The Russian invasion of Ukraine has brought a lot of attention to a region that has seen more than its share of human suffering. One people who could speak volumes about that are the Rusyns.
There is an old riddle in central and eastern Europe: I lived in six countries, and never moved once. Who am I? I was born in Austria-Hungary, grew up in Czechoslovakia. By the time of my drafting into the army, I had to swear allegiance in Hungarian. I deserted and later joined the Czechoslovak Army Corps, which fought alongside the Red Army to liberate Czechoslovakia from the Nazis. Later, when I returned to my home village, I was paid a visit by an NKVD agent. As an old man, I witnessed the red flag with the hammer and the sickle lowered for the final time and replaced by the yellow and blue of Ukraine. Oh, and let’s not forget about the one-day Republic of Carpatho-Ukraine.
Rusyns and the Rus’
Some years ago, as I was settling in for my Psychology class in a large lecture hall at one American university, my neighbor and I struck up a conversation about war cemeteries of all topics. He had recently visited Gettysburg and that clearly made an impression on him.
“Do you have any battlefield sites near where you live?” he asked.
I thought about the WW1 cemetery in my town of Medzilaborce and countless others in the surrounding villages. The WW1 crypt with 6000 skulls in the nearby Osadne. The even more numerous WW2 monuments, like the one in Dukla and Kalinov and many others. Then I thought about the litany of other conflicts which preceded these and which the land no longer preserves the memory of – the rising of 1848, the entire 18th century filled with anti-Hapsburg uprisings, The Ottoman Wars, countless wars among the nobility and between the nobles and their kings, the Mongols.
The earliest recorded war in which our ancestors had taken part was the Magyar invasion of the Carpathian Basin at the end of the 9th century. Back then, the people ruling over the northern Carpathian Mountains, an area straddling the borders of present-day Eastern Slovakia, Southeastern Poland, Southwestern Ukraine, and Northern Romania, were called White Croats, the color most likely referring to the cardinal direction of their homeland – as opposed to the Croats who migrated south into the Balkans. Over time, due to their eastern Christianity and their use of Old Church Slavonic, an ancient sacred language, and the migrations of the eastern Slavs, these people came to be known as Rusyns.
It is that religious connection, more than anything else, which linked this group of people to the wider world of Rus. The term, originally applied to the pagan Vikings who conquered large stretches of eastern Europe, had traveled wide and far and made some strange detours over the course of history. From pagans, it went on to label eastern Christians with the shared religious practices and scripture. At various times in history, the Rus label and its different derivations would describe people as diverse as Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, but even Lithuanians, Romanians, Bulgarians, Slovaks, and also the Rusyns of today.
Even though this nomenclature traveled over the Carpathians from the east, their eastern Christianity, for which the Rusyns are named, didn’t arrive in this region from the east but from the west. Francis Dvornik, in his book The Missions Among the Slavs, argues that Byzantine Christian rites, along with the Old Church Slavonic arrived to the White Croats via the Byzantine Missions of Cyril and Methodius in the Great Moravia, years before Kyiv’s first rulers were Christianized. As the Christian world split up after the Great Schism, the Latin rites eventually pushed out the Byzantine ones in the areas where they had previously taken root, like the nascent kingdoms of Czechia, Poland and Hungary. That is with the exception of the northeastern corner of the Hungarian kingdom where Rusyns today live.
The etymological connection between Rusyns and the Russians is self-evident. In the Rusyn Carpathian homeland, there is a large number of settlements named “Rusky”, “Ruska”, or “Ruske” meaning “of the Rus’” or simply Rusyn in the ancient sense. These settlements were found during the Wallachian colonization in the 14th and 15th centuries when a number of shepherding communities from the eastern Carpathians – present-day southwestern Ukraine and northern Romania – moved and settled westward – northeastern Slovakia and southeastern Poland. Just as countries today entice large factories with tax breaks, so too did medieval kingdoms use tax incentives and other privileges to settle and develop the sparsely settled regions in the Carpathians. While earlier Wallachian colonization in the southern parts of the Carpathians had a strong ethnic Vlach (Romanian) characteristic, by this phase of the colonization, the new settlers were predominantly Eastern Slavs or Ruthenians. Eventually, the term Vlach lost its ethnic characteristic and instead took on a vocational significance (i.e., shepherd). To distinguish themselves from their mostly Roman Catholic neighbors, many of these settlements staked their eastern Christian identity in their settlement name – “Rusky(a/e)”.
The first fragmentation of this large “Rus’” community of believers appeared around the time of reformation. The ancestors of Romanians were encouraged by their protestant Hungarian nobility to translate religious texts, written in an ancient Slavic language that the romance-speaking peasants didn’t understand, into vernacular.
