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 Just
Culture
Restoring Trust and Accountability
in Your Organization
THIRD EDITIO N
 Just
Culture
Restoring Trust and Accountability
in Your Organization
T HI R D E D I T I ON

SIDNEY DEKKER

Boca Raton London New York

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Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
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Names: Dekker, Sidney, author.

Title: Just culture : restoring trust and accountability in your organization
/ by Sidney Dekker.
Description: Third edition. | Burlington, VT : Ashgate, [2016] | “A just
culture is a culture of trust, learning and accountability. It is
particularly important when an incident has occurred; when something has
gone wrong. How do you respond to the people involved? What do you do to
minimize the negative impact, and maximize learning?.” | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015043204| ISBN 9781472475756 (hardback : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781472475787 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Professional ethics.
Classification: LCC BJ1725 .D45 2016 | DDC 174/.4--dc23
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Contents
Preface.......................................................................................................................ix
Acknowledgments ..................................................................................................xvii
Author .....................................................................................................................xix
Case Study: Under the Gun.....................................................................................xxi
Case Study: When Does a Mistake Stop Being Honest? .......................................xxv

Chapter 1 Retributive and Restorative Just Cultures ............................................1

Retributive Just Culture ........................................................................1
Shades of Retribution ......................................................................2
Difficulties and Fairness in Retribution ..........................................6
Substantive Justice ...........................................................................7
Breaking The Rules to Get More Recruits: Some Say
Cheating Needed to Fill Ranks .......................................................7
Procedural Justice............................................................................8
Summarizing and Managing the Difficulties with Retributive
Justice ............................................................................................ 10
Restorative Just Culture...................................................................... 12
Restorative Justice Steps................................................................ 13
Who Was Hurt, and What Are His or Her Needs? ................... 13
Identifying the Obligations to Meet Needs .............................. 16
Restoration and Forgiveness .......................................................... 19
Comparing and Contrasting Retributive and Restorative
Approaches ......................................................................................... 21
Neither Retributive nor Restorative Justice “Lets People
Off the Hook” ................................................................................ 22
Retributive and Restorative Forms of Justice Deal
Differently with Trust .................................................................... 23
Can Someone or Something Be Beyond Restorative Justice? ............24
Case Study ..........................................................................................26
Are All Mistakes Equal? ...............................................................26
Technical Errors: Errors in a Role .................................................26
Normative Errors: Errors of a Role ............................................... 29

Chapter 2 Why Do Your People Break the Rules? ............................................. 33

Labeling Theory .................................................................................34
Violations Seen from This Bench Are Just Your Imagination ......34
Control Theory ................................................................................... 38
Learning Theory ................................................................................40
The Bad Apple Theory ....................................................................... 42
Stupid Rules and Subculture Theory .................................................46

v
vi Contents

Resilience Theory .............................................................................. 50

Case Study .......................................................................................... 54
Hindsight and Shooting Down an Airliner.................................... 54
The Hindsight Bias ........................................................................ 55
A Normal, Technical Professional Error ....................................... 57
A Normative, Culpable Mistake .................................................... 58
Hindsight and Culpability ............................................................. 59
The Worse the Outcome, the More to Account For ......................60

Chapter 3 Safety Reporting and Honest Disclosure ........................................... 61

A Few Bad Apples? ............................................................................ 62
Getting People to Report .................................................................... 63
What to Report? .................................................................................64
Keeping the Reports Coming In ........................................................ 65
Reporting to Managers or to Safety Staff? ........................................66
The Successful Reporting System: Voluntary, Nonpunitive,
and Protected ...................................................................................... 67
Voluntary ....................................................................................... 68
Nonpunitive ................................................................................... 68
Protected ........................................................................................ 70
What If Reported Information Falls into the Wrong Hands? ........ 70
The Difference between Disclosure and Reporting ........................... 71
Overlapping Obligations ................................................................ 73
The Risks of Reporting and Disclosure ............................................. 75
The Ethical Obligation to Report or Disclose ............................... 76
The Risk with Disclosure .............................................................. 76
The Protection of Disclosure ......................................................... 77
What is Being Honest? ....................................................................... 77
Case Study .......................................................................................... 79
A Nurse’s Error Became a Crime .................................................. 79
At the Supreme Court .................................................................... 81
A Calculation Gone Awry ............................................................. 83
“Mea Culpa” .................................................................................. 85
Criminal Law and Accidental Death ................................................. 87
Rational Systems that Produce Irrational Outcomes ......................... 88
The Shortest Straw .............................................................................90

Chapter 4 The Criminalization of Human Error ................................................ 91

The First Victims................................................................................92
Do First Victims Believe that Justice Is Served by Putting
Error on Trial? ............................................................................... 93
Are Victims in It for the Money? .................................................. 95
The Second Victim ............................................................................. 95
The Prosecutor ...................................................................................96
Contents vii

What to Prosecute? ........................................................................96

Safety Investigations that Sound Like Prosecutors ....................... 98
The Prosecutor as Truth-Finder.....................................................99
The Defense Lawyer...........................................................................99
The Judge ......................................................................................... 100
Establishing the “Facts” .............................................................. 100
Determining Whether Laws Were Broken .................................. 101
Deciding Adequate Punishment .................................................. 101
Lawmakers ....................................................................................... 102
The Employing Organization ........................................................... 103
The Consequences of Criminalization ............................................. 103
Most Professionals Do Not Come to Work to Commit Crimes ....103
Is Criminalization Bad for Safety? .............................................. 103
But Isn’t There Anything Positive about Involving the Legal
System? ........................................................................................ 107
Tort Liability .................................................................................... 108
Without Prosecutors, There Would Be No Crime ............................ 109
The View from Nowhere ............................................................. 110
There Is No View from Nowhere ................................................ 110
Judicial Proceedings and Justice ...................................................... 113
Judicial Proceedings and Safety....................................................... 114
Summing Up the Evidence............................................................... 116
Case Study ........................................................................................ 117
Industry Responses to Criminalization ....................................... 117
Response 1: Do Nothing .............................................................. 119
Consequences ......................................................................... 120
Response 2: The Volatile Safety Database .................................. 120
Consequences ......................................................................... 120
Response 3: Formally Investigate Beyond the Period
of Limitation ................................................................................ 120
Consequences ......................................................................... 121
Response 4: Rely on Lobbying, Prosecutorial, and Media
Self-Restraint ............................................................................... 121
Consequences ......................................................................... 122
Response 5: Judge of Instruction ................................................. 122
Consequences ......................................................................... 123
Response 6: The Prosecutor Is Part of the Regulator .................. 123
Consequences ......................................................................... 123
Response 7: Disciplinary Rules within the Profession ................ 124
Consequences ......................................................................... 125

Chapter 5 What Is the Right Thing to Do? ....................................................... 127

Dealing with An Incident ................................................................. 127
Before Any Incident Has Even Happened ................................... 127
After an Incident Has Happened ................................................. 128
viii Contents

Not Individuals or Systems, but Individuals in Systems.................. 131

A Discretionary Space for Personal Accountability ................... 131
Blame-Free Is Not Accountability-Free ...................................... 132
Forward-Looking Accountability .................................................... 134
Ask What Is Responsible, Not Who Is Responsible .................... 136
What Is the Right Thing to Do? ....................................................... 137
What Can Ethics Tell You? .............................................................. 138
Virtue Ethics................................................................................ 139
Duty Ethics .................................................................................. 139
Contract Ethics ............................................................................ 141
Utilitarianism............................................................................... 142
Consequence Ethics ..................................................................... 142
Golden Rule Ethics ...................................................................... 143
Not Bad Practice, but Bad Relationships ......................................... 144
Case Study ........................................................................................ 145
There Is Never One “True” Story ................................................ 145
Which Perspective Do We Take? ..................................................... 147
The “Real” Story of What Happened? ........................................ 150
Rhetoric: The Art of Persuasion....................................................... 151
References ............................................................................................................. 153
Index ...................................................................................................................... 159
Preface
A just culture is a culture of trust, learning, and accountability. A just culture is par-
ticularly important when an incident has occurred, when something has gone wrong.
How do you respond to the people involved? How do you minimize the negative
impact and maximize learning?
The primary purpose of a just culture, to most, is to give people the confidence
to report safety issues. Because then people know that the organization will respond
fairly. A just culture should enable your organization to learn from an incident, yet
also hold people “accountable” for undesirable performance.

RETRIBUTIVE OR RESTORATIVE JUSTICE?

Most of the guidance available on just culture today—and the typical model adopted
by many organizations—considers justice in retributive terms. It asks questions such
as

• Which rule was broken?

• Who is responsible?
• How bad is the violation (honest mistake, at-risk acts, or reckless behavior)
and so what should the consequences be?

Such a “just culture” is organized around shades of retribution. It focuses on the

single “offender,” asks what they have done and what they deserve. But many manag-
ers have found that simplistic guidance about pigeonholing human acts does not take
them very far. In fact, it leaves all the hard work of deciding what is just, of what is
the right thing to do, to them. And it tends to favor those who already have power
in the organization. Simply dividing human behavior up into errors, at-risk acts, or
recklessness is really not very helpful. Somebody still needs to decide what category
to assign behavior to, and that means that somebody needs to have the power to do
so. There is little evidence that organizations with such schemes actually learn more
of value from their incidents. Indeed, it is widely held that learning and punishing
are mutually exclusive. And should an organization tasked with delivering a product
or service be in the business of sanctioning or punishing its people at all?
Fortunately, restorative approaches to justice have been getting more attention.
That is a great development—also for organizations wishing to adopt such prac-
tices themselves. Restorative justice asks very different questions in the wake of an
incident:

• Who is hurt?
• What are their needs?
• Whose obligation is it to meet those needs?

ix
x Preface

Such an approach to justice and accountability is more inclusive than a retributive

one. A variety of people can get hurt by an incident: not just the first victims (patients,
passengers) but also the second victim(s): the practitioner(s) involved. Colleagues, the
organization, the surrounding community—they too may somehow have been affected
by the incident. Hurt creates needs, and needs create obligations. Restorative justices
is achieved by systematically considering those needs, and working out collaboratively
whose obligation it is to meet them. The second victim may have an obligation to meet
the needs of the first, as does the organization. The organization, or colleagues, have
obligations toward the second victim (as well as the first). Even first victims can be asked
to acknowledge the humanity of the second victim, recognizing that they hurt as well.
Reaching a restorative agreement requires that all affected people are involved and have
their voices heard. That is hardly ever the case in retributive approaches. Retributive
justice might be limited to a boss and an employee. Restorative justice involves them but
also the community: first victims of the incident, colleagues, other stakeholders.
In both retributive and restorative approaches, people are held accountable for
their actions. Nobody gets “off the hook.” Retributive justice asks what a person
must do to compensate for his or her action and its consequences: the account is
something the person has to settle. Restorative justice achieves accountability by
listening to multiple accounts and looking ahead at what must be done to repair
the trust and relationships that were harmed. This makes it important for others to
understand why it made sense for the person to do what they did. Their account is
something they tell. This also offers an opportunity to express remorse. Restorative
approaches are open to multiple voices, and are willing to see practitioners not as
offenders or causes of an incident, but as recipients or inheritors of organizational,
operational, or design issues that could set up others for failure too. Restorative
approaches are therefore more likely to identify the deeper conditions that allowed
an incident to happen. They are better at combining accountability and learning,
at making them work in each other’s favor. Where retributive approaches to a just
culture meet hurt with more hurt, restorative approaches meet hurt with healing,
and with learning.

