Authors

Yevhen Yashchuk¹;  ¹ University of Oxford, UK

Discussion

Modern wars have brought ruptures and shaped communities in places not directly affected by them. To underline and approach such developments, this paper engages with the everyday practices of humanitarian action in the provincial contexts of the Russian Empire and Austro-Hungary between 1875 and 1878, during the Great Eastern Crisis in the Balkans. While the paper will acknowledge the recent developments in historiography aimed to decenter imperial experiences, it will also point out the necessity to move beyond the stress on intraimperial contexts when reactions to international events are concerned, thus triangulating the Crisis itself. Focusing on the urban communities of Kyiv and Lviv, the paper will demonstrate that the urge to act amidst the international crisis appealed to the opposing local political groups and brought the question of helping the “struggling Slavs” to the front of the public debates. Building on the evidence from the local press, governmental reactions to the responses, and the variety of documents produced locally, including the reports of the local committees of the Red Cross, it will present the uneven and changing nature of humanitarian action which was based on the agency of the educated urban inhabitants in organizing and quitting relief campaigns. It will also trace the commonalities of responses between different political groups within and across both empires, highlighting humanitarian action as the pattern in the exchanges between the two provincial centres. The paper will address the impact of the shifting character of warfare on the activities on the ground. Finally, it will highlight the overlap between the humanitarian response to the external crisis and the support of locally-oriented fundraising campaigns, with the same actors involved and the boundaries between humanitarian action and philanthropy being blurred.