An Essay · Open Questions
Galicia is the part of Ukraine that Russia did not rule until 1939. Why a poor, crowded province on the far side of the Carpathians became the workshop of Ukrainian identity, and why the Kremlin still uses its people's name as an insult.
A man born in Lviv in 1910 who lived there until 1991 never had to move to change countries. He was born a subject of the Austrian emperor. At four he was under Russian military occupation, and at five, Austrian again. At eight he lived for three weeks in a West Ukrainian republic, and then in Poland. At twenty-nine he was a Soviet citizen, at thirty-one he was under German occupation, and at thirty-four he was Soviet again. At eighty-one he was a citizen of independent Ukraine. If he was Jewish, he almost certainly did not live to see the last two changes. If he was a Polish Lvovian, he was probably moved west after 1945, to a city such as Wrocław. If he was a Greek Catholic, his church was abolished in 1946 and he worshiped in secret for forty-three years.
Most readers of Russian history meet Galicia as a place where armies passed through: the Brusilov Offensive, the Eastern Front, the Holocaust by bullets. In Plokhy's The Gates of Europe it becomes something else, the hinge of the whole Ukrainian story. It is worth asking why.
The name comes from Halych, a town on the Dniester. In the twelfth century Halych was one of the principalities of Kievan Rus', and in 1199 Prince Roman Mstyslavych joined it to neighboring Volhynia to create the strongest state in the southwest of the Rus' lands. When the Mongols sacked Kyiv in December 1240, Galicia-Volhynia survived them, battered but intact. Roman's son Daniel submitted to the Golden Horde as the princes of the north did, but he also looked west. In 1253, with papal blessing, he was crowned King of Rus'. He founded a new city and named it for his son Lev: Lviv.
This matters because the question of who inherited Kievan Rus' is still argued over. The Muscovite claim, which became the Russian imperial one, runs through Vladimir-Suzdal in the northeast to Moscow, and treats the Ukrainian lands as a branch that strayed. The Ukrainian claim, given its classic form by the historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky, runs from Kyiv through Galicia-Volhynia, and treats Moscow as the offshoot. Both are national stories read back into a medieval world that knew neither nation. But the Galician kingdom gave the Ukrainian version something the Russian one had to explain away: a Rus' state that carried on Kyiv's traditions for a century, in the old heartland, without Moscow.
The native line died out in 1323, and its successor, a Polish-born prince, was poisoned by his own boyars in 1340. Casimir the Great of Poland fought for Galicia over the next decade, and the Lithuanians took Volhynia. After a Hungarian interlude, Galicia was Polish for four centuries.
Polish rule meant Polish lords, Polish law, and a Latin Catholic church that held the prestige. Lviv became a trading city of Poles, Germans, Armenians, Jews, and Ruthenians, as the Orthodox Slavs of the region were called, each with its own quarter and its own houses of worship. The Ruthenian peasants worked the land of Polish magnates. Their own nobility gradually became Polish and Catholic, and by the seventeenth century being Ruthenian in Galicia increasingly meant being a peasant or a priest.
The Union of Brest in 1596 created what is now called the Greek Catholic Church, which kept the Byzantine liturgy, married clergy, and Church Slavonic, but accepted the authority of the Pope. One point here is often missed: Galicia did not join the Union at first. Its bishops and the powerful lay brotherhood of Lviv fought it, and the Galician dioceses came over only around 1700, a century later. Once they did, the Union took root there more deeply than anywhere else. Elsewhere in Ukraine, under Russian rule, it was suppressed and its parishes were forced back into Orthodoxy in the nineteenth century. In Galicia it became the national church.
This connects to a theme that runs through this guide. When Catherine intervened in Poland, she did so in the name of protecting its Orthodox Christians. In the Ottoman Empire, Russia claimed to protect the sultan's Orthodox subjects. "Protection of co-religionists" was Russia's standard lever for reaching into its neighbors' affairs. Galicia was the one Ukrainian land where that lever did not work. Its people were Eastern in rite, Western in allegiance, and Ukrainian without being Orthodox.
In 1772, in the First Partition of Poland, Austria took Galicia. The Habsburgs revived an old Hungarian claim and gave the province a medieval-sounding name, the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria. This is the irony at the center of the story: the partition we usually read as a crime against Poland handed the Ukrainian Galicians to the one great power in the region that would let them develop as a nation.
