Discussion
This paper considers the resonance of the Great Eastern Crisis of 1875-1878 through the length of political critique in provincial imperial cities of the Romanov and Habsburg empires. It departs from studying the history of international crises through the lens of politics and international relations that primarily unfolded in imperial capitals and, instead, pays attention to middle-level response to a major event of the time.
Examining references to the crisis in Kyiv in the Romanov Empire and Lviv in the Habsburg Empire, this paper argues that this matter of international politics was gradually domesticated by the means of provincial media and semi-legal political pamphlets.
The paper will first focus on the circulation of works and ideas of Mykhailo Drahomanov, an exile intellectual who left Kyiv in 1875 and settled in Geneva after spending some time in Lviv. Drahomanov, being openly critical of the means used by the Romanov Empire to govern its subjects, was banned from the country, and thus could only reach its public sphere through his smuggled political works. I argue that his utilization of the crisis as a tool to criticize the Russian imperial authorities found fruitful ground among liberal intellectuals in Kyiv who otherwise did not share his views. At the same time, his agents in Lviv served as mediators in sharing his smuggled works, thus strengthening the ties between two provincial imperial centres.
Additionally, the paper will argue that various political forces in Lviv utilized the discussion about the warfare in the Balkans, the epicentre of the Great Eastern Crisis, to receive support of the population in Galicia. It will contrast the activities of the Russophile camp led by the newspaper Slovo and Polish national camp related to newspapers Gazeta Narodova and Dziennik Polski, pointing out that both parties were using the crisis as a mean to getting support during the provincial elections in 1876 and question the loyalties their opponents in relation to the Eastern Question and relations with the central government in Vienna.
Ultimately, this paper will argue for the importance of studying provincial imperial cities amidst the modern international militarized crisis as their histories allow to problematize chronological and conceptual boundaries of such events of rupture.
