There is Great Russia - the Great Russian Fatherland. There is Belaya Rus - Belarus, Belarus. There is Subcarpathian Rus - Transcarpathia, where the highest Carpathian mountain Goverla is located, formerly called Ruska. Here live Subcarpathian Rusyns. There is Pokut Rus - Pokut'e, the land of Hutsul Rusnaks. And all these nationalities, before, and to some extent are now referred to as Rusyns. Boikos, Lemks, Dolinyans, too, had previously been Rusyns. Many Transcarpathians and now retain this introspection.Rusians lived in Galicia (Galicia). In memory of them, the name of the town Rava-Russkaya in the Lviv region has been preserved. Yes, and in the old part of Lviv there is a Russian street.
AT FIRST DIDN'T KNOW UP THE UKRAINIANS
Where did the Galician Ruthenians disappear, are they Russian Galicians? After all, until 1914, the entire local population was almost universally called Rusyns. Poles, Jews, Germans made up mostly urban population. And the “Ukrainians” (Mazepians) were called the representatives of the then small anti-Russian political movement, inspired by the Polish nationalists and the Austro-Hungarian authorities. The goals of the Poles and the Austrians were different. The Poles, who in the times of the Polish – Lithuanian Commonwealth from the 13th to the end of the 18th century ruled the lands now called Ukrainian, sought to separate their Russian subjects from their compatriots in the Moscow State. For this, the term “Ukraine” (outskirts of Poland) was used, which was transformed from a territorial concept into a national-political concept. This was facilitated by the mass Polish terror and the imposition of Catholicism, Uniatism.
Polish figures Jan Pototsky and Tadeusz Chatsky at the turn of the XVIII – XIX centuries in their works tried to justify the contrived difference between the Ukrainians, to whom they attributed the Little Russians and the Galicians to the Great Russians.
The Habsburg monarchy, which seized the Russian lands of Transcarpathia and Galicia, after the annexation of Hungary in the 16th – 17th centuries and the division of Poland in the 1772 – 1795, had other reasons. Initially, the Austrians wanted to oppose the Russian population to their former masters - the Poles and the Magyars. Especially in 1846 – 1849, when Poles and Hungarians tried to rebel against the Hapsburgs.
The Galician Ruthenians helped the Austrian authorities suppress Polish performances, and the Subcarpathian Ruthenians helped to pacify the Magyars. This was especially evident during the “Galician Massacre” of 1846, when Ruthenian peasants formed detachments and, with the assistance of the Austrian authorities, massively killed the hated Polish gentry.
During the campaign of the Russian Imperial Army in Hungary in 1849, the Russian population of Galicia and Transcarpathia first met with the Russian soldiers and realized their identity with the Eastern brothers. All this contributed to the "Russian Renaissance" in Galicia. Formed Rusin, Markian Shashkevich founded the Russophile society “Russian Matica”, published in Russian the almanac “Rusalka Dnestrov”.
In 1866, the Galician enlightener Ioann Naumovich proudly wrote in the Russian-language Lviv journal Slovo: “All the efforts of diplomacy and Poles to make us a special nation of Uniate Ruthenes turned out to be futile ... Rus Galitskaya, Ugorsk, Kiev, Moscow, Tobolsk, etc. from the point of view ethnographic view historical, linguistic, literary, ceremonial - this is one and the same Russia ... We cannot separate the Chinese wall from our brothers and refuse ... communication with the whole Russian world. We are no longer the Rusyns of 1848; we are real Russians. ”
Russian cultural and educational societies, political organizations, newspapers, magazines, and almanacs were created in Galicia. By the beginning of the twentieth century, 17 newspapers and 50 magazines were published here in Russian. And if the Ruthenian publications, for example, “Galician’ ”, При Prikarpatskaia Rus’, were published at the expense of subscribers, then the Ukrainian Dilo and Ruslan existed on the allowances of the Austrian Foreign Ministry and did not use the general public interest.
The Russian movement gradually from cultural and educational turned into a political plane. The program of the Russian Rada, a party of Russian Galicians, adopted in March 1871, proclaimed: “Our three-million Russian people living under the Austrian scepter are only one part of the same Russian people, little, white and great Russian.”
Using the old and proven imperial principle of divideetivpera ("Divide and rule"), the Austrians for some time put up with the Russian movement as a counterweight to the Polish movement. But the upcoming historical upheavals, primarily the alleged conflict with the Russian Empire, forced the Austro-Hungarian monarchy to begin the transformation and conversion of the Russian Galicians into Ukrainians hostile to both Poland and Russia.
