The so different Habsburgs

Whoever visits our state’s western parts (particularly Lviv and Galicia) will see easily that the attitude to the imperial Austrian (Austro-Hungarian in 1867-1918) family of the Habsburgs still remains somewhat special here. Either recalling the narrations of forefathers in the neighboring lands, or having read historical literature, or comparing the Habsburgs’ style of ruling in the 18th-early 20th centuries with the autocratic and despotic ways of the Romanov dynasty in the east, many Ukrainians in this region have given preference to the Habsburgs’ “dual” Austro-Hungarian monarchy.

People still esteem and remember that government somewhat sentimentally (to what extent this sentimentality is justified is a question to which there is no short and unambiguous answer) for stability and certain good things it had been doing for Ukraine through the decades and centuries (it would open or, to be more exact, allowed opening Ukrainian schools; did not ban Ukrainian books and periodicals – compare this with the notorious Valuev Circular and Ems Ukase in the times of Alexander II; would build Galicia’s first railroads and create the inimitable “charm” of Western Ukrainian cities, such as Lviv and Chernivtsi). Even today it is quite natural for Lviv’s environment to see a portrait of Emperor (Kaiser) Franz Joseph Habsburg in the window of a marvelous cafe or a postcard with his photo at a street bookstall.

What lies behind this? Nostalgia or a natural wish to protect from oblivion the pages of the past, which really deserve to be respected? To what extent did the Habsburgs (and which of them?) love Ukraine and strive to do it good? Calling on the readers to avoid simplified and deceptively “simple” answers and, instead, to think, doubt, and analyze facts, we will give a brief historical account of what we know about the Habsburgs.

First of all, they were very different. Among them were outstanding reformers who promoted progress in Ukraine (although this was not on top of their agenda: we must admit honestly that for all Viennese emperors, with one striking exception, which we will also discuss, Ukraine was a very remote frontier land, “the boondocks”), and narrow-minded obtuse despots; liberals who began to “graft” the first tender seedlings of European parliamentary democracy to their empire in the late 19th century, and extremely aggressive conservatives; proponents of a harmonious “concert of peoples” (incidentally, the Austrian Germans formed a minority of the dual empire’s population in the early 20th century – those who prevailed were Slavs: Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Ukrainians, Croats, and Slovenes; there was also an essential presence of Hungarians), and rabid German chauvinists. By the way, Hitler confessed in Mein Kampf, recalling his life in Vienna in 1906-13, that what had laid the groundwork for his “life philosophy” was hatred for the Slavs (who “were superseding all things German”), the Jews (naturally), and parliamentary democracy (which Franz Joseph’s 1860 Constitution granted to the empire’s nations).

Therefore, the Habsburgs’ historical legacy is very contradictory. But, before speaking about this legacy (and about the dynasty’s brightest representatives) in more concrete terms, let us examine some general information about the family’s history. The first emperor (who led the “Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation” which comprised, albeit rather nominally, all the ethnic German lands) from this family was Rudolf of Habsburg elected in 1273. After this, for 614 (!) years on end, various Habsburgs were crowned as sovereigns of the Holy Roman and Austrian (Austro-Hungarian) empires, were rulers (kings, dukes, and other kinds of monarchs) of Spain in the 16th-17th centuries and the Netherlands in the 16th-18th centuries. The Habsburgs were also related to French kings, the Romanov dynasty, and Spanish rulers. Incidentally, one of the numerous branches of this dynasty – that of Lorraine – also comprised the blood of the ancient French King Henry I and, therefore, his wife Anna Yaroslavna, and, therefore, Yaroslav the Wise, and, hence, all the grand princes of Kyiv, Yaroslav’s ancestors. A very telling fact…

EMPEROR FRANZ JOSEPH HABSBURG WHO HEADED THE AUSTRIAN (LATER AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN) STATE FOR 68 YEARS, FROM 1848 TO 1916. A SYMBOL OF A CONFIDENT, STABLE, AND UNSHAKABLE EMPIRE /  Photo from the website RUS-ARC.RU

There is a nice legend about the origin of the Habsburg ruling family. One day, a gallant knight, the Count of Altenburg, went hunting in the mountains (the ancient Habsburgs usually stayed in Eastern Switzerland at the time – only Emperor Rudolf assumed possession of the duchies of Austria and Styria in 1273-80). The count chased his quarry very fast, leaving his retinue far behind him. Suddenly, before he knew it, Altenburg found himself among the mountain rocks, where vultures began to swoop on him, defending their nests. As there was nobody else around, the count knelt down and prayed to God for rescue. And suddenly, at that very moment, a flock of black ravens flew and drove the vultures away. In a gesture of gratitude, the Count of Altenburg ordered his vassals to put up a tower at the place of his miraculous rescue and named it Habisburg (“vultures’ tower” in German). The count’s servants were told to keep ravens permanently on the tower and feed them. But, in the course of time, Altenburg’s descendants ruined the tower, drove away the birds, and built a castle at this place. For this, a curse was allegedly put on the next Altenburg-Habsburg generations, with black ravens being heralds of it.

