In the fall of 1908, in a series of popular articles published in the St. Petersburg press—Novoe vremia and Svet—Count Vladimir Alekseevich Bobrinskii (1868–1927), a Russian Duma deputy and a member of the Party of the Moderate Right [Partiia umerenno-pravykh], described his journey through the eastern reaches of the Habsburg empire.Footnote ² Bobrinskii, or Bobrinskii 2^nd as he was known in the Duma, was on his way home from the Prague Neo-Slav Congress where he had sponsored a resolution urging a Russian-Polish rapprochement, a resolution that the Congress accepted unanimously. The overarching theme of Bobrinskii's travel diary was intended to be Slavic unity and cooperation, but the articles, in fact, chronicled his own growing captivation with the “Russians” of Austrian Galicia—and his gradual disillusionment with the prospects for a Polish-Russian conciliation. East Galicia or Subjugated Rus΄ (Pod΄iaremnaia Rus΄), as Bobrinskii dubbed it, was a beleaguered outpost of Russian Orthodox civilization, a land of sacred Orthodox monuments and stalwart “Russian” people heroically fighting to “save” their language and culture, a land where “Russians,” in his words, were “denied their own schools, ostracized for speaking the Russian language, and persecuted for their desire to return to their original faith.”Footnote ³

Conspicuously absent from Bobrinskii's account was any sense of the complexity of the region, its multi-confessional, multi-lingual, and multi-cultural history and character.Footnote ⁴ The Polish, Jewish, and German presence—not to mention the distinctive aspects of Ruthenische culture and politics—remained largely obscured. The 3.3 million Ruthenians of East Galicia constituted 62.5% of the population; they were predominantly Greek Catholic but politically divided among three orientations, Ukrainian, Old Ruthenian, and Russophile. By 1900, however, the Ukrainian movement had successfully developed a popular base and was clearly ascendant. In 1907, with the introduction of universal manhood suffrage in the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy, for example, Ruthenian voters elected twenty-seven Ukrainian and five Russophile deputies to the Austrian Parliament.Footnote ⁵ In Bobrinskii's rendition, however, they were simply “Russians” inhabiting “those Russian lands torn away from our state more than 500 years ago and who, despite this, have fully preserved their Russian consciousness, their Russian language and nationality, and our Church-Slavonic liturgy.”Footnote ⁶

Poles and Ukraintsy (Ukrainians) figured exclusively as interlopers in this version, as culprits in the oppression of the so-called “Galician-Russian nation.” It was the Ukrainians who, with the help of the Polish ruling elite, were intent on “driving out the Russian language and literature” from the educational system, who were hostile to all things Russian and therefore kept the “Galician-Russian people” in a state of perpetual illiteracy.Footnote ⁷ Though Bobrinskii never quite explained exactly who the Ukraintsy were or the nature of their cultural and political program, he nonetheless reassured his readers that if not for the support of powerful outside interests, they would be reduced to a small and insignificant sect.Footnote ⁸ Indeed, having met the “Russians” of Subjugated Rus΄, having visited the Russophile student dormitory in Lemberg (Lwów, L΄viv) and heard the residents, mostly poor peasant boys, singing patriotic Russian songs and reciting Russian poetry, Bobrinskii had no doubts regarding the virtue of their cause or the certainty of their victory. As he advised his audience at home:

Bobrinskii's account of the plight of these “forgotten Russians” immediately captured the imagination of the Russian reading public. The articles were quickly collected and republished as a separate volume in early 1909. Bobrinskii was certainly not the first Russian traveler to discover the “Russians” of East Galicia: in 1835, Mikhail Pogodin (1800–1875), the noted historian and Slavist, had originally made contact with Ruthenian circles in Lemberg and adamantly insisted that they were russkie, no different from the “Little Russians in Chernihiv, Poltava, and Kharkiv.”Footnote ¹⁰ In fact, the idea of the “lost lands of Rus΄,” a concept that came to embrace not only East Galicia but also Bukovina and the areas of Ruthenian settlement in the Kingdom of Hungary, continued to be cultivated in academic, Orthodox, and Pan-Slav circles in the second half of the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹¹ In this regard, the “lost lands of Rus΄” became important not as a place with fixed boundaries, but rather as part of a larger discourse on Russian national identity, a site for representations of the Russian nation and its grand narrative, the “historic struggle for unity.” Bobrinskii's articles—which fatefully coincided with the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina and a major crisis in Russo-Austrian relations—revived this nationalist narrative at a critical juncture. They reanimated the idea of the “lost lands of Rus΄,” popularized the notion of “four million persecuted Russians,” and, ultimately, on the eve of the First World War, helped to recast the concept of Rus΄ irredenta into a distinct political—and ultimately military—mission, the liberation of Subjugated Rus΄.Footnote ¹² (Figure 1)

Figure 1.

The Border between Austria-Hungary and the Russian Empire on the Eve of the First World War originally appears as “Central Europe in 1910,” Historical Atlas of Central Europe, Third Revised and Expanded Edition, by Paul Robert Magocsi (University of Toronto Press 2018).

Subjugated Rus΄, as I argue here, became a main focus of a radical Russian nationalist project in late imperial Russia, a project that reached its apogee with the triumphant entry of the Russian Army into Lemberg on September 21, 1914. Indeed, in recent years, historians have begun to examine more closely the lead up to war and to revise the long-held image of a cautious and defensive-minded Russia, an image carefully cultivated in the post-war memoirs of Sergei Sazonov, Russian foreign minister from 1910 to 1916. The archives, as the historian Sean McMeekin has observed, tell a different story.Footnote ¹³ Among other things, they help to illuminate the complex dynamics of a “nationalizing empire.” Nationalism and empire building, as numerous studies of the last twenty years have shown, were not mutually exclusive.Footnote ¹⁴ The campaign to liberate Subjugated Rus΄, in fact, illustrates how widely the Russian nationalist discourse and “the principle of nationality”—with its far-reaching and potentially explosive implications—had come to be accepted in St. Petersburg by 1914.

