From early childhood, I got used to hearing a bunch of different languages spoken around me. My world of the late 1970s – 1980s which was centered in Mukachevo, was extremely multilingual and multicultural. For instance, in the city, there were 10 Ukrainian, 4 Russian, and 2 Hungarian (including one school for Romani where the subjects were taught in Hungarian) schools. However, the language palette was not as bright as one may think it was, and the languages spoken in Mukachevo were quite strictly classified by their importance. By then, taking into account many military units quartered and thus many Russian officers living in the city, Russian had become the most prestigious language. Unofficially, this fact was supported by the Soviet power.
The first secretaries of the local branches of the Communist Party (who were factual leaders of the respective areas) had to be local people, showing off the efficiency and internationalism of the Leninist national policy, but the second secretaries – at all levels, starting from the republican, and down to oblast (regional) and to rayon (district) Party committees had to be ethnic Russians (‘to supervise over the locals,’ as I often heard to be said). Despite the fact that there were more than twice as many Ukrainian schools in the city than Russian ones, the bias towards Russian was obvious: during the breaks, many schoolchildren switched to Russian, even though at home, with their parents they spoke Rusyn, Ukrainian, Hungarian, German or Yiddish (or a couple of these languages within one family, but not Russian! – this was the picture in my class).
In the USSR, the common view was that dialects just merely litter a literary language, which was why their carriers should be (and were) treated as uneducated persons, and were often mocked.
If somebody from a village would come to Mukachevo to study at a vocational school or the cooperative college, they would be called Hukan, or Hukanyn (literally, one that hukaye, i.e. shouts from a mountain to another mountain, like the Highlanders (Verkhovyntsi) were believed to be doing to hear each other, when there were no cellular phones and any other means of communication was rare and unstable) because of their thick Rusyn accent. So many of the young people coming to the city from villages were trying to shift to Russian as quickly as possible – but it was really hard: most of them had actually never gotten rid of their pronunciation peculiarities – I have met many natives of Subcarpathia who have lived in other countries for decades, but as soon as they opened up their mouth, the strong Rusyn Ы proved to me who they were. Many demobilized soldiers, upon arriving home after serving two years in the army, would also show their fellow villagers how much ‘more advanced’ they were by speaking Russian to them – to the utter bewilderment of their grandparents.
As for the Rusyn vernacular itself, I would not say that it was banned – it simply was out of fashion. Then we rarely heard the very word Rusyn. We spoke it with our grandparents or visiting our rural relatives, and we referred to it as ‘говорити по-нашому, по-місному’ (‘speak local’). As it was revealed later, we did not hear many other historical and political terms that had been in use in Subcarpathia not long before – for instance, nobody told us about ‘Carpatho-Ukraine,’ and only years later I began to hear these things openly, only guessing why our grandparents who had lived in Austria-Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and finally the USSR had preferred not to tell us anything about the events of the first half of the 20th century.
And, of course, there was one more sphere where Rusyn was used: the prayers. It was again our grandmothers who taught us them during the atheist Soviet time (our parents seemed to feel more concerned about their careers and thus they avoided going to such ‘dangerous’ places as churches). Despite the fact that the Holy Services both in the Orthodox (openly) and Greek Catholic (underground – at the priests’ homes, or listening to the Vatican Radio) rites were held in Old Slavonic, the phonetics were ‘extremely Rusyn’ (I understood it for the first time when I traveled to Sergiev Posad, then Zagorsk near Moscow, and heard how differently the entire Service sounded), and even more ‘Rusyn’ were the sermons delivered by the priests (it was the leftover of that yazychie originating from the mid-19th century, from the works of Dukhnovych and other Ruthenian budytels-awakeners, with the prevailing majority of local vocabulary and some bookish Old Slavonic words, all wrapped into the Rusyn phonetics – I still remember the exclamation of a Greek Catholic priest in Mukachevo: Якоє великоліпноє піснопініє! – to those who do not read Cyrillic, I will say that this sentence, meaning ‘What a splendid chanting!, was pronounced using Old Slavonic words, but the Rusyn adjective of the neutral gender, and Rusyn [i] in the place of the Old Slavonic [ѣ]).
