Mapping stateless peoples: The east Slavs of the Carpahtians

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

On the other hand, the sense of a distinct Carpatho-Rusyn identity based on historical tradition was enhanced by developments connected with the drive for political autonomy. Ever since the mid-nineteenth century, Rusyns living south of the Carpathians had been concerned with attaining political autonomy for a territory which they argued was inhabited by a distinct people. As early as 1849, the Austrian government created the Uzhhorod military district, which in practice became a Rusyn-led administrative entity. Although short-lived, the Uzhhorod district set a precedent which Carpatho-Rusyn spokespersons hoped once again to achieve even during the new wave of magyarization in the 1860s and 1870s, when religious and secular leaders continued to submit to the Hungarian government petitions for the creation of a Carpatho-Rusyn autonomous region.32 By the twentieth century, the principle that Carpatho-Rusyns were deserving of political autonomy because they formed a distinct national group was accepted by every state that ruled the region. Hence, the autonomous Rus'ka Kraina (1918-1919) was created in post-World War I Hungary, Subcarpathian Rus' (1919-1938) in the new state of Czechoslovakia, Carpatho-Ukraine (19381939) in post-Munich federated Czecho-Slovakia, and Transcarpathian Ukraine (1944-1945) in an international political vacuum-although in the presence of the Soviet military-during the closing months of World War II.33 There was, moreover, a remarkable consistency in the territorial extent of these autonomous units. Each one, beginning with the very first one back in 1849, comprised the four historic Hungarian counties of Ung/Uzh, Bereg, Ugocsa/Ugocha, and Maramaros/Maramorosh.

There was as well a degree of consistency in the geopolitical goals of Carpatho-Rusyn leaders. They continued to demand that Rusyn-inhabited regions in at least three other counties-Szepes/Spish, Saros/Sharysh, and Zemplen/Zemplyn in present-day northeastern Slovakia-be included within any Rusyn autonomous province. Their demands were even formally recognized by the international community, when two treaties at the Paris Peace Conference (Saint Germain, 1919 and Trianon, 1920) accepted the principle that "the Ruthenes south of the Carpathians" be endowed with "the fullest degree of selfgovernment compatible with the unity of the Czecho-Slovak state."34

It is certainly true that in practice no government ever delivered fully on its promises of autonomy for Carpatho-Rusyns. What is important in this discussion, however, is that the very recognition of some degree of autonomy for a Rus' land south of the Carpathians instilled in the inhabitants a sense of a distinct Carpatho-Rusyn political as well as cultural/national identity. Such an awareness was codified and promoted by numerous publications, including textbooks used in schools between 1919 and 1944, that provided a new generation of young people with a conceptual framework that considered the history of Subcarpathian Rus' (including all Rusyn lands south of the Carpathians) as well as Rusyn literature and art as phenomena with their own internal evolution distinct from that of their neighbors.35