Mykhailo Drahomanov’s ideas of parliament

Abstract

Ukrainian parliamentarism and constitutionalism have a long history. Its brightest episode occurred 100 years ago, in 1917–1921, when the Ukrainian activists tried to cope with the breakup of the Romanov Empire by suggesting various projects of its reconstruction. In this article, I argue that the history of these projects began at least half a century earlier, when a young professor of history at Kiev University, Mykhailo Drahomanov, started to reflect upon future reorganization of the Russian Empire into a parliamentary state. Being an ardent advocate of turning the empire into a representative democracy, Drahomanov still felt uneasy about unapologetic support of parliamentarism. Having embraced Proudhonian idea of anarchy or self-government, he realized that the existence of parliament was not a universal cure for all political ills of the Russian Empire, especially for the main one—extreme state centralization. Hence, his views of political reconstruction of the empire did not necessarily mean transforming it into the Russian Republic. It seems that a reasonable and reasoned monarch, who could turn the empire into a federal state with a wide local self-government, would totally fulfill Drahomanov’s ideas of future Russia. His enormous influence upon the pre-war Ukrainian intellectuals explains why only few of them seriously discussed an idea of Ukrainian state independence in 1917.

Introduction

In 1920, Otto Eikhel’man, formerly a professor of foreign and international law at Kiev University, submitted his project of the Ukrainian constitution to the Constitutional commission of the Ukrainian National Republic. The project envisioned Ukraine as a federal parliamentary republic, which consisted of 13 lands. Based on a principle of decentralized representative democracy, Eikhel’man suggested Ukraine to be governed by a bicameral parliament, which consisted of two chambers: Land-State Chamber and Federal-State Council. The first chamber was to include from three to five representatives of each land depending on a number of its population. The second chamber was to be created as a result of the secret, direct, and proportional elections by all citizens of Ukraine, who, to prevent “ochlocratic unreasonableness” and “arbitrariness of a crowd,” had to enjoy a plural vote depending on their age, family status, education, and experience of administering a state (Eikhel’man, 1921).

Eikhel’man’s was just one of a number of proposals of a future constitution, put forward by the Ukrainian intellectuals in 1917–1921. What were their intellectual antecedents and predecessors? This question might be answered in different ways. From a long durée perspective one can argue that the activity of “forefathers”—participants of Polish-Lithuanian early-modern noble parliaments from Ukrainian provinces—has been important for the development of Ukrainian parliamentarism since the early-modern period up to the twenty-first century (for an example of this approach, see Mykhailovs’kyi, 2018). From a short-term perspective, undoubtedly, Ukrainian revolutionaries of 1917–1921 benefited a lot from their experiences of being members of imperial parliaments of the long nineteenth century—Russian Duma, Austrian Reichsrat, and Galician Landtag (see some of their stories in Chornovol, 2002; Gerus, 1984). Most recently, a history of Ukrainian parliamentarism combined both of these approaches (Lytvyn, 2010).

Indeed, in 1917–1921 federal parliamentary republicanism was not a novel idea for the Ukrainian intellectuals. One could trace its emergence back at least to the first Ukrainian political organization of the Russian Empire, The Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius. In 1846–1847, its members put forward a plan of turning East-Central Europe into a federal union of Slavonic countries. This union was “to be ruled by a common seim [parliament] or a Slavonic assembly, which would gather the deputies of all Slavonic republics to decide those matters, common to all the Slavonic union” (Hlyz’ et al., 1990, p. 170). In the second half of the long nineteenth century, this project was taken as a model by other Ukrainian intellectuals, who proposed to turn the Romanov Empire either into a constitutional monarchy, where an emperor necessarily would be checked by a parliament (Grushevskiy, 1907), or into a federal parliamentary republic (Hrushevs’kyi, 1917). As a result of these discussions, after the reappearance of Ukrainian public sphere in the Russian Empire in 1906, the concept of parliament (with its accompanying words of parliamentarism, parliamentarist, parliamentary) actively entered Ukrainian political language. Thus, already, in 1906 the author of popular books in Ukrainian, Mariia Hrinchenko, unambiguously argued that Ukraine should have been ruled by a regional parliament, which would have issued regional laws (Zagirnia, 1906, p. 71). Unsurprisingly, in 1906 and 1910 the concept of parliament was included in the only two pre-war dictionaries of foreign words in Ukrainian language by Vasyl Domanytskyi ¹ and Zenon Kuzelia. ²