The growing importance of Subjugated Rus΄ after 1908 can be explained by the several different functions it served in the post-1905 context. It represented, first of all, a powerful unifying national myth. The “persecution of four million Russians” became a mobilizing slogan and rallying cry for the Russian public, an issue upon which many disparate elements could agree. In an otherwise deeply fragmented political elite and society, the idea of Subjugated Rus΄ offered a sense of common purpose, a sense of direction across a broad political spectrum. It joined together in one common cause Russian nationalists of all persuasions: not only those who formally supported the All-Russian National Union and its political program but also many educated Russians who simply accepted the idea, so deeply embedded in nineteenth century Russian historiography, of a historical mission to “reunite the Russian nation.”Footnote ¹⁵

Secondly and no less importantly, the “recovery of the lost lands of Rus΄” became part of a complex, long-term, and quite ambitious strategy developed by Petr Stolypin, the Russian Prime Minister (1906–11), and Sergei Sazonov, his brother-in-law and Minister of Foreign Affairs (1910–16), to solve the “problem” of the western borderlands. In its early stages, as we shall see, this strategy focused on aggressively promoting Russian nationalism in the borderlands and winning Polish support for Russian claims to the “lands of Rus΄.” In its most advanced form, during the war, it entailed “the application of the principle of nationality”: the annexation of East Galicia and the creation of an enlarged and self-governing Kingdom of Poland under Russian protection. The Kingdom of Poland would include Congress Poland, eastern Posen, Silesia, western Galicia, and, possibly, East Prussia. The principal goal, as explained by Sazonov in his memoirs, was to establish a “natural border” between the Poles and the “Russians” in the west, a “strict line between the lawful desires of the Polish people in their native land” and the lands of “Western Russia’” (Belarus and Ukraine).Footnote ¹⁶ The “application of the principle of nationality,” as he also made clear, did not include recognition of a separate and distinct Ukrainian nationality, which Sazonov dismissed as a “Polish creation.” In effect, the myth of “one and indivisible Russian nation from the Carpathian Mountains to the Pacific Ocean” came to be regarded as the key to Russia's domestic and international security.

The Russian nationalist project to recover the “lost lands of Rus΄” was, to be sure, profoundly influenced by the political situation within Russia. It was, in certain ways, a response to what many on the Russian Right regarded as the cataclysm of 1905–07 and the rising threat to Russian hegemony in the western borderlands.Footnote ¹⁷ This vulnerability was dramatically exposed by the extremely poor showing of Russian conservative and right-wing parties in the elections to the First and Second Dumas. In the elections to the First Duma, for example, only three of the 102 State Duma representatives returned from the Ukrainian provinces were members of Russian conservative or right-wing political parties.Footnote ¹⁸ Even more disturbing to Russian “patriotic forces” was the fact that many of the elected representatives from “Western Rus΄” were not even “Russian”—they were either Polish, Jewish, or “Ukrainophile,” that is, Ukrainian.Footnote ¹⁹ The Polish Koło, which included numerous elected representatives from “Western Rus΄,” for example, held the swing vote in the Second Duma and, at the time, demanded autonomy for Poland as the price for their loyalty and cooperation.Footnote ²⁰ Particularly troubling was the public emergence of a Ukrainian national movement after 1905, a movement that Russian nationalists firmly believed had been artificially created, nurtured, and imported into Russia from abroad.Footnote ²¹ As Anatolii Savenko, one of the founders of the Kiev Club of Russian Nationalists, argued, “Everybody knows that Ukrainian separatism arose and fortified itself in Galicia. How can we fight Ukrainophilism within the borders of the Rus΄ State if we do nothing about the movement in Subjugated Rus΄, Rus΄ irredenta?”Footnote ²² In this respect, the struggle for Rus΄ irredenta became part of a broader struggle for Russian national identity, an issue linked, in the minds of many Russian nationalists, to the very survival of Russia. It was, in the words of Mikhail Menshikov, the widely read publicist from Novoe vremia, “a matter of the life and death for Russia.”Footnote ²³

Indeed, the project to recover Rus΄ irredenta became, in many ways, an extension of the domestic agenda formulated by Stolypin to promote Russian political and cultural hegemony in Zapadnaia Rus΄, that is, the western provinces of the empire. The domestic part of Stolypin's nationalist agenda—his vision for a “Great Russia”—is, by now, well-known: (1) the revision of the electoral law, with the explicit aim of creating a Duma majority that was “conservative, rightist and Russian”Footnote ²⁴ (italics added for emphasis); (2) the introduction of an elective zemstvo system in the western provinces with national curiae that heavily favored Russian landowners and restricted the participation of the Polish nobility (the western zemstvo bill); (3) the separation of Kholm from the predominantly Polish provinces of Lublin and Siedlce, a measure intended to protect the indigenous “Russian” population against Polish and Catholic influences; and (4) the financing of Russian nationalist groups and organizations in the western borderlands. Stolypin, it is worth emphasizing, was himself a son of the borderlands and a man of strong and ardent Russian national sentiments.Footnote ²⁵ Political calculations aside, his domestic program was shaped by a firm conviction, as he noted in his defense of the western zemstvo bill, that “the Western lands are and will always and forever be Russian land.”Footnote ²⁶ Checking Polish influence and suppressing the Ukrainian movement, in other words, became keys to the realization of a “Great Russia.”Footnote ²⁷

