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| Stalin's Mistake: How Carpathian Rusyns Wanted to Become Russia, But Became Ukrainians |
| 2024-11-27 |
| Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Oleg Khavich [REGNUM] Exactly eighty years ago, on November 26, 1944, in the ancient city of Mukachevo, at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains, an event called the "First Congress of People's Committees" was held. A month before, the armies of the 4th Ukrainian Front, having overcome the Carpathian pass Russkiy Put (separating Galicia from the Danube plains), drove the Nazis and their allies, the troops of the Hungarian regent Miklos Horthy, out of Transcarpathia . And now in the liberated city of Munkacs — which was given back its original Slavic name of Mukachevo — the indigenous inhabitants of the region, the Rusyns, under the protection of the Red Army, were deciding the most pressing issues. About how to allocate land and forest to the peasants for free, how to elect a People's Council. And most importantly — under whose authority would Carpathian Rus be from now on. The long-suffering region had already changed its state affiliation for the fourth time (if we count from the beginning of the 20th century). But the result of this expression of will was not what the Rusyns had expected. AN ANCIENT PEOPLE WITH AN UNCLEAR DESTINY The word "Rusyns" has an interesting history. From the 13th to the 17th centuries, this was the name given to the subjects of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (and after the union of Lithuania and Poland, the subjects of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth), who spoke and wrote in Western Russian dialects of the Russian language and professed Orthodoxy. Only later did some of them accept the Uniate faith. Also, those descendants of the inhabitants of the ancient Galician Principality who found themselves under the rule of Polish, Hungarian kings and Moldavian rulers called themselves Rusyns. In the Carpathian plains and in the mountainous Lemkivshchyna at the junction of Poland and Slovakia, the name "Rusyns" has survived to this day. But the question remains: who are they? The fourth East Slavic ethnic group (along with the Great Russians, Little Russians and Belarusians), part of the large Russian people or a subethnos of Ukrainians? Historically, the indigenous people of Hungarian (Hungarian) Rus' were separated for centuries by state borders from their fellow tribesmen in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Moldova. Even the inclusion of Galicia and Bukovina in the Austrian, and later Austro-Hungarian Empire, did not change the situation much. Galicia and Bukovina were in the Austrian part of the dual monarchy, Hungarian Rus' and Slovakia were in the Hungarian part. THREE POWERS AND A TWO-WEEK REPUBLIC In 1918, the Habsburg monarchy was rapidly collapsing and Transcarpathia changed power for the first time since the beginning of the century. On October 15, 1918, the Ukrainian National Council in Lviv included the "Ukrainian strip of northeastern Hungary" into the "Ukrainian state", which later received the name of the West Ukrainian People's Republic (ZUNR). There was virtually no reaction to this in the region. Only the "Hutsul Republic" created in the mountain village of Yasinya expressed readiness to join the ZUNR. In the rest of Hungarian Rus, the ZUNR troops were perceived as occupying forces, especially after the marauding raid of several battalions of Ukrainian Sich Riflemen. At the beginning of 1919, power changed for the second time - the region was occupied by the army of Czechoslovakia, and on September 10 of the same year, the land of the Rusyns became part of this state. Although the Constitution of the first Czechoslovak Republic of February 29, 1920 introduced the name "Subcarpathian Rus" for the region and formally granted it autonomy, this status remained only on paper. The situation changed only after Adolf Hitler, with the assistance of France and Great Britain, began to redraw the map of Europe. After the Munich Agreement of September 30, 1938, when Czechoslovakia first lost the Sudetenland (to Germany) and the Teschen Region (to Poland), Prague finally decided to make the autonomy of Subcarpathian Ruthenia a reality. This ended with the proclamation by Ukrainian nationalists on March 15, 1939 of the so-called “Carpathian Ukraine” (this name was first officially used on December 30, 1938 by the government of the autonomy under the leadership of the Uniate priest Augustin Voloshin ). However, this quasi-state entity, controlled by the OUN*, existed for just over a day: on March 17, 1939, the troops of Regent Horthy "returned the lands lost by Hungary" - that is, they occupied the entire territory of the region, reaching its borders with Poland and Romania. Power changed for the third time. CARPATHIAN RUS' - NOT TRANSCARPATHIAN UKRAINE It is worth noting that at that time Moscow did not officially consider the territory of the region as a potential part of Soviet Ukraine. In the official note of the USSR to the Third Reich of March 18, 1939 regarding the liquidation of the Czechoslovak Republic, it was stated, in particular, that "the actions of the German government served as a signal for the brutal invasion of Hungarian troops into Carpathian Rus and the violation of the basic rights of its population", without specifying any ethnonyms. True, the Western press and diplomats first reported on March 10, 1939, that there were plans in the USSR to annex the region to Soviet Ukraine. In response, Stalin officially called this a fabrication and “suspicious noise,” the purpose of which was “to provoke a conflict between the USSR and Germany without any apparent