Mark von Hagen. War in a European Borderland: Occupations and Occupation Plans in Galicia and Ukraine, 1914-1918. Treadgold Studies on Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia Series. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007. 128 pp. $22.50 (paper), ISBN 978-0-295-98753-8.

Reviewed by Andrew Donson (Departments of History and German and Scandinavian Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst)
Published on H-German (April, 2008)

The Forgotten Occupations in the East

Since the end of the First World War, scholarly and literary works about the Western Front have outweighed those about the Eastern Front. This imbalance is regrettable, as historians are becoming increasingly aware that the war in the East shaped the violence of twentieth-century Europe as much if not more than the one in the West. This slim book on the occupations of an enormous area--in 1918 Germany controlled territory several times its size--helps redress this gap by detailing how they aggravated nationalist tempers, exacerbated ethnic violence, and gave the Ukrainians more reason for seeking their own independent state and the Germans new experience in ruling over eastern peoples. The book has a limited source base and mostly neglects the more than five hundred thousand Jews in the area. However, given the general ignorance about these occupations, including the nine-month German sojourn in the Ukraine, it is important reading for historians studying postwar eastern Europe and the rise of fascism in Germany.

The policies pursued during the various occupations from 1914 to 1918 were haphazard, sometimes violent, often contradictory, and in the end, counterproductive. New governors had to negotiate the conflicting interests of various parties: diplomats who pleaded for respect of official war aims; nationalists who aimed to impose a foreign culture and political system; army generals who needed resources for the industrial war; and administrators who had to maintain order and pay judges, teachers, tax collectors, and other bureaucrats. Between the first Russian occupation of Galicia and Bukovyna (September 1914 to June 1915) and the second (June 1916 to January 1918), the governor-general, Georgii Borinskii, learned that ruthless exploitation and Russification of Ukrainian schools, presses, and the Eastern Catholic (Uniate or Eastern Orthodox) churches sabotaged smooth administration and contradicted the war's justification in Pan-Slavism. Because he had to appease the Petrograd Soviet and the Provisional Government and recognized that the earlier policies had incited Ukrainian hatred, Borinskii pursued a more moderate course during the second occupation, tolerating Ukrainian language in schools and abolishing earlier discriminatory laws on religious confession. Even so, he had to deal with the turmoil caused by the Dual Power and an army that demanded deliveries of food and conscription of labor. The scorched earth policy during the June 1915 retreat had already left the Ukrainians starved and deprived. Borinskii was ultimately unable to revive Ukrainian cultural institutions.

Like the Russians, the Austro-Hungarian governors during the second occupation (of Galicia, Bukovnya, and the Russian provinces of Volynia and Kohlm from June 1915 to June 1916) learned from the first (of Galicia and Bukovnya from August to September 1914) that ruthless treatment of Ukrainians undermined the goal of creating a buffer state against Russian encroachment. In anticipation of a new Ukrainian state, governors from the supranational empire during the first occupation allowed the nationalists to form Ukrainian sharpshooter units--a policy similar to the creation of Jozef Pilsudki's Polish rifleman corps. But in so favoring a Ukrainian state, they infuriated the Polish minority and provoked more conflict between the two ethnicities. To make matters worse, when the army overran the Russian territories, the Austro-Hungarians arrested, tortured, and sometimes arbitrarily executed suspected Russian sympathizers, Russian Orthodox priests, and even Greek Catholic ones mistaken for the latter. During the second occupation, Governor-General Erich Freiherr von Diller tried to make peace with his subjects by permitting Ukrainian newspapers, reintroducing Ukrainian into the schools, guaranteeing religious freedom, expanding the Ukrainian legion, and, to a small degree, following the advice of the General Ukrainian National Council.

However, Austria-Hungary's policy contradicted Germany's imperialist goals during the third occupation (which extended from the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in January 1918 to the armistice in November 1918). Austro-Hungarian ministers aimed to build an autonomous Ukraine state in the supranational empire and foment Ukrainian uprisings in Russian-occupied territory, but right-wing German politicians and administrators made increasingly strident calls for annexations to create a central European empire stretching from the North Sea to Persia by way of the Ukraine and the Caucasus. With Austria-Hungary crumbling, Germany gained the upper hand and staged a coup, overthrowing the Ukrainian socialist Rada (parliamentary) government and installing Pavlo Skoropadsky as "Hetman of the Ukraine" and puppet dictator. Germany was little prepared to rule over territory several times its size. General Wilhelm Groener committed just three hundred thousand troops, who had to carry out dangerous food requisitions to feed Germans back home while facing shelling from the invading Red Army and skirmishes with Ukrainian partisans. Kaiser Wilhelm II bestowed Shoropadsky with the Order of the Red Eagle, and preparing for new, profitable markets, major German industrialists sent representatives to Kiev. But Bolshevik agents infiltrated the area, the German commander in Kiev was assassinated, and Ukrainian insurgents attacked the humiliated German troops as they withdrew in panic after the armistice.

It is unfortunate that the events of this last occupation have gone almost unnoticed in German historiography. Future research may very well demonstrate that the experience of occupying an enormous Slavic territory with hundreds of thousands of Jews played a major role in the development of German racial violence. The book is hopefully the beginning of a more detailed investigation of these occupations, as its main shortcoming is its length. In sketching mostly the actions of high political actors, the book says little about the social and cultural transformations, such as the increasing populism of Ukrainian nationalism or the effect of labor conscription and mass hunger on the Ukrainian people. With a few exceptions, it ignores the persecution of the Jews, thousands of whom were tortured and murdered. The author does not provide any firm conclusions about the effect of the occupations on post-1918 eastern Europe (he indicates that the last two pages offer "Preliminary Conclusions"). Nevertheless, the book provides a coherent narrative of a complex subject and lays out an agenda for future research that may very well reshape how we understand post-World War I violence and political instability.

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Citation: Andrew Donson. Review of von Hagen, Mark, War in a European Borderland: Occupations and Occupation Plans in Galicia and Ukraine, 1914-1918. H-German, H-Net Reviews. April, 2008.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14459

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