Ukrainian Radical Party - Programme and Ideology

Programme and Ideology

The Radical Party ideology was based on the political thought of Mykhailo Drahomanov, an eastern Ukrainian thinker who spent part of the nineteenth century in western Ukraine. Although the Radical party advocated socialism in its ideology, it considered itself different from western socialists who were beholden to the ideas of Karl Marx because western socialism was based on the industrial proletariat while the Radical party was focused on the peasantry. Accordingly, its socialism was agrarian and peasant-based. The Ukrainian Radical party claimed kinship and affinity with the similarly peasant-based socialist Serbian Radical Party of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It actively opposed the influence of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and its priests in Ukrainian society. It was also opposed to the Austrian government, to mainstream Ukrainophiles who were loyal to Austria, and to Ukrainian attempts to cooperate with Polish authorities. At the same time, the URP cooperated with Polish workers and peasants. The URP supported Ukrainian independence at a party congress in 1895, the first time that the goal of an independent Ukrainian state had been expressed anywhere. Involved with the plight of the Ukrainian peasants, the URP also called for and organized strikes of Ukrainian agricultural workers.