met Ukrainians from Galicia, then a possession of the Habsburg monarchy. When he visited Galicia himself, he discovered that society there was largely stagnant, with inertia even affecting the radicals and populists. In an attempt to combat this, he took to writing a number of progressive articles, in which he criticised the Galician political leadership, and established the Shevchenko Scientific Society, which became a center for Ukrainian scholarship in Lviv. During his trip, he also continued his studies of ancient history, collected folklore studies for comparison and began to write his first political works. In 1872, he published an article in Vestnik Evropy, in which he argued that policies of Russification targetting ethnic minorities aided the eastern expansion of the German Empire. In September 1873, Drahomanov arrived back in Kyiv, where he was finally appointed as an assistant professor for the university and joined the Ukrainian section of the Russian Geographical Society, with which he published his collections of Ukrainian folklore and folk music. The Society and Drahomanov himself quickly came under attack by the city's reactionaries around the newspaper Kievlyanin, which accused the Society of separatism and Drahomanov of being a Polish agent. After Drahomanov began working at the Kievsky Telegraph, he fell under even greater censorship by the Russian authorities, which removed his articles about Ukraine from Russian newspapers. In May 1875, the local curator requested Drahomanov resign from the university, due to the allegations of separatism. But instead of resigning, he returned to Galicia, where he continued his work of Europeanisation and worked as a liaison between Ukrainians in the empires of Austria and Russia, even advocating for the liberation of Carpathian Ruthenia from Hungarian rule. Drahomanov's influence helped to stimulate political life in Galicia, especially through his articles in the student newspaper Druh, which formed the nucleus of what would become the Ukrainian Radical Party. But Drahomanov's presence in Galicia brought greater scrutiny by the Russian authorities, with Alexander II himself ordering Drahomanov's dismissal from Kyiv University and appointing a commission suppress Ukrainian separatism. In May 1876, Alexander II issued the Ems Ukaz, which prohibited all Ukrainian language publications and public performances, shut down the Ukrainian Geographical Society and formally banished prominent Ukrainian nationalists, including Drahomanov himself. The Hromada responded by appointing Drahomanov to represent the Ukrainian national movement abroad and pledged to financially support him in exile. In May 1876, Drahomanov left Ukraine for Vienna.