided for 1918 and 1919, only the Gregorian dates thereafter. Unless declared otherwise, all translations into English are my own.

xiii

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@ Estate of the Ustymovych Family € Estate of the Pikhno-Shul'gin Family

MAP 1.

xiv

Cartography: S. Dutzmann 7] Leipzig, 2022 ©F Baumann

State border

Regional border

Ukraine around 1900. Cartography by Silke Dutzmann.

lakov Ignat’evich Shul'gin (1788-1860) [o]

luliia Fedorovna Devel’ (1788-1853)

FIGURE 1.

Nadezhda Nikolaevna Shul’gina (1848-2?)

Nikolai lakovlevich Shul'gin (1818-1857)

Mariia Evstafievna

Rudykovskaia (1828-1860)

lakov Nikolaevich Shul’gin (1851-1911) [o] Liubov Mykolaivna Ustymovych (1865-1945)

Aleksandra Nikolaevna Shul'gina (1852-?) [o] Petr Semenovich Shcherbina

(7-7)

Vera Nikolaevna Shul’gina (1855-7) [o] Volodymyr Pavlovych Naumenko (1852-1919)

Vitalii lakovlevich Shul'gin (1822-1878)

a

Mariia Konstantinovna Popova (1844-1883)

Pavla (Lina) Vital’evna Shul’gina (1864-1945) @ Aleksandr Pavlovich Mogilevskii (2-1891)

Alla Vital’evna Shul’gina (1874-1930) a Aleksandr Dmitrievich Bilimovich (1876-1963)

Dmitrii Ivanovich Pikhno (1853-1913)

Vasilii Vital’evich Shul'gin (1878-1976) [o] Ekaterina Grigor'evna Gradovskaia (1869—1934)

Pavel Dmitrievich Pikhno (1880-1919) @ Liubov Antonovna Popova (1880-1918)

Dmitrii Dmitrievich Pikhno (1883-1920) [o] Mariia Mikhailovna Merkulova (2-1910)

Nadiia lakivna Shul'hyna (1888-1979)

Roman Avhustynovych Ishchuk (1881-1979)

Oleksander lakovych Shul'hyn (1889—1960) aD Lidiia Vasylivna Bublyk (1888-7)

Volodymyr lakovych Shul'hyn (1894-1918) @ Lidiia Dmytrivna Tartakivs'ka (2-1938)

Mykola lakovych Shul'hyn (1896-1931)

Filipp Aleksandrovich Mogilevskii (1885-1920) [o] Elena Mikhailovna Merkulova (1888-2?)

Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Mogilevskii (1891—1941)

Ivan Aleksandrovich Mogilevskii (1903-1992)

Tat'iana Aleksandrovna Bilimovich (1907-1995)

Vasilid Vasil’evich Shul’gin (1899-1918)

Veniamin Vasil'evich Shul'gin (19012)

Dmitrii Vasil'evich Shul'gin (1905—1999)

The family tree reflects the official genealogy without taking into account Dmitrii

Pikhno's illegitimate fatherhood. Pikhno was the biological father of Vasilii Shul’gin (with Mariia Popova) and of Filipp, Aleksandr, and Ivan Mogilevskii (with Lina Shul'gina). All women are listed under their maiden names.

XV

DYNASTY DIVIDED

Introduction

The Ukrainian question is an internal quarrel among tbe Soutberners, some of whom wish to remain Russian, as they have been since time immemorial . . . , while others wish to relinquish the nationality of their forefathers, spitting their father and mother in the eyes. This formulation of the problem becomes absolutely clear in the case of a public quarrel between two Shul'gins, not just men of the same name but of tbe same blood, tbe same family, tbe same city.

—Vasilii Shul'gin, 1929 The family's two branches split up completely. Such cases are not rare in intellectual or aristocratic families among nations awakening to independence.

—Oleksander Shul'hyn, 1935

“Great and terrible" was the year 1918 according to Kiev's most famous novelist, Mikhail Bulgakov.! It was particularly terrible for chose families who lost a child in the fierce strugele for control of the city. One of the young men who perished in the battles for Kiev was twenty-three-year-old Volodymyr Shul'hyn, a gifted and idealistic student at the university's department of natural sciences. In late January 1918, Shul'hyn joined a hastily formed student detachment to defend the capital of the Ukrainian People's Republic. Shul'hyn's company was sent across the Dnieper river to face the invading Bolshevik regiments. The two forces met near the village of Kruty in Chernigov province, 150 kilometers northeast of Kiev. Vastly outnumbered, the students stood no chance. Dozens were killed, among them Volodymyr Shul'hyn. Back in Kiev, their funeral turned into a patriotic commemoration. Mykhailo Hrushevs'kyi, che leader of the People's Republic, made a speech about the glory of dying for one's fatherland.’