JUST CULTURE AND SUSPICIONS ABOUT

THE “SYSTEMS APPROACH”
We can trace the popularity of “just culture” to a relatively recent anxiety about “the
systems approach.” The systems approach says that failure and success are the joint
product of many factors—all necessary and only jointly sufficient. When something
in your organization succeeds, it is not likely because of one heroic individual. And
when something fails, it is not the result of one broken component, or one deficient
individual. It takes teamwork, an organization, a system, to succeed. And it takes
teamwork, an organization, a system, to fail.
Some people started fearing, though, that this gets people off the hook too easily.
That it might allow them to “blame the system” whenever things go wrong. Even
when all system provisions to do the right thing were thought to be in place.1 Safety
thinker James Reason asked in 1999: “Are we casting the net too widely in our
search for the factors contributing to errors and accidents?”2 It seemed as if the
Preface xi

system approach made it impossible to hold people accountable for poor behavior.
Were we no longer allowed to blame anyone? Patient safety champions Bob Wachter
and Peter Pronovost observed

…beginning a few years ago, some prominent … leaders began to question the sin-
gular embrace of the ‘no blame’ paradigm. Leape, a patient-safety pioneer and early
proponent of systems thinking, described the need for a more aggressive approach to
poorly performing [practitioners].3

They proposed a retributive just culture program by listing the patient-safety prac-
tices that they declared to be beyond the reach of system improvements. Particular
attention was given to hand hygiene or signing a surgical site before operating on the
patient. Even when everything was in place for clinicians to do the right thing, many
still refused, or forgot, or ignored the rules. What should a hospital do with them?
Well, said Wachter and Pronovost: hold them accountable. That is, sanction them,
punish them. Take a more “aggressive approach.” This was no longer a system prob-
lem: it was an accountability problem. And so they suggested penalties for individu-
als who failed to adhere to such practices. These included, for instance, revocation
of patient care privileges for certain periods of time. The length of the punishment
depended on the severity or frequency of the “offenses” committed by the clinician.
Their proposal made it into the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine. A
swift response by a colleague and me was published there soon as well.4
The appeal to punish noncompliant practitioners (or “hold them accountable”) is
part of a string of such calls during the 1990s and 2000s. Aviation safety researchers,
concerned at the enthusiasm of investigators to find all sorts of system precursors and
“latent conditions,” called at one of their conferences for a refocus on active “errors”
by front-line workers rather than mitigating factors in the system.5 Sometimes, they
argued, accidents are caused by people at the sharp end—it is as simple as that!
At times, it seemed as if the systems approach itself was on trial.

A concerned surgeon wrote that hospitals have a big problem with unnecessary
deaths from medical errors. And the numbers have remained high despite concerted
efforts to bring them down. Why? Because we’ve embraced a so-called solution that
doesn’t address the problem.
For the last 14 years, the medical profession has put its faith in a systems approach
to the problem. The concept was based on the success of such an approach in the
field of anesthesia decades ago, but it had been insufficiently tested in medicine
overall. And today, despite a widespread embrace of systemized medicine in hos-
pitals across the country, the number of unnecessary deaths hasn’t dropped sig-
nificantly. There’s a simple reason for that: Most preventable mishaps in hospitals
are caused by the acts of individual practitioners, not flawed systems, and there is
plenty of evidence of that fact available.
In 1991, for example, a Harvard Medical Practice Study examined more than
30,000 randomly selected records from 51 hospitals. A table in that study attributed
some 61% of harm to patients to either errors of technique (during surgeries and
other procedures) or to a failure of doctors to order the correct diagnostic tests.
xii Preface

These are both errors of individuals, not systems. The same study found that only
6% of adverse events were due to systems problems.
And studies have continued to draw similar conclusions. A 2008 analysis of
10,000 surgical patients at the University of South Florida found that, of all the
complications among those patients, only 4% were attributable to flawed systems.
The rest resulted from individual human shortcomings … including poor history-
taking, inadequate physical examinations, or ordering the wrong tests.6

British colleagues agreed, noting the “increasing disquiet at how the importance
of individual conduct, performance and responsibility was written out of the …
safety story.” To reorient our efforts, they believed, the community would “need to
take seriously the performance and behaviors of individual[s].”7
My collaborator Nancy Leveson and I wrote spirited responses in the British
Medical Journal8 and elsewhere. When did the systems approach become synony-
mous with blaming the system or its management for problems and shortcomings?
The systems approach argues that the interactions produced by the inevitable com-
plexities and dynamics of imperfect systems are responsible for the production of
risk—not a few broken components or flawed individuals. It does not eschew individ-
ual responsibility for roles taken on inside of those systems. It does not deny account-
ability that people owe each other within the many crisscrossing relationships that
make up such systems. People working in these systems typically don’t even want
to lose such responsibility or accountability—it gives their work deep meaning and
them a strong sense of identity.
I have met “second victims” in a variety of domains.9 These are practitioners who
were involved in an incident for which they feel responsible and guilty. The practi-
tioner might be a nurse, involved in the medication death of an infant, or a surviving
pilot who was at the controls during a crash that killed passengers, or an air traffic
controller at the radar scope during a collision or near-miss. Never did I get the
impression that these people were trying to duck responsibility, that they wanted to
avoid being held accountable. In fact, they typically took on so much responsibility
for what had happened—despite their own ability to point to all the system factors
that contributed to the incident—that it led to debilitating trauma-like symptoms. In
some cases, this overwhelming sense of personal responsibility and accountability
even drove the practitioner to commit suicide.10
You will encounter in this book the case of a New Zealand surgeon, who was
criminally prosecuted for a number of deaths of patients in his care. What received
scant attention was that he was forced to operate with help from medical students,
because of a lack of available competent assistance in the hospital that had hired
him. Prosecuting the surgeon, who had little control over the context in which he
worked, did not solve the problem. It would have similarly affected other clinicians
working in that environment. In such cases, blame is the enemy of safety. It finds the
culprit and stops any further exploration and conversation. Emphasizing blame and
punishment results in hiding errors and eliminates the possibility of learning from
them.
Nobody wants to unjustly sanction practitioners for their involvement in an inci-
dent. Nobody wants to jeopardize organizational learning by threatening people
Preface xiii

who disclose their mistakes. Unreflectively or arbitrarily punitive regimes destroy

the opportunity to report safety issues without fear of sanction or dismissal. This
is why you want to put a “just culture” policy or program in place. It might seem
so simple. But justice, accountability, and trust are all hugely difficult to define and
agree on. They are what social scientists call “essentially contested” categories.
Reasonable, smart people can forever debate their meaning. What is considered
just by some might be seen as a deep injustice by others. If you want to get any-
where with a just culture, you have to acknowledge the existence of multiple ways
of thinking about those categories. Your point of view is not necessarily right, just
like nobody else’s is. You have to commit to learning about, valuing, and respecting
those other ways too.

A JUST CULTURE HAS MORE ADVANTAGES

The main argument for building a just culture is that not having one is bad for both
justice and safety. But there is more. Recent research11,12 has shown that having a just
culture can support people’s

• Morale
• Commitment to the organization
• Job satisfaction
• Willingness to do that little extra, to step outside their role

Indeed, the idea of justice seems basic to any social relation, basic to what it
means to be human. We tend to endow a just culture with benefits that extend beyond
making an organization safer. Look at the hope expressed by a policy document
from aviation, where a “just culture operates … to foster safe operating practices,
and promote the development of internal evaluation programs.”13 It illustrates the
great expectations that people endow just cultures with: openness, compliance, fos-
tering safer practices, critical self-evaluation.
Now it may seem obvious why employees may want a just culture. They may want
to feel protected from capricious management actions, or from the (as they see it)
malicious intentions of a prosecutor. They want to be recognized when they get hurt,
they want their needs responded to, and also to have an opportunity to contribute to
healing when they can. But this oversimplifies and politicizes things. A just culture,
in the long run, benefits everyone.

• For those who run or regulate organizations, the incentive to have a

just culture is very simple. Without it, you won’t know what’s going on.
A just culture is necessary if you want to monitor the safety of an operation.
A just culture is necessary if you want to have any idea about the capability
of your people, or regulated organization, to effectively meet the problems
that will come their way.
• For those who work inside an organization, the incentive of having a
just culture is not “to get off the hook,” but to feel empowered to concen-
trate on doing a quality job rather than on limiting personal liability, to feel
xiv Preface

involved and able to contribute to safety improvements by flagging for weak

spots, errors, and failures.
• For those in society who consume the organization’s product or service,
just cultures are in their own long-term interest. Without them, organiza-
tions and the people in them will focus on better documenting, hiding, or
defending decisions—rather than on making better decisions. They will
prioritize short-term measures to limit legal or media exposure over long-
term investments in safety.