But, interestingly enough, no legendary curses hindered the Habsburgs’ empire from strengthening and spreading out its borders (by way of military, economic, ideological, and dynastic-marriage expansion). As for the Ukrainian lands, the Habsburgs added them to their crownland as follows. They annexed the north-western part of Transcarpathian Ukraine in 1526 and its south-eastern part in 1699. After the first partition of Poland in 1772, they took possession of Galicia (for 146 years until 1918, when the last of the Habsburgs, Emperor Charles (Karl), abdicated the thrown, following the revolution) and assumed another official title, “kings of Galicia and Lodomeria”). In 1774 they annexed Northern Bukovyna and made it part of Galicia. Therefore, the greater part of Western Ukrainian lands remained under the power of Habsburg emperors for almost one and a half century. We should not ignore this fact.

What progressive reforms (let us gear up for a cheerful tune!) did the Habsburg emperors carry out? And which of the monarchs did so? It would be fair to name at least three rulers: Maria Theresa (1717-80, on the throne from 1740), an “educated sovereign,” the contemporary and rival of Catherine II, who Ivan Franko said had “led Austria from medieval dusks,” even though he did not exactly show deep reference, to put it very mildly, for the Habsburg monarchy; her son, Emperor Joseph II (1741-90, on the throne from 1780), and Emperor Franz Joseph (1830-1916, on the throne from 1848). These people were really successful reformers of the empire. What concrete things did they do, as far as Ukraine is concerned?

The laws Maria Theresa enacted in 1773-76 limited corvee in Galicia to three days a week at most (in contrast to Tsarina Catherine’s steady course towards an extremely tough serfdom). In 1782 her heir Joseph II abolished personal dependence of peasants on landlords in the empire, including Galicia. In the same year Emperor Joseph decreed that emergency grain stocks be set up in Galicia to help peasants during a crop failure or a famine. Still earlier, in 1774, Maria Theresa had founded a seminary, Barbareum, in Vienna to train the Greek Catholic clergy, which had fateful cultural and spiritual consequences for Western Ukraine. In 1784, by decree of Joseph II, the German Studium Ruthenum was established at Lviv University, where a number of disciplines were taught in the Ukrainian language. At the same time (let us not harbor undue illusions), Vienna monarchs actively encouraged German and Rumanian colonists to settle in Galicia, Bukovyna, and Transcarpathia. The university, which was reopened in 1817 in Lviv under Emperor Franz, positioned itself as an unconditionally and overtly German-language institution.

A CHARACTERISTIC OLD-TIME LVIV PHOTO. IT IS A CITY THAT SAW A CHIMERICAL INTERTWINEMENT OF UKRAINIAN, POLISH, AUSTRIAN, AND ARMENIAN INFLUENCES AND SHOWS NOW AN OBVIOUS “IMPRINT” OF THE HABSBURGS’ ORIGINAL AURA

In response to the all-European revolution of 1848, a.k.a. “the Spring of Nations,” the Habsburgs (the 18-year-old Franz Joseph had just mounted the throne) officially and finally abolished corvee in Galicia and promulgated a constitution, which made it possible to establish the Supreme Ruthenian Council, Galicia’s first Ukrainian political organization. However, Franz Joseph I turned down the council’s request to divide Galicia into two autonomous – Polish and Ukrainian – parts (officially, a decision to this effect was not made until the end of the Habsburgs’ rule in 1918). The new 1860 Constitution formally granted certain autonomy to both Western (Polish) and Eastern (Ukrainian) Galicia, but the Ukrainians reaped an essentially lesser benefit from this than the Poles did. In general, word had it that Franz Joseph was usually inclined to trust and rely on the Polish. But, maybe, the emperor just wanted to hold the balance of power… And when a bicameral parliament, whose lower chamber was elected by a popular vote, and the regional Galician parliament began to function in the Habsburgs’ state in the 1870s-1890s on the principles of a democratic election law (even though universal suffrage for men only was introduced in the empire as late as in 1907), it was clear that the Franz Joseph government had also come under the influence of conservative, particularly Polish, circles. Galicia’s regional elite of that time was in fact being formed from representatives of the Vienna government and the Polish national movement. Ukrainians had in fact no access to this elite because the access was extremely limited. But it is also true that, thanks to the Habsburgs’ policy of cultural liberalization, it became possible, from the 1870s onwards, to turn Galicia (above all, Lviv) into the “Ukrainian Piedmont,” particularly by the efforts of Kulish, Drahomanov, and, naturally, Franko. It would be unfair to forget this.