The international dimension of this project, the attempt to promote Russian nationalism beyond the borders of the Russian empire as distinct from Pan-Slavism has, by contrast, received little scholarly attention. In general, Stolypin's views on foreign policy, I would argue, have been misunderstood: he was much more ambitious and involved than historians have recognized.Footnote ²⁸ The Russian Prime Minister, as several of his contemporaries noted, was, in fact, a keen observer of foreign affairs with clear-cut Russian nationalist sympathies. As Bobrinskii recalled after Stolypin's death, “Stolypin loved Chervonnaia Rus΄ and often when he was relaxing, pursued this interest—not as a minister—but rather as a Russian. He knew and loved Chervonnaia Rus΄.”Footnote ²⁹ Although external relations remained the prerogative of the tsar, this, of course, did not prevent the Russian Prime Minister from exerting influence in this area. When Slavic deputies for the first time won a majority of seats in the Austrian Parliament in June 1907 after the introduction of full manhood suffrage, Stolypin welcomed the development—and recognized the benefits and political opportunities it presented for Russia. In his capacity as Minister of Internal Affairs, he immediately facilitated a private 100,000-ruble donation for an “all-Slavic conference” to be held in Russia, an endowment that greatly assisted the launch of the Neo-Slav movement.Footnote ³⁰

The centerpiece of the Stolypin (later Stolypin-Sazonov) strategy to reshape the western borderlands was a broad Russian-Polish alliance, a proposal made public in May 1908 during a weeklong visit to St. Petersburg by a delegation of Slavic deputies from the Austrian Parliament. In a dramatic announcement that set the tone for the weeklong discussions, Roman Dmowski (1864–1939), father of modern Polish nationalism and head of the Polish Koło in the Duma, declared the loyalty of the Congress Kingdom to the Russian state and the “unconditional” support of the Poles for the Neo-Slav movement. Abandoning traditional demands for Polish autonomy as a pre-condition for a Russian-Polish conciliation, Dmowski voiced a new willingness to cooperate with Russian political leaders.Footnote ³¹ The basis of the agreement, as envisioned at the time, was a pledge of Polish loyalty to Russia in return for certain concessions to Poles within the Russian empire (increased rights in the area of self-government, language, religion, and education in Congress Poland). The Neo-Slav movement, with its explicit anti-German theme and emphasis on mutual respect and cooperation among Slavs, seemed to offer Dmowski and his colleagues a valuable opportunity to further the Polish cause. Such an alliance, Dmowski hoped, would, at the very least, prevent the implementation of a number of pending anti-Polish legislative measures, most notably the separation of Kholm from the Congress Kingdom.Footnote ³²

Stolypin himself strongly believed in the need to “normalize” Russian-Polish relations. As provincial marshal of the nobility in Kovno and later governor of Grodno, he had prided himself on his ability to deal with the Poles, a skill that earned him widespread recognition. But the experience also made him acutely aware of the peculiar volatility of Russian-Polish relations—and the great risks this posed to the long-term stability and security of Russia. One of Stolypin's most difficult tasks during his first year as Prime Minister, in fact, had been to negotiate with the Polish Koło. Indeed, by 1908, Stolypin had come to regard a resolution of the longstanding Polish problem as a prerequisite to Russia's domestic and international security.Footnote ³³ The Neo-Slav movement opened up a very useful avenue for Stolypin to pursue this aim. Thus, when the Austrian Slav mission arrived in St. Petersburg in May 1908 for talks with their Russian counterparts, the Russian Prime Minister accorded them a notably warm reception. Stolypin personally met with the delegation (as did the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Aleksandr Izvol΄skii, and the Minister of Finance, Vladimir Kokovtsov) and, during his discussions with the Austrian visitors, left no doubt that he endorsed the goals of the Neo-Slav movement and was serious about improving Russian-Polish relations.Footnote ³⁴

For Stolypin and the Russian supporters of the Neo-Slav movement, however, any such resolution required Polish acceptance of Russian “national principles”: Russian political and cultural hegemony on Russia's “historic territories.” The terms of the alliance, a quid pro quo, as it soon became apparent, included Polish support for the Russophile movement in East Galicia. As Grigorii Komarov, the editor of Svet and one of the leading voices of the Neo-Slav movement in Russia, insisted, “The Polish question cannot be resolved without the participation of Galicia, where the Poles deny the population of four million Russians the Russian language and Russian schools.”Footnote ³⁵ During the Neo-Slav Congress in Prague in July 1908, Dmowski and the Polish National Democrat Party, who were influential among the powerful conservative Polish landowners of East Galicia, consented, in the words of one Russian observer, “to grant the rights to cultural self-determination and development throughout Galicia to those elements of the Russian nation that do not presently enjoy them.” The Poles, in other words, agreed to support the demands of the Galician Russophiles, which included the recognition of Russian as a landesübliche Sprache (regional language), the creation of chairs of Russian language and literature on the university level, and the right to establish Russian gymnasiums at government expense. They also promised, several sources assert, “to check the Ukrainian movement” in East Galicia. In return for this, the Russians pledged, in rather unspecified terms, “to satisfy Polish national needs [in Congress Poland].”Footnote ³⁶

One of the manifestations of this arrangement was a dramatic increase in the activities of the Russophiles in Galicia, Transcarpathia, and Bukovina beginning in 1909, a development that startled Austrian and Hungarian authorities. The focal point of this effort was the founding of a Russian language daily, Prikarpatskaia Rus΄ (Sub-Carpathian Rus΄), printed in Lemberg and subsidized by the Russian government at a cost of 72,000 crowns/28,400 rubles annually. (The equivalent of $832,404 in US dollars today.) Subsidies to the press, both domestic and foreign, were routinely handed out by governments in this era.Footnote ³⁷ The difference here was that by 1909 the Russian government was supporting openly irredentist publications.

