POPULATION: (95e) 6,824,000 : 5,280,000 Western Ukrainians in Ukraine.
MAJOR NATIONAL GROUPS: (95e) Western Ukrainian 77%, Polish 7%,
Russian 2%, Moldovan 1.5%, other Ukrainian. MAJOR LANGUAGES: Ukrain-
ian, Polish, Russian. MAJOR RELIGIONS: (95e) Uniate Catholic 64%, Ukrain-
ian Orthodox 10%, Roman Catholic 8%, Protestant 3%, Russian Orthodox.
MAJOR CITIES: (95e) Lwiw (Lvov) 850,000 (1,026,000), Cernivci (Chernov-
tsy) 284,000, Stanislaviv (Ivano-Frankovsk) 270,000, Ternopil (Ternopol)
234,000,
Drohobych
(Drogobych)
106,000,
Cervonohrad
(Chervonograd)
79,000 (118,000), Kalus (Kalush) 71,000, Kolomyja (Kolomyya) 70,000, Stryj
(Stry) 66,000, Boryslav (Borislav) 48,000 (94,000).
GEOGRAPHY: AREA: 22,329 sq.mi.-57,847 sq.km. LOCATION: Western
Ukrainia occupies a flat plain, traversed by the Dniestr River and its tributaries,
rising to the Carpathian Mountains in southwestern Ukraine. POLITICAL
STATUS: Western Ukrainia has no official status; the region, the historic region
of Galicia, forms the Ukrainian oblasts of Lwiw, Cernivci, Ivano-Frankivs, and
Ternopil.
INDEPENDENCE DECLARED: 14 November 1918; 30 June 1941.
FLAG: The Western Ukrainian flag, the flag of the national movement, is a
horizontal bicolor of red over black. OTHER FLAG(S): The historic flag of
Galicia, used by several Western Ukrainian nationalist organizations, is a hori-
zontal bicolor of red over green.
PEOPLE: The Western Ukrainians are an East Slav people, ethnically part
WESTERN UKRAINIA
621
of the Ukrainian nation but historically, culturally, and religiously distinct. The
region’s language, the southwestern dialect of Ukrainian, is quite different from
the Russianized southeastern dialect spoken in Kiev and the eastern provinces.
The Western Ukrainian culture, through centuries of Austrian and Polish rule,
is a Central European culture and is notably free of the strong Russian influences
in the culture of central and eastern Ukraine. The majority of the Western
Ukrainians belong to the Byzantine rite Uniate Catholic church, with an Ortho-
dox minority split between the Autocephalous Orthodox Church, an independent
Ukrainian Orthodox sect banned in 1930, the official Ukrainian Orthodox
Church, and the Russian Orthodox Church.
THE NATION: Populated by East Slav tribes during the Slav migrations in
the sixth century A.D. the region early came under the influence of the non-Slav
peoples to the west. The Slavs of the upper Dniestr River basin became part of
Kievan Rus, the first great East Slav state, in 1054. Within fifty years Kievan
Rus had fragmented into twelve principalities. The most southerly of the prin-
cipalities, Galicia, lay on the frontier between the Latins and Byzantines.
Separated from Russian territory by the Mongol invasion of the thirteenth
century, Galicia eventually came under Tatar rule in 1324. The Poles liberated
and annexed the region in 1349, and in 1386 Galicia became part of the merged
Polish-Lithuanian state. The Roman Catholic Poles, intent on converting the
state’s Orthodox subjects, agreed to a compromise in 1596. The Orthodox
Ukrainians formed a union with Rome and accepted the pope as their spiritual
leader but retained the Byzantine religious rite and their own hierarchy, their
priests preserving the right to marry.
Galicia, with a mixed population of Ukrainians and Poles, became part of
Austria as a result of the first Polish partition in 1772. The southeastern area
around Cernivci, the region of Bukovina, was added to Austrian Galicia three
years later. Better educated and less restricted than the Ukrainians under Russian
rule, the Western Ukrainian culture and language developed separately, influ-
enced by Vienna and Krakow, not Kiev or Moscow.
