Book Review: Ivan Mazepa and the Russian Empire by Tatiana Tairova-Yakovleva

Abstract

Galicia’s inhabitants. Furthermore, without commenting on this decision, Jews are also excluded from purview, though they concentrated in the towns and cities and amounted to over a tenth of the crownland’s population. Hence, the book shines light on a fifth of the politically most influential inhabitants, among which, Polish Ruthenians could account for as much as 15 per cent. In Galicia’s increasingly nationalized reality, Polish Ruthenians’ influence spiked due to their ability to operate in both Polishand Ukrainian-speaking milieux. Furthermore, Polish and Ukrainian organizations strove to woo them to their own national camp, which boosted their visibility and importance. After a somewhat muddled discussion of methodology, which gives too much credit to qualified primordialism (62), Polish Ruthenians are defined in historical and ethnocultural terms (55–200). Their story in Galicia is introduced during the first half of the nineteenth century (201–54), before it enters the central stage during the 1848 revolutions (255–338). Polish Ruthenians played an important role during the period of absolutism, when the ‘Ruthenian language question’ arose (339–64) and the remembrance of Poland-Lithuania pushed Poles and Ruthenians (Ukrainians) to stand together for the last time in the face of Polish-Lithuanian nobles’ 1863–1864 uprising against the tsar (365–406). Finally, the study comes into its own in the period of Austria-Hungary, when the participation of Polish Ruthenians in Galicia’s politics is analysed (407–80), followed by their reaction to a range of official commemorations of events from the Polish(-Lithuanian) past (481–544). Despite its wealth of indexes, this extensive work sorely misses a basic index of subjects tackled. Most of today’s Ukrainians and Poles stem from peasantry, so a reflection on the rural population’s reaction to the Polish-Ruthenian identity is a must. But a pioneering work rarely exhausts a broached issue, while the task requires an interdisciplinary approach. Curiously, the book is silent on Galicia’s Jews and does not even cite Larry Wolff’s The Idea of Galicia (2011). Jews were the crownland’s most urban and multilingual inhabitants. Did some assimilationists convert to Greek Catholicism and choose the Polish Ruthenian identity? For the time being an answer to this query is buried in Galicia’s rich but neglected publications and archival material in Yiddish and Hebrew.