2014/05 Mark Von Hagen: Wartime Historian: Journey in History (Summer 2014)

May 10, 2014

On my way home to 90-degree Phoenix after freezing (or sweating) for the past five days in Vienna. I left thinking I had mostly gotten over a two-week flu, but that turned out not to be so, so the whole week was experienced through more than the usual haze of jet lag, culture and language adjustment, and exhaustion. But it was a very memorable few days. The reason for the trip was an invitation to give a paper at a conference on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, titled auspiciously “Contested Past? The National and International Historiography on the Downfall of the Habsburg Monarchy.” Since I’ve been teaching and writing about the Eastern Front during the World War, I hoped I had something to contribute, but was, again somewhat mysteriously, “assigned” a title for my paper, “Ukraine as the First Victim of the New Order.”

I arrived Tuesday noon after a very long flight via Chicago and Frankfurt and was met at the Vienna airport, Schwechat, by a driver who had been reserved by Christa, who refers to me as her cousin (a la francaise), and in fact is Christina Schmidt, a longtime Vienna friend who really is almost a relative. As she explained it to one of our colleagues at the symposium, “his Oma and my Oma were best friends.” And her father and my mother were also playmates, and it’s been very nice to keep up our relationship as the third generation. Christa is 64 and retired now a few years from a long medical practice and clinic, where she did a lot of homeopathy and alternative medicine, so we had lots to talk about. We had a bowl of soup (Griessnockerlsuppe, or cream of wheat dumpling soup, my childhood cold and flu remedy) and some water and apple cider and caught up a bit about our families. This was the first time I’d be in Vienna since my mom died last August, and since she was “a Weanerin,” the whole trip was a bit emotional. I quoted a song during my talk that got across my point to the local, Viennese audience, “mei’ Muatterl’ wa’ a’ Weanerin, d’rum hob’ I’ Wean so gean,” which means “my mother was Viennese and that’s why I love Vienna so much.” And I suppose it’s true, because I would never had the ties I do to Vienna were it not for my Viennese mother. I was born a year after she left Vienna after marrying my father. But even before I had a chance to return to Vienna as a child when my dad was stationed with the Air Force in France (Chaumont, Haute Marne), my Viennese grandmother, the aforementioned “Oma,” arrived also to start a new life and I think to help my mother out with me. Oma spoke a very thick Viennese dialect of her generation that I picked up a lot of, so I have a strangely Viennese accent for most German speakers.

But back to World War I. That evening after I checked into the Hotel Post--which advertises itself as one of Vienna’s oldest continuously running hotels and which received such celebrities as Nietzsche, Janacek, and others--I met Andreas Kappeler and his wife, Regine, for dinner. We walked through still warm evening Vienna and ended up at Palmenhaus (a former imperial orangerie) turned into a trendy and tasty restaurant. In the very next building, the Hofburg, the Austrian Foreign Minister, Kurz, was presiding over a meeting of thirty European foreign ministers who hoped to bring some dialogue between the Ukrainian and Russian foreign ministers. (Christa had caught me up on all this, knowing that I was interested in things Ukrainian and Russian.) And so the background was made clear for my own context for the upcoming conference, the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. (What happened at the conference was the Russian and Ukrainian foreign ministers didn’t ever meet, but there was a frenzied meeting at the airport as they were all leaving where Lavrov apparently made some small but important less threatening noises.) Of course, Andreas and I talked a great deal about all this, as we did already in preparation for his recent visit to Arizona, just two weeks ago. Andreas and I have both been part of a group that has been bringing together Russian and Ukrainian historians and others interested in Russia and Ukraine to reimagine relations, pasts, and identities, especially after the lifting of taboos in post-Soviet Ukraine and Russia. He and I co-organized a series of four meetings between Cologne, where he was teaching then, and New York/Columbia, where I was teaching then. We even co-edited the volume of essays. Andreas is now emiritiert as the chair in East European history at the University of Vienna, where he spent his next sixteen years after Cologne.

Andreas and I have also been doing interviews with newspapers and radios, he more than I, about Russian-Ukrainian history. We also have been surprised by our colleagues, both here and even more in the German-speaking lands, who seem to be what Andreas called “Russlandversteher,” (Russia “understanders”). The one I know best here has been Stephen Cohen lately, who defends Putin and denounces the “west” and Obama for restarting the Cold War. Andreas laments that this is the dominant tone in the German media, and, as if to make the point, we walked up to a noisy demonstration with posters and megaphones calling for “end to Russophobia” and to “fight against fascism.” These were far leftists defending Putin; there were as many spectators and police as there were demonstrators, but it was interesting that we had just been talking about the strange meeting of left and right of late when it comes to “understanding” Putin.

The symposium

The conference started the next day, Wednesday, and opened in the Stiftskaserne, (Kaserne is a barracks) which I understood to be a sort of West Point of Austria. One of our hosts was the “Military History Subcommittee of the Research Commission of the Federal Ministry of Defense and Sports;” and, indeed, we were welcomed by Major General Erich Csitkovits, the commandant of the Academy, who greeted all of us with the very Viennese “Gruess Gott” (God greet you). I don’t think I ever heard that from a man in uniform and caught myself saying it myself on the last day, instead of my usual default of Guten Morgen, Tag, or Abend.

