UKRAINIANS AND CITIES 1861-1917. NOT SO RURAL AND NOT SO RUSSIFIED

This article claims that not only was the total urban population of the Ukrainian provinces greater in reality than indicated in the 1897 imperial census, but that the mass migration of Ukrainian peasants at the turn of the century into cities and, in particular, smaller towns, meant that the degree of Ukrainians’ urbanization should not be underestimated nor the degree of their political russification exaggerated. It argues, first, that the urban population figures in the 1897 census must be re-calculated because the then official category ‘urban’ did not include all de facto urban settlements. And second, that a detailed critical re-examination of all available pre-war statistics not using the official definitions will probably indicate more Ukrainians in towns on the eve of 1917 than shown by the official data.

O n the eve of the war 22 million in tsarist Ukrainian provinces declared Ukrainian as their first language. Ukrainian tended then to be the spoken rural language of the illiterate and Russian the written urban language of the educated. But this total number of Ukrainian-language speakers must be regarded as a minimal figure. Alongside sheer negligence and incompetence of enumerators who missed people in the collection of information, there were an unknown number of ethnic Ukrainians who did not admit their first language was Ukrainian. Officials also were known to intimidate their underlings to declare Russian or Russian as their native language. 1 Tsarist Ukraine's total population in 1917 was almost thirty million. At least 5.7 million lived in 152 settlements defined officially as 'towns.' 2 On the eve of the War the typical district capital (povit-uezd) had an average population of at least 25,000 people. It had 2,300 buildings (20% on average brick), at least thirty-five inns, twelve churches, twelve schools, and at least one hospital and one pharmacy. Approximately half had a library and a printing shop, and almost all had night lighting, 5 % had sewer systems, 20 % had piped water. 3 Between 1861 and 1917 urban growth in the de jure towns was phenomenal ( Table  1). The cities of Poltava and Vinnytsia, reflecting the Ukrainian and imperial average, tripled in size. Odessa quadrupled. Sumy, Lutsk, and Kharkiv quintupled. The population of Kyiv increased seven-fold and of Katerynoslav (today Dnipro), ten-fold. Between 1897 and 1910 ten de jure towns doubled in size, during which time the population of Kyiv tripled. 4 Workers in Ukraine's de jure towns increased by at least The census, however, understated the total urban population just as it did the number of Ukrainian speakers. 6 This was because official tsarist statisticіans did not consider socio-economic criteria in their definition of "town." A settlement was categorized as a town if it was an administrative centre. Thus, in the early 19 th century, in Kyiv Volyn and Podillia provinces, newly annexed from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, many settlements considered towns in Polish law became villages in Russian law. Russian law, moreover, had no provision for changing the status of a settlement from village to town other than by tsarist decree. Officially in 1897, west of the Urals there were 761 commercial-manufacturing centers that had at least 2,000 inhabitants each listed as "towns." Yet, 227 of them had little or no trade or manufacturing, while 703 centers with trade and manufacturing and inhabited by more than 2,000 people each were officially listed as "villages." Accordingly, if these latter de jure villages are added to the 534 settlements that really were towns, then the total of de facto towns west of the Urals in 1897 would be 1, 237, not 761. 7 In the Ukrainian provinces (excluding Taurida which included the Crimea), 111 commercial-manufacturing centers with at least 2,000 inhabitants each were officially considered towns. But there were as many as 700 other settlements in Ukraine with more than 3,000 inhabitants each where as much as 50 % of the labour force worked in manufacturing, processing, or transport. Including these settlements into the category "town" would mean the Ukrainian provinces probably had as many as 800 de facto townsnot 111. And these de facto towns were populated by Ukrainians who should be counted as urban and not rural.
