Just as at one time before World War I Rusynism stubbornly pushed its way into the Ukrainian environment, so now has it unexpectedly become aggressive again. In the very center of this development stands one word: Magocsi…
-Valentyn Moroz¹

At the [First World] Congress we felt that we are a people, that we are a force, and that we must unite our strengths with all Rusyns in the world. Professor Magocsi gave us special help in that he explained in a scholarly fashion that we are Rusyns, that we are a people.
-Vasyl' Sochka²

The role of the intellectual in East Central Europe as a political catalyst has a strong tradition throughout the twentieth century. Tomáš G. Masaryk, the founder of Czechoslovakia in 1918 and its first philosopher-president, set forth a precedent in which scholarly thought was energized into practical political action. The extension of Soviet power into the region and its accompanying Marxist-Leninist doctrine suppressed open political and social dialogue, but could not completely extinguish intellectual, regional, religious, and ethnic consciousness beneath the seemingly monolithic surface. Some intellectuals, such as the Polish historian of philosophy Leszek Kołakowski, fled to the West, later to see their positions vindicated by developments in the homeland. Others, such as the Polish Catholic intellectual Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the Czech playwright Václav Havel, and the Lithuanian professor of music history Vytautas Landsbergis, attained positions of national political leadership after the demise of Communism. Intellectuals such as professors continue their role as models of leadership in East Central Europe.

Professor Paul Robert Magocsi, Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Toronto, is the person most responsible for the active promotion of the study of the Carpatho-Rusyn ethnic group in the world today. His scholarship, in its depth and breadth, towers over the scant attention paid to the Rusyns by other scholars, especially those in the West. Indeed, Professor Magocsi is referred to in East Central Europe both pejoratively and admiringly as "mohuchyj Magocsi"--"Mighty Magocsi."³ Yet this appellation is not simply due to his thorough and prodigious record of publication. Since 1989, various organizations in East Central Europe have asserted the cultural and linguistic rights of Carpatho-Rusyns as a distinct people in several countries. Most of them credit Professor Magocsi with giving them with the self-confidence to act by providing the necessary historical framework of their people.

The controversy over Magocsi's work includes a number of related but distinct areas. The Carpatho-Rusyn question had long been considered resolved by modern scholarship and administrative decree, especially in the European homeland, in favor of a Ukrainian ethnic identity. Professor Magocsi's scholarship has analyzed the ethnic alternatives traditionally available to the Rusyns, including that of a distinct East Slavic identity. He has also considered the present-day reality of Rusyn identity, especially in response to the fact that that the Ukrainian orientation has been explicitly rejected by many people of Rusyn origin in such places as the former Yugoslavia and the United States. He credits the clumsy official implementation of ukrainianization in Communist Czechoslovakia with causing substantial Rusyn assimilation into the Slovak ethnos. Magocsi has repeatedly shown that the conclusions of ethnographers and linguists about Rusyns were ineptly and insensitively imposed on the Rusyn masses, who largely did not feel the same way.

Magocsi has been at times criticized for overtly favoring data that supports his views, but it is rather his role as a scholar and how, according to some, he has used that position which has brought the most intense diatribes against him. The question of whether the Carpatho-Rusyns are an East Slavic ethnic group distinct from Ukrainians is problematic, and is best suited to scholarly journals in the fields of ethnography and linguistics. On the other hand, the question of whether Carpatho-Rusyns exist is no longer an appropriate inquiry, since people who feel that they are Rusyn have asked for official recognition. Hence, it would seem that the most pertinent questions surrounding the controversial figure of Magocsi are whether he has created (or recreated) the Rusyns and, if he did, how has he used scholarship to create and promote this viewpoint?

Who are the Rusyns?
The Rusyns as a group have been treated peripherally by most scholars and usually as part of larger Ukrainian and East Slavic topics. Much of the reliable scholarship about them can be credited to Magocsi, especially for English-reading audiences. Carpatho-Rusyns have been known in various times and places as Carpatho-Ruthenians, Ruthenes, Transcarpathian Ukrainians, Carpatho-Russians, Uhro-Rusins, Rusnaks, and, in Poland, Lemkos. They speak a number of related East Slavic dialects that linguists have in the past not hesitated to treat as belonging to Ukrainian.⁴ The dialects spoken by Carpatho-Rusyns are Lemko, Transcarpathian, and in part Boiko and Hutsul. The first two, which represent the vast majority of Carpatho-Rusyn speakers, differ substantially from standard Ukrainian, and their vocabularies include a large number of loanwords from neighboring languages.⁵

