Red Ruthenia

First, gentle readers, allow me to share a handful of maps. (I like maps. My favourite class in grad school was GIS.) Here is the first one, showing the ethnic make-up of Slovakia. The yellow municipalities are majority-Hungarian; the blue majority-Slovak; the brown majority-Roma and the bright red majority-Rusin. Rusins form significant majorities or pluralities in certain municipalities stretching from the district of Stará Ĺubovňa, to parts of the three districts of Svidník, Medzilaborce and Snina in the east, in a stretch across Slovakia’s northeast.

The second map shows the religious demographics of Slovakia. Here the colour schema is reversed somewhat, sadly. The red is for Latin Rite Roman Catholics; the yellow is for Byzantine Rite Catholics; the purple is for Lutherans; the green is for Calvinists; the blue is for Orthodox Christians. Again – outside little Orthodox municipal enclaves in Brezno, Michalovce and Sobrance – the major areas in which Orthodox believers form a majority are: Stará Ĺubovňa, Svidník, Medzilaborce and Snina.

Now, let’s look at this map, which shows how well the post-communist left Direction Party in Slovakia, led by the controversial and now somewhat-disgraced Róbert Fico, did in each district. As we can see, Direction turned out the heaviest majorities in the districts of – you guessed it! – Stará Ĺubovňa, Svidník, Medzilaborce and Snina. (Also Sobrance in the southeast, Čadca in the far north, and Topoľčany in the centre-west of the country.)

As Michal Pink, writing for the Central European Political Studies Review, puts it: ‘In three elections in a row, SMER [Direction] has found its greatest voter support outside of urban areas in the eastern Slovakia periphery. There is also pronounced voter support for the party in Central Slovakia, particularly in non-urban areas once again.’ It’s uncanny how closely these three – religious, ethnic and political preferences – coincide. Though Fico is a left-wing Slovak civic nationalist, his true blue – uh, make that red – political base lies in the areas of the country which have significant Rusin, Orthodox minorities. (They didn’t call it ‘Chervonnaya Rus’’ – ‘Red Ruthenia’ – fer nuttin’, I guess.)

This trend has been noted in the Slovak press with some degree of irony – take, for example, this piece in Týždeň magazine. In it, Jozef Majchrák notes that the Rusins in Slovakia consistently turn out to vote for Direction, despite the party’s leader complaining a bit about ‘minorities’ in Slovakia. The author makes due note of the Stalinist resettlement of the Rusins into Ukraine, and the subsequent violent attempts to change their culture, language and religion – a campaign, by the way, which is still ongoing in Slovakia’s eastern neighbour. The Rusins certainly have reason to be worried about the loss of their cultural and linguistic distinction; and this has been the cause of the rise of a local ethnic party, Our Region or Náš Kraj, which is dedicated to preserving precisely these cultural and linguistic distinctions. Majchrák speculates, slightly disparagingly, on the reasons why the Rusins continue to flock to the ‘red’ team despite this other option being available to them: ‘vysoká nezamesnanosť, nostalgia za rokmi socialistického rozvoja a istôt či migrácia mladých do iných kútov Slovenska a do zahraničia’ – ‘high indifference, nostalgia for the years of socialist development and security, and migration of the youth to other parts of Slovakia and abroad’.

There probably is significant ‘nostalgia’ for an era in which most Rusins did well (or at least better than they did under the Austrians). The Pink study further says, in agreement with Majchrák: ‘SMER [Direction] voters were repeatedly located primarily in areas with higher unemployment and lower incomes, along with a lower proportion of Catholic adherents’, and further: ‘SMER voters are very likely recruited from socially excluded areas characterized by a higher level of unemployment and lower incomes in smaller municipalities and towns.’ But again, I feel like this only gets at part of the picture.

The Rusin people, whether on these shores or back in the ‘old country’, have long flocked to the left for various historical reasons, which are more genuine – not merely ‘nostalgic’ – than I believe Majchrák will allow. Œconomic marginalisation and direct oppression by landlords (including clerical ones) was one such reason. Their deliberate exclusion by right-wing ‘national democrats’ and fascists on all sides would be another such reason. Many of them – particularly the Lemko branch – became Soviet or Czechoslovak partizans against Nazi domination, and the Rusin civic organisations of the diaspora long supported anti-fascist action on both sides of the Atlantic. And still another reason would be a certain solidarity with unionising mine workers in the diaspora. It is particularly worthy of note that Thomas Bell, a Rusin-American immigrant author of realist novels depicting the lives of the working class, has enjoyed greater popularity in Slovakia than here in his adoptive country, despite one of his books being adapted into a classic Hollywood film starring Joan Fontaine and Mark Stevens. One of these days I’m going to have to elaborate further on the effect reading All Brides Are Beautiful had on me when I was unemployed. But Thomas Bell’s literary support for localist Jewish political activism lends further credence to my suspicion that the civic ‘doyikayt’ of the Jewish diaspora is in some measure equivalent to and sympathetic with the ‘tutešni’ self-awareness of the Rusins.

That same self-awareness may be part of why Rusins do not flock easily to the politics of ethno-nationalism in the same way as their oppressors over the centuries have; why, in the words of Majchrák, they appear to be so ‘modest’ and ‘uncaring’ in their cultural demands. Their national awareness is civic and realist, not racial or linguistic. The Rusins of Slovakia do not shy away from Fico’s expressions of Slovak patriotism even if it isn’t pandering to them; on the other hand, they are still possessed of a remarkable sense of œconomic fairness and solidarity. Red Ruthenia is alive and well; long may it endure.

And: for lately-departed harbingers of truth and beauty Aretha and Samîr, večná pamäť; may God make their memories to be eternal!