A Peasant Democrat in the 1848 Revolution?
This blog is part of a series on 'Democratic Identity in the Age of Revolutions'.
Ivan Kapushchak (1807-1868) was born in the village of Liakhivtsi (today – Pidhir’ia), of the Stanislaviv (today – Ivano-Frankivs’k) circle in Austrian Galicia. His claim to fame rests on a short but powerful speech he gave in the Kremsier Parliament of 1848-1849 during the debate on the abolition of corvée and other feudal services and dues. After a short stint in the Imperial Diet, he returned to his home village, remaining active in local politics and community life till shortly before his death. Kapushchak’s biography and defense of peasant interests is similar to many nineteenth-century Galician peasant activists, but his explicit identification with the democratic left in Vienna in 1848-9 was unusual for a Galician peasant deputy. As a rule, peasant deputies from Galicia saw the left as their class enemy, the Polish “red” or “democratic” nobility.
Ivan Kapushchak’s grandfather belonged to the category of “gardeners” – smallholding peasants with only a vegetable garden next to their cottage. Ivan’s father was similarly a smallholder, who owned only 1 Joch and 3 Klafter (approx. 1.5 acres) of land, but he also served as a cantor in the local church and was consequently among the most literate people in his village. Cantors, alongside teachers and priests, were “rural notables.” They were better educated, more mobile, less dependent on agricultural labor, and relied more on their intellectual vocation. However, unlike institutionally trained and state-paid teachers and priests, cantors were unquestionably on the peasant side of rural social and cultural divides. Their training was not formal, their literacy skills were mostly in the relatively obsolete and primarily liturgical Old Slavonic. They shared fully in the local popular culture and were supported by the local community through informal arrangements. In the first half of the nineteenth century cantors also frequently served as teachers in community-funded one-grade parish schools. They were also over-represented among peasant plenipotentiaries, who composed appeals and petitions on behalf of their communities and presented them to the authorities. As a rule, those appeals were directed against their landlords.
Kapushchak went through the usual training as a cantor. Having learned the basics from his father, he was apprenticed to a priest from a nearby parish, who taught him church singing to the accompaniment of a lyre. What distinguished Kapushchak from the majority of Galician cantors was that he subsequently entered one of the better, state-funded Galician Volkschule – the so-called “main” four-grades school in the circle capital Stanislaviv. While most commentators believe that Kapushchak picked up German during his service in the army, he probably started the language in his school years. The school’s curriculum also included the basics of Latin in its final grade. His educational background and linguistic competence help explain his progress through the army ranks: reportedly he was discharged with the rank of Feldwebel (Sergeant). Having left the army, Kapushchak settled down in his home village of Liakhivtsi, married his co-villager Anastasiia Bugger and became, like his father, a village cantor.
The Revolution of 1848 opened a new chapter in Ivan Kapushchak’s life. In response to the events in Vienna, demonstrations broke out in Lviv. Polish revolutionaries organized their National Council in the provincial capital, with branch Circular Councils formed in local centers. The eastern part of Galicia, with its Ukrainian (Ruthenian) majority, developed an even denser network of Ruthenian Councils, subordinated to the main Ruthenian Council in Lviv. To secure their loyalty to the dynasty, the government abolished the corvée and all other feudal obligations of the Galician peasants effective May 15, 1848, sooner than in the rest of the Habsburg empire. When the procedures for the elections to the imperial constituency were finalized on June 1, 1848, a heated electoral contest erupted throughout the province.
As early as June 3, 1848, the Circular Council in Stanislaviv printed its “Appeal to Brothers Townsmen, Villagers and Jews.” The appeal advised people not to elect state officials, but literate, knowledgeable people of substantial wealth. The Ruthenian movement similarly stressed the importance of education and knowledge, but also advised Ukrainian villagers to elect specifically Greek Catholic priests, who dominated in the ranks of the tiny Ukrainian intelligentsia. In 1848-49, liberal public opinion in Vienna, often lumped the elected Ukrainian peasants and priests together as lackeys of reaction, ignorant and servile, elected with the government’s help. In reality, all Ukrainian peasant deputies from Galicia were elected against the wishes of the main Ruthenian Council, competing against Ukrainian clerical candidates.
In the Solotvyno electoral district, which included Liakhivtsi, the main electoral contest was between Ivan Kapushchak and Andrii Dutkevych, who later complained in his diary about the confused “Ruthenian nation,” which sent “36 stupid peasants” to Vienna as its deputies. Both candidates were elected as electors in the pre-elections, and both served on the electoral commission. In the second round 57 votes were in favor of Kapushchak, and 39 or 40 in favor of Dutkevych. The latter blamed his defeat on Polish intrigues. In reality, the defeat probably reflected the existing social tensions between priests and peasants: the former’s well-being relied on cheap or free peasant labor and payments for the ritual services the priests rendered.
Despite these tensions in the parliament’s first session, Ukrainian peasant deputies from Galicia sought advice and, most importantly, help from Ukrainian priests in translation from German. The first parliamentary debate in Vienna that pitted Galician peasant deputies against the German left was on the issue of language. While Galician peasant deputies asked for translators and ability to speak in their own language, German democrats, including Hans Kudlich, insisted on German as the only language to be used in the Austrian parliament. While Ivan Kapushchak knew German, initially he did not stand out among other Galician peasant deputies. Apparently, he wore typical holiday peasant clothes, voted together with the rest of Ukrainian deputies, and did not speak up.
