On the question of the nature of the (non)revolutionary movement in Eastern Galicia in 1918

Abstract

Abstract. The purpose of the study is to analyze the peculiarities of the historical narrative “The November Breakdown” (“November Action”) – the national democratic revolution in the Western Ukrainian lands – not as a revolution in its classical version, but a military coup with the elements of the national liberation struggle of Western Ukrainians in the Autumn of 1918. The research methodology is based on the principles of historicism, ethnical politology, systemicity, science, interdisciplinarity. The following general historiographical methods are used: historiographical  analysis, historical-genetic, terminological analysis, comparative, typological. The author adheres to the methodology of institutionalization of political actors in the context of politicization of ethnicities. The scientific novelty. On the basis of the historical and political analysis of the historiographical heritage of the preconditions and the creation of the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic, the events described on October 31 – November 1, 1918 as discrepancies and generalizations of their direct participants, clarified the factors of political and ideological “explanations” of the revolutionary “November Breakdown” in historiography of the Ukrainian diaspora of the 20th Century. Conclusions. The assertion of Soviet and contemporary Ukrainian historiography about the “revolutionary nature” of events in Eastern Halychyna in 1918, and hence the November 1918 national democratic revolution, are still debatable. Halychyna Ukrainians legally proclaimed the Ukrainian state within the framework of Austria-Hungary, expected a peaceful transfer of power in Eastern Halychyna, and the armed uprising of October 31 – November 1, 1918 in the geopolitical realities of the intensification of Polish-Ukrainian relations became a feasible fact as a military coup. As a result, on November 1, an act of transfer of state in Eastern Halychyna was authorized by the Austro-Hungarian government to the Ukrainian National Council, and on November 13, 1918, it proclaimed Western Ukrainian People’s Republic. The origins of the myth of the “revolutionary character”, “revolution” in Eastern Halychyna in 1918, should be sought in attempts to “inject” the really non-existent class struggle of the population of the region into the broader context of the Bolshevik and socialist revolution. The modification of this myth occurred in the conditions of Khrushchev’s “thaw” of 1957 in the famous article of Historian O.Karpenko, later the transformation of the myth began in 1993 in the form of a “national-democratic revolution” in Western Ukrainian lands. The memories of the direct creators of the “November Action”, the source of external origin, as well as the time press, in fact, do not contain the treatment of the events under study just as a revolution, but only as a coup, disarmament, etc., which testifies to the militaristicnature of events.