Die Ukraine im Ersten Weltkrieg – eine Nation kommt auf die Landkarte

In the territory of the Habsburg Monarchy, not only was the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic formed, claiming all Ukrainian-settled lands of the Monarchy, or at least Galicia and Bukovina, but there were also three attempts to establish micro-states: two Lemko states – one in Eastern and one in Western Galicia – and one Hutsul state in the Hungarian part of the Hutsul region. Bogdan Horbal, Działalność polityczna Łemków na Łemkowszczyźnie 1918-1921, Wrocław 1997; Romana Mondryk, Hlavní projevy etnické identity ukrajinských Huculů / Main manifestations of the ethnic identity of the Ukrainian Huculs, in: Kulturní Studia 1 (2017), 39-61. https://kulturnistudia.cz/2017-1/2017-1-mondryk.pdf. For a general discussion of the often problematic historiography of the Rusyn national movement, see Paul Robert Magocsi, With Their Backs to the Mountains. A History of Carpathian Rus’ and Carpatho-Rusyns, Budapest 2022; idem, The Shaping of a National Identity. Subcarpathian Rus’. 1848-1948, Harvard 1978.

Georgiy Kasianov, Die Ukraine zwischen Revolution, Selbstständigkeit und Fremdherrschaft, in: Wolfram Dornik et al. (eds.), Die Ukraine zwischen Selbstbestimmung und Fremdherrschaft 1917–1922, Graz 2011, 131-179, here 131.

Already immediately after the First World War, Ukrainian intellectuals began to place these vyzvol’ni zmahannja in a tradition with Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyj’s attempted state-building and his struggle against Poland, 1648–1657. In addition, the Ukrainian state-building attempts and resistance struggles during the Second World War, as well as the defense of independent Ukraine against Russian aggression since 2014, are also understood as vyzvol’ni zmahannja. For a modern interpretation of Ukrainian history as a history of violence, see Anna Veronika Wendland, Befreiungskrieg. Nationsbildung und Gewalt in der Ukraine, Frankfurt a.M. 2023.

For the political orientations of the Galician Ruthenians/Ukrainians, see Martin Rohde, Nationale Wissenschaft zwischen zwei Imperien. Die Ševčenko-Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, 1892–1918, Göttingen 2022; idem, Ruthenische Intellektuelle und die Frage nationaler Eigenständigkeit in Galizien im Jahr 1848, in: Claudia Reichl-Ham (ed.), „Für unsere und eure Freiheit“ (= Acta Austro-Polonica, vol. XV), Vienna 2024, 262–282; Ostap Sereda, ‘Whom Shall We Be?’ Public Debates over the National Identity of Galician Ruthenians in the 1860s, in: Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 49, no. 2 (2001), 200–212; Anna Veronika Wendland, Die Russophilen in Galizien. Ukrainische Konservative zwischen Österreich und Russland, 1848–1915, Vienna 2001.

Fabian Baumann, Dynasty Divided: A Family History of Russian and Ukrainian Nationalism, Ithaca, NY 2023; Faith Hillis, Children of Rus': Right-Bank Ukraine and the Invention of a Russian Nation, Ithaca, NY 2013. For the Little Russian movement 1917–1919, see Gennadii Korolov, In Search of the Lands of Rus’: The Idea of Ukraine in the Imagination of the Little Russian Movement (1917–1919), in: Nationalities Papers 49 (2021), no. 4, 679–690. doi:10.1017/nps.2020.47

Martin Rohde, “National Soul-catching”, State Categories, and Local Responses. Jewish and Ukrainian Challenges of the Census in Eastern Galicia and Eastern Lesser Poland, 1880–1931, in: Petru Negura, Svetlana Suveica, Andrei Cusco (eds.), Nationalism from Below. Popular Responses to Nation-Building in the Soviet and East European Borderlands, 1900–1940, Bloomsbury 2025; Martin Rohde, Ruthenen, Ukrainer oder doch "österreichische Ukrainer"? Begriffsgeschichtliche Anmerkungen zu einer verbreiteten Fußnote der Galizienforschung, in: Österreich in Geschichte und Literatur (mit Geographie) 65 (2021), no. 1, 32–44. For ‘national indifference’, see Tara Zahra, Imagined Noncommunities. National Indifference as a Category of Analysis, Slavic Review 69 (2010), no. 1, 93–119.

Martin Rohde, Wissenstopografien des Grenzraums: Die ruthenisch-ukrainisch bewohnten Ostkarpaten im Visier von „frontier“-Wissenschaften des langen 19. Jahrhunderts, in: Lina Schröder et al. (eds.), Raum- und Grenzkonzeptionen in der Erforschung europäischer Regionen, Dresden 2023, pp. 231–255. Open access via https://slub.qucosa.de/api/qucosa:85039/attachment/ATT-0/.

Piotr Szlanta, The Lemkos‘ Great War: Wartime Experiences of the Lemko People, 1914–18, Acta Poloniae Historica 2016, no. 113, 7–36, https://rcin.org.pl/Content/61384/PDF/WA303_80558_A295-APH-R-113_Szlanta.pdf.

Kerstin S. Jobst, Geschichte der Krim, Berlin/Boston 2020, 243–258.

Andrii Portnov, Dnipro. An Entangled History of a European City, Boston 2022, 123–168.

Mark R. Baker. Peasants, Power, and Place: Revolution in the Villages of Kharkiv Province, 1914-1921. Cambridge, 2016.

