CHAPTER FOUR
The Rise of Ukrainian Social Democracy
Drahomanov’s anarcho-socialism
The Ukrainian social-democratic workers movement can trace its roots to the emergence of Ukrainian socialism in the second half of the 19th century. In this period Social democracy had a different meaning from what it has today and was a term increasingly identified with Marxian socialists. It was phrase coined by socialists and communists during the 1848 revolutions who sought a revolution which was both social and democratic. The ‘red republic’ would bring about emancipation both from the dominance of the aristocracy and from the nascent bourgeoisie. In the 1870s, socialism revived from the defeat of the Paris Commune and the decline of the International Workingmen’s Association, new organisations began to appear which tried to base their activity on Marx’s ideas. The most important was the formation in 1875 of the SPD, Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschland [Social Democratic Party of Germany] which became the centre of international socialism.
The socialist movement had began its long journey at the start of the 19th century, and Ukraine was no different, early socialist ideas began appearing in the 1830s and 1840’s but other than a few individuals it was restricted to Polish secret societies. It was not until the 1870’s that a truly Ukrainian socialist current emerged in the shape of the circle of activists around Mykhailo Drahomanov. For his part in the activities of the student secret society the Kiev Hromada, Drahomanov was expelled from the Kiev University by the Tsarist authorities. In 1875 he was delegated by Hromada to be their missionary in Western Europe where he settled in Geneva. There in 1878 he began publishing the journal Hromada [Community], the pioneer of Ukrainian political journals. The group who formed around Hromada known as the ‘Geneva Circle’ was the embryo of modern Ukrainian socialism.
The influence of this tendency grew across partitioned Ukraine Drahomanov’s ideas marking a major turning point in the Ukrainian movement. He had converted to socialism under the influence of Robert Owen and Saint Simon but he cautioned “I have never thought of trying to put into practice in our country any stereotyped foreign socialist program”.1 Nevertheless he was the first to acknowledge the influence of such thinkers as Proudhon on his ideas: “Proudhon’s anarchism is the doctrine of the complete independence of the individual and the inviolability of his rights by all governmental powers, even elected and representative ones”.2 Drahomanov’s philosophy could be best described as an agrarian anarcho-socialism, looking mainly to the youth he advised the young radicals in Galicia they needed “European socialist ideas, and perhaps something of the Russian sympathy for the peasants”.3 The ability of the Irish movement to mobilize the peasantry in social and political agitation he saw as a model for study and adaptation to Ukraine, in the peasantry rebellions he saw a living attachment to Ukraine whereas other classes had abandoned their country: “Only among the literate people have such memories faded,… They have been educated in foreign schools in preparation for service in the kingdom and state between which our Ukraine is partitioned”.4
Drahomanov sought to move the Ukrainian movement from purerly cultural endeavours towards a political challenge. He saw the thread of history as broken since the defeat of the Cossacks and the revolt of the peasants carrying with it potential to reconstitute Ukraine on a federal, communal basis. Drahomanov was convinced that revolutionaries listening to the voice of revolt of the Ukrainian peasants from below would hear their cry for self-determination:
“Of course ‘Ukrainianism’ is not part of the aims of this work. The goals of human labour are the same throughout the world – they are the product of the same scientific thinking. But the applied science is not the same everywhere, and so it is with community work. In every country, in each human race, in every community and even each individual, there have to be separate approaches to the attainment of the same solutions. These are the lessons drawn from the efforts of the International Workingmen’s Association”.5
The program of Drahomanov’s Hromada was influential on subsequent Ukrainian socialist ideas and even on his critics. Notably that the “Independence of a land and people can be achieved either by secession and creation of an independent state (separatism) or by winning self-government without separatism (federalism).6 He also saw emancipation not in a narrow sense but as something universal, Ukrainians suffered “injustice not only socially and politically, but also nationally”. But he was no narrow nationalist, whilst defending the need for Ukrainian self-organization against an “all-Russian” organization as an expression of centralist tendencies he also called for a common front against Tsarism. One of the most important contributions by Drahomanov to Ukrainian socialism was on the Jewish question, a critic of national chauvinism he wrote:
“Our nationalism is not nearly so pacific (as its apologists say). Only listen to the hate with which our people sometimes speak of the Russians, Poles and Jews. Reflect on what might happen to men of these races living on Ukrainian soil if our nationalists should come to power”.7
The worst happened in 1881-92 in a wave of pogroms in Ukraine, the response of the Russian and Ukrainian populists was appalling. The executive committee of Narodnaia volia [People’s Will] party issued a statement in Ukrainian describing the pogroms a “revolts” aimed at the “exploitation” by “Jewish Kulaks”, this was simple anti-Semitism wrapped in leftist language. Drahomanov condemned it attacking it as “inexcusable” and the acts being endorsed were of a “purely negative significance”.8 In The Jewish Question in Ukraine, he argued that “Ukrainian socialist considers it a double task: first to separate Jewish workers from Jewish capitalists and, second to bring together Jewish workers with workers of other nationalities”.9 This was consistent with the Geneva Circle who in 1885 had published a pamphlet On Behalf of a Group of Jewish Workers by pioneer Jewish revolutionary Aaron Wieler arguing for a socialist press in Yiddish.