ABOUT THIS BOOK

I wrote the first edition of Just Culture (Ashgate, 2007) on the back of a trend toward
the criminalization of human error in aviation, healthcare, shipping, and other fields.
This concern about criminalization hasn’t gone away, to be sure, and the coverage of
it still has a prominent place in this third edition. Also, the psychological and socio-
logical mechanisms inherent in criminalization (the power to draw the line, the power
to call an act by a particular name, the power to attach sanctions to it) are not very
different from what we see in other accountability relationships—even those inside
organizations.
But in the years since publication of the first and second editions, I have met
managers who struggle with the creation of a just culture themselves. This may or
may not be influenced by what happens in society or law or regulations around them.
What should they do internally? How should they respond to incidents, errors, and
failures that happen on their watch?
So what will you find in the third edition of Just Culture? Chapter 1 develops the
differences and commonalities between retribution and restoration more fully, giv-
ing you a good overview of the options open to you. Chapter 2 then asks a basic but
often unasked question: Why do your people actually break the rules? It runs through
a number of possible explanations, based on what we know from the literature about
deviations so far. Each explanation suggests a different managerial or regulatory
repertoire of action. Chapter 3 runs through what we currently know about honest
disclosure and safety reporting—two of the typical organizational goals that a just
culture is supposed to support. Chapter 4 moves out of your organization and into
the surrounding environment, focusing on the criminalization of human error. This
matters: it sets constraints and creates opportunities for what you can do inside your
organization. Chapter 5 summarizes what you might want to do now. It puts the
things you should probably do and questions you should probably ask in a manage-
able order and format for you. And it asks, What is the right thing to do when things
go wrong? This chapter will take you through some of the basics of moral thinking
that might guide you toward ethical answers on the right thing to do.
You will find case studies mixed throughout this book. These sections introduce
people’s experiences and stories and invite you to reflect on them. Some of the guid-
ing principles are great, you might think. But why are they even necessary? And how
would they work in practice? How can you operationalize this? By offering you live
experiences from the cases, this book makes the issues more “alive” and helps you
address some of those questions.
Preface xv

ABOUT JUST CULTURE, ABOUT ME

A just culture is not a particular program or blueprint. There is no “pure” model that
is ideal to implement in any community. You cannot buy a just culture off the shelf
from a consultant. Because it won’t be a culture, and it will very likely not be just.
Nor can you get a just culture by simply reading this book, or by getting your people
or managers to read it.
Some of the more exciting and innovative practices for creating trust and account-
ability in organizational cultures have become visible after these things were first
written about. They have emerged through dialogue, experimentation, practical
innovation, human courage. Of course, the creation of a just culture can be guided
by principles. Why would you otherwise even read a book about it? But you should
never see these principles—or anybody’s principles about just culture—as your algo-
rithm, your policy, your program for how to achieve one. A just culture can only be
built from within your own organization’s practice. The various ideas need to be
tried, negotiated, and bargained among the people inside your organization. And you
need to test them with the various stakeholders that surround your organization, who
want their voices heard when things go wrong. But most of all, you need to test them
against your own voice, your own stand.
If you think this is hard, you are right. It is. Creating justice has been one of the
most vexing challenges for humanity—ever. You are unlikely to suddenly solve the
creation of justice in your own organization in a way that will satisfy everyone. But
if you think it is too hard, you are wrong. Because not seriously thinking about it
will make things even harder. A consultant who promises to deliver you a just cul-
ture with some algorithm or program may offer you the illusion that you’ve solved it.
But justice and culture are not for sale. They are things you cannot purchase. Justice
and culture emerge from the way you relate to other people, from how you listen to
their stories and concerns, from the ethical principles you stand for and from how
you govern your business, from the trust you gradually build up: the trust that is so
easy to break and so hard to fix. You can be guided in how to do this, for sure, and
you can ask or pay others to help you with this. You can be guided to do it better,
to do it more humanely. You can be taught to do it with more patience, with more
consideration, with more knowledge and wisdom. And I hope that this book will also
help you with that.
Since the first edition of Just Culture came out in 2007, some people and commu-
nities have considered me one of the founding developers and advocates of the con-
cept. This may or may not be true. Over the years, I have in any case tried to remain
critical of the various perspectives on just culture (including my own) and open to
other ideas. Hence this third edition. It speaks more directly to you if you struggle
to create a just culture in your own community. And it examines more broadly and
deeply the retributive and restorative options open to you.
But I come with a bias, just like everyone else. I have sat across from second
victims on multiple occasions. It moved me to indeed publish a book under that
very title (Second Victim, CRC Press) in 2013.9 These encounters inevitably turned
the offending practitioners into normal people, hurting people, vulnerable people:
people like you and me. These were not people who came to work to do a bad job.
xvi Preface

They were not evil or deviant. These were people who did what made sense to them
at the time, pretty much like it would have made sense to any of their colleagues.
But the consequences of an incident can be devastating, and not just for the first
victims. The consequences can overwhelm the most resilient second victims too:
even they are often still not adequately prepared—and neither is their organization.
In one case, the second victim was murdered by the father and the husband of some
of his first victims. In many others, the second victim just muddles through until the
end, having lost a job, an identity, a profession, a group of colleagues, a livelihood, a
dream, a hope, a life. It is only with considerable support, patience, and understand-
ing that a community around them can be restored, and the trust and accountability
that go with it.
So my writing, like any author’s, has been formed by those relationships. They
have shaped my voice, my vision. In all of this, I endeavor to stay true to my com-
mitments. Even that is an eclectic mix of commitments—a commitment to the voice
from below, for instance, and a commitment to justice over power. It involves a
commitment to diversity of stories and opinions, but also a commitment to critical
thinking, open-mindedness, relentless questioning, and reflection. And it ultimately
comes down to a commitment to my own ethical stand: doing our part to help build
a world where we respond to suffering not by inflicting even more suffering on each
other, but where we respond to suffering with healing.
Acknowledgments
In addition to the many practitioners, students, and colleagues who helped inspire
the previous editions of Just Culture, I specifically want to acknowledge the contri-
butions of Rob Robson, Rick Strycker, and Hugh Breakey in shaping the ideas for
the third edition.

xvii
Author
Sidney Dekker (PhD, Ohio State University, USA, 1996) is a professor of humani-
ties and social science at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, where he runs
the Safety Science Innovation Lab. He is also a professor (hon.) of psychology at the
University of Queensland, and professor (hon.) of human factors and patient safety at
Children’s Health Queensland in Brisbane. Previously, he was a professor of human
factors and system safety at Lund University in Sweden. After becoming a full pro-
fessor, he learned to fly the Boeing 737, working part-time as an airline pilot out of
Copenhagen. He has won worldwide acclaim for his groundbreaking work in human
factors and safety and is the best-selling author of, among others, Safety Differently
(2015), The Field Guide to Understanding ‘Human Error’ (2014), Second Victim
(2013), Drift into Failure (2011), Patient Safety (2011), and Ten Questions about
Human Error (2005). More information is available at http://sidneydekker.com/.

xix
Case Study: Under the Gun*
If professionals consider one thing “unjust,” it is often this: split-second operational
decisions that get evaluated, turned over, examined, picked apart, and analyzed for
months—by people who were not there when the decision was taken, and whose
daily work does not even involve such decisions.
British special operations officer Christopher Sherwood may just have felt that
way in the aftermath of a drug raid that left one man dead.14 It was midnight, January
15, 1998, when Sherwood and 21 other officers were summoned to the briefing room
of the Lewes police station in East Sussex. They had body armor, special helmets,
and raid vests (sleeveless vests with two-way radios built in). They may need to
immobilize somebody tonight, the briefing began. A raid was mounted, and Sussex
was in need of officers who could shoot. Police intelligence had established that a
suspected drug dealer from Liverpool and his associates were in a block of flats in
St. Leonards, near Hastings. They were believed to be trying to work their way into
the extensive drug trade on the British south coast, and to have a kilogram of cocaine
with them.
One of the men was James Ashley, previously convicted of manslaughter. The
other was Thomas McCrudden, thought to have stabbed a man before. In the brief-
ing, both men were described as violent and dangerous. And most likely armed. The
purpose of the raid was to capture the two men and to confiscate their contraband.
As usual with intelligence, however, it was incomplete. Where in the block of flats
they were going to be was not known. There were no plans over the flats either—all
would have to be searched, and as quickly as possible: with speed and surprise.
Equipped with rifles (fitted with flashlights on the barrel) and automatic pis-
tols, and up to 60 rounds of ammunition each, the officers proceeded in convoy to
the Hastings buildings. None of them were in any doubt about the threat awaiting
them, nor about the uncertainty of the outcome. “You get out on the plot, and you
never, never know how it’s going to end,” one veteran explained later. “Your heart is
pounding….”
After quietly unloading, and making their way to the block in the dark, six offi-
cers took up positions outside the target building. The rest were divided up into pairs,
accompanied by an officer with an “enforcer,” capable of busting front doors and
other obstacles. Each group was assigned a specific flat to search, where one officer
would cover the left side of whatever room they entered, and the other the right side.
“You know you are walking into danger,” commented another officer later. “You
know you may be in a situation where you have to kill or be killed. It’s a hell of a
responsibility.”
Christopher Sherwood was one of the officers who went to Flat 6. He was 30 years
old, and for carrying that “hell of a responsibility,” he was getting paid £20,000 per
year (about $35,000 dollars per year at that time).

* This case study is taken from Ref. 14.

xxi
xxii Case Study: Under the Gun

The door went down under the impact of the enforcer and Sherwood veered into
his half of the room. Peering through his gun sight into the dark, he could make
out a man running toward him, one arm outstretched. The officer’s time was run-
ning out quickly. Less than a second to decide what to do—the figure in the dark
did not respond, did not stop. Less than two feet to go. This had to be Ashley. Or
McCrudden. And armed. Violent, dangerous. Capable of killing. And now probably
desperate.
Sherwood fired. Even if there had been time for the thought (which there almost
certainly was not), Sherwood would rather be alive and accountable than dead. Most,
if not all, officers would. The bullet ripped into the gloaming assailant, knocking
him backward off his feet. Sherwood immediately bent down, found the wound,
tried to staunch it, searched for the weapon. Where was it?
Screaming started. The lights came on. A woman appeared out of the bedroom
and found Sherwood bent over a man flat on the ground—Ashley. Ashley, splayed
on his back and bleeding, was stark naked. He was unarmed. And soon dead, very
soon. It was determined later that Sherwood’s bullet had entered Ashley’s body at
the shoulder but deflected off the collarbone and gone straight into the heart, exiting
through the ribcage. Ashley had died instantly.
Whenever a police officer fired a fatal shot, an investigation was started auto-
matically. It did in this case. The Kent police force was appointed to investigate.
They found systemic failure in the Sussex force, including concocted intelligence,
bad planning, misapplication of raid techniques, and a wrong focus on small-time
crooks. Kent accused Sussex of a “complete corporate failure” in researching, plan-
ning, and executing the raid.
Sherwood, devastated that he had killed an unarmed man, was interviewed for
four days. He maintained that he, given the knowledge available to him at the time,
had acted in self-defense. Not long thereafter, however, Sherwood read that the inves-
tigator had prepared reports for the Crown Prosecution Service and the Director of
Public Prosecutions, though it was added that nobody knew at that point whether
criminal charges were going to be brought.
They were. A year and a half after his shot in the dark, Sherwood was charged
with murder.
“Why should anyone want to risk their career or their liberty,” an ex-firearms
officer reflected, “if, when something goes wrong, they are treated like a criminal
themselves?”
The “complete corporate failure” that had sent Sherwood into the building,
together with other officers loaded with 1200 rounds of ammunition, faced conse-
quences too (such as admonition letters). Nothing as serious as murder charges.
A review of the armed raid by a superintendent from the National Firearms School
had said that there had been no need for firearms to be used. Another superintendent,
with responsibility for the guidelines for the use of firearms, said that this case had
not met the requirements. The tactic for searching the flats, known as “Bermuda,”
was also extremely risky. “Bermuda” was originally designed for rescuing hostages
from imminent execution. Sussex Police claimed that their inspiration for using
“Bermuda” for arresting suspects came from the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC)
in Northern Ireland. The RUC denied. Sussex Police’s own memos had warned as
Case Study: Under the Gun xxiii