The shift to the Russian language and away from the local vernacular represented a significant break with past practice and probably accounts for the low number of subscribers [1000]). In the very first issue (September 16, 1909), the editors declared, “Our principle—and the basis for all our activity—is the national unity of the entire Russian nation. The Russian cause should be advanced openly and those who raise the flag must not be cowards and slaves.” Weekly newspapers were also started in Bukovina (Russkaia pravda); Transcarpathia (Nauka; Selo); western Galicia (Lemko); and Lemberg (Holos naroda, published in the “Galician dialect” and intended for a broad audience). Similarly, a series of new Russian-language libraries were established throughout East Galicia: 32 libraries for high school (gymnasia) students; one for the student society “Drug” in Lemberg; larger libraries in each of the five major towns of the region; 150 small reading rooms for peasants. [Major library collections were also planned for Vienna and Budapest.] The number of Russophile student residences and bursaries very quickly doubled (to 15 with 662 students); the student dining hall in Lemberg was enlarged; and the network of women's lodgings (pensions) was expanded. Under Stolypin, St. Petersburg allocated over 100,000 rubles per year in support of Russophile publications and organizations in Rus΄ irredenta. ($3,128,000 in present day US dollars.) By 1914, according to official sources, this figure rose to 200,000 rubles per year—though Austrian authorities believed that additional subsidies were provided by other sources (such as, the Governor of Kiev, the Governor of Warsaw, the Archbishop of Volyn΄) and that the total figure actually ran into the millions.Footnote ³⁸

Another highly visible manifestation of the Russian nationalist project was the campaign to “return [the lost lands of Rus΄] to their original faith,” that is, to attract and convert the Greek-Catholic population of East Galicia and Transcarpathia to Russian Orthodoxy. (“Conversions” to Orthodoxy were rare in Galicia before 1903.Footnote ³⁹) Indeed, the Russian Orthodox Church had long been regarded as a vital outpost of “Russianness” in the borderlands of the Russian empire, the principal institution through which the loyalties of the local population could be focused on the tsar, the Russian empire, and the Russian nation. Thus, with the help of state authorities, the Church had conducted a massive campaign of forcible “reunification” among the 3 million “Uniates” of the western borderlands of the Russian empire in the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁴⁰ In 1905, when official policy on religion in Russia relaxed, the Greek-Catholic Metropolitan of Lemberg, Andrei Sheptyts΄kyi, subsequently wrote to Tsar Nicholas II about reviving several of the Greek-Catholic eparchies in Russia—a development that further deepened Russian Orthodox anxieties and fears regarding “the Uniate question.”Footnote ⁴¹ The conversion of the Greek Catholics of Rus΄ irredenta became a seemingly logical extension of this exercise in “historical recovery.” By the turn of the century, the Church was encouraging mass conversions among Greek Catholic immigrants to North America. Now, under Antonii (Khrapovitskii), the dynamic Archbishop of Volyn΄ (and, later, head of the Russian Orthodox Church in exile), the Pochaev Monastery, located some 25 kilometers from the Austrian border, became the headquarters of an energetic Russian Orthodox mission directed at the very stronghold of the Uniates in the Habsburg empire. As Bishop Nikon, Antonii's biographer, explained, “Regarding Galicia, Carpathian Rus΄, and Bukovina to be an indivisible part of the Russian nation [italics added for emphasis], violently and unjustly torn away and deceived by the Union, Bishop Antonii focused his spiritual concerns on them, even though they found themselves in another state, in another realm.”Footnote ⁴²

The principal goal of this mission before July 1914 was to recruit, develop and sustain a native cadre of Russian Orthodox priests in East Galicia and Hungarian Ruthenia (Transcarpathia). (By law, Russian citizens were not permitted to serve in parishes on the territory of the Habsburg empire.) The number of scholarships for boys and young men to study in Russia increased significantly: by 1913, Vladimir Sabler, the Procurator of the Holy Synod, estimated that there were as many as 50 seminary students requiring state support. (This number did not include those Ruthenian boys enrolled in lower level church schools, primarily in Volyn΄ province.Footnote ⁴³) Efforts to convert Greek Catholic priests with Russophile sympathies also intensified. In fact, Archbishop Antonii introduced a special liturgical rite [bogosluzhebnyi chin] for the conversion of Uniates, a service publicly performed for the first time in the courtyard of the Church of the Annunciation in St. Petersburg during Lent in 1909, when the Gerovskiis, a prominent Russophile family from Transcarpathia, formally renounced Catholicism and affirmed their “return” to the Orthodox faith.Footnote ⁴⁴ At the same time, the Holy Synod, on the initiative of Archbishop Antonii, opened discussions with the Patriarch of Constantinople regarding recognition of the Russian Orthodox Church's jurisdiction in East Galicia. The deliberations culminated in 1913, when Archbishop Antonii was appointed Exarch of Galicia—a decision which the Metropolitan of Czernowitz, whose ecclesiastical jurisdiction included Galicia, refused to recognize. As the Archbishop revealed to the tsar in a personal audience in early 1914, the Church, at that point, had plans to develop and maintain a core group of Russian Orthodox priests for service in Rus΄ irredenta.Footnote ⁴⁵

