PauI R. Magocsi’s Work: Some Critical Comments
The scholarly, semi-scholarly, and publicist literature on Carpatho- Ukraine in several European languages is surprisingly rich,4 but it is Paul R. Magocsi’s merit to have produced the first monograph on the modern history of the land in English.
Recently Professor Magocsi has supplemented his major work with a study of the Ukrainian minority of the Presov region in Czechoslovakia.5 I propose to examine in some detail the former, major publication; the second, supplementary study will be discussed briefly toward the end of this paper.The Shaping of a National Identity: Subcarpathian Rus’, 1848—1948, is a stout volume of over 600 pages, of which less than half contain the work’s principal text; the rest consists of four long appendices, the notes, an impressive bibliography of no less than 2,279 entries, and an index. The author has used published materials in a number of languages: among others in Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, Russian, and Ukrainian. In addition, he has consulted Czechoslovak archives and has conducted personal interviews with several surviving participants in Carpatho- Ukrainian political and cultural life of the inter-war period. Owing to its solid base of factual information and the clarity of presentation, Magocsi’s book is bound to remain the standard work on the subject. It has deservedly attracted the attention of specialists in East European history and politics, and it has already been widely reviewed.
It was not Professor Magocsi’s intention to write a complete history of Carpatho-Ukraine. Chronologically his study is limited to the century from 1848 to 1948, that is, from the Springtime of Nations to the aftermath of World War II. The two chapters on the pre-World War I era are somewhat sketchy; the interested reader may be referred to the German monograph by Ivan Zeguc, which deals more thoroughly with the same period.6 The treatment of the incipient Soviet era in the concluding chapter is in the nature of an epilogue.
The core of the work is devoted to the twenty years of the Czechoslovak regime, from 1919 to 1939, and here the author indeed breaks new ground. However, while discussing at length political and cultural developments in inter-war Subcarpathian Ruthenia, as the territory was then officially known, he pays only scant attention to social and economic conditions.7The thematic focus of Magocsi’s work is indicated by its title—The Shaping of a National Identity. Carpatho-Ukraine is one of those backward areas of Europe whose population lacked, well into the present century, a crystallized national consciousness. Professor Magocsi has set himself the task of examining the groupings of the Carpatho-Ukrainian people, and especially of their intelligentsia, in trying to find an answer to the elementary and vitally important questions: “Who are we? To what nationality do we belong?’’ The problem is of more than local significance, because it provides a case study of the nation-building processes which have played, and still continue to play, a major role in the modern world.
Three national orientations used to contend for the allegiance of the population of Carpatho-Ukraine: a pro-Russian, a pro-Ukrainian, and a third orientation, which Magocsi calls “Rusynophile.” The Russophiles and Ukrainophiles identified themselves, respectively, with the Russian and the Ukrainian nations, while the Rusynophiles wished for their people to evolve into a separate nationality. These three trends originated in the second half of the nineteenth and the early years of the twentieth century, when the question of national identity began to be discussed in the tiny circles of the Subcarpathian intelligentsia, almost all of whose members were Greek Catholic (Uniate) clergymen. The peasantry, overwhelmingly illiterate and living under semi-feudal conditions, was still largely unaffected. The conflict came out into the open under the liberal Czechoslovak regime, and it played a crucial role in the province’s political and cultural life during the 1920s and 30s.
By that time, the issue of national identity had reached out from the intelligentsia to the masses. There is no doubt as to the final outcome of this struggle. Magocsi correctly describes the situation in present-day Soviet Transcarpathia: “Without exception, members of the younger generation identify themselves as being of the Ukrainian nationality and as part of one Ukrainian people’’ (267).While applauding Professor Magocsi’s choice of a valid subject of inquiry and paying tribute to his exemplary diligence, I find his study less than fully satisfactory. My reservations pertain not to points of fact, but rather to those of emphasis and interpretation. Factual errors are relatively easy to set straight. The task of a discussant becomes more difficult whenever he feels impelled to question a scholar’s interpretation. This requires not only a careful retracing of the arguments of the work under review, but also the presentation, at least in outline, of an alternative, more cogent interpretation.
In his treatment of the three Subcarpathian national orientations Professor Magocsi is not truly even-handed. His studious faςade of scholarly detachment notwithstanding, we shall do him no injustice in stating that his sympathies are clearly with the so-called Rusynophile orientation. Of course, Professor Magocsi, like everybody else, is entitled to his personal preferences, but, unfortunately, this bias has affected his historical judgment and, in certain instances, has induced him to bend the evidence in order to make it fit his preconceptions.
There is, in the first place, an issue of nomenclature. Magocsi consistently calls the people he is writing about “Rusyns,” and he argues that “the name Rusyn was chosen because it is the name used by the inhabitants and by most of their leaders” (277). Today, however, the people in question call themselves Ukrainians. Thus, while it may be quite acceptable to use the old name in a retrospective frame of reference, the present tense in Magocsi’s cited statement is obviously misleading.