RUSOPHOBSKY DASHEN INTO THE FIRST WORLD WAR
On the eve of the First World War, the Austrian General Staff dealt with this problem. Administrative and police forces for this was clearly not enough. It was necessary to involve the army, which later played its bloody role. At the same time, the work on the development and strengthening of the Ukrainian Galician community, formed from Uniates and other renegades, of the Ukrainian, “independent” movement, whose members symbolically called themselves “Mazepians” and dreamed that the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomerí (Vladimer) would receive the same federal rights in Austro-Hungarian Empire as the Hungarian Kingdom. Ukrainian organizations of Galicia under the leadership of Metropolitan Uniate Andriy Sheptytsky and Ukrainophile Mikhail Hrushevsky who moved from Russia, who headed the Gorky Association. Taras Shevchenko, heavily funded by the General Staff of the Hapsburg Army.It should be noted that the leadership of the Greek Catholic Uniate Church, ignoring the tendency of its lower clergy to russinism and even to return to Orthodoxy, stubbornly inculcated among the congregation Russophobic, Ukrainophile ideology.
But the Russian organizations of the region received support only from individuals. Even in 1911, Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin expelled the Russian People’s Party, which successfully carried out the election campaign and delegated its deputies to the imperial parliament, 11 thousand rubles. to cover election expenses on my own, and not on the Russian government that he headed. For those times it was a huge amount.
In August 1914, the First World War began. Russophiles were waiting for Russian troops as liberators from the centuries-old yoke of foreigners. The Ukrainophiles began to form the "Corps of Ukrainian sichovykh shooters" (OSS) to help Austro-Magyars. They hoped that the Habsburg army would seize Little Russia and Kuban, spreading their possessions to the Caucasus, turning these territories into Austrian Ukraine, where they would be under the Austrian patronage to rule the Ukrainians' renegades.
From the first days of the war, the Austrian authorities closed down and defeated all Russian organizations and printing houses, obliging the entire Russian population of Galicia to be called Ukrainians. It got to the point that the Galicians, who answered the question about nationality, that they, they say, Rusyns, were immediately hanged, shot or stabbed with bayonets. Hungarian Honvedas (soldiers) were especially rampant in this respect. The organized Galician-Russian movement was crushed, its representatives were subjected to repression.
The “sabbath” of denunciations and the personal involvement of Ukrainophiles, Poles and Jews, who tried to prove their loyalty to the Austrians in the beatings and murders of the Rusyns, the looting of their property, began. For each denunciation of the Russophile, the Hapsburg authorities issued from 50 to 500 crowns. So interethnic conflict in Galicia has long been mixed pretty. One of the survivors of the victims of terror, a former prisoner of the Austrian concentration camp "Talerhof" Vasily Vavrik later testified:“In the village of Voloshin, Bobrk district, the Magyars were tied with a rope to the gun of a peasant Ivan Terletsky and dragged him along the road. They choked with laughter and joy, seeing the body of a Russian villager, beating on sharp stones and hard ground, bleeding with thick blood. In the village of Bukovina of the same county, the Magyar hussars shot the 55-year-old peasant Mikhail Kot, the father of the 6 children, without trial and interrogation.
And what inhuman revenge was happening in the village of Tsunev, Gorodoskiy district! There, Austrian warriors arrested 60 peasants and 80 women with children. The men were separated from the women and set them by the trees. The Romanian soldier threw a noose around their necks and hung them one by one. A few minutes later, the rest of the soldiers removed the bodies, and the living were punished with bayonets. Mothers, wives and children witnessed this savage reprisal. Is it possible to put into words their despair? No, there are no words and strength for this!
In the village of Zaluzhye of the same district, soldiers brutally shot 5 peasants: Ivan Koval, Ivan Mikhaylishin, Grigory Sneda, Stanislav Dakhnovich and Vasily Stetsyk, and in the nearby village Velikopol, from the 70, arrested peasants, Madjaras put on a string of visors, and I’m looking at what I was looking for, I’m looking at what I’m looking for when I’m looking for options on what I’m looking for: Kmetya, Maria Kmet, Pavel Chaban, who earlier had broken arms. And that was not enough for them! As they left, they took the young girls with them.
Every day the brutal slaughter of the bloody work of the executioners took on all the big sizes. In the village of Kuzmina, Dobromilsky district, Austrians hammered iron hooks into the walls of the huts and hung people on them. One day, 30 peasants were hanged. In the village of Trostyanets they tortured the death of Matthew Kassian, Ivan and Evstafiy Klimovsky and the shepherd Dudu. In the village of Kvasenin, a rabid officer shot down the peasant Pavel Korostensky only because he could not explain to him where Russian intelligence had gone.