The other greeter and host, who also ended up introducing me on my panel, was Professor Michael Gehler, director of the Austrian Academy of Sciences Institute for Modern and Contemporary History.

We learned of an upcoming joint Austrian-Bosnian-Hercegovinan conference in Sarajevo on the outbreak of the war. I learned elsewhere that a monument has been erected in Sarajevo to Gavrilo Princip, the Serbian terrorist assassin of the Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo, the assassination that served as the pretext for the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia, alleged to be behind the terrorist, that was the immediate background to the outbreak of the war. I also learned that one of the more visible surviving Habsburgs reacted to the news of the statue to the murderer as “so typically bad taste.” So I am beginning to appreciate why a conference on the war in Vienna is going to be an interesting experience as long as the haze of my persistent flu doesn’t detract too much.

After the greetings, we got down to work with the first paper by the chief military historian of the Military Academy in the building hosting us, Professor Erwin Schmidl. He focused on the First World War as a military conflict and made all sorts of parallels to the “small wars” and colonial wars and even made references to the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, so I was relieved that my own thoughts along those lines which were part of what I wanted to talk about regarding Ukraine weren’t so crazy after all. The other, longer-term context for this conference is my recent new course on colonial wars and military occupations and that has as its core the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and I had been reading my students’ papers comparing their wars along these lines on the flight over). I was also happy to recognize the name of Herfried Muenkler, a Berlin political scientist whose book on empires I assigned for the course because it makes a case for the United States as a default, ideally benevolent, successor to previous empires, starting with the Romans. It got us into lots of discussions comparing US wars, also in Vietnam, and the French in Indochina and Algeria and the British in Kenya and Ireland. Schmidl has a recent book about Jews in the Habsburg army, a topic that was quite volatile 100 years ago in Vienna. (On the way home from dinner with Andreas, we walked past the statue to Karl Lueger, the anti-Semitic mayor of prewar Vienna. We agreed that the “anti-fascist leftists” we had seen earlier could have been protesting this monument.)

The next paper was also on another very familiar topic, the German Historikerstreit (the historians’ fight) over the place of the Nazi period and its relationship to the Wilhelmine Reich, and particularly the Fischer controversy (surrounding a book by the Hamburg liberal historian, Fritz Fischer, called Griff nach der Weltmacht and his linking the expansionism of Kaiser Wilhelm and his military and political advisors almost from the start of the war to later Nazi invasions and occupations) and all this related to the question of German war guilt. This lecture (the fourth one in German and so early in the morning! And in Viennese dialect for three of the four), was delivered by a German Professor, Wolf Gruner from Rostock, whose sub-field is listed as “integration history.” He reminded us once again why Vienna was such an appropriate place to talk about the war when he recalled that it was at the World Historical Congress of 1965 that met in Vienna when Fritz Fischer faced off with one of his most vocal critics. I’ll come back to that controversy in my own paper, so this is another relief that I might not have been invited by some curious mistake.

The last talk was to be delivered by Professor Alan Sked from London and was nothing less than “the historical significance of the First World War.” I knew Sked from his book arguing against the onetime mainstream view that the Habsburg monarchy was doomed and in decline before the outbreak of the war. His book was about the relatively good economic performance of the empire, despite its uneven development patterns. So I was quite looking forward to hearing this scholar in person finally. But he didn’t talk about any of that; for that matter, he didn’t talk at all, but had to cancel his appearance for family and personal reasons and had arranged for one of his younger colleagues and recent students to read his paper. The surrogate had written his dissertation on the last Kaiser Karl, another figure who shows up in my own story.

Sked’s talk was strangely provocative, but very knowledgeable. He spent a lot of time taking apart my dear friend Sir Michael Howard and the diplomatic historian George Kennan for their making far too much of the uniqueness or the profound transformation brought about by the war. Sked argued that the First World War was not as brutal as it has been made out to be, when compared with either the Second World War that followed (and which Sked believed was profoundly transformational and unique in its brutality) but also with the Napoleonic and Thirty Years’ War, by whose standards, according to Sked, even gas warfare looks humane. He also disputed Howard’s claim that the war was brought on by some crisis in European civilization. Quite the contrary, Europe was riding high in all sorts of spheres and had come out of plenty of military and diplomatic crises, even recently. The war started out of another of these crises for no profound reason but a breakdown of the system. It started in the narrow, largely aristocratic cabinets of the emperors, kings, and president, not from the financial imperialism of the Marxist explanation or some paroxysms of nationalism, militarism, or Social Darwinism. He pointed to the counter trends of pacifism, feminism, and Social Democracy.

Nor, does he believe that the First World War was the cause of the Second World War. It, too, was the consequence of the breakdown of the international system and had very specific moments and not long-term and deep social origins. Nor was it a civil war; this, Sked remarked is the view of Eurorealists, but not history.

