**Who Are the Rusyns? By John Righetti (Part 1/4) - Their beginnings to the 19th Century — Transcript & Summary | SozAI** Source: https://sozai.app/transcript/rusyns-beginnings-to-19th-century-john-righetti/ John Righetti introduces the Carpatho-Rusyns: a stateless East Slavic people of the Carpathian Mountains, their origins, and their divided homeland. ## Key Takeaways - Carpatho-Rusyns are a historically significant East Slavic people without a nation-state, and their identity has been shaped by geography, religion, and shifting political borders. - Their homeland is divided among five modern countries, so Rusyn history must be understood across multiple national contexts. - Ethnic identities evolve over centuries, and Rusyn origins trace back to the White Croat tribes of the early medieval period. - Religion (Eastern Catholicism) and language were central markers of Rusyn identity against surrounding Slavic and Hungarian populations. - Economic hardship and imperial policies were key drivers of the late 19th-century Rusyn migration to the United States. ## What the video covers - Rusyns (Carpatho-Rusyns) are a stateless people who have lived in the Carpathian Mountains of Eastern Europe for roughly 1,500 years, and many Americans of Rusyn descent are unfamiliar with the term. - Their traditional homeland is now split among five countries: southern Poland, eastern Slovakia, western Ukraine, northern Hungary, and northern Romania. - Transcarpathian Ukraine holds the largest Rusyn population, about 800,000 people, making it the largest Rusyn area in Europe. - Many Rusyns emigrated to the US Rust Belt between roughly the 1870s and 1920s to work in mills, mines, and factories, leaving onion domes and three-barred crosses as markers of their communities. - Ethnic groups are not static; the White Croats, ancestors of the Rusyns, were an East Slavic tribe present in the Carpathian region by at least 500 AD. - Rusyn language is most closely related to Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Russian, unlike the West Slavic languages of Poles, Czechs, and Slovaks. - Eastern Slovakia is one of the most ethnically and religiously mixed regions of Eastern Europe, with Slovaks, Rusyns, Hungarians, Germans, Roma, and Jews. - Rusyn identity was closely tied to Eastern (Greek) Catholicism, which distinguished them from Roman Catholic Slovaks and Hungarians. - Under 19th-century Hungarian Magyarization policies, education in Hungarian was required, pressuring Rusyn communities to assimilate. - Economic depression in the 1870s, along with military obligations under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, drove emigration to America. ## Chapters 1. 00:00 Introduction: Who Are the Rusyns? 2. 02:17 Nation-States and Stateless Peoples 3. 05:02 The Carpathian Homeland and Its Divisions 4. 07:05 How Ethnic Groups Form: Early Slavic Tribes 5. 09:00 East, West, and South Slavs 6. 12:20 Ethnic Mixing in Eastern Slovakia 7. 14:23 Eastern Christianity and Rusyn Identity 8. 16:57 Hungarian Revolutions and Magyarization Answers ## Questions about this video Where is the Rusyn homeland located? The Rusyn homeland is the Carpathian Mountain chain of Eastern Europe. Today it is divided among southern Poland, eastern Slovakia, western Ukraine, northern Hungary, and northern Romania. Who were the White Croats? The White Croats were an East Slavic tribe living in the Carpathian region from at least 500 AD. They are considered the ancestors of the Carpatho-Rusyns, and their language was related to other East Slavic languages. Why did many Rusyns emigrate to the United States? Rusyns emigrated mainly between the 1870s and 1920s due to economic depression, Hungarian assimilation pressures, and military obligations under the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Many came to work in Rust Belt mills, mines, and factories. ## Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown 00:01 Speaker A Hi, I'm John Righetti, and we're going to talk about who are the Rusyns, or in an American context, the word is often Carpatho-Rusyns. 00:31 Speaker A These people lived in the Carpathian mountain chain of Eastern Europe for centuries, but people know very little about them, and quite often here in the United States and other Western nations, people even ask, "What does that mean?" even those who are descended from the Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants in this part of the world. 00:44 Speaker A But who are these Rusyns? 00:51 Speaker A Well, first and foremost, I always tell people, if you want to start to wrap your hands around the Carpatho-Rusyn community and understand them, look for these onion domes and three-barred crosses, particularly in the Rust Belt of the Northeast, where many of the Rusyns came as immigrants to work in the mills, the mines, and the factories during the first industrial revolution, from the 1870s until about the 1920s. 01:06 Speaker A But once you locate that, now you, I'm sure, as everybody who wants to know more about this issue, says, "Tell me more about who these people are, where do they come from?" 01:22 Speaker A And that's a very difficult issue, given the fact that the Carpatho-Rusyns don't have a nation-state, and we're raised in an American educational system which kind of equates nation-state and nationality. 