Drahomanov’s radicalism brought him into conflict with the Kiev Hromada who not only feared his views would provoke Tsarist repression but opposed his radicalism per se and cutting his finances. Whilst he found himself isolated from the faint hearted in Kiev and hostility from the Russian left and right, his influence bore fruit in Austrian Ukraine, where his young sympathizers founded the first Ukrainian political party the Ukrainska radykalna partiia [Ukrainian radical party] who counted amongst its members Ivan Franko. Drahomanov wrote regularly for the URP press and their program advocated his agrarian-socialism, democracy and secularism against the influence of the conservative Greek Catholic church. Drahomanov himself ended his years in isolation at Sofia University in Bulgaria where he died in 1895.
Podolinsky the first Ukrainian social-democrat
One of the most active members in the Geneva circle, who may be considered the pioneer of Ukrainian social-democracy, was Serhii Podolinsky, a socialist and physician, who was an acquaintance of Marx and Engels.10 Whilst a student of the natural sciences in Kiev,
Podolinsky co-operated with another friend of Drahomanov’s Mykola Ziber, the first popularizer of Marx in Ukraine and the Russian Empire. Ziber was the first to lecture at a University on Capital in the Empire, and probably anywhere and considered Marx’s most brilliant economic follower at that time. His writings such as David Ricardo’s Theory of Value and Capital published in 1871 and his articles on Marx’s economic theory laid the foundation for Marxist economics in Ukraine and Russia. Most notably however is that Pdolynsky and Ziber organized the study of Marx not only for academic students but amongst the working class. In 1870 they established in Kiev a workers study group on Marx’s economics.11
In 1872, Podolinsky finished his studies in Kiev and traveled to the West, taking up studies in Paris and Zurich. At this time he met and worked with Pyotor Lavrov12 the Russian populist-socialist a member of the Narodnik secret society Zemlya i Volya [Land and Liberty], through whom he met Marx and Engels in London. In September, he attended the Hague Congress of the International Working Mens Association. Podolinsky was the motor force behind the Russian socialist the journal Vpered! [Forward!],13 which he helped launch with Lavrov. In the first issues he authored two articles on the history of the International. Already by 1874 Podolinsky’s differences with the Lavrovists had grown, they were indifferent and even hostile to the aspirations of the nationalities oppressed by Russia. No doubt this experience strengthened his belief in an self-organised Ukrainian social-democracy.
In 1875 Podolinsky’s had enough of funding and publishing the Russian Vpered! which gave no expression to the Ukrainian cause. He broke from the Russian socialists and considered himself part of the party of the Ukrainian social-democracts. Podolinsky then set out a systematic defendense of the independent Ukrainian social-democracy against the abuse of Valerian Smirnov an editor of Vpered!. In doing so he proclaimed the U.s.d.p some twenty-three years before the founding of the Russian social-democratic workers party of Plekhanov!
Podolinsky responded to the charge thrown at him of ‘Ukrainophilism’, which he argued no longer meant the amorphous liberalism and radicalism or the intelligentsia of the past but “now means the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Party”. They were no more nationalists that the English socialists, Serbian socialists or any others were for simply being a different own nation. He threw back the charge that by denying the validity of Ukrainian culture and literary activity “you reveal yourself as a most narrow Great Russian nationalist…. Do not forget that we cannot, and in particular the Ukrainian peple cannot develop in the direction of socialism using your forms, just as the Polish [people] will not be able to.”14 He source of strained relations between Russian and Ukrainian socialists was in his opinion entirely down to the refusal of the Russian to recognise the Ukrainian people as a nation. As to his split from Vpered! he pointed out that the reason was “not a lack of sympathy, but the realization of the urgency to set up a similar [publishing enterprise] of our own”.
In further exhanges with Sminrov/Vpered Podolynsky outlined more clearly what the views of Ukrainian social democracy. In comparison to the now establsihes German and Austrian parties “the USDP, like the Russian party does not represent a fully organized structured unit”, their principles of the Ukrainian social democrats were in accordance with the congresses of the First International. The immediate ideal of the U.s.d.p was a “decentralized federation with the greatest possible communal self-government”. The nation was in his opinion the convenient “grouping for economic self-administration”, which would take its place in a “world federation” of mankind.
The Ukrainian social democratic party existed in the generic sense of a millueii of radicals, despite their wish to publish a revolutionary organ, like Vpered of their own this was not immediately achieved. Nevertheless, Podolynsky was tireleless in his publishing efforts and set about producing the first social-democratic publications in the Ukrainian language. In Parova Mashyna [The Steam Engine] he conceptualised a socialist future through the dreams of an worker injured by a threshing machine.15
Then with Pro Bbidnist [On Poverty] he wrote the first outline of Marx’s labour theory of value in Ukrainian, and Pravda [Truth] on the injustice of the tax system. In 1879, he published his long study, The Life and Health of People in the Ukraine, a damning indictment of the lives of working people in Ukraine, and in 1880 wrote Crafts and Factories inUkraine the first economic monograph to be written in the Ukrainian language.