early as 1992 that “risk factors are high and, as such, it should only be considered
as a last resort.” Their specialist tactical adviser had been warned by the head of
the police’s National Firearms School that “Bermuda” was too dangerous for such
circumstances.
Meanwhile, the inquiry discovered that there had been meetings that had been
kept quiet between senior officers and some of those involved in the shooting. After
those discoveries, the Kent inquiry stopped cooperation with the chief constable of
Sussex, and informed the Police Complaints Authority that they suspected a cover-
up. Sussex countered that Kent was bullying and incompetent. The Hampshire police
force then took over the investigation instead. Yet in this defensive finger-pointing
aftermath, nothing stood out as much as Sherwood’s murder charge.
The murder charge may not have been connected only to this case. The Police
Complaints Authority was facing a national outcry about the apparent impunity with
which officers could get away with shooting people. In the previous 10 years, police
in England and Wales had shot 41 unarmed people, killing 15 of them. No police
officer had ever been convicted of a criminal offense, and most involved were not
even prosecuted. In this case, it seemed as if Sherwood was to be a sacrificial lamb,
the scapegoat, so that it would be obvious that the police was finally doing something
about the problem. After a year and a half of mulling over a split-second decision,
people who had not been there to share the tense, menacing moments in the danger-
ous dark opined that Chris should have made a different decision. Not necessarily
because of Sherwood, but because of all the other officers and previous incidents, the
public image of the police service, and the pressure this put on its superiors.
It would not have been the first time that a single individual was made to carry
the moral and explanatory load of a system failure. It would not have been the first
time for charges against that individual to be about protecting much larger inter-
ests. Many cases in this book point in similar directions. What it raises may seem
troubling. These sacrifices violate Aristotelian principles of justice that have under-
pinned Western society for millennia. Such justice particularly means refrain-
ing from pleonexia, that is, from gaining some advantage for oneself by blaming
another, by denying another person what is due to her or him, by not fulfilling a duty
or a promise, or not showing respect, or by destroying somebody else’s freedom or
reputation. Holding back from pleonexia puts an enormous ethical responsibility
on organizational leadership. Nothing can seem more compelling in the wake of a
highly public incident or accident than to find a local explanation that can be blamed,
suspended, charged, convicted. The problem and the pressure it generates are then
simply packed off, loaded onto somebody who can leave, slide out of view, or get
locked up—taking the problem along. But it is not ethical, and it is not likely to be
productive for the organization and its future safety and justness.

THE INJUSTICE IN JUSTICE

Pursuing justice in court will always produce truths and lies, losers and winners (and
more losers). Even if a scapegoat eventually gets exonerated, interests will have been
lined up against each other in a way that makes any kind of reconciliation really
difficult. By treating error as a crime, we ensure that there always will be losers,
xxiv Case Study: Under the Gun

whatever the outcome of a trial. Because it divides people into groups of adversaries,
we guarantee that there will always be injustice in justice, whether the practitioner
gets off the hook or not. Common interests dissipate, trust is violated, shared values
are trampled or ignored, relationships become or stay messed up.
On May 2, 2001, Chris Sherwood was cleared of any blame at the Old Bailey in
London when the judge, Mrs. Justice Rafferty, instructed the jury to find him not
guilty. There was no evidence of any intention to kill, she argued, other than that he
had fired in self-defense. Justice prevailed, at the same time that injustice prevailed.
What about the cover-up during the aftermath? And what about the victim’s family
or his girlfriend, the woman who had stumbled upon Ashley’s still-warm corpse? No
recourse for them, no justice, popular opinion found. Many commentators cried foul.
The reaction meant that the pressure for the Police Complaints Authority to show its
teeth, and for others to charge and convict, would probably remain.
No just culture—no peace for those who do the work every day.
Case Study: When Does a
Mistake Stop Being Honest?*
When does a mistake stop being honest? There is no clear a priori line. It isn’t as
if it would be patently clear to everybody involved that there is a line that has been
crossed, and once it has, the mistake is no longer honest. Rather, it depends very
much on how the story of a mistake is told, and who tells it. Here I want to recount
one such “mistake,” a mistake that got turned into a crime, first a “crime” of sorts
by the organization itself, and then by a prosecutor (who, in this particular country,
happens to work for the regulator). Who gets to draw the line? Who gets to tell the
story? These questions are absolutely critical in understanding how we end up with
what might be seen as unjust responses to failure.
The incident happened on the morning of November 21, 1989, when a Boeing
747 on an instrument approach in heavy fog came very near to crashing at London
Heathrow Airport. The big airliner had been misaligned with the runway so that,
when it started pulling up for a second go, it was actually outside the airport’s perim-
eter fence, and only about 75 feet off the ground. It narrowly missed a nearby hotel,
setting off car alarms all over the parking lot and fire sprinklers in the hotel. The
second approach and landing were uneventful. And most passengers had no idea
they had been so close to a possibly harmful outcome. For them, the flight was now
over. But for the captain, a veteran with 15,000 flight hours, it was only the beginning
of a greater drama. Two and a half years later, a divided jury (10 to 2) would find him
guilty of negligently endangering his aircraft and passengers—a criminal offense.
He would lose his job, and then some.
I reanalyze an account of the incident as masterfully told by Wilkinson15 to illus-
trate the tension and distance between different interpretations of the same event.
Was it a mistake culpable enough to warrant prosecution? Or was it normal, to be
expected, all in a day’s work?
We can never achieve “objective” closure on these questions. You can only make
up your own mind about them. Yet the case raises the fundamental issues about a
just culture: How can we produce explanations of failure that both satisfy demands
for accountability and provide maximum opportunities for organizational learning?

A BUG, WEATHER, AND A MISSED APPROACH

Wilkinson describes how the captain’s problems began at a Chinese restaurant in
Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean off Africa. Together with his flight deck
crew, a copilot and flight engineer, he dined there during a layover before flying on
to Bahrain and then to London. The leg from Bahrain to London would be the last
portion of a trip that had begun in Brisbane, Australia.

* This case study is taken from Ref. 15.

xxv
xxvi Case Study: When Does a Mistake Stop Being Honest?

Several days later, when the flight had gotten to Bahrain, both the copilot and
flight engineer were racked with gastroenteritis (stomach flu). The captain, however,
was unaffected. A Mauritian doctor had given the flight engineer’s wife tranquilizers
and painkillers. She also was on the trip and had dined with the crew. The doctor had
advised the flight engineer to take some of his wife’s pills as well if his symptoms
got worse. Flight crews, of course, can’t just take advice or prescriptions from any
doctor, but this man had been suggested by an airline-approved physician, who was
too far away but had recommended the examining doctor to the crew. He would soon
be added to the airline’s list anyway. He did not, however, seem concerned that the
crew had been scheduled to fly in a few days’ time again. A colleague pilot com-
mented afterward:

This was apparently a doctor who didn’t even understand the effects of self-medication
in a pressurized aircraft on the performance of a complex task, and right there is a
microcosm of everything that pressured the crew to get the job done. That doctor’s
vested interest is in sending flight crews out to fly. Certainly if he ever expects to work
for the airline again, he isn’t going to ground crews right and left. The company wants
you to fly. (As part of the court case years later, however, the captain would be accused
of violating the company’s medical procedures.)

The subsequent flight to London was grim. Unexpected headwinds cut into the
747’s fuel reserves, and the copilot had to leave the cockpit for several hours after
taking some of the flight engineer’s wife’s medicines to control his symptoms. It left
the captain to fly a stretch of five hours alone, much of it in the dark.

LONDON FOG
Over Frankfurt, the crew heard that the weather at London Heathrow Airport was
bad. Thick fog meant that they probably would have to execute a so-called Category
III instrument approach. In Category III conditions, a 747 is literally landing blind.
While the wheels may just have poked out of the fog in the flare, the cockpit, con-
siderably higher, is still in the clouds. Category III approaches are flown by the
autopilot, with the crew monitoring the instruments and autopilot performance.
The autopilot captures two radio beams (a localizer for lateral and a glideslope for
vertical guidance). These are transmitted by the instrument landing system on the
ground, and the autopilot translates them into control commands to make the aircraft
stay on track and on a gradual descent, exactly toward and onto the runway. At least,
that is the idea.
The captain, like most airline pilots, had never flown a Category III approach
down to minimums, despite his extensive instrument experience. The copilot, new
with the airline, hadn’t either. He had not even had the mandatory training for a
Category III approach, and was not approved to fly one. But that was not going
to stop anything. Still over Germany, the captain had gotten in touch with the air-
line and requested permission for the copilot to help out on this one approach into
London to get them home. Dispensation was granted. It routinely is. It almost always
is. The captain, however, never volunteered that his copilot was not in the best of
Case Study: When Does a Mistake Stop Being Honest? xxvii

states (in fact, he may not have been in the cockpit at that very moment). Nobody on
the ground inquired either.
Later, the copilot testified that nobody had asked him if he wanted a dispensa-
tion. But even if he’d been asked, it would have been difficult to refuse. “I accepted,
with the airline’s interests at heart, the dispensation to operate to category III auto-
land conditions,” he later wrote to the court. “I personally would not mind if we
had diverted. But what would the airline have said to the captain if he had diverted
without asking for a dispensation? What would they have said to me if I had not
accepted it?”
He really had been in a bind. Wanting to help the airline, wanting to get its pas-
sengers home, the copilot had agreed to go on with the flight. But he was sick, really.
So if the flight would have had to divert because he was feeling too poorly to do a
Category III approach, this once, what was he doing on board anyway? And where
had those medicines come from?
“This,” Wilkinson, observed, “is the heart of the professional pilot’s conflict.
Into one ear the airlines lecture, ‘Never break regulations. Never take a chance.
Never ignore written procedures. Never compromise safety.’ Yet in the other they
whisper, ‘Don’t cost us time. Don’t waste our money. Get your passengers to their
destination— don’t find reasons why you can’t.’”