Trying to answer the question of when does a story of Ukrainian parliamentarism of 1917–1921 begin, in this article I suggest to leave both long and short durée approaches to the story of the Ukrainian revolution mentioned above. On one hand, in 1917 memories of the early-modern Polish-Lithuanian noble parliaments did not have an important intellectual influence on the Ukrainian visions of their future state. On the other hand, activity of Ukrainian politicians in modern imperial parliaments, especially in the Russian Duma, and its relation to the events of 1917–1921 still require meticulous archival research.

Instead, I propose to look closely at the ideas of a key Ukrainian intellectual of the second half of the century, Mykhailo Drahomanov. I argue that they immensely inspired the Ukrainian revolutionaries of 1917–1921. At the turn of the centuries Drahomanov was actively read, praised, and criticized, but definitely taken into account by all generations of the Ukrainian activists (see, for instance, a summary of Drahomanov’s ideas by Ahatanhel Krymsky in his student notebook from the beginning of the twentieth century in Krymsky, n.d., pp. 20–221). Thus, one should not be surprised to find out that these were excerpts from one of the most important Drahomanov’s texts, which opened Otto Eikhel’man’s 1920 project of the Ukrainian constitution mentioned above (Eikhel’man, 1921, p. 1–1reverse). If previous scholars of Drahomanov’s intellectual oeuvre concentrated mainly on his ideas of federalism (see, for instance, Lysiak-Rudnytsky, 1994, pp. 289–374; Von Mohrenschildt, 1981, pp. 131–165), or on his political thought in general (Kruhlashov, 2000), in this article I am interested in Drahomanov’s views of representative government. Even though he did not write any special treatise about parliament, one can still find numerous references to it in a number of his writings. What exactly were Drahomanov’s ideas of the future reconstruction of the Romanov Empire? Was he an advocate of turning it into a parliamentary republic, or did he suggest to turn Russian absolute monarchy into something else? In this article, after providing a short biographical background, I will discuss Drahomanov’s ideas of parliament, arguing that representative government was for him neither a solution to the most pressing political problems of the Romanov Empire, nor did he necessarily presuppose a replacement of monarchy with a republican form of government. Russian political reconstruction, Drahomanov argued, would succeed only when accompanied by its decentralization.

Biographical background

Mykhailo Drahomanov has been deservedly considered one of the most notable modern Ukrainian political thinkers. He was born in 1841 in a small town of Poltava province in the south-west of the Russian Empire into a petty noble family. In 1863, he graduated from Kiev University as a specialist on Roman history. It was there that Drahomanov for the first time got involved into Kievan Ukrainian circles. In 1864, he submitted a pro venia legendi thesis on the emperor Tiberius, where still a young student argued that the empire had not brought a decline of the Roman world after the republic; on the contrary, in social and cultural terms it seemed to the author to be quite a progressive state. Five years later Drahomanov defended his MA thesis on Tacitus and historical meaning of the Roman empire and was sent abroad to finish his preparation for a teaching position. Some of these months of 1870–1871, during the Franco-Prussian war, he spent in Berlin and Heidelberg, which turned out to be of an utmost importance for him: it was in Germany, where Drahomanov wrote his first important texts on politics, federalism, and autonomism in the Eastern Europe. After his return to Kiev, Drahomanov taught at the university until 1875, when he was fired by ministry of education. Even though the reason of his dismissal had to do with his “political unreliability,” Drahomanov was still issued a passport and was allowed to leave the country. The rest of his life he spent as an emigre, first in Geneva, where he published his own journal and political brochures, and since 1889 as a professor at a University in Sofia. He died in Bulgaria in 1895.