Podolinsky’s most well known work to be the subject of critical study by Marx was published in 1881 in Russian, then French in La Revue Socialiste of which he was an editor, under the title Socialism and the Unity of Physical Forces.16 1 In it Podolinsky clearly identifies with the “theory of production formulated by Marx and accepted by Socialists”17 as he poses the question what are the best ways to apply human labor to nature for the satisfaction of human needs? This is done through very general outline, the relations that exist between the theory of the accumulation of energy and the different forms of production.an engagement with the relationship of physics, human labor and the accumulation of energy on Earth.
Podolinsky argues in favour of “labor and production in common, through the association of the work forces” , in an “egalitarian association of the workers” as the most advantageous form of division of labor for humanity in a “future socialist order” where that “entire class of idle and rapacious businessmen will simply be eliminated.”
Podolynsky believed that there was a process underway in the Ukrainian movement from which those still “rather narrow nationalists” were switching to “the international s.d position”. A view which may seem premature at the time but soon vindicated by history. He was pioneering in his work from 1875 until his protracted ill health began in 1882 lasting until his death in 1891.18
Marx, Engels, Plekhanov and Ukraine
It has been argued that Ukrainian social-democracy was a late comer to the socialist movement yet in reality nascent Ukrainian and Russians social-democracy shared a similar birthday. This is instructive for already at this juncture was can not only measure the attitude of the Russians to the Ukrainian question, but we can also view in this nascent socialism in relation to those of Marx to whom social democracy claimed to adhere.
Described as the father of “Russian Marxism”19 and even “precursor of the Russian workers’ movement”.20 Georgi Plekhanov21 started off in Zemlya i Volya [Land and Liberty] founded in 1873. The Narodniks that broke up into the Narodnaya Volya [People’s Will] and the Cherny Peredel [Black Redistribution] groups in 1879, Plekhanov was a supporter of the latter group. In 1880, hounded by the Okhrana, Plekhanov fled Russia for Geneva where he founded with Vera Zasulich, Paul Axelrod and Leo Deutsch in 1883 the Osvobozhdeniye Truda [Emancipation of Labour], the embryo of Russian Marxism.
If there was one power above all that Marx and Engels regarded as hostile to the cause of working class emancipation it was Tsarist Russia, the edifice of European reaction. Marx had dismissed those, like Bakunin who argued that there was a specific Russian road to socialism, arising from some special ‘Russian spirit’. But, unlike some of his followers, Marx was always prepared to reconsider his views in the light of new developments. In 1880 Narodskaya Volya wrote to Marx with their program and warmly praised Das Kapital, from then on his sympathy was with them. When the revolutionaries assassinated Tsar Alexander II in 1881 he described them as “sterling people” and these events would lead towards the “Commune of Russia”. Marx defended their methods as tailored to their own “spcificaly Russian’ conditions. As to the exile group of Plekhanov from which Russian Marxism sprang, Marx castigated them:
In Russia, where Capital is more read and appreciated than anywhere else, our success is even greater. On the one hand, we have the critics (mostly young university professors, some of them personal friends of mine, as well as some writers for the reviews), and on the other, the terrorist central committee, whose program secretly printed and issued in Petersburg recently, has provoked great fury among the anarchist Russians in Switzerland, who publish The Black Redistribution [Ed: This is the literal translation from the Russian] in Geneva. These persons — most (not all) of them people who left Russia voluntarily — constitute the so-called party of propaganda as opposed to the terrorists who risk their lives. (In order to carry on propaganda in Russia — they move to Geneva! What a quid pro quo!) These gentlemen are against all political-revolutionary action. Russia is to leap into the anarchist-communist-atheist millennium in one breakneck jump! In the meantime they are preparing for this leap by a tiresome doctrinarism whose so-called principes courent la rue depuis feu Bakounine.22
At the heart of the divisions amongst the socialists in Tsarist Russia was the question of capitalist development and the peasant commune, the obshchiny in Russia and hromada in Ukraine. Alongside feudalism there existed in the countryside this primeval rural commune, which still survived after the 1861 reforms, this argued the Narodniks was the basis of Russian socialism once liberated from Tsarist autocracy. Plekhanov considered that Russia must go thrugh the phase of industrial capitalism and bourgeois democracy before it could approach socialism. In the end Vera Zasulich wrote to Marx in 1881 seeking an answer to the question, should they either liberate the rural commune to devlop in a socialist direction or allow capitalism to doom it and concentrate on the urban workers? For Marx the peasant communes were indeed in jeopardy from the Tsarist state which he saw playing a central role in the rise of capitalism, the obshchiny should be defended.
