Black Hundreds: Ukrainian Aspect (End of the Nineteenth Century – 1917)

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to reconstruct and analyze the main stages and features of the Black Hundreds movement in Ukraine in the end of the 19th century and during the World War I.

The research methodology is based on the principles of historicism, scientificity, objectivity. Comparative-historical, analytical-septic methods, methods of scientific criticism of sources, interdisciplinary approach are used.

Scientific novelty. On the basis of the processed sources, a significant part of which is first introduced into scientific circulation, the specifics of the Black Hundreds movement in Ukraine at the end of the 19th century are characterized and in the first decades of the 20th century.

Results of the research. The issue of the Black Hundreds movement in the Russian Empire in the early 20th century, despite all its complexity and contradictions, has been quite successfully studied by Russian, Ukrainian, Jewish and other historians and publicists for over a century. The history of the origin and formation of the Black Hundreds parties and organizations, their number and social composition in Ukraine and in the empire in general has been significantly studied. Various currents in the Black Hundreds were analyzed – from moderate to extremist, the course of the Jewish pogroms and the causes of anti-Semitism. Researchers have paid less attention to the ties of the Black Hundreds and their leaders with Russian monarchism, the broad peasantry, and the hierarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church. The Duma tactics of the Black Hundreds, their attitude to the tsarist manifesto of October 17, 1905, and the problems of constitutionalism after its promulgation were even less well covered. The activity of the Black Hundreds during the World War I remains a serious gap in the national historiography.