Magosci: European Ukraine, or Eurasian Little Russia?
On November 29, 2014, UJE board member Paul Robert Magocsi gave the keynote address at the Canada-Ukraine Parliamentary Program Model Ukraine Conference in Lviv, Ukraine. The following is his speech, which was recently translated into Ukrainian and published by the leading Ukrainian intellectual journal, Krytyka (krytyka.com/en). The full transcript of the address is available here.
EUROPEAN UKRAINE, OR EURASIAN LITTLE RUSSIA?
Paul Robert Magocsi
Keynote address at the
Canada-Ukraine Parliamentary Program Model Ukraine Conference
Ukrainian Catholic University
L’viv, Ukraine, 29 November 2014
One year ago, when the crisis in Ukraine became the dominant story in the international media — at least for a few weeks — many people were taken by surprise. But was there anything really surprising in what was unfolding in this volatile part of the world?
The following reflections address four aspects of this past year’s events: (1) Russia’s annexation of Crimea; (2) the strategic goals of Putin’s Russia for the rest of Ukraine; (3) the unexpected appearance of Hungary and its interest in Ukraine’s Transcarpathia; (4) and the response of Ukraine’s leaders to its so-called Rusyn question.
Earlier this year, much of the world’s media has been telling us that Crimea is “a historic Russian land,” which only recently became part of Ukraine. How valid is such an assertion?
It might be useful to remember a few basic historical facts. Crimea was annexed to what was then the Russian Empire in 1783 and remained part of that empire and its Soviet successor state until 1954; that is, for a period of 170 years. Since 1954, Crimea has been part of Ukraine; that is, for 60 years. But the longest period of rule in Crimea was from the mid-fifteenth to late eighteenth centuries; that is, roughly 330 years, when it was part of the Crimean Khanate. The Crimean Khanate was ruled by the ancestors of the Crimean Tatars as a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire.
As for the population of Crimea, it was never Russian, nor for that matter even Slavic. The age-old farthest extent of Slavic settlement was the Ros River, which is only about 100 kilometers south of Kiev. This means that the Slavs, including Russians, cannot be considered the indigenous inhabitants of the Ukrainian steppe and certainly not of Crimea. Russians, and to a lesser extent Ukrainians, began to settle in Crimea only from the outset of the nineteenth century. Therefore, pride of place as the population which has lived longest in Crimea goes to the Crimean Tatars. Hence, if politicians, journalists, and scholarly commentators are obliged to make use of sound bites, the appropriate one would be: “Crimea – the historic land of the Crimean Tatars.”
There is some uncertainty about the number of Crimean Tatars in Crimea. In 2001 (the last census), there were just over two million inhabitants in Crimea, of whom 243,000, or 12 percent, were Crimean Tatars. It is likely today that their number is about 300,000.
Where did these 243,000 to 300,000 come from, if we know that the entire group— about 188,000 at the time—was forcibly and brutally deported on direct orders from Stalin to Soviet Central Asia? The exodus eastward began on May 18, 1944, which for the Crimean Tatars has ever since been remembered as their Black Day (Qara Kun).
After languishing for nearly half a century in Soviet Uzbekistan, the vast majority returned home from exile in the early 1990s, thanks largely to the welcoming policy of the government of independent Ukraine. It is for this reason that the Crimean Tatars and their political and civic institutions were fiercely loyal to Ukraine and feared having to live under Russian rule.
If Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian Russian government were not problematic enough, even worse are the local Russian inhabitants of Crimea, or more precisely the local “Soviet” inhabitants—the proverbial sovoks. They generally detest what they consider usurpers from the East, who have had the audacity to return and demand to live in a “Russian land.” For many of the local sovoks, who by the way live in the houses built and owned by Crimean Tatars before 1944, these Muslim intruders should go back where they came from and allegedly belong—the East.
And what has been the position of Russia in all of this? Many Western commentators seemed surprised by the boldness, some would even say recklessness, of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Actually, there should never have been the slightest surprise. He has been acting—and quite successfully—in a manner established by a long line of rulers stretching from medieval Muscovy, through the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and now the Russian Federation. That manner is determined by historic Muscovite-Russian geopolitical goals and deep-seated cultural beliefs.
