THE UKRAINE PROBLEM
—was intensified by bad economic conditions and the consequent growth of emigration. Driven alike by racial, political and economic reasons into hostility to its Polish masters, it would have gratified its natural Slavonic feelings by such an alliance with the Czechs and Jugoslavs as the summer of 1917 has finally produced; but in those days it found itself repelled by all those who, in their enthusiasm for Russia, accepted the Russian reactionary thesis that Ukrainian nationality is a “fake.” It was therefore driven by circumstances to seek temporary allies among the German parties. In the decade preceding the war it was looked upon with growing favour by the Clericals of Vienna and by their patron the late Archduke Francis Ferdinand, who sought to exploit the most national institution of the Austrian Ukraine, the Uniate Church, as a weapon against Orthodoxy. Fantastic designs of political and military ambition linked hands with no less ambitious ecclesiastical pretensions. “Barbarous Russia” was to be “hurled back into Asia,” a vast Ukraine kingdom created, stretching from the San to the Dniepr or the Don, as an appanage of the Habsburg Crown, while the Jesuits were to establish their sway in the very heart of the Orthodox church-system and drive in a fatal wedge between Moscow and Constantinople. On the other side stood a certain school of militant Panslavists, who dreamt of nothing less than the extension of the Orthodox faith throughout the Slavonic world, and interpreted political movements in the light of religious fanaticism. To them the very existence of a Ukrainian movement in Galicia and the increasing latitude accorded to it by the Austrian Government seemed a direct challenge of the most dangerous kind. Indeed, self-preservation drove the old régime in Russia to oppose the Ukrainian idea by every means in its power and to encourage and even subsidise the so-called “Moscalophil” party in Galicia. The rivalry of Ukrainians and Moscalophils—the latter refusing to admit the distinction between Great and Little Russians—was complicated by the jealousy of the Poles, who did not hesitate to join hands with Petrograd in its campaign of proselytism. The most striking example of this was the sensational end to the High Treason Trial at Lvov in June 1914; the accused Moscalophils being acquitted by a jury consisting of Poles and demonstratively presented with flowers on leaving the court. The concessions wrested from the Poles by the
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