The First World War made the Habsburgs change their attitudes to the solution of the Ukrainian problem. Yet, well before it began, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the 84-year-old Franz Joseph’s throne, had been drawing up the project of the “United States of Greater Austria,” where Germans, Hungarians, and Slavic peoples could coexist on a completely equal basis. The Ukrainian-populated Eastern Galicia was to have been one these states. But Gavrilo Princip’s shot on June 28, 1914, put an end not only to the archduke’s life, but also to these democratic intentions. When the world war broke out, the Austro-Hungarian army formed a Legion of Ukrainian Sich Riflemen (USS), the first legitimate Ukrainian military formation in many decades. One of those who took the most active part in USS operations was a wonderful person who deserves at least a few words about his uncommon destiny.

It is about Archduke Wilhelm Franz von Habsburg-Lothringen (incidentally, as we have said above, a descendant, albeit a very remote one, of Kyivan grand princes), a second cousin once removed of Franz Joseph (also known to Ukrainians as Vasyl Vyshyvany from 1915 on), a self-sacrificing fighter for Ukrainian national freedom, who was kidnapped by Cheka operatives in Vienna in 1947 and tortured to death, aged 53, at a Kyiv NKVD prison in 1948. Vasyl Vyshyvany is a brilliant example of a self-denying romantic who, seeing the unjust and inhuman national oppression of the Ukrainians, a stateless nation at the time, protesting against this, and feeling their pain as it were his own, devoted his life to fighting for Ukrainian independence. Back in 1915, he, a 20-year-old youth, commanded a Ukrainian company of the 13th Uhlan Imperial Regiment and wrote in rapturous terms about the combat abilities of our compatriots: “I consider Ukrainians the best soldiers. Their morale is very high.”

Gradually, Wilhelm Habsburg became a staunch Ukrainian state-minded patriot. He learned the Ukrainian language at the front (his “teacher” was a Ternopil region soldier), began to wear a blue-yellow ribbon of Sich Riflemen in 1915, and had his name in the passport changed for Vasyl Vyshyvany, as his Ukrainian comrades-in-arms called him, in 1916. He was dubbed “red prince” because he mingled daily with Ukrainian peasants who wore Sich Riflemen uniforms. In 1916-17 he met and established contact with Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky. At the same time he drew up and sent to Vienna the project of forming the “Grand Duchy of Ukraine” but did not receive a positive answer. This institution was planned as, of course, part of the Habsburg empire, and it was supposed to include the rest of the Ukrainian lands in case of a victory over Russia, but the empire itself was on its last legs.

According to Vyshyvany, he discussed Ukrainian matters with Emperor Karl many times in 1917-18, but the monarch never dared to make radical decisions about the Ukrainians. In 1918, after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed, Vyshyvany went, together with Ukrainian-Austrian units, to Ukraine (Odesa, Mykolaiv) and worked energetically to increase the Ukrainian army’s fighting efficiency. At the time, he was so famous and popular that some people viewed him as contender for the Ukrainian crown (which stirred up the resentment of not only Pavlo Skoropadsky, but also Kaiser Wilhelm).

Things changed in November 1918. The Habsburg government was gone, and Vyshyvany’s dream of a democratic federative Austria (in the spirit of Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s ideas) turned to be an illusion. But our hero continues to fight: in 1919 he is chief of the Foreign Relations Department at the Main Directorate of the UNR Army’s General Staff. Legend has it that Vyshyvany made an abortive attempt to meet Nestor Makhno. When told that Makhno was a “bandit,” the archduke said: “But was my ancestor Rudolf Habsburg, an elected emperor, not a bandit at the time? Makhno is a bright individual and the best leader in Ukraine.” After the defeat of the UNR army, Vyshyvany had to leave for Vienna in November 1919. He never stopped fighting for our cause – he was chairman of the Ukrainian National Free Cossack Society and maintained constant ties with Yevhen Konovalets, Pavlo Skoropadsky, Viacheslav Lypynsky, and Yevhen Petrushevych; lived in Vienna, Madrid, Paris, and Vienna again. The reader already knows about the tragic destiny of Vasyl Vyshyvany, a Ukrainian patriot from the House of Habsburg, after World War Two.

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The word “Habsburgs” calls to mind an inimitable aura of Lviv’s buildings and unique history, of what is difficult to express in words but can (and must) be felt deep in heart. It also brings to mind Otto von Habsburg, the son of Charles I and Zita Bourbon-Parma, our contemporary, a staunch friend of Ukraine, a European Parliament member, who departed this life four years ago at age 99 (!). The son of the last Habsburg emperor was still living as recently as 2011. History is not as old as it may seem to be…