We all know about the Muscovite and imperial Russian goal to secure year-long warm water ports on the Black Sea. The centuries-long struggle to push out the Ottoman Empire and Crimean Khanate from the northern shores of the Black Sea was finally accomplished in the 1780s during the reign of Catherine II, for which Russians designate her as “the Great.” Less known—or spoken about—are Putin’s ideological goals, which are based on long established cultural traditions inculcated in him and in all Russians.
In short, ever since at least the fifteenth century, Muscovy, the Russian Empire, and the Soviet Union have wanted to regain the lands that they felt rightfully belonged to them. Initially, this was known as the Gathering of the Russian Lands (sobiranie zemel’ russkikh) which included the heritage of medieval Kievan Rus’. And of all of Russia’s so-called great leaders, this goal was finally achieved by Joseph Stalin in 1945. The sphere that Russian ideologists claim to have been part of the Kievan inheritance includes much of European Russia, all of Belarus, throw in the Baltic states as well, and certainly all of Ukraine up to and beyond the Carpathians in the west and to the shores of the Black Sea in the south. (No matter that the Baltic northeastern and Black Sea southern fringes of this area were never part of Kievan Rus!).
This view of the “Russian world” is deeply embedded in the mind-set of every Russian. Yes, a Russian is quick to point out, we love Belarus and Belarusans; yes, we love “Little Russia” and “Little Russians.” How can we not love them? Belarusans and “Little Russians” are an integral part of our very body and soul. They not only speak the same basic variants of East Slavic languages, they are all Eastern Christians, a faith expressed best through the one and only “true” Orthodox faith. In this scenario, there is simply no place for a distinct Ukraine, unless that concept is understood as simply the “Little Russian” component of the one and indivisible world of Mother Russia.
Vladimir Putin is the most recent embodiment of the Russian worldview. Since coming to power at the very outset of the twenty-first century, he has acted systematically in trying to make that view a reality. One of his greatest triumphs came in 2007, when the diminutive former KGB officer stood alongside the patriarch and primate of the two largest Russian Orthodox Churches – the Moscow Patriarchate and Church Outside Russia (the Synod Abroad)—as together they healed the great division (raskol) within the Russian Orthodox Church that had existed since the Bolshevik Revolution.
We in the West were also unaware or choose to overlook the fact that, with Lukashenko and Belarus voluntarily in his pocket, Putin has during the past decade tried to undermine Ukraine, whether eastern Ukraine and Crimea, or farther west in Transcarpathia and even beyond, in independent Moldova. All these places are considered Russian, and to emphasize that point numerous publications from the nineteenth century that speak of “Little Russia” and “Carpathian Russia” (and that includes ethnic Ukrainian Galicia and Bukovina), as well as television news programs on these lands have been produced at state expense, usually under the auspices of the Russian World Foundation (Russkii Mir).
Therefore, Putin’s actions are really a forgone conclusion. Begin with Crimea, the least ethnic Ukrainian of Ukraine’s lands, and arrange to be invited in by the region’s autonomous parliament after it declares independence. Ironically, this very same scenario was followed two hundred years ago by Empress Catherine II. In 1772, the Crimean Khanate became an independent state under Russian protection. Eleven years later it was annexed by the Russian Empire. In February 2014 we witnessed the same scenario, but with one difference; instead of eleven years it took only eleven hours to go from Crimean independence to Russian annexation.
As it turned out, annexing Crimea was relatively easy, given the unpreparedness and unwillingness of the Ukraine’s revolutionary government to react. Eastern Ukraine and Donbas proved to be another matter. Ukraine under interim President Turchynov and now under President Poroshenko and Prime Minister Yatsenyuk have taken a firm stand. These leaders have translated the spirit of the Maidan and the 2014 Revolution of Dignity into resolve to defend and resist further encroachments on Ukraine’s territory. In other words, they are doing what they, as leaders of a state, should be doing: defending the territorial integrity of their country—Ukraine.
The actions of Putin’s Russia have also had another result. Perhaps Putin more than any one else has transformed hundreds of thousands of formerly passive citizens of Ukraine into patriots committed to defend their native country—Ukraine.