Most of this I found to be an interesting perspective, but I found myself objecting to his dismissing the First World War, in the end, as just one more European struggle over hegemony, not unlike the Napoleonic wars or even Louis XIV’s. He claims that the map of Europe changed more from the outbreak of the French Revolution to 1815 than it did between 1914-1918. I perceived this as a very Anglo-American take on things (how’s that coming from an American in Vienna?) after teaching about the Eastern Front and trying to understand what made it as horrible as it was. Being in Vienna and thinking about the fate of Vienna during the war helped me to restate my case for the particular nature of the Eastern Front. For starters Britain and the United States did not undergo occupations; France was partly and brutally occupied, but the occupations on the Eastern Front were constantly shifting from one conqueror/occupier to the next and far more expansive—from current Estonia in the north through Belarus, Ukraine, Crimea, Georgia, and Poland. Another “profound” difference that went along with these long-term, expansive and often brutal occupations was the refugees they produced in multiple directions in the millions by the end of the war and also the prisoners-of-war. Again, the Americans entered the war late and had few prisoners of war; the British and French had more, but the POW experience was “the second wartime experience” in the words of a Russian historian of the Eastern Front. Millions of Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and German soldiers languished in the prison camps of their enemies and even were hired out to work in the local agrarian and industrial economies. All this is vastly different from the Western Front.

Then we need to remember that the war ended for the Western Front in November 1918, but it just took another turn farther east. The most bloody was in the lands of the collapsed Russian empire, but there was also the chaos of the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy a year later and of the Hohenzollern dynasty in Berlin, the Novemberrevolution. Though the left-wing radicalism was not as strong as it emerged in the former Russian lands, it was strong in German and Austro-Hungarian politics as well, where moderate Social-Democrats were challenged by more radical left-wing splinter groups that soon claimed large followings. The brutal civil war that devastated most of the prewar civil society and set the economy back years transformed the lands and peoples of the recent Eastern Front. And, Bolshevik Russia was not part of the Versailles Peace process and the Ukrainian delegation that appeared in Paris was largely ignored, including by that advocate of national self-determination in his Fourteen Points, American president Woodrow Wilson.

In sum, not a bad first day, but I didn’t feel up to staying for the Empfang/reception which was a Viennese version of my least favorite Ukrainian tradition of the furshetka (after the forklet) which is a sort of buffet/cocktail party combination that involves eating, drinking while standing and trying to make conversation while balancing the food and drink. I was too tired to face that and went home for a bowl of liver dumpling soup at the Hotel Post. It tasted close enough to what I wanted to eat; the only way I eat liver.

The next day I was supposed to be part of an afternoon panel that was part two of the nation-state historiographies of the successor and partition states (and the Teilungsstaaten), which included Austria itself (in search of its identity), Hungary after its Reduktion from a central European nationality state to a Magyar national state; on the Czechoslovak nation-state, on Yugoslavia under Serbia’s leadership; Poland’s rebirth, the failed experiment that was the liberal Greater Romania; my talk on Ukraine and one on Italy’s lost victory. All these titles had been assigned to the speakers, apparently, just like I was assigned. I woke up the next morning feeling dizzy and weak and thought it best to call it a day and see if I might recover enough to perform on Friday if they could juggle the program. Frau Ulrike Harmat, of the Austrian Academy, was another one of my hostesses in Vienna and had been communicating with me from the time of their invitation to me. She also gave an interesting talk that tried out different ways of calling what happened to the Habsburg monarchy during the war: downfall, dissolution, or destruction (Untergang, Aufloesung, Zerstoerung) and was about memory and historiography. She not only arranged for me to be able to talk the next morning and urged me to go home after that. But she brought me a thermos of hot Kraeutertee (herbal tea) to keep me hydrated during my performance. Christa showed up for moral support, which was above and beyond the call of duty.

I woke up the next after spending the day mostly in bed and ordering in more soups and black bread with cheese and tea. That was all I could eat—in the land of Wiener Schnitzel (which I at least had the first night with Andreas and his wife), but I ordered Gulasch, another childhood favorite, but it proved too heavy for me, so I could only take a few bites.

The day started with the television news; it was May 9, Victory Day in Russia (and Ukraine). There had been much anticipation of the holiday all week, with trouble expected in eastern Ukraine and possibly Odessa; the Kyiv authorities were not encouraging any celebrations. Putin was presiding over a very much remilitarized parade on Red Square, making patriotic speeches and playing his role as strong man. It was rumored that he might be flying to Sebastopol later in the day to “mark” his recent annexation of Crimea. And sure enough he did, for a vast naval version of what he had just performed in Moscow. He reminded the world of Catherine’s gift to the world, Sebastopol (part of her Greek colony fantasy) and the heroic defense against the Nazis during World War II.