Eleven months later, in December 1918, Kiev was again threatened by an attacking army. Now held by the conservative Ukrainian Hetman government, the city nervously awaited the forces of the nationalist leader Symon Petliura, who intended to reestablish the Ukrainian People's Republic. Unable to command a regular army, the Hetman had to rely on retired Russian officers and adolescents such as Vasilid Shul'gin, a nineteen-year-old gymnasium graduate and aspiring poet who volunteered to defend his native city. He and his peers were positioned in the suburb of Petropavlovskaia Borshchagovka when the republican troops arrived. Badly prepared and abandoned by their superiors, the twenty-five young men were all killed. A few days later, Vasilid's mother could only recover her son's dead body?

Although they pronounced it in different ways, Volodymyr and Vasilid shared a last name—and a family history. Both were scions of the Shul'gin/Shul'hyn family, a prominent Kievan dynasty of journalists, scholars, and politicians. Volodymyr was the younger brother of Oleksander Shul'hyn, a Ukrainian nationalist who had just become the first foreign minister of independent Ukraine. Vasilid, their second cousin, was the eldest son of Vasilii Shul'gin, the city's most prominent Russian nationalist politician." Accordingly, Volodymyr thought of himself as a Ukrainian, and Vasilid saw himself as Russian. One of chem was killed in battle for the Ukrainian People’s Republic, the other died fighting against it. As the former Russian Empire descended into civil war, members of one and the same family parted ways and fought for different imagined communities.

At the time of this writing in May 2022, war is again ravaging Ukraine. On 24 February, Russia's president Vladimir Putin ordered an unprovoked attack on the neighboring state. Since then, tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians have lost their lives. Millions more civilians have fled west within the country and to Central Europe. Yet while Russia's war propagandists claim to liberate Ukraine from a fascist government, they also insist that the victims belong to the same nation as the invaders. Half a year before the invasion, Vladimir Putin himself stated his belief that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people,’

their countries part of “essentially the same historical and spiritual space,” and their ongoing conflict “the result of deliberate efforts by those forces that have always sought to undermine our unity.”*

Today, Ukraine’s elites and the general population are united in their rejection of these claims and of the Russian aggression, irrespective of the language they speak and of the political beliefs they hold. There is a broad consensus in favor of Ukrainian nationhood and independent statehood. However, this outcome was not foreordained. As the case of Volodymyr Shul'hyn and Vasilid Shul'gin reminds us, there was a time when Ukraine's inhabitants diverged in their choice of national affiliation. This was not the result of geopolitics, as Putin would have it, but of heated debates among the local intelligentsia. Over decades, they argued over Ukrainian culture and traditions, over the nature of Ukraine’s relationship with Russia and the appropriate degree of autonomy that it should be given within—or outside—the imperial state. In the process, the country's elites became increasingly divided into self-defined Ukrainians and self-defined Russians. Why did people with a similar social and cultural background come to understand themselves as members of two different nations? What role did individuals play in the emergence of nationalist conflicts? And how did the national divide between Russians and Ukrainians become relevant in Kiev's educated society—so relevant that people were ready to die for their vision of the national community?

The family history of the Shul'gins/Shul'hyns offers rich material to answer these questions. Its members engaged in the debates on their region's national belonging over three generations. When the last common ancestors ofthe family's two branches moved to Kiev in the 1830s, it was not yet a problem to reconcile regional patriotism with loyalty to Russian culture and the empire. However, when conflicts between Ukrainian patriots and Russian imperial loyalists broke out in the mid-nineteenth century, the historian Vitalii Shul'gin took a clear stand for the Russian side. In 1864, he established the newspaper Kievlianin as a beacon of Russian loyalism in the region. Vitalii’s nephew Iakov Shul'gin (Iakiv Shul'hyn) chose a completely different path. Rejecting his uncle's pro-imperial politics, he followed the lead of his radical university teachers and reinvented himself as a Ukrainian socialist.