Roughly around the same time, another change, a political one, had rippled from Moscow when Ivan the Terrible proclaimed himself the Tsar of all Rus, the first ruler to do so. The rest of the story – the gradual expansion of Russia in all directions – is rather well-known. What isn’t noticed is the slow change of the meaning of Rus’, as Muscovy took claim of this formerly religious-cultural label. From a loose community of true believers, Russians morphed into a more compact ethnic group ruled by the Tsar in Moscow. This process was slow, yet its effects reverberate in the history of ethnic identification in Central and Eastern Europe, and its effects are evident in Ukraine today.
Even before Ivan the Terrible proclaimed himself the Tsar of all Russia, a new dichotomy began to appear within the Rus. Whatever Ivan’s proclamations and ambitions, large swaths of Eastern Slavic Orthodoxy were ruled from the Catholic capitals of Poland-Lithuania and Hungary, eventually becoming Catholic themselves after the Unions of Brest (1595-6) and Užhorod (1646). This separation was recognized in name as well. The people in the west, today’s Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Rusyns were referred to as Ruthenians or Rusyns, as opposed to the people of the eastern Rus’ – Russkiye or Russians. Different languages denoted this dichotomy in different ways. The Poles call Russians “Rusijane” and Rusyns “Ruski” or “Rusiny”. For Slovaks, Russian is “Rusky” and Rusyn “Rusin”. Whatever the actual name, everyone recognized the two Rus’ worlds drifting apart.
The steady advance of the Russian empire didn’t change that. After it partitioned Poland-Lithuania with the help of Austria and Prussia, it failed to completely assimilate the emergent Belarusian and Ukrainian ethnicities. It wasn’t for lack of trying though. At the beginning of the 19th century, Russian authors and thinkers broke with the traditions of Old Church Slavonic and instead charted a new secular course for their writings. Pushkin was perhaps the epitome of that crop of talent emerging from the newly established St. Petersburg University. He’s often credited with creating the modern Russian language, a source of pride for Russians, but to Ukrainian authors, like Shevchenko, it was like putting on a straightjacket.
Ironically, it was an emigre group of Rusyn intellectuals, benefiting from the enlightened education reforms of Maria Theresa back in Austria a couple of generations beforehand, which played a key role in setting up the foundations for this new Russian literary elite. Michal Baluďansky, a native of a small Rusyn village in what is today Slovakia and the founder and the first lecturer of St. Petersburg University, was the leading figure of that group. Peter Lodij, a professor of law, philosophy, and Old Church Slavonic, was another.
Expansion of the Rusyns in Hungary
Another expansion of the Rusyn settlements in the Hungarian kingdom came in the aftermath of the numerous anti-Hapsburg estate rebellions during the 17th and early part of the 18th centuries. The immense devastation brought by these wars mostly affected the towns and villages in the more prosperous areas in the lowlands and spared the highlands in which the Rusyns lived. Encouraged by the Catholic authorities, who had managed to bring the formerly Orthodox Rusyns into a union, many Rusyn families took this opportunity to resettle in the more fertile lands to the south bringing their religion with them.
In his book, Tri Jazyky, Štyri Konfesie (Three Languages, Four Denominations), Peter Šoltés, paints a vivid picture of the Rusyn expansion from the foothills of the Carpathians. Compared to the Roman Catholics who lived in the more prosperous lowlands, the Rusyn communities, out of sheer necessity, had to figure out how to support a parish in the most meager of circumstances. After all, priests and churches weren’t cheap. For Roman Catholics, this meant building churches from stone or brick and sending young men into seminaries for several years. Rusyns, on the other hand, built their churches out of wooden beams fitted together like a jigsaw without the use of nails. Moving a church was just a matter of taking it apart piece by piece and putting it back together. Their clergy was also easier to train given that the Rusyn priests married and had children, passing down priesthood from father to son. Thus, in the battle of the two franchises, the Roman Catholic and, after the Union of Užhorod, the Greek Catholic, the latter had a clear advantage in terms of startup and operational costs.
The expansion of the Rusyns was so rapid that the Roman Catholic bishops tried their best to stymie it. Back in those days each soul was weighed in gold and losing a dominant position within an area meant losing revenue (this is still true now to an extent). Every christening, marriage, funeral, and other important services brought in resources, which the Roman Catholic Church, being the dominant denomination under the Austrian monarchy, would prefer to claim for itself. Even though the protestants were also disadvantaged, unlike them, the Rusyns didn’t have any representatives in the nobility. Thus, they were often taken advantage of by the Roman Catholic clergy despite the official laws which declared the equality of the Roman and Greek Catholics. It was only after numerous imperial interventions that true equality was established toward the end of the 18th century, by which time the newly established Rusyn communities had begun to assimilate into mostly Slovak, but sometimes also Hungarian majorities.
