Brothers or Enemies is a welcome addition to the small but growing body of new scholarship on nineteenth century Russian borderlands, and, specifically, on Ukraine. In recent years, a very interesting discussion has emerged concerning identity formation, state policy, and the long-term viability of an “All-Russian” nation-building project in Ukraine (Faith Hillis, Children of Rus΄, 2013; Alexei Miller, The Ukrainian Question: Russian Nationalism in the 19th c., 2003). There is general agreement among historians that the project ultimately did not succeed, but the explanations for the failure and its timing vary widely. With his book on the Ukrainian national movement—which in the second half of the nineteenth century came to be regarded as a threat and a dangerous rival to the idea of an “All-Russian” nation—Johannes Remy offers an altogether different perspective.
Brothers or Enemies examines the Ukrainian movement in the crucial decades between the founding of the clandestine Cyrillo-Methodian Society in the 1840s and the promulgation of the Ems decree (the prohibition on publishing in Ukrainian) in 1876. The book consists of seven chapters, organized mainly around an analysis of the most important Ukrainian political, literary, and historical texts produced and/or published at the time, as well as the government's response to them. On this basis, Remy argues that “the roots of Ukrainian independence were planted” in the 1840s, half a century earlier than some historians claim.
The book is not, however, strictly speaking, an intellectual, political, or social history, though it certainly contains elements of each. Rather, the author has a very specific objective: to investigate how Ukrainian activists perceived Russians and the Russian state. Remy shows that in the 1840s, the sense of difference was “already” very strong. In the most extreme version of the stereotype, Russians were seen as “undemocratic, prone to dominating other nations, collectivist rather than individualist, immoral in their violent behavior, egoistic, lacking respect for others’ property, and incapable of deep religiosity or high ideals in general” (224). These anti-Russian attitudes softened somewhat in the 1870s, most notably in the writings of the Mykhailo Drahomanov. As a progressive, he believed in the necessity of sweeping, empire-wide political change and found common cause with those Russian intellectuals and activists who were willing to work towards a democratic Russia. Ukraine's future was, to his way of thinking, contingent on the political transformation of the Russian Empire. For Drahomanov, in this respect, it was possible to be both Ukrainian and Russian, at least in a civic sense. With the Ems Ukaz and the new wave of repressions against Ukrainian activists, including Drahomanov, however, this optimism, as Remy notes, began to fade.
Did the assertion of essential differences between Ukrainians and Russians constitute a profound rupture? There is ample evidence to suggest that this kind of “othering” had a much longer and fuller history—on all sides. In fact, much of the nineteenth century Russian discourse on Ukraine centered on the meaning of the differences between Russians and “Little Russians,” not their very existence. Yet, in another way, Remy is exactly right. In the 1840s, as his book highlights, this sense of Ukrainian identity found a modern political expression in the programmatic works of the Cyrillo-Methodian Society. What made the Ukrainian national movement modern—and potent in its own right—was not the assertion of difference per se but rather the democratic aspirations of the Ukrainian activists, their feelings of solidarity with (the concept of) a Ukrainian people, and their devotion to the idea of a decentralized political life (what Remy refers to as “nationalism”). Indeed, as Remy's study confirms, political separation became a recurring theme among Ukrainian activists from the mid-1840s on. And this, implicitly, did pose a grave challenge to the construction of an “all-Russian” nation.
For specialists, perhaps the most interesting part of Brothers or Enemies is the author's account of the evolving government response to the Ukrainian movement. Among other things, the author shows, on the basis of extensive and careful archival research, the extraordinary lengths to which the Minister of Internal Affairs and the head of the Third Section were willing to go to by 1863 to incriminate and suppress the legal activities of the movement. The Polish revolution, Remy argues, provided an opportunity to fabricate evidence, spread disinformation and circumvent regular procedures in order to introduce the first prohibitions against publishing in the Ukrainian language. “The temporary character of the circular on Ukrainian publications,” he writes, “followed from the dubious manner in which it emerged, not from Valuev's supposed opinion that the restrictions were desirable only for a short time” (166).
Brothers or Enemies provides an important corrective to the recent tendency of historians to minimize the significance of the Ukrainian national movement in the Russian Empire, to view it as a mere reflection of state policy, and/or to treat it as a subsidiary of the movement that later developed in Habsburg Galicia (western Ukraine).
