This article is an important chapter from the book, Short History of Carpathian Rus by Simeon Pyzh and is published with the permission of the Lemko Association. We encourage anyone interested in Rusyn history and politics to read this work in its entirety. The book can be purchased by going to this link: http://lemkoassociation.org/publications/
The imperialistic war cost Karpatska Rus’ huge sacrifices, human as well as material. Besides those people who fell at the front, many others were murdered. Some were “tried” by courts martial as “Russophiles” and spies; others were murdered without trials by German and Hungarian gendarmes and soldiers without any chance of appeal. A Russian could be shot or hanged by any German or Magyar gendarme, officer, or soldier without any punishment to himself; no one investigated if that Carpatho-Russian villager was, in truth, guilty. Out of the thousands of Galician Lemkos interned in horrible German [Austrian] camps, hundreds died of typhus and hunger. Many Carpatho-Russian villages, where terrible battles occurred, were burnt and despoiled of seed, cattle and other means for living. When at last came the end of the terrible imperialistic world war came, out of all the countries involved the poorest and hungriest was Karpatska Rus’.
But even poor and hungry Karpatska Rus’ became alive when she heard of the self-determination of peoples, and our people understood the phrase of the American President Wilson, and naively believed in such self-determination. By it our people understood that henceforth neither the Magyars nor Poles would rule over us, that we would ourselves be the bosses in our land. It is not strange that Carpatho-Russians sincerely believed in such gratuitous freedom, for they did not understand that there can’t be any kind of national freedom under the capitalistic order, that that the capitalistic order is tightly tied with imperialism, seizure of foreign peoples and their lands, and with national oppression of weaker nations. This we did not understand because there was no one to teach us. We also did not understand the Russian proletarian revolution. Why? Because all the learning that they gave us was in and around the church and under its control. Small wonder that we believed in the “self-determination” of peoples large and small, that we believed in our own “self-determination.”
But when, after the fall of Austro-Hungary, the leaders of other nationalities in this multi-national state already knew what they wanted, already had worked out programs with their national organizations and knew everything about their own people, our people during the course of a long bondage had been deprived of its leaders who had crossed over to the camp of the ruling nations. And, when the time came to step out in the name of the Carpatho-Russian people, those who wanted to lead did not know whom to guide, did not know what country, what land, what people they were supposed to champion. They did not understand the situation of the Carpatho-Russian people, did not understand its soul, and even did not know its language and ethnographic boundaries. It is not surprising that every one of these self-styled leaders of our people sought freedom and benefits only for himself and not for the people.
This explains why no other people in those times established as many “rady” (councils) as our own Carpatho-Russians. No sooner appeared another self-styled leader, than already another orientation and “rada”. These “rady” multiplied like mushrooms after rain: in Lubovna a rada was organized, in Prešov still another, one in Užhorod sponsored by a chapter of a church order and one in Maramoroš.
The members of the Užhorod “Russian Rada”, established by canons at the Užhorod church chapter, oriented themselves toward Hungary. The Russian Rada in Prešov, whose members were the old Prešov patriots from the Beskid hills, oriented Carpathian Rus’ toward Czechoslovakia.
No less a number of “radas” were established in the Galician part of Lemkovyna. There, in fact, in every district a “Russian Rada”(Rus’ka Rada) was established by the local district leaders. There was such a rada in the Sącz district, in Grybów, in Gorlice, Jaslo, Krosno; and, in the Sanok district, there was even proclaimed in Lupkow a republic, called afterward, jestingly, the “Republic of Lupkow”.
In one respect, all of these “radas” in Galician Lemkovyna were the same: all wanted to join our people to Russia, but all imagined, not a Soviet, but a national Russia. The leaders of these radas did not understand or did not want to understand the Russian Revolution. They could not understand, those leaders of ours, neither from one nor the other side, nor even here in emigration in North America, that the first condition for achieving any kind of national, autonomous rights for Carpathian Rus’ was her unification, that is, a uniting into one unit in accordance with geography, ethnography, according to the laws of nature, language and national ideology. When Lemkos from Prešov Rus’ did not care what happened to the Lemkos on the Galician side, and Maramoroš cared not for Užhorod and Makovitsa, then it is easily understood that nobody else was obliged to care and fight for that union of those lands into one Carpathian Rus’ (Karpatska Rus’).