Places like Iuzivka and Kryvyi Rih, with factories and populations of over 10,000, were officially villages. 8 Written descriptions, meanwhile, show many such de jure villages were de facto towns. The "village" of Hulai-Pole in 1914 had 16,000 inhabitants, and was within a two-hour ride of a train station. It had three high schools, ten elementary schools, two churches and a synagogue, a library, a bank, a theatre, a printing press, fifty retail stores, a telegraph and post office, a doctor, a pharmacist, a lawyer, dozens of windmills, two steam mills, and two big agricultural machinery factories -converted to armaments works during the First World War. 9 The district of Uman, in Kyiv province, had sixty-one settlements listed as villages, and eight listed as towns, which together accounted for 19 % of the district's population. In reality, one of these de jure towns had no trade or manufacturing and only 1,734 inhabitants, while four settlements with mills, schools, manufacturing, trade, a clinic or pharmacy, and at least 3,000 inhabitants each were listed as villages. If we add to the number of urban dwellers the 14,628 people officially listed as rural, the Uman district de facto urban population would rise from 19 to 23 % -double the total given in the census. 10 In light of the data from Ukraine's three western provinces noted above, a full recalculation of the 1897 urban census figures using a rigorous application of a socio-economic definition of town and information in local compilations like the spravochni knigi, would reveal, first, that the true total urban population of the Ukrainian provinces on the eve of the war likely averaged 25% if not more of the total popu-6 Revised figures on social structure will not reveal anything new about Ukraine's place in the imperial and international division of labour. On the argument that the tsarist Ukrainian provinces constituted a Russian colony: S. Velychenko, (2009 Ryndzionskii, P.G. (1983). Krestiane i gorod v kapitalisticheskoi Rossii vtoroi poloviny XIX veka. Moscow,151,156,171,176,230. This book examines the entire USSR and includes the three southern Ukrainian provinces with two Russian ones into its "southern region" -for which it lists 395 urban-type settlements legally classified as villages. I know of no similar work devoted to the Ukrainian provinces. 9  lation. Second, that by 1917 more than the 2% indicated in the 1897 census, worked in the trade and manufacturing sectors were Ukrainian. And, third, a much higher percentage of the urban population were Ukrainian than shown by the census. 11 The two provinces with the most urban centers, each with a population of at least 5,000, were Katerynoslav and Kyiv (76), while Poltava and Chernihiv provinces had the least (35). 12 These more realistic percentages cannot be compared to the urban populations of countries like Great Britain, France, or Germany, but they are comparable to the percentage of urban dwellers at the time in Canada, the United States, and smaller European countries.
Just as the 1897 census indicated less urban centers than existed in reality, so it inflated the number of ethnic Russians in the Ukrainian provinces. It is likely impossible to determine the actual urban percentage share of Russians for pre-revolutionary years. However, it was most probably lower than commonly accepted. A key indicator are the data on migrant/settler origins. In 1897, for example, 81% of all first-generation urban dwellers were born in the same province as their city of residence. 63% of Kharkiv's population were born in a Ukrainian province -although only 25% of the city's residents gave Ukrainian as their first language. The 1926 census figures, meanwhile, reveal only half of those in Ukraine who declared Russian as their native language were ethnic Russians, which suggests the proportions might well have been similar 20 years earlier. 13 In light of such considerations, and the large number of Ukrainians residing in de facto towns, it follows that Ukrainians by 1917 were a sizable urban minority with probably more than one-third of the de facto urban population while ethnic Russians comprised less than one-third. Although comprising less than 20% of the population in the four Ukrainian de jure cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants in official statistics (Odessa, Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Katerynoslav), declared Ukrainians averaged almost 40 % in the remaining 148 de jure towns. 14 Ukrainians migrated en masse to towns in the decades before 1917 because of the urban jobs created by commercialization, industrialization and governmental expansion. Historians of cities since then, however, failed to consider much of this urbanization, because most of it occurred in de jure villages that they excluded from their calculations. In these de jure villages Ukrainian-speakers were the majority and most likely constituted a higher percentage of those in trade and manufacturing than indicated in the census -13 % and 30 % respectively. Only 43 % of Ukraine's factory jobs, for instance, were in de jure towns, and only Ukraine's four largest cities each had more than 5,000 factory workers living in them. But the majority of factory jobs were in locales officially listed as villages, that had enterprises with up to 5,000 employees and where most if not all inhabitants were Ukrainian-speaking.
In the de jure towns Ukrainian speakers were on average 73% of all workers, and between 30-50% of all industrial workers. Of those Ukrainian-speaking workers only 20% were industrial workers in de jure towns. But Ukrainians comprised 70% of all workers in settlements not classified as 'cities' in the census. In terms of linguistic and socio-economic structure, accordingly, "the Ukrainian proletariat was totally unlike the Russian proletariat." 15 The situation elsewhere remains unexamined.

