Transcarpathia

[citation needed] This is contrasted implicitly with Prykarpattia (Ciscarpathia; "Near-Carpathia"), an unofficial region in Ukraine, to the immediate north-east of the central area of the Carpathian Range, and potentially including its foothills, the Subcarpathian basin and part of the surrounding plains.

[citation needed] From a Hungarian (and to an extent Slovak and Czech) perspective, the region is usually described as Subcarpathia (literally "below the Carpathians"), although technically this name refers only to a long, narrow basin that flanks the northern side of the mountains.

[citation needed] The region declared its independence as Carpatho-Ukraine on March 15, 1939, but was occupied and annexed by Hungary on the same day, and remained under Hungarian control until the end of World War II.

During the tenth and for most of the eleventh century the territory remained a borderland between the Kingdom of Hungary to the south and the Kievan Rus' Principality of Halych to the north.

[15] Slavs from the north (Galicia) and east—who actually arrived from Podolia via the mountain passes of Transylvania—continued to settle in small numbers in various parts of the Carpathian borderland, which the Hungarians and other medieval writers referred to as the Marchia Ruthenorum—the Rus' March.

Prince Rostislav, a Ruthenian noble unable to continue his family's rule of Kiev, governed a great deal of Transcarpathia from 1243 to 1261 for his father-in-law, Béla IV of Hungary.

At the end of the 13th and beginning of the 14th century, during the collapse of the central power in the Kingdom of Hungary, the region was part of the domains of semi-independent oligarchs Amadeus Aba and Nicholas Pok.

The "Rus'ka rada" (or Rusyn Council), was made up of 42 representatives from the four constituent counties and headed by a chairman, Orest Sabov, and vice-chairman, Avhustyn Shtefan.

Their leader, Gregory Zatkovich, then signed the "Philadelphia Agreement" with Czechoslovak President Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, guaranteeing Rusyn autonomy upon unification with Czechoslovakia on 25 October 1918.

[23] This fighting prevented the arrival of Soviet aid, for which the Hungarian Communists hoped in vain; the Bolsheviks were also too preoccupied with their own civil war to assist.

In May 1919, a Central National Council convened in the United States under Zatkovich and voted unanimously to accept the admission of Carpathian Ruthenia to Czechoslovakia.

[c] The Hungarian left-wing writer Béla Illés claimed that the meeting was little more than a farce, with various "notables" fetched from their homes by police, formed into a "National Assembly" without any semblance of a democratic process, and effectively ordered to endorse incorporation into Czechoslovakia.

[27] According to the Czechoslovak Constitution of 1920, the former region of the Kingdom of Hungary, Ruthenian Land (Ruszka Krajna), was officially renamed to Subcarpathian Ruthenia (Podkarpatská Rus).

In 1920, the area was used as a conduit for arms and ammunition for the anti-Soviet Poles fighting in the Polish-Soviet War directly to the north, while local Communists sabotaged the trains and tried to help the Soviet side.

[citation needed] In the period 1918–1938 the Czechoslovak government attempted to bring the Subcarpathian Rus', with 70% of the population illiterate, no industry, and a herdsman way of life,[31] up to the level of the rest of Czechoslovakia.

[clarification needed] At the Paris Peace Conference, several other countries (including Hungary, Ukraine and Russia) laid claim to Carpathian Rus'.

After the German occupation of Hungary (19 March 1944) the pro-Nazi policies of the Hungarian government resulted in emigration and deportation of Hungarian-speaking Jews, and other groups living in the territory were decimated by war.

[35] According to the Soviet–Czechoslovak treaty, it was agreed that once any liberated territory of Czechoslovakia ceased to be a combat zone of the Red Army, those lands would be transferred to full control of the Czechoslovak state.

On November 26 this committee, led by Ivan Turyanitsa (a Rusyn who deserted from the Czechoslovak army) proclaimed the will of Ukrainian people to separate from Czechoslovakia and join Soviet Ukraine.

After two months of conflicts and negotiations the Czechoslovak government delegation departed from Khust on February 1, 1945, leaving Carpathian Ukraine under Soviet control.

[38][39] 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.

[36] 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 an accident leading to the death of recalcitrant bishop Theodore Romzha on 1 November 1947.

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 United States were now closed, Carpathian Ruthens and Romanians could now move for seasonal work in Russia's North and East.

The arrival of the Red Army meant the departure of 5,100 Magyars and 2,500 Germans, while 15–20,000 Jewish survivors of the Holocaust also decided to move out before the borders were sealed.

[41] In Tiachiv, a municipality which also adopted the decision to remove the monument faced resistance from local "supporters of Lenin" of Roma ethnicity who clashed with Rukh activists.

[41] On 28 August 1991 the demand for the extraordinary session was supported by the Zakarpattia Democratic League of Youth that previously was part of the Komsomol of Ukraine (LKSMU).

[41] One camp pro-Ukrainian has united around the National Movement of Ukraine also included URP, DemPU, Party of Greens, Shevchenko Association of Ukrainian Language, regional branches of Prosvita, Memorial and others.

[51][failed verification] The Orthodox community of Zakarpattia is divided as follows: Carpathian Ruthenia is inhabited mainly by people who self-identify as Ukrainians, many of whom may refer to themselves as Rusyns, Rusnak or Lemko.

[citation needed] A century later Vesna Goldsworthy, in Inventing Ruritania: the Imperialism of the Imagination (1998), theorizes on ideas underpinning western views of Europe's "Wild East", especially Ruthenia and some Slavic Balkan areas.