HARVARD UKRAINIAN STUDIES - See also - Harvard University

Reviews 557conflict between the Polish and Ukrainian parts of Galician society and to deal withthe growing influence of two radical political movements among the Poles—Agrarian and Socialist. Attention to all these problems heightened during discussionof the reform of electoral law, first concerning the election to the Council of theState in Vienna and then to the Galician Diet.Potocki was undoubtedly an able politician ready to undertake innovative solutions.He risked concluding an agreement with the growing and increasingly strongUkrainian movement in spite of its unpopularity among Poles. Thus, after a periodof tactical hesitation, he abandoned his support for the Muscophiles. Although therewere some inconsistencies in his behavior, he did manuever deftly between theopposing political forces: National Democrats and Podolians (pro-Muscophile) andVienna, which, recognizing the danger in the development of pro-Russian tendenciesin a border province, started to look with increasing benevolence at theUkrainian movement. The shot fired by a Ukrainian student ended this interplay.Emphasizing the political senselessness of the assassination, Demkovyc-Dobrjans'kyj draws attention to the interdependence between political decisions andsocial emotions. The author allows all sides of the conflict to present their points ofview. He quotes abundantly from Ukrainian radicals who considered Sicyns'kyj anational hero, and he also gives the floor to Metropolitan Septyc'kyj, who did nothesitate to condemn the act which he deemed incompatible with Christian moralityand the Christian concept of politics. A passage from an unpublished letter of themetropolitan to his brother, Stanislaw Szeptycki, reflects the tension prevailing inLviv after Potocki's assassination:The Metropolitan writes from Lviv four days after he said his bold sermon in St.George Cathedral:We are going through hard times. I was warned and asked from all sides not to return to Lvivfor the [Easter] holidays. I am very glad that I did not listen to that advice. It was good that Ireturned; immediately after my return I had an opportunity to condemn the crime and thisgreatly contributed to quieting stirred minds. I am sending you a clipping with [death] threats,verdicts, etc. And I am cautious: I did not do the consecration of Easter foods, I did not acceptvisitors during the holidays and did not reciprocate visits. The holidays have passed calmlyand I think that a relative calm has settled for a time. 9Most Ukrainian politicians of the moderate camp behaved inconsistently. Whiledisapproving in principle of Sicyns'kyj's act, they did not condemn it because ofUkrainian public opinion. They also saw benefits in the drastic manifestation ofUkrainian national aspirations. But it also had negative consequences for thedevelopment of national consciousness among the urban intelligentsia of Ukrainianorigin. The radicalism epitomized by Sicyns'kyj's act became an impulsestrengthening the processes of the polonization of that group, as is shown by thenumerous accounts in the press and the memoiristic literature, so that after 1908there occurred a wave of abandoning the Greek-Catholic rite in Lviv and larger East9Letter of Andrij Septyc'kyj to Stanistaw Szeptycki, Lviv, 28 April 1908, Jan KazimierzSzeptycki Archives in Warsaw, MS JKS-MA-20, p. 9.