It did not happen at once, and it was not entirely Vienna's intention. Maria Theresa and Joseph II raised the status of the Greek Catholic clergy, gave the church its modern name in 1774, and opened seminaries that educated the priests' sons who would become the national movement's first leaders. The real opening came in 1848. In the spring of that revolution the Austrian governor abolished serfdom in Galicia, and the Ruthenians founded a Supreme Ruthenian Council in Lviv and their first newspaper. The council declared that the Ruthenians of Galicia were part of a single nation with those across the border in the Russian Empire. The Poles, who wanted Galicia for a future Poland, sneered that the Ruthenians were "the Tyroleans of the East," loyal mountaineers for the emperor. They were not wrong about the loyalty. A small nation surrounded by larger ones had good reason to prefer a distant emperor to its neighbors.
After 1867, when Austria reorganized itself into Austria-Hungary, Vienna handed Galicia's administration to the Polish nobility in return for their loyalty. Polish became the language of government and of Lviv's university. That was a defeat for the Ruthenians, but the constitution still gave them things no Ukrainian in Russia had: elections, deputies in the Vienna parliament and the provincial diet, a press, reading rooms, cooperatives, and the right to organize. The Prosvita society, founded in 1868 to spread literacy in the villages, had thousands of reading rooms by 1914. The Shevchenko Scientific Society functioned as an unofficial Ukrainian academy of sciences. In 1894 Hrushevsky, a subject of the Tsar from Kyiv, came to Lviv to take up a chair in East European history, teaching in Ukrainian. There he began his ten-volume History of Ukraine-Rus'. Ivan Franko, the greatest Galician writer, was writing in the same city.
Across the border, the Russian state was doing the opposite. The Valuev Circular of 1863 asserted, attributing the view to most Little Russians themselves, that a separate Little Russian language "did not, does not, and cannot exist." The Ems Ukaz of 1876 banned the printing of most books in Ukrainian and the import of Ukrainian books from abroad, which meant from Galicia. So the movement moved west. Writers from Russian Ukraine published in Lviv; scholars from Kyiv taught there; the ideas went back across the border in suitcases. By the early twentieth century Galicia was being called the "Ukrainian Piedmont," after the Italian kingdom that had led the unification of Italy.
It is important not to make this sound inevitable. In 1848 the Galician Ruthenians had not decided what they were. A strong faction, the Russophiles, held that they were a branch of a single Russian people, and the Russian government quietly funded their newspapers and schools. Another faction, the Polonophiles, looked to assimilation. The Ukrainophile, or "populist," camp won the argument only gradually, through the reading rooms and cooperatives, and its victory was secure only around 1900. Galicia did not discover a Ukrainian identity. It built one, in competition with others, and in the one place where a free competition was allowed.
Nor was Vienna's tolerance simple liberalism. Austria-Hungary governed its peoples by balancing them against each other. In Galicia that meant letting the Poles rule and the Ruthenians organize, and keeping both dependent on the crown. The elections were rigged; in 1897 the "Badeni elections" in Galicia were notorious for violence against Ruthenian voters. In 1908 a Ukrainian student shot dead the Polish governor of Galicia, Count Andrzej Potocki, in his office in Lviv. The Habsburg room was a room with a lock on it. But it had a door, and the Russian Empire's Ukrainians had nothing of the kind.
Galicia was also one of the poorest corners of Europe. In 1888 Stanisław Szczepanowski, an engineer who made a fortune in Galician oil, published The Misery of Galicia in Figures, an argument from statistics that shocked Polish opinion. His conclusion is usually summarized in a line: each Galician did the work of a quarter of a man and ate for half a man. Peasant farms were divided and subdivided until they could not feed a family; the 1848 emancipation had left the forests and pastures with the lords.
The way out was emigration. From the 1880s to 1914, hundreds of thousands of Galicians, Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews left. They went to the coal and steel towns of Pennsylvania, to Brazil, and, in one of the great planned settlements of the age, to the Canadian prairies, where Ukrainian Canadians still trace their families to the villages of eastern Galicia. Many of the onion-domed churches between Winnipeg and Edmonton are Galician Greek Catholic churches.
The same province held the oil fields of Boryslav and Drohobych, at their peak around 1909 among the most productive in the world, and the shtetls of eastern Galicia, heartland of Hasidic Judaism. Jews were roughly a tenth of the province's people and often the majority in its small towns. This was the world of Joseph Roth, born in Brody, whose novel The Radetzky March is the great elegy for the Habsburg borderlands, and of Bruno Schulz, the writer and artist of Drohobych, shot in its street by a Gestapo officer in 1942. That world was destroyed in the war, and with it a tenth of Galicia's people and most of the life of its towns.