This does not mean that Putin’s ultimate goal—to return all of Little Russia (Ukraine) into Russia’s Eurasian world—will change. In the end, that goal is expressed through the convergence of historic tradition and current geopolitical strategy. I already mentioned how, since the outset of the twenty-first century, Putin has been poking at what he considers Ukraine’s weak spots: the Donetsk-Donbas region, Crimea, and Transcarpathia. We are all aware of what has transpired in Crimea and the Donetsk-Donbas. But what about Transcarpathia?
In early November 2014, Paul Goble, a commentator for the Jamestown Foundation, an influential think-tank in the United States, wrote a blog entitled: “Moscow Using Budapest to put Rusyns in Play against Kyiv.” In other words, Russia’s off-and-on interest since the outset of the twenty-first century in the so-called Rusyn question in Transcarpathia has taken a new turn: cooperation with the present right-wing oriented government of Hungary under that country’s prime minister, Victor Orban.
In essence, both Putin and Orban are products of their respective countries’ historical past, and each sees himself as the instrument to fulfill his country’s destiny. In the case of Putin, it is Eurasian Russia which would obviously include Little Russia, or Ukraine. In the case of Orban, it is historic Hungary before its dismemberment by the Treaty of Trianon in 1920. Pre-Trianon Hungary included territory in every country that borders present-day Hungary: all of Slovakia and Croatia, Transylvania in Romania, Vojvodina in Serbia, the Burgenland in Austria, and Transcarpathia in Ukraine. Like Putin, Orban considers that it is Hungary’s right and duty to protect ethnic Hungarians living in each of these countries; in other words, in Hungary’s “near abroad.” This includes the 150,000 or so Hungarian minority concentrated in southern Transcarpathia. As part of this truly unexpected Hungarian-Russian mutual geopolitical interest, both Putin’s and Orban’s policy advisors have been playing the Carpatho-Rusyn card, or exploiting Ukraine’s Rusyn question. This is not the time or place to launch into a historical discourse on Carpatho-Rusyns and the history of Transcarpathia. Since, however, most readers both within and beyond Ukraine have at best only a vague sense of their country’s farthest western oblast, a few observations need to be made.
Transcarpathia, or historic Subcarpathian Rus’, was the last territorial acquisition of the Soviet Union and therefore of Ukraine, having been acquired only at the close of World War II in 1945. Transcarpathia was never part of medieval Kievan Rus’, but for 800 years—from the early twelfth century until World War I—it was an integral part of the Hungarian Kingdom. During the interwar years of the twentieth century, it was part of the new state of Czechoslovakia, then forcibly returned to Hungary during World War II, until “liberated” by Soviet troops in the fall of 1944.
Transcarpathia may have been ruled by different countries—the Hungarian Kingdom, Habsburg Austria-Hungary, Czechoslovakia—but it often had a distinct status within those states. As early as 1848, the region’s civic leaders called for and received from the Habsburg rulers a degree of self-rule. The region actually achieved some form of autonomy, first as the Rus’ Land in early 1919 Hungary, then as Subcarpathian Rus’ (also briefly called Carpatho-Ukraine) in Czechoslovakia between 1919 and 1939. Most recently, in December 1991, no less than 78 percent of the inhabitants voted yes in a referendum that called for autonomy, literally self-government (samovriaduvannia), for Transcarpathia in Ukraine. The results of that referendum were never fulfilled, however, by the central government in Kyiv.
So much for politics. What about the inhabitants of Transcarpathia? The majority has always been comprised of East Slavs, although their national identity has remained problematic until today. The people have traditionally called themselves Rusnaks or Rusyns, who have at various times have described themselves as belonging either to the Russian nationality, the Ukrainian nationality, or a distinct Carpatho-Rusyn nationality. In 1945, the new Soviet regime proclaimed that it resolved the nationality question by simply declaring that all the indigenous East Slavic inhabitants in the Carpathian region were Ukrainian.
