From Nowhere to Somewhere: The Carpatho-Rusyn Movement. A Personal History

MAGOCSI

The Carpatho-Rusyn Movement

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Paul Robert Magocsi, described by his professional colleagues as a “scholar, historian, and public advocate,” is a professor of history and political science who for over four decades has held the endowed John Yaremko Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada.

FROM NOWHERE TO SOMEWHERE

Nationalism has long been the subject of analysis and debate. Has it been a positive or negative factor in human development? Since nationalism first took hold in Europe in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, scholars have developed various theories and historical narratives to describe this worldwide ideological and political phenomenon.

But how does nationalism work? How do certain groups of people become nationalities? What concrete mechanisms have been adopted by governments and/or intellectual leaders to transform often disparate individuals into groups who become conscious of their common identity and distinctiveness from others?

No new theory of nationalism is put forth in From Nowhere to Somewhere. Rather, in a memoiristic and clearly personal manner, the text provides a kind of nuts-and-bolts guide to nationality-building.

It focuses on developments during the last half century among Carpatho-Rusyns, or Ruthenians, a numerically mid-sized stateless people living in the heart of Europe and among the diaspora it has spawned in the United States.

To paraphrase the most famous person of Carpatho-Rusyn ancestry Andy Warhol, the reader of this book will discover how CarpathoRusyns, a previously unknown people from nowhere, have become recognized and can now be found somewhere.

FROM NOWHERE TO SOMEWHERE

FROM NOWHERE TO SOMEWHERE The Carpatho-Rusyn Movement — A PERSONAL HISTORY —

PAUL ROBERT MAGOCSI

Publication of this volume was made possible by the generous support of the John and Helen Timo Foundation Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

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Design and layout by John Beadle © Paul Robert Magocsi 2024

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PREFACE

For many years colleagues and friends in Europe and North America have been urging me to write my memoirs. They probably—and rightly so— were less interested in me, the individual, than in me, the national activist, who for decades has played a role in the civic and cultural revival of a small stateless people living in the heart of Europe—Carpatho-Rusyns.

In the summer of 2018, while I was at my residence in southern France near the border of Italy, I suddenly found myself with nothing to do for a few weeks. That uncharacteristic situation was due to the fact that my erstwhile girlfriend who I was courting at the time was unable to join me.

Easily bored, I sat down on my balcony, but instead of staring out blankly at the Mediterranean and the crests of the Alps which divide France from Italy, I sketched out my memoirs in six volumes. The first four were to be chronological, the last two thematic.

Four years went by, during which five of the planned six volumes were completed, in total about 1,200 manuscript pages. In the process of writing, I shared the text with a very select number of my closest and trusted friends, some of whom are discussed in various volumes.

All of them without exception urged me to publish the memoirs— and as soon as possible. I demurred, saying I was in no hurry to publish. Maybe the memoirs might never even see the light of day, or, if so, only after my passing. After all, the first four chronological volumes were written in a tell-it-all, un-self-censored, often graphic style.

Eventually, I was persuaded to publish the thematic volume, number five, under the title From Nowhere to Somewhere, which deals with the Carpatho-Rusyn movement that I helped to direct in the United States and the European homeland from the early 1970s to the present. Their v

From Nowhere To Somewhere

argument was that I—or rather my text—should lay bare the unknown background to events and personalities, information which allegedly had historic value and which otherwise could be lost to posterity.

As a professional historian, I was aware of the age-old permeable boundary between history and memoir, a phenomenon reflected in the writings of chroniclers since the days of the ancient Greeks. Our own contemporary chroniclers seem preoccupied with the need to dwell on the personal connections to a given subject, thereby making their own lives the subject of historical analysis—a form of presentism that goes by the name “ego-history.”

I have published numerous works in a scholarly mode about the Carpatho-Rusyn national revival of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. To be sure, the account presented here traverses much of the same ground that I have discussed elsewhere. The difference here, in From Nowhere to Somewhere, is the lack of any hesitation in presenting unadorned the dramatis personae—the key players of the Carpatho-Rusyn movement—with all their strengths and sometimes very unpleasant weaknesses.

Of course, the descriptions of individual personae—toned down to avoid extreme criticism and potential libelous assertions—reflect my own uninhibited bias. Hence, the subtitle of the book: A Personal History.

Recently, the French historian, Enzo Traverso, while discussing the increasing injection of subjectivism into the present-day historical profession, seemed to welcome the new trend by contrasting it with the practitioners of traditional “scientific” history.

The life of a scholar consists of teaching courses and seminars, attending conferences, and holing oneself up in archives and libraries, which isn’t as thrilling as the adventures of a James Bond.

It just so happens that much of From Nowhere to Somewhere does take place within the context of repressive regimes during the Cold War and of its liberated post-Communist aftermath. Perhaps, dear readers, you will find this very personal history (without any footnotes or classic scholarly apparatus) to be a reader-friendly narrative that is enlightening and even enjoyable, if not quite as adventurous as the experiences of 007.

PRM Toronto, Canada November 2023 vi

DRAMATIS PERSONAE The first number(s) refer to the text page(s).

The italicized number(s) refer to the illustrations.

ACADEMY OF RUSYN CULTURE IN SLOVAKIA/AKADEMIIA RUSYNSKOI KULTURŶ V SLOVATSKII REPUBLITSÏ: cultural society (est. 2001, Prešov, Slovakia) to publish Rusyn-language fiction and nonfiction books, 445 National ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF UKRAINE/NATIONALNA AKADEMIIA NAUK UKRAÏNY (NANU): government-funded body (est. 1918) based in Kyiv, Ukraine with several institutes (Ethnography, History, Language, Literature, Nationality Relations and Politics) that publish materials all of which promote the view that Carpatho-Rusyns are Ukrainians, 79-80, 100-102, 144, 258, 260, 458.

Larry ALFORD: American-born library administrator, director of the University of Toronto Libraries, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 234, 235 Mykhailo ALMASHII: teacher, choral director, Carpatho-Rusyn cultural activist in Transcarpathia, Ukraine, author of Rusyn-language textbooks, dictionaries, and histories, 251, 271, 276-277, 289, 311, 368, 377, 393, 394, 397, 398, 450; illus. 169, 172, 190, 221, 224, 233, 249 AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SLAVIC STUDIES (AAASS), renamed in 2010 the ASSOCIATION FOR SLAVIC EAST EUROPEAN, AND EURASIAN STUDIES (ASEEES): organization (est. 1948) based in the United States of scholars specializing in all disciplines connected with countries in the regions noted in the body’s current name, 183, 187-189, 193, 194, 218, 261, 349, 411-412, 472, 474; illus.

120, 121, 123, 286, 287 AMERICAN CARPATHO-RUSSIAN ORTHODOX DIOCESE—formerly the Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Diocese of America: church jurisdiction under the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople (est. 1937, vii

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Johnstown, Pennsylvania) comprised of clergy and lay people in the United States who broke with the Byzantine Ruthenian (Greek) Catholic Church because of opposition to clerical celibacy imposed by the Vatican, 26, 91, 343 Fedor ARISTOV SOCIETY OF FRIENDS OF SUBCARPATHIAN RUS’/ OBSHCESTVO DRUZEI KARPATSKOI RUSI IM F. F. ARISTOVA: short lived cultural group in Moscow, Russia focussing on the intellectual heritage of Fedor Aristov and his interest in “Carpatho-Russians,” 375, 376 Tatiana ARISTOVA: Russian historian from Moscow whose intellectual interests aligned with her father Fedor F. Aristov, the early twentieth century specialist on “Carpathian Russia,” 376; illus. 226 Timothy Garton ASH: British journalist, public intellectual, and historian of post-Communist Europe, professor at Oxford University, England, 281-282; illus. 176 Ján BABJAK, SJ: Slovak cleric of the Jesuit Order, archbishop of the Greek Catholic Eparchy of Prešov, Slovakia, 132, 489 Liubytsia BABOTA/L’ubica BABOTOVÁ: literary historian of Ukrainian orientation, professor at Prešov University, Slovakia, 216, 232, 286; illus. 75 Yurii BACHA/Juraj BAČA: writer, literary historian, professor at Pavel Šafárik University, Prešov, and Ukrainophile civic and cultural activist in Slovakia, 61-63, 73, 103; illus. 58, 75 Emylian BALETSKYI/Emil Baleczky: Transcarpathian born Hungarian Slavist and Russian-language poet of Carpatho-Rusyn origin, 135, 328 Yurii BALEGA: Transcarpathian-born Ukrainian literary historian, specialist on the literature of Subcarpathian Rus’/Transcarpathia, professor at Uzhhorod State/National University, Ukraine, 113, 139 Viktor BALOGA: businessman (regional oligarch) and politician in Transcarpathia, chief of the Office of the President of Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko, 264-265 Ivan BANDURYCH/BANDURIČ: city planner, Carpatho-Rusyn cultural and civic activist based in Bardejov, Slovakia, 155-156 Peter BAYCURA: Carpatho-Rusyn cultural and civic activist in western Pennsylvania, USA, 91; illus. 46 George BEDRIN: book publisher in Vermont, USA and business manager of the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center in the early twenty-first century, 196, 473 viii

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Beata BEGENYOVA: Carpatho-Rusyn folk singer from the Prešov Region in Slovakia and the United States, 330-331; illus. 202 Mykhailo BELEN: sculptor, creator of several totalitarian style monumental statues and building plaques of Carpatho-Rusyn national leaders, especially Aleksander Dukhnovych, throughout Transcarpathia, Ukraine, 325-327; illus. 199, 314 BENEDICTINE MONASTERY LIBRARY: library in Butler, Pennsylvania which specialized in collecting material about Carpatho-Rusyns in the United States and Europe, 7, 15, 25, 221-222 Ivan BERNASOVSKÝ: professor of social studies and educational administrator at Prešov University, Slovakia, illus. 259, 261 Paul BEST: American-born professor of political science; Lemko-Rusyn cultural and civic activist in the northeast United States, 478; illus. 182, 287 Serhiy BILENKY: Canadian-Ukrainian historian from Kyïv based in Toronto, Canada, director of the Ukrainian Summer School, Harvard University, 335-336 Thomas BIRD: American specialist in Slavic literatures and Eastern Christianity, supporter of Carpatho-Rusyn scholarly activity, professor of Slavic Studies, Queens College, City University of New York, USA, 191-193.

474; illus. 121 Alena BLŶKHOVA/BLICHOVÁ: Carpatho-Rusyn youth activist in Slovakia, subsequently advisor to the Slovak government on Rusyn affairs, 306-307; illus. 188 Mykola BOBYNETS: Carpatho-Rusyn civic activist in Transcarpathia, Ukraine, 298, 313, 402, 405, 406, 408-410, 450; illus. 217, 249 Pavlo BOGDAN: Ukrainophile civic and cultural activist in Slovakia, head of the Ukrainian-language radio broadcasting service, Prešov, Slovakia, 127, 128 Oleksa BOKSHAI: teacher from interwar Subcarpathian Rus’ and leading player of the Rus’ football (soccer) team, illus. 219 Elena BOUDOVSKAIA: Soviet-trained American linguist, specialist in Rusyn dialects and folklore, professor of Russian language, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., USA, 191; illus. 120, 286 Wilhelm BRAUMÜLLER UNIVERSITÄTS VERLAGSBUCHHANDLUNG: ix

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Vienna’s oldest existing publishing house (est. in 1783), which released several Carpatho-Rusyn related books in the 1980s, 66-68, 177; illus. 32, 34 Ivan BROVDII: sculptor and painter from Mukachevo in Transcarpathia, Ukraine, creator of the Carpatho-Rusyn “Oscar” presented to winners of the Dukhnovych Award in Carpatho-Rusyn Literature, 327; illus. 321 Wayles BROWNE: American Slavist, professor of linguistics, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA, 188-190, 474 Mykhal BYTSKO/Michal BICKO: art teacher and painter of Carpatho-Rusyn background, inspiration behind the Andy Warhol Museum in Medzilaborce, Slovakia, 86, 89, 124; illus. 45 Ivan BYTSKO/BICKO: Carpatho-Rusyn civic and political activist, based in Bratislava, Slovakia, 90-92, 98; illus. 46, 47, 48, 71 BYZANTINE RUTHENIAN (GREEK) CATHOLIC CHURCH/ METROPOLITAN PROVINCE: quasi-autonomous jurisdiction (ecclesia sui iuris) under the authority of the Holy See (est. 1969), comprised of the Eparchies of Pittsburgh, Passaic, Parma, and Phoenix in the United States and (since 2022) the Exarchate of Canada; formerly the Ruthenian Greek Catholic Exarchate of the United States based in Munhall, Pennsylvania, 10, 11, 14-16, 21, 22, 39, 44, 66, 87, 91, 216; illus. 12 Zuzana ČAPUTOVÁ: Slovak politician, fifth and first female president of Slovakia (2019-), 494; illus. 258, 298 Werner CARIGIET: professor and specialist on the Romansch people in Switzerland, 155, 156 CARPATHIAN STUDIES INSTITUTE/INSTYTUT KARPATOZNAVSTVA: research center (est. 1992) at Uzhhorod National University, Ukraine, specializing in the archeology and history of the Transcarpathian region of Ukraine, 278, 294, 342, 438; illus. 266 CARPATHO-RUSSIAN ETHNIC RESEARCH CENTER: short-lived scholarly society (est. 1983, Fort Lauderdale, Florida), founded by the Sabak family to promote the view that Carpatho-Rusyns are a branch of the Russian nationality, 345, 346; illus. 208, 210 CARPATHO-RUSYN CONSORTIUM OF NORTH AMERICA: civic organization (est. 2009) to advocate for Carpatho-Rusyn Americans with U.S. and foreign governments, NGOs, and the World Congress of Rusyns; comprised of the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center, Carpatho-Rusyn x

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Society, Lemko Association, Rusin Association of Minnesota, and the World Academy of Rusyn Culture, 408, 514-515; illus. 285 CARPATHO-RUSYN RESEARCH CENTER (C-RRC): non-profit publishing, distribution, benevolent, and scholarly center (est. 1978) based in the USA, 25, 28-34, 39, 44, 46, 50, 66, 68, 69, 80, 88, 91, 92, 123, 166, 182, 185, 187, 188, 191, 196-197, 207-208, 211, 237, 240, 258, 265-266, 296, 297, 301, 315, 318, 319, 332, 342, 347, 360, 367, 389, 408, 410, 426, 431, 434, 445, 446, 463464, 470, 473-474, 476, 477, 505, 514, 515, 524; illus. 16, 17, 18, 31, 33, 35, 123, 130, 287 CARPATHO-RUSYN SOCIETY: membership organization (est. 1994, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) devoted to promoting knowledge about Carpatho-Rusyns in North America and Europe, based in Munhall, Pennsylvania with several regional branches throughout the United States, 256, 261, 264, 265, 427, 476, 477, 514 CARPATHO-RUTHENIAN STUDIES FOUNDATION/KARPATO-RUS’KA NAUKOVA FUNDATSIIA: short-lived non-profit scholarly organization (est. 1976, McKeesport, Pennsylvania, USA) whose goal was to disseminate information about Carpatho-Rusyn culture and to create an endowed professorship at a university in the United States, 18-19, 25; illus. 10 CARPATO-RUTHENICA LIBRARY: repository of the largest collection in any one location of published materials about Carpathian Rus’ and CarpathoRusyns, in 2019 named the Paul Robert Magocsi Carpato-Ruthenica Collection, located at the University of Toronto, Canada, 83, 222, 230, 231236, 437, 519; illus. 135, 147, 265 CHAIR OF UKRAINIAN STUDIES, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO: first endowed professorship of its kind in Canada (inaugurated in 1980), named in 2010 for the Ukrainian-Canadian civil servant John Yaremko, 50, 56, 78, 84, 100-101, 235, 261, 414, 452; illus. 44, 279 Steven CHEPA: Canadian business entrepreneur and merchant banker, Carpatho-Rusyn philanthropist for cultural and scholarly projects, including the Dukhnovych Award for Carpatho-Rusyn Literature and the Chepa Fund for Carpatho-Rusyn Studies, 321-326, 328-335, 338, 342, 352, 353, 354, 367, 369, 370, 415, 416, 443-451, 459, 468, 489, 524; illus. 116, 161, 174, 194, 197, 198, 201, 217, 218, 223, 239, 247, 248, 270 Vasyl CHEPA: Transcarpathian-born immigrant to Canada; civic activist in

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the Lemko Society of Hamilton, Ontario; father of the Carpatho-Rusyn philanthropist Steven Chepa, 322, 333 Catherine Vakar CHVANY: American Slavist, professor of linguistics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, 188 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY: renowned Ivy League educational institution (est.

1754) based in New York City (Manhattan), USA; affiliate bodies include Columbia University Press with several Carpatho-Rusyn related titles and the Association for the Study of Nationalities that sponsors scholarly panels about Carpatho-Rusyns, 8, 23, 27, 207, 208, 211, 350, 431, 464; illus. 132 CULTURAL SOCIETY OF RUSYNS IN ROMANIA/KULTURNE TOVARYSTVO RUSYNIV V ROMANII: first organization in Romania (est.

2000) to promote the idea that Carpatho-Rusyns form a distinct nationality, 383, 388, 389, 392 CULTURAL UNION OF UKRAINIAN WORKERS/KULTURNYI SOIUZ UKRAÏNSKYKH TRUDIASHCHYKH (KSUT): state-controlled civic and cultural organization (est. 1952, Prešov, Czechoslovakia) intended to represent the country’s “Ukrainian” (Carpatho-Rusyn) national minority, 59, 83, 96 Richard CUSTER: IT analyst, chronicler of Carpatho-Rusyn Americans, founding editor of The New Rusyn Times, 44, 48, 182, 238; illus. 149 Zdeněk (Zed) DAVID: Czech-American Slavic bibliographer and librarian, Princeton University; later at the Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington, D.C., USA, 3 DEPARTMENT OF RUSYN LANGUAGE/KATEDRA RUSKOHO YAZIKA: oldest existing university-level Carpatho-Rusyn program in the world, University of Novi Sad, Vojvodina Yugoslavia (est. 1981), renamed (2007) the Rusyn Language Section/Oddzelenie, 111, 138, 439, 508 DEPARTMENT/KATEDRA OF UKRAINIAN AND RUSYN PHILOLOGY: university institution at the advanced School of Education, Nyíregyháza, Hungary (est. 1992), sponsor of publication series in Rusyn studies, department disbanded in 2014, 233-234, 438, 502, 505; illus. 309 Mikhail DRONOV: Russian-born specialist in the Carpatho-Rusyn nationality question and church history, based in Moscow at the Institute of Slavic Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences, 217, 309, 312, 375, 376; illus. 189, 226 xii

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Natalia DUDASH/Natalja DUDAŠ: poet, journalist, Vojvodinian Rusyn civic and cultural activist, government official, Belgrade, Yugoslavia, 129-131, 166, 269; illus. 81, 95, 165 Michael DUDICK: Byzantine Catholic cleric, bishop of the Byzantine Ruthenian Catholic Eparchy of Passaic, New Jersey, USA, 17, 39, 66, 67, 87, 88; illus. 12 Aleksander DUKHNOVYCH: nineteenth-century Greek Catholic priest in the Eparchy of Prešov (present-day eastern Slovakia), the “national awakener of Carpatho-Rusyns”, 17, 39, 41, 61, 81, 125, 184, 208, 224, 235, 325, 326, 360, 394, 524, 530; illus. 8, 116, 199, 217, 223 Aleksander DUKHNOVYCH SOCIETY OF CARPATHO-RUSSIAN CANADIANS: civic and cultural organization of leftist and openly proSoviet orientation based in Toronto, Canada, 52, 54: illus. 26 Aleksander DUKHNOVYCH THEATER/TEATR ALEKSANDRA DUKHNOVYCHA: professional state-funded Rusyn-language theater (est.

1990), successor to the Ukrainian National Theater in Prešov, Slovakia, 98, 122, 125, 151, 175, 178, 208, 235, 247, 251, 300, 302, 303, 332, 359, 461, 480; illus. 55, 97, 184, 296 DUKLIA UKRAINIAN SONG AND DANCE ENSEMBLE/ PIDDUKLIANSKYI UKRAINSKYI NARODNYI ENSAMBL: professional choir and dance company (est. 1956) within Communist Czechoslovakia’s state-supported Ukrainian National Theater, Prešov, Czechoslovakia, 175, 181 Aleksander/Alexander DULEBA: political consultant, media commentator, Carpatho-Rusyn civic activist based in Bratislava, Slovakia, 282, 488, 493; illus. 296 Aleksander DULICHENKO: Soviet-trained sociolinguist, specialist in Slavic “micro-languages” (especially Vojvodinian Rusyn), professor of linguistics, University of Tartu, Estonia, 165, 166, 170, 206, 232, 340, 341, 351 Pavel DUPKANYCH: Carpatho-Rusyn civic activist from Medzilaborce, Slovakia, 368, 461; illus. 186 Olena DUTS-FAIFER/Helena DUĆ-FAJFER: literary historian, professor at Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Lemko-Rusyn cultural and civic activist in Poland, 70, 73-75, 106, 108, 109, 113, 122, 131, 132, 170, 185, 206, 232, 251, 255, 270, 293, 354, 363, 368, 409, 414-419, 439, 468, 498; illus. 39, 59, 60, 61, xiii

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65, 70, 72, 86, 87, 89, 145, 151, 246, 247. 248, 303 Mikuláš DZURINDA: Slovak politician, parliamentary deputy, prime minister of Slovakia (1998-2006) who shepherded his country’s entry into the European Union, 167, 168, 177, 495; illus. 105 ELIZABETH (SISI): Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary (reigned 18541898), married to Franz Joseph I, emperor of Austria-Hungary, 480-481, 521; illus. 291, 319 EUROPEAN CONGRESS OF SUBCARPATHIAN RUSYNS/EVROPEISKII KONGRESS PODKARPATSKIKH RUSINOV: ephemeral body in the Czech Republic to support the “independent republic of Subcarpathian Rus’,” proclaimed in 2008, 399 Volodymyr FEDYNYSHYNETS: Transcarpathian-born Ukrainian-language writer, publicist, and cultural activist, among the first persons in Soviet Ukraine (Transcarpathia) to call for recognition of Carpatho-Rusyn as a distinct nationality, 115, 132, 216, 241, 242, 275, 276, 288, 325, 339, 369; illus. 70, 150, 151, 200, 223 Mykhailo FEISA/Michal FEJSA: linguist, translator, Vojvodinian Rusyn cultural and civic activist, professor in the Department of Rusyn Language, University of Novi Sad, Serbia, 232, 377, 379, 439, 509 Stepan FENTSYK: Greek Catholic priest of Russophile national orientation, cultural and political activist in interwar Subcarpathian Rus’ under Czechoslovakia and Hungarian-ruled Subcarpathia during World War II, 279 Volodymyr FENYCH: Transcarpathian-born church historian, professor and administrator at Uzhhorod National University, Ukraine, professor of Carpatho-Rusyn history, Institute of Rusyn Language and Culture, Prešov University, Slovakia, 440, 441, 455-458, 512; illus. 268, 276, 314 Jack FIGEL: publisher and Byzantine Catholic lay activist in the United States, founder of Eastern Christian Publications based in Fairfield, Virginia, USA, 196; illus. 125, 252 László FILKEHÁZI: Carpatho-Rusyn cultural activist in northeastern Hungary, based in the village of Múcsony, 271; illus. 166 Joyce FIRKO: American lawyer of Carpatho-Rusyn background, based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, 17; illus. 10

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Georgii FIRTSAK/Gheorghe FIRCZAK: civic and political activist of Carpatho-Rusyn background, founding head of the Cultural Society of Rusyns in Romania, based in Deva, Romania, 337, 383, 384, 387-389, 391, 392, 509; illus. 205, 228, 230, 311 Yulii FIRTSAK: Romanian politician of Carpatho-Rusyn background, son of Georgii Firtsak, 509; illus. 205 Stephan FISCHER-GALATI: Romanian-born American publisher, founder of the East European Monograph Series (Columbia University Press), professor, University of Colorado at Boulder, USA, 207, 208; illus. 129 Joshua FISHMAN: Jewish-American sociolinguist, Yiddishist, professor at Yeshiva University, New York City, USA, 155, 156; illus. 98 John FIZER: American Ukrainophile native of Transcarpathia, literary scholar, professor of Russian at Rutgers—The State University of New Jersey, USA, 7, 61, 62 Henryk FONTAŃSKI: Polish linguist, codifier of the Lemko-Rusyn language, professor of linguistics, University of Opole, Poland, 157, 170, 171 Aleksander FRANKO: teacher, Czechoslovak diplomat, chair of the First World Congress of Rusyn, Medzilaborce, Czechoslovakia, 125; illus. 111, 186 FRANZ JOSEPH I HABSBURG: Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary (reigned 1848-1916), ruler of the last state, Austria-Hungary, in which Carpatho-Rusyns in all regions of Europe were under the rule of one political entity, 480-481; illus. 290 Marek GAI/GAJ: first graduate of the Rusyn-language program at Prešov University, advisor to Slovakia’s Ministry of Education, teacher based in Radvan nad Laborcem, Slovakia, 309, 311, 312; illus. 191 Peter GALADZA: American-born Ukrainian Canadian Byzantine-rite priest of the Ukrainian Catholic Eparchy of Toronto, professor of Eastern Christian Liturgy, Sheptytsky Institute, University of Toronto, Canada, 193-195, 400, 411; illus. 122 Bogdan GAMBAL: Lemko-Rusyn cultural and civic activist, broadcast media specialist in Poland, 377, 467, 496, 497, 499; illus. 302 Meric GERTLER: professor of geography, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and eventually president of the University of Toronto during the xv

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first decades of the twenty-first century, 436; illus. 264 Petro GETSKO: Transcarpathian-born self-appointed spokesperson for the Carpatho-Rusyns of Ukraine in support of an independent republic of Subcarpathian Rus’, resident in exile in Moscow, Russia, 399; illus. 237 Vira GIRITS/Vera GIRECZ: native of Subcarpathia/Transcarpathia, cultural and civic activist in Rusyn self-governing communities in Hungary and deputy in the National Parliament in Budapest, Hungary, 368, 404, 501, 502, 504-506 Iosif GLIVKA: Transcarpathian-born cultural activist, founder of the Rusyn Homeland Carpathian Rus’ based in Moscow, 375-377; illus. 226 Olga GLOSIKOVA/GLOSÍKOVÁ: Carpatho-Rusyn civic activist, founding director of the Museum of Rusyn Culture, Prešov, Slovakia, 131, 467 Larry GOGA: police detective, founding president of the Rusin Association of Minnesota, based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, 41, 44, 182; illus. 22, 46, 47 Mikhail GORBACHEV: First Secretary of the All-Union Communist party of the Soviet Union; from 1985 he set in motion a series of reforms that “liberated” satellite countries in central and eastern Europe from Communist totalitarian rule; he oversaw the demise of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, 83, 84, 100, 112 George GRABOWICZ: professor of Ukrainian literature, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA; founding editor of the intellectual journal, Krytyka, based in Kyiv, Ukraine, which published articles favorable to Carpatho-Rusyns, 100, 106, 335; illus. 61 GREEK CATHOLIC EPARCHY OF MUKACHEVO: oldest church jurisdiction (Orthodox until 1646) serving Carpatho-Rusyns in Europe; seat of the eparch/diocesan bishop is in Uzhhorod in present-day Ukraine, 115-116, 257, 527 GREEK CATHOLIC EPARCHY OF PREŠOV: church jurisdiction carved out of the Eparchy of Mukachevo in 1818; abolished in 1950, restored in 1968 with a seat in Prešov serving Eastern-rite Catholics in present-day eastern Slovakia, 132, 257, 359, 360 GREEK CATHOLIC UNION/SOJEDINENIE GREKO-KAFTOLIČESKIKH RUSSKICH BRATSTV: mutual-benefit fraternal society (est. 1892, Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania), serving primarily Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants and xvi

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their descendants in the United States, based for most of its existence in western Pennsylvania (Homestead and Beaver), USA, 25, 217, 218, 222; illus. 136, 137 Sven GUSTAVSSON: professor of Slavic languages, Uppsala University, Sweden, specialist in the Vojvodinian Rusyn language, 155, 156; illus. 27, 90, 103 Victor HABURCHAK: Carpatho-Rusyn American civic activist and community liaison with diplomatic missions in Washington, D.C., USA, illus. 158 John HALUSHKA: Carpatho-Rusyn American cultural activist based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, 44, 182, 196, 203; illus. 22, 46, 47 Christopher (Chris) HANN: British-born social anthropologist, director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle an der Saale, Germany, specialist on Lemko Rusyns, 411, 444 Kevin HANNAN: American linguist of Silesian-Czech ancestry based in Texas, USA, 24, 191 L’udovít HARAKSIM: historian of Slovakia and Carpatho-Rusyns at the Historical Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, Slovakia, 57-59, 145, 166-167, 174; illus. 27, 78, 90 Peter HARDY: immigrant from the Lemko Region of Russophile national orientation, businessman based in southern Connecticut, USA, 314-315 Bill HARNUM: Canadian publisher, University of Toronto Press, Canada, 345, 350 Gabriel (Gabi) Klebashko HATTINGER: rock music singer, Carpatho-Rusyn poet, cultural activist, founder of the Budapest-based Organization of Rusyns in Hungary, 228, 229, 255, 271, 284-286, 311, 312, 368, 403, 404, 501; illus. 167, 175, 181, 190, 221 HARVARD UNIVERSITY: the oldest and most prestigious institution of higher learning in the USA (est. 1636) based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, home to the following bodies that directly or indirectly supported Carpatho-Rusyn studies: Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, Harvard University Press, Society of Fellows, Ukrainian Program/Research Institute, Widener Library, 7-9, 14, 15, 17-20, 24, 25, 34, 36, 50, 57, 60, 61, 66, 109, 139, 188, 210, 211, 214, 230, 312, 314, 335, 345, 416, 434; illus. 5, 24

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Václav HAVEL: Czech playwright, public intellectual, anti-totalitarian liberal humanist, first president of post-Communist Czechoslovakia, later the Czech and Slovak Republics, 127, 143, 146, 178, 270; illus. 113 Oleksander HAVROSH: Transcarpathian-born Ukrainian writer and journalist of Roma background (raised by a Carpatho-Rusyn family), adamant opponent of the Carpatho-Rusyn movement, 266, 528 John-Paul HIMKA: American-born professor of Ukrainian history at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, specialist in the Habsburg Austrian province of Galicia, 22, 356, 411 Ján HIRKA: priest and bishop (reigned 1990-2002) of the Slovak Greek Catholic Eparchy of Prešov, Slovakia, 132, 360 Natalia HNATKO: schoolteacher, civic activist among the Carpatho-Rusyns/ Rusnaks of Croatia, 404; illus. 205, 240 Petro HODMASH: lawyer, prosecutor in Transcarpathia, legal consultant to the Society of Carpatho-Rusyns in Uzhhorod, Ukraine, 276-279 Bogdan HORBAL: Polish-born historian of Lemko-Rusyns, Slavic specialist based at the New York Public Library, New York City, USA, 184-187, 207, 208, 211, 234, 340, 341, 347, 420-421, 444; illus. 117 Jaromír HOŘEC: born of Czech parents in interwar Subcarpathian Rus’, literary critic, journalist, post-1989 Carpatho-Rusyn cultural activist in Prague, Czech Republic, 273; illus. 169 Cyril HOVORUN: priest and high-ranking cleric in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church—Moscow Patriarchate and in the Office of External Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow, 400-401 Ivan M. HRANCHAK: Transcarpathian-born Soviet historian based at Uzhhorod State University, 48, 274 Yaroslav HOROSHCHAK/Jarosław HOROSZCZAK (pseudonym: Hunka): Lemko-Rusyn civic and cultural activist in Lower Silesia, southwestern Poland, 72-75, 117, 269; illus. 37, 38 Slavomir (Slavko) HYRIAK/HIRJAK: architectural engineer and designer in Canada and Slovakia, delegate and World Council member for North America on the World Congress of Rusyns, 410, 447, 449; illus. 243, 289 Larysa ILCHENKO: Ukrainian-born director and editor at V. Padiak Publishers in Uzhhorod, Ukraine, 334, 417; illus. 230, 267 xviii

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IMMIGRATION HISTORY RESEARCH CENTER: institution based at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA, with major archival and published materials dealing with immigrants from southern and eastern Europe to the United States, including Carpatho-Rusyns, 21, 216, 233 INSTITUTE OF RUSYN LANGUAGE AND CULTURE/INSHTITUT RUSYNSKOHO YAZŶKA I KULTURŶ: the first and still only universitylevel teaching, research, and publishing center in the world devoted specifically to Carpatho-Rusyns, based in Prešov University, Slovakia, 131, 233-235, 306, 420, 433, 434, 437, 441, 442, 459-461, 483, 494, 509, 514; illus.

256, 262, 263 INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF UKRAINIANISTS/MIZHNARODNA ASSOSIATSIIA UKRAÏNISTIV (MAU): post-Soviet organization based in Kyiv, Ukraine (est. 1989) with affiliates in over two dozen countries comprised of specialists in all humanistic disciplines connected to the study of Ukraine, 100-101 INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF SLAVISTS: association of specialists in Slavic languages and literatures which since its establishment in 1929 holds a scholarly congress every five years in a different city located in a “Slavic” country in Europe, 79; illus. 124 INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF THE RUSYN LANGUAGE/ MEDZHINARODNŶI KONGRES RUSYNSKOHO YAZŶKA: body of scholars (mostly linguists), Rusyn-language writers, journalists, and teachers; it meets periodically (1992, 2003, 2007, 2015) to discuss tactical and strategic matters related to the codification and teaching of the various Rusyn literary languages, 153-160, 177, 189, 190, 246, 416-418, 450; illus. 98, 99, 100, 103, 107, 111, 249, 310 Edward JACKMAN: priest, archivist of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Toronto, philanthropist for education and the arts through the Jackman Foundation (est. 1964) based in Toronto, Canada, 462-463, 465; illus. 279 Peter JACYK: Canadian real-estate developer, Ukrainian diaspora educational philanthropist, native of Ukrainian-inhabited Poland (East Galicia), 78 JAGIELLONIAN UNIVERSITY/UNIWERSYTET JAGIELLOŃSKI: one of central Europe’s oldest and prestigious university (est. 1364) based in Cracow, Poland, home to several bodies in Slavic studies and Polonica Abroad that are concerned with Lemko Rusyns, 69, 73, 76, 117, 232, 414-419, 498

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Jerry JUMBA: musician, church cantor, Carpatho-Rusyn cultural activist in western Pennsylvania, USA, 11, 41, 44, 46, 48, 87, 91, 103, 182, 221, 222, 308; illus. 23, 46, 149 James (Jim) Kepchar KAMINSKI: lawyer, Carpatho-Rusyn civic activist, North American member of the World Council of Rusyns, liaison with U.S. government bodies and diplomatic missions in Washington, D.C., USA, 265, 266, 473, 515; illus. 164 Mykhayl KAPRAL/Mihály Káprály: philologist, codifier of the Rusyn literary language in Hungary, professor, Advanced School of Education, Nyíregyháza, Hungary, 505-506; illus. 309 Martin KARASH/KARAŠ: Carpatho-Rusyn cultural and civic activist based in Stará L’ubovňa, Slovakia, 495; illus. 298 Nina KARPACHOVA: Ukrainian-born civic and political activist of Moldovan origin, head (1998-2012) of the parliamentary Office of the Ombudsman in Kyiv, Ukraine, 260, 402; illus. 161, 174, 238 Edward KASINEC: librarian, book historian, art appraiser, Chief of the Slavic and Baltic Division, New York Public Library, USA, 8, 10, 14, 15, 20-22, 44, 91, 182-184, 186, 192, 211, 234, 308; illus. 4, 7, 10, 46, 133, 286 Igor KERCHA: computer engineer, Carpatho-Rusyn cultural activist in Transcarpathia, Ukraine, compiler of major Rusyn-language dictionaries, 276, 277; illus. 173 Milan KHAUTUR/Milán CHAUTUR: Greek Catholic cleric of CarpathoRusyn background, first bishop of the newly created Greek Catholic Exarchate (1997)/Eparchy (2008) of Košice, Slovakia, 167; illus. 104 Vasyl KHOMA/Vasil’ CHOMA: literary scholar, Czechoslovak diplomat, Carpatho-Rusyn cultural activist in Bratislava, Slovakia, 306; illus. 187 Miroslava KHOMIAK/Mirosława CHOMIAK: schoolteacher, textbook author, Carpatho-Rusyn cultural activist, and codifier of the Lemko-Rusyn language, based in the village of Uście Gorlickie, Poland, 170, 171; illus. 107, 302 Pavel KHUDYSH: Transcarpathian-born historian of Carpatho-Rusyn origin, associate professor at Uzhhorod National University, 478, 512 Ksenya KIEBUZINSKI: American-born librarian in Slavic studies, head of the Petro Jacyk Centre, University of Toronto (Robarts) Library, Canada, 234 xx

The Carpatho-Rusyn Movement

Yudita KISH/Judit KISS: poet, Carpatho-Rusyn civic and cultural activist in Budapest, Hungary, 271, 501 Vira KOBULEI, journalist, founding chief editor and producer of the first Rusyn-language television program in Transcarpathia, Ukraine, illus. 313, 314 Stephen KOCISKO: Byzantine Catholic cleric, archbishop, first metropolitan of the Byzantine Catholic Archeparchy of Munhall, Pennsylvania, USA, 17, 20, 21, 48, 91; illus. 12, 48 Ivan KOMLOSHII: teacher, Russian-language poet, and Carpatho-Rusyn bibliophile in Berehovo, Transcarpathia, Ukraine, 224-228; illus. 141, 142, 143 Stanislav KONEČNÝ: Slovak historian, specialist on Carpatho-Rusyns and Ukrainians at the Institute for National Minority Studies, Slovak Academy of Sciences in Košice, professor, Institute of Rusyn Language and Culture, Prešov University, Slovakia, 207, 440, 441; illus. 296 Peter KÓNYA: historian of the Hungarian Kingdom, professor and rector/ president of Prešov University, Slovakia, 435; illus. 254 Andrei KOPCHA/Andrzej KOPCZA: theater administrator, Lemko-Rusyn civic and cultural activist, founding chairman of the Lemko Society/ Stovaryshŷnie Lemkiv, based in Legnica, southwestern Poland, 117, 125, 251, 253, 270, 292, 296, 311, 363-365, 367, 370, 371, 383; illus. 116, 155, 181, 190, 217, 221, 222, 242 Kvetoslava (Kveta) KOPOROVA: journalist, Carpatho-Rusyn cultural activist, lecturer and language codifier at the Institute of Rusyn Language and Culture, Prešov University, Slovakia, 164, 232, 379, 434, 438, 441; illus. 101 Keith KOSHUTE: Carpatho-Rusyn cultural activist in Pennsylvania, USA, 44; illus. 46 Patricia A. KRAFCIK: professor of Russian language and Slavic folklore, The Evergreen State College, Olympia, Oregon, USA, founding editor of the Carpatho-Rusyn American, 11, 24, 27, 28, 33, 39, 40, 42-44, 51, 91, 182, 183, 189, 208. 210, 238, 308, 347, 421, 431, 434, 470; illus. 3, 46, 149, 253, 286 Frantishek KRAINIAK/František KRAJŇÁK: priest in the Greek Catholic Eparchy of Prešov (Slovakia), translator of religious texts into Rusyn, 131133, 156, 167, 305, 306, 463, 488, 492; illus. 82, 83, 84, 104, 151, 186

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Petro KRAINIAK/Peter KRAJŇÁK Sr.: lawyer, civic activist, opponent of slovakization in the Greek Catholic Eparchy of Prešov, brother of the Rusyn translator, Reverend Frantishek Krainiak, father of the Carpatho-Rusyn political and cultural activist, Petro Krainiak Jr., 167, 359, 488, 492; illus.

105, 186, 299 Petro KRAINIAK/Peter KRAJŇÁK Jr.: schoolteacher, Carpatho-Rusyn civic activist, elected government official in Slovakia, 309, 311, 483, 488-495; illus.

261, 297, 298, 299, 300 Liuba KRALIOVA/L’uba KRAL’OVÁ: sociologist, Carpatho-Rusyn cultural and civic activist, director of the Museum of Rusyn Culture, Prešov, Slovakia, 131, 493 Ivan KRYVSKYI: physicist, Carpatho-Rusyn civic activist in Transcarpathia, professor at Uzhhorod National University, Ukraine, 275, 276 Emil KUBEK: priest in the Ruthenian Greek Catholic Exarchate, CarpathoRusyn cultural activist during the interwar years in Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania, USA, 222, 472; illus. 139 Leonid KUCHMA: Soviet industrial manager and political leader; second president (1994-2005) of independent Ukraine, 258, 287 Sylvester KUKHAR: physician, initiator of the first Carpatho-Rusyn organization (exclusively Vojvodinian Rusnaks) in Germany, based in Munich, 374-375; illus. 225 Vasyl KUKHTA: Transcarpathian-born Ukrainian writer and publisher based in Uzhhorod, Ukraine, 288; illus. 179 Nicholas KUPENSKY: American-born Slavic cultural historian, professor of Russian at the United States Air Force Academy, Carpatho-Rusyn American activist based in Colorado Springs, Colorado, 191, 411, 470-475, 479; illus.

284, 286 Ivan KURAS: Soviet and post-Soviet Ukrainian political scientist and government functionary based in Kyiv, Ukraine, 258; illus. 160 Nadiya KUSHKO: Ukrainian-born linguist from Uzhhorod, translator, historical editor, Chair of Ukrainian Studies, University of Toronto, Canada.

113, 232, 293, 319-320, 336, 352, 448, 463; illus. 143, 161, 195, 239 Taras KUZIO: British political scientist, specialist in current Ukrainian politics, professor at the National University of the Kyiv Mohyla Academy, Ukraine, 261 xxii

The Carpatho-Rusyn Movement

Vasyl KUZIO: representative for Transcarpathia in Ukraine’s Office of the Ombudsman, Kyiv, Ukraine, 260, 261 Anna KUZMIAKOVA: journalist, Carpatho-Rusyn cultural activist, chairman of the Rusyn Renaissance Society, Prešov, Slovakia, 98, 131, 151, 164, 311, 367, 371, 461; illus. 97, 190, 217, 224, 295 Serhii KVIT: Ukrainian journalist, born and educated in Transcarpathia, professor and rector National University of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Ukraine’s Minister of Education (2014-2016), 452-456, 458; illus. 275 Shtefan LADŶZHYNSŶI/Štefan LADIŽINSKÝ: dancer, choreographer, artistic director of the Dukla Ukrainian Folk Ensemble, Prešov, founding chairman of the Society of Rusyn Intelligentsia, Bratislava, Slovakia, 174, 175; illus. 111 Mykhailo LAVRIUK/Mihai LAURUC: businessman in the Romanian city of Sighet, head of a Carpatho-Rusyn organization in Romania, 387 Stanislav LAZEBNYK: government functionary, vice-chairman of the Ukraina Society in Kyiv, Soviet Ukraine, responsible for relations with Ukrainians abroad, 46- 48, 80, 82 LEMKO ASSOCIATION OF THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA/ LEMKO SOIUZ: cultural and civic organization (est. 1929, Winnipeg, Manitoba) comprised of Lemko Rusyns in the United States and Canada, based for most of its existence in Cleveland, Ohio and Yonkers, New York, 51, 52, 54, 187, 478, 514 LEMKO-RUSYN AND RUSSIAN PHILOLOGY PROGRAM/FILOLOGIA ROSYJSKA Z JĘZYKIEM RUSIŃSKO-LEMKOWSKIM: first (and only) university-level studies program in Poland (est. 2002), Pedagogical University, Cracow, disbanded in 2017, 233, 414-415, 418-419; illus. 246, 247, 248 LEMKO SOCIETY/STOVARYSHŶNIA LEMKIV: first post-1989 LemkoRusyn civic and cultural organization in Poland (est. 1989, Legnica, Poland), founding member of the World Congress of Rusyns, 296, 363, 368, 496 Mariia LENDIEL: elementary school teacher in Mukachevo, head of the School Board for the extracurricular Rusyn School Program in Transcarpathia, Ukraine, 451; illus. 249 Myroslava LENDIEL: vice-rector responsible for international affairs, Uzhhorod National University, Ukraine, 455

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Ivan LETSOVYCH: Carpatho-Rusyn civic activist in Mukachevo, Transcarpathia, Ukraine, 387; illus. 236 Ivan Em. LEVYTSYI: Galician-Ruthenian cultural activist and bibliographer in late nineteenth Habsburg-ruled Austrian Galicia, 211, 236; illus. 131 Ivan LIAVYNETS/LJAVINEC: priest from interwar Subcarpathian Rus’, bishop of the post-1989 Greek Catholic Exarchate of the Czech Republic, 273 Marianna LIAVYNETS/LJAVINECZ: native of Subcarpathian Rus’/ Transcarpathia, physician and child psychologist, Carpatho-Rusyn cultural activist and historical essayist based in Budapest, Hungary, 368, 403-404, 501-503; illus. 205, 307 Stepan LIAVYNETS, Jr./Sztyepán LJAVINYEC: psychiatrist trained in Soviet Ukraine, Carpatho-Rusyn civic and cultural activist, member for Hungary on the World Council and chairman of the World Congress of Rusyns, 368, 501; illus. 308 Marianna LIAVYNETS-UHRYN: Slavic linguist, Carpatho-Rusyn cultural activist in Budapest, Hungary, daughter of Dr. Marianna Liavynets, younger sister of Dr. Stepan Liavynets, 217, 337, 501, 503 Nykolai LIASH/Mikulás L’AŠ: actor, political activist, Carpatho-Rusyn radio personality (comic) in Prešov, Slovakia, 166, 178; illus. 113 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS: one of the world’s largest libraries (est. 1800) located in Washington, D. C., USA with an extensive Slavic collection, including numerous works by and about Carpatho-Rusyns, 41, 42, 214 Michael LUKACH/LUCAS: graphic artist, musician, Carpatho-Rusyn civic activist, founding president of several Lemko-Rusyn pro-Soviet Communist organizations in Toronto, Canada, 51-54; illus. 25 Yan LYPYNSKYI/Jan LIPINSKÝ: computer engineer, communications expert for the Bratislava city police, Carpatho-Rusyn civic and cultural activist in Slovakia, 299-308, 363, 366-368, 371, 401, 420, 461, 488; illus. 184, 186 Ivan LYSIAK-RUDNYTSKYI: intellectual historian, native of pre-World War II Poland (Ukrainian-inhabited East Galicia), professor of Ukrainian history, LaSalle University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA and University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, 7, 22, 109 Mariia (Marka) MACHOSHKA/Maria MAČOŠKOVÁ: Carpatho-Rusyn folk singer in the Dukla Ukrainian Song and Dance Ensemble (later PULS), xxiv

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Prešov, Czechoslovakia, 330, 331; illus. 202, 203 Anna Lengyel MAGOCSI: Carpatho-Rusyn immigrant to the United States; founding member of the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center based in Fairview, New Jersey, USA; mother of the historian Paul Robert Magocsi, 28, 196 Cynthia MAGOCSI: newspaper advertising and marketing director for the International Herald Tribune/New York Times based in Paris, France; oldest daughter of the historian Paul Robert Magocsi, 359, 490; illus. 52, 133 Daniel (Danik) MAGOCSI: trained geographer based in Toronto, Canada; son of the historian Paul Robert Magocsi, illus. 52, 133 Maria Chuvan MAGOCSI/Maria (Masha) ČUVANOVÁ: lead dancer in the Dukla Ukrainian Song and Dance Ensemble, Prešov, Czechoslovakia, 7, 11, 35, 52, 55, 59, 63, 78, 122, 175, 181, 221, 226, 288, 289, 329, 382; illus. 52, 133, 142, 179, 192, 193, 197 Tinka MAGOCSI: artist and landscape designer based in Toronto, Canada; youngest daughter of the historian Paul Robert Magocsi, 359, 381-382; illus.

52, 286 MAISONS DE PAYS: non-governmental organization (est. 1993, Cannes, France), whose goal was to encourage mutual cooperation among stateless peoples in Europe, 246-248; illus. 152, 153 Mykola MAKARA: Communist party activist in Soviet Transcarpathia, post-1989 Carpatho-Rusyn civic activist, professor and director of the Carpathian Studies Institute at Uzhhorod National University, 226, 294, 438; illus. 154, 155, 266 Nataliia MALETSKA-NOVAK/Natalia MAŁECKA NOWAK: Lemko-Rusyn civic and cultural activist in Gorlice, Poland, 496, 499; illus. 304 Pavel MALETSKII: Lemko-Rusyn civic and cultural activist based in Gorlice, Poland, 496; illus. 303, 304 Steve MALLICK: American of Carpatho-Rusyn background active in the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center 196; illus. 46 Mariia MALTSOVSKA/Mária MAL’COVSKÁ: Ukrainian- and Rusyn-language writer, editor, and Carpatho-Rusyn cultural activist in Prešov, Slovakia, 98, 151, 164, 176, 190, 329, 367; illus. 97, 201 Marian MARKO: actor, dramatist, Carpatho-Rusyn-oriented director of the Aleksander Dukhnovych Theater, Prešov, Slovakia, 461 xxv

From Nowhere To Somewhere

Pavlo MARKOVYCH: Czechoslovak-born painter and professor of studio art at Prešov University, Slovakia, 68; illus. 34 Vasyl MARKUS: Transcarpathian-born political scientist and professor based at Loyola College, Chicago, Illinois, USA; Ukrainian cultural and religious activist in the United States, 23, 103-104 Tomáš Garrigue MASARYK: philosopher, cultural historian, Czech national politician, professor at the Czech University of Prague, Czech revolutionary activist, founding president of Czechoslovakia (1918-1935), 3, 37, 273, 318, 329; illus. 169 Anna MASHLANA/MAŚLANA: Lemko-Rusyn linguist, translator, and radio journalist based in Sanok, Poland, 498; illus. 304 Linda MASTILÍŘ: Canadian-born historian of Moravian Czech ancestry based in the USA, wife of the Slavic linguist Stefan Pugh, 190; illus. 119, 185 René MATLOVIČ: Slovak professor of geography, rector of Prešov University, strong supporter of Carpatho-Rusyn studies in Slovakia, 432-437; illus. 254, 261, 264, 265 Rudolf MATOLA: native of Subcarpathian Rus’ living in Prague, founder of the Society of Rusyns/Obshchestvo Rusynov in Prague, Czechoslovakia, 121, 122, 273 Ivan MATSYNSKYI/MACINSKÝ: writer, historian, editor, and Ukrainophile civic activist based in Prešov, Slovakia, 59-61; illus. 28, 29 Olga Kavochka MAYO: American of Lemko-Rusyn background, research assistant at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, 15, 19, 196; illus. 7, 10 John MCCAIN: American politician, senator from Arizona (Republican), chairman of the U.S. Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, presidential envoy to Ukraine, 261-265; illus. 163 Vladimír MEČIÁR: Slovak politician, prime minister of Slovakia (1995-1998), unsympathetic toward national minorities, 166, 167, 173, 177, 270 Lubomir MEDIESHI/Ljubomir MEDEŠI: ethnographer, writer, civic activist among the Carpatho-Rusyns/Rusnaks of the Vojvodina Region in Yugoslavia and diaspora in Canada, 24, 106-109, 112, 113, 122, 125, 131, 132, 136, 138, 139, 216, 217, 243, 269, 321, 407; illus. 59, 63, 65, 70, 72, 78, 86, 87, 89, 196 xxvi

The Carpatho-Rusyn Movement

Petro MEDVID/Peter MEDVID’: journalist, playwright, public intellectual, since 2017 editor-in-chief of the Rusyn-language newspaper Info-Rusyn, Prešov, Slovakia, 377, 461, 467, 483-486, 488, 494, 495, 498, 499, 524; illus.

292, 294, 298, 304, 314 Ewa MICHNA: Polish sociologist, specialist in national minorities, professor in the Faculty of American Studies, Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland, 76, 207, 216, 232; illus. 145 Susan MIHALASKY: college teacher of history and politics, Carpatho-Rusyn community activist in New Jersey, USA, 182; illus. 123, 182 Orestes MIHALY: lawyer, Assistant Attorney General of the State of New York, legal advisor to the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center, 24, 26-29, 91, 182, 315, 361, 470; illus. 15, 46, 118, 182 Margarita MIKHALYOVA: Russian post-World War II in-migrant to Soviet Transcarpathia, representative of the government controlled Ukraina Society for relations with Ukrainians Abroad, based in Mukachevo, 102, 103; illus. 58 Raymund M. MISULICH: Byzantine Catholic priest, chancellor of the Byzantine Ruthenian Catholic Eparchy of Passaic, New Jersey, 14, 87, 88; illus. 7, 10 Milan MNIAHONCHAK/MŇAHONČÁK: construction engineer and business entrepreneur based in Humenné, Slovakia, Carpatho-Rusyn civic activist, 460-462, 483; illus. 278 Ivan MOISIUK/MOISUC: Rusyn-language poet and cultural activist from the Maramureş Region in Romania, 383, 384; illus. 228 Volodymyr MOKRYI/Włodimierz MOKRY: Polish-born Ukrainian political and cultural activist, professor of Ukrainian studies, Jagiellonian University, Poland, 73, 75, 414; illus. 37 Stefan MOLDOVAN: Jewish Holocaust survivor from Subcarpathian Rus’, engineer and business entrepreneur in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, philanthropical supporter of the Carpatho-Rusyn cause in Europe and North America, 318-320, 352, 354, 468; illus. 195 Elaine MOLLO: Monégasque sociolinguist, specialist in language pedagogy, professor at the University of Nice, France, 155, 156, 157; illus. 99 Michael MOSER: Austrian sociolinguist, specialist in the history of the Ukrainian language, professor at the University of Vienna, Austria, 222, 232 xxvii

From Nowhere To Somewhere

MOUNT MACRINA CONVENT: main seat of the Byzantine (Greek) Catholic Order of the Sisters of Saint Basilian the Great (Basilian Sisters), Uniontown, Pennsylvania, 9-10, 11, 27, 34; illus. 6 Karina MULIAR: Transcarpathian born Rusyn-language specialist and media reporter based in Prešov, Slovakia, 478, 498, 514; illus. 288, 316 MUSEUM OF RUSYN CULTURE/MUZEI RUSÍNSKEJ KÚLTURY: first professional museum devoted exclusively to Carpatho-Rusyns (est. 2007), based in Prešov as part of the network of institutions within the Slovak National Museum in Bratislava, Slovakia, 131, 234, 420, 467, 483 Mykola MUSHYNKA/Mikuláš MUŠINKA: ethnographer, publicist, professor at Prešov University, and Ukrainophile civic and cultural activist in Slovakia, 61, 64, 65, 73, 103, 106-109, 111, 119, 120, 122, 127, 136, 145, 146, 156, 159, 160, 266; illus. 31, 59, 62, 65, 72, 74, 75, 85, 86, 87, 89, 90, 91, 100 Oles MUSHYNKA/Alexander (Alek) MUŠINKA: Czechoslovak-born ethnographer and professor at Prešov University, Slovakia, son of the Rusyn-Ukrainian ethnographer Mykola Mushynka, 103, 232; illus. 58 Volodymyr MYKYTA: Carpatho-Rusyn painter and art critic, Uzhhorod, Transcarpathia, 115, 226-228, 276-278, 326, 327, 329; illus. 69, 70, 141, 142, 143, 169, 200, 207 Oleksa MYSHANYCH: pro-Ukrainian native of Subcarpathian Rus’/ Transcarpathia, literary historian, academic secretary of the Institute of Ukrainian Literature, Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Kyiv, 79-82, 100, 101, 103, 106-111, 114, 119, 120, 122, 127, 136, 137, 224, 226; illus. 41, 42, 43, 59, 65, 68, 72, 74, 75, 86, 87, 89 NATIONAL COUNCIL OF RUSYNS IN TRANSCARPATHIA/NARODNA RADA RUSYNIV ZAKARPATTIA: civic body (est. 2006, Uzhhorod) to represent Carpatho-Rusyn political interests in Ukraine, 386, 387 NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY (NYPL): site of one of the world’s finest collections of books and serials in Slavic languages, including works in Rusyn and about Carpathian Rus’; its main branch on Fifth Avenue (between 40th and 42nd streets in Manhattan) for several decades had its own Slavonic Division and Reading Room, 1, 186, 214; illus. 1, 133 Tibor ONDYK: Carpatho-Rusyn political activist from Ukraine’s Transcarpathia based in Bratislava, Slovakia, “minister of foreign affairs” of the ephemeral Provisional Government of Subcarpathian Rus’, 280, 282; illus. 175 xxviii

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ORGANIZATION OF RUSYNS IN HUNGARY/ORGANIZATSIIA RUSYNOV U MADIARSKU: first Carpatho-Rusyn cultural society (est.

1992, Budapest) in post-1989 Hungary, 229, 271, 285, 311, 368, 403 Valerii PADIAK: publisher, literary scholar, Carpatho-Rusyn cultural activist in Ukraine’s Transcarpathia, professor of Carpatho-Rusyn literature, Prešov University, Slovakia, 222, 232, 298, 319, 333-335, 346, 352, 402, 405, 406, 408, 409, 417, 438, 439, 440, 450, 468, 523; illus. 161, 164, 201, 205, 207, 229, 230, 239, 249, 267, 272, 275, 317, 320 PADIAK PUBLISHERS/VŶDAVNYTSTVO VALERIIA PADIAKA: largest (and only) publishing house in Ukraine (est. 2000, Uzhhorod), specializing in books about Carpathian Rus’ and Carpatho-Rusyns, 319, 350, 352, 353, 464; illus. 209, 214, 215, 281 Yurii PANKO/Juraj PAŇKO: linguist, Russian-language specialist, codifier of the Rusyn literary standard in Slovakia, professor, Šafarik University, Košice (Prešov branch) and Prešov University, Slovakia, 161, 162, 164, 184, 300, 428, 430, 432; illus. 101 Diura PAPHARHAI/Đura PAPHARHAJI: writer, editor, and Vojvodinian Rusyn cultural activist based in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia, 140, 269, 329; illus. 89 Diura PAPUGA: journalist, civic activist among the Vojvodinian Rusyns, member from Serbia on the World Council and chairman of the World Congress of Rusyns, 180, 377, 404, 406, 408, 410, 484; illus. 89, 242 PEDAGOGICAL UNIVERSITY/AKADEMIA PEDAGOGICZNA: institution of higher learning (est. 1946) based in Cracow; training ground for teachers in Poland’s school system, included a Russian-Lemko Rusyn Philology Program, 233, 414-416, 418, 419; illus. 246, 247, 248, 249 Athanasius Basil PEKAR: Ukrainophile native of Transcarpathia, Greek Catholic priest, Basilian monk, church historian, professor at Saints Cyril and Methodius Byzantine Catholic Seminary, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, 10, 11, 14-15, 210; illus. 7, 10 Andrew PEREJDA: geographer, professor at Central Connecticut State University, USA, 15, 25; illus. 7, 10 Fred PETRO: editor and communications director of the Greek Catholic Union benevolent society, Beaver, Pennsylvania, USA, 217, 218; illus. 46, 137 Vasyl PETROVAI: Carpatho-Rusyn born (eastern Slovakia) Soviet novelist, xxix

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post-1989 Carpatho-Rusyn cultural activist in Transcarpathian Ukraine, 275, 276 Ivan PETROVTSII: Ukrainian-language and Rusyn-language writer and translator, Carpatho-Rusyn cultural activist in Uzhhorod, Transcarpathia, Ukraine, 102, 132, 226, 241-243, 276, 286, 287, 328, 329; illus. 57, 58, 70, 99, 151, 201 Vasyl PETRYTSKYI: Carpatho-Rusyn cultural and civic activist in his native Maramureş Region in northcentral Romania, illus. 205, 230 Agata PILATOVA/Agáta PILÁTOVÁ: Czech journalist, Carpatho-Rusyn cultural activist, founding editor of the Czech-language Podkarpatská Rus, Prague, Czech Republic, 131, 273, 274, 311, 318, 510; illus. 181, 190, 205, 308 Milan PILIP: cultural and civic activist among the Carpatho-Rusyn diaspora in Bratislava, government advisor, head of Slovakia’s Ministry for Relations with Slovaks Abroad, 377, 483, 486, 488, 494, 495; illus. 298 Anna PLISHKOVA/PLIŠKOVÁ: journalist, Carpatho-Rusyn cultural activist, professor of Rusyn literature, founding director of the Institute of Rusyn Language and Culture, Prešov University, Slovakia, 98, 131, 151, 164, 166, 180, 190, 218, 232, 255, 300, 306, 307, 367, 377, 378, 428, 430-434, 436, 437, 439, 441, 459-461, 494; illus. 97, 101, 114, 137, 143, 144, 149, 155, 197, 232, 256, 259, 260 Dean POLOKA: dancer and choreographer, Carpatho-Rusyn cultural activist, director of the Slavjane Folk Ensemble based in western Pennsylvania, USA, 45, illus. 158 Jack POLOKA: choreographer, founding director of the Slavjane Folk Ensemble based in western Pennsylvania, USA, 45 Dymytrii POP: Slavic philologist, Carpatho-Rusyn cultural activist in Transcarpathia, Ukraine, compiler of Rusyn-language dictionaries and histories of Subcarpathian Rus’, younger brother of the historian Ivan Pop, 271, 345-346, 352, 397, 450; illus. 169, 210 Ivan POP: Transcarpathian-born Soviet historian, founding director of the Carpathian Institute, Uzhhorod National University, Ukraine, high school teacher in Cheb, Czech Republic, 157, 207, 245, 275-279, 319, 339-347, 376, 438; illus. 171, 207, 209, 211 Laslo POPOVYCH/ László POPOVICS: Carpatho-Rusyn cultural activist in xxx

The Carpatho-Rusyn Movement

his native village of Komlóska, Hungary, 271, 311; illus. 167 Mikulas (Mika) POPOVIC/Mikulash POPOVYCH: virologist at the National Institute of Health, Washington, D. C., professor at the University of Maryland—Baltimore, illus. 158, 159 Tibor Miklosh POPOVYCH/Tibor Miklós POPOVICS: geographer, historian, ethnographer, Carpatho-Rusyn civic and scholarly activist in Hungary, professor at the University of Budapest and Budapest University of Economics, Hungary, 271-272, 368, 501; illus. 168, 224 PREŠOV UNIVERSITY/PREŠOVSKÁ UNIVERZITA V PREŠOVE: institution of higher learning in Slovakia (before its creation in 1997, a branch of Šafarik University), specializing in the humanities and pedagogy, home to the Institute of Rusyn Language and Culture, 177, 235, 286, 306, 309, 312, 353, 375, 421, 424, 429, 430, 432, 433, 435-437, 439, 441, 459, 465, 476, 478, 483, 489, 494, 498, 508; illus. 111, 254, 255, 256, 259, 261, 262, 263, 264, 267 Omeljan PRITSAK: Ukrainian-born Turcologist, historian, and founder of the Ukrainian Studies Program, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, 7, 19, 61, 434 Vasillii PRONIN: Russian Orthodox (Moscow Patriarchate) monastic cleric, historian of the church in Transcarpathia, based in Mukachevo, Ukraine, 81-82; illus. 43 Vladimir PROTIVNIAK/PROTIVŇÁK: municipal government functionary, civic activist among the Carpatho-Rusyns in Slovakia, based in Medzilaborce, 90, 408, 461; illus. 47 PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT OF SUBCARPATHIAN RUS’: shadow government (est. 1993, Uzhhorod, Ukraine) with its own prime minister (Ivan Turianytsia) and ministerial cabinet created to negotiate Transcarpathia’s status in Ukraine, dissolved in 1999, 279-281, 285, 287; illus. 178 Stefan PUGH: American Slavist and Rusyn-language specialist, professor of Slavic Studies, St. Andrews University, Scotland and Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio, USA, 188-191, 206-207; illus. 119 PULS: professional song and dance company (est. 1990), which takes its name from the Slovak-language acronym of its predecessor, Poddukelský Ukrajinský L’udový Súbor, based in Prešov, Slovakia, 45, 330, 332 xxxi

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Vladimir PUTIN: authoritarian head of state of the Russian Federation (since 2000) whose foreign policy interests include the “Carpatho-Russians” of Ukraine’s Transcarpathian Region, 377, 379, 397, 400 Yuliian RAMACH: Vojvodinian-Rusyn linguist and grammarian based at the University of Novi Sad, Yugoslavia/Serbia, 439, 509; illus. 221 Roman REINFUSS: Polish ethnographer and leading specialist on Lemko Rusyns, 117; illus. 73 Richard RENOFF: sociologist, professor, Nassau Community College (City University of New York), USA, 8, 10, 15, 24, 182; illus. 4, 7, 10, 46 Julian REVAY/Yuliian REVAI: Ukrainian-oriented civic and political activist in interwar Subcarpathian Rus’, deputy in the Czechoslovak parliament, prime minister of Carpatho-Ukraine, director of the Ukrainian Institute, New York City, USA, 8, 22, 23, 54, 88; illus. 10, 14 Stephan REYNOLDS: American professor of religious studies, University of Oregon, USA, 9, 10 John RIGHETTI: public relations expert, Carpatho-Rusyn cultural activist, founding national president of the Carpatho-Rusyn Society, based in Munhall, Pennsylvania, USA, 24, 44, 46, 48, 182, 264, 265, 267, 308, 324, 427, 450, 469, 514; illus. 23, 46, 118, 158, 159, 164, 315 Stephen B. ROMAN: Canadian business entrepreneur of Slovak national orientation born in a Carpatho-Rusyn village in eastern Slovakia, inspiration behind the creation of the Slovak World Congress and Slovak Greek Catholic Eparchy based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 315-317; illus.

192 Pavlo ROMANIUK/Paul ROMANIUC: teacher in a Carpatho-Rusyn village, Maramureş Region of Romania, cultural activist of crypto-Ukrainian national orientation, 250, 381-383; illus. 155 Colin ROSE: British-born theater administrator based in Toronto, Canada, assistant to his uncle Steven Chepa, responsible for coordinating the latter’s Carpatho-Rusyn related projects, 444, 446 Stepan ROSOKHA/ROSOCHA: Ukrainophile civic activist from Subcarpathian Rus’, founding editor of the Ukrainian-language diaspora newspaper Vil’ne slovo (The Free Word), Toronto, Canada, 23, 54-55 Stu ROTHENBERG: American political consultant, media commentator, xxxii

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founding editor of The Congressional Roll-Call, Washington, D.C., USA, husband of the literary historian Elaine Rusinko, 261-263, 265, 370; illus.

162 Robert ROTHSTEIN: American philologist in Slavic and Jewish studies, professor of Russian and Polish, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA, 188-190, 474; illus. 118, 286 ROUND TABLE/OKRUHLYI STIL: informal assembly based in Prešov comprised of Carpatho-Rusyn activists in Slovakia to discuss and lobby the government on behalf of their people, 487-488, 514 Alex ROVT: Transcarpathian-born business entrepreneur in eastern Ukraine and his native city, Mukachevo, real estate investor in New York City, philanthropist for Jewish and Carpatho-Rusyn causes, 210, 463-465, 477; illus. 280 RUS’ CIVIC SOCIETY/OBSHCHESTVENNAIA ORGANIZATSIIA RUS’: cultural organization (est. 2003, Kishinev, Moldova) promoting the view through its publications that there allegedly exists a Rusyn community in Moldova, historic Bessarabia, 377; illus. 227 RUSIN ASSOCIATION OF MINNESOTA: community organization (est.

1983) based in Minneapolis, Minnesota to promote Carpatho-Rusyn cultural affairs, 44, 476, 477, 514; illus. 22 Elaine RUSINKO: literary historian, professor of Russian language and literature, University of Maryland in Baltimore, USA, 28, 182-185, 206, 209, 232, 261, 264, 327, 347, 370, 421, 444, 445, 470; illus. 115, 116, 158, 159, 182, 200 RUSKA BURSA: cultural organization (est. 1908; revived 1930 and 1991) based in Gorlice, Poland to promote Lemko-Rusyn culture; home to a museum, library, and the LemFM radio studio, 496-500; illus. 288, 302, 303, 304, 305, 306 RUSKA MATKA: civic and cultural organization of the Vojvodinian Rusyns (est. 1945, Ruski Kerestur, Yugoslavia, revived in 1989), founding member of the World Congress of Rusyns representing the former Yugoslavia, based in the Vojvodina, today Serbia, 404, 407 RUSKE SLOVO PUBLISHING HOUSE/NOVINSKO-VIDAVATELNA USTANOVA “RUSKE SLOVO”: government-funded print media and Rusyn-language book publisher (est. 1968) for the Vojvodinian-Rusyns based in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia/Serbia, 108, 131, 321; illus. 196 xxxiii

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RUSNAK SOCIETY/DRUZHSTVO “RUSNAK”: civic and cultural organization of Carpatho-Rusyns/Rusnaks of Croatia (est. 2003, Petrovci, Croatia), 404 RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH, MOSCOW PATRIARCHATE: jurisdictionally independent ecclesiastical body based in Moscow, Russia, in communion with the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople; its parishes in Ukraine are known officially as the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, based in Kyiv, not to be confused with the autocephalous (self-governing) Orthodox Church of Ukraine, 395, 400, 527 RUSSIAN WORLD/RUSSKII MIR FOUNDATION: government-funded organization (est. 2007) to promote Russian cultural and political interests outside the Russian Federation, including support for Carpatho-Rusyn/ Russian projects in Ukraine’s Transcarpathia and Moldova, 377, 379, 528 RUSYN HOMELAND CARPATHIAN RUS’ SOCIETY/RUSINSKOE ZEMLECHESTVO KARPATSKAIA RUS’: organization based in Moscow, Russian federation, which promotes knowledge of Carpathian Rus’ in the Russian-speaking world, 376-377 RUSYN RENAISSANCE SOCIETY OF SLOVAKIA/RUSYNSKA OBRODA SLOVENSKA (ROS): the first post-1989 Carpatho-Rusyn civic and cultural society in Slovakia (est. 1991), initially based in Medzilaborce, later in Prešov, Slovakia, 98, 99, 123, 128, 153, 156, 162, 165, 166, 173, 174, 178, 179, 201, 270, 296, 298-300, 362, 366-372, 386, 404-405, 408, 424, 426, 428, 429, 445, 460-462, 483, 485, 486; illus. 110 Transcarpathian RUSYN SUNDAY SCHOOL PROGRAM—BENEVOLENT SOCIETY/ZAKARPATSKYI OBLASNYI BLAHODIINYI FOND “RUSYNSKA NEDILNA SHKOLA”: non-governmental organization (est. 2008, Uzhhorod, Ukraine) set up to channel funds from North American Carpatho-Rusyns to support extracurricular elementary classes in Rusyn language and culture which functioned (2003-2014) in Ukraine’s Transcarpathia region, 402, 405, 408, 409, 450-452, 468, 511; illus. 249, 271, 272, 273, 274 RUSYN SECTION/RUSÍNSKE ODDELENIE: a small group of faculty at the Center for National Studies and Foreign Languages, Prešov University, working on the codification of the Rusyn language in Slovakia, created in 1998, replaced in 2008 by the Institute of Rusyn Language and Culture, 429, 433; illus. 259 xxxiv

The Carpatho-Rusyn Movement

Yanko SABADOSH/Janko SABADOŠ: Canadian businessman from Yugoslavia, civic activist among recent Vojvodinian Rusnak immigrants in Ontario, Canada, 321 Andrew I. SABAK/SHABAK: priest of Russophile national orientation in the American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese, founder of the CarpathoRussian Ethnic Research Center based in Florida and West Virginia, USA, 343, 345 Andrew SABAK Jr.: Russophile American of Carpatho-Rusyn background, co-founder with his father (Andrew Sabak) of the Carpatho-Russian Ethnic Research Center, West Virginia, USA, 343, 345 Pavel ŠAFARIK UNIVERSITY: institution of higher learning in Communist Czechoslovakia, based in Košice with a branch in Prešov (see also Prešov University), 59, 84, 161, 162 Vasyl SARKANYCH: factory manager in Soviet Transcarpathia, post-1989 Carpatho-Rusyn civic and educational activist in Svaliava, Transcarpathia, Ukraine, 319, 450; illus. 116, 194, 217, 272 Leo SCHLOSSER: priest, last hegumen (superior) of the Benedictine Monastery of Eastern-rite monks, Butler, Pennsylvania, 221 Luba SEGEDI-FALTS: Vojvodinian-Srem Rusyn writer, cultural activist, and founder of the first Carpatho-Rusyn organization in Croatia, the Rusnak Society, illus. 205, 240 Ioan/Ivan SEMEDII: bishop of the underground Greek Catholic Eparchy of Mukachevo during the Soviet era, given full episcopal authority in 1989 by the Vatican, 115, 116; illus. 71 Michael (Mike) SENKO: United States Foreign Service officer, ambassador, American of Carpatho-Rusyn ancestral heritage, 266, 515 Anna (Hanka) SERVYTSKA/Anna SERVICKÁ: Carpatho-Rusyn singer of folk and religious music, activist in the Rusyn-language pre-school movement in Slovakia, 330, 331; illus. 203 Basil SHEREGHY: Carpatho-Rusyn native of Transcarpathia, Greek Catholic priest, numismatist, bibliophile, professor at the Saints Cyril and Methodius Byzantine Catholic Seminary, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, 14-17, 224; illus. 4, 8, 9, 10 George SHEVELOV (pseudonym Yurii Sherekh): Slavic linguist and professor xxxv

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based at Columbia University, New York City, USA, distinguished Ukrainian literary critic, 23, 24 Petro SHTEFANIAK/Peter ŠTEFAŇAK: choreographer and cultural activist among Carpatho-Rusyn youth in Bratislava, Slovakia , 483, 486, 495; illus.

294, 298 Rudolf SHUSTER: Slovak politician, second president (1999-2004) of the postCommunist independent republic of Slovakia, 420; illus. 251 Yuliia SHYPOVYCH: television host and cultural activist among the Carpatho-Rusyns of Transcarpathia, Ukraine, daughter of the cultural activist Yurii Shypovych, 514 Yurii SHYPOVYCH: teacher, cultural activist, founding editor of the Rusyn-language quarterly magazine Ottsiuznyna (The Fatherland) in Transcarpathia, Ukraine, 450, 512; illus. 249, 314 Cathy Timo SILVESTRI: founding member of the Pittsburgh-based philanthropical organization, the John and Helen Timo Foundation, 497; illus. 288 Maria SILVESTRI: translator, Carpatho-Rusyn American cultural activist, president of the John and Helen Timo Foundation, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, daughter of Cathy Timo Silvestri, 222, 324, 465-469, 470, 473-475, 478, 481; illus. 282, 283, 286, 288 Maryann SIVAK: Carpatho-Rusyn cultural activist in the Pittsburgh area of western Pennsylvania, USA, 91, 182, 196, 324, 477; illus. 89, 149 Miroslav SLADEK: Czech politician, parliamentary deputy, supporter of the return of Subcarpathian Rus’/Transcarpathia to post-Communist Czechoslovakia, 283 SLAVJANE FOLK ENSEMBLE: Carpatho-Rusyn American folk-dance ensemble (est. 1973) based in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, USA, 45, 46 SLOVAK ASSOCIATION OF RUSYN ORGANIZATIONS (SARO): a consortium of Carpatho-Rusyn organizations (est. ca. 2008, Prešov, Slovakia) to represent Slovakia at the World Congress of Rusyns, 369, 372, 386, 404, 408 Andrii SMOLAK: painter and art dealer of Carpatho-Rusyn background, based in Snina, Slovakia, 459; illus. 277 Myron (Miro) SMOLAK: art dealer and cultural impresario of Carpathoxxxvi

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Rusyn background, founder of the Miro Gallery, Prague, Czech Republic, 459 Volodymyr SMOLANKA: medical doctor, heart surgeon, rector/president of Uzhhorod National University, Ukraine, 455, 458 Valerii SMOLII: historian of Ukraine and decades-long director of the Institute of Ukrainian History, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Kyiv, 458 Ladislav SNOPKO: politician, Minister of Education in post-Communist independent Slovakia responsible for negotiating the establishment of the Warhol Family Museum in Medzilaborce, Slovakia, 93, 94 Vasyl SOCHKA (literary pseudonym: Borzhavin): Russian-language poet, education administrator in Soviet Transcarpathia, Carpatho-Rusyn civic and cultural activist in post-1989 Transcarpathia, Ukraine, 125, 280 SOCIETY OF CARPATHO-RUSSIAN CANADIANS/OBSHCHESTVO KARPATORUSSKIKH KANADTSEV: pro-Soviet civic organization (est.

1964, Toronto, Canada), comprised mainly of Lemko Rusyn immigrants in Canada, 52, 54 SOCIETY OF CARPATHO-RUSYNS/TOVARYSTVO KARPATSKYKH RUSYNIV: first post-1989 Carpatho-Rusyn civic and cultural society in Ukraine (est. 1990, Uzhhorod), 100, 102, 112, 114, 264, 274, 275, 278, 279, 287, 288, 292, 296, 298, 319, 368, 402, 405; illus. 56, 67 SOCIETY OF FRIENDS OF SUBCARPATHIAN RUS/SPOLEČNOST’ PŘÁTEL PODKARPATSKÉ RUSI: first organization devoted to CarpathoRusyn affairs (est. 1990, Prague) in post-Communist Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic, 273, 274, 318, 510 SOCIETY OF RUSYN INTELLIGENTSIA IN SLOVAKIA/ZDRUZHINIA INTELIGENTSIÏ RUSYNIV SLOVENSKA (ZIRS): civic and social organization (est. 1994, Bratislava, Slovakia), comprised primarily of Carpatho-Rusyns from northeastern Slovakia living in the country’s capital, Bratislava, 175, 300 SOIM OF SUBCARPATHIAN RUSYNS: consortium of Carpatho-Rusyn cultural organizations in Transcarpathia, Ukraine later transformed into a political body calling for the creation of a sovereign “Republic of Subcarpathian Rus’,” 368, 386, 397, 398, 402; illus. 235 Bethany SROMOSKI: Carpatho-Rusyn cultural activist based in eastern Pennsylvania, USA, 480; illus. 289, 315 xxxvii

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Pavel STEFANOVSKII: Lemko-Rusyn civic and cultural activist in Poland, 117; illus. 73 Peter STERCHO: Transcarpathian-born professor of economics, historian, and civic activist of Ukrainian national orientation in the USA, 8; illus. 4 STUDIUM CARPATO-RUTHENORUM: international summer school, project of the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center and the Institute of Rusyn Language and Culture, Prešov University, since 2010 held annually in Prešov, Slovakia, 187, 190, 191, 411, 433-435, 440, 441, 465, 470-471, 473, 476-481, 508, 509, 515; illus. 289, 291 Andrej SULITKA: Moravian Czech-born ethnographer at the Slovak Academy of Sciences (Bratislava), advisor to the Czecho-Slovak Federal government in Prague, 146, 149; illus. 93 Sergei SULEAK/SULEAC: historian, journalist, editor, civic activist in Moldova and founder of the Rus’ Civic Society, Kishinev, Moldova, 377, 378 Peter ŠVORC: Slovak professor at Prešov University, publisher, specialist on the history of Subcarpathian Rus’, 207; illus. 256 Dymytrii SYDOR: Transcarpathian-born Orthodox priest of the Moscow Patriarchate, civic activist among the Carpatho-Rusyns in Ukraine’s Transcarpathian Region, 251, 275, 288-295, 298, 312, 335, 369, 376, 383, 387, 391, 395-399, 401, 402; illus. 161, 180, 183, 229, 235, 236, 239 Miron SŶSAK: professor of Russian at Prešov University, Carpatho-Rusyn cultural activist and publicist in Slovakia, brother of the theater director Yaroslav Sŷsak, 327; illus. 155 Yaroslav SŶSAK/Jaroslav SISÁK: actor, dramatist, cultural activist, director of the Ukrainian National Theatre and initiator of its transformation into the Rusyn-language Aleksander Dukhnovych Theater, Prešov, Slovakia, 123, 151, 178, 331, 332; illus. 79 Yaroslava (Yarka) SŶSAK/Jaroslava SISÁKOVÁ: actress in the Aleksander Dukhnovych Theatre in Prešov, Rusyn-language television journalist in Slovakia, daughter of the actor and dramatist Yaroslav Sŷsak, 332, 333 Robert TAFT, SJ: Eastern-rite Catholic liturgical scholar, Pontifical Oriental Institute, Rome, Italy, 192, 215 Yuliian TAMASH/Julian TAMAŠ: writer, literary historian, first holder of the Chair of Rusyn Language and Literature, University of Novi Sad, Yugoslavia, xxxviii

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108, 111, 112, 138, 439; illus. 64 Joseph TERELYA: Transcarpathian-born Greek Catholic religious dissident in Soviet Ukraine, writer and cultural activist of Ukrainian national orientation based in Toronto, Canada, 146; illus. 91, 92 John and Helen TIMO FOUNDATION: philanthropical body (est. 2013, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) that supports a wide range of Carpatho-Rusyn educational, cultural, civic, and publication projects in North America and Europe, 465, 468-469, 473, 474, 478, 479, 514; illus. 288 Petro TOLOCHKO: Soviet-Ukrainian academician, historian of Kyivan Rus’ based in Kyiv, Ukraine, 295-296 Mykhailo TOMCHANYI: chief architect of Uzhhorod, founding chairman of the Society of Carpatho-Rusyns in Soviet Transcarpathia, 102, 103, 114, 274; illus. 58, 67, 69, 70 TRANSCARPATHIAN REGION SCHOLARLY LIBRARY/ZAKARPATSKA OBLASNA UNIVERSALNA NAUKOVA BIBLIOTEKA: leading repository of books with special collections held in its Division for Carpathian Regional Studies, Uzhhorod, Ukraine, 214, 353; illus. 134 TRANSCARPATHIAN REGIONAL ASSEMBLY/ZAKARPATSKA OBLASNA RADA: highest legislative body in Transcarpathia, Ukraine comprised of 75 elected deputies, seat in Uzhhorod, 111, 112, 264, 277, 396; illus. 65, 234 Tom TRIER: Danish promoter of stateless peoples through work in nongovernmental organizations in Germany and former Soviet Republics, organizer of Days of Rusyn Culture in Copenhagen, Denmark, 249-252, 283, 382; illus. 154, 155, 156, 219 Stefan TROEBST: German historian, specialist on post-Communist central and eastern Europe, professor at the University of Leipzig, Germany, 252, 283; illus. 157 Demiian (Demko) TROKHANOVSKII: Lemko-Rusyn civic and cultural activist based in Krynica, Poland, 467, 496, 497 Petro TROKHANOVSKII/Petro TROCHANOWSKI (literary pseudonym: Murianka): poet, journalist, Lemko-Rusyn cultural activist, founding editor of first post-1989 Lemko-Rusyn language magazine Besida, Krynica, Poland, 74, 117, 132, 232, 270, 295, 423,499; illus. 39, 74, 92, 151, 255 Ivan TURIANYTSIA: microbiologist, professor at Uzhhorod State University, xxxix

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Carpatho-Rusyn civic and political activist, Transcarpathia, Ukraine, 114, 228, 251, 253, 259, 264, 275, 276, 278-280, 282, 283-290, 292, 295, 296, 298, 312, 313, 368, 395, 401; illus. 67, 69, 70, 155, 170, 175, 177, 181, 183, 236 Mykhal TUROK-HETESH/Michal TUROK-HETEŠ: municipal functionary in Medzilaborce, Czechoslovakia, organizer of the First World Congress of Rusyns (March 1991), 90, 98, 121; illus. 47, 48, 78, 186 Vasyl TUROK-HETESH/Vasil TUROK-HETEŠ: high school teacher, dramatist, Carpatho-Rusyn cultural and civic activist in Slovakia, founding chairman of the World Congress of Rusyns and of the Rusyn Renaissance Society, based in Prešov, Slovakia, 122, 123, 125, 127, 150-153, 159, 165, 166, 178, 179, 247, 248, 250, 255, 270, 286, 290, 292, 296, 300, 301, 302, 306, 329, 358, 362, 363, 366, 381, 383, 424-426, 429, 483; illus. 55, 78, 95, 99, 154, 155, 169, 181, 201 Iosafat (Vladimir) TYMKOVYCH/TIMKOVIČ: priest, editor, historian, Carpatho-Rusyn cultural activist, hegumen (superior) of the Greek Catholic Basilian monasteries in Trebišov and Prešov, Slovakia, 291, 292, 309 István UDVARI: Hungarian linguist, founder and first holder of the Chair of Ukrainian and Rusyn Philology, Advanced School of Education, Nyíregyháza, Hungary, 108, 109, 114, 135, 157, 191, 439, 502, 504, 505; illus.

63, 65, 70, 72, 74 UKRAINA SOCIETY: government-sponsored organization based in Kyiv, Soviet Ukraine, tasked to maintain contacts with the Ukrainian diaspora, especially its Communist and leftist organizations, 46, 48, 78, 80, 103 UNION OF RUSYNS-UKRAINIANS OF SLOVAKIA/SOIUZ RUSYNIVUKRAÏNTSIV SLOVACHCHYNY (SRUS): civic and cultural organization (est. 1990, Prešov, Slovakia), which promotes the view that CarpathoRusyns are not a distinct nationality but a branch of Ukrainians; successor to the Communist-controlled Cultural Union of Ukrainians of Czechoslovakia (KSUT), 96, 99, 173 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH: American university (est. 1787) based in western Pennsylvania, site of several scholarly events about CarpathoRusyns, 90, 465; illus. 46, 48, 282 UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO: one of the most prestigious and the largest university in Canada (est. 1827), home to several bodies promoting the study of Carpatho-Rusyns, including the Carpatho-Ruthenica Library, the xl

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Chair of Ukrainian Studies, and the Chepa Fund, 46, 50, 56, 69, 83, 101, 187, 214, 230, 234, 286, 411, 414, 415, 431, 435, 437, 446, 451, 519; illus. 44, 135, 144, 147, 264, 265, 279, 316 UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS: scholarly publishing house, whose list includes the Carpatho-Rusyn encyclopedia and several monographs on Carpatho-Rusyn history, literature, and cartography, 185, 319, 341, 345-347, 350, 444; illus. 211, 212 UZHHOROD STATE, subsequently NATIONAL UNIVERSITY/ UZHHORODSKYI DERZHAVNYI, NATSIONALNYI UNIVERSYTET: the first university (est. 1945) in Carpathian Rus’, home to the Carpathian Studies Institute and several academic departments (history, language, and literature) offering courses about Carpatho-Rusyns from a Ukrainian national perspective, 48, 80, 112, 113, 139, 226, 228 275, 276, 294, 339, 342, 438, 440, 452, 456, 458, 512 Yurii VANKO/Juraj VAŇKO: Slavic linguist, specialist on the Rusyn language, professor at the University of Nitra, Slovakia, 206, 431 Mykhailo/Mikhal VARGA: teacher, school administrator, and civic activist among the Vojvodinian Rusyns of Yugoslavia, 140, 251, 269, 383, 404; illus.

89, 154, 155, 181 Karen VARIAN: Carpatho-Rusyn American cultural activist based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, 478; illus. 182 VATRA: Lemko-Rusyn cultural festival held annually since the late 1970s in the Lemko Region as well as diaspora communities in southwestern Poland (Lower Silesia), western Ukraine (Galicia), Canada, and the United States, 71, 73-75, 248; illus. 39-40 Mykola VEGESH: Transcarpathian-born historian of Carpatho-Ukraine, professor of history and rector/president of Uzhhorod National University, illus. 266 Stephen VESELENAK: Benedictine monk, Byzantine-Ruthenian Catholic priest, librarian at the monastery in Butler, Pennsylvania, USA, 6-7, 14-15, 25, 221, 222; illus. 3, 7, 10 Stepan VIDNIANSKYI: Transcarpathian born historian considered an expert on the “Rusyn Question” at the Institute of the History of Ukraine, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Kyiv, 458; illus. 276 Fedor VITSO/VICO: caricaturist, political and social critic in Czechoslovakia xli

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and post-1991 Slovakia; Ilko Sova is his ironic, self-deprecating CarpathoRusyn persona, 151, 153, 249-250, 368, 489, 490; illus. 11, 96, 156, 186, 216 Mark WANSA: English-language novelist of Carpatho-Rusyn background, based in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, USA, 445-446; illus. 269 Andy WARHOL: artist and world-renowned cultural celebrity in the second half of the twentieth century, son of immigrants to the United States from Mikova, a Carpatho-Rusyn village in present-day northeastern Slovakia, 40, 86, 87, 92-93, 205, 250-252, 317, 318, 335, 397; illus. 49, 115, 118 WARHOL FAMILY MUSEUM/MÚZEUM MODERNÉHO UMENIA ANDYHO WARHOLA: state supported museum in Medzilaborce, Slovakia devoted to works of Andy Warhol, his brother Paul Warhola, and his nephew James Warhola, 89, 92-96, 98, 124, 317; illus. 45, 52 John WARHOLA: older brother of Andy Warhol, vice-president of the Andy Warhol Foundation, New York City, USA, 86, 89, 91, 93, 95, 317; illus. 47, 49, 193 Julia WARHOLA: Carpatho-Rusyn born mother of the American art and cultural figure Andy Warhol and an artist in her own right, 88, 318 Paul WARHOLA: eldest brother of Andy Warhol, scrap metal dealer in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area, amateur painter of some note, 87, 95; illus.

45, 52, 193 Marta WATRAL: Polish specialist in Carpatho-Rusyn literature based in Warsaw, Poland, 479; illus. 283 WIDENER LIBRARY: main building of the Harvard College Library; its holdings in Slavic and other languages of central and eastern European countries (including Ukraine and Russia) are among the richest in the world, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, 17, 214, 434 Wiesław WITKOWSKI: Polish Slavist and professor, director of the Institute of East Slavic Languages, Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland, 117, 157, illus. 72 WORLD ACADEMY OF RUSYN CULTURE: association of academics worldwide who research and publish in various disciplines dealing with central and eastern Europe preferably but not exclusively on CarpathoRusyn topics, based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 443-445, 514 WORLD CONGRESS FOR SOVIET AND EAST EUROPEAN STUDIES: xlii

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international organization of social scientists and historians in the West specializing in the Soviet Union and neighboring Communist-ruled countries, 105-106; illus. 59 WORLD CONGRESS OF RUSYNS/SVITOVŶI KONGRES RUSYNIV: international body designed to represent Carpatho-Rusyn interests (est.

1991, Medzilaborce, Czechoslovakia), initially comprised of organizations from five countries (Czechoslovakia, Poland, Ukraine, United States, Yugoslavia); after reconfiguration of the original and the addition of new countries, the number stands at nine (Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Ukraine, United States-Canada), 121131, 135, 137, 140, 142, 150, 151, 156, 167, 232, 253, 257, 261, 265, 268, 270, 273-275, 286, 290, 294, 295-301, 309, 311, 314, 328, 330, 331, 345, 357-365, 366-372, 373-381, 383-399, 402-410, 427, 460-462, 484, 503, 514, 525-528; illus. 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 167, 170, 171, 177, 182, 183, 201, 203, 205, 207, 219, 220, 221, 223, 224, 229, 241, 242 WORLD COUNCIL OF RUSYNS/SVITOVA RADA RUSYNIV: executive body of the World Congress of Rusyns, comprised of representatives from each of the World Congress’s nine country members, 179-180, 232, 265, 286, 291, 292, 337, 365, 371, 376, 381, 383, 385, 386, 398, 405, 406, 409, 484, 499, 525; illus. 181 Vasyl YABUR/Vasil’ JABUR: linguist, Russian-language specialist, main codifier of the Rusyn literary standard in Slovakia, professor, Šafarik University in Košice and Prešov University, Slovakia, 161, 165, 166, 184, 300, 427, 428, 430-432; illus. 101, 102, 103, 258, 259 John YURCISIN: church historian and cleric associated with the American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese based in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, USA, 91; illus. 46 Viktor YUSHCHENKO: Ukrainian banker, politician, third president of Ukraine (2005-2010), 261, 264; illus. 163 Olena ZAKRYVYDOROHA: librarian and long-time director during the last decades of Soviet and early post-Soviet Ukraine of the Transcarpathian Region Scholarly Library based in Uzhhorod, 214; illus. 137 Michael ZARECHNAK: Carpatho-Rusyn native from northeastern Slovakia, Russian-language specialist, professor of linguistics, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., USA, 155; illus. 99

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Nadia ZAVOROTNA: Slavic bibliographer and librarian, University of Toronto Libraries, Toronto, Canada, 217, 234; illus. 146 Gregory ZHATKOVYCH/ZATKOVIC: American lawyer and political activist of Carpatho-Rusyn descent based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; first governor of Czechoslovakia’s autonomous province of Subcarpathian Rus’ (1920-1921), 173, 448 Peter ZHENUKH/ŽEŇUCH: Slovak linguist, specialist in Church Slavonic, director of the Institute of the Slovak Language, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, Slovakia, 159 Miron ZHIROSH: journalist and community historian of Vojvodinian Rusyns, based in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia, 271; illus. 166 Yevhen ZHUPAN: physician, director of pediatric hospital in Mukachevo, Carpatho-Rusyn political activist, deputy in the Transcarpathian Regional Assembly (Oblasna rada), Uzhhorod, Ukraine, 277, 280, 368, 386, 387; illus.

161, 174, 236, 239 Andrzej ZIĘBA: Polish historian, professor at Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland, sympathetic supporter of Lemko Rusyns , 69-71, 75, 117; illus. 35, 36, 72, 145, 302 Joseph ZISSELS: civic and political activist of Jewish background in Ukraine, imprisoned anti-Soviet dissident in the 1970s, 480; illus. 290 Aleksander (Sasha) ZOZULIAK/Alexander ZOZUL’ÁK: journalist, publisher, painter, Carpatho-Rusyn civic activist, founding editor of the first Rusynlanguage newspaper (Narodnŷ novynŷ) and magazine (Rusyn) in post-1989 Slovakia, founder of the Rusyn Renaissance Society and Slovak Academy of Rusyn Culture publishing houses, 83-86, 96, 98, 99, 151, 159, 162, 165, 166, 173, 174, 177-181, 201, 218, 230, 232, 251, 255, 270, 300, 301, 303, 306, 327, 333, 354, 358, 361, 363, 366, 368, 369, 371, 373, 383, 402, 406-409, 424-426, 444, 445, 459-461, 483, 486; illus. 44, 96, 97, 114, 197, 205, 223, 232, 243

xliv

1

For over half a century, I have been associated with Carpatho-Rusyns.

Many have viewed that association in a positive light, others in a very negative way. Patriotic nationality-builder and “father of a nation?” Or, hired political separatist and deluded denier of the Ukrainian identity of a people once called Rusyns? How did this all come about?

***** Since my early teenage years, I had an interest, albeit passive, in the ethnic origins of our family. My curiosity and questions were never satisfactorily answered by my parents and maternal grandparents. Back in the late 1950s, when I was still in high school in northern New Jersey, I decided to go to New York City in an effort to find on a map the village of my mother, Voloskoe, something I was unable to do with the detailed world atlas at my Hungarian uncle’s house which I visted during holidays. All I knew was that my mother had come from Czechoslovakia just after World War I from an area called Carpatho-Ruthenia in the far eastern part of that country. Hopefully, nearby New York’s Isle of Manhattan, just a half-hour bus ride from my home, would have the map resources I needed.

I was about twelve or thirteen years old at the time when I mounted the outside staircase flanked by statues of two monumental-sized lions and stepped into the great entrance hall of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue at the corner of 42nd Street and made my way up the ornate marble staircase to something called the Slavic Reading Room.

Ironically, at the same moment there were two older women standing before the clerk (not a librarian, I later learned, but a book runner) from 1

From Nowhere To Somewhere

1. Austro-Hungarian topographic map, (1890), basis for a Czechoslovakian map (1936) showing the village Voloskoe, from holdings in the New York Public Library.

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whom they were trying to get some information about a place they called Ruthenia. Their queries were not well formulated, which gave the clerk an excuse to dismiss them abruptly with a comment that went something like: Why do you need to know about a place that has no real importance? Whatever he actually said to them, I vowed at the time that no one should be turned away from a library because they were asking about “insignificant” Ruthenia. I vowed to myself that someday we would make that place known so that these nice elderly ladies, or others like them, would not have to be subjected to such dismissive conduct because of their ancestral heritage.

The ornery clerk, or perhaps his colleague, directed me to the library’s Map Division, and I did eventually find Voloskoe. It was only when I became a graduate student at Princeton University in the late 1960s, however, that I began to study the “Ruthenian question” seriously.

Those were the days when learning how to use a research library and bibliographical knowledge were taken seriously. In a seminar on bibliography taught by Princeton’s Slavic Librarian Dr. Zdeněk David, I chose as the topic for the class essay, Subcarpathian Rus’, or Carpatho-Ruthenia as it was known in English at the time, at least to specialists of “Eastern” Europe. Dr. David was an émigré who fled Communist Czechoslovakia.

A Czech who was educated in the spirit of the interwar first republic of President Masaryk, Zed (as he was known to Americans) was particularly sympathetic toward that country’s far eastern province which had been lost to the Soviet Union at the close of World War II. Thanks to David’s encouragement, coupled with his own vast bibliographic knowledge of the Slavic world, in late 1967 I was able to produce a comprehensive term paper which, in effect, became the first draft of an essay published in a significantly revised form nearly a decade later in the Austrian History Yearbook under the title, “Historiographical Guide to Subcarpathian Rus’.”

Working on this study helped to change my views of Carpatho-Rusyns and their homeland. Most of the literature in western languages that made reference to Carpatho-Rusyns described them, to quote the distinguished historian of Austria-Hungary, Robert A. Kann, as “the most forgotten among the forgotten.” The reality, however, was quite differ3

From Nowhere To Somewhere

2. Opening page of “A Historiographical Guide to Subcarpathian Rus,” 65 pages, in the Austrian History Yearbook (1984).

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ent. None other than the world-renowned Slavic philologist Roman Jakobson pointed out as long ago as 1931 that: “In the whole East Slavic world, there is hardly any other marginal area whose past has been examined with such affectionate meticulousness and scholarliness as Carpatho-Russia.” Clearly, there was much knowledge in numerous languages about Carpatho-Rusyns and their homeland. The problem was how to get that knowledge to the specialized and general reading public.

