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

Skalat

Skalat is a small city in the Ternopil Oblast of western Ukraine. It is located in the Pidvolochysk Raion , at around .-External links:* - Transcripts of eyewitness testimonies...

.

Initially Naumovich focused his efforts on attempting to rid the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church

Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church

The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church , Ukrainska Hreko-Katolytska Tserkva), is the largest Eastern Rite Catholic sui juris particular church in full communion with the Holy See, and is directly subject to the Pope...

 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

Diet of Galicia

The Diet of Galicia was the regional assembly of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, which was part of Austro-Hungary. The Galician diet was a unicameral assembly composed of 150 deputies, which was presided over by a marshal or a vice-marshal that were appointed by the emperor. The...

 in 1861 and the Austrian parliament in 1873. During this time he was a passionate defender of the rights of the Ruthenian

Ruthenians

The name Ruthenian |Rus']]) is a culturally loaded term and has different meanings according to the context in which it is used. Initially, it was the ethnonym used for the East Slavic peoples who lived in Rus'. Later it was used predominantly for Ukrainians...

 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

Prosvita

Prosvita is a society created in the nineteenth century in Ukrainian Galicia for preserving and developing Ukrainian culture and education among population....

, 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

Vienna

Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...

, 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

Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church

The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church , Ukrainska Hreko-Katolytska Tserkva), is the largest Eastern Rite Catholic sui juris particular church in full communion with the Holy See, and is directly subject to the Pope...

. Naumovich converted to Russian Orthodoxy and settled in Kiev

Kiev

Kiev or Kyiv is the capital and the largest city of Ukraine, located in the north central part of the country on the Dnieper River. The population as of the 2001 census was 2,611,300. However, higher numbers have been cited in the press....

, then part of the Russian Empire

Russian Empire

The Russian Empire was a state that existed from 1721 until the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was the successor to the Tsardom of Russia and the predecessor of the Soviet Union...

, before becoming a parish priest in a village outside Kiev. Naumovich died in 1891.

Writings and Ideas

In 1866 the Austrian Empire was defeated in the Austro-Prussian War

Austro-Prussian War

The Austro-Prussian War was a war fought in 1866 between the German Confederation under the leadership of the Austrian Empire and its German allies on one side and the Kingdom of Prussia with its German allies and Italy on the...

 and central authorities found themselves weakened. Representative of various nationalities took advantage of this weakness to agitate for demands for more power the central authorities. Unlike their Polish rivals in eastern Galicia, Ukrainian community leaders made no demands, instead declaring their strong loyalty to the Habsburgs and hoped that this loyalty would be rewarded. However, in order to appease the restless Poles, the Austrian authorities gave in to many of their demands. The demands included greater Polish control over lands at the expense of the Ukrainian rivals, who had declared their loyalty to Austria.

A Glimpse into the Future, anonymously written by Naumovich and signed as "One in the Name of Many", was a response to these events. It would become the main manifesto of the Russophile movement in western Ukraine. The manifesto had two parts. The first part was an attack on the traditional Ukrainian policy of unconditional loyalty to the Habsburgs. He identified the fact that "our kindheartedness and tact" towards the Austrian Emperor at the time of his defeat was less effective than the agitation of the Polish enemies. He contrasted the weak behaviors of Ukrainians with that of Serbs and Romanians within the Empire and proclaimed that if Ukrainian policies were to continue all Ukrainians would eventually become Polonized. This view of the situation eventually came to be accepted by most elements of Ukrainian society, even those (such as the Ukrainophiles

Ukrainophilia

Ukrainophilia is the love of and/or identification with Ukraine and Ukrainians; its opposite is Ukrainophobia. The term is used primarily in a political and cultural context. "Ukrainophilia" and "Ukrainophile" are the terms used to denote pro-Ukrainian sentiments, usually in politics and...

) that did not follow Naumovich to the conclusion he drew in the second part of his article.

In the second part of A Glimpse into the Future, Naumovich concluded that the failure of Ukrainian leaders could be traced to their efforts to create a new western Ruthenian nation. He claimed that such efforts were in vain, and that from the perspective of ethnography, language, literature and ritual the people of Galicia, Kiev, Moscow, Tobolsk, etc. were all one Russian people. According to Naumovich, only by uniting with other Russians would Galician Ruthenians be able to maintain their East Slavic culture and Eastern Slavic religion and traditions. He proposed that Standard Russian should be adopted as the literary language among Ruthenians. He did not explicitly call for a detachment of eastern Galicia to Russia (perhaps in order to assuage the Austrian censors) but mentioned the case of Italian-populated regions of Switzerland which chose to remain in Switzerland rather than join Italy because they were "happy in Switzerland." Naumovich noted that, in contrast, Ruthenians were "not necessarily happy."

The publication of A Glimpse into the Future caused a response not only in the Austrian but also in the German, French and Russian presses.

Like other Galician Russophiles, Ivan Naumovich claimed a special place for the Ukrainian people within the Russian nation. He declared that the Russian language was derived from "Little Russia

Little Russia

Little Russia , sometimes Little or Lesser Rus’ , is a historical political and geographical term in the Russian language referring to most of the territory of modern-day Ukraine before the 20th century. It is similar to the Polish term Małopolska of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth...

n" and was only being readopted, and that the modern Russian language had been created in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by scholars from Ukraine.