HARVARD UKRAINIAN STUDIES - See also - Harvard University

THE WORKERS' UNION AND THE JEWS 193Besides its intrinsic importance, the union's history has bearing onanother topic, namely, the overall attitude of the nineteenth-centuryrevolutionary movement in the Russian Empire toward Jews andJewish problems.Kiev, where the Southern-Russian Workers' Union was foundedand which remained its main arena of activity, harbored all kinds ofideological persuasions and shades of radical involvement in the lastthird of the nineteenth century. It was a center of revolutionaryactivity not only locally, but also for the Ukraine and the wholeempire, 9 and for the Russian revolutionary movement proper. Moststriking was Kiev's role in the differentiated evolution of Ukrainianintellectual life and political thought. It brought together the outstandingUkrainian radicals and socialists of the 1870s, among themMykhailo Drahomanov and Serhii Podolyns'kyi, both of whom heldand expressed opinions and attitudes about Jews and Jewish problems.Indeed, Drahomanov was apparently the first radical political thinkerto try to formulate a comprehensive view of the Jewish question in theempire and particularly in the Ukraine.In Kiev, the participation of individual Jews in revolutionary organizationswas important. Noteworthy were Pavel Akselrod, a populistduring the 1870s who became a pioneer of social democracy, as well asG. Gurevich, L. Deich, the Levental brothers, and S. Lourie. AronLieberman, who after leaving Vilnius for London and Vienna(1876-78) became a pioneer of Jewish socialism and of the Jewishlabor movement, attracted some adherents in Kiev. In Vienna Liebermanestablished contact with Ostap Terlets'kyi, the central figure inthe Ukrainian socialist student organization, Sich; he correspondedwith Drahomanov and maintained connections in Kiev. 10The city was inhabited by Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, and othernationalities. Although it was out of the Pale of Settlement for Jews,9It is perhaps indicative that Kiev was second only to St. Petersburg in thereports of the New York Times about the "nihilist" movement in the RussianEmpire during the late 1870s and early 1880s.10On the central role of Kiev at the beginnings of Ukrainian socialism, seeM. Tkachenko, "M. I. Ziber u Kyivi, 1864-1876," in Iuvileinyi zbirnyk naposhanuakademika M. S. Hrushevs'koho, vol. 1 (Kiev, 1928), pp. 349-58. The course ofJewish-Ukrainian socialist contacts can be traced in Drahomanov's attitudestowards Jewish problems, especially his advocacy of Jewish autonomy in a federalsystem and of a Jewish socialist organization. The Hebrew writer Y. L. Ixvin("Jehalel") of Kiev reported about some contacts in Kiev; see his Zikhronotve-hegyonot (Jerusalem, 1968), p. 65.