Mykhailo Drahomanov

• Name — Mykhailo Drahomanov • Born — 18 September 1841 • Birthplace — Hadiach, Poltava Governorate, Russian Empire (present-day Poltava Oblast, Ukraine) • Died — 2 July 1895 • Place of death — Sofia, Bulgaria • Resting Place — Central Sofia Cemetery • Occupation — Historian, publicist • Language — Ukrainian, Russian • Education — University of Kyiv • Period — Ukrainian national revival • Genre — Academic writing, political journalism • Subject — Ukrainian history, culture and politics • Movement — Radicalism • Spouse — Lyudmyla Drahomanova • Children — Lidia Shishmanova • Relatives — Lesya Ukrainka (niece) Olena Pchilka (sister)

Mykhailo Drahomanov was born on, into a Zaporozhian Cossack minor noble family of Greek ancestry in Hadiach, a town in the Poltava Governorate of the Russian Empire. The family descended from a Greek dragoman who served in the chancellery of Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky. His family's status meant Drahomanov was closely acquainted with the ideas of progressivism from an early age. His father, Petro Drahomanov, was influenced by the liberal ideas of the Enlightenment and provided legal aid to serfs and military conscripts. His uncle, Yakiv Drahomanov, was a member of the Society of United Slavs and a sympathiser of the Decembrists. Mykhailo Drahomanov became an avid learner, enrolling at the Poltava Classical Gymnasium in 1853, where he was exposed to the works of the socialist Alexander Herzen and the historian Friedrich Schlosser. At the Gymnasium, he also began his career in journalism, editing his secret club's handwritten journal. When he took the side of a fellow student against mistreatment by a school inspector, he was expelled from the Gymnasium before he could graduate, only managing to finish his secondary education following the intervention of the liberal pedagogue Nikolay Pirogov.

In Geneva, Drahomanov began working on a socialist political program for the Hromada, as well as several other literary works: penning a collection of Ukrainian socialist music; writing about living and working conditions in Ukraine; and editing a novel by Panas Myrny and Ivan Bilyk. He again engaged in a debate with Russian revolutionaries, such as those of Narodnaya Volya, as he considered the establishment of socialism to require a gradual evolutionary process, rather than a swift revolutionary one. He also criticised their tendencies towards authoritarianism, Great Russian chauvinism and Machiavellianism, particularly disapproving of their terrorist tactics, which culminated with the assassination of Alexander II. In August 1881, Drahomanov became editor-in-chief for the journal Volnoye Slovo, which attracted readers and correspondents from opponents of the Tsarist autocracy, due to its advocacy of the Zemstvo system of self-governance and its opposition to revolutionary terror. Following the 1917 Revolution, the journal was discovered to have been financially supported by the Okhrana, due specifically to Drahomanov's opposition to Narodnaya Volya's terrorism, which Pavel Shuvalov hoped would split the revolutionary socialist movement. By May 1883, the journal had shuttered, after Alexander III committed to reactionary politics and dissolved Shuvalov's project. The following month, Drahomanov was joined in Geneva by other Ukrainian radicals, who together drew up a federalist and democratic program for remodelling Eastern Europe: the Volny Soyuz (Free Union. At this time, Drahomanov also aided in the publication of a geographical study of Ukraine by Élisée Reclus and publicised the Russian imperial prohibition of the Ukrainian language to Western European audiences. He also continued his involvement in Galician socialist politics, sending letters and articles to various publications and progressive political leaders, and keeping a close correspondence with his disciples Ivan Franko and Mykhailo Pavlyk. By this time, Drahomanov's radical socialist politics were beginning to alienate other members of the Hromada, which had moved closer towards right-wing politics in the face of the increasingly reactionary political climate in Kyiv and was now worried that his radicalism might prevent the Russian government from loosening restrictions on the Ukrainian language. In 1886, the Hromada stopped providing Drahomanov with financial assistance, leaving him outcast and isolated.

• Illustration — Memorial plaque dedicated to Drahomanov in Sofia In 1889, while working on a history of Ukrainian literature, Drahomanov was invited by the government of Bulgaria to teach history for three years at the University of Sofia, once again providing him with financial security. Despite demands by the Russian imperial government to expel him and other "nihilists" from Bulgaria, in 1893, his contract was renewed for another three years. Drahomanov's time in Sofia was largely spent lecturing on ancient civilisations and studying Ukrainian folklore and literature, although he still maintained his collaboration with the radical press in his "second homeland" of Galicia. In his articles for the Galician press, he defended freedom of religion and campaigned for the secularization of Galician society, opposing the influence of clericalism in the region. He also wrote a number of works about the situation in Dnieper Ukraine, managing to win over Borys Hrinchenko to his own radical perspective. Drahomanov's continuing radical journalism made enemies of the Polish nobility in Galicia, the Tsarist autocracy in Russia, which each accused him of being an agent for the other. He was also accused of revolutionary centralists in Russia and Galicia, as well as Ukrainian right-wing nationalists, of being an agent provocateur for the Russian Empire. Despite these accusations, he kept to his political convictions, upholding political freedom, self-determination and internationalism. With these principles in mind, he and his followers established the Ukrainian Radical Party, which helped spread and celebrate his ideas throughout Ukraine, despite the censorship of the Russian government. But by the time his ideas were beginning to receive widespread recognition, he was beginning to suffer from an abdominal aortic aneurysm, which left him with a fatal cardiovascular disease. On 20 June 1895, Mykhailo Drahomanov died shortly after giving a lecture at the University of Sofia. He was buried in the Central Sofia Cemetery.

