Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/157

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
Harold Williams
143

Empire. It might have developed into a movement like the Provençal movement in France. But when reaction set in after the great reforms of the early sixties, the Russian Government took alarm, and the language movement in Little Russia was very largely suppressed. It was only permitted to print and publish in Little Russian fiction or poetry, and that not in the orthography chosen by the people themselves, but in the orthography of the Great Russian language. This aroused strong protest amongst the Ukrainians: the leaders of the movement were arrested and exiled. Then the movement passed to Galicia, where the eastern section of the population is Little Russian or Ukrainian. Lemberg became the new centre and Galicia became what the Ukrainians called the Piedmont of the Ukrainian movement. This development found favour with the Austrian Government, which saw in it partly a bulwark against Russia and partly a means of checking the growth of Polish power in Galicia. Then later on it was taken up by Germany as a means of impairing the unity of Russia.

In 1905, the embargo on the Ukrainian language was removed in Russia, great activity was developed, various works appeared, newspapers, novels, histories, poetry, translations, and so on in great quantities, and the Ukrainian movement gained a new life in Russia. Demands were presented for the autonomy of Ukrainia, but the conception of the boundaries of the new state varied considerably. Moreover in the last fifty years the Great Russian language has made great progress over the whole of Southern Russia, and although the population of Southern Russia is now in