That I saw as one of my tasks and eventually as a life goal.

5

2

Life goals are certainly important, but I was still only a student. Moreover, I was entirely cut off from what was left of the pre-World War I Carpatho-Ruthenian immigrant community in the United States. Not only was I born and raised in a totally non-Slavic environment, but our family was neither Byzantine/Greek Catholic nor Orthodox, the two major church affiliations of Carpatho-Rusyn Americans.

Sometime in 1970 when I was a doctoral student at Princeton, Reverend Stephen Veselenak, a Carpatho-Rusyn American who was a Benedictine monk and Greek Catholic priest, discovered me. With the blessing of his abbot-superior, Father Steve, as we came to know him, set out on a journey throughout the United States looking for scholars who might want to become part of a group of academics interested in Car-

3. Father Stephen Veselenak in conversation with Patricia Krafcik (ca. 1975).

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The Carpatho-Rusyn Movement

patho-Rusyns. He was convinced that Carpatho-Rusyns were a distinct people who should not be confused or misidentified as Slovaks, Russians, Hungarians, Ukrainians, or anything else. Ironically, Father Steve learned of my existence from the well-known Galician-Ukrainian émigré historian Ivan Lysiak Rudnytsky, and from the literary historian and Ukrainophile native of Transcarpathia, John Fizer, who was my mentor when I was an undergraduate student at Rutgers University.* Father Steve Veselenak, a librarian by profession before becoming a monk, was very interested in making his Benedictine Monastery Library located in Butler, Pennsylvania, a major repository for books and other materials dealing with Carpatho-Rusyns. It was in this context that I had begun in 1970 to send him publications from Communist Czechoslovakia (where I was doing doctoral research), for which I was fully reimbursed by the Benedictine Monastery.

After a long correspondence between the United States and Czechoslovakia, in October 1971 Father Steve and I finally met. He visited me (and my wife Maria) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I had just begun a post-doctoral fellowship funded by the recently established Ukrainian studies program at Harvard University under Professor Omeljan Pritsak.

Father Steve and I became instant friends, since together we had the common goal of saving/reviving a sense of Ruthenian/Rusyn ancestral identity among the original pre-World War I immigrants (many still alive) and their children and grandchildren in the United States. Regardless of their generation, the vast majority of these “potential” Carpatho-Rusyn Americans would, if asked, say that their ethnicity was either Russian, Slovak, Hungarian, or more likely use vague terms such as Byzantine or even Slavish (pronounced demeaningly “slave-ish”).

***** Inspired by Father Steve—and at a time when we hoped to get as many scholars involved regardless of their views on national identity—I or*Throughout this text the term Ukrainophile is not used to depict any person who appreciates Ukrainians and Ukrainian culture, but rather someone—in this case a Carpatho-Rusyn—who believes that they belong to the Ukrainian nationality. Analogously, a Russophile believes they are a Russian by nationality and cultural identity.

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ganized in April 1973 a one-day conference at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, which was repeated one month later in New York City at the Ukrainian Institute of Fifth Avenue hosted by its director Julian Revay, prime minister of the short-lived Carpatho-Ukraine. At both conferences there were, aside from Columbia University Ph.D. candidate Edward Kasinec and me, the Drexel University professor of political science, Peter Stercho, an ardent pro-Ukrainian who had just published a book on Carpatho-Ukraine. It was already becoming clear that the older generation of Ukrainophiles (Stercho was born and educated in interwar Czechoslovakia’s Subcarpathian Rus’) was being challenged—with the blessing of Prime Minister Revay—by younger American-born graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, even younger community activists, all of whom argued—although still hesitatingly—that “Carpatho-Ruthenians” might comprise a distinct nationality.

Even more ambitious was an event I organized in June 1974 at the recently established Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. The two-day scholarly conference dealt specifically with the Carpatho-Ruthenian immigration in the United States. Aside from Edward Kasinec and myself (who chaired the event), we brought into our fold for the first time Richard Renoff, a sociologist from Nassau Community College (SUNY)

4. Richard Renoff, Edward Kasinec, Father Basil Shereghy, Paul Robert Magocsi, and Peter Stercho at Duquesne University (April 1973).

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The Carpatho-Rusyn Movement

in New York City who was interested in the celibacy controversy in the 1930s, and Stephen Reynolds from the University of Oregon who was a specialist in religious studies with a particular interest in Carpatho-Rusyn plainchant.

Our Ukrainian colleagues at Harvard were, if unwillingly, cajoled into having to realize that a distinct Carpatho-Ruthenian people and community did exist, at least in the United States. Not all Ukrainians, however, in particular community supporters of the institute, were pleased that the proceedings of the Carpatho-Ru5. Cover of the Proceedings of the thenian conference were published Harvard conference on CarpathoRuthenian immigration (June 1974). by “their” Harvard Center. But what could they do? I had by then become the managing editor of the Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies publishing program.

***** The most influential of the Carpatho-Rusyn conferences I was able to organize in those early years took place in August 1975 at the Mount Macrina Convent in Uniontown, about 75 miles south of Pittsburgh in the Laurel Mountains of southwestern Pennsylvania. Located there was the main seat, the so-called mother house, of the Order of the Sisters of Saint Basil the Great. The Basilian Sisters had acquired a kind of manor house and landed estate formerly owned by a wealthy American entrepreneur, Joseph Van Kirk Thompson, whose fortune had collapsed as a result of the Great Depression of 1929. It was at this elegant American Newport-like “aristocratic” setting, which the sisters renamed Mount Macrina, that during the 1940s and 1950s there took place the Rusyn-American community’s largest religious pilgrimage. In those decades, several 9

From Nowhere To Somewhere

of the pilgrimages to Mount Macrina attracted upwards of 50,000 people.

Mount Macrina’s abbess, or Provincial Superior, as well as the sisters, many of whom served as teachers in the Greek Catholic parochial schools, were proud of the fact that, while they may have been closely linked to the Greek Catholic Archbishop of Pittsburgh, they were not jurisdictionally subordinate to him.

Consequently, they could engage in activities that might be too risky for the archbishop and his eparchial priests to undertake. In other words, 6. Program for the cultural seminar at at a time when the Byzantine Ruthethe Mount Macrina Convent (August nian (Greek) Catholic Church stu1975). diously strove to disassociate itself from anything that might smack of nationalism, holding a conference on Carpatho-Rusyn “ethnic particularism” was precisely in the category of a risk. This did not seem to bother Mount Macrina’s Provincial Superior, Mother Christopher (née Malcovsky). In the spring of 1975, she welcomed us at that year’s annual retreat for the Order’s Sisters who, from wherever they were on their missions, returned to the Uniontown mother house for a weekend of prayer and reflection. In 1975, the topic for spiritual reflection was of a quite secular nature—the cultural heritage of Carpatho-Rusyns.

Mount Macrina was an opportunity for us younger secular types to get our message to women educators who had direct access and influence on young people. During the three-day conference, I delivered three lectures on Carpatho-Rusyn history, literature, and art. Among the other speakers were Father Athanasius Pekar, who spoke about the history of the church, Richard Renoff about immigrant socioeconomic life, Stephen Reynolds about liturgical music, and Edward Kasinec about the future of Carpatho-Rusyn studies. All the lectures were recorded so that 10

The Carpatho-Rusyn Movement

we had an aural record which might be used for greater public exposure in the future.

As for entertainment, we could count on my wife Maria to perform one or two folk dances, even though at the time she was several months pregnant with our future son. We were also desperate for visual entertainment, in particular some kind of film to depict traditional Carpatho-Rusyn life in the homeland. Our only solution was to show a Soviet-Ukrainian film, the international award-winning Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964). The Provincial Superior requested she have a private screening in advance before exposing her flock to any “risks.”

And risks there were, since the film had a scene of a nude woman— not in any sexual act, but engaging in some pagan ritual. But there was nudity. What to do? A last-minute compromise was found just before the showing was about to begin. We agreed that when the “nude scene” was about to occur, a piece of paper would be placed over the projector’s lens.

The paper saved the day, but it did cause ripples of laughter among the Sisters, one of whom quipped at the end of the film: “What was Mother Superior thinking? Have we Sisters never seen a nude woman before?”

The Mount Macrina conference had an incredibly important impact, although none of us were fully aware of its extent at the time; namely that there were several young people in the audience. Among them were Jerry Jumba, a recent graduate in music from Pittsburgh’s Duquesne University. Jerry was to become the most avid promoter in the United States of Carpatho-Rusyn folk music and church plain chant (prostopiniye).

There were other young people in the audience, but the most important of all attendees was an unassuming undergraduate student from Indiana University, Pat Krafcik. We chatted briefly about one of the talks, in particular Father Pekar’s spurious etymology of the ethnonym Rusyn as “sons of Rus’,” a position with which she took issue. Pat did later recall that the Mount Macrina experience marked the first time she had ever heard anything serious about her “Carpatho-Russian” ancestral heritage.

The nomenclature question was a problem that remained with us for some time. During the early years of the ethnic revival in the United States we worked primarily with representative of the Byzantine Ruthenian Catholic Church. It was, therefore, not surprising that we initial11

From Nowhere To Somewhere

ly referred to “our people” as Carpatho-Ruthenians. That term was not acceptable to our kinfolk of Orthodox religious affiliation, who argued, quite understandably, that Ruthenian meant being Catholic. Ruthenian was indeed the English form derived from the Latin name ruthenus, used since the late Middle Ages to designate the people of Rus’. The Orthodox, meanwhile, preferred to use Russian as the adjectival form of Rus’. Since at the time neither the territorial name Rus’ nor the ethnonym Rusyn existed in English, “our people” in America, regardless of religious affiliation, called themselves Carpatho-Russians, or simply Russians.

As this story unfolds, we will see how the nomenclature used in our ethnic revival in America gradually moved from the self-designation Carpatho-Russian and Carpatho-Ruthenian to Carpatho-Rusyn. We simply proclaimed Rusyn (sometimes spelled Rusin) to be an English word and eventually had that form accepted as the new norm in a wide range of books and articles about “our people,” many of which were published by some of the leading academic and commercial publishers in the United States.

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3

These tentative beginnings of the Carpatho-Rusyn American revival came at a very auspicious time. The United States was celebrating the 1976 Bicentennial of its Declaration of Independence, while at the outset of the following year over 180 million Americans were glued to their television sets watching a week-long drama series based on the Afro-American writer Alex Haley’s novel, Roots.

On the one hand, Roots was a saga about America’s Blacks, from their enslavement on the shores of West Africa to their arrival in chains in the antebellum South, where their harsh existence was depicted in numerous heart-rendering scenes. On the other hand, Roots was a universal story of how, under the worst of conditions, a people strove to preserve its ancestral identity, culture, and sense of self-worth.

Preserving one’s ancestral culture was the takeaway for many white European immigrants and their descendants in late twentieth-century America. Among these were Americans of Carpatho-Rusyn background who came from a place no one could find on a map. They were unknown to themselves and to others—the proverbial “people from nowhere.”

Interestingly, American government Bicentennial celebration planners decided that there would not be any single grandiose celebration on a specific date. Instead, each of the many immigrant groups would be encouraged to celebrate the Bicentennial throughout 1976 in their own way, all the while putting special emphasis on informing each fellow American about his or her specific ancestral ethno-cultural group. No longer are we bland, “melted,” non-descript Americans. “Tell everybody who you are,” said government planners: celebrate what makes you a distinct ethnicity within a diverse American whole.

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From Nowhere To Somewhere

***** We few Carpatho-Ruthenian scholars may have held some conferences, but that was a far cry from what other American “ethnic” communities like Jews, Armenians, and Poles had done, especially at leading universities. Even Ukrainian Americans had recently created several endowed professorships and a scholarly research institute at, of all places, America’s oldest and most prestigious university—Harvard.

What, then, could we Carpatho-Ruthenians, with much more limited resources, do to achieve our goal? At the very least, perhaps we might create some kind of association made up of scholars and like-minded individuals. Although Edward Kasinec and I were at Harvard University, we decided not to begin our deliberations there, but nearby. After all, the year was 1975, the beginning of America’s Bicentennial Celebrations.

What better place to meet than in Concord, Massachusetts, where alongside Lexington the first “battles” of the War of Independence took place?

At the very end of October 1975, we gathered for a two-day planning session at the historic Concord Inn. Aside from Edward Kasinec and myself from Harvard, we were joined by our spiritus movens Father Stephen Veselenak, OSB; the Greek Catholic priests Raymond Misulich from the Byzantine Ruthenian Eparchy of Passaic and Basil Shereghy and Athana-

7. Father Raymond Misulich (right foreground), and to the left: Richard Renoff, Paul Robert Magocsi, Andrew Perejda, Olga Mayo, Father Athanasius Pekar, Father Stephen Veselenak, and Edward Kasinec, Concord Inn, Concord Massachusetts (October 1975).

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The Carpatho-Rusyn Movement

sius Pekar, OSBM, both from the Byzantine Catholic Seminary in Pittsburgh; two university professors, Richard Renoff and Andrew Perejda; and Olga Kavochka Mayo as recording secretary. Several of us already had a proven record of published works dealing with Carpatho-Rusyns, and we were all committed to creating a formal body to promote knowledge about “our people.”

The cast of characters who gathered in Concord was, to say the least, a diverse lot. Father Steve Veselenak, a trained librarian, was determined to transform his base, the Benedictine Monastery near Butler, Pennsylvania, into the largest repository for books and other materials dealing with Carpatho-Ruthenians. Father Athanasius Pekar, a native of Subcarpathian Rus’, was a Basilian monk of Ukrainian national orientation.

After completing his religious studies in Rome during World War II, he arrived in the United States in 1948 and was assigned to serve in the Ruthenian Greek Catholic Exarchate of Pittsburgh, where he subsequently taught at its seminary. Abiding by the orders of his hierarch, Father Pekar muted his Ukrainian convictions and referred to “our people” as Carpatho-Ruthenians in his numerous English-language publications about church history as well as in his unpublished “Ruthenian Grammar” used to teach students “our language” at the Byzantine Catholic Seminary.

The American-born Andrew Perejda was a somewhat gentle, simple soul teaching at a provincial university in Connecticut. His major goal was to produce a detailed map of all Ruthenian/Rusyn villages south of the Carpathians. He eventually succeeded in doing just that: a large-scale Map of Uhro-Rus, which for all intents and purposes was an English-language version of a 1910 map by the Ukrainian geographer Stepan Tomashivskyi, a copy of which I lent him from the collection at Harvard.

The other American-born son of Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants was Edward Kasinec, who at the time was the librarian at Harvard University’s Ukrainian Research Institute.

The most interesting in our group was Father Basil Shereghy. A product of the traditional Hungarian environment in the European homeland, Shereghy was at the same time a Carpatho-Rusyn patriot forced into exile after the Soviets arrived in the fall of 1944. Fleeing to the United States, he was assigned to serve in one of the few Hungarian-lan15

From Nowhere To Somewhere

8. Title page and frontispiece of the literary almanac Greetings to the Rusyns (1851), compiled by Aleksander Dukhnovych, with the ex libris of Father Basil Shereghy.

9. “A Girl from Latirka” (1962), by Andrii Kotska, from the Basil Shereghy collection.

guage Greek Catholic parishes in the Pittsburgh Exarchate, specifically in McKeesport, Pennsylvania. One could not help but be impressed by this highly cultured, urbane priest, who had turned his parish residence into a veritable museum of Carpatho-Rusyn and Eastern Christian culture. His particular specialty was Byzantine coins, having amassed a huge collection of which he was particularly proud and known among coin collectors throughout the United States. For me, however, most valuable was Father Shereghy’s library of Carpatho-Ruthenica, with 16

60,8

3m

m

15 ,90

mm

The Carpatho-Rusyn Movement

10. Carpatho-Ruthenian Studies Foundation Executive Board meeting with guests at the Balch Institute, Philadelphia (June 1976). Seated left to right: Joyce Firko, Olga Kavochka Mayo, Irene Serafin, Ann Juba; standing l. to r.: Paul Robert Magocsi, Julian Revay, Fr. Basil Shereghy, Michael Mahonec, Fr. Athansius Pekar, Andrew Perejda, Edward Kasinec, Arthur Tuden, Richard Renoff, Philip Mooney, Alexander Minno, Fr. Stephen Veselenak, Fr. Raymond Misulich.

original editions of the historian Bazylovych (1799-1804) and national awakener Dukhnovych (1851), which he displayed and allowed me to touch. I was in awe at being able to see these and many other bibliographic rarities about which I had written but had not encountered in the flesh, so to speak, even at Harvard’s Widener Library.

Then there was Father Shereghy’s collection of paintings. He specialized in interwar artists from the Subcarpathian School, including its leading masters Adalbert Erdelyi, Iosyf Bokshai, Fedor Manailo, Andrii Kotska, and Zoltan Sholtes. Father Shereghy also helped the Byzantine Catholic archdiocesan bishops, especially Stephen Kocisko and Michael Dudick, build their art collections with works by these painters. But they generally got the inferior works produced during the Soviet period, while Father Shereghy kept for himself the best of these artists’ works produced during the interwar Czechoslovak and wartime Hungarian eras. Fortunately for me, after Father Shereghy’s death I was able to purchase from his estate some of the rare books and paintings.

Following our deliberations in Concord we created, and with the help of Pennsylvania lawyer Joyce Firko were able to incorporate, the Car17 15,33 mm

From Nowhere To Somewhere

patho-Ruthenian Studies Foundation in early 1976. It was intended to be a body that would not be under the auspices of any church or existing secular organization. Nevertheless, some of the founding members, especially its priests, felt that the new foundation should try to cultivate relations with the bishops and as many priests as possible. I agreed, and that led to my meeting with several Byzantine Ruthenian (Greek) Catholic hierarchs, both the bishops themselves and their eparchial chancellors. They assured me of their moral and, eventually, financial support for Carpatho-Rusyn related scholarly projects.

***** Harvard, where I was at the time, was a wonderful setting to achieve “Roots”-inspired ethnic-consciousness raising goals. Most fortunately, during those very years (1973-1976) I was a member of Harvard’s Society of Fellows, which allowed for financial support and unencumbered time to do creative things of a scholarly and civic nature. Moreover, I was already a member of the editorial board of the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, and from that position I was able to guarantee that unique work would include a major entry on Carpatho-Rusyns as a distinct people within the American mosaic.

As for my personal contribution to the Bicentennial, in 1976 I published the first ever Rusyn-English phrase book, Let’s Speak Rusyn/Bisiduime porus’kŷ. The text was based on the spoken language of Carpatho-Rusyns in the Prešov Region of northeastern Slovakia, specifically in Vŷshna Yablinka, the native village of my wife. Two years later, a second, analogous phrasebook appeared, Let’s Speak Rusyn/Hovorim po-rus’kŷ, based on the spoken language of Carpatho-Rusyns in the Transcarpathian Region (historic Subcarpathian Rus’) of Ukraine, specifically in Voloskoe, the native village of my mother. In this regard, I was inspired by the example of another little-known people and their language—Luxembourgish. The format of both Let’s Speak Rusyn volumes was borrowed from a recently published phrasebook, Sot et op Lëtzebuergisch/Say it in Luxemburgish (laid out in three columns: Luxemburgish/French/English) which exposed foreigners to the little-known language of a sovereign country, Luxembourg, where I had spent much time in the 1960s.

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The Carpatho-Rusyn Movement

11. “And so, what is your native tongue/language?” Illustration by Fedor Vitso from the first edition of the Let’s Speak Rusyn phrasebook (1976).

Always enamored of books which in themselves could justify the existence of something—in this case a people—I decided to compile a holdings catalog of all Carpatho-Rusyn related materials held in Widener Library and the Harvard University Library system in general. I was always fascinated by library card catalogues and could spend hours sifting through the cards as the first step to discovering how much was written about “our people.” Together with my all-purpose assistant at Harvard, Olga Kavochka Mayo, we prepared a catalogue of 1,030 library cards arranged according to 19 subjects. It was published under the title Carpato-Ruthenica at Harvard, initially in 1977, with an expanded second edition in 1983.

***** All the while I was revising and expanding my Princeton doctoral dissertation for publication as a book. It began as a dissertation covering only the interwar decades (1919-1939) when Subcarpathian Rus’ was under Czechoslovak rule. Thanks largely to the advice of the founder of Harvard’s Ukrainian program, Professor Omelian Pritsak, the revised text of what became the book tripled in size, covering the period from the late eighteenth century to the first years of the post-World War II Communist era. I was fortunate to have the significantly expanded text 19

From Nowhere To Somewhere

published in 1978 by Harvard University Press under the title suggested by the publisher, The Shaping of a National Identity: Subcarpathian Rus’, 1848-1948. I say fortunate because the biggest question was where to find funding to publish what became a massive 640-page tome.

Ties with the Carpatho-Rusyn American community—in of all places, the church—saved the day. My colleague Edward Kasinec travelled to Pittsburgh to meet Archbishop Stephen Kocisko of the Byzantine Ruthenian Archeparchy of Pittsburgh and to discuss possible support for The Shaping. I thought this was an unlikely-to-be-successful long-shot, considering that the Byzantine Ruthenian Church did not like to get mixed up in secular nationality controversies which were the very subject of my book.

But even the Ruthenian Greek Catholic hierarchs had been bitten, if indirectly, by the “Roots fever,” embodied in the 1977 television mini-series. The bishops understood the Roots phenomenon as the need to return to more Eastern-rite church practices (including re-installing iconostases) which were reduced in importance or even entirely removed from churches during the 1950s wave of Americanization and Latinization. The Byzantine hierarchs came to believe that in order to survive as a distinct

12. Byzantine Ruthenian Catholic hierarchs signing the agreement with the University of Minnesota. Left to right: Auxiliary Bishop John M. Bilock (Munhall-Pittsburgh), Frank Renkiewicz (Immigration History Research Center), Archbishop Stephen Kocisko (Munhall), Bishop Michael Dudick (Passaic), Bishop Emil J. Mihalik (Parma).

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13. Covers of the original English edition (1978) and second revised Ukrainian edition (2021) of The Shaping of a National Identity.

church within the universal Catholic fold, they needed to emphasize their distinctiveness from Roman-rite Catholic churches. It was in this context that Archbishop Kocisko considered supporting serious scholarly research projects.

Building on my long-term contacts with the University of Minnesota and its recently established Immigration History Research Center, sometime in 1975 Edward Kasinec and I proposed to Archbishop Kocisko that he consider supporting a microfilm project to preserve the rich body of Rusyn-American newspapers and other serial publications dating back to the early 1890s. The Byzantine Ruthenian Archeparchy together with the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington, D.C. provided matching funds to Minnesota’s Immigration History Research Center. The result was the preservation of sixty-two Rusyn-American serial publications (over 800 microfilm reels) that were deposited in four major research libraries in the United States.

No sooner was the microfilm project completed than Archbishop Kocisko proved receptive to giving support to publish my recently completed book, The Shaping of a National Identity: Subcarpathian Rus’, 1848-1948, as another potential source for his flock to learn about and appreciate their ancestral heritage. That included returning to the orig21

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inal church practices of the Eastern rite, something encouraged by the recent deliberations of the Vatican Council II. Hence, to my formal request for financial assistance, the archbishop agreed to purchase 175 copies of the book for $12,000. That was more than enough to pay for the cost of the publication. He then sent those copies to every priest in his Pittsburgh archeparchy as well as to priests in the Ruthenian eparchies of Passaic and Parma. Coming from the head of the Byzantine Ruthenian (Greek) Catholic Church, priests got the message laid out in the book: that Carpatho-Rusyn identity was approved and expected to be remembered.

The Shaping of a National Identity got much more attention and had a greater impact than even we Carpatho-Rusyns would have imagined.

Thanks to the advice and urging of my Harvard colleague Edward Kasinec—not to mention the cooperation of Harvard University Press (where my academic mentor Oscar Handlin was director) and the Ukrainian Research Institute (where I was the publications manager)—The Shaping of a National Identity garnered no less than 55 mostly favorable reviews.

Included among them were several in prestigious journals written by leading scholars in North America (Marc Raeff, Ivan Lysiak Rudnytsky, John-Paul Himka, Keith Hitchins, John S. Reshetar, Geoff Eley) and in several European countries (Emil Niederhauser, Güther Wytrzens, Peter Scheibert, Wolfdieter Bihl, Maciej Kozmiński).

Aside from reviews in professional journals, the Shaping of a National Identity was propagated by the three bishops and many of the clergy of the Byzantine Ruthenian Catholic Church through articles in church newspapers and several book launches held under church auspices.

Somewhat surprising, but pleasantly so, were the reactions of exiled figures who were instrumental in the Ukrainian movement in the European homeland, in particular the prime minister (Julian Revay) and minister of education (Avhustyn Shtefan) of the 1938-1939 autonomous and short-lived independent Carpatho-Ukraine. For both these figures the existence, no matter how brief, of Carpatho-Ukraine was the ultimate proof that Carpatho-Rusyns were Ukrainians.

And yet, at the prestigious Ukrainian Institute in the heart of New York City (diagonally across from the Metropolitan Museum of Art) its then di22

The Carpatho-Rusyn Movement

rector Julian Revay, together with the head of the Carpathian Sich Brotherhood, Stepan Rosokha, organized not one but two book launches for the Ukrainian-American diaspora.

Many patriotic Ukrainian Americans in the audience and beyond were confused—and often angered—by such attention and praise given to an author of a book which they believed argued that Carpatho-Rusyns are not Ukrainians, but a distinct people.

Among the most substantive anal14. Presentation of The Shaping of a Naysis of the book was by the Loyola tional Identity to Julian Revay, director of the Ukrainian Institute, New York University (Chicago) political scienCity (May 1978). tist Vasyl Markus, who published a long review in the leading Ukrainian émigré intellectual journal, Suchasnist, edited at the time by the Columbia University professor emeritus and distinguished Ukrainian linguist and literary critic, George Shevelov.

Professor Shevelov asked me to respond to Markus’s twenty-five-page article which began by describing The Shaping of a National Identity as a “truly rare and significant event in the field of Ukrainian scholarship . . . a monograph solid in breadth, scholarly apparatus, and methodology.”

I always believed that something must be good to warrant serious criticism. And Markus was not sparing in his criticism. In short, his well thought out review put forth the classic Ukrainian understanding of who and what Carpatho-Rusyns were and are—a branch of the Ukrainian nationality. At the request of the Suchasnist editor Shevelov, I wrote a rejoinder that sought to undermine the Ukrainian conception by proposing the theoretical possibility that Carpatho-Rusyns were in the past and could be in the future—should political circumstances in the homeland change—a distinct nationality.

The very topic was always intertwined with the reality that a Carpatho-Rusyn community continued to exist in the United States despite the ban against a Rusyn nationality and language imposed by Communist rul23

From Nowhere To Somewhere

ers in the European homeland after 1945. The editor of the Carpatho-Rusyn American magazine, Patricia Krafcik, gave voice to a wide range of scholars to express their views on the “Rusyn-Ukrainian debate,” including those who could be said to represent differing national views: American (Keith Dyrud, Richard Renoff); Czech (Kevin Hannan); Slovak (Rev. Michael Orthodox); Ukrainian (Bohdan Procko, George Shevelov, Frank Sysyn); and Vojvodinian Rusyn (Lubomir Medieshi). The extensive debate, joined by several Rusyn-American cultural and civic activists (Rev. Ewan Lowig, Orestes Mihaly, John Righetti), went on for two years and certainly helped popularize the book which within a year had to be reprinted.

For many Americans of Carpatho-Rusyn background The Shaping of a National Identity became a kind of Bible, in this case justifying their own existence as a distinct people. Symbolic of the kind of influence it had was revealed to me in an unexpected encounter about a year after the appearance of the book’s first edition.

One day I received a phone call from a person who introduced himself as a surgeon from California carrying out innovative procedures as part of a research fellowship at one of Boston’s world-renowned Harvard-affiliated medical centers. He asked if we could meet to speak about some personal matter. We agreed to a luncheon at the Harvard Faculty Club.

The earnest medical professional (whose name, alas, I’ve forgotten) began by thanking me. “For what?” I asked. “For writing The Shaping of a National Identity.” He had read the book twice and said that finally he was healed of a psychological problem that had haunted him for most of his adult life. He had not known who his ancestors were, who he was, or where he belonged in the greater scheme of things. “Now I am finally cured, knowing that I have an identity—Carpatho Rusyn.”

Always inclined to have some fun, I was tempted to say that I would send him a bill for my services (he did say he had several inconclusive hours with costly psychiatrists). But he seemed just too serious a character to joke with. To be sure, as a young aspiring scholar (just 33 at the time), I was flattered by the California surgeon’s appreciation of my first major book. More importantly, I walked away from our luncheon with a sense of satisfaction that my work on Carpatho-Rusyn topics was relevant in more ways than I could ever imagine.

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4

Having created a few scholarly and popular volumes as well as research tools for the serious study of Carpatho-Rusyns, the question arose as to how to get the message contained in our publications into the hands of our people. The Foundation we created at Concord in 1975 had as its main goal to collect funds (following the Ukrainian example at Harvard), in order to create a Chair (endowed professorship) of Carpatho-Rusyn Studies at some American university. That goal was laudable, but unrealistic. Carpatho-Rusyn Americans were clearly not Jewish Americans, Armenian American, or Ukrainian Americans, all known for their philanthropic generosity. Whereas Americans of Carpatho-Rusyn background might donate money to their respective churches, they were less likely to contribute to secular organizations and certainly not to scholarly endeavors related to their ostensible ancestral heritage. Such ideas were simply beyond their understanding.

As for the Carpatho-Ruthenian Studies Foundation, its board, chaired

by Andrew Perejda, met several times throughout 1976 and even launched a campaign to encourage the Greek Catholic Union to provide on-going grants. When that failed, the Foundation within a year or so came to an end in a kind of still-born death. While Father Veselenak continued to build his Carpatho-Rusyn Library at Butler’s Benedictine Monastery, creating an endowed university professorship was well beyond the potential of the Rusyn-American community in the 1970s. We needed another solution to propagate our message in the hope that it would help create an entirely new generation of conscious Carpatho-Rusyn Americans. That solution was found in what became known as the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center.

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***** The creation of a research center was in large part made possible by the appearance on the scene of a new person, Orestes Mihaly. Unexpectedly, it was he who found me. In the summer of the Bicentennial Year 1976, I received a letter from Mihaly, who told me of his having read my long article on Carpatho-Rusyn historiography in the Austrian History Yearbook and my other early piece in the Slavic Review about the incorporation of Subcarpathian Rus’ into Czechoslovakia. That began a period of frequent correspondence lasting two years until we finally met in person in the early fall of 1978.

Orestes was the son of Joseph Mihaly, a Greek Catholic seminarian who had completed his studies in 1929, got married (according to Eastern-rite Catholic tradition) but was denied ordination to the priesthood because the Ruthenian Greek Catholic bishop at the time, Basil Takach, had finally decided to abide by the decades-long celibacy requirement for candidates to the priesthood reiterated by the Vatican that very same year. As a result of the enforcement of celibacy, several priests led by Father Orestes Chornock at the Mihaly family’s Bridgeport, Connecticut parish left the jurisdiction of the Ruthenian Greek Catholic bishop and founded what they described as the “authentic” Greek Catholic Church, which retained the tradition of a married clergy and eventually came under the authority of the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. Orestes was raised in this institution, initially called the Carpatho-Russian Orthodox (i.e., authentic) Greek Catholic Diocese of America, that was eventually based in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.

As the son of a priest in this new Orthodox diocese, Orestes became active in the church’s youth organization, and although its members called themselves Carpatho-Russians, Orestes always seemed aware that this people and his ancestral heritage were Carpatho-Rusyn, not Russian.

Fortunately for us, by the time I met Orestes Mihaly in the mid-1970s, he was the assistant attorney general of the State of New York with offices in what was the former World Trade Center. Orest’s Carpatho-Rusyn inclinations were reinforced by his utterly charming and spirited wife, Katie, a relatively recent immigrant from the Carpatho-Rusyn village of 26

The Carpatho-Rusyn Movement

Litmanova in northeastern Slovakia.

Both Orestes and wife Katie became staunch supporters of my work on behalf of Carpatho-Rusyns. We were all proud of him as a Carpatho-Rusyn American success story, whose position as New York State’s Assistant Attorney General turned out to have practical advantages for our cause.

***** The other person I met in New York City was Patricia Krafcik, the 15. Orestes Mihaly, Esq., New York State very same Indiana University unAttorney General’s Office (1980s). dergraduate who I had encountered briefly at the Mt. Macrina Conference back in 1975. She was by now a graduate student in the Slavic Department at Columbia University, where during the 1976-1977 academic year I was working once a week as a consultant to the Bakhmetieff Archive of Russian Culture. I finally (really) met Pat Krafcik in person (through the good offices of the Columbia professor of Slovene background Rado Lenček). In weekly meetings, I proposed to Pat the idea of creating an organization with rather practical goals: to distribute at reasonable cost existing and whatever new English-language publications about Carpatho-Rusyns that I and others had recently published.

Because there was no one center to serve the Carpatho-Rusyn American community, which was spread out across the United States, we decided to create a kind of virtual (avant la lettre) organization which would have no staff or space other than the home of one person who would fulfill book orders that he or she received in the mail. That person would have to be recompensed financially unless he or she would be willing to carry out the task of distribution on a pro bono basis.

This meant finding an American of Carpatho-Rusyn background who would feel that he or she was contributing to the preservation and propagation of their own ancestral culture by working for our organization.

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In the end, I hit on the idea of paying what we called the business manager ten percent of the gross sales figure of books sold each month. This was not much financial recompense, considering the amount of work involved. But at least it was something.

An even greater cost for the book distribution organization that we had in mind was advertising and postage costs for sending out books.

Somehow, I learned about a substantial reduction in postage that the U.S. government allowed for non-profit organizations. Here stepped in Orestes Mihaly. Certainly, New York State’s assistant attorney general could take care of this matter—if not directly, then through one of his many lawyer friends.

Orestes acted quickly, first creating a corporation for which he wrote the statute. While working on the incorporation documents, he telephoned one day to ask what we should call the organization—and that he needed to know right away. I paused for a moment and then responded without much forethought: the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center. That name has stuck for an organization which, as of this writing, is less than a decade away from being half a century old.

As a corporation, Orestes said we needed at least three or four officers, and that these should preferably be “within the family.” He simply assumed that I would be president and preferably treasurer as well. He, or I, then proposed my mother Anna Lengyel Magocsi as vice-president and Pat Krafcik as secretary. It was with that slate that we operated until my mother died two decades later in 1998 and was replaced as vice-president by Professor Elaine Rusinko. Still all in the family, so to speak, although not “blood” family.

Because Orestes was based in New York, the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center was incorporated in that state, where it still has its “official” address. Its first seat of actual operations, however, was in neighboring New Jersey, specifically at my mother’s house in Fairview, my boyhood home atop the Palisades, the series of high cliffs looking out onto New York City (Manhattan). My mother served as the first business manager, carrying books to the post office every day until the last few months of her life.

The next step was to become a not-for-profit educational organiza28

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tion and obtain the coveted 501c(3) Internal Revenue Service status. The center would have to file each year but not pay taxes. The 501c(3) status also allowed us to obtain reduced postage rates. This was a major achievement, again carried out by Orestes, since the vast majority of our center’s work was advertising via flyers and fulfilling book orders sent to customers via the post office. Orestes may have not been an officer of the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center (C-RRC)—for reasons of conflict of interest he could not be—but he remained for the first quarter-century of its existence our trusted legal advisor and eventually major donor.

Things indeed remained in the family and were done mostly on a voluntary basis. No officer was ever paid, and even crucial services like submitting annual tax returns were done gratis for at least two decades by another of Orestes’s friends, an accountant (and travel agent) of Carpatho-Rusyn background, Nick Benyo, based in the Lemko-Rusyn community of Yonkers, New York.

***** I tried to keep C-RRC operations as simple as possible. We would send out flyers advertising a book three or four times a year. The interested customer would tear off the bottom of the order form and enclose a check.

Again, to make things simple, postage and tax were included in the selling price. Upon receipt of a check, the order would be filled and usually sent out the same day. Put another way: no check, no book. The reason for such a policy was simple. We could not be in the business of issuing invoices and waiting for—or chasing down—payment. As a result of this straightforward order fulfillment policy, a customer usually recieved his or her book within a week—a remarkably quick turnaround in those days.

And who were our customers? If, in their efforts to create a new society, the Soviet Union became wedded to “The Plan,” we at the C-RRC became wedded to “The List.” As an American, I had learned by instinct that the market, not the product, was crucial for any business and even non-business venture. If done properly, one could sell almost anything, provided one had a market. Our potential market consisted primarily of Americans of Carpatho-Rusyn background. Hence, we needed to find— or actually create and maintain—a mailing list of all actual or potential 29

From Nowhere To Somewhere

16. First advertising flyer of the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center (1979).

Carpatho-Rusyn Americans. The List became the alpha and omega of our operations. In a real sense it guaranteed the very existence of the C-RRC. Without The List we wouldn’t exist.

I seem to remember that our initial mailing list put together in 1978 had about 800 names. We probably found these names and addresses 30

The Carpatho-Rusyn Movement

17. Sample page of the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center Master Mailing List.

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in directories of priests and fraternal organizations to which were added university colleagues who specialized in East-Central European and Soviet studies. Within five years or so The List had grown to about six thousand names, which made it quite expensive to send out an advertising flyer to each address four times a year.

I believed then and still today, however, that the value of The List was not simply related to the number of books sold. Even if a high percentage of persons on The List did not order any books, the fact that they received a flyer from the C-RRC four times a year sent a message that Carpatho-Rusyns existed and that they were not going away.

We even tried to have some fun in our advertising efforts. I forgot from where I got the inspiration, but for our first catalogue of available publications, we produced a Carpathian passport. The handsome green cover had a hole toward the top to reveal the “passport number,” while each page inside contained a description of a publication for sale. The passport was certainly handsome, but its production taught me an important lesson, actually a very costly one. The greatest cost was producing that hole since a special die had to be made to cut through the cover. Perfection was an admirable goal, but sometimes it was just too expensive.

***** Although the C-RRC was a not-for-profit educational institution, it had to survive and could do so only by selling books. My principle was to price our books as low as possible so that as many of our people as possible could get access to them.

I developed a rather simple business formula, based on selling at least 100 copies of a given publication. Our costs for a given title were: (1) the books we purchased from a publisher, or printing costs should the C-RRC be the publisher (not the preferred option); (2) advertising; (3) packaging materials; and (4) postage to mail them. With these four cost elements in mind, I could then come up with the list price for a given book.

Typically, we would initially purchase from a publisher 200 copies. If the C-RRC was the publisher, we would have to print minimally 750 copies, since in those days anything less would still cost the equivalent 32

The Carpatho-Rusyn Movement

of 750 copies. For example, if we were able to purchase from a publisher 200 books at seven dollars per copy, our “production” costs would be $1,400 plus $900 for advertising for a total of $2,300. In order to recoup our costs, assuming we would sell the minimum 100 copies, the list price was set at $23.00. If we sold more than 100 copies—and we certainly sold many more copies of each title in those early years—that would be pure profit for the “non-profit” C-RRC. Whatever profit we did make was used to cover the costs of new publications, including bibliog18. First Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center Publications Catalogue (1979). raphies which were of scholarly importance but did not sell well. As time went on, the C-RRC also used its profits to help sponsor conferences, provide travel grants and scholarships to scholars and cultural activists, and, eventually, to send money to trouble spots in the European homeland, such as the Vojvodinian Rusyn community during Yugoslavia’s civil war in the mid-1990s.

As president and treasurer of the C-RRC, I was always—and still am— concerned with our organization’s financial situation. Remarkably, in the entire 40-year plus existence of the C-RRC, only one year did we finish in the red. We became the envy of many other American ethnic organizations whose leaders simply could not understand how we were able to do what we did. True, none of us were paid, and I as well as Pat Krafcik willingly devoted thousands of hours of our time. But the true secret of our success—our literal bread and butter—was The List of our customers’ names and addresses.

Whenever I tried to explain to post-1989 cultural activists in Europe how the C-RRC functioned and how we were proud of our book sales, they would often frown and sarcastically dismiss what they considered our American preoccupation with financial profit. Work for the national 33

From Nowhere To Somewhere

movement should be motivated by patriotic love for one’s people, not any profit margin. Of course, our fellow European activists could take the moral high ground, because (excepting Ukraine) their organizations were able to survive through grants from the state, while the C-RRC never received anything from a U.S. government body. I also resented the fact that while Carpatho-Rusyn organizations in Europe did publish important books, no one was concerned with sales, so that most of the printed books ended up unsold and growing moldy in some dark warehouse. Yes, the C-RRC was and would always be concerned with sales not because of profit, but for its own financial survival and ability to get the Carpatho-Rusyn message to the people.

***** The most popular items in those early years of the C-RRC reflected what Carpatho-Rusyn American readers wanted to know most—the language and historical background of their ancestral culture. Aside from a set of cassette tapes of the lectures from the 1975 Mount Macrina seminar, we were able to sell thousands of copies of two versions (Prešov Region and Transcarpathian) of the Let’s Speak Rusyn phrasebook and nearly 2,000 copies of what some Carpatho-Rusyn Americans considered their second Bible, the hefty volume, The Shaping of a National Identity, published in 1978 by Harvard University Press.

The Carpathian Passport catalogue served yet another unintended function—to needle the Czechoslovak border guards and security services. On one of our family trips to Communist Czechoslovakia, I brought several copies of our center’s Carpathian Passport to show Ukrainian-oriented cultural activists with whom I interacted in that country. On the border as we were entering the country, one of the custom officials came upon the Carpathian Passport as well as a mirror image Ukraine Passport that I had created for the Harvard Ukrainian publication program of which I was the founding managing editor.

***** Visiting the Carpathian homeland during the Communist era was far from fun. To get a better flavor for what things were like in those 34

The Carpatho-Rusyn Movement

days, I would share with you, the reader, an excerpt from the third book (volume) of my unpublished memoirs. The setting has to do with the Czechoslovak customs and border police, who were convinced that they had discovered a stash of fake passports. I had a wonderful internal laugh at their consternation until they finally realized these “counterfeit documents” were only book catalogues.

After the joys of civilized Hungary, we were off to fulfill familial duties in less inspiring Communist Czechoslovakia. We crossed the Hungarian-Czechoslovak border, went through the standard hour or so police and customs procedures, drove on through Košice, and then spent the night at [my wife] Maria’s sister’s house south of Prešov. The following morning, we set off for our final destination, Maria’s village, with a stop at Humenné to register our temporary residence in Vŷshna Yablinka.

This second return [1973] to Czechoslovakia seemed even better than the first. Again, there was the initial euphoria of the daughter from afar returning home. As one approaches Vŷshna Yablinka there is an open lowland that extends for about a kilometer. That is where the villagers were allotted strips of land to grow their vegetables and oats. As our van drove up the straight dirt road to the village, we looked to the left to see if perhaps Maria’s mother was tending her field. Sure enough, she emerged from the vegetation, saw our van, and as in some movie scene came running toward us as we jumped out of the vehicle. She showered Maria and our one-year-old baby Cindy with kisses all over their faces, while she bowed almost to her knees, took both my hands, and kissed them in gratitude for having returned as promised. Here were the emotional extremes of the Slavic soul incarnate.

The day after our arrival turned out to be one of those relatively rare warm sunny days in the mountains. Mother and father were sawing firewood on a wooden trestle in the courtyard, while Maria had spread out a blanket on the grass in the middle of which she placed a basin of warm water to bathe baby Cindy. Some artist could very well have relished this idyllic Currier and Ives scene. I was inside the house doing some reading when I was called out to the courtyard.

Two black cars had stopped on the road before the house, and three or four men were walking up the driveway. The grandparents stopped their sawing and were struck silent. One of the visitors asked Maria to call for 35

From Nowhere To Somewhere

her husband. I came out of the house and was asked if I might accompany them for a talk. I only asked for how long. They replied for an hour or so. I complied, returned to the house to get dressed properly, then came back out to be escorted down the driveway to the waiting cars. Baby Cindy started to wail, tears streamed down grandmother’s cheeks, grandfather remained sullenly stern and stiff-lipped. They remembered how in the past cars had come to pick up residents. They feared the worst.

I recall being slightly apprehensive, but more with a sense of curiosity as to how this scenario was to play out. We must have driven about 45 minutes to the town of Svidník. I cannot remember where we sat, probably in a secure room in the town’s only hotel. The conversation lasted about an hour and touched primarily on biographical data about me, what I did previously in Czechoslovakia when doing research, and what I was doing now in my job at Harvard. They asked if I would be willing to meet again whenever I was in Czechoslovakia. I must have told them that it was their country and that, as a visitor, I am obliged to abide by local rules and customs.

I was a bit firmer in criticizing their manner of finding me. I told them that there was no need to arrive “in force” with two classic, black, secret-police cars visible to everyone in the village as they stopped in front of the Chuvan household. They could quite easily have called for me to go down to the town hall. Of course, common courtesy would never cross the minds of internal security police, certainly not from the Communist world. They did, however, agree with my criticism and said it would not happen again. Surprisingly, they kept their word.

At the same time, they made it clear that non-cooperation would have consequences. After our first encounter the year before, a top secret (prísne tajné) internal report from the Košice agents proposed that “at the very beginning of the [next] conversation he [Magocsi] will be told that he is dealing with state internal security officials. In the event that he will not be willing to deal with us, he will be told that his activity with the security services in Czechoslovakia will be made known and that any further visits to Czechoslovakia will not be permitted.”

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19. The gazda and gazdŷnia of the Chuvan household, Vŷshna Yablinka, Czechoslovakia (September 1972).

And so, for the next six summers until the very end of the 1970s, each time we visited Czechoslovakia I was called in for a conversation. Each year the conversations seemed to get longer and longer, lasting at times up to three or four hours. They thought they were on the way of having a cooperative informant from the United States, but they were visibly upset in the summer of 1974 when I returned after having organized a few months earlier a well-publicized conference at Harvard commemorating Czechoslovakia’s founding president, Tomáš G. Masaryk. And why did I send a personal invitation to Communist Czechoslovakia’s ambassador to the United States? “Why not?” I answered. Masaryk was a great humanist and political leader, probably the best known of any twentieth-century figure from Czechoslovakia.

We spent the next two hours debating the meaning of democracy in the West and in Communist lands and why certain figures from the historical past should or should not be lauded. I told them how terrible it was that younger generations in Communist Czechoslovakia learned nothing in school about their country’s most respected leader in the outside world. We obviously did not then, or ever, see eye to eye on this issue. They realized quickly it was not worth talking about present-day Czechoslovak politics or trying to convince me otherwise.

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From Nowhere To Somewhere

I also made clear my views on Czechoslovakia’s nationality policies and their country’s denial—following the Soviet model—that Carpatho-Rusyns do not exist and that all “former” Rusyns were Ukrainians.

They were not about to waste their time on that issue, because their real interests were elsewhere. Those interests concerned two topics: my interactions with Ukrainian cultural activists in eastern Slovakia; and information about Ukrainian nationalist organizations in the United States.

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5

Publishing books to promote the Carpatho-Rusyn revival in America was an important activity. Pat Krafcik and I soon realized, however, that we needed something else to provoke interest among our people in their ancestral culture. That something else was a quarterly newsletter which we launched in 1978, the very year in which the C-RRC was incorporated. The eight-page quarterly, actually with six pages of text, was called the Carpatho-Rusyn American. Pat Krafcik became the editor, a post she held for most of the publication’s twenty-year existence. Interestingly, we were able to launch the first year’s publication of the Carpatho-Rusyn American because the Byzantine Ruthenian Bishop of Passaic, Michael Dudick, paid in advance for 175 subscriptions for all priests in the Metropolitan Province’s three eparchies (Passaic, Pittsburgh, and Parma). I believe Bishop Dudick repeated the pre-paid bulk subscription for a second year. Finding subscribers is always the bane of any serial publication, and this was certainly the case for a shoestring (albeit successful) organization like the C-RRC. On average we had only 450 paid subscribers, yet maintaining even that low figure was a challenge.

Our goal was to provide Carpatho-Rusyn American subscribers (which included a good number of research libraries in the United States and western Europe) reader-friendly but accurate articles on various aspects of Carpatho-Rusyn culture and history. Among the most popular featured columns was the editorial and a page devoted to some famous Carpatho-Rusyn whether in Europe or North America. This nation-building “portrait-gallery”—to quote the Polish sociologist Jacek Nowak, who later analyzed the Carpatho-Rusyn American in some detail—began with Aleksander Dukhnovych, the nineteenth-century “national awakener” 39

From Nowhere To Somewhere

who coined the national motto: Ya Rusyn bŷl, yesm i budu (I Was, Am, and Will Remain a Rusyn). Among the 80 biographical sketches that appeared in the quarterly was one on Andy Warhol, the first time he was presented in any publication as of Carpatho-Rusyn background—and with his correct birthdate and place, which until then no one knew. After all, Andy was, by choice, “from nowhere.” Pat Krafcik and I had a clear goal: to try to help Americans of 20. First issue of the Carpatho-Rusyn Carpatho-Rusyn background learn American (1978). something about their ancestral culture (through the only language they could understand—English) and thereby to develop pride in themselves for having found an identity. In other words, our goal was to overcome the basic Carpatho-Rusyn national characteristic, a debilitating sense of inferiority.

***** Before we could launch the Carpatho-Rusyn American, Pat and I had to sort out certain conceptual and editorial issues. First was the basic question: what to call “our people” in the English language? At least since the 1930s, the most widespread designations were Carpatho-Russian, Carpatho-Ruthenian, or simply Ruthenian and in some cases Rusyn (spelled Rusin). The first ethnonym, Carpatho-Russian, we eliminated for the simple fact that our people were not Russians. The second, Carpatho-Ruthenian, was problematic because those among our people who were of Orthodox religion associated Ruthenian with Byzantine/Greek Catholics. Hence, the ethnonym Rusyn seemed the best option, even though one could not find that word in any English-language dictionary in those years. “So what,” I argued. All languages evolve and adopt new words. Let’s make Rusyn a “new” English word. Use it often enough and it will be adopted by others—and it has!

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The term Rusyn also had the advantage of being used by the “national awakener,” Aleksander Dukhnovych, in the national credo he created for our people. But to use it alone raised problems because our Ukrainian friends, especially from Galicia, had also originally called themselves Rusyns. That led to their spurious argument that Rusyn was the older name for Ukrainian (they conveniently overlooked the fact that in older documents Belarusans were also called Rusyns), and therefore all Rusyns were really Ukrainians.

In order to overcome the Rusyn-equals-Ukrainian-equation, we decided on Carpatho-Rusyn as the ethnonym most appropriate for our people. It was geographically specific, alluding to the ancestral homeland as being in the Carpathian Mountains and not elsewhere. The term also had legitimacy, having been used by another nineteenth-century national activist, Mykhaïl Luchkai, as the title for his monumental six-volume Historia Carpato-Ruthenorum (A History of Carpatho-Rusyns, completed in the 1840s).

Yet there was still another problem—spelling. In early twentieth-century immigrant publications, the form Rusin was common, which in effect reflected the Slovak and Czech manner of rendering in the Roman alphabet the Cyrillic original Русин.

Both the Library of Congress and International transliteration systems, however, rendered the Cyrillic letter и as у; hence Rusyn. Some Rusyn-American activists wanted to stay with the spelling Rusin—this became a fetish for Jerry Jumba and Larry Goga—since Rusyn was the way Ukrainians rendered their ancestral name when writing in English.

To my mind, the form Rusin had a more serious problem. Many English readers might think they were encountering a typographical error and conclude that Rusin was a spelling “mistake” which should be corrected to read: Russian. The form Rusyn might look strange, but it clearly could not be mistaken for Russian. And so, we opted for the ethnonym Carpatho-Rusyn.

But what about the group’s ancestral homeland in Europe? Where was it and what should it be called? Some older English-language maps used the terms Carpatho-Russia, Carpatho-Ruthenia, or simply Ruthenia (in very rare cases Rusinia). All these terms, however, referred to only one 41

From Nowhere To Somewhere

part of the historic territory where Carpatho-Rusyns lived—the land officially called Subcarpathian Rus’ that was joined to Czechoslovakia as its eastern province in 1919.

We decided upon Carpathian Rus’ as the name to use when describing the historic European homeland. Initially, we defined that homeland’s territory in a rather limited way, reflecting at the time my own rather myopic view and understanding. Our focus was on Subcarpathian Rus’ (Transcarpathia in present-day Ukraine) and the Prešov Region in present-day Slovakia from where the largest percentage of Rusyn-American immigrants came. In other words, we initially left out the Lemko Region north of the Carpathians in present-day Poland. We were criticized by several Carpatho-Rusyn American readers for omitting Lemkos from the Carpatho-Rusyn family. This mistake on my part was only corrected after my first visits to the Lemko Region in 1985 and 1986.

Within a year after that visit, the Carpatho-Rusyn American devoted four of its issues to the Lemko Region, including a historical survey in which I made it clear that Lemkos were Carpatho-Rusyns. To drive the point home, every subsequent back cover of the Carpatho-Rusyn American included what became an iconic Carpatho-Rusyn visual badge—a map of the homeland with boundaries of present-day states depicted over the shaded contours of historic Carpathian Rus’ that encompassed the Prešov Region, Subcarpathian Rus’, and the Maramorosh Region on the southern slopes of the mountains and the Lemko Region on its northern slopes.

***** Finally, we had to decide upon which transliteration system to render Cyrillic words in our English-language publication, the Carpatho-Rusyn American. The editor Patricia Krafcik, who by then had received her Ph.D. from Columbia University, was a trained Slavicist and proponent of the “more scholarly” International System which provided only one Roman letter for one Cyrillic letter, instead of the Library of Congress System with its seemingly more cumbersome multiple Roman letters for some Cyrillic letters (for example, ch for ч instead of the International System č). The problem was that the International System, which basi42

The Carpatho-Rusyn Movement

21. Iconic Homeland Map on the back cover of the Carpatho-Rusyn American.

cally reflected the Czech variant of the Roman alphabet, used “accented” letters, especially the haček (č, š, šč), which meant nothing to an English-language reader. By that time, I was fluent in Czech, so that the “accents” (actually distinct Czech letters, including ch for the Cyrillic х) did not really bother me. I, therefore, went along with Pat’s transliteration decision, although in retrospect I came to learn that it was a tactical mistake.

We were consistent, however, in both nomenclature and transliterations, and we were driven—almost crazed—to produce an error-free English text. To achieve this, Pat and I spent hours on the phone going over—line by line, phrase by phrase, word by word—every issue of the Carpatho-Rusyn American. Tedious work, indeed. But Pat Krafcik was a wonderful editorial and intellectual partner from whom I learned much.

After all, we were both sacrificing innumerable hours of our time for “the cause”—spreading national-identity awareness among our fellow Carpatho-Rusyn Americans and, as important, conveying to our professional colleagues as well as government officials and the wider American media that Carpatho-Rusyns exist.

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6

Among the cardinal principles that drove what we could now consider a Carpatho-Rusyn revival in the United States was the conviction that the traditional Byzantine Greek Catholic and Orthodox churches and related secular organizations (brotherhoods/fraternals) could not be relied upon to take the lead, or even participate in, ethnic consciousness-raising work. At best we hoped they would remain neutral, not oppose what we were doing, and at times maybe even give support to certain specific projects we proposed to them. This is more or less what happened during the last decades of the twentieth century, with one important caveat.

Clerical and individual members associated with the Byzantine Ruthenian (Greek) Catholic Church actually provided more support than we ever expected.

The other cardinal principle behind the work of the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center (C-RRC) was that we did not expect much from the older generations (except to buy books), and instead placed our hopes in younger people who were the vanguard of the future. Not that we ourselves were all that old. At the time the C-RRC came into being I (and Edward Kasinec) had not yet reached 40, while Patricia Krafcik was younger still. But we wanted even younger people to become engaged in the movement—and several did. Among them were Jerry Jumba and John Righetti from the Pittsburgh area, and Keith Koshute and Richard Custer from other parts of Pennsylvania. Somewhat older were Larry Goga, the Korean War veteran and Minneapolis police detective who, together with John Halushka, founded the Rusin Association of Minnesota, and Nicholas Nagrant, who established a Carpatho-Rusyn folk ensemble based in Michigan.

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22. Larry Goga (left) and John Halushka (right) of the Rusin Association of Minnesota, Minneapolis (1994).

Folk ensembles seemed to be the preferred activity of several of these younger activists. In Pittsburgh there existed the Slavjane Ensemble directed by Jack Poloka. Although Jack was partially of Carpatho-Rusyn background, he seemed more interested in promoting Croatian (his mother’s heritage) and South Slavic folklore driven by music played on the tamburitza and circle dances. I was particularly turned off by this approach, which was far from the temperamental czardas and lyrical waltz melodies that formed the basis of traditional Carpatho-Rusyn folk music and dance. The Slavjane Ensemble did, however, play a very important role in creating elementary, junior, and senior-level dance groups. This approach attracted very young children with the goal of inspiring them to rise further up the dance ensemble ladder, and eventually reach the senior level. Among those who rose to the top in this fashion was Jack Poloka’s son, Dean, who at the outset of the twenty-first century became head choreographer of the Slavjane Ensemble and who managed to transform the troupe into a Carpatho-Rusyn ensemble as a result of his own learning experience with the professional Carpatho-Rusyn PULS folk dance company in Prešov, Slovakia.

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7

Through the C-RRC, I was successful in getting young Rusyn-American cultural activists to the homeland at a time when it was still under Communist rule. Among the two youngest and talented Rusyn-American activists in the late 1970s and 1980s were Jerry Jumba, who at the time worked with the Slavjane Ensemble, and John Righetti, who founded and directed the Carpathian Dancers of Monessen, Pennsylvania. Both Jerry and John were initially dependent on folkloric memories handed down by immigrants from pre-World War I days. By the post-World War II decades, however, Americanization had long taken hold. Consequently, whatever folk music and cultural traditions that were remembered were little more than watered-down, bastardized versions that were far from authentic examples of Carpatho-Rusyn culture. I was determined to get these young enthusiasts to the European homeland in order to learn “real” Carpatho-Rusyn songs and dances. That, of course, was easier said than done during the height of the Cold War.

***** Fortunately, after coming to the University of Toronto in 1980 and holding the professorial Chair of Ukrainian Studies, I got involved in hosting visiting scholars and cultural figures from Soviet Ukraine. Several years earlier the Soviet regime had set up the Ukraina Society based in Kyiv. Its goal was to foster cultural relations with Ukrainians abroad, in particular those relatively few who were Communists or more often leftist-leaning “fellow-travellers,” that is Americans who accepted the existence of the Soviet Union and its Soviet Ukrainian republic. The deputy head of the Ukraina Society at the time, Stanislav Lazebnyk, was commissioned by the 46

The Carpatho-Rusyn Movement

23. Jerry Jumba (left) and John Righetti (right) in Uzhhorod, Ukraine as reported in Soviet Ukraine’s newspaper for its diaspora, News from Ukraine (November 1983).

Soviet authorities to cultivate relations with the allegedly neutral (so they thought) professor from Toronto, Paul Robert Magocsi.

I used the outreach to Canada’s Ukrainian diaspora to promote my Carpatho-Rusyn agenda. If Soviet Ukraine was willing to host Ukrainian-American and Ukrainian-Canadian cultural activists, why not host Rusyn-American activists? The Soviets were well aware that there were distinct Carpatho-Rusyn communities in the United States, even though they classified them as older, “not-yet-conscious members” of the larger Ukrainian world.

My contacts with Lazebnyk and the Ukraina Society continued to increase throughout the 1980s. They arranged an invitation for me to speak 47

From Nowhere To Somewhere

at the University of Uzhhorod (hosted by the leading local historian Ivan M. Hranchak); they found and sent books about “Carpatho-Ukrainians” that I requested; and they supplied several popular articles for publication in the Carpatho-Rusyn American. As for the articles, most were mediocre Soviet-style propaganda pieces, although we did publish a few after heavy editing.

The high point of cooperation came in 1983 when the Ukraina Society agreed to accept the two candidates that I had proposed, Jerry Jumba and John Righetti, to study Carpatho-Rusyn folk culture. Lazebnyk intended to send our young Carpatho-Rusyn activists not to the Transcarpathian homeland but rather to Kyiv. The Ukraina Society would bring folk musicians and the famed choreographer of the Transcarpathian Folk Ensemble, Klara Balog, to teach Jerry and John in Kyiv. I said no, since the point was for them to experience Carpatho-Rusyn life not only in Transcarpathia’s capital Uzhhorod but in the region’s Rusyn-inhabited villages. In the end, the Ukraina Society relented, so that sometime in 1983, well before the collapse of the Soviet Union, our two young Carpatho-Rusyn Americans were off to Soviet Transcarpathia. It was an experience they never forgot, one that inspired them to further work on behalf of the Carpatho-Rusyn movement in America—Jerry in performance on his accordion at numerous social gatherings as well as creator of a program for church cantors; John as founding president of the Carpatho-Rusyn Society and indefatigable promoter of Carpatho-Rusyn history and culture at lecture appearances throughout the United States.

Although I always spoke of them as the younger generation, both Jumba and Righetti were only six or seven years younger than me. The truly next generation consisted of individuals like Richard Custer, who said he was awakened to his ancestral heritage when, as a young school student, he read about “his people” in my long entry on what for him was the authoritative Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups. I found out later that someone (the suspicion was the Byzantine Catholic Archbishop Kocisko) reproduced the entry in the form of a separate brochure and distributed it to thousands of Carpatho-Rusyn Americans. As an amateur historian, Rich Custer himself became a walking encyclopedia of all Carpatho-Rusyn communities in Pennsylvania and employed his computer technology skills as founding editor of the Carpatho-Rusyn Society’s quarterly, The New Rusyn Times, which effectively was the successor to the Carpatho-Rusyn American.

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24. Reprint of the entry on Carpatho-Rusyns from the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups.

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8

My departure from Harvard—with the prestige that it carried when I appeared in public on behalf of Carpatho-Rusyn matters—and my arrival in August 1980 at the University of Toronto launched a new phase of activity on behalf of our people. On the one hand, I was no longer in the United States, where the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center and all its activity was based. On the other hand, I was an associate and soon full professor, holding an endowed chair at a prestigious university (at least in Canada). This meant that I had financial and other means at my disposal to enhance further our Carpatho-Rusyn agenda.

One had to be judiciously or diplomatically careful, however. After all, I was holder of the Chair of Ukrainian, not Carpatho-Rusyn, Studies. Quite naturally, I was expected to promote the study of the history of Ukraine. In fact, I felt a moral obligation to those who were paying my adequate salary to do just that. From the outset of my arrival at the University of Toronto I considered myself a professional Ukrainianist—a historian of Ukraine. During the first three decades at the Toronto Chair, I only taught courses dealing with Ukraine, and I studiously avoided doing anything in public (at least in Toronto) that was connected with Carpatho-Rusyns.

That was the modus vivendi I maintained during the 9 to 5 work week, so to speak. But on the weekends, I was free to do what I wished. In effect, I limited my Carpatho-Rusyn activity to Saturdays, in particular the hours of 9:00 am to 2:00 pm, before going home for a late lunch. During those four to five hours each week, I coordinated the advertising and book distribution work of the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center and, at least one Saturday each month, spent extensive hours on the phone 50

The Carpatho-Rusyn Movement

with Pat Krafcik planning and editing the next issue of the quarterly Carpatho-Rusyn American. For all intents and purposes, I was two distinct persons in one: a Ukrainianist five days of the week; a Carpatho-Rusyn activist on Saturdays. Everyone in the Rusyn-American community knew that if they needed to reach me, they could be sure to find me on those “sacred” Saturday mornings.

***** Toronto, and for that matter Canada, had no Carpatho-Rusyn community. It is true that perhaps as many as 20,000 Canadians could theoretically claim a Carpatho-Rusyn ancestor, whether a parent or grandparent who emigrated, mostly from the Lemko Region in what was then Poland, in the late 1920s. Ironically, the Lemko Association (Soiuz), based in Cleveland, Ohio from 1930 and in Yonkers, New York from 1939, was actually founded in 1929 in Winnipeg, Manitoba. There were two branches of that society in Ontario—Hamilton and Toronto—but by the time I arrived in 1980 only the Toronto branch still existed, and even that existence took on a somewhat strange reconfiguration.

Ironically, the very first person to contact me after settling in Toronto was Michael Lucas (pronounced: Lukach). I had actually heard of him from my wife’s cousin living in Toronto, Yolanda Hall, who was his goddaughter. I actually do not know how such a religious status as godfather could have been held by someone like Lukach, who was an aggressive atheist and true believing Communist.

Within a week or so after our arrival in Toronto on August 1, 1980 Lukach invited me out to luncheon at a Hungarian restaurant near the corner of Yonge and Bloor Streets, 25. Michael Lukach presenting the very heart of Toronto. He was a memorial wreath to fallen Red pleasant enough, but anxious to Army soldiers, Uzhhorod, Soviet share with me his convictions as a Transcarpathia (1963).

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loyal supporter of Communist Czechoslovakia and most especially the “glorious” worker’s state, the Soviet Union. His father, Vasyl, by 1980 quite elderly, was a high-ranking member of the Communist party of Canada and a frequent honored guest of the Communist authorities whenever he visited Czechoslovakia both before and after the Prague Spring of 1968. Both father Vasyl and son Michael hated that glorious phenomenon, which they characterized as a Western imperialist ploy to overthrow socialism. Alas, I was subjected to this babble from the very first person I met after coming to Toronto.

The greatest irony in all this was that father Vasyl as well as son Michael were born in Vyšná Jablonka (Rusyn: Vŷshna Yablonka), my wife Maria’s native Carpatho-Rusyn village in far northeastern Slovakia. I knew this from attending services in the village’s Orthodox church, where we were married and where the devout Christian church cantor (diak) was yet another Lukach, the brother of the Communist Vasyl in Canada. Worse still—at least from my wife Maria’s perspective—was that Michael Lukach claimed that they were relatives, which Maria adamantly denied, especially since she detested anything to do with Communists and Soviet sympathizers.

And Michael Lukach was certainly that! A graphic designer by profession and musician by avocation, while he was still a young man during World War II, he organized several rather successful “Carpatho-Russian” concerts—even in Massey Hall, Toronto’s equivalent of Carnegie Hall— to raise funds for the Red Army. After the war, and until his death at 94 at the outset of the third decade of the twenty-first century, Lukach headed the Aleksander Dukhnovych Society of Carpatho-Russian Canadians made up of former members of Toronto’s Lemko Association branch. This was only one of several organizations he founded, including the Canadian Friends of the Soviet People, which continued to exist for three decades after the Soviet Union disappeared.

Mike Lukach was a quaint eccentric, but at the same time an ideological fool and worse—a dangerous political informer. He and his organizations were also relatively well off financially, because the Carpathian People’s Home (renamed Friendship House), over which he and his wife managed to take legal control, was located along an area of Queen Street West, 52

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which in the 1980s became gentrified.

As a result, he and his organizations were able to function comfortably from the rent they charged to highend clothing stores (Zara, Aritzia) located on the building’s ground floor.

Meanwhile, the basement of Friendship House was transformed into a Carpatho-Russian social center, while the top, third floor housed Lukach’s office, a board room, and a library. That entire space was a kind of time warp. The library contained only Soviet publications from the 1950s dominated by the complete works by Lenin and Stalin. There were busts of both those “cherished” Communists.

26. Entry sign on “Lemko” Rusyn head- Lukach’s favorite was Uncle Joe (Yoshquarters in Toronto, Canada. ko bachi as Nadiya Kushko and I used to call him) until he latched on to the still living Fidel Castro. Every time I had guests from Europe, especially Carpatho-Rusyns, I brought them to Luckach’s headquarters to view what for them was an unbelievable, albeit dopey, throwback to a terrible past.

Lukach seemed to be opposed to everyone, whether the capitalist Canadian and imperialist American governments and certainly all Ukrainian Canadians, or even fellow leftists and Communists. For him all Ukrainians were nationalists who were opposed to the very existence of “our Carpatho-Russian people.” The lone wolf, Lukach, was particularly proud of what he claimed was his unique status: not being able to leave Canada (on suspicion of anti-Canadian activity), being banned from entering the United States (because he was a Communist), and being denied entry to Russia (because of criticism directed against Putin for not restoring the Soviet Union).

And what did Lukach do for the Carpatho-Rusyn cause? He did publish in Rusyn during the 1960s and early 1970s an illustrated magazine 53

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called Nash holos/Our Voice; he organized ten-year commemorative celebrations (with guests from the Soviet Union) of the Society of Carpatho-Russian Canadians; and he wrote a history of Carpatho-Rusyns in Canada. But he also acted in nefarious ways.

My break with Lukach came in the last years of Communist rule in Czechoslovakia, when he reported to the authorities in Prague how some tour guide expressed negative comments about Communist rule in the course of her comments about the city. How was this the business of Lukach? And what, one could imagine, was the fate of the young guide?

At the minimum—immediate dismissal. But from Lukach’s perspective he was simply doing his duty: loyally defending the good name of an otherwise dastardly Communist regime.

Worse still was Lukach’s impact on younger descendants of Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants. Similar to leaders of the Lemko Association in the United States, the pro-Communist views of the Society of Carpatho-Russian Canadians were anathema to post-World War II Canadians and Americans who wanted nothing to do with the Communist world. If Communism was being associated with Carpatho-Rusynism, most young people were embarrassed and, therefore, they preferred to deny any association with their ancestral heritage. Thanks to Michael Lukach and his ideological bedfellows at the Lemko Association in the United States that organization and the Canadian Carpatho-Russian Society effectively ceased to exist in the 1980s.

***** The other “Carpatho-Rusyn” I met early on in Toronto was Stepan Rosokha. Two decades his senior, Rosokha could not have been more ideologically different from Michael Lukach. I first met Rosokha at the Ukrainian Institute in New York City, where he attended one of the two book launches (1978 and 1979) organized by its director Julian Revay for my Harvard monograph, The Shaping of a National Identity.

Born before World War I, Rosokha was a student activist in Subcarpathian Rus’ during the early 1930s, by which time he had become an avid Ukrainian nationalist. He fled his homeland after the Hungarian invasion in 1939, then in the late 1940s made his way to Toronto, where he eventu54

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ally published a Ukrainian-language newspaper, Vil’ne slovo. Despite the newspaper’s Ukrainian nationalist orientation, Rosokha published several favorable reviews of my book, The Shaping of a National Identity.

To emphasize his Ukrainian nationalist credentials, Rosokha served as founding head of the Brotherhood of the Carpathian Sich made up of veterans of Carpatho-Ukraine’s military force that fought against the Hungarian invasion in early 1939. Nevertheless, as a patriot of his regional homeland, he was proud of its inhabitants no matter where they may live. It was in this context that he organized a welcome party for Maria and me. I was struck by the genuine kindness shown to both of us

by Rosokha and his Ukrainian nationalist colleagues, and I still have the vase (with a Ukrainian, not Carpatho-Rusyn, folk design) that the Sich Brotherhood gave to us as a welcome present. Although we were invited—and did attend—the wedding reception of Rosokha’s son a few years later, I did not have any further contacts either with Stepan Rosokha or the Sich Brotherhood Organization. Neither Communists like Lukach nor nationalists like Rosokha were my cup of tea.

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Coming to Toronto, where I had a steady and relatively comfortable salary, I was more easily able to afford to travel, especially to Europe. One professorial perk came from the University of Toronto Alumni Society, which arranged for me to be a lecturer on river cruises in central Europe. They began in Istanbul, crossed the Bosporus and Black Sea, then proceeded with several stops (Sofia, Bucharest, Budapest, Bratislava) upstream along the Danube River until disembarking in Vienna. For over a decade beginning in 1988 I did at least seven or eight of these tours on an almost annual basis, which were a great boon allowing me even more frequent access to the European Continent. As a consequence, from the late 1980s I was on average two to three times each year in central and eastern Europe, often for a month or so at a time. It was such frequency that fueled speculation, especially among my political and ideological enemies, that such travel was possible only because I was being funded by some state security service, whether directly or through some wealthy private individual.

In fact, most of those trips were funded by research travel grants from the University of Toronto and the Chair of Ukrainian Studies to participate in scholarly conferences and conduct research, or they were covered by a travel agency based in St. Louis, Missouri as part of my work as a lecturer on Danube River boat cruises. Whatever the source of funding, these trips allowed me to keep in contact with Carpatho-Rusyn activists, especially in Slovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia.

Actually, contact with Carpatho-Rusyns began in earnest already in the 1970s, during our annual family visits to my in-laws in northeastern Slovakia. On the way there we also spent a few days in Prešov, where I had frequent interactions with local Ukrainian-oriented activists. Each 56

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of those visits brought with them uncomfortably high costs. As a member of the Ukrainian Program at Harvard University I proved to be of great interest to the Czechoslovak Security Services (ŠtB). They worked closely with the Soviet KGB, which was always concerned with keeping tabs on the Ukrainian diaspora. Hence, several hours of interrogation-like “conversations” became a requirement for my being able to visit Communist Czechoslovakia. The Ukrainophile activists with whom I interacted were themselves either secret police informants or post-1968 “dissidents” fired from their university jobs for being “politically unreliable” (i.e., anti-Communist).

On several occasions I gained the greatest pleasure before even reaching Prešov. Driving in our camping van from Luxembourg to Czechoslovakia, after crossing the border we would spend our first night in or near Bratislava. There I was able to meet with another intellectual purged after 1968, the Slovak Academy of Sciences historian L’udovít Haraksim. This was the very same person who was our scholarly contact back in 1968 (on the eve of the August 21 Soviet invasion), when I was hired to work on an immigration history project for the University of Minnesota. Now, in the early 1970s, I was able to get to know L’udovít Haraksim much better, and together with our respective wives we became quite close family friends.

Haraksim was an accomplished Slovak historian who happened to be born in Uzhhorod before the war, when that city was the administrative center of Czechoslovakia’s province of Subcarpathian Rus’. After Subcarpathian Rus’ was “returned” to Hungary in 1938-1939, Haraksim remained in his native city throughout the war years, completing his education at a senior high school (gymnasium) where, alongside Hungarian, a codified form of Rusyn (the region’s second official language) was the language of instruction.

Quite simply, it was a joy to be with L’udovít Haraksim, precisely because he was an intellectual of the old school—soft spoken and fluent not only in Slovak and Rusyn, but also in Hungarian, Latin, and German. Just before the Prague Spring, the Slovak Academy’s Institute of History published his outstanding survey of Carpatho-Rusyns in Slovakia from earliest times to the Austro-Hungarian Ausgleich/Compromise of 1867. Conversations with Haraksim enriched my knowledge of Car57

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27. L’udovít Haraksim (far right), together with (l. to r.) the Slovak ethnographer Jan Podolák, Paul Robert Magocsi, and the Swedish Slavist Sven Gustavsson, Bratislava, Slovakia (November 1991).

patho-Rusyn history enormously. And while he was sympathetic to the idea that Carpatho-Rusyns were a distinct nationality (even though they were referred to in his 1967 book as Ukrainians—a political requirement in those years), Haraksim and I did not agree on the extent of their settlement in northeastern Slovakia. He was adamantly opposed to referring to that Ukrainian/Carpatho-Rusyn inhabited area as the Prešov Region or Prešov Rus’, which for him would imply a reduction in the size of Slovakia. In other words, for Haraksim, Carpatho-Rusyns were a national minority living in several scattered villages in what otherwise was “Slovak” territory.

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Despite our strong disagreement on that matter, Ludovít Haraksim and I remained close friends. More appropriately, I should say that he was my first senior intellectual mentor in central Europe. Even more surprising was to find out his ethnic background. His mother was an ethnic Slovak, whether from Uzhhorod or from some nearby village. His father, however, was a Carpatho-Rusyn from of all places, Vŷshna Yablinka, my wife Maria’s native village. In fact, L’udovít’s sister was Maria’s teacher in the elementary village school. His father had worked for the Czechoslovak State Railroad in the 1930s and was based in Uzhhorod where he met his future wife, L’udovít’s mother.

Certainly not as personally pleasant—but valuable in other ways— were my encounters with several other characters in Prešov. There I came to know several local Carpatho-Rusyns who during World War II or the immediate postwar years were educated in Russian-language schools. In fact, all were convinced that they were Russians, that is, until Czechoslovakia’s Communist regime decided in the early 1950s (following the Soviet model), that Carpatho-Rusyns were Ukrainians. As Rusynsturned-Russians-turned-Ukrainians, these young activists became part of Czechoslovakia’s indigenous Ukrainian minority elite, finding jobs in the Prešov branch of Šafarík University and in closely government controlled civic organizations, including the Cultural Union of Ukrainian Workers, popularly known by its Ukrainian acronym KSUT (Kulturnyi soiuz ukraïnskykh trudiashchykh).

Among the Rusyn-Ukrainians who I really wanted to meet was Ivan Matsynskyi, the poet and playwright who was also a historian by avocation and an editor-publisher by profession. I knew Matsynskyi from his writings published just before and during the Prague Spring of 1968, in which he openly criticized the shortcomings of the administratively imposed Ukrainianization policies after 1952. Although himself a staunch Ukrainophile, he did not hesitate to point out that Communist Czechoslovakia’s Ukrainianization policies were not accepted by the vast majority of the region’s Carpatho-Rusyns. Instead, Matsynskyi proposed that the Ukrainian language should be replaced by Rusyn, and for that purpose he prepared a guide for editors and a grammatical rulebook for a yet uncodified Rusyn language.

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28. Title page of the mimeograph copy of Ivan Matsynskyi’s Practical Editorial Norms of the Popular Spoken Language for Use in the Newspaper “Nove zhyttia” (1967).

I only met Matsynskyi twice, once in his office, the second time in his apartment near the university. Neither encounter was easy-going. On the one hand, he was still employed in a state-run and closely Communist-controlled publishing office, the Prešov Ukrainian-language branch of the Slovak Pedagogical Publishing House based in Bratislava. Meeting with an American from Harvard during the height of Communist Czechoslovakia’s post-1968 political crackdown (euphemistically called “normal60

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ization”) was in itself quite risky. As I later learned from my Czechoslovak Secret Police files, the meetings were closely monitored, approved in advance, and followed up with security de-briefings of Matsynskyi.

The other reason for the unsatisfactory nature of our meeting was my fault. Having not long before lived 14 months in Czechoslovakia, a time when I spoke only Czech, I for all intents and purposes lost my ability to speak Ukrainian, and even less so Rusyn. My efforts at using Ukrainian with Matsynskyi, which turned out to be an illiterate mixture of Ukrainian, Rusyn, and Czech, proved embarrassing to him. He expected something better from a scholar at Harvard, and no less from someone associated with that university’s Ukrainian Studies Program.

As a result, our conversation was rather perfunctory, dwelling mostly on my inquiries about and efforts to obtain recent Ukrainian-language publications.

Matsynskyi was forthcoming on that topic but not on another, which I raised during our second encounter a year or two later. This was a time when the Harvard Ukrainian Institute was commissioned to prepare an encyclopedic volume about the Lemko Region which, according to Ukrainian nationalistic ideology, included the Carpatho-Rusyn inhabited Prešov Region of northeastern Slovakia. Before leaving Harvard, I convinced Professor Pritsak that we should try to engage reputable scholars from the region, including Matsynskyi to write the chapter on history, Olena Rudlovchak on literature, and Mykola Mushynka on ethnography. Matsynskyi refused the offer outright; Rudlovchak I did not reach; Mushynka was another story.

Much more fruitful were my encounters with Yurii Bacha and Mykola Mushynka, both of whom taught within the framework of Ukrainian studies at Šafarik University in Prešov. I knew of Bacha because of a solid study about the Carpatho-Rusyn national awakener Aleksander Dukhnovych that he had published in the 1960s. I had also heard of him from Professor John Fizer, my former mentor at Rutgers University, who befriended Bacha at a conference in Prague back in 1967 and who now wanted to help his friend financially. Bacha was removed from his teaching post and placed under scrutiny by Communist Czechoslovakia’s State Security Services for propagating anti-Soviet, Ukrainian nationalist 61

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29. Ivan Matsynskyi’s report to Czechoslovak State Security Service about meetings with the American Paul Robert Magocsi.

views. As for me, I did indeed bring relatively small amounts of money from Fizer on two or three of my annual visits to Prešov. In fact, Bacha took the initiative to contact my sister-in law before I arrived, always anxious to get his money.

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Bacha did prove invaluable to me, however. In 1974 and 1975, when I was preparing the Prešov Region edition of Let’s Speak Rusyn/Bisiduime po-rus’kŷ, I decided to include grammatical notes at the end (declension and conjugation tables, lists of adjectives, adverbs, and conjunctions, etc.). With no formal linguistic training, I was basically lost. Bacha graciously stepped in and reworked entirely my amateur efforts in the linguistic realm. Hence, the gram30. “House in Palanok” (1921), by Adalbert Erdeli, brought out of mar section of the first Rusyn-EnCzechoslovakia in 1974. glish phrasebook was prepared not only by a Ukrainophile, but by someone who subsequently became a fierce opponent of the Carpatho-Rusyn revival and of me personally.

Bacha’s other invaluable service was introducing me to a native of Subcarpathian Rus’ living in Košice (whose name I never recorded). This person had a wonderful collection of canvases by members of the interwar Subcarpathian School of Painting. One night Bacha drove me to Košice where I purchased three or four outstanding works by Adalbert Erdelyi, Andrei Kotska, Ernest Kontratovych, and Adalbert Boretskyi.

Getting the paintings out of the country proved to be a challenge, but I went through the normal procedures, including having to obtain an export permit from an office responsible for state artistic treasures. Of all the paintings, it was the 1921 canvas by Erdelyi that the experts (and I) deemed the most valuable. In the end, the government office approved its release, and with such documents Maria and I exited the country without any problem. The paintings, which ever since have hung prominently in our places of residence in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Toronto, continued to be a source of aesthetic inspiration and a constant reminder that the one Carpatho-Rusyn project I had not yet completed was a history of Carpatho-Rusyn art.

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***** The person with whom I spent the most time in Communist Czechoslovakia in those years was Mykola Mushynka. An ethnographer by profession, I had first met him at the Ukrainian Research Office of Šafarík University in Prešov, where I was finishing my doctoral research in the summer of 1969. He was an extremely outgoing and garrulous person, although somewhat rough around the edges with a sense of humor expressed through jokes and comments that were often laced with comical (in his view) sexual connotations. Mushynka was not averse to relating these in mixed company, which raised eyebrows, especially among females who might be present.

Mushynka may have been lacking in sophisticated manners, but he was at the same time extremely friendly and hospitable. In the over half century that I have known him, each time I was in Prešov (every year since 1968) I visited his home. His utterly charming wife, a Ukrainian-language school teacher named Magda, would immediately set a table of various foods while Mykola liberally poured drinks, usually vodka or borovichka.

31. Mykola Mushynka, Gorky Street home library, Prešov, Slovakia (2007).

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And what a home he had. The narrow three-story row house he inhabited at 21 Gorky Street in Prešov was filled in virtually every room and along its staircases with bookshelves and paintings. No one I knew in Czechoslovakia had as rich a Carpatho-Rusyn library as did Mykola.

This was the result of the incredible energy he expended while traveling throughout Czechoslovakia and cultivating friendships with the surviving family members of famous specialists in Carpatho-Rusyn studies, including the wives, sons, or daughters of the Galician-Ukrainian linguist Ivan Pankevych and ethnographer Volodymyr Hnatiuk, and the Czech civil servant and amateur architectural historian Florian Zapletal. Mykola managed to obtain most of these individual’s libraries which further enriched his own Carpatho-Ruthenica library in Prešov.

During the 1970s, Mykola and I met most often at his “workplace,” the bowels of a building where this highly talented and productive folklorist was reduced to stoking and caring for boilers that produced heat for several above-ground apartment buildings. Not surprisingly, most of our hour-long conversations had to do with the nationality question, he being sympathetic to our efforts to raise Carpatho-Rusyn awareness among immigrants and their descendants in the United States, while adamantly trying to convince me that “our people” were a distinct, perhaps unique branch of Ukrainians, but Ukrainians nonetheless. Such an ideological position did not stop him from allowing us to publish under his name in the Carpatho-Rusyn American a series of articles on what were called Carpatho-Rusyn traditions. Nor did he oppose the publication of a book of Florian Zapletal’s photographs of Carpatho-Rusyn wooden churches from the glass negatives he had inherited from the Zapletal family archive. Both Mykola’s introduction (which he asked be unsigned to avoid political problems) and all the captions in the Zapletal book referred to “our people” not as Ukrainians (as in the Mushynka original) but as Carpatho-Rusyns.

I considered at the time (and still do) that the appearance under my editorship of the book, Wooden Churches in the Carpathians, was a significant achievement for the Carpatho-Rusyn movement even before that movement had actually begun in post-1989 central Europe. I was determined to get this book published in Europe (a first for me) and 65

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preferably in Vienna, the capital of “our” historic homeland, the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

That goal was not, however, so easy to accomplish. I still have vivid memories of walking in a somewhat numbed state in the streets of Vienna after being promised then turned down by the reputable publisher Anton Schroll. But then my luck changed when I tried 32. Cover of the bi-lingual GermanWilhelm Braumüller. I knew about English album of Florian Zapletal Braumüller as the publisher of one photographs of wooden churches in the of my favorite journals at the time, 1920s.

Europa Ethnica, which was devoted to all the “little,” stateless peoples of Europe. I simply turned up one day (in 1975 I believe) in the Braumüller editorial offices and asked to speak to the director. The director, Renate Piffl, turned out to be a congenial businesswoman about my age (circa 40) who worked closely with an administrative assistant, Ulrike Dietmayer. Both were highly talented and efficient book publishers, which made it easy for us to take a quick liking to each other. My relatively good command of spoken German also facilitated our interaction.

My desire to publish in Europe, especially illustrated books, was based on the fact that the printing quality there was far superior to anything that could be done in the United States. Not to mention that publishing in Europe did carry a certain prestige in North American intellectual circles such as Harvard. Renate and Ulrike acted quickly and professionally, so that Wooden Churches in the Carpathians came out already in 1982.

Their desire to release the book quickly was likely helped by the fact that I had given them a guaranteed pre-purchase of 1,000 copies by the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center. Actually, that purchase was made possible by the cooperation, once again, with the Byzantine Ruthenian Church and specifically Bishop Michael Dudick of Passaic, who purchased for his eparchial Heritage Museum the Zapletal photographs 66

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33. Creditanstalt Bank press release for the photographic exhibit of Carpatho-Rusyn wooden churches in Vienna (October-November 1983).

from which Braumüller made printing plates.

In short, everyone was happy. Bishop Dudick got a set of rare photographs, the publisher Braumüller made a profit on bulk sales, and the 67

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Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center recouped its investment and even made a profit on the large number of books (more than 1,600 copies over ten years) that it sold.

An added bonus was what Braumüller (by the way, the oldest existing publishing house in Vienna) did to promote the book. It arranged for a display of blown-up photographs from the book as part of a 34. Dust jacket for the Wilhelm two-month long exhibit in the foyBraumüller Publisher’s English-laner of one of the city’s largest central guage translation of Pavlo Markovych’s banks, the Creditanstalt. There in the monograph about Carpatho-Rusyn painted Easter eggs (1987). heart of Vienna Carpatho-Rusyns were being featured by means of our bi-lingual German-English book, in which I introduced new words for Rusyn in the German language—Karpato-Russinen (Carpatho-Russians) and russinische instead of the heretofore German terms, Karpartoussen and karpatorussische (Carpatho-Russian).

Satisfied with their sales of Wooden Churches in the Carpathians, within one year Braumüller published my short history of Carpatho-Rusyns in northeastern Slovakia. The book carried the title, The Rusyn-Ukrainians of Czechoslovakia (1983), which reflected the official ethnonym used to describe Carpatho-Rusyns in Communist Czechoslovakia. Despite the word “Ukrainians” in its title, the book became popular among Rusyn Americans, with the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center alone selling 1,100 copies. But even more successful was the English-language translation of Pavlo Markovych’s book which Braumüller published for the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center under the title, Rusyn Easter Eggs from Eastern Slovakia (1987). Together we sold over 2,100 copies in Europe and North America. Clearly, “our people” had by the 1980s come into existence, at least on the printed page.

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After coming to Toronto in 1980, the most important of my European visits were those to Poland. They were the result of my relations with a Toronto colleague, Professor Robert (Bob) Harney. A long-time specialist in immigration history, Harney established contacts with the Polonia Institute of Jagiellonian University in Cracow which specialized in studying Poles abroad. In 1985, I joined him and a few Canadian colleagues for the first of two consecutive annual conferences in Poland’s ancient royal city.

I had actually known someone in Cracow. A few months earlier, a young graduate student at Jagiellonian University, Andrzej Zięba, wrote to the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center (perhaps to me personally) asking how he might obtain some of our publications. I had already made a decision that if and whenever we would receive a request from interested persons in or near the Communist-ruled Carpatho-Rusyn homeland, the C-RRC would send them whatever they wanted at no cost. When I came to Cracow in 1986, Andrzej was anxious to thank me for the help I gave him in getting the most important thing for any young student in Cracow—scholarly books.

Andrzej was a Pole and promising historian who was writing a doctoral dissertation on the Ukrainian immigration to Britain after World War II. He was also interested in the Greek Catholic religious leader, Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytskyi, and must have heard about the international conference about that figure that I organized at the University of Toronto in 1984. One of his other passions was the Lemkos, the forgotten minority in Poland who, as he surmised, were wrongly redefined as Ukrainians after the Communist regime had come to power just after World War II. 69

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35. First letter of young scholar from Communist-ruled central Europe to the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center, from Andrzej Zięba (April 1985).

Like many young, educated Poles of his generation, Andrzej was a Polish (anti-Soviet) patriot yet at the same time tolerant and respectful of the non-ethnically Polish peoples who lived in his country. He had already befriended a somewhat younger fellow graduate student at Jagellonian, Olena Duts, who was herself of Lemko background.

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36. Andrzej Zięba with Paul Robert Magocsi in Harrogate, England (July 1990).

In the course of the conference, Andrzej told me that the very following weekend the second so-called Vatra festival was to take place in some Carpatho-Rusyn mountain village about a hundred kilometers to the southeast of Cracow. “Would you be interested in going,” he asked?

Without hesitation I answered “yes.”

The Lemko question had already become a topic of discussion in some Polish newspapers. Who were these people? Ukrainians as the authorities said? Or a distinct nationality called Lemko Rusyns that may or may not be a branch of Carpatho-Rusyns who lived south of the mountains in Slovakia and Transcarpathian Ukraine? Particularly active in writing about these questions was a growing number of organizations promoting tourism to exotic places within Poland. Organizations such as the Student Circle of Guides to the Beskyd Mountains and the Carpathian Society published in Polish several guidebooks and annual yearbooks (Magury and Płaj), which contained excellently researched articles on the Beskyd and Bieszczady Mountain ranges and their historic inhabitants, Lemko Rusyns.

But the most important publication that Andrzej gave me was a battered mimeographed copy of an eleven-page essay titled “The Lemkos Today,” published in 1986 by the Student Circle of Guides to the Beskyd 71

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37. Cover pages of Yaroslav Hunka’s seminal essay “The Lemkos Today” (1986) and the pro-Ukrainian polemical responses compiled by Volodymyr Mokryi.

Mountains and signed with the pseudonym Yaroslav Hunka. This was a heart rending autobiographical account of a young Lemko born just after World War II, whose parents were driven from their homeland in the course of the Vistula Operation (Akcja Wisła) of 1947 and forced to live in western Poland, specifically Silesia.

Written in Polish, Hunka recounted how he was raised in a purely Polish environment and had been forced to hide his family’s Rus’ origins in what was at the time Polish society’s deep-seated intolerance for all whom they considered interlopers from the East. It made no difference what they called themselves, Ukrainians or Lemkos. From the Polish perspective, they were all foreigners on “Polish” land. The result for the young Hunka, his parents, and all other Lemkos whom he knew was 72

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38.Yaroslav (Hunka) Horoshchak addressing the Carpatho-Rusyn traveling seminar, Cracow (March 1991).

a deep sense of inferiority and shame. That Lemkos were described by Poles as Ukrainians made them feel even more anxiety and anger. These feelings were clearly at the heart of Hunka’s essay whose publication constituted a veritable baring of the soul and a coming out of the proverbial closet, so to speak.

Andrzej told me that Olena Duts and most likely Hunka would be at the Vatra. But how to get to the relatively distant village—actually a hillside between two villages—where it was to take place? Andrzej, the quintessentially poor central European student, had no car, so he asked a Jagiellonian colleague who had just finished his doctoral dissertation, Volodymyr Mokryi, if we could join him and his wife who were driving to the Vatra.

Mokryi was one of many Poles of mixed Ukrainian-Lemko ethnic heritage. He liked to present his wife as a Lemko, but he was a convinced Ukrainian like Bacha and Mushynka in Slovakia. Actually, Mokryi’s trip to the Vatra was part of an ideological mission. He had just edited a small collection of essays by Lemko-Ukrainians in Poland, all of whom denigrated the by then well-known and controversial tract by Hunka which I had just read. In fact, on our way leaving Cracow we had to stop by the printer to pick up the published collection that Mokryi planned to hand out to Vatra 73

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participants. That was the irony of my first visit to meet real Lemko Rusyns: I got there sitting in a car whose trunk was filled with brochures promoting the view that Lemkos were a branch of the Ukrainian nationality.

What was the Vatra? The word means bonfire, which was traditionally lit by Carpatho-Rusyn shepherds when they first arrived atop a highland mountain pasture (polonyna) for a six-to-eight-week period of pasturing sheep, shearing them, and making cheese. The bonfire (vatra) was kept burning 24 hours day and night until they departed and formally doused its flames.

The symbolically recreated Vatra phenomenon had actually begun in 1979 among Lemkos “living abroad” (na chuzhyni) in western Poland.

From 1984 Vatras were also held annually in the Carpathian homeland, despite the fact that there were only a small number of Lemkos living in those mountain villages, from which most had been deported in 19451947.

As a result, the “modern” Vatras had nothing to do with pasturing sheep. Instead, they were public events designed by urban intellectuals whose goal was to nurture, and at times to save, lost Lemko souls. These new Vatras were Woodstock-like affairs at which in lieu of rock music, drugs, and sex, upwards of several thousand curious young people of Lemko background (and some ethnic Poles) came to hear lectures and folk music in an effort to find out who they really were. These modern “intellectual” Vatras were organized by three future leading activists in the Lemko-Rusyn national revival, the poet Petro Murianka-Trokhanovskii, the literary historian Olena Duts (after marriage Duts-Faifer), and the writer Volodyslav Graban.

The setting was rather primitive. It included a hastily built stage at the bottom of a hilly slope on which the audience sat. “Accommodations,” due to the all-night nature of the festivities, were hardly needed and consisted of either tents perched alongside cars or the cars themselves in which participants slept for a few hours. The Vatra was clearly not an officially approved public event which would have required formal permission in Communist countries. The village elders turned a blind eye to such regulations, while the central government authorities did not know or care what was happening in such a remote corner of Poland.

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Where was I to sleep the one night we spent at the Vatra? Volodymyr Mokryi and his wife surrendered the room they had rented at some villager’s house to the special guests “from abroad”—me, the American from Canada, and Andrzej, the Pole from Cracow. The Mokryis made do by sleeping in the adjacent hay loft.

My goal was to meet the author of that wonderful essay, “The Lemkos Today,” who went by the name of Yaroslav Hunka. That proved next to impossible, however, because he wanted to remain anonymous and certainly not be exposed to some foreigner, who might be a provocateur and reveal Hunka’s identity. After all, I was from Canada, which in and of itself suggested that I was one of “those Ukrainians” likely to do harm to “Lemko separatists.” Instead, I met with the Vatra’s master of ceremonies, Olena Duts. She spoke to me in the most enthusiastic tones of how Lemkos were on the road to self-discovery and, therefore, recovery.

Finally, after an hour or so I was granted, through Olena, access to the mysterious Yaroslav Hunka, whose real family name was Horoshchak.

The quiet, self-absorbed Hunka-Horoshchak did not make much of an impression. Rather, I felt I was speaking to a distant guru who had set in motion through his one essay the kind of inspirational force that national movements need to be successful. I was convinced that his words had to reach a larger public, and upon returning to Toronto I had his essay translated into English and published in full in the Carpatho-Rusyn American.

I left the Vatra in a state of euphoria. There I found real people, young people, who had launched a national revival in the Carpathian homeland. While such things were hardly possible in neighboring Communist Czechoslovakia and Soviet Transcarpathia, they were possible in post-Solidarity Poland. There, Lemko-Rusyns were paving the way of the future by doing something that might someday be taken up elsewhere in Carpathian Rus’.

The Vatra experience had another very important consequence. It cemented what became a very close personal and professional friendship with Olena Duts and Andrzej Zięba, a relationship which increased in intensity and lasts to this day. Olena and Andrzej became the core of a coterie of supporters of the Carpatho-Rusyn movement and of me per75

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39. Petro Murianka Trokhanovskii and Olena Duts-Faifer, clearly determined to achieve recognition of Carpatho-Rusyns as a distinct people, Fourth Lemko Vatra, Bortne, Poland (July 1986).

sonally to whom were later added more Jagiellonian University scholars, including the sociologist Ewa Michna and the historian Jan Jacek Bruski.

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40. Second Lemko Vatra, Chorne/Czarnej, Poland (July 1984).

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I had come to the 1986 Cracow conference from the Riviera in southern France, where I was vacationing with Maria and our kids. That very year, our close family friend (godfather to our youngest daughter, Tinka), the Ukrainian benefactor from Canada Peter Jacyk, came to join us for a couple of weeks. He was still there when I returned from Poland, where he was actually born in the 1930s when Ukrainian-inhabited eastern Galicia was part of that country. I could not contain my enthusiasm for the Lemko-Rusyn revival that I had just witnessed. Carpatho-Rusyns did exist and were not just a figment of my imagination and that of my fellow supporters in the United States.

Mr. Jacyk reacted to my report about Lemko Rusyns in Poland with disbelief and certainly suspicion, which was not unexpected from a Ukrainian nationalist and Banderite sympathizer. “We, too, were once called Rusyns,” was his mantra-like response, followed by: “all Rusyns are Ukrainians.” There was nothing more to be said. Somehow those words were beginning to ring more and more hollow in what—though we still did not know it in the mid-1980s—was a changing world.