Ekonomichna heohrafiia
Ukrainy. Kyiv, 205. Uman's population was 46,572. The next largest town was Talne with 9,000. The third and fourth largest settlements were de jure villages: Kameneche (pop. 4,285) and Mankivka (pop. 4,156 Krawchenko, В. (1985). Social Change and National Consciousness in Twentieth-Century Ukraine. London, Besides increasing their share within the working class before 1917, Ukrainians also increased among urban administrators and clerks. Re-examining 1897 census figures would likely show more Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians in urban company and governmental administrative jobs than officially indicated. There is no statistical record of how many employees used which language in private companies outside Ukraine's three biggest cities. Russian was likely used more in Kherson and Chernihiv provinces than elsewhere because there Russians dominated the commercial-manufacturing sector. 16 Nor are all urban employment data broken down by language use. But the percentage of Ukrainian-speaking urban inhabitants and employees in Ukraine's cities inevitably increased in the decades before the revolution given the hiring pool from which the personnel who made-up the phenomenal increase in the size of the government bureaucracy and private-sector companies and organizations came. Russian appointees normally brought Russian clients with them to their Ukrainian postings but the expansion was so great at the beginning of the century, that such favorites could not possibly have sufficed for all positionswhich local Ukrainians would have filled. 17 This happened not only in the central government, and municipalities, but in the provincial zemstva (which each hired on average at least a hundred clerks and secretaries), and co-operatives --which increased in number from at least 7,100 in 1917 to at least 18,000 in 1919. By virtue of their semi-legal 'populist' aura, it might be added, co-ops attracted those unwilling to work in government offices.
In 1897, 40 % of the category "administrative, legal, and police personnel" in the Ukrainian provinces declared Ukrainian their native language. The published data shows that of the approximately 60,000 people who worked directly or indirectly as administrators, the overwhelming majority of whom were urban, at least half were declared Ukrainian-speakers (Table 2, 3). 37,642 of these were clerks in private companies; 20,923 individuals worked in the central government, zemstva, city dumas, and co-operatives. Of this latter group, approximately 14, 000 government, zemstvo, city duma, and village council officials gave their native language as Ukrainian. There are no published figures on language-use for individual ministries, private firms, or co-ops, but these are provided on the provincial level. These indicate that at least half of left-bank government administrators declared Ukrainian as their native language, and 41% of right-bank officials did so. 18 Approximately 43,000 people operated the railway, telephone, and telegraph system -with 64 % of the railway personnel and 29 % of the telephone and telegraph personnel declared Ukrainian-speakers (Table 4).
17 64 % of all those in commerce were Jews, most of whom lived west of the Dnipro. Wealthier educated Jews normally identified with Russian culture. As business rivals and moneylenders they could incur popular wrath when they foreclosed on outstanding loans, lowered prices or bought up properties. Russified Jewish intellectuals and some liberal Ukrainians condemned Olena Pchilka and her Ridnyi krai as anti-semitic for writing on this subject. Poorer Jewish craftsmen and traders understood and spoke their customers' language. Thousands of literate Jews were forbidden from holding any government jobs before1917. Table 5. 18 Women comprised less than 1 % (at most 400) of those employed in administration of whom no more than 120 were declared Ukrainian-speakers. tion for 1917 but, most all offices in de facto towns were likely staffed by Ukrainians.
Tsarist Ukraine in 1917 had more than 100,000 incumbents in state, civil, and private organizations, and an additional 200,000 railway and communications personnel (Table 4). The city of Kyiv in 1917 had approximately 26,000 administrative, legal, police personnel--15,000 more than there had been in the entire province in 1897. In addition, there were tens of thousands of civilian employees working for the army, enumerated as 'military personnel' in 1897 when they comprised approximately 2 to 4 % of that category. Between 1913 and 1917 the number of municipal employees in Kharkiv tripled, to almost 6,000, while the city's population had almost doubled.
The fact that Ukrainian-speakers got jobs in towns, where they had access to printed matter, shows that Ukrainians were socially mobile despite Russian-language schooling. Figures from Poltava, Kharkiv, and Chernihiv provinces reveal that in the 1890s the percentage of pupils who attended and then finished primary schools was the same there as in the rest of the empire -including the Russian provinces. 19 In absolute terms this had produced at least two million literate Ukrainian-speakers between the ages of 9 and 60 who served as a pool of candidates for urban desk jobs at the turn of the century. This total would be higher if we add to it the unknown number of those who knew Ukrainian but declared themselves Russian. Levels of literacy in Ukraine, finally, were higher in 1917 than in 1897 because by then more peasants had learned to read at the increasing number of rural schools, and millions of others learned in the army.
