The area of Western Ukraine that is to me home
Zakarpattia Oblast Ukrainian: Закарпатська область, romanized: Zakarpats'ka Oblast', also referred to as simply Zakarpattia (Ukrainian: Закарпаття; Hungarian: Kárpátalja) or Transcarpathia in English, is an oblast located in the Carpathian Mountains in western Ukraine, mostly coterminous with the historical region of Carpathian Ruthenia. Its administrative centre is the city of Uzhhorod. Other major cities within the oblast include Mukachevo, Khust, Berehove, and Chop, the last of which is home to railroad transport infrastructure.
Zakarpattia Oblast was established on 22 January 1946, following Czechoslovakia's abandonment of its claim to the territory of Subcarpathian Ruthenia (Czech and also Slovak: Podkarpatská Rus) under a treaty between Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. The territory of Subcarpathian Ruthenia was then taken over by the USSR and became part of the Ukrainian SSR.
During the Ukrainian independence referendum held in 1991, a referendum on autonomy was also held in the region. 78% of voters voted in favour of autonomy, but the region was never granted an autonomous status.
Situated in the Carpathian Mountains of western Ukraine, except the southwestern Hungarian-populated region that belongs to the Hungarian plain, Zakarpattia Oblast borders four countries: Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania. Since the Carpathian Mountains have a reputation as an important tourist and travel destination (home to many ski and spa resorts), they play a major role in the oblast's economy.
With a land area of almost 13,000 square kilometres (5,000 sq mi), the oblast is ranked 23rd by area and 15th by population; according to the 2001 Ukrainian Census, the population of Zakarpatska Oblast stood at 1,254,614. In 2022, the region's population was estimated at approximately 1,244,476 (2022 estimate). This total includes people of many nationalities, among which Hungarians, Romanians, and Rusyns constitute significant minorities in some of the province's cities, while in others, they form the majority of the population (as in the case of Berehove).
In 895, the Hungarian tribes entered the Carpathian Basin from here through the Verecke pass, and the lands of Transcarpathia were influenced by the Principality of Hungary since 895, which transformed the Kingdom of Hungary in 1000. In Transcarpathia, the Voivodeship of Maramureș, granted to a small Romanian nobility, was established in 1343. The region was reorganized into the Máramaros County in 1402.
Since 1867, it was part of the Hungarian side of Austria-Hungary until the latter's demise at the end of World War I. It approximately consisted of four Hungarian counties (comitatus): Bereg, Ung, Ugocsa, and Maramaros. This region was briefly part of the short-lived West Ukrainian National Republic in 1918. The region was occupied by Romania by the end of that year, mostly the eastern portion, such as Rakhiv and Khust. It was later recaptured by the Hungarian Soviet Republic in the summer of 1919. Finally, after the Treaty of Trianon of 1920, it became part of Czechoslovakia with a supposedly equal level of autonomy as the Slovak lands and Bohemia-Moravia-Czech Silesia (Czech lands).
The province has a unique footnote in history as the only region in the former Czechoslovakia to have had an American governor: its first governor was Gregory Zhatkovich, an American citizen who had earlier emigrated from the region and represented the Rusyn community in the U.S. Zhatkovich was appointed governor by Czechoslovakia's first president, T. G. Masaryk in 1920, and served for about one year until he resigned over differences regarding the region's autonomy. In 1928, it adopted the name of Subcarpathian Rus' (Czech: Podkarpatská Rus). Nevertheless, such autonomy was granted as late as in 1938, after detrimental events of the Munich Conference; until then, this land was administered directly from Prague by the government-appointed provincial presidents (zemští prezidenti) and/or elected governors (guvernéři).
Following the Munich Agreement, the southern part of the region was awarded to Hungary under the First Vienna Award in 1938. The remaining portion was constituted as an autonomous region of the short-lived Second Czechoslovak Republic.
After the Slovak declaration of an independent state on 14 March, the next day, Carpatho-Ukraine was proclaimed as an independent republic but was immediately occupied and annexed by Hungary, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was proclaimed a day after. Voloshyn asked Hitler for support and recognition in advance, but received no answer. The state is known as 'the one-day republic' because it did not exist more than one day. The military operations and the occupation of Carpatho-Ukraine were finished by the Hungarian troops on March 18.