The Big Moment: My performance

My impending talk had been undoubtedly shaped by recent events, though I resisted the temptation to “go there” in my remarks. In preparation for the talk, I re-read my own book on the serial Russian, Austrian, and German occupations between 1914 and 1918 of Galicia, Bukovina, and “Russian” Ukraine. I also re-read the classic on this topic by Oleh Fedyshyn, which I remember reading way back when I was a Humboldt fellow at the Free University in Berlin during 1991, but it felt like I was reading a new book. I turned the assigned title of my talk, “Ukraine as First Victim” on its head and cited Fedyshyn on the Treaty of the Central Powers with Ukraine at Brest-Litovsk in January 1918 and the restoration and survival of a Ukrainian state that was at least formally independent for most of 1918 as “a victory of the Ukrainian national movement” and that it had, as one of its lasting consequences, Lenin’s recognition of the imperative of some kind of federalism to accommodate the ethnic nationalisms that the war and civil war had mobilized. I rejected the Ukraine as victim narrative as too common and one that denies Ukrainians much agency in their own history. I went on to argue that the emergence of the first Ukrainian state of the 20^th century was a joint project--mostly reluctant, unplanned on all sides, and based on very divergent interests nonetheless—of the Germans, the Austrians, and the Ukrainians, and involved the contacts and mutual education and persuasion efforts of Germans, Austrians and Ukrainians in Kyiv, as well as Ukrainians in Vienna and in Berlin, another version of the entangled histories of this region. Among the key actors who played important roles at different periods were the Ruthenian members of the Vienna parliament from Galicia and Bukovyna, the members of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine, one of the most important expatriate paragovernmental organizations that advocated for the Ukrainian cause under the protection of, first, Vienna, and soon after, Berlin. In Ukraine during 1918, it involved the men who negotiated at Brest on behalf of the Rada (Mykola Lybyinskyi and Oleksandr Sevriuk); but it also meant the German Foreign Minister, Richard von Kuehlmann and the German General Max Hofman, one of the most knowledgeable and experienced officials in Russian affairs in the German government; and even Ottokar Czernin deserves some credit for bringing the negotiations to key moments, largely out of desperation over the growing hunger in Vienna and other imperial capitals and in hopes that a friendly Ukrainian state would deliver at least a good part of the desperately needed grain and other foodstuffs. And so the Central Powers recognized the Ukrainian government of the Rada, even as it was being overthrown by the Bolsheviks in Petrograd, who had sent onetime Left SR Mikhail Muravev to ravage the city of Kiev and establish Soviet powers “by bayonet,” as he so brutally stated it himself. All the while Leon Trotsky was trying to drag out the negotiations in Brest with political harangues that eventually exasperated the Central Powers, but opened up an unexpected space for the Ukrainian delegation to play its hand.

Trotsky, by the way, had recognized the Rada delegation even before Czernin did and appeared to see them as allies on the issue of peace without reparations and annexations, a democratic peace. A few days later he reneged on this when a group of Bolsheviks that had been unsuccessful in taking over the Kiev soviet of workers and deputies and had relocated to Kharkiv, a much more industrial, working-class and Russian city, where they proclaimed a Workers and Peasants Ukrainian Republic. (Again, while the Red Guard was shelling Kiev and murdering Russians, Jews, and Ukrainians alike.)

It’s remarkable how many of the main actors have written their memoirs or other accounts. Czernin, Hofmann, Trotsky, just for starters. Again, none of the parties came to Brest expecting to happen what happened; the Germans wanted to work out the next step after an armistice and weren’t ever entirely united about the future of Russia. Part of the decision-makers favored negotiating with the Bolsheviks as realism; others had ties with the White Russians and monarchists who dreamed of restoring a very different kind of Russia. By the way, the Entente powers were largely on the side of the White Russians out of a perceived advantage to restoring the unity of the Russian empire on some new terms and in containing the Bolshevik menace. The French and British early on had representatives in revolutionary Rada-“governed” Kyiv, but left after the Rada’s negotiations with the Central Powers were perceived as a separate peace with the enemy. Afterwards, the French and British support for the Whites virtually excluded them having any sympathies for Ukraine, even the later Ukraine of the Hetman Skoropadsky, another Ukrainian who became an unwitting author of Ukrainian statehood, after making the rather startling transformation from lieutenant general in the Imperial Russian army to Hetman (monarch in his own understanding) of the Ukrainian state and stylizing his rule after an image of the Cossack Golden Age of the 16^th and 17^th centuries that was fed by court historians, including Viacheslav Lypynskyi, the Hetman’s ambassador to Vienna. Other Germans who became unwitting advocates of a Ukrainian state included General Wilhelm Groener, the chief of staff to the Kiev commander, who was key in Skoropadsky’s coup against the Rada government after the Germans had grown impatient with the Ukrainian National Republic (as it renamed itself after returning from exile) for their inability and perhaps unwillingness to organize the collecting and delivery of the promised grain. After the German army began its withdrawal, Groener agonized about leaving the Hetman defenseless, without any army after all they had done together. (Skoropadsky soon resettled to Berlin where he spent the interwar years and, with the critical support of General Groener, founded a Ukrainian “think tank” that was meant to promote the cause of Ukrainian monarchism. The Commander in Chief in Kiev, Groener’s superior, was Hermann von Eichhorn, who gave his life, in a sense, protecting the Ukrainian state, when he was assassinated by a Russian Left SR terrorist who meant to destabilize the German occupation regime and the whole Brest settlement. There are many other authors of the Ukrainian state, and in some perhaps postmodern deconstructionist reading, none of the authors meant for what happened to happen, but they were reacting to rapidly and confusingly transforming circumstances in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution and the accompanying dissolution/downfall/destruction of the Russian empire and the Provisional Government that tried to hold it together for almost another year.