To be sure, minority representation in urban offices does not mean that decisions will inevitably reflect the given group's interests, nor does such participation necessarily promote acquiescence and stability. Administrative behaviour and responsiveness are more functions of social ethos than of origins or representation. Many undoubtedly shared the opinion of the writer Ivan Nechui-Levytsky about Ukrainians who made office careers: 20 And when they [tsarist officials] choose one of our Ukrainians for a higher administrative position, then it is one whose scrupulousness, obsequiousness, policing, and russificatory zeal outdoes that of even the most committed [follower of Mikhail] Katkov. So eager is he to make a career, that his brow sweats at the thought of it. These fellow countrymen are even worse than the foreign russifiers [who come here from] Russia and other Slavic countries.
Yet there is also evidence that Ukrainians used their administrative positions to further what they considered to be the Ukrainian national interest. No generalization concerning which of these two tendencies dominated should be made until both behaviour patterns are traced and researched . 21 Urbanization of populations takes time and normally first generation migrants do not all immediately assimilate into the urban working or middle-class. Traditional behaviour, customs, rituals and conflicts linger. This is what the notion of "ruralization of the city" includes. Nonetheless, the printed media was much more readily available to 19 Eklof, B. (1990 Ukrainian migrants in towns than in villages, and they accordingly provided a bigger audience for the bi-lingual urban educated, politically moderate national activists than they would have had in villages only. In particular, after 1905, when activists could legally form political parties, non-governmental organizations and publish. At the turn of the century, they began to disseminate the idea that the ethnically Ukrainian provinces of the tsarist empire (Rossiia) constituted a political, cultural, and economic entity called "Ukraine," which was distinct from Russia (Velikorossiia). A recalculation of available statistics from the turn of the century would most probably demonstrate that national leaders had a middle-class infrastructure of literate peasants, retailers, and white-collar workers prepared to listen to their argument that business, education, government, and high culture in "Ukraine" should be in Ukrainian and not in Russian.
A re-examination of available data as suggested above would also likely change the understanding of the relationship between modernization nationalization and urbanization. At the time, most Ukrainian activists believed capitalist urbanization was an alien force destroying 'traditional' society via cultural Russification (Fig. 1). This view persists today although not everyone shared it even then. Re-examined data would likely substantiate the views of the perspicacious minority who claimed Ukrainian nationality would develop alongside capitalist urban modernity. Among this latter group in the 1880s was Vladimir Vernadskii, who observed that a Ukrainian version of Russian was emerging in cities and that Ukrainophile sympathies were spreading in central-eastern Ukrainian towns where most people still spoke Ukrainian. Vladimir Zhabotinskii on the eve of the war predicted that in two generations Ukrainian would predominate in its cities. 22 When Olena Pchilka in her newspaper decried wealthy Jews who lowered prices, foreclosed on debts, formed monopolies and bought-up properties she was decrying capitalist practices -although she never said this directly. She wrote that, in response, Ukrainians should not engage in pogroms but learn, adopt and engage in those same capitalist practices -which she presumably did not think would make then less Ukrainian. 23   on nationality (Budiak [Kyiv], no.3, 1918) migrants. Implicit in Porsh's argument was that since local Ukrainian merchants, markets, and labour were 'nationalizing' capitalism and leading companies were beginning to advertise in Ukrainian, the government would inevitably have to administer in Ukrainian. 24 These observations echoed those of the liberal Galician newspaper editor Konstanty Srokowski, who in 1907 explained that Poles had to accept that towns in eastern Galicia were becoming Ukrainian because of migration and that Ukrainian national leaders were their equals.
