Mapping stateless peoples: The east Slavs of the Carpahtians

Canadian Slavonic Papers, Sep-Dec 1997 by Paul Robert Magocsi

In 1996, I published a large-scale (1: 355 000) map entitled Carpatho-Rusyn Settlement at the Outset of the 20th Century (henceforth the C-R Settlement Map).1 The map depicted over 1,300 villages inhabited by Carpatho-Rusyns between the years 1900 and 1921, with comparative reference to the years 1881 and 1806.

Carpatho-Rusyns have never had their own state nor even an administrative entity that encompassed all the territory where they have lived. Consequently, some criteria other than officially recognized borders had to be found in order to decide what should be depicted visually as Carpatho-Rusyn territory. This essay is an attempt to explain the conceptual basis of the C-R Settlement Map, which together with several smaller maps has begun to function as a didactic tool for those who in recent years support the idea of a distinct Carpatho-Rusyn nationality.2

My first encounter with the problem of depicting on a map the territory inhabited by a people that has no state dates back to the mid-1970s. At that time, I was commissioned to prepare 89 maps for the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups. These maps were intended to show the homelands of each of the peoples represented in the encyclopedia, some of whom had their own state, some of whom did not. Authors of the entries were asked to submit along with their text a sketch map with some of the elements they would like to have depicted. I remember vividly the map that accompanied the entry on the Basques, whose homeland straddles the present-day borders of Spain and France.

The Basque sketch map included no state borders or even a reference to either Spain or France. The Basque homeland could therefore have been anywhere, and this caused the encyclopedia editors-embued with Harvard's characteristic intellectual condescension-to dismiss the map outright as an example of myopic nationalism. Not unexpectedly, the final map that I drew for the encyclopedia made clear that the Basque Land (Euzkadi) was firmly a "part" of Spain and France.3

It took several years to extricate myself from the tyranny of contemporary state boundaries and to realize that the "borderless" map by the Basque author was in one sense as legitimate as my published corrected version in which the Basque homeland was rendered as subordinate to Spain and France. Why was the Basque author's version of spatial reality also legitimate? Because when asked about their homeland, at least some Basques respond in categories that disregard contemporary and historic state boundaries. And why is this so? Because they know that as Basques they have lived in their own homeland before Spain or France had ever come into existence. Hence, Basque "boundaries" have as much justification to be depicted on maps as any latter-day and often changing state boundaries.

Such an approach implies that there may be different kinds of boundaries. Some are "real" because they have been agreed to by governments, confirmed by surveyors, and depicted with lines on a map. Others are "real" because a group of people with a common historical memory are aware of and believe in their existence. Does this mean that boundaries in the second category are merely imagined and are, therefore, unreliable because imaginations can vary from individual to individual? Or do there exist quantitatively objective criteria which can be used to determine the boundaries of stateless peoples?

The stateless people under consideration here are the Carpatho-Rusyns. They are depicted on the C-R Settlement Map as living on contiguous territory within the present-day state boundaries of Ukraine, Slovakia, Poland, and Romania. All these territories were before World War I part of Austria-Hungary. The CarpathoRusyn inhabited lands within each present-day country are also known by regional names: (1) Subcarpathian Rus' (Podkarpats'ka Rus) or Transcarpathia (akarpattia) in Ukraine; (2) the Presov Region (Priashev'ska Rust/ Priashevshchna) in Slovakia; (3) the Lemko Region (Lemkovyna/ Lemkivshchyna) in Poland; and (4) the Maramures Region (Maramorosh) in Romania. Aside from these four regions which form a compact territory, there are as well isolated Carpatho-Rusyn villages or groups of villages (islets) in nearby southeastern Slovakia, northeastern Hungary, and farther south in the Vojvodina (historic Backa and Srem) of Yugoslavia's republic of Serbia.

Carpatho-Rusyns are linguistically and culturally an East Slavic people who live along a linguistic-cultural boundary, the other side of which is inhabited by West Slavic (Poles and Slovaks), Finno-Ugric (Magyars), and Romance (Romanian) peoples. Problems have arisen whenever scholars have attempted to determine with any degree of exactitude the extent of the Carpatho-Rusyn areal. Particularly problematic is the southwestern boundary with the Slovaks. There is also difficulty in delineating an eastern boundary, assuming there should be an eastern boundary at all. Put another way, to what degree are Carpatho-Rusyns distinguishable from fellow East Slavs, specifically the Ukrainians of neighboring historic Galicia?