The shlyakhta were a noble class of Ruthenians in what is now Western Ukraine that enjoyed certain legal and social privileges. Estimates of their numbers vary. According to one estimate, by the mid-19th century, there were approximately 32,000 Ukrainian nobles in the western Ukrainian territory of Galicia, over 25% of whom lived in 21 villages near the town of Sambir. They comprised less than 2% of the ethnic Ukrainian population. Other estimates place the number of nobles at 67,000 people at the end of the 18th century and 260,000 by the end of the 19th century, or approximately 6% of the ethnic Ukrainian population. The nobles tended to live in compact settlements either in villages populated mostly by nobles or in particular areas of larger villages.

The Eastern Catholic clergy of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church were a hereditary tight-knit social caste that dominated Ukrainian society in Western Ukraine from the late eighteenth until the mid-twentieth centuries, following the reforms instituted by Joseph II, Emperor of Austria. Because, like their Eastern Orthodox brethren, married men in the Ukrainian Catholic Church could become priests, they were able to establish "priestly dynasties", often associated with specific regions, for many generations. Numbering approximately 2,000-2,500 by the 19th century, priestly families tended to marry within their group, constituting a tight-knit hereditary caste. In the absence of a significant culturally and politically active native nobility, and enjoying a virtual monopoly on education and wealth within western Ukrainian society, the clergy came to form that group's native aristocracy. The clergy adopted Austria's role for them as bringers of culture and education to the Ukrainian countryside. Most Ukrainian social and political movements in Austrian-controlled territory emerged or were highly influenced by the clergy themselves or by their children. This influence was so great that western Ukrainians were accused by their Polish rivals of wanting to create a theocracy in western Ukraine. The central role played by the Ukrainian clergy or their children in western Ukrainian society would weaken somewhat at the end of the nineteenth century but would continue until the Soviet Union forcibly dissolved the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in Ukrainian territories in the mid-twentieth century.