From mid-18th to early 19th century, some Rusyn communities migrated to the southernmost part of the Hungarian kingdom and created the first Rusyn diasporas. These areas, located in present-day Croatia and Serbia, were recovered from the Ottomans and were severely depopulated. Numerous Rusyn enclaves exist there to this day.
Rusyns and Ukrainians
The 19th century was also a time when the Ukrainian and Rusyn labels began to diverge. Rusyn remained the preferred term for all eastern Slavs within the Austrian – later Austro-Hungarian – Empire for most of this time, while “little Russian” was the term used for Ukrainians on the Russian census. As Kristina Cantin, in her groundbreaking anthropological study of Rusyns in Slovakia and Ukraine, points out, the assimilating policies of the Russian Empire against Ukrainians in the 19th century contributed to two contradictory processes for the Rusyns in Austria.
For most of the 19th century, the dominant orientation of the eastern Slavs in Austria (and later Austria-Hungary), was that of the Russophiles, who saw themselves as part of the larger Russian nation. A large part of the Rusyns living in the Austrian provinces of Galicia and Bukovina began merging into the Ukrainian “ethnosphere” as a reaction against the Russian assimilation and in protection of a more local and authentic identity against the more distant and less authentic identity emanating out of Moscow and St. Petersburg.
At the same time, this process of Ukrainization of Austrian Rusyns resulted in a belated reaction from those Rusyns further west and south who, while feeling close to the Rusyns of Galicia and Bukovina, didn’t share the same affinity for the “Dnieper Ukrainians”. Eventually, these Rusyns traded in their Russophilia as well, but not for a Ukrainian orientation. Instead, much like the Rusyns of Galicia resisted russification and embraced a Ukrainian orientation, the Rusyns in Hungary and western Galicia have also resisted the larger and more distant Ukrainian ethnos in favor of something more local and authentic, it being their own Rusyn identity. It needs to be pointed out that these processes were largely elite-driven, as the regular populace was overwhelmingly illiterate and thus couldn’t meaningfully participate.
This ethnic divergence didn’t happen in a political vacuum. As the relations between the neighboring empires soured in the late 19th century, Galicia became a battleground between the Russians and Austrians, each supporting a different faction. Austrians, however, had the upper hand on their home turf, which meant a rising Ukrainian awareness and education opportunities, while the support for the Rusyn orientation, which tended to be pro-Russian, declined.
The story was markedly different in the Hungarian half of the empire. Where the Austrian authorities finessed their statecraft with divide and rule, the Hungarians were far blunter in their use of state instruments. They set off a campaign of heavy Magyarization, which had disastrous consequences for the Rusyns. By the 1910 census, gens fidelissima, “the most faithful people”, as a certain Hungarian noble dubbed the Rusyns during one of the last anti-Hapsburg risings, were the least literate of all the ethnic groups in Hungary at 22% (compared to Hungarians – 67%). During the process of Magyarization, many Rusyn schools were forced to close and only 47 remained open, a mere .27% of the total elementary schools in the kingdom of Hungary serving a Rusyn population of over 500,000 (2.5% of the total). Hungarians had, in comparison, over 14,000 elementary schools, as well as high schools, trade schools, gymnasiums and colleges.
The Hungarian authorities had also coopted the leading Rusyn institution, the Greek Catholic Church, and used it to promote their Magyarization policies. Orest Subtelny in his Ukraine: a History shows how far-reaching the control of the Hungarian state was within the Greek Catholic Church. For instance, the priests sent overseas to the growing Rusyn parishes in the American diaspora were filtered by the government authorities. This new and burgeoning Rusyn community would soon prove crucial in the political direction of their compatriots in the old country.
Genocide and Concentration Camps
As more information about the massacre of civilians in Ukraine comes to light a familiar arc of eastern European history emerges in view. Many of the readers will surely be familiar with the Armenian genocide in the wake of WW1. Everyone knows about the holocaust and most have probably heard about the genocide in Bosnia. Few, on the other hand, have ever heard of the Rusyn genocide.
Within the first few months of WW1, as the Russian armies pursued the Central Powers deep into Galicia, the retreating Austrian and Hungarian soldiers unleashed an indiscriminate campaign against their own subjects. Thousands of Rusyns were summarily executed, either at their homes or in the public squares. Many who survived the ravages of their country’s army were loaded onto train carts and driven west, all the way to the Austrian town of Thalerhof and the Czech town of Terezin, the first concentration camps in Europe. Thousands of Rusyn teachers, clerics, and better-educated peasants were held in dire living conditions, tortured, or killed. Austria-Hungary, a country that is often mythologized for its high culture and civility, had penned a new chapter in the history of human depravity.