As far as this is concerned, it is no longer a matter of solving a problem; it is simply a matter of beating an enemy. To save the Russian commune, a Russian revolution is needed. For that matter, the government and the “new pillars of society” are doing their best to prepare the masses for just such a disaster. If revolution comes at the opportune moment, if it concentrates all its forces so as to allow the rural commune full scope, the latter will soon develop as an element of regeneration in Russian society and an element of superiority over the countries enslaved by the capitalist system.23
It was certainly not the case that Marx accepted the whole of the Narodniks viewpoint or thought Russia could pursue a non-capitalist path independently based on the obshchiny as it existed. The key to success was based on collaboration with a revolution in the west, outlined in the preface for a new Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto which was requested by Lavrov the following year:
If the Russian revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that the two can supplement each other, then present Russian communal land ownership can serve as a point of departure for a communist development.24
Marx saw a duality within the obshchiny either the private property element will destroy the collective element or the latter will be saved by social revolution. It was not that Marx ignored the devlopment of capitalism but that he saw in the decline of the obshchiny loss of an opportunity to help avoid the hardships of development Western Europe had to follow. It it was that in his search for new paths to revolution he recognised the revolutionary potentiality in the obshchiny an idea intimately linked to his lessons from the Paris Commune of a decentralised workers self-government replacing the bourgeois state. Those Russian ‘Marxists’ who wanted the obshchiny eliminated by capitalism to clear the road for socialism, were cold-shouldered by Marx.
Plekhanov saw the obshchiny as ‘a bulwark of Russian absolutism’, which was ‘an instrument of capitalist exploitation in the hands of the rich peasants’. Neither the communal nature of this social form, nor the sufferings of the peasant masses as it disappeared entered into his mechanical view historical development. Marx’s dialectics differed, as opposed to to merely interpreting the world through somekind of laws of history, the point was after all to change it.
In contrast to the ‘Father of Russian Marxism’ the views of Podolinsky’s Ukrainian social democracy were closer to those of Marx. Podolinsky considered that the expliotation of the Ukrainain working masses accentuated by capitalist development called for a revolution in which the agrarian proletariat and peasants played a major role. He considered that the weaker Ukrainian version of peasant communes the hromady as key element in the forging a socialist society the view of the Ukrainian social democracy being the “transfer of the land to peasant communes and of the factories to the workers’ cartels”, within a “decentralized federation with the greatest possible communal self-government”, a process in which they also included the emancipation of women.
Marx died in 1883 the year in which Emancipation of Labour group was launched, the program the Geneva group was published the following year. Unfortunately, neither Max nor Podolinsky were around to express an opinion. The program of the pioneer Russian social demcoracy is instructive in its total absence of reference to the national question in the Russian Empire. Despite a cautionary note that it was not “something finished and complete”, their willingness to “to introduce into it any kind of corrections”25 for the work of the socialists in Russia did not lead to any change to the second draft published in 1887.26 The Russian social democrats spoke of the “Complete equality of all citizens irrespective of religion and racial origin”, but had nothing to say about Russian imperialism or its oppression of the subjugated nations.
It was not however the case that because Plekhanov’s cricle in Geneva did not oppose Russian imperialism in their program they had no attitude at all to the national question. Indeed they did and in 1890 it brought them into conflict with Engels over his essay, The Foreign Policy of Russian Tsardom, which he submitted to Plekhanov’s journal Sotsialdemokrat.27 The article itself was in the same vain of those he had shared with Marx for decades, an unbridled hatred of “Empire of the Tsar”. The machinations of Tsarist foreign policy were placed in the context of imperial ambition a fact that he noted even “Among the Russian Revolutionists, too, there still exists a comparatively great ignorance of this side of Russian history”.28
This gave the Tsars of Great Russia the welcome pretext to claim the former Lithuanian territory, as a land Russian by nationality but now oppressed by Poland, although the Little Russians [Ukraine] at least, according to the greatest living authority on Slavonic languages, Mikiosic, do not speak a mere Russian dialect, but a separate language; and the further pretext for interference as protectors of the Greek faith, for the benefit of the Uniate Greco-Catholics, although these had long since become reconciled to their position with regard to the Roman Church.29
None of this impressed Plekhanov and Zasulich who wrote to Engels protesting his consideration of Ukrainians as distinct nation conquered by Russia. Engels had since changed his earlier views of ‘non-historic peoples’, only two years earlier he told the Romanian Social-Democrat Ion Nadejde one positive outcome of the overthrow of Tsarism would be that “Little Russia [Ukraine] will be able to choose its political connections feely”.30 So he was not about to be lectured by Plekhanov and co, he responded telling them:
