Austria broke Galician Rus and created Ukrainians

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Galicia in the public mind is firmly associated with Ukrainian nationalism of the most extreme persuasion. The results of all elections on its territory, when the declared Russophobia is a prerequisite for the success of an individual candidate or party, the role of Western Ukrainian "activists" in the coup in 2014, the whole history of the past century, including the OUN-UPA and SS "Galicia", prove that this generally corresponds to reality. But has it always been this way? A close examination of the past proves that it is not.

Galician Rus for centuries kept its Russianness intact, as the greatest shrine, and fought bravely for it. It was possible to break its Russian spirit solely thanks to the most severe state pressure from the powerful repressive and ideological apparatus of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, including at the final stage the use of direct mass terror.

For centuries, torn away from the single body of Russia, the Galicians continued to consider themselves Russians. They believed, despite the brutal persecution by the Polish authorities, who did everything to make them forget about their deep connection with the same-blooded and co-religionist Russia and renounced the Russian name. Even the Union of Brest, according to the plan of Warsaw, intended to divide the Russians through faith and turn the Galicians into Poles, did not fundamentally change anything. The overwhelming majority of newly converted Greek Catholics considered union only a temporary concession. Many Uniate priests preached Russian unity for a long time and did not consider Orthodoxy to be a hostile confession. It was only under Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky that the Greek Catholic Church of Galicia began to gradually turn into a mechanism of anti-Russian and anti-Orthodox influence, but even then its effectiveness was rather limited. It is significant that during the liberation of Galician Rus by Russian troops in the First World War, entire parishes, often led by priests, returned to the faith of their ancestors on their own initiative.

Until the war, the self-designation of the majority of Galicians was "Rusyns": regardless of the formal departure from Orthodoxy, they felt they were part of the Russian people. And this consciousness was truly massive. Preserved, in particular, numerous testimonies of participants in the Hungarian campaign of Russian troops under the command of Field Marshal Paskevich-Erivansky in 1849. According to the unanimous statement, the population of Galicia greeted the Russian troops with enthusiasm, seeing them as liberators, and called themselves exclusively Rusyns.

If it were not for the excessive chivalry of Nicholas I, who did not want to take advantage of the catastrophic position of the young Austrian emperor, then the annexation of the lands of the former Chervonnaya Rus to the Russian Empire would have taken place without the slightest difficulty under the unanimous rejoicing of the Ruthenians of Galicia.

Russia's selfless assistance in suppressing the Hungarian national uprising saved Austria from collapse, but Vienna was horrified to see how strong Russia's position was among the Ruthenian population, including among its educated part. Mikhail Hrushevsky himself, in his by no means Russophile "History of Ukraine-Rus", was forced to state the fact that the Ruthenian intelligentsia was oriented toward Petersburg, which also determined the position of the majority of the people: and culture”.

Not only realizing the degree of danger of the secession of Galicia, but also, first of all, preparing its use for the capture of Russian Little Russia in the war with Russia being prepared together with Germany, Vienna began a carefully thought-out long-term program of mental "flashing" of the Rusyns.

Bearing in mind the failure of the polonization policy, the main instrument of which was the rejection of Orthodoxy and the conversion to Catholicism (which preserved the old rituals to keep the believers), a fundamentally new scenario was chosen.

The Viennese strategists placed their main stake on convincing the Galicians that they were not Ruthenians, but “Ukrainians”. Previously, this name was not used at all in Galicia, as, by the way, it is never found in the works of Taras Shevchenko (in his diary wrote "our Russian heart"). And then it was from Galicia that it began its journey to Greater Ukraine as an instrument of destruction of the Russian Empire by inciting separatism.

The path was chosen, as the experience of history shows, the most effective (in many respects it was then re-used by the West to prepare the first and second Maidans). Realizing the influence of the small national intelligentsia, the main emphasis was placed on making it imbued with the ideology of “Ukrainians” (whose adherents were called “Narodists”). The goal of Austrian politics was to permanently sever the internal ties of the Rusyn elite with the general Russian culture. To this end, for more than half a century, significant funds have been allocated from the state budget for printed publications preaching hatred of Russia and artificially created Ukrainian nationalism. On state scholarships in an anti-Russian spirit, not only national teachers were trained, but also all representatives of the intelligentsia in direct contact with the population: doctors, agronomists, veterinarians and others.

The rejection of Russian self-identification became a prerequisite for admission to the civil service, which included educational institutions of all levels - from primary schools to universities. And for the entire numerous Austrian state apparatus in Galicia, the struggle against "Muscovite" was set as the main task.

