After the number of Rusyns in Transcarpathia (the Transcarpathian oblast' of Ukraine), the second largest group of potential Rusyns resides in the United States (officially 12,500, estimated 620,000).¹⁰ Accurately assessing the number of Rusyn-Americans has proven especially difficult because of intermarriage and the arrival of many immigrants who were either misidentified by immigration authorities or began to identify themselves as some other nationality later. Magocsi has defined someone as being of Rusyn origin if he or she can identify at least one great-grandparent as originating in a village that once identified itself as Rusyn. The American diaspora is extremely important in Rusyn studies, since "Uhro-Rusins" and "Galician Rusins" have traditionally chosen not to form common associations. This separation has been the subject of much of Magocsi's scholarship on immigration. Some proponents of the Ukrainian orientation in the homeland claim the American-Rusyn community is the primary funding source for Magocsi's Rusyn program.

Origins of the Rusyns
Like their present day ethnic status, theories of the origin of the Rusyns in the Carpathians are not without controversy. Much of the evidence is circumstantial and gleaned from sources about other topics. Throughout his writings, Magocsi has presented numerous possible theories and assessed their relative reliability. The first controversy is when did the Rusyns arrive in their homeland. Popular Rusyn myths place them in the Carpathian Mountains during the sixth century Slavic migrations, thus predating the arrival of the Magyars in 895 (the autochthonous theory). Other writers have insisted that the Rusyns arrived only with the Magyars to serve as border guards, and as proof they cite Magyar sources and place names (however, not in the Carpathians).¹¹ There is also the question of the relationship of the White Croats in Galicia to the Carpatho-Rusyns, Kievan Rus', Great Moravia, and the East, West, and South Slavs.¹²

The most likely origin of the Carpatho-Rusyns is found in the slow, successive migration southward from Galicia through passes in the Lower Beskyd ranges of the Carpathians, and from Podolia through Transylvania. Although Rusyns may have been present prior to the thirteenth century, Subcarpathian settlement was greatest between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. Rusyn settlement at that time came from two directions: from the north (Galicia), most especially during the sixteenth century; and from the south, the so-called "Vlach migration" of shepherds, who moved through the Carpathians from what is today Romania.¹³ The "Vlachs" arriving in Carpathian Rus' were not of Walachian-Romanian origin, but Slavs who were attracted to the privileges given to shepherds who tended sparsely settled lands.¹⁴

The Early Years
On January 26, 1945, as Soviet troops were consolidating their hold on the Carpatho-Rusyn homeland, Paul Robert Magocsi was born in New Jersey. It would not be the only time that events in Magocsi’s life coincided with milestones in the lives of Europe’s Rusyns. He was exposed to the "Rusyn question" through his maternal grandparents, who were born in Subcarpathian Rus’. Magocsi recalls that throughout his childhood, his grandfather explicitly referred to his nationality as "Carpatho-Rusyn."¹⁵ “Ukrainian” was never mentioned as an alternate, nor was the term "Ukraine" brought up in his grandfather’s frequent reminiscences. Magocsi’s father’s family was of Hungarian background.¹⁶

As the result of academic scholarships that supplemented his parents’ limited means, Magocsi attended Rutgers University after a public school education.¹⁷ It was at Rutgers that Magocsi first encountered Ukrainian history, reading Hrushevs’kyi’s History of Rus’-Ukraine and becoming captivated with the Zaporozhian Cossacks. His first published article was on Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi while a student at Rutgers. Magocsi organized the Ukrainian Students’ Club and sponsored Ukrainian poets and academics to speak. Because Ukrainian was not yet taught in American universities, he studied the language on his own.

In 1967, after completing a Master’s Degree in American History, Magocsi was invited to study at Princeton University by Dr. James Billington.¹⁸ His intention was to indulge himself in the era of the Zaporozhian Cossacks--sixteenth and seventeenth century Ukraine, Poland, and Lithuania. The following summer, he was asked by the Immigration Research Center at the University of Minnesota to do background work in Prešov, Czechoslovakia, with five other graduate students. Halfway through their stay in August 1968, tanks and troops of the "fraternal" Warsaw Pact nations invaded to crush Dubček’s Prague Spring. The events during the next three weeks altered Magocsi’s academic focus for the rest of his career.