reason.” Indeed, in the spring of 1939, the region did not even have a common border with the Ukrainian SSR (it appeared only in September of that year, after the Soviet Union occupied the regions of Galicia). "OUR LAND, BUT WE CAN GIVE IN" The position of the Czechoslovak leaders in exile regarding the future fate of Subcarpathian Ruthenia was ambivalent. On the one hand, they insisted on the need to restore Czechoslovakia within the pre-Munich borders. But in conversations with Kremlin representatives, President-in-exile Edvard Beneš did not deny the possibility of a special solution to the region's issue. Benes' conversation with the Soviet ambassador to London, Ivan Maisky, on September 21, 1939, is revealing: "This is our land, we have a right to it. For us, there are only two solutions: either it will be ours, or, if the USSR is our neighbor and demands it, then we would have nothing against it." In the spring of 1944, Mr. Benes spoke in the same spirit: "We are for the fact that Subcarpathian Rus' should be formally returned to us, since it was included in our pre-Munich borders. However, if the Subcarpathian Rusyns decide to join Soviet Ukraine, we will not prevent this." At the same time, according to the alliance treaty, which was concluded at the end of 1943 between the USSR and Czechoslovakia for a period of 20 years, both parties were obliged to restore the borders that Czechoslovakia had before the Munich Agreement, that is, with Subcarpathian Rus as its integral part. THE NINTH STRIKE AND GEOGRAPHICAL NEWS The question of the future of Subcarpathian Ruthenia moved into the practical realm in October 1944, when the Nazi “new order” in this part of Europe began to come apart at the seams – first due to the Slovak National Uprising, then during one of the ten “Stalinist strikes” – offensive operations in 1944. Part of the ninth strike – the East Carpathian Operation – was the liberation by the forces of the 4th Ukrainian Front of Transcarpathia occupied by the Hungarians and the territories of Hitler’s satellite – the puppet Slovak Republic. The first sign that everything was changing radically was Joseph Stalin’s order of October 28, 1944, which solemnly announced that the Soviet troops had “gained control over the capital of Transcarpathian Ukraine, Uzhgorod, on the territory of Czechoslovakia.” Moscow suddenly began to operate with the new concept of “Transcarpathian Ukraine”, although such a territorial unit has never existed in history. CZECH GERMAN AND THE DISGUISED PARTISANS On October 28, 1944, the Czechoslovak mission headed by František Němec ( Minister in the Czechoslovak government in exile) arrived in Khust. By agreement with the command of the 4th Ukrainian Front, the mission was allowed to carry out its activities only in the territory of the five eastern districts of the region. On the day of his arrival in Khust, Mr. Nemec issued an appeal declaring the supremacy of the laws of Czechoslovakia adopted before September 30, 1938, as well as the decrees of the president and the orders of the London government in exile, in the territory of Subcarpathia. However, the Soviet commandant's offices paralyzed the work of Benes's emissaries. On November 19, 1944, at a conference in Mukachevo, the Communist Party of Transcarpathia was created, headed by Ivan Turyanitsa, a native of a village near Khust. Turyanitsa had previously been a lieutenant in the Czechoslovak corps of General Ludwig Svoboda, with whom he arrived in Transcarpathia, and was not noted for his separatist ideas. But Stalin explained to Benesh: the USSR had nothing to do with it, these were “mass and spontaneous movements of the local population,” the Rusyns, who were fighting for their right to self-determination… In such a situation, the first congress of the People's Committees of Transcarpathia was convened. Among the delegates to the congress were many regular workers of the party and Soviet bodies of Soviet Ukraine dressed as partisans. AND PERSONALLY DEAR LEONID ILYICH The Political Directorate of the 4th Ukrainian Front, headed by Lieutenant General Mikhail Pronin, was responsible for the preparation and holding of the congress, and among those “supervising” the congress was the chief “political instructor” of the 18th Army, Colonel Leonid Brezhnev. It seemed that the Red Army (which was perceived primarily as a Russian army) would become the guarantor of the realization of the aspirations of Carpathian Russophiles for reunification with “Mother Russia” or the creation of a separate Carpatho-Russian Republic. The congress was opened by Nikolai Dragula, director of the Mukachevo Rusyn Gymnasium and member of the board of the Russian Cultural and Educational Society named after Alexander Dukhnovich (a Greek Catholic priest, writer and teacher, one of the founding fathers of the Russophile movement of the 19th century). The famous Russophiles Pyotr Sova and Pyotr Lintur were elected "vice-speakers" of the People's Council under Speaker Turyanitsa. And then something unexpected happened. HOW RUS BECAME UKRAINE The first item on the congress’s agenda was the distribution of land and forest lands to the villagers, which, of course, no one objected to. But the right to free provision was granted to the people's committees of the formally non-existent Transcarpathian Ukraine. Therefore, the congress - whether it wanted to or not - had to rename Subcarpathian Rus to Transcarpathian Ukraine. After this, the congress moved on to the main issue - the adoption of the Manifesto on the annexation of the region to Soviet Ukraine. Not all delegates were delighted with this. If at the congress itself this was only discussed behind the scenes, then Pyotr Lintur openly declared in Moscow on December 7, 1944: “We are resolutely against the annexation of our territory to the Ukrainian SSR, and we wish to see our land autonomous within the borders of Soviet Russia,” because the Rusyns “do not want to be Ukrainians, but want to continue to be Rus’.” Lintur and his support group (among whom were Orthodox clergy) called for the creation of a Carpathian-Russian Soviet Republic or Carpathian autonomy within the RSFSR. But it was too late to complain and make suggestions, because the decision had already been made – and not in Uzhgorod. WHO DICTATED THE "UNSHAKABLE WILL" The editor of the journal “Soviet Slavic Studies”, a native of Mukachevo, Ivan Pop, in the late Soviet years found in the archive of the Central Committee of the CPSU the first copy of the Manifesto on the entry of Transcarpathia into the Ukrainian SSR and the USSR, typewritten in Russian. The text contains edits made by Lev Mekhlis, a member of the Military Council of the 4th Ukrainian Front. The People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs Vyacheslav Molotov and the head of the International Policy Department of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) Georgy Dimitrov also made their positive resolutions on the same original . The preamble to the Manifesto stated: "With the help of the heroic Red Army, the German-Hungarian yoke has been thrown off. An end has been put to the centuries-long rule of the Hungarians and all foreigners on the original Ukrainian lands of Transcarpathian Ukraine " (emphasis added. - IA Regnum ). Based on this, as well as on the “unshakable will of the entire people, expressed in petitions and resolutions of workers, peasants, intelligentsia and clergy of all cities and villages of Transcarpathian Ukraine,” the congress decided: "Reunite Transcarpathian Ukraine with its Great Mother Soviet Ukraine and leave Czechoslovakia." It remained to resolve the issue with the Czechoslovakians, who, as the Red Army advanced, increasingly had to take into account the will of Moscow. DELIVERY AND ACCEPTANCE On December 1, 1944, Lev Mekhlis and General Pronin, taking with them the head of the People's Council of Transcarpathia, Turyanitsa, met with Benes's emissary, František Nemec, and handed over a note on the "withdrawal of Transcarpathian Ukraine from federal Czechoslovakia." Beneš agreed, under the threat of Slovakia also separating from his state. The scenario was realistic, given the pro-Soviet sympathies of the Slovaks and Rusyns. Nikita Khrushchev claims in his memoirs: the delegation from north-eastern Slovakia “asked that their territory be annexed to the Soviet Union . ” True, Beneš bargained: he asked for a guarantee that Slovakia would not be taken away (but here Stalin referred to the right of nations to self-determination), and insisted that the decision to cede Subcarpathia should be approved after the war by the Czechoslovak parliament. The “delivery and acceptance” of the territory and the extremely important railway junction of Chop, which is not part of Transcarpathia, was formalized in 1945–1946: the Soviet-Czechoslovak treaty of March 1945, decisions of the Czechoslovak National Assembly and the Supreme Council of the Ukrainian SSR... But all of this was already formalities. HOW UZHGOROD DIDN'T BECOME KALININGRAD The main thing is that the Moscow leadership of that time, headed by Stalin, actually took the point of view of the Galician Ukrainophiles, who considered the Rusyns to be part of the Ukrainian nation, and “reunited all Ukrainian lands” within the framework of one large republic, without any Rusyn enclaves or autonomies. Thus, Transcarpathia found itself adjacent to Galicia. The differences between these two territories are evidenced by the NKVD and MGB reports on the number of people killed by the OUN*-UPA* in 1944–1953 in Transcarpathia and the neighboring Stanislav (Ivano-Frankivsk) regions: 48 killed against 10 thousand. Yes, armed Ukrainian nationalism was suppressed by the mid-to-late 1950s and the idea of "independence" seemed to be over. But in the long term, the decision to "add" Ukraine at the expense of Transcarpathia turned out to be a mistake. Unlike, for example, the decision to create the Kaliningrad Region of the RSFSR in the part of East Prussia that we inherited — and not to "donate" this territory, for example, to the Lithuanian SSR. The personal destinies of the main characters turned out happily. Ivan Turyanitsa became the first (in all senses) secretary of the Zaporizhzhya regional committee of the Communist Party (bolsheviks) of Ukraine and died a peaceful death of his own accord. Even the troublemaker Pyotr Lintur did not suffer - although he worked not on the party line, but "on culture". Turyanitsa is buried on the Hill of Glory in Uzhgorod, where a monument to Soviet soldiers-liberators was dismantled two years ago. The grave of the "reunifier" is not being touched yet, but all the streets named after him in the region have been renamed as part of the decommunization campaign. However, the Kiev regime is in no hurry to cancel the communist legacy - the Manifesto on the annexation of Transcarpathia to the Ukrainian SSR, adopted under Turyanitsa's leadership. The special self-awareness of the multi-ethnic Transcarpathia has not gone away. Judging by the results of the regional referendum of 1991, at the time of the collapse of the USSR, 78% of residents were in favor of self-government of the region. The plebiscite, of course, was not recognized in Kyiv - and nothing like this has been held since. As then, and to this day, any hint of self-determination of the Carpathian Hungarians and especially the Rusyns (for whom, unlike the local Magyars, there is no one to stand up for) is suppressed. At least for now. |
| Posted by:badanov |