The enduring interest of the Church in the “lost lands of Rus΄” notwithstanding, the main instrument of the nationalist project between 1909 and 1914 became the Galician-Russian Benevolent Society (Galitsko-russkoe blagotvoritel΄noe obshchestvo v S-Peterburge). This allowed Russian state and church authorities to maintain an unofficial “back channel” of communications to the Russophiles in Austria-Hungary and to claim, as they invariably did when Habsburg authorities protested, that Russian support for the Russophiles was the work of private individuals. Founded in 1902 by a circle of academics and administrators with close ties to the western borderlands, the Society had, in its early years, restricted itself, for the most part, to symbolic gestures: sending Russian-language books to East Galicia, offering public lectures on various aspects of Galician history, meeting with visiting Russophile dignitaries from Austria, and providing material aid to “Russian Galicians residing either temporarily or permanently in St. Petersburg.”Footnote ⁴⁶ In 1909, with the election of the indefatigable Count Bobrinskii as head of the Society, the organization quickly shed its pedantic orientation. Under his leadership—and with generous subsidies from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of Finance—the Society broadened its focus to include all the “lost lands of Rus΄”—Bukovina and Hungarian Ruthenia as well as Galicia—and shifted its efforts to the active promotion of the Russian nationalist project both at home and abroad. The Statutes of the Society were revised to reflect this ambitious new emphasis: “to further the cultural unity of the Russian Galicians, Bukovinians, and Transcarpathians with the Russian people [narod] and to offer them material and moral support in their efforts to achieve educational and economic success.”Footnote ⁴⁷

The Galician-Russian Society, in fact, developed into much more than simply a conduit for the transfer of money. For Bobrinskii, Subjugated Rus΄ became his “great mission,” in effect, the focus of his life's work. He returned to Russia from his travels in East Galicia in 1908 a confirmed Russian nationalist and soon afterwards quit the Party of the Moderate Right in order to help found the Russian Nationalist Party (Fraktsiia russkikh natsionalistov). He was eventually elected Deputy Speaker of the Fourth Duma. Until the War, Bobrinskii served as perhaps the most important spokesman and defender of Russian foreign policy interests in the Duma, and owing in no small part to his efforts, the cause of Subjugated Rus΄—with its strongly evocative image of “four million persecuted Russians”—became a prominent theme in the conservative press and gained a considerable following among the Russian elite. Indeed, the Galician-Russian Society grew into a powerful and surprisingly effective political organization with over 800 members in St. Petersburg by 1913, local branches in Kyiv, Moscow, Volyn΄, Kamianets΄-Podil΄sk, Astrakhan΄, and Vitebsk, and with its own periodical, Chervonnaia Rus΄. Its members included Duma deputies and political leaders, (N.N. L΄vov, M.G. Balashov, A.I. Savenko, N.L. Markov, and E.P. Kovalevskii) government officials (Prince N.B. Shcherbatov), military officers (Retired Gen. Skugarevskii, Col. M.Ia. Baliasinskii, Gen. P.D. Parensov), academics (A.A. Sobolevskii, T.D. Florinskii), journalists (A.A. Stolypin, brother of the Prime Minister; M.A. Suvorin, editor-in-chief of Novoe vremia), and, of course, church hierarchs (among others, Flavian, the Metropolitan of Kiev and Galicia; Vladimir, Metropolitan of St. Petersburg; Antonii, the Archbishop of Volyn΄, and Evlogii, the Bishop of Kholm) all served as honorary members of the organization.Footnote ⁴⁸ Cooperation with church officials was, in fact, very close. In 1913, after a particularly bad harvest, for example, on Bobrinskii's initiative, regular collections taken in churches throughout the empire sought to assist the “starving Russians of Rus΄ irredenta.”

Through Bobrinskii and the Galician-Russian Society, St. Petersburg became ever more deeply engaged in the complex borderland politics of the Habsburg empire. In June 1911, during the elections to the Austrian Parliament, Stolypin—most likely on Bobrinskii's advice—provided a secret subsidy of 30,000 Austrian crowns/15,000 rubles to the Russian People's Organization (Russkaia narodnaia organizatsiia, RPO), a Galician Russophile political party founded in 1909.Footnote ⁴⁹ This, too, was a typical tactic employed, with no small success, by Stolypin at home, particularly in the western borderlands of the Russian empire, where conservative and nationalist Russian parties and organizations were heavily subsidized by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. As Stolypin once explained his Minister of Finance, “In no country in the world is the government indifferent toward elections to legislative institutions.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Moreover, Bobrinskii's people traveled “with money” to Austria-Hungary during the elections and actively involved themselves in the campaign on behalf of the RPO. In this instance, however, the tactics backfired. The RPO won only one seat and the Russophile contingent in the Reichsrat dropped from five to two (by contrast, the number of Ukrainian deputies rose from twenty-five to thirty-one).Footnote ⁵¹ More alarmingly, Vienna soon learned that the RPO was being financed by government circles in St. Petersburg (part of the money had been passed along through the Russian Consul in Lemberg.) As N. Girs, the Russian Ambassador to Vienna subsequently informed Sazonov, Austrian authorities were furious and “regard all of Bobrinskii's activities as clearly hostile to Austria-Hungary and an intolerable intrusion into the internal affairs of the country.” The Russian Ambassador, as always, replied that Count Bobrinskii was a private individual.Footnote ⁵²

