![]() Facing powerful external (Russians, Poles) and internal (Bolsheviks, Russians, Jews, peasant anarchists) enemies, a Ukrainian independent government could only survive under Berlin’s wing. Ukraine emerged as a nominally independent state but, in reality, a German protectorate at the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of March 1918 which ended the First World War on the eastern front. For a brief period in 1917-18 this happened. If Ukraine was lost, Russia would cease to be a great power. Even worse, in 1914 the territories of today’s Ukraine included the core of the empire’s export agriculture as well as its coal and metallurgical industries. In that case Russians would make up only 44 per cent of the empire’s population and would become almost as vulnerable to nationalist movements as their Habsburg and Ottoman rivals. ![]() If the Ukrainians came to define themselves as a separate people, then the Belorussians would probably follow them. For the rulers of tsarist Russia, of all the nationalist movements they faced the Ukrainian one was potentially the most dangerous. In time, all the great empires that dominated most of the world before 1914 succumbed to this challenge. In Russia as elsewhere in the late nineteenth century pre-modern empire was increasingly challenged by modern nationalist ideologies that proclaimed the sovereignty of the nation, defined in terms of ethnicity, language and citizenship. All attempts to mine the pre-modern history of dynastic empire for contemporary nationalist purposes tell many lies. Alexander saw himself not just as emperor but also as the first (European) gentleman of his realms. Paul Lieven had been a friend of Alexander from his youth and was the Lord Chamberlain of the imperial court. If asked, he would have defined himself in political terms as ‘Russian’, by which he would have meant that he was a loyal subject of the Russian emperor, Alexander II, to whose dynasty the Lievens had been linked for generations. Family history and class mattered much more: he saw himself as the descendant of the Livonian chieftains who had ruled in his homeland’s forests before the German knights arrived, but who subsequently had been centuries-long members of the Livonian noble corporation. But he would never have seen his primary identity as German nor indeed have attached any political significance to ethno-linguistic identity as such. As Marshal of the Livonian nobility, he was for many years the senior spokesman for the Baltic German landowning class that dominated the Baltic provinces for centuries. His main estates were in the faraway provinces of Livonia and Courland, in other words, today’s Latvia. My great-grandfather, Prince Paul Lieven, was a cosmopolitan aristocrat who took speaking five languages for granted. The same was true at the other end of society. Still less did they share the modern nationalist idea that every ethno-linguistic community required its own nation-state. Modern ideas of ethno-linguistic identity had limited traction among illiterate peasants. More important, the tsar was widely perceived as the protector of the Orthodox community and as a mythical embodiment of justice and mercy in a harshly exploitative and cruel world. A dynasty that had ruled for centuries was entwined in popular memory and folklore. Along with this often came monarchist loyalties. ![]() To the extent that these peasants had a wider identity it was linked to religion, which in their case meant Orthodoxy. Like most pre-modern peasants throughout the world, the mental horizons of the rural population were largely confined to the village. Along most of what is now the Russo-Ukrainian borderlands peasants spoke local dialects, mixing what we now define as the Russian and Ukrainian languages but often incomprehensible to educated citizens of Moscow or Kyiv. In the nineteenth century it was often hard to tell Russian and Ukrainian peasants apart. In time, immigrants from Russia poured into the region and formed the majority of the mining community. Hughes brought with him from Wales hundreds of skilled miners. For that reason, Donetsk before 1917 was called Yuzovka. He leased the land to the man who actually developed the territory that was to become the core of the Russian Empire’s coal-mining industry - a Welsh entrepreneur named John Hughes. No doubt Paul Lieven realised that beneath the soil lay rich seams of coal. When my great-grandfather acquired the territory in the mid-nineteenth century it was an almost uninhabited sheep-run. My family used to own the city that is nowadays called Donetsk in the Donbas region.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |