Soldier Emperor:
Tsarist Ukraine
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
March 2023

During the last quarter of the 19th Century, even the word “Ukraine” was banned under Russian rule. Much of Ukraine’s modern history has been driven by attempts from Moscow or St. Petersburg to stamp out Ukrainian language and culture.

The word “Ukraine,” meaning “borderland” in several Slavic languages, dates back to the Hypatian Codex of 1187 as a reference to a specific territory. Slavic language and culture first arose in the region known as Polesie, which covers western Ukraine and neighboring parts of Poland and Belarus. But for centuries the borderlands would be contested among other nations: Poland, Ottoman Turkey and eventually Russia.

Ukrainian painter Ilya Repin's The Zaporozhye Cossacks Replying to the Sultan.

These lands that would become modern Ukraine fell under Russian rule in the 17th and 18th Centuries, as Russian armies drove the Ottoman Turks and their Tatar allies out of the lands north of the Black Sea (the Pontic Steppe), and the Russian Empire gorged on huge slices of Polish territory. Russia went from overlord of a slice of Ukraine to most of the lands inhabited by Ukrainian speakers, with the rest passing under Austrian rule.

The steppe grasses hid one of the world’s greatest resources: the chernozem, or black soil. One of the world’s two great belts of black soil (the other reaches from Kansas to Manitoba) extends from central Europe across Ukraine and into central Russia. The black soil is black, of course, with plenty of humus and a high phosphorus and ammonia content. It can retain moisture (because of all that humus) and already contains important plant nutrients. That makes the black soil incredibly productive for agriculture and perfectly suited to mass cultivation of grain crops. And those riches invited outsiders.

As towns and cities grew, they remained the province of foreign elites: at first Polish-speaking, and then after the Tsarist conquest, Russian-speaking. Ukrainian remained a spoken language of the rural masses, and educated people in what would become Ukraine wrote in Latin, Polish, Russian or Old Church Slavonic. When Russian officials or intellectuals acknowledged Ukraine at all, it was as “Little Russia,” and its people as “Little Russians.”

Most Ukrainians, being peasants, were also serfs – the property of the landowner where they resided, unable to leave. Many did anyway, fleeing to join the Cossacks to the south and east, or west into Polish (later Austrian) territory. One of the first overt Ukrainian political acts came even before the Russian seizure of Right Bank Ukraine, the provinces west of the Dnipro River. In 1791 someone, possibly Ukrainian poet Vasily Kapnist, met with Prussian Chancellor Ewald Friedrich Graf von Hertzberg, seeking support for a rising of the former Zaporizhian Cossack Host against the Russians; Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm II declined to get involved.

When Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812, Poles and Lithuanians turned out in good numbers for what seemed an opportunity to overthrow the oppressive tsarist regime. Ukraine experienced no disturbances, and some of the petty nobles even raised volunteer regiments to fight for Tsar Alexander I.

Dreams, by Taras Shevchenko.

Ukrainian consciousness remained limited to a handful of poets until 1840 when the 26-year-old Taras Shevchenko published Kobzar (The Bard), a collection of Ukrainian-language poems. “It burst forth like a spring of clear, cold water,” wrote poet Ivan Franko, “and sparkled with a clarity, breadth and elegance of artistic expression not previously known in Ukrainian writing.”

Practically single-handedly, Shevchenko – also a noted painter – turned Ukrainian from a Russian dialect into a thriving literary language. A champion of Ukrainian independence, he would be convicted of writing in the Ukrainian language and ridiculing the Imperial House, earning him a 10-year exile in Central Asia as an Army private. But others took up the pen and wrote in Ukrainian, while Ukrainian secret societies looked to Shevchenko’s poems as inspiration.

That didn’t escape the tsar’s secret police. Publishing in the Ukrainian language grew slowly: from the first Ukrainian-language book, Eneida by Ivan Kotliarevsky in 1798, until 1847, about 100 books appeared, most of them published in Kharkiv. The secret police then began a crackdown and publishing faltered, continuing intermittently for the next decade and a half.

Shevchenko died in 1861, worn down by the hard conditions of his exile. By that point, great changes had come to Ukraine. Seven days after the great poet died, Tsar Alexander II abolished serfdom. Two years after that, Interior Minister Petr Valuev began a virulent campaign to repress the “so-called Ukrainian language.”

“No separate Little Russian language has ever existed, does exist now, and can ever exist,” he wrote in a Putinesque secret memo to the education minister. “The dialect used by the common folk is the very same Russian language, only adulterated by the influence on it of the Polish language.”

A widespread rebellion in Poland provided the spark for the anti-Ukrainian campaign, which would quickly be echoed by the Orthodox Church’s Holy Synod and the Russian press. All of them damned the Ukrainian cultural movement as a Polish intrigue to undermine the Empire and break Ukraine away as part of a new independent Poland. The Russians eventually crushed the Polish uprising, but support had been strong among the Polish nobility in Right Bank Ukraine. The repression that followed caused many of them to flee for Austrian-ruled Poland, while the cultural and political influence of those remaining declined.

In the meantime, Ukraine’s economy grew. With the end of serfdom, Ukrainians could leave their farms and pursue other ways of life, providing a huge potential work force for new industries and mines. And by that point, the steam engine’s impact had revolutionized Ukrainian agriculture. The bumper crops of wheat and rye from all that black soil could now be moved from the farms to Black Sea ports by railroads and steamboats, and on to foreign buyers aboard steamships. The Russian Empire’s grain exports exploded by 60 percent between 1860 and 1870, and another 37 percent from 1870 to 1880.

A 1919 map of Ukrainian-inhabited lands.

Valuev’s effort to stamp out Ukrainian culture only shifted the center of Ukrainian-language publishing over the border to Lviv in Austrian Galicia. By 1875, 62 Ukrainian-language books were published in Galicia, rising to 177 in 1894. Galicia became the “Ukrainian Piedmont,” as the new generation of nationalists called it, the small core that would be the catalyst for Ukrainian independence the way the Kingdom of Piedmont had for a united Italy.

The success of Ukrainian publishers across the border provoked still greater pressure within Russian-ruled Ukraine. In May 1876, Alexander II signed the Ems Ukaz, a sweeping directive that outlawed all publishing in Ukrainian, all import of publications in Ukrainian, all public performances (plays, speeches, singing, lectures) in Ukrainian and teaching in Ukrainian. Tsarist secret police rifled through libraries, confiscating all Ukrainian-language books and other materials. Teachers suspected of favoring Ukrainian culture lost their jobs.

As with other tsarist measures, the government only issued Ems Ukaz in secret. It had the force of law, superseding all other law and regulations (the current President of Russia holds the same supreme legal power). The secrecy served to multiply its effect; unaware of the exact wording of the ban, people feared to even speak Ukrainian where informers might hear. Ukrainian writers, artists and other emigrated, some to North America but many to Austrian-ruled Galicia.

The attempt to annihilate Ukrainian identity failed, but it did significantly set back the development of Ukrainian culture. Alexander III eased some of the harshest measures, but most of the ban remained in effect until the aftermath of the 1905 Revolution. Ukrainian identity began to emerge in the years just before the First World War, but it would take the unprecedented upheavals of war, revolution and civil war for it to fully take form.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published an unknowable number of books, games and articles on historical subjects. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children and his dog, Leopold.

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