Peace and War
After the war, the Rusyn leaders had difficult decisions to make. True to form, a consensus was difficult to reach. Just a year before, few Rusyn leaders could imagine the 1000-year union of king Stephan’s crownlands coming to an end. Even after the war, there were Rusyns, like Orest Sabo, who took a gamble on Hungarian overtures promising cooperation and autonomy. These offers, however, came too late as the various Rusyn bodies, like the American National Council of Uhro-Rusyns, had already opted for autonomy within Czechoslovakia after all the other options – independence, union with Galician Rusyns – became unrealistic.
Interwar Czechoslovakia provided a much-needed respite for the Rusyns. The Czech leadership set to work in order to better connect and develop “their” new country. They saw this as the most effective way of battling possible irredentism. One of the biggest obstacles to these goals was the eastern part of the country, where the Rusyns lived. As Antonin Baťa pointed out in We’re Building a Nation for 40,000,000 People, Subcarpathian Rus lagged 200 years behind the rest of the country.
One immediate benefit for the Rusyns was the end of their forced assimilation. However, after the Magyarization policies had gutted the Rusyn education, there was a dire shortage of qualified teachers. At the same time, as more Ukrainian emigres escaped Bolshevik Russia and settled in Prague, which President Masaryk had intended to turn into a Ukrainian Oxford, Czechs saw an opportunity. Given the linguistic proximity between the Rusyn and Ukrainian languages, the Czech authorities decided to send Ukrainians east as educators. To the Czechs, this choice was a logical one. However, for the Rusyn nation, which was politically immature, this decision ended up backfiring. Not only for the Rusyns but for Czechoslovakia at large as the Soviet Union would end up annexing Subcarpathian Rus claiming that it was merely reuniting it with the rest of Ukraine.
Along with Ukrainians, Russian emigres flocked to Subcarpathian Rus as well and just as soon began to vie for influence among the Rusyns. Organizations, such as the Ukrainian Prosvita and its political arm the Rusyn Agricultural Party or the Carpatho-Russian Worker’s Party, began to appear. At first, Prosvita promoted the Rusyn language in classrooms, but by the 1930s they pushed for full Ukrainization. Even before this happened, the vice-governor of Subcarpathian Rus, Petr Ehrenfeld, had already warned about the harmful activities being perpetrated by Ukrainian and Russian political activists parceling out their territories. He recommended that all foreign nationals be moved back to Prague and instead allow Rusyns to develop their own language and nationhood. His warnings were ignored.
As important as the cultural and educational reforms were, for regular Rusyns perhaps the most important changes were the major land reforms. Huge tracts of arable land in the Subcarpathian Rus – as much as 600,000 acres – were owned by only a small number of Hungarian landholders. More than 40,000 families, of which 86% were Rusyn, benefited from this land transfer. Along with the transfer, the Czech authorities stressed education to make sure the new landholders would keep up the food production. Reforms like these helped secure the loyalty of the Rusyn populace to the new regime.
The Rusyns to the north of the Carpathians didn’t find as hospitable an environment. Initially, two small and short-lived Rusyn republics sprung up on the northern slopes of the Carpathians: The Eastern Lemko Republic and The Lemko-Rusyn People’s Republic. Lemko is a Polish exonym for the Rusyn people living in what is today southern Poland. As Ukrainian orientation found favorable conditions in the former Austria-Hungary it spread through a portion of the Lemko-speaking area. The Eastern Lemko Republic, a union of 33 villages that desired to unify with the rest of Galician Ukraine and lasted only for a couple of months, is a testament to that. However, the considerably larger Lemko-Rusyn People’s Republic proved that despite the previous regime’s attempts, Rusyn ethnicity survived, as did its president, Jaroslav Kačmarčyk, a former inmate of the Thalerhof concentration camp. Kačmarčyk desired to unify with the Rusyns to the south, but given many existing border disputes between Poland and Czechoslovakia, this proved impossible. By 1920, this Lemko Republic had also been subdued by Poland.
In an attempt to divide and rule, Poland supported various different ethnic orientations between Ukrainians and Rusyns. At the same time, especially during the 1920s, under Grabski’s leadership, Polonization was instituted at all levels. In the last census before WW2 (1931), Poland introduced the Ukrainian category for the first time along with the preexisting Rusyn one. For the central government in Warsaw, it was easier to manage two smaller groups rather than one large group of Rusyns.
Events leading up to WW2 severely complicated the situation for Rusyns everywhere, especially in Czechoslovakia. To counterbalance the large German minority, Czechs tethered their Slovak compatriots into a unitary state, which meant going back on the international agreements of autonomy. Even the census administered every decade grouped Czechs and Slovaks into a single ethnic category of Czechoslovak. The situation was similar with the Rusyns who also were deprived of autonomy promised to them under international treaties. Once the Sudeten crisis flared up, the events proceeded quickly.