In August 1914 Galicia became a battlefield, and it stayed one for three years. The Russians took Lviv on September 3, 1914 (in the Western calendar, which Austria used), besieged the fortress of Przemyśl through the winter, and took it in March 1915 with well over 100,000 prisoners. Count Georgy Bobrinsky, the Russian governor-general, announced that eastern Galicia was a primordially Russian land, and the occupation behaved accordingly. Ukrainian newspapers, societies, and reading rooms were closed. Greek Catholic parishes were pressed toward Orthodoxy, and the head of the church, Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky, was arrested and deported to Russia, where he was held in monasteries until the revolution freed him in 1917. The Tsar visited Lviv in April 1915.
The Austrians were not gentle either. Suspecting the Russophiles of treason, they arrested thousands of Galicians, many on denunciations, and interned them in camps such as Talerhof near Graz, where many died; others were executed as spies. When the German-Austrian offensive at Gorlice-Tarnów drove the Russians out in May and June 1915, the retreating Russian army took hostages and drove out the Jewish population ahead of it. The Brusilov Offensive brought the Russians back into the province in 1916. Solzhenitsyn's August 1914 is set on the other front, in East Prussia, but the war that broke the Russian army, and filled the Petrograd reserve battalions with the men who would mutiny in February 1917, was fought in large part across Galicia.
1340s–1772 Kingdom of Poland
1772–1918 Austria (Ternopil district Russian 1809–15; Russian occupation 1914–15, 1916–17)
Nov. 1918 West Ukrainian People's Republic, in Lviv
1918–1939 Poland
1939–1941 Soviet Union
1941–1944 Nazi Germany
1944–1991 Soviet Union
1991– Ukraine
When Austria-Hungary collapsed, Ukrainian units seized Lviv on November 1, 1918, and proclaimed the West Ukrainian People's Republic. The Poles of the city rose against them within hours, and the Polish-Ukrainian war ended in July 1919 with all of eastern Galicia in Polish hands. The Allies confirmed Polish sovereignty in 1923. Interwar Poland promised the Ukrainians autonomy and did not deliver it; it closed Ukrainian schools, settled Polish veterans on the land, and in 1930 answered a wave of sabotage with a brutal "pacification" of Ukrainian villages. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, founded in Vienna in 1929, drew its recruits from this world. Its most famous member, Stepan Bandera, was the son of a Greek Catholic priest in a Galician village. He organized the assassination of Poland's interior minister in 1934.
In September 1939, under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the Red Army entered Lviv. Apart from the Ternopil district, which Napoleon gave to Russia from 1809 to 1815, and the wartime occupations of 1914–17, it was the first time Russia, now as the Soviet Union, ruled eastern Galicia. In less than two years the NKVD deported tens of thousands to Siberia and Kazakhstan, and when the Germans attacked in June 1941 it shot thousands of prisoners in the Lviv jails rather than evacuate them. The bodies were found by the city's population when the Soviets fled, and the Germans and local nationalists used the discovery to incite the pogroms of July 1941. On June 30 Bandera's faction of the OUN proclaimed a Ukrainian state in Lviv. The Germans arrested its leaders within days, held Bandera in Berlin and later in Sachsenhausen until 1944, and annexed Galicia to occupied Poland as the "District of Galicia."
What followed was the destruction of Galician Jewry. Most of the province's Jews were killed in the Bełżec death camp, in the Janowska camp in Lviv, or shot near their towns; Lviv's Jewish population, around 160,000 in 1941 with refugees, was reduced to a small fraction; only a few hundred registered as survivors when the Red Army returned. Local Ukrainian police took part, as did local people of every background in the plunder. Some Galicians hid Jews at the risk of their lives. Metropolitan Sheptytsky sheltered about 150, mostly children, in his monasteries and published a pastoral letter titled "Thou Shalt Not Kill." He had also welcomed the German arrival in 1941 and later supported the recruitment of a Galician division for the Waffen-SS. Both facts are true. In 1943–44 the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, formed by Bandera's movement, carried out the mass killing of Polish civilians, first in Volhynia and then in Galicia, a campaign of ethnic cleansing that Poland and Ukraine still argue about.