The Hungarian invasion was followed by a few weeks of terror in which more than 27,000 people were shot dead without trial or investigation. Over 75,000 Ukrainians decided to seek asylum in the Soviet Union; of those, almost 60,000 died in Gulag prison camps. Others joined the Czechoslovak Army.
The major Jewish communities of the region had existed in Mukachevo, Ungvar, and Khust. During the German occupation of Hungary (March–December 1944), almost the entire Jewish population was deported; few survived the Holocaust.
In October 1944, the region was occupied by the Red Army. On 26 November 1944, the First Congress of People's Committees of Zakarpattia Ukraine took place in Mukachevo, and sham elections were organized on 10–25 November 1944. On 29 June 1945, Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš, seeking to postpone the inevitable incorporation of Czechoslovakia into the Soviet Bloc, signed a treaty formally ceding the area to the Soviet Union, and the next month it was united with the Ukrainian SSR through the "Manifest for unification with Soviet Ukraine" that was accepted by the 1st Congress of People's Committees of Sub-Carpathian Ukraine without any knowledge or approval of the common people. It was then annexed into the Soviet Union as Zakarpattia Oblast.
Between 1945 and 1947, the new Soviet authorities fortified the new borders and, in July 1947, declared Transcarpathia as "a restricted zone of the highest level", with checkpoints on the mountain passes connecting the region to mainland Ukraine.
In December 1944, the National Council of Transcarpatho-Ukraine set up a special people's tribunal in Uzhgorod to try and condemn all collaborationists with the previous governments, both Hungary and Carpatho-Ukraine. The court was allowed to hand down either 10 years of forced labour or the death penalty. Several Ruthenian leaders, including Andrej Bródy [cs] and Štefan Fencik [cs], were condemned and executed in May 1946. Avgustyn Voloshyn also died in prison. The extent of the repression showed to many Carpatho-Ruthenian activists that it was not possible to find an accommodation with the coming Soviet regime, as it had been with all previous ones.
After breaking the Greek Catholic Church in Eastern Galicia in 1946, Soviet authorities pushed for the return to Orthodoxy of Greek-Catholic parishes in Transcarpathia too, including by engineering the accident and death of recalcitrant bishop Theodore Romzha on 1 November 1947. In January 1949, the Greek Catholic Eparchy of Mukachevo was declared illegal; remaining priests and nuns were arrested, and church properties were nationalised and parcelled for public use or lent to the Russian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) as the only accepted religious authority in the region.[
Cultural institutions were also forbidden, including the Russophile Dukhnovych Society, the Ukrainophile Prosvita, and the Subcarpathian Scholarly Society. New books and publications were circulated, including the Zakarpatsk'a Pravda (130,000 copies). The Uzhhorod National University was opened in 1945. Over 816 cinemas were open by 1967 to ensure the indoctrination of the population with Marxist-Leninist propaganda. The Ukrainian language was the first language of instruction in schools throughout the region, followed by Russian, which was extensively used at the university level. Most new generations had a passive knowledge of the Rusyn language, but no knowledge about local culture. XIX-century Rusyn intellectuals were labelled as "members of the reactionary class and instruments of Vatican obscurantism." The Rusyn anthem and hymn were banned from public performance. Carpatho-Rusyn folk culture and songs, which were promoted, were presented as part of Transcarpathian regional culture as a local variant of Ukrainian culture.
As early as 1924, the Comintern had declared all East Slavic inhabitants of Czechoslovakia (Rusyns, Carpatho-Russians, Rusnaks) to be Ukrainians. As of the 1946 census, all Rusyns were recorded as Ukrainians; anyone clinging to the old label was considered a separatist and a potential counter-revolutionary.