This conversion split the family tree into two branches. After four years of Siberian exile, Iakov moved his activism to the domestic sphere. He and his wife Liubov raised their four children to be Ukrainian-speaking patriots and opponents of the tsarist regime. Meanwhile, the young economist Dmitrii Pikhno went the opposite way. Originally from the Ukrainian-speaking countryside, he married Vitalii Shul'gin's widow, took over the family newspaper, and continued the path of imperialloyalism and Russian nationalism. In the early twentieth century, the torch was passed to Iakov's and Dmitrii’s children. During the revolutionary period and the ensuing civil war, they fought on different sides to implement their visions of a national society. After the victory of the Bolsheviks, all surviving Shul'gins and Shul'hyns fled to Western

Europe, where they helped constitute the Russian and Ukrainian émigré milieus.

Using the story of the Shul'gin/Shul'hyn family as a narrative frame, this book advances three main arguments. First, it argues that nationalism among nineteenth-century intellectuals was a deliberate choice of path, not a process whereby they *discovered" and politicized their preexisting ethnicity. These men and women first decided to support a political project and only then began their self-fashioning as unambiguous members of their respective imagined communities. Their choices were conditioned by their political worldviews, by social milieus, family ties, or generational dynamics. Nationalists consciously appropriated the image of a stable and unified “national identity” and cultivated those aspects of their personal lives and biographies that suited this narrative. In other words, “national consciousness” preceded national being. Only in the following generation did such choices of path lead to path dependencies. Having grown up in nationalist households, the children of activists often came to understand themselves as members of the same nation that their parents had chosen.

Therefore, the book stresses the importance of private homes and family life as sites of nationalist socialization. In late imperial Russia, families retained their importance as basic economic units and as social networks ready to be instrumentalized for political purposes. Even with mass politics on the rise, the family could function as an organizational nucleus for political movements and an ideological model of a patriarchal nation. The private household provided a safe space to pursue semilegal cultural and political activism. The politics of private life were highly gendered; yet they created opportunities for women, whom the state excluded from bureaucratic and electoral politics. Idealized as “mothers of the nation,” nationalist women acquired political agency without participating in the typical feminist struggles for voting rights and legal equality. As home-school teachers, as domestic ideologues free from the constraints of a repressive state, but also as journalists and writers, they played an important role in national movements that has so far left few traces in the historiography.

Finally, the book offers a new interpretation of the relationship between rivaling nationalist projects and the imperial state. Ukrainian and Russian nationalists tried to mobilize the same Orthodox peasant population, which means that they worked with the same ethnographic materials and occasionally pursued similar short-term goals. However, they had very different political ends in mind. Ukrainian nationalists wanted to accommodate the local peasantry's cultural peculiarities by federalizing and democratizing the empire. Meanwhile, the region's imperial loyalists and Russian nationalists sought to use the autocratic state to improve the peasants’ socioeconomic standing while assimilating them to Russian culture. Although proponents of both projects continued to look for common ground, their paths increasingly diverged over the long nineteenth century. As the Russian-Ukrainian dichotomy became entrenched in educated society, previously neutral individuals had to choose sides. Thus, different political projects to reconstruct the relationship between the state and its population led to the fracturing of Eastern Europe's elites along nationalist lines. The split within the Shul'gin/Shul'hyn family is a result of chis larger process and a powerful metaphor for it.

Ukrainian, Russian, Little Russian

Sandwiched between two powerful neighbors, Ukraine has enjoyed a close and often problematic relationship with both Russia and Poland. Accordingly, Ukrainian nationalism can only be understood in conjunction with its closest rivals: Russian and Polish nationalism. While Ukrainian nationalism vied with Polish nationalism in Austrian Galicia, the competition with Russian nationalism has defined its history in the Russian Empire. The very concepts and practices that make up modern Ukrainian and Russian culture and nationalism only emerged over decades of exchange and conflict.

Three preconditions have defined the historical rivalry between Russian and Ukrainian nationalism: their competition over the same territory and population, the relative similarity of their “national cultures," and the asymmetry of their relationship. First, both camps saw the territories east and west of the Dnieper river as (part of) their ideal historical homeland; both claimed the East Slavic-speaking, Orthodox Christian peasantry of these provinces as their own kin. For Ukrainian nationalists, these peasants were the core of the autonomous Ukrainian nation. For Russian nationalists, by contrast, they were Little Russians, a distinct but integral part of the triune “All-Russian” nation that also included Great Russians and Belorussians. Claiming more than a quarter of the empire's East Slavic population, Ukrainian nationalism appeared to threaten both the state's unity and that of the purported Russian nation.”