But still, Mukachevo of the 1980s did remain a multilingual city. We, the kids of that time, knew which language to choose when communicating in different places and with different people. I knew, for instance, that all elderly people must speak Hungarian – and I preferred to speak to them in Hungarian when meeting our neighbors or going to the bazaar (open-air market). It was there where I for the first time met an elderly woman who was selling something and who could not answer me in Hungarian – then Mom explained to me that she was from Verkhovyna (Carpathian Highlands), but for me, it was a cultural shock learning that not in all places of Subcarpathia elderly people knew Hungarian.
Turning to the ethnic groups living in Mukachevo, I should say that the families that were offspring of old Greek Catholic intelligentsia (priests, teachers, physicians during the Czechoslovakian period) knew Hungarian, and many of them spoke it at home.
Besides, the elder generation of the ethnic Schwabs (Germans) from the city’s outskirts and German villages near Mukachevo, from Ust-Chorna (Königsfeld/Királymező), and Zipzerei neighborhood in Rakhiv (Rahó) knew Hungarian, too.
The Slovaks living in Fridieshovo (Frigyesfalva) also spoke Hungarian and were fluent in Rusyn. The same can be said about the Slovaks living near Uzhhorod, Perechyn, and Irshava. (Another thing was that in Mukachevo, there were quite a few persons registered officially as Slovaks whose mother tongue was Hungarian, and who in fact did not know the Slovak language; most likely, they or their parents preferred to state themselves as Slovaks to avoid being sent to work camps as ethnic Hungarians after WWII.)
As for the local Hungarians in Mukachevo, they knew Rusyn – unlike those from Berehovo rayon and the purely Hungarian villages in Uzhhorod and Vynohradiv rayons – they could hardly speak Russian (for they studied it at school), but did not know Rusyn or Ukrainian (in Hungarian schools during the Soviet time, students had two lessons of Russian a week, but Ukrainian was not taught at all). Bilingual Hungarians lived in the bilingual Hungarian-Rusyn villages, like Rakoshyno (Beregrákos), Zhniatyno (Izsnyéte), Vyshkovo (Visk); besides, Hungarians living in eastern part of Subcarpathia also knew Rusyn and Ukrainian perfectly well – Tiachiv (Técső), Rakhiv (Rahó), Yasinia (Kőrösmező). It was a pleasure listening to a pure Hungarian guy from Yasynia quarreling with his mate in impeccable Hutsul vernacular and then starting to sing a Hungarian song. Also, there is a string of Greek Catholic but Hungarian-speaking villages near Vynohradiv (Nagyszőlős): Fanchykovo (Fancsika), Chepa (Csepe), which not only could speak Rusyn but refused opening Hungarian schools in their villages when such possibility appeared after the collapse of the USSR.
Speaking about the ethnic palette of Mukachevo of the 1980s, one should not omit Jews. Of course, Mukachevo was not ‘the Central European Palestine’ (as it had been called in the interwar period) anymore, with most of its Jewish citizens having perished during the Holocaust, and in the 1970s many of them began leaving for Israel. But Jews still lived in the city. And – what is even more striking – they still spoke Yiddish, which had by then been forgotten and abandoned by most of their compatriots in Israel. One of my schoolmates, who spoke Yiddish at home, must have been one of the last of our generation who was using this language for general communication. My Grandmother also knew Yiddish – she recounted that she had learned it in her childhood while playing with the Jewish kids with whom she had lived in the same yard. And the grandfather of my classmate once told me that he could communicate in all languages that were in use in Subcarpathia – Hungarian, Czech, Romanian, German, Rusyn, Ukrainian, and Russian. It is worth adding that all Subcarpathian Jews also knew Hungarian (during the Hungarian censuses, many of them were identified as Hungarians by mother tongue but Israelites by faith), and that they had arrived at Subcarpathia from Galicia in the middle of the 19th century. But that would be a different story…
I did not meet Subcarpathian Romanians before going to the University, so I cannot say about their command of different languages at that time. But an interesting fact is that in Solotvyno (Aknaszlatina) the only school with four languages of instruction in the USSR operated – those languages were Ukrainian, Russian, Hungarian, and Romanian.
To my strong regret, my generation seemed to be the last ones who faced real multilingualism starting from their childhood and were able to switch to a bunch of different languages, depending on the conversational situation. The question arises: in whose way did this variegated Carpathian Babylon stand so that it disappeared within the lifespan of one generation?