From the Austrian perspective, Russian involvement in the borderlands of the Habsburg empire was clearly having a destabilizing effect on the delicate balance of ethnic relations in East Galicia. Among other things, it encouraged a new and militant brand of Russophilism, a movement predicated on the notion of union with Russia. Unlike the older generation of Galician Russophiles, the so-called “Old Ruthenians” (Starorusyny), who had retained a sense of regional identity, culture, and language as well as loyalty to the Habsburg monarchy, the new Russophiles, grouped around the RPO, had begun to regard themselves as unambiguously Russian.Footnote ⁵³ In an effort to undermine this new, more radical version of Russophilism, authorities cut off public funds to Russophile institutions, discouraged pilgrimages to the Pochaiv Monastery across the border, greatly increased surveillance of the Russophiles, and arrested several leading Russophile activists on charges of espionage, including two Russian Orthodox missionaries sent to Galicia by Archbishop Antonii in 1911. Similarly, Hungarian authorities in Transcarpathia ran a “sting operation” against the Russophiles in 1912 and subsequently tried sixty people on charges of high treason. The star witness at the trial in Máramarossziget (Sighetul Marmatiei) in the winter of 1913–14 was a Ruthenian police agent, Dulishkevych, who had gone underground to investigate the Russophile movement in Transcarpathia. His testimony revealed the existence of a network that stretched through the Habsburg monarchy (Budapest, Vienna, Prague, Lemberg, Czernowitz) into Russia where it was directed and financed by Count Bobrinskii. Among other things, Bobrinskii, according to Dulishkevych, gave him 2,000 rubles to arrange for a member of the Hungarian Parliament to publicize the plight of the “Russians” in Transcarpathia.Footnote ⁵⁴

The loyalty of the Ruthenians became for Vienna a paramount issue. In the summer of 1911, Count Aehrenthal, the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister (1906–12), confided to the head of the Ukrainian caucus in the Reichsrat that Vienna “needs to meet all the just demands of the Galician Ukrainians so that they will have no reason to gravitate towards Russia and so that Russia will have no pretext to interfere in the internal affairs of Austria, because this could become a casus belli between Austria and Russia.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Ironically, Sazonov, the Russian foreign minister, reasoned in much the same manner as he made the case for concessions to the Poles to the Tsar: “The fewer grounds for complaint that the Poles in Russia have the less likely they are to take out their grievances against our unfortunate relatives in Galicia.”Footnote ⁵⁶ In fact, immediately following their strong showing in the Austrian elections, Ukrainian political representatives renewed two of their longstanding demands: a revision of the system of elections to the Galician provincial diet and the creation of a separate Ukrainian university in Lemberg. The “Ukrainian Club,” as the parliamentary caucus was called, represented a crucial bloc of votes in the Reichsrat—a point that the Club was able to exploit by obstructing the work of parliament on several occasions.Footnote ⁵⁷ For nearly four years until the beginning of the war—the fierce resistance of the Polish elite in Galicia notwithstanding—Habsburg authorities pushed for a Polish compromise with the Ukrainians. As Count Leopold von Berchtold, Aehrenthal's successor as foreign minister (1912–15), described Vienna's quandary, “When supporting the Ukrainians, we must absolutely avoid putting the Poles in such a position that they too might one day become receptive to Russian influences.”Footnote ⁵⁸

Naturally, any talk of concessions to the Ukrainians was regarded in official, as well as unofficial, circles in Russia as a political provocation, a calculated attempt to weaken the historic “Russian” identity of the native population by promoting a dangerous Ukrainian “separatist movement.” “An artificial language and an artificial movement can exist only by artificial means, that is, only with money from the Vienna government, the Poles and the Jesuits,” asserted Prince N. Kudashev, the Russian Chargé d'Affaire in Vienna, in his letter to Sazonov. The creation of a Ukrainian university in Lemberg was considered a particularly menacing threat—it would become, in Kudashev's words, “a weapon of political struggle against Russia and all that is Russian.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Russian nationalists agreed. Such an institution, Kievlianin predicted, would become “a center of gravity for the Little Russians, an incubator for hatred towards Russia and a place of continuous intrigues that will ultimately lead to the tearing away of ‘Russian Ukraine’ from Russia and its annexation to Austria.”Footnote ⁶⁰ The arrest of Russian Orthodox missionaries in Galicia and Hungarian Ruthenia especially inflamed the passions of the nationalists. In the conservative and nationalist press, the defendants were widely portrayed as “martyrs for the faith,” as pious men victimized simply “for believing in God and the Holy Orthodox Church.”Footnote ⁶¹ “Will the Russian nation hear the groans of its brothers?” wondered Bobrinskii. “Russia has brought help and liberation to all nations—the Slavs, the Germans, the Greeks. Will it leave its closest and dearest brothers to perish in torment and humiliation . . . ?”Footnote ⁶²

Indeed, by 1912, the “Russians” of Rus΄ irredenta had made their way into the very center of Russia's foreign policy discussions. During the Balkan wars (1912–13), when sympathy for the South Slavs was running very high and public demonstrations in support of the Balkan League were attracting thousands of people in St. Petersburg, Rus΄ irredenta became an integral part of the narrative of Slav liberation. Bobrinskii and Savenko, who were both very active in the Slavic banquet campaign, kept reminding Russians, for example, that they have “their own Macedonia.” “The Galician question has more vital significance for the monarchy than Albania and Serbia,” argued one speaker at a public meeting sponsored by the Galician-Russian Society.Footnote ⁶³ Tellingly, when the Society of Slavic Reciprocity held a memorial service at the Kazan Cathedral, they chose to commemorate those who had died in the Balkan Wars as well as those who were “victims of the persecution of Orthodoxy in Austria-Hungary.” According to reports in the press, some 50,000 people attended the service.Footnote ⁶⁴ One day later, on March 25, 1913, at a demonstration organized by the Galician-Russian Society that drew 5,000 people—including Duma deputies and many military personnel, as Novoe vremiia noted pointedly—the Society adopted a resolution demanding that “the Russian government fulfill Russia's historical will and find a way to stop the inhuman torture of the Orthodox and to establish freedom to practice the Orthodox faith in Austria-Hungary, similar to that enjoyed by Roman Catholics in our country.”Footnote ⁶⁵