Drahomanov on parliament

Parliament was one of Drahomanov’s keywords. To understand his ideas of it one has to stress that even though some contemporaries pigeonholed him as a Ukrainian nationalist, Drahomanov never dreamt of an independent Ukrainian national state. As he repeated it many times in many of his texts, political separatism was not only almost impossible, but also did not make any sense for Ukrainians (as well as, for instance, for the Russian Poles). In 1888, Drahomanov wrote that

even in my thoughts I could not concede that all our country up to Stavropol could tear away from Russia; I had an indifferent attitude towards wars on the territorial side. War interested me solely from the point of view whether it would cause [. . .] a movement for reforms in Russia. (Drahomanov, 1901, p. 6)

Defining himself “not as any -phile, neither Ukrainophile, nor Slavophile, but simply as a Ukrainian with all-human tendencies, a man of the Ukrainian nation (homo nationis ukrainicae)” (Drahomanov, 1894a, p. 6) and as a “Ukrainian, with claims to be a European liberal and socialist on Ukrainian ground, similar to, for instance, English radicals and socialists” (Vakarchuk, Isaievych, 2006, p. 513), Drahomanov firmly disproved of any nationalism. At the same time, he did not reject the existence of nationalities, and turned a formula “cosmopolitanism in ideas and goals, nationality in the ground and forms of cultural work” (Drahomanov, 1893c, p. 223) into the most concise expression of his political theory. Identifying himself as a Ukrainian, he considered it natural to work primarily for other Ukrainians in his plans for the federal reconstruction of Russia. As he put it in 1894, “I do not separate myself from the Great Russians, but only find Ukrainians to be different from the former, which is why they require special attention” (Drahomanov, 1901, p. 34). A decade later Bohdan Kistiakivsky would call this idea a “nationalization of socialism” (Dragomanov, 1908, p. xxxi). Unsurprisingly, all political ideas of Drahomanov were concerned with the future of the Russian Empire, not of an independent Ukrainian state. This is why it was a Russian parliament, which he discussed in his texts on prospective reconstruction of the Romanov Empire, not a Ukrainian one.

For Drahomanov, this was the first step for the future political reform of Russia—to abolish the “obsolete beast” of the Russian autocracy and replace or amend it with a parliament, or zemsky sobor (Dragomanov, 1877, p. 28). He was convinced in an inevitability of arrival of representative government to Russia, and his argument was that of a historian. Human past provided him with an idea that absolute monarchies were simply historical phenomena, they had not existed from the times immemorial, and would not last forever. Drahomanov underlined that various popular councils and self-governments checked the power of kings and queens already in the most ancient societies, which made freedom an ancient phenomenon and despotism a novel one. A specialist in the ancient history, he emphasized that one could have found seeds of representative government already in the Roman Empire. What concerns Eastern Europe, here local absolute monarchies were checked by the early-modern parliaments like veche or zemsky sobor, both of which were summoned in Muscovy in the 16th to 17th centuries (Drahomanov, 1894c, pp. 104–105, 255–256).

It seems that Drahomanov mentioned Muscovite zemsky sobor in his texts for two reasons. First, it enabled him to argue that monarchism and despotism were not Russian national peculiarities. In Drahomanov’s opinion, Muscovite veche and zemsky sobor perfectly corresponded to the contemporary Western European parliaments, while “the ideas of local theorists of government of the people [. . .] were fully compatible with the ideas of English Fortescue and French Comines.” The French history of representative government especially reminded him of the Russian one:

France separated from the Carolingian conglomerate in 843, the Principality of Vladimir [separated] from the old principalities in 1243; [the first] French états généraux [were convened] in 1302, the first zemsky sobor in Moscow—in 1550; the last états généraux were convened in 1614, the last zemsky sobor—in 1698; the attempt to restore états généraux was undertaken in 1649–1651, the project of a constitutional charter of Anna Ioannovna [was proposed] in 1730. (Drahomanov, 1893a, p. 143) ³

Second, Drahomanov noted that republican democracy was not an inherent trait of the Ukrainian national character. While he recognized that the Ukrainian past provided one with numerous examples of struggle for political freedom, self-governance, and political equality, ⁴ while he called upon the Ukrainian historians to bring their history back to life (Drahomanov, 1893b, p. 169) and spread the ideas of constitutionalism in Russia in print at least in historical texts (Drahomanov, 1894a, p. 5), Drahomanov still considered them to be historical phenomena as well, thus subject to change. For instance, he explicitly mentioned that in the seventeenth century, while the Muscovites were still summoning zemsky sobor, the Ukrainian Cossacks and churchmen put forward not a republican, but a monarchical ideal (Drahomanov, 1893a, p. 143).

