Imaging a Homeland: Carpatho-Rusyn Immigrants in the US React to the Czechoslovak Option

• In Event: Czechoslovakia at 100 I: Envisioning and Imaging Subcarpathian Rus'

Abstract

In the earliest decades of their life in the United States, relations between Rusyn and Slovak immigrants were frequent and generally productive. But Czech immigrants neither settled in the same places most Rusyn immigrants went, nor had had any notable higher-level contacts with them. The Carpatho-Rusyn community’s most widely-circulated newspaper, Amerikansky Russky Viestnik, scarcely made mention of Czechs until 1916. Yet by late 1918, American Rusyn leaders were laying a foundation for their homeland countrymen entering into a new state with the Czechs and Slovaks. In the space of just a few months of the concept of the first Czechoslovak Republic being known to American Rusyns, a plebiscite conducted in some segments of the community resulted in a strong, though not overwhelming, preference for inclusion into the nascent Czechoslovak state. The results would prove decisive in the fate of post-Austro-Hungarian Subcarpathian Rus’. This presentation will examine why Czechoslovakia became and did, or did not, remain their preferred option. What was the early reaction to the new state on the part of the Rusyn American secular and religious press? How was a campaign around the plebiscite conducted in the Rusyn immigrant media? Can the local results be explained by the geographical background, prevailing ethnonational orientation, and leaders in those communities?  It will also consider the extent to which the American Carpatho-Rusyn community integrated itself into the greater Czechoslovak community in diaspora, and in the First Czechoslovak Republic.

Author

• Richard D. Custer, Independent Scholar