The last free election of Czechoslovakia in 1935 can give us some clue as to the political situation within the Rusyn community. The two biggest parties in the Užhorod electoral district, representing most of the Rusyn lands within Czechoslovakia, were the Communists (25.61%) and the Agrarians (RSZML at 19.6%), which makes sense given the largely rural nature of the Rusyn settlements. The third largest party, actually a block of Slovak, Rusyn and Polish parties pushing for autonomy, received 14.85% of the vote and shows a growing awareness in the Rusyn electorate of larger political issues, such as the need for self-government. Although autonomy was pretty much an important issue for anyone doing politics in the Subcarpathian Rus.
At this time, two prominent figures emerge in Rusyn politics: Andrij Brodij and Augustin Vološin. Brodij took over the leadership of the Autonomous Agrarian Union, while Vološin, a leading figure in the pro-Ukrainian political and cultural life, was a candidate for the Czechoslovak People’s Party. Brodij railed against the Ukrainian emigres for organizing the “Ukrainian ‘hakenkreuz’ intrigue” against the local Rusyn organizations. Much like many other native Rusyn leaders, he struggled against the foreign influence on Rusyn politics and the increasing Ukrainization of Rusyns. After the Munich Agreement, which saw Czechoslovakia cede large parts of its territory and population to Germany, the central government proclaimed a second republic with much greater regional autonomy and Brodij became the leader of the provisional autonomous government in Subcarpathian Rus.
The crisis was not averted, however, as Munich would soon be followed by Vienna. Hungary pressed its own territorial demands against Czechoslovakia and it is this instability that led Brodij to pursue closer bonds with the former in the hopes that he could preserve the territorial integrity of the lands over which he governed. Two weeks after taking office, information incriminating Brodij with treason leaked out. He was accepting funding from Budapest and agreed to help undermine Czechoslovakia’s territorial integrity. He fled to Hungary and was replaced by Vološin. It’s worth noting that in the last free elections held in Subcarpathian Rus in 1935, Vološin’s party had received only 2.36% of the vote.
With German arbitration, Czechoslovakia ceded a large portion of its land to Hungary, including Užhorod and Mukačevo, the two largest cities of Subcarpathian Rus. As the leader of the autonomous Subcarpathia, Vološin pursued a pro-Ukrainian line within the confines of whatever was left of the short-lived second Czechoslovak Republic. When the final act of Hitler’s play on Czechoslovakia opened and Slovakia gave in to Hitler’s ultimatum to secede, Vološin proclaimed independence. The name of the state, which lasted for a full day, was Carpatho-Ukraine.
It was later discovered that the people responsible for leaking the information about Brodij’s treason were the Nazis. There are allegations that claim they did this in order to promote their own candidate, Vološin, whom they had financed in turn. This would give some credence to Brodij’s claims about the ‘hakenkreuz’ intrigue of the pro-Ukrainian politicians. It’s possible that Hitler had anticipated using Vološin as his pawn, a model Ukrainian republic under the Nazi tutelage, before invading Galicia and the rest of Poland. In the end, however, both prominent Rusyn politicians met a similar end: death in a Soviet prison.
To say that the Rusyn political situation was complicated, given all these different political orientations – pro-Russian, pro-Ukrainian, pro-Hungarian, and pro-Czechoslovak – would be an understatement. This Gordian knot was ultimately severed by Stalin in 1945. Subcarpathian Rus was annexed by the Soviet Union and attached to Ukraine as one of the many other administrative units and its 1000-year connection to Pannonia’s cultural and economic sphere had finally come to an end.
The westernmost Rusyns of Poland, Lemkos, met an even worse end. In the aftermath of the Volhynian massacre, where tens of thousands of Polish civilians were butchered at the hands of Ukrainians, the tension between these two groups broke any hope of post-war reconciliation. As the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the paramilitary organization most responsible for the massacre, moved further west to escape the advancing Soviet armies, it settled in the Lemkovyna, the homeland of the Lemko’s. These people didn’t share UPA’s hatred for the Jews, Poles, or the Russians. For the most part, they didn’t even share their Ukrainian ethnicity for which they were dubbed “nationally unaware” by the UPA.
After the war, as the new borders were drawn up and exchanges of the population put into motion, the Lemkos were caught between two millstones. At first, they were given an opportunity to emigrate to the Ukrainian SSR, mostly to the villages left vacant by the Czechs in Volhynia. Some were also settled in the Donbas. Many decided to stay put. That is until 1947 when Operation Vistula was set in motion. All of the Lemkos who remained in southern Poland were forcibly removed from their homes and moved to the lands vacated by the Germans in western Poland. Families were separated, parishes broken up, villages destroyed.
My great-grandfather, from whom I inherited my surname, was a Lemko from a small village of Vyšna Voľa, although I’m not sure he ever labeled himself as such since many Lemkos back then simply called themselves Rusyns or Rusnaks. He got married and settled in Čertižne, a village on the southern slopes of the Carpathians, becoming a citizen of Czechoslovakia. There are stories still being told on the southern slopes. Thousands of people fled across the mountains away from the Polish army; people who had lost much in the war with one last thing to lose, their land. They were gathered up into long columns and, despite the pleas of the locals and Church authorities, they were pushed back into Poland by the Czechoslovak army. A people between two millstones.
