Conclusion

Abstract

In the decades preceding the revolution, formidable obstacles blocked the development of the Ukrainian national movement. Autonomous Ukrainian institutions had been destroyed by the end of the eighteenth century and the administration of the country was firmly in the hands of the Russian bureaucracy. The old Ukrainian ruling class, the Cossack officer class, had ceased to exist as a cohesive national elite, and tsarist statist economic policies prevented the emergence of an alternative elite based on the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie. The leadership of the national movement went by default to the not too numerous intelligentsia and semi-intelligentsia, whose ability to mobilise the Ukrainian people was greatly hampered by the relentless efforts of the tsarist regime to block the emergence of the infrastructures of national life — schools, social and political organisations, book publishing and newspapers.