THE APPROACH
Nearing London, the 747 was given a routine holding northeast of the airport. After
some time of flying racetracks in the holding pattern, the flight engineer suggested,
“Come on, we’ve got two minutes of holding fuel left, let’s buzz off to Manchester.”
The crew discussed the options—both Manchester and Gatwick (south of London)
were diversion airports, though Manchester had better weather. But the captain “was
a very determined man,” as the flight engineer recalled. Just as he was deciding to
head off to Manchester, Heathrow called and cleared the 747 for approach.
But a complication had arisen: instead of landing to the east (runway 09), as had
been planned, they would now have to turn in shorter and land toward the west (run-
way 27), because the wind had changed. The approach became a hurried affair. The
crew had to reshuffle charts, think and talk through the procedures, revise their men-
tal pictures. A 10-knot tailwind at altitude meant that the 747 was motoring down the
approach path toward the runway at an even greater groundspeed. Tightening their
slack further still, the approach controller turned the 747 onto the localizer 10 miles
from the runway, rather than the normal 12 miles or more. Halfway down, the tower
radioed that some approach lights were apparently not working, requiring the flight
engineer to take a quick look through his checklist to see how this, if at all, affected
their planned procedure. The tower controller also withheld clearance for the 747 to
land until the last moment, as a preceding 747 was feeling its way through the fog,
trying to find its turnoff from the runway.
But the autopilots really were about to become the final straw: they never seemed
to settle onto the localizer, instead trundling back and forth through the beam, left
to right. The two autopilots on this old, “classic” 747 may never have been able to
capture the localizer: when the aircraft turned in to start its approach, the autopilots
xxviii Case Study: When Does a Mistake Stop Being Honest?

disconnected for some time and the airplane was flown manually. The autopilots,
built by Sperry, were based on an earlier design. They were never really meant for
this aircraft, but sort of “bolted on,” and had to be nursed carefully. On this flight the
crew made a later attempt to reengage the autopilots, though radar pictures showed
that the 747 never settled on a stable approach path.
The flight engineer was getting worried about the captain, who had basically been
flying solo through the night, and still was alone at the controls. The copilot was of little
help. “I was not qualified to make this approach and could not make any suggestions as
to what was wrong,” he would later tell safety investigators. He stayed out of the way.
The captain was now technically illegal: trying to fly a Category III approach
with autopilots that refused to settle down and function perfectly was not allowed.
The right decision, to everybody in hindsight, would have been to go around, to fly
what’s called a missed approach. And then to try again or go to the alternative. “I’d
have thrown away the approach, gone to my alternate or tried again. No question
about it,” one pilot questioned by Wilkinson said.
But other pilots, some with the same airline, believed the opposite. “Look, he was
concerned about fuel. He had a first officer who was no help. He knew a diversion to
Manchester would cost the airline a minimum of $30,000. He realized he’d be sit-
ting in the chief pilot’s office trying to explain how he got himself into a position that
required a missed approach in the first place. He figured the autopilots would settle
down. And I’ll bet he was convinced he’d break out at Category I limits (a higher
cloud ceiling and better visibility than Category III) and could take over and hand-fly
it the rest of the way. I can understand why he carried on.”
It might have worked, Wilkinson observed. And if it had, nobody would ever have
heard of this case.
But it did not work. Ever concerned with passenger comfort, the captain waited
with making a go-around. And then he made a gentle one. The 747 sank another
50 feet. The flight engineer glimpsed approach lights out the left window as they
started pulling up, away.
As one 747 instructor said, “This is a pilot who was critically low on fuel, which
probably was one reason why he waited a second before going around. At decision
height on a Category II approach, you look to see the slightest glow of approach
lights, you wait ‘one-potato,’ see if anything comes into sight. Perhaps a thou-
sand times before, he’d watched that same autopilot do strange things on the same
approach to the same airport, and he’d break out at two hundred or five hundred feet
and make a play for the runway. And on the crew bus everybody says, ‘Boy, that
autopilot sucked again today.’”
On climb-out after the first try, the copilot noticed how the captain’s hands were
shaking. He suggested that he fly the second approach instead, but the captain waved
him away. The second approach was uneventful, and was followed by a landing that
elicited applause in the passenger cabin.

NO DISCLOSURE, BUT A TRIAL

Back in the crew room after they had shut down the airplane, the captain found a
note in his company letterbox. It requested that the crew see the chief pilot. The
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 Les villes, qui avaient été autrefois des centres de la vie politique,
cessèrent de jouer un rôle. Le droit allemand les isolait de
l’administration générale du pays, en faisait, en principe, de petites
républiques autonomes, mais nullement rattachées entre elles, pas
plus qu’aux organes centraux. En pratique cela les livrait sans
défense à l’arbitraire de l’administration ou des seigneurs fonciers.
Comme elles n’avaient aucune part à la confection des lois, qui se
trouvait entre les mains de ces derniers, il en résulta pour elles une
exploitation systématique, qui les conduisit à la ruine. Bientôt tout le
commerce et l’industrie fut en la possession des israélites, qui
avaient su le mieux s’accommoder à ces conditions défavorables.
Quant à l’élément ukrainien, il passa au second rang dans les villes ;
il formait la population des faubourgs, dépourvue du droit urbain. Le
plus souvent, en effet, l’Ukrainien, en tant qu’orthodoxe, était privé
du droit d’entrer en apprentissage et de faire partie des corporations
de métiers. Pour cette même raison, il était à peu près exclu des
emplois municipaux administratifs.
Ainsi l’élément ukrainien se trouvait relégué dans la classe
paysanne, qui avait le plus à souffrir du régime polonais. Le droit
polonais avait dans la forme aboli l’esclavage, mais la grande masse
des paysans était pratiquement réduite à un état voisin du servage.
Ils avaient perdu le droit de propriété sur le sol. La terre était
considérée comme appartenant au seigneur foncier ou au roi et,
dans ce dernier cas, elle se trouvait en la possession viagère soit
d’un fonctionnaire, soit d’un noble, à qui elle avait été allouée en
raison de ses services. Le paysan était attaché au domaine
seigneurial sur lequel il était né et ni lui, ni ses enfants ne pouvaient
le quitter sans autorisation. Le seigneur avait droit de vie et de mort
sur ses sujets, il pouvait leur enlever leurs biens, les rouer de coups,
sans qu’ils pussent se plaindre. Le roi lui-même ne pouvait pas
s’immiscer dans les affaires des seigneurs avec leurs sujets. Seuls
les paysans des domaines de la couronne dont l’usufruit avait été
concédé aux familles nobles, pouvaient porter plainte devant le
tribunal du roi. Encore était-ce une procédure si difficile que, dans
les pays ukrainiens, c’était seulement les paysans de Galicie qui
essayaient de s’en servir, et bientôt en usèrent-ils de moins en
moins, car, même si le tribunal rendait un jugement en leur faveur, le
seigneur n’en tenait généralement aucun compte.
Ainsi le paysan était dépourvu non seulement de tous droits
politiques, mais aussi de tous droits civils et même naturels. On en
était déjà arrivé là dans la première moitié du XVIe siècle. Il vint s’y
ajouter, dans la seconde moitié du siècle, une extrême oppression
économique et une exploitation éhontée de l’énergie productive des
travailleurs des champs. Ce fut la conséquence de profonds
changements économiques.
Jusqu’alors on n’avait exporté de l’Ukraine que du bétail, du
poisson et des produits provenant des animaux, comme les
fourrures, le cuir, la cire, le miel. Plus tard on avait transporté à
l’étranger du bois et des produits dérivés, comme le goudron et la
potasse, par les rivières flottables de la région baltique. Surtout la
potasse, article très convoité et aisément transportable, avait attiré
les agents des seigneurs de toutes les parties de l’Ukraine. Vers le
milieu du XVIe siècle, on commença à envoyer du blé des pays
ukrainiens en Angleterre, aux Pays-Bas, en France et en Espagne,
par les ports de la Baltique. Le nombre des demandes pour cette
denrée sur le marché européen causa un changement radical dans
l’exploitation agricole des grands propriétaires fonciers.
Avant cet afflux de demandes, il n’y avait pas de raison pour se
livrer à une culture très intensive, aussi n’exigeait-on pas des
paysans de lourdes corvées : ils payaient leurs redevances soit en
argent, soit en nature. On avait fixé comme base de cet impôt,
souvent établi par le titre de fondation du village, le « lan » ou
« voloka », qui équivalait environ à 20 hectares, de sorte que son
taux était à peu près invariable. Si la terre du paysan se divisait, la
redevance était aussi divisée, et les seigneurs, n’ayant aucun intérêt
à les morceler, les lots concédés conservaient une certaine étendue
et maintenaient des familles nombreuses dans un bien-être relatif.
Les demandes de blé pour l’extérieur poussèrent à
l’augmentation de la production sur les grandes propriétés. On étend
les surfaces ensemencées, on reprend des terres aux paysans, on
leur assigne des lots plus petits, dont on favorise encore le
morcellement pour grossir la classe de ceux qui, n’ayant pas de
terres ou n’en ayant que très peu, ne peuvent payer de redevance et
sont obligés de travailler chez les propriétaires. Dès que la corvée
devint due par les détenteurs de terres sans qu’on tînt compte de
l’étendue des lots, il y eut là un moyen de multiplier les têtes
corvéables. Du reste les seigneurs ne se font pas faute d’aggraver
les obligations des gens de la glèbe. Si, au XVe siècle, une tenure
d’un « lan » est forcée de fournir à la corvée un homme pour
quelques jours par an, ou tout au plus un jour sur huit, au XVIe siècle,
dans l’Ukraine occidentale, qui était la plus grande productrice de
blé, le paysan est forcé de fournir son travail souvent pendant six
jours de la semaine.
La législation en vigueur ne laissait aucun remède à cette
situation insupportable ; il ne restait plus que de s’insurger ou de
prendre la fuite. Les temps n’étaient point propices au premier
moyen : les insurrections n’éclatent qu’assez rarement. En revanche
les évasions se multiplient de plus en plus. Certes le fugitif risque sa
peau, puisqu’on le traquera comme une bête fauve, mais il peut
atteindre la Podolie, où déjà la condition des paysans est moins
précaire, ou même plus loin à l’est, « l’Ukraine », où les grands
domaines commencent à peine de s’établir ; là la terre appartient
« seulement à Dieu ». C’était le refuge espéré contre tous les abus
de la noblesse.
 XVI.
Antagonisme des nationalités.