01:35 Speaker A So, what I mean by this is, when we think about Italy, who comes from Italy? Italians. Or if we think about Spain, who comes from Spain? The Spanish. Sweden, the Swedish. 01:51 Speaker A We don't think about those nationalities that don't have countries, since the idea of a nation-state is actually a very new thing. Only since the 1850s has it been really prominent, particularly in a European context. 02:09 Speaker A So, for instance, if we take the examples that I just used, there are other nationalities in Italy that, however, are not Italians. 02:27 Speaker A There are, particularly in Spain, two very large minority groups: the Basques, some of which you've heard of, and the Catalans, also both living in Spain, and that's their native land, but they are not Spanish. 02:41 Speaker A They speak their own languages, they have their own customs. 02:54 Speaker A So, it is really actually not uncommon for people not to have their own nation-state. 03:02 Speaker A And in fact, in the world, there are about 200 nation-states, but over 5,000 ethnicities and nationalities. 03:21 Speaker A What this really means is that most nationalities don't have their own state. 03:32 Speaker A To have your own state is really kind of the exception to the rule. 03:45 Speaker A Carpatho-Rusyns are amongst those people that don't have their own state, though they have lived in their homeland for about 1,500 years, of which we're aware. 03:59 Speaker A And that homeland is the Carpathian mountain chain of Eastern Europe. 04:14 Speaker A So, today, the Carpatho-Rusyn homeland is divided between five nations: Southern Poland, Eastern Slovakia, Western Ukraine, Northern Hungary, and Northern Romania. 04:29 Speaker A Now, if you look at the map that I'm showing you now, you'll see the ethnographic territory of the Carpatho-Rusyns. 04:51 Speaker A Everything gray on this map is ethnographically Carpatho-Rusyn. 05:06 Speaker A And if you look at it, you'll see in Southern Poland, this, the region that the Rusyns lived in in Southern Poland, is referred to in the Rusyn language as Lemkovyna, or the Lemko region, which you can see here, and it straddles the northern slopes of the Carpathian border. 05:20 Speaker A This section, the Lemko region in Southern Poland, was also a part of a larger territory known as Galicia, or Galic. This is a word that people, particularly doing research about their families, may encounter. 05:39 Speaker A This is the northern slopes of the Carpathians, but as you can see, on the southern slopes in eastern Slovakia there's a very large territory, in fact a very large portion of eastern Slovakia, called the Prešov region, or amongst the Rusyns, Spišská Rus, and then the Transcarpathian region of today in Ukraine, formerly referred to as the Subcarpathian Rus. 05:52 Speaker A You can see this is the largest area of Rusyn settlement in Europe, and in fact the majority of Rusyns, about 800,000 Carpatho-Rusyns, live here in the Transcarpathian region of Ukraine. 06:07 Speaker A Then we have smaller populations in northern Romania on the border with Ukraine, and then individual Rusyn settlements throughout northeastern Hungary. 06:24 Speaker A So what was once the Rusyn territory, completely unified as one ethnic territory, is now divided into these three particular areas. 06:39 Speaker A But let's talk a little bit about how ethnic groups came to be, and one of the first issues we have to talk about is that ethnic groups are not what they have always been. 06:53 Speaker A We have kind of this bizarre concept in American education that somehow, God created Adam and Eve, and then after that Cain and Abel, and after that Italians, Croatians, Poles, etc. 07:07 Speaker A Well, this is a really aberrant concept, because ethnicities and groups evolve over time. 07:21 Speaker A What that means is that some tribes, some groups come together and form a nationality or ethnic group; others separate and form different nationalities and ethnic groups. 07:33 Speaker A And this slide here, the map that you're now looking at, should be able to demonstrate this for you. 07:46 Speaker A This is a map of Central Europe in the 7th to 8th century, so the 600s to 700s. 08:01 Speaker A And if you look at this, what you see are some very familiar names. 08:17 Speaker A Like, you see the Czechs on here, and you also see the Slovaks on here, but you don't see Rusyns, and in fact, you don't see Russians, and you don't see Poles, and you don't see Ukrainians. 08:31 Speaker A You see Croats, but you see other groups that you've never heard of, like Mazovians, or Drevlyanians, or Dregovichians, or Severians. 08:48 Speaker A These are all tribes that were of Slavic heritage that came together and formed other groups. 09:04 Speaker A Now, where are the Rusyns on this map? 09:15 Speaker A If you look directly north of the Avar Khaganate, you see a group called White Croats. 09:29 Speaker A White Croats are the ancestors of the Carpathian Rusyns. 09:44 Speaker A The White Croats are an East Slavic tribe. 09:56 Speaker A It means that their language was like the other East Slavs. 