Second, more accurate figures on Ukrainian urban population would explain where the audience for the phenomenal explosion of Ukrainian-language publishing in 1917 originated. In January of that year there was no legal Ukrainian publishing. By the end of the year 106 Ukrainian newspapers and journals (of a total of 800 in Ukraine) were published with press-runs limited only by high costs and shortages of paper, ink, and qualified workers. During 1917 Kyiv's shops published some Ukrainian school texts in runs of 100 000. Total Ukrainian books published is unknown. But the most published author was Borys Hrinchenko, all of whose works that year totaled approximately 400 000 copies, followed by Mykhailo Hrushevsky, whose published works that year were released in a total of approximately 300 000 copies. 25 Kyiv city had 20 of Ukraine's 38 Ukrainian publishing companies and accounted for almost 75% of all Ukrainian books and pamphlets published in 1917. 26 Publishing in provincial capitals after 1917 is unstudied. 27 While peasants undoubtedly read some of this material, or had it read to them, most readers would have had to have been urban because printed matter requires presses and rail transport. 28 The further away a settlement was from rail lines and presses the less printed matter its inhabitants had. Just how many readers were urban, however, will remain unknown until historians undertake a much needed study on publication distribution patterns.
Third, more accurate figures on literacy, language-use and urbanization, would likely confirm the presence of more urban Ukrainians at the turn of the century than later historians assumed. Accordingly, since most Russian-speaking urban dwellers would have realized they lived in a Ukrainian milieu, it should not be assumed that all of them would have inevitably shared the attitudes of Ukrainophobes like Vissarion Bilinskii or Mikhail Pogodin or Mikhail Katkov. Party membership figures suggest that few within the urban Russian or Russified minority were so hostile to Ukrainian national issues as to be impelled by that hostility to join Russian imperial-loyalist extreme right groups -which were statistically tiny. 29 Activists sharing populist assumptions about nationality like Serhyi Efremov and Evhen Chykalenko duly recorded such hostility. But for the majority of Russians the prevailing attitude would sooner have been indifference rather than hostility. National difference was a part of everyday life in towns -in particular because of the high percentage of Jews. In the town council of Vinnytsia in 1917, a typical provincial capital of approximately 60,000 people, of whom almost 40% were Jewish, "… [deputies] spoke in all languages: Polish, Ukrainian, Hebrew, various jargons, sometimes Russian, and the spokes- 24 Porsh, M. (May 1912 P. (1996). Presa i Ukrainska derzhvanist (1917-1920 rr.). Ternopil, 9;Petrov, S., (2002 117, no 23, 32. 28 Peasants' interest in published matter peaked significantly in the wake of major events and whether or not villages had newspapers and journals often depended not only on geography and technology but on the presence or absence of some committed activist. Prysiazhniuk, Iu. (2007). Ukrainske selianstvo naddniprianskoi Ukrainy: sotsiomentalna istoriia. Cherkasy, 439. 29 Between 1905 and1917 approximately 250,000 people, 1% of tsarist Ukraine"s population, belonged to political parties --8,631 were Kadets, man [of the Jewish faction] Spivak spoke in a mix of all of them." 30 Russian children exposed to Ukrainian could easily learn it. Alexei Tatishchev was a boy when his father became the governor of Poltava province and during his three years there Alexei learned to understand Ukrainian as his mother had relatives living in Myrhorod. After 1905 he worked in the Settlement Bureau of the Land Ministry, where he perfected his Ukrainian as most of the people he dealt with were Ukrainians. 31 Given that loyalties were still multiple before the war, concentric rather than exclusive, language did not denote political loyalties. Patron-client and kin networks crossed national lines, and national self-awareness and self-assertion was still muted. Moderate Ukrainian national activists focused on cultural-linguistic rather than economic issues and offered loyalty in discussions with moderate Russians, in return for autonomy. Most literate educated Russian speakers, urban white-collar professionals, and industrial workers, in turn, tolerated "Little Russians" and their folk songs. Ethnic Ukrainians and Russians who supported a loyalist "Little Russian" cultural autonomy could simultaneously condemn Ukrainian political separatism. The Black Hundreds, who opposed political separatism based on ethno-cultural borders, did not oppose regional "little Russian' or Ukrainian provincial cultural autonomy under the auspices of a "good tsar" or even public use of Ukrainian --until 1912 when they split over this issue. 32 Local authorities monitored national activists and intimidated or arrested the increasing number of those who engaged in anything other than cultural-literary-academic activity. This atmosphere of intimidation deterred the average person from publicly identifying themselves as Ukrainian. In light of recently examined archival materials, however, that repression did not seem to have been as effective in dampening public self-identification as Ukrainian in the pre-war decade as it had been earlier. Specifically, provincial secret police reports from the early years of the war bear witness to this development as they repeatedly warned superiors about the increasing number of national movement sympathizers and activists. They reported on inter-provincial organizational links, widespread teaching IN Ukrainian in rural schools, priests who did not pray for the tsar and gave sermons in Ukrainians, and growing working class and student support for and activism around Ukrainian national issues. 33 When repression disappeared with the collapse of the tsar, public self-identification and loyalties shifted accordingly (Fig. 2). In a collection of letters written to Volodymyr Vynnychenko in December 1918-January 1919 when he was a member of the Directory, for instance, there is one written by a Kyiv resident Petro Tyk: In the name of the Ukrainian nation, its conscious working intellectuals I beseech and implore the Directory of the UNR, before it is too late, before the barbarian communists with the Black Hundreds take Kyiv and slaughter its Ukrainian citizens… to use M-O-N-E-Y B-L-O-O-D and S-T-E-E-L [sic] to secure our statehood….I sincerely welcome Ukrainian Bolshevism in all its forms but emphatically call for struggle against Russian Bolshevik imperialism.