The emerging competition between two nationalisms led to a shift in ethnic terminology. In the first half of the nineteenth century, "Little Russian" (maloross, malorus, malorossiianin) was the most common designation for any Orthodox, East Slavic-speaking inhabitant of the empire's Southwest, as opposed to the *Great Russians" of Russia proper. However, in the middle decades of the century, those who stood for the region's cultural autonomy came to use "Ukraine" for the territory and “Ukrainian” (wkrainets') as their preferred ethnonym.? Conservative supporters of the imperial state rejected this terminology and nicknamed its adherents “Ukrainophiles”—a name that the latter soon adopted for themselves. Meanwhile, “Little Russian,” once a neutral term, acquired political connotations. It increasingly became the proud self-designation of (as well as the scoffing appellation for) those who believed that the region’s inhabitants were a distinct yet inseparable branch of the All-Russian nation.’ These conservative self-styled Little Russians provided the cadres for the powerful Russian nationalist movement that emerged in the southwestern provinces after 1905.

Second, rivaling claims to the same peasant population were only possible because, for all their different traditions, Ukrainian and Russian cultures were comparatively similar. Ukrainian dialects were related to those spoken in Central Russia and to the Russian literary language. There was a clear-cut linguistic boundary between Ukrainian and Russian dialects, but the Russian presence in Ukraine had produced mixed idioms in some locations. Assimilation in both directions was relatively easy." In terms of confession, the Russian Empire’s Ukrainian and Russian population adhered to the same Eastern Orthodox Church." History, too, offered many commonalities. Both territories had been part of the medieval Rus’ state, and, after centuries of Lithuanian and Polish rule, most of Ukraine found itself in the Russian Empire by the late eighteenth century. For Ukrainian nationalists, governed by a state whose dominant culture and language were threateningly similar to the ones they promoted, the main task was thus to demonstrate the distinction between Ukraine and Russia. Precisely this relationship made Russia (i.e., “Muscovy,” the empire's Great Russian core) into the constitutive other of the Ukrainian national movement."

The cultural affinities between Russia and Ukraine facilitated the absorption of Ukraine's Orthodox inhabitants into Russian imperial culture.P? While the Russian state denied them collective national-cultural rights, it did not discriminate against them as individuals. All careers were open to them if they agreed to be treated as Russians.'* Therefore, many Russian nationalists in Ukraine were not Great Russians from the imperial center but locals loyal to the empire. As exemplified by the Shul'gin/Shul'hyn family, intellectuals' nationality was a conscious choice between various nation-building projects, based on their political preferences. Critics of the imperial state and its centralism turned toward Ukrainophilism; those loyal to the state became involved in Russian nation-building.

Third, the Russian-Ukrainian relationship in the nineteenth century was fundamentally asymmetrical owing to the absence of a Ukrainian state.! While earlier studies tended to either conflate Russian nationalism with the imperial state (“official nationalism") or saw the empire as an obstacle to Russian nation-building, recent scholarship has drawn a more nuanced picture of the manifold connections between nationalism and empire.!^ Russia's imperial situation was always on the mind of Russian nationalists. A nonimperial nation was unthinkable to them, although their visions of the exact relations between nation and empire differed. From the perspective of the tsarist administration, Russian nationalism was a tool that could be—and increasingly was—used to legitimate the empire's political system. While Russian nationalists sometimes disagreed with imperial policies, chey were much more likely than any other national movement to have the governmenc's ear.

If nineteenth-century Russian nationalism was thus framed by and loyal to an existing state, Ukrainian nationalism was a stateless national movement of the type described by Miroslav Hroch." Whereas Russian nationalism tended to be conservative, monarchist, and often antidemocratic, Ukrainian nationalism was an outlet of oppositional feeling and aligned itself with liberal and socialist currents. Without a state to call their own, Ukrainian nationalists rallied around national culture (language, literature, music, theater), while Russian nationalists, whose national culture was omnipresent, were more preoccupied with questions of state organization or geopolitics. The imperial state repeatedly restricted the use of the Ukrainian language, making it almost impossible to support Ukrainian high culture and the empire at the same time. Thus, repression reinforced the anti-imperial tendency of Ukrainian nationalism.!?

