Ivan Franko’s triad of freedom: ideal and reality

The colossal figure of Ivan Franko staggers his inquisitive descendants trying at least to visualize the scope of what the great stonecutter accomplished in the Ukrainian cultural domain. He was a brilliant writer, whose role in Ukrainian literature perhaps matches that of Taras Shevchenko; a noted scholar, ethnographer, sociologist, economist, philosopher, and political figure (not an armchair one but professional — he was a member of the Austrian parliament and spared neither time nor energy in strengthening West Ukrainian political parties). In a word, Ivan Franko was an outstanding thinker and humanist. If only the modern Ukrainian state could scrape up funds enough to publish all his works (unabridged), the result would be at least eighty volumes. This is just one example showing the grandeur of his titanic selfless endeavors. Franko’s creative heritage is as immense and lasting as life on earth.

The author of the brilliant poem Moses harbored an eternal ideal, which he served to his dying day, freedom. In his case it was the national freedom in Ukraine, freedom for all workingmen, and social liberties for all. If one were to glimpse Franko’s spiritual universe, I think that the intellectual, creative, and sociopolitical endeavors of that brilliant Ukrainian were dominated by the idea of a triad of freedom (of course, he never used the notion), made up of precisely these components: national, social, and individual. They merged into an organic, rather than artificial, whole, meaning they could not exist and be considered separately. That is why any attempts to reduce his grand ideal to a single, albeit very significant, component will likely seem unconvincing.

My people, exhausted, beaten,
Is like a cripple left by the road,
Covered in scabs of scorn!
I’m alarmed to think of posterity,
Your sorrows will bring them shame;
Their judgment will be severe,
I feel its weight and suffer the blame.

Like a hero resolute who goes
To meet his enemies’ onslaught,
So Moses went, while in his soul
He still a desperate battle fought.

“This yearning,” something seemed to say,
“The fruit of shame and sympathy —
Was that the burning bush which made
Me strive to set my people free? ...

Component One: Franko the socialist. Precisely this component of his world outlook was for decades (and quite effectively) capitalized upon by Soviet propaganda. “An unbending champion of freedom and happiness for the proletariat,” “brilliant prophet of the coming revolution,” and other such “steel-girded concrete” clichОs remained invariable requisites in conveying his image up to the 1990s.

Were there any reasons for interpreting th e legacy of the celebrated humanist that way? Certainly. One cannot ignore the fact that Ivan Franko held the giants of the Socialist movements in great respect; he considered Karl Marx “a great Socialist” and translated into Ukrainian Chapter 24 of the first volume of Das Kapital; together with Mykhailo Pavlyk headed the Left wing of the Ukrainian-Ruthenian Radical Party (founded in 1890) that was close to the Socialist movement. “The aim of Socialism is to achieve a balance between the advance of wealth, knowledge, and the arts, and the growing well-being and progress of the masses” was how Ivan Franko formulated his understanding of the doctrine in his paper “What is Progress?” (1903). The development of a society cannot but be impeded by “immense wealth owned by a handful of individuals, on the one hand, and abysmal poverty strangling millions of people, on the other.”

It should be made perfectly clear, however, that Franko took a rigid stand against two principal tenets held by the Socialists during the period (specifically by Frederick Engels and his Social Democrats). First, the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat with its subsequent transformation into a “people’s state.” The theory attracted many Leftists, yet Ivan Franko wrote in 1903, “The state, the future people’s state, must unconditionally rule the lives of all citizens... Such omnipotent power would be a horrible burden on the life of every individual. Individual will and thought would have to vanish. What if the state found them harmful or unnecessary? The people’s state would have become a giant prison of the people.” And further on, very prophetically (note that 1903 was the year marking the birth of Bolshevism): “Who would guard the guardians?... The Social Democrats are vague on the subject; in any case, those people would have tremendous power over the lives and destinies of millions of their comrades, more than the greatest despots have ever had. And the old evil of inequality, ousted through the door, would steal back inside through the window; there would be no oppression of workingmen by capitalists, but there would be absolute power wielded by theirown leaders, whether high- born or high-elected... Possessing such unlimited power, even if for a short while, such leaders would easily call it their own forever!”

This is a prophecy that needs no comment. Take but two aspects. First, Ivan Franko treated social justice with utmost respect all his life (unlike many of us cynically ignoring the problem), yet considered himself an exponent of “scientific” rather than “ethical” Socialism. Second, his remarks address not a specific party but any political force promising people paradise on earth while depriving them of freedom.

