‘Nation, Language, Blood’: (Un)Popular Themes in the Ukrainian Propaganda of the Imperial Era
Abstract
The article considers the extent of the presence of national/nationalist ideology in the ideological content of Ukrainian propaganda literature in the Russian Empire. The study is based on the most widespread and dynamic type of such literature — leaflets, which in the late 19th and early 20th centuries represented for political parties and organizations one of the principal means of communication with the masses. Methodologically, the work positions itself in the field of nationalism studies and employs elements of discourse analysis and content analysis. The categories of ‘nation’, ‘language’, and ‘blood’ are chosen as keywords, and their use together as a ‘triad’ is considered a marker of national radicalism. The problem has not been studied in much depth, and its source base and archaeographical aspects remain poorly known (it may be noted that the corpus of leaflets analyzed by the author is many times larger than previously utilized by scholars). It is found that, among political organizations, only the Ukrainian People’s Party consistently made use of the ‘triad’, which confirms the appropriateness of employing this combination of keywords to mark national-radical ideology. Elements of the ‘triad’ rarely occur in the publications of other Ukrainian political bodies, and in the case of the most numerous and popular of them, the Revolutionary Ukrainian Party (RUP-USDLP), they appear only in the early days of its existence and then later as a result of the initiative of some local branches at the height of the revolution of 1905– 1907. The author thus concludes that during this period the dissemination of the ideology of Ukrainian nationalism was not carried out purposefully, systematically, or on any appreciable scale. Attempts in this direction were consistently made only by the radical right-wing fringe of the national movement, but its activities were limited and had little noticeable impact on society. This was one of the main reasons for the weakness of national identity among the Ukrainian population of the Dnieper basin during the imperial era.
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