Red is old is good is red(dish)

Ivan Naumovich and Yakov Golovatskiy, 1883

The Carpathian Institute and the Lemko Association recently came out with a new short volume of essays from Polish professor Dr Stefan Dudra, translated by Dr Paul Best, on Lemko identity and the Orthodox Church. This volume shows how the Rusin people, including the Lemkos, have long been a subaltern people in the truest sense, formed in the context of the politics of Central Europe. The historical pathways by which their consciousness has been formed – under subjection to Poland, then Hungary, then the Dual Monarchy, Czechoslovakia, Germany, the Soviet Union, now the Ukraine – are of endless interest to me, given the historical ties between the Rusins (including the diaspora) and the Jews of Central Europe (including the diaspora). There are some generalisations and characterisations in Dr Dudra’s narrative I could pick nits with, but on the whole volume does not disappoint. He does great justice to the various aspects of Lemko-Rusin consciousness which too often get ignored in the established histories of the time – but his focus is primarily on the twentieth century and the political struggles that took place on account of WWI, the resistance against the Nazis in WWII, Operation Vistula during and after the war, and the post-war rebuilding of Lemko communities.

Dr Dudra shows quite adroitly how the Rusin communities of southern Poland and Transcarpathia which were so violently repressed by Austria-Hungary and then so brutally uprooted and relocated by the NKVD, held to Orthodox Christianity not only to prevent cultural and linguistic assimilation, but also as a way of remembering and honouring their parents and communities, which had always – even under the Unia – considered themselves little-o ‘orthodox’ (‘православны’) in belief. They had always celebrated the Liturgy in Slavonic; had always had bearded, married priests; had never made a show of ethnic identity in their church life. So when Greek-Catholic seminaries began, in the early twentieth century under pressure from the Austro-Hungarian government, sending clean-shaven, celibate priests to them, who used vernacular Ukrainian and displayed tryzubs in the liturgy, it became a political problem for them. One of the answers to this political problem was switching jurisdictions and entering the Orthodox Church – under Constantinople, Serbia, Poland or most popularly Russia.

These old but recently-Orthodox communities were immediately politically-suspect. They incurred the displeasure of both the Austro-Hungarian authorities (who treated them as Russian spies or as a Russian fifth column), and, for obvious reasons, the Greek-Catholic hierarchy and priesthood. It was in these political conditions that the show-trial of Saint Aleksei (Kabalyuk) occurred, and the martyrdom in Gorlice of Fr Saint Maksim (Sandovich) (who said of himself: ‘my only politics is the Gospel’). Over 30,000 Orthodox Lemkos, having been informed on to the gendarmes by their neighbours, were interred and suffered in Thalerhof concentration camp. World War II brought even further suffering. Orthodox Rusins, like Saint Iov of Ugolka, fought for Czechoslovakia, and were again herded into camps and murdered by the Nazis – many welcomed the coming of the Soviets. However, the directive under Operation Vistula (carried out by the satellite Polish government) was to round up and disperse the Rusins – who, far from being Nazi collaborators, were more likely to be innocent bystanders.

Among the Lemkos so displaced, who were generally mistrusted and despised as outsiders where they were settled, folk songs and Christmas carols shared within the family circle from their ‘little homeland’, from ‘those brought from the mountains’, were one particular source of comfort and cultural continuity. The other was the Church. Icons which had been salvaged from the villages prior to Operation Vistula came to adorn house churches, abandoned buildings, hospital and cemetery chapels which became the makeshift Orthodox chrámy (at the expense of the parishioners; there was no aid from the state). These temples would then become the centres of the internal Lemko diaspora’s shared life – weddings, baptisms, funerals. Priests – who were victims of displacement along with the laypeople – would take it upon themselves to teach catechesis, the Slavonic language and even sæcular history. These classes were often the only times Lemko children were permitted to speak по-нашему (‘our way’, i.e. the Rusin language) in public.

The Rusins did fare a little better when Khrushchev came to power in Moscow in 1953, and some were allowed to return home by the Polish government starting around 1956 under the partial thaw in religious and ethnic policies. However, communal conflict between Orthodox Lemkos and Catholic (including Greek-Catholic) priests who had taken control of their home parish churches in their absence was still fraught in places like Rozdziele and Polany, and conflicts often came to forcible seizures, vandalism, intimidation and literal blows. (In Rozdziele the Orthodox community survived; in Polany it did not.) Catholics and Greek-Catholics accused the Orthodox of being ‘pagans’, schismatics and Soviet spies. It was not that the Polish government at the time was any friendlier to the Catholics than to the Orthodox Christians; it was simply that the government found a policy of ‘divide and rule’ to be the most effective way to quell any possible dissent. Suffice it to say: as Dr Dudra’s book makes clear, the road to the current status of the Orthodox Lemko communities in southern Poland and Slovakia has not been a particularly easy one.

