"Time to finish off your Ukrainian identity for good": the 1914 Russian occupation of Lviv as an instruction manual for Putin's army

"Save yourselves, the Russians are coming!" In early September 1914, a terrified man rode into Lviv on a bicycle from the Lychakiv area shouting words to that effect. He was stopped and knocked to the ground by Bohdan Kshyshtofovych, a public figure and railway official of Polish origin whose memoirs are part of the historical record consulted by researchers. Kshyshtofovych put his revolver to the alarmist's head, ordered him to shut his trap, and handed the man – whether coward or provocateur – over to the military.

But the reality was that Bohdan Kshyshtofovych's actions were more a gesture of despair than a display of confidence in tomorrow. Despite the reassuring articles that were appearing in periodicals, rumours of a Russian advance were gathering pace. Lviv residents were fighting to get onto departing trains, and huge numbers of people who lived in Lychakiv, then a suburb, were moving into Lviv proper in the hope that the enemy would be stopped at the approaches. But the Austrian army, exhausted by the fighting in Galicia, took the decision to withdraw, and so the city itself was surrendered practically without a fight on 3 September 1914.

By an irony of fate, Bohdan Kshyshtofovych, who had believed to the last that the Russians would not take Lviv, hastily left the city with his family very soon after his encounter with the cyclist. He was obliged to draw his pistol again, this time pressing the barrel to the temple of a coachman who, in the general chaos, was refusing to carry his enormous quantity of belongings to the railway station.

The first Russian occupation of Lviv in history, which lasted almost 10 months, ruined the lives of the local population with the appearance of a new phenomenon – the one we know today as the "Russian world". The Jewish community and Ukrainian identity came under particular pressure from the occupation administration.

Hostage-taking, repressions, censorship, press shutdowns, forced Russification, poverty, curfews – it's all happened before. And just like today, it took place under the slogans of "liberation" and "taking back primordially Russian lands".

"The Russian authorities treated Galicia, and specifically its Ukrainian population, as a region that had supposedly revolted against the metropole and now had to be pacified and punished," Dmytro Doroshenko, the Ukrainian foreign minister under Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi, recalled in exile. "The actions and overall conduct of the Russian authorities in Galicia are comparable only to the regime of Count Mikhail Muravyov in Lithuania and Belarus during the pacification of the Polish uprising of 1863.

That region was proclaimed 'primordially Russian', and on that basis everything Polish was ruthlessly destroyed and the Belarusian and Lithuanian peasants were forced to take on a 'Russian' appearance. In exactly the same way, in Galicia, based on the claim that it was a 'primordially Russian region' and the 'lawful heritage of the Russian ruling house', every expression of the local distinctive, original way of life was declared to be 'Mazepism' and destroyed with astonishing zeal and brutality," Doroshenko noted. ["Mazepism" is a derogatory term for the Ukrainian independence movement. Ivan Mazepa was a Ukrainian military commander who sided with Sweden against the Russian tsar Peter the "Great" during the Great Northern War (1700-1721) in an abortive attempt to assert Ukraine's independence.]

To mark the anniversary of the first Russian occupation of Lviv, Ukrainska Pravda recounts what led up to it, how Galicians responded to the "liberators", and what it was like to live under the rule of a foreign tsar. (Spoiler alert: in their latest attempt to destroy Ukraine, the Russians are following the old playbook, albeit a far bloodier one.)

The justification for the occupation

When the First World War broke out in 1914, the Kyiv Military District Staff distributed a top secret pamphlet on the characteristics of Austrian-ruled Ukraine to officers. The main purpose of the manual was to explain how to distinguish "Mazepists" from "Russians" among the inhabitants of Galicia – that is, how to tell "traitors" from "our own people".

"There will be a portrait of Shevchenko on the wall and 'Mazepist' books in their homes," Dmytro Doroshenko quoted from the secret publication. To the imperial capital of St Petersburg, "Russians" encompassed Russophiles and anyone who could at least potentially be covered by that concept.

In preparation for the 1914 invasion of Ukraine's western lands under the guise of liberating Slavs from "Austrian oppression", the Russians did an enormous amount of groundwork. A significant portion of it had been done in the 19th century, when Russophilia or Moscophilia took shape in Transcarpathia, Galicia and Bukovyna. Representatives of this movement, which Russia keenly supported, acknowledged the supremacy not of the Austro-Hungarian emperor, but of the Orthodox tsar.

After taking the Galician lands briefly under his control in 1914, Tsar Nicholas II proclaimed the historic "unification of the Russian people" in a triumphal manifesto. In an address, he appealed to the "first gatherer of the Russian lands", the 14th-century Muscovite prince Ivan Kalita, whose work had now supposedly been completed at last with the taking of Lviv.

On the eve of World War I, the Russian press set about actively stoking interest in the "Galician question". Newspapers wrote of the necessity of "liberating" Galicia and "reuniting Rus". Just as with Crimea and Donbas in 2014, in the summer of 1914 the imperialists relied on the ground being already prepared for expansion, having formulated "legitimate" claims (according to their distorted logic) to these foreign territories.