By a tragic twist of fate, one descendant of that Skala branch of our family, which emigrated to the US and thus was spared the deportations from Lemkovyna, John Skala, would end up at the World Trade Center helping with the rescue when the building collapsed.
Rusyns in Slovakia were also given the choice to opt for Soviet citizenship and emigrate. My grandmother’s family, this time on the mother’s side, took this opportunity, a decision they would come to regret. It took my grandmother almost 15 years to return to her home.
Lastly, the Greek Catholic Church, the main cultural and religious institution of the Rusyn people which had accompanied them throughout the world for the past 300 years, was banned, and, in their homeland, Rusyns officially ceased to exist. From this moment on, these people were Ukrainians.
The New World Order and Ukrainization
Before we examine the post-war period, it is important to consider the relationship between political orientation and ethnic identification. Did being a pro-Ukrainian Rusyn necessarily mean that one was ethnically also Ukrainian? While the Ukrainians who immigrated to Czechoslovakia, and worked as teachers, and political and cultural organizers were indeed Ukrainian the same needn’t apply to the Rusyn public figures with whom they shared political goals. Julius Revay is an interesting figure worthy of closer examination. He was a native of Subcarpathia, worked in Vološin’s provisional autonomous government as a minister and supported various Ukrainian organizations. However, when it came to the question of ethnic identity, he was clearly a Rusyn, as evidenced by a body of educational literature in the Rusyn language he had left behind. Thus, it seems that whatever the political orientation of the Rusyn leaders, for the most part, they shared the goal of preserving the local culture. Being a small stateless nation, their modus operandi was alignment with one of their larger neighbors to achieve this goal, knowing full well that the survival of their people as a distinct ethnic group was at stake.
After the events of WW2 had settled and the political elites had resolved the Rusyn question, ethnic awareness and political activism in the Rusyn community didn’t completely disappear. In Czechoslovakia, some activists, like Štefan Bunganič, argued for an autonomous region for the Rusyns in northeastern Slovakia. In it, they would be free to decide their national orientation, a hint at breaking with the imposed Ukrainian ethnos. The transition from a Rusyn nationality to a Ukrainian one in Czechoslovakia wasn’t completely smooth. Many parents, especially in the larger towns protested sending their children into Ukrainian schools and opted for Slovak schools instead. Also, Rusyns living in the villages bordering the Soviet Union were afraid of being eventually annexed. As a result, many adopted the Slovak nationality rather than the new Ukrainian one. By allowing people once again to identify as Rusyns, activists were hoping to prevent a further decline in their numbers. The efforts to create an autonomous region for Rusyns, however, didn’t come to fruition.
The situation in Subcarpathian Rus, renamed Transcarpathia, was a lot more complicated. The Soviet authorities instituted drastic collectivization plunging thousands of war-deprived families toward the brink of starvation. Politically, too, the situation was very tense. Foreigners from other parts of the USSR immigrated in droves and looked upon the locals with suspicion. Predictably, hard repressions were introduced as hundreds of people were arrested and shipped off to gulags. Many never returned. Despite this Rusyns didn’t forget about their heritage.
One such Rusyn was a teacher by the name of Pavlo Kampov. Around the time of the 25th anniversary of Subcarpathia’s annexation, a pamphlet titled “25 Years of Hopes and Disappointment” spread throughout the region. The security apparatus pushed hard to convict Pavlo of the authorship, even though none of the 11,000 people who they interrogated turned on him. Even the torture Pavlo experienced, as a result of which he lost sight in one of his eyes, didn’t break him. He was finally released in 1989 as one of the last political prisoners.
Despite the Rusyn ethnicity officially disappearing in their own homeland, Rusyns didn’t stop preserving their own heritage. The post-war period was rich in new literature about them. Ethnographers traveled to Rusyn villages in Czechoslovakia and Subcarpathia and recorded customs, dialects, traditional crafts, manner of dress, and songs. Professional ensembles were given strong support by the state to preserve and promote these customs. The most famous of these in Czechoslovakia was PUĽS (Poddukelský Ukrajinský Umelecký Ľudový Súbor – Dukla Ukrainian Folk Ensemble). Despite the name, the culture they promoted was mainly Rusyn, although they had to enlist some elements of Ukrainian culture, such as keeping a trained bandura player (an instrument native to Ukraine), to keep their state donors satisfied.