10:13 Speaker A So, Rusyns, in terms of language, are related more closely to Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Russians than they would be to the other Slavs that you may have familiarity with. 10:28 Speaker A These White Croats have lived in that Carpathian Mountain region, particularly in Eastern Slovakia and Western Ukraine, from at least 500 AD, and perhaps even earlier than that. 10:42 Speaker A But one of the things that we need to find out to learn more about these Rusyns is this issue about East Slavs and other Slavs. 10:59 Speaker A Now, Slavic groups, divided by language, divide into three groups. 11:15 Speaker A So, there are the East Slavs, the West Slavs, and the South Slavs. 11:29 Speaker A On this piece of material I'm sharing with you, the ethnolinguistic distribution shows you who makes up each of those groups. 11:35 Speaker A Now, for our purposes, we're not going to deal with South Slavs, but what you'll see here is the East Slavs are a kind of rose color, and the West Slavs are an orange color. 11:40 Speaker A And so, we see that the West Slavs, those whose languages are similar together, are Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, and then way there in the German territories, a small group, it says Lusatia, and that's the Lusatian Sorbs. 11:50 Speaker A The East Slavs are on this map Belarusians, Ukrainians, you can see Carpathian Rus very near Slovakia, and then far off of this map, the Russians. 12:06 Speaker A And then you can see, as you look at this map, obviously, that another lesson is that countries and borders are never very clean, never, but particularly in Eastern Europe. 12:27 Speaker A So, if you look here, you can see a lot of the overlap with mixed nationalities, and if you go down to where the Slovaks are, you see Eastern Slovakia, and you look there, you'll see the orange pockets of Slovaks, the pink Rusyns, and then you see striped areas, which are ethnographically mixed neighborhoods of Slovaks, Rusyns, Hungarians, Germans, Gypsies, Jews. 12:44 Speaker A Eastern Slovakia is one of the most ethnically and religiously mixed territories in all of Eastern Europe. 13:00 Speaker A Now, let's take a look again at who these Rusyns were, and particularly for those who are doing genealogical work, where do they come from? This presenta 13:13 Speaker A The words Rusyn and Greek Catholic were interchangeable for these people. So much so that often people we would refer to the Greek Catholic Church as Ruska Vira or the Rusyn faith. And sometimes when you would ask Rusyns what their 13:29 Speaker A ethnicity was, particularly in the United States, and would say to them, "What are you?" they would say, "I'm a Greek Catholic." And they would say that not because they didn't understand the distinction, but quite the opposite. To say in the homeland that they were Greek 13:43 Speaker A Catholics was pretty much to say that they were Rusyns, distinct from the Roman Catholic Slovaks, the Catholic and and Protestant Hungarians, the Lutheran Germans, etc. So, these people had a very strong commitment to Eastern Christianity, um which helped them to maintain their 14:01 Speaker A culture and to maintain their culture distinct from the others around them. By the time we get to the 1850s, though, something important really happens. And um in 1848, the Hungarians revolt against the Austrians in an attempt to become independent of the Austrian 14:19 Speaker A Empire. The Austrian emperor invites the Russian Tsar to send troops in to help him quell this Hungarian Revolution. And when he does so, he needs someone to serve as a translator for the Russians, and he chooses a gentleman by the name of Adolf 14:38 Speaker A Dobriansky. Dobriansky is a a Rusyn, and he chooses him because of all the languages spoken in Austria-Hungary, the language closest to Russian, remember, an East Slavic language, is Rusyn. And so, Dobriansky serves as official translator for the Austrian Empire. The 14:57 Speaker A Russian troops assist the Austrians in putting down the Hungarian Revolution in 1848, and Dobriansky gets selected to serve as the Rusyn representative in the Austrian Parliament. But 20 years later, in 1868, the Hungarians revolt again. 15:16 Speaker A And when they revolt, this time Russia cannot aid Austria, and so instead of Austria potentially losing Hungary, what it does is develops what's known as the Great Compromise, where sits down with Hungarian leadership and said, "If you allow us, 15:32 Speaker A the Austrians, to handle everything federal, the money, the army, etc., taxation, then you can handle all activities within the Hungarian portion of the empire yourself." As Hungarian leadership, the Hungarians agreed to this. And what it means now is that 15:49 Speaker A everything in terms of education, um everything in terms of the way land reform is done or land is managed in the Hungarian portion of the empire is run by the Hungarians. 16:00 Speaker A Now at this point, there's a gentleman who stands up in the Hungarian parliament and he says, "Gentlemen, we have a problem in Hungary. We, the Hungarians, are outnumbered in our own country." And it was indeed the truth. 