In the village of Kretsovaya Volya, soldiers hanged on the willow of a peasant Peter Tkach. All these horrors happened in Dobromilsky district. On the denunciation of the gendarme of Holyavia in the village of Vygoda, Dolinsky district, peasants were hanged: Matvey Petrik, Ivan Gainiuk, Osip Fediniak, Dorofey Sosnik, Elena Koverdan. Together with the gendarme, a degenerate Vinnytskyi, a stunned “independent rampant”, raged in the outskirts, and he was guided in his insignificant deeds not so “by the idea” as by an insatiable thirst for profit: who among those arrested gave a rich ransom for himself that he set free; who had no money, he ended his life on a hook.
Based on the verdict of the military court, the gallows died: Lev Kobylyansky, a great clerk from Sinechola, Dolinsky district, and Panteleimon Zabyak, a resident of the same village, the father of 5 children. Together with them, Roman Berezovsky, the parish priest in Protses of Zhidachevskiy Uyezd, the father of 2 children, hung on a rope. For the priest and the peasants there was not the slightest guilt.
There was no village in Zholkovsky district where a peaceful land plowman or an intellectual worker would not pay with his life. Austrian intelligence stumbled upon Nabak the priest, who was traveling from Mogilyan to Nagortsy. The punishers blindfolded him, tied him to a tree and shot him. Neither the prayers nor the tears of the daughter returning home with her father helped. The deacon was stabbed with bayonets. The priest was forbidden to be buried in the village. His body lay in the 5 field for days, and only after the flight of the Austrian regiment did the Russian regimental priest bury him.
Having entered the village of Peredrymikhi, the Magyars burned the whole peasant good, did not spare the school, and tortured them to death with severe torture: Grigory Savitsky Ilya Salo, Mikhail Losik, Alexey Kazak, Ekaterina Valko and beaten many. People died in the fire. In sec. The rivers Austrians hanged a peasant Prokopovich, in with. Zebolki killed the peasant Peter Povoroznik.
In the settlements of Lipovitsa, Kulikovo, Sulimov, Batyatychi, purely devilish pogroms were organized. Among the scammers was a Ukrainian teacher, Ivan Sherstylo from Sulimov, who gave the Austrian gendarmes a few peasants and a priest, Savin Kmitsikevich, and his son. ”
Thus, the Austro-Hungarian army, ignoring international agreements and the Geneva Convention, violating the laws of war, committing war crimes and crimes against humanity, assumed both police and punitive functions, and became the forerunner of Hitler's executioners.
"Ukrainians", participants of terror, gloated and sang loyal "Kolomyyki" (ditties):
Depend the phone’s
Hang katsap zamіst dzvona.
The mouth of the young man
Black and Black
Teeth in the blood boiled,
Shnuri shia peyli.
WHEN KILLED WITH ZEDOR
In the first weeks of the war, the Austrians had already created concentration camps for the deportation and extermination of the Russian Galicians "Talerhof" and "Terezin". Thousands of people passed through these death camps, of whom 80 thousand were executed.
The newspaper "Prikarpatska Rus" in the number 1539 from 1915, published the following article:
“The brutal massacre of the“ Russophiles ”on the streets of Przemysl.
15 September 1914 in the streets of the old Russian prince Przemysl there was such an eerie and nightmarish scene, which with its immediate savagery and cruelty far surpassed all the other horrors and fury of the terror that had been used unrestrainedly against the Russian population in those terrible days.
On a white day, under the protection of the state gendarmerie, among the many thousands of cultural population and the innumerable serf garrison were suddenly, for no reason and guilt, brutally hacked and torn by frantic soldiers and the city crowd of forty-four innocent Russian people. Moreover, this terrible reprisal not only did not cause the slightest indignation and retribution from the local Austrian authorities, but even, on the contrary, received from the lips of the supreme chief of these latter, the notorious commandant of the fortress General Kusmanek, ...
In view of the exceptional and characteristic ugliness and brightness of this nightmarish event, the outraged memory of which will pass, of course, in our long-suffering people, from clan to genus, we cite a number of messages and memories about it that appeared at different times and from different sides in periodicals.