Comme on a pu le voir — et nous tenons encore à le souligner —

il n’y avait pas, à proprement parler, d’oppression exercée de la part
des Polonais sur les Ukrainiens en tant que nationalité. La noblesse
polonaise se considérait en toute sincérité comme la plus libérale du
monde. Mais la première cause des restrictions et des persécutions
était le conflit des religions. La Pologne avait emprunté à l’Europe du
moyen-âge un ordre politique et social, qui avait pour base le
catholicisme. Seul le catholique pouvait être citoyen, jouissant de
tous ses droits dans l’état et dans la commune, de même que seul il
pouvait remplir les charges publiques, indissolublement liées aux
formes religieuses (serment, participation aux cérémonies de
l’église). Un Ukrainien, en sa qualité d’adhérent au « schisme grec »,
n’était pas considéré comme véritablement chrétien. De là ces
restrictions, ces incapacités légales de remplir les fonctions
publiques, de faire partie des organisations politiques et même
économiques, que la population ukrainienne ressentait si vivement.
Le gouvernement polonais employait beaucoup de zèle à
convertir ses sujets et ne reculait même pas devant la contrainte,
selon la maxime : compelle intrare. Il défendait, par exemple, de
bâtir de nouvelles églises orthodoxes et de réparer les anciennes
sans une autorisation préalable ; il ordonnait de rebaptiser les
enfants issus de mariages mixtes et déjà baptisés d’après le rite
orthodoxe ; il laissait les évêchés orthodoxes vacants et les faisait
administrer par des catholiques. Mais tout cela n’aboutissait qu’à des
résultats contraires à ceux qu’on se proposait, puisque les
Ukrainiens n’en tenaient que davantage à leur église, qui constituait
le seul lien qui les unissait et leur permettait de résister aux
attaques, le drapeau autour duquel on se serre, le palladium de leur
nationalité. Tout ce qui portait atteinte à la religion orthodoxe les
frappait comme une défaite infligée à la nationalité ukrainienne, ou,
comme l’on disait alors, à la nationalité russe [8] . Si le gouvernement
polonais n’avait même pas eu l’intention d’opprimer le peuple
ukrainien, ce dernier se serait considéré en fait comme tel, puisque
la Pologne ne lui permettait pas de se développer suivant les formes
traditionnelles de sa vie nationale.
[8] En opposition avec les Polonais, les Ukrainiens et
Blancs-Russes se nommaient Russines, ou dans la forme
latine Ruthènes. Cette appellation a persisté jusqu’à nos
jours en Galicie, où les populations n’ont jamais eu
l’occasion d’être mises en opposition avec les autres
Slaves orientaux. Les Ukrainiens orientaux appellent les
Blancs-Russes, les Lithuaniens et les Grands-Russes,
catsapes, moscals ou moscovites. Le terme de « Petite
Russie », introduit, comme nous l’avons vu, par les Grecs
au XIVe siècle pour distinguer l’Ukraine occidentale de la
Moscovie, n’a été employé que très rarement dans les
relations entre les métropolites ukrainiens et ceux de
Moscou ; il ne fut remis en usage que plus tard, comme
on le verra plus loin, en 1654.

Une autre source de conflit gisait dans la structure sociale. A

mesure que les classes supérieures ukrainiennes se ruinaient,
tombaient en déchéance ou s’assimilaient aux Polonais, la vie
nationale ukrainienne se retirait dans les classes inférieures. Il ne lui
restait qu’une noblesse pauvre et rabaissée à qui toutes les carrières
étaient fermées, le bas clergé orthodoxe, qui végétait péniblement,
une bourgeoisie privée dans une grande mesure des droits
municipaux, enfin, et surtout, la masse des paysans, pour qui la
domination polonaise avait changé la vie en un enfer, comme le note
l’écrivain français Beauplan, dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle.
Quant à ceux qui jouissaient de privilèges, ceux pour qui la Pologne
était un paradis, suivant l’expression du même auteur, c’étaient
seulement des Polonais, ou s’il y avait des « Russǐ », il y en avait si
peu, que ce n’était pas la peine d’en parler. Ces derniers étaient
d’ailleurs considérés par le peuple comme des « lakhes », des
polonais ou comme « un os russe recouvert de chair polonaise ».
Ainsi les Ukrainiens se voyaient opprimés non pas justement à
cause de leur nationalité, mais cependant pour des causes résultant
de cette nationalité.
Cela va sans dire, cette situation n’avait pu s’établir tant qu’il y
eut une force de résistance dans ce qui se considérait comme la
« Russie ».
Les princes, les boïards, le haut clergé, qui dirigeaient le pays
avant l’invasion polonaise, furent les premiers attaqués, ripostèrent
et succombèrent aussi les premiers. Dans l’Ukraine occidentale, en
Galicie et dans les pays limitrophes, l’aristocratie était déjà abattue
au XIVe siècle. Dans l’Ukraine centrale ainsi que dans la Russie
Blanche, elle fit tous ses efforts pour soutenir, au XVe siècle,
Svidrigaïl, qui, en défendant l’indépendance du grand-duché, lui
promettait le retour à l’ancien état de choses et l’égalité politique
avec les catholiques. Elle tomba avec Svidrigaïl, en 1435, et nous la
voyons, dans la seconde moitié du XVe siècle, comploter un
revirement avec l’aide des Moscovites ou des Moldaves.
Un de ces complots nous est connu, parce qu’il fut découvert par
le gouvernement lithuanien en 1481. Comme principal personnage y
figure le prince Michel Olelkovitch. Ce prince, offensé de ce que la
principauté de Kiev, qui devait lui revenir à la mort de son frère, eût
été transformée en une simple province ou palatinat et donnée en
gérance à un gouverneur lithuanien catholique (1470), essaya de
profiter du mécontentement soulevé par cet acte arbitraire pour faire
un coup d’état avec l’appui de ses beaux-frères : le prince de
Moscovie et le voïvode de Moldavie. Mais la trame fut découverte et
le prince ainsi que ses partisans payèrent de leur tête.
Vers la fin du même siècle un nouveau mouvement se dessina
parmi les princes des pays orientaux voisins de la Moscovie. Usant
du droit, qui leur avait été reconnu par les anciens traités, de pouvoir
changer d’allégeance, ils commencèrent à se placer sous la
suzeraineté du prince de Moscou, prétextant les changements de
politique du gouvernement lithuanien et, en particulier, son
oppression de la religion orthodoxe. Le gouvernement moscovite
déclara que, vu la gravité des motifs, il ne pouvait considérer comme
obligatoires pour lui les restrictions imposées par la Lithuanie à ces
changements de suzeraineté, et il aida de ses armes les prétentions
des princes. Favorisé par le sort des armes, il s’annexa tous les
pays de Tchernyhiv, et le prince de Moscovie profita de ce
mouvement pour énoncer ses prétentions sur tous les « pays
russes » en général, même ceux qui se trouvaient sous la
domination de la Lithuanie, comme faisant partie de son
patrimoine [9] .
[9] Au XIVe siècle, Olguerd avait émis l’opinion que
« toute la Russie devait appartenir à la Lithuanie ». Son
dessein était de réunir sous sa dynastie tous les pays de
l’ancien royaume de Kiev. Et comme cette dynastie se
montra jalouse de conserver les traditions de Kiev, cela
attira les pays slaves sous son égide. Mais au XVe siècle,
au contraire, l’état protégeait la religion catholique,
persécutait les orthodoxes pour les amener à adopter
l’union des églises, les principautés étaient abolies et
transformées en simples provinces, on écartait les
princes et les boïards orthodoxes des fonctions
publiques, conformément à l’union de 1385 et ses
interprétations postérieures. Tout cela fit naître un
mouvement contraire à la Lithuanie et qui favorisait sa
rivale, la Moscovie. Les évènements, qui survinrent au
tournant du XVe et XVIe siècle, firent germer dans les
sphères moscovites l’idée d’un droit dynastique des
princes de Moscou sur les pays du système de Kiev. Cela
poussa les écrivains grands-russes à échafauder le
 système d’une Moscovie héritière des traditions politiques
de Kiev, de sa civilisation et de la pensée nationale. La
translation du métropolite de Kiev à Moscou, sembla
donner une première base à ces prétentions, car, au
fond, cette opinion que la Grande-Russie serait la vraie
continuatrice de la vie de Kiev et non pas Halitch, Lviv et
Kiev lui-même, ne repose que sur l’apparente succession
de la hiérarchie religieuse et de la dynastie politique. En
fait, comme nous l’avons vu, l’ancienne vie de Kiev a
continué d’exister sans interruption à Vladimir de
Volhynie, à Halitch, à Lviv, à Kiev et n’a jamais quitté le
territoire de l’Ukraine.

Les résultats fâcheux de sa politique religieuse obligèrent le

gouvernement lithuano-polonais à agir avec plus de circonspection.
Il renonça à ses manœuvres, lorsque la transformation de la religion
orthodoxe en église uniate eut causé l’intervention de la Moscovie.
Mais cela n’apporta pas d’amélioration sensible au sort des
populations ukrainiennes et blanc-russiennes. Quelques années plus
tard de nouveaux mouvements insurrectionnels se produisirent.
D’abord, en Kiévie, le prince Michel Hlinsky, comptant sur l’appui de
Moscou et de la Crimée, souleva la population en 1507. La
Moscovie en profita bien pour engager une nouvelle guerre contre la
Lithuanie et lui arracher Smolensk, mais elle ne soutint pas
l’insurrection en Ukraine, qui se termina sans résultats.
En Galicie, une grande insurrection éclata en 1490, avec l’aide
de la Moldavie, où régnait alors Stéphane le Grand, le plus puissant
des princes moldaves. Elle eut pour chef un certain Moukha de
Valachie. Il avait avec lui 9000 paysans armés, au dire d’une source
polonaise, qui souligne que les paysans de la Galicie méridionale
(Pocoutié) y prirent part. Elle eut aussi le concours de la noblesse
ukrainienne, comme nous le révèlent les documents. Un autre
document nous informe que la noblesse locale prit également part,
en 1509, aux expéditions des voïvodes moldaves en Galicie. La
Moldavie restait encore sous l’influence intellectuelle de la Bulgarie,
dont la civilisation était très proche de celle des Ukrainiens. Cela
explique les liens étroits, qui existaient entre les deux pays, la
participation fréquente d’ukrainiens dans les affaires moldaves et les
espoirs que l’Ukraine occidentale oppressée fondait sur la Moldavie.
Mais ces mouvements du commencement du XVIe siècle, n’ayant
réussi, ni à soulever les larges masses du peuple, ni même à unir
entre elles les classes supérieures, n’eurent pour résultat que de
démontrer l’impuissance de l’aristocratie. Elle était incapable d’une
grande action et manquait de ressources pour cela. En
conséquence, le rôle principal dans le mouvement national passe à
la bourgeoisie de l’Ukraine occidentale. Et comme les moyens de
cette bourgeoisie, malgré ses confréries et les forces intellectuelles
et religieuses qui s’y rattachent, ne suffiront pas à faire triompher la
cause nationale, alors ses défenseurs auront recours aux
organisations cosaques de l’Ukraine orientale, qui tirent leurs forces
des masses paysannes.
 XVII.
La bourgeoisie des villes. Les
confréries.

