Hail Ruthenia!

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Subject: Hail Ruthenia!

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Hail Ruthenia!


Hail Ruthenia!
by Timothy Garton Ash
The New York Review of Books, 22 April 1999
 
Whence they came, no one can tell. Nobody knows exactly who, how many,
or where they are. They live in six states and in none. They are loyal
to each of these states, and to none of them. Their language is
written in five different versions; in the Cyrillic alphabet, but also
in the Latin. Some regard themselves as Ukrainians, others as Slovaks,
others as Poles. Or Romanians. Or Hungarians. Or Yugoslavs. But many
insist they are "Rusyns," or "Carpatho-Rusyns," or rusnatsi. Or they
throw up their hands and give the ancient answer of the peasant from
Europe's Slavic borderlands: "We're just from here."
 
Yet now they have a provisional government that wants to form a new
nation-state. A state called Ruthenia. Here I am, talking to the prime
minister. We are sitting in the office he occupies as a pharmacologist
at a large hospital in Uzhorod, capital of what Ukrainians call
Trans-Carpathian Ukraine but he insists is Sub-Carpathian Rus'.
Professor Ivan Turyanitsa is a stout, cheerful, energetic man, with a
shock of black hair, bright eyes, and the gift of the gab. He is
dressed in what I find to be the current style among the Ruthenians:
polyester sports jacket above, pin-striped trousers below. He has just
introduced me to the foreign minister, who has come specially from
Slovakia, and the justice minister, who is a surgeon in the same
hospital. "But," he hastens to add, "only two of the cabinet work
here."
 
While the justice minister - still wearing his medical white coat -
makes me a cup of tea from a kettle in the corner, the prime minister
expounds. In the December 1991 referendum on Ukrainian independence,
he says, 78 percent of the people in this region voted for greater
autonomy from the rest of Ukraine, on the far side of the high
Carpathian Mountains. But what he calls the "Ukrainian national
fascist regime" ignored this popular wish. So in May 1993 he and his
colleagues formed the Provisional Government of Sub-Carpathian Rus'
-or, in English, Ruthenia.
 
How did the Ukrainian authorities react? "Normanie!" he replies. (As
befits this transfrontier folk, we are speaking a mixture of Slovak
and Polish.) "In the normal way. They arranged a car crash for me."
Later, he takes me outside to show me the damaged car. At present, he
says, he and his colleagues are tolerated, but given no access to the
press.
 
They want their own state, in the boundaries of the present
Trans-Carpathian oblast, or province, of Ukraine, but with close ties
to fellow Ruthenians in Slovakia and Poland. As responsible
politicians, they will leave defense and what they call "global"
foreign policy to the Kiev government. Everything else - including
"local and European" foreign policy, education, health, and so on -
would be their domain. They would have their own currency, "though it
could be called the same." Professor Turyanitsa hands me a lapel badge
showing their national symbol: yellow and gold stripes, with a red
bear prancing. Rather handsome.
 
Do they have a national anthem? Yes, of course. Could I see the text?
Well, er, um, they don't seem to have one on hand. "But," says the
foreign minister helpfully, "we could sing it for you." Yes, please.
Unfortunately they then get bashful, and instead of singing they dig
around until they do find the words, written by Aleksander Dukhnovych,
a nineteenth-century priest regarded as the father of the nation.
"Sub-Carpathian Rusyns," the anthem begins, "Arise from your deep
slumber."
 
It's tempting to dismiss all this as a joke. Ruthenia even sounds like
something out of a Tintin book; perhaps a neighbor to Ruritania. And
the Provisional Government is certainly good for a laugh. Yet the
Ruthenian Question takes you to the heart of one of the most important
problems of international politics in our time. For in the decade
since the end of the cold war, in the new freedom, these suppressed or
sometimes only half-formed nationalities have reemerged and formulated
political aspirations all over Europe.
 
To understand the Ruthenians' case, you need first to swallow a little
potted history. The Ruthenians are a part of the family of east Slavic
peoples, like the Russians, Belarussians, and Ukrainians, all of whom
were at one time or another described as part of Rus'. One scholar
wanted to call them "Rus'ians" as opposed to "Russians," but you can
see why the fine distinction did not catch on. Everything about their
origins, culture, language, and politics is disputed.
 
For most of their modern history most Ruthenians lived in the
Austro-Hungarian empire. They were mainly farmers or woodcutters in
the heavily forested Carpathian foothills. (You still see peasant
woodcutters at work in mountain villages that look like pictures by
Chagall.) It was the Habsburgs who christened them Ruthenen; the
English word derives from the German. When the empire was broken up
after the First World War, they found themselves scattered between
Poland, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and what would shortly become
the Soviet Union, but the greatest concentration was in the new state
of Czechoslovakia.
 
Czechoslovakia, the most democratic and liberal of those successor
states, gave them considerable autonomy, in a province it called
Sub-Carpathian Rus'. The book in which they found me the words of the
national anthem was actually published in pre-war Czechoslovakia. In
those golden days of freedom, there was a great debate between
Ukrainophiles, who argued that the Ruthenians were really Ukrainians,
Russophiles, who thought they were closer to Russians, and
Rusynophiles, who said they were altogether different. Today, the
debate has revived as freedom has returned. In Slovakia, I visited two
rival organizations: the Union of Rusyno-Ukrainians, who insisted that
a Ruthenian is just a kind of Ukrainian, and Ruthenian Renaissance,
whose spokeswoman told me it's impossible to be both Ruthenian and
Ukrainian.
 
