[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] Who are the Rusyns?

[rfmcdonald]

On a recent visit to Serbia's autonomous province of Vojvodina, nhw mentioned noticing text in the Ruthenian language at Vojvodina's parliament buildings. The Ruthenes--known in the former Yugoslavia as Rusins, a term that is apparently the Serbo-Croatian translation of "Ruthenian"-- constitute one of the more interesting ethnic minorities in central and eastern Europe.

It all starts with Ukrainian and Belarusian ethnogenesis, which, as described by Andrew Wilson in his The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation, took quite a long time. Up until the 17th century, in fact, both Ukraine and Belarus were thought of as territories of "Ruthenia", a term derived from the name given by medieval Western Christians to the lands of the Eastern Slavs, by the early modern period referring only to the territories occupied by Poland. The Belarusians, attached to the heritage of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, were the first to separate themselves from Ruthenia's heritage. The Belarusians were followed in the 19th century by most of the Ukrainians, although as the Catholic Encyclopedia noted Ruthenian was, confusingly, often used to refer to the Ukrainians. Only in the territory of Carpathian Ruthenia, part of the Hungarian kingdom from the 11th century, did a distinct Ruthenian identity persist.

As Chris Togneri and Tom Philpott write in the article "The Ruthene Minority and its Wooden Churches", the million-odd Rusyns persisted as a distinct group because they found themselves in a neutral middle ground.

Ethnically Slavic, the Ruthenes traditionally adhere to the Greek Catholic Church, a unique hybrid religion that essentially bridges the Great Schism between Catholic Rome and Orthodox Byzantium. Greek Catholicism uses Eastern Orthodox rites and the old Slavonic liturgy created by Saints Cyril and Methodius in the 10th century, but it also recognizes the authority of the Pope. The religion also acts a bridge in another sense. Directly to the west lies the historically Catholic and Protestant world, which uses the Roman alphabet; to the east lies the historically Byzantine world, where the Cyrillic alphabet holds sway. Greek Catholicism has elements of both traditions.

The religion was founded in 1596, when Ruthenia was the easternmost part of the Habsburg-controlled Hungarian Kingdom. The Counter Reformation had taken hold in the Habsburg lands, and, perhaps as a matter of expediency, the Orthodox priests of Ruthenia broke with their peers to the east and sought an alliance with Rome.

Carpathian Ruthenia passed to Czechoslovakia. Under the First Czechoslovak Republic, Carpathian Ruthenia was a poor and disaffected territory, with promises of autonomy from Prague unfulfilled, the region's poverty unabated, and mass emigration continuing. The Rusyns developed a rather large immigrant diaspora in the United States, concentrated in the coal-mining districts of Pennsylvania and the adjoining states.

The advent of the Slavs into the United States really commenced about 1879-1880. Those of the Greek Rite came from the north-eastern portion of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, where they inhabited chiefly the northern and southern slopes of the Carpathian Mountains, which form the boundary line between Galicia and Hungary. The first of the new-corners were miners in the coal districts. During the troublous times in Pennsylvania, from 1871 to 1879, when the "Molly Maguires" terrorized the mining districts and practically defied the authority of the State, the various coal companies determined to look abroad for foreign labour to replace their lawless workmen, and so they introduced the Austrian Slav to the mining regions of Pennsylvania. His success in wage-earning induced his countrymen to follow, and the coal companies and iron-masters of Pennsylvania were quick to avail themselves of the new and less costly labour. This was before any of the present contract labour laws were enacted. The Slav was willing to work for longer hours than the English-speaking labourer, to perform heavier work, and to stolidly put up with inconveniences which his predecessor would not brook. He came from a land in which he had originally been a serf (serfdom was abolished in Austria-Hungary in 1848, and in Russia in 1861), then a degraded poverty-stricken peasant with hardly anything to call his own, and it was no wonder that America seemed to offer him boundless opportunity to earn a living and improve his condition. At first he was a cheap man; but in the course of a very short time the Slav became not a mere pair of strong hands, but a skilled worker, and as such he drove out his competitors, and his success drew still more of his countrymen across the sea. In the anthracite coal region of Pennsylvania there were in 1880 but some 1900 Slavs; in 1890, over 40,000; and in 1900, upwards of 81,000. The same proportion holds good of the bituminous coal-mining districts and of the iron regions in that and other states. Taking simply the past four years (1905-1908), the immigration of the Slovaks and Ruthenians, both of the Greek Catholic Rite, has amounted to 215,972.

The most prominent product of the Ruthenian diaspora in the 20th century is Andy Warhol. Unfortunately, the development of Ruthenia into what might well have become the fourth of the Eastern Slav nations was aborted by the Soviet Union's 1945 annexation of Carpathian Ruthenia and the territory's fusion into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. There the Ruthene homeland remains to this day, divided between proponents of a distinct Rusyn identity and people who see themselves as Ukrainian. It's tempting to conclude that, living inside a Ukrainian nation-state and speaking a tongue that--even if a separate language--is closely related to Ukrainian, the second faction will gain over time.

The Rusyns made it into Vojvodina and adjacent areas of Croatia in the 18th century, thanks to the Hapsburg sponsorship of a program of settlement in Slavonia after the conquest of that former Turkish frontier province left the territory depopulated. Since then, the Ruthenes have managed to avoid getting pulled into the various conflicts of the Yugoslav lands, receiving some measure of recognition and cultural autonomy in Communist Yugoslavia. As Vassilis Petsinis noted in his April 2003 article "Vojvodina’s National Minorities: Current Realities and Future Prospects", writing for Spaces of Identity, the Ruthene community's problems in Vojvodina come mainly from its small size.

[T]here exist three elementary schools in Vojvodina, in which subjects in the Ruthene language are taught. The problems facing the Ruthene minority, with regard to the educational sector, have primarily to do with the small size of the community. This, combined with the fact that the Vojvodinian Ruthenes live mainly in small rural communities (e.g. Ruski Krstur), has often led Ruthenes to consciously assimilate into the national majority. Bearing also in mind that the Ruthenes are not among the wealthier groups in the province, many Ruthene parents assess their children’s chances of better employment and economic opportunities as higher which an adequate command of the Serbian language. In fact, by mid-2000, a mere 15 out of the total 125 Ruthene students enrolled at the University of Novi Sad studied at the Department of Ruthene Language and Literature.

The Rusyn community's future doesn't seem particularly bright. Rusyn identity is generally a product of the Rusyn diaspora; the Rusyn homeland in Ukraine remains Ukrainian, and will remain so barring the collapse of the Ukrainian state. New waves of emigration might create new centres of the diaspora, but the old centres--in North America, in Slavonia-Vojvodina, and elsewhere--aren't necessarily likely to attract more Rusyns. For the time being, it seems safe to conclude that the Rusyns will remain a what-if in the history of central and eastern European nation-building, the population that almost managed to make it but ultimately failed.