The Habsburg “Ukrainian”

By Dr. Myron Kuropas

The Habsburgs and I go back many years.  When I was growing up, my saintly grandmother, who lived with us at the time, would proudly regale me with a gold medal she kept wrapped in a handkerchief in her dresser drawer.  The medal was embossed with a likeness of Franz Joseph I, the Austro-Hungarian Emperor.  As a young girl she had worked at a tobacco factory in Vynnyky, a suburb of Lviv, then a part of the multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire.  My grandmother was awarded the medal for perfect attendance at work.  She always spoke kindly of Franz Joseph who died in 1916.

The recent death of Otto von Habsburg, the last heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, brought to mind another Habsburg, Archduke Wilhelm Habsburg-Lothringen, affectionately called “Vasyl Vyshyvany” because of his penchant for Ukrainian embroidered shirts.

Wilhelm fell in love with Ukrainians early in life. His mother, Maria Theresia, liked the soft sounds of Ukrainian, a language that reminded her of her native Italian.   Wilhelm read With Fire and Sword, a novel by Henryk Sienkiewicz about the 17^th century Khmelnitsky rebellion against the Polish aristocracy. He was fascinated by the heroic Cossacks.  Poles whom  he knew told him that “Ukrainians were a race of savage bandits”, writes Yale Professor Timothy Snyder in his fascinating 2008 book, The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke. With a growing dislike for the Polish aristocrats he knew, the teen-age Wilhelm decided to learn about these Ukrainians on his own.  With a map of Galicia (Halychyna) under his arm, Wilhelm travelled east into the Carpathian Mountains and soon found himself in Vorokhta, where he was befriended by Hutsuls. He lived among them for a time, learning to sing their songs and perfecting his language skills.  Returning to the family castle-home in Zywiec, in western Galicia, he became committed to the Ukrainian cause.         

As a young adult, Wilhelm was a dashingly handsome fellow with a gift for languages.  Prof. Snyder writes: Wilhelm “spoke the Italian of his archduchess mother, the German of his archduke father, the English of his British royal friends, the Polish of the country his father wished to rule, and the Ukrainian of the land he wished to rule himself.”  Wilhelm’s love for Ukrainians soon came to the attention of Franz Joseph who, in 1912, asked Wilhelm to familiarize himself further with the Ukrainian question.

Habsburg rule had been relatively kind to Ukrainians. After annexing Western Ukraine in 1772, the Habsburgs encouraged the growth and development of Ukrainian culture. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church came to enjoy equal status with the Roman Catholic Church.  A seminary was established in Vienna to train Ukrainian clergy. It was these graduate priests and their children who gave rise to a Ukrainian intelligentsia.  Ukrainians were eventually elected to the Austrian-Hungarian Parliament.  Working assiduously as a liaison between the Ukrainian community and Emperor Charles I, Wilhelm assisted Ukrainian parliamentarians to gain more rights for the Ukrainian minority.     

During World War I, Wilhelm, a trained Austrian military officer, commanded a detachment of Ukrainians from Halychyna.   During the German and Austrian occupation of Ukraine, he commanded units of the Sich Riflemen (Sichovi Striltsi), his embroidered shirt peeking out from beneath his army tunic.  In 1919, Wilhelm served as a colonel in the war ministry of the Ukrainian National Republic.  His goal was to become king of an autonomous crown land Ukraine within a reconstituted Habsburg Empire.

Although the idea of a Ukrainian “king” seems farfetched in 2011, support for a Ukrainian monarchy was not so strange in 1918.   The Germans had forcibly replaced Mykhailo Hrushevsky, Ukraine’s first President, with Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky, a former Russian army general.  The Germans continued to support the authoritarian Skoropadsky while the Austrians supported Wilhelm.  Skoropadsky was unseated by Ataman Simon Petlura who signed a peace treaty with the Polish government, a move Wilhelm considered a betrayal of Western Ukraine. He resigned from his post and moved to Paris.

During his time in Paris, Wilhelm lived a desultory and decadent life which eventually led to a financial scandal.  He fled to Vienna and made contact with his former comrades in arms, Evhen Konovalets and Andrij Melnyk, who were being wooed by the Nazis.  When it became clear that Hitler had no intention of supporting an independent Ukraine, Wilhelm became a spy for the British.  When the Second World War ended, he was hired by the French to spy against the Soviets. In 1947, Soviet secret police kidnapped Wilhelm and brought him to Kyiv.  Sentenced to twenty-five years in prison, he died in captivity in 1948, still a Ukrainian patriot.

Today, over sixty years later, this Habsburg “Ukrainian” remains one of the most fascinating, unsung heroes in modern Ukrainian history.  We owe a debt of gratitude to Prof. Snyder for resurrecting Wilhelm in his book.