Although one of the conference presenters referred to the German Reichstag debate as good political theater but having no impact on wartime decision-making, that is less true for the German occupation authorities in Kiev, above all the Ambassador, Alfons Philipp von Mumm zu Schwarzenstein. Mumm even invited a group of left-wing and centrist Reichstag deputies to meet with their left-wing Ukrainian counterparts in the first Ukrainian state, including two deputies who had a “Ukraine” plank. Mumm worried about the reports of the behavior of German troops in requisition campaigns against resistant Ukrainian peasants on behalf of Polish landlords and worried about Matthias Erzberger, the Catholic Center party leader, who also developed an interest in the future of Ukraine. The German and Austrian occupations, though not without considerable brutality especially from the summer of 1918 on with the peasant insurgency against the grain requisitioning and the crackdown on trade union that were also striking against restrictions on workers’ rights. After all, the German Social Democrats, the majority party in the Reichstag, were a workers’ party too.

Even in Austria-Hungary, where the parliament had not been convened since the outbreak of war, the domestic news reports of hunger and antiwar protest kept Czernin in a state of near nervous breakdown, according to Hoffman’s memoirs of the negotiations, out of the urgency of getting the Brotfrieden (the bread peace) from the Ukrainians. Still, the Austrians played the subordinate partner in this Ukrainian experiment of the Central Powers. Though Czernin was key to the negotiating of the treaty with the Ukrainians, his political space was very constrained for delivering what the Ukrainians wanted by way of territorial redivisions that involved assigning eastern Galicia, Bukovina, Transcarpathia, and the much contested province (with the Poles and the Russians) of Kholm, The major “other” for the Austrians were the Poles, who had been delegated to rule over Galicia and who dominated in politics and, importantly, also had important influence in Vienna through their parliamentary delegation. On the matter of Transcarpathia, Hungarian national pride blocked that option for Czernin to bargain with. Even on the matter of support for the Ukrainians of Russia and their possible unification with the Habsburg Ukrainians, Czernin was leary of supporting a movement that advocated the dismemberment of another, albeit rival, multinational empire.

Already mentioned was the German and Austrian ambivalence about what future Russia they could or wanted to work with, Bolshevik or White and monarchist. By sympathies, most likely they both preferred former monarchists and military men with some aristocratic pedigree, not unlike “their” Hetman Skoropadsky, a Poltava landowner and the descendant of a long line of Cossack hetmans. But the Germans, at least, were realists enough to understand that the Bolsheviks were not to be dismissed and had to be possible to work with.

And then there were the Bolsheviks themselves, who were pursuing multiple and sometimes contradictory, or perhaps paradoxical, lines of action regarding Ukraine, but fundamentally insistent on a version of their own Petrograd-Moscow Bolshevik “proletarian” dictatorship in Ukraine, even if, as Muravev so honestly put it, on the point of bayonets. The very quickly “organized” elections in the Kharkiv soviet voted to send a delegation to Brest at Petrograd’s encouragement as part of the Russian delegation and as proof that the Bolsheviks had the right to represent all of the former Russian empire (!) They probably didn’t anticipate that the Rada delegation saw, by contrast, Kyiv, as the launching pad for a new democratic, federalist Russia with Ukraine and Russia as equal partners. The duplicity of Trotsky was clear from these early meetings, when he welcomed the Rada delegation as allies even before the Central Powers decided on recognition. And after the Kharkiv Ukrainian delegation was selected and Kiev was besieged by Muravev’s Red Guards, Trotsky withdrew his recognition of the Rada delegation, in fact, denied that he had ever done so, and proclaimed them to be bourgeois pretenders in Ukraine and that the genuine representatives of the Ukrainian toiling masses was the Petrograd-led delegation.

After the Ukrainian treaty was signed, the Bolsheviks signed their own treaty with the Central Powers, which obliged them, importantly, to also recognize the Ukrainian government and to establish diplomatic relations with it to resolve the many outstanding issues from borders to exchanges of citizens wanting to return to the other state. And, so, in this very peculiar and counter-intuitive sense, even the Bolsheviks had their role to play in this provisional victory of the Ukrainian national movement. They recognized an independent Ukrainian state for the first time.

It is true, however, that the Bolsheviks never ceased in their campaign to destabilize Ukraine, and had sympathizers in Ukraine helping to foment peasant and worker unrest against the Hetman-German occupation regime, as they called it. The Ukrainian state did not survive the temporary occupation of General Anton Denikin’s White Army that saw a very Russian Kiev as the launching pad for a Russia, one and indivisible, and who had declared Skoropadsky worse than the Bolsheviks when the Hetman had offered his alliance with the Whites against what he thought was their common enemy, the Bolsheviks. Nor did the Ukrainian state survive a brief Polish occupation during the Soviet-Polish war of 1920, which should also be called at least the Polish-Ukrainian-Soviet war since most of the fighting, as was often the case, took place on Ukrainian lands and involved rival Ukrainian armies and political visions.

