A Battle in Ukraine Echoes Through the Decades - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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While often killing only their own brethren on the battlefields of World War I, Mr. Pavlyshyn said, Ukrainians who served on opposite sides discovered for the first time “that they were the same people and started to think like Ukrainians.” A nationalist cause that had been mostly limited to intellectuals and politicians expanded to “create a real national consciousness.”
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When the war erupted nearly a century ago, Russian forces mobilized and swiftly captured the western city of Lviv and the surrounding region of eastern Galicia. Aleksei Brusilov, a Russian commanding officer, proclaimed the territory — under Hapsburg control for more than two centuries and ruled before that by Poland — as “Russian land from time immemorial, populated after all by Russian people.”
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Instead of rallying behind Russia and its ruler, Czar Nicholas II, however, many Ukrainians in the west sided with the Hapsburg dynasty, which had granted them a political voice and freedoms unimaginable to Ukrainian speakers living under the Russian Empire to the east.
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t was at Makivka, according to a Ukrainian version of events that is celebrated in museum displays, monuments, patriotic songs and a recent movie, that Ukrainian soldiers achieved an extraordinary feat: They held their ground against the Russian Empire.
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Their historic lands claimed by both the Russian czar and the Hapsburgs, Ukrainians fought on both sides of World War I. Some, like the 800 or so members of a unit called the Sich Sharpshooters that held off the Russians at Makivka in April 1915, served as volunteers for the Austro-Hungarian Empire of the Hapsburg dynasty, which had governed the western part of Ukraine since the late 18th century. An additional 250,000 served the Austrians as conscripts.
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About 3.5 million Ukrainians, a vast majority of them conscripts, fought for the Russians, who controlled the central and eastern parts of what is now Ukraine.
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For Ukraine, however, World War I delivered not only catastrophic suffering but also its first modern experience as an independent state. It was an experiment that lasted only a few months and was scarred by anarchy and infighting, but it laid the foundations for Ukraine today.
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But the war, which Russia initially saw as a chance to unite within its empire all of its Slavic brethren in “Little Russia,” as it called Ukraine, also planted suspicions that poison Russia’s dealings with Ukraine to this day.