Ominously, public rhetoric had begun to veer towards the subject of “resolving the Galician question.” Privately, by 1913, the idea of one day “completing the gathering of the Russian lands” had come to be accepted, even at the highest levels of the Russian government. In a report on Rus΄ irredenta circulated among the Prime Minister, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Finance, and the Ober-Procurator of the Holy Synod in May, Vladimir Bobrinskii openly declared: “Our help to Subjugated Rus΄ has a centuries-long history and a concrete historical and national-state significance today as well as in the future, until that day when Russia liberates its subjugated brothers and thus completes the gathering of the Russian lands.” His request for money was approved without comment.Footnote ⁶⁶ During the Balkan wars, when international tensions were at their height, the idea of liberating Galician Rus΄ suddenly entered into public discussion. Vladimir Lvov, a member of the Nationalist faction of the Duma—gave several speeches in which he spoke about unity as a historical imperative, the final act in a long historical process: “The bond between Galician Rus΄ and the united Russian land is recognized even today and current events in the Near East raise [the issue] of the completion of the gathering of the Russian lands by one means or another.”Footnote ⁶⁷ In January 1913, the Galician Russian Society sponsored a public lecture entitled “Establishing the Ideal Border of Western Rus΄.” The talk, as described by Novoe vremia, focused on “solving the Galician-Russian Question.” “From the Slavic point of view,” argued the speaker, “a resolution of the question by bloodless means represents, of course, the optimal [way out].”Footnote ⁶⁸

By 1912–13, however, there was widespread conviction shared by many people on both sides of the border that Austria-Hungary and Russia were on the verge of war. One symptom of the tension in Russo-Austrian relations was a decisive shift in Russian military strategy. In the mobilizations plans approved in 1910, the main focus had been on Germany, on responding to the von Schlieffen plan by concentrating troops against German forces in East Prussia in order to relieve pressure on the French army in the west. Accordingly, fifty-three Russian divisions were to be sent against Germany in the event of war, and nineteen against Austria-Hungary.Footnote ⁶⁹ In February 1912, this plan came under strong attack at a military conference of military district chiefs of staff in Moscow. As General Alekseev, chief of staff of the Kiev Military District, argued, “Austria unquestionably represents our main enemy.”Footnote ⁷⁰ There was an assumption in some government, political, and military quarters that a war against Austria need not necessarily involve Germany.Footnote ⁷¹ The revised mobilization plan approved by the tsar in May 1912 represented, in fact, a significant change in threat perception and strategic priorities—an “abrupt reversal,” in the words of Bruce Menning. Schedule 19 now had two variations, Plan “A” for a main effort against Austria-Hungary and Plan “G”—in the unlikely event that Germany concentrated its entire attack on Russia. “The objective of the Southwest Front was to encircle and destroy Austro-Hungarian forces concentrating in Galicia, then to seize the Carpathian passes to facilitate subsequent operations across the Hungarian plain.”Footnote ⁷² Securing Galicia, in other words, had become a goal of Russian military planning. As one military historian later observed, “The interests of France were an afterthought and were satisfied in a way very different from the one imagined by the French staff.”Footnote ⁷³

Behind the scenes as well, diplomats on both sides acknowledged the central importance of the “Galician Question” to Austro-Russian relations. In March 1912, as rumors of an imminent war with Austria swirled in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Warsaw, Sazonov assured Count Douglas Thurn, the Austro-Hungarian Ambassador, that Russia wants good relations “but there is the matter of the Russians in Austria.” Similarly, in February 1913, when, at the height of international tensions during the Balkan wars, Emperor Franz Josef sent a special emissary, Prince Hohenlohe, to St. Petersburg, he was informed that “there can ultimately be no agreement between Russia and Austria as long as Austrian authorities continue to allow Mazeppist (Ukrainian) and Polish propaganda in Galicia and oppress the Russians.” Indeed, the Minister of Foreign Affairs continued to reiterate this point until the beginning of the war. Efforts to persuade Sazonov that the Ruthenians do not consider themselves to be Russians were dismissed by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, who replied that in Russia, only revolutionaries regard themselves as Ukrainian.Footnote ⁷⁴ In fact, there were those in Sazonov's circle who were convinced by 1914 that Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his associates were the “main leaders of the Ukrainian movement both within Galicia as well as within [the borders of Russia].”Footnote ⁷⁵ For his part, Count Leopold Berchtold, the Foreign Minister of Austria-Hungary and a former Ambassador to Russia, also came to see this issue in similar terms, that, is, as the greatest obstacle to improving Austro-Russian relations. In the summer of 1912, at a Joint Meeting of the Ministers, he identified Russian sensitivities concerning the Ruthenian population as one of the biggest dangers on the horizon.Footnote ⁷⁶ His subsequent attempts to smooth over relations with Russia notwithstanding, Berchtold concluded by June 1914 that the Ruthenians remained the key to the future: “It is no exaggeration when I say that our relations with Russia, which are of such great importance, will depend in the future on our success in preventing the Russification of the Ruthenians, which is vigorously pursued on our territory, and in preserving the separate character of this nation.”Footnote ⁷⁷