Kerstin S. Jobst, Oksana Nagornaia, Kerstin von Lingen (ed.), The Great War and the Anthropocene. Empire and Environment, Soldiers and Civilians on the Eastern Front., Leiden – Boston 2024. Open access via https://brill.com/display/title/70473.

See, for example, Tanja Penter, Odessa 1917. Revolution an der Peripherie, Cologne et al. 2000.

Kerstin S. Jobst, Geschichte der Krim, Berlin/Boston 2020, p. 247; for L’viv in the First World War, see Christoph Mick, Lemberg - Lwów - L'viv, 1914–1947. Violence and Ethnicity in a Contested City, West Lafayette, IN 2015.

Ljubov’ Žvanko, Biženci peršoji svitovoji vijny. Ukrajins’kyj vymir (1914–1918 rr.), Kharkiv 2012.

Ostap Hrytsaj, Ukrainische Legion, Vienna 1917; Offizieller Katalog der Kriegsausstellung Wien, Vienna 1916. https://resolver.obvsg.at/urn:nbn:at:AT-WBR-10570.

Verzeichnis der Enthobenen und zur Dienstleistung bei der Zentralleitung der k.k. ukrainischen Legion zugeteilten Landsturmpflichtigen, National Archives of the Czech Republic, fond 922, box 66, inventory number 855.

Mark von Hagen, War in a European Borderland. Occupations and Occupation Plans in Galicia and Ukraine, 1914–1918, Seattle 2007.

Maciej Górny, Science Embattled. Eastern European Intellectuals and the Great War, Paderborn 2019; Martin Rohde, Nationale Wissenschaft zwischen zwei Imperien. Die Ševčenko-Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, 1892–1918. Göttingen 2022. Open access via https://www.vr-elibrary.de/doi/book/10.14220/9783737013901.

Oksana Dudko, Rifleman Art. Visualizing the Ukrainian War, in: Lidia Głuchowska, Vojtěch Lahoda (eds.), Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in the Avant-Garde and Modernism, Prague 2022, 114–145. Likewise, the propaganda activists of the Russian army produced their own documentation during the occupation of Galicia, using it to support their narratives of a backward Galicia. See Alexandra Likhacheva, Galician Landscapes through the Camera Lens: Visualizing Combat Spaces of the First World War, in: Jobst/Nagornaia/von Lingen (eds.), The Great War, 241–262.

Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, Kriegsland im Osten. Eroberung, Kolonisierung und Militärherrschaft im Ersten Weltkrieg, Hamburg 2018 (first published as War Land on the Eastern Front. Culture, National Identity, and German Occupation in World War I, Cambridge UP 2000).

Frank Sysyn, Nestor Makhno and the Ukrainian Revolution (= Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute Offprint Series, no. 4), Cambridge, MA [n.d.; first published 1977], p. 277. For detailed discussion, see Olena Palko, Constantin Ardeleanu, Introduction. Making the Borders of Contemporary Ukraine, in: idem (eds.), Making Ukraine. Negotiating, contesting, and drawing the borders in the twentieth century, McGill-Queen’s University Press 2022, 3–63, here 22–26.

Borislav Chernev, Ukraine’s Borders at the Brest-Litovsk Peace Conference, 1917–18, in: Palko/Ardeleanu (eds.), Making Ukraine, 67–85. The borders with Belarus, for example, remained subject to further negotiation and were subsequently adjusted several times. Dorota Michaluk, Emerging States and Border-Making in Times of War. Negotiating the Ukrainian-Belarusian Borders in 1918, in: ibid., 163–188.

Schewtschenko-Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften in Lemberg, Denkschrift über die Notwendigkeit des ausschließlichen Gebrauchs des Nationalnamens »Ukrainer«, 1915, Austrian State Archives, General Administrative Archive, Ministry of the Interior, Präs 17044/1915.

Yuki Murata, Inverting National Hierarchy. Great-Russian Autonomy in Revolutionary Ukraine from a Historical Perspective, in: Časopys doslidžennja vijn ta revoljucij, 2021, no. 1, 85–124, http://resource.history.org.ua/publ/chvr_2021_1_7.

For the German and (often neglected:) Austrian occupation of Ukraine in 1918, see Wolfram Dornik, Die Besatzung der Ukraine 1918. Historischer Kontext – Forschungsstand – wirtschaftliche und soziale Folgen, Graz – Vienna – Klagenfurt 2008; Frank Golczewski, Deutsche und Ukrainer 1914–1939, Paderborn et al. 2010, pp. 240–360; Frank Grelka, Die ukrainische Nationalbewegung unter deutscher Besatzungsherrschaft 1918 und 1941/42, Wiesbaden 2005; Marian Luschnat-Ziegler, Die ukrainische Revolution und die Deutschen 1917–1918, Marburg 2021.

Kasianov, Die Ukraine; Stephan Lehnstaedt, Der vergessene Sieg. Der Polnisch-Sowjetische Krieg 1919–1921 und die Entstehung des modernen Osteuropa, Munich 2019.

Guido Hausmann, Die Kultur der Niederlage. Der Erste Weltkrieg und die Ukraine, in: OSTEUROPA, 64, issues 2–4, 2014, 127–140.

Alexander J. Motyl, The Turn to the Right. The Ideological Origins and Development of Ukrainian Nationalism, 1919–1929, New York 1980.