Immediately after Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, the Committee for the Liberation of Carpathian Ruthenia (KROK), which included Galician Russophiles, was set up in Kyiv. One of its leaders was Yaroslav Yavorskyi, who in 1904 had emigrated from Galicia to Kyiv, fleeing persecution by the Austrian authorities. In 1914, his task was, in the words of Dmytro Doroshenko, "to help the victorious Russian army destroy Ukrainian life".

Yavorskyi was a teacher. He taught German at a Kyiv gymnasium and rose to the rank of associate professor at the university. He was deputy head of the Galician-Russian Charitable Society in Kyiv. Having extensive experience in what was in effect subversive work in the interests of St Petersburg, he was now preparing for a triumphant return to Galicia under the Russian flag.

It was KROK and Yavorskyi who, according to reports circulating among the Ukrainian intelligentsia in Kyiv, were the authors of the secret pamphlet that was handed out to the Russian military prior to the invasion of Galicia.

The pre-invasion psyop

Alarming rumours may have spread more slowly in the pre-digital era, but they had the same effect as today – they created chaos.

Peaceful life in Lviv, as in the rest of Europe, ended as soon as World War I began. Those who remained in the rear were weighing up whether it was better to withdraw their money from the Galician Savings Bank, since the Austrian government would borrow it for the war. Officials had to print assurances in the newspapers that it was all enemy slander.

The further west the Russians advanced, the more the Galicians panicked. A rumour sprang up from somewhere that the whole of Lviv's water supply system had been poisoned by Russian spies – and again the authorities and the press were obliged to refute the fake news.

Those brave enough to stay in Lviv despite the mounting panic had to queue in shops to stock up on food, while those who decided to flee the likely occupation joined the crowds at the railway station. At least eight people died in the stampede.

Volodymyr Shukhevych, an educator and public figure and the grandfather of future Ukrainian Insurgent Army commander Roman Shukhevych, described the atmosphere in the city: "Lviv is panicking as if a Tatar invasion were imminent. The shops are locked up. People are afraid of each other. Acquaintances give each other a wide berth. Everyone listens out for the latest news – and each piece of news is more alarming than the last."

The panic among Lviv residents was extremely useful to the Russians. Most of the Ukrainian intelligentsia left occupied Galicia, meaning the new authorities could expend less effort and fewer resources on pacifying "Mazepists".

"It was rumoured among the locals that the Russians would take revenge on the families of anyone involved in the riflemen's or scouting movement [Plast – UP]," researcher Oksana Ivannyk recounts from eyewitness memoirs. "So people tried to destroy any evidence: literature, insignia, clothing.

Terrified by the rumours about the Cossacks [Russian soldiers – UP], the population found a rather original way of defending themselves against them," Ivannyk writes. "People would put icons in their windows and at their gates – and it wasn't only Christians that did this, but Jews as well. Lviv residents evidently credited the Russian army with considerable religiosity."

Repression and information blockade

The first small Russian units entered Lviv shortly before noon on 3 September 1914. It seems the Russians had not believed until the very last moment that they would not encounter serious resistance. Scouts appeared near City Hall and demanded that the keys to the city be handed over. Lviv capitulated. Within a few hours, its streets were filled with strangers.

First the new occupation authorities ordered everyone who had weapons to relinquish them voluntarily by the morning of 4 September. To make the city's residents more compliant, they took around 20 people hostage – representatives of the local business community, clergy and intelligentsia, including Professor Volodymyr Shukhevych.

"One must behave courteously and properly towards the victorious Russian army," the "liberators" warned. On 4 September, a Russian flag was hung from Lviv City Hall. Clocks throughout the region were moved from Central European Time to Petrograd Time. A curfew was imposed in Lviv. A special permit was required to leave the city.

The Russians expected the Greek Catholics to return to the true "Orthodox faith" and hoped to "bring the Uniates to their senses". They took a hostile attitude towards anyone who stood in the way of their imperial plans.

Andrei Sheptytskyi, the leader of the Greek Catholic Church, was deported to Russia by the new occupation authorities because he refused to play by the new rules and had enormous influence among the people of Galicia.

Sheptytskyi's behaviour had infuriated the new Lviv administration right from the start. During his first service under the occupation, the metropolitan gave thanks to God that the Russian people, who only knew "official Orthodoxy", would finally learn what the "true Orthodox church" was. He was referring to the Greek Catholic Church, which was flourishing at the time.

To promote their own ideas, the Russians imposed an information blockade on Lviv. Many periodicals had left the city before the occupation, and those that remained were censored. Telegraph and telephone communications were restricted for everyone except the authorities and the military. Within a month and a half, newspapers had been given access to paid subscriptions to news from the Petrograd Telegraph Agency. Residents of the city who wanted alternative sources of news would hunt around for the occasional copies of out-of-date European periodicals that would reach Lviv by various means and be passed from hand to hand.

Many new newspapers appeared in Ukraine's west in 1914-1915, working to indoctrinate people with the ideas of the "Russian world". The Russophiles had triumphed.