I admit, incidentally, that from the Russian point of view the question of Poland’s partitioning (1772 and so on) looks completely different than it does from the Polish point of view, which has become the viewpoint of Western Europe. But in the final analysis I must likewise take the Poles into account. If the Poles have pretensions to territories which the Russians have generally considered to be their permanent acquisitions and Russian by national composition, then it is not my task to decide this question. I can only say this, that in my opinion the people concerned should decide their fate themselves-just as the Alsatians will have to choose themselves between Germany and France.”31
Thus none other than Engels had to lecture the young Russian social-democracy on the right of self-determination of Ukraine viewed it as a “permanent acquisition”. The advice of Engels made little impact on them for the following year they expressed their chauvinism more clearly by publishing a pamphlet entitled O Bezvykhodnosti Uukrainskago Sotsializma v Rossii [The Blind Alley of Ukrainian Socialism in Russia].32 It depicted the Russian conquest of the Black Sea coast and the fertile Ukrainian territories as an economic necessity achieved by ‘Peter the Great’. The Ukrainian movement was damned as a utopian invention with no historical material basis:
The abolition of serfdom, universal conscription, the development of commerce and industry, the steady growth of the homeless agrarian proletariat, the influence of the administration, railroads and schools (in so far as they exist), the influence of the church and religious sects, the influence of urban life and civilization – these are the factors that have definitively merged the rural population of Ukraine, even linguistically, . . . into a sphere of influences shared with Russia .33
The urban working class of Ukraine was in their view Russian or russified, any separatists tendencies were a nuisance against the flow of history as opposed to an ally. As for Plekhanov the opinion one time leader of Narodnaya Volya Lev Tikhomirov of in his memoirs are instructive:
“I can not refrain from noting a curious character trait of his. He bore in his soul an irrepressible Russian patriotism. He did not see or recognize in Russia, as in all other lands in the world, anything original, unique. Yet he saw in Russia the great socialist land of the future, and he did not give Russia away to anyone. He literally hated every kind of separatism. He regarded Ukrainophilism with contempt and hostility. In the depths of his soul lived the Great Russian unitarist and unifier. As a revolutionary and emigrant he dared not come out openly against the Poles, since they were also a revolutionary force. But Plekhanov did not like the Poles; he neither respected nor trusted them. He was quite frank about this in conversations among friends. He was in open enmity with Drahomanov [the Ukrainian socialist]. He used to laugh and say this about Shevchenko [the Ukrainian poet]: `I will never forgive Shevchenko for writing: I can, but don’t want, to speak Russian’.”34
Ironically Engels had wrote in his controversial article that “the Russian who is a chauvinist, will sooner or later fall on his knees before the Tsar”. Plekhanov who had already revealed a latent streak of chauvinism was unsurprisingly to descend into virulent nationalism in support for the war with Germany in 1914.35
The Ukrainian Social Democrats
Some two years after the death of Serhii Podolinsky initiatives were underway in Russian-ruled Ukraine that would regenerate Ukrainian social democracy. The increased activism of Marxist socialism in the 1890’s fell on fertile ground, on the one hand increasing industrialisation created a larger recipient proletariat, on the other hand the failure of populism and pedagogical centred nationalism saw the revolutionary ideas from the west exercise a genuine fascination for a large part of the educated and semi-educated younger generation. The growth in Marxist ideas in Ukraine found expression in underground of study groups, initially consisting of intellectuals, cropped up in Kharkiv, Katerynoslav [Dnipropetrovs’k], Poltava, Kherson and Odesa in the late 1880’s and early 1890’s.
In March 1897 the Kiev Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class was founded modeled on the St. Petersburg organization of the same name led by Vladimir Lenin. The League had about 30 members mainly Russian and Polish social-democrats groups and a grouping of the Polish Socialist Party. On May Day 1897 the Kiev Union distributed 6,500 copies of its proclamations at more than 25 Kiev factories. That august they launched an illegal Russian language paper Rabochaya Gazeta [Workers’ Gazette].36 This Kiev Rabochaya Gazeta, played leading role carrying out its belief that “separate workers’ circles should combine into one common party…The Russian workers’ party will be a Social Democratic Party.” 37 This initiative took place at a meeting in Minsk in spring 1898, of the six organization present, even though they considered themselves Russian, three of them were from Ukraine, Katerynolsav, and Kiev Union for the Emancipation of the Working Class, the Rabochaya Gazeta editorial group. The conference founded the Rossiiskaia Sotsial-Demokraticheskaia Rabochaia Partiia [Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party]. This first congress of the RSDRP adopted the Kiev adopted Rabochaya Gazeta as the Party’s official organ. A Central Committee of three was elected; it was agreed to issue a manifesto and Rabochaya Gazeta was named as its official organ. However, the hopes aroused by the congress were not destined to be fulfilled. One of the participants, P.Tuchapsky a founder of the Kiev Union, recalls in his memoirs:
“We left the Congress with a feeling of cheerful faith in our cause. Arriving in Kiev I gave a report back to the Union and the Workers’ Committee. The congress resolutions were fully approved. It looked as if the work would now go forward still better and more successfully than in the past. But only a week after my return the Kiev organisation was smashed.”38
Important initiatives were also underway in terms of Ukrainian social democracy, throughout 1883-94 a number of radical minded students had broken away from the established student society the Kiev Hromada, and in 1897 they established the Ukrainska Sotsiial Demokratii [Ukrainian Social Democracy]. Amongst there members were a number of socialists from Galicia and Tuchapsky was also in its ranks.
