Carpatho-Rusyns (also known as Ruthenians or by the regional names Lemkos and Rusnaks) come from an area in the geographical center of the European continent. Their homeland, Carpathian Rus (Ruthenia), is located on the southern and northern slopes of the Carpathian Mountains where the borders of Ukraine, Slovakia, and Poland meet. From the sixth and seventh centuries onward, Carpatho-Rusyns lived as a stateless people: first in the kingdoms of Hungary and Poland; then from the late eighteenth century to 1918 in the Austro-Hungarian Empire; from 1919 to 1939 in Czechoslovakia and Poland; during World War II in Hungary, Slovakia, and Nazi Germany; and from 1945 to 1989 in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. Since the Revolution of 1989 and the fall of the Soviet Union, most resided in Ukraine, Slovakia, and Poland, with smaller numbers in neighboring Romania, Hungary, and the Czech Republic; in the Vojvodina region of Yugoslavia; and in nearby eastern Croatia.
As a stateless people, Carpatho-Rusyns had to struggle to be recognized as a distinct group and to be accorded rights such as education in their own East Slavic language and preservation of their culture. As of the early twenty-first century, and in contrast to all other countries where Carpatho-Rusyns live, Ukraine did not recognize Carpatho-Rusyns as a distinct group but rather simply as a branch of Ukrainians, and their language a dialect of Ukrainian.
It was only during the Soviet period (1945 - 1991) that the majority of Carpatho-Rusyns, that is, those in Ukraine's Transcarpathian oblast, found themselves within the same state as Russians. It was also during this period that Russians from other parts of the Soviet Union emigrated to Transcarpathia where by the end of the Soviet era they numbered 49,500 (1989).
Reciprocal relations between Rusyns and Russians date from at least the early seventeenth century, when Church Slavonic religious books printed in Moscow and other cities under Russian imperial rule were sought by churches in Carpathian Rus. From the last decade of the eighteenth century several Carpatho-Rusyns were invited to the Russian Empire, including Mikhail Baludyansky, the first rector of St. Petersburg University; Ivan Orlai, chief physician to the tsarist court; and Yuri Venelin, Slavist and founder of Bulgarian studies in Russia. In the nineteenth century Russian panslavists showed increasing interest in the plight of "Russians beyond our borders," that is, the Rusyns of Galicia and northeastern Hungary. Russian scholars and publicists (Nikolai Nadezhdin, Mikhail Pogodin, Vladimir Lamansky, Ivan Filevich, Alexei L. Petrov, Fyodor F. Aristov, among others) either traveled to Carpathian Rus or wrote about its culture, history, and plight under "foreign" Austro-Hungarian rule. On the eve of World War I, a Galician Russian Benevolent Society was created in St. Petersburg, and a Carpatho-Russian Liberation Society in Kiev, with the goal to assist the cultural and religious needs of the Carpatho-Rusyn population, as well as to keep the tsarist government informed about local conditions should the Russian Empire in the future be able to extend its borders up to and beyond the Carpathian Mountains.
The Carpatho-Rusyn secular and clerical intelligentsia was particularly supportive of contacts with tsarist Russia. From the outset of the national awakening that began in full force after 1848, many Rusyn leaders actually believed that their people formed a branch of the Russian nationality, that their East Slavic speech represented dialects of Russian, and that literary Russian should be taught in Rusyn schools and used in publications intended for the group. The pro-Russian, or Russophile, trend in Carpatho-Rusyn national life was to continue at least until the 1950s. During the century after 1848, several Carpatho-Rusyn writers published their poetry and prose in Russian, all the while claiming they were a branch of the Russian nationality. Belorusian émigrés, including the "grandmother of the Russian Revolution" Yekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaya and several Orthodox priests and hierarchs, settled in Carpatho-Rus during the 1920s and 1930s and helped to strengthen the local Russophile orientation. In turn, Carpatho-Rusyns who were sympathetic to Orthodoxy looked to tsarist Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church for assistance. Beginning in the 1890s a "return to Orthodoxy" movement had begun among Carpatho-Rusyn Greek Catholics/Uniates, and the new converts welcomed funds from the Russian Empire and training in tsarist seminaries before the Revolution and in Russian émigré religious institutions in central Europe after World War I.
Despite the decline of the Russophile national orientation among Carpatho-Rusyns during the second half of the twentieth century, some activists in the post-1989 Rusyn national movement, especially among Orthodox adherents, continued to look toward Russia as a source of moral support. This was reciprocated in part through organizations like the Society of Friends of Carpathian Rus established in Moscow in 1999.
Bibliography
Bonkáló, Alexander. (1990). The Rusyns. New York: Columbia University Press.
Dyrud, Keith. (1992). The Quest for the Rusyn Soul: The Politics of Religion and Culture in Eastern Europe and America, 1890 - World War I. Philadelphia: Associated University Presses for the Balch Institute.
Himka, John-Paul. (1999). Religion and Nationality in Western Ukraine. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.
Magocsi, Paul Robert. (1978). The Shaping of a National Identity: Subcarpathian Rus', 1848 - 1948. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
—PAUL ROBERT MAGOCSI
