21 OCTOBER 1938, Page 14

RUTHENIA AND ITS FATE

Commonwealth and Foreign

By MERVYN HORDER

WEDGED between Poland and Roumania, at the eastern end of the Czechoslovakian sausage, lies the province of Sub- carpathian Russia, more commonly known as Ruthenia— remote and picturesque, yet by no means so much so that it has escaped, or could hope to escape, the menace of the predatory ambitions to which Czechoslovakia as a whole is exposed on every side. It is not surprising, indeed, that Ruthenia has come to be one of the principal pawns in the Central European game, since there are various factors which make it as attractive spoil to an aggressor. It would be no new thing for it to be once more the scene of armed conflict. Trenches and barbed-wire entanglements from the World War remain to this day on the mountain heights, and military cemeteries bear testimony to the intensity of the Hungarian campaign against the Russians under General Brusilov ; in one engagement over 8o,000 men were killed here in a single day.

For a small district, under 5,000 square miles in extent, it is remarkably rich in natural resources, of the kind to be found in most of the mountainous districts of Central Europe. Foremost among them are the immense state-owned forests, which have been energetically developed under Czech auspices since the War. The system by which the timber— mainly beech, ash and softwoods—is prepared and assembled in artificial reservoirs (clausures) before being floated in rafts down the Tisa river, is an old one, but it has been extended with additional capital and the clausures recently enlarged and reconstructed. Hungary, to-whom the whole district belonged before the War, is still the principal export market but some of the beech-wood finds its way even to England. The science of forestry is conscientiously applied, even to the reservation of certain areas untouched in their original state, in order to study Nature's own ideas on the subject of woodcraft.

Along the Polish border, particularly near Uiok, there is oil to be found, but at too great a depth to be profitably worked without a huge capital outlay. There are also small deposits of coal, of iron, and of salt—the last a State monopoly, which also provides in the glistening caves at Slatinske Doly one of the most impressive sights the country can offer to visiting tourists. Grapes are grown on the lower hillsides, and the usual farm crops on the rich plain adjoining the present Hungarian border in the south-west. Cultivation is not as intense as it might be in view of the prevailing system of land-tenure, by which a man's land is divided equally among the members of his family at his death ; every effort is made to combat this wasteful system, but the weight of an age-old tradition has often been too much for the.authorities. The visitor carries away with him from the country districts an impression of a contented, self-reliant peasant people sub- jected to a necessary minimum of enlightened bureaucratic control. Unemployment over the whole province is negligible and wages are high ; the unskilled woodman, like his English counterpart, earns about 5s. a day, but his tastes are more frugal and among a people all living close to the land much more cheaply satisfied. A wood-foreman complained to m: about his men now earning so much that they were apt to use religious festivals and so forth as an excuse for going off into the town for the day and not coming to work at all.

The second factor which makes the district vulnerable to modern forms of aggression is the heterogeneous nature of the population. This is par excellence the region of minorities ; its 750,000 inhabitants include Russians (25 per cent.), Hungarians, Jews, Slovaks, Czechs, Germans, Poles and Roumanians. It is hardly surprising to find that the capital Uihorod, a town of 35,000 inhabitants—about the size of Rugby—supports as many as eighteen daily newspapers : an infinite variety of Schools, including the only one in Europe exclusively for the children of gypsies : and an assortment of Churches which puts British sectarianism well in the shade. It will always be impossible to delineate a frontier here that is anything but artificial—there are Hungarians on the Polish frontier, Russians on the Slovak frontier and Jewish trade,- men everywhere. Esprit de corps, in a community mainly: of independent landowners, naturally takes time to develop, and there are meanwhile abundant opportunities for sedition, propaganda.

Reference to a map will show that control of this territory by anyone but the Czechs can effectively prevent Russian military assistance ever being given to the rest of Czecho- slovakia in an emergency, except by air. It is here that the railway-line essential to any large-scale operations of the kind enters, at Kralovo, from Roumanian territory. Poland having already refused permission for the transit of Russian troops, the actual length of the available Roumanian frontier is reduced to about 300 kilometres, mostly mountainous, and crossed by only four roads and as many single-line railways. Foreign control of this stretch of frontier, with Poland and Hungary in their present frame of mind—much more the division of Ruthenia between those two countries—would completely isolate the rest of Czechoslovakia.

This is one of the strongest reasons why Germany has " put her shirt on " the Ukrainian separatist movement, the ultimate aim of which is to mould Subcarpathian Russia, together with selected portions of Poland, Roumania and the U.S.S.R., into a new republic. There seems little doubt that some such programme will be one of Germany's next steps, if she does not break too many teeth in the process of masticating Western Czechoslovakia. Representatives of what is known as the " First Russo-Ukrainian Central National Council " have been invited to attend Sudeten party conferences, and the Henleinist newspaper, Die Zeit, is always ready to devote space to the iniquities of Czech administration in that part of the world ; in particular, the slowness with which the promise of territorial autonomy to Subcarpathian Russia, made in a decree of last year, was being implemented.

In actual fact the programme was well up on its schedule, and the exact constitution of the local assembly due for settlement by the end of this year. Though the Prague Government has been stampeded by events into granting Ruthenia autonomy at once in order to offset Hungary's more extravagant claims, the machinery was nearly ready in the normal course of events, and the " turnover " will be one of the least onerous of the burdens which the weakened Czechoslovakia has to sustain.

Germany's unwillingness to support, at the Komarom conference, Hungary's claim to the return of the whole province and a common frontier with Poland, is a suggestive pointer to her own future ambitions in this part of the world. With Czech policies now dominated by Germany, Ruthenia's place may be to hold the door open to Roumania and the Ukraine. In pursuit of her much-vaunted principle of self- determination, Germany should be ready to insist on the cession to Hungary of the flat Hungarian-speaking districts in the south-west ; but since this gives Hungary control of the only east-bound railway and creates other local adminis- trative difficulties, it may well be that logic will be allowed to go by the board on this occasion, unless Hungary can pay for German support by concessions elsewhere.

At all events the inhabitants of Ruthenia must say good-bye to the days when their land was a half-forgotten corner of Europe, visited only by tourists in search of the picturesque. They must adjust themselves to the fact that they now lie directly in Germany's path east, and that their country is a prize to be snatched for its own sake.