Slovak reaction to the Warsaw Pact invasion partially vented itself on the Rusyns. The Prague Spring had loosened the official Ukrainian grip on Rusyn cultural institutions and a distinct Rusyn identity began to emerge. The use of standard literary Ukrainian was no longer a prerequisite to get published, and parents began demanding the introduction of Rusyn into elementary schools to stem the tide of slovakization. However, after the Warsaw Pact invasion of August 21, the Rusyns (and Ukrainians, for that matter) were seen by some Slovaks as a foreign, eastern, pro-Soviet element. It was pointed out that Rusyns comprised a large proportion of the state security apparatus, and few failed to notice that Vasyľ Biľak, a party official who was instrumental in coordinating the invasion, was of Rusyn origin.¹⁹

Like Aleksander Dukhnovych, the Rusyn priest and writer who was impressed by the tsarist Russian intervention in Hungary in 1849, Paul Magocsi had witnessed an invasion from the east that forever altered his attitudes.²⁰ Future graduate work in Soviet Moscow or Kiev turned out to be unappealing to him. Magocsi had been among the Czechs, Slovaks, and Rusyns at one of their darkest hours, and he could not help being sympathetic. A switch in his concentration from Ukrainian studies to the Rusyns would allow him to study in Prague and Prešov rather than the Soviet Union. It was also in the summer of 1968 that he met his future wife, Maria Čuvanová, a native of the Rusyn village of Vyšná Jablonka in Slovakia. He and Maria were married in 1971, and began returning every summer to visit her family in the Prešov Region.

Magocsi's Professional Career
In 1971, Professor Omeljan Pritsak invited Magocsi to become a research fellow in the newly-created Harvard Ukrainian Studies Program. With access to Harvard’s extensive Ukrainian and Rusyn sources, Magocsi wrote prolifically on a variety of Ukrainian topics and honed his skills as a writer and researcher. It was also during the 1970s that he was appointed for three years to Harvard's exclusive Society of Fellows. In 1980, the University of Toronto created a Chair (professorship) in Ukrainian studies, partially, but not exclusively, funded by Canada’s Ukrainian community and offered it to Magocsi.²¹ It was a controversial appointment, since much of his major work had been in Rusyn studies, including his monumental The Shaping of a National Identity: Subcarpathian Rus', 1848-1948. He had also founded the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center in 1978 for the dissemination of materials among Rusyn-Americans. He remains the current president.

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¹⁰ Carpatho-Ruthenian as a separate rubric has only appeared in the United States census in 1990. ▲
¹¹ Bonkáló, 9. ▲
¹² Volodymyr Fedynyshynets', Our Peaceful Rusyn Way (Prešov: Rusyns'ka obroda, 1992), 104. ▲
¹³ Magocsi, The Rusyns of Slovakia (New York: East European Monographs/Columbia University Press, 1993), 13. ▲
¹⁴ Slovak historians such as Ľ. Haraksim, J. Benko, and F. Uličný ascribe Rusyn settlement in Slovakia to the Walachian Act. See Jana Božová and František Gutek, Drevené kostolíky v okolí Bardejove (Wooden Churches in the Vicinity of Bardejov) (Bardejov: Sajancy, 1997), 25. ▲
¹⁵ Magocsi, "An Interview with Professor Paul Robert Magocsi," conducted by Oles Mushynka (Toronto, 28 March 1993). Orwell, Vermont: Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center, 1993: 4. ▲
¹⁶ Although it is tempting to find Slavic cognates for "Magocsi," the name is of Magyar origin. On the other hand, Magocsi's paternal grandfather, Alexander Mágocs, came from the Greek Catholic village of Beregdároc (in present-day Hungary along the border with Ukraine's Transcarpathia), which was originally a Rusyn-speaking village magyarized during the nineteenth century. ▲
¹⁷ Fedynyšynec', Istoryčna metafora profesora Magočija, 26-27. ▲
¹⁸ The present Librarian of Congress. ▲
¹⁹ Biľak, however, considered himself to be Slovak. ▲
²⁰ Alexander Dukhnovych was a Greek Catholic priest whose experience with the Russian army that arrived at the request of the Austrian emperor to crush the Magyar anti-Habsburg revolt made him a Russophile. He subsequently believed that the Rusyns should choose Russian as their “high” literary language. ▲
²¹ Fedynyshynets', 34. ▲

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