Act of Unity in the Political Conceptual Sphere of the “Ukrainian 1919”

Abstract

The solemn declaration of the Act of Unity between the UPR and WUPR on January 22, 1919 on Saint Sophia Square became an important stage in the process of implementing Ukrainian unity. It was a milestone which separated two historical eras: if previously the unity of our eastern and western terrains remained only a dream of intellectuals, a poetic vision of writers, or a program political formula for the future, from then on it became a real-time topical strategy. The logic of the national-revolutionary revival saw it as a fully reasoned transition from theory to practical implementation of the visionary project, whose foundations were elaborated back in the stateless time by M. Drahomanov, Yu. Bachynskyi, M. Mikhnovskyi, M. Hrushevsky. However, at the same time, that very active and practical stage forced two Ukrainian republics united in one state to enter into the armed conflict as with Russia in its “white” and “red” modifications, so with the revived Poland cherishing imperial ambitions: in this regard, the very idea of Ukrainian integrity was fundamentally unacceptable. Such new quality of historical processes in the Ukrainian political conceptual sphere also demanded new comprehension, for which the events of 1919 played a crucial part. It was during that period that the UPR and WUPR leaders were actively seeking for the possibilities to optimally accommodate the interests of Upper-Dnieper Ukraine and Galicia within the political strategy of the united state. Often those controversies turned into an open contradiction: the concept grounded by S. Petliura and his followers, which consisted in the institutional completion of the consolidation process by forming the unified government and army for all Ukrainian terrains, was opposed by the concept of the WUPR leaders, who were totally against such approaches, supporting the maximum possible separation of political institutions in Galicia. Although these discrepancies led to tragic consequences of the Liberation Movement, the concept of unity was established during 1919 as an imperative of the social and political thinking of Ukrainians.