The first report about the terrible slaughter in Przemysl received the Lviv newspaper “Prikarpatska Rus” only at the beginning of 1915 from a person who was at that time in Peremyshl, and then taken to the depths of Austria and fleeing to Switzerland from there:
“In Przemysl, we had to suffer particularly from local Mazepians, Poles and Jews, as well as from Magyar soldiers. But even worse was another party of our arrested in Przemysl. At 2 one o'clock in the afternoon, at a distance of any 400 steps from the police directorate, a crowd of local Mazepians, Poles and Jews, encouraged by Magyar soldiers, with such frenzy attacked the arrested Russian peasants and intellectuals who were under convoy, including the total number of 42 people that 40 of them were right there on the streets torn to death and only 2 people survived. Among those killed was also an 17-year-old girl, a student of 7 cells. gymnasium, Maria Ignatievna Mokhnatskaya, daughter of the parish priest in the village. Voytkova Dobromilskogo County.
The battle on the line Jan-Gorodok ended with a new defeat for the Austrian army. Retreating to Przemysl, the Austrian troops arrested local residents suspected of “Russophilism” on the way from Gorodok to the Ship's Cherry 48 local Russians, and drove them under a strong convoy to the fortress. In the motley crowd of prisoners, peasants prevailed, but there were also several railway employees and two girls, one of whom was the priest’s daughter.
In Przemysl, on Dvorsky Street, the Magyar-Honved and the infantry, riding astride, met the unfortunate. Seeing tired and exhausted Russians, they began to push them with rifle butts and ruthlessly push and beat them. The unfortunate victims, falling and drenching their blood, continued to move forward until they were driven into Semiradskoe Street, adjoining at one of the crossroads with Dvorsky Street.
Here, at houses No. 1, 2 and 3, the real, brutal beating of the arrested began. They were beaten by monveds, beaten by Magyars-infantrymen, local Jews and Mazepians, as they were, and as they were. Helping the monsters jumped out of the restaurant into the house number 1 even some hooligans. From the doors and windows, the Jews began to throw heavy beer glasses, sticks, and even unknown pieces of railroad tracks from where they came from to the poor martyrs.
The street was announced with moans and shouts ...
- Nіchtschlagen - nurschiessen (Do not beat, but shoot)! - suddenly came the harsh and shrill voice of some major.
Then the girl - the priest's daughter fell on her knees before the Crucifixion, located on the corner in the niche of the house number 4, and raising her hands to him, exclaimed:
- Mother of God, save us!
Then the Magyar soldier jumped to the unfortunate girl and hit her hard on the head with a revolver's handle, and then shot her in the forehead, after which she fell like a dead beak and fell dead ...
This shot served as a signal. The shooting started. Groans, shouts, rifle shots - everything mixed up in some wild, nightmarish chaos ...
Soldiers and Jews with frenzy continued to beat with the sticks and butts of the lifeless bodies of those killed ... Splashes of blood and brain scattered to the sides, leaving dense traces on the pavement and walls of the neighboring houses ... After beating the bodies of the unfortunate sufferers turned into a shapeless mass. They were subsequently picked up on carts and taken away somewhere. Among the dead were two unfortunate people who still showed weak signs of life, but one of them died on the way, and the other a few hours later in the hospital.
And the next day, the Jews began diligently to scrape bloody footprints from the walls and cover them with lime ... Nevertheless, at the houses of 1 and 3 No. these bloody seals of shameful and vile crimes were long seen as an eternal and indelible reproach to inhuman executioners. ”
RUSSIAN ARMY AND THEN HAS BEEN DONE BY LIBERATOR
According to some statistics, at that time, of the three million population of Galicia, two million were ethnic Rusyns — Russophiles, with a small number of “Ukrainians”. Of these, Austrian punishers killed about 200 thousand people. Is this not the genocide of the Russian national minority in Austria-Hungary? In fact, every tenth Rusyns in Galicia was destroyed for their commitment to the Russian world and Orthodoxy.
And after these brutal repressions, the world community has not yet recognized the genocide. Austro-Magyars with Jesuit cruelty carried out forced Ukrainization among their East Slavic population. If the punishers asked the Galician a question about nationality and he answered that he was a Ruthenian, he was killed or sent to concentration camps in a sadistic way. If declared that the Ukrainian, do not touch. It is curious that the prisoners "Talerhof" and "Teresina" had a choice. They were released at any time if they confirmed in writing that they belong to the Ukrainians. But almost all prisoners went to hunger and death, but did not betray their Russian identity.
Of course, many peasants and ordinary people, in order to protect themselves and their families, recognized their belonging to Ukrainians. In this way, the Russian Galicians were turned into Ukrainians, into renegades, shifters. Can you judge the weak in spirit of people for this? The question is controversial and rhetorical.
Many later renounced the forced Ukrainians and returned to the Russian identity.
Even during the census, the Polish authorities in 1931, 1 million 116 thousand people signed up with the Ruthenians. And Ukrainians-1 million 660 thousand. People. And this is after the massacres, deportations and forced emigration of the Russian population.