Already in February 1945, the National Council proceeded to confiscate 53,000 hectares of land from big landowners and redistribute it to 54,000 peasant households (37% of the population). Forced collectivisation of land started in 1946; around 2,000 peasants were arrested during protests in 1948–49 and sent for forced labour in the Gulag. Collectivisation, including of mountain shepherds, was completed by May 1950. Central planning decisions set Transcarpathia to become a "land of orchards and vineyards" between 1955 and 1965, planting 98,000 hectares with little result. Attempts to cultivate tea and citrus also failed due to the climate. Most vineyards were uprooted twenty years later, during Mikhail Gorbachev's anti-alcohol campaign in 1985–87.
The Soviet period also meant the upscaling of industrialisation in Transcarpathia. State-owned lumber mills, chemical and food-processing plants widened, with Mukachevo's tobacco factory and Solotvyno's salt works as the biggest ones, providing steady employment to the residents of the region, beyond the traditional subsistence agriculture. And while traditional labour migration routes to the fields of Hungary or the factories of the North-West United States were now closed, Carpathian Ruthens and Romanians could now move for seasonal work in Russia's North and East.
The inhabitants of the oblast grew steadily in the Soviet period, from 776,000 in 1946 to over 1,2 million in 1989. Uzhgorod increased its residents fivefold, from 26,000 to 117,000, and Mukachevo likewise from 26,600 to 84,000. This population increase also reflected demographic changes.
The arrival of the Red Army meant the departure of 5,100 Magyars and 2,500 Germans, while the 15–20,000 Jewish survivors of the Holocaust also decided to move out before the borders were sealed. By 1945, around 30,000 Hungarians and Germans had been interned and sent to labour camps in Eastern Ukraine and Siberia; while amnestied in 1955, around 5,000 did not come back. In January 1946, 2,000 more Germans were deported. In return, a large number of Ukrainians and Russians moved to Transcarpathia, where they found jobs in the industry, the military, or the civilian administration. By 1989, around 170,000 Ukrainians (mainly from nearby Galizia) and 49,000 Russians were living in Transcarpathia, mainly in new residential blocks in the main towns of Uzhgorod and Mukachevo, where the dominant language had soon turned from Hungarian and Yiddish to Russian. They kept being considered newcomers (novoprybuli) due to their disconnect from the Rusyn- and Hungarian-speaking countryside.
After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine held an independence referendum in which the residents of Zakarpattia were asked about the Zakarpattia Oblast Council's proposal for self-rule. About 78% of the oblast's population voted in favour of autonomy; however, it was not granted.
At the first Presidential elections in Ukraine in 1991, voters from Transcarpathia supported Leonid Kravchuk by 58%. At the 1994 Ukrainian parliamentary election, Transcarpathia elected 9 independent MPs over 11 to the Rada. The same year, voters in the region supported the incumbent Leonid Kravchuk over Leonid Kuchma by 70.5% At the 1998 Ukrainian parliamentary election, Transcarpathia turned out to be one of the strongholds (together with Kyiv and L'viv) of Viktor Medvedchuk's Social Democratic Party of Ukraine (united), which back then ran on a moderate Ukrainian nationalist ideology. One year later, at the Presidential elections, Transcarpathian voters supported the re-election of Leonid Kuchma by 85%.
At the 2002 Ukrainian parliamentary election, voters from Transcapathia supported the Our Ukraine Bloc, in line with voters from all Western Ukraine. At the 2004 Ukrainian presidential election, Transcarpathians voted in the majority for Viktor Yushchenko. At the 2006 Ukrainian parliamentary election, voters from Transcapathia supported the Our Ukraine Bloc and the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc, in line with voters in Ciscarpatian East Galizia. At the 2007 Ukrainian parliamentary election, the Our Ukraine–People's Self-Defense Bloc linked to former President Viktor Yushchenko, won in most of the region, while the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc came out first in Uzhhorod and its raion.
On 7 March 2007, the Zakarpattia Oblast Council recognized the Rusyn ethnicity.
On October 25, 2008, 100 delegates to the Congress of Carpathian Ruthenians declared the formation of the "Republic of Carpathian Ruthenia". The prosecutor's office of Zakarpattia region filed a case against priest Dymytrii Sydor and Yevhen Zhupan (members of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) in Ukraine and in close relations with the Russkiy Mir Foundation), an Our Ukraine deputy of the Zakarpattia regional council and chairman of the People's Council of Ruthenians, on charges of encroaching on the territorial integrity and inviolability of Ukraine. On May 1, 2009, National Union Svoboda blocked the holding of the third European congress of the Carpathian Ruthenians, a pro-Russian entity.