In the book, however, a couple of passing references were made to the cultural-political self-identification of ‘Old Ruthenia’ (or ‘Old Rus’’, ‘Старорусь’) which were somewhat intriguing to me. It was somewhat outside the scope of the book, which was more focussed on twentieth-century events, so I ended up having to delve into the topic a bit on my own with outside sources.

In short: the ‘Old Ruthenian’ group were the first people among the Rusins to try to resist the official policies, on either side of the border, of Ukrainianisation and Polonisation. Being drawn from the Rusin intelligentsia, they were as often as not Greek-Catholic priests or relatives of priests. Appealing to distant historical memory, they revived the idea of the unified Rus’ civilisation: Great Rus’ (Russia), Little Rus’ (Ukraine), White Rus’ (Belarus) and Red Rus’ (Carpathian Ruthenia) – through the last of which they claimed belonging for themselves. Their orientation was one of cultural conservatism. They wanted to keep Church Slavonic, the unreformed Cyrillic orthography, the Byzantine Liturgy and the married priesthood. They distanced themselves decisively from all market-liberal and ethno-nationalist appeals. Though a few of their number voiced some sympathy for Russia, at the time, most of the ‘Old Ruthenians’ appealed instead to the Austroslawismus of Czech statesmen like František Palack‎ý and to the political reaction of Metternich. In the eyes of the Old Ruthenians, the Habsburg monarchy as a multi-ethnic state stood the best chance of preserving their cultural heritage from assimilation. The Old Ruthenians thus constituted a politically- and socially-conservative party among the Rusins in Central Europe.

The subsequent events leading up to and during the First World War unfortunately disabused and destroyed a lot of this monarchical-conservative ‘Old Ruthenian’ idealism. Beginning with the Ausgleich in 1867, when the Habsburg Empire reorganised as Austria-Hungary (thus alienating the Slavs by exclusion), the Teutophile orientation of the Old Ruthenians became much harder to justify on the grounds of ethno-political parity. At the same time, the liberal nationalism which was fomenting in the newly-autonomous region of Galicia – even though the people who embraced it were Slavs – was galling to their conservative sensibilities. In such an environment, with what they saw as an Austrian political betrayal on the one side and an artificial geometric vernacularism on the other, it was only natural for the ‘Old Ruthenian’ tendency to begin looking further eastward towards Imperial Russia for support, and many of them converted to Orthodoxy. This was the course charted by, for example, Yakov Golovatskiy and Ivan Naumovich, encouraged by the Russian Slavophil historian Mikhail Pogodin.

However, this influence from the Slavophils and from Imperial Russia over the long run meant that the Old Ruthenians, now Orthodoxising and drifting in orientation toward Russophilia, began to adopt certain radical and populist ideas. (This makes sense: not being able to draw on the Austrian nobility for political support, where else could these Slavic intellectuals go but to the common people who held onto the old religious traditions?) At the same time, even their original, high-Tory lack of enthusiasm for parliamentary finagling was reinforced by the fact that the Ausgleich had taken place pretty much entirely over their heads! The result was: a culturally-conservative movement, nationalist only in a loose, mild Herderian sense, whose class-based œconomic tendencies, learned from a poor peasantry and later from a proletarianising diaspora, were firmly – if not fanatically – on the left.

One can see some of these same tendencies in modern Rusin political preferences in the mother country. According to the data, Rusins in Slovakia tend to be loyal to the Direction party which embraces left œconomics and a mild form of civic nationalism; however, they tend to reject the ethnic-nationalist options which are set before them. Now, I’m a realist; I understand full well that there are good material reasons for (especially older) Rusins to stick by Direction, which have nothing to do with the Habsburg-era cultural politics of their great-great-great-grandfathers. But it is an intriguing point of convergence that both the rejection of a narrow ethnic nationalism and the embrace of œconomic populism appear to be typical of the ‘Old Ruthenian’ mindset. It should be clear by now that both of these tendencies endear this mindset to me greatly.

A quick note on my Latinised orthography. I use the spelling ‘Rusin’ rather than ‘Rusyn’ for two reasons. First of all, it is the preferred spelling of the local Rusin Association of Minnesota. It is out of respect for my friends in that Association that I use their preferred spelling of ‘Rusin’. (Sorry, Pittsburghers!) Secondly, though, ‘Rusin’ simply seems to me to be common-sense. The Western Slavic languages with which Rusin forms a language continuum simply do not have the front-to-central vowel mutation that occurred further north and east whereby /i/ changed to /ɨ/: thus, the demonym in Czech and Slovak ‘Rusíni’; in BCS ‘Rusini’; in Polish ‘(Karpato)rusini’, in Rusin itself ‘Русины’ or ‘Rusinŷ’. It might even just be better to write ‘Ruthene’ following the historical English usage.