In the nineteenth century, however, according to Drahomanov’s evolutionary vision of the past, both Russian and Ukrainian political lives were still passing through a stage of Western Europe’s development, which the latter had left behind in the 17th and 18th centuries. Thus, he was not surprised to find out that in Russia monarchical principle was popular even “among the honest people” (Drahomanov, 1893a, p. 143). However, he underlined that as far as everywhere in contemporary Europe, except for the Romanov and Ottoman Empire, it was agreed that states had to be ruled not just by the czars and their officials, but by the constitutional governments and according to the laws, passed by the elected parliaments, those institutions would inevitably return to Russia (Drahomanov, 1894b, pp. 173–175).

For Drahomanov, two examples of parliamentary democracy for future Russia were Great Britain and Switzerland. The former especially fascinated him. For instance, his daughter remembered that Drahomanov used to admire Britain underlining that its evolution was far more expedient than the French revolutions (Drahomaniv-Shyshmanova, 1991, p. 141). Maybe this was a reason why after his move to Sofia Drahomanov even gave a special class on English parliamentarism to his students, predicting that future would belong to Englishmen (Pavlyk, 1896, p. 425). On the other hand, a longtime resident in Switzerland, Drahomanov got closely acquainted with this country, which became another example of an ideal state formation for him. Thus, for instance, in his review of recent books on contemporary Switzerland (the French translation of The Swiss Confederation by Francis Adams and C.D. Cunningham and Les Alpes Suisses by Eugène Rambert), Drahomanov praised this country for being an example of a successful direct democracy. Moreover, he argued that “every educated person of our times has to get acquainted meticulously with Switzerland, which is a laboratory, where many things were created, which later appear in larger states” (Drahomanov, 1891a, p. 176). His support for a system of a proportional representation during a general voting also came from his Swiss experience (Drahomanov, 1892, p. 202). In both cases, those were parliaments, which allowed Drahomanov to use groupist categories of “Englishmen” and “Swiss”: he underlined that only parliaments revealed a true nature of nations. This is why, for instance, Drahomanov (1915) argued that at least at the moment it was premature to blame the Russian society for the ongoing Russification or any other governmental policies toward Ukrainians as one could blame the French or German governments for their Gallicization or Germanization of population of France and Germany: the existing Russian laws were not passed by a parliament, appointed during general elections, as they were passed in other European countries (p. 52).

Drahomanov’s dilemma of parliament

Despite praising parliamentary democracy, Drahomanov constantly underlined that in his dreamt of state autocracy would not just be replaced with a parliamentary rule (see, for instance, Dragomanov, 1877, p. 28). His main fear was that a centralized autocracy would be substituted with a centralized parliamentarism, which Drahomanov was as much opposed to as to the former (Kruhlashov, 2000, p. 381). In his words, in a heavily centralized state there was no real political freedom. Drahomanov’s condemnation of any tendency toward centralization stemmed from his admiration of an anarchist socialism à la Proudhon, which he got acquainted with during his tour around Europe in 1870–1873, and whose advocate he remained till the end of his life (Fedenko, 1930). As Drahomanov explained it himself in 1881,

the teaching of anarchy, i.e., of statelessness, is an exact opposite of the more or less centralist monarchist, constitutionalist, and republican theories of France in the 1840s and 1850s. Proudhon defined his doctrine as that of complete independence of the individual and of the inviolability of his rights from all authority, even from that of elected representatives. [. . .] Accordingly, Proudhon considered “an-archy” as synonymous with the English term “self-government.” In its practical application the theory of anarchy leads to federalism. (Dragomanov, 1905, p. 124) ⁵

Anarchy/self-government seemed to Drahomanov the main tool for the improvement of life of the common people, their “political, social and cultural advancement, where a nationality is only a ground, form and experience” (Dragomanov, 1915, p. 115). He clearly juxtaposed this idea to any Jacobin-inspired vision of a centralized state, not only to the Romanov Empire (which belonged not to Russian people, but to people of Russia) ⁶ or Habsburg Empire. As Bohdan Kistiakivsky put it,