This was more or less the status quo in the communist bloc for more than 40 years with the exception of Yugoslavia, where Rusyns were recognized as a separate ethnic group. One important thing that did change in Czechoslovakia after the Prague Spring in ‘68 was the legalization of the Greek Catholic Church. However, the first signs of true political transformation came in Poland in the 80s with the cultural renaissance of Lemko organizations. Vatra (or bonfire) festivals were organized bringing Lemkos from Poland and Ukraine back to their homeland. Later, some of these events became a battleground to promote Ukrainian nationalism among the Lemkos.
The New Beginnings
After the communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe were toppled, a new period of renaissance dawned on the Rusyn community. In all of the countries, except Ukraine, Rusyns were again recognized as a separate ethnic group and returned as a category in each country’s census. 1st world Congress of Rusyns, codification of Rusyn in Slovakia (1995) and later in Poland (2000) – the Pannonian Rusyn of Serbia and Croatia was codified much earlier (1923) – the creation of Rusyn Language Institute at the University of Prešov, and the Lemko Philology Department at the University of Krakow. The Rusyn language made its way back into media – print, video, and radio. Formerly Ukrainian organizations like PUĽS, changed their names to signal the reassertion of their Rusyn identity. Eventually, the Rusyn language made its way back into the classrooms.
The situation in Ukraine was very different. In 1991, when Ukrainians voted on whether to become an independent country, two regions – Crimea and Transcarpathia – also voted on autonomy. In both regions, the voters opted for self-rule. While Crimea received its autonomy, through a legal obstruction, Transcarpathia’s efforts were stymied. Also in 1991, an umbrella organization was established in Transcarpathia which provided a forum for all the regional minorities to cooperate and coordinate its communication with the central government – The Democratic League of Nationalities of Transcarpathia. Instead of autonomy, the Ukrainian government introduced a new law in 1993 which required all organizations to re-register. According to the new rules, umbrella organizations were prohibited from registration and thus this multinational organization in Transcarpathia was disbanded and the region’s different nationalities splintered. Then, in 1996 classified documents were leaked from the State Committee of Ukraine on Nationalities and Migration. These documents outlined the so-called “Plan of Measures to Solve the Ukrainian-Rusyn problem”. Part of the plan was to arrest any activists promoting autonomy in Transcarpathia and to promote assimilation of Rusyns.
All of these issues along with other problems in Transcarpathia were repeated by Rusyn leaders in an inter-ethnic dialogue hosted by the European Center for Minority Issues (ECMI). The report about this meeting illustrates the intransigence of the Ukrainian side. While one Ukrainian official pointed out all of the international agreements on minority rights their government was a party to, which on its own should somehow serve as proof of Ukraine’s tolerance toward its minorities, another mentioned “scientific studies” conducted in Kyiv, which had conclusively proven that Rusyns were merely a sub-group of Ukrainians. The Rusyn leaders were adamant about demanding recognition and protection of their minority rights. To this day, this hasn’t happened.
One figure that embodies all of the frustrations of the Rusyn community in Transcarpathia with both Ukraine and its predecessor, the USSR, is Ivan Pop. Born in 1938, he remembered well the communist repressions after the annexation of Transcarpathia by the USSR, dire poverty, which followed collectivization. He recalled school children fainting during class because of hunger. Nevertheless, his parents understood how important education was to escape that poverty and did everything in their power to ensure he’d get the best opportunities that life in Transcarpathia had to offer. The year he was about to graduate from the University of Užhorod, he was arrested on trumped-up charges of anti-state activities. He managed to get an acquittal but had to leave his home for exile in Moscow. There, he finished his studies and became a well-regarded if politically-suspect academic. He finally returned back home after the regime collapsed and worked on rebuilding Rusyn history and activism in Transcarpathia while being harassed by the authorities. He persevered through all of this for several years and as a result of his efforts, an Encyclopedia of Rusyn History and Culture was published in Rusyn and later also in English. In the end, as the Ukrainian authorities made his life increasingly difficult in his homeland, he along with his family left into another exile, this time in Czechia.
The Rusyns are Dying Out
Since the third Rusyn awakening, which started with the collapse of communism, there has been quite a bit of progress made in the Rusyn communities, even in Ukraine. Ignoring the recommendations of the central government in Kyiv, the Transcarpathian Regional Council declared Rusyns to be a separate people in 2007. This is only symbolic, however, since the resources meant for the protection and promotion of minorities are doled out by Kyiv. This means that the Rusyn activities continue to be almost exclusively funded from private resources. Furthermore, in 2012 Ukraine passed a language law, which included Rusyn as a separate language. However, this policy was short-lived as Kravchuk’s Draft, the latest language law passed in 2014, revoked this status. István Csernicskó and Csilla Fedinec in their study of different language laws passed in Ukraine since 1989 conclude that Kravchuk’s Draft is even more restrictive than the one passed by the communist regime in ’89.
