Ivan Grigorievitch Naumovich (, , ; (January 14, 1826 – August 16, 1891), was a priest, member of parliament, writer, and major figure in the Russophile movement in western Ukraine. His article Glimpse into the future was considered the most important manifesto of Galician Russophilism
Background
During the 19th century the area currently known as western Ukraine was part of the Austrian Empire. Its people consisted primarily of Poles and Ukrainians. The Poles had ruled over western Ukraine prior to the Austrians having ruled over it, and made up most of the nobility. They dominated the region politically and economically. The Ukrainians, although a numeric majority, were mostly peasants or priests. During the nineteenth century the people who are now known as Ukrainians referred to themselves as Rusyny, typically translated as Ruthenians. Among the Ruthenians, two competing national ideologies developed: Russophilism, the belief that there was no such thing as a Ukrainian nation and that the people of western Ukraine were the westernmost branch of the Russian people, and Ukrainophilism, the belief that there was a Ukrainian nation separate from a Russian one and that the people of western Ukraine belonged to that Ukrainian nation. Although initially the Austrian authorities supported Russophilism as a counterbalance against the Poles, when Austria and Russia became rivals Austria shifted its support to the Ukrainophile movement.
Biography
Ivan Naumovich was born into a clerical family in western Ukraine, which was at the time part of the Austrian Empire; his father was a school teacher but his grandfather was a priest. Like many with his social background, the family spoke the Polish language at home while maintaining Ruthenian traditions. When Naumovich entered a Ukrainian Catholic seminary in Lviv in 1848, he became swept up into and joined the Polish revolutionary movement and attempted to convince other Ukrainians to join the Polish cause. These efforts met with complete rejection from the Ukrainian peasants, causing Naumovich to turn away from the Poles. Naumovich married in 1851 and finished his studies that year, becoming a parish priest in Skalat.
Initially Naumovich focused his efforts on attempting to rid the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church of various Roman Catholic rituals and practices that it had adopted during the centuries of Catholic Polish rule, a process referred to as purification, in order to reestablish the pure "Russian" character of the Church. Such actions earned him great popularity among the Ukrainian people, and he was elected to the Galician Diet in 1861 and the Austrian parliament in 1873. During this time he was a passionate defender of the rights of the Ruthenian people against the Polish landlords and supported the division of the province of Galicia into western (Polish) and Eastern (Ukrainian, which Naumovich considered to be Russian) parts. Naumovich also founded the Kachkovsky Society, the Russophile counterpart and rival to the pro-Ukrainian Prosvita, which involved creating pro-Russian reading rooms for Ruthenian peasants.
The intensity of Naumovich's pro-Russian activities earned the distrust of the Austrian authorities and of the Catholic Church. A seemingly minor incident in 1881 led to his downfall. In that year, the 129 inhabitants of a small village demanded their own Ukrainian Catholic parish and church rather than to pay to support the building of a new church in a neighboring village that would serve both villages. When their petition for a new church in their own village was denied, the villagers voted to convert their village to Eastern Orthodoxy. This event caught the attention of the Vatican and of the Austrian authorities in Vienna, who feared that it portended the beginning of large-scale conversion to Orthodoxy and to a Russian orientation. An investigation proved that Ivan Naumovich, despite being a Greek Catholic priest, wrote the peasants' petition requesting conversion to Orthodoxy.
In 1882 Naumovich was arrested for treason. Acquitted of that charge, he was instead convicted of disturbing public order and spent eight months in prison. In 1885 he was excommunicated from the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. Naumovich converted to Russian Orthodoxy and settled in Kiev, then part of the Russian Empire, before becoming a parish priest in a village outside Kiev. Naumovich died in 1891 in Novorossiysk.