• Collections • Historical Songs of the Ukrainian People (Kyiv, 1874–1875) • Ukrainian Popular Legends and Tales (Kyiv, 1876) • Political Songs of the Ukrainian People (Geneva, 1876) • Articles • Review: "Primer for Use in the Folk Schools of the School District of Kyiv" (Kyiv, 1866) • On the Question of Ukrainian Literature (Vienna, 1876) • Ukrainian literature banned by the Russian government (Paris, 1878) • Panslav Federalism (Grenoble, 1878) • Political and Social Ideas in Ukrainian Folk Songs (Vienna, 1880) • A Geographic and Historical Survey of Eastern Europe (Geneva, 1881) • Program of the Hromada (Geneva, 1881) • The Centralization of the Revolutionary Struggle in Russia (Geneva, 1882) • Germany's Drive to the East and Moscow's Drive to the West (Geneva, 1882) • Free Union (Geneva, 1884) • Peculiar Thoughts on the Ukrainian National Cause (Lviv, 1891) • Letters to Dnieper Ukraine (Lviv, 1893) • Taming of the Shrew in the Folklore of the Ukraine (Chicago, 1893) • The Lost Epoch (Published posthumously) • Journals • Kievsky Telegraf [Kyiv Telegraph] (Kyiv, 1874–1875) • Hromada [Community] (Geneva, 1876–1881) • Volnoye Slovo [Free Word] (Geneva, 1881–1883)

Several members of Drahomanov's family were relevant in their own right. He was an uncle of Ukrainian poet Larysa Kosach (better known as Lesya Ukrainka), whose own education he contributed to, and he was a brother of the writer and ethnographer Olha Kosach (Olena Pchilka). With his wife, actress Liudmyla Drahomanova, he had a daughter, Lidia Shishmanova, who became the wife of the Bulgarian writer and politician Ivan Shishmanov.

In his political journalism, Drahomanov was both fiercely critical of the Ukrainian national movement while writing in the Ukrainian language and ardently defended Ukrainian self-determination while writing in the Russian language. As a result, he was denounced respectively as a socialist internationalist and as a bourgeois nationalist by both sides of the debate. His system of thought was based in an opposition to dogmatism, which led him to reject more rigid political philosophy that claimed to have solutions to all social issues. This resulted in his own political philosophy becoming syncretic, drawing from both liberalism and socialism; patriotism and cosmopolitanism; and Slavophilia and Westernism. Drahomanov's politics centered freedom and dignity, concerning itself mainly with strengthening human rights and defending those rights from the State, as Drahomanov believed the expansion of liberty resulted from the limiting of government power by way of political revolution. He therefore considered the goal of mankind to be movement towards anarchy, a society based on free association and mutual aid. He was influenced directly by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who had formulated anarchism in opposition to the dominant theories of authoritarianism and centralism, in developing his own ideas on federalism. His other influences included Francesc Pi i Margall, John Stuart Mill, Édouard René de Laboulaye, Odilon Barrot, Charles Dupont-White and Benjamin Constant. Drahomanov believed that true freedom could be accomplished through a federation of equal and autonomous individuals, groups and communities. In terms of state forms, he was intrigued most by the federative democracy in Switzerland and the constitutionalism in the United Kingdom. He had a negative opinion of the French Republic, as he believed the centralising tendency of the Jacobins had been counterrevolutionary and had ultimately resulted in the suppression of workers' rights to freedom of association. He was opposed to the concept of popular sovereignty, what he called the "autocracy of the people", represented in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's theory of the social contract. He believed that the idea of the "popular will" was diametrically opposed to political freedom, as the will of the people could be used to justify majority rule or even dictatorship, which endangered both individual and group rights.

He also worked under the names Толмачев, Толмачов and Українець. The authorities additionally record the heading Mykhailo Petrovych Drahomanov. His recorded languages were Russian and Ukrainian. He was the child of Petro Drahomanov and Yelyzaveta Drahomanova. He married Dragomanova Ludmyla. 3 children are recorded: Dragomanov Svitozar, Lidia Shishmanova and Ariadna Trush.

Mykhailo Drahomanov worked in literary studies, history, philosophy, economics and folkloristics. He was employed by Imperial University of St. Vladimir and Sofia University. He worked at Kyiv, Sofia and Geneva.

Mykhailo Drahomanov is recorded as anthropologist, historian, philosopher, professor and literary critic.