When the independent Ukrainian state, the last being the Directory associated with one of the archenemies of Soviet “nationalities” propaganda, Semen Petliura, was reconquered by a still effective Red Army, the first years of Soviet Ukraine involved bilateral treaty relations with Soviet Russia. Those bilateral relations, however cosmetic many historians might hold them to be, nonetheless involved prominent and forceful Bolsheviks on both sides, so it was not yet the relationship of colonial subordination that would be the hallmark of Stalinist Soviet state-rebuilding. These advocates of Ukraine included Mikhail Frunze, a member of the Ukrainian Council of Commissars and first commander-in-chief of the armed forces of Ukraine AND CRIMEA! Frunze was a typical borderlands Bolshevik, of a Moldovan father who served as a feldsher (medical orderly) in the Russian army; Frunze’s mother was Russian. He was born in Bishkek, which long bore his name in Soviet times, and was reported to have known Turkic languages (further suggested by his role as representative of Ukraine to the Ataturk government in Turkey as one of the first approaches of the two “revolutionary” states toward one another. Ataturk was also a military man and a very political one.) The state structure of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that was worked out in the Soviet constitution of 1924 had the Ukrainian republic as one of four constituent parts of the new Union, together with the Russian Federation, Belarus, and the Transcaucasian Federation. This outcome was the result of a battle between Stalin and Lenin on the structure of the new multinational state. Stalin’s platform of “autonomization” would have reduced all the republics to parts of an expanded Russian federation (there’s that federalism idea again), whereas Lenin saw a relationship building on the period of bilateral relations and providing at least some institutional guarantees of equality at the state level. For these ideas, Stalin denounced Lenin as a “bourgeois nationalist,” something that was applied to anti-heroes like Semen Petliura. The Soviet Ukrainian authorities also launched a program of Soviet nation-building that came to be known as ukrainianization and involved drives for mass literacy in the Ukrainian language, support for Ukrainian newspapers, theaters, schools, and other cultural institutions. These were largely the legacy of the practices of the Ukrainian states of the Rada and the Hetman, so here, too, there is more victory and agency than victimhood at this stage. It is true that political censorship restrained any expressions of overt nationalism, but celebrations of Ukrainian culture and language were very politically correct and promotion in the Ukrainian administration was tied to learning the Ukrainian language. The Red Army, under Frunze, who succeeded Trostky as Red Army head and moved to Moscow from Kharkiv, the Soviet capital, introduced ukrainization among the militia formations that were part of the 1924 Trotsky-Frunze reforms. The units’ language was Ukrainian, their ranks followed Cossack traditions, as did their nomenclature. This, before long, too, would be denounced as “bourgeois nationalism,” and Frunze died a mysterious death on the operating table after the Central Committee “ordered” his surgery for what were probably Civil War wounds and the stressful battle conditions that never healed.

The Bolsheviks claimed they had their own “Ukrainian” army under Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, whose ties to Ukraine were largely attenuated, but who had some other “Soviet Ukrainians” on his general staff. But they never went so far, as did Frunze’s reforms, as to authorize Ukrainian units using the Ukrainian language and even teaching those units a new Soviet history of Ukraine.

It is the scope and seeming seriousness of these Bolshevik efforts at Ukrainian nation-building that persuaded several prominent Ukrainian Social Revolutionaries and Social Democrats, the most prominent being the father of Ukrainian history himself, Myhailo Hrushevskyi, who had moved to Vienna and founded there a Ukrainian Sociological Institute, to return to Ukraine, now Soviet.

One of Hrushevskyi’s associates at the Institute was another of my Ukrainian heroes who are the authors of the Ukrainian state, Pavlo Khrystiuk. Khrystiuk, a veteran of the Ukrainian cooperative movement and from a Cossack stanitsa in Poltava, was a member of the Rada governments and the insurgency against Skoropadsky before choosing refuge in post-revolutionary Red Vienna. It was there he composed his masterpiece, Notes and Material toward a History of the Ukrainian Revolution, which he published in 1921 (in Vienna) and has since become a classic of the history of the period from 1914-1919. He takes his very kaleidoscopic view of the revolution from the outbreak of the Great War and the Russian army’s occupation of Galicia to the downfall of another monarchy, that of Skoropadsky, to the forces of the Directory, a successor to the Rada and the UNR, but which never attained the stability or capacity to control events for any very large part of Ukraine that its predecessor states did.