[Drahomanov] did not stop to prove the disastrous influence of centralism for the sole existence of political freedom, whomever this centralism came from: be it from the autocratic bureaucracy, or centralizing revolutionary parties, and whichever ideals this centralism supported, be it a falsely understood idea of unity and inseparability of Russia, or historical rights of Poland for Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine and for a restoration of Polish statehood in old borders. (Dragomanov, 1908, p. xvi)

Thus, even being an apologist of a constitution, he definitively opposed any centralized government. On the contrary, Drahomanov always stressed the idea of federalism, of local self-government, or the recognition of the widest autonomous rights for political, social, and national groups, rights for a wide local self-government. After him, popular representation had necessarily to be linked as closely as possible with a local and regional representation. At the same time, he argued that political freedom was different from a constitutional form of government: autocratic parliament could not grant personal freedom, freedom of faith, as well as of unbelief, of national life, of speech as those could not be granted by an autocrat sovereign. In particular, Drahomanov pointed out that probable Russian zemsky sobor would preserve the predominance of a “Great Russian nation” and would protect the interests of the central Russian provinces over the rest, especially what concerned schooling and economy—this is what Drahomanov saw happening in Germany, where Berlin dominated Poznan and Alsace, and in the Habsburg empire, where Vienna and Budapest dominated Slavs. This meant that there was no reason for the “sons of nations and regions of Russia” to shed its blood during any revolution if its only result was an establishment of an autocratic zemsky sobor. After Drahomanov, such bloodshed would have some meaning only if imperial borderlands were governed by their own parliaments, which in this way would check the central parliament (Dragomanov, 1906, p. 410).

In addition to his categorical disapproval and condemnation of terror as a method of achieving political aims, the last argument was one of the reasons of Dragomanov’s criticism of Russian populists: he found them to be too centralist. After Drahomanov, already a couple of days after they killed Aleksandr II, members of the People’s Will suggested Aleksandr III to convene a Constituent Assembly on behalf of all Russian people [russkogo naroda] to solve its most pressing problems. For Drahomanov, this project was problematic as

Since the times of a famous Déclaration des droits de l’homme, if not earlier, science and practice of civilized countries realized the existence of whole concentric circles of the rights of individual, public, communal, regional, and national. People, who are interested in them, do not have to ask any kind of national assembly, [. . .] a more or less random gathering, led by the dominant nationality, for them. Non-recognition of these rights by this assembly is neither morally binding, nor legal. (Dragomanov, 1906, p. 730)

Hence, even if political liberation of Russia would begin from summoning a zemsky sobor, Drahomanov wished that elimination of a czarist-bureaucratic autocracy would not be limited just by a reestablishment of parliament, which would subsequently act in an autocratic fashion (Ukraїnets’, 1891, p. 320). This is why, even though for Drahomanov a parliamentary state was by definition the most superior form of political organization, even being an ardent republican, his vision of a future parliamentary Russian state was not necessarily that of a Russian republic. Drahomanov explicitly mentioned that the head of the future Russia might even be a (reasonable) hereditary emperor.

If one were to choose [. . .],—wrote he in 1884,—on one hand, between local self-government with personal rights even under an autocratic-monarchic form of state government, and, on the other hand, between the representative government without personal freedom and local self-government, then, of course, a choice should have been made in favor of the first. (Dragomanov, 1884, p. 59)

The second option was realized in France, whose parliament created a republic according to a principle (probably, most detested by Drahomanov) of one and indivisible state, thus substituting a “despotism of tsars” by a “despotism of freedom.” After the idea of a centralized parliamentary rule á la France spread around Europe, it became especially harmful in multinational states like Austro-Hungary: according to Drahomanov, local parliamentarism simply turned into a tool for a German and Hungarian rule over Slavs and Romanians, and of Poles over Ukrainians (Dragomanov, 1884, p. 65). As far as Drahomanov was very much afraid that Russia would follow the model of French centralized parliamentarism, he was convinced that it was enough to reason the Romanov dynasty not necessarily removing it (vrazumit’, and not ustranit’) (Dragomanov, 1884, p. 69). Instead of copying the examples of France and other parliamentary countries without any guarantees of personal or public rights and freedoms, he would have liked Russia to follow the paths of Britain, Belgium, or Netherlands (Ukraїnets’, 1891, p. 320). In 1884, Dra-homanov published his own project of a future reconstruction of Russia, Free Union, which tried to take all the thoughts above into consideration.