***** My position as holder of the University of Toronto’s Chair of Ukrainian Studies also opened up doors to visit Soviet Ukraine. The Ukraina Society in particular was anxious to pursue further contacts of the kind that led to the successful visits of Soviet Ukrainian writers and scholars to the annual Shevchenko Readings that the Chair hosted in Toronto during the 1980s.

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attending the International Slavic Congress being held in Kyiv, that I met for the first time Dr. Oleksa Myshanych. I had already known him from work on my doctoral dissertation as the author of several solid monographs on the literary history of Subcarpathian Rus’. Those works contained valuable factual information about cultural figures that was usually not mentioned in studies by Soviet Marxist historians of the region.

My brief visit to his Academy of Sciences office and a somewhat longer meeting at his cramped Kyiv apartment gave me visual access to his enormously rich library of Carpatho-Ruthenica. Oh, how I would like to acquire through purchase or, otherwise, some items from his invaluable collection.

As I was to learn through subsequent encounters with him, which increased in frequency during the next decade, Myshanych was a classic Soviet Transcarpathian intellectual. Outwardly, he was a Ukrainian and yet he was ever ready to remind visitors that, as someone from Transcarpathia, he had special qualities distinct from “other Ukrainians.” First and foremost, as he insisted, Transcarpathians were serious about work, a characteristic they probably got from the interwar period of Czechoslovak rule.

41. Oleksa Myshanych with Paul Robert Magocsi at the Slavic Congress, Belgrade, Yugoslavia (September 1987).

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Myshanych was certainly hard working, as revealed by his position as academic secretary of the Institute of Literature at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Also important—as he was fond of telling everyone in Kyiv—only Transcarpathians knew how to make proper coffee (naturally espresso), something they imbibed as part of their long history living under Hungarian rule. Myshanych seemed to take a liking to me from the outset and was tolerant of my Carpatho-Rusyn views, even though he was not about to budge from his dyed-in-the-wool Ukrainian position. Rumors had it that he was a crypto-Rusynophile during his undergraduate student days at the University of Uzhhorod, but that he learned quickly to rid himself of that “shortcoming,” certainly a dead-end for someone wanting to make a scholarly career in Soviet Ukraine.

It seemed that Stanislav Lazebnyk from the Ukraina Society teamed up with Myshanych in order to maintain contacts and perhaps influence me to retain what they thought were my neutral, if not necessarily friendly, attitude toward Soviet Ukraine. They knew neutrality was somewhat of an exception for someone coming from ostensibly “Ukrainian nationalist Canada.”

One-to-one encounters were the key to such personal relations. In early 1989, Lazebnyk wrote a warm letter of congratulations which was published in a booklet celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center. Knowing that I was going to be in Czechoslovakia, he urged me to come to Kyiv for discussions on future cooperative ventures. I refused, saying that I would be willing to meet him in Transcarpathia instead. After hesitating a bit, he agreed to fly to Uzhhorod (still possible in those years) and brought Myshanych along with him. In an effort to be as accommodating as possible, and knowing my penchant for finer things, they invited me for a private wine tasting in the cellars of Seredne, a small town halfway between Uzhhorod and Mukachevo. There I was regaled with the taste of Transcarpathia’s excellent whites and a few of its experimental reds. I particularly liked the dry whites which reminded me of the Rieslings, Sylvaners, and Eblings I had access to when I lived in Luxembourg. The point, of course, was that through wine (not surprisingly) we were able to cement among us a better understanding and even friendship.

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Before leaving Transcarpathia, Myshanych was especially set on bringing me to Mukachevo. Thanks to his persistence, we gained access to the Mukachevo Castle perched atop a hillock just south of the city. We managed to slide our bodies through an opening in the locked entry gates, only to be stopped by a suspicious guard. Half-jokingly, Myshanych told the guard that his guest, a distinguished professor from America, was a descendant of the Magocsy family who “owned” the castle in the sixteenth century. Hence, the professor had every right to see his ancestral patrimony. Nice story.

42. Oleksa Myshanych and Paul Robert Magocsi in first courtyard under reconstruction of the Mukachevo Castle (June 1988).

More important for me was to go to the opposite side of Mukachevo where an audience was arranged for me with the abbess (hegumina) of the centuries-old cultural center of Carpatho-Rusyns, the Basilian, by then Orthodox St. Nicholas Monastery. Aside from seeing along the dark walls of the monastery interior the only contemporary portrait of the mid-nineteenth century “national awakener of Carpatho-Rusyns,” Aleksander Dukhnovych, I met in his cell the legendary historian and Orthodox monk Vasilii Pronin, who at the time was still working on his monumental history of the church in Carpathian Rus’. Although Vasilii was clearly a local patriot, he was, like all Orthodox adherents in the 81

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43 Convent sister, Paul Robert Magocsi, Father Vasilii Pronin, and Oleksa Myshanych, St. Nicholas Orthodox Monastery, Mukachevo, Ukraine (June 1988).

region, a Russophile forced by Soviet political circumstance to acknowledge Ukrainians and at the same be totally opposed to any idea of Carpatho-Rusyn national distinctiveness. I was certainly appreciative of the hospitality extended to me by Oleksa Myshanych and Stanislav Lazebnyk. Nevertheless, both were Soviets, and I could not be too careful to avoid being drawn into their hidden agenda. With that caveat in mind, I could enjoy their company, most especially if it could help in my getting access to current and older publications about Carpatho-Rusyns.

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Aside from contacts with Lemko Rusyns in Poland and visits to Soviet Transcarpathia, my relations with scholars and cultural activists in Czechoslovakia’s Prešov Region continued throughout the 1980s. I was in particular able to acquire new and older publications for my ever-growing Carpatho-Ruthenica library that increasingly came to dominate my office space at the University of Toronto.

This was also the period when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union. We were all following closely the reforms being introduced by his regime and how they might have an impact on the rest of the Communist world, in particular Czechoslovakia, Poland, and perhaps even Soviet Ukraine’s Transcarpathian region. An interesting glimmer of the changes to come occurred sometime in 1988, when I received a phone call from someone named Aleksander Zozuliak. He said he was from Prešov and on a visit to his sister in Toronto. Would I, he asked, be willing to meet with him?

I had seen the name Alexander Zozuliak before in the pages of Prešov’s Ukrainian-language weekly newspaper Nove zhyttia (The New Life), the official organ of the Cultural Union of Ukrainian Workers (KSUT) in Czechoslovakia. Zozuliak was a young journalist at the time, asking if he could do an interview with me for Nove zhyttia. Always anxious to meet with anyone from the European homeland, I agreed to see him in my university office.

From the very outset I told him that he may conduct the interview but that the staunchly Ukrainian-oriented Communist editor of Nove zhyttia would never publish any words, however benign, by Magocsi.

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that he would deal with his editor. His self-confidence was borne out when within a few weeks the text of the interview was indeed published together with a photograph of me. The interview focused exclusively on the work of the Chair of Ukrainian Studies. That itself was risqué, since Czechoslovakia’s Communist authorities, following the Soviet lead, were always critical of Ukrainian “bourgeois nationalist” study centers in the West, suspecting them as training grounds for covert espionage activity.

Nevertheless, by the time of Zozuliak’s 1988 visit, Gorbachev had been in power for a good three years, and activists, even in the small provincial city of Prešov in eastern Slovakia, began to realize that censorship rules were loosening somewhat.

After the interview that lasted about 45 minutes, we spent the next three hours (much of it at a luncheon accompanied by sufficient amounts of wine) discussing the more serious topic—Carpatho-Rusyns. Alexander Zozuliak was the son of Vasyl Zozuliak, one of the most prominent postwar Ukrainian-language writers in Czechoslovakia’s Prešov Region. As a result, the young Aleksander, or Sasha as he was known to everyone, was raised in a “Ukrainian” environment, and sent to Prešov’s Ukrainian-language elementary and high school. He then went on to the Prešov branch of Šafarik University, where he majored in Ukrainian Language and Literature and in the Applied Arts. Aside from his writing skills, Zozuliak was an excellent painter whose work (alas in part because of his own modesty) has never gotten the recognition it deserves.

As for the Rusyn question, Zozuliak had known some of my writings and views on Carpatho-Rusyns as a potentially distinct nationality. He actually agreed that his ancestral people might have developed into a distinct nationality with their own language but that historical circumstances dictated otherwise. Like it or not, Rusyns became Ukrainians, and to pursue an agenda of Carpatho-Rusyn national distinctiveness was a vain attempt to turn back the historic clock and therefore doomed to failure. Considering his background, I was not surprised by these views.

Zozuliak and I may have disagreed, but we parted on good terms. I did not expect ever to see him again.

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44. Aleksander Zozuliak’s article about the Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Toronto in Prešov, Czechoslovakia’s Ukrainian newspaper Nove zhyttia (1988).

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A few months later I received another phone call, this one from Medzilaborce, a small town in the far northeast corner of Czechoslovakia not far from my wife’s village of Vŷshna Yablinka. The caller introduced himself as Mykhal Bytsko, a local art teacher who got my number from his friend and fellow artist, Aleksander/Sasha Zozuliak.

Bytsko told me that he was enamored with the art of Andy Warhol, that he knew all about the American artist’s family’s roots in the nearby village of Mikova, and that he was hoping to create a Warhol museum in Medzilaborce. He was calling to ask if I would help him to convince Andy’s brother John Warhola, a member of the recently established Warhol

45. Mykhal Bytsko and Paul Warhola at the Warhola Family Museum, Medzilaborce, Czechoslovakia (1991).

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Foundation, to support the idea of a museum in Medzilaborce. Considering Andy’s Warhol’s incredible worldwide fame, associating him with Carpatho-Rusyns could not but help in our efforts to raise awareness about our people in the outside world.

Soon after his death in 1987, I had written a short biography of Warhol for the Carpatho-Rusyn American. It was in the course of my research about his family background that, thanks to Jerry Jumba’s help, I was able to speak with Andy’s two older surviving brothers, Paul and John. Both told me sometime later that my short piece was the most accurate and honest portrayal they had ever read about their famous brother.

***** How I found out about Andy Warhol being of Carpatho-Rusyn descent is in itself an intriguing story.

As a university-educated American who studied art history and who actually did a graduate school field in the discipline at Princeton, I was well aware of Andy Warhol and his innovative depictions of Campbell soup cans and Brillo boxes as art. And yet, despite my extensive visits to museums in the United States and most especially Europe, it was not until 1969 that I saw an original Warhol painting for the first time. Of all places it was in Prague, where the United States Embassy was hosting a month-long exhibit of American art as part of the cultural exchange program that existed between the United States and Communist Czechoslovakia. In the context of that exhibit, Warhol was just another American artist who happened to be from Pittsburgh. Never did it dawn on me that he might have some connection to Carpatho-Rusyns.

I was not enlightened about that connection until the appearance of my book, The Shaping of a National Identity (1978), which for all intents and purposes was funded by the Byzantine Ruthenian Catholic Church. In the spirit of the Roots phenomenon, in 1978 the Byzantine Ruthenian Eparchy of Passaic invited me to speak about the church’s Carpatho-Rusyn heritage at one of its annual retreats for its priests. After the lecture, I was seated at dinner alongside the Passaic eparchial bishop, Michael Dudick, and the chancellor of the eparchy, Monsignor Raymond Misulich.

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Inevitably, the conversation turned to Carpatho-Rusyns. One of the priests asked my opinion as to who was the most famous Carpatho-Rusyn.

I forgot what I answered, but Chancellor Misulich leaned over and whispered in my ear that my answer was wrong. “In the church,” he said, “we don’t much like to advertise the fact that the most famous Carpatho-Rusyn was actually Andy Warhol.” “No way,” I retorted. I thought to myself that the chancellor’s statement was an exaggeration, a kind of misplaced example of unfounded ethnic patriotism. How could he know such a thing?

Our conversation was brought to the attention of the table as a whole.

Bishop Dudick smiled in a manner that suggested a sense of self-confidence, since he knew something more than the “professor” from Harvard.

Chancellor Misulich was actually the parish priest of St. Mary’s Ruthenian Catholic Church on 15th Street and Second Avenue in Manhattan’s Lower East side. That was Andy’s mother’s parish where her son also attended sporadically. Ironically, it was the same parish in which one of the choir singers was the short-lived prime minister of Carpatho-Ukraine, the pro-Ukrainian-oriented Julian Revay, over whose funeral Monsignor Misulich presided in 1978.

Ten years earlier, when in 1968 Andy was shot by an estranged and deranged “member” of his circle of Factory hangers-on, his terrified mother (who resided in the same townhouse as Andy) ran to her parish priest to assure that the last rites be given to her son should he die. Everyone in the church knew that Julia Warhola was Carpatho-Rusyn because that was the only language she spoke to fellow parishioners.

Armed with this knowledge from my Byzantine Ruthenian clerical friends, I felt confident including Warhol as one of the most prominent of Carpatho-Rusyns in my book Our People. This illustrated history of Carpatho-Rusyn Americans and their descendants, first published in Toronto in 1984, turned out to be the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center’s most popular book, selling more than 7,000 copies and appearing in four more revised and expanded editions (1985, 1993, and 2005, and 2023).

As a result, many more Carpatho-Rusyn Americans became aware of their most famous son—Andy Warhol.

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***** As part of my work as a go-between for Mykhal Bytsko in Medzilaborce and John Warhola and the Warhol Foundation president Fred Hughes, I learned that there were plans to build a major museum in Pittsburgh to house Andy’s works. This news did not deter Bytsko, who, with support from the Medzilaborce’s elected town officials, proposed creating their own Warhol museum. Their hope was to obtain some paintings and personal artefacts from the family in Pittsburgh through the good graces of brothers John and Paul Warhola.

In the midst of the on-going Warhol negotiations, the Velvet Revolution broke out in Czechoslovakia, with the result that Communist rule came to an end in November 1989. That event changed everything, including an end to travel restrictions outside the country which had been strictly enforced for more than four decades by Czechoslovakia’s Communist regime.

Taking advantage of the new political circumstances, a four-man del-

46. Carpatho-Rusyn American activists, seated from the left: Peter Baycura, Orthodox Chancellor John Yurcisin, Paul Robert Magocsi, Slovak parliamentary deputy Ivan Bytsko; standing from the left: Jerry Jumba, Maryann Sivak, Richard Renoff, Steve Mallick, Pat Onufrak, John Righetti, Edward Kasinec, Fred Petro, Patricia Krafcik, Orestes Mihaly, Larry Goga, John Halushka, Keith Koshute (?), University of Pittsburgh (April 1990).

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egation travelled to Pittsburgh in the spring of 1990 to press the idea of a Warhol museum in the European homeland. The group included three town officials (Mykhal Turok-Hetesh, Evgenii Galishyn, Vladimir Protivniak) who were joined by Ivan Bytsko (no relation to Mykhal Bytsko), a Carpatho-Rusyn who was elected deputy to the first post-Communist parliament of Slovakia. I was asked to organize a meeting for the group with the Carpatho-Rusyn community in the United States.

This was a historic opportunity, actually the first time since before World War II when a delegation of Carpatho-Rusyn activists in the homeland could meet with their American counterparts not only from western Pennsylvania but from as far afield as New York, Virginia, Ohio, Minnesota, and Canada. To give the occasion the weight it deserved, we met at the University of Pittsburgh in an impressive building overlooking the monumental neo-Gothic Tower of Learning and exquisite Heinz Chapel modelled after the Sainte Chapelle in Paris.

On the American side were present several activists associated with

47. John Warhola (center) with: (from the left) John Halushka, Ivan Bytsko, Larry Goga; and (from the right) Vladimir Protivniak, Evgenii Galishyn, Mykhal Turok-Hetesh.

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48. Mykhal Turok-Hetesh, Paul Robert Magocsi, Byzantine Ruthenian Catholic Archbishop Stephen Kocisko, Ivan Bytsko, University of Pittsburgh (April 1990).

the host of the meeting, the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center (including Edward Kasinec, Jerry Jumba, Orestes Mihaly, Patricia Krafcik, Maryann Sivak, Peter Baycura), John Warhola from the Andy Warhol Foundation, and as special honored guests, Archbishop-Metropolitan Stephen Kocisko of the Byzantine Ruthenian Catholic Archdiocese and Protopresbyter John Yurcisin of the American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese.

After that meeting, our European guests felt that they had the support of their Rusyn-American brethren, while we in America were convinced that there was a Carpatho-Rusyn community, at least in Czechoslovakia, with whom we in the United States could work.

Unfortunately, no sooner had he returned home than Ivan Bytsko was caught up in the so-called lustration scandals that rocked virtually every post-Communist society. Lustration was, in theory, a legitimate effort to uncover and bar from civic life individuals who actively worked with or represented the previous Communist regime. In practice, rivals of one political activist would accuse another of “collaboration.” The often volatile and nervous Ivan Bytsko became the object of such an attack. Despite 91

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his later proven innocence, Bytsko was forced to resign his Slovak Parliament deputy seat and was never again elected to that body.

***** Warhol’s fame had grown after his death as the American press was filled with reports of the multimillion-dollar value of his estate. Several new biographies of the artist began to appear, written by authors who felt the need to describe his family background. In the ethnic press there began almost immediately a battle over the origins of the artist who, when alive, if not proclaiming he was “from nowhere” did mention that he was “Czechoslovak.” This did not deter other claims, especially from ethnic spokespersons in Europe and North America, that Andy was Czech, or Slovak, or Hungarian, or Polish, or Ukrainian. It was our job, especially that of the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center, to inform the larger public the truth of his Ruthenian or Rusyn ancestral origins.

Ironically, the only supporters of the Ruthenian/Rusyn explanation were Ukrainian Americans and eventually publicists in Ukraine itself.

Their reasoning was simple. Of course, Warhol’s family was Ruthenian or Rusyn, which meant Ukrainian, since from their perspective all Rusyns were Ukrainians. During this struggle over identity, I was consulted— and even listened to—by several American biographers. The result was that some of the most authoritative biographies to appear soon after his death (by Victor Bokris, David Bourdon, Bob Colacello) spoke about Carpatho-Rusyns/Ruthenians and made it clear that Andy’s parents were of that distinct Slavic nationality.

The struggle over Warhol’s identity also played itself out in post-Communist Czechoslovakia, where a debate arose as to where the proposed Warhol museum should be located. The serious powers that be, among them Slovakia’s Ministry of Culture in Bratislava, scoffed at the idea of a museum for such a world figure being located in a provincial backwater town, which with its six thousand-plus number of inhabitants was not much larger than a village. (Actually, some local activists wanted the museum to be in an even smaller place, some fifteen kilometers away, in the native village of both his parents—Mikova).

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49. John Warhola (right) with Andy Warhol activist Joseph Keselitsa (middle) in Mikova, Slovakia (ca. 1992).

and Slovaks who, post-Communist liberals that they pretended to be, had no problem appropriating Warhol as part of their own cultural/ national heritage. Since I knew they wanted the help of Andy’s brother John Warhola, I prevailed upon him the need to oppose any museum that would not be in the Carpatho-Rusyn homeland, preferably Medzilaborce. The Czech Ministry of Culture soon gave up on the idea that a Warhol Museum would be created in Prague. Not so the Slovak authorities, however, whose Ministry of Culture argued that the most appropriate place to house a museum for a world-famous son of Slovakia would be Bratislava, the capital of a soon to be independent state of Slovakia.

With that in mind, Slovakia’s Minster of Culture at the time, Ladislav Snopko, flew to Košice in eastern Slovakia to meet with me. He sent a ministry driver to pick me up at my sister-in-law’s house in Lemešany (half-way between Prešov and Košice). I could not help but revel in the ironic contrast with the incident fifteen years earlier when I was involuntarily picked up by the Czechoslovak secret police (ŠtB) at my wife’s parents’ home in Vŷshna Yablinka. Now, I was being sought after by the Slovak government for my opinion and advice and not hounded by Communist security services. Thankfully, the world had changed after 1989, and for Carpatho-Rusyns the change was certainly for the better.

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50. Old post office, Medzilaborce, Slovakia (1990).

Minister Snopko and I met in an appropriate setting—over drinks and dinner at the newly renovated Hotel Slovan in Košice—to discuss the Warhol museum matter. Realizing already that I was opposed to Bratislava as the site of the proposed museum, the minister pointed out that the Slovak government would be pleased to have a Warhol museum in the largest metropolis of eastern Slovakia, precisely where we were sitting—Košice. I responded that Košice was not in “Carpatho-Rusyn” ter-

51. Cultural Center, Medzilaborce, Slovakia (June 1991).

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ritory, that Prešov was an outside possibility, but that Medzilaborce had my support and (as I knew already) the support of John Warhola. The minister seemed to concede to my arguments.

There had been some thought of transforming Medzilaborce’s old post office into a museum space, but instead the town council decided sometime in early 1991 to place the proposed Warhol museum in the bombastically oversized, architecturally uninspired municipal cultural center which was completed in 1989, just before the fall of the Communist regime. There it was, this massive white behemoth of a building which was located along the main road as it entered Medzilaborce and below a hill on top of which sat a Russian-style Orthodox Church built after World War II to commemorate Soviet (and Czechoslovak) soldiers who died in the nearby Battle of the Dukla Pass.

In the end, Medzilaborce did become home to the Warhol Family Museum, complete with two six-foot high Campbell soup cans to grace the entrance. In 1991 the Slovak authorities organized two grand openings in the presence of Slovakia’s Minister of Culture, Andy’s older brothers Paul and John, as well as other Carpatho-Rusyn Americans.

52. Paul Warhola with the Magocsi family: Maria (left), Danik, Cindy, and Tinka at the second opening of the Warhol Family Museum, Medzilaborce, Slovakia (1991).

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While the opening ceremonies in 1991 of a Warhol Museum in Medzilaborce put some emphasis on the artist’s Carpatho-Rusyn roots, even more important were events that had unfolded two years earlier in Prešov.

A few days after the fall of Communist rule in Czechoslovakia, marked by the Velvet Revolution in Prague on 21 November 1989, the Initiative Group for Reconstruction of Rusyns-Ukrainians was established in Prešov. Its founder and leader was none other than Aleksander Zozuliak, the young journalist who had visited me a year or so earlier in Toronto.

The Initiative Group called for the reconstruction, in other words, the democratization of the Cultural Union of Ukrainian Workers—KSUT, the Communist civic organization that had a monopoly on representing Rusyns-Ukrainians ever since the early 1950s. Zozuliak, who in 1989 became editor-in-chief of that organization’s official organ Nove zhyttia (The New Life), decided to add a two-page supplement called Holos Rusyna (The Rusyn Voice) to each issue of the newspaper. Reflecting the mood of those post-Communist revolutionary times, Holos Rusyna was published in Rusyn, not Ukrainian, and it argued that Carpatho-Rusyns should demand a return to their status as a distinct nationality with full rights as a national minority in post-Communist Czechoslovakia. Zozuliak had clearly changed the views he had expressed to me when we spoke a little over a year before in Toronto. Now he believed that a revival of Carpatho-Rusynism was possible and that he was going to devote all his energies to that cause.

The next few months of early 1990 witnessed an internal struggle within the successor to KSUT, renamed the Union of Rusyns-Ukrainians of Czechoslovakia—SRUCH. The struggle was over which of the 96

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53. First issue of “Holos rusyniv” (The Rusyn Voice) in the newspaper Nove zhyttia (2 February 1990).

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two national orientations—Rusyn or Ukrainian—should be promoted. Zozuliak clearly argued for the Rusyn orientation, and for that reason he and his journalist colleagues (Anna Plishkova, Mariia Maltsovska, and Anna Kuzmiakova) left (or were fired from) Nove zhyttia and remained unemployed for a few months. Meanwhile, Zozuliak lent his editorial expertise to the first entirely Rusyn-language publication, an illustrated magazine called Rusyn, initiated by his friend Mykhal Byts54. First issue of the magazine Rusyn (Medzilaborce, 1991). ko, who had inspired the Warhol Museum project in Mezilaborce.

In keeping with the revolution in Czechoslovakia, Bytsko and a few other activists created the Medzilaborce branch of the all-Slovak anti-Communist organization, Civic Forum and Public Against Violence, which in March 1990 they transformed into a new organization called the Rusyn Renaissance Society (Rusynska obroda). The main goal of the new society was to promote the Rusyn language and culture and to have Carpatho-Rusyns recognized once again as a nationality distinct from Ukrainians.

The Warhol enthusiast Bytsko never really took a clear position on the nationality question, suggesting for instance that Rusyn children should be taught in their native “dialect” for only the first four years of elementary school, after which the language of instruction in upper grades through high school should remain literary Ukrainian as it had been under the Communist regime. Such waffling on the language and nationality question was unacceptable to other activists, so that in November 1990, exactly one year after the November 17, 1989 Velvet Revolution began, the Rusyn Renaissance Society held its first congress (soim) and elected as its chairman Vasyl Turok-Hetesh. A dramatist at the Dukhnovych Theater in Prešov, Turok had very clear views on the nationality question: Carpatho-Rusyns were a distinct people, not Ukrainians!

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55. Vasyl Turok-Hetesh, Dukhnovych Theater, Prešov, Slovakia (ca. 1992).

The focus of further Carpatho-Rusyn organizational activity now moved from Medzilaborce to Prešov. From then on, the lines were drawn. On the one side were supporters of the Rusyn Renaissance Society, who believed Carpatho-Rusyns were a distinct Slavic nationality worthy to have its own language taught in schools and used in cultural activity and publications. On the other side were supporters of the Union of Rusyns-Ukrainians of Czechoslovakia, who believed that Carpatho-Rusyns were a branch of the Ukrainian nationality and, therefore, they already had a literary language—Ukrainian.

Supporters of the Rusyn Renaissance Society liked to stress that the Union of Rusyns-Ukrainians was made up of former Communists-turned-national patriots, while they, the Renaissance supporters, were younger liberal democrats who never were party members. That might have been true of Zozuliak and his journalist colleagues, but otherwise the reality was more complex. The fact of the matter was that there were former Communists and non-Communists in both organizations. Needless to say, the two organizations grew progressively apart until there was little other than open ideological warfare between them.

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What was going on in Transcarpathia during these months of 1990? The Soviet Union still existed, although the process of loosening of central government controls set in motion by Mikhail Gorbachev was finally, if only gradually, reaching peripheral areas like Ukraine’s Transcarpathian region.

One day in late February 1990, while luncheoning at our university’s Faculty Club and reading the leftist leaning newspaper, The Ukrainian-Canadian Herald, I chanced upon a short article that reported about the creation earlier that same month of a new organization in Transcarpathia called the Society of Carpatho-Rusyns (Tovarystvo karpatskykh rusyniv). “Could this be true?” I asked myself in wonder.

Were there still Transcarpathians who after four decades of Soviet rule believed they were not Ukrainians? I had to find out.

The opportunity to do so came of all places in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv.

In late August 1990, at the initiative of Ukrainianist colleagues in Canada (Bohdan Krawchenko) and the United States (George Grabowicz), the first congress of the International Association of Ukrainianists/Mizhnarodna assotsiatsiia ukraïnistiv—MAU took place. The representative from Kyiv responsible for organizing what became a truly large-scale historic event was none other than my friend Oleksa Myshanych representing the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences.

By the early 1990s, I was for the most part estranged from the Ukrainian world in North America. For that reason, I was not about to join either the Canadian or American delegations to this purely Ukrainian affair. It turned out that Myshanych was astounded when he discovered that one of the leading Ukrainianists in North America, the holder of the Chair of 100

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56. First news in the “West” about the establishment of the Society of Carpatho-Rusyns in Uzhhorod, Soviet Ukraine (Ukrainian-Canadian Herald, February 1990).

Ukrainian Studies at the University of Toronto, might not be at this historic, first gathering of Ukrainianists from no less than five continents.

As executive director of the Kyiv congress, Myshanych by-passed protocol, disregarded the American and Canadian delegations, and issued a special invitation to me from the central Organizing Committee in Kyiv.

Not wanting to embarrass him (we were still friends), and not wanting to seem too cantankerous or prima-donna like, I accepted the invitation.

It turned out that I actually delivered two lectures at the Congress, one on Carpatho-Rusyns in America and their relations with the homeland, 101

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the other on the Lemko-Rusyn Republic of 1918-1919. For some reason, I do not remember what took place during those lectures, although press reports from that time relate that the Lemko lecture (delivered at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences Institute of History) prompted a fierce debate and highly emotional responses from the audience, virtually all of whom would have been Ukrainophiles from the Carpathian region and Ukrainian scholars.

What I do remember were events 57. Ivan Petrovtsi (right) with Paul Robert Magocsi on the Maidan in central that took place outside the formal Kyiv, Soviet Ukraine (September 1990).

Congress proceedings. They began the very first day before the Congress even began. At the ungodly hour of 7:00 am I was abruptly awoken by loud knocking on my hotel room door.

I stumbled out of bed, opened the door, and feasted my half-closed eyes on a portly young, bearded guy who introduced himself as Ivan Petrovtsi, a Rusyn writer from Transcarpathia. Speaking in rapid-fire nervous, nay unnerved, tones, he told me how he had to meet me, at the very least shake my hand, and to let me know that he was part of a group who had come especially to Kyiv from Transcarpathia in order to meet the renowned Carpatho-Rusyn American from Canada, Professor Paul Robert Magocsi. The frenzied Petrovtsi turned out to be my introduction to the alleged Carpatho-Rusyns of Soviet Transcarpathia, the historic Subcarpathian Rus’ and birthplace of my mother. I was not impressed by this initial encounter.

Somewhat better were the other members of the delegation from Transcarpathia which was led by the founding chairman of the Society of Carpatho-Rusyns, Mykhailo Tomchanyi, and one of its two vice-chairpersons, Margarita Mikhalyova. Tomchanyi was the chief architect of Uzhhorod; Mihalyova was a classic Russian-speaking postwar newcomer to the region who worked for the Mukachevo branch of the Kyiv-based 102

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58. Fedir Zubanych, Ivan Petrovtsi, Yurii Bacha, Margarita Mikhalyova, Alek Mushynka, and Mykhailo Tomchanyi in Kyiv, Soviet Ukraine (September 1990).

Ukraina Society. In that role she functioned as an informer for the Soviet security services (KGB), something she had done back in 1983 when I had arranged for the Rusyn-American cultural activists Jerry Jumba and John Rightetti to study in Uzhhorod. On that first August 1990 morning in Kyiv, Tomchanyi, Mykhalyova, and I spent a few hours discussing what their society hoped to achieve and whether I would help them in their efforts to promote the Carpatho-Rusyn cause in historic Subcarpathian Rus’. I agreed to do what I could.

Still hopeful that some kind of accommodation could be reached with Ukrainophile Rusyns, I organized a meeting of the Transcarpathian delegation with a few Carpatho-Ukrainians at the Congress. My goal was to let the Ukrainophiles hear about the new Carpatho-Rusyn movement directly from the activists who had come from Transcarpathia instead of through often biased newspaper reports. Oleksa Myshanych, the Congress organizer, was too busy to attend, but Yurii Bacha and Mykola Mushynka’s son Alek, both from Prešov, did show up and acted in a civilized manner. In contrast, I remember the response to my invitation from the Ukrainophile American political scientist Vasyl Markus, the postwar exile from Transcarpathia, who in the 1980s had both praised 103

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the scholarly value of my book, The Shaping of a National Identity, and criticized its alleged anti-Ukrainian slant. In Kyiv that day he was blunt and to the point: “I refuse to associate with such anti-Ukrainian traitors.”

In the end, nothing much came of our rather superficial meeting, since the lines between Rusynophile and Ukrainophile Carpatho-Rusyns in Europe had been already drawn.

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The views and actions of community activists were one thing; those of scholars were, or should be, something else. Still believing that some kind of cooperation between Ukrainophiles and Rusynophiles might be possible, I wanted to take advantage of the rapidly changing political situation in what was clearly becoming the new post-Soviet world. My proposal was something that heretofore had been impossible: to bring scholars from the Soviet Union and the formerly Soviet-dominated sphere in central Europe to meet at a scholarly forum in the West. The occasion that presented itself was the IV Congress of the World Association of Soviet and East European Studies scheduled to take place in July

59. Oleksa Myshanych, Paul Robert Magocsi, Olena Duts-Faifer, Mykola Mushynka, and Lubomir Medieshi at the IV World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies, Harrogate, England (July 1990).

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1990 in Harrogate, a handsome town in the Yorkshire district of England.

I submitted plans for a panel specifically devoted to Carpatho-Rusyns at which Oleksa Myshanych would speak about the community in Ukraine, Mykola Mushynka in Slovakia, Olena Duts-Faifer in Poland, Lubomir Medieshi in Yugoslavia, and Paul Robert Magocsi in the United States. The panel, at which Ukrainian and Rusyn were spoken (I cannot remember whether I spoke in Ukrainian or English) was 60. Olena Duts-Faifer and Paul Robert successful in that it made Western Magocsi in York, England (July 1990). specialists who dominated the audience aware of a phenomenon—Carpatho-Rusyns—of whom most were totally unaware. Although the ideological lines were clearly drawn, with the Ukrainophiles Myshanych and Mushynka pitted against the Rusynophiles Duts-Faifer, Medieshi, and Magocsi, we got along quite well and spent some pleasant social hours together. I especially remember the trip with Olena Duts to the neighboring medieval citadel of York (it was there that the two of us really started to bond), and also a pleasant group dinner (featuring real Yorkshire pudding as the specialty) at which my Harvard colleague, the renowned specialist in Ukrainian literature George Grabowicz and his wife Oksana (my kuma—godmother to son Danik), were in attendance. I always thought then—and still now—that Ukrainians and Ukrainianists should know about all the peoples in the country they study. And that includes Carpatho-Rusyns.

The only glitch we encountered at the Harrogate Congress of scholars was related to the patriarchal and hierarchical nature of traditional East Slavic societies. Oleksa Myshanych let it be known that he was uncomfortable with having a graduate student as equal panel participant among a group of “senior” scholars. That Olena Duts-Faifer was a female and somewhat of an acerbic personality with a tendency to speak too long and much 106

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61. Jarosław Mokliak (left), Olena Duts’-Faifer, and George Grabowicz, York, England (July 1990).

too fast, were all characteristics that did not help the situation. Myshanych and to a degree Mushynka even suggested that she should not be allowed to speak at the panel. I tried to calm their concerns in a way that Olena felt I was giving in to the older “professors” who were, aside from everything else, Ukrainophiles unfriendly to the Carpatho-Rusyn idea. In the end, Olena spoke at the panel and at many future scholarly meetings that I was responsible for organizing. Among them was the so-called travelling seminar or, as our Ukrainophile critics later quipped, “travelling circus.”

***** I cannot remember whose suggestion it was to bring the Harrogate seminar to the Carpathian homeland, but I do not think it was mine. Probably it was Oleksa Myshanych’s, especially since he turned out to be the biggest enthusiast of the idea. How then to pull it off?

I decided to consult with and call on the help of a close friend, Lubomir Medieshi, whom I first met in the early 1980s. At that time he was a young ethnographer-historian from Novi Sad whose goal was to write a doctoral dissertation and publish a book on the model of my Shaping of a National Identity. The only difference was that he would deal with the Vojvodinian-Bachka Rusyns.

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62. Paul Robert Magocsi and Mykola Mushynka, Harrogate, England (July 1990).

I always felt that Lubomir had ambitions to be a modern re-awakener of the Vojvodinian Rusyns, especially since the holder of the university professorial Chair in Rusyn Studies at the University of Novi Sad, Yuliian Tamash (whom Medieshi had initially supported for that position), turned out to be a crypto-Ukrainophile and soon openly aggressive proUkrainian opponent of the Carpatho-Rusyn orientation. Medieshi accepted my invitation to spend six months (September 1986-March 1987) on a research fellowship in Toronto. Within two months of his return to Yugoslavia he was appointed to the influential post—and quite politically sensitive position in Communist Yugoslavia—of director of the state sponsored Ruske Slovo Publishing House.

In order to make the two-week long travelling seminar possible, we decided to rent two cars, one of which I would drive, the other Medieshi. Aside from the original five speakers at Harrogate from Ukraine, Slovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, and the United States—Myshanych, Mushynka, Duts-Faifer, Medieshi, and Magocsi—we added István Udvari from Hungary to speak about the remnants of the Carpatho-Rusyn community in that country.

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The “elders,” Myshanych and Mushynka, together with Udvari sat in my car; the younger ones, Olena Duts and Medieshi, sat in the other car with the extra luggage. I believe Udvari may have joined their car for part of the trip. The point was that I was stuck with Myshanych and Mushynka for several hours over a two-week period during which we for the most part discussed the rightness and righteousness of adopting either a pro-Rusyn or pro-Ukrainian position on the Carpatho-Rusyn nationality question. In fact, our discussions often turned into heated arguments.

In the end, instead of reaching some kind of accommodation, each side had hardened its views at the expense of scholarly detachment and personal friendships which for all intents and purposes came to an end.

This was certainly the case between Myshanych and me. I believe our break-up was especially problematic for Oleksa, who was expected by the Soviet authorities (in cooperation with the Ukraina Society) to maintain Magocsi “on their [Soviet Ukrainian] side.” There was also a financial incentive behind Oleksa’s ties with me. Early on, when we first met, Myshanych the Ukrainian academician told me that I was a krupnii vchenyi, a Soviet turn of phrase which meant roughly “very major scholar.” As such, he surmised, I should not allow myself to get bogged down in provincial matters concerning Subcarpathian Rus’, but rather concentrate on Ukrainian history where I was sure to have an outstanding career. Myshanych’s remark reminded me of a similar one by Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytskyi who on a visit to Harvard in the early 1970s told me that, unlike the other young Ukrainian historians at Harvard (Subtelny, Kohut, Hajda, Sysyn), I should not accept just any teaching position, but rather wait for an offer from some major university where, he felt, I was destined to be. For Myshanych I should not only be a Ukrainianist but accept my ancestral identity as Ukrainian and therefore be assured a wonderful professional career. When it turned out that I refused to do that, he was sorely disappointed.

The other project Myshanych proposed turned out to be more successful, or at least realized. As part of his plans to have me recognized as a krupnii vchenyi in Ukraine, he proposed that my Harvard monograph, The Shaping of a National Identity, be translated into Ukrainian.

His brother Fedir, who lived in the Transcarpathian village of Baranyntsi 109

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just outside of Uzhhorod, was, I believe, an ethnographer by training who knew English quite well. Although Oleksa never told me, I believe Fedir did the translation while Oleksa did the painstaking job of editing the footnotes and bibliography with its more than two-thousand entries, at least half of which had to be re-transliterated back into the original Cyrillic alphabet.

The cost of the translating and editorial work was somewhere between $8,000 and $10,000 US, which I managed to raise in the United States (from whom I forget). The point is that this was an enormous sum of money in the early 1990s, a time when the Soviet Union was collapsing, and independent Ukraine’s economy was in shambles. The funds were paid to Oleksa Myshanych, who would wait anxiously for my arrival in Slovakia or Transcarpathia with the cash installments. He then used the money to build a large new family house where Fedir lived (and where Myshanych’s great Carpatica library was to be housed) in the village of Baranyntsi, just east of Uzhhorod. In the years since then, each time I travel by car from Uzhhorod eastward to Mukachevo through Baranyntsi I cannot help but see the house which funding for The Shaping of a National Identity made possible and which reminds me of the friendship I once had with Oleksa Myshanych.

63. István Udvari, Paul Robert Magocsi, and Lubomir Medieshi on the eve of the first stop of the traveling seminar, Uzhhorod, Soviet Ukraine (March 1991).

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***** As for the “traveling seminar,” it took place in March 1991. Myshanych was determined that the seminar should begin in Uzhhorod (Transcarpathian Ukraine) continue in Cracow (Poland) and Prešov (Slovakia), then after a weekend break, end in Novi Sad (Yugoslavia). As the organizer in Uzhhorod, Myshanych, who had the prestige of an academician from Kyiv, 64. Yuliian Tamash at the Uzhhorod managed to have our seminar held in seminar (March 1991). the chambers of the Transcarpathian Regional Assembly (Oblasna rada), the very same building that the Czechoslovak regime had inaugurated in 1935 to house the future autonomous diet (soim) of its eastern province Subcarpathian Rus’.

Before the seminar began there was a disturbance in the hallway. Professor Yuliian Tamash had driven all the way from Novi Sad in Yugoslavia with the intention of speaking. His assumption was that this was just another provincial gathering of local academics at which anyone could appear on the program should they wish.

The organizer Myshanych looked at the rest of us and realized that such an intrusion was not permitted at serious scholarly forums. Tamash was incensed. He, the self-styled distinguished—and pro-Ukrainian—head of the Department of Rusyn Language and Literature at the University of Novi Sad, was being rejected, while Lubomir Medieshi, his pro-Rusyn nemesis who did not hold an academic post, was on the formal program and was going to be allowed to present his “anti-Ukrainian” understanding of the Vojvodinian-Bachka Rusyns. Mykola Mushynka supported his Ukrainophile friend’s request to appear on our panel, but surprisingly Myshanych—the most Ukrainian of us all—held his ground and said, “No!” Tamash, who could hardly restrain his pent-up anger, reluctantly took a seat in the audience. After our formal presentations, he was allowed to pose a question (actually a ten-minute or so intervention). When he 111

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finished his tirade, mostly directed against Medieshi, Tamash stormed out of the hall and immediately set off for his long trip back to Yugoslavia.

He was not about to forget the shabby treatment he got in Uzhhorod and vowed secretly to avenge himself when the appropriate time would come.

But there we were, all six of us seated at Transcarpathia’s Regional Assembly podium under a large bust of Vladimir Lenin. I could not help but recall the first time I gave a public lecture in Toronto. I, an American of the 1776 revolutionary tradition, was lecturing under a portrait of Canada’s sovereign, Queen Elizabeth II. She was at least a benign ruler, unlike the despot Lenin. Transcarpathia was still the Soviet Union, however. Sacred symbols like Lenin busts and statues were everywhere.

At the same time, however, it was early 1991, and we were witnessing the height of Gorbachev’s glasnost, which had finally trickled down to provincial outposts like Ukraine’s Transcarpathia. Evidence of that were at least three recent developments: (1) the University of Uzhhorod professor of the Ukrainian language, Pavlo Chuchka, was able to publish in 1989 in the local Communist party newspaper a five-part article provocatively entitled, “How Rusyns Became Ukrainians”; (2) the Society of Carpatho-Rusyns had just come into existence; and (3) Transcarpathia’s Regional Assembly appointed a special commission to propose how the region’s historic autonomous status could be restored. Our panel included at least three pro-Rusyn scholars, something that would have been unheard of in a public setting just a few months before. That the audience

65. Mykola Mushynka (far left), István Udvari, Paul Robert Magocsi, Oleksa Myshanych, Olena Duts-Faifer, and Lubomir Medieshi at the first travelling seminar, Transcarpathian Regional Assembly, Uzhhorod, Soviet Ukraine (March 1991).

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66. The ubiquitous Lenin overseeing the first travelling seminar, Uzhhorod, Soviet Ukraine (March 1991).

was made up of both pro-Ukrainian and pro-Rusyn supporters assured that the discussion period would be at the very least lively. And so it was, although thankfully totally opposite opinions on the nationality question were discussed in a civilized manner.

This was not the case a few hours later when several of the panel members spoke at the University of Uzhhorod to a large gathering of students mostly from the Faculty of Ukrainian Language and Literature. I, in particular, was greeted by ad hominem attacks from the former Communist sympathizer-turned-Ukrainian nationalist, Professor Yurii Balega, although I seemed to have deflected his criticisms successfully without any direct reference to him. Also at that gathering was a young graduate student Nadiya Kushko, who was later to play an important role in the Carpatho-Rusyn movement and particularly in my personal life.

Early in the evening after the talk at the university, three of us (Medieshi, Duts-Faifer, and myself) were invited to a meeting held in a rather large cultural center under the sponsorship of the Society of Car113

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67. The Society of Carpatho-Rusyns hosts the American guest Paul Robert Magocsi, flanked

by Mykhailo Tomchanyi and Ivan Turianytsia, Uzhhorod, Soviet Ukraine (March 1991).

patho-Rusyns. Oleksa Myshanych seemed adamant that we should not go, but we were determined to accept the invitation. As our protective host in Uzhhorod, Oleksa felt he could not leave us alone and came along as well, bringing Mykola Mushynka and István Udvari in tow.

It turned out that I was the guest of honor and asked to sit at the podium where the Society of Carpatho-Rusyns chairman Mykhailo Tomchanyi and several other speakers told the audience of how for decades Subcarpathia’s Rusyns were denied their very existence and that now was the time they needed to rise up and be recognized. One of the speakers was Professor Ivan Turianytsia, a true firebrand who I encountered for the first time. When the meeting was over, Myshanych ran into the crowd that surrounded me and pulled on my right arm in an effort to take me out of what for him was a most distasteful environment. Turianytsia 68. Oleksa Myshanych (far right) trying glared at him, pulling my other arm, to whisk away P. R. Magocsi from and yelling that Professor Magocsi “those nefarious Rusyns,” Uzhhorod, was going with him in order to be Soviet Ukraine (March 1991).

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69. Mykhailo Tomchanyi, Paul Robert Magocsi, Volodymyr Mykyta, and Ivan Turianytsia, Uzhhorod, Soviet Ukraine (March 1991).

with “our Carpatho-Rusyns.” I did go with Turianytsia and company, while Myshanych left alone in disgust.

We were whisked off to a special place—the studio of one of Transcarpathia’s most distinguished painters, Volodymyr Mykyta. From the first moment I became enamored with this quiet, unassuming, pipe-smoking, thoroughly civilized European.

I also met for the first time that night Volodymyr Fedynyshynets, a prolific Ukrainian-language writer who was determined to transform himself and his active or passive Ukrainophile Transcarpathians into Carpatho-Rusyns. Fedynyshynets was what one might call a post-Soviet Carpatho-Rusyn cultural nationalist. I believe he would have welcomed being described with such an epithet. Both Mykyta and Fedynyshynets became my closest friends and main collaborators in Transcarpathia, most especially during the 1990s.

As important during our two days in Transcarpathia was the privilege I had to meet the reigning bishop of the recently re-legalized Greek Catholic Eparchy of Mukachevo, Ioan Semedii. Even before the Soviet Union finally collapsed at the end of 1991, local Ukrainophiles in Transcarpathia, with support from Ukrainian nationalist circles in neighboring Galicia, were demanding that the Mukachevo Eparchy be united with the rest of Ukraine’s Greek Catholic Church based at the time in Lviv. Semedii 115

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70. “Nationality builders” in the artist’s atelier: (standing left to right) Mykhailo Tomchanyi, unidentified, Lubomir Medieshi, Olena Duts’-Faifer, István Udvari, Ivan Turianytsia; and (kneeling from bottom up) Volodymyr Mykyta, Ivan Petrovtsi, and Volodymyr Fedynyshynets, Uzhhorod, Soviet Ukraine (March 1991).

was increasingly being criticized as a “Rusyn separatist,” simply because he defended the historic status of the eparchy (ecclesia sui juris) established and defended by the Holy See in the Vatican. I simply had to pay my respects to this humble man, persecuted during the Communist era, who was until his passing over a decade later to be under attack for supporting the jurisdictional status quo of his distinct Ruthenian Greek Catholic Eparchy.

***** 71. Ivan Bytsko, Bishop Ioan Semedii, Paul Robert Magocsi in front of the temporary Greek Catholic episcopal residence, Uzhhorod, Soviet Ukraine (March 1991).

After Ukraine’s Transcarpathia, our travelling seminar moved on to Poland, where we were warmly greet116

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ed by the authorities at Jagiellonian University in Cracow. Here we were on neutral ground. Poland’s Rusynophile Lemko activists turned out in full force, including the younger Yaroslav Horoshchak, Andrei Kopcha, Petro Trokhanovskii and the older Fedor Goch, Pavel Stefanovskii, and Yaroslav Trokhanovskii. The atmosphere was less emotionally charged, largely because of the prestigious setting of Jagiellonian University and the presence of Poles in the audience who had no particular vested interest in the “Rusyn problem.” For them this was basically an intellectual matter that raised important theoretical and conceptual issues in the study of nationalism and social anthropology.

Among our Jagiellonian hosts were the respected Polish linguist Wiesław Witkowski and the advanced Ph.D. candidate Andrzej Zięba, a friend of Lemko Rusyns, who I knew from the late 1980s. It was particularly pleasant to hear the comments from one audience member, the by then legendary Polish specialist on Lemkos going back to the interwar years, Professor Roman Reinfuss. Before leaving Poland we paid homage to the “father” of the new Lemko Rusyn literature, Petro Trokhanovskii-Murianka at the parish house in Krynica, where a new Orthodox church was still under construction.

From Poland we moved on to Prešov in Slovakia. Our few days in that

72. Andrzej Zięba, Mykola Mushynka, Oleksa Myshanych, Olena Duts’-Faifer, Paul Robert Magocsi, Wiesław Witkowski, István Udvari, and Lubomir Medieshi at the second stop of the travelling seminar, Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences, Cracow, Poland (March 1991).

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73. Roman Reinfuss (white hair seated in center); Pavel Stefanovskii (standing with camera), Cracow, Poland (March 1991).

country turned out to be a watershed moment in the travelling seminar.

I cannot remember who our host was, but the seminar was held in the historic Rus’ Cultural Center/Russkii Dom on Prešov’s main street. I had admired the exterior of this building numerous times during my visits to the city going back to 1968. I was always pleased to see its handsome façade, the only one in the historic core of the city with prominent letters in the Cyrillic alphabet: Русский дом 1923. That date referred to the year when the local Carpatho-Rusyn community, with substantial financial help from Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants in the United States, was able to purchase this former urban residence of a Hungarian aristocratic family and turn it into a national cultural center. Actually, the main hall on the second floor where we spoke was somewhat disappointing in that it was much much smaller than I had imagined. Because the setting was so small and so many people showed up, I believe we panelists did not even have a place to sit but rather delivered our talks standing up. Most of the large audience was made up of Prešov’s Ukrainophile civic and academic (often intolerant) activists who had dominated the study of Carpatho-Rusyns in Slovakia since the Communist era. The Ukrainians in our delegation, Mykola Mushynka and Oleksa Myshanych, were clear118

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ly in their element.

For some of us, the cramped quarters of the Rus’ Cutlural Center were the least of our problems. By then I had heard Oleksa Myshanych’s presentation three times, first the year before in Harrogate, England and then the first days of our travelling seminar in Uzhhorod and Cracow. I could not contain myself any more with what I heard and decided that during the discussion period I would read a rebuttal to his distortion of historic events in Subcarpathian Rus’ during the late 1930s, especially his argument that a 74. Petro Trokhanovskii, István Udvari, Oleksa Myshanych, and Mykola rally of several thousand pro-UkraiMushynka before the yet unfinished nians held in 1937 “proved” that the Orthodox Church, Krynica-Wieś, region’s Carpatho-Rusyn inhabitants Poland (March 1991). were ethnically Ukrainian.

After a few passages of my rebuttal, Mykola Mushynka, cut in and chastised me for criticizing the “distinguished scholar” Oleksa Myshanych. Oleksa, in his usual manner, remained stone-faced and said nothing. I was both embarrassed and angry at Mushynka, but I too said nothing more. After a few more audience questions, the seminar was brought to a close. We all left in a foul mood.

We still, however, had another seminar to do in Yugoslavia and, therefore, would still be stuck travelling together. But before setting off for Yugoslavia we took a three-day break and remained in Czechoslovakia.

Specifically, we went northward to Medzilaborce. At first we were all silent, but about halfway through the roughly hour-long car trip, we finally began to talk and inevitably turned to the incident the day before in Prešov. No one was about to apologize.

Instead, I said that if a graduate student handed in an essay to me such as the one Oleksa presented, that student would receive a failing grade.

Again, Oleksa, who was sitting alongside me “riding shotgun,” said 119

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75. Ukrainophiles at the third stop of the travelling seminar: Iurii Bacha, Liubytsia Babotova, Mykola Mushynka, Oleksa Myshanych, Rus’ Cultural Center/Russkii Dom, Prešov, Czechoslovakia (March 1991).

nothing. But Mykola Mushynka sitting in the back went berserk. How could I dare speak in such insulting tones to a distinguished member of Ukraine’s Academy of Sciences? When Mykola finally paused from his tirade, I said that Oleksa’s unacceptable “graduate-student” text was probably a reflection of the low level of politicized Soviet scholarship and that his piece was still deserving of a failing grade. Sitting alongside Mushynka was Udvari who did not utter a word.

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But why were we going to Medzilaborce? Sometime in February 1991, when we were completing arrangements for the travelling seminar, I received in the mail an envelope sent from somewhere in Czechoslovakia.

I believe it could have been from Rudolf Matola in Prague. Inside was a small piece of paper on which was a typewritten invitation to attend what was called the First World Congress of Rusyns to be held on March 22-23, 1991, in Medzilaborce. It was signed by an employee of the town’s administration, Mykhal Turok-Hetesh. Aside from its rather pedestrian look, I was struck by the fact that some of the words on the invitation included the old Cyrillic letter yat (ѣ) which one hardly ever saw anymore.

76. Invitation from the Union of Rusyns to the “first” World Congress, Medzilaborce, Czechoslovakia, planned for 22-24 March 1991.

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The old man Matola was a fanatic defender of the yat—a man after my own heart.

My first reaction was that this was not serious, but rather a joke, or perhaps even a provocation. Since I was going to be in Europe in March in order to participate in the travelling seminar, I let the organizers in Medzilaborce know that I would attend their planned World Congress.

At least two of the other participants in the travelling seminar also decided to attend: Olena Duts-Faifer as part of the delegation from Poland 77. Public poster announcing and Lubomir Medieshi with the the I. World Congress of Rusyns, Medzilaborce, Czechoslovakia. delegation from Yugoslavia. I guess Mushynka and Myshanych could not resist keeping tabs on what those “suspicious” Rusyns were doing, and so our entire travelling seminar (with István Udvari in tow) was off to the First World Congress of Rusyns.

When I pulled up our car into the center of the town and got out, the first person to greet us was Vasyl Turok. He smiled and hugged me as if I were a long-lost friend. In a sense we were friends, because twenty years earlier, just after Maria and I had gotten married, the first apartment we lived in as a couple was a few floors above Vasyl’s in what was at the time Prešov’s newest residential district (Sidlisko I). I believe it was Vasyl who actually found the apartment for us in response to a request from Maria’s colleagues in the Ukrainian National Theater.

I would often meet Vasyl in the elevator or outside the building and we struck up a friendship. This was not hard to do with Vasyl, who was known for his outgoing personality. At that time, Vasyl taught the Slovak language and literature at the Ukrainian gymnasium in Prešov, but when we reconnected at the Congress in Medzilaborce he was by then a dramatist at the former Ukrainian National, recently renamed Aleksander Dukhnovych, Theater. Thanks to his determination, and in close 122

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cooperation with the accomplished actor-director Yaroslav Sŷsak, the theater’s repertoire was modernized, and its performances were almost exclusively in Rusyn.

As a former Slovak-language teacher, Turok’s language was, alas, heavily slovakized. He might be excused, since a literary standard had not yet been created. Even after it was, however, the often-stubborn Vasyl continued to use more, albeit rusynized Slovak loan words than seemed inappropriate for a language that was trying to reveal its distinctiveness from cognate East Slavic languages.

More important was that here we were in Medzilaborce, two old friends reconnecting and setting out on a new revolutionary path working together on behalf of a Carpatho-Rusyn national revival: Vasyl, as recently-elected chairman of the Rusyn Renaissance Society (Rusynska obroda) in Slovakia; I, as president of the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center in the United States. We felt an instant compatibility which made cooperation between us on behalf of the national movement very easy and productive—and for many years to come.

78. Mykhal Turok-Hetesh, L’udovít Haraksim, Paul Robert Magocsi, Vasyl TurokHetesh, and Lubomir Medieshi during a break at the First World Congress of Rusyns.

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Irony of ironies, the First World Congress was being held in the town’s largest structure, the recently completed (by the former Communist regime) Cultural Center, which now housed the Warhol Museum that Mykhal Bytsko had so desperately been trying to create since the late 1980s.

I can still remember our entry into the Cultural Center on the first day of the Congress. To get to the main auditorium, we had to walk up two long flights of stairs. Each step riser and the walls alongside the staircase were painted with Warhol motifs—flowers and cows. What a cultural disconnect, I thought, a kind of theater of the absurd. The largest delegation, three busloads of Carpatho-Rusyns from Soviet Transcarpathia, were baffled, probably shocked, by what seemed too playful a setting for something so serious as the First World Congress of Carpatho-Rusyns.

The atmosphere was much different, however, when we entered the large auditorium. On the stage was a long table to seat the heads of each delegation. Hanging from the middle of the stage’s curtain backdrop was a large reproduction of the Carpatho-Rusyn national symbol with its red bear. Surrounding it on all sides were placards with large Cyrillic letters that proclaimed moving patriotic verses by the nineteenth-century national revivalist Aleksander Pavlovych: “Oi, probud’te sya, Rusynŷ/ Zhebŷ

79. Yaroslav Sŷsak opens the First World Congress of Rusyns.

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na Vas bŷly pŷshnŷ—divkŷ, sŷnŷ./ Zhebŷ plodŷ nashykh otsiv ne propaly . . . / Zhebŷ hrobŷ nashykh predkiv ne plakaly” (Oh, awaken all ye Rusyns/ So that your daughters and sons remain proud./ So that the offspring of our fathers are not lost . . ./ So that the graves of our ancestors do not weep).

The heads of each country who entered from the side of the stage to take their places facing the audience were Vasyl Turok-Hetesh (Slovakia), Andrei Kopcha (Poland), Vasyl Sochka-Borzhavyn (Ukraine), Lubomir Medieshi (Yugoslavia), and Paul Robert Magocsi (United States). Most significantly, all the delegation heads except for Vasyl Sochka from Ukraine’s Transcarpathia were younger than 45, implying that the Carpatho-Rusyn movement was dominated by a younger generation and that, therefore, it has a future.

For me, most impressive was the coordinator of the proceedings, Aleksander Franko. Although also in his mid-forties, he had retired for health reasons from the Czechoslovak diplomatic service and returned to his native town of Medzilaborce, where he taught English at the town’s senior high school (gymnasium). Trained as a diplomat, Aleksander (Sasha) Franko conducted the Congress proceedings in a professional and sophisticated manner. His approach was most gratifying for my tastes, formed as they were in North American academic and civic circles. Franko set the tone. There was no yelling or confrontational language at the First World Congress, even though there may have been disagreement regarding the identity questions and future tactics that the movement should adopt.

What one did feel in the auditorium was a sense of euphoria which was palpable among the entire audience—about 250 delegates and guests from within and beyond Slovakia—especially when they rose from their seats to sing the national hymn set to Dukhnovych’s verses, “Ya Rusyn bŷl, yesm i budu” (I Was, Am, and Will Remain a Rusyn). Tears streamed down the cheeks of both young and old who were present.

And why shouldn’t there be such emotion? This was the first time Carpatho-Rusyns from the core homeland (Subcarpathian Rus’ in Ukraine, the Prešov Region in Slovakia, the Lemko Region in Poland) joined by diaspora Rusyns from Yugoslavia’s Vojvodina region and from North America (only me) were able to meet in one place and proclaim 125

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to themselves and to the world that despite international borders they formed one distinct nationality that was worthy of recognition. Thanks to the end of Communist rule, the future was now in the hands of Carpatho-Rusyns themselves. Would the road ahead be difficult and strewn with obstacles? Yes. But could the movement achieve its basic objectives?

Most in the Congress hall thought yes. And ultimately they were right.

After the national hymn and the introduction of guests from local and regional Slovak governmental bodies, the chairman of each delegation was called on to speak. I was the last to do so. For the occasion I wrote what I thought was one of the best texts I had ever composed. Actually, it was a kind of civic call to arms couched in the style of a logical, emotionally restrained university lecture. Although the original text was written in Rusyn, I had it translated into Ukrainian for the simple reason that I knew no one in North America—or for that matter elsewhere— who could render a nuanced text accurately into Rusyn. No one in the audience seemed bothered by the use of Ukrainian, which most of the audience understood since they were either from Ukraine or from Communist-ruled countries where Ukrainian had been the language of education in “Rusyn” schools.

In the first half of my 45-minute address I systematically described the situation in each country where Carpatho-Rusyns lived, beginning with Subcarpathian Rus’/Transcarpathia in Ukraine. In the second half I raised general conceptual issues about national movements and national identity and then proposed specific measures that needed to be taken to assure the movement’s success, especially civic, cultural, and educational activity. I stressed language codification and national censuses as particularly important.

There was an especially sensitive moment when I posed the rhetorical question: “Are Carpatho-Rusyns a distinct nationality?” and followed it with the response: “No!” One could hear gasps of disbelief in several audience members who could not believe that their hoped-for leader from America would dare say such a thing. Then came from me a second rhetorical question: “Do Carpatho-Rusyns have all the ethnographic and cultural characteristics to become a distinct nationality?” followed the definitive answer: “Yes.” That calmed those who were shocked by the an126

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80. Paul Robert Magocsi, delegate from the United States, addressing the First World Congress of Rusyns.

swer to my first question.

Overall, many felt that my speech was a policy statement, a kind of clarion call for Carpatho-Rusyns everywhere to “arise from their deep slumber” (to quote the national anthem) and for each one of us to do what he or she could to support the national movement. Because it was subsequently published in several languages (English, Ukrainian, Rusyn, Slovak, Polish), my first Congress speech reached many more Carpatho-Rusyns who were not in Medzilaborce on that historic March day in 1991.

On the second day of proceedings, the Congress was open to anyone who wanted to speak. Vasyl Turok in particular, as well as other Carpatho-Rusyns in Slovakia were convinced liberals, inspired by Czechoslovakia’s first post-Communist philosopher-president Václav Havel.

Following Havel’s principles, everyone should be allowed to express his or her views, even Ukrainophiles who continued to deny the very existence of Carpatho-Rusyns. Surprisingly, neither of our fellow travelling seminar Ukrainophiles, Mykola Mushynka (who was actually on home ground) or Oleksa Myshanych, opted to speak. But the head of Slovakia’s Ukrainian-language radio broadcasting service, Pavlo Bogdan, did rise to the occasion.

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Now that the national theater in Prešov had changed its language of performance from Ukrainian to Rusyn, the Rusyn Renaissance Society was calling for a change of name and policy for the Museum of RusynUkrainian Culture in Svidník and for the state-sponsored Ukrainian-language broadcasting service. Speaking on behalf of that service, Bogdan tried to strike a conciliatory note. The station, he said, could not use “Rusyn dialect” because there was no codified standard. “Codify a Rusyn standard language,” he said, and the radio station will start “broadcasting in Rusyn immediately.” True, there was not yet a Rusyn literary standard (something I had called for in my address the previous day), but then Bogdan—as it turned out—was not about to deliver on his promise even if a standard literary form would be created.

Pavlo Bogdan was a typical “Rusyn-Ukrainian,” that is, someone born in a Prešov Region village just after World War II and educated in eastern Slovakia or, as in the case of some other local cultural activists, in Soviet Ukraine where their families had emigrated in 1947. Prešov Region Rusyn-Ukrainians like Bogdan, Myroslav Sopolyga (director of the Museum of Rusyn-Ukrainian Culture in Svidník), and Ivan Yatskanyn (editor-in-chief of the Ukrainian language cultural and civic affairs journal Duklia) had been taught from earliest youth that they were of Ukrainian nationality. They did not learn this from their Rusyn/Rusnak parents, but rather from the school system in post-1948 Communist Czechoslovakia. Following the Soviet model, Czechoslovakia’s schools instilled in students the characteristic of intolerance toward any differences or variant from the social norm. As Marxist-Leninist ideology preached, there was only one demonstrably provable “truth,” and with regard to “our people’s” national identity that truth was simple and straightforward: all Rusyns are Ukrainians. Imbued with the fervor of converts of the moreCatholic-than-the-Pope variety, certain Carpatho-Rusyns, whether in Communist Czechoslovakia or among the Lemko Rusyns in Communist-ruled Poland, presented themselves as super Ukrainian patriots.

What was becoming more and more evident, both at the Congress and later, was the following: there was not any struggle between Ukrainians and Carpatho-Rusyns. In Soviet Ukraine, for instance, most Ukrainians in that vast country of 50 million inhabitants never even heard 128

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81. Natalia Dudash, delegate from Yugoslavia, addressing the First World Congress of Rusyns.

or cared about Carpatho-Rusyns. Rather, the struggle was among Carpatho-Rusyns themselves—among those who believed they were ethnically and culturally Ukrainians versus those who believed they comprised a distinct nationality, Carpatho-Rusyn.

To my mind, the most impressive speech at the First Congress was delivered by Natalia Dudash. This small-statured poet was from the Vojvodina region in Yugoslavia and, therefore, delivered her remarks in what was the only form of the Rusyn language officially recognized by any state in the post-World War II Communist era—Vojvodinian-Bachka Rusyn.

In measured, thoughtful cadences Dudash inspired Carpatho-Rusyns in other countries to follow the example of her small diasporan group who successfully created a standard literary language taught in a school system from elementary to university level. Education, not political activity, was the only means to guarantee the future survival of Carpatho-Rusyns as a distinct people.

Dudash’s words touched on two phenomena that were to characterize what I began to call “the third Carpatho-Rusyn national revival.” One of those phenomena concerned a strategic matter: how best to secure the success of the national movement. Should this be done through politi129

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cal or cultural activity? In other words, should Carpatho-Rusyns press for some kind of autonomy in the countries where they live, after which rights like Rusyn-language education, funding for cultural and civic organizations, and recognition as a distinct nationality would all flow? Or, should the emphasis be first on cultural and educational activity, in order to create a significant number of conscious Carpatho-Rusyns who, through existing political channels, would be able to achieve cultural and perhaps political autonomy in the various states where they lived?

The Carpatho-Rusyns from Ukraine basically favored the political option, since they assumed they had a legal and moral right to renew the autonomy that their homeland, Subcarpathian Rus’, had in pre-1938 interwar Czechoslovakia. No matter that these present-day activists did not have mass support among the Carpatho-Rusyn inhabitants of Transcarpathia. The few leaders who were to come and go in Transcarpathia deluded themselves into believing that they had such support. In fact, they were like those proverbial generals without an army.

Carpatho-Rusyn leaders in other countries, especially Slovakia and Poland, studiously avoided making any demands for autonomy and rather focused on purely cultural and educational matters that included seeking state funding for Rusyn-language schools, theaters, publications, museums, festivals, and youth organizations, and other “safe” non-political activity.

The cultural or political approach? That was the question. Three decades later, the most vibrant Carpatho-Rusyn movements turned out to be in Slovakia and Poland, while the weakest was in Ukraine. While it is true that the Ukrainian authorities adopted very unfavorable policies toward Carpatho-Rusyns, it is also true that much of the blame for the weakness of the movement in Ukraine’s Transcarpathian region was the result of the misplaced hopes of local Carpatho-Rusyn leaders that political activity would somehow change the status of their people.

The other phenomenon that Natalia Dudash’s Congress address highlighted was one of a tactical nature, what I subsequently described in my publications about the third Carpatho-Rusyn national revival as the female factor. Not only were women present in all aspects of the Carpatho-Rusyn movement (Ukraine’s Transcarpathia being the exception), 130

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they also played a prominent role in each of the countries where Carpatho-Rusyn organizations functioned.

Aside from Natalia Dudash, who was to succeed Lubomir Medieshi as director of the Rusko Slovo Publishing House in Yugoslavia, the founder of Lemko-Rusyn university studies in Poland was Olena Duts-Faifer; the influential journalist and long-time editor of the Prague-based magazine Podkarpatská Rus was Agata Pilatova; the founding director of the Rusyn Institute at Prešov University was Anna Plishkova; the founding director of the Rusyn Museum in Slovakia was Olga Glosikova, her successor Liuba Kraliova; and the long-time head of the Rusyn Renaissance Society of Slovakia was Anna Kuzmiakova.

Most important, while Carpatho-Rusyn males tended to act and speak in restrained tones in order not to upset the political and governmental establishment, the mostly young thirty-something Carpatho-Rusyn females were not afraid to speak and write forcibly on behalf of their people’s interests. In other words, it was Carpatho-Rusyn women, not men, who “had the balls,” so to speak. The physically diminutive but intellectually powerful Natalia Dudash from Yugoslavia’s Vojvodina, speaking at the First World Congress, made many of us aware of how lucky the movement was to have these and many other strong women in its midst.

***** For me, the most significant aspect of the First World Congress did not even take place during the Congress proceedings, but rather at the home of Medzilaborce Greek Catholic parish priest, Frantishek Krainiak.

I had already known about Father Krainiak, the young twenty-something married priest who believed that the word of God in the form of religious publications, catechism classes, and Sunday liturgies should be brought to believers not in the traditional Slavonic language, and certainly not in Slovak (a growing trend at the time), but in Rusyn.

At the risk of harassment and threats from the Communist regime’s secret police, in the mid-1980s Father Krainiak gathered a few Rusyn-language enthusiasts, including the writer Osyp Kudzei from the nearby village of Nyagov/Ňagov, to begin translating certain religious texts into Rusyn. Among the first of these to be completed (1988)—but published 131

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only later in parallel Cyrillic and Roman alphabet versions—was the Malŷi grekokatolytsŷi katekhism pro rusynskŷ dity (A Little Catechism for Rusyn Children, 1992).

After the end of Communist rule, Father Krainiak was faced with another kind of opposition, this time from Slovakophiles in his own Greek Catholic Church. The Eparchy of Prešov’s post-Communist bishops, first Jan Hirka and then the intoler82. Father Frantishek Krainiak (1992). ant bi-ritual Roman Catholic Jesuit, Ján Babjak, refused to grant permission (the coveted episcopal imprimatur) to allow the use of Krainiak’s Rusyn-language texts in church.

Nevertheless, Father Krainiak, who was an otherwise soft-spoken accommodating personality, persisted in his translation work, publishing the four books of the New Testament Gospels and eventually the entire New Testament into Rusyn.

We, in America, tried to help Father Krainiak with moral and financial support, so that when I was chairman of the World Congress that organization was listed as the formal publisher of the Gospels. There was yet another source of strength behind Father Krainiak, his wife. She was a former chemistry teacher with a personality, so to speak, that was as hard as nails. She literally propped up and drove her husband forward whenever criticism seemed too much for him to bear. Again, it was females who best sustained the work of the Carpatho-Rusyn movement, especially in times of crisis.

From my perspective there was no better person to meet during the First World Congress than Father Krainiak. I invited a select number of writers, Petro Trokhanovskii and Olena Duts-Faifer from Poland, Ivan Petrovtsi and Volodymyr Fedynyshynets from Ukraine, and Lubomir Medieshi from Yugoslavia, for an informal discussion with Father Krainiak about what for me was the most important task of the Carpatho-Rusyn movement—codification of a not yet existing standard Rusyn literary 132

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83. Father Frantishek Krainiak, his wife Vira, and Paul Robert Magocsi, Medzilaborce, Slovakia (2002).

language. In a sense that meeting in Father Krainiak’s apartment was the precursor to what one year later became the first International Congress of the Rusyn Language.

I was overjoyed that such a discussion could finally take place. Although not a linguist, I was enthralled to hear debate as to whether the reflexive ся (sia) should come before or after the verb, whether or not to use a soft sign (ь) after the letter (phoneme) c (s) in adjectives, and whether the Roman alphabet (latynyka) could/should be used in new Rusyn-language publications. The ever-practical Father Krainiak, who had to deal with young children and older adults educated in Slovakia, favored the Roman alphabet; all the others were adamantly opposed.

The discussion could have gone on for hours. When we finally left Father Krainiak’s apartment, I felt a feeling of elation. We had just begun to address the important, even crucial kind of problem that needed to be resolved—language—and not useless debates about autonomy or any other kind of political structures for Carpatho-Rusyns.

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83. The first gathering of Rusyn literary-language creators: Father Frantishek Krainiak (Czechoslovakia), Ivan Petrovtsii (Ukraine), Olena Duts’-Faifer (Poland), Volodymyr Fedynyshynets (Ukraine), and Petro Trokhanovskii (Poland), Medzilaborce, Czechoslovakia (March 1991).

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The March 1991 First World Congress of Rusyns was over, but not the travelling seminar. We had the last seminar to go, the one scheduled for the Vojvodina in Yugoslavia. We set off late in the morning from Medzilaborce. I proposed that we make a stop along the way in Hungary.

Aside from István Udvari, only I was aware (from the scholarly writings of Emylian Baletskyi) that there was at least one village in northeastern Hungary where Rusyn was still spoken. And so, with István’s help, our first stop was Komlóska, located just off the main road that runs southward from the border town of Sátorályújhely to Miskolc.

We arrived sometime around midday and stopped in front of the village Greek Catholic Church. There must have been some kind of service,

85. Mykola Mushynka (center with tie) meeting with Rusyn-speaking villagers in Komlóska, Hungary (March 1991).

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because several older women with prayer-books in hand were milling around in front of the church. Who were these strangers—six of us— who descended into their midst? The women addressed us in Hungarian, which aside from István no one among us really knew. They seemed puzzled when Medieshi, Mushynka, and I offered the traditional Rusyn greeting Slava Isusu Khrystu (Glory to Jesus Christ). With the help of István’s prompting in Hungarian, the women began to speak in their native language, a transitional dialect which contained elements of the Vojvodinian and Prešov Region variants of the Rusyn language. They ushered us back into the church, introduced us to the priest, and began reciting religious texts from memory to show us what they knew.

We were overjoyed at finding Rusyn speakers in the heart of an otherwise a purely Hungarian-speaking region of the country. The ethnographers Mushynka and Medieshi were the most garrulous interlocutors. They had no problems being understood when speaking their own versions of Rusyn.

Then there was Myshanych, who did not even try. Despite being born in a highland Carpatho-Rusyn village in Transcarpathia, and despite his frequent claims of ability to speak Rusyn (something I never heard), he adamantly spoke to these gentle Komlóska older women only in literary Ukrainian. They looked at him with glazed eyes, not understanding a thing. But he persisted in the language of Shevchenko. “What a fool,” I thought (although I said nothing), expecting that as an ostensibly intelligent person he would at least have the decency to accommodate to the specific situation, which he certainly could have done through his native version of Rusyn. I guess doing that would be below his pretentious Ukrainophile sympathies and “national” convictions. As for the rest of us, we were ecstatic about our brief visit to Komlóska, a village that some of us would come back to again, and for me more than once.

After leaving Komlóska, Udvari urged that we go first to Nyíregyháza (about another hour’s drive) and check into a hotel where we would spend the night. After doing that, I suggested we go for dinner to the most famous place in all of eastern Hungary, the village of Tokaj, which was only a half hour away. There, in a restaurant overlooking the confluence of the Bodrog and Tisza rivers, we had a sumptuous traditional Hungarian meal that started off with bograch levesh (spicy beef soup) and continued with a wide vari136

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86. The last glass (kapurkova) following a Tokaj wine tasting: (left to right) Lubomir Medieshi, unidentified cellar owner, Paul Robert Magocsi, Olena Duts-Faifer, Mykola Mushynka, unidentified village museum director, and Oleksa Myshanych.

ety of grilled meats. But most important of all was the wine. We were, after all, in the heart of the Tokaj wine district, famous world-wide for its sweet and semi-sweet vintages. I informed our group that Tsar Peter I himself had bought vineyards near Tokaj. It was there, in the early eighteenth century, that he stationed a small garrison of Russian imperial soldiers (with permission of the Habsburg authorities) to safeguard and guarantee the delivery to his new imperial capital of St. Petersburg a steady supply of his favorite drink, sweet (aszu) Tokaj at the incredibly high natural sugar concentration of 7, even 8 puttonyos (a system of grading levels of sweetness).

We decided on the semi-sweet (szamarodni) variety. Because all of us were psychologically drained from the World Congress and physically exhausted from the full-day drive from eastern Slovakia, we decided that we deserved a rest. Before even starting the meal, we were all in a wonderful tipsy state thanks to the Tokaj szamorodni. Even the otherwise restrained and always on-guard Oleksa Myshanych let himself go and joined the rest of us in admitting pride in the fact that, as Carpatho-Rusyns, we could be proud of our historical ties as subjects of the kings of Hungary and could claim ourselves as part of the Hungarian world. Ah, yes, in vino veritas.

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87. Oleksa Myshanych, Mykola Mushynka, Olena Duts’-Faifer, Lubomir Medieshi, and Paul Robert Magocsi at the fourth and last stop of the travelling seminar, Novi Sad, Yugoslavia (March 1991).

The next day we set out for the long eight-hour drive to Novi Sad, the cultural capital of Yugoslavia’s Vojvodinian Rusyns. Our last seminar was scheduled to take place at the University of Novi Sad, where the world’s only university department (katedra) of Rusyn studies existed. But the department’s chairman Yuliian Tamash, was poised to take revenge for how he was treated a week or so earlier in Uzhhorod.

Tamash succeeded in having cancelled the university venue for our seminar. As a last-minute alternative, Lubomir Medieshi and his local friends found for us a large hotel-restaurant that could accommodate us panelists and an audience. Actually, the setting was for all intents and purposes a night club in which the lounge chairs were pushed aside and a long table for us panelists set up not far from the club’s bar. I found this setting a great insult to Carpatho-Rusyns and argued that we should not “perform” but leave immediately. I was overruled, so that the last of our group seminars that began at the University of Harrogate in England ended in the bowels of a nightclub in Yugoslavia.

While our local host Lubomir Medieshi was embarrassed, none of the others in our group seemed particularly concerned about performing in a nightclub. I guess I also should not have been upset. After all, for me this was not the first time such a last minute change of venues motivated by ideological differences had happened.

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***** For example, back in the mid-1970s, while still at Harvard, I decided to try my hand at contacting the University of Uzhhorod where I would welcome the possibility to deliver a lecture. The only person I knew about was Yurii Balega, a professor of literature, whom I had met only through his publications about Carpatho-Rusyn (or as he wrote “Ukrainian”) literature in interwar Subcarpathian Rus’. His works were among the very few published at the time in Soviet Transcarpathia from which I could learn factual details about Carpatho-Rusyn cultural developments in “bourgeois” Czechoslovakia.

I have no record of correspondence with Balega, although many decades later he described our encounter in his memoirs, not surprisingly in negative terms. I do remember meeting in his office before the lecture scheduled to take place sometime in the fall of 1976 at the University of Uzhhorod. When I arrived, however, he told me that the lecture could not be held at the university (despite its politically benign subject, the Rusyn-American immigration), but rather would take place at the Hotel Uzhhorod.

I found this very upsetting but could not refuse to speak, since from our North American perspective refusing would not be in good form— as if the Soviets could give a damn about such niceties. Balega did introduce me properly and chair the session. Later in the 1990s, however, this former loyal Communist-turned-Ukrainian nationalist tried to enhance his anti-Rusyn, anti-Magocsi credentials. He did so by recalling our first encounter back in 1976, which he said only took place because the local Soviet KGB authorities in Transcarpathia demanded that he host the “anti-Soviet” Magocsi at a lecture. Despite his alleged “protests” Balega was forced to perform what was for him a most onerous task. I remember what Lubomir Medieshi said after I told him about the Uzhhorod incident. “You know, Bob, what balega means in our Vojvodinian Rusyn language?” “Hovno,” he answered, that is “a pile of cow’s dung.” “What did you expect from a loyal Communist professor in Uzhhorod? You were dealing with—and literally stepped in—a pile of shit.”

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Actually, it was not in a nightclub where our travelling seminar held its last session. The day after the debacle in Novi Sad, our seminar group travelled about a half hour northward to the heart of the Vojvodina. Our goal was a settlement aptly called Ruski Kerestur (the Rusyn Cross).

Although administratively classified as a village, Ruski Kerestur was actually a small town which at the time had about five thousand residents, at least 95 percent of whom were of Rusyn nationality (a legally recog88. Folding book pages at the Rusyn nized category in Yugoslavia). Ruski printshop in Ruski Kerestur (March Kerestur was indeed the “capital” of 1991). the Vojvodinian-Srem Rusyn people in boasting a cultural center, printshop, restaurant/banquet hall, profitable food-processing cooperative, and modern residential school for elementary and high school students, the only such institution in the world where Rusyn (in its Vojvodinian variant) was the language of instruction. The local inhabitants and their civic and intellectual leaders were very proud of, and self-confident in, their Rusyn identity and institutions.

When we gathered at the high school auditorium, it was clear that the teachers, students, the school’s principal Mikhal Varga (the head of Yugoslavia’s delegation to the First World Congress of Rusyns), and the leading Vojvodinian Rusyn writer Diura Papharhai were all genuinely overjoyed to meet their brethren from the Carpathian homeland and North America. We, too, were grateful that our seminar’s mission to bring to the people the scholarly conception of Carpatho-Rusyns as a distinct nationality had ended on a positive note. As for the relations between the Rusynophiles and Ukrainophiles among the seminar presenters (and, in particular, others outside our group), they only worsened.

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89. Relaxing after the last of the travelling seminars: (standing) Mikhal Varga, Oleksa Myshanych, Diura Papharhaï, Mykola Mushynka, István Udvari; (seated) Diura Papuga, unidentified, unidentified, Olena Duts-Faifer, unidentified, (kneeling) Paul Robert Magocsi, Ruski Kerestur, Yugoslavia (March 1991).

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About the same time that the First World Congress of Rusyns was taking place, another important development was reaching its culmination—Czechoslovakia’s first post-Communist decennial census set for 31 March 1991. I felt at the time that this was the moment when the real battle had come. In other words, the moment which would decide the fate of the Carpatho-Rusyn movement first in Czechoslovakia and then in neighboring countries as well.

Most scholars and members of the informed public know quite well that all statistics are suspect, in particular those that deal with questions of national identity and native language (mother tongue). Be suspicious of statistics? Yes, be suspicious and be skeptical. But we only have what we have.

Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth and continuing throughout the twentieth century, decennial censuses were undertaken in most European countries, including pre-Communist and Communist Czechoslovakia, and like it or not, the data published (which may or may not coincide with the data collected) was used to inform and often determine government policy. This was especially important in countries like post1989 Czechoslovakia, which continued the Communist-era practice of providing funding for its national minorities. In practice, the larger the numerical size of a given national minority, the larger amount of government subsidies would be made available for a given minority’s civic, educational, and cultural activity. To be sure, a national minority had to be recognized by the government in order to receive financial support.

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tion of northeastern Slovakia—Ukrainian. Even if its members may have called themselves Rusnaks, or Rusyns, or sometimes Russians, they were classified by the census authorities as Ukrainian. Hence, government support was only given to civic, educational, and cultural organizations that were Ukrainian, or that claimed they were representing the country’s “Ukrainian national minority.”

But after the Velvet Revolution and fall of Communist rule in late 1989, the new liberal Czechoslovak government found itself confronted with people and organizations that said they were Rusyn, not Ukrainian, and that they deserved government recognition and support. Such a situation was not unique to eastern Slovakia, since in those same early post-Communist years there also appeared Moravians and Silesians, whose adherents claimed they comprised distinct nationalities and were not Czechs.

What then to do with the newly emancipated Carpatho-Rusyns? The liberal democratic environment that reflected the humanistic values of the country’s president Václav Havel was confronted by holdovers from the former Communist regime, especially among Slovaks in Bratislava, who by design or by inertia-like default, assumed that all Rusyns were Ukrainians. What, then, should be the question posed about nationality on the upcoming 1991 census? And whatever the question may be, how should the responses be classified: as two distinct nationalities— Rusyn and Ukrainian, or as one nationality—Ukrainian, perhaps RusynUkrainian?

Activists in the post-1989 Union of Rusyns-Ukrainians realized the danger to their very existence and lobbied the government to indicate as a rubric for the nationality question in the census form one term, RusynUkrainian. The new Rusynophile activists wanted two separate nationality rubrics, Rusyn and Ukrainian. This seemingly minor matter—a hyphen, or the conjunction “and” which implied differentiation—was of crucial importance to the Carpatho-Rusyn cause. Either Rusyns existed as a distinct nationality, or they were a hyphenated equivalent to the Ukrainians.

The government had to decide. But which government? Actually, at the time post-Communist Czechoslovakia had three levels of govern143

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90. Mykola Mushynka, Paul Robert Magocsi, Sven Gustavsson (standing), and L’udovít Haraksim, European Cultural Foundation Conference, Bratislava, Czechoslovakia (November 1991).

ment: that of the Czech lands, that of Slovakia, and that of the entire state of federal Czechoslovakia. Carpatho-Rusyns in the Prešov Region were within the competence of the Slovak government in Bratislava.

For the most part, the authorities in Bratislava were sympathetic to the demands of the Ukrainophile orientation. The national census, however, was within the competence of the federal government based in Prague.

Consequently, it was there that our battle had to be waged.

*****

In 1991-1992, I was invited as a “Western expert” to speak and provide advice about nationality problems in post-Communist Czechoslovakia and Ukraine, with a focus on the so-called “Rusyn question.”

Among the several conferences or seminars at which I was the featured speaker were those at the Historical Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences (Bratislava, March 1991), the School of Slavonic Studies at the University of London (May 1991), the New York and Prague-based Institute for East-West Security Studies (Stiřín Castle near Prague, October 1991), the Czechoslovak Committee of the Amsterdam-based European Cultural Foundation (Bratislava and Časta, November 1991), and the Institute for Nationality Relations and Politics at the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (Kyïv, November 1992). I was very pleased that the message of Carpatho-Rusyn distinctiveness could be conveyed to such a large number of scholars and publicists during the crucial transitional period after the fall of Communist rule.

Those international conferences provoked the ire of Ukrainophile Rusyns in Slovakia, most especially Mykola Mushynka, who was a participant in some of them. The European Cultural Foundation conference in 144

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91. Cover of Mykola Mushynka’s Ukrainian-language polemical brochure, Political Rusynism in Practice, published in 20,000 copies by Joseph Terelya (1992).

Bratislava and Časta published a report which included the recommendation made by two of three participants on the Carpatho-Rusyn panel (I and L’udovit Haraksim); namely, that Rusyns and Ukrainians be recognized as two distinct peoples.

The third panelist, Mykola Mushynka, refused to participate in the conference report and instead published a brochure in Prešov’s Ukrainian-language newspaper Nove zhyttia under the title Political Rusynism in Practice: On the Presentation of Professor Paul Robert Magocsi at the Symposium on National Minorities in Central and Southeastern Europe. The Mushynka brochure, which argued that Rusyns and Ukrainians are one and the same

92. The Ukrainian patriot Joseph Terelya and the Lemko-Rusyn patriot Petro Trokhanovskii in debate at the Magocsi household in Toronto, Canada (March 1990) 145

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people was reprinted twice: by the pro-Ukrainian Lemko Region Research Foundation in the United States; and in another edition of 20,000 copies with funding from the Transcarpathian Greek Catholic exiled dissident living in Canada, Joseph Terelya.

The point of all this was that while Mushynka’s anti-Rusyn message was being propagated to a small and uninfluential Ukrainian-language reading audience, our Carpatho-Rusyn message was accepted and promoted at international gatherings where leading scholars, civic activists, governmental figures (including Czechoslovakia’s President Václav Havel) were in attendance.

***** It was at one of those international gatherings that I met Andrej Sulitka, a Czechoslovak ethnographer originally from Moravia. For many years, Sulitka was a full-time researcher at the Institute of Ethnography of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava, but in the new post-Communist environment he served as an advisor to the Czechoslovak federal government on national minority issues.

We struck up a friendship, and while returning to the hotel after the day’s conference proceedings (I believe the one in Bratislava, Slovakia) we discussed the matter of classifying the data from the Czechoslovak census taken a few months before. Sulitka already had a clear position on the Rusyn-Ukrainian matter, but nonetheless asked my opinion in the hope that mine might coincide with his. I adamantly argued for reporting Rusyns and Ukrainians separately in the March 1991 census data, something I had said that very day at the conference. My words might have made Sulitka more comfortable with his own views. In any case, his advice must have been heard in federal government circles (he told me as much, a few years later), so that when the census data was finally published in early 1997 the questions about nationality and mother tongue provided separate figures for persons who indicated either Rusyn or Ukrainian.

The Ukrainophile activists in Prešov were furious, suspecting that they had lost a crucial battle. And they did! Just over 17,000 persons responded their nationality as Rusyn, while nearly 14,000 as Ukrainian. The lan146

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93. Andrej Sulitka (third from left) and Paul Robert Magocsi (fourth from left), Štiřín Palace, Czechoslovakia (October 1991).

guage statistics were even more telling: 49,000 persons said Rusyn was their mother tongue, while only 9,500 said Ukrainian. No matter what subsequent arguments were made by Prešov’s Ukrainophile activists, government officials in Czechoslovakia and in the soon-to-be-independent Slovakia had no choice but eventually to accept the new reality: Carpatho-Rusyns did—once again—exist.

Subsequently, when Slovakia became independent at the outset of 1992, its constitution formally listed the country’s national minorities, which included Rusyns as a distinct people. Each of the following decennial censuses witnessed a steady increase in the number of people identifying themselves of Rusyn nationality (24,000 in 2001; 33,000 in 2011; 63,000 in 2021). At the same time there was a marked decrease in the number of self-declared Ukrainians (down to 9,000 in 2021).

Nevertheless, many politicians and bureaucrats in Slovak government circles were slow in recognizing the new reality. The result was that for much of the 1990s Ukrainian civic and cultural organizations received more government funding than did Rusyn ones. But by the new millennium that shortcoming was corrected so that the amount of funding allotted a national minority was in large measure a reflection of the numerical size of the group according to the previous census. As a result, 147

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94. Czechoslovak census form (1991) with questions concerning: 11. state citizenship; 12. nationality; 13. mother tongue; 14. religion.

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Carpatho-Rusyns became and have remained the third largest national minority (after Magyars and Roma) in Slovakia.

I firmly believe that without the help of the former Czechoslovak federal government and its advisors, first and foremost the Moravian ethnographer Andrej Sulitka, the fate of Carpatho-Rusyns in Slovakia would have remained under permanent threat. Thanks to the bureaucratic decision about the census taken early 1991 the future existence of Carpatho-Rusyns was guaranteed, at least in Slovakia.

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Next on our nationality-building agenda was the language question.

As the 1991 manifesto of the First World Congress proclaimed, Carpatho-Rusyns must work to create a codified literary standard language for use in schools, cultural institutions, the media, and civic affairs.

In the wake of the March 1991 World Congress, Vasyl Turok and I became ever closer colleagues, so that each time I came to Slovakia we consulted at length about tactical and strategic issues related to the Carpatho-Rusyn movement. Sometime in the early summer of 1991, while sitting in a café in Medzilaborce, Vasyl and I talked about the need to

95. Vasyl Turok and Natalia Dudash in conversation with Paul Robert Magocsi, Budapest, Hungary (ca. 1993) 150

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create a Rusyn-language newspaper that would appear weekly alongside the already existing bi-monthly magazine Rusyn.

Turok told me he had the perfect person in mind for the job—Aleksander Zozuliak. Sasha, as he was known, was recently dismissed as editor-in-chief of the Ukrainophile newspaper Nove zhyttia because of his increasingly strong pro-Rusyn views. After accepting Turok’s offer, Zozuliak asked his friend and caricaturist Fedor Vitso to design a logo for the masthead, and he brought along three former Nove zyttia journalists (Anna Plishkova, Anna Kuzmiakova, Mariia Maltsovska) in order to publish a new, entirely Rusyn-language newspaper called Narodnŷ novynkŷ (The People’s News). Always sensitive to historic symbolism, Zozuliak released the first issue of Narodnŷ novynkŷ on 21 August 1991, the anniversary date of the Soviet-led invasion that not only crushed the Prague Spring of 1968 (Czechoslovakia’s effort to liberalize Communist rule), but also brought to an end the short-lived attempt to revive the Carpatho-Rusyn identity and cultural life.

Zozuliak was a very close confidant of Turok, who soon made him secretary of the World Congress of Rusyns. I got along very well with both Turok and Zozuliak, and every time I was in Prešov (generally two or three times a year throughout the 1990s) the three of us spent hours upon hours discussing various plans and projects to enhance the Carpatho-Rusyn movement within and beyond Slovakia.

The Narodnŷ novynkŷ newspaper, together with the magazine Rusyn, which Zozuliak also took over as editor-in-chief, started off on a shoestring budget. The editorial “offices” were in cramped quarters at the Dukhnovych Theater looking out onto an enclosed courtyard. The director Yaroslav Sŷsak funded the newspaper, at least initially, from the theater’s budget. Cramped quarters yes, but they were literally and figuratively in the very heart of the Carpatho-Rusyn movement.

That heart was located just opposite the editorial offices on the other side of the courtyard in the theater’s pub (korchma), where actors, singers, dancers, and now Carpatho-Rusyn activists gathered to take a break or spend hours relaxing. Whenever Carpatho-Rusyns from other countries, not to mention Slovak or European journalists seeking interviews, they could be sure to find representatives of Slovakia’s “new” nationality in the 151

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96. First issue of Narodnŷ novynkŷ (The People’s News, 21 August 1991), editor-in-chief Aleksander Zozuliak, masthead design by Fedor Vitso.

theater’s korchma. The alcohol that was easily available and relatively inexpensive certainly helped the creative process for Turok, who translated 152

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97. Editorial staff of Narodnŷ novynkŷ; (from the left) journalists Anna Kuzmiakova, Anna Plishkova, and Mariia Maltsovska with editor-in-chief Aleksander Zozuliak, Dukhnovych Theater, Prešov, Czechoslovakia, 1991.

many plays into Rusyn, as well as for the artist Mykhal Chabala and caricaturist Fedor Vitso who worked on their sketches in the korchma.

***** Among the foremost topics in my discussions with Turok and Zozuliak was the need for language codification. I suggested the usefulness of convening a “working seminar” of scholars and writers to discuss and decide certain conceptual issues. Among these issues was the question of whether to create one or several literary standards and what alphabet to use, Cyrillic or Roman (Latin). Turok asked me to come up with a program of speakers, while he, as chairman of the Rusyn Renaissance Society, would take care of organizational matters. Our discussions marked the birth of a “working seminar,” subsequently dubbed the First International Congress of the Rusyn Language, which was held at the spa resort of Bardejovské Kúpele near the historic town of Bardejov, on 7-8 November 1992.

In formulating the program and the list of speakers I kept a few theoretical and practical principles in mind. The first principle was to invite 153

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98. Joshua Fishman (right) at the opening session of the first International Congress of the Rusyn Language, Bardejovské Kúpele, Czechoslovakia (November 1992).

as many Rusyn-language writers as possible from Slovakia, Ukraine, Poland, and Yugoslavia in order to meet in separate working sessions and come up with codification principles and action plans for each of the countries where Carpatho-Rusyn communities were located.

The second principle was to entice non-Rusyn scholars to present in a plenary session theoretical and practical matters related to language codification. For the plenary sessions I hoped to attract a general sociolinguist, a Slavic linguist, and codifiers from two European languages standardized in the twentieth century: Romansch (in Switzerland) and Monégasque (in the Principality of Monaco).

I had already spent some time visiting, studying, and writing about the situation among the Romansch and the Monégasques. I was especially impressed by the practical pedagogical techniques adopted in Monaco and the language-building conceptualization adopted by the Romansch.

The presence of distinguished international scholars could not help but raise the prestige of the Rusyn-language codification process not only in the eyes of Carpatho-Rusyns themselves (always lacking in self-confidence) but also of international scholarly participants and observers.

Even I was amazed at whom I was able to attract to come to far distant northeastern Slovakia. First and foremost who showed up was the 154

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very founding father of North American sociolinguistics, Joshua Fishman, from Yeshiva University in New York City. Our contacts went back to the late 1970s, when an organization he headed presented me an award for promoting “immigrant” languages in the United States. From Uppsala University in Sweden came my old friend Sven Gustavsson, a well-known Slavist who was particularly interested in the Vojvodinian variant of Rusyn. From Monaco came Professor Elaine Mollo from the University of Nice, one of the codifiers of the Monégasque language that dated from the early 1970s. Mollo and I had become close colleagues, when in the mid-1980s I was researching a study about the late twentieth-century Monégasque national revival. Finally, from Switzerland came Werner Carigiet, representing Professor Georges Darms (whom I knew from correspondence), holder of the Chair at the Department of the Romansch Language at the University of Freiburg.

Fishman spoke about the worldwide phenomenon of language congresses dating back to the late nineteenth century. Gustavsson spoke about codification problems specifically in the Slavic world. Mollo shared with us how a new language could become a subject in schools if political conditions were right. Professor Darms expanded on the five literary variants of Romansch and the desirability of a sixth variant (which he called a koiné) as a unifying all-Romansch linguistic form.

The first challenge we faced was how participants from various cultural spheres would be able to communicate with each other. The plenary session speakers spoke English or French from prepared texts, while our official translator (before the days of simultaneous translations heard through earphones) was Georgetown University Professor Michael Zarechnak. A pioneer in the field of machine translation, Zarechnak was a trained Russian linguist who just happened to be a native Carpatho-Rusyn originally from a nearby village in northeastern Slovakia.

I’ll never forget my arrival during dinner time on the night before the seminar/congress was to begin. Anticipating my arrival at the front door of the meeting hall was a nervously energetic retired gentleman who introduced himself as Ivan Bandurych. A former employee of the town of Bardejov, Bandurych was largely responsible for coordinating its medieval restoration which resulted in a UNESCO listing as a world heritage 155

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site. As head of the Bardejov branch of the Rusyn Renaissance Society, he enthusiastically took on the task of making the organizational arrangements for the language seminar. Forgetting that he was just the logistical organizer, he later proclaimed that the language congress was itself his idea and that he somehow brought all the foreign specialists and Carpatho-Rusyn activists from other countries, about most of whom he had never ever heard. Obviously, the man had a need to feel important.

That need was exhibited in yet another way. As Bandurych was profusely and warmly welcoming me at the entrance door, Mykola Mushynka, a scholar from Prešov who was not on the program, was trying to enter as well. Bandurych blocked the entrance, and in rude terms told Mushynka that “Ukrainians of his kind” were not welcome and would not be allowed to enter. I was angered by such crudity, told Bandurych that scholarly meetings which are open to the public should be open to all members of the public, that we were no longer in restrictive Communist Czechoslovakia, and that I would not enter unless Mushynka was allowed in as well. Bandurych mumbled something to himself and then stepped aside.