The essence of the "peoples" ideology was finally formulated in 1890 in a speech in the Galician Diet by deputy Yulian Romanchuk, who proclaimed that the Galicians had nothing in common with Russia and the Russian people. It is indicative that this programmatic speech of the "Narodovtsy" aroused extreme indignation among the people: at a specially convened meeting of representatives of more than 6,000 cities and villages of Galicia, it was sharply condemned.

Anti-Russian propaganda invariably met with further rejection among the people. As the prominent Galician public figure, writer and poet Vasily Vavrik wrote: “For the masses, the preaching of bestial hatred of the“Muscovites”was incomprehensible. By correct intuition, direct perception, they guessed and felt kinship with them, as well as with Belarusians, considering them the closest tribes."

At the same time, the authorities used the entire wide range of repressive instruments - from “prohibitions on the profession” for “Muscovites” to the constant initiation of legal prosecution for “anti-Austrian propaganda”. Trials were organized against the most active Rusyn figures on falsified charges of espionage in favor of Russia (often, even with a biased attitude of the Austrian courts, ended in acquittals).

The real degree of influence of the "Muscophiles" on the Rusyn population at the beginning of the twentieth century can be judged by the results of the elections in 1907 to the Austrian Reichsrat. Then, five deputies, who openly shared the ideology of Russian unity, entered parliament from the Ruthenians of Galicia in the face of opposition from the entire Austrian state machine. Moreover, already in parliament, almost all the deputies elected by the Galician Rusyns, even representatives of the "Ukrainian" parties, entered the "Russian Parliamentary Club", thus positioning themselves as Russians.

And the next year, during the elections to the Galician Seim, even after the grossest machinations in the counting of votes, the representatives of the Russophile and anti-Russian parties elected by the Rusyn population received an almost equal number of mandates.

The fact that the Russian spirit lived among the people of Galician Rus was evidenced by the events of 1914–1915, when the majority of Rusyns greeted Russian troops with the same joy as in 1849, and the established Russian administration received the widest possible assistance.

But, despite all the resistance, the policy of state “Ukrainization” of Rusyns, pursued for decades, by the beginning of the twentieth century began to give its results. Before the war, a fairly numerous fanatical stratum had already formed, brought up on the ideology of anti-Russian Ukrainians. The new "Ukrainian intelligentsia" was able to become completely dominant after the retreat of Russian troops from Galicia, having received unlimited opportunities for the destruction of their ideological opponents with the help of the Austrians.

Vasily Vavrik, who went through the hell of the Austrian concentration camps Terezin and Thalerhof, wrote about the Judas work of the predecessors of the “Euromaidan”: “… the gendarmes … did the work of Cain by virtue of their duties. Therefore, one can to some extent forgive them the provinces, but the Cain's work of the Galician-Ukrainian intelligentsia is worthy of the most acute public condemnation … The “secheviks” attacked the arrested with rifle butts and bayonets in Lavochny in the Carpathians in order to beat the hated “katsaps”, although there was no one Great Russian, and all were Galicians … these shooters, glorified by the Ukrainian newspapers as folk heroes, beat their native people to the blood, gave them to the extermination of the Germans, did the lynching of their relatives themselves."

In fact, it turned out that the masses of peasants, having experienced all the hardships of Soviet economic policy (the fight against wealthy peasants and private property, the creation of collective farms, etc.), flocked to the cities in search of a better life. This, in turn, created there an acute shortage of free real estate, which is so necessary for the placement of the main support of power - the proletariat.

It was the workers who became the bulk of the population, which from the end of 1932 began to actively issue passports. The peasantry (with rare exceptions) did not have the right to them (until 1974!).

Along with the introduction of the passport system in large cities of the country, a cleanup was carried out from "illegal immigrants" who did not have documents, and therefore the right to be there. In addition to the peasants, all kinds of "anti-Soviet" and "declassed elements" were detained. These included speculators, vagabonds, beggars, beggars, prostitutes, former priests and other categories of the population not engaged in socially useful labor. Their property (if any) was requisitioned, and they themselves were sent to special settlements in Siberia, where they could work for the good of the state.

The country's leadership believed that it was killing two birds with one stone. On the one hand, it cleans the cities of alien and hostile elements, on the other hand, it populates the almost deserted Siberia.