A letter from the same collection was written by a Russian student in Kyiv, Vavra Neronov. She explained she was a "Russkie [katsapka]" 7,857 were Octobrists, and an estimated 2,000 were in Ukrainian national parties. In 1905-07, 84% of 222, 488 political party members belonged to an extreme-right group. This was an anomaly. While Black Hundreds were not averse to supporting Ukrainian cultural demands on a regional level, what motivated peasants to join in droves during those years were extremist activists who promised them land for membership. They left in droves when they realized no land was forthcoming. In 1917 total membership in all Ukraine's parties was at least 214,500 -not including an unknown number of Ukrainian members in the Russian PSR, Zionists, and Kadets. Bolsheviks--50,000; Mensheviks--30,000; USRP--75,000; USDP--40,000; Bund--11,000. Russian loyalist extremist membership had fallen to 8,500. Velychenko, S. State Building in Revolutionary Ukraine, 45-47.  (1906)(1907)(1908)(1909)(1910)(1911)(1912)(1913)(1914)(1915)(1916)(1917)(1918)(1919)(1920)(1921). Moscow,16,305. 32 Black Hundred authors used the terms "Little Russian" and "Ukrainian" interchangeably. Fedevych, "Taras-shevchenko i malorusskie-monarkhisty;" "Termin Ukraina i radikalnye monarkhisty." and apologized for her bad Ukrainian. She continued: "… not all Russkies share that extreme hostility towards Ukraine, its independence and culture." 34 In another instance, there have survived three versions of Kharkiv province factory worker Evdokyi Semenenko's 1919 Bolshevik party membership application form indicating what is now termed "identity shift." He indicated there he had "domestic education," could give speeches, and wanted to be an agitator. In the first form he wrote he was Ukrainian and spoke Little-Russian. In the second that he was Little-Russian and spoke Ukrainian. In the third, he indicated he was Ukrainian and spoke Ukrainian. 35 The writer Borys Antonenko-Davydovych related how his Russified ethnic-Polish high school principal and teacher in eastern Ukraine, by the end of 1917, had changed from a Russian-speaking monarchist-loyalist who had warned his students about the dangerous consequences of Ukrainian sympathies, into a Ukrainian-speaking supporter of the Central Rada who wondered why there was no statue to Hetman Mazepa in Kyiv. 36 When later Bolshevik repression replaced tsarist repression, self-identification and loyalties changed accordingly. In Chernihiv province in late 1917, reported an eyewitness, 'Ukrainians particularly feared the Bolsheviks who dealt with them with exceptional ferocity.' National activists in response, "changed their faith" or, in today's terms, changed their identities. Women previously active in Ukrainian social and cultural work suddenly began saying publicly: "What kind of Ukrainian am I? My father was born in Petrograd and my mother in Voronezh. I was only born here." A Ukrainian former government minister and historian put it this way: "today's 'Russian' or 'Little Russian' could tomorrow become nationally conscious and 'Ukrainian.' Conversely, today's nationalist Ukrainian upon becoming a Bolshevik looked at 'Ukrainian nationalism' as a reactionary phenomenon hostile to the interests of the 'working mass' and took up arms against the Ukrainian movement." 37 Particularly revealing insight into Russian-Ukrainian relations is provided by 170 personnel forms completed by Kyiv district zemstvo staff in October 1918. These asked applicants about place of birth, native language, language competence, and language use at home. These reveal that of forty-six Russians only thirteen could not speak or write in Ukrainian -although they all could presumably read it since they did fill out the form. These thirteen were either Kyiv-born or immigrants, like self-taught Olga Bugachova, who was nineteen years old when she 34 TsDAVO, f. 1492, op 5, ark. 20, 71, 95-96. There also other letters here calling Vynnychenko a son of bitch consigned to burn in hell for separating " brother peoples." 