The revolution of 1848 in Galicia in the concept of S. Eisenstadt

The article discusses the events of the revolution of 1848 in Eastern Galicia. The main attention is paid to the consideration of the progress and results of the revolution. The paper also presents a brief overview of the pre-revolutionary situation in the region, which highlighted the social and national background of the revolution. In the analysis of the revolutionary events in the region, the authors used the concept of the American and Israeli sociologist S. Eisenstadt proposed in his Revolution and Transformation of Societies. In his work, Eisenstadt divided the revolution into "clean" and "unclean" after giving a convincing justification of this classification and showing in detail the features typical in his view of the revolution of the both denoted types. The use of the above concepts allows a better assessment of the scale of the studied events. Insufficient coverage of the 1848 revolution in Galicia in the Russian historiography makes the research topic relevant. The events of 1848 became one of the key milestones in the history of the Rusyn revival in the first half of the 19th century. It stepped up until then a purely cultural Rusyn national movement and translated it to the political plane. In this period the first political organization of Rusyns, Golovna Ruska Rada, was created. However, the opposition of the Rusyn movement to Polish nationalism made it impossible to create a national autonomy that would unite all Rusyn lands. A change of the political elite, characteristic for "clean" revolutions, did not occur. Besides, the few political successes of the Rusyns were short-lived. They were all revised after the abolition of the Constitution of 1849 and the advent of "neoabsolutism". In addition to politics, the revolution initiated changes in the cultural sphere. Since that time, the development of the Rusyn language accelerated. The Rusyn language was actively used in newspapers, theatres and in the education system. The most important achievements of the Rusyn movement in the cultural sphere began: the founding of the Galician-Rusyn Matica, the construction of the People's House in Lviv, the opening of the Department of the Rusyn Language and Literature at Lviv University. According to the study, the authors come to a conclusion that the revolution in Galicia should be categorized as an "unclean" revolution. This conclusion is based on the fact that the absence of a significant and lasting political change is typical for revolutions of this type.

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