I cited Khrystiuk’s evaluation of the Brest treaty of the Central Powers with Ukraine as “the only non-imperialist, non-annexationist, peace of the war” and far more just and respectful than all of those treaties that the Entente powers devised for the defeated powers at Versailles. Khrystiuk had no illusions about the nature of the Hetman’s power and his dependence on the occupiers for his position; he was active in the underground resistance to the Hetman. And even in emigration in Vienna, he kept to his own faith that “his” Ukrainian revolution was the best one for Ukraine, a revolution that did not subordinate the Ukrainian peasants to the Russian workers, but offered more equality. He often wrote the reverse of the Bolsheviks, that a peasant-worker form of revolution and socialism was needed for Ukraine, one that respected peasants’ cooperative and political organizations and the Ukrainian culture, but also had room for Russians and Jews and other nations living on the territory claimed by the Ukrainian movement as historically or ethnographically Ukrainian. It was Khrystiuk, also, who decried the first war “between two socialist nations,” when the Petrograd Bolsheviks declared war on Rada and socialist Ukraine over an ultimatum to Kyiv to allow Red Guard troops to cross Ukrainian territory to put down the “counter-revolutionary” Don Cossacks. The Bolsheviks also demanded the Rada government cease all talks with the Don and Kuban Cossacks as enemies of the revolution. The Rada was talking with the Cossacks and others, including Siberian oblastniki, about reaching some kind of federation of a more democratic Russia. (It is true that the Don Cossacks, at least, were not particularly democratic but rather martial and authoritarian.) The Rada refused both of these demands, fearing, after the brief Red Guard occupation in December and the attempted Bolshevik coup in Kyiv in 1917, that Petrograd would take advantage of this access to its territory to foment trouble.

And, tragically for the Directory, with the ending of the war and the German and Austrian withdrawal from Ukraine, the Treaty of Brest was annulled, as were all the diplomatic recognitions that the “Brest process” had achieved. Above all, that meant the Soviet Russian recognition, which Lenin had been confident all along would be temporary because he “knew” the Germans were going to be defeated. That was part of his revolutionary faith, together with his fellow believer, Leon Trotsky, who was proud in his memoirs of his brilliant outsmarting of the Central Powers with his “no war, no peace” formula and thereupon departed for Petrograd. That quickly led to the Central Powers reaching agreement on their treaty with Ukraine as a separate peace and shortly thereafter a renewed German assault toward Petrograd, which sent the Bolshevik government fleeing toward their new capital, Moscow. The original plan of the Central Powers had been to have a common treaty with the Bolsheviks and the Rada, another challenge to some of the arguments of Fischer, to come back to that, finally.

When re-reading my own book, I think I came fairly close to Fedyshyn’s account of things, but probably became prematurely captive to Fischer’s student Borowsky’s taking the master’s idea of a master plan of the German Reich for an empire in eastern Europe. I wrote a passage about Wilhelm in particular that made him sound like George Bush, which, on reflection, might have been my context. Our disastrous president might be seen as pursuing some American Griff nach der Weltmacht, and I did start writing my occupation book around 9/11 in New York just after the attacks. So I came to appreciate more Hofmann, Kuehlmann, and Mumm, not so sure about Eichhorn yet, since his occupation regime was not particularly successful or humane. Even Czernin, though he didn’t really mean to, nonetheless was able to take a risk when his capital was on the verge of collapse from hunger. (I told the story in my introduction about my grandmother, Bertha Koenig, also a Viennese lady, who was born in 1908, claimed she saw Kaiser Franz Josef before he died, and, most interestingly, remembers a wonderful Dutch family with whom she spent nearly a year around 1917-18 because Vienna’s food shortages were so severe. That Holland opened its borders to Austrian children was also an important indicator of the humanity that was still possible so late in the war. My great-grandfather, Bertha’s father, was on the Italian front in the k.u.k. Armee.) I think I was destined to be at this conference. I would have loved to go to what looked like a fabulous exhibit on the war at the State Library that included lots of posters and had the very important appeal of the Kaiser’s address to announce the outbreak of war: To my peoples! In the characteristic multinational rhetoric that he believed he stood above as emperor (and king). And on the Austrian Airlines flight to Brussels for my first connection to Washington, I was reminded that another anniversary is coming up this year, the 200^th anniversary of the Congress of Vienna, which concluded its work in 1815 and restored some sort of order after the national revolutions that Napoleon’s armies brought in their conquering wake. The claim was that Vienna invented the congress tradition, and I did start the week competing with the 30 foreign ministers at the Hofburg. But I made a promise to return to Vienna to Christa, who brought me back to some life by deploying her medical training and gave me an Infusion, which I learned was the word for hydration and was what I concluded I needed after three weeks of flu and dehydration (not to mention the three plane rides to get me to Vienna). Christa went across the street to the internationale Apotheke and came back with saline solution, syringes, tubing and the works. We sat together for an hour while I got hydrated and am as good as I am today thanks to Dr. Schmidt’s ministrations. I know I should have gone to pray at the Santa Barbara Ukrainain Greek-Catholic Church, which Andreas also showed me on the walk home Tuesday and which was literally around the corner from my hotel.