Aiming to analyze the relations between Russian and Ukrainian nationalism *on the ground," my study is indebted to several predecessors. Alexei Miller was the first to identify local Russian nationalists in Kiev as a third player in the relationship between the empire and Ukrainian nationalism. Miller argues that the state's failure to promote an assimilatory All-Russian nationalism guaranteed the long-term success of Ukrainian nationalism. Thus, his study focuses on the state's actions and intentions rather than individuals’ motivation to prefer one nationalist program over the other.” Faith Hillis's insightful monograph on the patriotic intelligentsia of Kiev and right-bank Ukraine (i.e., west of the Dnieper river) uncovered their foundational role in modern Russian nationalism and their ambivalent relationship with its Ukrainian counterpart. Hillis posits the existence of a “Little Russian lobby” including both conservative Little Russians and radical Ukrainophiles, which split into rivaling camps only in the late nineteenth century. While this approach is fruitful in examining the common roots of Russian and Ukrainian nationalism, it tends to understate ideological differences that remained hidden behind cautious public utterances.” Serhiy Bilenky has discussed the emergence of romantic nationalism in the region as the result of an open-ended triangular debate between Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian intellectuals.” By contrast, Johannes Remy’s close reading of the classical texts of Ukrainian nationalism stresses the anti-Russian stereotypes and resentments prevalent among midcentury Ukrainian writers.”

This book reads the relationship between Ukrainophiles and (Little) Russian nationalists as a process of negotiation, in which various actors repeatedly tested to what extent their ideas were compatible with those of others. Since both nationalist projects targeted the same population, their interests sometimes coincided and made cooperation desirable. However, their ultimate political aims were too different for a lasting alliance, and the two sides repeatedly came to blows. After the Ems Ukaz of 1876, which outlawed almost all forms of high culture in Ukrainian, the Ukrainophiles had to engage in a similar negotiation process with the imperial state. Knowing they were being watched, the Ukrainophiles exploited gray areas in the legislation and gradually extended their scope of action. There were still personal and professional contacts between the Ukrainophile and conservative Little Russian camps, and even occasional cooperation, but overall, their milieus moved ever further apart. When the new semiconstitutional system of the early twentieth century legalized the formation of political organizations, the two sides entered into open struggle.

Nationalist Biographies

Whatever their disagreements, most studies of both Russian and Ukrainian nationalism share a focus on high politics and state policies, on the history of ideas and canonical texts. This narrow definition of political history has excluded many relevant actors from the story—most importantly, almost all women. My study shifts attention from ideas and organizations to milieus and individuals, demonstrating how nationalism as a political ideology and lived practice interacted with biographical paths and personal choices. The biographies of nationalist activists are a rich and largely untapped resource for the study of nationalism. If they take into account the pitfalls of teleology and retrospective interpretation, nationalist biographies can contribute to a better understanding of the ideological differences between various nationalisms, their relationship with other political movements, and their appeal to various socioeconomic groups.?

A study of nationalism is not a study of nations. I follow Rogers Brubaker in understanding “nation” not as a category of analysis but as a “category of practice,” a “system of social classification, an organizing ‘principle of vision and division’ of the social world."^* Rejecting the treatment of national groups as collective individuals acting in their common interests, Brubaker urges researchers to think about how nationalist activists—in his terms, “ethnopolitical entrepreneurs"—try to divide society into clearly delimited groups. His research program leads beyond purely intellectual and political history toward an interest in the everyday practices of national classification, mobilization, and institutionalization.?^ Applying Brubaker’s scheme to the Ukrainian- Russian context, one must ask how Ukrainian and Russian nationalists competed for the implementation of their respective ways to divide the social world. To what extent and by what means did the Russian- Ukrainian dividing line, wished for by Ukrainian nationalists and contested by their Russian opponents, become entrenched in the minds of the local population, embodied in social milieus, and ultimately institutionalized by the state?

Inspired by Brubaker’s work, historians of the Habsburg monarchy have explored the practices by which populations and institutions came to perceive reality in national categories.” They have pointed out that many people were not a priori inclined to embrace national categories and often had to be pressured into doing so. This notion of “national indifference” challenges teleological accounts that show the nationalization of societies as a unidirectional and unstoppable process.” The Shul'gins and Shul'hyns, of course, were nationalists and by definition not indifferent to national categories. However, the literature on national indifference serves as a reminder that such activists were a small minority among a rather unresponsive population. Anecdotal evidence suggests that this was also the case with Ukraine's Orthodox peasantry, the target population of both Russian and Ukrainian nationalists. Although these peasants perceived themselves as different from Great Russians (nicknamed katsapy, literally “billy goats"), their self-identification as inhabitants of a specific locality was probably stronger than their loyalty to any imagined nation, whether Ukrainian or Russian.’ Meanwhile, certain members of the Russian Empire’s elites consciously resisted nationalist mobilization. In the Southwest, some landowners and intellectuals sympathized with parts of both the Russian and Ukrainian nation-building program and hesitated to break ties with either.” It is against this background that we must read the nationalists’ fierce ideological battles.