A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

provided by the Muslim religious leaders. By 1900 the Volga Jadidists controlled over a thousand primary schools. Meanwhile, in the Kazan Teachers' School and at Kazan University, there were the makings of a native and increasingly rebellious Tatar intelligentsia, although Kazan itself was mainly Russian.⁵⁵

In the western Ukraine (Galicia) the development of the peasants' national consciousness went hand in hand with the formation of a network of rural institutions such as reading clubs, credit unions, co-operative stores, choirs, insurance agencies, volunteer fire departments and gymnastic societies, which were linked with the national movement. The Ukrainian-language newspaper Baktivshchyna ('Fatherland') was the nationalists' main route into the village: it attracted a mass peasant readership through its close attention to local affairs which it mixed with a subtle propaganda for the national cause. The readers of Baktivshchyna, like the members of the reading clubs and the other primary institutions of the national movement, were mainly the new and 'conscious type' of peasants — young and literate, thrifty and sober, and, above all, self-improving — who emerged from the parish schools around the turn of the century. They formed the village cohort of the national movement, together with the local priests, cantors and teachers, who slowly took over local government from the local mayors and their (mainly Jewish) henchmen in the villages, most of whom had been appointed by the Polish landowners. In this sense the national movement was thoroughly democratic: it brought politics to the village.⁵⁶

The most remarkable thing about the Ukrainian national movement, both under Austrian and tsarist rule, was that it remained based on the peasants. Most nationalist movements are centred on the towns. In the Constituent Assembly elections of November 1917 — the first democratic elections in the country's history — 71 per cent of the Ukrainian peasants voted for the nationalists. In the end, of course, when it came to the naked power struggles of 1917—21, this would be the national movement's fundamental weakness: the history of almost every country shows that the peasants are too weak politically to sustain a revolutionary regime without the support of the towns. But in the earlier period, when the main concern of the national movement was to build up a popular base, this distinctive peasant character was a source of strength. Ninety per cent of the Ukrainian people lived in rural areas. The towns of the Ukraine were dominated by the Russians, the Jews and the Poles; and even those few Ukrainians who lived there, mostly professionals and administrators, easily became Russified. Thus to be a Ukrainian meant in effect to be a peasant (i.e. doubly disadvantaged). Indeed this was symbolized by the fact that the original Ukrainian word for 'citizen' (hromaijanyn), which in all other European languages is derived from the word for a city, was based on the word for the village assembly (hromada). The Ukrainian national movement developed as a peasant movement against the influence of the 'foreign' towns. Nationalist agitators

blamed all the evils which the peasants associated with towns — the oppression of the state, the wealth and privilege of the nobility, the greed and swindling of usurers and merchants — on the Russians, Poles and Jews who lived there. They contrasted the pure and simple lifestyle of the Ukrainian village with the corruption of this alien urban world; and as the influence of the latter grew, with the penetration of capitalism, of factory-made goods and city fashions, into the Ukrainian countryside, so they were able to present this as a threat to the 'national way of life'. More and more traditional crafts would be pushed aside, they said, by manufactured goods. The 'honest' Ukrainian shopkeeper would be superseded by the 'cheating' Jewish one. The co-operative movement, which became the backbone of the Ukrainian nationalist organization in the countryside, was developed with the aim — and the rhetoric — of protecting the simple peasants from exploitation by the Jewish traders and money-men.⁵⁷