The man who would be King of Ukraine

At the outbreak of World War I, a scion of the Habsburg dynasty, Archduke Wilhelm von Habsburg, had a vision for the post-war Habsburg empire. The nineteen-year old Wilhelm had a dream, how to allay the festering antagonism between Habsburg supranationalism and Slavic particularism. Wilhelm had enjoyed the cosmopolitan upbringing befitting an Austria-Hungarian grandee: born in Croatia, raised in Poland, schooled in Moravia, and a cadet in Vienna. In his youthful vision, the Habsburg mystique would carry him to the throne of a future kingdom of Ukraine. The life of Wilhelm von Habsburg mirrored the vicissitudes of his adoptive nation, Ukraine.

Wilhelm’s aspiration did not sit well with his father, Archduke Karl Stefan, as he harboured his own dynastic aspirations — in his case, to rise to the rank of King of Poland. Karl Stephan had made his main residence in Poland, assimilated with Polish society, and prepared the ground, in the best Habsburg tradition, through marital alliances with leading Polish noble families. Indeed, one of his daughters married a Radziwill. But if for Karl Stephan a Kingdom of Poland was a dream, a Kingdom of Ukraine was a nightmare. Poles and Ukrainians had rivalling claims to large swathes of land in Galicia; border disputes between a Polish and a Ukrainian kingdom would be unavoidable.

The early stages of World War I seemed to favour Wilhelm’s and Karl’s aspirations. Austria armed a Polish Legion and a Ukrainian Legion. Wilhelm commanded 4,000 Ukrainian troops, donned a Ukrainian shirt, and made himself known by a vernacular Ukrainian name: Vasyl Vyshyvanyi.

By 1916 developments on the Eastern front encouraged Germany and Austria to consider creating a Polish client monarchy. But plans for a Kingdom of Poland came to nothing. The Kaiser in Vienna did not countenance the prospect of a separate line of Habsburgs ruling a new kingdom. And the Kaiser in Berlin would not countenance the Kaiser in Vienna thwarting German supremacy in Eastern Europe.

Wilhelm’s goal to succeed to a throne of Ukraine likewise was put out of reach, in his case by developments in both West and East. In the West, Woodrow Wilson’s insistence on disbanding supranational empires made his project nugatory. And in the East, Russian Czarism gave way to Russian Bolshevism.

Indeed, in 1920 Bolsheviks would have conquered Warsaw, had Polish and Ukrainian forces not been beaten them back. Ukrainian soldiers however received scant reward for their contribution. They were sent back to their home country and there they again had to take up arms, now in defence against Bolsheviks and Poles, who carved out territory in Galicia. The future of Ukraine again hung in the balance.

After the war, Wilhelm von Habsburg made his way back to an Austria, a country where his relative, the Emperor Karl, had been deposed and he no longer felt at home. Wilhelm decided to move abroad. When applying for a passport he had to contend with a galling humiliation. Austrian passports were issued only to citizens who abjured loyalty to the now deposed monarchy, an imposition Wilhelm von Habsburg sidestepped by having his passport made out in the name of his adoptive identity, Vasyl Vyshyvanyi.

Vasyl/Wilhelm never gave up on his new identity or on his dream of leading a kingdom of Ukraine. He cultivated contacts that might open a passage back to Ukrainian politics, but he was no match for wily projectors who outsmarted him. Some of his initiatives were ill advised, some maladroit, all of them futile. Wilhelm became a déclassé aristocrat moving in and out of demi-monde glitter.

Worse indignities were visited on his cousins in Poland. When World War II began, the German invaders confiscated their property because they considered the family Polish. When World War II ended, Polish authorities refused to reverse confiscations because they considered the family German.

Wilhelm by then had resettled in Vienna. In his last foray into the world of politics, he became an asset of Western intelligence agencies. This decision, testimony to his personal courage, once more exacted a high price.

Soviet authorities in occupied post-war Vienna were tipped off about Wilhelm’s connections to Ukrainian nationalists. They had him kidnapped, deported to Kiev (now Kyiv), and sentenced him to 25 years imprisonment. Wilhelm died of tuberculosis in 1948. (Records of his interrogation have been declassified by the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine.)

Wilhelm’s life was an extreme example of the reversals visited on an entire generation. The visit of the Habsburg Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand to Sarajevo in 1914 had coincided with the anniversary of an event hurtful to the pride of his hosts, the Battle of Kosovo of 1389, and Russophile separatists saw an opportunity to settle scores. When Franz Ferdinand was shot dead, a spark ignited on Europe’s periphery that sent the belle époque up in flames.

At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the Habsburgs had created a supranational order that ensured unhindered movement from Croatia to Poland and Moravia to Austria. In 1920 a supranational order that had lasted for a century was superseded by one that within two decades was drawn into the conflagration of the next World War. Wilhelm’s fate, that led him from his birth in a castle in Croatia to an unmarked grave in Kyiv, showed how a firestorm bursting out of ethnic antagonisms had the potency to incinerate an entire international order.

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