"The editors of these publications saw their main task as promoting the Russian great-power idea in Galicia," researcher Olha Paliukh writes. "The Novy Krai newspaper stated: 'We will do everything in our power to ensure that our publication serves the true aims of Great Russia – in the land of her unfortunate younger sister – and that the name of Russia becomes as dear and close to every Galician as it is dear and close to each of us Russians.'"

From the book Dmytro Doroshenko: My Memories of the Recent Past (1914-1920):

"That one of the main causes of the war for Russia was its desire to seize Galicia and destroy the heart of the Ukrainian national movement there was demonstrated by something that Russian Foreign Minister [Sergei] Sazonov said at the time. When a delegation from the Ukrainian community in St Petersburg came to see him, believing him to be the most liberal and 'European' of the ministers, and asked him to intervene on behalf of the Ukrainian movement, which, as they put it, was being unjustly and irrationally suppressed by the Russian authorities in both Russia and Galicia, this liberal minister replied: 'What do you expect? Now is the most convenient time to finish off your Ukrainian identity once and for all!' His answer required no comment."

Russification

Any hopes the Ukrainians who had stayed in Lviv may have had of somehow coexisting with the new occupation authorities were quickly dashed. The Russians' economic, cultural and religious policy was more or less lenient with respect to the Poles, but not the "Mazepists". At a meeting with a Ukrainian delegation, the new head of the city, Sergei Sheremetiev, made it clear that the old order familiar to Galicia would no longer exist, including in matters of language.

Representatives of the intelligentsia, including Volodymyr Shukhevych, explained that Ukrainian financial and cultural societies had traditionally operated in the region and that politics was not their purpose. When the delegates asked for official circulars and statements to the population to be printed in Ukrainian as well, Sheremetiev said: "Well, you read my proclamation in Russian and understood it all." "Yes," Shukhevych replied, "because we read books in Great Russian. But people in the villages do not know it."

The "liberation from the Austrian yoke" that Russia invoked in the course of seizing Galicia brought with it everything that we see happening today in Ukraine's occupied territories under the slogan of fighting the "neo-Nazi Kyiv regime".

It meant that from autumn 1914 to summer 1915, Lviv was a city where everyone in the local authorities was loyal to Moscow and Russian was the language of official use. It meant the persecution of everyone who refused to accept the empire's rules in their own home.

With the arrival of the new authorities, Lviv, which had enjoyed Austro-Hungarian-style self-government, suffered a mounting crisis of governance under the Russian flag – a flag that residents were now required to display on the facades of their buildings for New Year and major holidays.

Rising prices for food and goods, shortages, black-marketeering, a lack of fuel, cold apartments – all the hardships of war fell on the occupation authorities. According to historians, the Russians' only positive achievements during their 10 months in control of Lviv were the establishment of a Charity Committee that distributed food to the poorest, and the opening of public canteens.

The consequences

Whatever life under the Austrian crown may have been like, the arrival of the Russians in Galicia in 1914-1915 demonstrated some of the worst examples of deprivation of rights.

Ukrainians in Russian-ruled Ukraine had long been familiar with this as they fought to preserve their independence; now it became a reality for the people of the west. Moreover, the Galicians faced even more serious demands, as they were regarded as "Russian" people whose consciousness had developed outside the "Russian world".

Although Russia's rule in Lviv during World War I lasted for less than a year, its negative repercussions were significant and long-lasting: emigration and resettlement in different directions – both westwards and deeper into Russia; the forced "conversion of Galicians to Orthodoxy"; a deepening of the West-East division among Ukrainians; and the loss of cultural treasures that were removed from libraries and museums by the Russian armed forces.

All these abuses were described by Dmytro Doroshenko in his memoirs, which he wrote in the 1920s after the failure of the Ukrainian Revolution. At the time, some may have considered the tone of his memoirs overly dramatic and politicised. But emotional though it was, his account of the first Russian occupation of Lviv was entirely justified. As time has shown, the worst was still to come: Bolshevik repression in the Ukrainian SSR, the Holodomors, and the return of Moscow – this time Soviet Moscow – to the western lands under the perpetual pretext of "liberation".

People like Doroshenko could hardly have imagined how far all of Russia's future regimes, together with its population, would go in denying Ukrainian identity – from the Bolshevik-Communist regime to that of Vladimir Putin. Yet one hundred years ago, he perfectly described the essence of Russia's relationship with Ukraine and its other neighbours:

"Reality showed that Minister Sazonov had described the Russian government's policy towards Ukrainians very accurately. Indeed, Ukrainian public life in Russia came to a standstill. All the newspapers and journals were closed down one after the other. Young Ukrainians – intellectuals and ordinary people alike – went off to die for Russia on the battlefields of Galicia and East Prussia. Those who remained had to keep silent.

For the Russian government and those circles of Russian society that sought to build the future of their state on complete uniformity and the levelling of all its peoples, only Galicia remained – the 'Piedmont' of Ukrainian identity, a hotbed of Mazepism. And so all measures and efforts were directed towards 'tearing this infection out by the roots' and 'crushing the wasps' nest once and for all'."

Yevhen Rudenko for Ukrainska Pravda

Translated by Anastasiia Lipara and Tetiana Buchkovska

Edited by Teresa Pearce