The USD was small in numbers and they faced a problem prevalent in these early days summed up by Dmytro Antonovych39, that one could either be a Marxists or a Ukrainian but not both, it was a situation changing, but for the time being they were cut off from the mainstream Ukrainian movement.40 Amongst its members were Drahomanov’s niece the famous poet Lesia Ukrainka (Liarysa Kosach) and M Kotsiubynsky and Ivan Steshenko.
They were the first Ukrainian Marxists to attempt a critique of Drahomanov’s ideas in their 1897 pamphlet Mykhaylo Petrovych Drahomanov written by Lesia Ukrainka. They praised Drahomanov for tireless “work for the Ukrainian cause” and pointed to his “constant reminder that Ukrainians must not stand in line behind the Russian radical groups, but must form their own national group to work among the people, has great importance even now”.41 The recognised as his “strong point” he had pushed “the people in Galicia and Russian Ukraine to turn to the peasant masses”. Nevertheless the weakness in his ideas was their:
“…failure to note that peasantry was not entirely homogenous. To begin thinking about the peasantry as a whole means very little. The modern class principle of sociology demands clarification as to which class of peasants one is defending, for only then can sympathy for the peasants have concrete value”.42
The USD considered that that in light of increasing industrialisation and that there was a greater differentiation of the peasantry including wage-workers, small holding peasants and kulaks, alongside an increasing absorption into the industrial proletariat. They placed the leading role in acquiring social and democratic liberty in Ukraine with the working class, and decided to concentrate on the rural workers to help build an alliance with the urban proletariat.43
On the national question the believed in Ukrainian autonomy in federation with Russia. In 1899 they worked with another organisation established by a student M.Melenevskyi The Social Democratic Group of Village Workers in Kiev province. Another initiative at the time was the “Ukrainska Partiia Sotsyialistychna’, the Ukrainian Socialist Party modelled on the PPS-Polish Socialist Party.44 This was an unusual but interesting development in that it was taken by a group of Polish students who despite their ethnic origin considered themselves Ukrainian and identified with the Ukrainian cause. This stand in stark contrast sharply with the activity of Russian socialists in Ukraine at the time. The leader of the group was Bohdan Iaroshevskyi who had been influenced by the historian Professor Volodymyr Antonovych at Kiev University; Iaroshevskyi was linked with the Polish socialist groups in Galicia.
The Draft Program of the Ukrainian Socialist Party was published in 1900 and was an interesting document; it was not only scathing of the exploitation of the working masses of Ukraine and Tsarist national oppression but incredibly far sighted in the dangers of a post-colonial situation:
“Just as our oppression I threefold – economic, political and national – so must our liberation be complete; it must give us room to live comfortably and freely and allow us full national development. The replacement of Russian, Polish and Jewish exploiters with Ukrainians, as our nationalist patriots would wish, cannot satisfy us, fro this would not improve the fate of our people one single jot…..The only program which, when implemented, will guarantee the happiness of our people is the socialist program’.45
The USP considered itself followers of Marx and rejected national chauvinism advocating fraternal alliances with workers of all countries, this included the Russian socialists who they sought an agreement of “brotherly alliance. They sought a “democratic Ukrainian republic” and “complete equality among nationalities with each nation being free to enter into the republic”. The USP hailed the formation of the Ukrainian Social Democratic Party in Galicia accepting the Austro-Marxist program and the demand for “political freedom and independence for all Ukraine”.46
As a solution to the social and national oppression its support for independence differed not only from the PPS but most organized Ukrainians political views of the time. Whist they received a great deal of support from the Ukrainian social democrats in Galicia notably Mykola Hankevych47 founding leader of the new USDP they came into conflict with the Ukrainian Social Democrats in Kiev. Lesia Ukrainka authored a USD critique of the draft program published as a pamphlet in 1901 in which she argued their opinions were akin to “chauvinist populists” alien to socialists.48 Their means of achieving independence were vague; the USD considered that the question of separatism should be stalled until after the overthrow of autocracy, if it was desirable at all. There was the further question of orientation, should it prioritise the urban workers in the peasantry, the perspective of social democracy argued Ukrainka should one in which:
Together with socialist propaganda, propaganda about [Ukrainian] national awareness is now most important (although not very easy) among urban workers so that they do not become strangers to their identity [u ridni storoni] and to their brothers, the village workers …whereas what is needed among the village proletariat (including all those who have land but do not use hired labourers) is not so much national propaganda, for here denationalization [vynarodovlennia] continues much more slowly [than among urban workers] — but rather socialist [propaganda] so that between the urban and village workers there does not arise that ‘cultural divide’ about which the intelligentsia has for so long complained.