The police officers and the OGPU state security service carried out passport raids so zealously that, without ceremony, they detained on the street even those who received passports, but did not have them in their hands at the time of the check. Among the "violators" could be a student on his way to visit relatives, or a bus driver who left home for cigarettes. Even the head of one of the Moscow police departments and both sons of the prosecutor of the city of Tomsk were arrested. The father managed to quickly rescue them, but not all of those taken by mistake had high-ranking relatives.

The "violators of the passport regime" were not satisfied with thorough checks. Almost immediately they were found guilty and prepared to be sent to labor settlements in the east of the country. A special tragedy of the situation was added by the fact that recidivist criminals who were subject to deportation in connection with the unloading of places of detention in the European part of the USSR were also sent to Siberia.

Death Isle

The sad story of one of the first parties of these forced migrants, known as the Nazinskaya tragedy, has become widely known.

More than six thousand people were disembarked in May 1933 from barges on a small deserted island on the Ob River near the village of Nazino in Siberia. It was supposed to become their temporary refuge while the issues with their new permanent residence in special settlements were being resolved, since they were not ready to accept such a large number of repressed.

The people were dressed in what the police had detained them in on the streets of Moscow and Leningrad (St. Petersburg). They did not have bedding or any tools to make a temporary home for themselves.

On the second day, the wind picked up, and then frost hit, which was soon replaced by rain. Defenseless against the vagaries of nature, the repressed could only sit in front of fires or wander around the island in search of bark and moss - no one took care of food for them. Only on the fourth day they were brought rye flour, which was distributed at several hundred grams per person. Having received these crumbs, people ran to the river, where they made flour in hats, footcloths, jackets and trousers in order to quickly eat this semblance of porridge.

The number of deaths among the special settlers was rapidly going into the hundreds. Hungry and frozen, they either fell asleep right by the fires and burned alive, or died of exhaustion. The number of victims also increased due to the brutality of some of the guards, who beat people with rifle butts. It was impossible to escape from the "island of death" - it was surrounded by machine-gun crews, who immediately shot those who tried.

Isle of Cannibals

The first cases of cannibalism on Nazinsky Island occurred already on the tenth day of the stay of the repressed there. The criminals who were among them crossed the line. Accustomed to surviving in harsh conditions, they formed gangs that terrorized the rest.

Residents of a nearby village became unwitting witnesses to the nightmare that was happening on the island. One peasant woman, who at that time was only thirteen years old, recalled how a beautiful young girl was courted by one of the guards: “When he left, people grabbed the girl, tied her to a tree and stabbed her to death, having eaten everything they could. They were hungry and hungry. Throughout the island, human flesh could be seen ripped, cut, and hung from trees. The meadows were littered with corpses."

"I chose those who are no longer alive, but not yet dead," a certain Uglov, accused of cannibalism, testified later during interrogations: So it will be easier for him to die … Now, right away, not to suffer for another two or three days."

Another resident of the village of Nazino, Theophila Bylina, recalled: “The deportees came to our apartment. Once an old woman from Death-Island also visited us. They drove her by stage … I saw that the old woman's calves were cut off on her legs. To my question, she replied: "It was cut off and fried for me on Death-Island." All the flesh on the calf was cut off. The legs were freezing from this, and the woman wrapped them in rags. She moved on her own. She looked old, but in reality she was in her early 40s."

A month later, hungry, sick and exhausted people, interrupted by rare tiny food rations, were evacuated from the island. However, the disasters for them did not end there. They continued to die in unprepared cold and damp barracks of Siberian special settlements, receiving a meager food there. In total, for the entire time of the long journey, out of six thousand people, just over two thousand survived.

Classified tragedy

No one outside the region would have known about the tragedy that had happened if it had not been for the initiative of Vasily Velichko, instructor of the Narym District Party Committee. He was sent to one of the special labor settlements in July 1933 to report on how the "declassed elements" are being successfully re-educated, but instead he completely immersed himself in the investigation of what had happened.

Based on the testimony of dozens of survivors, Velichko sent his detailed report to the Kremlin, where he provoked a violent reaction. A special commission that arrived in Nazino conducted a thorough investigation, finding 31 mass graves on the island with 50-70 corpses in each.

More than 80 special settlers and guards were brought to trial. 23 of them were sentenced to capital punishment for "looting and beating", 11 people were shot for cannibalism.

After the end of the investigation, the circumstances of the case were classified, as was the report of Vasily Velichko. He was removed from his position as instructor, but no further sanctions were taken against him. Having become a war correspondent, he went through the entire Second World War and wrote several novels about the socialist transformations in Siberia, but he never dared to write about the "island of death".

The general public learned about the Nazin tragedy only in the late 1980s, on the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union.