Commonwealth and Foreign
THE REDEMPTION OF RUTHENIA
By HENRY BAERLEIN
ONE of the most noteworthy—and least known—results of the War was the salvation of Ruthenia. For about a thousand years the Ruthenes, who are in numbers much the smallest of the Slav peoples, had been under the Magyars, an exception to the saying that the land without a history is to be envied. Not even the most ardent pro- Magyar amongst us will claim that the Ruthenes were regarded by the Government as first-class citizens. When Serbia languished for five centuries under the Turk their priests kept the patriotic flame alive, each monastery was a lighthouse in the dismal darkness ; very little of such help was given to the Ruthenes, at any rate after the creation of the Greek- Catholic Church in the days of Maria Theresa, for it was only in the rarest cases that a Ruthene priest, emerging from a Magyar school—no other was available—did not regard himself as a Magyar. " Hang them as fast as you like ! " exclaimed a notorious priest at Jasina during the War, when his parishioners were suspected of harbouring Slav ideals. " I shall not be long," he cried, " in confessing them." And now we have a new generation of priests, honourable men and patriots.
The one hope of the Ruthenes before the War lay in emigration and it was with those in America that Masaryk negotiated. Their little land of mountain and forest and plain was to be included in the Czechoslovak Republic of their brother Slays and, when the population should be ripe for it, autonomy was to be granted them. The Magyars who, to put it mildly, had neglected Ruthenia for a thousand years, have had the hardihood, ever since the establishment of Czechoslovakia, to denounce the Prague Government for not bestowing this autonomy at once. A people kept in such ignorance of the world that when the American Red Cross distributed chocolate among them in the winter of 1918 they mixed it with water and painted the outside walls of their huts with it, a people with not the least experi- ence of politics, local or otherwise—such a people has to receive a certain amount of education before it can make use of autonomy. Now, in the month of October, 1937, the first Diet of Ruthenia came into being ; half the members are freely and secretly elected ; the Governor, Constantine Hrabar, a competent, genial personage, is a Ruthene, an erstwhile Greek-Catholic priest, then a banker and mayor of lilhorod, which is Ruthenia's capital ; and a good deal of the administration has been handed over to him and the Diet Much remains to be done. For one thing most of the Ruthenes do not yet know what they are, a branch of the Ukrainian race. The clumsy and unfortunate name which was given to their land—Pod Karpatska Rus (Sub-Car- pathian Russia)—has caused them to believe that they are Russians, and this has been encouraged by Hungarian propaganda which, foreseeing somewhat optimistically Der Tag when Ruthenia will return to them, would sooner have the Ruthenes regard themselves as the kinsfolk of distant Russia than of the adjacent Ukrainia. The belief of the Ruthenes that they are Russians is not founded on knowledge there has been considerable misgiving about the language of instruction in the Ruthene schools, and when the Czechoslovak Ministry of Education sent down a repre- sentative who was to discuss, here and there, with Ruthene parents what the language in the schools should be, he reported that in one of the larger places he kept the parents in a room with a pile of Ukrainian and Russian books, telling them that he would be back in half an hour and bidding them in the meantime to select the language. On his return be found that the books had all been correctly separated and the parents, pointing to the Russian ones, declared that they were hostile to the teaching of that Ukrainian language. Then they pointed to the Ukrainian volumes and expressed the desire to have this Russian language taught. The learned and jovial head of a cultural institute at UZhorod told me, a few weeks ago, that he was going to address a great assemblage of Ruthenes, for the purpose of explaining to them what they are.
Upon the people's physique when Ruthenia joined the Republic, it is interesting to have the observations of a medical man. Dr. Girsa, the present Czechoslovak Minister in Belgrade, told me the other day that the average Ruthene in 1919 was found to be quite incapable of performing the same amount of agricultural labour as a Czech or a Slovak. The food on which he had existed was insufficient and the Red Cross kitchens, established throughout the province in 1919, were two or three years in teaching the Ruthene women how to cook. . . . And it has not been a very easy task to induce the Ruthenes to live hygienically—so much leeway had to be made up. The peasants were disinclined to inform the authorities of typhoid cases and dysentery ; they have even attacked with knives the doctors who come with an ambulance for the sufferers. And when the sick man is removed, sometimes by force, it has been found that his relatives, afraid lest in the hospitals his embroidered Sunday clothes and linen will be spoiled, have removed these, of course not disinfected, to the house of a neighbour. But gradually the Ruthenes, both in their mountains and in the plains—where the marshy districts are being strenuously regulated—can be said to have grown more amenable to the doctors and more healthy. Hospitals, large and small, have been erected all over the province ; one of the first is at Berehovo on the Hungarian frontier, and any Hungarian casualty is permitted to cross the frontier without a passport and if unable to pay, he receives gratuitous treatment.
One of the most admirable of the gratuitous institutions in Ruthenia is the Jasina wood-school, where shepherd lads, who want to do something more than to carve bits of wood while tending their flocks, may be trained to be carpenters, sculptors, artists in wood or other materials. One of the schools, the existence of which should make a neighbouring country blush, is a large State-supported school at Mukacevo, where all the instruction is given to the orthodox Jews in Hebrew, except for an hour or two a week of Czech, so that the pupils will not be handicapped in seeking for employment in the Civil Service. In many Ruthenian places the Jews who are not so strictly orthodox frequent the Czech school, and what can be more amiable than the attitude of the Czech children, who, because the Jews do not present themselves on a Saturday, refuse to leap ahead of them in the path of knowledge and likewise refrain from coming to school ? And at an experimental farm near Berehovo I met a Czech official, a Roman Catholic who on October 28th, the national day of independence, does not go to church but to the synagogue, because, he told me, the rabbi is particularly eloquent.
A good deal remains to be done in Ruthenia and a good deal to be undone. For instance, in Uihorod, a town of no great size, there are some forty newspapers. One could do without some of them, especially without the so-called " Revolver-Press," the papers of which gain their livelihood not by what they print but by the scandalous material which comes into their office and which they consent, for a con- sideration, not to publish.
" If someone," says a Ruthene proverb, " pulls you by the hair, do not resist." The Czechs and the Slovaks have been pulling the Ruthenes—and not too violently—to a higher life and those who resist are comparatively few.
Previous page