I hope this is not too much for you to read.
Zakarpattia Oblast was established on 22 January 1946, following Czechoslovakia's abandonment of its claim to the territory of Subcarpathian Ruthenia (Czech and also Slovak: Podkarpatská Rus) under a treaty between Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. The territory of Subcarpathian Ruthenia was then taken over by the USSR and became part of the Ukrainian SSR.
During the Ukrainian independence referendum held in 1991, a referendum on autonomy was also held in the region. 78% of voters voted in favour of autonomy, but the region was never granted an autonomous status.
Situated in the Carpathian Mountains of western Ukraine, except the southwestern Hungarian-populated region that belongs to the Hungarian plain, Zakarpattia Oblast borders four countries: Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania. Since the Carpathian Mountains have a reputation as an important tourist and travel destination (home to many ski and spa resorts), they play a major role in the oblast's economy.
With a land area of almost 13,000 square kilometres (5,000 sq mi), the oblast is ranked 23rd by area and 15th by population; according to the 2001 Ukrainian Census, the population of Zakarpatska Oblast stood at 1,254,614. In 2022, the region's population was estimated at approximately 1,244,476 (2022 estimate). This total includes people of many nationalities, among which Hungarians, Romanians, and Rusyns constitute significant minorities in some of the province's cities, while in others, they form the majority of the population (as in the case of Berehove).
In 895, the Hungarian tribes entered the Carpathian Basin from here through the Verecke pass, and the lands of Transcarpathia were influenced by the Principality of Hungary since 895, which transformed the Kingdom of Hungary in 1000. In Transcarpathia, the Voivodeship of Maramureș, granted to a small Romanian nobility, was established in 1343. The region was reorganized into the Máramaros County in 1402.
Since 1867, it was part of the Hungarian side of Austria-Hungary until the latter's demise at the end of World War I. It approximately consisted of four Hungarian counties (comitatus): Bereg, Ung, Ugocsa, and Maramaros. This region was briefly part of the short-lived West Ukrainian National Republic in 1918. The region was occupied by Romania by the end of that year, mostly the eastern portion, such as Rakhiv and Khust. It was later recaptured by the Hungarian Soviet Republic in the summer of 1919. Finally, after the Treaty of Trianon of 1920, it became part of Czechoslovakia with a supposedly equal level of autonomy as the Slovak lands and Bohemia-Moravia-Czech Silesia (Czech lands).
The province has a unique footnote in history as the only region in the former Czechoslovakia to have had an American governor: its first governor was Gregory Zhatkovich, an American citizen who had earlier emigrated from the region and represented the Rusyn community in the U.S. Zhatkovich was appointed governor by Czechoslovakia's first president, T. G. Masaryk in 1920, and served for about one year until he resigned over differences regarding the region's autonomy. In 1928, it adopted the name of Subcarpathian Rus' (Czech: Podkarpatská Rus). Nevertheless, such autonomy was granted as late as in 1938, after detrimental events of the Munich Conference; until then, this land was administered directly from Prague by the government-appointed provincial presidents (zemští prezidenti) and/or elected governors (guvernéři).
Following the Munich Agreement, the southern part of the region was awarded to Hungary under the First Vienna Award in 1938. The remaining portion was constituted as an autonomous region of the short-lived Second Czechoslovak Republic.
After the Slovak declaration of an independent state on 14 March, the next day, Carpatho-Ukraine was proclaimed as an independent republic but was immediately occupied and annexed by Hungary, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was proclaimed a day after. Voloshyn asked Hitler for support and recognition in advance, but received no answer. The state is known as 'the one-day republic' because it did not exist more than one day. The military operations and the occupation of Carpatho-Ukraine were finished by the Hungarian troops on March 18.
The Hungarian invasion was followed by a few weeks of terror in which more than 27,000 people were shot dead without trial or investigation. Over 75,000 Ukrainians decided to seek asylum in the Soviet Union; of those, almost 60,000 died in Gulag prison camps. Others joined the Czechoslovak Army.