…Even though in today’s circumstances this kind of propaganda among the peasants seems to us both difficult and less productive than propaganda among the urban workers (who already by the very conditions of life are better prepared to accept socialism), nevertheless we still think it
is inappropriate to neglect completely work among the peasantry.
The social democrats were righty cynical with regard to the USP’s call for union of all social democrats groups into an ‘all-Russian’ party, because the new RSDRP was still ‘state centralist’ both in program and organization. Les Ukrainka defended co-operation with continued autonomy as more beneficial for Ukrainians. Though the polemic continued neither the USD or USP found common ground to unify into a larger Ukrainian social democracic organization and remained as two solitudes, pioneering but lacking in influence.
Nevertheless despite these teething problems and efforts of the Tsarist gendarmerie to choke the growing social and democratic movement, socialist ideas continued to spread.
At the turn of the century new current of Ukrainian militants of Drohomanovite, social democratic and nationalist opinion began to cohere leading to the foundation of the first mass Ukrainian revolutionary party in Russian-ruled Ukraine – the Revoliutsiina Ukrainska Partiia [Revolutionary Ukrainian Party] in 1900. The UDP survived until 1903 when fused with the taking a further step in the direction of their goal of a Ukrainian social democracy, but not without a protracted battle ideas of the relationship of social emancipation and national liberation in a subjugated nation.
NOTES
1 Cited in Essay in Ivan L.Rudnytsky, “Modern Ukrainian History”, and Drahomanov as Political Theorist, CIUS Edmonton 1987, and p.219.
2 Ibid, p.206
3 Ibid p.220.
4 Mykhailo Drahomanov, Vybrani Tvory, ed. P.Bohatsky, Prague-New York, 1937 p.93 Cited in Bojcun p.176.
5 Ibid p.22 cited in Bojcun p.177
6 Cited in L.Rudnytsky, ibid p.243.
7 Ibid p.240
8 Ibid, Drahomanov and Ukrainian-Jewish Relations, p.287.
9 Ibid.
10 See Roman Serbyn. In defense of an independent Ukrainian socialist movement: Three letters
from Serhii Podolinsky to Valerian Smirnov. Journal of Ukrainian Studies, 1982.
11 Bojcun ibid, p.178.
12 P. L. Lavrov (1820-1900); was a member of the Narodnik secret society Zemlya i Volya (Land and Liberty), and then of the Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) party. In the 1870’s he advocated the need to “go among the people.” Lavrov preferred to fight for his ideas with the pen He developed an original philosophy, which he called anthropologism. He traced its origins to ancient philosophers and Feuerbach.. Lavrov did not share Marx’s fatalistic approach to historical development. Neither did he agree with Bakunin’s anarchic plans. In Lavrov’s scheme, the state could play a positive part in the hands of revolutionaries, although he was worried about concentration of power in the hands of a few and hoped that the state would disappear soon after the revolution. Although towards the end of his life he fell under the influence Marxism he died in emigration, in Paris, on February 6, 1900.
13 Vpered! The name of two Russian publications, a journal and a newspaper, edited by P. L. Lavrov and published abroad during the 1870s; organs of the Lavrov orientation in the revolutionary Narodnik (Populist) movement. The journal Vpered!, an irregularly published review, first appeared in Zurich, 1 August (or 13, New Style) 1873, and then from 1874 to 1877 came out in London. The journal carried theoretical articles, The newspaper Vpered! was published every two weeks in London during 1875-76; The views expressed in the Vpered! publications were different from other currents in the Narodnik movement primarily in that they advocated propaganda among the people as the tactic of revolutionary struggle. Some of the articles in Vpered! received the approval of K. Marx and F. Engels.
14 Letter to Valerian Smirnov 4 may 1875, published in Roman Serbyn. In defense of an independent Ukrainian socialist movement: Three letters from Serhii Podolinsky toValerian Smirnov. Journal of Ukrainian Studies, 1982, p.12
15 John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burket, Ecological Economics and Classical Marxism, “The Podolinsky Business Reconsidered”, Organization and Environment, March 2004, USA.
16 Ibid.
17 “Socialism and the Unity of Physical Forces”, Serhii Podolinsky, translated by Angelo Di Salvo and Mark Hudson, Organization and Environment, March 2004, USA
18 Podolinsky suffered a mental collapse in January 1882 from which he never revovered after the death of two of his three daughters. He was brought back to Kiev by his mother where he died in 1891.
19 The claim to be the father of Russian ‘Marxism’ is itself a very questionable statement, this is eloquently challenged by
20 Tony Cliff, “Plekhanov: The Father of Russian Marxism”, Socialist Review, January 1957. Transcribed by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
21 Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov, (1856-1918) One of the founders of the first Marxist organisation in Russia: the Emancipation of Labour group, Plekhanov later joined the Russian Social-Democratic party, becomming a Menshevik after the split in the party. Plekhanov became involved with Narodnaia Volia, the People’s Will revolutionary party. By 1880, hounded by the Tsarist Okhanara, Plekhanov fled Russia, not returning until the General Amnesty granted by the Provisional Government, in 1917. . In 1883 Plekhanov helped form the Russian Marxist organisation: the Emancipation of Labour group. Plekhanov’s theoretical position stressed that Russia must pass through genuine capitalistic development, in order for the conditions and tools to be built to enable a Socialist revolution to occur. During the First World War, Plekhanov supported the War. By the 1917 February Revolution, Plekhanov returned to Russia and gave his support to the Provisional government, claiming it to have established a truly bourgeois government. By the time of the October Revolution, Plekhanov was outraged, and fought to usurp the Soviet government, believing it premature.