The first thing I noticed was a table at which all our international colleagues—Joshua Fishman, Elaine Mollo, Sven Gustavsson, and Werner Carigiet—were sitting. They were engaged in what was clearly an animated discussion. But in which language would our English-speaking American, French-speaking Monégasque, Swedish-speaking Swede, and Romansch-speaking Swiss guests be speaking to each other? When I reached their table I found out. They were communicating in Spanish.

Why should I be surprised? To paraphrase the American expression: Only in the Carpathians!

I was overjoyed that the idea first launched that night at Father Krainiak’s home during the First World Congress of Rusyns in Medzilaborce was now, a year and a half later in November 1992, being realized in Bardejovské Kúpele at what later became known as the First International Congress of the Rusyn Language.

The plenary sessions were inspirational, especially the remarks by Joshua Fishman. But it was Elaine Mollo from Monaco who attracted the greatest interest. I believe it was Shtefan Bunganych, who at the time was 156

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99. Paul Robert Magocsi, Elaine Mollo, Vasyl Turok-Hetesh, Ivan Petrovtsi, and Michael Zarechnak, opening plenary session, International Congress of the Rusyn Language, Bardejovské Kúpele, Czechoslovakia (November 1992).

working on a Rusyn grammar (eventually finished but never published), who asked if Professor Mollo (who spoke in French) could read something in Monégasque. Many expected it to be a variant of French or of Provençal. They were surprised to hear that it was more like Italian. That should not have been a surprise, because Monégasque derives from one of the Ligurean dialects that stretch along the Mediterranean coastline from Nice (with its own literary language—Nissart) in the west to Genoa in the east.

Pleased was I as well with the four afternoon sessions in which writers and cultural activists from the Prešov Region (Slovakia), Lemko Region (Poland), Subcarpathian Rus’ (Ukraine), and the Vojvodina (Yugoslavia) met separately to discuss the language-building issues specific to their own region. Among the accomplished Slavists who joined the region-focused sessions were Wiesław Witkowski and Henryk Fontański from Poland, István Udvari from Hungary, and Ivan Pop from Ukraine.

At the end of the proceedings a resolution was adopted that outlined four general principles to guide the codification process. (1) That each region would codify its own variant of Rusyn, keeping in mind the cre157

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100. Title page of Mykola Mushynka’s Seminar for the Chosen Ones, a polemical critique of the First International Congress of the Rusyn Language, initially broadcast on the Ukrainian program of Radio Free Europe (Munich), published in Prešov, Czechoslovakia (1992). The handwritten dedication reads: “in the hope that he [Professor Magocsi] accepts this work as my contribution for debate.”

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ation of a fifth common literary language as the ultimate goal (the socalled Romansch model of a koine; which I had pushed for in my opening remarks on the first day). (2) That in each region its codified variant would be based on the vernacular language. (3) That the alphabet used for all forms of literary Rusyn be Cyrillic. (4) That centers to promote the codification process be established in each region, preferably at the nearest university. Our friends from the Vojvodina were proud of the fact that they already had a sociologically complete language and a university research center. In other words, one codified variant down, three to go.

Two incidents occurred during the First Language Congress that turned out to have unpleasant consequences. Both Vasyl Turok and I (for that matter Sasha Zozuliak as well) continued to operate under the principle that in the new liberal democratic Czechoslovakia everyone should be allowed to express his or her opinion, even if we may strongly disagree with them. It was with that in mind that I defended Mykola Mushynka’s “right” to be a conference observer. I also agreed (although somewhat reluctantly) to Vasyl’s request to allow a young student from Slovakia to speak, even though he was not on the program. Vasyl told me the student was one of “ours.” His name was Peter Zhenukh (Ženuch).

I cannot remember what the young Zhenukh said, but I do know that it was nothing problematic. When several years later Zhenukh’s name popped up again, by then he had completed his Ph.D. and worked for the Slovak Academy of Science’s Institute of the Slovak Language, of which in the early twenty-first century he had become director. His numerous publications were governed by the following conviction: that the early Slavonic texts found in various Greek Catholic churches and archives were examples of the “Slovak cultural heritage.” Zhenukh’s reasoning was unabashedly straightforward: most Greek Catholics in eastern Slovakia were in the past—and certainly are now—ethnic Slovaks. And so, we at the First International Congress of the Rusyn language unwittingly helped to launch the career of a slovakizer who remains determined to downplay and even dismiss the presence of Carpatho-Rusyns in eastern Slovakia.

On the other side of the anti-Rusyn ideological spectrum was Mykola Mushynka. He only attended as an observer the first day of the Congress 159

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proceedings, and even then I remember him dozing off on several occasions. He was particularly interested in the discussions at the separate meetings of the participants from Subcarpathian Rus’ (Ukraine) and the Prešov Region (Slovakia).

A few weeks later we all learned why Mushynka was so anxious to be at the Rusyn language congress. Even if his attendance for a few hours was interrupted by sleep, he ostensibly had heard enough to recreate—or outright invent—what had taken place. Mushynka’s version of the event was described in a brochure which he provocatively entitled: A Seminar for the “Chosen Ones”: On the So-Called “First Rusyn Language Congress” in Bardejovské Kúpele. His text was filled with invented statements and misquotations attributed to participants at what Mushynka castigated as an anti-Ukrainian event organized by Carpatho-Rusyns deliberately to coincide with the 75th Anniversary of the November 7, 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.

If it were not clear already, the First International Congress of the Rusyn Language confirmed that any efforts to engage and reason with Ukrainophiles from the Carpathian region or Ukrainian scholars and civic leaders in Ukraine were a waste of time. Why engage in hours of debate or in spilled ink with such people? We, who embodied the Carpatho-Rusyn movement, had more important, concrete things to do.

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Among those concrete things was to create a codified Rusyn literary language. The first to undertake that task were Carpatho-Rusyns in the Prešov Region. As irony would have it, only one of the two leading codifiers of the Rusyn language in Slovakia was present at the seminar-congress in Bardejovské Kúpele. Yurii Panko was there, Vasyl Yabur was not.

Both Panko and Yabur were born and raised in eastern Slovakia. They both completed the Russian gymnasium in Prešov and then went on to become associate professors of Russian at Šafárik University—Yabur in Kosiče, Panko at its branch in Prešov. Both were soft-spoken personalities and very cautious in their initial interaction with strangers, a trait that was probably ingrained in them during their formative years in the immediate post-World War II Stalinist era in Communist Czechoslovakia.

Sometime in 1992 or 1993 I met each of them separately. Panko seemed the braver of the two and had already decided to participate in work on codification. Yabur, the better-trained linguist, was clearly not a risk-taker and was reluctant to leave his career as a Russianist. When we finally got to know each other—Yabur opened up after a few shots of his favorite drink, Metaxa—I felt emboldened to speak frankly to him.

“Professor Yabur,” I said, “as a Russianist you’re just one of thousands in the former Soviet Union, not to mention many others throughout Europe and especially the United States. Moreover, you are working at a provincial university in eastern Slovakia that most serious scholars have never even heard of.” He let me continue. “You’ll never really make a mark as a Russianist. But as a specialist in the Rusyn language you are unique and could become one of the world’s leading specialists.” We left it at that.

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101. The codifiers of the Rusyn language in Slovakia: (top) Yurii Panko and Vasyl Yabur; (bottom) Anna Plishkova and Kvetoslava Koporova.

I did not hear from Yabur again for over a year until in mid-1994, when he presented me with a signed copy of the first part of a proposed Rule Book of the Rusyn Language. Co-authored with his colleague at Šafárik University in Prešov, Yurii Panko, the rulebook was published in full form by Sasha Zozuliak under the imprint of the Rusyn Renaissance Society during the last weeks of December 1994. In that same month appeared a Rusyn multilingual dictionary of linguistic terminology by 162

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102. Cover of The Rule Book of the Rusyn Language (Prešov, 1994) with dedication on the title page: “To my dear friend Professor Magocsi on the occasion of the memorable day proclaiming the codification of the Rusyn language in Slovakia, from one of the ‘fathers’ of the Rusyn language norm—Vasyl Yabur, Bratislava, 27 January 1995.”

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Yurii Panko and an orthographic dictionary, basically a list of 42,000 properly spelled Rusyn words. This latter work was prepared under the editorship of Yurii Panko together with all four journalists from Narodnŷ novynkŷ: Anna Plishkova, Kveta Koporova, Anna Kuzmiakova, and Mariia Maltsovska. This was the first time I encountered these talented and nationally committed Carpatho-Rusyn women. Cooperation with Plishkova on many scholarly and pedagogical projects was yet to come.

Two things I learned in that year of 1994 about the Carpatho-Rusyns in the Prešov Region of Slovakia and why they soon became the most successful propagators of the national movement. Prešov Region Rusyns were led by journalists and theatrical people who understood the meaning of deadlines. Furthermore, they were not encumbered by the frequent need of scholars whose often larger-than-life egos always needed to be stroked. Instead, they were assigned to carry out a task, and they simply did it. Related to that reality was an even harsher one.

Government funding policies were such in Slovakia that if in any given year a grant for a book was awarded, the book in question had to be published before the end (December 31) of the very year of the grant. And so, by the end of 1994, three texts were published (a terminological dictionary, a rulebook, an orthographic dictionary), which allowed one to proclaim that the Rusyn-language was codified. Also among the new books to appear before the end of the year was a bi-lingual Slovak-Rusyn translation of my historical survey (published in English the following year) entitled Rusynŷ na Slovensku (The Rusyns of Slovakia). The fate of that book was no less interesting than that of the other three, but that is another story.

Now that there were three basic codified language texts, some public celebration seemed in order. This was particularly important because, until that time, both Slovakia’s Ministry of Education and Ministry of Culture argued that they could not establish Rusyn-language schools or a radio program because there was not yet a codified form of Rusyn. The very word “codification” became a kind of mantra. Without codification it seemed that the Carpatho-Rusyn movement could not move forward.

I remember being in Slovakia in November 1994 and again in January 1995. In November, I was given the Rusyn-language rulebook and dictionary as well as the history I wrote, The Rusyns of Slovakia, in a bilingual 164

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103. Paul Robert Magocsi, Sven Gustavsson, and Vasyl Yabur at the Third International Congress of the Rusyn Language, Cracow, Poland (September 2007).

Slovak-Rusyn edition. After a mini-celebration in Prešov, I joined Sasha Zozuliak in his car late one night as we drove Vasyl Yabur back to his residence in Košice. Along the way, we agreed that some sort of public announcement and book launch was necessary. The ever-cautious Yabur suggested a small ceremony in Prešov. I adamantly objected, saying that any proper celebration worth its name should be in the country’s capital, Bratislava, that it should include government and civic figures, and that as part of the “celebration” there should be an international scholarly conference with presentations by renowned scholars. Yabur remained silent; Zozuliak enthusiastically agreed.

Zozuliak brought the Bratislava idea to Vasyl Turok, who promised financial support from the government-funded Rusyn Renaissance Society. After returning to Canada, within a few weeks I received a formal invitation to attend the official ceremony to be held in Bratislava on 27 January 1995. I hastily planned a scholarly conference, which was to include three talks: by me, the main codifier Yabur, and the University of Tartu sociolinguist Aleksander Dulichenko. Dulichenko was well known in international scholarly circles for his comparative work on what he called Slavic micro-languages. Among the languages about which he 165

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wrote extensively were Vojvodinian Rusyn and “American Rusyn.” He was just the kind of person who could lend the celebration the international prestige it deserved.

The only problem was getting Dulichenko from Estonia to Bratislava.

As a scholar working at a post-Soviet institution, he had no real money.

At that point the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center stepped in and paid for his flight.

There was yet another financial problem that arose. In the few weeks since late November when I was last in Slovakia, a new government had come into power led by a decidedly less liberal, nationalistically leaning, demagogic-like self-described “super Slovak” named Vladimír Mečiár. Not only did he have little sympathy for national minorities, most especially Magyars, he was surrounded by advisors who favored the Ukrainophile view of the “Rusyn problem.” As a result, the Mečiár government gave no support to the codification event and even confiscated my recently published book, Rusyns in Slovakia, on the grounds that it was anti-Slovak in spirit.

Unrelated to those larger Slovak political factors—and perhaps even worse—was the news that Vasyl Turok was removed as head of the Rusyn Renaissance Society. When, on the first day of the event I was introduced to the new chairman of the Society, Mykola Liash/Laš, the first thing he did was to ask for more money from American Rusyns to cover the costs of the codification event which the Slovak government had declined to provide. We had just found, with difficulty, over a thousand dollars to pay for Dulichenko’s flight, now we somewhat unceremoniously were being asked for more money. I was not about to allow any of these behind-thescenes problems dampen my spirits. The show must and will go on.

Actually, the night before, which coincided with my fiftieth birthday on January 26, I hosted in the European manner (that is, the “birthday boy” pays) a dinner for several of my closest friends among the Carpatho-Rusyn activists who had come to Bratislava for the next day’s historic event. These included Natalia Dudash from Yugoslavia and, of course, the two codifiers from Slovakia, Vasyl Yabur and Anna Plishkova, as well as the publisher who produced the codification books on time, Sasha Zozuliak.

But for me the special guest was L’udovít Haraksim who I hadn’t seen for several years. After 1989, he was restored to his job at the Slovak Acad166

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emy of Sciences Institute of History, and despite his renown as a historian of Slovaks and Carpatho-Rusyns, none of our activists from Prešov had ever met or even heard of him until he showed up in 1991 as an honored guest at the First World Congress of Rusyns. From then on he was present at all conferences dealing with national minorities at which he defended the right of Carpatho-Rusyns to exist as a distinct nationality. Now he was with us again in the most auspicious of circumstances; that is, at a sumptuous meal in a downtown Bratislava restaurant with red wine flowing and a Gypsy orchestra playing csardases to our heart’s delight.

The following day, January 27, the codification event was held at the student residential complex of Comenius University on the outskirts of Bratislava. When we arrived at the site, it was obvious that, with their experience as theater and media people, Slovakia’s Carpatho-Rusyns knew how to put on a show. Moreover, those present immediately realized the historical—and practical—significance of what they were witnessing.

The celebratory opening session was held in the morning, the scholarly conference for which I was directly responsible was in the afternoon.

Not yet used to my “fame” and still harboring an innate shyness, after entering the hall I sat somewhere alone toward the back. My attempt at being an anonymous observer lasted about a minute before I was spotted by a lawyer from Prešov, Petro Krainiak Sr. Petro was the brother of the Greek Catholic priest from Medzilaborce, Father Frantishek Krainiak, the pioneer codifier of Rusyn-language religious texts. “Professor Magocsi,” said Petro Krainiak, “such an important person as you who helped initiate this event cannot be sitting in the back but must be up front.

That’s how I got placed in the front row next to the other honored guest, the recently consecrated Greek Catholic bishop of Košice, Milan Khautur/Chautur.

There was no one from Slovakia’s Mečiár-led government, and there was only one politician present, a deputy from the Slovak parliament who was seated diagonally in the row behind me. I only later learned that this parliamentary deputy who dared to show up at this “suspect” Carpatho-Rusyn event was Mikuláš Dzurinda, the left of center liberal politician who four years later was to succeed Mečiár as prime minister of Slovakia. Aside from his tolerance as a democratically minded politician, 167

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104. Front row (second from right) at the Act of Codification of the Rusyn Language: Father Frantishek Krainiak, Paul Robert Magocsi, and Bishop Milan Khautur, Bratislava, Slovakia (27 January 1995).

Dzurinda was the son of a graduate of the Greek Catholic gymnasium in Prešov and, on his father’s side, of Carpatho-Rusyn heritage.

The codification ceremonies and afternoon scholarly conference was pulled off without any problems.

From my perspective, the most important thing was the kind of spin that needed to be put on the day’s events. The Slovak national media was present, and they heard over and over that we were announcing the creation of a codified language, which was no longer some unsophisticated dialect. Fortunately, the verbal formula, “codified Rusyn language,” must have stuck in their 105. MikulአDzurinda and Petro Krainiak Sr. at the Act of Codification heads as I discovered first thing of the Rusyn Language, Bratislava, the morning after. I rushed to the Slovakia (27 January 1995).

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106. Slovak newspaper articles from Pravda, Národná obrana, Slovenská repubika, and Sme (27-28 January 1995) announcing the codification of the Rusyn language in Slovakia.

Bratislava city center in order to buy all of that day’s newspapers, including the most read and respected ones at the time, Národná obrana, Slovenská republika, and Sme. There it was—an article with the heading: “The codification of Rusyn is an opportunity to correct the [past] injustices done to the Rusyns.” The only dissenting voice was from the 169

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old Communist newspaper, Pravda. It carried commentary from proUkrainian activists in the Prešov Region (almost all former Communist party members) who were “opposed to codification,” which they viewed as “primarily the result of the work of the pro-Hungarian international secret agent from Canada, Paul Robert Magocsi.”

The newspaper reports underlined the ultimate success of the codification event. From then on Slovak governmental, civic, and intellectual circles who might know—or need to know—something about their East Slavic fellow citizens at the far end of the country would simply parrot the phrase, “codified Rusyn language.” Since everyone now knew that there was a codified literary standard, demands to have the Rusyn language taught in schools had to be taken seriously by Slovakia’s Ministry of Education.

I immediately set out to broadcast to the scholarly world the existence of this new Slavic language. A brief essay that I wrote was published in English and French in the most prominent Slavic studies journals in the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, and Slovenia.

I also put together the papers from the scholarly conference and declaratory codification documents, and published them in an English-Slovak bilingual edition in the Columbia University Press Carpatho-Rusyn Series before the end of 1995. I chose a provocative title, A New Slavic Language is Born. Through the efforts of Professor Dulichenko, we were able to include a preface to the book by one of the world’s leading Slavists in the second half of the twentieth century, Nikita Tolstoi, of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The academician Tolstoi had long believed in the distinctiveness of the Rusyn language and expressed great satisfaction at the codification process undertaken by Carpatho-Rusyns in Slovakia.

Codification efforts were also to start soon after among the Lemko Rusyns in Poland, largely thanks to the initiative of a Rusyn-language teacher, Miroslava Khomiak/Chomiak. Olena Duts-Faifer, the Lemko Region’s leading university-based intellectual, did not see eye to eye (to say the least) with what for her was the provincial, insufficiently educated village teacher Miroslava Khomiak. Fortunately, Khomiak had turned to an accomplished Polish linguist Henryk Fontański from the University of 170

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107. Myroslava Khomiak at the Third International Congress of the Rusyn Language, Cracow, Poland (September 2007).

108. Cover of the Grammar of the Lemko Language (2000) codifying Poland’s Lemko variant of the Rusyn language.

Opole in Upper Silesia, and together they produced a grammar for a Lemko-Rusyn standard language that was published in the year 2000. Consequently, that year became the official date of the codification of Lemko Rusyn in Poland, although there was no celebratory announcement and certainly not any event that even remotely could compare to what had taken place in Slovakia five years earlier. At the time, our Lemko-Rusyn friends simply did not understand the importance of public relations.

On the other hand, Poland’s Ministry of Education did recognize the Fontański-Khomiak grammar, which provided the basis for the Rusyn-language eventually taught in the several elementary- and high school-level classes in communities throughout Poland where Lemkos lived.

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While the 1995 language codification event was a great success, the planning stages before and the fall-out after revealed certain problems faced not only by Carpatho-Rusyns in Slovakia but also in Poland, Ukraine, and other post-Communist countries.

At certain times Slovak and Polish government officials and their advisors gave support to the Carpatho-Rusyn movement, while at other times they provided only limited or no support for fear that they might upset their neighbor to the east, Ukraine. Those were the years when Poland was strongly committed to maintaining good relations with Ukraine. In fact, Poland had become Ukraine’s foremost lobbyist for greater integration and future membership in the European Union.

Torn between the democratic imperative to recognize those Lemkos who believed that they were part of a distinct Carpatho-Rusyn nationality and the larger geo-political need to function as a friend and supporter of Ukraine on the international stage, Poland struggled to find an acceptable balance in its handling of the “Rusyn problem.”

Symbolic of its attempt to avoid conflict was the manner in which Poland officially classified non-ethnic Polish citizens in the country. Some non-ethnic Polish groups were classified as national minorities (including Ukrainians), while others were designated as “only” ethnic groups (including Lemkos). While in theory—and to a sufficient degree in practice—there was no difference between the two categories with regard to their access to state funding, the ethnic group classification applied to Lemkos clearly implied that they were not at the developmental level of a distinct nationality.

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109. Historic map accompanying the polemical article, “Slovak Money Used Against Slovaks,” that appeared in Slovakia’s Ukrainian language newspaper, Nove zhyttia, No. 43 (Prešov, 1994).

Ukraine, except during the tenure of Prime Minister Vladimír Mečiár, whose government lasted from December 1994 to October 1998. Those nearly four years coincided with the strange saga surrounding my book, The Rusyns of Slovakia, published in 1994 by the Rusyn Renaissance Society and in 1995 by Columbia University Press in New York City. This was the first history to provide a Rusynophile understanding of the Prešov Region’s Carpatho-Rusyns.

Immediately upon the appearance of the Slovak-Rusyn bilingual edition of the book in late 1994, the Ukrainophile newspaper Nove zhyttia, the organ of the Union of Rusyns-Ukrainians of Slovakia (SRUS), ran an article accusing me of wanting to alter international boundaries at the expense of both Slovakia and Ukraine. Magocsi’s alleged goal was to create an independent Carpatho-Rusyn state as depicted in a 1919 map by the Carpatho-Rusyn American political activist (and first governor of Subcarpathian Rus’) Gregory Zhatkovych. I, indeed, included in the book a reproduction of the 1919 map as a historic document, but certainly not as a blueprint for a new independent state. There were also rumors that I had insulted the World War II Slovak state and its president Mons. Josef Tiso (popular in certain post-Communist Slovak nationalist circles) by mentioning his government’s support for the deportation of Slovakia’s Jews to Auschwitz.

Such clouds of suspicion led to a directive from Mečiár’s government to the publisher, Aleksander Zozuliak of the Rusyn Renaissance Society, to stop immediately any further distribution of the book and to provide 173

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a list of persons to whom complimentary copies had already been given. Zozuliak was furious at the request to provide a list of names as was done in Communist times. He simply refused to fulfill that demand.

The copies of The Rusyns of Slovakia were, on the other hand, technically the property of Slovakia’s Ministry of Education, which paid for their production as a textbook to be used in Rusyn-language schools.

Zozuliak told me that a government van did, indeed, come to Prešov in 110. Cover of The Rusyns of Slovakia order to confiscate the books, haul(1994), bi-lingual Rusyn and Slovak texts, by Paul Robert Magocsi, ing them first to Košice and then, afpublished by the Rusyn Renaissance ter being held there for a few months Society for Slovakia’s Ministry of under lock-and-key, transferring Education in Bratislava. them to Bratislava, where they remained “in prison” for nearly the next five years. Government bureaucrats argued that they could do nothing further until they received expert assessments which they requested from the Institute of History of the Slovak Academy of Sciences.

When, after several months or even a year, the assessments came, they proved to be inconclusive. I got hold of the unsigned assessments only several years later. I suspect that one of them was written by my good friend L’udovít Haraksím. As he had always told me, he disagreed with my presentation of the Prešov Region as a land inhabited primarily by Carpatho-Rusyns. If that were the case, it would provide justification for territorial autonomy, something that could threaten the integrity of the Slovak state. Although of partial Carpatho-Rusyn background, Haraksim was first and foremost a Slovak patriot.

Meanwhile, Slovakia’s Carpatho-Rusyn activists transformed the “imprisoned” books into a mini cause-célèbre. The head of the Bratislava branch of the Rusyn Renaissance Society was Shtefan Ladŷzhynskyi, a 174

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111. Paul Robert Magocsi presents the SS Cyril and Methodius Rusyn-language Award to Shtefan Ladŷzhynskyi as Aleksander Franko looks on, Second International Congress of the Rusyn Language, Prešov University, Slovakia (April 1999).

retired choreographer and former artistic director of the professional Duklia Folk Ensemble during the first half of the 1960s, precisely the time when my wife joined the company. Ladŷzhynskyi, who always had an eye out for pretty young ladies immediately assumed I was a friend, if only indirectly through the connection with one of “his” former dancers, my future wife, Maria. As one of the founders of the newly created Society of Rusyn Intelligentsia in Slovakia, he arranged that symbolically I become its first member. I still have my identification card marked Member No. 001.

Living near Bratislava and being retired with time on his hands, the ever-energetic Ladŷzhynskyi took advantage of his location to visit frequently Slovak government offices to press Carpatho-Rusyn demands.

He told me how his first and foremost demand was “to liberate their” (my) book, The Rusyns of Slovakia. He was never going to sleep peacefully until that happened.

All along the book was available in Prešov. I remember how, at some event I attended at the Dukhnovych Theater sometime in 1996 or 1997, there was a display of books on sale. During the intermission I saw that 175

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112. Cover and title page of The Rusyns of Slovakia: A Historical Survey (Prešov, 1994) with “a dedication to the author, Mr. Magocsi, from the Ministry of Education of the Slovak Republic, Division of National Minority Schools, 16 April 1999.”

the writer Mariia Maltsovska was behind the sales desk. When I asked how it was possible that the book was available when it was otherwise officially banned, she replied with an ironic twinkle in her eye: “What goes on in Bratislava is their business. This is Prešov, our land, where we decide what is and what is not possible.” In effect, the wily publisher Zo176

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zuliak had printed a few hundred more than the “official” one thousand copies. The latter he was forced to return to the government authorities, while he kept the smaller number for his own purposes.

Finally, in October 1998, with the fall of the Mečiár government and the arrival of the liberal Mikuláš Dzurinda to the post of Slovakia’s prime minister, my book The Rusyns of Slovakia was finally “liberated.” I very well remember an incident in the spring of 1999 at the Second International Congress of the Rusyn Language held at Prešov University. Just before the proceedings were to begin, a visiting official from the Ministry of Education in Slovakia approached me in a somewhat sheepish fashion to congratulate and present to me the “new” book that her Ministry had “just published”—as if I hadn’t seen it before. I figured I would have some fun and asked her to autograph the copy with a dedication from the Ministry, which she was glad to do.

Quite frankly, I was never pleased with Zozuliak’s design for the outside cover, not to mention his uninspired page layout and choice of an ugly sans-serif typeface. Nevertheless, the book did indeed reach a wide Rusyn and non-Rusyn readership and has been cited numerous times in scholarly literature. That, after all, was the whole point of publishing in Slovakia in 1994/1999 and in the United States (1993) an enhanced version of a text with illustrations that had been published a decade earlier

by Wilhelm Braumüller in Vienna under the title, The Rusyn-Ukrainians of Czechoslovakia (1983). Titles alone revealed how I was gradually “moving forward” in the choice of ethnonyms to describe our people in Europe: from Rusyns-Ukrainians to Rusyns, then eventually to the most appropriate and accurate term—Carpatho-Rusyns.

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The other matter that came to the fore on the eve of the 1995 language codification ceremony was the rather abrupt departure of Vasyl Turok as chairman of the Rusyn Renaissance Society. The reason had to do with the classic Carpatho-Rusyn problem, alcoholism. Vasyl’s, and for that matter Sasha Zozuliak’s need for drink only seemed to increase with the inevitable stress and pressure placed on them by the Carpatho-Rusyn movement to which they devoted their heart and soul.

The turning point for Vasyl had come when, in late 1994, he began to show up at meetings with government officials in Bratislava stone drunk.

Other members of the Rusyn Renaissance Society were fed up and forced him to resign. For about a year, the society was headed first very briefly

by Nykolai Liash (in office during the language codification event) and then by Vasyl’s close friend, Yaroslav Sŷsak. Both were from the theatrical world—Liash as actor, Sŷsak as director of the Dukhnovych Theater.

Liash was no stranger to civic and political activism, having been in the forefront supporting the Czech playwright and political dissident Václav Havel during the Velvet Revolution that in November 1989 overturned Communist rule in Czechoslovakia. Neither Liash nor Sŷsak had their heart in running the Rusyn Renaissance Society. When both turned out to be decidedly ineffective, Vasyl Turok was urged to return. And he did.

Fortunately, the Rusyn Renaissance Society was put back on track after Turok’s return.

Subsequently, Turok managed to control himself and act properly at official meetings and public events. Otherwise, for most of the rest of his life his everyday routine was more or less the same. He would arrive at the Dukhnovych Theater each morning about nine and work to about 178

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113. Nykolai Liash (center) with Václav Havel (left) at one of several meetings during the Velvet Revolution, Prague, Czechoslovakia (November 1989).

2:00 pm, at which time he went to the courtyard korchma to eat a bit and drink the rest of the day until a taxi came about 7:00 or 8:00 pm to take him home to sleep.

Not that Vasyl was unaware of his problem. I recall the trip we took together as part of a group of Carpatho-Rusyns from several countries visiting Denmark for a week to learn about how western democracies function. In the town hall and civic center of some Danish village outside Copenhagen that we visited, there was a sign on an office door, which indicated that it sponsored government-funded programs for alcoholics.

Smiling at our group Vasyl burst out in a loud voice: “Now this is what we Rusyns need in our villages. Then maybe we could become as ‘democratic’ as the Danes.”

Sasha Zozuliak was not much better. One could be assured that at the end of every public event he would have to be escorted home—in some cases literally picked-up off the street—and dragged home. By then Sasha’s work as a Rusyn-language publisher, editor-in-chief, and executive secretary of both the Rusyn Renaissance Society and World Council of 179

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114. Anna Plishkova and Aleksander Zozuliak, Rusyn Festival, Medzilaborce, Slovakia (June 1991).

Rusyns under Turok was marked by one success after another. Fortunately for Zozuliak, he was living with Anna Plishkova (they eventually were legally married), who had the patience of a saint. She did help to stabilize his conduct, at least in public.

Sasha Zozuliak’s father was Vasyl Zozuliak, a leading Ukrainian-language writer and civic activist in the Prešov Region during the Communist era. Sasha’s mother came from a village, which after 1945 was in Soviet Transcarpathia. As a child, Sasha visited his maternal grandparents on several occasions and remembered how each border crossing into the “Soviet paradise” was a deeply traumatic experience. Now he was forced to return there as the executive secretary of the World Council of Rusyns.

I remember how the head of the Vojvodinian Rusyn organization, Diura Papuga, would anxiously wait for Sasha to arrive so that he could start drinking with him, even during pauses in our deliberations. I came to despise Papuga and even begged him on several occasions to leave Sasha alone. He wouldn’t listen. On and on they caroused, often into the early morning, when finally they would take their last shot (kapurkova) before we got into our cars for the drive home to our respective countries.

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On more than one occasion, I had to drive Sasha’s car while he lay unconscious on the back seat. For Sasha, being in Transcarpathia and carrying his negative childhood memories from Soviet times made things only worse. One time we couldn’t even lift Sasha up and so left him sleeping in the Uzhhorod cathedral church basement while we left Ukraine. A few days later Sasha turned up in Slovakia.

Everyone has a right to his or her personal habits. They become problematic, however, when those habits are played out in public. My wife Maria’s former Carpatho-Rusyn colleague in the Dukla Dance Company who still lived in Prešov, Hanka Žižková, summed it up best. On one occasion, I asked her if she knew about and would participate in the exciting Carpatho-Rusyn revival. Her response was unequivocal: “I don’t want to have anything to do with that group of drunkards.”

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The Revolutions of 1989 and the Carpatho-Rusyn revival in Europe had a profound impact on our people in the United States. Until 1989, the main goal of the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center was to try to convince our fellow Americans to become interested in the historical past and culture of their European ancestors. For all intents and purposes, we were playing on the nostalgia card: How nice it would be to learn about a culture from which your ancestors derive but that, in effect, no longer exists except, perhaps, among us “last Mohicans” in America.

As a result of 1989, our message could be something else: Look, there are real Carpatho-Rusyns in the European homeland today. And they need our support in their struggle to gain recognition as a distinct nationality from the governments of the various countries where they live, in particular Ukraine, Slovakia, and Poland. That seemed to be a much easier message to sell. The instrument to motivate, so to speak, new Rusyn-Americans “in the making” was the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center (the C-RRC).

While it is true that the “movement” had begun back in the mid-1970s with only a handful of individuals, in particular Patricia Krafcik, Edward Kasinec, Orestes Mihaly, and Richard Renoff, by the late 1980s and 1990s several younger—and not so younger—people joined our ranks as Kulturträger (cultural propagators): Jerry Jumba, John Righetti, Maryann Sivak, Richard Custer, Larry Goga, John Halushka, and Susyn Mihalasky.

***** In an entirely different category, and a particularly invaluable find, was Elaine Rusinko. Elaine was an assistant professor of Russian language 182

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and literature at the University of Maryland in Baltimore. She was another one of those young American scholars of Carpatho-Rusyn heritage (including Patricia Krafcik and Edward Kasinec), who certainly knew where their parents or grandparents came from, but they maintained a low profile regarding their Ruthenian/Rusyn origins. Nevertheless, they had an ingrained affinity with the East Slavic world, which made it easy for them to pursue careers connected to the Russian language and culture. My goal was to wean these 115. Elaine Rusinko before Andy people away from the Russian field Warhol’s boyhood home, Pittsburgh, and to re-direct their intellectual talPennsylvania (November 1992). ents to Carpatho-Rusyn topics.

I first came across Elaine Rusinko’s name as the author of a study on modern Russian literature (Nikolai Gumilev and acmeism) which appeared in the Slavic Review, the authoritative journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS). Getting to Elaine was a step-by-step process. At the AAASS convention, held in Honolulu, Hawaii (1988), I asked Pat Krafcik to seek out the still elusive Professor Rusinko. My chance to meet Elaine in person came at a meeting in Washington, D.C. in the spring of 1989. During that brief encounter, I suggested the possibility that she apply her advanced Russian language and literary analytical skills to Russian-language writers in interwar Subcarpathian Rus’ and perhaps even write a biography of Andrei Karabelesh.

She must have taken to heart what I said, because for the next year we both pursued an intense correspondence about research possibilities in Subcarpathian literature. Then came the AAASS Convention, which took place in Washington, D.C. (1990), Elaine’s home turf. It was there that things got serious, because I invited her to a “sit-down”, which took the form of a good meal with an appropriate amount of red wine at a 183

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116. Elaine Rusinko (center) flanked by Paul Robert Magocsi and Andrei Kopcha (on the left) and Steven Chepa and Vasyl Sarkanych (to the right), at the crypt of Aleksander Dukhnovych, Greek Catholic Cathedral, Prešov, Slovakia (May 2003).

respectable restaurant. In an effort to make the atmosphere less intimidating (although Elaine was quite sophisticated and not easily intimidated), I asked my two still teenage children (Cindy and Danik) as well as Edward Kasinec (Danik’s godfather) to join us.

Enjoy ourselves? Yes. But I was on a mission, just as I had been when dealing with Vasyl Yabur and Yurii Panko in Slovakia. Namely, there was a surfeit of Russianists worldwide. Hence, if one wanted not only to have a successful scholarly career but to make a unique contribution to knowledge, it would be preferable to find oneself a niche. Carpatho-Rusyn topics provided just such a niche. Ever the skeptic and even negative by nature, I thought that after our first meeting Elaine Rusinko would not accept my proposal. Happily, I was wrong. She did accept.

Almost immediately Elaine plunged into Carpatho-Rusyn literary texts, so that in the mid-1990s she published an innovative study on Hryhorii Tarkovych’s 1805 ode to the palatine of Hungary, followed by the first English-language translation of Aleksander Dukhnovych’s 1850 play, Virtue is More Important than Riches (Dobrodîtel perevŷshaet bohatsvo).

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The culmination of her intense research came less than a decade later, when she published the first major history in English of Carpatho-Rusyn literature, applying her analysis to what was then a new methodological approach (post-colonial theory). I helped get her 560-page monograph (Straddling Borders, 2003) published by the University of Toronto Press.

I was overjoyed. Thanks to Elaine Rusinko, Carpatho-Rusyn literature was finally being introduced to the English-speaking general reader and scholarly world.

Aside from her invaluable scholarly work, Elaine agreed to serve for nearly two decades as vice-president of the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center. Only much later, as part of our developing friendship, did I learn something of her biography. In the early 1970s, Elaine had worked for the United States Information Agency Foreign Service, and that included a stint in Moscow as a Russian-speaking guide for an American government exhibit. But even more important for us was the fact that she had first-hand experience on a topic that many of us always mentioned but knew little about: the phenomenon of early Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants and the United States coal industry. Elaine was literally the proverbial coal-miner’s daughter, born and raised in the coal patches of eastern Pennsylvania—of all places in a town called Coaldale. She grew up to be an externally gentle, but internally strong-willed, individual who evolved into an accomplished scholar committed to her ancestral Carpatho-Rusyn heritage.

Another valuable addition to Carpatho-Rusyn scholarship in the United States was connected with the arrival of Bogdan Horbal from Poland. Bogdan was one of those few students who back in the days of Communist rule asked for English-language publications about Carpatho-Rusyns, which we promptly sent gratis from the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center. I finally met Bogdan in person sometime in the late 1980s, when he was still an undergraduate studying history at the University of Wrocław. He accepted my invitation to meet while I was on a brief visit to Warsaw. He brought along Miroslav Vorhach, a fellow student of Lemko background. I met them in the presence of the Lemko-Rusyn activist Olena Duts-Faifer.

Soon after that meeting, Bogdan emigrated to the United States, set185

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117. Bogdan Horbal, Magocsi Festschrift book launch, Slovak Embassy, Washington, D. C. (November 2006).

tling in New York City in 1990. He planned to earn some extra money and then return home. As things frequently turn out, he never left New York. Like many young people from Poland in those years, Bogdan started at the lower end of the social ladder, working in a restaurant first as a dishwasher, then busboy, and finally “graduating” to waiter. He spent his spare time in the Slavonic Division of the New York Public Library (NYPL), headed at that time by the Division Chief, our own Edward Kasinec. The ever-practical Edward urged Bodgan to get a degree in Library Science, which would enable him to get a “real” job. He followed the advice of his older fellow Carpatho-Rusyn colleague, obtained a library school degree, and then landed a job in one of Manhattan’s branches of the NYPL that specialized in Science and Technology.

The “nine-to-five” job guaranteed a roof over Bogdan’s head and food on the table. More importantly, it allowed him evening hours and the weekends to devote to his true passion, Lemko-Rusyn history in Europe and America. Thanks to Bogdan we now have a wide range of heretofore little-known information about Lemko immigrant communities in the United States and know more about the post-World War I “independent” Lemko-Rusyn “republics” than ever before.

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Bogdan was much more reticent to participate in Carpatho-Rusyn projects that were not his own. For instance, he frequently declined attendance at the annual Slavic Convention panels (perhaps legitimately for financial reasons), and he never accepted our proposals to teach at the Studium Carpatho-Ruthenorum International Summer School at Prešov University. He did, however, in the early twenty-first century accept the post as vice-president, then president of the Lemko Association (with its valuable archives). Most important, he continued to produce studies on little-known Lemko topics as well as publish a 706-page magnum opus, Lemko Studies: A Handbook, which appeared in 2010 as part of the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center’s Series of Reference Works.

Finally, Bogdan had many positive personal traits. At first glance he seemed to be reserved, but even the briefest encounter revealed him to be a down-to-earth genuinely open personality. Most research scholars who do not teach are usually uninspired and boring lecturers. Not so Bogdan. I remember someone inviting him to speak at the University of Toronto, where his verbal performance not only impressed the audience but put a damper on the criticism of those present (both Polish and Ukrainian scholars) who were not particularly appreciative of Bogdan’s solid “exposé” of the “separatist” Lemko-Rusyn Republic of 1918-1920.

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Aside from “our own” scholars, there were Americans of various ethnic heritages who were professional Slavists. They discovered Carpatho-Rusyns largely through the publications of the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center. Among the first of these was Catherine Chvany, daughter of the Belorussian specialist Nicholas Vakar, and herself a professor of linguistics at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in Cambridge. While I was at Harvard, I discovered Catherine in the mid-1970s through her husband Larry Chvany, a Rusyn-American who was a loyal purchaser of all books distributed by the C-RRC. Catherine prided herself on being a scholar sensitive to details (something that goes with being a linguist) and on being a great proofreader. She offered her services to me gratis. How could I pass up such a generous offer? I did ask her to review at least one of my publications, the two-volume Of the Making of Nationalities There is No End (1999), for which she proofread with the greatest of care all 1,070 printed pages.

Other accomplished American Slavists included Wayles Browne of Cornell University, Robert Rothstein of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and Stefan Pugh of St. Andrews University in Scotland and later Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. They began to attend and then participate in panels on Carpatho-Rusyn topics that took place each year from 1995 at the annual conventions of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS). Through their publications and academic affiliations, all three lent prestige and authority to the view that Rusyn was a distinct Slavic language, not a dialect of Ukrainian.

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118. Robert Rothstein (second from right) with (from the left) John Righetti, Paul Robert Magocsi, and Orestes Mihaly before the iconostasis of the St. Mary’s Greek Catholic Church in Pittsburgh where Andy Warhol’s baptism and funeral were held.

through his long-term contacts with Yugoslavia that he became aware and interested in the language of the Vojvodinian-Srem Rusyns. Urged by his friend Pat Krafcik, Wayles extended his interests to the Rusyn language in the Carpathian homeland.

It was sometime in the 1990s that I came to know Robert Rothstein, a polyglot Polish-Russian-Yiddish philologist who not only participated in Carpatho-Rusyn-related panels at the AAASS conventions, but also took an active part in the Second (Prešov University 1999) and the Third (Pedagogical University, Cracow 2007) International Congress of the Rusyn Language, as well as at other Carpatho-Rusyn scholarly activities in both Europe and North America. Bob Rothstein’s participation at all these events was enhanced by the presence of his charming wife Galina, a Russian-speaking Jewish refusenik who had emigrated from the Soviet Union sometime in the 1980s.

Stefan Pugh was particularly influential in promoting Rusyn-language distinctiveness. He did this through two books published in Germany: one on East Slavic languages; the other, the first professional grammar of the Rusyn language in English. Both came out during the first decade 189

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of the twenty-first century, by which time Stefan accepted my suggestion that he write a Rusyn-language textbook for English speakers.

While doing research, Stefan came to love the Carpatho-Rusyns that he met in Slovakia and Poland. He taught Rusyn at the Studium Carpatho-Ruthenorum in Prešov and 119. Stefan Pugh and his future wife on one occasion was blessed (togethLinda Mastilíř, Rusyn Language er with his fiancée) by a Rusyn priest Seminar, Prešov (September 2007). from the Vojvodina in a ceremony held in the presence of a large gathering of Carpatho-Rusyn scholars and activists held in a Lemko restaurant in Cracow during the Third International Congress of the Rusyn Language (2007).

It turned out that Stefan’s fiancée at the symbolic pre-nuptial blessing was none other than my former Canadian graduate student of Moravian-Czech background, Linda Mastilíř. Linda had herself become enamored with Carpatho-Rusyn culture and maintained especially close ties with the linguist Anna Plishkova and writer Mariia Maltsovska in Prešov.

It seemed that everything was unfolding as I had hoped within the framework of an ever-increasing “Carpatho-Rusyn family.” Stefan Pugh fulfilled our long-standing desire to have a professional Rusyn-language specialist in the English-speaking scholarly world. He was well on his way to taking on that role when, suddenly, his struggle with cancer took a turn for the worse. To the shock of us all, he died in 2013.

Despite his untimely death, the legacy of Stefan Pugh lived on. Realizing his end was imminent (I last saw him in November 2012 as he struggled to walk with me and his wife Linda on the streets of New Orleans), Stefan completed a first draft of his Rusyn-language textbook. He signed a contract with Slavica Publishers and entrusted the manuscript to his Slavicist colleagues, Wayles Browne and Robert Rothstein, to do the painstaking work of preparing a final version of the text for publication. Several more years passed. Browne and Rothstein did complete a revised text, but Slavica, proved unable to fulfill the agreement with 190

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the author. Finally, in late 2020, the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center stepped in, and, with Nick Kupensky (a Yale-trained Slavist) in charge of the manuscript, within five months Stephan Pugh’s textbook Welcome: A Textbook of Rusyn appeared. Now there was a textbook that could serve Carpatho-Rusyns in the United States and anyone else in the world wanting to learn the language, in particular participants of the annual Studium Carpatho-Ruthenorum International Summer School at Prešov University. I believe Stefan Pugh would have been overjoyed that his— and our—dreams were fulfilled.

***** Stefan Pugh’s death was a great blow. It seemed that professional linguists and sociolinguists who could have, or actually did, research and publish on the Rusyn language were taken from us at a relatively young age. Within less than a decade, three invaluable language specialists passed on from this world: the Hungarian István Udvari (2004), the American of Czech-Silesian heritage Kevin Hannan (2008), and the American Stefan Pugh (2013). I hoped our luck would turn around when I somehow discovered Elena Boudovskaia from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Elena was a Russian from Moscow who emigrated to the United States in the early 1980s. While still in the Soviet Union she did some research on the Highland/Verkhovyna dialects in Transcarpathia which she described—as required in Soviet times—as Ukrainian. I managed to convince her to replace the deceased Stefan Pugh and teach Rusyn at the Studium Carpatho-Ruthenorum. She seemed to appreciate being inducted into the Carpatho-Rusyn “family,” and since then has redirected her academic career to research and publishing on Carpatho-Rusyn linguistic topics and folk beliefs. She has a very kind and pleasant personality, and, as such, is a good representative of Carpatho-Rusyn scholarship at international conferences.

***** There were several other Americans of non-Carpatho-Rusyn background who were drawn into the “family fold.” A special place was held

by Thomas Bird, a professor of Slavic literatures at Queens College of 191

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120. Elena Boudovskaia (left) with Agniezska Halemba at the Family Dinner, 49th ASEEES Convention, Chicago, Illinois (November 2017).

the City University of New York. Tom Bird was a close friend of Edward Kasinec who introduced him to me sometime in the early 1970s.

Tom was an exceedingly erudite and cultured individual who, perhaps because of his Welsh roots, was incredibly articulate in the English language. He was truly a wordsmith. While he published very little (I believe he never completed his doctoral dissertation), the essays that he did write were outstanding examples of magnificent prose.

Tom was by avocation an aficionado of contemporary church politics, especially concerning the Eastern Catholics and Orthodox in the United States. Like another great essayist and prolific published scholar, Father Robert Taft, SJ, of the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome (also a personal friend of mine), Tom Bird was drawn to Carpatho-Rusyns through his interest in the church. In short, Bird and Taft, both Roman Catholics of liberal persuasion, were incensed at the dismissive treatment to which Carpatho-Rusyn Greek Catholics were subjected by the Vatican ever since the late nineteenth century massive immigration to the United States.

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121. Thomas Bird at the CarpathoRusyn panel, 27th ASEEES convention, Washington D. C. (October 1995)

Tom Bird enthusiastically participated in several conferences about Carpatho-Rusyns in the United States and served as an intellectually provocative chairman of almost every panel on Carpatho-Rusyn topics at the annual Slavic Conventions (AAASS). He was always a wonderful dinner companion. I especially remember the invitation extended to me to dine with him at the Princeton Club on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

We were a natural fit, considering that we both went to Princeton for our graduate studies.

***** Another friend of Carpatho-Rusyns was Father Peter Galadza, whom I first met in 1983, a few years after coming to Toronto. It was not until the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, that we began to interact on a somewhat frequent basis. Happily for me, we developed a close friendship. Peter Galadza’s connections with Carpatho-Rusyns came from his upbringing in the 1950s in western Pennsylvania, where he was exposed to the numerous Ruthenian Greek Catholic churches in his midst. The son of Galician-Ukrainian parents, Peter was a staunch Ukrainian patriot, although he recognized and always pointed out the distinctiveness of Carpatho-Rusyns. After marriage, he was ordained a priest in the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and later university professor of Eastern Christian theology.

Father Peter’s sub-specialty was liturgical music, and he was especially enamored with the Carpathian plainchant (prostopiniye) which confirmed for him not only the national distinctiveness of Carpatho-Rusyns but also their differences from fellow East Slavic Greek Catholics from “Ukrainian” Galicia. Despite—or because of—his Ukrainianness, he made a particularly favorable impression on Carpatho-Rusyn scholars 193

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122. Father Peter Galadza

and community activists, especially after I first invited him to join us as a special guest at the “family dinner” we held during the 2011 Slavic Convention in Washington, D.C. 194

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Father Galadza agreed to come but on one condition: that those of us present begin the proceedings by singing the Carpatho-Rusyn national hymn: “I Was, Am, and Will Remain a Rusyn” (Ya Rusyn bŷl, yesm i budu), for which he brought the music and words. Moreover, he could not help but be impressed that so many of the dinner guests were able to sing the Otche nash (Our Father) in Carpathian plainchant and without the help of music or text. Singing the national hymn at our annual family dinners subsequently became a tradition, one that was started by our Ukrainian-American friend and supporter living in Canada, Father Peter Galadza.

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As important as scholars to our cause were several ordinary Americans of Carpatho-Rusyn background who also lent their support—and often hundreds of hours of work—to the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center.

Most essential were those figures who served as business managers, that is, who received and processed book orders. For this task we needed people who were efficient and honest. Luckily, we were able to find several individuals who over the years fit that profile.

If the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center was not virtual, it was certainly mobile. In other words, from 1978 during its four decades of existence it was located in six different places, which in effect were the personal residences of the various business managers. The first seat of the C-RRC was the home of my mother, Anna Lengyel Magocsi, in Fairview, New Jersey (1978-1993), followed by that of my cousin Barbara Kapitan Corbey in Orwell, Vermont and Ocala, Florida (1993-2006), Theresa Lancaster in Erie, Pennsylvania (2006-2008), Ed Boyko in Glassport, Pennsylvania (2009-2015), and George Bedrin in Grand Isle, Vermont (2016-2022).

The C-RRC also had a board of advisors that during its first two decades of existence met on average once a year. Again, board members came from various parts of the United States, in particular Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Minnesota. Finally, the Carpatho-Rusyn American quarterly magazine had its own staff of business managers during its two decades of existence: Olga Kavochka Mayo (Hingham, Massachusetts), Steve Mallick (North Madison, Ohio), John A. Halushka (Cambridge, Minnesota), Maryann Sivak (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), and Jack Figel (Fairfax, Virginia).

There is no question that the C-RRC could not have done as much as it did (distributing through sales over 68,000 books, brochures, and maps 196

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123. Jack Figel and Susyn Mihalasky at the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center booth, 27th ASEEES Convention, Washington, D. C. (October 1995).

over 44 years) were it not for the selfless contributions in labor by the wide variety of individuals mentioned above. Our European brethren had always been—and are still—used to operating cultural organizations with financial support from the governments of the countries where they live. American Rusyns through organizations like the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center have been successful because of the largely unpaid enthusiastic labor of love on the part of patriotic individuals concerned with promoting the cultural heritage of their ancestors.

***** The work of the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center was never haphazard. From the very outset I established two basic goals: to encourage research and publications about Carpatho-Rusyns in Europe and North America; and, as importantly, to create a mechanism to distribute the printed results of that research to the largest number of individuals and libraries worldwide.

The first challenge was to determine what was the homeland which we called Carpathian Rus’. I always felt we needed clearly defined boundaries, based on my belief that vagueness is the enemy of ideological com197

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mitment and purpose. Historically, Carpathian Rus’, often called Carpatho-Russia, referred to all the lands inhabited by East Slavs (Rusyns/ Ruthenians) in the pre-World War I Austro-Hungarian Empire. This meant three regions: Austrian-ruled East Galicia (including the Lemko Region west of the San River) and Bukovina on the northern slopes of the Carpathians, and Hungarian or Subcarpathian Rus’ on the southern slopes of the mountains. That broad definition of Carpathian Rus’ was clearly inappropriate, because by the first decades of the twentieth century the Rusyns/Ruthenians in East Galicia and Bukovina identified themselves as Ukrainians. This transformation did not occur among the Rusyns/Ruthenians in the Lemko Region in Galicia (west of the San River) nor in Hungarian and later Czechoslovak-ruled Subcarpathian Rus’ and the Prešov Region. In those three areas—the Lemko Region, Prešov Region, Subcarpathian Rus’—resided the last remaining Ruthenians/ Rusyns, if you will. And to distinguish them from other Ruthenians, now Ukrainians in eastern Galicia and northern Bukovina, we decided to designate them as Carpatho-Rusyns.

Unfortunately, many of our people in Europe and America continue to use the short-hand term Rusyn, which unwittingly plays into the hands of Ukrainians who claim that Rusyn is just an older name for Ukrainian; hence, from their perspective, all Rusyns are Ukrainians. I tried to drive the point of distinctiveness home in the title of a book of my essays that appeared in Ukrainian: Kozhen Karpatorusyn ie Rusynom ale ne kozhen Rusyn ie Karpatorusynom (Every Carpatho-Rusyn is a Rusyn, but Not Every Rusyn is a Carpatho-Rusyn, 2015). In theory, most of our people agree with the above-mentioned principle while at the same time continuing to refer to themselves simply as Rusyns.

***** Practical tools and scholarly works were what we needed most in the new post-Communist world. To justify the borders of historic Carpathian Rus’, in 1996, I published a large-scale Map of Carpathian Rusyn Settlement. It indicated over 1,100 villages in which the inhabitants identified as Carpatho-Rusyn between the years 1806 and 1921. To help users find their ancestral village, the reverse side of the map had a gazetteer 198

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124. Paul Robert Magocsi presenting the Carpatho-Rusyn Settlement Map at the XII International Congress of Slavic Studies, Cracow, Poland (September 1998).

listing over 3,500 village name variants in Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Rusyn, Slovak, and Ukrainian. The map was exceedingly popular, subsequently went into two revised printings (1998 and 2011), and by 2023 had sold over 5,200 copies with another 1,000 or so distributed gratis in the European homeland.

125. Carpatho-Rusyn Settlement Map featured in the village museum, Múcsony, Hungary (June 1997).

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In order to distill the information on the Map of Carpatho-Rusyn Settlement, I prepared a smaller version whose ethnolinguistic boundaries encompassed those villages where more than 50 percent (usually over 80 to 90 percent) of the inhabitants identified themselves as Rusyn by language or nationality on the decennial censuses of 1900, 1910, 1921.

Those dates were chosen as the most reliable, since the censuses in question were conducted at a time before large-scale manipulation of statistical data and population transfers took place during the rest of the twentieth century. This smaller map, titled the “Carpatho-Rusyn Homeland,” was first produced in the mid-1990s. Subsequently, it appeared in countless publications in various languages as well as on ethnic paraphernalia such as flags, mugs, and T-shirts. Through this smaller and by now iconic map, the allegedly virtual Carpathian Rus’ became—and remains—a real place.

To be sure, the iconic Homeland Map, whose Carpatho-Rusyn ethnolinguistic borders are superimposed over the present-day international boundaries of Poland, Ukraine, Slovakia, and Romania, is not without its critics. Pro-Ukrainian scholars and present-day Ukraine’s governing au-

126. The iconic Homeland Map of Carpathian Rus’ on a T-shirt.

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thorities, all of whom still deny the very existence of Carpatho-Rusyns, argue that the very existence of the Carpatho-Rusyn Homeland Map suggests a future independent state whose new borders would, by definition, be a threat to the territorial integrity of Ukraine.

Such critics (several of whom are mentioned elsewhere in this text) cannot, or simply will not, accept the existence of Carpathian Rus’, which like many other historic European lands (Friesland, Kashubia, Occitanie, Ladinia, Catalonia, the Basque Land, Piemonte), may cross the borders of modern-day states. More often than not, historic territories inhabited by a distinct people/nationality were on the scene long before the appearance of states. In essence, it is modern-day state boundaries that cross— one might say violate—historic territories, not the other way around.

***** I was convinced that another practical tool to propagate awareness of Carpatho-Rusyns would be an all-purpose brochure that could be easily handed out in person or sent through the mail. Therefore, it was designed deliberately to fit into a standard American letter-sized envelope.

I was encouraged to put such a brochure together by Aleksander (Sasha) Zozuliak who for decades was the official spokesperson for the Rusyn Renaissance Society (Rusynska obroda) in Slovakia as well as the World Congress of Rusyns. In those roles, and certainly during the first few years after the Revolution of 1989, he was besieged in his Prešov editorial office by a steady stream of journalists and NGO activists from various countries all wanting to know about the “new” Carpatho-Rusyn nationality. Sasha, like Carpatho-Rusyn leaders in other countries, was becoming bored with the same “who-where-when-how” questions.

Why not have a brochure to hand out with a short readable text about Carpatho-Rusyn political and human geography, history, religion, culture, and current events? This is what I set out to produce. Aside from addressing the aforementioned topics, the brochure, simply called Carpatho-Rusyns, also included a chronology of historic events, a list of addresses of Carpatho-Rusyn organizations and Rusyn-language press organs, and most important in the middle two pages, a reproduction of the iconic Carpatho-Rusyn Homeland Map. 201

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127. The Carpatho-Rusyns brochure in its eleven language editions: Czech, English, German, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Rusyn (Prešov Region), Rusyn (Transcarpathian), Rusyn (Vojvodinian), Slovak, and Ukrainian.

The brochure first appeared in 1995 in five separate language editions: English, Slovak, Ukrainian, Vojvodinian Rusyn, and Serbo-Croatian. The ultimate goal was to have the brochure appear in each state language where Carpatho-Rusyns lived. Within the next few years, Carpatho-Rusyn organizations in several countries published, in cooperation with me as author, Czech-, German-, Hungarian-, Polish-, Romanian-, and two more Rusyn- (Transcarpathian and Prešov Region) language editions of the brochure. I would have wanted French-, Russian-, and Chinese-language editions as well, but that never happened.

The original 24-page text was expanded to 32 pages and a few editions (English, Slovak, Rusyn) went into three, four, and five revised and expanded printings. The brochure certainly got around so that more than 80,000 copies in the various languages were printed and distributed primarily in North America and central Europe.

I used to joke that this Carpatho-Rusyns brochure was our “white catechism,” containing the “official” information anyone needed to know 202

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about our people, somewhat like Mao’s Little Red Book for Chinese Communists.

In some ways the joke was realized in the sense that the first paragraph of the “white catechism” was quoted over and over again at the outset of numerous popular and even scholarly articles. It has become a kind of mantra-like succinct introduction to the subject. Having stood the test of time, it may be worth citing from the most recent fifth revised English-language edition (2019). The brochure’s cover is adorned with the full color national emblem dominated by a Carpathian bear under which are the frequently cited introductory words: Carpatho-Rusyns live in the very heart of Europe, along the northern and southern slopes of the Carpathian Mountains. Their homeland, known as Carpathian Rus’, is situated at the crossroads where the borders of Ukraine, Slovakia, and Poland meet. Aside from those countries, there are smaller numbers of Carpatho-Rusyns in Romania, Hungary, Serbia, Croatia, and the Czech Republic. In no country do Carpatho-Rusyns have an administratively distinct territory.

***** Another form of public outreach was the travel world, in particular guidebooks that one could easily find in most bookstores, most especially those at airports. With the fall of Communist rule and a general resurgence of interest in “unknown” central Europe which Westerners could now easily visit, several new guidebooks were published not only about the region as a whole but also about specific countries, in particular Czechoslovakia (later the Czech and Slovak Republics), Poland, and to a lesser degree Ukraine. Would these new publications deal somehow with national minorities in those countries and would mention be made of Carpatho-Rusyns? If so, how would they be designated—as Ukrainians or as Rusyns/Ruthenians?

Throughout the 1990s, I developed a kind of fetish. Every time I entered a bookstore, whether in North America or Europe, I would first go to the travel section in order to see whether Carpatho-Rusyns were mentioned and, if so, how? I believe it was John Halushka, at the time the 203

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128. Carpathian Rus’ as depicted in Rob Humphrey’s Real Guide to Czechoslovakia (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991, pp. 340-341).

editor and business manager of the Carpatho-Rusyn American quarterly magazine, who once telephoned to say how he could not contain himself with joy after having come across a guidebook about Czechoslovakia in which not only were “our people” mentioned but done so with the proper ethnonym: Rusyn.

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The guidebook in question was part of The Real Guide series, published in a very large print-run for the English-speaking world by the prestigious publisher, Simon and Schuster, based in New York City and with several other offices in London and the Far East. The author of the volume for Czechoslovakia (later Czech and Slovak Republics), which first appeared in 1991 was someone named Rob Humphreys.

We did not know who this Rob Humphreys was. We could not, however, help but like him. Using Andy Warhol and “his” museum in Medzilaborce as a hook to attract readers of the guidebook, Humphreys proceeded to do something that even the most patriotic Carpatho-Rusyns would not have dared to do. He simply appropriated all of present-day northeastern Slovakia and called it Carpatho-Ruthenia, even if he admitted (albeit in a footnote) that “strictly speaking Carpatho-Ruthenia was a separate province” of interwar Czechoslovakia “taken as war booty by the Soviet Union in 1945.” No matter about such details. Humphreys made it seem that the only reason anyone would want to visit the eastern part of Slovakia was because of its Carpatho-Rusyn inhabitants. Not only did Carpatho-Rusyn villages have stunning wooden churches, the region’s only town, Medzilaborce, sported a unique museum whose American namesake, Andy Warhol, was “brought up speaking Rusyn and English.”

Alas, the volume on Poland in the Simon and Schuster Real Guide series mixed up Lemko Rusyns and Ukrainians. Ron Humphreys set the new tone, however, and it was his take about our people, at least in Slovakia, that was picked up by many other authors producing guidebooks not only in English, but also in French and German.

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Popular brochures, maps, and travel guides were certainly important, but their value as sources for reliable information needed to be backed up by scholarship, preferably appearing under the imprint of authoritative publishers. I tried my best and had some success in publishing scholarly works in various disciplines: history, sociolinguistics, human geography, and church history. Fortunately, my publications were not alone, but were joined already in the 1990s by newly researched monographs by scholars in Europe and the United States. Among the most important of these books were the literary histories by Elaine Rusinko and Olena Duts-Faifer, the sociolinguistic works by Aleksander Dulichenko and Anna Plishkova, the linguistic materials by Yurii Vanko and Stefan

129. Stephen Fischer-Galati (far right) with Alexander Motyl and Paul Robert Magocsi, Festetics Castle at Keszthély, Hungary (May 1991).

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Pugh, the political histories by Ivan Pop, Stanislav Konečný, Bogdan Horbal, and Peter Švorc, and the sociological studies by Stanislav Gajdoš and Ewa Michna.

I also felt that the English-speaking world should have access to some of the wide range of excellent scholarship that was published during the early part of the twentieth century by our predecessors. This was the genesis of the idea to create a Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center project called Classics in Carpatho-Rusyn Studies. Ideas may be good, but how to realize them? Fortunately, we had the good fortune to cooperate with a dynamic individual named Stephen Fischer-Galati.

A native of Romania, Fischer-Galati had after World War II immigrated to the United States where he eventually took up a teaching post in either history or political science at the University of Colorado. I believe he was trained in Europe as a journalist; he certainly was committed to promoting knowledge about Eastern Europe—as it was known in those years—in the English-speaking world. He founded a journal called the East European Quarterly and then inaugurated a series of books under the rubric East European Monographs. The series was first published in Boulder, Colorado, but then Fischer-Galati reached an agreement with Columbia University Press in New York City to become his distributor.

And productive Fisher-Galati was, publishing a remarkable 800 monographs over a thirty-year period.

I came to know Professor Fischer-Galati after he accepted two or three of my articles for the journal, East European Quarterly, in the early 1970s.

After that our relations were sporadic until the mid-1980s when I proposed that the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center purchase 500 copies of a book he was about to publish on Carpatho-Rusyn plainchant by Sister Joan Roccasalvo. Following up on the Roccasalvo volume, which sold relatively well, I suggested to Fischer-Galati that he publish for our center two sub-series: Classics in Carpatho-Rusyn Studies (eventually 14 volumes, 1987-2009) and Reference Works in Carpatho-Rusyn Studies (eventually 8 volumes, 1978-2012), both within the Columbia East European Monograph Series. We also published with him a few works outside the two sub-series, including the nearly eleven-hundred page, two-volume collection of my essays titled, Of the Making of Nationalities There is No End. 207

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All this turned out to be a win-win situation for both parties. Fischer-Galati produced for us hardcover books at a very reasonable price and got them listed in the Columbia University Press catalogue. As a result, hundreds and hundreds of books on Carpatho-Rusyn topics were sold by Columbia University Press mostly to libraries (which still bought books in those days) and by the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center to its extensive customer list. We had a prestigious “Ivy League” imprint and a publisher that helped get reviews in places that were likely inaccessible to us.

Most important was the easy working relationship with Fischer-Galati. I was always suspect of his lackadaisical approach to proofreading, so I proposed that we prepare for him a camera-ready copy of each book over which we would have full and final control. He agreed, and that procedure assured quality control, something that Pat Krafcik and I had become fanatical about.

The first of our books with the East European Monographs/Columbia imprint appeared in 1990; the last in 2012. The relationship ended only because of Fischer-Galati’s death, although his daughter helped to shepherd one of the last books through the publication process, Bogdan Horbal’s monumental 637-page Lemko Studies Handbook. The point is that Professor Stephen Fischer-Galati played an enormously positive role in helping us create a solid basis for the field of Carpatho-Rusyn Studies in North America.

Encouraged and enabled as we were by Professor Fischer-Galati, Pat Krafcik and I set out to make the Classics and Reference Book Series the success that it became. I chose the titles; we both edited the translations.

The choice of titles was determined, in part, by what I thought would be attractive and sales worthy to our intended audience: North American libraries, individual scholars (in particular Slavists and East European/ Soviet specialists), and Americans of Carpatho-Rusyn background interested in their ancestral heritage.

The series did include some true “classics” in the field, such as monographs by the Russian historian Aleksei L. Petrov on early medieval history, by the Hungarian philologist Alexander Bonkáló on history and culture, and by the national awakener Aleksander Dukhnovych, whose first play was translated and accompanied by an extensive and insightful 208

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130. Titles in the series, Classics in Carpatho-Rusyn Scholarship (1987-2009)

commentary by Elaine Rusinko. In terms of sales, among the more popular works in the Classics Series were by the Russian ethnographer Petr Bogatyrev on folk beliefs (with the catchy title Vampires in the Carpathi209

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ans) and by the American Byzantine Ruthenian Catholic priest Athanasius Pekar’s history of the Carpatho-Rusyn church.

In reality, the choice of most of the works happened by chance as much as by planning. For example, the monograph by Petrov was brought to my attention by the Harvard Slavist Horace G. Lunt, who had among his files a translation of the work prepared by a Carpatho-Rusyn American enthusiast George Parvensky. The idea to publish Bonkáló’s book, The Rusyns, came from his youngest son Ervin (then living in Canada), who provided us with a translation from Hungarian. Maria Mayer’s monograph on Carpatho-Rusyns in the nineteenth-century Hungarian Kingdom was inspired by her husband of Jewish background born in Subcarpathian Rus’, Alex Kraus (then living in Britain), while the English-language translation of Yeshayahu Jelinek’s original Hebrew-language history of Jews in Subcarpathian Rus’ was provided to us with a request to publish by the World Association of Subcarpathian Jewry based in Tel Aviv, Israel. Funding to publish that volume came from Dr. Alex Rovt, a Jewish businessman based in New York City who was originally from Mukachevo.

The point is that many of the works that appeared in the Classics of Carpatho-Rusyn Scholarship Series did so because some kind of support was available, whether in the form of a translation or a publication grant. I might add that every one of the translations we received had to be heavily edited and given the proper scholarly apparatus (footnotes and bibliographic references). That painstaking and laborious work was carried out gratis by the editors of the series, Pat Krafcik and me.

Given a choice, I would have liked to publish English translations of other “classic” works, such as the massive Hungarian-language history of the Greek Catholic Church by Antal Hodinka and the magnificent Ukrainian-language description of Rusyn dialects in Subcarpathian Rus’ and the Prešov Region by Ivan Pankevych. Because of a lack of funding we were unable to undertake these projects. Nevertheless, all the titles that we did publish in the Classic series, some in second printings, all sold out.

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I was always aware of the value of bibliographies and the need to record somewhere the incredibly large amount of scholarship that continued to appear in numerous languages about all aspects of Carpatho-Rusyn society. Inspired by the many great compilers of Slavic-language bibliographies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (such as the Galician Ruthenian Ivan E. Levytskyi about whom I wrote while at Harvard), I dreamed of creating a national bibliography for Carpathian Rus’. And so was born a multi-volume book project that I called Carpatho-Rusyn Studies: An Annotated Bibliography. It was intended to record all scholarly books, chapters, and journal articles that appeared anywhere in the world and in any language beginning with the year 1975 and continuing to the present. The order was chronological, and each entry had an annotation, which was in fact a mini review. Included as well were several journals which were systematically surveyed for whatever Carpatho-Rusyn related material they might have.

I actually spent most of my spare time compiling the annotated bibliography—a never ending task—and was able to publish five largesized volumes each initially encompassing ten years, then five covering all together the period 1975 to 2009. The first volume (1975-1984) was published in 1988 by a leading bibliographic publishing house, Garland, based in New York City and London. When Garland got out of the bibliography business (clearly not a source of profitable sales), the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center funded the remaining four volumes (1998-2010), which appeared under the Columbia University Press East European Monographs imprint in our center’s Reference Works sub-series. The annotated bibliography project ended with the year 2012 simply because I ran out of energy—and certainly time—to continue such demanding work. I tried to find a successor to continue (Bogdan Horbal was the obvious choice), but there were no takers. Nevertheless, the five volumes that appeared did manage to provide a remarkable 4,200 annotated bibliographic entries. This very fact provided the basis for the existence of a new scholarly discipline, Carpatho-Rusyn Studies.

To round out our bibliographic work, the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center managed (with the organizational help of Edward Kasinec) to publish two volumes of annotated indexes to the leading Carpatho-Rusyn 211

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131. Title page of Ivan Em. Levytskii, Halytsko-ruskaia bybliohrafiia XIX-ho stolîtiia (Galician Rus’ Bibliography of the 19th Century), Vol. I: 1801-1860 (Lviv, 1888).

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132. Title page of last volume of the Carpatho-Rusyn “national bibliography.”

American newspaper, the Amerikansky russky viestnik, for the years 1894 through 1929. The appearance of all these works published during the last decade of the twentieth and first decade of the twenty-first century demonstrated that a scholarly discipline of Carpatho-Rusyn Studies had indeed come into being—and continues to flourish to this day.

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I may have wanted, and in part succeeded, to create a national bibliography. But in order to do so, one needed the material to describe. In other words, one needed a library. No existing library, not even the great Slavic collections in the United States (the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, Widener Library at Harvard University) collected in any systematic manner Carpatho-Ruthenica. With the collapse of Communist rule and the lifting of censorship after 1989, one would have thought obtaining published materials from central Europe would be easier. In one sense it was, but in another, the situation got worse. This was because of the explosion of uncensored publications in very small print-runs (50 copies was not uncommon) which were often impossible to obtain.

Only one place made an effort to collect systematically Carpatho-Ruthenica: the Transcarpathian Region Scholarly Library in Uzhhorod. For many decades under the direction of Olena Zakryvydoroha, that library created and still maintains a Carpathian Regional Studies Division with its own accessible reading room and specialized card catalog. While incredibly useful to researchers, it focusses on the Transcarpathian oblast (historic Subcarpathian Rus’) with little or no material on Carpatho-Rusyns outside the borders of Ukraine.

My dream had always been to create a Carpatho-Rusyn “national library,” but that required physical space. While I was still at Harvard in the 1970s my access to space was limited, but when I came to Toronto that situation changed, especially in the late 1990s. At that time, I obtained ever larger office space at the University of Toronto, in particular when my office was located in a former chapel with twenty-five foot ceilings.

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patho-Rusyns long ago, even before I had adequate space to house the material. Beginning in the late 1960s, when doing doctoral research over a five-year period in Prague, I scoured all the antikvariat (second-hand book stores) which, despite Communist government restrictions, still had rich collections of pre-World War II publications—and at incredibly cheap prices for someone with Western currency.

Aside from a wide variety of excellent monographs about Subcarpath133. Rare view of the stacks containing ian Rus’ published during the interSlavic language volumes in the main war years of the first Czechoslovak building of the New York Public Library nd republic, I was also able to obtain deat Fifth Avenue and 42 Street: (from front to back) Edward Kasinec—Chief tailed demographic data from Slovaof the Slavonic Division, Maria Magocsi, kia and Subcarpathian Rus’ listed in Cynthia Magocsi, and Daniel Magocsi. the 1921 and 1930 published censuses. While still at Harvard I photocopied from the collection at Widener Library the complete stenographic record of speeches and law proposals of every senator and deputy from Subcarpathian Rus’ and the Prešov Region who spoke in the interwar Czechoslovak parliament.

It was also during the late 1960s and 1970s that I was able to microfilm full runs of newspapers and periodicals from Subcarpathian Rus’ that were held in several institutions in Prague (Slavonic Library, National Museum), Vienna (Austrian National Library), Budapest (Széchenyi Library), and Rome (Pontifical Oriental Institute). Access to the Oriental Institute’s stacks was made possible by the host of my visit, the distinguished theologian Robert Taft, SJ. There I discovered—and thanks to him was able to microfilm—something truly unique: a full run of Svît (1867-1868), the first newspaper published in Subcarpathian Rus’ that dealt with Carpatho-Rusyn affairs. I was also able to obtain the most important Carpatho-Rusyn American newspapers and almanacs thanks to 215

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134. Paul Robert Magocsi with Olena Zakryvydoroha, director of the Transcarpathian Region Scholarly Library, before the card catalog of the Carpathian Regional Studies Division, Uzhhorod, Ukraine (April 1996).

a major microfilming project supported by the Byzantine Catholic Archdiocese of Pittsburgh and the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota (discussed above in section 3).

In a very real sense, I had become a fanatic, seeking out whatever I could find about Carpatho-Rusyns on every visit to bookstores in the great central European cultural centers like Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Cracow, and Lviv, not to mention Prešov, Uzhhorod, and Mukachevo in the Carpatho-Rusyn homeland. What I could not find myself came instead from bookdealers who systematically saved and gave me first option to purchase whatever Carpatho-Ruthenica they obtained. In this way numerous invaluable finds came to me in my early years of collecting from dealers like George Sabo in Florida, Kubon and Sagner in Munich, and more recently from Lexicon in Warsaw and the Kobzar Bookstore in Uzhhorod.

I was also able to engage the services of individuals on the ground, so to speak. Invaluable service in my collection-building efforts was carried out by Lubomir Medieshi in Novi Sad, Liubytsa Babota in Prešov, Volodymyr Fedynyshynets and Valerii Padiak in Uzhhorod, Ewa Michna in 216

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Cracow, Mikhail Dronov in Moscow, and Nadia Zavorotna in Prague, all of whom actually sought out and provided me with current Carpatho-Ruthenica materials published in their respective countries—Yugoslavia, Slovakia, Ukraine, Poland, Russia, and the Czech Republic. These individuals often found items that I would otherwise have not even known about.

For a while I had a similar person for Vojvodinian Rusyn publications, 135. First location of the CarpathoRuthenica Library, housed in the Gabriel Kolesar, but, like Lubomir former chapel of a former Protestant Medieshi, he left Yugoslavia in the missionary society, University of early 1990s. After their departure for Toronto (November 2002).

Canada my access to publications from the Vojvodina became at best sporadic. For Hungary, I was lucky to find József Vekerdi, head of the International Exchange Service at the Széchényi National Library in Budapest. He and his successors for well over a decade provided current and past Hungarian-language publications about Carpatho-Rusyns in exchange for English-language publications. More recently my person on the ground in Budapest has been Marianna Liavynets-Uhryn.

It is particularly gratifying to know that all these individuals—for no monetary recompense—went out of their way to find new publications, knowing that they would find a safe and permanent place in the Carpatho-Ruthenica “national” library housed in my offices at the University of Toronto.

***** Finally, there were private collections to which I got unlimited access.

In 2002, when the first edition of the Encyclopedia of Rusyn Language and Culture was published, I received a phone call from Fred Petro, the longtime editor at the Greek Catholic Union fraternal society based in Bea217

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ver, Pennsylvania. This oldest of Carpatho-Rusyn American organizations dated back to 1892. Over the decades since then it had built up (largely through donations from members) an enormously rich body of books about Carpatho-Rusyns published in Europe as well as the United States.

In the last decades of the twentieth century, the Greek Catholic Union was housed in large and modern headquarters in Beaver, Pennsylvania, where they even built a beautiful replica of a Carpathian wooden church.

I seem to remember having provided them with designs that were used to construct the wooden structure. A small museum and library were housed in the basement of the new church, but it was too small for all the “old” books. The society’s administrators decided to discard what they assumed was superfluous material written in “funny” and not understandable languages. The long-time editor of the Greek Catholic Union publications, Fred Petro, who was on the cusp of retirement, was aghast at the decision of the organization’s leadership and hoped that I would be able to take some or all of the books for my library.

We arranged to meet during the week of the annual American Slavic Association (AAASS) convention, which was being held in Pittsburgh that year. Sasha Zozuliak and Anna Plishkova from Prešov, who happened to be on a research trip in Toronto, accompanied me to the Slavic Convention where our new encyclopedia was being presented. On the way, we stopped in Beaver to meet Fred Petro.

There we were, in the basement of the Greek Catholic Union’s wooden church. The museum floor was strewn with boxes of books just begging to be taken. The three of us were like kids let loose in a candy store. For about two hours we gathered up whatever we could fit in the trunk and back seat of my car. Poor Anna was squeezed in the corner of the back seat since we needed every inch for the invaluable book treasures we were given. An incredibly high number were rare European publications from the 1920s and 1930s that were collected by a long-time Greek Catholic Union officer and prominent Carpatho-Rusyn American activist in the first half of the twentieth century, Dr. Peter Zeedick.

One book stands out in my mind forever. For years I had tried to get a copy of an excellent monograph by the Swiss geographer Aldo Dami called La Ruthénie subcarpathique, published in Geneva in 1944. I remem218

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136. Greek Catholic Union’s St. Nicholas Chapel, Beaver, Pennsylvania.

ber how on every trip to Paris—which since the mid-1960s happened on average once every two years—I would saunter along the Left Bank of the Seine scouring the bouquinistes in the outside chance that I might stumble across Dami’s French-language text. That never happened. But in the fall of

137. Fred Petro (right) with Paul Robert Magocsi and Anna Plishkova (behind), Greek Catholic Union Museum-Library, Beaver, Pennsylvania (November 2002).

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138. Title page of Aldo Dami’s French-language monograph, Subcarpathian Ruthenia (Geneva, 1944).

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2002, and of all places in the basement of the Carpathian wooden church in Beaver, Pennsylvania, I found the Dami volume which was mine simply for the taking. I did take and treasure it to this day.

About a decade later I was given access to yet another great library, but this time in Butler, Pennsylvania at the Benedictine Monastery of Eastern-rite monks, one of whom had been my old friend, Father Steve Veselenak, by then long deceased. He had built a wonderfully rich library, in part with publications I had sent him from Communist Czechoslovakia in the 1970s. I believe it was Jerry Jumba who suggested that I should contact the current hegumen/abbot. I was told that the monastery was sold, and that the library had to be liquidated. If I did not take possession of the books they would be trashed.

Getting to the monastery was not all that straightforward. First, I had to contact the hegumen, Father Leo (Schlosser) and arrange to meet him in the parish house of St. John’s Byzantine Catholic Church in Lyndora, Pennsylvania, about twenty minutes by car from the monastery. Lyndora was one of those company towns, where in the early years of the twentieth century, thousands of Carpatho-Rusyns found employment. Jerry alerted me to the fact that the hegumen had good taste in food and wine, and indeed he did invite me to a rather good restaurant somewhere in Lyndora. It was, as usual, over bread and wine that we got to know and appreciate each other. He certainly was a refined man, generous of spirit. But he was also a faithful man of God who celebrated the Eastern-rite liturgy with the local Carpatho-Rusyn “congregation” (one or two people on weekdays) at 7:00 am each morning. I was informed—and expected—to be present at the liturgy. Fortunately, Father Leo hosted me in the second-floor bedroom of the old wooden parish house and awakened me at 6:45 so that I had time to dress before descending the staircase into a makeshift chapel adjacent to the house’s entrance. After a half hour or so of prayers and chants in which I helped the cantor in singing, Father Leo and I retired to the parish house’s small adjacent dining room for breakfast.

As inappropriate as it may sound, going through this exercise reminded me of my youth when I was courting my future wife, Maria, in eastern Slovakia. Since she was a fanatic about dancing, I also had to spend an hour or so in some club dancing with her before retiring to do what I 221

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really wanted to do—make love. Here, in southwestern Pennsylvania, the dues I had to pay consisted of an early morning liturgy celebrated by a gentle elderly monk before getting access to my other love—books about Carpatho-Rusyns.

When we finally got to the monastery grounds mid-morning, we entered the basement of a large building where my eyes feasted on four large rooms filled with carefully ordered shelves holding thousands of books. My mouth watered and fingers itched at the thought that these were mine for the taking. A good number were religious in content and dating back to the seventeenth century. There were also complete bound runs of several Carpatho-Rusyn American newspapers dating from just before and after World War I. I took what I could on that first visit and then returned two months later. This time I was with Valerii Padiak, my very close friend and professional colleague from Uzhhorod, who was doing research in Canada at the Toronto Carpatho-Ruthenica Library. For this, my second visit, I rented an SUV which we filled to the brim. What we could not fit in that vehicle, we set aside for Jerry Jumba and Maria Silvestri to pick up later and store at their houses in the Pittsburgh area until I could return for a third time. All these materials eventually found their way to Toronto.

As with the Greek Catholic Union collection where a decade or so earlier I had found the Aldo Dami volume, so too did the Benedictine Monastery provide incredible finds. During the last few hectic minutes of my second and last visit at the monastery, I glanced at the now dusty desk where a librarian (perhaps Father Steve Veselenak) once sat. On the adjacent shelves were a few stray books, one of which was lying flat and had no external markings. I picked it up, wiped off the accumulated grime, and opened the soiled black cover. What did I find? The four-language dictionary published in 1906 by the Carpatho-Rusyn American writer Emil Kubek. This dictionary was frequently mentioned in scholarly literature, but neither I nor any of my linguist colleagues had ever seen it. Even the Austrian Slavist Michael Moser tried at my request to find the Kubek dictionary at the great libraries in Vienna, L’viv, and Budapest, but came up with nothing. And there it was, in my hands, as I stood in the bowels of a monastery library in Butler, Pennsylvania.

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139. Title page of Emil Kubek’s Old Slavonic-Hungarian/Russian-German Dictionary (Uzhhorod, 1906).

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***** I was also able to acquire rare Carpatho-Ruthenica from private libraries. Often these came with a hefty price tag. Among the earliest of finds came during my first visit to Bukovina, where I bought the little-known first history of Carpatho-Rusyn literature by Petr Feerchak published in Odessa in 1888, from the wife of the deceased University of Chernivtsi professor, Iurii Prykhodko.

Back in America, from the niece who inherited the estate of Father Basil Shereghy in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, I got two rare titles: the 1851 literary anthology compiled by Aleksander Dukhnovych in which his poem with the national credo, Ya Rusyn bŷl, yesm i budu (I Was, Am, and Will Remain a Rusyn) first appeared; and the two-volume first published history of Carpatho-Rusyns (1799-1804) by Innokentii Bazylovych. I might have gotten more from these two private libraries, but in the early 1970s I had only limited funds.

I did better in the 1990s, when I had a bit more money and when the US dollar went a very long way in early post-Communist Ukraine. I spent about a thousand dollars on books and journals from the library of the Kyiv-based literary specialist Oleksa Myshanych. But the biggest find of all was the private library of a little-known individual named Ivan Komloshii, living of all places in the predominantly Hungarian-inhabited town of Berehovo in southern Transcarpathia, not far from the border with Hungary.

At the time I met him in the early 1990s, Komloshii was in his early seventies but in poor health, actually immobile most of the time and able to walk only with great difficulty. While in interwar Czechoslovakia and later Hungarian-ruled Subcarpathia, Komloshii published poetry in Russian. Although a Carpatho-Rusyn patriot, he was of Russophile national orientation. For most of his life during the post-World War II Soviet era he served as a teacher and director of a gymnasium (senior high school) in a small Hungarian-inhabited village near Berehovo. His wife was a local Magyar, and the language of his household was exclusively Hungarian. As difficult as it is to believe, his son could speak only Hungarian, understood with great difficulty Russian, and did not know—or 224

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140. Title page of Innokentii Bazylevych’s Latin-language Brief Commentary on the Donation (1360) by Teodor Koriatovych to the Ruthenian Religious Order of St. Basil the Great, Monk’s Hill near Mukachevo, Vol. I (Košice, 1799).

care to know—a word of Ukrainian. This was not atypical of the Hungarian-speaking part of Transcarpathia during Soviet times. And, I might add, in terms of language use and identity nothing much changed there after three decades of living in independent Ukraine.

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Komloshii’s real passion was books, and throughout the years of Soviet rule he built up one of the richest private libraries of Carpatho-Ruthenica in the region. His particular emphasis was on Carpatho-Rusyn literature and education, although he collected widely works in other disciplines, including an incredible collection of bound full runs of newspapers and journals from Subcarpathian Rus’ under Czechoslovak and Hungarian rule. Keeping such material during Soviet times was a crime, so that Komloshii was instinctively secretive and suspicious of all outsiders. In particular, he railed against pro-Ukrainian Carpatho-Rusyns, especially the literary scholar Oleksa Myshanych who, when a graduate student, begged Komloshii to lend him some rare books which, allegedly, he never returned.

How then did someone like me from the capitalist West gain access to Komloshii’s legendary library? I believe it was the writer and post-Communist era Carpatho-Rusyn activist Ivan Petrovtsii, who sometime in 1991 told me about Komloshii. He wanted to introduce the legendary bibliophile to me, but I didn’t much trust the volatile Petrovtsii who had his own book collecting agenda mixed with monetary interests.

About a year later I raised this issue with my close fully trustworthy friend, the artist Volodymyr Mykyta, who said he would set up a meeting. Within a few days, Mykyta and I, together with the head of the Carpathian Institute at Uzhhorod University, the historian Mykola Makara, set off in Mykyta’s rickety car to Berehovo. Komloshii trusted Mykyta and Makara, knowing that they were not Ukrainophiles, and only with them was I granted access to the inner sanctum and incredible trove of Carpatho-Rusyn books that were held in an otherwise non-descript house along a side street of Berehovo.

During that first visit we spoke in generalities, and I believe I was ushered into one of the library’s rooms for a few moments. It seemed, however, that with Mykyta’s blessing Komloshii began to trust me. The second visit came in 1994. This time I was with my wife Maria, who had a wonderful talent to charm anyone she met. Komloshii was especially pleased that she spoke Rusyn. Greater trust ensued, so that I was allowed a good half hour to peruse some of the books. I was particularly moved at being able to touch the original editions of most Carpatho-Rusyn 226

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141. Ivan Komloshii (center) with Paul Robert Magocsi and Volodymyr Mykyta perusing rare Carpatho-Rusyn literary first editions in his home library, Berehovo, Ukraine (July 1992).

belletrists from the 1920s and 1930s. At that meeting we agreed that I would hope to purchase some part or all of the library. Not surprisingly, Komloshii demurred, arguing that it was difficult to part with his treasures while still alive.

Then fate intervened. In 1996 he died, and within a year his wife reached out to me (probably via Volodymyr Mykyta) with a proposal to sell the library. She was not shy and asked for $10,000 (US), an enormous sum at the time. I decided to act quickly and found the money—I actually cannot remember where. The money was delivered to her in cash (again probably via Mykyta), but then I was faced with another problem. What to do with the thousands of books and periodicals I had just acquired?

The removal took several months. We decided to pack up the books and bring them to Mykyta’s art studio, then on the top floor of a seven-story building (with no elevator) in Uzhhorod. The ever-accommodating Mykyta—at the time in his mid-seventies—helped to carry at least twenty or thirty heavy boxes up the seven flights of stairs.

Just getting the books from Berehovo to Uzhhorod was a challenge.

Komloshii’s son, who spoke only Hungarian—and I not much—filled 227

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his small car to the brim. We set out deliberately along back roads, passing through several small Hungarian-inhabited villages along the flat Transcarpathian plain. We wanted to avoid being seen by the police who in those years were very sensitive to smuggling alcohol, cigarettes, and other products across the nearby Hungarian and Slovak borders.

Sure enough, although seemingly in the middle of nowhere, a police car appeared and stopped us. The 142. Maria Magocsi relaxing with Volo- boxes were clearly visible. We were dymyr Mykyta in his old atelier in Uzhasked for our identification papers— horod, Ukraine, the first temporary Komloshii’s son his driver’s license, I home of the Komloshii library en route my American passport. The son was to Toronto (July 1992). asked to step out of the car and open the packed trunk. Some words ensued, I believe in Hungarian, and we were left to continue on our way. Clearly for the police old books were less of a concern than vodka and cigarettes.

I had decided to leave the books in Mykyta’s studio and from there, each time I would be in Ukraine, bring them in small batches across the border into Slovakia and eventually to Toronto. The large volumes of bound newspapers were another matter. Getting them across the border with Slovakia would pose serious problems, perhaps confiscation. Moreover, I didn’t much care to ship them at enormous cost to Toronto. In any case, they needed to be preserved, preferably on microfilm.

At this crucial juncture the young Carpatho-Rusyn activist from Hungary, Gabor Hattinger, stepped in. Gabi was at the time closely engaged with the University of Uzhhorod Professor Ivan Turianytsia in his efforts to create a shadow government for an autonomous Subcarpathian Rus’. Hattinger and Turianytsia travelled frequently from Uzhhorod to Budapest using the two border crossings south of Uzhhorod and south of Berehovo. The Hungarians were much more accommodating than the 228

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143. Anna Plishkova and Nadiya Kushko relaxing with Volodymyr Mykyta in his new atelier on Sobranetska Street, Uzhhorod, Ukraine, the second temporary home of the Komloshii library en route to Toronto (July 2005).

Slovaks, not to mention that the guards on both sides of the border between Ukraine and Hungary all spoke Hungarian. In other words, they were locals who were much easier to deal with than customs officers that might be from other parts of Ukraine.

Most important, however, was that Hattinger, as head of the government supported Organization of Rusyns in Hungary, carried a diplomatic passport. This was the ultimate document to have as I witnessed on one of Hattinger’s several trips from Komloshii’s house in Berehovo to Budapest. Hattinger’s trunk was filled with rare newspapers. Yet no one on either side of the border crossing into Hungary cared about such strange things. A few hours later, we arrived without a problem at a microfilming company called Pedro that I had previously found in Budapest. Hattinger returned at least twice more to Komloshii’s house in Berehovo for the rest of the periodicals.

All were safely delivered to Budapest. All were microfilmed and made available to the scholarly public at large following an arrangement I made with an American company headed by Norman Ross, who worked closely with Pedro in Budapest. The Norman Ross company even had a special Carpatho-Ruthenica list whose contents were sold to a few research 229

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libraries (Harvard, University of Alberta, University of Toronto). As for the originals left behind after microfilming, I instructed Pedro that they be donated to the Széchenyi National Library in Budapest.

Slovakia’s Carpatho-Rusyn activist Sasha Zozuliak and I used to joke that the two of us had become not only Kulturträger (purveyors of culture) but Bucherträger/colportiers, in other words, professional book carriers. We did whatever it took to get Carpatho-Rusyn publications across land borders and across the proverbial Pond to North America. The result was the establishment of a true Carpatho-Ruthenica research library housed in my offices at the University of Toronto.

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Now I could invite scholars to make use of the Toronto collection. Some, especially from Europe, were provided with travel funds from various sources I could find; others came with funding they were able to obtain from grants available in their home countries. This became increasingly possible after 2004, when countries like Poland and Slovakia entered the European Union, which helped its new member states with greater resources for academic research support.

Some of the best new publications came into being largely because their authors were able to spend between two and six months working in Toronto at the Carpatho-Ruthenica Library. Among the more exceptional results derived from research in my library were by visiting scholars

144. Paul Robert Magocsi introducing Anna Plishkova at a seminar during her research visit to the University of Toronto; Gleb Žekulin and his wife on the far right (November 2002).

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from Poland: Olena Duts-Faifer’s doctoral dissertation (later published as volume one in her planned trilogy history of Lemko-Rusyn literature); from Estonia: Aleksander Dulichenko’s monumental anthology of Rusyn-language writings; from Poland: Janusz Rieger’s dictionary of Hutsul dialects; from the United States: Elaine Rusinko’s history of Carpatho-Rusyn literature; from Slovakia: Anna Plishkova’s sociolinguistic study of the Rusyn language; from Ukraine: Valerii Padiak’s history of the Carpatho-Rusyn theater; from Belarus: Kirill Shevchenko’s history of interwar Subcarpathian Rus’; and from Slovakia: Kveta Koporova’s linguistic work on the standardization of the Rusyn literary language in Slovakia. The Encyclopedia of Rusyn History and Culture (2002 and 2005) and its translation into Ukrainian by Nadiya Kushko (2010) would have been impossible to complete had it not been for the rare material available in the Toronto Carpatho-Ruthenica Library.

Numerous other scholars have made use of the Carpatho-Ruthenica Library, including Petro Trokhanovskii (Poland), Aleksander Zozuliak (Slovakia), Mikhailo Feisa (Serbia), Liubytsia Babota (Slovakia), Michael Moser (Austria), and Oles Mushynka (Slovakia).

Finally, there was Ewa Michna (Poland), who deserves special mention.

Not only did she spend more than one research stay in Toronto, this sociologist from Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Poland was unique in that she was granted entrance into the inner workings of the Carpatho-Rusyn movement. So trusted was this soft-spoken scholar (who communicated in a heavily polonized, yet fully understandable version of Rusyn) that during the first two decades of the World Congress of Rusyns she was allowed to sit in on the otherwise confidential deliberations of the World Council. As a result, Michna acquired incredible insight into the workings of the Carpatho-Rusyn movement which were reflected (through anonymous quotations) in her comprehensive monograph on the movement in Slovakia, Ukraine, and Poland, published by the prestigious Polish Academy of Arts in Cracow. Unfortunately, this invaluable study has not (yet) been translated into and published in English.

By the outset of the twenty-first century the Carpatho-Ruthenica Library was approaching 10,000 published items, not to mention thousands of archival documents and correspondence. Despite the research visits 232

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145. Ewa Michna (second from right) with Paul Robert Magocsi, Andrzej Zięba, and Olena Duts-Faifer, Krynica Zdrój, Poland (June 2005).

by several scholars from abroad, there were many others, especially of the younger generation, who wished to consult the collection but could not do so because of the costs involved in traveling and living in Toronto.

One way to alleviate this problem was to send materials to Europe.

Beginning sometime in the late 1990s, I decided to make four copies of our microfilm collection of Carpatho-Rusyn related newspapers and journals from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I brought several dozen reels of microfilm to the Department of Ukrainian and Rusyn Philology in Nyíregyháza (Hungary), the Rusyn Institute at Prešov University, and the program in Lemko-Rusyn Philology at the Pedagogical University in Cracow. The fourth set of microfilm destined for Ukraine was never delivered because there was no scholarly institute in Transcarpathia that focused on Carpatho-Rusyn matters.

Aside from microfilm, I decided to duplicate whatever books our library had. We already had duplicate exchanges on a somewhat smaller scale with the Széchényi National Library in Budapest and the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota. Now I simply decided to send gratis (or carry by hand) duplicate books. Among the recipients were the Carpatho-Rusyn university centers in Cracow and 233

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146. Nadia Zavorotna with Paul Robert Magocsi during a working session, Obecný dům, Prague, Czech Republic (September 2020).

Nyíregyháza as well as the more recently established Museum of Rusyn Culture in Prešov. But the biggest recipient was the Institute of Rusyn Language and Culture at Prešov University which over several years was given upwards of one thousand volumes.

To be sure, the microfilm collection and duplicates represented only a fraction of the Toronto Carpatho-Ruthenica holdings. Realizing the potential of modern technology—and often pressed by librarian colleagues like Edward Kasinec and Bogdan Horbal—I approached the University of Toronto Library director, a very congenial figure named Larry Alford, with a proposal to digitize my entire Carpatho-Ruthenica Library. The library director was enthusiastic but extremely cautious for fear of violating copyright laws.

This was the very time (2014) when controversy around Google’s intention to digitize collections from the world’s largest libraries was at its height. While talks with legal consultants were taking place, the library director assigned and paid for two highly competent Slavic librarians, Dr. Ksenya Kiebuzinski and her assistant Nadia Zavorotna, to survey the entire Carpatho-Ruthenica Library. Despite the extensive Slavic holdings at the University of Toronto’s main library (the fourth largest in North 234

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America), they discovered that it held at most only 15 percent of what was in my Carpatho-Ruthenica Library. More remarkable they discovered that 32 percent of the materials were unique; that is, not found in any other library worldwide. As the library director Alford told me: “Professor Magocsi, we covet your library.”

I was flattered. But more important was the question of digitization.

Despite the fact that much of the cost was to be covered by a European Union grant funneled through Prešov University’s Rusyn Institute, the University of Toronto Library felt restricted to digitize only books published before 1923, when protective international copyright laws were adopted. Nevertheless, nearly 500 titles were digitized, including rare eighteenth- and nineteenth-century works by Bazylovych, Fogarashii, Mészáros, Dukhnovych, Dulishkovych, and Feerchak among others.

Particularly valuable was a complete run of the schematism (1816-1917) of the Greek Catholic Eparchy of Mukachevo and the annual almanacs published from 1854 to World War I. I was told that in the first year alone, after the pre-1923 collection was put online, there were more than 60,000 hits. At least part of the Carpatho-Ruthenica Library made it to readers worldwide.

***** Back in Toronto I was still being courted by the University of Toronto Library. Finally, in 2018 I agreed to donate my acquisitions to the university library, which they designated the Paul Robert Magocsi Carpatho-Ruthenica Collection. Unlike some of my colleagues, I did not sell the collection, but donated it gratis. To be sure, I did receive a generous tax deduction based on the officially appraised value of $350,000 that was placed on the collection.

The director Larry Alford wisely suggested that the collection not be turned over to the university library until after my death. Until then (as per formal agreement between the library director and the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences), the collection was to remain under my supervision in its present location, the five small offices of the Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the Jackman Humanities Building in the very heart of the University of Toronto campus.