Lemburg (Lwiw) emerged as the principal center of Ukrainian nationalism in
the Hapsburg Empire in the nineteenth century. The Uniate Church, closely tied
to Western Ukrainian culture, provided the focus of Western Ukrainian nation-
alism.
A border region on the frontier with Russia, Galicia became a battleground
when war began in 1914. As Austro-Hungarian defeat neared in October 1918,
Western Ukrainian nationalists organized to oppose Polish and Romanian claims
on the region. On 14 November 1918 nationalist leaders declared the independ-
ence of Galicia. Romanian troops invaded the new state to occupy the south-
eastern region of Bukovina, but a hastily organized national army repulsed the
Poles in 1919. Threatened on all sides, the Western Ukrainians voted for union
with newly independent Ukraine despite vigorous opposition to the union on
religious and cultural grounds. After the Soviet occupation of central and eastern
Ukraine, Polish troops overran the region during the Polish-Soviet War in 1919.
622
WESTERN UKRAINIA
The Paris Peace Conference, convened after World War I, citing religious af-
finities, assigned most of Galicia to Poland.
The Soviets, as part of the secret Nazi-Soviet pact signed in 1939, occupied
the eastern provinces of Poland in November 1939 and in 1940 took Bukovina
from Romania. The region’s ties to Rome and the West provoked severe re-
pression, with over a million Western Ukrainians killed or deported, including
all those with the smooth hands of the intellectual.
In June 1941 the Nazis launched an invasion of their Soviet ally, and, as
Soviet authority collapsed, Western Ukrainian nationalists emerged from hiding
to take control of the region. On 30 June 1941 the nationalists declared Western
Ukrainia an independent state, but the Nazis ignored the proclamation and oc-
cupied the region. The Germans suppressed the national government and sent
the region’s leaders to concentration camps. Separated from the eastern Ukraine
and eventually promoted as an ally in the Nazis’ anti-Communist crusade, many
Western Ukrainians joined the Germans to fight the hated Soviets.
Retaken by the Red Army in 1944, another half million Western Ukrainians
faced deportation or imprisonment between 1945 and 1949. Stalin accused the
entire Uniate Catholic population, including the Metropolitan of Lwiw, of col-
laboration with the Nazis. Forced to renounce its ties to Rome, the Uniate
Church was absorbed by the official Russian Orthodox Church. While Russian
Orthodoxy received state subsidies, Ukrainian Uniate Catholic priests, nuns, and
laymen filled Stalin’s slave labor camps.
The church, forced underground, became a center of clandestine Western
Ukrainian nationalism from the 1950s to the liberalization of the late 1980s.
The Uniate Church functioned openly after 1987 and received official sanction
in 1988. The legalization of the church opened bitter disputes between the Un-
iates and Orthodox over church properties confiscated in 1946, the controversy
becoming part of the growing rift between the strongly nationalist Western
Ukraine and the traditionally pro-Russian central and eastern regions.
Ukrainian independence, enthusiastically supported in the western provinces,
achieved during the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, temporarily
submerged the east-west rifts. In the 1990s economic hardships exacerbated the
split between the two halves of the country, the nationalists versus the unionists
of eastern Ukraine seeking renewed ties with Russia. In Ukrainian presidential
elections in July 1994, the pro-Russian victor received less than 4% of the vote
in the region, the danger of civil war in Ukraine moving closer. Nationalist
leaders reiterated their readiness to go it alone and to suffer the initial hardships
of independence.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Armstrong, John A. Ukrainian Nationalism. 1990.
Markovits, Andrei, and Frank E. Sipyn. Nation Building and the Politics of Nationalism:
Essays on Austrian Galicia. 1982.
Ramet, Pedro. Cross and Commissar: The Politics of Religion in Eastern Europe and
the U.S.S.R. 1987.
Sullivant, R. S. Soviet Policies in the Ukraine, 1917–1957. 1962.