Les particularités de la vie urbaine, dont j’ai déjà parlé, faisaient

sentir plus vivement, dans le cadre étroit des villes, l’antagonisme
des nationalités, en même temps que l’activité des relations
journalières favorisait la formation d’organisations nationales. Léopol
(Lviv en ukrainien, Lemberg en allemand), alors le foyer de la vie
économique et intellectuelle de l’Ukraine, « la métropole des
artisans », le grand centre du commerce avec l’orient, attirait les
éléments ukrainiens les plus actifs et les plus énergiques, leur
fournissant l’occasion de ressentir plus particulièrement l’oppression
nationale, puisque nulle part ailleurs on n’était gêné par tant de
restrictions, on n’était écarté aussi systématiquement de la direction
des affaires municipales. Cette ville était donc destinée à servir de
berceau à la nouvelle organisation nationale.
La première fois que la bourgeoisie de Léopol manifesta son
activité politique, ce fut contre les restrictions de toutes sortes que lui
faisait subir le magistrat catholique de la ville. Cette tentative
échoua, mais elle ranima les courages. Une affaire bien plus
importante allait les mettre à l’épreuve : ce fut la question du
rétablissement de l’évêché de Halitch, complètement déchu et
supprimé de fait au milieu du XVe siècle. En tête du mouvement
figurent les quelques familles de la noblesse orthodoxe existant
encore en Galicie, mais c’est la bourgeoisie ukrainienne de Léopol,
qui en constitue le nerf véritable. Grâce à des protections et en ne
ménageant pas les cadeaux, on obtint du roi l’autorisation, que le
métropolite ordonnât un évêque pour la Galicie orientale. Ce
nouveau dignitaire fut installé à Léopol (1539), car l’ancienne
résidence, Halitch, était complètement déchue de son ancienne
splendeur.
Cet important évènement donna un nouvel essor à la
renaissance de la vie nationale. Un exemple des organisations qui
s’établissent dans ce but, nous est fourni par les confréries, qui se
réorganisèrent probablement à l’époque de la fondation de l’évêché
de Léopol.
Il existait des confréries déjà depuis longtemps autour des
églises. Leur origine remontait aux fêtes et réjouissances de
l’époque païenne, qui réunissaient autour des lieux sacrés les
populations des contrées voisines. Ces fêtes, adoptées avec le
temps par la religion orthodoxe, donnaient lieu à des festins
populaires appelés « bratchini » ou banquets fraternels, qui se
tenaient autour des églises. Nous en avons des relations du XIIe au
XIVe siècle : on y recevait les étrangers, moyennant paiement, on y
consommait des quantités de bière et d’hydromel et le bénéfice en
était employé au profit du culte. Quand, au XVe siècle, le système
des corporations, sous la forme de confréries de métiers, calquées
sur le modèle allemand, commença à se répandre, les bourgeois
ukrainiens et blanc-russiens adaptèrent leurs anciennes confréries à
ce système, afin de leur donner une forme légale. C’est en Russie
Blanche, à Vilna et, en Ukraine, à Léopol, que l’on trouve les plus
anciens statuts des confréries orthodoxes, organisées sur le modèle
des corporations et des confréries catholiques.
La principale confrérie de Léopol, sous le patronage de l’église
de l’Assomption, dans le quartier « russe », avait été probablement
réorganisée à l’époque de la fondation de l’évêché. Son statut lui
donnait un caractère national : pouvaient en faire partie non
seulement les citadins de la ville, mais aussi les habitants d’autres
endroits et même les personnes n’appartenant pas à la bourgeoisie.
Une fois admis, on ne pouvait plus en sortir. La confrérie de
l’Assomption fut la mère des autres confréries, une sorte de
représentation de la Russie galicienne. Les voïvodes de Moldavie
sont en relation avec elle, ils envoient à « leurs amis », comme ils
appellent les confrères, de l’argent et des cadeaux en nature pour
leurs festins publics.
Dans la seconde moitié du XVIe siècle, les confréries, et
particulièrement celle de l’Assomption qui en était le centre, se
trouvent en face de problèmes de plus en plus graves. La réaction
catholique et la langue polonaise sortent victorieuses des luttes
religieuses de la réformation protestante, les contrées centrales et
orientales de l’Ukraine sont incorporées, l’aristocratie ukrainienne se
polonise rapidement, l’église orthodoxe dépérit parce que les rois
nomment arbitrairement aux évêchés des personnes incompétentes
— n’y avait-il point là de quoi jeter l’alarme dans la conscience des
patriotes éclairés ?
Dans la première moitié du siècle, l’église catholique avait
traversé en Pologne une période critique. Mais le mouvement de la
réforme s’éteignit bien vite dans le pays sous les efforts des jésuites,
qui prirent alors une situation prépondérante. L’église régénérée et
raffermie chercha une revanche de ses pertes récentes. L’église
orthodoxe, dans son étroite dépendance de l’état lithuano-polonais,
lui parut une proie facile, d’autant plus que la Moscovie, qui était
considérée comme la protectrice de cette religion, en Ukraine et en
Russie Blanche, pour avoir donné autrefois au gouvernement
lithuanien des avertissements énergiques, se trouvait à cette époque
(1580 à 1590) dans une situation précaire. Il n’y avait donc à
craindre aucune intervention de sa part.
Comme les évêques orthodoxes, nommés par le gouvernement,
étaient incapables de mener à bien les affaires ecclésiastiques, la
population elle-même se vit dans l’obligation d’en prendre la
direction, puisqu’elles avaient une si grande portée nationale. Il
s’agissait surtout de rétablir la discipline ecclésiastique, d’épurer les
mœurs du clergé et de développer son instruction, en un mot de
relever le niveau intellectuel et moral de la nationalité ukrainienne,
puisqu’elle se trouvait si intimement liée à sa religion traditionnelle.
De 1570 à 1580, sur plusieurs points de l’Ukraine se forment, sous
les auspices de quelques seigneurs, des petits foyers de culture
intellectuelle : on établit des imprimeries, on fonde des écoles, des
savants se groupent pour mettre au jour des publications. Il faut
surtout citer Ostrog, la résidence des princes Ostrogsky,
descendants de l’ancienne dynastie Kiévienne, dont les presses
impriment entre autres ouvrages la première bible complète en
langue slave (1580). Son école, que la tradition postérieure appela
l’académie, fut le premier exemple d’une école supérieure
ukrainienne.
Mais la faveur de quelques mécènes ne garantissait en rien
l’avenir du mouvement national, puisque, comme nous l’avons vu,
ces aristocrates se catholicisaient et se polonisaient rapidement.
Tout espoir fondé sur les grandes familles (y compris celle des
Ostrogsky) était implacablement déçu. Il fallait donc, sans avoir à
compter sur elles, que les confréries bourgeoises prissent en main la
cause nationale.
La confrérie de Léopol, racheta d’un israélite, à qui elles avaient
été données en gage, les presses d’un réfugié moscovite, nommé
Fédoroff et se mit à faire des collectes dans toute l’Ukraine afin de
pouvoir établir une imprimerie. Ensuite, elle entreprit de fonder une
école supérieure pour arrêter la polonisation, qui pénétrait la
jeunesse fréquentant les écoles catholiques. Dans ce but, on
demanda au patriarche d’Antioche, de passage à Léopol, d’inciter la
population à contribuer pécuniairement à cette œuvre. En même
temps, on décida de réorganiser la confrérie elle-même, pour la
rendre plus apte à ses nouveaux devoirs et de faire appel aux
sentiments religieux et patriotiques des Ukrainiens. Pour se
conformer à cette ligne de conduite, les festins fraternels, qui avaient
été jusqu’ici la raison d’être de la société, furent complètement abolis
et les assemblées des confrères durent servir à répandre
l’enseignement de la religion et de la morale. Ses membres
s’astreignirent aux pratiques de la vie chrétienne ; ceux d’entre eux
qui avaient commis des fautes furent réprimandés et les incorrigibles
exclus.
On présenta un nouveau statut à la sanction du patriarche, qui
non seulement en approuva les motifs, mais encore donna à la
confrérie réorganisée des droits très étendus dans les affaires de
l’église, pour mettre fin au désordre qui y régnait. Elle fut chargée de
surveiller le clergé, de faire remarquer à l’évêque les manquements
qui se produiraient, et, au cas où ce dernier se refuserait d’y mettre
bon ordre, de le traiter en ennemi de la justice et de la vérité. Le
patriarche décréta aussi que toutes les autres confréries seraient
soumises à celle de Léopol.
Ces décisions furent sanctionnées ensuite par le patriarche de
Constantinople, en tant que chef de l’église ukrainienne. Les
confréries obtinrent ainsi, et celle de l’Assomption à Léopol en
particulier, une importance considérable. Encouragées par de telles
marques de confiance, pourvues de droits étendus, elles
s’engagèrent avec ardeur dans les luttes autour des idées
religieuses.
 XVIII.
L’union des églises ; les luttes
religieuses et nationales qu’elle
provoqua. Première renaissance
ukrainienne.