The major Jewish communities of the region had existed in Mukachevo, Ungvar, and Khust. During the German occupation of Hungary (March–December 1944), almost the entire Jewish population was deported; few survived the Holocaust.
In October 1944, the region was occupied by the Red Army. On 26 November 1944, the First Congress of People's Committees of Zakarpattia Ukraine took place in Mukachevo, and sham elections were organized on 10–25 November 1944. On 29 June 1945, Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš, seeking to postpone the inevitable incorporation of Czechoslovakia into the Soviet Bloc, signed a treaty formally ceding the area to the Soviet Union, and the next month it was united with the Ukrainian SSR through the "Manifest for unification with Soviet Ukraine" that was accepted by the 1st Congress of People's Committees of Sub-Carpathian Ukraine without any knowledge or approval of the common people. It was then annexed into the Soviet Union as Zakarpattia Oblast.
Between 1945 and 1947, the new Soviet authorities fortified the new borders and, in July 1947, declared Transcarpathia as "a restricted zone of the highest level", with checkpoints on the mountain passes connecting the region to mainland Ukraine.
In December 1944, the National Council of Transcarpatho-Ukraine set up a special people's tribunal in Uzhgorod to try and condemn all collaborationists with the previous governments, both Hungary and Carpatho-Ukraine. The court was allowed to hand down either 10 years of forced labour or the death penalty. Several Ruthenian leaders, including Andrej Bródy [cs] and Štefan Fencik [cs], were condemned and executed in May 1946. Avgustyn Voloshyn also died in prison. The extent of the repression showed to many Carpatho-Ruthenian activists that it was not possible to find an accommodation with the coming Soviet regime, as it had been with all previous ones.
After breaking the Greek Catholic Church in Eastern Galicia in 1946, Soviet authorities pushed for the return to Orthodoxy of Greek-Catholic parishes in Transcarpathia too, including by engineering the accident and death of recalcitrant bishop Theodore Romzha on 1 November 1947. In January 1949, the Greek Catholic Eparchy of Mukachevo was declared illegal; remaining priests and nuns were arrested, and church properties were nationalised and parcelled for public use or lent to the Russian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) as the only accepted religious authority in the region.[
Cultural institutions were also forbidden, including the Russophile Dukhnovych Society, the Ukrainophile Prosvita, and the Subcarpathian Scholarly Society. New books and publications were circulated, including the Zakarpatsk'a Pravda (130,000 copies). The Uzhhorod National University was opened in 1945. Over 816 cinemas were open by 1967 to ensure the indoctrination of the population with Marxist-Leninist propaganda. The Ukrainian language was the first language of instruction in schools throughout the region, followed by Russian, which was extensively used at the university level. Most new generations had a passive knowledge of the Rusyn language, but no knowledge about local culture. XIX-century Rusyn intellectuals were labelled as "members of the reactionary class and instruments of Vatican obscurantism." The Rusyn anthem and hymn were banned from public performance. Carpatho-Rusyn folk culture and songs, which were promoted, were presented as part of Transcarpathian regional culture as a local variant of Ukrainian culture.
As early as 1924, the Comintern had declared all East Slavic inhabitants of Czechoslovakia (Rusyns, Carpatho-Russians, Rusnaks) to be Ukrainians. As of the 1946 census, all Rusyns were recorded as Ukrainians; anyone clinging to the old label was considered a separatist and a potential counter-revolutionary.
Already in February 1945, the National Council proceeded to confiscate 53,000 hectares of land from big landowners and redistribute it to 54,000 peasant households (37% of the population). Forced collectivisation of land started in 1946; around 2,000 peasants were arrested during protests in 1948–49 and sent for forced labour in the Gulag. Collectivisation, including of mountain shepherds, was completed by May 1950. Central planning decisions set Transcarpathia to become a "land of orchards and vineyards" between 1955 and 1965, planting 98,000 hectares with little result. Attempts to cultivate tea and citrus also failed due to the climate. Most vineyards were uprooted twenty years later, during Mikhail Gorbachev's anti-alcohol campaign in 1985–87.