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This meant that after my retirement as professor (probably two or three years from the time I am writing—2020) I will still have a job as curator of the Carpatho-Ruthenica Collection. Maybe I’ll spend the last years of my life renewing the Carpatho-Rusyn Studies Annotated Bibliography. If so, I would be ending my days in the first half of the twenty-first century as Ivan E. Levytskyi had ended his in the late nineteenth century working on his monumental Galician-Ruthenian bibliography.

147. Cover of the exhibition catalogue on the occasion of the formal donation of the Carpatho-Ruthenica Collection to the University of Toronto Library (April 2023).

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Scholarship from the past was important, but we were living in the present which was defined by the Revolutions of 1989. In effect, our people in Europe were resurrected and thereby enabled to enter a new phase of their existence, what came to be known as the third Carpatho-Rusyn national revival. The Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center (C-RRC) in the United States was still publishing the Carpatho-Rusyn American quarterly, which in the 1990s made its focus the Revolutions of 1989 and their impact on Carpatho-Rusyns.

The magazine’s goal was to inform the English-reading public about the revival of Carpatho-Rusyns and the challenges they faced in post-Communist Europe. It published detailed information about the new Carpatho-Rusyn organizations that came into being, brief biographies of activists in those organizations, documents and correspondence of American organizations with the governments where Carpatho-Rusyns lived (especially Ukraine, Slovakia, and Poland), and a systematic chronology of events related to the fallout from political change connected to the Revolutions of 1989. In effect, the Carpatho-Rusyn American became the only authoritative source for information about the post1989 Carpatho-Rusyn revival in all the countries where the movement played itself out.

The quarterly magazine also included balanced discussions about the Greek Catholic Eparchy of Mukachevo, which was threatened with absorption by the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Archeparchy of Lviv, and it promoted a C-RRC sponsored campaign to raise funds to assist Rusnaks (Carpatho-Rusyns) who were negatively affected by the civil war in Yugoslavia, especially those living in far eastern Croatia (near Vukovar) 237

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148. Last issue of the Carpatho-Rusyn American, Vol. XX, No. 4 (1997); first issue of the The New Rusyn Times, Vol. I, No. 1 (1994).

along the front line in the conflict with Serbia. Because of my frequent visits to Slovakia, Poland, Ukraine, and Yugoslavia, I was able to gain first-hand information on both the positive and negative developments among Carpatho-Rusyns in those countries.

Like any periodical, preparing the Carpatho-Rusyn American required an incredible amount of time. By the late 1990s, both Pat Krafcik and I who put together each issue, felt that our energies could best be spent on other Carpatho-Rusyn activity. And so, in 1997, its twentieth year, we decided to end publication of the Carpatho-Rusyn American in an orderly fashion. Many of our subscribers, about 500 in its last year (down from a high of 800), were deeply disappointed.

In retrospect, our decision to end publication was the correct one, especially since the newly established grassroots organization, the Carpatho-Rusyn Society, had in 1994 launched its own periodical, The New Rusyn Times. Under the competent editorship of Richard Custer, in 1998 that publication adopted a more professional look and, in a sense, became the successor to the Carpatho-Rusyn American. The New Rusyn Times may not have had the same amount of in-depth information about contemporary developments in the homeland, but it did satisfy the needs of Carpatho-Rusyn Americans, the majority of whom were driven by a 238

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149. Richard Custer (far right) with (from right to left) Anna Plishkova, Jerry Jumba, and Patricia Krafcik at the Maryann Sivak residence, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (November 2002).

nostalgic quest to discover their ancestral heritage and were much less interested in present-day “politics.”

***** The reason for that lack of interest among Carpatho-Rusyn Americans was rather straightforward. For them concern with Europe meant getting mixed up in politics. And that, they thought, might somehow compromise their status as patriotic U.S. citizens. After all, they were Americans first and foremost who at best may have had some vague awareness of their ancestral Carpatho-Rusyn identity. Hence, a nostalgic interest in the cultural heritage of the parents and grandparents was about as far as they could go.

I, on the other hand, became increasingly bored with half-baked efforts at preserving or reviving Carpatho-Rusyn customs in America.

Those activities generally took the form of cooking a few fatty and overly starchy food dishes, especially the ubiquitous pirohŷ, or establishing vocal and dance ensembles that performed “Slavic” folk music, which meant mostly popular Russian folk tunes (in particular kalinka moya) or South Slavic circle dances (kolo), neither of which had anything to 239

do with Carpatho-Rusyn folk music. While I continued to operate the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center and oversee its book selling activity among an ever-increasing number of people who were discovering for the first time their ancestral identity and heritage, my greatest concern was how the Carpatho-Rusyn movement was unfolding in Europe in the wake of the Revolutions of 1989. That, after all, was the real thing.

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Developments in the United States, where the Carpatho-Rusyn revival began as far back as the early 1970s, were certainly important, but it was the European homeland in the wake of the Revolutions of 1989 where our attention needed to be focused. Fortunately for me, ever since the upheavals of 1989, I was greeted warmly and appreciated by activists in the newly revived Carpatho-Rusyn communities in Europe. Almost without exception I was accorded respect as “the distinguished professor from America” (even though I was living in Canada), whose counsel was sought and often followed. But I was not naïve: the fact that I might also be a source of funding more than likely enhanced my welcome.

At the same time, I often felt uncomfortable, because many activists, especially in Subcarpathian Rus’ (Ukraine’s Transcarpathia), turned to me as a kind of messiah who could resolve all their problems. All too often, especially among former Soviet citizens in Transcarpathia, I was greeted with subservient fawning and excessive praise that might seem flattering at first glance, but that had the potential to distort one’s sense of reality. I continually felt uncomfortable and fearful that I might start to believe what for me was simply false rhetoric.

The most egregious and excessive fawners were the Transcarpathian belletrists Volodymyr Fedynyshynets and Ivan Petrovtsi. Fedynyshynets interviewed me for what he said was a biography. This incredibly prolific and rapid writer—critics dubbed Fedynyshnets a grafoman (literally: a writing maniac)—completed the promised biography in a few months. When I protested that its appearance would be premature, he went ahead anyway and published in Ukrainian a 272-page book under the title, “Professor Magocsi as a Historical Metaphor” (Istorychna 241

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metafora profesora Magochiia, 1995), whatever that means. Only after he badgered me several times in person and in writing did I force myself to read the text which was filled with embarrassing passages such as: Just what is the phenomenon of Professor Magocsi. . . . or the ‘All-powerful Magocsi’, as I have referred to him in one of my poems? . . . His humane and scholarly power lies in the fact that at the very end of this century and millennium, he, like a messiah, has brought attention to an unjustly treated people in central Europe called Rusyns, Ruthenes, or Rusnaks.

150. Title page of Volodymyr Fedynyshynets’s Ukrainian-language biography, Professor Magocsi as a Historical Metaphor (Uzhhorod, 1995).

In yet another article Fedynyshynets posed and answered a rhetorical question: Dear readers, do you know who has the greatest reputation as a historian or philosopher in Subcarpathian Rus’?—Paul Robert Magocsi. . . .

Perhaps he has been sent by God to give rebirth to an unjustly treated people?! Surely his profound ideas and his energy . . . reflect a rare gift of nature.

I was transformed by conversations with Professor Magocsi. It is as if this architect of the Rusyns has programmed me to undertake some major work. It is rare to meet such people in life.

Ivan Petrovtsii, who hated his rival author Fedynyshynets, was an even worse fawner, although it mostly took the form of histrionics expressed verbally, not in publications. Of course, admiration could easily be turned around into hatefulness. Sometime at the outset of the twenty-first century, Petrovtsii once again asked me for money. I had helped him finan242

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151. Ivan Petrovtsi (far left) and Volodymyr Fedynyshynets (far right) separated by Father Frantishek Krainiak, Olena Duts-Faifer, and Petro Trokhanovskii, Medzilaborce, Czechoslovakia (March 1991).

cially on several occasions for some of his publication projects. This time he said the funds were for his wife (a successful prosecutor in Transcarpathia) who needed some kind of operation. I consulted with my friend, the Vojvodinian-Rusyn activist Lubomir Medieshi, who at the time was living in Toronto. We concluded that the request was a ploy. And so, I did not send him any funds. From that moment I became Petrovtsii’s worst enemy and the object of numerous brutal ad hominem attacks which appeared repeatedly in his writings until his untimely death in 2016.

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Because my reputation and prestige among Carpatho-Rusyn activists in all countries remained high, that allowed me to promote and to have accepted certain theoretical and practical approaches to the Carpatho-Rusyn movement. There were six areas of particular concern: provincialism; self-centeredness; relations with ruling governmental bodies; the influence of personalities on the movement; young people; and symbols of national identity.

Carpatho-Rusyns had, at least since World War II, lost historical perspective as to who they were. For them the international borders created in 1919 and again in 1945 were accepted as if they were an age-old norm likely to remain in place forever. Hence, no Carpatho-Rusyn thought in terms of historic Carpathian Rus’, but rather in terms of “we Rusyns in Slovakia,” or “we Rusyns in Ukraine’s Transcarpathia,” or “we Lemkos in Poland.”

In some ways the obverse of self-centered provincialism was a sense of superiority. For example, Carpatho-Rusyn activists in Slovakia looked down at their brethren in Transcarpathia, considering them incapable of any serious organizational activity. Such shortcomings were allegedly a result of their experience under Soviet rule, which rendered them full of anger and uncontrolled emotion as well as incompetence when it came to the new post-Communist market-driven economy. Put another way, in the post-1989 world, one had to act on one’s own and not expect the government to do everything.

In turn, Transcarpathia’s Carpatho-Rusyns felt they were the center of the movement. Since Subcarpathian Rus’ once had autonomy under Czechoslovakia during the interwar years of the twentieth century, they 244

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considered their region—and their region alone—the Carpatho-Rusyn homeland. From their perspective, Carpatho-Rusyns in neighboring Slovakia were just a minor addendum, almost as if they were immigrants abroad.

As for the Subcarpathian perspective on the Lemkos of Poland, for all intents and purposes there was no perspective, because Lemko Rusyns simply did not exist. It was for that reason that I created the large scale Carpatho-Rusyn Settlement Map and the iconic smaller Homeland Map in an attempt to drive home the point that the Carpatho-Rusyn homeland was not only Transcarpathia/Subcarpathian Rus’, but that it was one historic land that stretched from the Poprad River (in Slovakia and Poland) to the upper Tysa River (in Ukraine’s Transcarpathia).

Subcarpathian self-centeredness was carried to the extreme by the accomplished historian and native of that region, Ivan Pop. He produced an encyclopedia of Carpatho-Rusyns (2001, 2006) that focused only on Subcarpathian Rus’. And when he worked with me on the general Encyclopedia of Rusyn History and Culture (2002, 2005) he had no interest in (because he knew nothing about) the Carpatho-Rusyn/Lemko/ Rusnak communities in Slovakia, Poland, and Serbia. The ultimate example of Pop’s convictions was outlined in his History of Subcarpathian Rus’ (Historie Podkarpatské Rusi, 2005), which he managed to publish in a Czech-language series called a History of States (Historie statů). I thought then—and still now—that Pop’s book was conceptually misguided. Subcarpathian Rus’ was at best an autonomous region, never an independent state. Moreover, it was only one region of Carpathian Rus’.

Whereas I was somewhat successful in creating a mental map of a single historic homeland, Carpathian Rus’, albeit divided by twentieth century international boundaries, the idea of Subcarpathian Rus’/Transcarpathia as the Carpatho-Rusyn homeland par excellence still lives on in the minds of certain activists in that region.

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Self-centeredness and a belief in uniqueness was another problem that I felt needed to be overcome. Every group, especially disempowered stateless peoples, feel that their experiences are unique, that their suffering has been worse than that of other peoples, and that their status as victims of foreign domination qualifies them for special sympathy. Such characteristics, present in the minds of many Carpatho-Rusyn leaders, often lead to a kind of self-paralysis. That’s how things have been for centuries; that’s how things will always be.

My goal was to show Carpatho-Rusyns that they were far from unique and that they should at least become aware of other stateless peoples in Europe, some of whom were/are in an even worse situation. The first step in becoming aware of the larger European context occurred in November 1992 at the First Congress of the Rusyn Language (see above section 20).

I deliberately invited a representative of the Monégasques (a numerical minority in their own country of Monaco) and the Romansch (a stateless though officially recognized people in Switzerland) to share their experiences in language codification. The Carpatho-Rusyn activists in attendance were shocked to learn that the Monégasque language for decades had faced discrimination in their own country in favor of French.

For some time, although in another context, I had close contacts with stateless peoples from the Romance world, in particular Catalans, Walloons, Romansch, Friulians, Monégasques, and most particularly the Provencals withing the framework of the Occitan nationality. Marcel Meaufront, a Provençal activist from Cannes in southern France, told me about an organization he created in 1993, the European Federation of the Maisons de Pays, whose goal was to promote the status of stateless 246

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peoples in Europe through grassroots cultural work. I must admit I found their activities and goals a bit vague, but nonetheless I welcomed their interest in getting Carpatho-Rusyns involved in the organization.

Vasyl Turok, at the time chairman of the World Congress of Rusyns, always had a broad perspective on national minority politics, and at my urging the Rusyn Renaissance Society joined the Maisons de Pays. Their Frenchand English-language promotional materials now included information on Carpatho-Rusyns (which I wrote), and that certainly helped raise awareness about our little-known Slavic people.

At the initiative of Turok, we scored a propaganda coup, when in August 1996 the Maisons de Pays decided to hold its second congress in Prešov.

Vasyl arranged that the Dukhnovych Theater be made available for the convention meetings as well as that it be 152. The Maisons de Pays Multilingual the site for cultural entertainment in the evening. The latter was funded by European Guide (2000) with four chapters in Rusyn, French, and the Slovak government and included, English about Carpatho-Rusyns alongside a short Carpatho-Rusyn cultural program, a musical play performed by the Romathan Theater from Košice, which told the story of the Roma/Gypsies as an indigenous people of Slovakia.

I can still remember the manner of announcing that memorable performance, which took the form of a town crier walking the streets of Prešov and calling on the city’s residents to come to the theater that very 247

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153. Occitan town criers announcing the opening of the Second Congress of the European Federation Maisons de Pays, Prešov, Slovakia (August 1996).

evening. The uniqueness of this form of advertising was in the town crier himself: a young male dressed in traditional Occitan garb banging on a drum to garner the attention of passersby.

On the last day of the Maison des Pays convention, Turok arranged for a pig-roasting feast alongside an evening bonfire (Vatra) in an outdoor mountain retreat north of Medzilaborce near the border with Poland.

Some of our friends from the Romance world were not used to drinking copious amounts of 40 percent (80 proof) vodka and borovichka instead of wine. Hence, they quickly became inebriated. The Piemontese became particularly rowdy, so much so that Vasyl threatened to evict them from the bus on the drive back to Prešov in the wee hours of the morning.

Vasyl, the creative dramatist, and I, the professorial historian, had effectively become babysitters for undisciplined national minority activists from western Europe.

Oh, the costs we incurred while undertaking our work on behalf of the Carpatho-Rusyn movement! To be sure, Turok, himself a heavy drinker, was more adept and tolerant of such excesses than was I. In the end we succeeded in our basic goal: to integrate Carpatho-Rusyns—a “normal” stateless people—with other stateless peoples in Europe.

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154. Tom Trier (back center) meeting with Mykola Makara and Vasyl Turok (far right) and Mykhal Varga (far left) at the Danish Cultural Institute, Copenhagen, Denmark (November 1997).

Integration was achieved in yet another way thanks to the young Danish anthropologist named Tom Trier, who at the time was an associate at the European Centre for Minority Issues in Flensburg, a small town on the German side of that country’s border with Denmark. In November 1997, Trier organized a visit for Carpatho-Rusyn activists to come to Germany and Denmark. Our delegation first visited the center in Flensburg as well as villages inhabited by the Danish minority in Germany and the German minority in Denmark. These were in the historically contested region of Schleswig (remember Bismarck in the nineteenth century). The point was to show our delegation how borderland minority problems are resolved amicably in the European Union.

The high point of the visit, however, was a series of events organized by the self-proclaimed Carpatho-Rusyn enthusiast, Tom Trier, in cooperation with the government-funded Danish Cultural Institute in Denmark’s capital, Copenhagen. The events were advertised and promoted under the rubric “Rusyn Week.” Among the cultural events open to the Danish public was an exhibit of works by several contemporary Carpatho-Rusyn painters, by the Carpatho-Rusyn political cartoonist Fedor 249

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Vitso, and the premiere of a film produced by Trier called The Warhol Nation. Western Europeans were easily drawn to Carpatho-Rusyns through the connection with the famous American artist Andy Warhol. In a real sense, Europeans (and some Americans) became aware and could make some sense of Carpatho-Rusyns thanks to the association with Warhol.

Aside from cultural events, most of the activity during Denmark’s Rusyn Week consisted of exposing Carpatho-Rusyn activists to the workings of a modern democratic state. Although a native of “democratic” America, I was invited by Tom Trier to serve as an observer and speaker at the week’s main conference. Most important was the presence of other Carpatho-Rusyn activists. As I remember, there were two from each country where Carpatho-Rusyns lived: Poland, Slovakia, Ukraine, Hungary, and Serbia. We even had our first Carpatho-Rusyn from Romania, Pavlo Romaniuk, a village teacher from the Maramureş Region who turned out to be a crypto Ukrainophile (see below). More important was the fact that our delegation included the most important Carpatho-Rusyn activists during the 1990s: Vasyl Turok and Aleksand-

155. Carpatho-Rusyn delegation during Rusyn Week in Denmark: (left to right) Mikhal Varga, Ivan Turianytsia, unidentified, unidentified, Paul Robert Magocsi, Miron Sŷsak, Olena Duts-Faifer, unidentified, Tom Trier, Andrii Kopcha, Vasyl Turok, Pavlo Romaniuk, Mykola Makara, and Anna Plishkova, Copenhagen, Denmark (November 1997).

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er Zozuliak from Slovakia, Andrei Kopcha and Olena Duts-Faifer from Poland, Mykhailo Varga from Serbia, and Ivan Turianytsia, Mykhailo Almashii, and Father Dmytrii Sydor from Ukraine. The politically astute Trier was particularly anxious to have Professor Turianytsia, because he had already established a reputation for himself as “premier” of a “separatist” Carpatho-Rusyn shadow government in Ukraine.

The visit started off on an amusing note well before Rusyn Week even 156. Cover of Tom Trier’s edited biformally began. I flew in from Tolingual English-Rusyn volume, Focus ronto to Copenhagen, while the rest on the Rusyns (Copenhagen, 1999) with Fedor Vitso’s cartoon spoof on of the delegation came by bus. The Shakespeare’s famous line from Hamlet. participants from Ukraine, Hungary, Romania, and Serbia all came to Prešov where the bus, supplied by the Dukhnovych Theater, set off northward toward Poland to pick up Olena Duts-Faifer in Cracow and then Andrei Kopcha in Wrocław before continuing on to Copenhagen. When the bus crossed the Carpathians from Slovakia into Poland, the driver took a wrong turn and was headed eastward toward Ukraine. When the mistake was discovered, Professor Turianytsia jumped up and yelled: “Stop, stop. Turn around: We’re not going back to Ukraine. We’ll walk, if we must, to Denmark.”

That incident set the relaxed, even amusing tone that characterized much of the Rusyn Week in Denmark. We were given tours and were received by deputies in the Danish parliament and by officials in several local municipalities. Indeed, all this did impress upon our Carpatho-Rusyn delegates that Denmark was a model democracy from which much could be learned. Ironically, it was in Copenhagen, thanks to Tom Trier’s film, that some of our Carpatho-Rusyn delegates first learned of Andy Warhol.

The film was filled with several poignant and ironic moments, although our more conservative-minded delegates from Ukraine and Serbia were 251

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not much impressed. Not surpprisingly, they were turned off by Warhol’s art and public persona, which for them epitomized what was, according to the Communist educational systems in which they were raised: “decadent capitalist America”.

The week in Copenhagen culminated with a public seminar held at the Danish Cultural Institute. This event featured a talk by one Carpatho-Rusyn from each of the countries where they lived, followed by a commentary by a governmental representative (in most cases the ambassador). Only one country did not send a government representative— Ukraine. This was duly noted in the proceedings of the seminar which were subsequently published, with parallel Rusyn- and English-language texts under the editorship of Tom Trier, Focus on the Rusyns (1999). I suggested leaving a blank page in the book where the representative from Ukraine would have—but chose not to—have his or her voice heard. For the Danish audience it was quite clear that Ukraine was afraid or simply did not know how to address the Carpatho-Rusyn phenomenon within its borders.

Trier edited another volume, Inter-Ethnic Relations in Transcarpathian Ukraine, based on a conference organized in Uzhhorod (September 1998) by Germany’s European Centre for Minority Issues. Present at the conference were the European Centre’s director and sympatico of Carpatho-Rusyns, Professor Stefan Troebst, and Ukraine’s main government advisor on the country’s national minorities, Volodymyr Troshchynskyi.

It was at this Uzhhorod conference where I presented the keynote address, “What Can Europe Learn from Transcarpathia?,” which stressed that learning was a two-way street. In other words, it was not only the so-called democratic West that could teach the former Communist East.

In effect, Transcarpathia was a place of tolerance among the region’s various peoples, first and foremost Carpatho-Rusyns. Many western democracies, in particular France and Italy, could learn from such tolerance.

Clearly, the northern Germanic countries, with their favorable treatment of the German minority in Denmark and the Danish minority in Germany, provided a stark contrast to the status of many of the stateless Romance peoples, such as the Occitans and Piemontese, whose languages and cultures were at best tolerated if not openly scorned.

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157. Stefan Troebst following Paul Robert Magocsi’s Ukrainian-language address at a conference on inter-ethnic relations in Transcarpathia, held in Uzhhorod, Ukraine (October 1998).

The visit to Copenhagen allowed for another accomplishment. For nearly a decade, the World Congress of Rusyns had operated without any statute. In other words, the organization did not formally exist. I seem to remember that the Lemko-Rusyn activist from Poland, Andrei Kopcha, was always concerned about rules of procedure.

Taking advantage of our retreat in Denmark, where we were all stuck together for a week, I convened early one evening in my hotel room the heads of each Carpatho-Rusyn organization that was a formal member of the World Congress. I said we could not leave the room to take dinner until we came up with a draft of a statute. Despite the reluctance of many in the room to concentrate on this serious matter (Professor Turianytsia was particularly egregious in this regard), we did come up with a draft text which was later edited by Andrei Kopcha.

While we achieved some kind of order for the World Congress, the original draft and subsequent confirmed statute contained what, to my mind, was an unfortunate clause: that each country represented in the World Congress (at the time Slovakia, Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Serbia, and the United States) would be represented by 253

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one organization and one organization only. This was a truly undemocratic format that was to cause numerous subsequent problems, especially for those countries where there were numerous organizations.

Another undemocratic procedural matter had to do with the number of voting delegates at the bi-annual congresses. Each country, regardless of the numerical size of its Carpatho-Rusyn population, was allotted ten delegates. Hence, Croatia (a future Congress member) with only 2,500 Carpatho-Rusyn inhabitants, had as many delegates as Slovakia with over 55,000 Carpatho-Rusyns. As a result of such skewed representation, the Congress came to be dominated by its smallest members—Croatia, Serbia, Hungary, and Romania.

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Because Carpatho-Rusyns were a stateless people, the evolution of their national movement depended on the policies of the governments in the countries where they lived. Of course, governments changed as did policies toward national minorities. Therefore, Carpatho-Rusyn activists had to be ever ready to pressure their central governments to deliver on promises about assistance to national minorities. Those promises were usually made during pre-election campaigns, when candidates to local and national elections hoped to gain the support of the electorate, at least a small portion of whom were Carpatho-Rusyns. If necessary, Carpatho-Rusyn candidates to each country’s parliament might consider joining forces with numerically larger national groups. This, in fact, happened on several occasions in Slovakia, where Carpatho-Rusyn political activists cooperated with their allegedly age-old enemies, the Magyars.

I always believed that the European Union could be the savior of regions and of national minorities. This proved to be the case already in the mid-1990s, when at least four countries where Carpatho-Rusyns lived became candidates for entry into the European Union. In order to achieve that goal, Brussels laid out a wide range of conditions that needed to be fulfilled before a candidate country could be considered for union membership. Several of these conditions concerned human rights and the protection for national minorities. While special attention was accorded the Roma (Gypsies), Carpatho-Rusyns also gained certain advantages from the public attention given by European Union leaders to national minority questions. Carpatho-Rusyn activists like Vasyl Turok in Slovakia, Olena Duts-Faifer in Poland, and Gabriel Hattinger in Hungary put forth demands to their respective governments for funding for 255

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cultural programs and institutions, during the nearly decade-long candidacy period that culminated in 2004 with the acceptance of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary into the European Union.

I remember what for me was a very happy day in the spring of 2004. I happened to be in Prešov and walked to the polling booth with Sasha Zozuliak and Anna Plishkova, who, as Slovak citizens, were required to cast their ballot for or against Slovakia’s entry into the European Union. I, 158. Carpatho-Rusyn American delegation at the Embassy of Ukraine to too, would have wished to cast my the United States: (left to right) Mikulas vote in favor, but as a non-Slovak Popovic, Paul Robert Magocsi, John citizen I could neither vote nor even Righetti, Dean Poloka, Elaine Rusinko, enter the polling place. Happy was and Victor Haburchak, Georgetownthe day, nevertheless, because a week Washington, D. C. (November 2005). or so later we learned that Slovakia passed this last hurdle and would become an EU member state.

Promises by politicians are almost always forgotten, or at best lose priority once elections are over. Therefore, governments needed to be constantly reminded of their Carpatho-Rusyn citizens through pressure from outside. This was easier said than done. Carpatho-Rusyn activists had neither the linguistic skills (knowledge of English) nor financial means to do lobbying work where it counted—in Brussels and in Washington, D.C. In those places the Rusyn-American community needed to do its part. Together with community activists in the Washington, D.C. branch of the Carpatho-Rusyn Society, I was able to organize visits on more than one occasion to the embassies of Poland, Slovakia, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, the European Union, and The Vatican. The “excuse” for the visits varied, depending on the needs of a given Carpatho-Rusyn community.

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language and its introduction into the public-school curriculum. At the Ukrainian embassy our demand was for official recognition of Carpatho-Rusyns as a distinct nationality. At the Romanian embassy we urged the completion of the new bridge across the Tysa River so that delegates from Transcarpathia could walk across it to attend the World Congress of Rusyns scheduled for 2007 in the Romanian border city of Sighet. At the Polish embassy we pressed for acknowledgement of the 159. Carpatho-Rusyn delegation at the Embassy of Poland to the United States: government’s wrong-doing during (left to right) Mikulas Popovic, Christie the 1947 Vistula Operation, while Slifkey, John Righetti, Elaine Rusinko, at the Yugoslav/Serbian embassy and Paul Robert Magocsi, Washington, our demand was for clarification D. C. (March 2006). regarding that country’s Communist-era law according to which qualifications for the status of a nationality (narodnost) demanded that the group in question have a “mother country” (matichna zem). In the case of the Vojvodinian Rusyns, their mother country was not designated as Slovakia or Hungary (where the vast majority of the group’s ancestors came from) but rather Ukraine. Finally, at the offices of the Holy See’s papal nuncio to the United States we called for a halt to slovakization policies in the Greek Catholic Eparchy of Prešov in Slovakia and for maintenance of the ecclesia sui iuris status of the Greek Catholic Eparchy of Mukachevo in Ukraine.

For each of these meetings I prepared talking points and in some cases memoranda, which our Carpatho-Rusyn American delegations (with or without my presence) submitted to embassy officials. I knew full well that the best way to assure that our memoranda would reach the governments of the various countries where Carpatho-Rusyns lived was through the embassies of those countries in Washington, D.C. In some cases, we visited the embassies of foreign countries and the Eu257

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ropean Union office in Ukraine’s capital of Kyiv. On at least two occasions I arranged for Carpatho-Rusyn activists from Transcarpathia to be received at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv. I remember in particular our meeting with Ambassador William Taylor, who had a particularly soft spot for Transcarpathia. He had arranged for U.S. funds to be used to restore a wooden church in the region and proudly showed off a photograph of the restored edifice on the wall alongside his desk. He also was happy to introduce the embassy’s spokesperson, who he described as a young American woman of Carpatho-Rusyn background from Maryland. I was very pleased when she recalled how she had learned about her roots through reading publications from our Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center.

***** Aside from the U.S. Embassy I was able to arrange meetings in Kyiv with Ukrainian governmental officials. The first of these went back to November 1992, specifically with Professor Ivan Kuras, an advisor to Ukraine’s President Leonid Kuchma and director of the newly established Academy of Sciences Institute for Nationality Relations and Politics. Kuras invited me to give three lectures over as many days to the institute’s members and research staff. Two of the lectures dealt with the “Rusyn question,” the third with the general situation of national minorities in post-Communist central and eastern Europe. The audience listened to me with respect and did not interrupt or denigrate my view that all citizens of the new “democratic” Ukraine, including Carpatho-Rusyns, should have the right to identify themselves as they wish.

Director Kuras related how the institute he headed (and was later renamed for) was gathering information about the “Rusyn problem” from pro-Rusyn and pro-Ukrainian sources, although I believe I was the only pro-Rusyn source. When the fact-finding exercise was over, Ivan Kuras (by the then Vice-Prime Minister of Ukraine) responded to the request of President Kuchma to submit recommendations on how to deal with the “Rusyn problem.” The response took the form of what became a presidential decree entitled, “Proposed Measures for Resolving the Problem of Ukrainians-Rusyns.” I remember getting a copy of this document from the head of Transcarpathia’s Society of Carpatho-Rusyns, Ivan Turianytsia, 258

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160. Cover letter from the State Committee of Ukraine for Nationalities and Migration to Vice-Prime Minister Ivan F. Kuras followed by the “Proposed Measures for Resolving the Problem of Rusyns-Ukrainians” (Kyiv, Ukraine, 7 October 1996).

even before it was officially announced in October 1996.

We were all shocked by the document because it became clear that “democratic” Ukraine was not about to change by one iota the standard position taken by Ukrainian nationalists, not to mention the former So259

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viet regime—namely, that Rusyns are Ukrainians. Any ideas that they form a distinct nationality and language constituted a serious danger to Ukraine and must be opposed.

The “Proposed Measures” included ten goals that were expected to be carried out by various state ministries (Foreign Affairs, Internal Affairs, Justice, Education), the Office of the General Prosecutor, the National Academy of Sciences, the State Commission for Television and Radio Broadcasting, the State Committee for National Minorities and Migration, and the Transcarpathian Oblast State Administration. Not only were pro-Rusyn activists and organizations in Ukraine to be investigated and, if necessary, prosecuted, but the Carpatho-Rusyn movement in neighboring countries needed to be monitored and, if possible, undermined by Ukraine’s embassies and by pro-Ukrainian organizations in those countries.

From our perspective the “Proposed Measures” represented a return to Stalinism, as argued in an article by Julian Galloway (one of my pseudonyms) in the Carpatho-Rusyn American. At all subsequent meetings with Ukrainian officials, we demanded the repeal of the “Proposed Measures.” Typical for Ukraine, the government never repealed the measures, but nor did they ever really act on them in any effective manner.

***** Unexpectedly, Carpatho-Rusyns found some friends in Kyiv governing circles. The Office of the Ukrainian Parliamentary Commissioner for Human Rights, or Ombudsman, in particular when it was headed from 2007 by Nina Karpachova, spoke out more than once calling for recognition of Rusyns as a distinct nationality. Karpachova also received on two occasions delegations of Carpatho-Rusyns from Ukraine and North America that I organized to come to Kyiv. All these meetings, whose photo-ops had great propaganda value for our movement, were brokered by the Ombudsman’s Office in Transcarpathia, headed at the time by a somewhat slippery fellow named Vasyl Kuzio. I could never tell whether or not he was sympathetic to the Carpatho-Rusyn cause.

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161. Carpatho-Rusyn delegation from North America and Transcarpathia at the Office of Ombudsman of Ukraine: (left to right) Father Dymytrii Sydor, Nadiya Kushko, Paul Robert Magocsi, Nina Karpachova—Ombudsman, Steven Chepa, Yevhen Zhupan, and Valerii Padiak, Kyiv, Ukraine (June 2007).

Personal contacts are inevitably the best means to gain access to politically influential people. For example, thanks to my younger colleague and Research Fellow at the Chair of Ukrainian Studies, Taras Kuzio (not to be confused with Vasyl Kuzio from Transcarpathia), a meeting was arranged for me (to whom I added activists from Transcarpathia) with U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, William Taylor. In Washington, D.C., meanwhile, we had an even better contact.

That contact was Elaine Rusinko’s husband, Stu Rothenberg, a political consultant (he bristled whenever I mistakenly referred to him as a lobbyist) who founded the influential publication, The Congressional RollCall. At a time when Elaine was deeply engaged in writing a history of Carpatho-Rusyn literature, Stu—an American of Jewish heritage—decided he would help out his “wife’s people” in whatever way he could. I remember him attending meetings of the Washington D.C. branch of the Carpatho-Rusyn Society, several annual Slavic Association conventions, and even the World Congress of Rusyns in Krynica, Poland (2005), at which Elaine was a member of the North American delegation.

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162. Stu Rothenberg and Paul Robert Magocsi at the Embassy of Slovakia to the United States, Washington, D. C. (November 2006)

Stu was your quintessential American nice guy and very well experienced in dealing with senators, congressmembers, and their staff on Capitol Hill. Thanks to Stu we were able to find congressional representatives on the so-called Ukrainian Caucus who were willing to learn about the Carpatho-Rusyn “problem” (non-recognition by Ukraine). I felt at the time that the Ukrainian government could be pressured on the Carpatho-Rusyn matter if they knew that some congressional figures might block U.S. aid packages to Ukraine.

Stu’s ultimate intervention came with Senator John McCain, the influential Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Senator McCain had been President George Bush’s personal envoy to Ukraine during the Orange Revolution in late 2004 early 2005. It was at that time that McCain developed a close personal relationship with Viktor Yushchenko, who became president of Ukraine in the wake of the Orange Revolution.

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163. Letter of U. S. Senator John McCain to Ukraine’s President Victor Yushchenko on behalf of Carpatho-Rusyns in Transcarpathia (Washington, D. C., 6 June 2005).

Through his contacts with McCain’s staff and a personal meeting with the senator in March 2005, Stu Rothenberg coached us on how to proceed and, most importantly, alerted us to a basic principle in the American political world. Senators and Congressmembers are beholden first and foremost to their constituencies. Hence, within a few weeks a branch 263

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of the Carpatho-Rusyn Society was established in Arizona (McCain’s home state). At the same time, Elaine Rusinko and the national president of the Carpatho-Rusyn Society, John Righetti, met with Senator McCain.

In response to the senator’s request, they prepared a comprehensive sixpart brief about Carpatho-Rusyns.

The stage was now set for some action. On 6 June 2005, McCain sent a letter on United States Senate letterhead to President Yushchenko. The letter focused on only one topic: the desirability of recognizing Carpatho-Rusyns as a distinct nationality in Ukraine.

At the time that McCain sent his letter, the presidential chief-of-staff and most influential person in Viktor Yushchenko’s governing circle was none other than a native of Transcarpathia, Viktor Baloga. Born in a village near Mukachevo, Baloga was head of a family clan and the most powerful political and financial figure in Transcarpathia. He was also known to be sympathetic to the Carpatho-Rusyn cause. Baloga often showed up at community events and was prominently seated on the podium alongside the controversial and outspoken anti-Ukrainian chairman of the Society of Carpatho-Rusyns, Professor Ivan Turianytsia.

Such seeming contradictions could be explained by remembering Viktor Baloga’s real goal: to assure his control or at least a free hand to manipulate the region’s economy to his personal advantage. Through local elections, Baloga managed to fund the campaigns of candidates loyal to President Yushchenko and therefore to form the majority of members in the otherwise “democratically” elected Transcarpathian Regional Assembly (Oblasna rada). It should come as no surprise that Viktor’s brother, Ivan Baloga, was chosen chairman of the Regional Assembly by Yushchenko’s supporters, most of whom were fervent Ukrainian national patriots. As such they were decidedly opposed to the Carpatho-Rusyn movement.

And yet, on March 7, 2007, a motion to recognize Rusyns as a distinct nationality was put on the agenda of the Regional Assembly. No less than 72 of the 76 deputies voted in favor of the motion. Why this sudden turn around?

We later learned—through the grapevine, so to speak—that when President Yushchenko received Senator McCain’s letter he turned to his 264

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trusted chief-of-staff Viktor Baloga and said: “This is your Transcarpathian problem. You should deal with it.” And deal with it he did. Instructions came from Kyiv and a “democratic” vote was held in the Regional Council. The results? Carpatho-Rusyns were recognized as a distinct nationality at least on the territory of the Transcarpathian oblast, which in any case was where all of them in Ukraine lived.

***** For at least another decade after Senator McCain’s 1995 letter and the 1997 recognition of Carpatho-Rusyns in Transcarpathia, Stu Rothenberg continued to provide advice and to help facilitate meetings in Washington, D.C., most especially with individual members of Congress and with the recently established Ukrainian Desk in the State Department.

After the initial contacts set up by Stu (our first meeting took place in 2005), subsequent meetings at the State Department were organized by Jim Kepchar Kaminski.

Jim was a lawyer and at the time was connected with a small Washington law firm. Through his mother, Jim discovered his Carpatho-Rusyn roots, and although he knew little about his ancestral culture—and was slow in reading to make up for that deficit—he was a great enthusiast for the cause. He was hand-picked to succeed John Righetti in 2013 as president of the Carpatho-Rusyn Society.

I was skeptical of his ability to head a community organization. Those reservations were confirmed when, after one three-year term in that office, he decided to step down. Nevertheless, and more importantly, Jim by then had become one of a growing number of younger-generation Carpatho-Rusyn American activists. Best of all, he understood the need to interact and support the movement in Europe. As part of his education, he learned and was relatively fluent in Russian, something that made it easier for him to interact with Carpatho-Rusyns in other countries.

By the second decade of the twentieth century, Kaminski accepted my invitation to become one of our North American delegates to the World Council of Rusyns and legal advisor to the body which represented the United States and Canada at the World Congress, the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center. In short, Jim Kaminski was efficient, thorough, and he 265

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turned out to be someone I could depend upon to assist in our work, whether it be correcting the legal status of the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center or arranging for meetings in Washington D.C. at foreign embassies or at the U.S. State Department.

***** I must admit that it was quite thrilling each time we entered the halls of American power and to do so on behalf of our Carpatho-Rusyns. After all, only a few years ago (before 1989), we as a people did not exist in the minds of the public-at-large, governments included. Now, from the mid-1990s onward our delegations were being received in Washington D.C. by foreign embassies, by the U.S. State Department, and by congressmembers and senators whose portfolios were concerned with former Communist countries in central and eastern Europe.

At all the State Department meetings where I was present, our delegations were received with great respect. At least two or three departmental staffers were present at each meeting, and copious notes and follow-up questions revealed the level of seriousness accorded the Carpatho-Rusyn question.

Our discussions focused mainly on Ukraine and ranged from general matters regarding recognition as a distinct nationality to specific problems such as Radio Free Europe broadcasts. The Ukrainian Service of Radio Free Europe (Radio Svoboda) was, in particular, filled with reports by proUkrainian freelance “reporters,” in particular Mykola Mushynka from the Prešov Region in Slovakia and Oleksandr Havrosh from Transcarpathia in Ukraine. Both, but especially Havrosh, submitted often scathing and distorted reports about Carpatho-Rusyns. Our delegations of CarpathoRusyn Americans—all U.S. citizens and taxpayers—demanded that the State Department reiterate its position on Carpatho-Rusyns and, if necessary, stop the Uzhhorod-based Havrosh from broadcasting on a program funded by U.S. taxpayers. Among those taxpayers were CarpathoRusyn Americans, who, through our visiting delegations were being taken seriously as revealed in several follow-up meetings arranged by Jim Kaminski and another Carpatho-Rusyn American activist in Washington, the former U.S. ambassador, Mike Senko. As a result, Havrosh was for the most part reigned in on the Carpatho-Rusyn issue.

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164. Carpatho-Rusyns from North America and Ukraine at the Ukraine Desk, U. S. Department of State: (left to right) Jim Kaminski, Michael C. Keays—Senior Policy Advisor for Ukraine, Valerii Padiak, John Righetti, and Paul Robert Magocsi, Washington, D. C. (May 2015).

Nonetheless, in spite of some successes, John Righetti and I concluded that our advocacy work would never bring immediate results. Rather we had to consider ourselves to be pesky mosquitoes. Put another way, we had to continue to write memos and seek meetings at foreign embassies and U.S. government offices so that they knew that Carpatho-Rusyns exist and that they were not going away.

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There is no question that organizations, real or perceived, were the best instruments through which to promote the Carpatho-Rusyn cause in the international space. Organizations depend, however, on individuals to lead them. While Carpatho-Rusyn leaders varied in their leadership capabilities, they all had a disproportionately large influence, for better or worse, on the direction of the national movement in their respective countries. Those positive and negative leadership qualities were particularly evident in the deliberations of the World Congress of Rusyns.

Admittedly, I was from the very beginning skeptical about the very idea of a world congress. This is because, by nature and conviction, I tend to be skeptical of all organizations. True enough, I was a member of some organizations, among them the Royal Society of Canada and professional societies to which I paid dues, but I took no active part in any of them.

Something like the World Congress of Rusyns had yet another danger for my psyche. It was made up largely of people who were far from the academic world to which I had become accustomed. On the other hand, the Congress brought together in one place, if only for a few days, activists from five, seven, and eventually nine countries who were engaged in promoting the Carpatho-Rusyn movement. To my mind, that was the ultimate value of the World Congress. In essence, we World Congress delegates were brothers and sisters in arms united by one common goal: to have Carpatho-Rusyns recognized as a distinct nationality and to promote our ancestral language and culture in all countries where our people live.

It was not always easy, however, working together with people from former Communist societies. Many of them—or their parents—were raised and educated in the late 1940s and 1950s, precisely at a time when 268

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the dictatorship created by Stalin, his Soviet successors, and their satraps in central Europe (Gottwald, Bierut, Rákósi) was at its most repressive.

Because of such a direct or indirect upbringing, most Carpatho-Rusyns in Europe were suspicious of all authority—and of each other. Moreover, they were even prone to explaining real or imagined problems as part of some great conspiracy by known or unknown forces against the Carpatho-Rusyn movement.

There were also differences among 165. Natalia Dudash from Yugoslavia and Paul Robert Magocsi, Budapest, Hungary the delegates depending on their country of origin and their age. Yu(May 1997). goslavia’s Rusnaks were perhaps the group with the least number of complexes. This is largely because of the relatively liberal environment of Tito’s Yugoslavia, which had not been a Soviet satellite. Moreover, the Rusnaks in the Vojvodina and Srem regions were recognized by the state as a distinct nationality. As a result, Rusnak delegates from Yugoslavia (and later Serbia and Croatia) always exhibited a sense of self-confidence, even superiority, vis-a-vis fellow Carpatho-Rusyns from other countries. Such not-always-admirable attitudes were especially evident in the cultural activist Lubomir Medieshi, the talented writers Diura Papharhai and Natalia Dudash, although much less so in the Yugoslav Rusnak’s first Congress delegation head, the amicable high-school teacher Mikhal Varga.

In great contrast were the Lemko Rusyns from Poland, who all seemed to be deeply scarred by the forced deportation experienced by their parents in 1947 and by their own experience as youngsters growing up “in a foreign land” (western Poland) surrounded by often chauvinistic Poles who looked down on them. The reaction to such negative experiences was either self-deprecation and fear of engaging the public (Yaroslav Horoshchak-Hunka was a good example) or a decided single-mind269

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edness and stubborn sense of purpose best exhibited by the long-time head of the Lemko-Rusyn Congress delegation Andrei Kopcha, the charismatic poet Petro Trokhanovskii, and the Carpatho-Rusyn world’s Thatcher-like “iron lady,” Olena Duts-Faifer.

As for the Congress delegates from Slovakia, some exhibited negative characteristics stemming from their upbringing in Communist Czechoslovakia. But their leaders, Vasyl Turok and his closest associate Aleksander Zozuliak, were spiritual children of the Velvet Revolution’s world-renowned liberal democratic leader, Václav Havel. Aside from Havel’s moral inspiration, Turok and Zozuliak were themselves fearless in the face of societal convention and governmental authority.

Turok’s optimism and vision characterized his long-time leadership as founding and long-time chairman of the World Congress as well as Slovakia’s member organization, the Rusyn Renaissance Society. The fact that post-Communist Slovak society and most of its government leaders (with the exception of Vladimír Mečiár) were tolerant towards and concretely supportive of Carpatho-Rusyns was no small factor in creating an increasing sense of confidence in our people living in Slovakia.

166. Miron Zhirosh (center) and László Filkeházi (right) with Paul Robert Magocsi in Múcsony, Hungary (June 1997).

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The biggest surprise for all of us was the rebirth of the tiny community of Carpatho-Rusyns in Hungary. There were two villages in the northeastern part of the country where older residents still spoke their Rusyn ancestral language: Múcsony near Miskolc in former Borshod county and Komlóska near Sarospatak in former Zemplén county. In Múcsony a young enthusiast, László Filkeházi, set up a small museum to display local Carpatho-Rusyn artifacts, and he cooperated with a local teacher Maria Jobaggyi (wife of the Vojvodinian journalist Miron Zhirosh) who began to conduct Rusyn language classes in the village school. But it was three people in their late twenties from the village of Komlóska, Gabor Hattinger, Judit Kiss, and Laslo Popovych who initially came to dominate the Carpatho-Rusyn revival in Hungary.

Hattinger and Kiss moved to Budapest and in 1992 founded the Organization of Rusyns in Hungary, which eventually received rather substantial funding from the post-Communist liberal Hungarian government.

Hattinger was a rock musician and poet by profession who, like many Magyar males, sported a sense of self-confidence, pride, and in his case, machismo. Gabi, as we fondly called him, never missed an opportunity to boast (at least to me) of his success in acquiring young female admirers and lovers. His bohemian-like youthful personality was not always suited, however, for the kind of systematic bureaucratic work needed to direct the organization that he was responsible for bringing into being.

Undoubtedly, Hattinger was aware of his bureaucratic shortcomings, but he was not about to give up his leadership posts. He decided, therefore, to leave day-to-day organizational matters to his young fellow native of Komlóska, Judit Kiss, and to the older, more distinguished, recently retired university professor of economic geography, Tibor Miklosh Popovych. While Kiss was a somewhat naïve village girl with a very pleasant personality, Popovych, who was also very amiable, had an entirely different life trajectory.

Popovych was born of mixed Carpatho-Rusyn, Hungarian, and Serb ancestry in a small village in Subcarpathian Rus’ on the eve of World War II, when that region was still part of Czechoslovakia. He began his elementary education in Rusyn-language schools, then continued in Ukrainian- and Russian-language middle schools in Soviet-ruled 271

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167. Gabor Hattinger and Laslo Popovych (behind) greeting Rusyn World Congress delegates on Hero’s Square, Budapest, Hungary (May 1997).

Transcarpathia, completed his graduate education at Leningrad University, all the while speaking Hungarian as the language of his parent’s household. Tibor lent a certain intellectual weight and prestige to the fledgling Carpatho-Rusyn movement in Hungary. He even created a Rusyn Research Institute in Budapest, which sponsored several scholarly conferences. For a while in the late 1990s, Tibor’s institute was the only forum for Carpatho-Rusyn “scholarly” activists from Transcarpathia (Mykhailo Almashii, Dymytrii Pop, among a few others) to have their voice heard in “international” circles.

Popovych was fond of proposing large publication projects, although most were never realized. He was, nevertheless, an indominable, kind-hearted bear-like figure (actually well over six feet in height), who faithfully attended all Carpatho-Rusyn related scholarly conferences as well as the bi-annual World Congresses. He continued to do this well into the second decade of the twenty-first century, when he was by then in his eighties.

The dynamism of the leading personalities among the Carpatho-Rusyn communities in Slovakia, Poland, and Hungary was in stark contrast to activists in western Czechoslovakia (the future Czech Republic). There 272

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the leading Carpatho-Rusyn activists were quite old and often physically frail. The patriarch of the community in Prague—the originator of the idea of the World Congress—was Ivan Parkanyi, who in the 1990s was approaching his hundredth birthday.

The two Carpatho-Rusyn organizations that came into being were inspired by very elderly gentlemen (Aleksander Velychko, Rudolf Matola, the Greek Catholic priest Ivan Liavynets) who settled in Prague before or just after World War II. They ba168. Tibor Miklosh Popovych with Paul sically lived in very modest circumRobert Magocsi and unidentified at stances and were isolated from the Central European University, Budapest, larger Czech society in which they Hungary (May 2017) found themselves. It was Velychko who in 1990 set up the Society of Subcarpathian Rusyns, which in a year or so came to be headed by Jaromír Hořec who worked closely with the journalist Agata Pilatova. Hořec and Pilatova were no strangers to Czech intellectual and civic circles, especially Hořec, a well-known dissident writer from the 1968 generation, who finally gained widespread respect in post-Communist Czechoslovakia. His role as a public intellectual was enhanced because he led an organization whose goal was to restore the reputation and heritage (through reconstruction of statues) of Czechoslovakia’s beloved founding-president, Tomáš G. Masaryk.

Hořec’s Carpatho-Rusyn connections stem from the fact that he was born in Subcarpathian Rus’ in the early 1930s into a family of Czech civil servants. Only in post-Communist Czechoslovakia could he express his love and undertake work on behalf of what he considered his native land—Subcarpathian Rus’ within the interwar Masaryk-led democratic first Czechoslovak Republic. Hořec and his close collaborator Agata Pilatova (also born in Subcarpathian Rus’ but of mixed Czech-Rusyn parentage) set the tone for Carpatho-Rusyn activity in the post-Com273

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munist Czech Republic, a tone that was inspired by a nostalgic longing to recall one’s youth in interwar Subcarpathian Rus’. They did this mainly through conferences, the re-publication of Czech-language books about the region, and most especially the publication of a quarterly journal called Podkarpatská Rus. Their work was certainly important, particularly because both Hořec and Pilatova were able to get coverage of historic and present-day developments in Subcarpathian Rus’ and 169. Jaromír Hořec (far right) with (from Transcarpathia placed in the Czech the left): Mykhailo Almashii, Dymytrii media, whether television, radio, Pop, Paul Robert Magocsi, Vasyl Turoknewspapers, or journals. Although Hetesh, and Volodymyr Mykyta before motivated by nostalgia, Hořec was the newly erected statue of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, Castle Hill, Prague, also sensitive to the need to pressure Czech Republic (October 2001) Czech government officials to take an interest in their country’s former eastern province. He was opposed by the Society’s mostly Czech-centered members, but nevertheless enthusiastically pushed for and achieved membership in the World Congress of Rusyns. The Society of Friends of Subcarpathian Rus’, representing the Czech Republic, was the first organization to be accepted following the five original organizations (representing Slovakia, Poland, Ukraine, Yugoslavia, and the United States) that created the Congress in 1991.

***** The most problematic of all country delegations in the World Congress was the Society of Carpatho-Rusyns which represented Ukraine. Relatively soon after its establishment in February 1990, the Society lost its most prominent and respected leaders, Uzhhorod’s chief architect Mykhailo Tomchanii, university professor Ivan Hranchak, and Mukachevo’s gymnasium director Mykhailo Popovych. Among those who stayed on were the 274

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170. Paul Robert Magocsi and Ivan Turianytsia at the Fourth World Congress of Rusyns, Budapest, Hungary (May 1997).

firebrand and opinionated writers Volodymyr Fedynyshynets and Vasyl Petrovai, the openly aggressive university professor Ivan Turianytsia, and the increasingly intolerant and suspect Orthodox priest Dymytrii Sydor. In effect, the Society of Carpatho-Rusyns came to resemble an all-male club dominated by rough looking and abrasive Soviet types, who often fought among themselves in public. Their internal factionalism and often crude behavior created a very negative impression on delegates from other member countries of the World Congress. Most problematic, Ukraine’s delegation was the only one to have a decidedly political agenda. This became clear already during the Second World Congress which was held in 1993 at the Lemko Region spa of Krynica-Zdrój in Poland.

At that gathering, Ukraine’s delegation was led by the recently elected chairman of the Society of Carpatho-Rusyns, Ivan Turianytsia. Turianytsia was a professor of microbiology at the University of Uzhhorod who had gained a degree of prestige at that institution because of several international patents which he held and from which he earned a respectable additional income. Soon after becoming head of the Society of Carpatho-Rusyns, Turianytsia began to cooperate with two other university colleagues: Ivan Kryvskyi, an accomplished physicist, and Ivan Pop, an 275

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171. Ivan Pop at the Fifth World Congress of Rusyns, Uzhhorod, Ukraine (June 1999).

historian who had made a very successful career at the Soviet Union’s Institute of Slavic Studies in Moscow until 1992 when he was invited to return to his native Subcarpathian Rus’/Transcarpathia. Because of his renown as a scholar from Moscow, Pop was offered the directorship of the newly created Carpathian Studies Institute at the University of Uzhhorod. That such a research institute could come into being at a state institution in Ukraine was because the rector at the time, Vasyl Slyvka, was

sympathetic to the Rusyn cause.

All three professorial activists—Turianytsia, Kryvskyi, Pop—were united by one overriding characteristic—an almost visceral hatred for Ukraine and Ukrainians. I was always very uncomfortable when having to hear their verbal tirades, and not only because I was a professional Ukrainianist. Anyone who expresses hatred, not to mention xenophobic hatred, against an entire people (whichever people it may be) is the kind of person to stay away from. Alas, these Uzhhorod university professors, together with the jurist Petr Hodmash and the writers Volodymyr Fedynyshynets, Ivan Petrovtsi, and Vasyl Petrovai (recently arrived from Mariupol) were the public face of the Carpatho-Rusyn movement in Ukraine during the early 1990s. Like it or not, if we from other countries wanted to help promote the movement in Ukraine’s Transcarpathia these were the kind of people with whom we had no choice but to work.

Not that all Carpatho-Rusyn activists in Transcarpathia were xenophobic anti-Ukrainians. The choral director Mykhailo Almashii, the painter Volodymyr Mykyta, and the computer engineer Igor Kercha were highly cultivated and gentle souls who would not let a negative word about any one person or nationality cross their lips. Most important, each was committed to cultural activity and each made concrete contributions to the Carpatho-Rusyn movement. Almashii revived folk 276

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172. Mykhailo Almashii addressing the Dukhnovych Society, Uzhhorod (July 2005).

and religious music through choral concerts throughout Transcarpathia, always emphasizing its Carpatho-Rusyn and not “Transcarpathian” or Ukrainian aspects. Mykyta continued to carry on in his new works the traditions of the interwar Subcarpathian School of Painting (Bokshai, Erdelyi, Manailo) of which he was a direct descendent. Meanwhile Kercha, who dabbled in poetry and elementary pedagogical tools for yet to exist Rusyn-language schools or classes, carried out what others talked about but were unable to achieve. Without any fanfare, the remarkably unassuming and self-deprecating Kercha worked quietly for over a decade to produce single-handedly and then publish (without asking anyone for money) four volumes of a Rusyn-Russian (58,000 words) and Russian-Rusyn (65,000 words) dictionary.

Finally, there was also the much-admired pediatrician, Dr. Yevhen Zhupan. Aside from his successful medical practice and work as hospital director in Mukachevo, Zhupan was a long-time deputy to the elected Transcarpathian Regional Assembly (Oblasna rada) in Uzhhorod. He was the first to call on fellow deputies in that body to recognize CarpathoRusyns as a distinct nationality.

I especially appreciated all my encounters with these sophisticated individuals. For me they represented the best of what it meant to be Carpatho-Rusyn, exhibiting cultural traits they undoubtedly learned 277

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from their parents, relatives, and early schooling during the last years of interwar Czechoslovakia and the World War II-era Hungarian regime.

And even if some of them were born and formed under Soviet rule, they knew what it meant not to act like a crude Soviet (sovok).

***** As for the others who played at politics, Ivan Turianytsia was for173. Igor Kercha, Uzhhorod, Ukraine tunate to have Ivan Pop as histor(2007). ical advisor and Petro Hodmash as legal consultant. Both Pop and Hodmash authored, or contributed substantially to, the many memoranda issued by the Society of Carpatho-Rusyns, which were sent to the governments of Ukraine, Russia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the United States, the European Union, the United Nations, and the Organization of Unrepresented [by the United Nations] Nations and Peoples.

Ivan Turianytsia reminded me of the interwar Carpatho-Rusyn ac-

174. Yevhen Zhupan (right) with Nina Karpachova—Ombudsman and Steven Chepa, Office of the Ombudsman of Ukraine, Kyiv, Ukraine (June 2007).

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tivist, Stepan Fentsyk. Both were multi-talented. Fentsyk held several doctorates and was an ordained Greek Catholic priest until he left the priesthood in the early 1930s. He was also a professional musician. But politics became Fentsyk’s passion, since he thought that was the best route to secure a place as leader (vozhd) of what he designated as his “Carpatho-Russian” people. He did have some political success, especially when Hungary re-annexed Subcarpathia on the eve of World War II, but he ended his career literally on the gallows, executed by hanging in 1946 on orders from the Soviet People’s Court in Uzhhorod for collaboration with the fascist enemy.

Just as ambitious, but in the post-Communist era, was the microbiologist and university professor Ivan Turianytsia, who also fancied himself as a poet and musician. I remember when Turianytsia got on stage and serenaded us during the cultural programs at several world congresses. I guess he thought that his own patriotic Rusyn lyrics would be enhanced if he crooned them in the style of Frank Sinatra. Quite embarrassing, to say the least.

And yet one could not help but be intrigued by Turianytsia’s mercurial personality. At one moment he would be ranting in Rusyn or Russian (never Ukrainian) and using the foulest language to denigrate the fledgling Ukrainian state and, in particular, Galician Ukrainians living in Transcarpathia. And yet he could in an instant, without hesitation, turn to someone else (certainly always to me) and speak in the calmest tones and rational manner. Ivan was clearly a great performer who knew exactly what he was doing.

When petitions with rational arguments calling for recognition of Carpatho-Rusyns as a distinct nationality and for the implementation of the 1991 referendum on autonomy failed to garner any positive response—actually no response—from the Ukrainian authorities in Kyiv, Turianytsia decided on another tactic to gain attention. Grounded in historic and legal arguments provided by Pop and Hodmash, the Society of Carpatho-Rusyns proclaimed in May 1993 the formation of a Provisional Government of Subcarpathian Rus’. Almost immediately it set out to negotiate with the authorities in Kyiv about the legal status of Subcarpathian Rus’.

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175. Gabor Hattinger (left) with “officials” of the Provisional Government of Subcarpathian Rus’: Tibor Ondyk—Minister of Foreign Affairs; Ivan Turianytsia— Premier; Vladimir Mohorita—plenipotentiary for Slovakia.

stored immediately, after which the region’s future relationship with Ukraine would be negotiated and spelled out in a treaty between two equal partners: autonomous Subcarpathian Rus’ and Ukraine. Professor Turianytsia “was chosen” premier of the Provisional Government.

Alongside him was the completely unknown native of Subcarpathian Rus’ living in Bratislava, Tibor Ondyk, who was designated minister of foreign affairs, while the writer Vasylii Sochka, and the physicians Yurii Dumnych and Yevhen Zhupan took up other ministerial posts. The Provisional Government proclaimed that the 1945 Soviet annexation of Subcarpathian Rus’ was invalid according to international law, while foreign affairs minister Ondyk accused the Ukrainian government of carrying out “cultural genocide” against its Carpatho-Rusyn population.

At first glance, the creation of a Provisional Government may have seemed silly, even a joke. Turianytsia got what he wanted, however. The government of Ukraine finally took note of its Carpatho-Rusyn problem and responded. It had no choice, since the international press in Europe and North America, as well as government officials in the Eu280

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176. Timothy Garton Ash’s influential article, “Hail Ruthenia,” in the New York Review of Books (22 April 1999).

ropean Union and especially neighboring Slovakia, Hungary, and the Czech Republic took the Provisional Government’s claims seriously. The Russian Federation’s international mouthpiece, Moscow News, informed its reader’s that the Provisional Government of Subcarpathian Ruthenia had a permanent representative in Moscow in the person of Aleksander Savchuk.

None other than the leading chronicler and analyst of the Revolutions of 1989, the international public intellectual from Great Britain, Timothy Garton Ash, took up the Carpatho-Rusyn question. He travelled to 281

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Bratislava and, through the good offices of the Slovak political scientist of Carpatho-Rusyn background, Aleksander Duleba, travelled eastward to Prešov and Uzhhorod, where he met with Turianytsia. Armed with notes from these personal encounters, Garton Ash wrote in a tongue-incheek style an otherwise serious article, “Hail Ruthenia!,” which first appeared in the prestigious New York Review of Books (1999). The piece was picked up and republished in the original or translation in several authoritative press organs, among them Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Slovakia’s Sme. Ash wrote with grudging respect for Turianytsia, whom he called “a gifted demagogue” fighting for his Ruthenian people who would “be much better off governing themselves.” At the time, I wrote a rebuttal to Ash (alas published in only minor community publications) in which I took him to task for what I thought was a style overly laden with a heavy dose of British irony, even sarcasm. As is his wont, Ash responded with a gracious acknowledgement of my observations. We remained professional colleagues. More to the point, Timothy Garton Ash did, indeed, bring the post-1989 Carpatho-Rusyn national revival to the attention of a large segment of the movers and shakers in the European and American political world.

Ukraine’s officials and media saw in all this attention the possibility of a new Bosnia-Hercegovina or Kosovo (alluded to by Ash) arising in Transcarpathia. That prompted fears—however unfounded—that the Carpatho-Rusyn phenomenon might turn violent. “Foreign Minister” Ondyk made things worse (or, from his perspective, better) when he contacted the extreme nationalist, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who now seemed to take up the Carpatho-Rusyn cause in the halls of Russia’s parliament.

Clearly, Turianytsia was riding high. At the Fourth World Congress of Rusyns held in Budapest in May 1997, we were deluged at a news conference by a bevy of Hungarian and Budapest-based international correspondents. I was overjoyed with the attention given to Carpatho-Rusyns. But no one seemed even remotely interested in the achievements on cultural and educational fronts, among which was codification of the Rusyn language in Slovakia announced just a year or so earlier in Bratislava.

Instead, all the attention and questions were directed to “Prime Minis282

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177. Ivan Turianytsia (right of the column) fielding questions from reporters in Hungary during the Fourth World Congress of Rusyns in Budapest (May 1997).

ter” Turianytsia in the hope that he would reveal what his “government” was about to do next. Similarly, when Tom Trier and Professor Stefan Troebst organized Carpatho-Rusyn related events in Denmark, Germany, and Ukraine (Uzhhorod), they insisted that Professor Turianytsia be present. From their perspective, what he was doing was of greatest significance for the future of the Carpatho-Rusyn movement, if not for the political stability of central Europe and countries that had a common border with Ukraine.

***** Other political options had been discussed earlier, although Turianytsia seemed not to be involved with them. Some Czech politicians, most notably the leader of the short-lived Republican party, Miroslav Sládek, already in 1990 called upon the still existing Czechoslovakia to consider seriously accepting Subcarpathian Rus’ back into its domain. But with the break-up of that country at the outset of 1993, the Czechoslovak option was no longer feasible, even for unrealistic extremists like Sládek and his sympathizers in Subcarpathia.

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178. Front page of the official organ of the Republican party of Czechoslovakia with a banner over a map of Subcarpathian Rus’ that reads “Back to Czechoslovakia,” Republika (Prague), 18 October 1990.

in the fall and winter months of 1993-1994 he had been a guest of Gabor Hattinger in Budapest. Among other things, Turianytsia was avidly studying Hungarian, which he eventually was able to speak quite well. I remem284

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ber also being hosted and sleeping in a room adjacent to Turianytsia’s in the building provided by the government of Hungary for the Hattinger-led Organization of Rusyns in Hungary. Our conversations—or monologues pronounced by Turianytsia well into the night—were filled with predictions that Ukraine was a failed state about to collapse and that ostensibly Hungary was prepared to take back under its wing Subcarpathia, at the very least to protect the Hungarian minority living there.

These were all pipe dreams. No one in Europe sympathized with changing international borders. Hungary, moreover, as a country hoping to enter the European Union, was not about to threaten that goal by getting bogged down in international adventures along its eastern border with Ukraine. Clearly, in the 1990s, Hungary was still dominated by liberal democrats of pro-European ilk, not right-wing politicians who later were to call into question the borders established back in 1920 by what for them was the odious and shameful Treaty of Trianon.

Then there was the skepticism natural to many Carpatho-Rusyn activists, especially in Slovakia and Poland. Was Turianytsia an agent-provocateur of the Ukrainian security services who was undertaking extremist activity like the Provisional Government with the goal to compromise the Carpatho-Rusyn movement and to confuse and split its supporters in various countries?

I, too, was faced with doubts about Turianytsia. I had spent many hours with him in Transcarpathia as well as at meetings in Budapest.

Was he a somewhat unrealistic Carpatho-Rusyn patriot, or was he a deliberately calculating instrument of Ukraine’s security services? I really didn’t know. I was, however, forced from time to time to take a stand on this matter.

In October 1996, on the fortieth anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution, the Hungarian community in Toronto organized a large-scale commemorative event, to which I got myself invited. The honored after-dinner speaker was Hungary’s Foreign Minister at the time, the highly respected historian Géza Jeszenszky, who took me aside into an adjacent empty room. No introductory pleasantries on his part. Just one question: “Professor Magocsi, what do you think? Is Ivan Turianytsia an agent of Ukraine’s secret services?” This was an obviously serious ques285

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tion which required a careful answer. After reflecting a few moments, I responded: “No, I think not. I believe he is a patriot trying to do his best for the Carpatho-Rusyn cause, even if his methods are questionable and his political goals somewhat naïve.” Despite subsequent actions that were certainly compromising, I remain to this day unsure whether or not Ivan Turianytsia was a provocateur working for the Ukrainian authorities.

Less sympathetic on this score was the opinion of another one of my colleagues, the literary historian from Prešov University, Liubytsa Babota. I had gotten to know her very well when she spent, on separate occasions, nearly two academic years at the University of Toronto. During the many hours that we spoke, the topic of Ivan Turianytsia came up.

The staunchly Ukrainophile Babota’s uncle on her mother’s side was the former official in the 1938-1939 autonomous entity Carpatho-Ukraine, Vikentii Shandor. Her first cousin on that side of the family was Liuba née Shandor, Ivan Turianytsia’s wife. Babotova disliked her cousin’s husband, Ivan, whom she knew through family connections. She was convinced he was a “fake” Carpatho-Rusyn working for Ukraine’s authorities. I guess the jury on this matter is still out.

***** Turianytsia wanted to take over the World Congress of Rusyns and transform it into an instrument for his political ventures. But Vasyl Turok was as strong, if not a more steadfast personality, and he was not about to be pushed aside by Turianytsia. A kind of showdown occurred at the 1997 World Congress in Budapest. Turianytsia was being promoted by the Congress host and his close friend, Gabor Hattinger, while at the same time he was being undermined by the arrival of a second delegation from Ukraine led by the equally fiery—and somewhat unstable—Ivan Petrovtsii.

I remember, as a neutral figure, having to take a firm hand in order to quell the dispute between Turianytsia and Petrovtsii at the meeting of the Congress executive, the World Council. In the end, both Turianytsia and Petrovtsii agreed—or were forced—to compromise, so that the scandal did not spill over into the Congress proceedings which ended on a peaceful note.

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***** No sooner had Turianytsia and Petrovtsii left Budapest, however, than the controversy between them was renewed with even greater force and rancor. In effect, these two figures were but symbols of a deeper problem— the widespread internal divisiveness among the various self-styled leaders and factions in Transcarpathia. The never-ending insults hurled at each other played right into the hands of the Ukrainian authorities, who were delighted at the resultant ineffectiveness of the Carpatho-Rusyn movement.

They may have turned Turianytsia into an agent provocateur, but they did not have to encourage Petrovtsii’s naturally destructive tendencies.

Petrovtsii prided himself on being the enfant terrible of the Carpatho-Rusyn literary world. His first “revolutionary” act was to publish a collection of poems (Nashî spivankŷ/Our Songs, 1996) in which he depicted Galician-Ukrainian nationalists past and present as “the worst fascists in the world” and hurled insults rendered in the most foul language against independent Ukraine’s first and second presidents, Leonid Kravchuk and Leonid Kuchma. The resultant scandal prompted condemnations of Petrovtsii and of “Rusyn separatism” in Ukraine’s national parliament.

On the one hand, Petrovtsii brought attention to Carpatho-Rusyns; on the other, his means proved embarrassing to most activists in Transcarpathia who were shocked by what they considered his uncivilized, crude, and immoral behavior. I tended to agree with them. Petrovtsii was, so to speak, the loosest of canons.

Meanwhile, Turianytsia was trying to maintain his leadership over the Society of Carpatho-Rusyns as part of an ongoing struggle against various factions and rivals. All these machinations finally came to an end at the outset of the twenty-first century. Suddenly, and without any warning, he wrote an open letter to President Kuchma declaring that he was ending the Provisional Government of Subcarpathian Rus’. Turianytsia proclaimed that his move was only “temporary,” although it was indeed final.

Speculation about his motivation for such an “unpatriotic” act tended to paint Turianytsia in the darkest colors. Perhaps he was about to be indicted for crimes against the state. After all, the Provisional Government was by its very nature separatist and dismissive of the legitimacy of Ukrainian rule.

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In the end, Turianytsia was not indicted. He simply resigned as chairman of the Society of Carpatho-Rusyns in 2002 and disappeared for close to a year. He finally resurfaced in Bratislava, where he was said to be teaching and in the process of obtaining Slovak citizenship. My own suspicions of Turianytsia as an agent-provocateur on behalf of the Ukrainian authorities were now confirmed. Despite all the sound and fury he produced in the 1990s, Professor Ivan Turianytsia did little to advance the Carpatho-Rusyn cause in Ukraine, or anywhere else.

***** Even before Turianytsia left the scene, another activist appeared in the person of the Orthodox priest, Dymytrii Sydor. I first met this dynamic and charismatic long-bearded priest in the autumn of 1994. My Harvard monograph, The Shaping of a National Identity, had just been published in a Ukrainian translation.

I was invited by the publisher, Vasyl Kukhta, to take part in a book launch that was organized in Mukachevo. My wife Maria was with me. I was particularly anxious that she would see for herself how the Carpatho-Rusyn movement was unfolding in Transcarpathia and for her to meet some of its leaders—and now my friends—with whom I was working.

Among those friends, my closest at the time were the painter Volodymyr Mykyta and the writer Volodymyr Fedynyshynets, both of whom were exceptionally gracious toward Maria. Not so, however, the host of the book launch in Mukachevo, Professor Ivan Turianytsia.

The night before the launch, as we were returning from a wonderful evening in Mykyta’s studio, Turianytsia met Maria and me on the steps of Uzhhorod’s Hotel Druzhba where we were staying. Ivan was, as usual, in an agitated mood, the cause of which this time was the Ukrainian translation of my book which he was holding in his hand. He had marked up several passages and was particularly angry at my conclusion (written back in the mid-1970s), which suggested the demise of Rusynism and the inevitable victory of the Ukrainian orientation. This was Maria’s introduction to Professor Turianytsia, whose conduct was the polar opposite of what she had just experienced with Mykyta and Fedynyshynets.

Somewhat uncharacteristic was Maria’s reaction. Before I even said 288

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anything, she spoke in her native Rusyn, berating Turianytsia for insulting her husband who had already “done so much for the Rusyn cause.” Typical for Turianytsia was his immediate change of verbal tone and demeanor, which was now filled with profuse apologies for having lost his composure. Ivan was not unattractive and was full of manly charm which he thought would calm Maria. It did—to a degree.

179. Paul Robert Magocsi and Maria Early the following evening we Magocsi with Vasyl Kukhta and were at the book launch in MukacheOrthodox Bishop of Mukachevo, Efimii vo. There were about seventy-five (Shutak) (October 1994). people present, many of whom I had never met before. The most “authoritative” presence in the room was the retired educator and Carpatho-Rusyn cultural leader, Mykhailo Almashii, who praised the book. I believe the writer and local media figure Dmytro Keshelia was also present, although he said nothing.

The biggest surprise came toward the end of the proceedings, when a tall priest stood up to begin a monologue not about the book but rather about its author, Professor Magocsi. The priest compared Carpatho-Rusyns to the ancient Jews enslaved in Egypt who were finally led out of bondage by Moses. “Professor Magocsi is our Moses,” he said.

“And, like Moses, the professor from America has brought us to the borders of the Promised Land. By that act,” intoned the priest, “he has done for us the greatest of services. But from now on it is Carpatho-Rusyns who must take their fate into their own hands.” The priest who uttered those sentiments, as I found out later, was Father Dymytrii Sydor.

That evening we were hosted at the home of Professor Turianytsia and his charming wife. My wife Maria and Ivan seemed to have buried the hatchet from the night before, so that we had a wonderful evening in the presence of a few participants from the book launch. Although Father Sydor was not among them, I was going to encounter him again.

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***** According to generally accepted tradition, the World Congress of Rusyns was to take place every two years, sometime in May or June, in each of the countries that had an organization which was a member of the Congress. Following the First Congress in Slovakia, the Second was held in Poland (1993), the Third in Yugoslavia (1995). Turianytsia and the Society of Carpatho-Rusyns expected that the Congress would be held in what they considered the main homeland of our people, Subcarpathian Rus’. They were incensed when the Fourth Congress was held instead in Hungary (1997) and not Ukraine.

To be sure the Congress chairman Vasyl Turok and the leaders of other member organizations were skeptical of what they saw as the anarchic-like conditions which characterized the Carpatho-Rusyn community in Ukraine’s Transcarpathia. The situation there was only made worse by the political antics of Turianytsia. Nevertheless, he was determined that the Fifth Congress would be held in Uzhhorod.

Up until then each Congress was supported financially by local, regional, or national governmental bodies, whether in Slovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, or Hungary. In each of those cases, the governments of those states welcomed the Congress on their territory. Not so Ukraine, which not only did not recognize Carpatho-Rusyns as a distinct people, but as recently as 1996 had issued its Proposed Measures for “resolving” the Rusyn problem. In other words, Carpatho-Rusyns, in whatever country they lived, could identify themselves as such as long as they realized that Rusyns were a branch of Ukrainians and that their language was merely a dialectal form of Ukrainian.

Together with Vasyl Turok, I argued that the Fifth Congress could not take place in Uzhhorod until the governmental authorities in Ukraine would issue a formal statement that they welcomed us. We were not about “to sneak” into the country and conduct the Congress as if it were a private, semi-clandestine affair. Despite Turianytsia’s efforts, only three months remained before the Fifth Congress was to take place (May 1999) and we still had not heard from the Ukrainian government.

At this critical moment, in stepped Father Dymytrii Sydor. In early 290

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180. Father Dymytrii Sydor and Paul Robert Magocsi (June 1997).

1999 he and I met in Uzhhorod. He tried to convince me that the Congress must take place in Ukraine, arguing that the prestige and the very survival of the movement in Transcarpathia depended on it. He then asked if he could accompany me back to Prešov in order to make his case in person at a scheduled meeting of the World Council. Off we drove— he and I, together with his wife (the Orthodox matushka)—to Slovakia.

By the time we got across the border it was quite late, so I suggested we stop at my good friends, the Tymkovych brothers at the Basilian Greek Catholic Monastery in Trebišov, where Iosafat was the hegumen (abbot).

I knew already that the Orthodox zealot Sydor was very critical of the Greek Catholic Church, or, as he would say dismissively, “those Uniates.”

Hence, I was somewhat anxious regarding the encounter between Sydor and our two Greek Catholic Basilian hosts. That Sydor’s matushka (wife) was present made the encounter even more piquant, since no woman, we were told, had ever set foot inside the all-male monastic sanctuary. The Vatican-trained Tymkovyches were, however, already known for their “liberal” minded views, especially when it came to questioning church authorities. Perhaps their ultimate “unorthodox” act was to allow Father 291

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Sydor’s wife to spend the night inside the monastery.

In the end, we had a wonderful evening meal during which religious issues took second place to our real concerns: the Carpatho-Rusyn movement in Slovakia and Ukraine. Carpatho-Rusyn patriotism brought the Tymkovyches and Sydors together. I was very happy to have helped bridge the Orthodox-Greek Catholic gap.

The following day’s meeting in Prešov was much more challenging, since the World Council members who were present—Vasyl Turok from Slovakia, Andrei Kopcha from Poland, and myself—declared that we were not prepared to wait any longer for a response from Ukraine’s authorities and that alternative plans were being made to hold the Fifth Congress in the Czech Republic or, if necessary, in Slovakia. Father Dymytrii pleaded with us to stage the Congress in Uzhhorod. We responded that the head of the Society of Carpatho-Rusyns, Ivan Turianytsia, had compromised himself in the eyes of many fellow Carpatho-Rusyns both within and beyond Transcarpathia. I believe that a sexual scandal with one of his students was already unfolding to the public, and that only contributed further to a decline in his effectiveness as a leader. Father Dymytrii responded by saying that he would take full responsibility for organizing the Congress. In the end, he convinced us, so that the following morning he returned to Uzhhorod a happy man determined to fulfill his promise.

Vasyl Turok and Andrei Kopcha were still somewhat skeptical, but I was a bit more hopeful. Why? Unlike other activists in Transcarpathia, Father Dymytrii did have a real following. He was an Orthodox priest, who since 1991 headed the largest parish in Transcarpathia. Exceedingly ambitious, and with an almost mega-maniacal drive, he had set out to construct the largest cathedral-sized church in central Europe. And he succeeded. In the process he gathered around him thousands of parishioners who believed (of course with God’s help) in his super-human, if not supernatural, powers. They were prepared to support him in whatever way they could.

While I was uncomfortable with Father Sydor’s conservative religious views (he was trained in late Soviet times at the famed Moscow Theological Academy in Zagorsk), I became convinced of his dedication to 292

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the Carpatho-Rusyn cause. Most of our one-on-one conversations focused on the need to codify a Rusyn language variant for Transcarpathia and to produce a reliable Rusyn-oriented newspaper which he did do for several years as editor of Khrystiianska rodyna (The Christian Family, 1996-2002).

Not everyone in international Carpatho-Rusyn circles was, like me, taken in by Father Dymytrii’s charisma. I remember the first time Olena Duts-Faifer, the Carpatho-Rusyn “iron lady” from Poland (and herself a devout Orthodox believer) met Father Dymytrii. It was during the 1998 Rusyn Week in Copenhagen. As part of our visits to Danish institutions, we were brought to the Lutheran Cathedral Church (the Protestant denomination in which I was raised) that served the Danish royal family. I distinctly remember Father Dymytrii mentioning how uncomfortable he felt when entering this “uncanonical house” of Christian worship. More to the point was when we left the church and were outside in the courtyard of the royal palace. Olena said to me in reference to Sydor: “He is a maniacal Satanic figure. I never want to have anything to do with him.” A few years later, another young woman, Nadiya Kushko, who for most of her life before emigrating to Canada resided near the Uzhhorod church where her family were parishioners, joined me as a dinner guest in Father Dymytrii’s home within the cathedral complex. After what I thought was an exceedingly pleasant evening, Nadiya stopped me after leaving the church grounds and blurted out in shock: “I have just seen the devil.

And the devil is in the form of that priest Sydor.”

Notwithstanding all the emotional males among Carpatho-Rusyns (yours truly included), I could not understand Nadiya’s “irrational feminine” reaction. Aside from his Carpatho-Rusyn patriotism, I thought Father Dymytrii was exceedingly congenial. He had a wonderful sense of humor expressed in an unending stream of jokes, some of which were laden with sexual innuendo. He may have been critical of, but was careful not to openly denigrate, his “natural” enemies—Galician Ukrainians and Greek Catholics. And he was a most gracious host who loved to eat and drink well.

Father Dymytrii also had a penchant for ostentatiousness, not uncommon for a peasant boy who did well in life. He drove a new Mercedes 293

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and still maintained a house in the small town of Perechyn, where he had been the Orthodox parish priest before coming to Uzhhorod. When he hosted me there on one occasion, he could not help but introduce me to the two servants who were on hand to cook and serve us, and he was particularly anxious to show me the premises which included a rooftop American-style barbecue and an indoor swimming pool and sauna which we savored before joining his wife and daughters for dinner.

This was the first—and only—time that after a sauna I was offered a tied bunch of branches to self-flagellate. Of course, it was not to do penance but to stimulate one’s blood circulation.

Among Father Dymytrii’s numerous talents, including familiarity with modern technology (holding a university degree in computer science), he was a superb organizer as was evident in the Fifth World Congress of Rusyns. Although Ivan Turianytsia was still head of the Society of Carpatho-Rusyns and therefore the nominal host of the 1991 Fifth Congress, the entire “show” from beginning to end was carried out by Father Dymytrii.

With regard to logistics, he found the financial means to feed and house all the delegates for three days, drawing on his church kitchen staff to cook and serve all meals. He cooperated closely with the new director of the Carpathian Institute at Uzhhorod National University, Mykola Makara, to ensure that distinguished guests were present. Among them was the director of Ukraine’s State Bureau of Statistics in Kyiv, who assured the Congress audience that in the first census to be held in independent Ukraine the rubric Rusyn as a nationality category would be included. Would those promises be kept? No. The other honored guest from Kyiv was the academician Petro Tolochko, Ukraine’s most authoritative specialist on the history of medieval Kyivan Rus’, whom I had known personally from Soviet times.

Tolochko’s appearance at the Uzhhorod Congress was a real surprise.

Speaking in Russian, he began by proclaiming that finally he was among people who still called themselves Rusyn, that is, as he said: “Here in the Carpathians are the last descendants of the subject to which I have devoted my entire scholarly career, Kyivan Rus’. ” Some in the audience may have thought such comments were patronizing. Not so the Transcarpathian 294

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Rusyns, who were in awe at the academician’s pronouncements. On the other hand, the Lemko-Rusyn Congress delegate from Poland, Petro Trokhanovskii, took Tolochko to task for not emphasizing the White Croats (not the Rus’ of Kyiv) as the ancestors of Carpatho-Rusyns.

As at all previous World Congresses, I gave a keynote address at the opening plenary session that was couched not with requests but rather with expectations from Ukraine. With a sense of optimistic confidence, I declared: “Rusyns exist and will continue to exist in Subcarpathian Rus’ regardless of what certain Ukrainians or the Ukrainian government may think.”

But the culmination of the Fifth Congress came at the closing ceremonies which had shades of grandeur that one usually associates with the Olympics. After a series of dance ensembles and singers showed us the best of Subcarpathian Rusyn traditional folk culture, Father Sydor brought the house down with a rousing monologue—half-spoken, halfsung—which tore on the heartstrings of everyone in the audience. There had not been as much euphoria since the First World Congress of Rusyns a decade earlier in 1991. Clearly, the dominant figure in Transcarpathia’s Carpatho-Rusyn world was no longer Ivan Turianytsia. It was Father Dymytrii Sydor.

***** One of the reasons for the on-going controversies within the World Congress was its basic undemocratic structure. Aside from the fact that each country’s delegation had the same number of delegates (10) regardless of the size of the Carpatho-Rusyn population within a given country, only one organization represented each country. The principle—one organization for each country—was understandable when the Congress was established back in 1991. In those early years of the post-Communist Carpatho-Rusyn revival there was usually only one organization that existed in each country. But, as the movement evolved, each country came to have more than one Carpatho-Rusyn organization. Slovakia, alone, had perhaps ten by the time of the second (1993) and third (1995) Congresses.

Despite their often-valuable cultural work, these “other” organizations were not represented at the Congress unless one of the representatives 295

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181. World Council of Rusyns: (left to right) Agata Pilatova, Czech Republic; Gabor Hattinger, Hungary; Paul Robert Magocsi, United States; Vasyl Turok-Hetesh, Slovakia; Andrei Kopcha, Poland; Ivan Turianytsia, Ukraine; and Mikhal Varga, Yugoslavia (Bratislava, December 2000).

was asked to join the country’s Congress delegation. In other words, the composition of the delegation from Slovakia was decided by the head of the Rusyn Renaissance Society Vasyl Turok, Poland’s delegation by the Lemko Society head Andrei Kopcha, and Ukraine’s delegation by the Society of Carpatho-Rusyns’ head Ivan Turianytsia. Very often on the eve of each Congress there was a struggle within each country among the various individuals who felt he or she had a right to be invited as an official Congress delegate, regardless to which organization that person might belong. On the one hand, such struggles revealed that many Carpatho-Rusyns took the movement and World Congress seriously. On the other hand, the in-fighting produced unnecessary friction among activists, especially in Ukraine’s Transcarpathia.

I, as president of the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center, the organization which represented North America, was responsible for choosing our World Congress delegates. I would be lucky if I could convince one or two, let alone ten people, to pay for their own relatively expensive transatlantic airfare in order to get to some place in central Europe to which there usually were no direct flights. Considering these conditions, 296

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at the first three Congresses (Medzilaborce in Slovakia; Krynica in Poland, and Ruski Kerestur in Yugoslavia) there were, aside from myself, only one or two other Carpatho-Rusyn Americans in attendance.

Beginning with the Fourth Congress held in Budapest (1997) and most Congresses thereafter, we Americans managed to have delegations of seven, eight, or sometimes the full complement of ten delegates. With regard to the composition of our delegations, I was determined to introduce a more democratic system. Our North American delegation was to consist of the head of every Carpatho-Rusyn organization in the United States and Canada (whose number generally fluctuated between five and six), with the remaining slots going to known cultural activists among whom, pro forma, was the editor of The New Rusyn Times. In a sense, I created a representative umbrella group in which the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center had only one member.

I tried to convince other Congress member organizations to adopt the same principle, but I was basically unsuccessful. Ironically, the one place where we had partial success was in Ukraine—at least for a while.

Following the adoption of a Congress resolution, the North American principle was basically imposed on our brethren in Subcarpathian Rus’/

182. North American delegation at the V World Congress of Rusyns: (left to right) Orestes Mihaly, Susyn Mihalasky, Paul Best, Karen Varian, Walt Orange, Elaine Rusinko, Katie Mihaly, and Paul Robert Magocsi, Uzhhorod, Ukraine (June 1999) 297

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Transcarpathia. Father Sydor was receptive to the idea and proposed calling the umbrella group the Council, or Diet (Soim) of Subcarpathian Rus’. Each of the five organizations in Transcarpathia at the time would be allowed two delegates as part of Ukraine’s delegation to the World Congress. From the very beginning Ivan Turianytsia rejected the proposal, so that at the next Congress in 2001, Transcarpathia’s Soim had only eight delegates: in other words, two each from four organizations but 183. Leading Transcarpathian activist Ivan Turianytsia on the cusp of his none from Ukraine’s original foundreplacement by Father Dymytrii Sydor ing-member Congress organization, (back right), Fifth World Congress of Rusyns, Uzhhorod, Ukraine (June 1999). the Society of Carpatho-Rusyns.

Turianytsia’s boycott played into the hands of Father Sydor who, through the Soim, became the effective head of Ukraine’s delegation to the World Congress. His prestige in Transcarpathia was higher than ever, in particular after his stunning performance at the 1999 Fifth World Congress in Uzhhorod. And yet Sydor’s position, like that of any leader in the ever-unstable Carpatho-Rusyn community in Transcarpathia, was never secure. As explained below, within a few years he and “his” Soim were, with my strong encouragement, pushed out of the World Congress and replaced by two younger rivals, Valerii Padiak and Mykola Bobynets.

In-fighting among Carpatho-Rusyns was not limited to Ukraine. The situation was as bad in Slovakia. One might say it was even worse. Why? While in Transcarpathia the in-fighting occurred between individuals who headed organizations that had little or no funding and therefore conducted little concrete activity, in Slovakia several organizations, first and foremost the Rusyn Renaissance Society, often had substantive budgets based on access to funding from the state for its national minorities.

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ganizations competed for a fixed annual sum of state money, it was in the interest of any given organization to denigrate the work of “rival” organizations also applying for state monies. Denigrating a rival organization often meant denigrating its leaders. As a result, the competitive grant system inevitably produced on-going internal squabbling and conflict among Slovakia’s Carpatho-Rusyn organizations to the overall detriment of the movement.

The struggle over funding, it should be noted, did not have a personal angle. In other words, no Carpatho-Rusyn leader—at least in Slovakia and Poland—got rich from being a cultural activist. In fact, most activists were of quite modest means and often had to contribute funds out of their own pocket to sustain the activity of their organization during hard times. Even if the issue was not personal financial gain, the conflicts between individuals over principles, tactics, and strategy were no less fierce.

The worst example of such fierceness as it played out in Slovakia was related to the appearance, so to speak, of a new guy on the block, Yan Lypynskyi/Jan Lipinsky. In the revolutionary year 1989, Lypynskyi was still a university student in Bratislava and did not take part in any of the Carpatho-Rusyn activities that unfolded in those early years, such as the First World Congress, the First Congress of the Rusyn Language, or the creation of the Rusyn Renaissance Society. He did begin to show up at some events in the late 1990s, and it was there that he and I met.

I was always open to the idea of getting younger people involved in the movement and, therefore, it was not long before he and I developed a working relationship, dare I say friendship, based on our common interest in promoting the Carpatho-Rusyn movement. I believe it was Lypynskyi who organized some of the early public talks I gave for the Carpatho-Rusyn community in Bratislava.

Lypynskyi himself was born and raised in a Carpatho-Rusyn village in the Spish region, whose Rusyn speakers were easily identifiable by their rapid mode of speech tainted with the Polish-like pronunciation sh for the phoneme s. He attended university in Slovakia’s capital and largest city, Bratislava. There the Rusyn village boy Yanko, as he was popularly known, completed a master’s program in computer science, which gave 299

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him the right to use the title before his name “Ing.” (engineer). Pleased with his own success, Yanko decided to remain in the “big city” and not return to the proverbial village farm. Not surprisingly, Prešov in eastern Slovakia was too small and provincial for the ambitious Lypynskyi. At some point he landed a job heading the office of communications for the city of Bratislava’s police department. This allowed him access to personal information about individuals not only in Bratislava but throughout Slovakia.

Lypynskyi was not only self-confident, but often arrogant and, as it turned out, mean-spirited. He liked to point to his achievements organizing Carpatho-Rusyn community events as co-founder (and leading figure) in the Society of Rusyn Intelligentsia in Slovakia. In conversations with me, Lypynskyi continually juxtaposed the successful achievements of “his” organization in Bratislava to the “lazy,” ineffective Carpatho-Rusyn activists in Prešov. He dismissed Vasyl Turok as a proverbial drunkard but reserved his greatest anger and hatred for Aleksander (Sasha) Zozuliak, the editor-in-chief of the Rusyn Renaissance Society’s publications and Turok’s trusted right-hand man as secretary of the World Congress. While Lypynskyi and I were on cordial terms, he knew of my great respect for the Prešov-based Turok, Zozuliak, and the scholars Vasyl Yabur, Yurii Panko, and Anna Plishkova who were busy creating the fundamentals for a university-level discipline in Carpatho-Rusyn Studies.

I’ll never forget an encounter that Lypynskyi and I had while conversing during a walk toward the Dukhnovych Theater. He railed against all the Carpatho-Rusyn activists in Prešov, who according to him were all do-nothing incompetents. As if taking on the role of a savior, he, Lypynskyi, was going to show them how to get things done and advance the status of Carpatho-Rusyns where it counted, in Slovakia’s governmental circles. When we finally reached the theater he stopped and looked at me with mean, steely eyes: “Zozuliak has to go. Mark my words. I’m going to destroy him.”

That, indeed, is what Lypynskyi set out to do, making it one of his main activities for at least the first decade of the twenty-first century.

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184. Paul Robert Magocsi, Mariia Dupkanych Khoma, and Yan Lypynskyi, Dukhnovych Theater, Prešov, Slovakia (February 2000).

and continued to work very closely with Zozuliak on publication projects and in the World Congress, Lypynskyi stopped communicating with me. We actually did not speak for nearly the next two decades until sometime in 2019.

Working in Bratislava, Lypynskyi managed to get himself appointed as an advisor for Carpatho-Rusyn matters on several different government committees, especially the board that allotted funding to Rusyn cultural organizations and publications. From such a position he managed to reduce substantially the annual grants given to the periodicals Narodnŷ novynkŷ and Rusyn. Because of such tactics, both those serials edited

by Zozuliak almost ceased publication. In fact, they were able to survive only because the laid-off editorial staff signed up for unemployment benefits while continuing to work clandestinely for both publications.

Meanwhile, Zozuliak managed to acquire donations from individual subscribers and, through me, funds from the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center and individual Rusyn-American donors.

I was convinced—although without any concrete proof—that Lypynskyi also tried to make life difficult by providing the police and border authorities with the names of a few persons who were “possibly dangerous” to the Slovak state. Among such persons were Vasyl Turok and 301

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me. We were easy targets, since both of us crossed in and out of Slovakia frequently—Vasyl on tours with the Dukhnovych Theater, I on visits to the country from abroad.

Lypynskyi knew quite well how bureaucratic systems function. No accusation was needed. All that a bureaucrat with access to a data bank had to do was punch in a name, let’s say Turok or Magocsi. The result? That person was not only entered but “get stuck” in the system. This meant that a Slovakian police officer or border guard, when routinely punching in those names, would immediately see that they were flagged and needed further attention—in other words, clearance from the central data bank. Hence, each time the Dukhnovych Theater bus crossed the border, the entire company would be delayed because Turok’s name would come up as a person who needed to be checked further.

I, too, had more than one such experience. The first occurred on an overnight train from Prague to Košice in eastern Slovakia. I was in a sleeping cabin with two other foreign travelers, I believe from England.

Sometime around two o’clock in the morning, when we reached the border of Slovakia, I was woken up from a deep sleep by a border guard who entered our cabin. Seeing the name in my passport, he asked me to get dressed, take all my baggage, and leave the train. There I stood on the platform in the middle of the night. About twenty minutes later, the border guard returned with my passport and said I could get back on the train. When I entered my cabin, the startled English guys were terrified, thinking that I was some kind of dangerous agent. All that inconvenience for nothing.

A few months later, the next time I took the Prague-Košice train, I was sure to do so during the day. After a pleasant midday meal in the dining car, the train reached the border with Slovakia. I was at least fortified with a good meal and red wine. Sure enough, the scenario was repeated.

I was ordered to take my baggage and leave the train. This time it was daylight outside and relatively warm. The wait turned out to be much longer, close to forty-five minutes. I asked the border guard why I was removed from the train and how I was to get to Košice if it left. He curtly responded that I could wait and catch the next train in six hours. I protested, but to no avail.

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Fortunately, the train did not move from the station while I sat on the small bench along the platform. Finally, the border guard returned, this time with a more friendly and polite mien. He apologized for the delay and said I could go. Since at that moment I was standing near the locomotive, I could hear distinctly the engineer who leaned out of his window and asked the border guard with a note of sarcasm: “Can we leave now?” I reboarded the train and off we went.

How ridiculous to make an entire twenty-or-so-car passenger train wait nearly an hour, all because Lypynskyi probably had slipped my name into the system as “a person of interest.” I should note that all these incidents were happening not in Communist Czechoslovakia but during the post-1989 era of the so-called independent democratic state of Slovakia on the eve of its entrance into the European Union.

After this second instance I was determined to do something. Immediately upon returning home to Canada, I wrote the Slovak ambassador in Ottawa whom I knew personally. I complained to him about how I, as a friend of independent Slovakia, was being harassed at the border as if we were still in the old Communist days.

Not long after, I bumped into Lypynskyi who was in Prešov at some kind of event taking place at the Dukhnovych Theater. I was livid at just seeing his arrogant overconfident demeanor when we happened to bump into each other in the doorway that led to the foyer. Surrounded and jostled by others in the audience, I gave him no greeting but simply said: “So, Yanko, who do you think is more influential in present-day Slovakia, the minister of foreign affairs or the minister of interior?” With a puzzled look, he responded: “What do you mean?” As I turned and walked away, I uttered in a sarcastic tone: “You know exactly what I mean.” Realistically, I thought to myself, the interior minister probably had more influence, although after sending my letter to the Slovak ambassador in Canada my name must have been deleted because I never was harassed again.

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185. Paul Robert Magocsi (left), Linda Mastilíř (center) with Ambassador Miroslav MikoláŠik (second from right), Embassy of Slovakia, Ottawa, Canada (April 2000)

his participation in several government committees, he also showed up at every World Congress beginning with the fifth one in 1999, although he never spoke. He just observed and obviously recorded in his head all that was going on: who was there, what they said, and who met with whom. He looked and acted like the classic shpitzer (informer) from the Communist era. And upon a shpitzer we spit.

Perhaps the lowest level to which Lypynskyi stooped was connected with the phenomenon called lustrace, which derives from the Latin lustratio (a purification by sacrifice) or, more prosaically, to cast light upon, or to uncover the truth. Soon after the fall of Communist rule in central Europe, each former Soviet satellite country faced the dilemma of how to reckon with the thousands of officials and ordinary citizens who were part of the pre-1989 repressive totalitarian regimes that were overthrown. Each country dealt with lustrace in its own way.

Most post-Communist governments set up institutes of national memory that gathered archival materials on Communist leaders and on those who cooperated with the system willingly or unwillingly. Numerous Carpatho-Rusyn activists, whether of pro-Rusyn or pro-Ukrainian orientation, had secret police files that were now accessible to public scrutiny.

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The ustrace commission was responsible for investigating potential and real collaborators of the former Communist regime. I could not be touched because I was a dual U.S. and Canadian citizen not born, or residing, in Slovakia, even though I was listed as an agent of the former Czechoslovak Security Services (ŠtB). And, as I later found out, I had a file of over 300 single-spaced typed pages. If not me, certainly citizens of Slovakia could, and indeed were, investigated.