Drahomanov’s project of a Free Union

In 1884, Drahomanov summed up his ideas on how to reform the Russian Empire in a brochure Free Union (Dragomanov, 1884). It became immensely popular among the contemporaries, some of whom (for instance, Pyotr Struve) even called it the first detailed project of Russian constitution. Free Union was a name of an organization, which Drahomanov suggested to create on the territory of the Russian Empire to popularize there the ideas of political freedom, which not only meant the rights of man and the citizen, but most importantly the idea of self-government.

According to Drahomanov, self-government was to become a key principle for a future reconstruction of Russia: the country was to be divided approximately into 20 regions, defined, after Swiss cantons, according to their geography, economy, and ethnography. Some time ago Dimitri Von Mohrenschildt (1981) argued that Drahomanov advocated “a federal constitution in Russia with historical regions as units of the federation” (p. 131). In fact, the criterion for defining his future Russian states was of an utmost importance for Drahomanov, who tried to avoid both historical or national grounds for defining those units. At that particular moment, he argued, division of Russia into separate national regions according to the historical or ethnographic map would be very doctrinaire-like, especially taking into consideration that historical and national borders did not always correspond to the borders of economic basins. Therefore, after Drahomanov, an a priori creation of provinces according to their history or prevailing nationalities could have contributed to the emergence of national centralisms similar to those already existing in the crown lands of Austria-Hungary. Besides, already in the 1880s Drahomanov anticipated a critique of national-territorial autonomy, which is today associated solely with Austro-Hungarian Marxists. He argued that creation of separate Ukrainian national unit would leave out of it and deprive of their national rights those Ukrainians, which resided in other parts of the Russian Empire. On the other hand, the existing governorates were inappropriate units for the reconstructed Russia as they were created for administrative reasons, often very haphazard in nature. In the end, his Free Union project was grounded not only on some peculiar attribute of the land or population, but

as far as possible on a totality of the area’s peculiarities: natural, which determine the unity of the economic interests of its inhabitants, and also national, determining unity of its moral interests, while at the same time we paid attention to the peculiarities of the first kind. [. . .] This is why in some cases of our project of Russia’s division we tolerated a mixed population, in another a population of one nationality is divided into several regions, as in the case of the large and widespread populations of Great Russians and Ukrainians. (Dragomanov, 1884, p. 46)

Thus, among the projected federal states of Russia, its southern, Ukrainian territories, did not constitute a separate and indivisible national body, but were divided into four separate provinces: Polessia, Kiev, Kharkov, and Odessa (Dragomanov, 1884, pp. 281–282 ft) (Figure 1), ⁷ reminding one more of military or educational districts of the empire. What is more, none of these provinces was solely a Ukrainian one; for instance, Odessa region included not only Ukrainian, but also Romanian population of the empire: for Drahomanov it did not make economic sense to create a separate province of Bessarabia. ⁸

Figure 1.

Mykhailo Drahomanov’s division of Ukraine into four provinces. Source: Bilimovich, A. (1918)

Except for the judiciary, the supreme power in these regions was to belong to the elected local assemblies/parliaments (oblastnym dumam). They were in charge of local economy (including an imposition of direct state taxes), welfare, and culture.