22 Letter of Marx To Sorge November 5, 1880; [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/letters/80_11_05.htm]
23 First Draft of Letter To Vera Zasulich, MECW, Volume 24, p. 346 March 1881, [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/03/zasulich1.htm]
24 Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels, Preface to Russian Edition. drafted by Engels, but is signed jointly by Marx
25 G.V. Plekhanov, Programme of the Social-Democratic Emancipation of Labour Group, (1883) Georgi Plekhanov: Selected Philosopohical Works, Vol I., Progress Publishers,1974 [http://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1883/xx/sdelg1.htm]
26 G.V. Plekhanov, Second Draft Programme of the Russian Social-Democrats, 1887. Georgi Plekhanov: “Selected Philosophical Works”, Vol I, Progress Publishers, 1974. [http://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1887/xx/sdelg2.htm]
27 Frederick Engels’ article “The Foreign Policy of Russian Tsarism” appeared in two issues of the Sotsial-Demokrat a literary and political review, published by tbe Emancipation of Labour group in London and Geneva in the years 1890-92.
28 Foreign Policy of Russian Tsardom [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1890/russian-tsardom/index.htm]
29 Ibid.
30 Engels to Najejde, 4 January 1888, cited in Cummins ibid, p.161.
31 Letter of Engels to Vera Zaulich 3 April 1890 cited in Roman Rosdolksy, Engels and the “Nonhistoric” Peoples: The National Question in the Revolution of 1848, Critique Books 1987, p189.
32 O Bezvykhodnosti Uukrainskago Sotsializma v Rossii Geneva 1891, Cited in Roman Rosdolksy, Engels and the “Nonhistoric” Peoples: The National Question in the Revolution of 1848, Critique Books 1987, p., 141,
33 Ibid p.141-142.
34 Lev Tikhomirov, Vospominaniia (Moscow-Leningrad, 1927), p. 91.Cited in Rosdolsky ibid, p189.
35 Lunacharsky recalled how during the war Plekhanov has said to “a socialist comrade, an ‘internationalist’, he said: ‘So far as I am concerned, if I were not old and sick I would join the army. To bayonet your German comrades would give me great pleasure.”
36 Rabochaya Gazeta (Workers’ Gazette) — the illegal organ of the Kiev group of Social Democrats. Two issues appeared —No. 1 in August 1897 and No. 2 in December (dated November) of the same year. The First Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. adopted Rabochaya Gazeta as the Party’s official organ. The newspaper did not appear after the Congress, the print shop having been destroyed by the police and the members of the Central Committee arrested.
37 Cited in V. I. Lenin A Protest by Rusian Social-Democrats, V. I. Lenin, “Collected Works”, 4th English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972 Vol. 4, pp. 167-82.
38 Cited in Bolshevism: The Road to Revolution by Alan Woods, “Part One: The Birth of Russian Marxism”, Wellred Publications, 1999, ISBN: 1900007053
39 Dmytro Antonovych (1877-1945. A founder leader of the Revolutionary Ukrainian Party 1900-1905 and from 1905 of the Ukrainian Social Democratic Workers Party. He edited the journals Haslo and Selianyn and worked for Dzvin. He was prominent in the Ukrainian Peoples’ Republic 1917-18. Died in exile in Prague where has president of the Ukrainian Pedagogical Society.
40 Dmytro Anatonovych, Karl Marks i Ukraintsi, Dzvin no.3 (1913), cited in George.Y.Boshyk, “The Rise of Ukrainian Political Parties in Russia 1900-1907: With Special Reference to Social Democracy”, PhD Theses, St.Anthony’s College, Oxford, 1981. British Library Theses Service, London.
41 Cited in Ivan Maistrenko, “Borotbism: A Chapter in the History of Ukrainian Communism”, Research Program on the USSR, New York 1954, and p.15.
42 Ibid, p.15
43 Ibid, p.41-42 and Bojcun ibid p.181.
44 Ibid, Boshyk p.55. Both Bojcun and Juri Borys mistakenly consider that the USP was a continuation of the USD group, a fact clearly at contradicted by the sharp criticism of the USD at the time.
45 Ibid p.406
46 The program is reprinted in full in Boshyk p.404-409.
47 Mykola Hankevych (1867-1931. A leading socialist in Galicia who helped organize Ukrainian workers and edited the paper Robitnyk. He was founding member of the USDP.
48 Lesia Ukrainka, Otsinka narysu programy, Ibid p.60.