Slovakia’s lustrace commission honed in on none other than the highly respected Greek Catholic priest and Rusyn-language translator of religious texts, Father Frantishek Krainiak. Lypynskyi knew very well that Father Krainiak had been under close surveillance by the Czechoslovak secret services in the 1980s and was clearly not a supporter, but opponent of the Communist regime. Yet, when asked to inquire among his government contacts and perhaps put in a good word, Lypynskyi refused to get involved or even question the commission’s proposal to investigate Father Krainiak.

Such investigations caused terrible stress not only for the person being targeted but also for his or her family. In effect, Lypynskyi was sending

186. Yan Lypynskyi (far right) praying alongside Father Frantishek Krainiak together with (from the right) Paul Robert Magocsi, Mykhal Turok-Hetesh (center), Fedor Vitso, Aleksander Franko, Petro Krainiak, Sr., and Pavel Dupkanych, Good Friday Eve, Medzilaborce, Slovakia (February 2000).

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a message that all Carpatho-Rusyn activists, who for whatever reason he did not like, could likely expect to experience lustrace. I remember how Vasyl Khoma—the respected literary critic and former diplomat in Communist Czechoslovakia who became an outspoken supporter of the Carpatho-Rusyn movement after 1989— turned petrified at the thought that he might be called before the lustrace commission.

187. Vasyl Khoma In the end, none of Lypynskyi’s enemies like Vasyl Turok and Aleksander Zozuliak was subjected to lustrace.

After all, neither was ever a member of the Communist party or a fellow traveler. Only the unlucky Father Krainiak was forced to go through a lustrace “trial,” after which he was fully exonerated of any cooperation or wrongdoing. But at what cost? All his mental suffering and anguish was abetted by none other than a fellow Carpatho-Rusyn, Yan Lypynskyi.

Even some young people got caught up in Lypynskyi’s scheming. A particularly unfortunate example was Alena Blŷkhova/Blichová, a recent university graduate who was slated to become a language instructor and researcher at the newly founded Institute of Rusyn Language and Culture at Prešov University. Armed with his long-standing ire for activists in eastern Slovakia, Lypynskyi hoped to undermine the institute’s status by spreading suspicions among government functionaries in Bratislava about alleged misappropriation of funds. He manipulated the gentle and somewhat naïve Blŷkhova into providing him with information about finances that were discussed at an institute meeting at which Blŷkhova was present.

Although nothing compromising was found, the institute director Anna Plishkova asked me and the rector of the university what to do about such a breach of confidence. I knew Alena as a very serious student and excellent native Rusyn speaker and writer. For that reason, I counseled hearing Alena’s side of the story. She, however, was incensed 306

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188. Alena Blŷkhova, Slovakia (third from right) with other Carpatho-Rusyn youth activists; (far left) Slavko Zagorskii, Poland; (second from right) Viorica Petrytska, Sighet, Romania (June 2007).

at the very idea that she was suspected of any wrongdoing and refused to discuss the matter with the institute’s director. For his part, the rector reminded Plishkova that loyalty was essential in any organization, especially a new one.

As a result, Alena Blŷkhova’s university contract was not renewed. She left Prešov, taught for a while at an elementary school in central Slovakia, and then moved to Bratislava, started a family, and permanently left the academic and pedagogical world. I maintained contact with her, and six months after the incident had a sit-down. She did not deny having a brief telephone conversation with Lypynskyi but was psychologically devastated that her word and person were mistrusted by her own people. What a loss, I thought, for Carpatho-Rusyn studies in Slovakia. The talented Alena had, indeed, become the proverbial lamb sacrificed in the nefarious web of Lypynskyi’s machinations. Despite some of his good works on behalf of Carpatho-Rusyns, Yan Lypynskyi will surely go down in history as one of the most destructive forces in the post-1989 national revival in Slovakia.

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The problem of Lypynskyi reflected, in part, another issue—youth. From the very beginning of the Carpatho-Rusyn revival that dated back to the early 1970s in the United States, I was preoccupied with the need to get younger people involved. At that time, we few activists (Jerry Jumba, Edward Kasinec, Pat Krafcik, John Righetti, and myself) represented a younger generation of whom none had yet reached thirty. But by the time of the Revolutions of 1989, let alone the late 1990s, we were all middle-aged. Hence, we welcomed younger people, including the energetic Lypynskyi, even though he turned out to be problematic, very problematic.

For some reason, I defined “young” as someone who had not yet reached thirty. Why thirty? I guess I believed that a person’s beliefs were already firmly entrenched by that age, and that any subsequent change in one’s mindset was not likely. Under age thirty, so I hoped, one’s worldview was still malleable. Carpatho-Rusyn activists in Europe, especially from Transcarpathia, thought my thirty-year-old threshold was, to say the least, strange, since from their point of view one was “young” until at least fifty.

Perhaps it would have been better, certainly in the European context, to think not in terms of some precise numerical age but rather in terms of one’s relationship to the most important sociopolitical event in contemporary Carpatho-Rusyn life—the Revolutions of 1989. On the one hand, there were individuals who played an active role in that revolutionary year and who thereafter led civic and cultural organizations for at least the rest of the twentieth century. On the other hand, there was to come a second generation whose members did not become active until 308

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189. Mikhail Dronov and Paul Robert Magocsi, Prešov, Slovakia (February 2007).

the first decade of the twenty-first century. These individuals, who might be called the Generation of Millennials, had begun by the end of the first decade of the new century (2010) to take over many of the organizations and leading positions in Carpatho-Rusyn communities both in Europe and North America.

Whether or not I used the term Millennial Generation at the time (and I didn’t), I did put forth my views about young people at the 1999 Fifth World Congress in Uzhhorod, where in my opening address I proposed that each delegate should within the following two years until the next Congress find two younger people “to join” the movement. As important, one of those new young people I suggested should be made a member of his or her respective national delegation.

In the interim, until the next, Sixth Congress in Prague (2001), I met on several occasions in Prešov with Petro Krainiak Jr., Marek Gai, and Mikhail Dronov from Moscow, all of whom at the time were undergraduate students at Prešov University. I must say that my meetings with these young people and, in particular, with the relatively young Tymkovych monastic and blood brothers (Iosafat and Gorazd) who at the time were conducting weekly “seminars” on social ethics at the Basilian 309

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190. Elders at the First Rusyn Youth Camp: (left to right): Mykhailo Almashii, Ukraine; Andrei Kopcha, Poland; Anna Kuzmiakova, Slovakia; Paul Robert Magocsi, North America; Gabor Hattinger, Hungary; Agata Pilatova, Czech Republic, Komlóska, Hungary (May 2003).

191. Marek Gai (second from right) overseeing the presentation of the Encyclopedia of Rusyn History and Culture, First Rusyn Youth Camp, Komlóska, Hungary (May 2003).

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Monastery on Vajanská Street in Prešov, provided me with some of my fondest memories of the Carpatho-Rusyn movement. These young people and their friends represented the future.

I was, therefore, so happy when in October 2001 at the Sixth Congress in Prague, Petro Krainiak Jr. and Marek Gai, acting on my earlier proposal, announced that they were forming an international Carpatho-Rusyn youth organization. Although it took some time, they were ready to get started by the summer of 2003.

With the help of Gabor Hattinger, Krainiak Jr. and Gai were able to organize with friends from the Organization of Rusyns in Hungary the First Rusyn Youth Camp. It took place in Komlóska, one of the few remaining Rusyn-speaking villages in northeastern Hungary.

Aside from youth representatives from Slovakia, Hungary, Ukraine, Poland, and the Czech Republic, a few older Carpatho-Rusyn activists who were especially committed to youth came to the two-day meeting in Komlóska to show our support. These included, aside from myself, Mykhailo Almashii from Ukraine, Andrei Kopcha from Poland, Anna Kuzmiakova from Slovakia, Agata Pilatova from the Czech Republic, and Gabor Hattinger, our host from Hungary, who throughout the two days proudly sported an American-made T-shirt with the iconic Carpatho-Rusyn Homeland Map sprawled across his chest.

The presence of older-generation activists was only symbolic since, as the chairman of the youth gathering Marek Gai made clear, the young people were determined to create their own organization and agenda without any interference from the “older folk.”

The gathering was enhanced by the rural village atmosphere. Komlóska happens to be located in a hilly area, not quite the Carpathians, but certainly not anything like the flat Hungarian plain just to the south.

The traditional Carpatho-Rusyn culture of Komlóska was, in particular, shared with the participants at mealtime. Hattinger’s close friend and fellow activist still living in the village, Laslo Popovych, spent all afternoon preparing bograch levesh (bogrács leves), a thick spicy beef and vegetable soup that simmered for hours in a large cauldron (bogrács) over an open outdoor fire. Wine, too, flowed almost non-stop. Komlóska, after all, was within the world-famous Tokaj wine growing region.

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Hattinger was in particular very proud to show us his family’s wine cellar, which was among the many dug out on the side of a hill at the end of the village. Four or five of us elders were invited for a wine tasting. I had long ago learned—from my experience living in Luxembourg, in France, and as a wine steward in the Society of Fellows at Harvard University—never to swallow wine during a tasting. Look at the color, inhale the fragrance (the so-called nose), swish the liquid throughout the mouth, especially the back, but never swallow!

Aware of that cardinal rule, I asked Hattinger for a spittoon, but he had none. While others tasted (and swallowed), I tasted, then spit onto the hard clay cellar floor what was in my mouth. Hattinger seemed a bit upset at what I was doing. “Professor,” he said, “don’t spit on the ground, spit on the walls; it’s good for the truffles.” And I thought only the French were concerned with that otherwise tasteless delicacy.

Semi-sweet Tokaj served cold is, like champagne, very easy to drink and to consume in dangerously large amounts. The Sunday morning that we were scheduled to depart, I learned of Tokaj’s hazards. Our then recent Prešov University graduate, Mikhail Dronov from Moscow, sheepishly approached me to apologize for what he said had never happened to him before. Coming from a world of vodka drinkers, he had no idea of what wine—“weak” in alcohol content—could do if consumed unwisely.

He admitted to becoming stone drunk and waking up along the side of the village road sometime early in the morn. He felt he had “to confess his sin” to the professor and promise never again to be drawn into Tokaj’s devilish clutches. Thank God, he did not get crushed at night by the wheels of a car driving along the dark narrow village road. All’s well that ends well.

Yet, the Komlóska youth camp deliberations could not unfold without at least some hitch. A couple of years before, when Professor Ivan Turianytsia, the Carpatho-Rusyn activist from Transcarpathia, was at the height of his influence, he thought to assuage me by pointing out that he was not only interested in political matters, but also in youth. In the early autumn of 2001, Father Sydor drove me to the founding meeting of the Congress of Rusyn Writers which was taking place in the town of Tiachovo. Turianytsia greeted us as we entered the hall. He was anxious 312

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to introduce me to a tall guy, probably in his early thirties at the time.

Ivan was proud of “his find” and bombastically proclaimed: “Professor Magocsi, we, too, have young people and here is someone who is the future of our movement.” The tall guy made no impression on me, and I didn’t even remember his name.

Then, a few years later in Komlóska, Turianytsia’s young protégé showed up. Actually, he was not invited to the First Rusyn Youth Camp and did not even sit down among the other participants. Rather, in the Soviet manner, he stood at the back together with a scruffy looking bearded character and some blond woman. They were already known to the rest of the group, because they had spent the night before drinking and singing loudly into the wee hours of the morning, despite the complaints of the other youth guests. Quite frankly, they were an embarrassment.

Turianytsia’s young protégé interrupted the proceedings several times until the chairman from Slovakia, Marek Gai, had had enough. He snapped in a sharp staccato tone: “Who are you? What are you doing here? No one invited you; you don’t belong here; and you especially have no right to interrupt us. Leave right now.” I cannot remember whether the unpleasant Transcarpathian left, but he was indeed chastened and said not another word. I later learned the obtrusive character was Mykola Bobynets, someone we all would be hearing from again.

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The first six World Congresses that culminated at the very outset of the twenty-first century each adopted resolutions about cultural, educational, and even economic goals that needed to be achieved. The Congress, however, had no funds and could do little more than pass resolutions, most of which were never fulfilled. As for the movement in general, Ukraine provided no funding, while Poland and Slovakia adopted erratic policies that in some years resulted in little or almost no funding at all.

What the Carpatho-Rusyn movement needed were philanthropists who would provide donations and perhaps even create an endowed fund to underwrite the costs of cultural and educational activity.

Ever since the movement began in the United States back in the early 1970s, I had dreamed of finding a wealthy Carpatho-Rusyn or two. At that time, I was at Harvard University. There I observed the workings of the Ukrainian Studies Fund, whose sole goal was to raise money for Harvard’s ever-expanding Ukrainian program. The Fund’s managers had found several wealthy Americans and Canadians of Ukrainian background. Couldn’t I find some Carpatho-Rusyn American equivalent?

Whenever I heard about someone who was described as a successful businessman of Carpatho-Rusyn background, I immediately tried to contact him. Always in the back of my mind, however, was a basic reality: Carpatho-Rusyn Americans are generally cheapskates. Moreover, they have no tradition of giving money to charitable causes other than the church. As for the idea that someone should financially support the study of his or her ancestral heritage, whether in the form of grants for publications or scholarships for students, forget it. Nevertheless, I tried.

In the 1970s, for example, I attempted to solicit funds from Peter Hardy, 314

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a somewhat successful businessmen from Connecticut, who owned the Peerless Aluminum Foundry. He did spend some money on reprinting old books, but only those which supported the view that Carpatho-Rusyns were Russians. He made it clear that for promoting the idea of CarpathoRusyns there would not be any financial support.

In fact, the only person in the 1970s who provided funding for Carpatho-Rusyn cultural matters was the lawyer Orestes Mihaly who was the Assistant Attorney General of the State of New York when I met him.

Although Mihaly initially thought Carpatho-Rusyns were a branch of the Russian nationality, he began to change his mind after reading my Harvard monograph, The Shaping of a National Identity. From then on, we became friends, and he became one of my staunchest supporters.

Aside from registering the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center as a legal, non-profit entity, Orestes also provided seed money for what was our goal back then: the creation of an endowed university professorship in Carpatho-Rusyn Studies at some prestigious university in the United States. For nearly two decades Mihaly provided $500 each year, later matched by his retirement fund at Merrill-Lynch, so that by the outset of the twenty-first century there was about $12,000 in the Chair of Carpatho-Rusyn Studies Fund managed by the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center. Orestes turned out to be the only donor, so that the idea of creating a Carpatho-Rusyn university professorship in the United States eventually died. At his suggestion the funds he donated were eventually used to support publications, I believe the fourth revised and expanded edition of the very popular book, Our People (2005), was among them.

After coming to Toronto in 1980, my interest and hopes for raising funds from donors waned. But I didn’t give up hope. Sometime in 1982 or 1983 I met and became quite close friends with a truly wealthy businessman, the multi-billionaire uranium magnate Stephen B. Roman.

On the eve of World War II, Stephen came to Canada when he was 16 years old. He became a quintessential example of the proverbial “ragsto-riches” story. He began working in the nickel mines near Sudbury in northern Ontario. Having gotten a tip (from his future wife) about land under which there was uranium, he purchased as much of that land as he could and established what later became a worldwide natural resources 315

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192. Steve Roman greeting Paul Robert and Maria Magocsi at his estate, Markham, Ontario, Canada (August 1985).

conglomerate known as Denison Mines.

Steve was born in eastern Slovakia in a village called Vel’ky Ruskov, most of whose inhabitants until the outset of the twentieth century identified themselves as Rusnaks of the Greek Catholic faith. Steve had no problem with that ethnonym. In fact, he was proud to call himself a Rusnak. The problem from my/our perspective was that Steve understood Rusnak to mean a Greek Catholic of Slovak nationality. From our very first meeting Steve never stopped reminding me that there was no such thing as a Carpatho-Rusyn nationality. “Your people,” he would say, “are either Slovaks or Ukrainians.” For Steve, I was a Slovak. I just did not know it—at least not yet, so he hoped.

Stephen Roman was not shy about donating money to what for him were his two most worthy causes: the Greek Catholic Church, and an independent “non-Czechoslovak” Slovakia. He spent millions of dollars on a cathedral church for the Slovak Greek Catholic Diocese in Canada, which he helped to establish in 1985. Earlier, in 1970, he had created the Slovak World Congress to undermine not only the Communist regime 316

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but the very idea of Czechoslovakia as a legitimate state for Czechs and Slovaks. In short, Slovaks must be independent, as they had been during the World War II-era Slovak state.

Steve Roman and I may have been close friends right up to his untimely death in November 1988, but there was never any possibility that he would help the Carpatho-Rusyn cause for the simple reason that they were a nationality whose existence he did not recognize.

***** Literally, during the same month that Steve Roman died, I reached out to John Warhola, whose famous brother Andy had died—also unexpectedly—the year before. The mainstream U.S. media was full of reports about Andy Warhol’s estate, whose value was growing by millions of dollars each day as the artwork he left behind kept increasing in value.

John Warhola was vice-president of the recently established Andy Warhol Foundation whose initial goal was to create a Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.

John and I had come to know each other in 1988 when discussions about creating another Warhol museum, specifically in Czechoslovakia,

193. Paul Warhola (left) and John Warhola (right) with Paul Robert and Maria Magocsi, Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA (April 1999).

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had begun. Taking advantage of our acquaintance, I took the original proposal for a university Chair of Carpathian Studies and refashioned it as the Julia Warhola Chair of Carpathian Studies. Since Andy was to be remembered through one, maybe two, museums (both of which were eventually established), why not honor his mother in some way?

John himself was becoming more and more aware of the family’s Carpatho-Rusyn heritage, but he was not a dynamic personality, nor did he have all that much influence at the Warhol Foundation. I tried, but again I found no donor to support the Carpatho-Rusyn university chair idea.

***** After the collapse of Communist rule in 1989, I became too engaged in European homeland politics to be concerned with actively trying to find a philanthropist of Carpatho-Rusyn background. Quite frankly, I became convinced that such a species—generous donors interested in Carpatho-Rusyns—did not exist. Of course, should I hear of a potential donor I would not hesitate to seek him (or her) out.

Such a possibility arose sometime in the year 2000, when the Praguebased Society of Friends of Subcarpathian Rus’, in the person of Agata Pilatova I believe, wrote to tell me about a person called Stefan Moldovan in Ottawa. He seemed to want to help the Society of Friends and I was being asked to contact Moldovan on their behalf. That I did, and in the process, I also told him about the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center in the United States and its work on behalf of the Carpatho-Rusyn movement in all countries in Europe.

It turned out that Moldovan, who was born in Subcarpathian Rus’ in the late 1930s, was of Jewish background and a Holocaust survivor. His parents had left the young Stefan and his brother with a Carpatho-Rusyn family just before they were deported in May 1944 to the death camp at Auschwitz. After the war Moldovan made his way to Canada, where he eventually founded a successful engineering company in Montreal. He never forgot the Carpatho-Rusyn family who hid him and his brother for nearly a year until the war was over. Later in life, after retirement, Mr. Moldovan (as I always called him) became passionately devoted to the memory of Tomáš G. Masaryk, the founding president of his coun318

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try of birth, Czechoslovakia, as well as to the Carpatho-Rusyn people, from whom the family who saved him derived. Soon after we spoke on the phone, Mr. Moldovan did his research, found out that I and the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center were reliable, and before long became a great personal supporter of me and my work.

***** Also at the outset of the twenty-first century, I met with Vasyl Sar194. Steven Chepa and Vasyl Sarkanych, kanych, head of the Svaliava branch Prešov, Slovakia (June 2003). of the Society of Carpatho-Rusyns in Transcarpathia. I proposed to him the idea that we in North America would help to support financially Rusyn-language classes as part of the extracurricular programming in the region’s elementary schools. Sarkanych, who enthusiastically welcomed the idea, was about the same age as Moldovan (in his mid-seventies at the time) and, like Mr. Moldovan, a native of Svaliava. Thus began a decade-long period during which Moldovan donated about $1,500 each year, which was enough to support two Rusyn classes.

Mr. Moldovan was particularly impressed when the Encyclopedia of Rusyn Language and Culture, a project that I initiated with Ivan Pop, was published in 2002 by the University of Toronto Press. In conversation with the Uzhhorod publisher and Carpatho-Rusyn activist in Transcarpathia, Valerii Padiak, we agreed on the desirability of publishing a Ukrainianlanguage version of the encyclopedia. But where to find the funds to translate the work?

Stefan Moldovan provided the solution. He donated $10,000 (US) to cover half the costs of the translation project which was carried out by a newly arrived immigrant from Uzhhorod to Toronto, Nadiya Kushko. Mr. Moldovan was overjoyed with the choice of Nadiya, not in the least be319

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195. Stefan Moldovan, Montreal (circa 2000) and Nadiya Kushko, Toronto (2011).

cause—despite his advanced yet healthy age—he still had an eye for pretty females. He and Nadiya struck up a cordial relationship (via correspondence and telephone), even though they never met personally.

Stefan Moldovan was certainly a philanthropical supporter of Carpatho-Rusyn cultural and educational activity. Even if his financial contributions were on a relatively modest scale, they were truly heartfelt, consistent, and greater than those provided by anyone else up until then.

Even more generous—largely because he had greater financial means— was another Canadian, Steven W. Chepa.

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I cannot remember exactly when, or how, I met Steve Chepa. I believe the encounter came about largely through the intervention of the Vojvodinian-Rusyn cultural activist, Lubomir Medieshi. Sometime around 1992, Lubomir, then director of the Ruske Slovo Publishing House based in Novi Sad, had the foresight to realize, like Hamlet, that “something is rotten in the state” of Yugoslavia. The savvy Lubomir had, himself, already applied and received the coveted status of “landed immigrant,” or permanent resident, in Canada. Sometime in the mid-1990s, Lubomir applied to obtain the same status for his wife and their one daughter.

As director of the Multicultural History Society of Ontario at that time, I was able to secure him a job (as assistant archivist) in that institution. He proved himself very loyal to me personally and, aside from his work for the Multicultural Society, he set out to find anyone in Canada, most especially Toronto, who might be of Carpatho-Rusyn background.

It was largely through Lubomir that I learned about a small-scale businessman of Vojvodinian Rusyn background living in Kitchener, Ontario, a certain Yanko Sabadosh. He was known for hiring Vojvodinian Rusyn immigrants who had legal status as permanent residents in Canada. Sabadosh was persuaded (by Lubomir) to fund the creation in 1995 of the Rusyn Association of North America of which he became president. Almost all members of this new organization were recent Rusnak immigrants from eastern Croatia and Serbia’s Vojvodina who were fleeing the civil war that was ravaging Yugoslavia in the mid-1990s.

At some meeting or other being held at the Multicultural History Society, Lubomir met a Canadian-born woman of Lemko-Rusyn background, who in turn introduced him to Steve Chepa. Steve, too, must have come 321

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to an event at the Society and was, in particular, pleased to learn that the institution where I was director and CEO, with impressive headquarters in the heart of Toronto overlooking the Provincial Parliament building, was not only headed by someone of Carpatho-Rusyn background but by someone who was working on behalf of the post-Communist cultural and national revival in the European homeland. During a dinner at some elegant restaurant (Steve, like me, 196. Lubomir Medieshi, Ruske Slovo Publishing House, Novi Sad, Yugoslavia appreciated fine food and wine), we (March 1991). immediately discovered and basked in our common interests. He had the financial wherewithal. I had an unending store of ideas about how to promote the cultural heritage of our people not only in North America but, more importantly, in Europe.

Steve, himself, was the son of working-class Carpatho-Rusyn parents who had immigrated to Canada in 1927 or 1928 and found employment in the steel town of Hamilton, Ontario—Canada’s Pittsburgh. His mother came from a village in the Lemko Region (at the time in Poland), his father Vasyl Chepa was from Malyi Bereznyi in Subcarpathian Rus’ (at the time in Czechoslovakia). His father attended, for a while, the Greek Catholic Seminary in Uzhhorod, but soon got turned off by the church and for that matter religion in general.

Such a philosophical disposition made it easy for Vasyl Chepa to gravitate toward the Lemko Association, which during the interwar years was at the height of its leftist-oriented Communist, pro-Soviet, and Russophile orientation. Steve liked to recall that he was raised to believe that Lemkos and other Rusyns from the Carpathians were generally uneducated and unsophisticated “Russian hillbillies.”

Throughout our otherwise close and warm relationship I always resented the derogatory, even insulting description that Steve liked to give to our people. Like many North Americans of Carpatho-Rusyn background, he 322

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197. Steven Chepa (far right) hosting at his favorite Japanese restaurant in Yorkville, Toronto: (left to right) Maria Magocsi, Paul Robert Magocsi, Anna Plishkova, Aleksander Zozuliak (November 2002).

had only a rudimentary knowledge of his ancestral heritage and certainly no awareness of the achievements of our people in the realm of culture and the arts. Burdened with a sense of inferiority (his short stature did not help to instill self-confidence), Steve was determined to overcompensate by becoming a successful and wealthy businessman in what was still a largely WASP-dominated social and economic climate in Ontario.

When I first met Steve, he introduced himself as a “merchant banker,” a term I had never heard before. He explained what it meant, or rather what he did for a living. He would purchase a failing or already bankrupt business, get it back on its feet, then sell it for a profit. He must have been doing very well, since he had an office with several employees in a prestigious building in Toronto’s financial district. To enhance the image that he thought was appropriate for his new socioeconomic status, Steve divorced his first wife and found a blond, statuesque, former model, Melissa Vincent, who looked the part of a “trophy wife” (the turn of phrase used by Steve himself). Allegedly at her insistence, Steve bought 200 acres of property near Caledon, a rural town north of Toronto, on which he built a 26-room Georgian-style mansion bombastically called Stoneridge Hall.

Despite all the years that I knew Steve, I was never invited to his man323

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198. Steven Chepa’s residence, Caledon, Ontario, Canada.

sion. I only came to know of it from a glitzy Toronto magazine article titled “The Lady of the Manor,” which focused on wife Melissa’s skills as an interior decorator. As evident from the sumptuous interior and exterior photographs, Chepa’s Stoneridge Hall reflected all the pretentious characteristics of nouveaux riches, who desperately try to overcome their humble working-class origins by building second-rate versions of centuries-old English manor houses. As a barrier against the outside world, the property was surrounded with high groomed hedges and closed iron gates. To top it off Steve was able to indulge his passion for horses. The estate featured stables to accommodate a dozen or so racehorses which Steve, as the proper English gentleman, exercised each morn before leaving for work in downtown Toronto.

Clearly, when I met Steve any lingering self-deprecation and inferiority complex had been replaced by an attitude of external self-confidence, even superiority. Essentially, Steve epitomized a characteristic that I noticed in several Carpatho-Rusyn activists in the United States. Among those activists were John Righetti, Maryann Sivak, and to a degree the much younger Maria Silvestri, each of whom at times acted as entitled Americans. They were sure that they could teach Carpatho-Rusyns in Europe how to get things done. I always resented such attitudes, knowing from experience 324

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how many Carpatho-Rusyn Americans, as often as not, were themselves inefficient and slow in their efforts to achieve something on behalf of Carpatho-Rusyn culture. Let it be said that until Steve Chepa’s hubris got the better of him (see below), he did direct some of his wealth in a very positive manner. At least until the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, our ideas and his money made possible a whole host of Carpatho-Rusyn related projects that otherwise might never have been realized.

***** Thanks to the enormous work of Carpatho-Rusyn activists in Slovakia, Poland, and to some degree in Ukraine’s Transcarpathia, it was easier for me to convince someone like Steve to build on what was already achieved. Now that we had the first language codification in Slovakia in 1995 and another on its way in Poland, we needed to promote the language’s practical use. I thought the best way to do this was to encourage Rusyn-language writings and to recognize those who created them through means of an annual prize, named after the national awakener, Aleksander Dukhnovych. The Dukhnovych Prize, awarded to the author of the best Rusyn-language literary work (prose or poetry), carried a monetary award of $1,000, a not unsubstantial sum in post-Communist central and eastern Europe.

I cannot remember whether it was Steve or I who came up with the idea of presenting the winner (along with the cash prize) a bronze statue of a standing bear. Almost immediately we began to refer to this quintessential Carpatho-Rusyn symbol as our people’s (or at least our writer’s) Oscar.

Creating the prototype Oscar/Bear was itself a challenge. My close colleague in Uzhhorod, the writer Volodymyr Fedynyshynets, urged me to give the task to his friend, the sculptor Mykhailo Belen. I had met Belen several years before in his studio in Nevytske just north of Uzhhorod.

He was a tireless creator of stone statues and reliefs. He was especially adept at obtaining very substantial commissions from Transcarpathia’s municipal and county authorities, who seemed to be always in need of commemorating religious and secular figures deliberately forgotten by 325

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the Soviet regime but now eagerly sought out by the post-Communist nationally patriotic regime in independent Ukraine.

Belen had no qualms about creating sculptured images (full-sized figures, busts, plaques, medallions) of earlier Ukrainian nationalists as well as non-Ukrainian Carpatho-Rusyn patriots. His ideological malleability did not bother me all that much.

After all, like anyone, he needed to make a living. The real problem was that Belen’s style embodied the worst features of a Stalinist-like totalitarian 199. Mykhailo Belen at his studio, monumentalism. For example, his fashioning the monumental Uzhhorod statues of the Carpatho-Rusyn nastatue of Aleksander Dukhnovych, tional awakener Aleksander DukhNevytske, Ukraine (1994). novych erected in the late 1990s in front of the Regional Theater in Uzhhorod and on the main square in Mukachevo were, on aesthetic grounds, simply atrocious. And yet, here I was, turning to him to propose a sketch for the Carpatho-Rusyn “Oscar.”

Almost immediately I was turned off by Belen’s request to provide a fifty percent advance before starting his work on a sketch. Steve Chepa, who was financing the project, agreed to give him the down payment.

But instead of providing us with something in a month or so as he promised, Belen took over half a year before I received a paper sketch and a clay maquette. What he submitted was a squat, pregnant-like figurine that turned off both Steve and me. We decided to pay him the remainder of the agreed $1,000 sum and write it off as a loss. Belen, however, took deep umbrage at not receiving the commission. His anger took the form of refusing to speak with me (on those rare occasions we were in the same physical space) for at least a decade.

I was embarrassed to mention this matter to my very close friend, the distinguished painter Volodymyr Mykyta. When I finally did, Mykyta 326

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200. Volodymyr Fedynyshynets and Elaine Rusinko, Krynica-Wieś, Poland (June 2005).

gently but firmly chastised me for dealing with, in his words, such an “incompetent” though commercially successful “hack” like Belen. Who then, I asked? Mykyta responded that a truly outstanding artist and sculptor was Ivan Brovdii. Off I went to his studio in Mukachevo. It took some convincing, but the otherwise modest Brovdii accepted the commission and, without any advance, produced within a month or so the maquette that became the bronze Carpatho-Rusyn Oscar. Since by then I had a solid working relationship with Aleksander Zozuliak in Prešov, himself an accomplished painter, he arranged to have the “Oscars” produced at a foundry in Slovakia for a relatively reasonable price.

Of course, we needed a panel of judges to determine who would become the annual recipient of what formally became known as the Aleksander Dukhnovych Award for the Best Work of Rusyn Literature. I was convinced that the panel should not include anyone who might be eligible for the award. It was always a challenge to persuade Professor Elaine Rusinko, but I managed to have her accept, for an initial fiveyear period, the chairmanship of the panel of three judges. The other two judges during that initial period were Miron Sŷsak and Maria Pavlovska (originally from Hungary and the last PhD student of the Slavist of Car327

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patho-Rusyn origin Emylian Baletskyi). By 1996 we were ready to make the first award which went to the acclaimed Vojvodinian Rusyn writer, Diura Papharhai.

That first award was made in 1997 at the Fourth World Congress of Rusyns in Budapest. The second award in 1998 (a year the Congress wasn’t being held) was given without any fanfare to Ivan Petrovtsii in recognition of his collection of poetry, Nashi spivankŷ. Almost immediately after its appearance, the book provoked a scandal among Transcarpathia’s Carpatho-Rusyn community largely because of Petrovtsii’s graphic language and crude denigration of the president of Ukraine.

Consequently, on the eve of the Fifth World Congress, planned to be held in Uzhhorod in 1999, I was deluged with angry demands that Petrovtsii should be stripped of the award he was given the year before. Considering later developments and Petrovtsii’s aggressive stance toward me, I found it ironic that I was the one defending him against his detractors on the grounds of “artistic freedom.”

The Petrovtsii scandal showed how not even two years had gone by before the Dukhnovych literary award had its first controversy. The award quickly became an object of prestige that Rusyn-language writers hoped to obtain. I remember with fondness how at subsequent World Congresses the most dramatic moment occurred when the suspense was lifted, the envelope was opened: “and the Oscar goes to . . .”

I especially remember the fourth time the award was presented, which took place in 2001 at the Congress in Prague. In the interim, Steve and I came up with the idea of another prize: an outstanding achievement award for lifetime work on behalf of Carpatho-Rusyns. Unlike the annual literary award, the lifetime achievement award would be presented whenever we felt it appropriate.

For the first time Steve travelled to Europe for the award presentations, largely because the event was being held, as he said, in a civilized center, Prague, instead of some provincial backwater in the Carpatho-Rusyn homeland! After all, Steve had to maintain his stature as someone associated with the larger cultural world.

As photographs attest, he was particularly proud to be in Prague.

Moreover, the Congress was held in the beautiful main hall at the Czech 328

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201. Literature and Lifetime Achievement Award Winners with their “Oscars”: (left to right) Vasyl Turok-Hetesh, Volodymyr Mykyta, Steve Chepa, Mariia Maltsovska, Ivan Petrovtsii, and Diura Papharhaï, Sixth World Congress of Rusyns, Prague, Czech Republic (October 2001).

National Home in the Vinohrady section of the city, not far from the National Museum. Standing before a large portrait of interwar Czechoslovakia’s first two presidents, Tomáš G. Masaryk and Edward Beneš, Steve was overjoyed as he presented the lifetime achievement awards to Vasyl Turok and Volodymyr Mykyta, and that year’s literary award to Mariia Maltsovska, who was flanked by the previous winners Diura Papharhai and Ivan Petrovtsii. All held their “Oscar Bears” up high, including Steve who somewhat injudiciously presented himself with a statue.

Aside from the fanfare we created during the award presentations, I am convinced that for as long as it existed the Dukhnovych Literary Award did, indeed, encourage authors to write in Rusyn. They undoubtedly did their creative best, since inevitably they had their eye on the prize.

***** Since Steve Chepa was very keen on promoting Carpatho-Rusyn culture, it was easy to get support from him for another idea I had had in mind. Sometime in the late 1990s, my wife Maria visited me in Prague 329

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where I was spending a sabbatical year doing research for a new book.

One night we went to a folk concert, which instead of featuring polkas and more or less boring brass band music characteristic of Czech folklore, the ensemble on stage performed mostly czardases and other spirited dances and songs from Slovakia. The point was that the Prague concert organizers wanted to show international visitors the best folklore their country had to offer, even if they had to take the repertoire from Slovakia. Look! We are a distinct country whose folk music is of the highest quality and is one of the many things our people have to offer to the world.

About that very same time in international musical circles, everyone had heard recordings or seen television replays of the now legendary concert staged within the ruins of the Baths of Caracalla in Rome which featured the three greatest tenors of the day: Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, and José Carreras. Granted it may be a different musical style, but Carpatho-Rusyns also had singers, especially female folk singers. And so that night in Prague, I envisioned a concert that would feature our best: three great female Carpatho-Rusyn folk singers. Leaving the concert hall, I could not contain my enthusiasm for the idea, even though my wife, a former lead dancer with the PULS folk ensemble in Prešov, was skeptical. Never mind, I was determined that one day such a concert would take place.

Several years went by until the occasion presented itself. It was in the context of the week-long cultural program connected with the Seventh World Congress of Rusyns being held that year (2003) in Prešov. My plan was to get the best Carpatho-Rusyn female singers from three generations: Marka Machoshka, the grand dame who started her career in the 1950s; Hanka Servytska, the spirited and beautiful star of the 1990s; and the youngest of the lot, Beata Begenyova, who was at her prime in the early twenty-first century. Most fortunately, Steve Chepa, too, was enthusiastic about my plan, so that funding the concert and subsequently producing a recording was not a problem.

Alas, Begenyova was residing in the United States at the time and awaiting approval for a permanent (green) residency card; hence, she could not come to Slovakia for fear of not being able to return to the 330

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202. Beata Begenyova and Marka Machoskova, Cleveland, Ohio, USA (September 2013).

States. Eventually Begenyova did perform with Machoshka, but only several years later and in the United States. Meanwhile, for the Prešov World Congress gala, the organizers came up with a replacement, a twenty-twoyear-old novice (Andrea Sikoryakova) who had an adequate voice but was inexperienced and basically a dour looking performer.

No matter. Machoshka and Servytska were superb, as was the Dukhnovych Theater director and actor Yaroslav Sŷsak whose magnificent baritone voice provided, in beautifully enunciated Rusyn, the introductions and commentary to the concert. We recorded the entire show and, again with Chepa’s financial help, issued in 2004 a CD titled Three Stars—Three Generations, together with a thick booklet with lyrics to all the songs in Rusyn (Cyrillic and Roman alphabets) and with an English translation.

The production experience brought me back to the 1960s when I worked as a sound editor in my brother’s recording studio in the United States. Now I was working with colleagues in Prešov preparing the master recording of Three Stars—Three Generations. The sound editing was done in the studios of the old Ukrainian and Rusyn broadcasting center just a few weeks before the building was closed and Slovak Na331

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203. CD cover of the Three Stars— Three Generations concert at the VII World Congress of Rusyns, Prešov, Slovakia (June 2003).

tional Radio moved those studios— in the face of numerous protests by Carpatho-Rusyns—permanently to Košice.

After the CDs were manufactured in Slovakia, we distributed, gratis, hundreds of them to individuals in Europe and North America, and through the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center we sold over a thousand sets. While the world had The Three Tenors, we Carpatho-Rusyns projected onto that same world The Three Stars.

***** Steve and I came up with yet another idea, which perhaps was born after a performance we both attended in Cracow of the Broadway musical, Les Misérables. Why not create a Rusyn musical? I do remember that in 2001 the Czechs had created a very popular musical (Kolochava) depicting the life of the Carpatho-Rusyn robber bandit Nikola Shuhai.

What about a new musical based on a Carpatho-Rusyn theme which, if produced properly and with financial backing from Steve Chepa, might even someday reach stages in New York, London, and Paris? If we could pull that off, Carpatho-Rusyns would emerge to become part of the international cultural world.

Fortunately, we had the professional Aleksander Dukhnovych Theatre and the PULS Folk Ensemble in Prešov, both of which had well-trained, talented, and experienced dramatists, producers, singers, and dancers. I approached the charmingly energetic Yarka Sŷsak, who welcomed with great enthusiasm the idea of creating a Carpatho-Rusyn musical. I believe she consulted with her father, the longtime Dukhnovych Theater director Yaroslav Sŷsak, and came up with a libretto and phenomenal music based on several gorgeous folk melodies reconfigured into a modern style. Steve and I were positively stunned by the results, although he 332

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wanted to change the typical East Slavic tragic ending into something more positive. North American theater goers, he argued, wanted to leave after the curtain goes down feeling good, not depressed. I agreed with Steve. Yarka, in turn, understood and promised to rewrite the ending.

Months went by with no revised version. Meanwhile, Chepa’s financial situation worsened, and in any case, we never got a revised version. All that was left of this project was a great CD recording of the pilot version.

Alas, we never got a chance to realize a full-fledged Broadway musical on a Carpatho-Rusyn theme. Maybe someday.

***** I also called upon Steve Chepa to underwrite the costs for a new edition of the Carpatho-Rusyns brochure—the “White Catechism”(see above, section 26). He agreed, provided we added dedications to his father Vasyl Chepa and mother, Mariia Pŷrkhova. But when, a couple of years later, I went back to him for funds to create revised reprintings of the “catechism,” he balked. By that time, he had become impatient. He wanted to see something more substantial than a “mere” 32-page brochure. Steve’s reluctance about the brochure thankfully gave birth to a new idea: a full-colored, profusely illustrated, introductory history of Carpatho-Rusyns encompassing all countries past and present where they lived.

I had published scholarly books on the Carpatho-Rusyns in Subcarpathian Rus’ (1978), in Slovakia (1985, 1993), and a short historical survey about the Lemkos of Poland (1987). Now I was being given the opportunity to do a popular work that would be attractive to the general reader, whether or not they were of Carpatho-Rusyn background. By the outset of the twenty-first century, I was working less and less with Sasha Zozuliak in Prešov (I never quite liked his graphic designs and certainly not his constant use of sans serif typefaces) and more and more with Valerii Padiak in Uzhhorod. Aside from our greater aesthetic compatibility, the production costs proposed by Padiak in Ukraine were half to two-thirds less than those needed by Zozuliak in Slovakia.

For the new popular history project, I wrote the text (nine chapters with a few footnotes), created the maps, and provided some of the illustrations. Padiak provided the rest of the illustrations, wrote the captions, 333

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204. Covers of the ten different language editions of The People from Nowhere (2006-2014).

and with his wife Larysa did the design and layout. We planned to publish the book initially in English and Ukrainian-language editions with plans for further editions in the official language of each of the countries where Carpatho-Rusyns lived—Slovak, Polish, Romanian, Croa334

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tian, Hungarian, Czech—as well as in two versions of Rusyn, one in a Carpathian amalgam created by Padiak, the other in Vojvodinian Rusyn.

Our plans were realized in a total of ten editions, which Padiak liked to describe as the first Carpatho-Rusyn mega-project.

Steve Chepa, the donor who funded much of the mega-project, wanted to connect it somehow to the world-renowned American celebrity of Carpatho-Rusyn background, Andy Warhol. I paraphrased one of Warhol’s most famous sayings and titled the book, The People from Nowhere, while Padiak designed an attractive cover that included in the background an iconic image of Andy.

Like me, Valerii Padiak had a keen eye for promotion, most especially if sales of a book might help to enhance the Carpatho-Rusyn cause. We were especially lucky to have two launches of the Ukrainian edition of The People from Nowhere in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv. One was at the renowned National Historical Library, the other took place in the very heart and spiritual soul of the city, the medieval Monastery of the Caves (Pecherska Lavra).

In June 2007, on the grounds of that sacred space, we were given access to the prestigious National Museum of the Ukrainian Book. How that happened was in large part thanks to the intervention of Olena Mykyta Yurchenko (daughter of the renowned Carpatho-Rusyn artist Volodymyr Mykyta) from Ukraine’s Ministry of Culture and Tibor Kiss (a Hungarian from Transcarpathia) who at the time was the senior administrator of the state-owned Kyivan Cave Historical Cultural Preserve.

Into the auditorium of the museum arrived a wide range of Ukraine’s intellectuals, both those who were favorable (or at least tolerant of) as well as those antagonistic to the idea that Carpatho-Rusyns are a distinct nationality. On the favorably inclined side were an otherwise odd pair, the founding editor of the journal Krytyka and staunch Ukrainian patriot, Harvard Professor George Grabowicz, and the Moscow patriarchal Orthodox priest from Uzhhorod, who by that time had become the symbol of Carpatho-Rusyn “separatism,” Father Dymytrii Sydor. On the antagonistic side were a few professors from St. Volodymyr University of Kyiv, including the historian of Ukraine, Volodymyr Serhiichuk, who was particularly upset at his former graduate student, Serhiy Bilenky, who seemingly sold himself out to “Rusyn separatists.”

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The book’s translators, both native-born Ukrainian patriots—Nadiya Kushko from Uzhhorod and Serhiy Bilenky from Kyiv—were the only presenters on the program. Speaking in impeccable literary Ukrainian, both described the challenges posed by their translation work. Some in the audience were anxious to enter into a polemical discussion about the “Rusyn question.” Quickly sizing up the situation, the otherwise petite Nadiya Kushko took matters in hand. She declared that “we Transcarpathians” do things differently, that the formal program was over, and that now we all needed to move into the adjacent reception area where there awaited tables filled with a wide array of hors d’oeuvres, Transcarpathian wines, and most important, the Hudatska Taistra folk ensemble from Uzhhorod. They were already playing the first of several spirited Carpatho-Rusyn folksongs. In other words, the appearance of The People from Nowhere was a cause for celebration, not an excuse for a caustic debate about whether Carpatho-Rusyns exist. Of course, they exist. So, let’s get on with life. That was the Carpatho-Rusyn message being brought to the heart of Ukraine by the otherwise fervent Ukrainian, Nadiya Kushko.

205. World Congress members hosted at the Romanian Parliament (“Ceauçescu Palace”): (left to right) Olivia Niţescu, Luba Segedi-Falts, Viorica Igelsky, Ana Mund, Natalia Hnatko, Marianna Liavynets, unidentified, Agata Pilatova, Valerii Padiak, Paul Robert Magocsi, Father Vasyl Boichuk, Bogdan Oltanu—Speaker of Parliament, Vasyl Petrytskyi, Gheorghe Firtsak, unidentified, Diura Papuga, unidentified, Aleksander Zozuliak, Academician Camil Mureşanu, Julius Firtsak, Bucharest, Romania (February 2008) 336

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206. Presentation of the Czech edition of The People from Nowhere: (left to right) Paul Robert Magocsi; Peter Vorliček, parliamentary press secretary; Jíří Junek, deputy; and Jan Hamaček, Speaker of Parliament, Parliament of the Czech Republic, Prague (June 2014).

Some of the other editions of The People from Nowhere were also promoted with flair. Gheorghe Firtsak, the head of Romania’s Carpatho-Rusyn Society and deputy in that country’s national parliament, hosted in Bucharest all members of the World Council of Rusyns. On that occasion we were introduced during a session of the parliament, after which its speaker chaired a panel discussion about the book with a group of Romanian historians. These events helped secure the position of the Carpatho-Rusyn community which at the time—and still today—is subjected to claims by Romania’s Ukrainian activists that Carpatho-Rusyns do not exist but are simply the figment of the imagination of ill-informed people of the kind who write books like The People from Nowhere.

Like the Romanian edition, so too was the Czech edition of The People from Nowhere honored at a ceremony in halls of the Czech Parliament and at the Center for National Minorities in Prague.

Less enthusiastic was the acceptance of the Hungarian edition. It is true that many earnestly patriotic Carpatho-Rusyns were not amused by the title’s implication that they came from nowhere and consequently were a non-people, a non-nationality. One younger generation activist from Hungary, Marianna Liavynets-Uhryn (only later a strong advocate of mine) proclaimed sarcastically that “Professor Magocsi,” in speaking 337

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about the origins of our people, “has even proposed the theory that we come from nowhere.” Never mind that on the first page of the book I pointed out that the title, The People from Nowhere, dripping with irony, was meant to attract readers. And it did.

In the end I could not help being pleased that numerous young Carpatho-Rusyns in both Europe and North America became aware of their ancestral heritage and gained a newly found pride in themselves after reading The People from Nowhere. In short, the book did—and continues to do—its job. To be sure, all this was possible because of the generous support of our filantrop/metsenat (benefactor), Steve Chepa.

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39

Popular books were one thing. What Carpatho-Rusyns really needed was their own encyclopedia. I had always marveled at a stateless people like the Catalans who made a point about producing an encyclopedia (in the Catalan language), which by its very nature would justify their existence as a distinct people. Carpatho-Rusyns were not in need of a Catalan-like encyclopedia of general knowledge which, in any case, could not be done in the Rusyn language, since none of the existing variants was fully standardized with specialized terminology in all branches of knowledge. We did, however, need an encyclopedia devoted specifically to the Carpatho-Rusyn past and present—a volume that would gather in one place information that was difficult or impossible to find elsewhere.

I remember at the very beginning of Europe’s Carpatho-Rusyn movement back in 1989-1990 how the writer Volodymyr Fedynyshynets, with his characteristic enthusiasm, had frequently called for the preparation of a multi-volume encyclopedia. My goal was much more modest, a one-volume, yet substantial large-sized book of about 1,500 double-column pages. Sometime in 1992, when the Moscow-based Slavist Ivan Pop had arrived to take up a post at the University of Uzhhorod, I approached him with the idea of cooperating on an encyclopedia of Carpatho-Rusyns. He quickly agreed to work with me on the project.

From the very beginning our conceptual approach to Carpatho-Rusyn studies differed. Pop took a much narrower view influenced by an acceptance of borders created in the twentieth century. In other words, he was interested primarily, if not exclusively, in Subcarpathian Rus’ (present day Transcarpathia in Ukraine), which he considered the ancestral homeland par excellence of Carpatho-Rusyns. At best, Pop accepted as a 339

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kind of addendum the Rusyn-inhabited Prešov Region in Slovakia. The Lemko Region north of the Carpathians did not interest him at all, especially since he knew little or nothing about Lemko Rusyns and even less about the Carpatho-Rusyn diasporas in Serbia’s Vojvodina and in the United States.

By contrast, I took the more traditional view that there was one historic homeland, Carpathian Rus’, which had been artificially divided after World War I among Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Romania, then after 207. Ivan Pop (center) with Valerii World War II re-distributed again to Padiak (left) and Volodymyr Mykyta (right), Fifth World Congress of Rusyns, Czechoslovakia (eventually SlovaUzhhorod, Ukraine (June 1999). kia), the Soviet Union (eventually independent Ukraine), Poland, and Romania. I was adamant that our encyclopedia should deal with the entire historic land of Carpathian Rus’, as well as with diasporic communities from that land living in Yugoslavia/Serbia (Vojvodina), Croatia (the Srem region), the Czech Republic, the United States, and Canada. In the end, Ivan Pop and I wrote the entries dealing with Subcarpathian Rus’, while entries related to the other countries and regions were covered by me together with Bogdan Horbal, Aleksander Dulichenko, and a few other reputable scholars. The planned English-language Encyclopedia of Rusyn History and Culture turned out to be a truly international project with no less than 23 authors and 25 advisors/reviewers.

Working with Ivan was initially a very positive experience. On the one hand, he was prompt in submitting entries, especially after he left Uzhhorod in 1994 and settled permanently in the Czech Republic, specifically in the far western Bohemian town of Cheb. On the other hand, he had little inclination for conceptual planning, so that I had to devise a list of potential entries to which we continually added—and sometimes 340

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omitted—individuals and other subjects. Most disconcerting was Ivan’s uninhibited emotions. He had an almost visceral hatred for Ukrainians, most especially Galician-Ukrainian scholars who had taken up positions in postwar Transcarpathia. To be sure, they worked for decades in a provincial, peripheral “region” of Soviet Ukraine, while Pop had been ensconced in the capital of the “empire”—Moscow. Moreover, he held a respected position as senior researcher at the world-renowned Institute of Slavic Studies of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

Despite his professional status and scholarly reputation, Pop felt that he was a “martyr,” first of the Soviet Union, then of independent Ukraine, which forced him into “exile”—albeit into the much more comfortable and democratic post-Communist Czech Republic. All his woes, surmised Ivan, were the fault of “those dastardly Ukrainians.” As a result, when referring to Ukrainians and Ukrainophiles, virtually each of his encyclopedia entries included negative assessments, sarcastic adjectives, and ad hominem attacks. That may have been acceptable in Soviet Marxist publications, but it was anathema to Western scholarly standards.

Ivan himself recognized the problem and asked me to remove his “emotional language.” I did as much as I could, although the editorial staff at our publisher, the University of Toronto Press, felt obliged to remove even more of what they felt was offensive phraseology in the entries by my co-editor.

On the other hand, thanks to the work ethic of our main authors— Pop, Horbal, Dulichenko, and myself—who maintained the deadlines we set, the manuscript was completed within two years. Ivan Pop liked to boast that entire scholarly institutes could not achieve what he and I (with Horbal, Dulichenko, etc.) did in record time. But then something occurred that threatened to sabotage the very publication of the volume.

***** I always thought that Ivan Pop was the great intellectual hope for the Carpatho-Rusyn movement in Europe, most especially in Ukraine’s Transcarpathian region/historic Subcarpathian Rus’. He was an accomplished historian not only of diplomatic affairs in twentieth-century central and eastern Europe but also a specialist in art history. For example, 341

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in Soviet times his only publications about Carpatho-Rusyns dealt with architecture in the region.

Perhaps because Ivan lived and worked for several decades in Moscow, he picked up the Soviet characteristic of intolerance and aggressiveness toward real or perceived enemies and professional colleagues. He had already revealed his hatred and rejection of all things Ukrainian during the two years or so that he was director of the Carpathian Institute at Uzhhorod State University.

Pop seemed to have a knack at holding grudges and permanently alienating people. It is true that the promises he received from the rector (president) of Uzhhorod University regarding housing for his family were not fulfilled. This, he often told me in those years, was one of the primary reasons why he left Uzhhorod (not persecution from the Ukrainian authorities) and moved to the residence of his oldest daughter in the Czech Republic who was married to someone living in Prague.

Pop’s stay in Prague was only a transitional phase before he accepted the co-directorship of a research project on Czech-German relations. That is what prompted him to move to the Bohemian town of Cheb near the border with Germany. But somehow (perhaps because of Ivan’s stubbornness) that arrangement also fell through, so that he was left struggling to learn spoken Czech in order to take up a job as a high school history teacher in Cheb. This was clearly a major professional step downward from previous positions he had held as senior researcher and editor-in-chief of the official scholarly journal (Slavianovedenie) at the Institute of Slavic Studies in Moscow and as director of the Carpathian Institute at the University of Uzhhorod.

Throughout the 1990s, Pop lived with his wife and his younger divorced daughter in a house in Cheb, supporting his extended family on a teacher’s salary and a grant of $10,000 that I secured from Steve Chepa in order that he work on the Carpatho-Rusyn encyclopedia project. In other words, Ivan Pop was the only encyclopedia author who was paid (and rather well) to write entries which for all intents and purposes became the property of the project as a fee for services rendered to the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center.

During one of my visits to Prague in the course of the academic year 342

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1999-2000, I set off for Cheb to visit Ivan Pop and discuss our work on the encyclopedia which was in its latter stages. His family hosted me warmly over luncheon, after which Ivan gave me a tour of Cheb and the nearby spa at Františkanské Lazné/Franzensbad. Ivan and I had a wonderful and productive conversation. I always felt enriched because I always learned something from him. After all, for me he was the older historian colleague who certainly knew more about Subcarpathian Rus’ and central Europe than I did.

Two incidents in our otherwise very pleasant talks that day gave me pause. Returning to his house after our walk around Cheb, Ivan remarked how one day there would be a plaque on the wall of his house saying that this was where the Encyclopedia of Rusyn History and Culture was produced. Clearly, he had appropriated the project as if it were his alone.

Put another way, I and the other authors were simply his assistants, in my case not only as author of several entries (actually more than him) but also as the middleman who would assure that the work of the “great” European scholar (Ivan Pop) would get published in the West.

The second incident was even more worrisome, prompting me to remember precisely when and where it took place. We were walking across the park in front of the main building of the spa in Františkanské Lazné and stopped before a commemorative statue to the town’s most famous resident, the nineteenth-century visionary and creator of Esperanto, Dr. Ludwig Zamenhof. At that moment Ivan mentioned in passing that his older, recently divorced daughter had just set off for the United States to join her new husband, Constantine Sabak. He was the son of Andrew I. Sabak (Shabak), a priest in the American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese based in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.

The Sabaks, who were known to only a small circle of priests in the United States, were guided by three principles: (1) Carpatho-Rusyns were a branch of the Russian nationality; (2) misguided people who called themselves Ukrainians were fascist-like extreme nationalists; and (3) people who called themselves Rusyns or Ruthenians were unworthy Uniates (traitors to Orthodoxy) or followers of the crypto-Ukrainian national renegade Magocsi.

One of the priest’s sons, also named Andrew, had once visited me at 343

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208. First issue of Carpatho-Russian Echoes/Karpatorusskie otzvuki (Fort Lauderdale, Florida, 1983).

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Harvard in the 1970s. For a while we maintained a cordial correspondence, especially since the junior Andrew Sabak wrote how he and his family were “encouraged that someone of your [my] academic standing is finally studying” Carpatho-Rusyns. That attitude must have changed.

By the early 1980s, the Sabak family (the priest Andrew and his two sons Andrew Jr. and Constantine) began to operate from their family home, or rather from the Orthodox parish priest residences in Florida and West Virginia, something they called the Carpatho-Russian Ethnic Research Center. Under Andrew Jr.’s editorship, the family published for a few years a newspaper called Karpatorusskie otzvuki (Carpatho-Russian Echoes, 1983-89), which was filled with criticism of those, like me, who argued that Carpatho-Rusyns were not Russians.

I found it somewhat strange that the strongly Carpatho-Rusyn-oriented Ivan Pop would decide to interact professionally with his recently acquired, avid, and rather intolerant pro-Russian son-in-law, Constantine Sabak. I said nothing as we finished our visit to Františkanské Lazné but felt that the Pop-Sabak connection did not bode well for the future. I believe Ivan sensed that I was uncomfortable but said nothing.

Work on our encyclopedia proceeded. After having edited on my own the entire English-language text, I submitted it to the University of Toronto Press. Thankfully, my close friends Bill Harnum (vice-president for scholarly publishing) and Ron Schoeffel (senior acquisitions editor) were still in charge at the Press, with the result that the encyclopedia was easily accepted for publication. Production commenced and continued throughout 2001 and into the next year when the encyclopedia finally appeared.

In the midst of that process came the Sixth World Congress of Rusyns held in Prague in October 2001. I believe I had helped secure funds to pay for the travel costs of the delegation from Ukraine (Transcarpathia).

Although Ivan Pop was only a few hours away in Cheb, he did not come to the Congress. But among the delegates from Transcarpathia who did show up was his younger brother, Dymytrii Pop. Dymytrii had some training as a Slavic philologist but never attained the basic Soviet academic rank of candidate of sciences (kandidat nauk), roughly the equivalent of a doctorate. Nonetheless, he had pretentions that he was a talented scholar who was to become a leading historian of Sub345

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210. Dymytrii Pop, Uzhhorod (2018).

carpathian Rus’. He never had qualms about making himself “co-author” of works written by his better known and respected older brother, Ivan Pop. The night before the Congress began, I met with the delegates from Transcarpathia, all of whom thanked me for helping them get to Prague.

Dymytrii then pulled me aside to present me with what he thought was a pleasant surprise. It was a newly published book in Russian, titled Entsiklopediia Podkarpatskoi Rusi (Encyclopedia of Subcarpathian Rus’), whose “author” given on the cover

and title page was Ivan Pop. I was shocked. Ivan could not wait for our English-language encyclopedia to appear. He simply lifted the unedited entries he had authored, including some co-authored with me, and published them under his name. To make matters worse, the book was published by Valerii Padiak, the younger Carpatho-Rusyn patriot who I had begun to champion and support financially for his excellent work as a publisher.

When I returned to Toronto, I wrote Ivan a letter of reproach. He responded that his brother Dymytrii had published the work “without my knowledge.” Subsequently, I was stuck having to spend hours upon hours to see the much more comprehensive English-language text through the publication process with no help or input from Ivan. In a subsequent letter, I suggested that it would be appropriate and fair that the English-language encyclopedia should appear with all entries signed by their authors (as originally planned) but with my name alone as editor (not author) of the volume.

For about a month I heard nothing until the University of Toronto Press informed me that they received a letter from a respected law firm in Toronto, acting on behalf of Ivan Pop (Constantine Sabak’s father-inlaw) and the Sabak-operated Carpatho-Russian Ethnic Research Center, 346

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demanding that the English-language encyclopedia not be published if it were to appear with only the name Magocsi as editor.

The Press got cold feet and was unwilling to proceed further with publication if there were a legal challenge—whatever its validity. Then started a flurry of correspondence between the Press, the Pop-Sabak lawyer, and me. Other Carpatho-Rusyn activists (and authors of some of the encyclopedia articles), including Bogdan Horbal, Elaine Rusinko, and Patricia Krafcik, 209. Title page of Ivan Pop’s Russianlanguage Encyclopedia of Subcarpathian got involved. They were especially Rus’ (Uzhhorod: Valerii Padiak incensed after Ivan hurled insults at Publishers, 2001). the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center and the Rusyn-American immigrant community in general. Clearly, the Russophile Sabak family was getting back at those whom they hated, Magocsi and his Rusyn-American supporters, using Ivan Pop as the instrument through which they could express their bile.

I was angry and personally hurt after discovering that Ivan Pop, whom I had admired as a professional colleague, would act in such a way. And even worse, after all the work that was done I was fearful the encyclopedia might not be published, at least not by the University of Toronto Press. The Press was relieved when they learned that Ivan Pop was paid for his entries and that as a “work for hire” he had forfeited his right to control what would be done with the intellectual product he, so to speak, sold to the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center. The Press confidently informed the Sabak-Pop lawyer that it intended to publish the work. We did, however, leave Ivan’s name as co-editor.

Aside from the incredible stress I experienced during the encyclopedia ordeal and the complete end to any further communication with a former friend and colleague, the rest of the story turned out even better 347

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211. One of the last letters from Pop-Sabak’s legal counsel to the University of Toronto Press (13 February 2002).

than I expected. The published work exuded a look of scholarly gravitas. Its cover was graced with a painting by Fedor Manailo (my favorite Carpatho-Rusyn artist) and its large 8.5 x 11-inch format with nearly 550 pages lent it the physical weight that the subject—our people—warranted.

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212. Dustjacket of the Encyclopedia of Rusyn History and Culture (University of Toronto Press, 2002), second revised and expanded edition (2005).

We were also able to achieve a remarkable degree of success in public relations and sales. The encyclopedia was launched at the 34th convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, which that year (2002) was being held in Pittsburgh. A special panel on the encyclopedia, as part of the convention, attracted a standing-room 349

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only audience. That same night a celebration for the community, with nearly 200 in attendance, was held at the very site where the Pittsburgh Agreement (May1918) was signed that led to the creation of Czechoslovakia. At that event the encyclopedia was available. I especially remember how the University of Toronto Press vice-president Bill Harnum, who came to Pittsburgh especially for this occasion, was overwhelmed and overjoyed to see how more than sixty encyclopedias (at $75 a copy) were sold in the space of a half hour. Such a remarkable achievement (considering that a typical academic book launch might result at most in the sale of ten copies) not only enhanced the status of the “non-existent” Carpatho-Rusyn nationality, it also further enhanced my status in future relations with a leading scholarly publisher, in this case the University of Toronto Press.

The encyclopedia sold out within one year of its first printing (I believe 1,000 copies). Consequently, I was asked to prepare a revised and expanded second edition, which in the end had over 600 double-columned pages. To this second revised edition Ivan Pop contributed nothing, although his name remained on the cover as co-editor. Yet another academic panel devoted specifically to the encyclopedia was held, this time at the Eighth Convention of the Association for the Study of Nationalities held in 2003 at Columbia University in New York City. Eventually, several positive reviews of the encyclopedia appeared in scholarly journals.

Reaching an English-reading audience was certainly important for the Carpatho-Rusyn movement, but what about the very carriers of that culture in the European homeland who, with few exceptions, could not read English? A translation of the encyclopedia seemed necessary, but into which Slavic language? Clearly, the largest potential readership was in Transcarpathia (Subcarpathian Rus’). Should, therefore, the language of translation be Russian or Ukrainian, both of which were in those years accessible to the Transcarpathian readership whether of the older or younger generation?

Finally, there was the question of finding a reliable publisher in Ukraine. Quite naturally, I thought, it should be Valerii Padiak. But it was he who had published Ivan Pop’s Russian-language encyclopedia, 350

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213. Book launch of the Encyclopedia of Rusyn History and Culture, site of the May 1918 signing between Czechs and Slovaks of the Pittsburgh Agreement, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (November 2002).

which clearly left a bad taste in my mouth toward all those who had anything to do with that project. Clearly, I had to clear the air with Padiak before we could work together on any future project. The occasion to clarify the situation came in an unexpected place.

In the early fall of 2005, both Padiak and I were invited to an international conference on Slavic micro-languages organized by our older colleague Aleksander Dulichenko at his home institution, the University of Tartu in Estonia. At the end of the conference all the participants 351

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were taken on an excursion to a Russian Old Believer community along the shores of Lake Chud, which formed the border between Estonia and Russia.

That body of water had a very special place in my heart. Even though I had never been there before, it was for decades deeply imbedded in my imagination, for it was on its frozen surface where allegedly in 1241 the Battle on the Ice took place between the Rus’ armies of Prince Aleksander Nevsky and the invading Teutonic Knights. That was the same battle which I had sung about while a student in the Rutgers University Choir performing Prokofiev’s cantata on stage at Carnegie Hall (under the baton of Leopold Stokowski) and whose depiction I had seen numerous times through the lens of the director Sergei Eisenstein in his 1942 film, “Aleksander Nevsky.” Now, on a crisp sunny September afternoon, there we were standing together near Lake Chud on the opposite shore from the ancient Rus’ city of Pskov. Valerii told me that he had no idea about the English-language encyclopedia project when Ivan Pop’s brother Dymytrii persuaded him to publish the Russian-language text. The explanation, given as the sun was setting over the pristine waves of the dark blue lake, was convincing. The air between us was definitively cleared that September day. Valerii Padiak and I have been working closely together on numerous projects ever since.

As for the encyclopedia translation, I—and for that matter so, too, the donor Steve Chepa and publisher Valerii Padiak—favored Ukrainian. As Carpatho-Rusyn patriots we were uncomfortable using Russian, the language of a state, the Soviet Union, which in the not-so-distant past had done so much harm to Carpatho-Rusyns. Moreover, Ukrainian was the official language of one of the states where Carpatho-Rusyns lived and toward which they were loyal citizens. Finally, I already had a candidate as translator in the person of Nadiya Kushko, a native of Uzhhorod who was hoping to immigrate to Canada.

All the necessary elements seemed aligned when I turned to Steve Chepa and Stepan Moldovan, each of whom provided $10,000 which allowed me to hire the translator. Aside from the funds for the translation, the publisher Valerii Padiak obtained a subsidy from Steve Chepa to produce what turned out to be an 880-page volume in Ukrainian. Unlike the 352

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English-language edition, the Ukrainian edition published in 2010 was enhanced by innumerable illustrations (at least one to accompany each of the 1,119 entries), as well as a 32-page inset of full-color illustrations and 13 maps, also in color. Although we managed to hold launches at Prešov University and the Transcarpathian Region Scholarly Library in Uzhhorod, the Ukrainian edition did not sell well at all, especially among a potential audience that was accustomed to receiving books for free.

The result was that the publisher Padiak was stuck with most of the 1,000 copies he had printed. His enthusiasm and expectations had gotten the better of him.

Despite the publishing subsidy from Steve Chepa (actually a loan, much of which was paid back), Valerii Padiak lost a good deal of money on this project. Nonetheless, he did produce a beautiful and impressive volume based on the second revised and expanded English edition. The Ukrainian edition carried only my name as editor. It also had a more accurate title: Entsyklopediia istoriï i kul’tury karpats’kykh rusyniv (The Encyclopedia of the History and Culture of Carpatho-Rusyns).

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Clearly, the encyclopedia project was a very important intellectual exercise for me, and would not have been possible without the generous support of Steve Chepa and Stephan Moldovan.

Throughout the decade of the 1990s, when the Carpatho-Rusyn movement was unfolding in Europe and when the encyclopedia project was being planned, I had continually been criticized by Ukrainians as well as by neutral or admiring observers as the person who more or less single-handedly had dreamed up the idea that Carpatho-Rusyns were a distinct nationality. When the idea seemed to become a reality, I was blamed or praised as the person who “created” Carpatho-Rusyns.

The very idea that any one person could create a people was absurd.

In fact, the very thought was insulting to some of my closest collaborators in the movement, in particular Olena Duts-Faifer and Sasha Zozuliak, among others. Nevertheless, the idea of me as “creator” or “father of the nation” stuck. I was embarrassed and denied such “accusations,” but to no avail.

As work on the encyclopedia progressed, I began to feel uncomfortable at the thought that perhaps I was indeed engaged in a kind of social engineering. As the effective sole editor of the encyclopedia, I had the power—which I did exercise—to decide on the work’s content. In other words, what figures and events would be included, and how they would be assessed.

In effect, through the encyclopedia we were creating a canon of knowledge, forming a consciousness of being Carpatho-Rusyn, and thereby “creating” a people. Hopefully, I did not let what was written about me undermine the principles of impartiality that I had learned to uphold 354

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214. Title page of the Ukrainian-language Encyclopedia of the History and Culture of Carpatho-Rusyns (Uzhhorod: Valerii Padiak Publishers, 2010).

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during my scholarly training. Nevertheless, I could not help but feel uncomfortable that I was fulfilling what my colleague, the Ukrainian Canadian historian, John-Paul Himka, had written about me: “he uses his knowledge of history to influence history. . . in short he is not just studying history, but taking part as an actor in the historical process.”

One of the greatest challenges in putting together the encyclopedia was to standardize terminology and to determine the territorial extent of our subject of inquiry. The 215. Book cover of Paul Robert maps I conceived clearly outlined Magocsi’s Ukrainian-language what I believed to be the historic collection of essays, Every CarpathoCarpatho-Rusyn homeland whose Rusyn is a Rusyn, But not Every Rusyn is a Carpatho-Rusyn (Uzhhorod: V. boundaries were not constrained by Padiak Publishers, 2015). the divisive “artificial” international borders imposed on Carpatho-Rusyns in the twentieth century. In effect, the encyclopedia simply followed the geographic guidelines which I had established in the iconic Carpatho-Rusyn Homeland Map and the largescale Map of Carpatho-Rusyn Settlement.

With regard to the appropriate name, or ethnonym of “our people,” I made a serious mistake. I had long ago argued that the most appropriate ethnonym was Carpatho-Rusyn. Yet, whether in an effort to be brief or because of laziness, I used throughout the encyclopedia, including its title, the ethnonym Rusyn. That lapsus played directly into the hands of Ukrainian-oriented critics, who rightly pointed out that historically the term Rusyn was used by “Ukrainians” in Galicia, Bukovina, and central Ukraine. I certainly should have used the ethnonym Carpatho-Rusyn to avoid confusion with other Rusyns living beyond the mountains to the north and east; that is, modern-day Ukrainians and Belarusans. At least the “improved” Ukrainian edition of the encyclopedia properly used the ethnonym Carpatho-Rusyn.

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To this day I have had to struggle constantly in a vain effort to convince our people to get away from the ethnonym Rusyn, which is used by the World Congress of Rusyns and is the official term used by the governments of Slovakia and the Czech Republic (rusíny), Poland (łemkowie rusiny), Hungary (ruténok), Romania (rutenii), and Serbia and Croatia (rusini). With few exceptions no one was ready to accept the principle of differentiation that I only later expressed in the title of a book of essays published in Ukrainian: Kozhen karpatorusyn ie rusynom, ale ne kozhen rusyn ie karpatorusynom—Every Carpatho-Rusyn is a Rusyn, But not Every Rusyn is a Carpatho-Rusyn.

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The World Congress of Rusyns continued to be the main instrument that brought Carpatho-Rusyns together. Although a somewhat reluctant participant during that body’s first decade of existence, from the outset of the new millennium I began to play an ever more active role. I had finally come to grasp the significance of the fact that many Carpatho-Rusyns, regardless of which country they lived in, came to believe that the Congress was “their” representative body on the world stage. Even more surprising was the fact that governments where Carpatho-Rusyns lived took the World Congress seriously, either as a body to deal with or, in the case of one country (Ukraine), a body to criticize. In either case, no one seemed to question that Carpatho-Rusyns, this otherwise stateless people living in several countries, did have a body which was recognized by the outside world.

At the Sixth Congress in Prague (2001), Vasyl Turok was replaced as chairman by his second in command, the Congress secretary Aleksander (Sasha) Zozuliak. Sasha was now in the anomalous situation of being both chairman and executive secretary (a position he held under Turok) of the organization. Zozuliak and I were closer than ever, so that he depended on me for advice and most importantly moral and, if possible, financial support.

It turned out that the site of the next, Seventh Congress in June 2003 was to be Slovakia, specifically Sasha’s home city, Prešov. Most of the heads of Congress’s eight delegations had within the last few years been to Denmark once, if not twice, where we participated in Rusyn Week sponsored by the government-funded Danish Cultural Institute in Copenhagen. Inspired by that experience, Sasha and I decided to make the Sixth 358

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216. Fedor Vitso (right) beside his self-portrait (1984), Šariš Gallery, Prešov (June 2003).

Congress in Prešov grander than any before. It was planned over a week’s time and included a mini-theatrical festival at the Dukhnovych Theater and an international exhibition of contemporary Carpatho-Rusyn art at the Šariš Gallery on Prešov’s main street.

Each country submitted several works of art, the only exception being Ukraine. The absence of art works from Subcarpathia was due to the fact that our brethren there were, as usual, feuding among themselves and could not even get their act together to send a few pieces of art. I remember with special pride that the one artist representing North America was my youngest daughter Tinka, who had sent two paintings that were on display and reproduced in the catalog published to accompany the exhibit. While Tinka was not able to come to Prešov in person, she was represented by her older sister Cynthia, who flew in from Paris where she was working at the time for the International Herald Tribune.

Of particular historic significance was the access that several World Congress delegates got to the burial crypt below the Greek Catholic Eparchy’s cathedral church. At the time the crypt was still in a decrepit state, untouched since the Communist era. In consultation with the Carpatho-Rusyn Greek Catholic activist Petro Krainiak Sr., I decided to 359

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217. At the final resting place of the national awakener, Aleksander Dukhnovych: (left to right): Mykola Bobynets, Paul Robert Magocsi, Andrei Kopcha, Anna Kuzmiakova, Steve Chepa, and Vasyl Sarkanych (June 2003).

raise funds in America so that under the auspices of the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center we could place a commemorative wall tablet where the remains of the crypt’s most famous figure lay—the nineteenth-century national awakener of Carpatho-Rusyns, Aleksander Dukhnovych. Although not a straightforward proposition, we managed to obtain the permission of the reigning bishop, Jan Hirka, to hold a brief ceremony at Dukhnovych’s resting place. The point was to show the increasingly Slovak-oriented Greek Catholic hierarchy in Prešov that Carpatho-Rusyns worldwide are a force with which to contend, especially when comes to their national identity and their most prominent national awakener.

The Prešov Congress was also unique in that it had a wide range of guests from several Europeean countries, even from Japan, and that for the first time North America had a full complement of ten delegates representing the United States and Canada. Knowing that there would be so many Americans and Canadians, the theater festival included one play performed in English by a troupe of young people from Bratislava. The only problem was that these radically minded student artists thought they would be breaking down traditional barriers by staging a modern 360

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play in which the dialogue was laden with obscenities, among which “f… this and f… that” resounded several dozen times within the space of the otherwise short 45-minute play.

Americans in the audience of a somewhat older generation demonstratively walked out halfway through the performance. Among the incensed viewers was Orestes Mihaly (the assistant attorney general of New York) and his wife Katie (a native born Carpatho-Rusyn from the Spish region). I remember having to hold a post-performance discussion during which I tried, with only some success, to calm frayed nerves. “Is this what the new Carpatho-Rusyn movement is all about?” they asked.

“Obviously not,” I responded. The performance may have been a classic artistic scandal so dear to the hearts of student radicals, but it was not useful for an audience of people committed to supporting a somewhat traditional national revival.

The scandalous play was only a blip in what otherwise was an incredibly successful week, one that allowed Carpatho-Rusyns from nine countries to meet, exchange ideas, and make concrete plans for future cultural and educational projects. All hats off to Sasha Zozuliak for having pulled off an incredibly successful week.

Alas, the stress was too great for Zozuliak. In an effort to cope, he be-

218. Lighter moments at the Seventh World Congress of Rusyns: Steven Chepa, Liuba Huptseiova, Paul Robert Magocsi, Prešov (June 2003).

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219. Carpatho-Rusyn football/soccer immortal Oleksei Bokshai (center) and Danish national minority expert Tom Trier, Seventh World Congress of Rusyns, Prešov (June 2003).

gan the Congress week with one of his alcoholic binges. By the last day of the Congress, he could barely stand up. Vasyl Turok had previously acted in a similar fashion, even at government meetings in Bratislava. For that reason, he was forced to step down as head of the Rusyn Renaissance

220. Impromptu performance by students from Japan singing in Japanese “Chervena ruzha” at the Seventh World Congress of Rusyns, Prešov (June 2003).

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Society and later as chairman of the World Congress. It turned out that Turok’s hand-picked and otherwise enormously talented and efficient successor, Sasha Zozuliak, also could not get through an event without minimally getting inebriated, if not uncontrollably drunk.

These shenanigans played right into the hands of internal rivals in Slovakia, most especially Yan Lypynskyi. This activist from Bratislava had already vowed to sweep out Turok and Zozuliak from leadership positions. Now, after the Seventh Congress (2003), he was one step closer to his goal. In fact, at the close of the Congress when the new world council met, Zozuliak did not stand for re-election (he would have been defeated), and instead Andrei Kopcha from Poland was chosen the new chairman of the World Congress.

***** I got to know Andrei Kopcha at the First World Congress of Rusyns back in 1991 and interacted with him at every subsequent Congress and at interim meetings of the Congress executive, the World Council, on which we both sat. On a less formal note, we spent several days together as part of the Carpatho-Rusyn delegation that on two occasions was invited to Denmark in the late 1990s. Andrei always struck me as a very personable fellow who never provoked anyone, and, if a problematic situation arose, he was always able to find a way to avoid conflicts.

Kopcha was among those Lemkos whose parents had been deported to the western regions of Poland in 1947. He was born in Lower Silesia and worked as an administrator for a Polish theater in Wrocław. He also directed an amateur Lemko theatrical troupe for which he wrote a few plays including one, not surprisingly, about the 1947 deportation known as the Vistula Operation. Moreover, he was the driving force behind the creation of the Lemko Society/Stovaryshŷnia Lemkiv in 1989 and its only chairman for over two decades.

With regard to his work with the World Congress (as head of the delegation from Poland), Andrei had two basic shortcomings. Like many Lemko Rusyns (Olena Duts-Faifer included) Kopcha spoke very fast and, worse still in his case, with a slurred speech pattern. If one was not a native Lemko speaker, it was difficult if not impossible to understand 363

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221. Andrei Kopcha (standing) taking over leadership of the World Congress of Rusyns: (left to right) Mykhailo Almashii, Gabor Hattinger, Yuliian Ramach (partially hidden), Aleksander Zozuliak, Anna Kuzmiakova, and Agata Pilatova, Prešov (June 2003)

what he was saying. Most World Council members from other countries would simply give up in frustration and wait for him to stop speaking, knowing that they would understand little or nothing of what he said.

That was a pity, because some of his interventions, especially regarding organizational and legal issues recorded in Congress documents, were in the end done properly thanks to Andrei’s advice.

The other basic shortcoming was Andrei’s procrastination or sometimes inability to meet promised deadlines. For example, during his two-year tenure as chairman of the World Congress from 2003 to 2005, he was incapable of convening a single meeting of the World Council (scheduled to meet three or four times a year). In effect, the World Congress and World Council did nothing during his tenure.

Yet one could not get angry at Andrei. He was too nice a guy. One of his enduring charms was related to his passionate hobby. On the one occasion I visited his apartment in Wrocław, I discovered that he—like me—had an HO model train layout. I remember subsequently gifting to him a few of my unused railroad cars for which he was exceedingly grateful.

Aside from model trains at home, Andrei on principle travelled only 364

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by train. He always carried on his person a small book of international train schedules according to which he directed his life. I remember how our World Congress/Council meetings would have to begin and end in order to accommodate Andrei’s—or rather the train book’s—schedules of arrivals and departures.

Andrei’s train fetish sometimes led to comical moments. On one occasion the World Council was meeting somewhere in eastern Slovakia, 222. Andrei Kopcha (2014). in Humenné I believe. I agreed to drive him to the train station, but when we got there it turned out that his train had just left Humenné on route to Michalovce where a connecting train would take Andrei northward to Cracow and then Wrocław. What to do? I agreed to get him to Michalovce in my rented car. The highway ran more or less parallel to the rail line on Slovakia’s flat southeastern plain. There we were, rushing to keep up and hopefully to bypass the train which we could see to the left of the highway. Thanks to my aggressive driving technique (I learned to drive, after all, in northern New Jersey and on the streets of Manhattan in New York City) we got to the Michalovce train station with two minutes to spare.

The point is that being with Andrei Kopcha—as frustrating as his rapid-fire speech and procrastination could be—was always great fun.

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Fun and functionality did not often make good bedfellows, however.

When, in 2005, we arrived in Krynica, Poland for the Ninth World Congress, it was clear to many of us, including the executive secretary Sasha Zozuliak, that Kopcha had to be replaced. But by whom? Ever since the founding chairman Vasyl Turok had left after the 2001 Congress, there were an increasing number of people who hoped that I would take on the chairmanship. For several reasons I was reluctant to do so. Engagement as a community leader was not, I thought, appropriate for an academic. I never much liked the limelight and hated to be interviewed by the press.

I lived on another continent and could not travel around central Europe at a moment’s or few days’ notice. Finally, I guess I was never fully committed to the idea of a world congress as the best instrument to promote the Carpatho-Rusyn movement. Something happened at Krynica, however, to change my mind.

Sasha Zozuliak, who stayed on in the influential position of executive secretary, was under increasing pressure from his rivals or outright enemies in Slovakia to end his role in Carpatho-Rusyn organizations at home as well as in the World Congress. Yan Lypynskyi, who a few years before had vowed to me that he was determined to destroy Sasha, lobbied other activists to remove Zozuliak as head of the Rusyn Renaissance Society. That was somewhat easily done since Sasha was tired of the ongoing intrigues against him. He was not about to give up, however, his true love and profession as editor-in-chief of the Narodnŷ novynkŷ newspaper and Rusyn magazine. Both were legally the official organs of the Rusyn Renaissance Society, which formally was required to elect the editor-in-chief every year or two.

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Lypynskyi was able to convince several members of the Rusyn Renaissance Society executive board to replace Zozuliak as editor, but Sasha simply would not step down. The fact that one of his former lead journalists, Anna Kuzmiakova, left his editorial staff to become chairman of the Rusyn Renaissance Society only complicated matters. In effect, Zozuliak simply continued to function as editor-in-chief. Of course, the newspaper, magazines, and book publishing activity were all funded by grants from the Slovak government in Bratislava. Lypynskyi had managed to get himself appointed to several government advisory boards, including those that determined grant requests for national minority cultural activity. It was these influential positions that Lypynskyi used to enable his on-going efforts to undermine Zozuliak.

For several years government grants were cut so substantially that Narodnŷ novynkŷ and Rusyn could barely survive. Still, Zozuliak would not give up. His remaining editorial staff (Anna Plishkova and Mariia Maltsovska) agreed to go on unemployment while still working “voluntarily” for both publications. Sasha then launched a public fundraising campaign among the newspaper’s readership, and he solicited through me several grants from supporters in North America, primarily Steve Chepa and the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center.

Having failed to push out Zozuliak from his editorial and publishing work, Lypynskyi’s next gambit was to eliminate him from the World Congress. Actually, Lypynskyi was never a member of Slovakia’s delegation, although from the mid-1990s he did show up at every Congress as an “observer,” somewhat in the fashion of shpitzers from the Communist era, when all public events associated with national minorities always had at least one informer assigned to report back to the internal security services. The stage was set for what became an unpleasant showdown that played itself out in 2005 at the Eighth World Congress in Krynica, Poland.

At the heart of the problem was a structural issue that had never been resolved. Namely, that the principle that each member country had only one organization to represent it. This meant that other Carpatho-Rusyn organizations within a given country were not represented at the Congress. Poland’s delegation headed by Andrei Kopcha simply refused to 367

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accept any organization other than the Lemko Society (Stovarŷshŷnia Lemkiv). Ukraine’s delegation was comprised of several organizations which together formed an umbrella group called the Soim, represented at the congress by Mykhailo Almashii. Absent were delegates from the founding organizational member from Ukraine, the Society of Carpatho-Rusyns. This is because its leaders (Ivan Turianytsia and Yevhen Zhupan) refused to join. Hungary’s delegation was led by the accommodating Tibor Miklosh Popovych, but the real leader, Gabriel Hattinger, refused to allow any group other than the Organization of Rusyns which he headed. In fact, that organization was stagnating under Hattinger’s leadership, while a new rival group, led by the Liavynets family (father Stepan, wife Marianna, son Stefan) and Vira Girits, showed up in Krynica, denounced Hattinger, and demanded membership in the Congress.

But the biggest problem was the delegation from Slovakia. It was headed by the new chairman of the Rusyn Renaissance Society, Anna Kuzmiakova, although for all intents and purposes it was directed from behind the scenes by Yan Lypynskyi and Pavel Dupkanych, a delegate from Medzilaborce. Both were determined to get rid of Zozuliak. During the Congress proceedings Kuzmiakova and Lypynskyi denounced Zozuliak with a battery of personal insults. So harsh was their tone that one influential member of the Slovak delegation, the renowned caricaturist Fedor Vitso, rose to speak out in anger and disgust against his fellow delegates.

While Zozuliak, he said, may have had some problems, no one could ever doubt his patriotism to the Carpatho-Rusyn cause. Everyone in the hall, said Vitso, should be thankful for Sasha’s incredibly positive work for over a decade on behalf of the World Congress and specifically, the Carpatho-Rusyn movement in Slovakia. Vitso’s words did not dissuade the Slovak delegation, which was determined to get rid of Zozuliak.

Many of the other country delegates were surprised and shocked by the attacks spewing forth from the Slovak delegation. Among those upset and dismayed was the Lemko “iron lady” and member of Poland’s delegation, Olena Duts-Faifer, who rose to give a ringing testimonial in praise of her fellow Carpatho-Rusyn patriot Sasha Zozuliak.

I was long aware of Lypynskyi’s anti-Zozuliak campaign and had come to Krynica prepared with plans to combat Sasha’s enemies. As a strong 368

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223. Steven Chepa (far right) with Lifetime Achievement Awardees Volodymyr Fedynyshynets and Aleksander Zozuliak, and Dukhnovych Literary Awardee Agneta Papharhai, Eighth World Congress of Rusyns, Krynica, Poland (June 2005).

believer in having each country represented by a kind of consortium or an umbrella group of organizations, I had convinced Father Dymytrii Sydor to create such a body (the Soim) for Ukraine. Similarly, Zozuliak had taken up my suggestion and created the Slovak Association of Rusyn Organizations (SARO) as a consortium which would include—but not be dominated by—the Rusyn Renaissance Society. My goal was to have the Slovak Association of Rusyn Organizations recognized as the body to represent Slovakia at the World Congress.

Even before we left Canada, Steve Chepa and I agreed that the Award for Lifetime Achievement on behalf of Carpatho-Rusyns should be presented once again. We chose as recipients the two earliest activists in the movement: Volodymyr Fedynyshynets from Ukraine, and none other than Aleksander Zozuliak from Slovakia.

The formal award ceremony at the Krynica Congress constituted an open slap in the face to those members of the Slovak delegation who had denigrated Zozuliak the day before. Steve Chepa and I were overjoyed at our response to the livid Lypynskyi and his supporters.

The tension in the hall was worse than it had ever been at any other 369

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224. Anna Kuzmiakova flanked (to the right) by Tibor Miklosh Popovych and (to the left) by Mykhailo Almashii at the podium of the Eighth World Congress of Rusyns, Krynica, Poland (June 2005).

Congress, so much so that it seemed as if the Congress itself might dissipate. Andrei Kopcha, never much of an organizer, was incapable of dealing with the situation. The North American delegation, which included Elaine Rusinko and her impartial husband, the Washington political consultant Stu Rothenberg, were among those, including Steve Chepa, who thought that the time had come for me to step up to the plate.

For years, members of the Ukrainian, Yugoslav, Czech, Hungarian, and for a time Slovak delegations expressed the view that I should become the chairman of the Congress. I continually refused for the reasons expressed above. But now the Carpatho-Rusyn movement, at least in the context of the World Congress, seemed threatened. And so, I agreed, albeit reluctantly.

As was the practice in those days, the chairman of the Congress was chosen by the World Council, that is, the executive body comprised of the heads of each country’s delegation. That body decided almost unanimously (I believe Slovakia’s member abstained) that I become the new chairman of the World Congress. When the World Council members returned to the hall where the Congress delegates were anxiously waiting, and when it was announced that Professor Magocsi was elected chair370

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man, there was a resounding standing ovation, the exception being most (although not all) of the delegates from Slovakia.

As I took my seat at the center of the podium as the new chairman, alongside me was the previous chairman, Andrei Kopcha, who felt he should still direct the proceedings. I politely informed him that I was now the chairman and would take over from then on. He concurred, and I turned to the first order of business. I announced that I would accept the chairmanship on one condition: that the executive secretary (who actually ran the Congress) would remain Aleksander Zozuliak. This prompted cries of protest from the Slovak delegation. Almost on cue, Slovakia’s World Council member and head of the Rusyn Renaissance Society, Anna Kuzmiakova, left the podium and led her delegation out of the hall. I believe their “observer” Lypynskyi remained behind to see what would happen next.

Members of the Slovak delegation were convinced that the Congress could not function without them and that, as a body, we would ask them to return and capitulate to their conditions—the removal of Zozuliak as executive chairman. My response was expressed in the following manner. “We all regret that the Slovak delegation decided to follow the classic Bolshevik tactic used during the Revolution of 1917. Whenever the Bolsheviks found themselves outnumbered at any of the numerous councils being held, they would march out. Then, with the help of Red Guards, they would storm back in and take over the proceedings, or they would move to another place and set up a rival council. Unfortunately for the Slovak delegation, it had no contingent of Red Guards.” The World Congress would safely proceed with or without any delegation from Slovakia.

And so, it did.

When a few minutes later the Eighth World Congress came to an official close and we all left to take our luncheon, I remember walking through the park outside the Congress hall and seeing the Slovak delegation sitting dejected on several benches. They really thought we would invite them back. We glared at each other and said nothing. It was clear to them that I, as the new chairman of the World Congress, would act with a firm hand. I felt confident I could do so, knowing that I had the very strong support of members of all the other country delegations.

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And if Slovakia’s Rusyn Renaissance Society did not want to return to the Congress, there was always the consortium idea, to which the Slovak Association of Rusyn Organizations (created by Zozuliak) already belonged which they could join.

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For the next four years from 2005 to 2009, I served as chairman of the World Congress of Rusyns. During that time, the organization had to respond to requests from other countries for membership; to integrate fully its newest member, Romania; to address structural matters within the delegations from Ukraine, Hungary, and Slovakia; and to resolve the question of national symbols. Since I was generally averse to administrative responsibilities and meeting with committees, I left those matters in the competent hands of the executive secretary, Sasha Zozuliak. And he performed well, very well. In fact, whether it be at our periodic World Council meetings or the two subsequent Congresses (2007 and 2009) at which I, pro forma, presided as chairman, it was Zozuliak who for the most part set the agenda and directed the discussions. While I would formally open the World Congress and would still give a carefully worded address on the current state of the Carpatho-Rusyn movement, the rest of the proceedings were, at my request, chaired by Zozuliak. This format was for me an ideal arrangement, in which Sasha and I complemented each other perfectly.

There were, of course, larger strategic matters with which I was always concerned. From the very beginning of the movement, I set out to convince Carpatho-Rusyns that present-day Transcarpathia (historic Subcarpathian Rus’) in Ukraine was not the only place where our people lived, and that communities in all countries must be represented and have a voice in the World Congress. The “founding countries” represented at the First World Congress in 1991 were Slovakia, Ukraine, Poland, Yugoslavia, and the United States, to which were added in the next year or so the Czech Republic and Hungary. Later Canada was joined with the 373

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225. Sylvester Kukhar and Paul Robert Magocsi, Munich, Germany (March 2001).

United States to comprise one North American delegation, while in the wake of the break-up of Yugoslavia, the Congress accepted two separate member delegations: one for Yugoslavia (later Serbia), the other for Croatia. And there remained the question of Romania.

***** The World Congress also hoped to get Carpatho-Rusyn diaspora communities in other countries involved. Only after several years had gone by did I learn that as early as 1995 a German-Rusyn Friendship Society, made up exclusively of recent Rusnak immigrants from Yugoslavia’s Vojvodina region, had been established in Munich. In March 2001, while I was on the first of several two-month appointments at the Max Planck Institute in Halle, I travelled one weekend to Munich in order to meet with the founding head of the Friendship Society, the physician Sylvester Kukhar.

After that encounter I proposed to the World Council that we create the category of associate member, which meant that a given country’s representative organization would pay half dues (50 Euros) and would be allotted five instead of ten voting delegates at the World Congress.

The German-Rusyn Friendship Society accepted these conditions and 374

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became an associate member. Alas, Kukhar had stepped down as organization head in 2002, and after a few years the Carpatho-Rusyn organization in Germany was heard of no more.

More complex was the case of Russia. At the Seventh Congress in Prešov (2003), two persons came from Moscow claiming to represent the Society of Rusyns/Obshchestvo Rusinov, which had evolved from the already existing Fedor Aristov Society of Friends of Subcarpathian Rus’/ Obshchestvo druzei Karpatskoi Rusi im. F.F. Aristova set up (also in Moscow) in 1999. The Rusyn Society’s spokesperson was Iosif Glivka, a native of Transcarpathia and self-described Carpatho-Rusyn who had been living and working in Russia’s capital for several years. The two-member delegation from Moscow was being “chaperoned” by Mikhail Dronov, who after graduating from Prešov University returned to his native Moscow, where he landed a junior research position at the prestigious Russian Academy of Science’s Institute of Slavic Studies. Dronov was on his way to becoming Russia’s expert on Carpatho-Rusyn matters and had already become a scholarly advisor to the recently established Aristov Society of Friends. Although I was not chairman of the World Congress

226. Mikhail Dronov (far right) with Iosif Glivka and Tatiana Aristova, daughter of the namesake of the Aristov Society of Friends of Subcarpathian Rus’, Moscow (ca. 2000).

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at the time, Dronov brought “the Russians” first to me, in the hope that I would support their request for membership in the World Congress.

Ever since the Aristov Society of Friends was created in 1999, I was suspicious. What Carpatho-Rusyn immigrant community, if any, was there in Russia? It is true that since 1945 several individuals from Soviet Transcarpathia were drawn to Moscow where some made very successful professional careers, including the economist Vasyl Simchera and the historian Ivan Pop. But individuals do not make a community. As for the Aristov Society, its main activity was to publish reprints of Russophile historic works, including those by the society’s namesake Fedor Aristov and his daughter Tatiana Aristova. These works actually denied the basic tenets of the World Congress and, instead, argued that Carpatho-Rusyns are not a distinct nationality but a branch of the Russian nationality, something that all Russophile publications and the Russian imperial government had argued since the nineteenth century.

Therefore, I was opposed to membership for Russia in the World Congress. The subsequent activity of Transcarpathia’s Moscow Patriarchate priest Dymytrii Sydor (see below, section 47) certainly did not help the ongoing requests of individuals like Iosif Glivka and Mikhail Dronov who remained determined to have an organization from Russia enter the World Congress.

Always suspicious of Russia, certainly in its former Soviet incarnation, I was now becoming increasingly concerned that the entreaties from Moscow, whether facilitated naively or deliberately by Mikhail Dronov (whom I continued to like and respect as a scholar), were clearly part of the Russian government’s—specifically Putin’s—longer term policy to destabilize Ukraine. As long as I was active in the World Congress as World Council member and later Congress chairman—and with the help of member delegations from Slovakia, Poland, and Romania—the idea of a Russian presence in the World Congress, even as associate member, was never realized.

After my “retirement” from the World Congress in 2009, however, the Russian request for membership was put forth by a new organization, also headed by the Carpatho-Rusyn activist living in Moscow, Iosif Glivka. Glivka’s organization, called the Rusyn Homeland Carpathian 376

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Rus’ Society/Rusinskoe zemlechestvo Karpatskaia Rus’, was given serious consideration. This is because the new World Congress chairman Diura Papuga and his delegation from Serbia, as well as some younger activists from Poland (Bogdan Gambal) and Slovakia (Petro Medvid and Milan Pilip) were in favor of bringing Russia into the fold. Papuga, after all, did come from a country, Serbia, which was always a close ally of Russia. As for the younger activists from Poland and Slovakia, Medvid and Pilip, they had such a strong aversion to Ukraine and its treatment of CarpathoRusyns that they saw Russia as the only political entity which could force the hand of the central government in Kyiv. The World Congress had gone so far as to offer a two-year trial period intended to result in full membership for Russia. Somewhat unexpectedly, the organization headed by Glivka wrote back and did not accept the offer.

***** Even more dubious in my view was the appearance of an entirely unexpected country candidate—Moldova. In 2003 the Rus’ Civic Society/ Obshchestvennaia organizatsiia Rus’ was established in Kishinev under the leadership of a dynamic journalist-historian, Sergei Suleak. The Rus’ Society was openly supported by funds from Moscow that came through Putin’s pet project to reach “Russians abroad,” the Russian World/Russkii Mir Foundation. Suleak’s energy, combined with substantial funding from Moscow, made possible the creation of a quarterly journal called Rusin. From 2007 it began to appear four times a year (an achievement in itself) so that by 2020 there were no less than 60 issues of the journal published, each containing 100 to 200 or more pages.

Early on Suleak asked me to become a contributor. I refused. He did, however, manage to attract to the journal’s editorial board some of our leading Carpatho-Rusyn scholars and writers, including Anna Plishkova from Slovakia, Mykhailo Feisa from Serbia, and Mykhailo Almashii from Ukraine. My refusal to participate in this venture was polite, but firm.

My reasoning was quite simple. Suleak’s argument that there were Rusyns in Moldova was at the very least a spurious contention. He provided no proof that today the East Slavic inhabitants in Moldova (officially designated Russians or Ukrainians) call themselves Rusyns. Cer377

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227. Cover of the first issue of Moldova’s Russian-language journal Rusin (Chişinaŭ/ Kishinev 2005).

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tainly, none believed that Carpatho-Rusyns formed a distinct nationality.

We all know that the term Rusyn was a widespread ethnonym for East Slavs inhabiting what is today western Ukraine (historic Galicia and Bukovina) and Moldova (especially its northern and southern regions). But long ago those East Slavs adopted either a Russian or Ukrainian national identity.

