Михайло Драгоманов

Fields of activity: Science and Education, Politics
Date of birth: September 6 (18), 1841
Date of death: June 20 (July 2), 1895
Navigator: The Long 19th Century

A historian, literary scholar, folklorist, and public figure, and one of the organizers of the “Kyiv Hromada,” Mykhailo Drahomanov formulated the foundations of modern Ukrainian political ideology, becoming the founder of Ukrainian socialism.

Together with Volodymyr Antonovych, Drahomanov was a leader of the “Kyiv Hromada” until the mid-1870s. In shaping attitudes toward the historical past, he contributed the now well-known thesis of the “lost time” — the period of Ukraine’s subjugation by Moscow after 1654.
Drahomanov and Antonovych held different views on the national idea. The former elevated Ukrainianness to the level of European radicalism and political activism, while the latter adhered to conservative values and called for the accumulation of cultural potential and the growth of a conscious, educated Ukrainian community. While Antonovych was skeptical about cooperation with Russian liberal-democratic circles due to their rejection of Ukrainian aspirations, Drahomanov consistently advocated for a joint Russian-Ukrainian revolutionary front and a socialist movement. Unfortunately, Ukrainians were unable to organically synthesize these two components of the national movement. The youth followed Drahomanov, drifting away from Ukrainian roots, while the older generation remained within outdated Ukrainophilism.
Drahomanov developed the idea of a shared interest between the democracies of Russia and Ukraine and a common enemy — the tsarist regime and the entrepreneurial and landowning classes. In fact, on Ukrainian soil, he became a proponent of class struggle, declaring that “a capitalist cannot be a Ukrainian.” For him, the Ukrainian movement could only be democratic, while anything conservative (in his understanding, negative) was чужим, non-Ukrainian. He sought support among the youth regardless of social origin and, based on the primacy of the social factor, looked for allies not among the national elite (“his own gentry”) but among socially близьких strata of Russian and Polish populations. These groups, however, unlike Ukrainians, had well-formed national ideologies aligned with the goals of Polish and Russian elites — political dominance over the indigenous Ukrainian population in Ukraine.
Drahomanov’s ideas found support in the later activities of Ukrainian social democrats and influenced the formation of national historical memory in both positive and negative ways. Among the positive aspects of his historiosophy were his belief in the civilizational progress of humanity and his constitutional approach to solving social problems.
Until 1875, Drahomanov was a docent at the Department of History at Kyiv University, but he was dismissed for political unreliability. In the autumn of 1875, due to persecution by the tsarist authorities, he was forced to emigrate with the assistance of members of the Hromada. He settled in Geneva (Switzerland), where he founded the Free Ukrainian Printing House and published the Ukrainian political journal Hromada (1878–1879, 1882; five issues) — the first uncensored periodical in the history of the Ukrainian press. Brochures in Ukrainian and Western European languages were also published there, aiming to familiarize Ukrainians with Europe’s political, spiritual, and cultural achievements, while informing the European public about the “Ukrainian question” as it stood after the Ems Ukaz.
Drahomanov’s mission in Geneva marked a new era in the activity of Ukrainian emigration. It was he who brought the Ukrainian issue to the all-European level, thus moving it beyond the framework of an internal Russian or Polish matter.
In the 1870s–1890s, he actively contributed to Galician journals Druh, Svit, and Narod, publishing journalistic, literary-critical, and scholarly articles in Russian and Ukrainian liberal and democratic press, as well as in English, German, French, Italian, Bulgarian, and Western Slavic publications. He gained European recognition through his reports defending Ukrainian literature persecuted by the tsarist regime at the Literary Congress in Paris (1878) and the International Literary Congress in Vienna (1881). Due to health and family circumstances, Drahomanov left Switzerland. At the invitation of the Bulgarian government, he moved to Sofia, where from 1889 he worked as a professor at Sofia University.
Drahomanov did not support terrorist methods of gaining power proposed by Russian revolutionaries. He favored legal means of struggle. Cosmopolitanism in general aims combined with national forms of achieving them attracted representatives of “progressive” Ukraine to his ideas. He inspired centrist political forces at the beginning of the 20th century. His ideas were popularized by Serhii Yefremov and Yevhen Chykalenko. However, Ukrainian socialists did not deeply assimilate Drahomanov’s work, instead orienting themselves toward ideologues of orthodox Russian Marxism.

Author: Ihor Hyrych

Brief conclusions

Statesman and reformer — a multifaceted figure: historian, philosopher, publicist, folklorist, and socio-political activist.
Legislator — did not create laws but developed his own political program and ideology, which had a significant influence on the Ukrainian movement; founder of Ukrainian socialism.
Builder and patron — not a patron in the strict sense, but an important cultural and educational figure whose work was valuable for Ukrainian culture and society.
Church policy — critically viewed church dogmatism and its influence on society, believing that it could hinder social progress, while studying religious and church processes from a historical perspective.
Legacy — contributed to the revival of the national idea: developed concepts of the popular character of literature, researched history, ethnography, and folklore, founded the socio-political collection Hromada, and actively promoted the work of Taras Shevchenko.

Portal Editorial Team