Last evening in Vienna

The last night had very nice dinner with another now old Vienna friend, Joschi, Josef Leidenfrost, and Elisabeth, his wife, and their two sons, Matthias and Adam. Matthias had just passed the first part of his Matura, a massive battery of written and then oral exams in history, German, Latin, mathematics, usw. Joschi works as an ombudsman for Austrian universities and is a former historian of eastern Europe himself who worked on the Soviet occupation of Ukraine, so another occupation specialist. I taught about the joint occupation of postwar Germany and Austria in my new class and showed them a clip from The Third Man, my father’s favorite movie and that somehow captures what was for him a fond memory of his time as an undercover officer of the Counter-Intelligence Corps. He told me last summer the Russians had a price on his head because one of his jobs was to smuggle out East Europeans who the Soviets wanted for themselves for one reason or another, mostly scientists and politicians. When my father met my mother, he worried about her and her mother living in their old apartment in the Soviet occupation zone and with two Red Army female officers. He was able to arrange with his boss to get her permission to move to the French zone with a relative. And, to complete the romantic espionage story, my father had to resign his officer’s rank and left the Army to marry the ex-enemy alien that was my mother. My father had talked about accompanying me on this trip, but his health hasn’t been good and if he had come, he’d have ended up taking care of me.

Joschi and Elisabeth celebrated their honeymoon in our New York Morningside Drive apartment. I first met Joschi when I was at Columbia and he was part of a delegation of the then Minister for Education and Science, Eduard Busek, from the Austrian People’s Party, when he got excited about doing a conference about the new possibilities in eastern Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain. As I would learn, Busek was key to a plan to take advantage of as much of the historical regional ties to the east the the Donaumonarchie (Danube Monarchy, a less dynastic and imperial sound than Habsburg) and he and my colleague Istvan Deak planned a sort of policy history conference around the theme of Mitteleuropa (Past, Present, Future, or something along those lines). I got to know Joschi well because we worked together on the program at various points. There were scholar/public intellectuals there from Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, the Czech republic, Slovakia (we even had a tour of Bratislava), but, curiously, no one from Germany. I say no one if you didn’t count that that year I was affiliated with the Free University in Berlin so I flew to Schwechat from Tegel airport. Mitteleuropa was a wartime (First World War) and interwar German geopolitical concept that was thought to have inspired Hitler in his quest for Lebensraum in the East. It was a fascinating conference from the political point of view and during my time in Berlin, 1991, I was witnessing remarkable events in German history and memory, including the vote to move the capital from provincial Bonn to Prussian Berlin, with its association with Frederick the Great and militarism, and the Wilhelmine Reich, and Hitler; and there was the reburial of Frederick the Great’s remains to his own wished burial place in Sans Souci in Potsdam which aroused a great Angst in the German Publizistik about the possibilities for a return to Prussian-like militarism. It was also a time during which whole neighborhoods in the former East still bore the scars of late GDR neglect and even World War Two damage.

Istvan was in his element in Vienna, with Servus and kuess die Hand, Madame, he knew how to win over the Viennese too. He was someone who was my office neighbor for nearly 20 years at Columbia and from who I learned a lot about the k.u.k Armee and the Habsburg monarchy in general, because he invited me to his graduate students’ oral exams and dissertation defenses. I’ve thought how much Istvan would have enjoyed being here; a Hungarian Habsburgophile, but not blind to some of the problems of the late empire, let alone about independent Hungary. And I had a very pleasant reminder of Istvan more directly, when I saw Pieter Judson, a doctoral student under Istvan who was finishing up as his dissertation as I was starting at Columbia, was on the program of the symposium as well. As it turned out, after Frau Harmat was able to get the program rearranged so I could talk on Friday morning at the Austrian Academy of Science building, I ended up speaking after Pieter, who I was very happy to see. Pieter is Dutch by origin, taught for many years at Swarthmore in Pennsylvania, is also a prize winning historian of the Habsburg lands, especially on language politics and identity.

P.S. One other context for the symposium was the Eurovision pop contest that was scheduled for the weekend in Copenhagen. Austria’s entry was a drag performer with the name Conchita Wurst and appeared with a black beard and dress. Eurovision was already a favorite target of the European right as a sign of the decadence and depravity of the West. Several Russian commentators spoke with disgust about Austria’s entry and the Belarusan authorities were threatening to cut off their national audiences from the broadcast. And Conchita Wurst was the winner, to the dismay of the East European right. Not sure how my mother and Oma would have felt about Conchita, but I don’t imagine they would have been among the audience for Eurovision in any event, a happening the New York Times described as a campier and tackier version of American Idol.

Mark von Hagen is professor of history in the Arizona State University School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies. In 2008 von Hagen was elected President of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (recently renamed to Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies). He is the author of Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship: The Red Army and the Soviet Socialist State, 1917-1930 (Cornell, 1990); co-edited (with Catherine Evtuhov, Boris Gasparov, and Alexander Ospovat) Kazan, Moscow, St. Petersburg: Multiple Faces of the Russian Empire (Moscow, 1997); co-edited (with Karen Barkey) After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building: The Soviet Union and the Russian, Ottoman and Habsburg Empire (Westview, 1997); co-edited (with Andreas Kappeler, Zenon Kohut and Frank Sysyn) Culture, Nation, Identity: the Ukrainian-Russian Encounter (1600-1945) (Toronto, 2003); and is coediting (with Jane Burbank) Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700-1930 (Indiana, 2007); War in a European Borderlands: Occupations and Occupation Plans in Galicia and Ukraine, 1914-1918 (University of Washington Press, 2007). He has also written articles and essays on topics in historiography, civil-military relations, nationality politics and minority history, and cultural history.