Russophile scholars in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, regardless of where they resided, argued that there was no Ukrainian nationality and no Rusyn or Carpatho-Rusyn nationality. They were all Russians. Now at the outset of the twenty-first century this ideology was being revived on the pages of Suleak’s Moldovan journal Rusin, which openly admitted to the substantial funding it received from Putin’s Russian World/Russkii Mir Foundation. While the early issues of Suleak’s Rusin did include many articles about Carpatho-Rusyns, some even written in Rusyn, the vast majority of articles since then have been about Moldovan and Ukrainian history, but all written in Russian and all presenting the Russophile view that these lands—Ukraine and Moldavia (Bessarabia)—are historically, culturally, and demographically Russian.

And it was such an organization based in Moldova that wanted to join the World Congress of Rusyns.

I argued unequivocally against such a proposition at the same time that I expressed my displeasure with Carpatho-Rusyn colleagues from Prešov University (Anna Plishkova and Kveta Koporova) and the University of Novi Sad (Mykhailo Feisa) who allowed themselves to be drawn into the Moldovan adventure. Actually, Sergei Suleak showed up at the Ninth World Congress in Sighet. Romania was, after all, one of the easiest countries for citizens of Moldovia to visit. After all, Moldovans are ethnolinguistically no different from Romanians. Suleak and I met briefly on the street during a break in the Congress sessions.

Suleak struck me as a respectable figure. Our brief conversation was cordial, even though I made it clear why Moldova could never be a member of the World Congress of Rusyns. Even if—and it was a big if—some East Slavic citizens of Moldova still called themselves Rusyns, Moldova was not geographically even near Carpathian Rus’. Put another way, even if some of Moldova’s inhabitants in the past or present may have called 379

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themselves Rusyns, they are not Carpatho-Rusyns.

Here, as I argued time after and time again, maps are important. They outline a specific historic homeland of the Carpatho-Rusyn people, and not some vague undefined space to which anyone can belong. This is the message that continually needed to be hammered into the minds of our people: Carpatho-Rusyns know who they are and where they come from—Carpathian Rus’. To be sure, there are also immigrants and their descendants who trace their origins to Carpathian Rus’ and who in some cases have lived for decades, even centuries, as diasporas in various countries—the United States, Canada, Serbia, Croatia, the Czech Republic, as well as the newest diasporas in southwestern Poland (Silesia) and western Ukraine (Galicia). But Moldova was clearly not one of those diasporas. Fortunately, the Moldovan request for World Congress membership never came up again, even though the journal Rusin, with its antiquated and politically charged Russophile views, continues to be published.

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Whereas none of the experiments with communities in Germany, Russia, and Moldova resulted in World Congress membership, there was still one community that was missing among our ranks—the Carpatho-Rusyns of Romania.

No one among the delegates in existing member organizations in the World Congress seemed to care or even know about our people in Romania. I had to inform them that in several villages south of the Tysa River, there was an indigenous Carpatho-Rusyn population living in the Maramureş Region (the southern part of historic Maramorosh county), which was simply an extension of Subcarpathian Rus’. There were about 35,000 East Slavic inhabitants in those villages, who, since 1945, as in other areas of historic Carpathian Rus’, were classified as “Ukrainians.” Did these people all adopt a Ukrainian identity, or were there still some self-declared Carpatho-Rusyns? And, if so, where were they? And shouldn’t they be brought into the fold of the World Congress and the Carpatho-Rusyn movement? I was determined to find them. But it turned out not to be so easy.

Sometime in 1996 or 1997, I arranged to have invited to one of our World Council meetings a woman from Romania who worked for some government body (perhaps the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) and who said she was of Ruthenian (rutenul) background. Vasyl Turok was chairman at the time and, after meeting with her, both he and I quickly realized that this person represented the view that Ruthenians/Carpatho-Rusyns and Ukrainians are the same people.

Undeterred, I came across yet another “Carpatho-Rusyn” from Romania, Pavlo Romaniuk. I cannot remember which of us found the other.

What I do remember is that my youngest daughter, Tinka, who in the 381

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late 1990s was about fifteen years old, had a keen interest in witchcraft and pagan-like rituals. When I suggested that I could take her for a visit to Transylvania, the land of Dracula, she jumped with joy at the idea.

And so, with my wife Maria, the three of us set off from eastern Slovakia across Hungary into Romania, beginning at Brašov in the southern Carpathians near the border with historic Wallachia, where Dracula (the fifteenth-century voivode Vlad II Dracul) allegedly had his castle.

On our way northward back to Slovakia we deliberately drove through the Maramureş Region and stopped to spend the night at the home of Pavlo Romaniuk in the Rusyn-inhabited village of Rona de Sus/Vŷshnia Runa. Romaniuk was a very generous host who loved to entertain guests by singing and playing—actually, quite poorly—the piano.

In conversation I learned that he was a local cultural activist (for which he received a modest salary from the Romanian government) and that he was also an external graduate student working on a doctoral dissertation about his region’s folklore at Chernivtsi University in neighboring Ukraine. I already had a suspicion that he made no distinction between Ruthenians and Ukrainians, although in conversation he all the while spoke about himself and his people in Maramureş as Rusyns/Ruthenians.

Within a few months after my visit to Transylvania and Maramureş, I received an invitation from Tom Trier to participate in the Rusyn Cultural Week and the Danish government-sponsored visit of Carpatho-Rusyn leaders to Copenhagen planned for the autumn of 1997. I proposed that we invite Romaniuk to represent the Carpatho-Rusyns of Romania. He came but turned out to be a disaster.

For the bus trip Romaniuk’s wife packed him a large food basket, while he brought a sufficient amount of palinka (home brew). Our Carpatho-Rusyn colleagues from Slovakia, Ukraine, and Poland—no strangers to palinka consumption—were shocked by the newcomer from Romania who was inebriated during the entire trip. After arriving in Copenhagen, our fastidious Danish hosts provided a per diem to each participant in order that they use it for food and other basic expenses.

Romaniuk did not understand the per diem (daily allowance) concept, certainly had no self-discipline, and by the second day had drunk up his entire per diem for the week.

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In effect, the peasant child was let out of the village. He simply did not know how to act and was reduced to begging for food from the rest of us for his remaining days in Denmark and the return trip home. To say the least, Romaniuk was an embarrassment to us all.

In his rare sober moments, Romaniuk spoke with bombast about how, when returning home, he would organize a Rusyn cultural society which would become a formal member of the World Congress. After the fiasco in Denmark, none of us ever saw or heard from him again.

I had virtually given up on Romania until something totally unexpected occurred. Sometime in the year 2000, I believe, there was a World Council meeting being held in Prešov. During that meeting, I was called out of the room and asked to meet with two persons who had just arrived from Romania and wished to see me. Standing before me were two individuals who introduced themselves as Dr. Georgii Firtsak, a deputy of Romania’s parliament, and Ivan Moisiuk, a writer and cultural activist.

Moisiuk did the talking, because Firczak, although of Carpatho-Rusyn background, could not speak a word of Rusyn. Aside from Romanian and Hungarian (the language of his mother), Firtsak spoke basic French, the means through which he and I communicated, both orally and, subsequently, in writing. Their reason for coming to Prešov was to join the World Congress, and they hoped I would intercede on their behalf.

I asked them to wait. I returned to the World Council meeting and told the others in the room who, aside from our chairman Vasyl Turok, were Andrei Kopcha from Poland, Mikhal Varga from Yugoslavia, Father Dymytrii Sydor from Ukraine, and the council’s executive secretary, Aleksander Zozuliak. When I told them about the unexpected visitors from Romania, Turok’s first reaction was negative. Perhaps he reacted that way because of the two previous negative experiences with “Rusyns” from Romania. The others were less hostile, and it was agreed that we should allow Firtsak and Moisiuk to enter and make their case.

Speaking in Romanian, Firtsak related that he was a relative of the late nineteenth-century Greek Catholic bishop of Mukachevo, Iulii Firtsak, and that he himself was proud of his Carpatho-Rusyn heritage. More importantly, he told us about the newly created Cultural Society of Rusyns in Romania. After Moisiuk translated Firtsak’s words into Rusyn, 383

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228. Ivan Moisuk and Gheorghe Firtsak at a Carpatho-Rusyn cultural festival in Hungary (2002).

he spoke himself in passionate, poetic tones and with tears in his eyes, about how his Rusyn people were re-awakening after four decades of forced ukrainianization, the official policy of former Communist Romania, which at the time had followed the Soviet lead on this matter.

Both Firtsak and Moisiuk were successfully pulling at our heartstrings.

Following their performance, the Cultural Society of Rusyns in Romania headed by Georgii Firtsak was invited to send a delegation to the next World Congress. Romania’s Carpatho-Rusyns were overjoyed and forever after credited me, perhaps unjustifiably, as the person who made their membership possible.

At the Seventh World Congress in Prešov (2003), the Cultural Society of Rusyns in Romania was formally inducted. From that moment the energetic—and effective—Firtsak pushed for having a future World Congress held in Romania. After I became chairman in 2005, Firtsak felt the time was right. The next 2007 Congress which I chaired was, indeed, held in Romania. *****

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Already in the 1990s, the bi-annual meetings of the World Congress had adopted a standard and predictable format. The Congress became a three-day affair, generally beginning on Friday evening (with a welcoming dinner and folk concert) before the formal opening on Saturday morning with a plenary session which included pro-forma greetings by several municipal, regional, and central government officials (one of which usually read a statement from the host country’s president or prime minister). Then followed activity reports by the heads of each national delegation which concluded the morning’s plenary session. It was in the context of that plenary session that I always spoke last, hardly ever delivering a status report on activity among Carpatho-Rusyns in North America, but rather a general strategic analysis of the Carpatho-Rusyn movement worldwide.

Saturday afternoon was devoted to break-out discussion groups among delegates assigned to various commissions concerned with matters such as the media, education, economic development, and scholarship. Then followed on Saturday night a festive dinner and concert at which prizes, such as the Dukhnovych Literary Award, were announced.

Sunday morning the Congress gathered for its closing plenary session at which resolutions for the next two years were adopted, but, as with all previous Congress resolutions, were hardly ever fulfilled. Each national delegation announced its delegate, almost always the same one as before, to the World Council which secluded itself for about a quarter of an hour or so to choose a new World Congress chairman for the next two years.

The point was that for nearly three days, Congress delegates and guests, usually about one hundred or so, sat in a few rooms without even interacting with the larger Carpatho-Rusyn community in the country where they were meeting. I hoped to change that format at the first Congress that I chaired which was about to be held in Romania.

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As we approached the 2007 Ninth World Congress in Romania, the perennial question of representation was again becoming a major problem. Should there be only one organization to represent each country, or should each country be represented by a group or consortium of organizations? The consortium approach, long informally adopted by the North American delegation, was tried by the delegations from Slovakia and Ukraine. In the wake of the 2005 Congress in Krynica, the Slovak delegation managed to overcome internal dissent and accept two bodies to represent them, Slovakia’s Association of Rusyn Organizations (SARO) and the Rusyn Renaissance Society (Obroda). By contrast, in Ukraine, the Soim of Subcarpathian Rusyns comprised of four or five organizations proved unworkable.

In those days, everyone wanted to be a leader (the vozhdism phenomenon), so that when it seemed that Father Dymytrii Sydor was emerging as Transcarpathia’s main Carpatho-Rusyn figure, the long-time activist and respected pediatrician Yevhen Zhupan broke with the Soim.

Zhupan founded in Mukachevo something called the National Council of Rusyns in Transcarpathia and petitioned that this new body should represent Ukraine in the World Congress. At its last meeting before the Ninth Congress in Romania, the World Council rejected Zhupan’s request and instead accepted the Soim as Ukraine’s official member.

I proposed, however, to exercise my prerogative as chairman and to invite three guests from the National Council of Rusyns to the Congress.

I felt strongly that someone as important as Dr. Zhupan should not be excluded from our World Congress deliberations. The World Council agreed with me, and an invitation was extended to Zhupan and two oth386

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er (named) National Council members. Then the good doctor threw a wrench into my efforts, by arguing that a fourth person from Mukachevo, the head of the Carpatho-Rusyn Society branch in that city, Ivan Letsovych, be allowed to come as well. This was not what was agreed, and when I reminded Zhupan of our agreement he said that without Letsovych he would not come to the Congress.

I remember how on the eve of the opening of the Congress being held in Sighet, I stopped in Mukachevo to meet specifically with Zhupan.

I literally begged him to come to the Congress as my (the chairman’s) honored guest. I thought I had his agreement to do so. Yet the following day, at the Congress opening, neither Zhupan nor any of his colleagues from the National Council showed up at Sighet. Even our host, Georgii Firtsak—otherwise a supporter of the one organization per country principle—was upset. But for another reason.

When Firtsak and I met on the eve of the Congress opening, he proceeded to lash out in an emotional tirade, telling me about a person named Mihai Lauruc/Mykhailo Lavriuk, a local Sighet businessman with an allegedly shady reputation. He was trying to get himself on to the Congress’ Romanian delegation as head of what was likely a fictitious “second” Rusyn organization in Romania. Lavriuk had befriended Father Sydor who headed Ukraine’s Soim. Sydor, in turn, convinced me (while we were driving in his car from Uzhhorod to the Congress) that I should meet with Lavriuk. I was always open to meeting and listening to everyone before making any decision. When Firtsak discovered I had met with his enemy, he was furious. In any case nothing ever came of the meeting with Lavriuk, other than Firtsak becoming forever alienated from Sydor. That Firtsak was a fervent Greek Catholic, and Sydor an Orthodox priest, was a profound difference that certainly did not help matters.

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Our local hosts, the Cultural Society of Rusyns in Romania, wanted the Ninth Congress to be held in the country’s capital Bucharest or, at the very least, in the town of Deva, not far from the Hungarian border, which happened to be the residence of the Cultural Society’s chairman and Romanian parliamentary deputy, Georgii Firtsak. I was totally opposed to either Bucharest or Deva, since those cities and surrounding areas had no Carpatho-Rusyns.

If the Congress were to be held anywhere in Romania, I argued, it should be in the Maramureş Region where Carpatho-Rusyns actually lived. Many of us were skeptical that Maramureş village inhabitants identified themselves as Rusyns. If not, the role of the Congress should be, at least in part, to promote the idea of Carpatho-Rusynism among them.

While Firtsak was clearly not happy about my proposal, he nevertheless agreed to hold the Congress in Sighet (Maramaţei Sighetul).

How could a stay in this difficult to reach provincial town be justified?

My answer was the following. Sighet was the site of an important secondary school (gymnasium) attended by several generations of Carpatho-Rusyns before World War I. The city was also the seat of the Marmarosh county courthouse, where in late 1913-1914 the infamous anti-Orthodox trial was held against 96 Carpatho-Rusyn peasants (mostly from Iza in Subcarpathian Rus’/Transcarpathia) accused of treason by the Hungarian authorities for having “returned” to the Orthodox “faith of their fathers.”

On a more contemporary note, we learned that plans were being made to rebuild a bridge (destroyed during World War II) across the Tysa River which would connect Solotvyno in Transcarpathian Ukraine with Sighet on the Romanian side of the border.

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229. Arrival on the Romanian side of the new Tysa River bridge of delegates to the Ninth World Congress of Rusyns: (back left) Valerii Padiak, Congress chairman Paul Robert Magocsi, unidentified, and Father Dymytrii Sydor, Sighet, Romania (June 2007).

I urged Firtsak to prepare a memorial plaque (with a text in Romanian and in Rusyn) to commemorate the 1913-1914 anti-Orthodox trial. The goal was to have the bridge and plaque ready by the time the Ninth World Congress of Rusyns was scheduled to begin in June 2007. Spearheaded

by Firtsak, the Rusyn Cultural Society did lobby the Romanian central government in Bucharest and the local authorities in Sighet. Meanwhile, we in North America, through the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center, visited on two occasions the Romanian Embassy in Washington, D.C. to urge the completion of the bridge across the Tysa and to be granted permission to mount the memorial plaque in Sighet. Such lobbying 389

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230. Vasyl Petrytskyi, Paul Robert Magocsi, Gheorghe Firtsak, Larysa Ilchenko Padiak, and Valerii Padiak lead the procession to the Ninth World Congress of Rusyns, Sighet, Romania (June 2007).

activity certainly provided a renewed sense of civic purpose among the Carpatho-Rusyn American community.

In the end, we were partially successful. I had argued that we needed to create a kind of show. As chairman of the World Congress, I arrived first in Uzhhorod, Ukraine. Together with one or two members of the North American delegation as well as with Ukraine’s entire ten-person delegation, we travelled by car eastward to Solotvyno, where we were given permission by the border patrol of both countries to walk across the new bridge. Traffic had to be held up as, with Carpatho-Rusyn flags fluttering in the wind under a bright blue sky on a gorgeously sunny June day, we walked across the bridge. Waiting to greet us on the Romanian side of the border were our Carpatho-Rusyn World Congress brethren from Romania, Hungary, and Yugoslavia.

After the traditional bread and salt was broken, consumed, and washed down with an appropriate amount of palinka, our now much larger group with many more Carpatho-Rusyn flags and accompanying musicians (much like at a village wedding) proceeded from the Tysa River’s edge to the center of Sighet. Later that first day, we proceeded 390

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231. Paul Robert Magocsi presenting the memorial plague, held by Ivan Levytskyi and Florin Groza, to Orthodox martyrs for the faith (1913-1914) at the county courthouse, Sighet, Romania (June 2007).

to the courthouse carrying the plague commemorating the 1913-1914 trial. Despite urging from Romania’s national government in Bucharest, Sighet’s municipal authorities (influenced by Ukrainian-oriented town council members) refused to allow the plaque to be mounted.

Regardless of the setback, we symbolically held up the plaque on the courthouse wall, while the head of the delegation from Ukraine, the Orthodox priest Father Sydor, and the granddaughter of one of the accused Orthodox “converts,” the popular singer Olga Prokop, spoke in a solemn manner about those who on the eve of World War I were persecuted for their Orthodox faith by the pre-World War I Hungarian authorities.

Interestingly, neither the chairman of the Congress (me) nor our host in Romania (Georgii Firtsak) was asked to speak or even show up in the photographs of what turned out to be a rather modest event.

I was also displeased with the pattern of Congress delegates sitting in a room for two and a half days talking among themselves and isolated from the local Carpatho-Rusyn inhabitants. Consequently, Saturday afternoon saw no indoor meetings. Rather, we hired buses and divided the Congress delegates into four groups which went out into the countryside, 391

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232. Anna Plishkova and Aleksander Zozuliak from Slovakia (on the right) interviewing Carpatho-Rusyn villagers in the Maramuresh Region village of Tisa/Tysa, Romania (June 2007).

each to visit one or two villages. This exercise was to my mind especially successful, as delegates from Hungary, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Slovakia, and Poland, who mostly resided in cities, had an opportunity to meet ordinary Carpatho-Rusyns in their village homes in the otherwise backwater Maramureş Region of Romania.

The greatest surprise during that afternoon’s excursion was to see a private museum filled with cultural artifacts and to learn and feel on the spot that the local populace did identify themselves as Rusyns, regardless how they might be recorded in census reports and by education officials who considered them to be Ukrainian.

In short, my goal was fulfilled. World Congress delegates reached out to Carpatho-Rusyns living in the Maramureş Region and were received with open arms. It was, thereafter, the task of the Cultural Society of Rusyns in Romania to follow up and help the locals assert publicly their true ancestral identity. Alas, Firtsak and his colleagues never really followed up on the initiative we undertook during the Ninth World Congress.

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233. Carpatho-Rusyn flag, designed by Mykhailo Almashii, 2007.

Well before the Ninth World Congress began in Sighet, I had been frequently contacted, actually badgered, by Carpatho-Rusyns in the United States who wanted to know what the correct national flag was. Published sources showed different versions of what was described as the Carpatho-Rusyn flag. All versions included a coat of arms in the center with a standing red bear on the right side and a series of seven horizontal bars on the left. The background field on which the coat of arms was placed was made up of either three horizontal bands in red, white, and blue (the traditional Slavic colors) or two horizontal bands in azure blue and yellow (the Ukrainian national colors). Which one of these versions was correct? And who should decide? Since Carpatho-Rusyns did not have their own state, should the decision not be made by the World Congress of Rusyns?

I agreed that indeed it should be the decision of the Congress and, therefore, asked Mykhailo Almashii, the respected cultural activist from Transcarpathia, to make recommendations for an authoritative version of a Carpatho-Rusyn national flag. He did finally come up with a proposal for the traditional coat of arms (red bear and seven horizontal bars) on a field of blue, white, and red horizontal full-length bands. I cannot remember whether Almashii proposed, or whether I insisted, on including the red bear coat of arms, originally commissioned and approved in 393

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1920 by the Czechoslovak government for its eastern province of Subcarpathian Rus’.

While on the subject of national symbols, I proposed that the World Congress should also designate a common national hymn. I circulated several musical scores (with only slight variations) of a melody set to the national awakener Aleksander Dukhnovych’s poem, “I was, Am, and Will Remain a Rusyn.” Almashii, a trained musician and long-term choir director, chose the final version of the melody.

The Ninth World Congress in Sighet unanimously adopted the proposals put forth for a common Carpatho-Rusyn national flag and national hymn. I was quite pleased that this happened during my chairmanship and that the bear symbol in particular was henceforth used not only by the World Congress but by each of its component member organizations as often revealed on the mastheads of their official publications and correspondence. It is true that some Carpatho-Rusyn communities had regional anthems, such as those for the Subcarpathian Rusyns of Ukraine, the Lemko Rusyns of Poland, and Vojvodinian Rusyns of Serbia, but after 2007, all World Congress organizations accepted as “theirs” the common national flag and national hymn.

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Within a few months after the Sighet World Congress, Father Dymytrii Sydor became a serious problem. Ever since the late 1990s, when he entered the ranks of the Carpatho-Rusyn movement, I had been subjected to comments from various quarters that Sydor was not any ordinary priest in the Russian Orthodox Moscow Patriarchate. That church was, in fact, closely allied to the foreign policy objectives of the Russian state, which after the year 2000 was to come under the control of Vladimir Putin. Like Professor Ivan Turianytsia in the 1990s, so too Father Dymytrii Sydor in the 2000s was, at the very least, a provocateur, if not an agent of Russia.

I could not dismiss these accusations outright. And while I did remain suspicious of him, I reserved final judgement. On the one hand, I could not help but remain impressed, even inspired, by Father Sydor’s commitment to our cause, as evidenced by his superb organization of the Fifth World Congress (1999) in Uzhhorod and his work on a Rusyn grammar.

On the other hand, I witnessed a telephone conversation he had with his superiors in Moscow (probably the Office of External Affairs of the Moscow Patriarchate) as I sat alongside him during the car ride to the Sighet Congress. Clearly Russia was interested in the workings of the World Congress of Rusyns, just as it was interested in stirring up trouble in Transcarpathia (as well as Crimea and the Donbas) as part of its ongoing efforts to undermine independent Ukraine.

And so, despite all the criticism I would hear about Father Dymytrii, I decided to act on the principle that it was better to keep problematic persons close by, so that one could at least communicate with—and perhaps dampen—possible excessive actions on their part. In the case of Father Sydor, that policy seemed to work more or less, at least until 2007.

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234. Resolution No. 241 of the Transcarpathian Regional Assembly, On Recognizing the ‘Rusyn’ Nationality, Uzhhorod, Ukraine, 7 March 2007.

That was the year when, on 7 March, the Transcarpathian Regional Assembly adopted a legislative proposal that legally recognized the Rusyn nationality. We were overjoyed, viewing that act as the first step toward recognition by Ukraine on a national level. Perhaps this step, which theoretically 396

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could lead to better relations between Transcarpathia’s Carpatho-Rusyns and Ukraine’s authorities, was exactly what Russia did not want. How best, from Russia’s standpoint, to derail the recognition process?

Before the end of the year Father Sydor, in the name of the Soim of Subcarpathian Rusyns—Ukraine’s member organization in the World Congress—issued a declaration on 17 December 2007, proclaiming Subcarpathian Rus’ to be a “self-governing [autonomous] territory under international control.” Perhaps Sydor was thinking that his homeland should be a kind of UN mandate—but under whose “protection”? The signatories of the declaration (Dymytrii Sydor, Mykhailo Almashii, and Dymytrii Pop) did call on the European Union and the Russian Federation under Vladimir Putin to act as the “guarantors” of the autonomous Carpatho-Rusyn territory.

Calling on Russia was the worst kind of red flag that could be thrown in the face of Ukraine. From the Ukrainian perspective the phenomenon of “political Rusynism” now became “Rusyn separatism.” To be sure Father Sydor and his few supporters represented only a small percentage of Carpatho-Rusyns in Transcarpathia, while his sympathizers in other Carpatho-Rusyn inhabited countries were still smaller in number.

In one sense, the Soim’s declaration could be seen as a joke, if not a hoax. But it was neither. Father Sydor together with a few Transcarpathian businessmen based in the Czech Republic were quite serious in their efforts to provoke Ukraine. In the process of doing so, they hoped to get support from Russia.

One could not help but be amused by the obvious comical aspects of this affair. The Soim was re-christened the parliament of Subcarpathian Rus’. It promptly issued an identity card (legitymatsiya) in Rusyn and English—available only on the Internet—on which there appeared a photograph of the territory’s first honorary citizen (albeit by then long deceased), the world’s most famous Carpatho-Rusyn, Andy Warhol.

When asked if the Soim’s declaration might have a negative impact on Ukraine’s consideration to recognize Carpatho-Rusyns as a distinct nationality, Sydor haughtily and dismissively replied that he was not interested in recognition, since all that really mattered was political sovereignty. Were Father Sydor’s bizarre actions the ultimate example of po397

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235. Citizenship card issued by the Soim (National Parliament) of Subcarpathian Rusyns, signed by D. Sydor, Uzhhorod, Ukraine.

litical naivete, or were they part of a calculated provocation planned in Moscow with the specific goal to undermine Ukraine?

There was no time to speculate on Sydor’s motivations. We needed to act and to act fast. As chairman of the World Council, I issued a statement in April 2008 that distanced the Carpatho-Rusyn movement from the extremist views and actions of Father Sydor. The Soim was ousted as Ukraine’s member in the World Congress of Rusyns and all relations with Dymytrii Sydor ended.

Although it took some time, eventually it became common knowledge among government officials in Ukraine, Russia, and other countries where Carpatho-Rusyns lived (as well as among journalists and scholars writing about current events) that the worldwide Carpatho-Rusyn movement was divided between established, responsible, and apolitical organizations which were part of the World Congress, and a small number of individual political extremists associated with Father Sydor and the so-called Soim/Parliament of “sovereign” Subcarpathian Rus’.

Father Sydor continued to pursue his political agenda with or without local supporters. For example, both Mykhailo Almashii (Soim delegate to 398

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236. Leaders at the proclamation of the Republic of Subcarpathian Rus’: (from left) Father Stepan Siuch, Father Dymytrii Sydor, Ivan Letsovych, Yevhen Zhupan, and Ivan Turianytsia, Mukachevo, Ukraine (October 2008).

the World Congress) and the Transcarpathian cultural activist Dymytrii Pop claimed that Sydor had “forged” their signatures on the December 2007 declaration of the self-governing territory. But this did not bother Sydor, who proceeded to create a rival to the World Congress of Rusyns, which he called the European Congress of Subcarpathian Rusyns. On 25 October 2008, this new body proclaimed the “independent republic of Subcarpathian Rus’.” Whether or not he was asked, a supporter of Sydor, the relatively younger Petro Getsko, proclaimed himself the representative of the Subcarpathian “republic” abroad. Getsko promptly left Transcarpathia to take up his post in exile in Moscow.

After these incidents, Father Sydor and I never met or spoke again.

As the years went on, I would have nothing against meeting with him.

After all, he was once a friend and close community collaborator. But I was led to believe that he detested me for having allegedly betrayed and ostracized him from the World Congress. His attitudes toward me only hardened when, in the spring of 2009, he was indicted in Ukraine on criminal charges and found guilty of undertaking activity that threatened the integrity of the Ukrainian state. Considering the charges against him, the punishment was relatively light: a small fine, the confiscation of 399

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237. Petro Getsko (far right) and Vasyl Dzhugan (center) on Red Square, Moscow, Russia.

his passport, and a ban on foreign travel for three years. As for the question of motivation—political naivete or calculation—I remained uncertain for several years, always tending to give my old friend the benefit of the doubt. Later, that doubt was finally dispelled.

Sometime in 2015-2016 another close friend, the scholar-priest and head of the Sheptytskyi Institute of Eastern Christian Studies at the University of Toronto, Father Peter Galadza, asked if I would meet with a distinguished Orthodox theologian from Ukraine, Cyril Hovorun. Father Hovorun, who at the time was on a research fellowship at Yale University, was a high-ranking cleric in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church— Moscow Patriarchate. Sometime at the outset of the twenty-first century, he was brought from Kyiv to Moscow to serve as the personal secretary of Metropolitan Kirill (Gundiayev), then head of the External Affairs Office of the Russian Orthodox Church. Hovorun remained the metropolitan’s personal secretary when Kirill became patriarch of the entire Russian Orthodox Church—Moscow Patriarchate. It is well known that the Moscow patriarchal church was closely allied to and virtually an arm of the Russian government, especially after Vladimir Putin consolidated his power throughout the country.

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My conversation with Father Hovorun in Toronto focused on his future career path after leaving the position of Patriarch Kirill’s personal secretary. Toward the end of our conversation and almost as an afterthought, I asked if during his service in Moscow to the Metropolitan/ Patriarch Kirill he had ever heard of Father Dymytrii Sydor from Transcarpathia. Typical of all high-ranking church figures, Father Hovorun simply answered “yes.” No elaboration.

Now that the topic was on the table, I pursued the matter with further questions. “Did you ever meet with Father Sydor?” I asked. “Yes, several times,” he responded. “In what context?” Hovorun replied: “On several occasions Father Sydor visited the metropolitan/patriarch.” Back and forth my questions and his answers continued. “Were you present at those meetings?” Hovorun: “Since I was Aleksei’s private secretary, yes, always.” My curiosity was peaked: “What was the topic of discussions?”

Response: “The current political situation in Transcarpathia.”

All was now clear. Father Sydor was not acting out of naiveté, but rather on instructions (I believe Hovorun may have even used that word) from Metropolitan/Patriarch Kirill.

Any lingering doubts I may still have had about Dymytrii Sydor were dispelled. He may have been a patriot of his people, but he was also another in a long line of Carpatho-Rusyns who in the past (and present) have acted as informers, provocateurs, and security agents in the service of the country or countries that have ruled their homeland. Clearly, the post-1989 Carpatho-Rusyn movement must have been serious enough to warrant placing informers and provocateurs like Ivan Turianytsia, Yan Lypynskyi, and Dymytrii Sydor within its ranks. Likely there were many others that I/we do not know about—at least not yet.

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At the Ninth World Congress in Sighet (2007) I was re-elected unanimously for another two-year term. I was very appreciative of the enthusiastic support and accepted to serve together with Sasha Zozuliak at my side. Nevertheless, both he, and certainly I, were losing interest in the World Congress. The members of the World Council executive seemed not to change, while the situation with the representation from Ukraine only worsened after the fiasco caused by Father Dymytrii Sydor and the expulsion of the Soim from membership in the Congress. In its stead, I tried to create for Transcarpathia a new consortium of organizations to be initially led by Valerii Padiak, head of the Rusyn Sunday School Benevolent Fund, and Mykola Bobynets, head of the Transcarpathian Region’s Society of Carpatho-Rusyns.

All the while, I continued to head World Congress delegations that met with a wide variety of embassies in Washington, D.C. and in Kyiv, including the European Union Representation and the Office of the Ombudsman of Ukraine, headed at the time by Ukraine’s Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights, Nina Karpachova. We could not help but be encouraged by Ombudsman Karpachova’s public statement: “To ignore the Rusyn nationality is simply discrimination that since 1945 has still not yet been eliminated.” The main goal of these meetings was to put pressure on the government and parliament of Ukraine to recognize Carpatho-Rusyns as a distinct nationality at the national level.

This lobbying activity received much attention in the press and was looked upon favorably by most Carpatho-Rusyn delegates in the World Congress. In short, I was credited with bringing the Carpatho-Rusyn phenomenon to the attention of the larger world, even though, quite frankly, 402

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the practical results were limited. The Ukrainian governmental authorities were not willing to budge from their conviction that Carpatho-Rusyns were simply Ukrainians and, therefore, in no need of recognition.

***** By the time of the Tenth World Congress in 2009, I had decided I would not stand for re-election as 238. Ombudsman Nina Karpachova and Paul Robert Magocsi at the office of chairman. But before leaving, I had the Ombudsman, Kyiv, Ukraine (June hoped to put the Congress house in 2007). order. Already during my first tenure (2005-2007), I had encouraged the replacement of the Organization of Rusyns in Hungary, headed by Gabriel Hattinger, with a small coalition of organizations in which the Liavynets family (especially mother Mar-

239. Carpatho-Rusyn activists from Transcarpathia and North America at the European Union Representation in Ukraine: (left to right) Yevhen Zhupan, Steven Chepa, Ambassador Ian Boag, Paul Robert Magocsi, Nadiya Kushko, Valerii Padiak, Father Dymytrii Sydor, Kyiv, Ukraine (June 2007).

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240. Rusnak activists in Croatia: Natalia Hnatko, Nadia Baïch, and Luba Segedi-Falts, Krynica, Poland (June 2005).

ianna) and Vira Girits played the leading role. I felt very bad about replacing Gabi Hattinger, a personal friend, but he and his organization had become moribund.

At the same time, I wanted to raise the prestige of the Rusnak Society, which was our newest permanent member representing Croatia. The host of the member organization at the Tenth World Congress was the Ruska Matka, which after the untimely death in 2007 of Mikhal Varga, was headed by Diura Papuga. He wanted the Tenth Congress to be held only in Serbia, specifically in the small town of Ruski Kerestur, the historic center of Vojvodina’s Rusyns. Over Papuga’s protests I simply declared that the Congress would be sponsored jointly and held one day in Ruski Kerestur (Serbia) and one day in Petrovci (Croatia). Our Rusnak friends in Croatia, whose head at the time was the charmingly patriotic schoolteacher Natalia Hnatko, were overjoyed that the World Congress was coming to them. In various ways they expressed their appreciation for my role in making this happen.

My other goal was to straighten out the situation with the problematic delegations from Slovakia and Ukraine. I brokered an agreement whereby the Slovak Association of Rusyns (SARO) and the Rusyn Renaissance 404

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241. Paul Robert Magocsi with Rusnak children at the Tenth World Congress of Rusyns, Petrovci, Croatia (June 2009).

Society/Rusynska obroda would each have five delegates and that Slovakia’s member on the World Council would alternate between each of the organizations (SARO and Obroda) for a two-year term.

With regard to Ukraine, I persuaded two younger activists to be part of the following scenario. One of those activists was Valerii Padiak, who had earlier convinced me that Mykola Bobynets was a worthy individual with whom one could work. A few months earlier I heard Bobynets out, as one night we were walking the streets of Budapest following a World Council meeting that happened to take place in Hungary’s capital city. Despite his earnestness, I remained skeptical. After all, this was the very same Bobynets who ignominiously had crashed the first meeting of Rusyn Youth in Komlóska (2002), where he made a fool of himself.

Should I chalk his conduct up to the transgressions of youth? Valerii Padiak, whom I did trust, urged me to revise my opinion of Bobynets.

And so, the three of us met in a café during the Tenth Congress in Ruski Kerestur. There I proposed the following division of labor. As with the compromise for Slovakia, I proposed that Padiak’s and Bobynets’s organizations (the Rusyn School Benevolent Fund and the Regional Society of Carpatho-Rusyns) would share equal membership in the World 405

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242. Diura Papuga (left), Andrei Kopcha (right) call on Paul Robert Magocsi to be proclaimed lifetime Honorary Chairman of the World Congress of Rusyns, Tenth World Congress, Ruski Kerestur, Serbia (June 2009).

Congress. Each of them would rotate for the seat on the World Council.

Bobynets would begin for the first two-year cycle, then Padiak would follow. In the interim Padiak could concern himself at home in Transcarpathia with the Rusyn School Program (for me the most important thing), while Bobynets “played politics” as World Council member.

Having achieved all these compromises, I felt relieved that I could “resign” the chairmanship of the World Congress in the knowledge that I had left the organization healthy and with some internal order. From now on, let others deal with Congress “politics.” While I was certainly going to remain active in the Carpatho-Rusyn movement, my work was to be focused on promoting educational and scholarly activity. Sasha Zozuliak was in full accord with this strategy, concluding that if I left the chairmanship he would simultaneously resign as executive secretary.

It was a sunny and warm June day in the Vojvodina when the last hours of the Tenth Congress unfolded. Following my closing remarks as chairman, I left the hall carrying a large handful of books that had been given to me. This was more than just a symbolic gesture. After all, 406

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books were what for me was most important for the preservation of Carpatho-Rusyns as a distinct nationality. I rejoiced in having the weight of the chairmanship lifted from my shoulders as I rested on a bench in the center of Ruski Kerestur while the concluding formal proceedings of the Congress were going on inside the hall.

When I was asked to return, I learned that Diura Papuga from Serbia was elected chairman. I was disappointed but not surprised. What did surprise me was a call that I return to the podium to be appointed by acclamation the first (and still only) honorary chairman of the World Congress of Rusyns. I was applauded very warmly, although I did not think very much of an honorary title for an organization in which I had already lost interest. Nonetheless, Sasha Zozuliak and Lubomir Medieshi (the founding head of the Ruska Matka organization who was by then living in Canada) rejoiced together with me as we left Ruski Kerestur.

Our sights for the future of the Carpatho-Rusyn movement were clearly elsewhere.

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One can never make a final break with an organization with which one was connected since its very beginning, in this case for nearly two decades. Sasha Zozuliak could and did make a clean break as executive secretary and returned to his publishing activity in Slovakia. I, on the other hand, became honorary chairman and inevitably was to remain engaged in one form or another with the World Congress of Rusyns.

No sooner had we left Ruski Kerestur than all the compromises I had brokered collapsed. With the support of the wily Papuga and his new executive secretary Vladimir Protivniak from Slovakia, the equal balance between SARO and the Obroda/Rusyn Renaissance Society was promptly broken. The Obroda was given six (not the agreed upon five) delegates, thereby guaranteeing that a representative of SARO would not likely ever represent Slovakia on the World Council.

As for the compromise reached for Ukraine’s delegation, Bobynets turned on Padiak, began to denounce him publicly in the worst possible terms and, with the support of the chairman Diura Papuga, banned Padiak and the Rusyn School Benevolent Society from the World Congress.

In the face of such unpleasant internal struggles and the growing support among several delegates to offer Congress membership to some (or any they could find) organization from Russia, the North American delegation expressed its opposition in the following manner. The newly created Carpatho-Rusyn Consortium, designed to represent North America at the World Congress, refused to do so. As a result, the founding member organization of which I was president, the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center, remained the only North American link to the World Congress.

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In on-going discussions with Sasha Zozuliak and Valerii Padiak, we concluded that after ten years of existence, perhaps the very idea of the World Congress had run its course. Why was it needed, when by the second decade of the twenty-first century Carpatho-Rusyn organizations, especially those in countries of the European Union, were functioning quite well and without any need for possible lobbying efforts from the World Congress. The only country where recognition of Carpatho-Rusyns remained unresolved was Ukraine. But in Transcarpathia there was chaos because no one supported Mykola Bobynets as World Council member except a few of his friends in Mukachevo.

In such a situation, I decided to attend the next Eleventh World Congress (2011) planned to be held in Pilisszentkereszt, a small town just to the northwest of Budapest. I was allowed to speak, even though many delegates knew already that I was going to propose that the Congress be disbanded. My remarks were met with fierce opposition from all delegations, especially those from Romania and Poland, including my closest friend and colleague from the latter country, Olena Duts-Faifer.

243. Slavko Hyriak (left) in conversation with Aleksander Zozuliak and Paul Robert Magocsi, Krynica, Poland (June 2005).

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Now that my suggestion for disbandment was roundly rejected, it was easy for me to suspend further contact with the World Congress. I did not even attend the next, Twelfth Congress (2013) that was held in Mukachevo under very dubious circumstances for which the ever-problematic Mykola Bobynets, together with the increasingly buffoon-like chairman Diura Papuga, was responsible.

I only regret that the World Council member who represented the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center, Slavomir/Slavko Hyriak (a permanent resident of Canada who by then was back in his native Slovakia), had to put up with several unpleasant incidents while he was in Transcarpathia for the Twelfth Congress proceedings. I felt very bad when he later told me how he felt threatened by some of Bobynets’s supporters. He even found a bullet in his car. That was supposedly a sign that he had better hold his tongue and leave Transcarpathia before it was too late. Most shockingly was the fact that the threats directed at Slavko Hyriak—and by association at the North American organization headed by me—were being carried out not by the “Ukrainian enemy” (local Ukrainophiles and the state’s security services) but by professed Carpatho-Rusyns and supporters of Mykola Bobynets.

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I was more convinced than ever that my decision to step down from the chairmanship in 2009 and to end any active relationship with the World Congress was the correct one. My calling—the one with which I always felt most comfortable—was to produce new scholarly works about Carpatho-Rusyns and to disseminate information about our people in the form of books and teaching. A good step in that direction was the popular illustrated volume The People from Nowhere, which continued to appear in several different languages during and after my chairmanship of the World Congress. But that book was really only an outline providing the conceptual basis for what should be a larger more comprehensive work.

That work did appear in 2015 under the title With Their Backs to the Mountains: A History of Carpathian Rus’ [the territory] and Carpatho-Rusyns [one of the peoples who lived in modern times on that territory]. This nearly 600-page volume which appeared first in English (2015), then in Slovak (2016) and Polish (2022) was the first history of Carpatho-Rusyns worldwide. The book had evolved from the lecture course I taught at the Studium Carpatho-Ruthenorum International Summer School and from a year-long seminar, provocatively titled “The People from Nowhere,” which I taught at least four times at the University of Toronto.

Although the book was favorably reviewed in North America and Europe, it is perhaps not surprising that what I thought was innovative seemed to evade reviewers, even the distinguished scholars (Harvey Goldblatt, John-Paul Himka, Chris Hann, Peter Galadza, Valerii Padiak, and Nick Kupensky) who analyzed various aspects of With Their Backs in a special panel at the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eur411

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244. Covers of the English (2015), Slovak (2016), and Polish (2022) editions of With Their Backs to the Mountains: A History of Carpathian Rus’ and Carpatho-Rusyns.

asian Studies, and whose texts were subsequently published in the journal Nationalities Papers. As I subsequently wrote in an article, “Myths and Stereotypes in Carpatho-Rusyn History,” the image that all Carpatho-Rusyns were downtrodden and destitute (at least before the twentieth century) and that the Hungarian Kingdom had suppressed them for a thousand years were among those stereotypical narratives that I thought were overturned by the evidence presented in With Their Backs to the Mountains. I guess not—yet.

Having spent much time creating 34 new or revised maps for With Their Backs, I believed they deserved to reach a larger audience. That gave birth to Carpathian Rus’: A Historical Atlas, in which the maps were now in full-color, each with a brief accompanying text. With the appearance of these two works, I felt somewhat satisfied that now the field of Carpatho-Rusyn Studies had an introductory history and a historical atlas that outlined developments in Carpathian Rus’ from pre-historic (archeological) times to the present.

Whether my attention was directed toward North America or to Europe, I decided that the years remaining to me in this life should be devoted to the two most crucial aspects of the Carpatho-Rusyn movement—education and scholarship. The focus of such activity, I thought, should be in the three countries where the largest number of actual and potential Carpatho-Rusyns lived: Ukraine, Slovakia, and Poland.

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243. Covers of the English (2017) and Slovak (2022) editions of Carpathian Rus’: A Historical Atlas.

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As we all knew very well back then, there were many more potential than actual (as self-defined on censuses) Carpatho-Rusyns. To achieve the transformation from potential to actual, we needed to focus on young people. In other words, elementary and high schools were the real battleground where we needed to win over the proverbial hearts and minds of future conscious Carpatho-Rusyns. And to educate new generations in a patriotic spirit we needed to train teachers at existing or proposed university-level programs.

Considering where we most needed to direct our attention—Ukraine, Slovakia, Poland and universities in Uzhhorod, Prešov, and Cracow—their administrations posed challenges that needed to be overcome.

***** The Lemko-Rusyn patriot, Olena Duts-Faifer, was among the first to act. In 1997, she had completed her PhD in Slavic Studies at the prestigious Jagiellonian University, where I was among the two external examiners at her doctoral defense. Not unexpectedly, she tried to get a position to promote Lemko-Rusyn studies at Jagiellonian, but was aggressively blocked by Volodymyr Mokryi, a Ukrainian from Poland who from his position as professor and head of the Ukrainian Department was able to block all efforts to establish a scholarly program for what he obviously dismissed as a nonexistent people.

Olena then turned to the Pedagogical University, also located in Cracow, where she found a sympathetic ear in Professor Janusz Henzel, the chairman of that institution’s Russian Department. Olena turned to me, as the Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Toronto, to write a letter of support in order to establish what came to be called a program in Lemko and Russian Philology. In other words, students in the program would study both the Lemko-Rusyn (codified in 2000) and Russian languages and receive diploma certificates authorizing them to teach either or both of those subjects in Poland’s school system. This was not quite what we would have wanted, that is, a distinct Carpatho-Rusyn program, but it was better than nothing. As Olena insisted, it was only a start to something better.

The Lemko-Rusyn program, which began operating in 2001, had a small office and classroom with space for a small library. The classroom was handsomely decorated with portraits of past Lemko-Rusyn schol414

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246. Olena Duts-Faifer teaching at the Lemko and Russian Philology Program, Pedagogical University, Cracow, Poland (ca. 2002).

ars and cultural activists, much in the same way as was my office at the University of Toronto, which Olena knew well from her two extended research visits with us.

I immediately started to send books and, I believe, microfilms of newspapers and journals to enhance the holdings of the program’s Lemko-Rusyn library. In an effort to attract funding, which both Olena and the head of the Russian Department hoped to see realized, I convinced Steve Chepa to come with me to Cracow, where I happened to be giving a lecture on nationalist historiography at Jagiellonian University.

Later in the day, or perhaps the next, Steve and I attended a Lemko-Rusyn language class taught by Olena. We saw and heard with our own eyes and ears how talented a teacher she was. As remarkable was the fact that the majority of the dozen or so students were ethnic Poles.

Why not? Lemko-Rusyn Studies was a scholarly discipline like any other and, therefore, open to all students, regardless of their ethnic origin. So impressed were we with the pedagogical atmosphere created by Olena that Steve Chepa began to provide financial support—through a fund controlled by me—for the Lemko-Russian Philology Program at Cracow’s Pedagogical University.

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247. Steven Chepa with Paul Robert Magocsi (standing far right) and Olena Duts-Faifer (seated far left), Rusyn-language class, Pedagogical University, Cracow, Poland (May 2002).

Within five years or so, Olena wanted more. Actually, she remained hopeful that something better for Carpatho-Rusyn studies would eventually work out at Jagiellonian University. To be sure, that institution was the more prestigious of the two, and to have Carpatho-Rusyn Studies at Jagiellonian University would be akin to Ukrainian Studies at Harvard University. The Jagiellonian brand was in and of itself an imprimatur that would give an otherwise little-known discipline prestige in the larger Polish society in which it functioned.

With that in mind, Olena kept her foot in the door, so to speak, teaching one or two courses as a junior instructor at Jagiellonian while also teaching and directing the Lemko program at the Pedagogical University. I saw this as a potential problem and told her so. Sitting on two stools for too long would, sooner or later, result in having no stool at all.

This dilemma of Olena’s making reached a critical point in 2007.

She had asked me for financial help to organize the Third International Congress of the Rusyn Language under the auspices of the Pedagogical University. From the Chepa Fund I was able to provide the necessary support to cover the costs of what turned out to be a truly impressive three-day conference. At my insistence, we invited Rusyn-language teachers from Slovakia, Ukraine, Serbia, and of course Poland, in order 416

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248. Notes from Paul Robert Magocsi and donor Steven Chepa to the Lemko Rusyn program at the Pedagogical University, Cracow, Poland (May 2002).

that they could interact with each other as well as with scholars who research the language. I asked Larysa Ilchenko and Valerii Padiak to organize an exhibit of Rusyn-language publications that was held in the main ground-floor hall of the massive Jagiellonian University Library.

Large banners announcing the Carpatho-Rusyn book exhibit hung from the exterior façade of the library building which faced one of Cracow’s 417

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249. Advisors and teachers from Transcarpathia’s Rusyn Extracurricular School Program: Yelizaveta Baranyne, Mykhailo Almashii, Anna Svyd, Valerii Padiak, Mariya Polyanska, Mykola Bobynets, Mariia Boiko, Anna Megela, Larysa Kuruts Iliashevyts, Mariia Lendiel, Yurii Shypovych, and Anna Pokhylets, Third International Congress of the Rusyn Language, Pedagogical University, Cracow, Poland (September 2007).

main thoroughfares. For nearly a month, thousands of Poles were at least visually exposed to banners advertising a Carpatho-Rusyn event. Likely, they would surmise that such a people exist. Our point, precisely.

I was reminded of the Third Language Congress and library exhibit’s success, when about a year later in Toronto a Canadian government functionary of Polish ancestry reported how he had seen me on a television screen clip that was running continually as part of a “wonderful library exhibit” he saw in Cracow. Clearly our public outreach efforts on behalf of Lemko-Rusyns were an enormous success.

Olena also used the occasion of the Third Language Congress to have me meet with the rector and her faculty dean of the Pedagogical University. Previous to the meeting I was asked by Olena and provided a letter pledging support (scholarly and financial) for what we hoped would become a distinct Lemko-Rusyn Studies Program with Olena Duts-Faifer as its head. Clearly, the Pedagogical University was ready to act positively for what I thought we all wanted.

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At our meeting the rector did hint delicately, but ever so clearly, that Olena was going to have to make a decision—the Pedagogical University or Jagiellonian? I argued with Olena that she needed to decide which stool to sit on. Lemko-Rusyn Studies had a concrete offer from the Pedagogical University and nothing—other than some vague hopes in the mind of Olena—from Jagiellonian. Better something concrete than something that was at best only a vague hope.

The headstrong Olena did not listen. She continued to sit on two stools. Convinced that she would pull something off at Jagiellonian, she thought it could be done through political intervention from the Polish government (much like what was happening in Slovakia at the very same time). In that regard, she got herself appointed to several government commissions responsible for minority affairs and told me that such contacts would eventually lead to a Lemko-Rusyn department, perhaps even an institute, at Jagiellonian University. Those hopes were dashed even before she was replaced (actually dismissed) from her membership in one of the government’s advisory boards.

While politicking in Warsaw, Olena was neglecting the Lemko-Rusyn Program at the Pedagogical University where a few students started what turned out to be a scandalous campaign to remove her as its head.

The number of incoming students was reduced to one or two each new school year and none were of Lemko-Rusyn background. This situation was criticized by her own supporters in Poland’s non-university Lemko-Rusyn community.

In the end, the Program in Lemko-Rusyn and Russian Philology was closed, with the result that after 2017 there were no university-level Lemko studies courses offered anywhere in Poland. Olena Duts-Faifer eventually landed a position as associate professor (docent) in the Department of Polish Language at Jagiellonian University, where she continued to direct two PhD candidates writing on Lemko-related topics. This was a far cry from what we expected.

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Much different was the situation in Slovakia. From the very outset of the Carpatho-Rusyn revival that began in 1989, I was convinced that the situation in Slovakia was the most promising. My expectations, most of which were eventually fulfilled, were not based on hope alone.

No other country in the region—nay the world—provided the kind of support as did Slovakia. This included substantial government funding for a professional Rusyn-language theater, folk song and dance ensemble, publications, radio and television programs, a large building in the heart of Prešov to house a Museum of Rusyn Culture, and a university-level Institute of Rusyn Language and Culture in which students can earn a master’s degree and Ph.D. in Carpatho-Rusyn studies. And what country anywhere in the world can compare to what Slovakia has done and continues to do—urge its citizens to identify their nationality on decennial censuses not with the dominant state nationality, Slovak, but with the national identity and language of the individual’s heritage.

Hence, the steady increase in the number of Carpatho-Rusyns from the first post-Communist era census of 1991 to the most recent one of 2021.

It is, therefore, not surprising that as the symbolic leader in the Carpatho-Rusyn scholarly world, I have been treated quite well by Slovakia’s institutions. I was able to promote the Carpatho-Rusyn cause in discussions with several ministers of culture, with Slovak ambassadors to the United States and Canada, as well as with the country’s third president, Rudolf Shuster, in a meeting set up by none other than Yan Lypynskyi.

Aside from awards given to me by the Ministry of Education in Bratislava (2016), Slovakia’s embassy in Washington, D.C. hosted the celebratory launch (2006) of a Festschrift given to me by scholarly colleagues (Bog420

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250. Slovakia’s 2001 census form in the Rusyn language as a promotional flyer emphasizing the need to respond “Rusyn” to questions 10. Nationality and 11. Mother tongue.

dan Horbal, Patricia Krafcik, and Elaine Rusinko) on the occasion of my sixtieth birthday. Less than a decade later (2013), Prešov University organized an impressive ceremony with all the appropriate pomp and 421

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251. Paul Robert Magocsi with Slovakia’s President Rudolf Shuster (2002).

circumstance (perhaps drawn from Hungarian models) that they felt was necessary for the granting of an honorary doctorate. Among the more than a hundred guests in attendance was the renowned Lemko-Rusyn

252. Publisher Jack Figel presents the Festschrift to its honoree, Paul Robert Magocsi, Embassy of Slovakia, Washington, D. C. (November 2006).

253. Festschrift co-editor Patricia Krafcik, Embassy of Slovakia, Washington, D. C. (November 2006).

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254. Rector René Matlovič (left) and Vice Rector Peter Konya (right) present Honorary Doctorate Awardee Paul Robert Magocsi, Prešov University, Slovakia (June 2013).

poet from Poland Petro Trokhanovskii who poignantly remarked to me after the ceremony: “the honorary doctorate may be presented to you, but it is really a mark of recognition of how far all of us Carpatho-Rusyns

255. Poland’s Lemko-Rusyn poet laureate Petro Murianka Trokhanovskii congratulates PreŠov University Doctor Honoris Causa Paul Robert Magocsi, PreŠov, Slovakia (June 2013).

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256. “Blessing” of the newly published Slovak edition of With Their Backs to the Mountains: (from the left) Anna Plishkova—Rusyn Institute director; Paul Robert Magocsi—author; Peter Švorc—publisher; Eva Eddy—translator, Prešov University Library (December 2016).

have come.” Larger still was the audience that turned out at Prešov University to mark the appearance in 2016 of the Slovak edition of the first general history of Carpatho-Rusyns world-wide, which I titled With Their Backs to the Mountains (Chrbtom k horám).

And yet, not all the efforts of Carpatho-Rusyns in Slovakia came easily, and some were not met with success. Rusyn-language education at the elementary level proved to be especially problematic. The Rusyn Renaissance Society, headed in the 1990s by Vasyl Turok and his executive secretary Aleksander Zozuliak, made an effort to introduce Rusyn-language classes in villages which traditionally had rus’ki shkolŷ, so-called Rusyn schools, before they were administratively ukrainianized in the early 1950s. The post-1989 efforts to return to “Rusyn schools” was a failure which, I believe, was the result of a flawed tactical error.

Understandably, people like Vasyl Turok were products of the anti-Communist Revolutions of 1989. As firm believers in the principle of freedom of choice they were not about to impose on anyone, let alone children (or more properly their parents), what should be the language 424

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257. Opening day at the first Rusyn-language school, Svidnyk, Slovakia (April 1998).

of instruction in elementary schools. After all, if Turok and Zozuliak were themselves denouncing the imposed “ukrainianization” that began in 1952, how could they, in good conscience, impose “rusynization” after 1989? To be sure, Turok and his supporters argued that they certainly 425

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want Rusyn language instruction in village schools, but that it should only happen on a voluntary basis. Parents had to ask for it.

Such a position may have been philosophically and morally admirable, but practically it was disastrous. As I argued with Turok, Zozuliak, and others in the Rusyn Renaissance Society, we should all uphold the principle of the great Czech fifteenth-century religious reformer Jan Hus that “truth will prevail.” I had even proposed that the Carpatho-Rusyn movement adopt as its motto a variant of Hus’s precept with something that went: “Pravda pobidaye zlo” (Truth Conquers Evil).

Yet at the same time I reminded our Carpatho-Rusyn colleagues that we need to face reality. Every once in a while, we, the living, need to help moral precepts. In other words, from time to time “truth needs a kick in the pants.” I suggested some examples from North America, whether they pertained to the Blacks in the United States trying to enter universities, or more aptly in this case, French speakers in Québec wanting to promote their language. In other words, what the Carpatho-Rusyn leadership in Slovakia needed to do was to practice affirmative action.

One should demand that the Slovak Ministry of Education introduce the Rusyn language into elementary schools in villages where Carpatho-Rusyns formed the majority of the inhabitants.

Better still, why not take a page from the book of post-Communist property restitution policy, according to which owners automatically had a right to what was once theirs? Hence, just make Rusyn a required subject in all villages where there had been rus’ki shkolŷ before 1952, the year that full ukrainianization had begun. Alas, our ultimately liberal humanists, Turok and Zozuliak, rejected all my pleas. The result was that by the outset of the twenty-first century, a good decade after the collapse of Communist rule, there were at most only 7 or 8 elementary schools where Rusyn was taught as a subject for a mere 1 or 2 hours per week. We in the United States sent petitions from the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center and multi-signed letters from Slavists to the Slovak government which responded—and rightly so—that the parents and school directors in most “Rusyn” villages did not want, or did not ask, that the Rusyn language be taught in their elementary school.

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258. President of Slovakia, Zuzanna Čaputová, presenting a high state award to Vasyl Yabur for his work in codifying the Rusyn language, Bratislava, Slovakia (June 2021).

numbering twelve during the 2005/2006 and 2006/2007 school years— four of the teacher’s salaries were not being paid by the Slovak government. I requested help from the Carpatho-Rusyn Society in Pittsburgh (headed at the time by John Righetti) which responded favorably by sending over three thousand dollars, albeit a stop-gap solution, administered by the World Congress of Rusyns based in Slovakia.

Convinced that Rusyn-language education at the elementary level was precarious and beyond our ability to support with funds from North America, I decided to concentrate my lobbying efforts at the university level. Specifically, I hoped to see a Department of Carpatho-Rusyn Studies created at Prešov University. This was a proposal I had put forth already at the First World Congress of Rusyns (1991), although the response in Slovak scholarly as well as government circles was that Carpatho-Rusyn related education at any level could not be considered until the language was codified. That hurdle was overcome in January 1995, when the Rusyn language was indeed codified.

In the wake of the codification announcement the Slovak government did act relatively quickly. One of the main codifiers, Vasyl Yabur, to427

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gether with the younger Ph.D. candidate at the time, Anna Plishkova, were hired to prepare a program of Rusyn-language study for Slovakia’s Ministry of Education. About the same time, government funds were provided to create in January 1993 the Rusyn Language Scholarly Research Institute connected with the Prešov University. The funds were distributed as a grant to the Rusyn Renaissance Society, although the university took control of the new center which was headed by two associate professors (docents) employed by the university, the codifiers Vasyl Yabur and Yurii Panko.

While the Slovak government, for political reasons, was sympathetic to Carpatho-Rusyn demands—and put up a substantial amount of money to support the new language center—Prešov University was not. The reason was simple. Its Slavic Department and governing structures like the Faculty Council and Senate included among its members Ukrainian-oriented academics (Carpatho-Rusyns by origin as well as some Slovak colleagues) who blocked all efforts to create any kind of department or program for a “non-existent people.”

This situation reminded me of the old Habsburg Empire when the “good” imperial rulers in Vienna (Maria Theresa and Joseph II) were believed to have had best the interests of the peasants in mind. The rural folk believed that their emperors were blocked in their benevolent reforms by the “wicked” local nobility who wished to maintain control over those who worked for them on the manorial landed estates. Now there was a somewhat analogous situation at the end of the twentieth century. The “good” central government authorities in post-Communist democratic Slovakia were being blocked by pro-Ukrainian elements among Prešov University’s professoriate who felt—and rightly so—that their ideological convictions (Rusyns are Ukrainians) were being challenged by the Carpatho-Rusyn movement both within and beyond the halls of academia.

Although they were Carpatho-Rusyn scholars, neither Yabur nor Panko had the necessary academic status. They were docents, that is associate professors operating in a world where only full professors counted.

More problematic was the fact that neither of these soft-spoken gentlemanly types had the kind of combative personality traits needed to con428

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front those who were still in influential positions at Prešov University.

Consequently, the short-lived Rusyn Language Research Institute was closed after two years. Even its furniture and office materials (paid for from a grant received by the Rusyn Renaissance Society from the Slovak government) were confiscated by the university.

This was a time when, at my own initiative, or in response to Vasyl Turok’s proposal—I cannot remember which—I requested a meeting with the rector of Prešov University to press the case for a Rusyn studies center. The rector, someone named Karol Feč, was a true provincially minded functionary, a specialist in sports who had little interest in, or knowledge of, what I was talking about. Finally, in late 1998, when rector Feč was on his way out, the university agreed to create a section (oddelenie) devoted to Rusyn studies that was to become part of a yet-to-be-created Center for Nationality Studies and Foreign Languages.

Some of the university’s administrators were sensitive to government funding and aware of the Slovak Ministry of Education’s favorable attitude toward Carpatho-Rusyn studies. Hence, the new Rusyn Section in the Center for Nationality Studies and Foreign Languages was placed

259. Rusyn Section Office at Prešov University’s Center for Nationality Studies and Foreign Languages (left to right): Paul Robert Magocsi; Ivan Bernasovský—Center director; Anna Plishkova—Section director; and Vasyl Yabur—language instructor (2002).

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under the direct authority of the rector, thereby avoiding any possible opposition from Ukrainophile professors at the faculty level.

***** Most fortunate was the fact that Carpatho-Rusyn university studies had among its ranks Anna Plishkova. She was a journalist by profession, who, since their establishment in 1991, was associate editor of Slovakia’s two Rusyn-language periodicals, the newspaper Narodnŷ novynkŷ and the magazine Rusyn. Plishkova was a staunch patriot with roots in the village of Pŷkhni/Pichné in the far eastern part of the country. The point is that Rusyn was her native language used in the home in which she was raised.

Anya (as she was affectionately known) was very content at remaining a journalist, but fate—or The Movement—had another role in store for her.

The two Rusyn-language codifiers Vasyl Yabur and Yurii Panko were on the cusp of retirement from the university, and they were anxious to find someone to continue their work. I remember having several conversations with Anya Plishkova, trying to convince her to change professions in order to assure the future of Carpatho-Rusyn Studies at the university level. Always modest, she was also fully aware of her limited training. She had completed her studies at Prešov University with a master’s degree in the Ukrainian and Slovak languages, but she never attended graduate school. She certainly knew Rusyn from childhood and from working with Vasyl Yabur on the codification process. In the end, she agreed to do a Ph.D. on a Rusyn-language topic under the supervision of the respected Slovak linguist, Ján Dorul’a, at the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava.

Plishkova was always an incredibly diligent worker and keenly aware of deadlines, a characteristic stemming from her years of work as a journalist. I cannot remember whether I was an external member on her Ph.D. committee. What I do remember is that her dissertation was the first of its kind anywhere in the world. It was written in Rusyn. This first step in her academic career allowed Plishkova to teach at the university, at least at the junior level, as an assistant professor. The next step was to write, as they say in Europe, a second dissertation. She completed that work for which she attained the rank of docent, more or less the equiv430

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alent in North America of a tenured associate professor.

The hard-working and efficient Plishkova taught courses as part of an undergraduate teaching program in Rusyn language and literature that she formulated in cooperation with the not yet retired Vasyl Yabur. She also published extensively, completed several research trips to the University of Toronto in Canada, and attended several conferences throughout Europe that dealt with minority, or 260. Anna Plishkova (2014). “endangered” languages.

In order to enhance her status (perhaps in conjunction with her efforts to become a tenured associate professor), I arranged with Pat Krafcik the translation and publication of Plishkova’s monograph in the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center’s series with the East European Monograph Series at Columbia University Press. Publication of a book in the proverbial West, let alone under an imprimatur associated with a reputable Ivy League institution, was considered a major achievement in post-Communist European countries.

I did the same service as a personal favor to the Slovak comparative linguist, Yurii Vanko, who for a while (until he had a falling out with Vasyl Yabur) had contributed to scholarship about the Rusyn language.

His “Columbia” monograph was titled The Language of Slovakia’s Rusyns and, as he told me, was very helpful in the review process that led to his promotion to the rank of full professor in Slovakia. Despite the efforts to help him, his anger at the Prešov “project” (in particular with Yabur, not with me) prompted Vanko to cease any further work in the Carpatho-Rusyn field. I was very upset at this loss, since Vanko was highly intelligent and, as a bonus, was someone who knew English quite well.

But then I always have found linguists to be ornery in general and certainly among themselves. I believe that this negative characteristic stems from their belief that linguistics is an “exact science” in which theoretical 431

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261. Prešov University Rector René Matlovič (second from left) with Faculty of Humanities Dean Ivan Bernasovský and Slovak Ministry of Education State Secretary Petro Krainiak, Jr. (December 2016).

propositions can be proven true as long as one uncovers the concrete data to back up one’s convictions.

Anna Plishkova never had such pretentions to absolutism. Moreover, her accommodating personality meant that she was destined to succeed in a bureaucratic environment, which alas, dominates all universities.

Anya always spoke calmly and never let herself be provoked by emotional outbursts that characterize many academic encounters. One might think that she was phlegmatic and passive toward everything. But she had an inner strength, and, unlike the older males Yabur and Panko, she was not intimidated. In fact, she was fearless in pushing the Carpatho-Rusyn agenda in otherwise often difficult civic, political, or academic settings.

***** Most fortunate—literally a godsend—was the appointment of a new rector of Prešov University, René Matlovič. He was a geographer by profession who knew about me through my Historical Atlas of Central Europe. Anya was anxious that I meet with him and stress our goal of 432

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placing the Rusyn Section/Oddelenie on a more permanent and jurisdictionally independent basis.

I had encountered several Slovak academics (rectors, deans, professors) before and found them for the most part intellectually uninteresting and/or emotionally superficial. Matlovič was refreshingly different—very calm and controlled. When he spoke, one listened and had confidence that he was straight forward and dead serious. What a relief, I thought, and what hope for Carpatho-Rusyn Studies if he were in our camp. And he was!

My hopes were geared toward the establishment of a distinct Department (Katedra) of Rusyn Language and Literature in one of the university’s faculties (the humanities or, if necessary, pedagogy). Suddenly, in 2008 I learned that the Rusyn Section (Oddelenie) was being replaced by a full-fledged Institute of Rusyn Language and Culture, and that its first director was PhD Anna Plishkova. Like the previous Rusyn Section, the new Institute was placed directly under the office of the university rector.

We were overjoyed. Carpatho-Rusyn Studies had its first university-level institute anywhere in the world, one whose mandate was to engage in both pedagogy and research. Whereas language was given priority, the word culture in the institute’s name implied that not only language and literature but also history and ethnography would be part of its activity.

Anna Plishkova consulted with me on what the new institute should look like. I dusted off a proposal that I had drawn up a decade before but that was too ambitious for the smaller-scale mandate of the Rusyn Section. But now we had an institute.

That proposal called for three elements which I predicted would reveal the seriousness of the Carpatho-Rusyn academic enterprise, certainly within Prešov University and, even more importantly, within the Slavic scholarly world in general. The first element was to create a research library with a specific concentration of Carpatho-Rusyn related publications. The second was to create a research seminar on a bi-weekly or minimally a monthly basis at which scholars, primarily from beyond Prešov University in Slovakia and from abroad, would give talks. The third element was an international summer school for which I proposed the Latinate name Studium Carpatho-Ruthenorum.

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262. Rusyn Institute Library, Prešov University, hosting the first session of the Rusyn Language Commission (February 2017).

The university rector Matlovič was impressed by these proposals and, with Plishkova’s organizational skills, all three were carried out. The rector assured space (always a rarity at universities) for a library/seminar room, something that reminded me of the early days of the Ukrainian Program at Harvard, when all seminars were held in the Widener Library office of Professor Omeljan Pritsak with volumes of great scholarship surrounding the seminar table where we conducted our deliberations.

In order to enhance the Prešov institute’s library holdings, I donated close to a thousand duplicate volumes from my own library as well as a complete set of microfilm holdings of Carpatho-Rusyn related newspapers and journals from the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries.

The seminars began in earnest during the academic year of 2009/2010.

Thanks to the initiative of Anna Plishkova and her language-teaching colleague Kveta Koporova (both of whom were former journalists) the seminar provided materials for an annual published volume containing the papers delivered at each seminar. As for the international summer school, the first of which was held in June 2010, I, together with Patricia Krafcik and other Slavists connected with the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center, worked to have students of all backgrounds participate.

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I was particularly proud of the Studium Carpatho-Ruthenorum.

The first two or three years the preponderance of 15 to 20 participants were nostalgia-driven older generation Americans of Carpatho-Rusyn heritage who wanted to learn something of the land from where their parents or grandparents had come.

In subsequent years, the number of older American participants steadily declined. They were replaced by undergraduate and graduate students of various ethnic backgrounds and from various countries. The Studium 263. First issue of the Studium Carpatho-Ruthenorum was truly Carpatho-Ruthenorum yearbook published by the Institute of Rusyn international. While the majority of Language and Culture, Prešov participants were from Slovakia, the University, Slovakia.

United States, and Ukraine, others were from Bulgaria, Canada, Germany, Italy, Poland, Serbia, and even from as far afield as Argentina, China, and Japan.

The rector Matlovič and his less inspired but still supportive successor Peter Konya were pleasantly shocked by the success of an “esoteric” Rusyn Institute that brought international acclaim to their otherwise provincial institution.

Another step, so I thought, in this right direction was to conclude a formal agreement of academic cooperation between the University of Toronto and Prešov University. I was never much for writing grant proposals, but I knew that a younger colleague and good friend, Robert Austin at the University of Toronto’s Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREES) was a master at securing grants. Moreover, he had taught for nearly a year in Slovakia and was quite familiar with university life in that country. I approached him for advice, but he was quite dismissive, arguing that no reputable institution, such as Canada’s leading University of Toronto, would ever sign an agreement with a pro435

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vincial university in a small provincial country (Slovakia)—as if in the larger scheme of things Canada was not itself quintessentially provincial in size (small population) and certainly in mindset. I was very angered

by Robert’s remarks but said nothing and did nothing until reminded by Anna Plishkova.

Responding to her prompting, I simply went to our dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Meric Gertler (like Matlovič, also a geographer), and told him about the possibility of an agreement of cooperation with Prešov University. He asked me to draw up a proposal, which was quickly and lightly edited by the University of Toronto dean’s office and sent off to rector Matlovič for his signature.

264. Meric Gertler—Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, University of Toronto, and René Matlovič—Rector of Prešov University, at the Memorandum of Agreement ceremony (October 2012).

I then proposed that rector Matlovič come to Toronto for the formal signing. Dean Gertler was surprised by my suggestion, saying that such inter-university agreements were usually not consummated in person. I, however, saw the publicity value of an international visit, both for Prešov University and, by extension, for Carpatho-Rusyn Studies. Matlovič immediately accepted, got on a plane with his wife (also a Prešov University faculty member) and Anna Plishkova in tow, and spent a week in 436

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265. René Matlovič and Paul Robert Magocsi at the Carpatho-Ruthenica Library, Jackman Humanities Building, University of Toronto (October 2012).

Toronto. Our university stepped up to the plate, assured that there was a proper ceremony with an official photograph, and we all—especially Prešov—got great publicity mileage out of the short signing ceremony.

Even more important was that Matlovič and I got to know and like each other better. In particular, he was enthralled by my Carpatho-Ruthenica library. He immediately proposed that to enrich the Rusyn Institute’s library in Prešov, he would help Plishkova formulate a major grant proposal to European Union funding agencies with the goal to digitize the entire Carpatho-Ruthenica Library at the University of Toronto (at that time about 8,000 volumes).

Within a few months after returning home, the ever-adept Plishkova put together a proposal for which, in the end, the Rusyn Institute via Prešov University obtained a 250,000 Euro grant. The digitization project was launched in cooperation with the University of Toronto Library (of which the Carpatho-Ruthenica Library was not yet a part). The project proved more difficult than expected, however. The problem had to do with copyright protection of all books published after 1923. As a result, only the pre-1923 imprints (about 500 volumes) were digitized and made available on the World Wide Web. During this process, Anna Plishkova, 437

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266. Mykola Vegesh—second director of the Carpathian Studies Institute, Uzhhorod State University (right) and Mykola Makara—third director (center), with Paul Robert Magocsi, Uzhhorod, Ukraine (2002).

Kveta Koporova, and Valerii Padiak came twice to Toronto armed with cameras to photograph post-1923 imprints primarily dealing with Rusyn language and literature from my “private” library—something that was legal.

***** By the first decade of the twenty-first century, the university-level Carpatho-Rusyn world was clearly identified. Prešov was its only center. This is not to say that there had not been other attempts to create university-level institutions. I already mentioned how Lemko-Rusyn studies in Poland began at the Pedagogical University in Cracow, but then ended in 2017. Earlier still there was the Carpathian Studies Institute which functioned for a few years in the early 1990s at Uzhhorod State University.

Its Carpatho-Rusyn orientation was always tenuous (only evident when Ivan Pop and Mykola Makara were the directors) even before it ceased to exist by the outset of the twenty-first century. The Department of Ukrainian and Rusyn Philology established in 1992 at the Higher School of Education in Nyíregyhaza, Hungary, did remarkable work publishing studies in the fields of Carpatho-Rusyn history and language. But after 438

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its founding director István Udvari died in 2012, within a year or two the Rusyn component of the department was disbanded.

Finally, there was the oldest institution of all: a lectureship (1973), which evolved into the Department of Rusyn Language (1981) at the University of Novi Sad. For most of its existence it was headed by the openly anti-Rusyn Ukrainophile Yuliian Tamash and the otherwise less aggressive—but Ukrainophile nevertheless—Yanko Ramach. Neither of the Rusyn-oriented scholars in that department (Yuliian Ramach and Mykhailo Feisa) were ever able to limit the Ukrainophile orientation of the Novi Sad department. In any case, the provincial nature of the Vojvodinian Rusyns, who among other things used a language that some Carpatho-Rusyns (especially from Ukraine) had difficulty understanding, were factors playing against any influence that the Novi Sad department would ever be able to have outside its own little Vojvodinian world.

And so, all eyes and all efforts had to be focused on Prešov. Nor should its faculty be drawn solely from eastern Slovakia. I urged Olena DutsFaifer, who was highly intelligent and well-trained in literary theory, to teach at Prešov. Anna Plishkova offered; Olena declined, hoping, as she always did, to land a permanent position at the much more prestigious Jagiellonian University in Cracow.

I had really hoped to get Valerii Padiak, the prolific researcher and charismatic pedagogue, to teach in Prešov. Since he was from Ukraine, a non-European Union country, that was a much more difficult proposition. Fortunately, Plishkova acted on my suggestion, and because of her persistence was able to overcome the bureaucratic red tape, not so much of the university but of the Slovak police and immigration authorities.

Padiak was hired part-time and then full-time to teach Carpatho-Rusyn literature. He rightly placed an emphasis on all literary production from whatever time period and country where Carpatho-Rusyns lived, including North America.

I was most concerned that although students (and even faculty) enrolled at the Prešov Institute were receiving a solid grounding in Rusyn language and literature, they were sorely lacking in the general history of Carpatho-Rusyns. Plishkova agreed to include Carpatho-Rusyn history as an integral part of the five-year undergraduate study program.

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267. Valerii Padiak and Larysa Ilchenko Padiak, Prešov University Library, Slovakia (December 2016).

With no real place to turn, she was forced to hire Stanislav Konečný to teach the history course. Konečný was a very accomplished historian, especially of the twentieth century, but as a Slovak he did not speak a word of Rusyn—not good for a teacher at a Rusyn institute. Worse still, he worked all his life at the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Košice, had no real teaching experience, and had the poorest and driest lecturing style.

He was the kiss of death when it came to getting students interested in Carpatho-Rusyn history.

Fortunately, another person came onto the scene. Sometime in the course of the first decade of the twenty-first century I befriended Volodymyr Fenych, then dean of the Historical Faculty at Uzhhorod National University. He had become interested in my large-scale history of Ukraine and recommended it to his students. Educated as a Ukrainian in Transcarpathia, he later commented that he discovered his “true” Carpatho-Rusyn heritage after reading The Shaping of a National Identity. He was also a friend of Valerii Padiak, who published some of Fenych’s writings.

When Padiak wanted to stop teaching the Rusyn-language history course at the Studium Carpatho-Ruthenorum and concentrate on 440

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ethnography instead, I proposed that we replace him with Volodymyr Fenych. Like Padiak, Fenych was a passionate and inspiring teacher, just what we needed at the Rusyn Institute.

My plan was to get him involved in the Studium, where he first taught in 2018, and then hopefully to move him on to teaching the history course during the normal academic year at Prešov University. Konečný had finally retired, and the director Plishkova was pleased with my proposal. By the following academic year (2019-2020) Fenych was formally hired by the Institute of Rusyn History and Culture.

The wheel of history had come full circle. The traditional Carpatho-Rusyn cultural centers, Prešov and Uzhhorod, were no longer kept apart by borders. At least in the world of Carpatho-Rusyn studies, there was no Slovakia or Ukraine, there was only Carpathian Rus’. The new generation of university scholars, whether from eastern Slovakia (Plishkova and Koporova) or from Ukraine’s Transcarpathian region (Padiak and Fenych) were working together in one Carpatho-Rusyn institution which happened to be in Prešov.

268. Volodymyr Fenych (right) with Paul Robert Magocsi, Mukachevo, Ukraine (September 2015).

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This “re-unification” of Carpatho-Rusyns at the university level was reinforced by the fact that many of the students enrolled in the Prešov Institute’s Rusyn program were from Ukraine’s Transcarpathia. Parents in that region were willing to sacrifice and find funds so that their children could study at a university in the European Union. They got their wish by going to Prešov University. We got our wish by educating young people from Transcarpathia in a Carpatho-Rusyn spirit, something they could never receive in Ukraine.

I felt at peace, knowing that all the time and energy we had invested in Carpatho-Rusyn educational projects were paying off in human dividends. Oh, how I loved to return to Prešov at least once a year to enjoy seeing young people proud—and knowledgeable! —of their Carpatho-Rusyn identity and heritage. Historical justice had been served, and there was a return to normalcy.

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Much of the cultural and civic activity that we were able to carry out in Europe at the end of the twentieth and outset of the twenty-first centuries was made possible because of funding from my previously mentioned close friend and Carpatho-Rusyn benefactor Steve Chepa. Among his newest projects was to create in 2002 a World Academy of Rusyn (later renamed Carpatho-Rusyn) culture.

I was always skeptical about creating new organizations unless they had a clear—and practical—purpose. Hence, by instinct, I argued against the academy idea. Steve went ahead, nonetheless. His argument was that the new organization would have a practical goal and symbolic value.

According to him, electing accomplished personages from whatever field of activity to become members would enhance, even if only symbolically, the idea of Carpatho-Rusynism. On a more practical level, Steve’s goal was to create an Internet site and fill it with reliable information about Carpatho-Rusyns which would be available to everyone who used the “new” technology embodied in the World Wide Web. As for the World Academy’s structure, Steve proposed a slate of individuals for a five-member Board of Directors to be headed by him, while I was asked to propose scholars and cultural activists who were formally invited to become Academy members. Most candidates were of Carpatho-Rusyn background living in Europe and North America; others were of various national backgrounds who had a professional interest in the group.

Not a single person turned down the Academy’s invitation. But the real surprise for me was the degree to which Academy members took their appointments seriously. This was not surprising for individuals from central and eastern Europe who were always pleased if they could get 443

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recognition from the West. For instance, respect for the Carpatho-Rusyn idea was embodied in the reaction of someone like Chris Hann, permanent director of an institute within the prestigious Max Planck Institute, Germany’s academy of sciences. Several years later I saw somewhere in print that Professor Dr. Hann (a social anthropologist by profession) proudly listed as among his “accomplishments” membership in the World Academy of Rusyn Culture. I, for instance, was both a member of the Rusyn Academy and a member of its Board of Directors, yet I seem never to have it listed on my curriculum vitae. And not for any particular reason other than perhaps I just didn’t take “our” Rusyn Academy seriously. Clearly, others did.

As for the practical aspects of the Academy’s work, there was a problem largely of Steve’s making. He was convinced that scholars in the field, like Elaine Rusinko, Bogdan Horbal, among a few others in North America, would jump at the possibility of being “editor” of one of the discipline pages on the academy’s internet site. As it turned out, no one was interested in spending time on a project that, at least for scholars, brought them no concrete professional advantage.

Frustrated with the fact that nothing was happening on the academy website (run by Steve’s nephew Colin Rose, an employee in one of his uncle’s businesses), I decided to undertake an experiment. It consisted of choosing ten recent studies on the topic of the Rusyn language and giving them over to Colin for posting. In the end, I was the only one to submit material to the otherwise loudly touted but basically empty Academy website. With nothing to show for and to avoid total embarrassment, Steve decided to post entries from the recently published Encyclopedia of Rusyn History and Culture. He never asked for permission from the publisher (University of Toronto Press). I guess he assumed he had a right to do so because he funded the book’s print publication. None of this helped, however, and from about 2012 the Academy website and the organization in general was for all intents and purposes still born.

Another idea of Steve’s was, aside from the World Academy, to encourage the creation of regional academies in each country where Carpatho-Rusyns lived. Only one country, Slovakia, took up the offer. This was because the enterprising Sasha Zozuliak, with some initial funding from Mr. Chepa, 444

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did create something called the Academy of Rusyn Culture in Slovakia.

Having broken relations with the Rusyn Renaissance Society, Zozuliak set up an internet news site and continued to publish Rusyn-language books under the imprint of the Academy of Rusyn Culture in Slovakia.

He registered this body in Slovakia, and after funding from Chepa dried up, he applied for and received grants from the Slovak government making possible, to this day, the publication of a wide range of Rusyn-language literary works.

The World Academy was instrumental in publishing at least one book in North America. Sometime in the early summer of 2007, I received in the mail from Elaine Rusinko an unpublished manuscript by someone I never heard of, Mark Wansa. He had just completed his first novel.

Since it was a saga about a Carpatho-Rusyn family, Elaine asked me to communicate with him about its worth and possible publication. In the past I had received more than one English-language literary manuscripts whose authors wanted from me an assessment and perhaps some kind of help to publish. Among such authors were Sonya Jason and Luba Czerhoniak Fedash, for whose books I wrote an introduction and/or organized the sale of their books through the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center.

But Mark Wansa with his novel called The Linden and the Oak was different. It is true that I had written about Carpatho-Rusyn American literature, even though I was far from being a literary specialist. I do read novels, however, most especially each summer when I vacation in southern France.

I took Wansa’s manuscript with me in the summer of 2007, although it sat several weeks on my desk unopened. After all, reading takes time, and it certainly gets in the way of one’s own writing, my highest priority.

Seeing the manuscript every day, I felt guilty. Finally, I took it with me to begin reading while sitting on the coastal train that connects our little French town of Roquebrune-Cap Martin near the Italian border with Nice about a 35-minute ride to the west. I opened to page one of the manuscript and could not put it down until I finished reading it later that night or the next day. Already on the train and only about a quarter through the text I was convinced that this novel simply had to be published.

Upon returning to Canada, I told Steve Chepa about Wansa’s novel and gave it effusive praise. He passed it on to his nephew and assistant 445

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Colin Rose (a theater administrator in an earlier life), who also came back with praise. I told Steve I would help in the publication process, but he together with Colin wanted to do it themselves. So be it. I was asked by Wansa to provide a preface, which I gladly did. Although not the publisher, the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center did nevertheless sell several hundred copies.

Steve was pleased but eventually gave up interest, passing over publication rights to the author who proceeded to reprint and sell it himself (or through Amazon). We were all 269. Book cover of Mark Wansa’s novel The Linden and the Oak (2009). happy. We had a Rusyn-American author who could and did produce quality work. As things turned out, however, the Wansa novel was Steve Chepa’s last hurrah.

***** There is no question that Steve’s philanthropy, channeled through the University of Toronto’s Chepa Fund which I administered, and which amounted to about $350,000 spread over a decade, was a unique phenomenon and a major contribution to the third Carpatho-Rusyn national revival that began after the Revolutions of 1989. Like many self-made businesspersons, Chepa was (at least externally) self-confident, nay over-confident. I say, at least externally, because as a person Steve was constantly wracked with self-doubt and bouts of incapacitating depression. I know this from numerous discussions with him not only when he was stable but also when he was in the depths of despair.

As for his commitment to the Carpatho-Rusyn cause, I proposed to him that, instead of providing me with expendable monies through the Chepa Fund, he create a foundation from which permanent funding— even if amounting to smaller sums on an annual basis—would be avail446

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270. Under the Slovak-language advertising banner, “Live Your Dream,” one of the first private homes constructed by Steven Chepa’s Norstone Development Corporation, Košice, Slovakia.

able for Carpatho-Rusyn projects. Despite my pleas, he put off the idea of a foundation for some undetermined time in the future. That time never came, and no foundation was ever created.

Chepa’s over-confidence extended to Europe, something that turned out to be a fatal mistake. Like many North Americans in those days, Steve was convinced that he knew how business worked in the “capitalist West.”

That being the case, he was going to teach people in former Communist central and eastern Europe how to operate businesses on their own turf.

To make his international business ventures feasible, he hired an architect of Carpatho-Rusyn background from Slovakia, Slavomir/Slavko Hyriak, who was working at the time for Ryerson University in Toronto.

Steve convinced Slavko to return to his native Prešov to oversee Steve’s new business venture: the construction of a North American-style housing development on several acres of land that he bought just north of eastern Slovakia’s largest city, Košice. Steve also invested in a hotel complex in the Tatra Mountain resort area.

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So convinced was Steve of his on-going success that he managed to buy a lakeside property along the shores of Morske Oko, which was part of a government-restricted nature reserve of the highest ecological purity. The only other residence (by then abandoned) along the lake was an old stone summer cottage built for the Vanderbilt family during the last decades of the nineteenth century. How did this come about? Gladys Moore Vanderbilt, heiress of the U.S. railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt (and grand aunt of the well-known twenty-first century CNN journalist Anderson Cooper), was married to the Hungarian Count László Széchényi. The count had large landholdings in Felvidék/Upper Hungary that included Morské Oko, which the couple visited each summer during the decades just before and after World War I. In the early 1920s, Leonora Kotheimer, the American wife of the first governor of autonomous Subcarpathian Rus’ Gregory Zhatkovych, would visit Gladys whenever she got bored with life in Uzhhorod.

Steve clearly touted himself as a modern “Hungarian” aristocrat with enough money to spend in post-Communist Slovakia on elaborate meals prepared by high-end chefs from Prešov and Bratislava, musicians to enhance the festivities, and young ladies to entertain in whatever way necessary after the dining was over.

With regard to his business interests in Ukraine, Steve engaged his two nephews, Vasyl and Ivan Tsuga, whom we met when Steve and I visited his father’s birthplace in Malyi Bereznyi, a village north of Uzhhorod along the border of Slovakia. The Tsuga boys were trained as lawyers, but they were not particularly bright, and certainly had no experience in business. Steve’s goal was to create an enterprise that could provide employment for Carpatho-Rusyns in Transcarpathia, which at the time had an unemployment rate of 75 percent or more. I remember my editorial assistant in Toronto, Nadiya Kushko, warning Mr. Chepa on more than one occasion not to get involved in business operations in corrupt, post-Soviet Ukraine. But Steve was not about to listen to anyone. He knew best.

I remember joining him to look at an abandoned factory between Malyi Bereznyi and the Slovak border, which was at least in a Carpatho-Rusyn inhabited part of Transcarpathia. But the Tsuga boys, following the advice of some other Ukrainian employees working for Steve 448

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in Toronto, settled instead on an abandoned factory in the town of Vylok in southern Transcarpathia near the border with Hungary.

Several hundreds of thousands of dollars later and the factory in Vylok, slated to produce wood chips for export, began operations with 20 employees. Aside from its modest size, most of the employees were ethnic Hungarians since that part of Transcarpathia was inhabited by local Magyars. Clearly, no help was being given to the region’s unemployed Carpatho-Rusyns.

The factory struggled to operate for a few years, but then post-Soviet business “raiders” entered the picture. They were determined to drive out the “foreign Canadian” and take over his factory. This was not uncommon in Ukraine in those days. Steve was convinced that the courts would protect his legitimate interests. When he finally realized that Ukraine was indeed corrupt, he started to provide bribes to local and district judges.

Lawsuits in Ukraine and even in Toronto over this matter drained hundreds of thousands of more dollars from Chepa’s finances.

Things also went bad in Slovakia even without the degree of corruption that Steve encountered in Ukraine. Of the planned twelve homes in the Košice area housing project, only one or two were completed. Chepa broke with Slavko Hyriak (an otherwise loyal Carpatho-Rusyn patriot) whom he fired, and he also lost the property in the Tatras after defaulting on back taxes. Steve eventually had to sell his beloved retreat at Morské Oko. Chepa’s personal situation also went from bad to worse. After losing all that money in failed ventures in Ukraine and Slovakia, he was forced to declare bankruptcy and liquidate his last businesses in Toronto. All that he had left was his multi-million-dollar residence north of the city. But even that was tied up, because he was in the throes of an unresolved and contested divorce with his long-estranged wife. Eventually, the mansion was sold, from which he received a portion of the sale (see illus. 198).

I last saw Steve Chepa was upon my invitation to him sometime in 2019 to come for a luncheon visit to Toronto. He was a shell of the man he once was. He had lost everything: his businesses in Toronto, his properties in Europe, his wife, his home in Canada, and his ability to continue as the grand benefactor of the Carpatho-Rusyn movement that he had been for nearly two decades.

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Aside from my deep sorrow at seeing how low my good friend Steve had fallen, I was terribly disturbed about the end of our most important civic project, the Rusyn School Program in Transcarpathia. I was determined to find some solution.

From the very beginning of the School Program in 2003, those of us who were most directly involved—Steve Chepa, John Righetti, and I in North America together with Vasyl Sarkanych and eventually Valerii Padiak in Transcarpathia—all realized that we could never be able to fund classes for every elementary school. I remember how we began with 7, then moved within a year or so to 16 and 27, each with between 20 and 30 pupils. Then, following Steve Chepa’s enthusiastic pronouncement at the Third Congress of the Rusyn Language in Cracow (2007), the number rose to a high point of 40.

The School Program was so successful that several activists and some part-time teachers, among them Dymytrii Pop, Mykola Bobynets (on behalf of his wife), Mykhailo Almashii, and Yurii Shypovych, began to claim that one or the other of them should head the program instead of Valerii Padiak, who had taken over the directorship after the death of Vasyl Sarkanych in early 2008. Once again, we were experiencing destructive in-fighting among activists in Transcarpathia, each of whom wanted and expected to be “The Leader.” Claims aside, the real question was funding. Steve Chepa, through me, was supplying the money, and we both decided to support the only person we could trust, Valerii Padiak.

Padiak immediately proceeded to create a government-registered Benevolent Fund, which could receive and disperse money. At the same time, I suggested we create a School Board comprised of teachers who 450

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271. Vasyl Sarkanych addressing teachers in Transcarpathia’s Rusyn School Program (ca. 2007).

272. Valerii Padiak with the youngest of students in Transcarpathia’s Rusyn School Program (ca. 2007).

would determine the curriculum and which teachers and school classes would receive funding. The School Board was headed by Mariia Lendiel from a village near Mukachevo, who a few years earlier had spent nearly a year on a research fellowship (provided by Steve Chepa) under my direction at the University of Toronto.

The Rusyn School Program functioned relatively well, as indicated by the fact that there were more parents who requested that their children attend than could be accommodated. Nothing was more complimentary than to have a waiting list. In the end, everything depended on funding from one person whose own financial woes were rapidly bringing him down. By 2013 Chepa simply had no more money for schools, or, for that matter, anything else.

Ironically, Steve Chepa’s last trip to Transcarpathia coincided with the tenth anniversary of the School Program. It was held in Mukachevo on what turned out to be a beautiful sunny day in May 2013 with the participation of dozens of happily smiling young students and their inspired teachers. As Steve and I looked on, little did those students and teachers know that their main benefactor had nothing more to give. During the next school year a few classes still managed to function, but after that there were none.

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273. The teacher Nadiia Pechora on the opening day of the Rusyn School Program in Transcarpathia, Makariovo, Ukraine (2010).

I guess we always knew that the Rusyn School Program in Transcarpathia was at best an experimental pilot project which we considered only a first step toward the eventual incorporation of Carpatho-Rusyn subjects in the state’s educational curriculum. The end of funding from Steve Chepa simply accelerated the need to approach Ukraine’s authorities.

I argued this could only be done in Kyiv, most particularly at the Ministry of Education. Through the Chair of Ukrainian Studies and its supporters in Toronto, I had come to know personally Ukraine’s Minister of Education at the time, Serhii Kvit. It turns out that Kvit was a native of Uzhhorod and graduate of the University of Uzhhorod. He certainly knew the situation in Transcarpathia where his aging mother still resided. His parents were not locals, however, but so-called novoprybuly, post-World War II Ukrainian newcomers from Galicia, who more often than not were intensely committed, even intolerant, Ukrainian patriots.

Kvit attained his rise to power by playing the nationalist card and positioning himself a Ukrainian patriot. Quite interestingly, the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada saw through this ploy (particularly common in early post-Communist Ukraine) and therefore was very suspicious when Kvit was appointed rector (president) of the University of the Kyivan Mohyla Academy. That seventeenth-century institution, reestablished in post-1991 independent Ukraine, relied heavily on donations from the 452

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274. Poster for the 10th Anniversary of the Rusyn School Program in Transcarpathia, Mukachevo, Ukraine (April 2013).

Ukrainian diaspora. I guess that to prove his nationalist credentials (and assure on-going financial assistance from the diaspora) Kvit had to exhibit, in whatever way necessary, his Ukrainian patriotism.

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Kvit’s opportunity came in 2014 following the latest political upheaval in Ukraine—the Maidan Revolution of Dignity. That event brought about the ouster of the country’s pro-Russian president (Yanukovych), which in turn led to the annexation of Crimea engineered by Russia’s president Vladimir Putin and a war with Ukraine over two breakaway “separatist” republics in the eastern part of the country. War and separatism were the new realities which were to have ominous repercussions for Ukraine’s Carpatho-Rusyns.

It was in the wake of these events that Ukraine’s post-Maidan transitional and reform-minded president (Poroshenko) appointed Serhii Kvit the country’s new minister of education. I viewed Kvit’s appointment in Ukraine’s hour of crisis and his efforts at reform as an opportune moment that should not be missed. Of course, things could go either way.

Although of Galician-Ukrainian parentage, the Transcarpathian born and educated Kvit might be of use on behalf of our Carpatho-Rusyn education projects. Or, he could sabotage our efforts. As skeptical as I was of his character, I thought it was worth a try.

The timing seemed right for me as well, since in the fall of 2014 I began to work on a major project to commemorate the 1941 murder of 33,000 Jews in the ravine of Babyn Yar in the northern suburbs of Kyiv.

This meant that for the next two years until September 2016, I would frequently be in Ukraine’s capital on a travel budget paid by a Toronto-based organization to which I belonged, the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter. Why not combine work on behalf of Ukraine’s Jewry with work on behalf of Carpatho-Rusyns?

Already in September 2014, I asked the head of the Rusyn School Program in Transcarpathia, Valerii Padiak, to join me in Kyiv at a meeting I arranged with Minister Kvit. In a letter to the minister, I made it clear in advance that the goal of our meeting was to discuss two topics: (1) the introduction of Carpatho-Rusyn language and culture classes in the elementary school curriculum in Transcarpathia; and (2) the creation of a Department/Katedra or a Center of Carpatho-Rusyn Studies at the Faculty of History of Uzhhorod National University.

During the nearly one-hour meeting, Minister Kvit listened attentively and even seemed to show genuine interest in what we were propos454

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ing. He was particularly impressed when we presented him with several Ukrainian-language books about “our people,” including the 900-page Encyclopedia of the History and Culture of Carpatho-Rusyns and The People from Nowhere, both published by Valerii Padiak.

Minister Kvit told us that the request about elementary schools was within the mandate of his ministry and that he would have his staff look into the matter, in particular his deputy minister. As for the university department or center, he said that because of the stipulations of the all-European Bologna Agreement on university autonomy (which he himself had signed on behalf of Ukraine), his ministry could not act on this matter. He did, however, urge us to draw up two separate written proposals, one for the elementary school program, the other for the university program.

A year later, in October 2015, Valerii Padiak and I were received again at the Ministry of Education. This time the dean of Uzhhorod University’s Historical Faculty, Volodymyr Fenych, came with us. We presented the two written proposals that Minister Kvit asked us to prepare. The minister said he would pass on the elementary school proposal to his deputy minister in charge of such matters (Pavlo Khobzei). As for the university “department/ center” proposal, Kvit said we should raise it directly with the rector (president) of Uzhhorod National University, Volodymyr Smolanka. It turned out that Smolanka, a surgeon by profession, was Kvit’s close personal friend and the doctor who had operated on his elderly mother still residing in Uzhhorod. I asked Minister Kvit if he would alert the rector about our request for a meeting with him. The minister said he would do so.

A few months later, on an unseasonably warm February day, I showed up with Dean Volodymyr Fenych for the scheduled meeting with the university rector, Smolanka. At the last moment we were told the rector was called out of town—although his car was visibly in the rectorate’s parking lot—and that the vice-rector Myroslava Lendiel would meet with us in his stead. Lendiel said she was authorized to speak on behalf of the rector and that she would be frank. In the post-Maidan political environment and given the war with Russia in the eastern part of Ukraine, any program devoted specifically to Carpatho-Rusyns would be viewed as “separatism” and, therefore, would never be allowed. At best, Volodymyr Fenych might create some Rusyn-related specialized courses for future graduate 455

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275. Proposal by Valerii Padiak to Ukraine’s Ministry of Education to introduce a Rusyn education program in Transcarpathia’s elementary schools (1 July 2015).

students. The rector’s deliberate refusal to meet with us did not bode well.

