Carpathian Ruthenia
This article concerns Carpathian Ruthenia, the small former Austro-Hungarian province that Europeans have long recognized by the designation "Ruthenia", in which usage English speakers merely follow suit.Ruthenia is a sensitive subject. Wikipedians and readers should avoid confusion with different geographical and historical meanings of "Ruthenia," 'Rus'" and "Russia" which are easily confused in Slavic usages. English usage is followed in the English Wikipedia; Ukrainian usage is followed in the Ukrainian Wikipedia. For the grandest interpretation on the boldest scale, see Ruthenia.
In nationalist Slavic circles, "Ruthenia" connotes more than this historic territory of Carpathian Ruthenia. Ethnic Ruthenians ("Ruthenes" would be more correctly Slavic) are found over wide stretches of central Europe. To find information about Ruthenian ethnicity read the entries at Rusyn, the language sometimes less correctly called "Ruthenian," and at Ruthenians.
Ruthenians before World War I
In 1911, the Encyclopaedia Britannica characterized the Ruthenians as those "Little Russians" (Ukrainians) who were at that time subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, specifically a province of the Kingdom of Hungary in the Dual Monarchy. The name, it was pointed out, is a form of the word "Russian", that were previously used to describe Eastern Slavs, descants of Kievan Rus'. Later on word Russian was in 18th century used by Russian Tsars to describe the people of their country, therefore underlined the fact, that many other Eastern Slavs are different. Those were later called different names.
The Ruthenians were separated from the Russians by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which in turn was for a time united with Poland, and Polish province of Red Ruthenia. Later on, Eastern Slavs of Lithuania were called Belarussians, those from Poland Ukrainians and those from Hungary Ruthenians. To confuse everything, Ukrainians from Galicia (Central Europe) were also sometimes referred as Ruthenians. At the partitions of Poland in the 18th century, none of the dynastic diplomats of the great powers troubled about ethnological boundaries, or the sensibilities of what seemed minor Slavic splinter populations. Rusyn, less accurately referred to as the Ruthenian language, is in substance like Ukrainian, enough so that the Ukrainian government considers it merely a dialect of Ukrainian, to the intense resentment of Ruthenians. In the extreme west of Carpathian Ruthenia, the language approaches Slovak. The dialect of the Huculs near borders of Bukovina is also characteristic .
In 1911, the Encyclopaedia Britannica recorded that ethnic Ruthenians numbered some three million in Galicia, Bukovina, and in the Carpathian Mountains along the edges of Hungary. Throughout Galicia the Poles then formed a landed aristocracy, though in two-thirds of it Ruthenians formed the bulk of the population, while The Ruthenians were therefore under an alien yoke both politically and economically, as the Britannica writers recognized.
In religion the Ruthenians mostly belong to the Uniate Church, acknowledging the Pope, since the meetings at Uzhhorod in 1508 and Lithuanian Brest in 1596, but retaining their Old Slavonic liturgy and most of the outward forms of the Greek or Eastern Orthodox Church. Their intellectual centre was Lvov, which the Austrians called "Lemberg", where some lectures in the university were being given in Rusyn, and intellectuals were agitating for it to have equal rights with Polish. Yet the Austrian policy towards minority languages since 1866 was almost complete freedom, while imperial Russia continued complete ban on minority print-outs, and in Lvov/Lviv/Lemberg, Rusyn found the center of its published literature.
After WWI Ruthenia become part of Czechoslovak Republic with limited autonomy.
See Occupation of Czechoslovakia#Annexation of Carpatho-Ukraine (Subcarpathian Ruthenia) by the Soviet Union.
Memoirs and historical studies provide much evidence that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Rusyn-Jewish relations were generally peaceful. In 1939, census records showed that 80,000 Jews lived in the autonomous province of Ruthenia.
During the Holocaust 17 main ghettos were set up in cities in Ruthenia, from which all Jews were taken to Auschwitz for extermination. Almost all the Jews of Carpathian Ruthenia were murdered and the handful who survived, were hidden by their neighbours.
For urbane European readers in the 19th century, Ruthenia, whether seen as at the far end of Slovakia, or in the distant corner of the Ukraine or as a forgotten piece of Hungary, was one original of the 19th century's imaginary "Ruritania" the most rural, most rustic and deeply provincial tiny province lost in forested mountains that could be imagined. Conceived sometimes as a kingdom of central Europe, Ruritania was the setting of several novels by Anthony Hope, especially The Prisoner of Zenda (1894). Recently Vesna Goldsworthy, in Inventing Ruritania: the imperialism of the imagination has explored the origins of the ideas that underpin Western perceptions of the “Wild East” of Europe, especially of Ruthenian and other rural Slavs in the upper Balkans, but ideas that are highly applicable to Carpathian Ruthenia, all in all "an innocent process: a cultural great power seizes and exploits the resources of an area, while imposing new frontiers on its mind-map and creating ideas which, reflected back, have the ability to reshape reality." As urban Europeans shaped Ruritania, Slavic nationalists are reshaping a "historic" Ruthenia.
The Austrian Chancellor Metternich (1773-1859) famously remarked that "Asia begins at the LandstraÃÂÃÂe" — the road out of Vienna towards the east.
20th century before World War II
See main article Ruthenians and Ukrainians in Czechoslovakia (1918-1938).Ruthenia during World War II and annexation by Soviet Union
Ruthenia in Soviet times
To be writtenJews of Carpathian Ruthenia
See main article History of the Jews in Carpathian RutheniaWestern view on Ruthenia
Famous Ruthenians
External links