La réforme du calendrier, introduite par le pape Grégoire XIII et

que le gouvernement polonais voulut imposer aussi bien à ses sujets
orthodoxes que catholiques, fournit le prétexte à la première
escarmouche politique et littéraire, d’un caractère très vif, qui servit
d’introduction aux luttes plus sérieuses, qui s’engagèrent vers 1590.
Le décret royal ordonnant de célébrer les fêtes religieuses suivant le
nouveau calendrier, fut ressenti par les orthodoxes comme une
immixtion inadmissible dans les affaires de leur église, qui ne
pouvaient être réglées que par les décrets des conciles, pris au su et
avec la participation du patriarche de Constantinople. Le principe
étant inattaquable, leur cause triompha. Mais bientôt après surgit
une question plus grave, dans laquelle le gouvernement se montra
moins prompt à céder : il s’agissait de l’union des églises.
Depuis le jour où Casimir le Grand avait essayé de ramener les
orthodoxes de l’Ukraine occidentale dans le sein de l’église
catholique, en tentant de nommer des catholiques aux fonctions
épiscopales de la hiérarchie schismatique, mais avait dû renoncer à
son projet et revenir aux coutumes anciennes et légales, le
gouvernement lithuano-polonais n’avait pas cessé un moment de
vouloir forcer les dissidents à se soumettre au pape. Le plus souvent
les archevêques et les évêques restaient sourds à toute persuasion,
alléguant qu’ils ne pouvaient rien décider sans en référer au
patriarche de Constantinople ; d’autres fois, ne pouvant éluder des
ordres plus précis, ils se répandaient en compliments sans
conséquences à l’adresse du pontife de Rome, faisaient des
démarches pour arriver à un rapprochement et quelques-uns allèrent
même assister aux conciles œcuméniques, qui se réunirent au XVe
siècle. Mais tout cela n’aboutissait jamais à une véritable union, car
le clergé et les populations orthodoxes s’y montraient opposés.
Les derniers essais de ce genre avaient été tentés au début du
XVI siècle, mais on avait dû y renoncer pour longtemps en face de
e
l’attitude prise par la Moscovie et des coups qu’elle avait portés à ce
propos à la Lithuanie. Mais lorsque la Moscovie déclina vers la fin du
siècle, le moment sembla venu pour faire de nouvelles tentatives.
Les jésuites, fiers de leurs succès, entreprirent alors de convertir
la Russie, dont l’état religieux était, à les en croire, désespéré :
l’église orthodoxe ne pouvait, paraît-il, se relever, puisque la langue
slave ne serait jamais propre ni à la littérature, ni à l’instruction des
masses. Les circonstances semblaient, en effet, favorables à leurs
projets : la discipline ecclésiastique s’était relâchée ; ni l’instruction,
ni le degré de civilisation n’étaient au niveau des besoins du temps ;
l’aristocratie se polonisait en masse. De plus un grand
mécontentement se faisait sentir dans le haut clergé orthodoxe,
causé par une immixtion jusque-là inconnue dans les affaires
intérieures de l’église ukrainienne et blanc-russienne d’abord du
patriarche d’Antioche, puis de celui de Constantinople, qui, vers
1588, reparut en Russie, ce que l’on n’avait pas vu depuis que le
pays avait reçu le baptême. Ces suprêmes pasteurs séjournèrent à
Léopol et à Vilna ; ils voulurent y remettre les choses en ordre par
des moyens, qui ne furent pas toujours heureusement choisis et
finirent par s’aliéner les évêques.
En particulier, l’évêque de Léopol, Balaban se sentit atteint par
les droits que les patriarches, à l’encontre des usages canoniques,
avaient accordés aux confrères, qui n’étaient, selon son expression,
que « de simples paysans, des cordonniers, des selliers et des
tanneurs ». Quand ils voulurent se mêler des affaires de son évêché,
lui qui jusque-là les avait soutenus dans leurs efforts pour réformer
l’éducation, les frappa d’anathème. Le patriarche ayant pris parti
pour eux, Balaban en fut tellement vexé qu’il s’adressa à
l’archevêque catholique de Léopol, en le priant d’affranchir
l’épiscopat orthodoxe du « servage auquel le contraignaient les
patriarches ». Il s’aboucha avec d’autres évêques mécontents et se
mit d’accord avec eux pour reconnaître l’autorité du pape (1590). Le
métropolite lui-même participa à la fin à ce mouvement et, dans les
derniers mois de 1594, ils firent savoir leur intention au roi. Deux
d’entre eux, Terletsky et Potiy se rendirent à Rome pour présenter
formellement au pontife leur soumission.
Quoique tout cela eût été tramé en secret, le bruit s’en répandit
dans la population et y souleva une grande irritation contre la
trahison des évêques et contre les intrigues du gouvernement. Il s’en
suivit une vive agitation politique, qui fit couler beaucoup d’encre. La
population orthodoxe, à la tête de laquelle figurait le prince
Constantin Ostrogsky, mais qui de fait était menée par quelques
hommes de plume faisant partie de l’académie d’Ostrog, ou réunis
autour des confréries de Léopol et de Vilna, exigea que l’on
convoquât un concile pour tirer les choses au clair.
Il se réunit, en effet, en automne 1596, à Brest-Litovsk (Beresté
en ukr.), mais seulement pour entendre proclamer l’acte d’union
élaboré à Rome et formellement confirmé par le pape. Aussitôt les
adhérents des anciennes traditions se retirèrent et s’étant formés
parallèlement en concile, ils excommunièrent les évêques apostats
et demandèrent au roi de les destituer. Cette fois le gouvernement
tint bon : il prit sous sa protection les évêques uniates, reconnut
légalement l’acte d’union, se mit à traiter les orthodoxes comme
rebelles aux autorités ecclésiastiques et donna tous les postes
vacants aux uniates, espérant ainsi de venir facilement à bout du
« schisme orthodoxe ». C’est en vain que les vaincus essayèrent de
mettre en mouvement les membres de la noblesse qui leur restaient,
les seuls qui pussent faire entendre leur voix à la diète. Ces derniers
essayèrent de faire passer et firent passer parfois des décisions
exigeant la restitution de la hiérarchie orthodoxe. Le roi lui-même fut
forcé, en 1607, de donner une promesse formelle à cet effet, mais
rien ne fut exécuté et l’on s’employa plutôt à réaliser les desseins
des jésuites tendant à exterminer l’église schismatique.
Cette lutte religieuse, qui éclata à la fin du XVIe siècle, eut
vraiment un caractère national. On vit dans l’union un attentat contre
la nation « russe ». On sentait arriver « la perte entière du peuple »,
la mort de la nation. Pour la première fois dans l’histoire du peuple
ukrainien un élan généreux s’empara de toutes les classes, depuis
la haute aristocratie jusqu’au petit paysan, une seule aspiration les
anima pour atteindre ce but unique : sauver « la religion russe » [10]
en tant que patrimoine national.
[10] Il faut bien se garder que l’emploi de ce terme
n’amène une confusion. L’idée que l’on se faisait alors en
Ukraine de la nationalité et de la religion russes
n’impliquait pas plus que Moscou en fût le représentant,
qu’elle ne l’impliqua plus tard, au XIXe siècle, en Galicie,
où se conserva plus longtemps la vieille terminologie.
Dans cette conception, le blanc-russien était encore un
russe ou plutôt un russine, mais le moscovite ne l’était
plus. On recourait à l’aide de la Moscovie ou de la
Moldavie, comme à des pays liés, il est vrai, par une
religion et des traditions communes, mais tout de même
étrangers. Le profond éloignement des Ukrainiens pour
les Moscovites ou Grands-Russes sera manifeste au
XVIIe siècle ; mais déjà au XVIe siècle la conscience des
Slaves orientaux cherche de nouveaux termes pour les
distinguer : on applique le terme de ruthenus aux pays
occidentaux et d’Alba Russia aux pays du nord. Au XVIIe
siècle réapparaîtra le nom de « Petite Russie ».
 Le mouvement intellectuel qui en résulta influença beaucoup la
littérature. C’est à cette époque que se place la première
renaissance ukrainienne. Pour répondre aux affirmations des
polémistes catholiques qui prétendaient que le développement
intellectuel de la « Russie » ne saurait avoir lieu que sur les bases de
la religion catholique et par l’intermédiaire de la langue latine, les
lettrés ukrainiens et blanc-russiens s’efforcèrent de démontrer les
aptitudes intellectuelles de leur peuple. Publicistes et hommes
politiques insistent sur la nécessité d’organiser l’enseignement
supérieur « russe », afin de satisfaire aux besoins des classes
élevées et les prévenir d’envoyer leurs enfants dans les écoles
catholiques. L’école et le livre : tel est le mot d’ordre. (Un traité
anonyme de Léopol « Perestoroha » insiste surtout sur ce point : il
montre que les anciens ont donné à tort tous leurs soins à l’église et
n’ont rien fait pour les écoles.) Des mesures effectives sont prises
dans ce sens.
 L’Ukraine aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles (avant l’insurrection de
Chmelnytsky)

— — — frontière entre la Pologne, la Hongrie et la

Moldavie.
— · — · — frontière entre la Pologne et le grand-duché de
Lithuanie, avant les actes de Lublin (1569).
— ·· — ·· — frontière entre le grand-duché de Lithuanie au
XVIe siècle (à partir de 1569 de la Pologne) et la Moscovie.
— ·· — ·· — ligne Romen-Briansk — frontière entre la
Pologne et la Moscovie au XVIIe siècle (avant l’insurrection de
Chmelnytsky).
· · · · · · · · frontières des provinces :
Comitats hongrois, habités par les Ukrainiens : I. Zemplin,
II. Oujhorod, III. Bereg, IV. Marmaros, V. Ugotcha.
A) palatinat Russe ; A1 pays de Kholm, partie du palatinat
Russe. B) Palatinat de Belze. C) Palatinat de Podolie. D)
Palatinat de Podlassie. E) Palatinat de Beresté. F) Palatinat
de Volhynie. G) Palatinat de Braslav. H) Palatinat de Kiev. I)
Palatinat de Tchernyhiv. J) Territoire des Zaporogues (Nyz).

Et maintenant la littérature se met à fleurir. Dans les deux camps

surgirent des théologiens et des polémistes distingués : chez les
orthodoxes : Hérazime Smotritsky, Basile le clerc, Jean de Vychnia,
Philalète Bronsky, Stephan Koukol-Zizany, Maxime-Melety
Smotritsky ; du côté des uniates : Potiy. Naturellement ces
polémiques avaient surtout un caractère théologique, mais elles
touchaient aussi à des sujets d’intérêt politique, social et national,
puisque la question religieuse était placée au centre de la vie
nationale. Dans les œuvres de Jean de Vychnia, le lettré le plus
éminent de cette époque, nous trouvons des pages, où passe un
souffle patriotique, comme nous n’en avions pas rencontré depuis la
chanson d’Igor. Nous y découvrons aussi une immense sympathie