The situation changed during the parliament’s second session. Kapushchak first spoke on August 12, bringing the parliament’s attention to the fact that rights to use wood from manorial forests were essential to the livelihood of Galician peasant communities, and should be preserved, instead of being abolished together with other “burdens” attached to land ownership under the seigneurial regime. Peasants’ insistence on preservation of common rights or easements came as a surprise to the parliamentary left, which, by and large, assumed that unrestricted and fully alienable private property was crucial for political freedom and the rule of law. Then, on 24 July 1848, the leftist deputy Hans Kudlich introduced a bill to abolish seigneurial bond and all the rights and obligations connected with it. Kapushchak’s famous speech on the vicious inhumanity of the seigneurial regime was made during the debate that followed Kudlich’s proposal. Kapushchak’s finest hour came on 17 August 1848, when he spoke in the parliament against compensating landlords for the abolition of corvée and other seigneurial obligations. He argued that in Galicia and Silesia abuses of the seigneurial regime were the rule, not the exception. He listed the most common abuses: corvée in excess of the limit set by Joseph II, arbitrary corporal punishment and detention, illegal seizure of peasant and communal land; all subsequently confirmed by historical scholarship. What impressed the parliament most, however, was Kapushchak’s passionate condemnation of the system that enabled these abuses and reduced human beings to “corvée machines” and, essentially, “slaves.” One eyewitness claimed that Kapushchak was very convincing, his passion palpable, and his face expressed sincere and deeply felt emotions. The protocols of the Reichstag’s sessions confirm that the powerful conclusion of Kapushchak’s speech – “Shall we pay compensation for all these humiliations? I think not. The whips and knouts that wrapped our heads and our wearied bodies should be enough for them and become their compensation” – met with “unabated applause.”
This speech also provides some evidence of Kapushchak’s association with the democratic political camp. Referring to the revolutionary insurrection in Vienna, Kapushchak insisted that the abolition of corvée came only after the “sons of the German people sacrificed their lives for our rights. It is to them that we should give our thanks, and to the good Emperor, who granted just wishes of his people.”
Greek Catholic clergy portrayed him as a manipulated stooge of the German “ultra-liberals” whose German skills meant that “Viennese students snapped him up and he turned into an ultra-liberal and passionate adherent of German democrats.” But his association with the German democratic left did not mean that he severed ties with Ukrainian representatives in the parliament. At the beginning of 1849 Kapushchak acted in concert with other Ukrainian deputies to demand Ukrainian representation on the commission preparing the law on municipalities. In line with the main Ruthenian Council, which demanded the division of the province of Galicia into Western (Polish) and Eastern (Ukrainian), Kapushchak argued that Eastern Galicia was predominantly Ukrainian, not Polish and that the deputy Michał Popiel, elected to the commission, although a Greek Catholic and of Ruthenian origin, self-identified as a Pole and therefore should not be seen as a Ukrainian representative. This time, Polish writers claimed that the “half-literate peasant” Kapushchak was merely doing the bidding of the clerical leadership of the Ukrainian movement.
In practice, Kapushchak was a consistent defender of what he saw as the interests of the Ukrainian Galician peasantry. During the same February 1849 session, Kapushchak proposed to abolish the fees parishioners paid for ritual services. When this proposal, which angered Greek Catholic priests, was defeated, he prepared another that would take away lands assigned to the parishes and used to provide part of parish clergy’s remuneration. Both ritual fees and parish lands, were the major source of social tension between Ukrainian villagers and Greek Catholic priests. Nevertheless, the patriotic Greek Catholic priests again insinuated that there was “someone else’s mind” behind Kapushchak’s proposals.
Ivan Kapushchak’s grave in his home village, photographed in 2015 by Iurii Lysak.
After the dissolution of the parliament, Ivan Kapushchak returned to his home village to live a typical life as a literate villager and cantor. He initiated the founding of a parish school in Liakhivtsi and became its first teacher. He also served for over a decade as a community scribe, and acted for his own and neighboring villages in their protracted, decades-long legal battles over the communal rights to manorial forests. Kapushchak’s time in Vienna as a parliamentary deputy hardly had any influence on his material well-being, which remained as precarious as that of any other peasant. In 1859, a fire destroyed his farmstead. He never recovered from this catastrophe and died destitute.
Kapushchak did not leave any statement identifying himself as a “democrat,” but there are no surviving ego-documents from Kapushchak or any of the Galician peasant deputies to the 1848-1849 Austrian Parliament. Contemporary observers certainly identified him as a member of the democratic left. Moreover, his democratic associations left a lasting imprint on his appearance and habits. He returned to the village sporting a Calabrese hat and the uniform of Vienna’s Academic Legion. He also returned with an addiction to coffee, which he drank daily to the amusement of his fellow villagers. Arguably, in mostly illiterate communities, such visual and material signs were more eloquent than any textual profession de foi.
Andriy Zayarnyuk, University of Winnipeg
