Subcarpathian Populism and the Origins of the Ukrainian Orientation

The emergence of the populist trend must be comprehended against the background of the dismal condition of the Carpatho-Ukrainian people at the turn of the century. The economic situation of the Ruthenian peasant­ry under the rule of Hungarian Iatifundialism deteriorated to the point of chronic famine in the mountain regions.

Another element of the situation was an intensified Magyarization drive, stimulated to a frenetic pitch by the celebrations of the millennium of Hungary in 1896. The notorious Apponyi school law of 1907 led to the suppression of the few remaining Ruthenian-Ianguage elementary schools; secondary education had been totally Magyarized for decades. The assimilationist policy was abetted by a coterie of Magyarone intel­lectuals of Ruthenian origin centred in Budapest. Their objective was the transformation of the Ruthenians of Hungary into “Greek Catholic Mag­yars” in the course of the next one or two generations. This was to be ac­complished by the eradication of those features of the Greek Catholic Church which still visibly tied it to the East Slavic world: the introduc­tion of the Gregorian instead of the Julian calendar, the replacement of the Cyrillic by the Latin alphabet (with Hungarian spelling) in Ruthenian publications, and finally the imposition of the Magyar liturgical lan­guage, instead of traditional Church Slavonic, in church services.

These were the unprepossessing circumstances under which a few young Ruthenian intellectuals began a search after new ways to assure the survival and the possible future regeneration of their people. They had become convinced of the sterility of the Russophile orientation, which they held responsible for the decline of Ruthenian national life. The decisive step was the abandonment of the would-be literary Russian advocated by the Russophiles and the choice of the vernacular as a vehicle of education and literature. The weekly Nauka, started in 1897, became the organ of the populist movement. From 1903, its editor was Avhustyn Voloshyn (1874-1946), a Greek Catholic priest, who also dis- tinguised himself as an educator and author of grammars and textbooks. Scholarly exponents of the populist orientation were the historian and ethnographer Iurii Zhatkovych (1855-1920) and the literary historian Hiiador Strypsky (1875-1949). The latter published a monograph, Star- sha ruska pysmennost na Uhorshchyni (The Older Ruthenian Literature in Hungary, 1907), in which he argued that the fairly rich manuscript lit­erature which circulated in Subcarpathia in the seventeenth and eigh­teenth centuries was written in an idiom close to the vernacular; there­fore, the Russifying linguistic tendency of the second half of the nine­teenth century represented a deviation from the older native tradition.

The populist trend was stimulated by the example of and growing con­tacts with the Ukrainian national movement in Galicia, which was mak­ing great strides at that time. Zhatkovych and Strypsky contributed to the publications of the Shevchenko Scientific Society in Lviv, while several Galician scholars (Ivan Franko, Volodymyr Hnatiuk, Stepan Tomashiv- sky), following in Drahomanov’s footsteps, produced studies on Carpatho-Ukrainian topics.

The populists’ turn to the vernacular implied a new national orienta­tion. But how should this orientation be defined—in a Rusynophile or in a Ukrainian sense? Professor Magocsi asserts that Strypsky and Volo- shyn were Rusynophiles (328, 331); the latter allegedly “started out as a Rusynophile, then by the 1920s [that is, during the Czechoslovak era] began to express openly the belief that Subcarpathian Rusyns were part of one Little Russian or Ukrainian nationality” (331). The findings of the Hungarian specialist in Carpatho-Ukrainian history, Maria Mayer, differ from those of Magocsi: “At the turn of the century the Ukrainophile ten­dency also appeared in the ‘nationalist’ circles of the learned Ruthenes, who were strongly influenced by the achievements of the Ukrainian na­tionalist movements in Galicia and Russia.” In this context, she specifi­cally refers to Iu. Zhatkovych and “his followers,” A. Voloshyn and la. Strypsky. Mayer provides an extensive summary of the debates con­ducted in 1897-9 in the pages of Kelet, the Hungarian-Ianguage organ of the Greek Catholic clergy, edited by Zhatkovych. Taking a stand against Russophile spokesmen, “Zsatkovics [Zhatkovych] asserted with weighty scholarly arguments that there was ample proof of the separate existence of the Ukrainian nation and a Ukrainian literary language absolutely dis­tinct from the Russian nation and literary language. He also professed that the [Subcarpathian] Ruthenian and Ukrainian peoples were related with regard to language.” The same position was defended by Strypsky. However, Zhatkovych and Strypsky left undecided, for the time being, the question whether the Subcarpathian Ruthenians should simply take over the Ukrainian literary language from Galicia or try to develop a lit­erary language on the basis of local dialects; this was to be determined later by the natural course of events.

The nature of the populists’ national ideology has been correctly as­sessed by Ivan Zeguc. According to him, it is inappropriate to apply to the pre-World War I period the sharp distinctions derived from the expe­rience of the 1920s and 30s. What mattered to the populists was the basic principle: the turn to the people and the people’s living language. In this they saw the precondition of the lifting of Hungarian Ruthenia from the current deep crisis; the details could be worked out later.

Without identifying themselves unconditionally with the Ukrain­ian movement, particularly with the Ukrainian phonetic orthography, the Ruthenian [populist] leaders did not hide their sympathy for Ukrainian literature, which they attested by translat­ing Ukrainian authors into Magyar.... It is undeniable that Voloshyn considered the Ukrainian movement the natural exten­sion of the Ruthenian national idea, as he clearly stated in his pro­grammatic contributions in Nauka.

Thus Mayer and Zeguc support the interpretation of the populist trend as the embryonic stage of Ukrainian nationalism in Subcarpathia.

Certain limitations of populism should not be overlooked. In the first place, it was quite non-political, restricting itself to questions of lan­guage, literature, and education. The populists were not separatists in re­gard to Hungary; they did not dream about the inclusion of their home­land in a future Ukrainian state.