Rusyn cultural leaders in Transcarpathia, however, didn’t wait around for Kyiv. There has been a notable production of literature coming from this region mainly focused on the instruction of the Rusyn language. Even though there are no schools in Ukraine that teach Rusyn as part of the regular curriculum, Rusyn activists managed to set up Sunday schools for which these books, like dictionaries, textbooks and grammar books were designed. Other regions have also seen a great output of Rusyn literature. Lemko activists in Poland have put out dictionaries, drawing books and primers for their youngest students. The largest output though has been registered from the Rusyn community in Slovakia, where the instruction reaches all the way to the University level. Even the smallest Rusyn community in Hungary, numbering only several hundred members, created its own language standard based on which a number of instructional books were published.
Other notable successes, at least in the countries where Rusyns are recognized as a separate ethnic group, are in their growing awareness. The results from censuses conducted every decade are clear. In Slovakia, for instance, the number of Rusyns rose from 17,197 in 1991, the first time Rusyns were included in a census as a separate category since the end of WW2, to 63,556 in 2021. At the same time, the number of people identifying as Ukrainian fell from 13,281 to 9,451. The number of towns and villages with dual Slovak and Rusyn language designation, indicating the presence of the Rusyn minority, has also grown from 68 to 156 after the last census. All of these indicators would suggest that the Rusyns are on the rise.
If we zoom in on these numbers, a different picture comes into view. While the absolute number of self-identified Rusyns in Slovakia has grown, the number of people indicating their mother tongue as Rusyn has decreased from 55,469 in 2011 to 38,679 in 2021. That is a significant change. The reason behind this change is the gradual disappearance of Rusyn from the family in favor of Slovak. Ľuba Kráľová in her sociological study of Rusyns in Slovakia stumbled upon a disturbing trend. In half of Rusyn families, the use of Rusyn disappeared in favor of Slovak within the span of three generations. This is generally attributed to Rusyns moving into the Slovak majority environment or mixed marriages between Slovaks and Rusyns, but it does also happen in towns with the Rusyn majority.
Another oft-touted success is the reappearance of Rusyn in classrooms. Here again, Slovakia leads all other communities in the number of enrolled students. The instruction in Rusyn reaches merely 500 students at the most in any given year. Unfortunately, these numbers aren’t enough to sustain Rusyn as a viable language. Also, Rusyn education rests on a handful of determined volunteers who sacrifice their careers and free time to stave off the demise of their native language. There are no institutions with ample funding which can step in to cover the real costs of Rusyn education. Without these volunteers, the Rusyn education would be nonexistent. The situation in Transcarpathia, where there is no government funding, is even worse.
In addition to these problems, Kristina Cantin described the harmful effects of the politicization of the Rusyn identity in Ukraine. Public expressions asserting unique Rusyn language and identity may elicit derogatory remarks. This antagonism isn’t derived only from anonymous online commentary. On the contrary, it reaches the upper echelons of Ukrainian political society. Witness comments by Ivan Kruľko, a member of the Ukrainian parliament, who called Rusyns “fake” nationality on a talk show a couple of years ago. Comments like these contribute to an already low level of self-identification within the Rusyn community and push the Rusyn identity from the public into the private sphere. To illustrate this, Cantin described an interaction with a woman from Transcarpathia who identified as a Rusyn only after making sure that the environment she spoke in was safe and there were other Rusyns in the group. It is up to the leadership in Ukraine to change those attitudes beginning with giving Rusyns official recognition as a separate ethnic group.
Besides politics, there are economic factors endangering the survival of Rusyns, as the areas where they live tend to be some of the least developed. The previous regime built large factories and collective farms which employed hundreds of people. As these factories and cooperatives went bust, a large wave of emigration ensued. Facing economic hardships, preservation of one’s ethnicity is the least of a person’s concerns. This has further exacerbated the rate of assimilation.
Finally, there’s the issue of the current war which may restrict the Rusyn identity in Ukraine even further. As Myhal Lyzhechko, a Rusyn living and working in Transcarpathia, writes, the situation for Rusyns is a precarious one. In an environment where a nation is fighting for its very survival, it’s not difficult to imagine a scenario in which radicalized elements within a society begin to turn on all the real, perceived, or imagined enemies from within. Rusyns who publicly express their opinions could in this case serve as a scapegoat and their calls for recognition be equated with treason. One silver lining is the EU accession.
Ukraine has officially become a candidate for EU membership. This is a major step for this young and sorely tested country. In a way, EU membership for Ukraine could return this part of Europe to the state it was in before WW1 when all the Rusyns lived in one country. Accession into the EU, therefore, offers a unique opportunity to Ukraine and to Rusyns.
If the Rusyn issue goes unnoticed during the accession process and if Rusyns in all of the countries where they live fail to build robust institutions which unify the disparate organizations and individuals striving for the same goals, Rusyns will most likely join the hundreds of ethnic groups and languages which are disappearing around the world. It is my hope in writing this that that won’t happen.