The Red Army returned to Lviv in July 1944, and the insurgents went into the forests. The war of the UPA against Soviet rule lasted into the early 1950s. Its commander, Roman Shukhevych, was killed in 1950. The Soviets answered with mass deportations, and in March 1946 an assembly in Lviv, staged by the NKVD, "dissolved" the Union of Brest and merged the Greek Catholic Church into the Russian Orthodox Church. Its bishops were sent to the Gulag; Metropolitan Josyf Slipyj spent eighteen years in camps and exile before the Vatican secured his release in 1963. The church survived underground, with secret priests and secret ordinations, until it was legalized in 1989. The Poles of Lviv were moved west to the lands Poland took from Germany; the Ossolineum library went with them to Wrocław. Bandera himself was assassinated by a KGB agent in Munich in 1959.
Three cautions for the listener:
The Habsburg nostalgia is real but partial. Roth's elegy and Galicia's coffeehouse memory are sincere, but the province was poor, rigged, and run by one nationality over the others. The Habsburgs gave the Ukrainians a room, not a home.
The nationalist record is mixed, and the history is not settled. The OUN and UPA fought both Hitler and Stalin, and they also took part in the killing of Jews and Poles. President Yushchenko named Bandera a Hero of Ukraine in 2010; the courts annulled the title in 2010–11. Historians such as Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe and John-Paul Himka have documented the movement's crimes in detail; many Ukrainians remember it chiefly as resistance to Soviet rule. Both memories exist, and both rest on facts.
The Russian usage is something else. In Soviet and now Russian state language, "Banderite" is applied to any Ukrainian who rejects Moscow's claim on Ukraine, whatever his politics or region. It is a way of saying that Ukrainian independence is itself fascist. It borrows a real and contested history to make a political argument that history does not support.
In the referendum of December 1, 1991, every region of Ukraine voted for independence, including Crimea, narrowly. The Galician regions voted for it almost unanimously, at well over ninety percent. That vote is the best measure of what the previous two centuries had built. In the east and south, Ukrainian identity was real but layered with Russian language, Orthodox faith, and Soviet memory. In Galicia it was the whole of the thing. The national movement that Russia had suppressed at home had been allowed to grow in a province Russia did not rule, and when the Soviet Union came apart, it was ready.
That leads back to the irony we started with. The partitions of Poland are rightly remembered as an act of aggression by three despots against a weaker neighbor. But the first partition put Galicia in the hands of the one empire that let a Ukrainian nation be built, while the second and third put Right-Bank Ukraine and Volhynia under the empire that said no such nation existed. Catherine took more of Ukraine than Maria Theresa did. She also, without intending it, set the stage on which the claim she denied would be proved.
Further reading: Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (2015); Larry Wolff, The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture (2010); Paul Robert Magocsi, A History of Ukraine (2nd ed., 2010); Christopher Hann and Paul Robert Magocsi, eds., Galicia: A Multicultured Land (2005); John-Paul Himka, Galician Villagers and the Ukrainian National Movement in the Nineteenth Century (1988); Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999 (2003); Omer Bartov, Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (2018); Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist (2014); Philippe Sands, East West Street (2016), on Lviv and the lawyers who named genocide and crimes against humanity; and Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March (1932).
A note on certainty: The political sequence — the Galician-Volhynian kingdom and Daniel's coronation, Polish annexation in the fourteenth century, the late Galician acceptance of the Union of Brest, the Austrian annexation of 1772, the reforms of 1848 and 1867, the Russian bans of 1863 and 1876, the Russian occupation of 1914–15, the West Ukrainian republic and the Polish-Ukrainian war, the Soviet annexation of 1939, the German occupation, and the liquidation of the Greek Catholic Church in 1946 — is documented and agreed. Dates for Galicia are given in the Western calendar, which Austria and Poland used, unlike the Old Style dates elsewhere in this guide. Numbers are less firm: emigration totals, the Jewish population of Lviv in 1941, the victims of the Volhynian and Galician massacres, and the deaths at Talerhof all vary by source and are given here in round terms or not at all. The weight of the Russophile movement before 1900 and the nationalist movement's record in the 1940s remain actively debated. The thesis that Galicia's distinctiveness follows from its being outside Russian rule until 1939 is this essay's argument. This piece was drafted with Claude's help from the sources listed. Its dates, names, and figures were then checked by a separate fact-checking pass, but it has not been verified line by line against the books.
Reads alongside One Battle, Three Doors, on how the rest of Ukraine came under Russian rule; The Two-Fingered Man, on the other great quarrel over rite and authority; and The Second Order, on the garrison that the Galician front filled. One of the Essays & Open Questions in the Russian History guide.