The Soviet period also meant the upscaling of industrialisation in Transcarpathia. State-owned lumber mills, chemical and food-processing plants widened, with Mukachevo's tobacco factory and Solotvyno's salt works as the biggest ones, providing steady employment to the residents of the region, beyond the traditional subsistence agriculture. And while traditional labour migration routes to the fields of Hungary or the factories of the North-West United States were now closed, Carpathian Ruthens and Romanians could now move for seasonal work in Russia's North and East.
The inhabitants of the oblast grew steadily in the Soviet period, from 776,000 in 1946 to over 1,2 million in 1989. Uzhgorod increased its residents fivefold, from 26,000 to 117,000, and Mukachevo likewise from 26,600 to 84,000. This population increase also reflected demographic changes.
The arrival of the Red Army meant the departure of 5,100 Magyars and 2,500 Germans, while the 15–20,000 Jewish survivors of the Holocaust also decided to move out before the borders were sealed. By 1945, around 30,000 Hungarians and Germans had been interned and sent to labour camps in Eastern Ukraine and Siberia; while amnestied in 1955, around 5,000 did not come back. In January 1946, 2,000 more Germans were deported. In return, a large number of Ukrainians and Russians moved to Transcarpathia, where they found jobs in the industry, the military, or the civilian administration. By 1989, around 170,000 Ukrainians (mainly from nearby Galizia) and 49,000 Russians were living in Transcarpathia, mainly in new residential blocks in the main towns of Uzhgorod and Mukachevo, where the dominant language had soon turned from Hungarian and Yiddish to Russian. They kept being considered newcomers (novoprybuli) due to their disconnect from the Rusyn- and Hungarian-speaking countryside.
After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine held an independence referendum in which the residents of Zakarpattia were asked about the Zakarpattia Oblast Council's proposal for self-rule. About 78% of the oblast's population voted in favour of autonomy; however, it was not granted.
At the first Presidential elections in Ukraine in 1991, voters from Transcarpathia supported Leonid Kravchuk by 58%. At the 1994 Ukrainian parliamentary election, Transcarpathia elected 9 independent MPs over 11 to the Rada. The same year, voters in the region supported the incumbent Leonid Kravchuk over Leonid Kuchma by 70.5% At the 1998 Ukrainian parliamentary election, Transcarpathia turned out to be one of the strongholds (together with Kyiv and L'viv) of Viktor Medvedchuk's Social Democratic Party of Ukraine (united), which back then ran on a moderate Ukrainian nationalist ideology. One year later, at the Presidential elections, Transcarpathian voters supported the re-election of Leonid Kuchma by 85%.
At the 2002 Ukrainian parliamentary election, voters from Transcapathia supported the Our Ukraine Bloc, in line with voters from all Western Ukraine. At the 2004 Ukrainian presidential election, Transcarpathians voted in the majority for Viktor Yushchenko. At the 2006 Ukrainian parliamentary election, voters from Transcapathia supported the Our Ukraine Bloc and the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc, in line with voters in Ciscarpatian East Galizia. At the 2007 Ukrainian parliamentary election, the Our Ukraine–People's Self-Defense Bloc linked to former President Viktor Yushchenko, won in most of the region, while the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc came out first in Uzhhorod and its raion.
On 7 March 2007, the Zakarpattia Oblast Council recognized the Rusyn ethnicity.
On October 25, 2008, 100 delegates to the Congress of Carpathian Ruthenians declared the formation of the "Republic of Carpathian Ruthenia". The prosecutor's office of Zakarpattia region filed a case against priest Dymytrii Sydor and Yevhen Zhupan (members of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) in Ukraine and in close relations with the Russkiy Mir Foundation), an Our Ukraine deputy of the Zakarpattia regional council and chairman of the People's Council of Ruthenians, on charges of encroaching on the territorial integrity and inviolability of Ukraine. On May 1, 2009, National Union Svoboda blocked the holding of the third European congress of the Carpathian Ruthenians, a pro-Russian entity.
I hope this is not too much for you to read.
