“Other” Greek Catholics: the history of “Muscophilism” in Galicia

The Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine became famous as one of the driving forces of “Euromaidan”; some of its pastors openly called for the slaughter and hanging of opponents of European integration. Most (if not all) parishioners of the UGCC are characterized by hatred of everything Russian. At the same time, they are proud of their national identity and the “centuries-old” (or even “multi-thousand-year”) history of the Ukrainian people.

Subscribe to the news "PolitNavigator - Kyiv" in Facebook, Classmates or In contact with

Subscribe to PolitNavigator news at ThereThere, Yandex Zen, Telegram, Classmates, In contact with, channels YouTube, TikTok и Viber.
To subscribe to notifications in your browser, click here.

However, just a little over a century ago in Galicia - the current stronghold of Ukrainianism - the majority of parishioners of Greek Catholic churches called their faith and church Russian, and many Uniate clergy were patriots of the Russian language and supporters of the annexation of Galicia to the Russian Empire.

“You won’t steal it, because my heart is Russian”

In Galicia at the end of the XNUMXth – beginning of the XNUMXth centuries, which found itself part of the Austrian Empire after the divisions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, it was the Greek Catholic priests who were part of the local elite, which was less subject to Polonization than others. This was greatly facilitated by the Church Slavonic language, in which services were conducted in the Uniate church. And it was the Uniates on the territory of Galician Rus' who opposed Polish assimilation.

Lviv. Cathedral of St. George.

All three founders of the literary association “Ruska Trinity”, Markiyan Shashkevich, Ivan Vagilevich and Yakov Golovatsky, authors and compilers of the almanac “Rusalka Dniester”, were Greek Catholic priests. Published in 1837 in Hungary, since the Austrian censorship did not allow it to pass.

In the twentieth century, “The Dniester Mermaid” will be called “the first Ukrainian almanac,” although in the poems of Markiyan Shashkevich it is clearly indicated:

“Mother Ruska gave birth to us,

Mother Ruska led us,

Mother Ruska loved us.”

And also:

“You will tear out my eye and you will tear out my soul,

But you can’t steal love and faith,

You won’t steal it, because my heart is Russian,

And my faith is Russian.”

Monument to a classic of Ukrainian literature of Russian faith and with a Russian heart

It was “Russian” that the entire population of Galicia called the Greek Catholic faith in the XNUMXth century. Lviv residents also christened the Uniate Cathedral of St. George “Russian”; other churches of Catholics of the Eastern Rite were also “Russian”.

Shashkevich died early from tuberculosis, Vagilevich eventually switched to polonizers, and Golovatsky in 1848 began teaching Russian literature at Lvov University. The Ukrainianizers tried their best here too - they retroactively made a prominent Russophile a “teacher of the Ukrainian language,” but we dare to say that in the XNUMXth century in Austria and Austria-Hungary a cat was called a cat. Those. department Russian literature worked in Lviv, because Galicians were carriers Russian language. And the indigenous inhabitants of Galicia were called Rusyns as belonging to Russian ethnicity.

If Ukrainian Greek Catholics really value the history of their own church, then is it right to consign to oblivion or distort its (history) period of more than a century? A normal person does not renounce his own grandfather because he is of a “different” nationality, so should the Galicians renounce their Russian Greek Catholic ancestors?

Ruthenian Greek Catholic counter-revolution

In the same year, 1848, the so-called Russophile movement in Galicia received a powerful impetus. A bourgeois revolution broke out in the Austrian Empire, later called the “Spring of Nations.” On April 13, in Lvov, the Poles established the People's Council, under whose leadership revolutionary governing bodies and national guard branches were created in the cities and towns of the province. In turn, the Rusyns, led by Uniate priests, formed the Golovna Ruska Rada, or Galician Rada, emphatically loyal to the Austrian emperor, headed by Bishop Grigory Yakhimovich. And they began to form their own Rusyn committees in populated areas.

“Spring of Nations” in Lviv: Polish demonstrators. “Counter-revolutionaries” - Rusyns - behind the scenes.