The upshot of all these meetings in Kyiv and Uzhhorod led to nothing and only proved the two-faced nature of Serhii Kvit. Nothing ever came of the Rusyn elementary school proposal, which was probably buried somewhere in the ministry’s archives.

More likely was a scenario suggested by the ever-skeptical Volodymyr Fenych. He had noted that at the two meetings with Kvit in Kyiv, only he, the minister, was present. Normally at such meetings a secretary or section head, even a deputy minister would be present. The fact that only Minister Kvit was present meant that, for the record, our meetings never took place.

As for the university-level proposal for a Department/Center of Carpatho-Rusyn Studies, it too was forgotten. But before it was, the dean of the Historical Faculty, Volodymyr Fenych, had to be punished for getting involved in such “separatist” Carpatho-Rusyn ventures. For his sins Fenych became the proverbial sacrificial lamb.

A coordinated campaign of denunciations began in the fall of 2016 with the appearance of two brochures—one by a Uzhhorod university professor of ethnography (Mykhailo Tyvodar), the other by a disaffected historian from Transcarpathia living in Canada (Ernest Gyidel)—both with the intention to expose the “dangerous” politically inspired activi456

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276. The first page of the “expert report” by Stepan Vidnianskyi, regarding the “scandalous” book by Volodymyr Fenych.

ty of Volodymyr Fenych. This was followed by accusations of wrongdoing by another fellow faculty member, the university vice-rector Roman Ofitsynskyi and by a social media blitz spearheaded by a self-styled representative of the “community,” Volodymyr Pipash. The crime? Fenych 457

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had published a scandalous book (Hungarian Rus’ and the “Oath of Hannibal”: The Beginnings of Ukraine’s Intellectual Conquest of Transcarpathia [2015]) which was allegedly anti-Ukrainian in content. The critics also implied or stated openly that Fenych should be fired from his teaching post at the University of Uzhhorod because of his allegedly nefarious impact on young, impressionable student minds.

In the face of such artificially created pressure, the university rector, Volodymyr Smolanka, decided to call upon the Institute of the History of Ukraine of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kyiv to provide a scholarly “judgement” on Fenych’s publication. Since the History Institute’s director, Valerii Smolii, was a personal friend of mine, I wrote to him on 6 October 2016 asking if, indeed, “Ukraine has returned to the Middle Ages and Papal-like attacks against free thought?” To no avail. Smolii moved forward, commissioning one of his staff, Stepan Vidnianskyi, a resident “specialist” on Transcarpathian matters, to write an “expert report.” Vidnianskyi did that and more. He said nothing about the content of Fenych’s publication but rather spoke only about the dangers of “Rusyn separatism”—a very serious legal accusation in the wake of Russia’s recent annexation of Crimea and the creation of separatist “Russian” republics in war-torn eastern Ukraine.

What was the rector of Uzhhorod National University to do with Fenych? Fire him? That would make him a martyr, at the very least in Carpatho-Rusyn circles outside Ukraine. A scandal of international proportions would certainly not do.

The rector simply announced the abolition of the Faculty of History, which by the way had the prestigious distinction of being one of the first four faculties when Uzhhorod University was established in 1945.

Hence, the quintessential Stalinist solution. No more faculty, no more need for a dean. Fenych was given a research leave and later assigned to teach in another faculty. No firing. No martyr. No international scandal.

In effect, our hopes and plans for Carpatho-Rusyn education in Transcarpathia ended in a fiasco engineered by Ukraine’s Minister of Education, Serhii Kvit. Clearly, Ukraine was, is, and would continue to be an enemy anything that promoted the idea of a distinct Carpatho-Rusyn nationality.

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While Transcarpathia in Ukraine seemed a lost cause, there was always Slovakia and the Institute of Rusyn Language and Culture at Prešov University. Faced with the reality of the demise of our main benefactor Steve Chepa, I thought there might be other financial resources available, whether in Slovakia or perhaps from post-Communist financially successful businesspeople in Transcarpathia.

Actually, Sasha Zozuliak and Prešov University’s Rusyn Institute director Anna Plishkova had turned to a few individuals in eastern Slovakia in the hope of obtaining funding for their own concerns: Rusyn-language publications (in the case of Zozuliak), and university-related pedagogical and scholarly projects (in the case of Plishkova).

Together with Sasha, we visited the art dealer and painter Andrii Smolak, who had an art gallery in, of all places, the eastern Slovak provincial town of Snina. This was actually a branch of his brother Miro Smolak’s larger gallery in Prague. Both Smolak brothers proclaimed that they were Carpatho-Rusyn patriots, despite their previous Ukrainophile tendencies. Zozuliak and I spent hours upon hours speaking with both brothers in the hope that they might become financial patrons of Carpatho-Rusyn cultural and educational projects in Slovakia. I even visited Miro Smolak at his impressive gallery in the former monastic St. Roch Church in Prague. There I had a wonderful time with him and his wife (a lead soprano in the Czech National Opera). They both regaled me with tales about their elevated standing in the Czech cultural world. But aside from Miro’s descriptions of international artistic events under his sponsorship, nothing at all came from either brother regarding concrete assistance to Carpatho-Rusyn culture and education in Slovakia.

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277. Andrii Smolak with Paul Robert Magocsi at his gallery in Snina, Slovakia (June 2003).

At Zozuliak’s and Plishkova’s suggestion I tried to engage yet another possible Carpatho-Rusyn donor to our cause in Slovakia. This was Milan Mniahonchak, general manager of the privatized Chemstav Construction Company in Humenné. He prided himself on being an effective “Western” entrepreneur who had carried out successful construction projects throughout Slovakia and western Europe, in particular France.

Mniahonchak strove to convey the impression that he could do anything and everything. In hours of conversation—actually monologues by him—he proclaimed that he was going to get himself elected chairman of the Rusyn Renaissance Society (which he did) and then chairman of the World Congress of Rusyns (which he did not) and put both those houses in order. All this was supposedly for the good of the Carpatho-Rusyn cause, but most specially to soothe Mniahonchak’s megalomanic ego.

Not that he did not fulfill some of his claims. As chairman he put the Rusyn Renaissance Society’s finances in order, avoiding default on a large debt incurred to the Slovak government agencies that funded the organization. He also provided funds from his personal resources to help keep Slovakia’s oldest periodicals (Narodnŷ novynkŷ and Rusyn) afloat as well as to assist projects at the Institute of Rusyn Language and Culture.

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positive side. For several years, the Rusyn Renaissance Society (headed by Anna Kuzmiakova who was prompted by Yan Lypynskyi in Bratislava) was feuding—and eventually suing in court—Sasha Zozuliak.

They accused him (with some justification) of having appropriated the society’s serial publications, Rusyn and Narodnŷ novynkŷ, and placing them under his personal control. I had earlier recommended to Sasha that he do precisely that in order to silence ongoing criticism against him on the part of activists in the Rusyn Renais278. Milan Mniahonchak (ca. 2020). sance Society, in particular Lypynskyi and a group from Medzilaborce led by Pavel Dupkanych and Vladimir Protivniak. Sasha, as stubborn as ever, was not about to give up the organs he had established back in 1991 and sustained at great personal, financial, and psychological cost for over a quarter century.

Soon after becoming chairman, Mniahonchak put a stop to the detrimental anti-Zozuliak campaign. The businessman-turned-civic activist facilitated an end to the lawsuit and officially recognized Zozuliak’s ownership of “his” two publications. Even more important for the long term was Mniahonchak’s acceptance of my suggestion that henceforth the Renaissance Society’s own publication, Info Rusyn, be edited by the young activist, Petro Medvid, a highly intelligent Rusyn-language writer.

The younger Medvid admired Zozuliak for his revolutionary and ongoing productive role in Slovakia’s Carpatho-Rusyn movement, and he was an avid supporter of the university’s Institute of Rusyn Language and Culture (under Anna Plishkova) and the Aleksander Dukhnovych Theater (headed by Marian Marko). It seemed that finally peace and stability was brought to the various factions of the Carpatho-Rusyn intelligentsia and their organizations in Prešov. It was thanks to Milan Mniahonchak that this all came about.

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Yet, at the moment of his greatest success in Slovakia and his plans (with my support) to be elected chairman of the World Congress of Rusyns, Mniahonchak announced in early 2016 that for “health reasons” (in part true) he was resigning the chairmanship of the Rusyn Renaissance Society. For all intents and purposes, he was heard from no more.

***** Milan Mniahonchak was the last of possible financial benefactors in Slovakia—at least about whom I was aware. Yet, as fate would have it—I was able to find, or in some cases was myself found by—new ones. These benefactors sometimes arrived from an entirely unexpected source.

One day in early 2010, I received a knock on my university office door.

In walked a tall gentleman around 65 years old who may have been wearing a clerical collar. He introduced himself as the Reverend Edward Jackman, scion of one of the wealthiest families in Ontario. Father Jackman told me he had read and was enamored with several of my books. To my surprise those he was referring to all dealt with Carpatho-Rusyns. His favorite book was Our People, perhaps because it dealt largely with the religious life of Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants and their descendants in

279. Reverend Edward Jackman at the 30th anniversary celebration for the Chair of Ukrainian Studies, University of Toronto, Faculty Club (June 2011).

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the United States and Canada.

After we got to know each other better, I proposed—or rather he offered—to supply an annual grant of $10,000 from the Jackman Foundation to support publication projects related to my own research on Carpatho-Rusyns. He was particularly enthusiastic when I told him about the Rusyn-language translation project of the New Testament under the direction of my good friend in Slovakia, Father Frantishek Krainiak.

In the end, the Jackman Foun- 280. Alex Rovt dation supplied an annual grant of $10,000 which after a period of ten years (at the time of this writing) amounted to $100,000 (Canadian). Those funds, for use at my discretion, allowed me to fund the Slovak translation of the general Carpatho-Rusyn history, With Their Backs to the Mountains, published under the title Chrbtom k horám in 2016. I justified to myself that Jackman’s money was being used to publish a book which included a very significant amount of material (maybe as much as one-third) about religion among Carpatho-Rusyns, whether Greek Catholicism, Orthodoxy, or even Protestantism. Not having heard any complaints from the Reverend Jackman, I also used his funds to allow the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center to publish several other books, among which were the second revised edition of the very popular Prešov Region edition of Let’s Speak Rusyn/Bisiduime po-rusyn’skŷ (2018) phrasebook.

Another new benefactor was the American billionaire Alex Rovt, the Mukachevo-born Jewish entrepreneur from Ukraine, who in the late 1990s moved his operations to New York City, where he eventually became a real estate investor, rivaling Donald Trump in the purchase of Manhattan properties. My relations with Roth came about in the following manner. The Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center (C-RRC) was asked by an Israeli scholar and Tel Aviv-based organization, the World Association of Subcarpathian Jews, 463

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to publish in English Yeshayahu Jelinek’s history of Jews in Subcarpathian Rus’. The World Association agreed to supply at their cost the English translation of the Jelinek book (which I had to edit quite heavily—virtually re-write), on the understanding that for its part the C-RRC would publish the book. Since our center did not have sufficient funds, I was urged by my research assistant, Nadiya Kushko, to approach Alex Rovt. She told me that he was a well-known philanthropist and donor to Jewish-related causes in his native Mukachevo.

This was the same Alex Rovt, who 281. Cover of the Russian-language in post-Communist times restored edition of Yeshayahu Jelinek’s The and reopened the historic Hotel Star/ Carpathian Diaspora: The Jews of Csillág on the main square in MukSubcarpathian Rus’ and Mukachevo (Uzhhorod: V. Padiak Publishers, 2010). achevo.

I had never met or even communicated with Rovt, and therefore I was quite reluctant to reach out to him. When I finally did so, I was still reluctant to accept his invitation to meet which, because of the last-minute travel arrangements, cost me $850 for a 45-minute return flight Toronto-New York-Toronto. I thought this was an expensive risk to take with little or no guarantee of success.

As it turned out, Rovt set an appointment on a Friday afternoon about two hours before the beginning of Jewish Sabbath which he observed.

Our meeting lasted about 45 minutes after which I received about $15,000 to publish the English-language edition of The Carpathian Diaspora: The Jews of Mukachevo and Subcarpathian Rus’ in the Columbia University Press Carpatho-Rusyn book series.

Rovt was so pleased that he decided to underwrite the full costs for a Russian-language edition of the book for publication by Valerii Padiak in Uzhhorod. I had urged that the book be in Ukrainian, but like most Jews 464

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in Ukraine Rovt was dismissive of that language and adamant that it be in Russian. Successful in these two publishing ventures I felt confident to approach Alex Rovt once again.

This time the request was quite specifically Carpatho-Rusyn in nature.

I proposed—and he agreed—to provide a scholarship ($1,600) each year to allow a student from Ukraine to attend the Studium Carpatho-Ruthenorum International Summer School at Prešov University. If we could not implement Rusyn-related educational programs in Ukraine’s Transcarpathia, at the very least, I thought, we could educate a few university students from that region in a Carpatho-Rusyn spirit.

***** Certainly, the funds from the Jackman Foundation and Alex Rovt enhanced our Carpatho-Rusyn publication and educational work, but a real stimulus and wide-ranging benefactor to our cause was the John and Helen Timo Foundation of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. That foundation was related to yet another phenomenon—the appearance of new blood in the form of young cadres, especially in the United States and Slovakia. Beginning with the second decade of the twenty-first century, these young people—the so-called Millennials—set out to enhance and enrich the Carpatho-Rusyn movement. Symbolic of the renewed spirit was a young woman from Pittsburgh, Maria Silvestri.

I first met Maria in the spring of 1999 when I was giving a guest lecture on Carpatho-Rusyns at the University of Pittsburgh. It seems that this was the second time I had seen this twelve/thirteen-year-old girl sitting in the first row and listening very intently to every word I delivered during the lecture and the question-and-answer period. Why was this young teenager the exception in an audience of adults whose average age was about fifty? It turns out that she was not there because her parents had forced her to be there. On the contrary, she probably dragged her parents to the event. My curiosity got the better of me the second time I was in Pittsburgh, so that after the lecture I left the podium to sit beside the young teenager to find out who she was.

Maria was born in Pittsburgh of mixed parentage: her mother Cathy Timo was of Carpatho-Rusyn heritage and a devout Greek Catholic. I be465

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lieve she may have been in a convent for a while, at least as a novice. Cathy was a gentle soul always carrying a welcoming smile. I cannot imagine her ever being angry or even raising her voice. The father, James Silvestri, was an American of Italian background who I believe was raised a Roman Catholic until switching (perhaps under the influence of mother Cathy) to the Greek Catholic rite.

During our first conversation, Ma282. The twelve-year old Carpathoria told me of her great interest in the Rusyn American activist Maria Silvestri Carpatho-Rusyn culture of her mawith Paul Robert Magocsi, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA (April ternal grandparents, John and Helen 1999).

Timo, with whom she was particularly close. I remember them both, most especially her grandmother, Helen, who I met at several Carpatho-Rusyn events that I attended in Pittsburgh. It was during those initial years of the twenty-first century that I got to know Maria better. She studied art and museum curatorship at Seton Hall University in New Jersey. Even before university, her first two years of high school were spent with her parents in Rome, where she became more familiar with the paternal, Italian side of her ancestry. Most importantly she learned fluent Italian and was exposed to great works of art and architecture firsthand.

Maria Silvestri was precisely the kind of young person that the Carpatho-Rusyn movement needed to survive, whether in the United States or Europe. She was very knowledgeable in the history of Western culture, most especially through the prism of Italian and later Spanish (more precisely Catalan) art and language. She also developed a deep appreciation for elegant dining (she is an accomplished cook) and for fine wines, and became an aficionado of the theater, especially opera, the symphony, and eventually, perhaps under my influence, operetta. As Maria grew older, I was able to share with her many of these finer (or as I would say “normal”) aspects of life at restaurants and performances at various venues in the United States and most especially central Europe.

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To enhance her first-hand knowledge of the Carpatho-Rusyn world, after graduating from university Maria landed a job teaching English as a foreign language at a high school in the central Slovak town Ružomberok, about 150 kilometers west of Prešov. During the academic year when she taught there (2008-2009), she was housed at the town’s Roman Catholic convent. Each weekend, however, as well as during the holidays, she made a point of spending as much time as possible in Prešov, where she befriended Olga Glosikova, the first director of the newly established state supported Museum of Rusyn Culture.

283. Marta Watral, Paul Robert Magocsi, and Maria Silvestri, Monument commemorating the arrival of the Magyar tribes into the Danube Basin through the Veretskyi Pass, Transcarpathia/Galicia, Ukraine (June 2016).

While in Slovakia, Maria also befriended a younger cohort of Carpatho-Rusyns who were about to become leading activists, including Petro Medvid in Slovakia and Bogdan Gambal and Demiian (Demko) Trokhanovskii among the Lemkos in Poland. I would have preferred that Maria remain in Prešov, perhaps land a job as curator at the Museum of Rusyn Culture. Unfortunately, the rather ineffectual and self-centered director Olga Glosikova may have liked Maria but did not have the foresight to create for her a permanent museum curatorial position.

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Back home in Pittsburgh Maria made use of her excellent knowledge of Italian and Slovak and began freelance translation and editing work.

But she really came into her own following the passing of her beloved grandparents, John and Helen Timo. Before his death in 2017, grandfather John, who had saved a substantial sum of money earned as a smalltown pharmacist, created a family foundation whose mission statement reflected John and Helen’s lifetime commitment: “As Carpatho-Rusyns dedicated to our beloved ancestors and traditions, we are committed to educating others and promoting our treasured culture and faith.”

Maria Silvestri became president of the John and Helen Timo Foundation, which by the time of this writing has dispersed to various Carpatho-Rusyn projects nearly two million dollars. In short, the budding twelve-year old Carpatho-Rusyn enthusiast I met at the very end of the twentieth century had, by the second decade of the twenty-first century, become the most generous Carpatho-Rusyn benefactor.

***** After it became clear that the Timo Foundation was a functioning body, I approached them with requests for funding. The first was on behalf of the Rusyn School Program in Transcarpathia, which, after 2013 neither the bankrupt Steve Chepa nor the ageing Stepan Moldovan (already on his deathbed) was able to support. Maria agreed to act but, following legal procedures, she needed a formal request from Valerii Padiak, the head of the Rusyn School Benevolent Fund in Transcarpathia.

Alas, Padiak didn’t quite get it. He procrastinated and procrastinated and never responded to the Timo Foundation. No funds were forthcoming. All that happened was that Transcarpathia’s School Program ended completely in 2014, and Maria Silvestri became alienated from Valerii Padiak for not having acted as he could and should have. I was also very disappointed in my good friend Valerii.

Maria was not deterred, however. She and I realized in the course of numerous and extended “telephone meetings” that working with our own Carpatho-Rusyn activists in Transcarpathia, not to mention the government of Ukraine, was basically a lost cause. At the very same time Olena Duts-Faifer was squandering opportunities for Lemko-Rusyn ed468

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ucational and scholarly institutions in Poland. Conclusion? Put all our efforts into supporting Carpatho-Rusyn activity in Slovakia and in the United States, both places where we could be assured that our investment of time and money would produce concrete results.

Not the least of the Timo Foundation’s good works were three documentary films produced by John Righetti and Maria Silvestri. The first two dealt with tragedies: the internment of thousands of Lemko-Rusyns during World War I; and the deportation, known as the Vistula Operation of 1947, which effectively eliminated the Lemko-Rusyn population from its Carpathian homeland. Both films quite effectively depicted the sufferings imposed by unfriendly governments (imperial Austria and Communist Poland) on Lemko Rusyns. Another tear-jerker, but in a positive sense, was the Righetti-Silvestri documentary, The Resurrection of a Nation (2018), which through a series of interviews with individuals in Europe and North America, told the story of the third Carpatho-Rusyn national revival that began in the wake of the Revolutions of 1989.

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It was also during the second decade of the twenty-first century that I was forced to restructure the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center. Pat Krafcik stayed on as secretary, but Elaine Rusinko resigned as vice-president.

I hoped to restructure the C-RRC Board of Directors by appointing Maria Silvestri and Nick Kupensky. Very important was to assure the continuation of the organization (founded over four decades ago in 1978) should I be run over by a bus, so to speak. Nick Kupensky accepted with enthusiasm. Maria declined. I was very surprised—and hurt—by her decision. And so, alongside Pat Krafcik (secretary) and me (president and treasurer), the third board member was Nick Kupensky who became vice-president.

Nick Kupensky was an outstanding example of our success in attracting a younger, second post-1989 generation of activists into the Carpatho-Rusyn movement. I first met him sometime in late 2010 following an Orthodox liturgy in a church that the C-RRC legal advisor Orestes Mihaly brought me to in Connecticut. At the time Nick was a Ph.D. graduate student in Slavic Studies at Yale University. Although our initial meeting was brief (at most ten minutes), it was enough time for the precocious student to tell the professor that he was familiar with my views but that he was—and would remain—a Carpatho-Russian; in other words, a Russophile and certainly not a Carpatho-Rusyn. I took this to mean that there was no need for us to communicate further.

Yale was a respectable Ivy League university, however, and that encouraged me to believe that its graduates would, at the very least, be rational and open-minded. I left the encounter with words to the effect that Nick might consider attending the recently established Studium Carpatho-Ru470

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284. Nick Kupensky consulting with Paul Robert Magocsi on a cold late autumn windy wintry street in rural Québec, Canada (October 2019).

thenorum International Summer School at Prešov University. He seemed intrigued but, as a struggling graduate student, he suggested that the cost of attending would be well beyond his meager economic means.

I heard nothing more about this matter. What I do know, however, was that during the second year of the Studium in 2011, Nick Kupensky was sitting in my class in Carpatho-Rusyn history. He clearly was smitten by the Studium experience, because by the second week our died-inthe-wool Russophile and self-described Carpatho-Russian had become a Carpatho-Rusyn patriot. But at what cost? I later learned that Nick, whose pride as an adult was severely challenged, asked and received from his mother money for airfare to Europe. Under no circumstances, however, would he ask for anything else. He, therefore, did not pay for the meal program, and virtually ate nothing for three weeks, managing to survive on coffee and cigarettes. Shades of the starving nineteenth-century European student willing to sacrifice everything for the one true value in life—knowledge.

After the Studium experience, Nick’s acquired knowledge inspired by patriotism has taken concrete form in a most productive manner: incorporating Carpatho-Rusyn themes in his teaching (first at Bucknell 471

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285. Carpatho-Rusyn Consortium petition for recognition of Carpatho-Rusyns in Ukraine as a distinct nationality (29 October 2014).

University and subsequently at the United States Air Force Academy); carrying out a research project on the Rusyn-American writer Emil Kubek; organizing several highly successful Carpatho-Rusyn panels at the annual conventions of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES); and recruiting undergraduate students to 472

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attend the Studium Carpatho-Ruthenorum. I am overjoyed in knowing that the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center will be in the good hands of its vice-president and likely future president, Professor Nick Kupensky.

Despite Maria Silvestri’s refusal to become member of the C-RRC board of directors, she proceeded to do more than any board member, past or present. In short, she saved the organization’s very existence. For example, we were having some bureaucratic problems with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, which called into question our non-profit status.

Based on her experience with the Timo Foundation, Maria proposed to hire and pay for a lawyer (“our own” Jim Kaminski) to look into the matter. Kaminski did just that. The problem, which turned out to be nothing more than a classic bureaucratic glitch on the part of the IRS, was successfully put to rest.

An even more crucial problem for the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center was its book-selling activity. Between 2014 and 2016, the C-RRC’s sales had been reduced by almost half. Why? While we continued to publish and advertise books, they were being bought from the giant distributor Amazon instead of from the C-RRC. Maria, always on top of modern technology, argued that our center had to modernize. She worked closely with her friend Nick Kupensky, our new vice-president, to address this problem. My position was to let the younger generation deal with the matter. And they did.

Nick designed all of our advertising flyers to give them a fresher look—a vast improvement over my staid and uninspired designs. Maria, meanwhile, proposed that the C-RRC join the “enemy” by becoming part of what she said was Amazon Market Place. Together with the C-RRC’s highly competent and enthusiastic business manager George Bedrin (albeit not of the younger generation), we began to advertise and sell books via Amazon. At the same time George organized an order payment process via credit card. Hence, one could learn about and purchase C-RRC publications in three different ways: via our traditional paper-flyer mailings (four times a year), via a listing on Amazon Market Place, or via credit card through E-Bay or the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center website created and operated by Maria Silvestri. Actually, as a non-computer user, I have never seen the website of the organization 473

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of which I am president. Who cares? The younger generation has taken over. And it works! I am overjoyed!!

It was also thanks to Maria and the Timo Foundation that the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center was able to publish new or revised versions of publications destined for a wide audience. These included fully revised and updated versions of the Carpatho-Rusyns brochure (2020); the illustrated history, The People from Nowhere (2018); the ever popular saga of Carpatho-Rusyn Americans, Our People (2023); and a new prestigious full-color publication, Carpathian Rus’: An Historical Atlas (2017). Maria also made possible the dissemination of texts (prepared mostly by me), issued in the form of petitions signed by hundreds of scholars and civic activists worldwide, that were directed at the government of Ukraine for its refusal to recognize Carpatho-Rusyns as a distinct nationality and to not allow elementary and university-level educational programs.

The Timo Foundation began to play an active role in supporting panels supported by the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center at the annual conventions of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. The foundation provided travel grants for participants from Ukraine and Poland as well as financial assistance to assure a “proper” family dinner. While Maria guaranteed sufficient funding, Nick Kupensky assured that the evening festivities were held in the most elegant settings, usually the most reputable restaurants in Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and San Francisco, among others.

To be sure, the family dinners were not settings only for food and drink, although we had enough of that as well. They were always planned as occasions at which Carpatho-Rusynists could commune with other scholars of non-Rusyn background. Professors Thomas Bird, Robert Rothstein, and Wayles Browne were frequently present, not to mention other select guests who were given the opportunity to meet personally with us and to realize that Carpatho-Rusyns are a serious—and broadly cultured—people. In the otherwise generally bland and uninspired American academic world, it was not hard to create a sophisticated environment, especially if one could depend on cooperation from the likes of Nick Kupensky and Maria Silvestri.

Our antagonists (usually but not only Ukrainophiles and Ukrainians) 474

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286. After the Family Dinner: (seated) Elena Boudovskaia; (first row from left) Galina Rothstein, Sarah Latanyshyn, Kristina Cantin, Patricia Krafcik, Joseph Nakpil, Robert Rothstein (second and third row from left) Natalia Feduschak, Georgii Artiushenko, Aga Pasieka, Agnieszka Halemba, Václav Zheng, Tinka Magocsi, Paul Robert Magocsi, Maria Silvestri, Nick Kupensky, and Edward Kasinec, Palmer House American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies 49th Convention, Chicago, USA (November 2017).

would often refer with sarcasm, perhaps unconscious envy, to the success of the “Rusyn Mafia.” I took such an epithet as a compliment and decided to play on that theme. And so, we had several capos (Nick, Maria, Pat, et. al.), a capo di tutti (me), and an annual “family dinner” to seal the close relationship among family members who were dedicated to our ancestral Carpatho-Rusyn heritage and its future. Of that we were most proud.

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Aside from its role in having Carpatho-Rusyn Studies recognized as a distinct academic discipline, one of the most important activities of the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center was its support of the Studium Carpatho-Ruthenorum International Summer School at Prešov University.

As already noted, the first few years of the Studium’s operation attracted mostly upper-middle-aged and senior citizen Americans who wanted to learn something about their ancestral Carpatho-Rusyn heritage.

True, they took seriously the courses in language and history that we offered, and many returned back to the United States with a renewed sense of purpose to participate in community organizations, such as the Carpatho-Rusyn Society and the Rusin Association of Minnesota. But I wanted to see more university students in the summer program whether from North America or Europe and most especially from Ukraine.

Young people do not have money, however. This was especially challenging for North Americans who had to pay for an international flight as well as for tuition, room, and board, which altogether amounted to about $3,000 (US). To be sure, this was an incredibly reasonable price for a three-week program that included all meals and excursions. Nonetheless, each North American participant had to come up with $3,000 (US).

Meanwhile, students from Europe had only to pay for tuition, room, and board (about $1,500 US), since for them travel costs to Prešov were relatively minimal. Yet even graduate students from places like Germany and the Czech Republic were not always guaranteed scholarships from their home institutions to attend the Studium.

My dream was to have a program with 15 to 20 students each year, at least half of whom would receive a full scholarship in order to attend 476

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287. Paul Best and Paul Robert Magocsi at the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center booth, American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies 34th Convention, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (November 2002).

free. When it became clear that the Studium (an experiment when it began in 2010) would continue, I launched a campaign to solicit donations for scholarships.

I wrote letters to several seemingly influential Americans of Carpatho-Rusyn heritage, albeit with little success. I systematically compiled the addresses of every Studium alumnus to whom I wrote each year requesting a tax-free donation to the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center’s Studium Fellowship Fund. We did begin to receive from alumni at best a total of $400 to $600 each year, which was not even enough for a half-scholarship. Quite exceptionally, one Studium alumnus, Albert DiNuncio, did create an annual fellowship ($1,600) in the name of his grandfather. A few others said they planned to do the same, but never did. The Jewish philanthropist from New York City, Alex Rovt was the only other individual I found to donate an annual scholarship.

As for the several community organizations I contacted, only the Pittsburgh-based Carpatho-Rusyn Society, thanks to their president Maryann Sivak, arranged for an annual scholarship. The Rusin Association in Minnesota sporadically donated a few hundred dollars, and when they were 477

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no longer able to come up with that modest sum, their loyal and patriotic president Karen Varian (a Studium alumnus) sent her personal funds. The Lemko Association never contributed anything, which was not surprising since its long-time president Paul Best was known for his stingy nature. Although Paul himself was a Studium alumnus, that did not deter him from publishing in the association’s magazine Karpatska Rus an account of his experience (criticizing mostly the “difficulties” of traveling to “provincial Prešov”) and incorrectly claiming that no scholarships were available for students to attend. Paul Best was simply being Paul Best—at best cantankerous, at worse unpleasant and often factually wrong.

Then Maria Silvestri and the Timo Foundation entered the picture. Maria, too, was a Studium alumnus and someone who understood the value of the program. Beginning in 2016 (the year Maria attended the Studium to check it out) and for each year afterward, the Timo Foundation provided, with no strings attached, $6,000 to $7,000 in grant money which, at $1,600 each, allowed for five full scholarships. Those funds, together with the others that I raised from individuals and organizations, made it possible to cover the costs of up to ten student participants each year.

There were certain criteria and goals we hoped to achieve. Scholarships were primarily available to students and teachers. Moreover, at least two of them each year had to be from Ukraine. Although most of the “Ukrainians” who attended came from Transcarpathia (mostly of Carpatho-Rusyn heritage), there were as well several from other parts of Ukraine. They included journalists, schoolteachers (including those who taught in Transcarpathia’s School Program), and students who were setting out on a path toward an academic career, such as Tomash Kalynych who went on to study at Charles University in Prague, Pavel Khudysh who became an instructor in history at Uzhhorod National University, and Karina Muliar who stayed at Prešov University to complete a master’s degree in Carpatho-Rusyn literature.

Then there were already existing university instructors, academic researchers, doctoral students, and cultural activists of Carpatho-Rusyn and other backgrounds who honed their skills and knowledge at the Studium.

A Czech graduate student (Michal Vasiček) was hired by the Czech Academy of Sciences Slavonic Institute in Prague to prepare for publication 478

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the Rusyn-language dictionary compiled by the interwar scholar Ivan Pankevych. A German graduate student of Tunisian background (Moulay Zaidan Lahjouji) was hired to work on a Rusyn dialect research project at the University of Freiburg. A museum administrator (Kostadin Kostadinov) from Varna on the Black Sea coast published the first general book in Bulgarian about Carpatho-Rusyns.

Graduate students from Argentina (Nancy Edith Rutyna) and the United States (Christina Cantin) decided to base their doctoral dissertations in 288. Karina Muliar (left) with Timo Foundation directors Cathy Silvestri and the field of anthropology as a result of Maria Silvestri, Ruska Bursa, Gorlice, research opportunities that opened to Poland (September 2021). them while at the Studium. Two other graduate students in literary studies from Poland (Marta Watral) and the United States (Nick Kupensky) were inspired by their Studium experience to undertake research and teach topics in modern Rusyn literature as part of their university teaching. Several other undergraduate students from the United States, China, and Canada, whether or not they were of Carpatho-Rusyn background, became aware of the distinctiveness and richness of this small Slavic people living in the Carpathians.

What an achievement! During its first decade, the Studium Carpatho-Ruthenorum turned out over 200 graduates, who, in effect, became Carpatho-Rusyn cultural ambassadors (Kulturträger) throughout the world and for generations to come. Maria and her mother Cathy of the Timo Foundation fully realized what we had achieved. To celebrate and rejoice we organized in June 2019 a three-day “alumni” reunion for current (and some past) students, teaching and administrative staff, and university and community supporters. Those festivities were rich and varied, ranging from a visit to the Regional Archives and the premiere of the documentary film, Resurrection of a Nation, held in the Aleksander 479

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Dukhnovych Theater, to a wine tasting in a cellar deep under Prešov’s historic town hall. The culmination was an elegant reception and dinner at a restored nineteenth-century manor house in the countryside west of Prešov. To my mind, however, the most charming and symbolically significant event was the homage we paid to “our Carpatho-Rusyn queen,” Elizabeth.

About a year earlier, my close friend and renowned Soviet Jewish dissident from Ukraine, Joseph Zissels, and I had placed flowers at 289. The youngest ever participant at the Studium Carpatho-Ruthenorum, the foot of the statue of Emperor 15-year-old Bethany Sromosky, with Franz Joseph in Chernivtsi, the adher father Adam Sromosky (on the ministrative center of the historic left) and her aunt Mary Ann O’Brian Habsburg Austrian province of Buand Slavko Hyriak (to the right), Péchy Manor house, Hermanovce, Slovakia kovina. That experience gave me an (June 2019). idea. In the park that graces the center of Prešov there is a pediment with a bust of a beautiful woman with only one word engraved below—Sisi. As we stood before the statue, I tested all the participants at the Studium celebration as to whose image graced the pediment. Only one person knew the answer, which came from the remarkable fifteen-year-old Bethany Sromoski, the youngest and among the brightest students ever to attend the Studium. The statue, she said confidently, was of Elizabeth—Queen of Hungary, Empress of Austria, and wife of “our” Emperor Franz Joseph (reigned 1848-1916).

The point of this symbolic exercise was to reinforce among our Carpatho-Rusyns that the pre-World War I Austro-Hungarian Empire was not as bad as Czechoslovak (Communist and non-Communist) and Soviet writers had told their citizens in the decades after 1945. Rather, the Habsburg rulers of old Austria-Hungary were benevolent toward many of their realm’s nationalities, including Carpatho-Rusyns. Can I be ac480

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290. Joseph Zissels (left) and Paul Robert Magocsi (right) at the memorial statue to Habsburg Emperor Franz Joseph, Chernivtsi, Ukraine (September 2017).

cused of sugar-coated nostalgia? Perhaps, yes. But then the Habsburg era, a time when all Carpatho-Rusyn inhabited lands were within one empire, was certainly better, much better, than the dastardly twentieth century that followed Austria-Hungary’s demise in 1918.

Maria Silvestri, who particularly appreciated the context of our gesture of homage, took measurements of the statue and arranged to have fashioned a beautiful flower laurel, which on the day of the ceremony we placed on Sisi’s head. Then I handed out copies of the words to the Habsburg “national” hymn and led in the singing to Franz Joseph Haydn’s melody, “Gott erschütze, Gott erhalte/Unser gute Kaiser Franz.”

Who, but Carpatho-Rusyns, would sing the Habsburg hymn in the center of Prešov where it was not heard—if it ever was—for over a century?

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291. Studium Carpatho-Ruthenorum Tenth Anniversary students, teachers, and alumni guests before the bust of Habsburg Empress Elizabeth (Sisi) of Austria and Queen of Hungary, Prešov, Slovakia (June 2019).

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The new millennium witnessed the appearance of what may be called the second generation of post-1989 Carpatho-Rusyn activists not only in the United States, but more importantly—and in larger numbers—in Europe. This was especially the case in Slovakia and Poland. In Slovakia, aside from young university graduates working at the Prešov-based Institute of Rusyn Language and Culture and at the Museum of Rusyn Culture, as well as Petro Medvid, the editor-in-chief of the bi-weekly Info Rusyn, there are several Carpatho-Rusyn activists whose careers have brought them to Slovakia’s capital Bratislava, in particular Milan Pilip, Petro Shtefaniak, and Petro Krainiak Jr. Sometime in 2010, I had heard about Petro Medvid, described to me as a talented recent graduate of the Greek Catholic Seminary affiliated with Prešov University. This was not surprising since the traditional hold of religion on Carpatho-Rusyns remained strong among many post1989 second generation activists.

Although a secular activist, Petro Medvid looked like an ascetic monk, small built and very thin (almost emaciated), with long hair tied back in a ponytail. I came across Medvid at the time when the assertive chairman of the Rusyn Renaissance Society, Milan Mniahonchak, was discussing with me his desire to find a new editor-in-chief of the organization’s newspaper, Info Rusyn. To assist in that process, I invited Medvid to lunch for the proverbial sit-down, something I had done with numerous individuals before they were “let into” The Movement. Somewhat ironically, twenty years earlier, Vasyl Turok and I had had a sit-down with Sasha Zozuliak before he was named editor of Narodnŷ novynkŷ. Now I was sounding out Petro Medvid, who I recommended to Mniahonchak to be made editor-in-chief of Info 483

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Rusyn, which we both knew would be on his terms. Those terms were: that Medvid would continue to speak honestly and critically (even of Mniahonchak) if circumstances warranted.

The choice was brilliant. Within weeks after taking the helm of Info Rusyn in 2014, Medvid created a high-level Rusyn-language weekly that informed its readers about international and national news as well as about developments in the Carpatho-Rusyn world not only in Slovakia but in all other countries as well.

292. Petro Medvid (2023) Medvid’s weekly editorials revealed an insightful and provocative mind that forced one to reflect on current problems facing Carpatho-Rusyns. He was particularly critical of both Slovakia’s Ukrainian-oriented Rusyns and the government of Ukraine for their negative attitude toward the Carpatho-Rusyn movement. Aside from being a talented thinker, Medvid was a man of principle—precisely what the Carpatho-Rusyn movement needed.

As a representative of the new, second generation of post-1989 activists, Medvid did not mince words in his criticism of the World Congress of Rusyns, then under the chairmanship of Diura Papuga from Serbia and surrounded by old-guard members of the World Council who were routinely re-elected year after year. I certainly got the sense that Medvid and his younger colleagues were somewhat upset with me for resigning from the chairmanship and distancing myself from the World Congress, other than allowing my name to be used as honorary chairman. In the end, Medvid’s calls to change the direction of the World Congress were unsuccessful, in part because of his lack of diplomacy and tact in dealing with the old guard for whom he had only the harshest criticism.

Like me and many others, Medvid considered the World Congress to be superfluous. Since changes at the Congress seemed unlikely, he worked instead to transform the Carpatho-Rusyn movement where 484

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293. First issue of the newly merged Rusyn-language newspaper in Slovakia, Narodnŷ novynky/Info Rusyn, No. 1-2 (Prešov, 2017).

he could, that is, in Slovakia. Aside from being editor-in-chief of Info Rusyn, he became the spokesperson for the Rusyn Renaissance Society and member of the Slovak government’s various advisory boards for the 485

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294. Petro Medvid and Petro Shtefaniak, Molodŷ Rusynŷ Ensemble première, Bratislava, Slovakia (June 2022).

country’s national minorities. Among those boards on which he sat was one in which funds were allotted for cultural activity.

Fortunately—and wisely—Medvid realized that his predecessor Sasha Zozuliak deserved to be supported and therefore helped to ensure that his press organs, Narodnŷ novynkŷ and Rusyn, were adequately funded by the Slovak government. I was particularly pleased when Medvid and Zozuliak, both close friends and colleagues of mine, brokered an agreement that formally—and amicably—separated Rusyn and Narodnŷ novynkŷ from their original “owner,” the Rusyn Renaissance Society. In January 2017, as the Rusyn Renaissance Society embarked on the second quarter century of its existence, Narodnŷ novynkŷ was merged with Info Rusyn, something that would never have happened if Petro Medvid had not been involved.

Meanwhile in Bratislava, recent university graduates of Carpatho-Rusyn background created new organizations. Petro Shtefaniak founded a youth group, Molodŷ Rusynŷ, which operated a vibrant folk ensemble and an internet radio station, Radio Rusyn FM, which from its outset in 2016 had cooperated closely with Lem FM, a similar station set up earlier by Lemkos in Poland. Also in the Bratislava group was Milan Pilip, an employee of the Ministry of Defense, who eventually was appointed as the Carpatho-Rusyn 486

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representative on various government advisory boards.

I remember a colleague of mine, Professor Wolf Moskovich from Hebrew University in Jerusalem, telling me about his visit sometime in 2012 or 2013 as part of an Israeli government delegation to Slovakia. One of the topics the Israeli guests were introduced to was Slovakia’s policy toward its national minorities. Professor Moskovich, a specialist in Slavic Studies originally from Soviet Ukraine, related how he and his colleagues were especially impressed by young Carpatho-Rusyns who were clearly

295. Veteran journalists Anna Kuzmiakova (fifth from left) and Teodosiia Lattova (second from right) join the youthful staff of Radio Rusyn FM: (from the left) Nikola Shkvarova, Diana Shutiova, Tania Kapitanova, Zdenka Tsitriakova, Anna Kuzmiakova, Marianna Zhelezna, Teodosiia Lattova, and Liudmyla Vozarova, Molodŷ Rusynŷ headquarters, Bratislava, Slovakia (2016).

not Ukrainians and who showed themselves to be active and successful promoters of their culture. Unsolicited reports like those (in this case via Israelis) were music to my ears.

***** Aware of their ability to influence Slovakia’s governmental structures, second-generation Carpatho-Rusyn activists decided to coordinate their lobbying efforts. In 2013, a so-called Round Table (Okruhlyi stil) came into being. This was something unique for Carpatho-Rusyns in Europe.

Namely, an informal body of interested individuals who would meet periodically to discuss problems facing Carpatho-Rusyns, in this case the community in Slovakia.

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296. Aleksander Duleba (center) with Paul Robert Magocsi (left) and Stanislav Koněcný (right), Dukhnovych Theater, Prešov (February 2000).

The Round Table had no mandate to act from anyone other than those who were present at its meetings. The driving force behind the group were the second-generation activists Petro Medvid and Milan Pilip, and the somewhat older Yan Lypynskyi. The Round Table participants chose a chairman, or coordinator, whose tenure was limited to one year. The first coordinator was indeed an excellent choice, the rather well-known (at least in Slovakia) public intellectual and foreign affairs expert Aleksander Duleba.

I thought the Round Table was a brilliant idea. Even though it had no authority to act, the discussions and decisions it adopted regarding matters like the census, language policy, and national minority laws were passed on to the Slovak government by its members, some of whom themselves were advisors and government functionaries.

The Round Table was, in fact, the ultimate mark of success of the new generation of Carpatho-Rusyn civic and cultural activists. Unlike their post-1989 first-generation predecessors, they were not criticizing and making demands from outside the system. They became part of the system and, therefore, were able to push the Carpatho-Rusyn agenda from within.

A good example of this phenomenon was Petro Krainiak Jr., the son of a Greek Catholic lawyer activist in Prešov (Petro Krainiak) and nephew of 488

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297. Petro Krainiak Jr. during his university student years with Paul Robert Magocsi, Prešov, Slovakia (February 2007).

the Greek Catholic priest and early codifier of the Rusyn language, Father Frantishek Krainiak. The young Petro had really wanted to be a priest, but after being asked to leave the Greek Catholic Seminary by the pro-Slovak Bishop Babjak (with whom he clashed over the slovakization policies of the church), Petro Jr. finished the Pedagogical Faculty at Prešov University and became qualified to work as an elementary school teacher.

As a defender of his Carpatho-Rusyn people, Petro Jr. was sympathetic to the plight of national minorities. According to the traditional and stereotypical pecking order in Slovakia, the shaleni Rusnakŷ (crazy Rusyns) had always been on the bottom except for one group below them, the Gypsies—as they were traditionally known until the government officially accepted their self-designation, Roma. While still an undergraduate student, Petro Jr. joined the renowned caricaturist Fedor Vitso to form a Carpatho-Rusyn youth soccer team. I believe they asked me, and that I did secure money from the Chepa Fund to purchase uniforms for the team that bore the name Carpatia and sported the Carpatho-Rusyn bear emblem on the sleeve of each player’s jersey.

The original purpose of the football club was to inspire, through sport, a sense of national awareness and pride among youngsters whose parents 489

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or grandparents were Carpatho-Rusyns but who themselves were born in Prešov and therefore acculturated in a totally Slovak environment.

The problem was that not enough “Carpatho-Rusyn” kids had joined the team, so that most of the players were Roma. This did not phase the liberal-minded Vitso and Krainiak. Moreover, many Roma spoke Rusyn (especially in the villages), and a good number identified themselves of Rusyn nationality and Rusyn mother tongue in each of post-Communist Slovakia’s decennial censuses since 1991.

During the more than half century that I spent time each year in Slovakia, I had more than one opportunity to observe Carpatho-Rusyn patriotism among the Roma. One such incident remained embedded in my memory.

Sometime in the summer of 2008, my oldest daughter, Cindy, who at the time was working for the International Herald Tribune in Paris, wanted to introduce her boyfriend (and future husband), Eamon O’Dea, to her mother’s family in Slovakia. They flew to Cracow, where I picked them up and drove by car to Slovakia, where my wife was waiting for us at her sister’s house in Lemešany, a village just south of Prešov. After crossing the Polish border into Slovakia, we stopped for luncheon in Svidník.

There, in a restaurant near the main square, I proceeded to explain to Cindy’s beau, Eamon (born in Manchester of English-Irish descent), the complicated ethnic situation in northeastern Slovakia. Aside from Carpatho-Rusyns there were many Roma, whose percentage of the local inhabitants was the highest of anywhere in Slovakia and, for that matter, anywhere in central and eastern Europe.

As fate would have it, the server who came to take our order was a young slender female with dark skin, long black hair, and large charcoal eyes. There she was, the quintessential Roma with a pleasant smile and cheerful disposition. Eamon had encountered Gypsies (often from Romania) on the streets of Paris; now he saw one in her native milieu.

As a pedagogical exercise, which I often carry out in public settings, I feigned ignorance when our server returned to the table. “Are you from here?” I asked. “Yes,” she replied. “This is our first time in Slovakia,” I said, before continuing with a battery of questions: “Who are the people who live around here? Some told us they are called Rusyns.” “Have you 490

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heard of such a people?” “Are they some kind of Slovaks?” “Do they have their own language, or do they only speak some dialect of Slovak?” “Do you understand it?” She replied rather adamantly: “Of course, Rusyns are a people. And I speak Rusyn. It’s the language we speak at home.”

Our server clearly felt the need to defend “her” language and “her” people from what seemed to be an insult (she was oblivious to the irony) coming from the English-speaking tourists she was serving. I was surprised by her reaction and happy to witness (or have provoked) in the presence of my future son-in-law the existence of Carpatho-Rusyns thanks to this charming and proud, Rusyn/Roma person.

Petro Krainiak Jr. carried his liberal commitment several steps further.

His first job as a teacher was in an elementary school in the village of Svinia, just west of Prešov, where no less than ninety percent of the pupils were Roma. I witnessed this fascinating environment when attending an end-of-the-school-year concert put on by the pupils for their parents and the village public.

Petro’s next step was to fall in love and marry a young woman of Roma background from central Slovakia. In a traditional society like that of Carpatho-Rusyns (and for that matter of Slovaks, too), his was a revolutionary act. I remember hearing this “shocking news” from both his

298. Paul Robert Magocsi with Petro Krainiak, Jr.’s elementary level Roma/Gypsy students, Svinia, Slovakia (June 2010).

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299. The teacher Petro Krainiak Jr. (far right) with a Roma “student guide” assigned to Petro Krainiak Sr. and Paul Robert Magocsi at the village church, Svinia, Slovakia (June 2020).

father, the lawyer Petro Sr., and his uncle, Father Frantishek. They both were clearly struggling to reconcile their Christian moral principles with deeply embedded cross generational social prejudices. I believe one of the two Krainiak brothers even admitted they could never accept the Gypsy/Roma wife as a full member of their family. In the end, Petro Jr. and his wife had their first child, making Petro Sr. a very happy grandfather, nonetheless.

While Petro Krainiak Jr. was still teaching elementary school he got involved in politics both at the level of the Prešov city council and the Prešov regional council to which he was elected. As a result of his electoral successes and national minority background and sympathies, he was approached by Slovakia’s new political party called Most-Hid, comprised primarily of the country’s ethnic Magyars. The Slovak-Hungarian name of the party meant bridge, in the sense of linking the Hungarian (and other) minorities with Slovak society. Considering his own experience as a Carpatho-Rusyn with pronounced Roma sympathies, Petro Krainiak Jr. was an ideal catch for Most-Hid, which wanted to increase its influence in Eastern Slovakia. Aside from all his other qualifications, Petro was young (only in his late twenties) and handsome, very hand492

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some. He was a towering six-foot-four, athletically toned, dark-haired Adonis, who reminded one of the race-car driver who was Mary Granthom’s last beau in the enormously popular TV series, Downton Abbey.

The Carpatho-Rusyn patriot Krainiak’s joining with Slovakia’s ethnic Magyars/Hungarians was another one of his revolutionary acts that raised numerous eyebrows. After all, the deeply rooted stereotype was that the Hungarians/Magyars were always the enemy of Carpatho-Rusyns. This was certainly the view of our people living in Slovakia, if not necessarily that of our people in Transcarpathia/Subcarpathian Rus’.

More important than distorted or false stereotypes was a practical consideration: in post-1989 Slovakia, Hungarian political parties were never strong enough to win a majority of deputies in parliament, but unlike other parties they always garnered 10 to 12 percent of the vote in each election. Hence, they always were represented in parliament and at times were crucial to forming a coalition government. The Slovak government frequently included Hungarian ministers and even vice-prime ministers. Whereas some activists (Aleksander Duleba, Liuba Kraliova) tried but failed to create any lasting Carpatho-Rusyn political party in Slovakia, Petro Krainiak Jr. joined the “Hungarian” party Most-Hid and rose quickly through its ranks.

Krainiak was never high enough on the party list of Most-Hid candidates to be given a seat in parliament, but in 2016 something better happened. As a result of inconclusive elections that year, the Hungarians gained access and appointments in the new coalition government. As a result of Most-Hid’s status, Petro Krainiak Jr. was appointed a state secretary in the Ministry of Education. Unlike parliamentary deputies, who at best could give fiery speeches critical of government policy, Krainiak was part of a bureaucracy that could formulate—and implement—change.

Thanks to his initiative, several new policies were adopted that enhanced the possibilities for teaching Rusyn in elementary schools not only as a subject but as a language of instruction.

Politics, of course, are politics, and politicians come and go. In 2019, Slovakia’s coalition government was voted out of office at the same time that the Hungarian parties had their worst electoral results ever. As a result, Krainiak was out of a job. Although as a national level government 493

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300. Slovakia’s Minister of Education and Science, Peter Plavčán, with his state secretaries Petro Krainiak Jr. (left) and Erik Tomáš (right).

appointee he may be gone momentarily, he remains a regionally elected deputy whose political career is far from over.

Ironically, the same elections that ousted the coalition government and undermined Krainiak brought to power for the first time in Slovakia’s history a female president, Zuzana Čaputová. She not only expressed sympathy and support for the country’s minorities, but also appointed a presidential advisory board to deal specifically with that aspect of Slovak society.

As advisory board members representing Carpatho-Rusyns, the president appointed Anna Plishkova, director of the Rusyn Institute at Prešov University, and Petro Medvid, the influential Carpatho-Rusyn civic activist.

Throughout her term in office President Čaputová repeatedly invited Carpatho-Rusyn activists to Slovakia’s highest governmental ceremonies.

About the same time as Plishkova and Medvid were appointed presidential advisors, another Carpatho-Rusyn cultural activist, Milan Pilip, was appointed, of all things, director of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Institute for Slovaks Abroad. Irony of ironies: an influential and self-professed Carpatho-Rusyn civic activist became responsible for relations with ethnic Slovaks living outside Slovakia.

To be sure there were individuals of partial Rusyn background who at various times held high positions in Slovak political life. Former Prime 494

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298. Martin Karash, Milan Pilip, Ladislav Dovhun, Petro Medvid, and Petro Shtefaniak as the Rusyn delegation invited by Zuzana Čaputová to the presidential palace, Bratislava, Slovakia (January 2023).

Minister Mikuláš Dzurinda and Minister of Foreign Affairs Ivan Laichak immediately come to mind. These and other figures, after being pressed by journalists, at best may have admitted that they had Carpatho-Rusyn forebears, but most likely chose to hide the fact. The new twenty-first century post-1989 second generation of civic activists—the likes of Petro Krainiak Jr., Petro Shtefaniak, Petro Medvid, Milan Pilip, and Martin Karash—were not only proud of their Carpatho-Rusyn identity but committed to advancing the interests of their people through the offices that they held in civic, educational, governmental, and other state institutions of Slovakia.

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The Carpatho-Rusyn/Lemko community in Poland was also blessed with a remarkable cohort of post-1989 second generation activists in the persons of Bogdan Gambal, Demko Trokhanovskii, Andrei Trokhanovskii, Pavel Maletskii, and his sister Nataliia Maletska-Novak. In contrast to the first post-1989 generation founders of the Stovaryshŷnia Lemkiv/ Lemko Society who were mostly based “abroad” in western Poland, the second-generation activists have made their base the Ruska Bursa, an organization in the town of Gorlice on the northern edge of the Lemko Region in southeastern Poland. The Ruska Bursa, which traces its origins to the decade before World War I, had already by then its own building

302. Andrzej Zięba (far right) initiates the first visit of Paul Robert Magocsi to the Ruska Bursa building, Gorlice, Poland, to meet with Lemko-Rusyn activists Miroslava Khomiak and unidentified (ca. 1988).

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303. Mayor of Gorlice Mirosław Wendrychowicz (left) congratulating Bogdan Gambal (second from right), Pavel Maletskii, and Olena Duts-Faifer upon the formal transfer of the cultural and civic center to the Ruska Bursa, Gorlice, Poland (2009).

which over the course of the twentieth century was forcibly closed, reopened, and again closed by a succession of Habsburg Austrian, interwar Polish, and post-World War II Communist Polish authorities. Finally, in 2009, after a long court battle with the post-Communist Poland’s city fathers in Gorlice, as well as with a pro-Ukrainian rival Lemko organization that claimed ownership, the Lemko Rusyns led by Bogdan Gambal acquired legal ownership of the building. The registration papers made it clear that the Ruska Bursa was an organization whose goal was to promote cultural activity on behalf of Lemko-Rusyns, a distinct nationality.

For these second-generation Lemko-Rusyn activists, obtaining the Ruska Bursa building was only the beginning. Its premises were to become home to a library, museum, rehearsal space for amateur folk ensembles, and, in 2011, a studio for the Lem-FM radio station that, remarkably, now broadcasts 24 hours, 7 days a week. The station, which works closely with the Bratislava-based Rusyn radio station in Slovakia, has contributing journalists from other parts of Poland (Demko Trokhanovskii in Warsaw, the Jagiellonian University Ph.D. candidate Anna 497

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304. Lem-FM staff from Poland, Slovakia, and Ukraine: (left to right) Olena Duts, Monika Tyliavska, Olia Pelekach, Marian Kadanka, unidentified, Jakub Zygmund, Anna Mashlana, Severian Kosovskii, Petro Medvid, Pavel Maletskii, Nataliia MaletskaNovak, Ruska Bursa, Gorlice, Poland (2020).

Mashlana in Cracow), Slovakia (Petro Medvid in Prešov), and Ukraine (the recent Prešov University graduate, Karina Muliar).

Finally, the organization sponsors the only truly international scholarly journal devoted to Carpatho-Rusyns studies, the Richnyk Ruskoï Bursy, edited by the Jagiellonian University professor, Olena Duts-Faifer, with articles in Rusyn, English, and other Slavic languages. Since 2020 under

305. Ruska Bursa building, Gorlice, Poland (2020).

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the leadership of Nataliia Maletska-Novak, the Ruska Bursa has become a true magnet operated exclusively by a second generation of post-1989 revivalists committed to promoting cultural activity not only in Poland but also in immediately neighboring countries that include with their state borders parts of the European Carpatho-Rusyn homeland.

The success of the Ruska Bursa is in large part due to the visionary activist Bogdan Gambal. Not only was he the driving force behind the reacquisition of the Ruska Bursa property and building for Lemko-Rusyns, but he was the founding head of the Lem-FM radio station and strongest supporter of Olena Duts-Faifer’s intention to transform the annual Ruska Bursa Yearbook/Richnyk Ruskoï Bursy into a first-rate scholarly journal.

Together they also proposed to the Polish government the creation of a Lemko Cultural Institute. Not long before his untimely death in 2020, Gambal told me that he wanted the proposed institute’s first project to be a Polish translation of my book, With Their Backs to the Mountains: A History of Carpathian Rus’ and Carpatho-Rusyns. The Lemko Institute has yet to be established. But the Polish translation of my book did appear, dedicated to Bogdan’s memory.

I did not spend as much time with Bogdan Gambal as I would have liked—I believe I first met him as a young student in the late 1980s—but I do remember our last encounter, which took place in somewhat unorthodox circumstances. Sometime in early 2019 I unexpectedly had to be in Europe. The Carpatho-Rusyn activist from Slovakia Petro Medvid and his second-generation colleagues from Poland wanted to meet with me to discuss ways to reform the World Council of Rusyns. They knew I was sympathetic to replacing the old guard leadership with younger people. Bogdan Gambal and Demko Trokhanovskii came from Poland for an evening meal in Prešov together with Medvid and me. Somewhat shockingly, many of Prešov’s restaurants were closed or occupied by guests who had previous reservations. When we finally found a restaurant that would take us in, we were seated at a table decorated with hearts and balloons. Suddenly we realized it was February 14, Valentine’s Day. There we were, four guys seated amidst couples celebrating a night of love, while we were discussing banal matters—Carpatho-Rusyn politics. I guess it is quite appropriate that we all remember Bogdan Gambal with love, platonic or otherwise.

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306. First issue of the Ruska Bursa Yearbook in its international format, Richnyk Ruskoi Bursŷ, Vol. 13 (2017), published by Księgarnia Akademicka, Cracow, Poland.

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The situation among Carpatho-Rusyns in Hungary has also evolved, even if not in as dynamic a manner as in Slovakia or Poland. On the one hand, the numbers of self-described Carpatho-Rusyns on censuses have increased, from 1,100 in 2001 to 3,900 in 2011, and to 7,100 in 2021. The increases are in part due to the Hungarian government’s policy of providing extra funding to national minorities, especially at the village level, where self-declared minority communities, as part of their autonomous status, receive more funding for schools and cultural activities than do neighboring villages inhabited by the “dominant” state nationality—Magyars.

On the other hand, less than 2,000 of Hungary’s declared CarpathoRusyns do not speak the language and only “became Rusyn” in the past few years. This is a classic example of what scholars call situational identity. Put another way, several Hungarians (especially in Greek Catholic-inhabited villages in the northeastern part of the country) have discovered that it pays to be a Rusyn.

Since all this depends on funding from the central government, much of the community’s energy is spent—literally wasted—on internal battles for leadership positions in the various Rusyn minority self-governments operating at the local level and most especially in the national level minority self-government structures.

After the fall from grace of Hungary’s Carpatho-Rusyn founding father Gabor Hattinger in 2005, the Liavynets clan (father Antonii, mother Marianna, son Stefan, daughter Marianna-Uhryn), together with extended family members and Vira Girits, have come to dominate Carpatho-Rusyn community life in Hungary. They eliminated all rivals (especially Hattinger, Yudita Kish, and Tibor Popovych), while at the same 501

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time initiating very important cultural and high-quality publication activity, the latter almost single-handedly by mother Marianna Liavynets.

Aside from several books and annual almanacs, they began a bilingual Rusyn-Hungarian monthly magazine, Rusyns’kyi svit/Ruszin világ (The Rusyn World), all beautifully designed and illustrated in full color by the talented graphic artist, Andrei/András Manailo, grandson of the renowned Carpatho-Rusyn artist, Fedor Manailo. The only other viable force in Hungary was the Department of Ukrainian and Rusyn Philology in Nyíregyhaza, headed by István Udvari.

307. Marianna Liavynets at a lecture about the first prime minister of autonomous Subcarpathian Rus’, Andrei Brodii, Budapest (ca. 2020).

By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the Liavynets family had a falling out with Vira Girits, who in turn managed to dominate the National Minority Autonomous Administration and get herself elected as the Carpatho-Rusyn community’s deputy in the Hungarian parliament. Although not a voting member, the parliamentary position does come with a high degree of prestige and some funds, both of which have transformed “Lady” Girits into a grand and pretentious dame. Her main interest has been to create a fifth codified variant of the Rusyn language, specifically for Hungary.

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308. Stepan Liavynets (right) and Paul Robert Magocsi, Sixteenth World Congress of Rusyns, Krynica, Poland (September 2021).

I never felt comfortable with either Girits or the Liavynets clan, even though it was I who helped their organization become Hungary’s member in the World Congress. Alliances, of course, always change, so that I, as honorary chairman with some remaining influence in the World Congress, in 2017 and again in 2019 engineered the election of son Stepan Liavynets to the chairmanship. The Liavynets family now saw me as a tactical ally and perhaps even friend. This was especially the case for daughter Marianna, who I had defended during a public attack against her by Ukrainophiles at a scholarly conference in Berehovo, the center of the Hungarian minority in Ukraine’s Transcarpathian region. Marianna exhibited significant intellectual potential in her PhD dissertation on nineteenth-century Carpatho-Rusyn literature. This younger scholarly 503

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309. Letter to the president of Hungary on behalf of preserving a Department of Rusyn Philology in Nyíregyháza, Hungary.

colleague was especially valuable in that she enthusiastically obtained for me many new Rusyn-language and Carpatho-Rusyn-related publications in Hungary. My cooperation with and support of the Liavynetses, not surprisingly, prompted Girits to become my enemy.

In-fighting aside, what did all this mean for Hungary’s Carpatho-Rusyn community? Within three years after Professor Udvari’s untimely death 504

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310. Mykhayl Kapral announcing plans to codify a fifth variant of the Rusyn language for Hungary, Fourth International Congress of the Rusyn Language, Prešov University (September 2015).

in 2011, the Ukrainian and Rusyn Philology Department at Nyíregyháza was closed. I wrote the President of Hungary on behalf of the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center, calling on him not to allow the end of university level Carpatho-Rusyn studies. His office responded politely, but nothing was ever done. Vira Girits from her position as parliamentary deputy also did nothing on behalf of a university position in Carpatho-Rusyn studies.

She has, however, pursued her pet project: to codify a fifth Hungarian variant of the Rusyn language. To achieve this, she engaged the longtime colleague of Professor Udvari, Mykhayl Kapral, who found himself out of a job once the Nyíregyháza department was closed. Aside from the fact that Kapral was a relative newcomer to Hungary from Ukraine, he was not the kind of personality who could spearhead a campaign to convince university authorities, let alone Hungary’s Ministry of Education, to save the department or create a new one elsewhere.

Kapral did, however, carry out the task of creating a codified standard, which began to take shape after he took over the editorship of the 505

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monthly magazine Rusyns’kyi svit/Ruszin világ. His efforts culminated in the publication of an orthographic dictionary and a grammatical rule book under his editorship. The fifth “Hungarian” Rusyn variant borrows heavily from the spoken dialects in Transcarpathia (the native language of the Liavynetses and Girits) to which were added some morphological and lexical elements from the two remaining Rusyn-language villages in Hungary, Komlóska and Múcsony. One has to wonder for whom this fifth literary standard of Rusyn is intended, since aside from the one periodical and several Rusyn-language books (mostly about art) that are published in Hungary, the country’s few elementary school classes have less than a dozen pupils.

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My joy and great satisfaction at seeing how the Carpatho-Rusyn movement evolved in Slovakia, Poland, and in part Hungary during the second decade of the twenty-first century was not necessarily matched by developments in other countries.

The oldest officially recognized Carpatho-Rusyn communities, those in modern-day Serbia (the Vojvodina) and Croatia (Srem) are particularly problematic. Despite generous financial support, especially for the Vojvodinian Rusnaks in Serbia, both these communities have steadily been undermined and are literally dying out. Emigration abroad (especially to Canada), which began during Yugoslavia’s civil war in the 1990s, and the flight from traditional Rusnak-inhabited villages (Ruski Kerestur, Kucura, Djurdevo) to urban centers (Novi Sad and Belgrade), coupled with the death of older people have reduced by half the number of Vojvodinian Rusyns from the 22,000 recorded just after World War II in 1948. The last census (2022) recorded only 11,500 Rusnaks in Serbia’s Vojvodina and 1,300 in Croatia.

Ruski Kerestur was once the heart of the Vojvodinian Rusnak world, where at one time no less than 95 percent of the inhabitants of the town were Rusyns. During my last two visits in 2009 and 2023, what I saw were streets where many of the houses were shuttered and empty. The old folks had died, while their children and grandchildren were living in Vojvodina’s capital Novi Sad or as often as not in Canada.

During that time an even more ominous trend has accelerated. The Yugoslav civil war in the mid-1990s drove many Serbs (especially from Bosnia-Hercegovina) from their homes. Serbia’s national government in Belgrade urged the refugees to settle in the traditionally more peaceful Vojvodina. That included Ruski Kerestur, where now nearly half of the 507

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inhabitants are ethnic Serbs. These newcomers have no knowledge—and in some cases no sympathy—for the locals, who from their perspective not only speak a strange non-Serbian language but are of a strange non-Serbian (that is, Greek Catholic) religion.

Ruski Kerestur long boasted that it had the only Rusyn-language combined elementary and high school in the world, an institution that traced its origins back to the 1750s. By the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, however, the school had become internally divided into Serbian-language and Rusyn-language classes. Because the Rusyn classes do not have enough students, they are gradually being phased out. The situation is much the same in Croatia, where there are only two small villages (Petrovci and Bačinci) with a majority Rusyn population.

Worst of all, one does not get the impression that civic and intellectual leaders are taking this situation seriously. Their press organs (Ruske slovo especially) are sometimes filled with articles that sound an alarm, but the cries seem to have no effect. Moreover, I was always struck by the sense of self-imposed isolation among Vojvodinian Rusyns. On the one hand, since the days of Communist Yugoslavia they have received for three-quarters of a century substantial government support for cultural and educational activity. This gave many of them a sense of self-satisfaction, even of superiority toward their fellow Rusyns in the Carpathian homeland who before 1989 were certainly worse off from the nationality standpoint. I guess it is this sense of smugness and isolation—evident in Europe as well as among recent immigrants in Canada—that has kept Vojvodinian Rusyns from interacting with other Carpatho-Rusyns in other than the most superficial ways.

For example, no students from either Serbia or Croatia ever applied to the Studium Carpatho-Ruthenorum (although in one year, two participated because they were already enrolled in a program at Prešov University). There are also no Carpatho-Rusyn scholars whose works appear in Vojvodinian Rusyn publications, since the region’s main literary/scholarly journal, Shvetlosts, has for decades been controlled by pro-Ukrainian—and openly anti-Carpatho-Rusyn—editors. The same applies to the Department (in 2007 demoted to a Section/Oddzelenie) of Rusyn Studies at the University of Novi Sad, which has only limited 508

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311. Georgii Firtsak (2020).

relations with, for instance, the Institute of Rusyn Language and Culture at Prešov University. There is some talent among Vojvodinian Rusyns (e.g. many belletrists, the linguists Mykhailo Feisa, Yuliian Ramach, and Helena Medieshi, the publisher Boris Varga), but none has the leadership qualities to undertake a renewal of the community which seems likely to decline further.

*****

If the Vojvodinian-Srem Rusyns have declined as a vibrant community, the Carpatho-Rusyns of Romania have never even been revived.

Whereas the well-meaning Georgii Firtsak and his son Yulii Firtsak may have gotten themselves elected for over a decade to the Romanian parliament, and whereas there is a Cultural Society of Rusyns in Romania which functions as a full-fledged member of the World Congress of Rusyns, there are virtually no Carpatho-Rusyns in the country. Arguments with my otherwise good friend Georgii Firtsak are met with rejection. He simply refuses to accept as failure that after two decades of work a mere 535 persons (2011 census) identify as Rusyns (rutenul) in Romania.

Instead of concrete plans to agitate among the 30,000 to 35,000 “potential Carpatho-Rusyns” in the Maramureş Region, Firtsak blames everything on local Ukrainophiles who, it is quite true, are aggressively opposed to everything Carpatho-Rusyn. That, however, had been the same situation in Slovakia and Poland throughout much of the 1990s and beyond. Yet activists there turned the situation around after 1989 and created vibrant—and numerically growing—Carpatho-Rusyn communities. By contrast, Romania’s Carpatho-Rusyn activists seemed averse to engage in nationality conscious-raising efforts among the relatively large rural populace in the Maramureş Region. Even our efforts to get participants from Romania into the Studium Carpatho-Ruthenorum have, 509

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until very recently, been ignored. In the end, it is hard to have sympathy for our friends in Romania who, for all intents and purposes, have failed in their self-ascribed mission to enhance the Carpatho-Rusyn movement in their country.

***** Possibly better is the situation and prognosis for the Czech Republic.

Despite a sizeable number of Carpatho-Rusyns from Subcarpathian 308. Agata Pilatova (2018).

Rus’ who settled in Prague during the interwar years and another wave from eastern Slovakia that came to work in northern Moravia during the decades following World War II, these diasporan communities for the most part assimilated into the Czech majority well before the end of the twentieth century. Those few individuals who did not fully assimilate joined with ethnic Czechs born in Subcarpathian Rus’ to form the first post-1989 organization, the Society of Friends of Subcarpathian Rus’.

From its beginnings, the Society has been concerned primarily with informing the Czech public about its former pre-World War II province, Subcarpathian Rus’, annexed to the Soviet Union in 1945 and renamed the Transcarpathian oblast of Soviet Ukraine. These informational goals were well fulfilled by an unending stream of articles in mainline Czech-language newspapers, programs on state-run radio and television programs, and publication of the Society’s own quarterly magazine, Podkarpatská Rus, mostly carried out by the accomplished Czech-language writer Jaromír Hořec and the highly professional journalist Agata Pilatova.

The Society’s membership, meanwhile, has always been inspired by nostalgia for the long-lost Subcarpathian Rus’ of their youth. Nostalgic longings do not, however, do much for the present. The Society has never been able to attract younger descendants of Carpatho-Rusyns (whether from Subcarpathian Rus’ or Slovakia), nor has it been able to draw into its ranks 510

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any of the tens of thousands of migrant workers from post-Soviet Transcarpathia resident in Prague. These newcomers, who identify themselves as Ukrainians (they are, of course, from Ukraine), have little knowledge of, or interest in, what theoretically is their Carpatho-Rusyn heritage.

On several occasions during the past three decades, I met with the Society’s leadership and offered advice and help from resources in North America for nationality conscious-raising work but received no real response. This may be the result of my own shortcomings. Most younger Carpatho-Rusyn activists, regardless of which homeland or diaspora country they live in, communicate via various forms of social media. All these instruments are beyond my ability to use.

Will, in the short term, there be any Carpatho-Rusyns left in the Czech Republic? The results of recent census data are somewhat encouraging.

If, in 1991, there were over 1,900 Czech citizens who indicated Rusyn as their nationality, the number then declined to 1,100 in 2001 and to only 739 in 2011. But subsequently, when both single and multiple identities are being counted, there has been a marked turn around, with again over 1,900 persons declaring Rusyn as one of their national identities in the Czech Republic’s census of 2021.

***** These smallest of Carpatho-Rusyn communities in Serbia, Croatia, and Romania are plagued by a steady decline in numbers, even though all continue to receive funding, in some cases substantial, from the governments of the states where they reside. By contrast, the situation in Ukraine reveals both negative reality and positive potential. On the one hand, it is in Ukraine’s Transcarpathian oblast where likely resides the largest number of Carpatho-Rusyns anywhere in the world. The fact, however, is that we have no idea of whether there has been an increase or decrease in their numbers, for the simple reason that Ukraine has no reliable statistical data.

What we do know is that cultural activity has severely declined since the outset of the second decade of the twenty-first century. The extracurricular Sunday School program (at one time with 40 classes in Carpatho-Rusyn language and culture) ceased to exist in 2011; the last 511

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313. Founding editorial director Vira Kobulei of the Rusyn-language program, Ukrainian State Television, Uzhhorod, Ukraine, with Paul Robert Magocsi atop Kremenets mountain peak along the Polish Slovak-Ukrainian border (ca. 2013).

Rusyn-language magazine (Ottsiuznyna) ceased publication in 2016; and even the annual “Rusyn” folk festivals held in Mukachevo are no more. On the other hand, a state-sponsored Rusyn-language television program still exists, and spoken Rusyn seems alive and well in the rural countryside. Moreover, Transcarpathia’s villages remain demographically stable averaging 800 to 1,000 inhabitants, in contrast to the Prešov Region where the majority have less than 200 and, in some cases, as few as 27 and 6 inhabitants.

There are no university-level courses in Carpatho-Rusyn subjects, even though there are a few historians at Uzhhorod National University (Volodymyr Fenych, Pavlo Khudysh, Mykhailo Zan) who, openly or clandestinely, are favorably inclined toward the idea that Carpatho-Rusyns are a distinct nationality.

Particularly problematic, however, is the absence in Transcarpathia of a strong cohort of younger activists who are visible on the ground, something that is in stark contrast to the post-1989 second-generation and even third-generation activists that do exist in Slovakia, Poland, and the United States. The schoolteacher Yurii Shypovych has, with financial as512

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314. Yurii Shypovych (seated center) flanked by Paul Robert Magocsi (left) and Mykhailo Belen (right); (standing) Vira Kobulei, Mykhal Chykyvdia, unidentified, Volodymyr Fenych, Yurii Prodan, Mykhal Lyzychko, and Petro Medvid, at the re-launching of Ottsiuznyna, the Rusyn-language quarterly for Transcarpathia, Uzhhorod, Ukraine (July 2023).

sistance from Carpatho-Rusyn organizations in North America and Slovakia, been able to publish an annual literary almanac and to revive on a quarterly basis the Rusyn-language magazine, Ottsiuznyna (The Fatherland). There are, indeed, a handful of younger people in Transcarpathia who pride themselves on being Carpatho-Rusyn. To my mind, however, they mistakenly believe that speaking to each other on the Internet will somehow contribute to enhancing Carpatho-Rusynism in Transcarpathia. It will not.

One is tempted to accept the standard explanation put forth by older and younger Carpatho-Rusyn activists that the problem in Transcarpathia lies at the feet of Ukraine and the policies of its officials in the central and regional governments in Kyiv and Uzhhorod. While it is certainly true that Ukraine’s attitudes toward Rusyns, who are officially classified as a “sub-ethnos” of Ukrainians, continue to have a negative impact, the national government does not ban cultural activity initiated—and paid for—by the community itself, whether the funding comes from local resources or the diaspora in North America.

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The real problem is that Transcarpathia has only a few innovative and energetic young people who are able to organize and carry out effective civic and cultural work. Alas, none among these few has any civic leadership skills. Moreover, Russia’s war against Ukraine since 2014 has only made the situation worse for the simple reason that anyone who speaks openly of being a Rusyn is likely to be branded a “separatist.” And for most of Ukrainian society being a separatist means someone working on behalf of the enemy—Russia.

Another aspect of Carpatho-Rusynism in Ukraine is symbolized by the fate of two talented young women from Carpatho-Rusyn villages in Transcarpathia. The now accomplished translator (from English to Rusyn), Karina Muliar, went to study at Prešov University’s Rusyn Institute and subsequently opted to remain in Slovakia. The recently appointed head of the Rusyn-language television program in Uzhhorod, Yuliia Shypovych, has left for a safer, perhaps better life in Denmark. The departure of these and other younger people has left a void and silence in Carpatho-Rusyn circles in Ukraine that can be deafening.

***** Finally, there is the situation among Carpatho-Rusyns in North America. As one enters the third decade of the twenty-first century, scholarly activity remains as vibrant as ever thanks to the on-going work of individual scholars, the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center, and funding from the Timo Foundation.

At the community level, the North Americans have acted in a manner somewhat similar to their Carpatho-Rusyn colleagues in Slovakia who created the Round Table consultation group. In 2009, John Righetti and I convened a body called the Carpatho-Rusyn Consortium of North America comprised of five organizations: the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center, the Carpatho-Rusyn Society, the Lemko Association, the Rusin Association of Minnesota, and the World Academy of Rusyn Culture.

The initial raison d’être for creating the consortium was that it would replace the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center (C-RRC) as the single official member of the World Congress.

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For various reasons that goal was not fulfilled, although the Consortium did continue for about a decade to function as an informal platform for discussion among the heads of the main Carpatho-Rusyn organizations in North America. During that time, the Consortium sponsored petitions of protest to governments, especially Ukraine, on behalf of Carpatho-Rusyn issues (nationality recognition and language rights); it helped coordinate support for the Studium Carpatho-Ruthenorum Summer School; 315. Carpatho-Rusyn American and it represented Carpatho-Rusyn activists of the older and youngest Americans at meetings with U.S. generations: John Righetti and Bethany government bodies, in particular the Sromoski, Scranton, Pennsylvania State Department and Radio Free Eu(September 2017). rope. The Consortium was especially fortunate to be able to add to its ranks as a consultant-activist, the former U.S. Foreign Service career diplomat and ambassador, Mike Senko. After a traditional sit-down with me and the C-RRC legal advisor Jim Kaminski over a fine meal and wine in a Georgetown restaurant, I was convinced that Mike needed to be inducted into “the family.” That happened, and his invaluable experience effectively smoothed access to foreign embassies in Washington, D.C. that otherwise would have been quite difficult if not impossible to achieve.

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316. Karina Muliar during a research visit to the University of Toronto, Magocsi residence, Toronto, Canada (January 2019).

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This may be the end of my story and participation in the modern Carpatho-Rusyn national movement. But it is not the end of The Story.

I would have preferred to end this tale here, but I was reminded— even gently chastised by one of the few colleagues to whom I gave the first draft to read—to do something more. This representative of the second generation of post-1989 Carpatho-Rusyn activists concluded his remarks with the following: . . . so many people will read this text looking for an account of the past but also for a roadmap for the future. Please articulate your dreams for the Carpatho-Rusyn movement. Give us all projects, things to think about, problems to solve, roads not to take, encouragement, hope. . . .

It could be unrealizable pipe dreams. It could be all in the subjunctive—‘If I were to have another seventy years, I would spend my energies on . . .’ Which books would you write? What initiatives would you start?

What types of activists do we need? What type of scholars?

You don’t have to answer all or any of those questions, but minimally offer a roadmap for Carpatho-Rusyns in Europe and North America that we can turn to on the unfortunate days when we won’t be able to call you on the phone anymore. . . .

So, on behalf of many of us who rely on your judgement and wisdom, please show us the paths that you would take, even if we may choose to go our own ways.

Yes, my tale about the past has ended, but our younger colleague has quite rightly asked: What about the future, both in the short term and long term? I would suggest seven areas of concern.

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1. University Studies. Each country where Carpatho-Rusyns live should have at that country’s most prestigious university at least one permanent professorship, department, or research institute that specializes in one or more disciplines in Carpatho-Rusyn studies, whether language, history, literature, ethnography, or religion. Students enrolled in such programs—future Carpatho-Rusynists—should be required to enroll in courses of a comparative nature—general linguistics, histories of neighboring countries, comparative literature, etc. An even more stringent requirement concerns knowledge of languages. Aside from minimally three languages—Rusyn, one’s own state language, and English—every Carpatho-Rusynist would have to know at least three other languages that functioned at one time or another in Carpathian Rus’.

Those three, depending on the student’s specialty, would be two modern Slavic languages (whether Czech, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, or Ukrainian) and the third—either Latin, Church Slavonic, or Hungarian.

Finally, each student should be required to study for one year abroad in a country outside the Carpatho-Rusyn homeland. The point of such Carpatho-Rusyn university programs would be to produce a new generation of scholars not simply trained as specialists but who are broadly educated humanists.

2. National Library. I have always dreamed of a Carpatho-Rusyn National Library, a place where every publication by Carpatho-Rusyns and about Carpathian Rus’ could be found. I was reminded of this need recently on a visit to southeastern Poland, specifically to the Potocki Palace in Lancut, where on a private tour I was given access to the vast tworoom library assembled by Count Roman Potocki.

Carpatho-Rusyns may not have aristocratic counts, but they could gain access to some North American philanthropist or a moneyed eastern European oligarch who could easily purchase a handsome building somewhere, even if it might not have floor-to-ceiling wainscoted shelving and a billiard table to relax after reading, as Count Potocki provided for himself and his select readers. The proposed “somewhere” might be Toronto—where the beginning of a Carpatho-Rusyn National Library 518

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317. Paul Robert Magocsi and Valerii Padiak on an Alpine intellectual retreat, Hallstadt, Austria (September 2021).

already exists—and it might be a separate building or a permanently endowed space in a University of Toronto building.

The Carpatho-Rusyn National Library would not only house a collection of books, serials, microfilm, electronic, and visual materials, it would also be the site for the compilation of a retrospective and current national bibliography. To be sure, the library’s budget should include funds for research scholars and advanced students from anywhere in the world who are working on a Carpatho-Rusyn related topic.

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318. View from the Magocsi summer residence along the French Riviera toward the Alps and Italy beyond, Roquebrune-Cap Martin, France (July 2022).

3. Intellectual retreats. While on the subject of research and scholarship, I wish to recall a fantasy that was frequently on my mind. Carpatho-Rusyn creative figures—humanistic scholars, public intellectuals, and artists—deserve to get away from their daily responsibilities and workspaces to rest and reflect. One might think that such a get-away is the equivalent of sitting on a beach and doing nothing. That, too, is also all right, because as some apocryphal Greek philosopher once said (I still cannot remember if there ever was such a philosopher): “He, who is most intelligent, is he who has most free time.”

Why, then not find some kind of residence in a geographically inspiring place where Carpatho-Rusyn creative minds could spend a month or so (alone or with a companion) “doing nothing.” It should be a place where certainly there would be no cell telephone, no computer, and certainly no Internet for external communication. Such intellectual retreats should not be a place to complete already existing projects, but rather be a place where one is encouraged to relax, to think, and to take stock of one’s place in the Carpatho-Rusyn world present and future.

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It seems my fantasy on this matter may have been realized. I now own an apartment that is a mere seventy-five feet from the Mediterranean Sea. It is located in the few kilometers patch of France that is tucked in between Monaco/Monte Carlo and the Italian border, literally at the point where the Alps fall into the sea. Note that there are mountains, and like Carpathian Rus’ this patch of land is a borderland between three countries, in this case France, Monaco, and Italy. There is also a historic connection in that my residential retreat is located in the commune of Roquebrune, specifically on its peninsula called Cap Martin, the very spot where the sovereign of our Carpatho-Rusyn ancestors—Elizabeth, Habsburg Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary—spent the last four summers recuperating after the suicide of her beloved son Rudolf and before her own assassination in 1898.

I would welcome any Carpatho-Rusyn scholar, artist, or cultural activist to spend some time gratis on the still physically beautiful French Riviera. I am convinced that there they would likely be inspired to undertake further creative work on behalf of our Carpatho-Rusyn people.

4. Publications. With regard to my young colleague’s question, “Which books would you write,” there was always one subject that was high on my agenda: a history of Carpatho-Rusyn art, in particular of secular painting and sculpture. Fortunately, in the very last years of my seventh decade I did complete writing that volume. A discussion of architecture—always my passion—might also have been included alongside painting and sculpture, but I will leave that to someone else whose own future history of art might include a discussion not only of Carpatho-Rusyn village wooden churches, but also other structures that grace the streets of small towns and cities connected to the history and culture of Carpathian Rus’.

Other books that I would have liked to but did not write and that might be undertaken by others are a survey history of all peoples that have lived among Carpatho-Rusyns (Czechs, Germans/Shwabs, Magyars, Jews, Poles, Roma/Gypsies, Romanians, Russians, Slovaks, Ukrainians, among others). Yet another book would be a general account of Carpatho-Rusyn diaspora communities, not the older diasporas in the 521

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319. Monument (1899) to Elizabeth, Habsburg Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary with a dedication from Roquebrune’s inhabitants: “We’ve erected this humble obelisk / To you, Queen Elizabeth, because in the evening you so loved / To come and breathe in the soft aroma / And to sit among the rocky crags nearby,” Cap Martin, France.

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Vojvodina and the United States about whom I and others have written, but about the more recent functioning diaspora communities that have appeared—and are likely to remain—in cities like Prague, Bratislava, Wrocław, Legnica, Cracow, and Budapest, among others.

Then there are publication projects that I would never be able to undertake but that nonetheless should be done: (1) an anthology of Carpatho-Rusyn literature worldwide, which would in effect result in the creation of a canon; (2) critical edi320. Cover of the collected works of tions of the collected works of all Anatolii Kralytskŷi, compiled by Valerii prominent Carpatho-Rusyn writers Padiak, Tvorŷ (Prešov University Press, (something already begun by Valerii 2019).

Padiak); and (3) a collection of documents, in original languages and English translation, elucidating major historical events in Carpathian Rus’ and the diaspora.

At the more popular and educationally didactic level, we need a series of textbooks for elementary and middle schools that deal with the following Carpatho-Rusyn related topics: geography, history, literature, religion (and not simply Eastern-rite Christian varieties), ethnography and folklore. Such textbooks should be handsomely designed, written in a reader-friendly style, and include a profuse number of full-color illustrations. Most importantly, each textbook should be not only in one of the five codified variants of the Rusyn language, but also in the official languages of the states where Carpatho-Rusyns live—most especially in Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Ukrainian, and perhaps also in Croatian, Czech, and English. The point is to introduce these textbooks into each state’s school system where all students, regardless of their ethnic background, will have an opportunity to learn about the Carpatho-Rusyns who live within their respective countries.

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And why not comic book histories in Rusyn and state languages? I have always been struck how many French learn their national and regional history from comic books.

Why else would there be so many historical-theme comic books on the continually restocked shelves of bookstores in France?

5. Awards. The insightful CarpathoRusyn commentator and public intellectual, Petro Medvid, recently reminded his readers of an award that once existed. To be sure, Carpatho-Rusyn organizations give out periodically a wide range of awards 321. Carpatho-Rusyn “Oscar,” designed to local activists for past and present

by Ivan Brovdii (2001). achievements. But, as Medvid said, there was only one prestigious Carpatho-Rusyn “Nobel,” which together with an Oscar-like bronze bear and monetary sum was awarded annually to the author of the best recent literary work in the Rusyn language. He was referring to the Dukhnovych Rusyn Literature Award, which, alas, ended in 2015 when the awarding body, the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center, no longer received funds from the donor, Steve Chepa.

Why not renew the award, but like Nobel not limit it to literature? To be sure, there should be the literary award, which in its Dukhnovych iteration did inspire authors to write in Rusyn. But there should also be awards for outstanding works in Carpatho-Rusyn scholarship, public service, the media, art, and achievements in medicine and the natural sciences by someone of Carpatho-Rusyn background.

In order to make all this possible, perhaps Carpatho-Rusyn activists will be inspired to seek and find a new Alfred Nobel, or perhaps just win a million-dollar-plus lottery and donate his or her winnings to our cause.

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6. World Congress of Rusyns. Despite criticism about its mode of action—or inaction—the World Congress of Rusyns remains a very important symbolic force among Carpatho-Rusyns. We also know that it continues to be perceived as politically important by governments of the states where Carpatho-Rusyns reside. Hence, the Congress should be maintained, even though it is in need of reform.

The first reform refers to its very name. It should be called the World Congress of Carpatho-Rusyns. Without getting into details, the ethnonym Rusyn is a somewhat vague term that historically refers to Belarusans and Ukrainians as well as Carpatho-Rusyns. To quote the title of one of my Ukrainian-language books: Every Carpatho-Rusyn is a Rusyn, but not Every Rusyn is a Carpatho-Rusyn. If the World Congress amends its name, Carpatho-Rusyns will no longer have to respond to the assertion—made by Ukrainian and some non-Ukrainian scholars—that Rusyn is simply an older historic term for Ukrainian and, therefore, that every Rusyn is by default a Ukrainian.

The second necessary reform has to do with the World Congress structure. Alas, the Congress is representative but not democratic! Not democratic in two ways.

The original state principle remains in place, whereby each of the nine country members is represented by one organization (or in rare cases a real or nominal consortium of a few organizations). In practice, this means that several otherwise active Carpatho-Rusyn organizations are not represented in the Congress.

Even less democratic is the allocation of voting delegates. Each of the nine state members is equally entitled to ten voting delegates. This means that, for example, Romania with less than 600 self-proclaimed Rusyns throughout the entire country has the same number of Congress delegate votes as Slovakia, where there are more than 63,000 selfdeclared Carpatho-Rusyns. As a result, five World Congress member organizations—Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, and Serbia with a total population of only 21,000 Carpatho-Rusyns—hold 50 out of 90 delegate votes that are more often than not used en bloc to determine resolutions and elections for the chairman of the Congress and its executive organ, the World Council.

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This undemocratic anomaly can and needs to be corrected. Henceforth, the World Congress of Carpatho-Rusyns should be comprised of a total of 60 voting delegates representing organizations from nine countries. A more democratic distribution of delegates would be ten each from three countries (Poland, Slovakia, Ukraine) and five each from the remaining six countries (Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Serbia, and the United States/Canada).

Aside from structural matters, there is the question of what the World Congress should be doing. As a body representing Carpatho-Rusyns in nine countries (ten if one counts Canada separately), the Congress should be primarily concerned with international relations. It should take up matters that may apply to individual countries; for example, an apology from Poland for the Vistula Operation and recognition of Carpatho-Rusyns in Ukraine at the national level. To achieve these goals, it is necessary to bring these matters to the attention of the international community through lobbying efforts.

To take the Operation Vistula as an example, each World Congress member organization should visit and petition the Embassy of Poland in its country (whether it be Belgrade, Bratislava, Bucharest, Budapest, Kyiv, Ottawa, Prague, Warsaw, Washington, D.C., or Zagreb). This needs to be done on a repetitive basis and for as long as it takes until the Vistula Operation matter has been favorably resolved. Undoubtedly, the Congress’s representatives in such matters—certainly its World Congress chairman—must be fluent in Europe’s lingua franca, English, or be accompanied by someone who is.

The World Congress of Carpatho-Rusyns should also look for ideas about how to function from the example of other existing—and highly successful—counterparts, such as the Jewish World Congress and the Ukrainian World Congress. For example, whenever these bodies have concerns, the governments of Israel and Ukraine listen. In the future, the World Congress of Carpatho-Rusyns needs to earn the right to be listened to by the governments of all countries where Carpatho-Rusyns live.

Finally, the World Congress of Carpatho-Rusyns must take a more active role in advocating for the religious interests of the vast number of its constituency who belong to Eastern-rite Christian churches (Greek 526

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Catholic and Orthodox). Among those interests are: language use— Church Slavonic in the Holy Liturgy and Rusyn for biblical readings, homilies, and non-liturgical parts of the worship service; and the jurisdictional status of eparchies serving Carpatho-Rusyns. Regarding jurisdictional matters, World Congress representatives should systematically engage with all relevant church authorities: (1) with the Vatican in Rome, not only to maintain the Greek Catholic Eparchy of Mukachevo’s distinct status (ecclesia sui juris) but also to renew plans set in motion in 1937 to create a single metropolitan province encompassing Greek Catholic eparchies in what is present-day Transcarpathian Ukraine, Slovakia, and perhaps Hungary; (2) with the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople in Istanbul, which is the symbolic “ultimate authority” in the Orthodox Christian world; and (3) with the Serbian Orthodox Patriarchate in Belgrade, in order to consider the desirable possibility of returning the Orthodox eparchies in Ukraine’s Transcarpathia and Slovakia to the Serbian jurisdiction as had been the case before 1945, when the Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Eparchy of Mukachevo and Prešov was transferred (for obvious opportunistic political reasons) to the jurisdiction of the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate of Moscow. Should the latter goal be achieved, it would certainly improve the social and civic standing of the Orthodox of Transcarpathia in post-2014/2022 war-torn Ukraine.

7. Relations with the East. Carpatho-Rusyns—as individuals and through their organizations—should always project an image of self-confidence. We know who we are. What others may think, in agreement with us or not, is their problem. We are Carpatho-Rusyns, a distinct nationality with a proud historical tradition and culture.

Beginning from that standpoint, we should try to understand our neighbors to the East. Until recently, Ukrainians were a stateless people imbued with all the characteristics of a national minority, including an inferiority complex vis-à-vis the Russians and, to some extent, vis-à-vis the Poles. A sense of inferiority negates the self-confidence that is needed to understand and tolerate certain differences from a self-perceived Ukrainian national norm. As a close colleague and staunch Ukrainian patriot once remarked: “Ukrainians are still incapable of what Germans 527

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have long ago been able to accept: Bavarians are first and foremost Bavarians, who may or may not feel themselves or identify as Germans.”

Bavarianness does not pose a threat to a people like Germans who have a sense of self-confidence. As long as Ukrainians have not reached a stage similar to German self-confidence, Carpatho-Rusyns should forgive them, for they know not what they do.

Put another way, Carpatho-Rusyns should not care what the “mythical Ukrainian” thinks about them. In fact, the only “Ukrainians” who do really care about Carpatho-Rusyns are fellow Carpatho-Rusyns of Ukrainian national persuasion, whether the especially intolerant Lemko Ukrainophiles in Poland, a few frustrated intellectuals in Ukraine’s Transcarpathian region (the deceased Liubomyr Belei, Oleksander Havrosh, Andrii Lubka), or activists from neighboring Galicia who are inspired

by Ukrainian nationalism (not necessarily only Banderites). Looked at another way, the vast majority of Ukraine’s 35 million or so inhabitants do not know about and/or could not care less about Carpatho-Rusyns.

Faced with that reality, our job is to inform the Ukrainian public through the social and print media and by lobbying Ukraine’s parliament, government officials, and diplomatic corps about Carpatho-Rusyn history and culture. Some Ukrainians will listen and even understand.

This is albeit a slow process, but such efforts, together with Ukraine’s eventual entry into the European Union, will result in recognition at the national level of Carpatho-Rusyns as one of Ukraine’s many nationalities.

Then there is the Russia factor. The World Congress and all existing Carpatho-Rusyn organizations, media outlets, and community spokespersons need to rid themselves of any lingering sympathies for Russia.

Calls for accepting Russia as a member of the World Congress (not to mention the Russkii Mir front organization in Moldova) should end, for no other reason than that there never was, nor is there any organized Carpatho-Rusyn community in Russia. Moreover, the belief among some of our people that playing the Russia card will somehow weaken Ukraine and change its attitudes toward “their Rusyn question” is both dangerous and the height of political naivete. The only result of such shenanigans is to provide (partially justified) grist for Ukraine’s accusations that Rusyns are “political separatists” who threaten the integrity of Ukraine as a state.

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Let us never forget that the Russophile orientation among Carpatho-Rusyns, which was closely connected with nineteenth-century Slavophilism, brought no good to our people. The pre-1917 tsarist regime never did anything positive for Carpathian Rus’, while the Soviet regime, which incarnated the worst of Russian national characteristics, left a horrible legacy: the destruction of traditional Carpatho-Rusyn civic, cultural, and religious values. And who in the world would want to be associated in any way with the Russia of today? Carpatho-Rusyns do not need to depend on either the Ukrainians or Russians, just as they did not need to depend on the Hungarians or Czechs of yesteryear. Carpatho-Rusyns are Europeans who need only to depend on themselves, on their present-day and future younger cultural activists, and on the one country in which they live—the European Union.

***** My last and most fervent hope is that Carpatho-Rusyns, of whatever age and wherever they live, will always keep in mind our community’s enormous successes, especially in the wake of the Revolutions of 1989.

Before 1989 Carpatho-Rusyns “did not exist,” certainly not officially nor in the minds of most Carpatho-Rusyns themselves.

What do we have today, four decades later? Carpatho-Rusyns are recognized officially in all countries where they reside—yes, technically, also in Ukraine, at least in Transcarpathia. They have professionally staffed and government-funded theaters, museums, radio and television programs, a wide range of print and electronic media, numerous fiction and non-fiction books, folk ensembles and festivals, public signage in Carpatho-Rusyn-inhabited towns and villages, advisors to governments, and members of parliaments. And all the while the number of persons claiming Carpatho-Rusyn as their national identity steadily increases!

To be sure, the achievements related to the above-mentioned phenomena vary from country to country. Yet, as I have always said, it is not easy to be a member of a stateless people or national minority. To be so is an everyday struggle to remind oneself and to remind one’s family and friends, let alone the wider society in which one lives, as to who one is, what is one’s ethnocultural heritage, and why that is important.

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And why is it important? Because Carpatho-Rusyns must forever overcome the debilitating characteristic of all minorities, national or otherwise: an inferiority complex. Gone must be the days when our spokespersons begin or conclude any of their presentations with phrases such as, “we Rusyns do not have to be ashamed”—mŷ sya ne mame hanbŷty. And who ever asked that you, Rusnak, should be ashamed of yourself and your people? That is certainly not what our national bard, Aleksander Dukhnovych, would expect when he asked us all to internalize his immortal words: “I was, am, and will remain a Rusyn.”

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am profoundly grateful to the following individuals who provided a careful and critical read of the pre-publication manuscript of this book: Reverend Peter Galadza, Sally Jones, Edward Kasinec, Patricia Krafcik, Nick Kupensky, Lubomyr Luciuk, Cathy Silvestri, and Maria Silvestri.

Nevertheless, I as the author am solely responsible for the final text.

The illustrations are drawn primarily from the private collection of the author, supplemented with others from Olena Duts-Faifer, Jerry Jumba, Johannah Knudson, Stepan Liavynets, Oles Mushynka, Cynthia Magocsi O’Dea, Valerii Padiak, Michal Pavlič, Elaine Rusinko, Peter Shtefaniak, and Aleksander Zozuliak.

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