16:13 Speaker A If you took all of the other minorities that lived in the Hungarian portion of the empire, Rusyns, Slovaks, Serbians Gypsies Jews Germans Croatians, Romanians, Hungarians were only 40% of the population in the Hungarian portion. 16:30 Speaker A So the Hungarian parliament passes laws called Magyarization laws. And the purpose of these laws was to take these non-Hungarian populations and turn them into ethnic Hungarians over time. 16:43 Speaker A Now this did several things. First and foremost, one of the first things that happened was that Carpatho-Rusyn, Slovak, and Croatian schools were closed. 16:51 Speaker A So if you are of these ethnicities and you wanted your children to have education, you had to send them to Hungarian schools. And this is why many people say to me in an American context, "Oh, my grandparents or my 17:03 Speaker A great-grandparents could speak Hungarian." Because indeed they did, because it was the only language in which they could have education. 17:10 Speaker A In addition to that, the Magyarization process, the church was becoming Magyarized as well. So that church prayer books, the alphabet was changed and the language was changing. In the Prešov diocese especially, the printing of church books were no longer printed in the Rusyn 17:27 Speaker A Cyrillic alphabet, but now printed in Latinica, which is the same language English is used is printed in, and eventually Hungarian orthography. So that the goal was to take these Rusyn Greek Catholics and to teach them first Hungarian alphabet, then Hungarian 17:44 Speaker A language, and hopefully eventually become Hungarian church as well. While all of this Magyarization was going on, something else happens in Europe, and that's in 1870, there's a drastic depression. 17:57 Speaker A Um almost worldwide in scope, but particularly very very very powerful in Europe. And so, unemployment is very high, there are no jobs, agriculture is not doing well. And in fact, as you can see in this picture, here's a picture of 18:12 Speaker A the average Rusyn household at the turn of the century. Uh it's a thatched-roof home. It had on average parents and between 10 and 14 children living in a two-room house. Um families were very large for everyone at the time, and particularly for these 18:32 Speaker A rural Rusyns. Um so now what you have for Rusyns is a situation where the economy is destitute, they cannot propagate their faith in the same way, they cannot propagate their ethnicity in the same way, they're being turned into 18:47 Speaker A Hungarians, they're being told in what ways they can do things, and things are desperate economically. 18:54 Speaker A On top of that, we lay one other issue, and that's conscription. Because Austria-Hungary is the one of the largest states in Europe and wants to defend its borders, and it fears the development of Russia and Turkey, the Ottoman Empire, it continues to grow its 19:10 Speaker A armed forces, and therefore begins to conscript young men into the armed forces, no matter what ethnicity you are. So, now if you're a young Rusyn man, and conscription was very different than what we think about it in an 19:23 Speaker A American context, you could be conscripted for as much as 8 years active service, and then 12 years reserve. So, you're stuck for 20 years. 19:31 Speaker A You're not allowed to leave the village. And essence, the government has control of you should it need to call you up to help defend the Austro-Hungarian Empire. 19:40 Speaker A Um, and the other issue that comes with conscription is these young Slavic men um, were considered to be truly second and third class citizens in the German-speaking Austrian army. Here, um, your officer could do literally whatever he wanted with you. 19:57 Speaker A Um, life was horrible. The beatings were terrible. The imprisonment was terrible. And in fact, at this point in time, the number one cause of death in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Austro-Hungarian forces, um, amongst those who have been conscripted is 20:12 Speaker A suicide. Because these young men can't take how they are treated worse than slaves within the army. So, you're a young 18-year-old man and you're a Rusyn, and you're living in the hills, and the economy is terrible, and you're threatened with conscription, 20:28 Speaker A and you really have no hope. And then you hear about this new land across the ocean where the streets are paved with gold. Topics: Carpatho-Rusyns Rusyn history Carpathian Mountains East Slavs White Croats Eastern Europe Rusyn emigration Greek Catholic Austro-Hungarian Empire genealogy Study this video - [Flashcards from this video](https://sozai.app/tools/ai-flashcard-generator/?from=transcript&id=84057) - [Quiz on this video](https://sozai.app/tools/quiz-generator/?from=transcript&id=84057) Free, made by AI from this transcript. No signup. --- This is the markdown twin of https://sozai.app/transcript/rusyns-beginnings-to-19th-century-john-righetti/ — the same content, without the markup. Published by SozAI (https://sozai.app). Reuse and quotation are allowed with attribution and a link back. Machine-readable index: https://sozai.app/llms.txt · data API: https://sozai.app/api/