November was the ninth month in the ancient Roman calendar, taking its name from the Latin, “novem,” the number nine. Ukrainians have a much more descriptive name: “Lystopad” – falling leaves, a month that has political/historical significance stemming from age-old aspirations for national self-determination.
A thousand-plus years ago, Kyiv was the capital of a vast empire called Rus’. Three separate peoples – Ukrainians, Belarusians and Russians – trace their origin to that era. Over the centuries, Rus’ glory faded in the wake of invasions, changing political rule and borders being moved. Generation after generation, Ukrainians were repressed by foreign rule and the cruel social-economic system of serfdom. And yet, the culture was sustained, spawning as it did a legacy of resistance celebrated in the country’s national anthem “a brotherhood of Kozaks.”
The “1st of Lystopad,” significant for Ukrainians, is linked to an even more important November date: Armistice Day, when the Allies and Germany ended the “Great War” whose centennial we commemorate: the 11th hour, of the 11th day, of the 11th month in 1918. Svoboda, the flagship newspaper of the Ukrainian National Association, had a banner headline the next day: КОНЕЦЬ ВІЙНИ (End of the War).
Looking back, the war made no sense for anyone, but it was particularly senseless for Ukrainians, Poles and other peoples in a Europe carved into empires, their borders set and reset, aggrandizing dynastic families, enriching the ruling class and arbitrarily dividing nationalities. When war broke out in July 1914, Transcarpathia and Galicia were in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and their inhabitants were subjects of Kaiser Francis Joseph. Viennese bureaucrats dubbed them “Ruthenians,” the German rendition of “Rusyns,” an appellation surviving centuries after the fall of the Rus’ Empire. Inspired by Taras Shevchenko, nationally conscious folks called themselves “Ukrainians,” also an ancient appellation, which distinguished them from “Russians.”
Both our parents were born in the easternmost region of the Austrian Empire. You could walk from our father’s Galician town of Mosty Velyki to the border with Russia and back home in less than a day. Ukrainians were “Rusyns” in the west; across the border to the east, they were “Little Russians,” subjects of Tsar Nicholas II. Either side was just two generations separated from slavery.
If you were a male in your late teens or 20s in July 1914 you were mobilized (yet another form of slavery). You could be a student, schoolteacher, farmer, shopkeeper today and then tomorrow be ordered to report for military service, marching to the front a week later. According to family lore, one of our father’s uncles romantically strewed flowers on his bride as she woke the morning after their wedding. He died in the first weeks of combat.
Who killed him? It could have been anyone, just as he might have killed someone else. Perhaps a fellow Ukrainian. They were on both sides.
The war was greeted with enthusiasm, with victory promised by Christmas. That didn’t happen. Casualties mounted into the millions as leaders sacrificed more and more young men, if only to justify the deaths of those already gone. At the home front, privation grew even as grief became unbearable. And for what?
Certainly nothing that would have benefited Ukraine – on the contrary. Years ago, an elderly Ukrainian military veteran recounted how half a year into the conflict homesick Ukrainian soldiers on either side of the front sang “koliady” (carols) on January 6, 1915 – Christmas Eve according to the traditional Julian calendar – and then in the morning went back to killing each other.
How is it, Ukrainian leaders in the Russian and Austrian empires asked themselves, that our young men are killing each other when we have no stake and no interest in the outcome? Because, they concluded, Ukrainians don’t have a country of their own. And that became the goal on both sides of the military divide: independence.
Less than a month into the war, Ukrainian civic leaders in Galicia organized the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine, pledging support for Austria’s war effort even as they looked to the conflict as an opportunity for eventual statehood. Austria went along because it needed nationalities to support the empire and, frankly, wanted Ruthenians (and other peoples) to serve as cannon fodder. As for Russia, the empire chose oppression, closing Ukrainian newspapers, re-instituting the language ban, arresting leaders and drafting men into the army. Three years later, in February 1917, disgusted by the pointless sacrifice at the front and hardship at home, the Russian Empire erupted in revolution. Two weeks after the tsar abdicated in March, Ukrainians in Kyiv established the Ukrainian Central Rada and in January 1918 declared independence.
Austria remained in the war until the fall, when that empire also unraveled. Anticipating a time when Ukraine would need an army, young military leaders had formed a unit within the Austrian force – the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen – also within the first weeks of the war. Four years later, in the early hours of November 1, a couple thousand of them in Lviv seized control of city hall, the telegraph station and other strategic points, raised the blue-and-yellow flag and declared independence for Western Ukraine. In his unpublished memoirs my uncle Yuriy relates how our grandfather told his sons a few days later that they were no longer Rusyns; they were Ukrainians now, in a country of their own. Two and a half months later, the Western Ukrainian National Republic joined the independent Ukrainian republic in Kyiv. Years of fighting ensued against and among Bolsheviks, Russian Whites, Poles, and various Ukrainian factions, and independence was denied for another 75 years.
And yet, the efforts of activists in Kyiv and Lviv, having adopted the ancient tryzub (trident) from the glory days of ancient Rus’, were lodestones for Ukrainian aspirations every year. They were ultimately realized in 1991.
Allow me a personal note. From the mid-1950s, our family attended a requiem service on the evening of October 31 for the fallen of Lystopad. Which meant, we missed Halloween. That spawned a revolution of our own, laying bare the divide between our American and Ukrainian identities. After a couple of years, my brothers and I jettisoned the requiem and got to go door to door for candy. Why not? The heroes of that era were fighting for freedom. May they rest in peace and may their memory be eternal. Glory to Ukraine!