Only the affairs, related to the whole state, as well as implementation of state laws, had to be conducted and passed by a central bicameral parliament. Its first chamber was to be a State Duma, whose members were to be elected throughout the country during the general elections by all Russian citizens, who were older than 21 years. The same age limited one’s ability to be elected to local representative institutions, whereas to be elected to regional and state parliaments one had to reach 25 years. This electoral system had two important peculiarities. First, even though he did not specify it in this project, most probably, under “all Russian citizens” Drahomanov meant both men and women as in his other texts he was very explicit in his support of sharing political rights of men with women (Drahomanov, 1892, p. 202). This, after Drahomanov, was especially important for Eastern Europeans, who still discussed the rights of women to attend universities (Drahomanov, 1892, p. 203). Second, the elected deputies had to represent not only the inhabitants of all Russian regions, but also of all occupations, and not just of a majority, but also of minority. ⁹ The last stipulation was especially important for the territories with mixed national composition (Dragomanov, 1884, pp. 11, 49–50).

The second chamber of the proposed parliament was to be called a Union Duma, whose members were to be elected by the regional parliaments. The latter would have a right to provide its representatives in the Union Duma with instructions (nakazy), and if those were not followed, they had a right to replace them with other deputies. State ministers were responsible before both chambers of the Parliament, and could even be brought to court by them. In addition to that, as a representative of regions, Union Duma was in charge of all state property. The head of state could dissolve the State Duma, but not the Union one—not the representatives of the regions. In case of a coup d’état the public order had to be restored exactly by the regional assemblies; in this case all army units, which were located in their regions, were to obey those regional assemblies.

Members of both of these chambers, State and Union Dumas, would constitute a State Council (Gosudarstvennyy Sobor)—the only institution, which could approve changes of the state’s Fundamental laws (Dragomanov, 1884, pp. 7–14).

Drahomanov was well aware of the contemporary criticism of a bicameral parliament, especially of the British aristocratic and conservative House of Lords. This is why he explicitly underlined that his Union Duma was different from the upper chambers or senates of European states, but similar to the U.S. Senate or Swiss Council of Estates. He argued that these two models were neither anti-democratic, nor conservative, but simply representatives of states or cantons, whose main aim was to block those decisions of the central government and of the second chamber of the parliament, which contradicted substantial interests of the regions (Dragomanov, 1884, p. 56). Of course, he recognized that a need to pass decisions, which had to be approved by a number of additional institutions, would slow down a process of administering of the state. However, for Drahomanov, a system of regional checks and balances of the central authorities was still worth it as it would not allow the latter initiate reactionary actions. Out of his own experience in Switzerland, all the progressive measures were initiated exactly by the regional authorities and not from the center (Dragomanov, 1884, pp. 57–58).

Finally, Drahomanov acutely recognized a problem of summoning such a parliament in contemporary Russia, where not only Caucasus and Siberia, but even its whole western European part did not enjoy the activities of zemstvo—in his opinion, the latter being an appropriate school of a representative government. Although the current rulers made him rather pessimistic about this project, Drahomanov still argued that extension of zemstvo throughout the whole empire would become the first necessary step toward a convention of a future state parliament. He laid especially big hopes on those Russian regions, which were the least affected by serfdom: the most northern provinces, Ural and Volga regions, Cossack lands, some districts of New Russia and Left Bank Ukraine.

Conclusion

Ukrainian parliamentarism and constitutionalism have a long history. Its brightest episode occurred 100 years ago, in 1917–1921, when the Ukrainian activists tried to cope with the breakup of the Romanov Empire by suggesting various projects of its reconstruction. In this article, I argued that the history of these projects began at least half a century earlier, when a young professor of history at Kiev University, Mykhailo Drahomanov, started to reflect upon future reorganization of the Russian Empire into a parliamentary state. Being an ardent advocate of turning the empire into a representative democracy, Drahomanov still felt uneasy about unapologetic support of parliamentarism. Having embraced Proudhonian idea of anarchy or self-government, he realized that the existence of parliament was not a universal cure for all political ills of the Russian Empire, especially for the main one—extreme state centralization. Hence, his views of political reconstruction of the empire did not necessarily mean transforming it into the Russian republic. It seems that a reasonable and reasoned monarch, who could turn the empire into a federal state with a wide local self-government, would totally fulfill Drahomanov’s ideas of future Russia. His enormous influence upon the pre-war Ukrainian intellectuals explains why only few of them seriously discussed an idea of Ukrainian state independence in 1917 as well as why even in 1920 Otto Eikhel’man dreamt of a federal Ukrainian republic, governed by a bicameral parliament.