Another nonetheless important topic of debate between Franko and the Socialists was the national one. Here we come to the second component of his freedom triad. Franko as a nationalist. He was convinced that “the ideals of national independence cannot be disguised by the ideals of social equality and political will. The ideal of national independence is the only one to allow those two ideals enough room for true development.” Moreover, as an ardent patriot of Ukraine, he held that “everything outside the framework of the nation is either Phariseeism on the part of those willing to hide their desire to have one nation rule the next and hiding it behind international ideals or the pathologic sentimentalism of dreamers happy to disguise spiritual estrangement from their own nation by ecumenical phraseology.”

Ivan Franko constantly propagated these ideas, especially after 1895 when young Galician patriots published the booklet Ukrayina irredenta, the first to clearly formulate a motto of Ukrainian national independence. He supported it in no uncertain words in the article “Beyond the Limits of Capability.” Another fact: in 1899, Franko sided with the National Democratic Party because of a sharp disagreement with the Radical Party’s concept of the future Ukrainian state, and because the NDP took a much clearer stand in the matter.

Paradoxically, however, just as the brilliant thinker and author was not quite on the Socialist side, he also did not wind up entirely on the nationalist one. He realized that national renascence took years and decades of constructive work; it could not happen overnight. In addition, he was fully aware that there are neither superior nor inferior peoples; they all have an equal right to free progress. A nation suppressing and otherwise holding back another one “is digging a grave for itself and the state whose benefit that suppression supposedly serves.” Franko’s ideal remained invariable: “the closest possible rapprochement among individuals and nations as free among the free, equal among the equal, through the lifting of all sorts of political dependence, all sorts of enslavement of one people by the next.”

The last but not least component of his freedom triad was individual liberty. To him, human rights were values sufficient in themselves ; one had to fight to gain them, relying on public opinion in the first place (while forming it, a synchronous process). This was why Franko the revolutionary sharply denounced the assassination of Alexander II of Russia by the revolutionary, Narodnaya volia [People’s Will] on March 1, 1881. Two hours before his death, the monarch had signed Russia’s first constitution (albeit with restrictions) and afterwards “the silent emperor... took vengeance on his assassins in a much harder way than he would have done during his lifetime, because the news of the constitution signed by the tsar and reduced to nil by the revolutionaries had instantly deprived the latter of the public support that had hitherto constituted their main force in combating the government” (from his article “The Loris-Melikov Constitution,” 1893).

And further: “Lacking any serious guarantees of freedom of the individual, meetings, press, and conscience, and given administrative arbitrariness... a constitution is out of the question.” Franko was a sage politician and knew that “a constitution is merely soil tilled to a varying degree of farming mastery that will not yield crops unless painstakingly tended” (from the article “On Ukrainian-Polish Relations” {1896}).

However, the above by no means belittles the great importance Franko attached to human rights (also in the liberal sense of the word; Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytsky, a noted Ukrainian emigre historian considered Franko a liberal). Yet he was an unconventional illiberal liberal; particularly when he disagreed with the notion of social inequality being a favorable, necessary stimulus in the development of a society (there is an excellent formula in his paper “What is Progress?”: “So much inequality, so much envy.”); instead, he asked whether you are sure that the best get rich in conditions of inequality.

Geniuses, even if canonized with portraits displayed in public places, cannot be evened out... As for Franko, one is reminded of the elephant and three blind men, each exploring a part of the animal’s body (the trunk, tail, belly) with his hands and then arriving at a “learned conclusion” about the elephant as a whole.

Likewise, Franko’s triad of freedom cannot be divided into separate parts; he was a Socialist, an exponent of state construction, a Liberal, all at the same time and on a much broader scope than any popular, simplified interpretations can explain. In his concepts and works that great Ukrainian combined European and national ideals, proudly identifying himself, “I am a peasant: a prologue, not epilogue!” He stressed, “I am for prudence, but only in terms of means, a manner of speaking and acting, but never in principle; when it comes to the crux of the matter, prudence... simply masks the absence of firm principle or enthusiasm, dedication to a cause recognized as right and holy.” I believe, nay I am sure that a true Ivan Franko is still to be discovered, so I say let us all remember his words!