Mapping stateless peoples: The east Slavs of the Carpahtians

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

Nomenclature, however, does not by itself help to distinguish CarpathoRusyns from other East Slavs. This is because at least until the 1920s, the Ukrainians of Galicia and Bukovina also called themselves Rusyns. Consequently, Ukrainian authors considered the ethnonym Rusyn to be an older name for Ukrainian, while Russian authors considered it to be a regional name for Russian. From such a perspective, there is no need to define a CarpathoRusyn areal distinct from the rest of the East Slavic world. Instead, the East Slavs on both sides of the Carpathians are subdivided into three ethnographic groups-Lemkos, Boikos, and Hutsuls. These groups may have distinct ethnographic characteristics, but they are viewed as part of an East Slavic ethnolinguistic continuum, whether as a branch of the Ukrainian nationality or a branch of an even more encompassing Russian nationality.26

The major shortcoming of this approach is that the three-fold ethnographic classification scheme does not respond, so to speak, to the reality on the ground. For instance, none of the so-called Lemkos and very few of the so-called Boikos living on the southern slopes of the Carpathians have ever called themselves Lemkos or Boikos, but instead use the terms Rusyn or Rusnak to describe themselves. Linguists, moreover, do not speak of Boiko dialects on the southern slopes of the Carpathians. In other words, the people that ethnographers consider to be Boikos living south of the mountains in a territory that coincides with virtually all of Subcarpathian Rus'/Transcarpathia do not describe themselves as Boikos and are classified by linguists as speaking dialects that are different from Boiko dialects north of the mountains.27

If the ethnographic scheme, with its arguments about similarities between people on the northern and southern slopes of the mountains, is rejected as a valid conceptual framework, how does one justify including within the CarpathoRusyn areal (1) the Lemko Region in historic Galicia, which is north of the Carpathians; and (2) the southeastern corner of Transcarpathia where the inhabitants have traditionally used the name Hutsul just as do the inhabitants immediately on the northern slopes of the mountains? Even more important, how can one justify speaking at all of a Carpatho-Rusyn areal distinct from the rest of the East Slavic world?

Put quite simply, the C-R Settlement Map reflects the views of political activists and writers who at least since the second half of the nineteenth century have, like the Basques mentioned at the outset of this essay, come to believe in the existence of a definable homeland called Carpathian Rus'. They have based their belief on the presence among the area's inhabitants of a national will expressed in the form of a common historic tradition. Admittedly, there has also been a Russian national will and a Ukrainian national will expressed at various times among the region's East Slavic inhabitants, and those are subjects worthy of attention in their own right. The object of this essay, however, is to explain the evolution of the Rusyn national will and therefore the justification for the areal depicted on the C-R Settlement Map.