Therefore, the faithful Ukrainian servants of Emperor Franz Joseph II unanimously voted:
Ukrainians pute, walk,
And katsap vzhe konayut!
Ukrainians goo on gofi
And katsapy in Talerhofi.
The Russian imperial army 4 September entered Lviv and besieged Peremyshl fortress, freeing almost all of Galicia. The surviving Russian population happily greeted native troops. Peasant and church-Orthodox deputations with bread and salt came out to meet them. The passing troops threw flowers, brought treats. Many residents volunteered for the royal army. Rejoicing over the liberation from the 600-year-old foreign enslavement was universal.
Even across the ocean, the newspaper American Galicians "Sweet" wrote: "Our Lviv is Russian, our Galich is Russian!" O Lord, glory to You, out of millions of Russian hearts, all of Russia sends You my prayer prayer to You. God the great, mighty Savior, unite us, as you are one in three persons, so Russia in our parts alone will be forever. ”
Russian presence in Galicia seemed to reign forever. There was a military-civil administration of the Galician province, headed by the Governor-General, Count Georgy Bobrinsky. On the streets of Lviv and other settlements walked Russian police officers. But for the entire stay of Russian troops in the region, only 1200 arrests were made, 1568 people were sent into the depths of Russia. No civilian was sentenced to death. And this is in wartime. It should be understood that the Russians came to Carpatoria not as invaders, but as the liberators of the fraternal population. And the Russian army with civilians, in contrast to the Austro-Hungarian did not fight.
UKRAINIANS DO NOT HAVE TO FORGET THAT THEY ARE THEY IN ALL
That is why, with the withdrawal of the Russian army from Galicia in the spring of 1915, about 200 of thousands of Rusyns, who after the October Revolution served in the Carpathian units of the White Guard, left with the retreating.
Characteristically, after the collapse of Austria-Hungary in 1918, the Ukrainian Galician Army (UGA) defended the West Ukrainian People's Republic (ZUNR) in the Ukrainian-Polish 1918 – 1919 war and retreated as a result across the river Zbruch, did not actually fight on the side Simon Petliura and his UNR (Ukrainian People’s Republic) with the White Guard formations, Lieutenant General Anton Denikin. And later, after the treacherous agreement of Petliura with the Polish leader Józef Pilsudski about the transfer of Galicia to Poland, she took the side of Denikin. The regiments of the Carpathians were also in the army of Admiral Alexander Kolchak.
And after the defeat of the White Army guards, the UGA moved to the side of the Red Army to fight the Poles in the Polish-Soviet war of the 1919 – 1920 years. And began to be called Chuga (Chervona Ukrainian Galician Army). That is, the Galician Rusyns in the Russian people did not see the enemy. Neither white nor red. The main thing was to free the Galician lands from the Poles.
A separate topic is the Ukrainization of Little Russia, both by the Petliurists and by the Party and Soviet authorities. Here Ukrainization was carried out in a softer form — as a transitional phase to the formation of a single Soviet people from the peoples of the Soviet Union.
The problem of Ukrainization remains topical in our time. After the Maidan coup in Kiev in 2014, the Euro-reform authorities, like the Austrians, launched the “anti-Russian project” and sent both volunteer battalions of nationalists and the regular army against their own revolted citizens in the Donbass. Here we see that the Ukrainian army, like the Austro-Hungarian one, performs punitive-police functions not inherent in the laws of war to suppress citizens rebelled in the east of the country who are opposed to Russophobia.
Any army involved in repressions against its own population ceases to be popular ... and becomes an anti-people servant who sent its masters. This problem, the problem of the Donbass civil war, can only be solved by implementing the Minsk 2015 agreements of the year. There is no alternative to this path. Otherwise, a protracted fratricidal conflict and the collapse of Ukraine as a state, as a political, social and economic structure.
Harmful to forget the lessons of history. The past may well aim and kill the present and future. So the Russian Galicians did not disappear. Actual, but not yet officially recognized ... genocide, forced Ukrainization, other historical conflicts turned them into Ukrainians. Only a part of the East Slavic population in Transcarpathia, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Serbia, in the USA and Canada continue to call themselves Rusyns and protect the traditions of Russian ancestors.
... I would not in any way like to insult the national pride of fellow citizens who consider themselves Ukrainians, among whom I have many friends and even relatives. Few people had to cross the strip of so many foreign dominions and influences, to get an incredible number of national psychological traumas, to experience a real genocide in the early twentieth century. But I want to believe that the Ukrainians will sooner or later remember that they are Russian people, and will return to their historical sources.