There were, of course, dissenting voices on Rus΄ irredenta. Entire discourses—Polish, Ukrainian, and “Little Russian”—remained beyond the purview of the Russian nationalists. But there was conservative opposition to the nationalist project within the Russian political elite as well. In February 1914, in his now famously prescient memorandum to the tsar, Peter Durnovo, the former Minister of Internal Affairs and Stolypin's erstwhile rival, warned against a rush to war:

Durnovo, in other words, rejected the myth of “one, united and indivisible Russian nation from the Carpathian Mountains to the Pacific Ocean,” the very premise of the nationalist project. For Durnovo and the conservative “pacifists,” moreover, this was not merely a difference over foreign policy, but rather a clash of world views. The memorandum represented, in effect, the last defense of the monarchists, a final assertion of a dynastic-statist concept of political legitimacy against a rising tide of nationalism within the Russian political elite itself. As Durnovo tried to remind the tsar, Russia and Germany remained bulwarks of conservatism “in the civilized world” and a war between these powers would inevitably weaken, if not destroy, the monarchic principle on which they were founded. In the winter of 1913–14, Durnovo and a circle of aristocrats—a group that included Baron Mikhail Taube, Count Sergei Witte, Prince Vladimir Mescherskii, and Prince Vladimir Orlov—tried unsuccessfully to remove Sergei Sazonov from his position as Minister of Foreign Affairs and to replace him with Nikolai Giers, the former ambassador to Vienna.Footnote ⁷⁹

In his capacity as Russian Ambassador to Austria-Hungary, Giers had, in fact, several times cautioned St. Petersburg about the dangers of supporting the Russophile party in Austria-Hungary.Footnote ⁸⁰ In June 1913, after another dismal showing by the RNO in elections to the Galician provincial parliament—the Russophiles again managed to win only one seat and did so by blocking with Ukrainians against the Polish candidate—Giers had forwarded to Anatolii Neratov in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs a scathing criticism of Bobrinskii's activities (though Bobrinskii's name was tactfully nowhere mentioned).

In his cover letter, the Ambassador noted that he “shares the opinions expressed” by the Russian consular official in Lemberg in the document. Not long afterwards, Giers was removed from his position—no doubt on the recommendation of Sazonov himself—and replaced with Nikolai Shebeko, a staunch defender of the rights of the “Russians” in Rus΄ irredenta.Footnote ⁸²

By the summer of 1913, the military wing of the Polish Socialist Party had reached its own conclusions regarding the state of Austrian-Russian relations. A report issued in Kraków argued that it was time to begin training soldiers and preparing for war. The crises of 1908 and 1912–13 had merely postponed a bloody, military conflict. It “will come either as a result of events in Serbia or Montenegro; or else of events in Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Dalmatia; it will come either as a result of the Ukrainian question in Russia, or the Russian movement in East Galicia; it will come either as result of these contentious issues, or it will be over the very existence of the Habsburg monarchy . . . Be prepared for war, neutrality will not be possible.”Footnote ⁸³

Rus΄ irredenta was not, however, merely yet another flashpoint with the potential to trigger a military conflict between the two powers—it was an issue that came to inform the whole of St. Petersburg's understanding of its relations with Austria-Hungary on the eve of the war. In Russian nationalist discourse, which came to be embraced among top officials, the very existence of a separate and distinct Ukrainian identity and movement—either in the Russian empire or in Austro-Hungary—posed a grave security threat, a direct danger to Russia itself. The basis of Russia's strength, they believed, derived from its “Russianness.” The annexation of East Galicia—the “gathering of the lands of Rus΄”—thus became the desiderata of Russian foreign policy and military planning by 1914. This put Russia on a collision course that made war with Austria-Hungary seem inevitable.Footnote ⁸⁴

Ultimately, the myth of Subjugated Rus΄ foundered on the realities of war and occupation. As the Russian Army crossed the border into Austria, General Aleksei Brusilov explained to his troops: “We are entering Galicia, which, though part of Austria-Hungary, is, from time immemorial, a Russian land inhabited by Russian people.”Footnote ⁸⁵ What they encountered in East Galicia, however, was not a “Russian land inhabited by Russian people” or a population yearning for the “restoration” of the Russian faith and language, but rather a complex, ethnically diverse society, many of whose members—“the Russians”—were Greek Catholic and identified as Ukrainian. Austrian authorities, in fact, had arrested and interned several thousand suspected Russophiles at the beginning of the war. The Russification of “Galician Rus΄,” in this respect, proved to be a much more difficult task than many Russian authorities and nationalists had imagined. The brutal practices of the Russian occupation regime—the pogroms against the Jews, the persecution of Ukrainian activists and organizations, the arrests of revolutionary socialists, and the attacks against the Greek Catholic Church in 1914–15—sparked outrage, provoked international condemnation, and greatly complicated the conduct of military operations.Footnote ⁸⁶ With the retreat of the Russian Army from Austrian Galicia in the spring of 1915, the mission to “recover the lost lands of Rus΄” came to an abrupt and untidy end. Though the dream of “one, united, and indivisible Russian nation from the Carpathian Mountains to the Pacific Ocean” was never entirely abandoned by Russian nationalists, the imperial project that had animated so much of Russian foreign and domestic policy in the years leading up to the war had, effectively, collapsed.Footnote ⁸⁷