35 Pre-1921 Bolshevik rank and file party membership statistics are rare. A random collection of 52 applications from 1919 are particularly valuable because they indicated nationality and known languages. These forms reveal the Russian nature of the party in Ukraine. Of the 52 applicants, 13 indicated Ukrainian nationality but only 5 knowledge of Ukrainian. Of those, 2 were Jewish. Tsentralnyi derzhavny arkhiv hromaskykh obiednan Ukrainy, f. 1 op 20 sprava 81 no 85-86. 36 Antonenko-Davydovych, B. (1999). Tvory v dvokh tomakh. 2 vols. Vol. II. Kyiv, 514, 534-5. 37 Doroshenko, D. (1954). Istoriia Ukrainy 1917-1923 rr. 2nd ed. New York, 270-1.  (Budiak[Kyiv], no. 2, 1917) arrived in Kyiv in 1905. All the other Russians, like the eight Poles who filled out the forms, were born in small Ukrainian towns and could read, write, and speak Ukrainian. Among them were sixteen-year-old Tetiana Gorbanova from Bohuslav, who after finishing Kyiv's girls' high school and conservatory in 1916 got a job with the district zemstvo as a typist, where a year later she was joined by Vera Vintskovska from Volyn province, who besides Ukrainian, knew Polish and French. Some Russians filled out their forms in Ukrainian. 38 In Kyiv in 1919 Bolshevik city-census enumerators could still refuse to register Ukrainians as Ukrainians. Apparently some were not intimated by Bolshevik rule. One irate resident complained that after he explicitly stated that he was Ukrainian, the enumerator had said: "Okay. It's all the same. Ukrainian -that means Russian. Here there is no difference." He then entered Russian as nationality on his form, and the person concerned would not have known had he not by chance seen the completed form. Enumerators also rewrote all forms written in Ukrainian into Russian. But, by that year, there seem to have been others like the above resident who were prepared to stand-up and declare themselves. Consequently, the published results recorded an increase in the number of declared Ukrainians from 12% in 1917 to 24% and a decline in declared Russians (50% to 42%). 39 In short, a critical re-examination of all available pre-war statistics NOT using the official definitions will indicate a higher degree of urbanization and Ukrainization by 1917 than shown in official data. The massive demographic shift these figures indicate, also suggest a need to reconsider the broader social trends, contexts, and political issues present in Ukraine in 1917. Because real rates of Ukrainian language-use and urbanization outside the four largest cities were higher than officially indicated, historians should not underestimate support for the national movement nor exaggerate Russian loyalist opposition to it. The revised data would support the argument that modernization and urbanization in Ukraine under tsarist-Russian domination was not necessarily inimical to nationalization.    Source: Obshchii svod po Imperii, I: 1, 9, 11; II: charts 20, 20a, 23.
Note: In the census, Category 1 includes among the 43% listed as administrators an unspecified number of lawyers and judges; 17% were auxiliary personnel (caretakers, guards, couriers). In Category 13, 6% were administrators. In the fifty provinces west of the Urals 52% of Category 2 (obshchestvennaia sluzhba) were elected, full-time and part-time officials; 48% were auxiliaries. Subcategories are not indicated or divided according to language or gender for the provinces. Pervaia vseobshchaia perepis, charts 21, 22, vols. 8, 13, 16, 32, 33, 41, 46, 47, and 48. 'Civic councils' includes zemstva, city duma, and village councils. Sadovsky, Pratsia v SSSR . The total number of Ukrainians and Jews able to read and write in Russian was 2,553,041, out of a total literate population of 3,477,591.