Furthermore, there is little justification for using the native form of an ethnonym where there exists a standard English equivalent. (We do not call the Germans, in English, “Deutsche.”) The precise English equivalent of the Slavic term “Rusyn” is “Ruthenian,” which is legitimized by an old tradition. In its Latin and German forms (“Rutheni,” “die Ruthenen”) it was universally applied to the East Slavic (Ukrainian and Belorussian) inhabitants of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and later to the Ukrainian subjects of the Habsburg Empire. In reference to the Subcarpathian region, it is attested already in medieval sources. In its French form, “les Ruthenes,” it is found in the post-World War I peace treaties, in the acts of the League of Nations, and in the diplomatic documents and official pronouncements of the Czechoslovak government. It has also been widely used by writers in the English language, including Magocsi himself in one of his earlier articles.8 This makes one wonder about the motives which induced him to scuttle a well-established, traditional designation in favour of a newfangled one. By the exclusive use of the term “Rusyn,” a bias in favour of the Rusynophile orientation is insinuated into the reader’s mind.The map of ttSubcarpathian Ethno-Geographical Features” (11) shows the area of “Rusyn” settlement in Subcarpathia only, without placing it within an ethnic map of Eastern Europe as a whole. By this artful device the false impression is created that the Slavic population of the Subcarpathian land is ethnically distinct from the rest of the Ukrainian people.
It is noteworthy that the author of the first scholarly history of Carpatho-Ukraine, published in 1862-7, the German Austrian historian Hermann Ignaz Bidermann, unhesitatingly classified the Subcarpathian Ruthenians as belonging to the same nationality as the people of Russian Ukraine (to whom he also applied the traditional Ruthenian name), while, incidentally, contrasting them with the Great Russians:
The Hungarian Ruthenians are not free from Magyar and Slovak admixtures.
Nevertheless, the core of the Ruthenian people displays such a clearly formed individuality that against this all attempts must fail to deny their distinct national character. Their contrast with the Great Russians is particularly striking. Every traveller in Russia who at all possesses an open eye for national differences will immediately notice when he has passed from the area of settlement of the Great Russians to that of the Ruthenians. He will notice this in the manner in which the houses are built, in the dress and the physiognomy of the people, and in their entire way of life (in deren ganzen Tun und Lassen).9Magocsi does not deny that the people of Subcarpathia are Ukrainian according to ethnolinguistic criteria, but the wording of this admission is characteristically guarded and somewhat ambiguous: “Subcarpathian Rusyns speak a range of dialects that are closely related to those spoken in eastern Galicia. The Subcarpathian varieties have been classified by linguists as belonging to the Ukrainian language, even if they diverge substantially from the Ukrainian literary norm” (13-14). Actually, the Subcarpathian dialects are not only “related” to those spoken in Galicia: the same dialectal-tribal groups of Ukrainian mountaineers (moving from east to west, the Hutsuls, the Boikos, and the Lemkos) inhabit both sides of the Carpathians. Magocsi, moreover, fails to mention that the Ukrainian ethnic character of Subcarpathia is attested not only by language, but also by folk culture and the Eastern Christian religious tradition, which until recently stood at the very centre of the people’s spiritual life.
Professor Magocsi’s principal argument, however, is that “language cannot simply be equated with nationality” (14). I concede that this point is valid in principle. Ethnicity, indeed, cannot be equated with nationality, because the latter is a phenomenon of a different, higher order than the former. An ethnos is constituted by objective traits, such as language, folk culture, and an inherited way of life, while the existence of a nation presupposes a subjective element of consciousness and will.
Owing to their backward and oppressed condition under Hungarian rule, the people of Carpatho-Ukraine entered the twentieth century without a crystallized national consciousness. To be more precise, they possessed such consciousness only in rudimentary form, for instance, in being aware of their religion as the “Ruthenian faith.” This state of national underdevelopment was the point of departure for the emergence of the above-mentioned rival national orientations.In a recent paper, Hugh Trevor-Roper has eloquently pleaded for a non-deterministic approach to the study of history. He proposes that in dealing with past conflicts a historian ought to view them not only from the perspective of the known outcome; he should also make an effort of imagination and try to visualize them as open-ended, as they appeared at a time when the result was still in suspense. “History is not merely what happened; it is what happened in the context of what might have happened. Therefore it must incorporate, as a necessary element, the alternatives, the might-have-beens.”10
I am in full agreement with this position, provided that the deterministic and teleological elements, which undoubtedly also play a major role in historical processes, are not short-changed. A historian should, so to say, accord full hearing to all alternatives which at a given time contended for supremacy, but he is also under an obligation to account adequately for the reasons of the success of the one that ultimately prevailed. Applied to the problem at hand, this means that we must strive to understand the raison d’etre of the failed Russophile and Rusynophile national orientations in Subcarpathia, and the structural factors which determined the victory of the Ukrainian orientation. This is precisely the point in which I find Professor Magocsi,s interpretation of “the shaping of a national identity” wanting.
In the following sections, I shall briefly review the three Subcarpathian national orientations, concentrating on their underlying ideological premises, and I shall attempt to show to what extent these concepts jibed with social and political realities and how they accorded with the people’s needs and aspirations.