Khripachenko, T. I. A Case of Failed Compromise: Russian Liberals and the Projects of Polish and Ukrainian Autonomy on the Eve of the World War I

The paper considers the political debates on autonomy and federation between the Russian liberals and representatives of the Polish and Ukrainian national movements on the eve of the World War I. Searching for the allies among the national movements in the struggle against the autocracy, the Russian Kadets were willing to provide an autonomy for particular borderlands. However, the Kadets’ meaning of autonomy differed from the way the Polish and Ukrainian groups treated this concept. In the Polish case the autonomy presupposed restoration of a separate Polish statehood linked with the Russian monarchy by a real union. In the Ukrainian case the autonomy implied reorganization of the Russian empire as a federation of national-territorial units. The paper will demonstrate that the initial assumptions of the Russian liberals and the representatives of the Ukrainian and Polish national movements were incompatible. This did not exclude the possibility of finding a compromise. However, it could involve only a tactical agreement. It did not presuppose any perspective of convergence of the political programs of Russia’s reorganization on the level of principles. An additional impediment to the dialogue between the Russian liberals and the Polish and Ukrainian national movements was that each side of the dialogue had a wrong self-perception and inadequate image of its potential allies. In this situation, a strategic compromise was impossible, because each of the sides did not consider the other side as authorized to make any final decision.

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