Ukrainian political parties of Glukhiv region during the First Russian Revolution (1905 – 1907)

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     This article is dedicated to complex analysis of activity specification of the russian, ukrainian and jewish political local organizations in Hlukhiv and Hlukhiv povit. Especially the aim of research is to analyse a number of issues related to the emergence of centers of Ukrainian political parties in Hlukhiv and Hlukhiv county durindg First Russian revolution 1905 – 1907. The research lights up the role of the noted political forces in region public life on base of analysis of archived and published sources, historiografic literature. The main characteristics of political force’s information and propaganda work among the public are found out. The study aims to establish the advent of local party organizations, especially their formation and activities, identifying forms of influence on social groups. The task is to explore their quantitative and qualitative composition, ideology and content relevant to national problems.

     Among political parties of Hlukhiv povit only RUP and Ukrainian SRs most fully represented and distributed Ukrainian ideology. Among the Hlukhiv descendants of Ukrainian officers only member RUP Dmytro Doroshenko actively defended Ukrainian traditional values and interests. He was able to attach to this important cause significant portion of students Hlukhiv teachers institute. The first mass Ukrainian revolutionary party in Russian-ruled Ukraine, established on 11 February 1900 by the then Kharkiv Student Hromada leaders Dmytro Antonovych, Petro Andriievsky, Bonifatii Kaminsky, Yurii Kollard, Oleksander Kovalenko, Lev Matsiievych, D. Poznansky, and Mykhailo Rusov. RUP was the culmination of earlier attempts at creating a Ukrainian political organization in a society whose intelligentsia was by and large apolitical, and whose Ukrainophile activity was limited to the cultural sphere. Its political antecedents were the Brotherhood of Taras (est 1891) and the first Ukrainian Social Democracy group (est 1896 in Kyiv), headed by Ivan M. Steshenko and Lesia Ukrainka.

      Initially RUP based its politics on a speech delivered by a sympathizer, Mykola Mikhnovsky, at public commemorations of Taras Shevchenko in Poltava and Kharkiv in March 1900; the speech was solicited by the founding members and published as the first RUP brochure under the title Samostiina Ukraïna (Independent Ukraine, 1900). Mikhnovsky called for ‘a single, unitary, indivisible, free, independent Ukraine from the Carpathians to the Caucasus’ and the immediate goal of the ‘restoration ... of rights defined in the Pereiaslav constitution of 1654 and the dissemination of its authority throughout the entire territory of the Ukrainian people in Russia.’

Keywords: First Revolution of 1905 – 1907, Political forces, parties, Ukrainian movement, ideology, student strike, demonstration, elections.