Following the collapse of Communist rule and the Soviet Union, it turned out that Carpatho-Rusyns still existed not only in Ukraine’s Transcarpathian region, but also in immediately neighboring Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, and Romania. Since 1989, each of those member countries of the European Union has recognized Rusyns/Carpatho-Rusyns as a distinct nationality. By contrast, independent Ukraine has been reluctant to act on the national identity question. Most central government and intellectual circles in Ukraine hold to the late nineteenth-century view of Ukrainian national ideologists (and for that matter Soviet Marxist ideologists as well) that there never was, is, nor will be a distinct Carpatho-Rusyn nationality. And anyone who holds such views is either unenlightened or a separatist opposed to Ukraine. As a result of pressure from the United States government, the European Union, and Carpatho-Rusyn diaspora organizations, some movement on this issue occurred during the first decade of the twenty-first century. In March 2007, the elected Transcarpathian Regional Assembly (Oblasna rada) passed by an overwhelming majority (72 to 2) a decree recognizing Rusyns as a distinct nationality, and in 2012 Ukraine’s language law (still in force) listed Rusyn as one of the country’s official languages.
Such then, are the two components of Ukraine’s Rusyn question: the unresolved 1991 referendum on autonomy; and the unresolved issue of recognition of Carpatho-Rusyns as a distinct nationality at the national level. Both issues are now being exploited not only by Putin’s Russia, but also Orban’s Hungary.
What then, should be done? And by whom? By Russia, Hungary, Carpatho-Rusyns, and Ukraine?
As for Russia, one cannot expect any change. Putin’s propaganda machine will continue to promote whatever elements within or beyond that are inclined to view Russia as the region’s saviour and alleged guarantor of the Carpatho-Rusyn nationality and Transcarpathian autonomy. As for Hungary, support should be given to those forces within that country which oppose Prime Minister Orban and the far right Jobbik party with its misplaced dreams of restoring pre-Trianon, pre-World War I Hungary. Pre-Trianon restoration of any kind would require changing borders and, therefore, bring an end to the political order and stability of the European Union.
One must wonder how Hungary’s present-day right-wing patriots can be so naïve to expect help and cooperation from Russia. While they remember and long for pre-Trianon historic Hungary, they conveniently forget how Hungary’s 1849 War for Independence was defeated by tsarist Russian troops and how the valiant Revolution of 1956 was crushed by Soviet tanks dispatched from Moscow. And as for the Hungarian minority in Transcarpathia, no amount of propaganda from Hungary can change the fact that their status under independent Ukraine’s rule has been as good if not better than that of any other Hungarian minority living in countries adjacent to Hungary.
As for Carpatho-Rusyns, the vast majority within Transcarpathia, as well as in neighboring countries and the diaspora in America, simply wish that they be recognized as a distinct nationality and that their language and culture be promoted in the countries where they live. They have basically achieved those goals since the Revolution of 1989 in all countries but one—Ukraine. The worldwide Carpatho-Rusyn movement has never been interested in creating a separate state; it is opposed to changing international borders; it has always supported the territorial integrity of Ukraine; and, most importantly, it looks forward to Ukraine’s eventual inclusion in the European Union.
As for those few but vociferous elements among Carpatho-Rusyns who do look to Russia, let them remember what the East brought them, or did not bring them. Russian intellectual circles never accepted the view that Carpatho-Rusyns are a distinct nationality, and when in the guise of the Soviet Union “real” Russians finally took control of the region in 1945, within a few years they brutally undermined traditional Carpatho-Rusyn cultural values by destroying the Greek Catholic Church, by taking away their precious land, and by banning their language and national identity. Carpatho-Rusyns have never gotten nor do they need help from Russia, whether tsarist, Soviet, or Putinesque. And finally Ukraine. Ukraine has created the Rusyn question, and Ukraine can resolve the Rusyn question. It makes no sense to deny the reality of a people within or beyond
Ukraine which exists and claims it belongs to a distinct nationality. It makes no sense to deny the validity of the December 1991 referendum on autonomy. Deal with autonomy in the context of the decentralization of government power throughout Ukraine. Most importantly, recognize Carpatho-Rusyns as a distinct nationality. This is a basic human-rights matter that was resolved by neighboring countries in the European Union years ago.
Sooner or later Ukraine will have to get in step with the European Union and act positively on the matter of Carpatho-Rusyn nationality recognition. Doing the right thing and doing it now will show that the leadership in Kyiv is firmly committed to making their coun try a European Ukraine, not a Eurasian Little Russia.