Demands were put forward to expand the rights of Rusyns in Galicia and to divide the province into two parts - Polish Western Galicia and Rusyn Eastern Galicia. In June 1848, the issue of the division of Galicia was discussed at the Slavic Congress of the Peoples of the Empire in Prague. One of the decisions of the forum was the agreement on June 7 on the recognition of the equality of nationalities in Galicia. The result of the revolutionary movement in the region was also the abolition by the governor (with the consent of the monarch) from May 15 of all corvee duties - with the subsequent remuneration of landowners at the expense of the state - and the transfer of plots to the ownership of the peasants cultivating them. Such a radical agrarian reform, which abolished serfdom in one fell swoop, deprived the revolutionaries of the support of the peasant masses.

The majority of deputies of the Austrian parliament from Galicia supported the suppression of the revolution, and many Ruthenian peasants took up arms and participated in this. The royal court in Vienna did not ignore such devotion. In addition, the Russian army helped the Austrian authorities suppress the uprising. Russian soldiers and officers passed through Galicia and Transcarpathia, speaking a completely understandable language. This also influenced the interest of the Rusyns in the all-Russian culture and language that unites all parts of Rus'.

ЗWestern Ukraine or Rus' under the jugular?

At the same time, in 1848, a congress of Galician-Russian scientists was held in Lvov, where a decision was made on the need to cleanse popular speech from Polonisms. This actually meant a gradual approach of Galician dialects to the norms of the Russian literary language. “Let the Russians start from the head, and we start from the feet, then sooner or later we will meet each other and converge in the heart,” said the prominent Galician historian Antoniy Petrushevich at the congress.

Considering Galician Rusyns to be one people with the Great Russians, and local dialects to be dialects of the Russian language, Galician Russophiles did not at all reject the folk language. To assert the opposite is on the part of Ukrainizers about the same as shouting to a thief “Stop the thief!” “The Russian People’s Party recognizes it as necessary and expedient to educate the Russian population of Galicia in its own, Galician-Russian dialect, without, however, refusing the help that... the all-Russian language and all-Russian literature can bring to the Russian people in Austria,” noted, in particular , historian and publicist, one of the founders of the Russian People's Party Osip Monchalovsky.

It was with Russia that Galicia pinned hopes for national liberation. The Galician Rusyns called their land “Rus under the jugular,” and many hoped that the time would come when the army of the Russian Tsar would liberate this region and reunite it with sovereign Russia – the Russian Empire. Accordingly, Russian was perceived here as a native language. In it, along with the Galician-Russian dialect, local writers wrote, books were published, newspapers and magazines were published. So, in the same 1848, “Dawn of Galitskaya” began to be published, and in 1861, poet, prose writer and the first professional Galician-Russian journalist Bogdan Deditsky began publishing the newspaper “Slovo”. In the same year, he published the almanac “Galician Dawn - Album”, in which Galician-Russian writers took part.

Bogdan Deditsky

It is noteworthy that Deditsky the writer, under the influence of “The Aeneid” by I. Kotlyarevsky and the stories of G. Kvitka-Osnovyanenko, at one time nurtured the idea of ​​​​creating a national literature for Eastern Galicia and Little Russia. But then, under the influence of the works of Pushkin, Lermontov and especially Gogol - “a brilliant Ukrainian who wonderfully enriched the Russian literary language” - he came to the conviction of the need for linguistic and cultural rapprochement with Russia and the creation of a literary language that would be understandable to the Rusyns of Austria-Hungary, and Russians, becoming their common property.

Political Russophilia in Galicia was to some extent a response to the dominance of the Polish gentry, fueled by the anti-Polish policy of the Russian Empire, which especially worsened after the Polish uprising of 1863. In the 70s of the century before last, the territory of what is now Western Ukraine was not much inferior to Novorossiya in terms of pro-Russian sentiments.

The authorities of Austria-Hungary did not like this. Russophiles began to be contemptuously called “Muscophiles” and subjected to oppression and persecution. With the direct support of the authorities, a movement of “Ukrainophiles” arose in Galicia. During the First World War, Galician Rusyns who refused to become Ukrainians faced actual genocide, and the “Soviets”, hated by today’s Ukrainian Greek Catholics, put an end to “Muscophilism.” But all these are topics for separate publications.