Concomitant with the Rusyns' East Slavic linguistic grouping is their traditional adherence to Eastern Christianity. The origin of the terms Rusyn, Rusnak, and Ruthenian implies an association with the medieval cultural entity known as Kievan Rus', and its inclusion in the Byzantine Orthodox sphere of Christianity. The present-day Rusyns are divided in their religious allegiance between Eastern Orthodoxy and Greek Catholicism, formerly known as Uniatism.⁶ The Greek Catholic Church, which came about in the Subcarpathian region as a result of the 1646 Union of Uzhhorod, had until World War II been considered to be the national religious identity of the Rusyns, since it included the vast majority of believers and produced much of the region's native intelligentsia.

Carpatho-Rusyns are presently spread across the central Carpathian Mountains in a region that includes areas of northeastern Slovakia (officially 49,000, estimated 130,000), southern Poland (estimated 60,000), and the majority of the Transcarpathian oblast' of Ukraine (estimated 650,000).⁷ Rusyn villages also exist in Romania (officially 1,000, estimated 20,000) and Hungary (estimated 3,000). A large number of Rusyns from what is now southeastern Slovakia resettled in the Vojvodina (Bačka and Srem) region of Yugoslavia and Slavonia in Croatia in the eighteenth century (officially 19,000, estimated 25,000 in Yugoslavia; officially 3,500, estimated 5,000 in Croatia). This group of Rusyns has maintained its ethnic cohesiveness, and in its cultural life employs a variant of literary Rusyn standardized in the early twentieth century.⁸ Significant numbers of Rusyns have also settled in other parts of Slovakia and the Czech Republic, where most have been linguistically assimilated (officially 1,700, estimated 12,000 in the Czech Republic). Rusyn settlers in Canada have mostly become members of the existing Ukrainian or Slovak communities (estimated 20,000).⁹

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¹ Anabazys (Toronto) no. 1 (1990): 7. Valentyn Moroz was a prominent anti-Soviet Ukrainian dissident who as a result of international intervention was released and sent to the West in the late 1970s. ▲
² Ruske slovo (Novi Sad, Yugoslavia), 26 June 1991. Vasyl' Sochka is a poet and literary historian prominent in the Rusyn movement in Ukraine's Transcarpathian region during the 1990s. ▲
³ Volodymyr Fedynyshynets'' Ukrainian language biography of Magocsi, Istorychna metafora profesora Magochiya (Uzhhorod: Patent, 1995), frequently employs the phrase positively. ▲
⁴ George Y. Shevelov, A Historical Phonology of the Ukrainian Language (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag/Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1979), 761-764. ▲
⁵ Alexander Bonkáló, The Rusyns (New York: East European Monographs/Columbia University Press), 80. ▲
⁶ The term "Uniate" is now considered a pejorative among Greek Catholics. ▲
⁷ These statistics are from a pamphlet by Magocsi, Carpatho-Rusyns (Orwell, Vermont: Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center, 1995). The official statistics from Slovakia (1991 census) categories refer to people who identified their native tongue as Rusyn. The Ukrainian government does not differentiate Rusyns from Ukrainians. ▲
⁸ The Vojvodinian Rusyn literary language presents a dilemma for linguists. Although it is written in the Cyrillic alphabet and strongly influenced in its vocabulary by East Slavic, it is nonetheless most probably a dialect of West Slavic Slovak. The population, however, identifies itself as Rusyn. A much smaller number feels that the group is Ukrainian. For the Vojvodinian Rusyn linguistic viewpoint see Ljubomir Medejši, "The Problem of Cultural Borders in the History of Ethnic Groups: The Yugoslav Rusyns," in Magocsi, ed., The Persistence of Regional Cultures (New York: East European Monographs/Columbia University Press, 1993), 139-162. For a linguistic summary see Jiři Marvan, "Vojvodina's Rusinian and Its Ukrainian Constituent," Journal of Ukrainian Studies, no. 18 (Edmonton, Alberta, 1985): 73-81. Another supporter of the Slovak linguistic classification is Wiesław Witkowski, "Commentary," in Magocsi, ed., The Persistence of Regional Cultures, 187-190. ▲
⁹ Magocsi, Our People: Carpatho-Rusyns and Their Descendants in North America (Toronto: Multicultural Society of Ontario, 1984), 56-57. ▲

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