The Russophile Orientation

The representative personality of the initial stage of the Subcarpathian Ruthenians’ national revival, in the middle of the nineteenth century, was the poet and educator Oleksander Dukhnovych (1803-65).

In his writings he used a mixture of local dialect and traditional Church Slavonic. Dukhnovych had a strong sense of the national unity joining the Subcarpathian Ruthenians with their Galician brethren, and in a poem dedicated to the Greek Catholic Metropolitan of Galicia, Hryhorii Ia- khymovych, he made the famous and oft-quoted programmatic declaration: “Our own people, not strangers, live beyond the mountains. / One Rus’, one common idea, is in the souls of us all.’’ At the same time, he lacked a clear perception of the national differences between the RutheniansZUkrainians and the Russians. Ivan Franko aptly characterized Dukhnovych as “a man of unquestionable good will and no mean talent, but incurably confused in his linguistic and political doctrines. ’ ’

This undifferentiated Ruthenian patriotism, in the manner of Dukhno- vych, assumed a decidedly Russophile colouring in the second half of the century. Two men were most instrumental in spreading the pro-Russian orientation in Subcarpathia: the editor and publicist Ivan Rakovsky (1815-85), and the political activist Adolf Dobriansky (1817-1901). Rakovsky laboured strenuously at making the Ruthenians adopt Russian as their literary language. Dobriansky, who had served as the Austrian liaison officer with the Russian army in Hungary in 1849, continued to maintain contacts with Russian governmental and Pan-Slavist circles. Russophiles controlled the first Ruthenian cultural association, the Society of St. Basil the Great, founded in 1866.

An incisive contemporary analysis of the Russophile phenomenon was provided by the Ukrainian scholar and political thinker Mykhailo Drahomanov (1841 — 95), a professor at Kiev University and after 1876 an exile in Switzerland and Bulgaria.

Drahomanov visited Subcarpathia twice in 1875 and 1876, and was shocked by the condition of the people whom he called “the wounded brother.’’ In his interpretation Russophilism represented a natural reaction against overwhelming Hungarian pressure, which made Ruthenian patriots look for outside help. Furthermore, the Ruthenian clerical intelligentsia were under the spell of the aristocratic mores of Hungarian society. Drahomanov wrote in his memoirs: “Hungarian Rus’ is a land neglected in every respect, and its oppression by Magyarism is not only of a national, but also of a social, noble character. This [bias] lives in the heads of Ruthenian patriots most opposed to Magyarism.’’¹¹ Educated Ruthenians desired to match the “genteel’’ Hungarian language and culture with an equally prestigious one, namely the Russian. A local editor, Nykolai Homychkov, responded to Drahomanov’s promptings with the following candid statement in his newspaper Karpat: “Mr. Drahomanov wants us to write in the language of the servants, but literature is everywhere being written for the masters.’’ However, Drahomanov noted, with his own family Homychkov spoke only in Hungarian. “And rightly so, since the Russian ‘masters’ are far away, and the Magyars are nearby.’’¹² Drahomanov concluded that Russophilism was self-defeating, because it deprived the Ruthenians of the ability to resist Magyarization effectively by alienating the intelligentsia from the common people and by denying the latter educational services, which could not be provided in an alien idiom. The Russophiles’ infatuation with the mighty empire of the tsars by no means implied a close familiarity with things Russian. Quite to the contrary, it was nurtured by isolation from the outside world, including Russia, and went hand in hand with a profound ignorance of contemporary Russian conditions, including modern Russian literature. Subcarpathian Russophiles were only rarely capable of mastering the Russian language properly.

The idiom they actually used in their publications was more often than not an artificial hybrid of Russian, Church Slavonic, and local Ukrainian dialect, interspersed with Hungarian and German phrases.

Drahomanov preserved his concern for Carpatho-Ukraine to the end of his days. In the answer to the greetings received on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of his public activity, written shortly before his death in 1895, and which may be considered his political testament, Drahomanov once again returned to this problem:

There is still another part of our common Fatherland which I can never forget, like a wounded brother. This is Hungarian Rus’. Having visited this land twice in 1875-6, I became convinced that nobody cares there about the common people, or [if somebody does care] it is being approached by methods which are doomed to failure in advance. There the most sincere Ruthenian patriots live in their thought and heart either with the princes and boyars of old, or with the Muscovite bishops and generals, but they do not see at all the living Ruthenian people with its distress right by their side. When they sometimes address the people, then always about dead topics only, and in a language which nobody speaks anywhere and which they themselves do not understand without a parallel Magyar translation. As I was the first Ukrainian to visit Hungarian Rus’, and as I saw that it is farther separated even from Galicia than Australia is from Europe-I swore to myself an “oath of Hannibal” to work for the integration of Hungarian Rus’ into our national democratic and progressive movement, in which lies its only salvation. Unfavourable circumstances nullified my early efforts.... Thus Hungarian Rus’ remains without the propagation of progressive ideas to this day. I have not been able to fulfill my oath, but now, having received greetings from such a great number of my fellow countrymen, I dare to lay this oath upon their heads.¹³

Under Russophile leadership, Ruthenian national life continued to decline in Subcarpathia in the late nineteenth century, thus confirming the accuracy of Drahomanov’s diagnosis.

The business meetings of the St. Basil Society were conducted in Hungarian by that time, and the Society became almost completely inactive. Russophile newspapers failed because of the lack of contributors and subscribers. A local writer, Olek- sander Mytrak (1837-1913), complained in 1885: “We are only five men left, who stand nearer to the grave than to the cradle.’’ The mood of despair was voiced by another writer of the Russophile orientation, Iulii Stavrovsky-Popradov (1850-89), in a poem with the Dantesque title “Lasciate Ogni Speranza’’:

Deprived of feeling and strength,

You, my defenceless Helot,

You unfortunate Ugro-Russian people,

Die, descend into the darkness of the grave!

Slavs, intone a sorrowful dirge,

Kindle a funerary torch!

The situation of the Subcarpathian Ruthenians was indeed extremely bleak, but Stavrovsky-Popradov’s exaggerated pessimism reflected the bankruptcy of the Russophile trend, whose partisans had reached a dead end: the hoped-for intervention of tsarist Russia was not forthcoming, while they did not know how to mobilize the resources of their own people against the ever-increasing pressures of Magyarization. Around the turn of the century, the older Russophile activists of the Dobriansky and Rakovsky generation had largely passed from the scene, and their successors could not be identified. This did not mean, however, that Russophilism disappeared completely. Rather, it went into a state of hibernation from which it was to re-emerge to some extent after 1918. Russophile sentiment persisted also on the popular level, as evidenced by the Orthodox religious movement, which spread spontaneously in several Subcarpathian villages in the early years of the twentieth century. Conversions to Orthodoxy expressed the peasants’ social grievances and their dissatisfaction with the Magyarized Greek Catholic clergy. The authorities reacted by staging, in 1904 and 1913, trials of Orthodox agitators and believers charged with the disturbance of public peace and treason against the Hungarian state.

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Source: Rudnytsky I.. Essays in modern Ukrainian history. Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies University of Alberta,1987. — 500 p.. 1987

The Russophile Orientation

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