Despite sharing the language and religion of their Ukrainian peasant neighbors, throughout the nineteenth century the Ukrainian nobles in western Ukraine tended to side with the Polish nobility during conflicts between the Polish and Ukrainian communities. In 1848, Ukrainian nobles volunteered for the Polish national guard and in 1863 they took up donations in support of Polish rebels in the Russian Empire. Villages populated mostly by the Ukrainian nobility tended to vote for Polish candidates and to oppose efforts to spread literacy among the peasants. The nobles were so politically preoccupied with trying to retain or win back their special rights as nobles that they did not engage in other forms of political activism. The alienation of the nobles from the Ukrainian national movement was not one-sided. The Ukrainian national movement was very peasant-focused and rejected the nobility, whose social background did not fit the nationalist narrative. The nobility were often treated as scapegoats and blamed for electoral failures; the press of the national movement accused them of greed and of selling their votes to the Poles. Almost none of the nineteenth century political activists seeking to alleviate the plight of Ukrainian peasants, or to spread literacy, or to encourage Ukrainization, or to limit economic exploitation, were nobles. The nobles' consistent indifference or opposition towards Ukrainian causes resulted in some rural Ukrainian activists claiming that the nobles were not even part of the Ukrainian nation.