Czechoslovakia

In the nineteenth century, the Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia emerged as one of Austria-Hungary’s major industrial centres. After 1918, Czechoslovakia became the most developed economy in East Central Europe, among the ten largest in the world.

In February 1921, the newly established state possessed almost 13.4 mil­lion inhabitants, and by December 1930, 14.7 million, making it the fourth most populous country in East Central Europe (Yugoslavia being the third).¹⁰⁴ The country’s 7.2 million Czechs constituted over half the popu­lation; its nearly two million Slovaks represented almost 14 per cent.

The country’s 3.3 million Germans, who lived primarily in the Sudetenland, comprised 23 per cent of Czechoslovakia’s population.¹⁰⁵ The overwhelming majority of them did not want to belong to this new state, which the Czechs had centralized, “denying German opponents refuge in federalist struc­tures.”¹⁰⁶ Czech authorities favoured their fellow compatriots in the public sector job market and Czech-owned businesses in the private sector.¹⁰⁷ As the Great Depression impoverished Czechoslovakia’s German population, Hitler - who had campaigned on a platform of creating a “Greater Germany” - came to power and introduced reforms that improved the Third Reich’s economy. Germany’s economic and political resurrection in the 1930s em­boldened Czechoslovakia’s Germans to destabilize their new state. The an­tagonistic relationship between the Germans and Czechs helped undermine Czech rapport with the Slovaks and Rusyns/Ukrainians.

Czechs and Slovaks had much in common, but the two leading nations in Czechoslovakia possessed more differences than the state’s founders imag­ined.

Although the Czechoslovak government experienced serious difficul­ties with its German and Slovak minorities, which threatened the integrity of the new state, its difficulties with the Ukrainian-speaking population in Transcarpathia remained less problematic. In 1930, 446,916 East Slavs lived in Transcarpathia, Czechoslovakia’s most economically and politi­cally underdeveloped region, and another 200,000 in the adjacent Presov region of Slovakia.¹¹⁰ Although the government employed the designation “Ruski” to refer to these East Slavs (which the Austro-Hungarian govern­ment defined as Ruthenians) in their 1921 and 1930 censuses, “Ruski” did not represent the Russians, Ukrainians, or Carpatho-Rusyns in the mod­ern sense of these terms.¹¹¹ These East Slavic speakers spoke a series of dia­lects “closely related to the Ukrainian dialects of Galicia.”¹¹² But language and dialectical similarities did not necessarily predispose these speakers to accept a modern-Ukrainian identity or to identify with the Ukrainian po­litical project. Altogether, the Ukrainian speakers constituted 4 per cent of the new state’s total population.¹¹³

As the Habsburg Empire began to dissolve in the last months of 1918 and the early months of 1919, the Ruthenians formed numerous national councils, which discussed the political future of this region.

Contrary to the provisions of the treaty, however, the Czechoslovak constitution (promulgated earlier on 29 February 1920) and its subsequent amendments did not establish an autonomous Transcarpathia un­til October-November 1938, although it did create a distinct province, known officially as Subcarpathian Rus (Podkarpatska Rus). Although of­ficials claimed that the Ruthenians remained too politically immature to govern themselves within the framework of an autonomous province, na­tional security concerns outweighed all others. The Czechoslovak govern­ment feared not the Ruthenians, but the province’s large Hungarian population, which in conjunction with the Hungarian government across the border, hoped to destabilize the region and annex it to Hungary.¹¹⁵ Giving Subcarpathian Rus political autonomy would provide opportuni­ties for Hungarian irredentists to legitimize their cause.

Despite these anxieties, the Czechoslovak authorities did manage to raise Transcarpathia’s living standards and cultural and educational condi­tions in the 1920s. During the 1913-14 school year, this area possessed only thirty-four elementary schools with some form of Ukrainian (or Russian or local Slavic dialect) as the language of instruction. By 1931 the Czechoslovak authorities had established 425 schools with some variant of the local language in this region and approximately another one hundred in the Presov region.¹¹⁶ The Czechoslovak government also invested in adult education programs, which helped to raise the literacy rate in this region from 22 per cent in 1910 to 60 per cent in 1930.¹¹⁷ On the negative side and despite the introduction of large public-works projects, the Czechoslovak government failed to alleviate peasant poverty.

The legacy of poverty hampered the process of consolidating a single East Slavic identity in this area. The Rusyn/Ukrainian-speaking population’s small landholdings, conservatism, weak political awareness, high illiteracy rate, and small number of educated persons enfeebled the region’s political and economic development. These factors, in turn, restrained the emergence of a consensus regarding the national identity of the local population.

As in Galicia fifty years before, the struggle over language divided the small number of members of the intelligentsia, which consisted of clerics, teachers, and lawyers. Although some of them still embraced a pro-Hungarian orientation, Hungary’s appeal declined in the interwar period. Pro-Ukrainian and Russophile sympathies slowly replaced it, as did the Rusynophile re­sponse, a local patriotism which distinguished itself from the Ukrainian, Russian, Slovak, and Hungarian nations.¹¹⁸ In the interwar period, the Czechoslovak government supported the pro-Ukrainian, pro-Russian, and pro-Rusyn identifications at different times.¹¹⁹ Subsequently, many families in Transcarpathia possessed “a ‘Russian’ child, a ‘Ukrainian’ child, and a ‘Rusyn’ child.”¹²⁰ By the 1930s, the Czechoslovak government favoured the Rusynophile orientation, which retained a pro-Czechoslovak position. By the end of the interwar period, however, the Ukrainian national orientation made greater headway than its Russian or Rusyn competitors.¹²¹

Although the Czechoslovak government failed to satisfy the Ruthenian minority’s hopes and expectations, it never introduced the assimilatory policies of Poland or Romania. The Ukrainian speakers of Czechoslovakia participated in fair and free elections at the village, county, provincial, and national levels throughout the interwar period, unlike their compatriots in Poland, Romania, or the USSR. Of all the Ukrainian speakers in the ter­ritories of East Central Europe (including the USSR) in the interwar pe­riod, those living in Subcarpathian Rus experienced the most generous political opportunities. Only poverty, illiteracy, and an adherence to the peasant way of life hampered their efforts to take full advantage of them.