The autonomy of Sub-Carpathian Rus' reached a perilous height after
Britain and France agreed to the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia at
Munich in 1938. For six months it was a separate unit in what was left
of federal Czechoslovakia. The official English name for this unit was
Ruthenia. Then, as the Nazis marched into Prague, Ruthenia was gobbled
up by Hungary. But that didn't last long either. At the end of the
Second World War, Stalin seized it for the Soviet Union. When the
Soviet Union collapsed, it became part of Ukraine.
 
Through all this, the Ruthenians went on chopping their wood.
Professor Turyanitsa tells me the classic East European joke about the
old man who says he was born in Austria-Hungary, went to school in
Czechoslovakia, married in Hungary, worked most of his life in the
Soviet Union, and now lives in Ukraine. "Traveled a lot, then?" asks
his interviewer. "No, I never moved from Mukachevo."
 
One of the big questions that small Ruthenia prompts is whether the
ethnically checkered successor states of the former Soviet Union might
yet go the bloody way of former Yugoslavia. Are the Ruthenian
rumblings an exception, inspired by the relatively recent experience
of autonomy in pre-war Czechoslovakia? Or are other suppressed
nationalities even now forming provisional governments in remote
hospital offices?
 
Perhaps as many as one million Ruthenians live in Ukraine. But there
are another 100,000 or so in Slovakia, some 60,000 in Poland (where
they are called "Lemkos"), and smaller numbers in Romania, Hungary,
and the Vojvodina province of Milosevic's Yugoslavia. (They also have
one vital asset for any would-be nation: a large community in the
United States.) So they live across half-a-dozen state frontiers. One
dramatic way in which they describe themselves is "the Kurds of
Central Europe."
 
They also straddle two other frontiers. Samuel Huntington argues, in
his Clash of Civilizations, that the great dividing line in Europe,
after the end of the iron curtain, is that between Western (Catholic
or Protestant) and Eastern (Orthodox) Christianity. Here, according to
Huntington, is the new eastern boundary of Europe and of "Western
civilization," no less. The Ruthenians, true to form, cut right across
it. They worship in both the Orthodox Church and the Uniate (or Greek
Catholic) Church, which uses the Eastern rite but acknowledges the
authority of the Western Pope. If you drive through the Ruthenian
mountain villages of eastern Slovakia you often see two churches side
by side: an old wooden-built one, which is Uniate, and a new Orthodox
one. The original wooden churches were illegally given to the Orthodox
by the communists after 1945, then returned to the Uniates after the
end of communism, whereupon the Orthodox congregations stormed off and
built their own next door.
 
More immediately, the Ruthenians are on both sides of the new eastern
frontier of NATO. That is true since Poland joined NATO on March 12,
and will be even more so if a now rapidly reforming Slovakia enters
the Western alliance in a few years' time. Then you will have
significant numbers of Ruthenians on both sides of the West's front
line. The foreign minister tells me confidentially that his government
is "delighted to see NATO coming closer to us."
 
The Ruthenian story is, in every respect, a quintessentially Eastern
European one. Yet in Western Europe, too, we have nationalities, in
varying degrees of formation, striving for anything from autonomy to
statehood. Think of Scotland and Wales in Britain, or Catalonia and
the Basque country in Spain.
 
And it's not just Europe. When I ask the prime minister if his
government has achieved international recognition he proudly declares,
"Yes, we've been accepted into UNPROFOR."
 
"UNPROFOR? But that was the military force in Bosnia!"
 
"Sorry, Imean UNPRO."
 
Finally, we establish that it's UNPO, the Unrepresented Nations and
Peoples Organization. On my return, I visit UNPO's website and find a
list of almost fifty, starting with Abkhazia, Aboriginals of
Australia, and Alcheh/ Sumatra, then on to East Timor, Kurdistan,
Nagaland, and Tibet. And, in the middle, Kosova - the Albanian
spelling of Kosovo.
 
All over the world there are these peoples who would be states. Or at
least, recognized political units. This is a problem in dictatorships,
when established identities are brutally suppressed, as in Tibet or
East Timor. It's also a problem in liberal democracies, when people
wish to be governed by those whom they feel speak the same language or
are of the same kind. Perhaps most of all, it's a problem at the
fragile halfway stage between dictatorship and democracy. So often the
road that begins with an UNPO ends in the need for an UNPROFOR.
 
The Ruthenians are still far from being Kurds or Kosovars. For now,
their "representatives" want some basic minority rights like education
in their own language. Improvements in Slovakia will increase the
grievances in Ukraine. They demand that Ruthenian nationality should
be an option in the Ukrainian census scheduled for 2001, and that
Ukrainian state forestry companies should stop the mechanized
stripping of the trees from their beloved hills. Those forests are
their national heritage. They hope to prevent the Trans-Carpathian
oblast from being incorporated into a new, enlarged province ruled
from Lviv, in a planned reform of public administration for which,
they tell me, the International Monetary Fund has been pressing. And
they look for more cooperation across the frontiers, in what is
already the Carpathian Euroregion.
 
That's a long way short of statehood. But Professor Turyanitsa is a
gifted demagogue. If the circumstances were right, and he was given
access to the press and television, I could see him - or someone like
him - persuading an audience of Ruthenian hill farmers, woodcutters,
and impoverished town dwellers that they are heirs to a great
tradition; that they were more prosperous and free as part of
Czechoslovakia before the war; that the Ukrainian "national
chauvinists" - a phrase he repeats often and with relish - are to
blame for all their troubles; in short, that they'd be much better off
governing themselves. As we speak, rainwater is pouring down from the
Carpathians and flooding the lowlands on the border with Slovakia,
Hungary, and Romania. "You see," he exclaims, "the very waters are
pushing us to the West."
 
Absurd as it may sound, I have a hunch that one day we will again see
on the political map of Europe - if not as the name of a sovereign
state, then at least as that of a more or less autonomous province -
the word "Ruthenia."

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