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previous: Chapter 12 This webpage reproduces a chapter of Twentieth-Century Ukraine by Clarence Manning published by Bookman Associates New York, 1951 The text is in the public domain. This page has been carefully proofread and I believe it to be free of errors. If you find a mistake though, please let me know! next: Chapter 14

 p117  XIII

The Ukrainians and Czecho­slovakia

While open conflict marked the relations between the Ukrainians and the Poles and a creeping paralysis affected all Ukrainian work in Romania, the situation in Czecho­slovakia was far more complicated. The Czecho­slovak government followed a policy of not letting its right hand know what its left hand was doing. The situation in Prague and Bohemia was very different from that which prevailed in the Ukrainian section in the east of the republic, later to be known as Podkarpatska Rus, or Carpathian Ukraine, and this divergence was so sharp that it is necessary to consider separately the relations between the Ukrainians and the Czecho­slovak government in the various parts of the country.

There was a scarcely hidden antipathy between Czecho­slovak and Poland which arose largely from the difference in the two national characters and partly from boundary disputes.⁠1 There was a theatrical and romantic side to the Polish character which made it naturally unsympathetic to the essentially sober and almost commonplace temper of the Czechs. There was a verve, a flash in the makeup of Warsaw and Krakow that was almost entirely lacking in Prague. On the other hand there was a sense of realism in the Czech capital that was not found among the Poles.

In addition the attitude of the Poles toward the Russians  p118 differed widely from that of the Czechs. The Poles fought for supremacy for centuries with the Great Russians. They had had enough experience of Russian domination. They therefore were less responsive than other Slavs to the beauties and advantages of a mystical Pan-Slavism as devised for the benefit of the Russians. Even their experiences in the campaigns through 1920 had taught them an instinctive suspicion of all Russians whether White or Communist, and fear of the U. S. S. R. was one of the most important factors in their policy.

The Czechs had no common border with the Russians but they did have a romantic faith in Pan-Slavism and a firm conviction that it was relatively simple for the Slavs to work together.⁠2 It was the Czechs who had developed and fostered Pan-Slavism as the Pan-Slavic brotherhood and they regarded Russia as one of the mainstays of this policy. Their chief enemies were the Germans and the Hungarians. Czech foreign policy after World War I was directed toward the neutralization of these two peoples. They had a fear and distrust of the Germans that the Poles did not share and a dislike for the Hungarians that was almost fantastic.

This was reflected in the policies of the Little Entente of Czecho­slovakia, Yugoslavia and Romania, of which Dr. Benes was the chief architect.⁠3 This was composed of the nations which surrounded Hungary and had been largely carved out of the Hapsburg Empire and its chief functions were to watch and thwart the irredentist dreams of Hungary and the efforts of the Hapsburgs to recover their power. It carefully avoided any stand on the subject of the Soviet Union and it failed to broaden into a general alliance of the post-Versailles states. Poland and Romania collaborated on the Soviet situation. Yugoslavia and Romania worked together with regard to Bulgarian claims, a subject from which Czecho­slovakia stayed aloof, just as Yugoslavia and Romania did not interfere in the Czecho­slovak attitude toward Germany. Poland and Czecho­slovakia rarely came into close and friendly relations even on the question of Germany.

 p119  We may perhaps doubt the authenticity of the supposed letter of Jan Masaryk to Stalin before his suicide, when he stated that his father, Thomas G. Masaryk, had made it a principle that the Czechs and the Russians should never fight.⁠4 Yet it was a fact that during the Soviet drive into Poland in 1920, the Czechs refused to help their neighbors; and this added to the bitter feelings between the two peoples. There were strong and well-founded suspicions that the Poles really desired friendship with the Hungarians. These two nations, and especially their upper classes, shared many of the same tastes. Poland was also accused of wanting to spread her influence among the Slovaks and intensify their disagreements with the Czechs.⁠5

Whatever the exact motives and the political developments, it was President Masaryk's dream to make Prague the real Slav center after the war. From this city emanated all the calls for Pan-Slavic congresses, whether of law or philology or history or politics. In these meetings the Poles were the most critical and they often revealed their latent antagonism to Czecho­slovakia.

During these years the Charles University of Prague was undoubtedly not only the oldest Slav university but the greatest. It rapidly built up an international reputation and it attracted young men and women from all parts of the Slavic world. Naturally the Ukrainians, particularly those from Poland, gathered here in large numbers. As brother Slavs, the Czechs received them kindly and were happy to help them, especially in ways that would annoy the Poles in the midst of their struggle for Eastern Galicia.⁠6

Hence it came about that the Czechs and the Czech government showed themselves more than hospitable toward the Ukrainians who came within their borders. At Prague the government helped to set up a Free Ukrainian University staffed by scholars who had escaped from Poland and somewhat less often from Soviet Ukraine. With Czech approval and support, this institution embarked upon an extensive program of research and publication. Its student body was drawn  p120 to a startling degree from Western Ukraine under Polish domination, and it proved itself in a few years not only the freest and best of the various Ukrainian institutions but a worthy companion of the Slav organizations that came into being around Prague.⁠7

The Czechs also helped to establish a Ukrainian agricultural school at Podebrady. In Prague they allowed a Ukrainian museum and library. There were a Ukrainian Historical and Philological Society, a Union of Ukrainian Physicians of Czecho­slovakia, and many other organizations. Prague became a center of émigré Ukrainian cultural life and the institutions there were liberally supported also by Ukrainians of the United States and Canada.

The policy of the Czecho­slovak government toward these foundations fluctuated with the years. From the first, the Czecho­slovaks had been against support of the more conservative groups of Slav émigrés, whether they were Ukrainians, White Russians or others. In the course of time, these rightists found themselves in a more congenial milieu in either Berlin or Paris, with the latter city growing in popularity after the rise of Hitler. On the other hand, the steadily growing rapprochement between the Czecho­slovak government and the Soviet regime which coincided with the increasing age and lessening activity of President Masaryk led to some withdrawal of support from these institutions and it was widely believed that some restriction of their activity was a condition of the Czechoslovak-Soviet alliance of 1935. Incidentally this was the first voluntary alliance between an independent Slav government and the Soviet Communists and it had serious repercussions on the European situation.

The relation­ship of these Ukrainian organizations and of the émigrés in and around Prague to the Czechs was handled apart from the relations between the Czecho­slovak government and the population of Carpatho-Ukraine. This area offered the Prague regime some of its most troublesome questions.

We are poorly informed as to the early history of this part of  p121 the Ukrainian population. We know that they existed in the later Middle Ages, but it is hard to decide whether they formed part of the pre-Magyar population of the area, whether they followed the Magyar hordes as they cut their way from the east through Ukraine and into the plains of Hungary before the Christianization of Kiev towards the end of the first millennium A.D., or whether they were fugitives from the fighting in Galicia that followed the collapse of the Kiev state. Perhaps they arrived in these isolated valleys in various waves of settlement. It was the only point where a Ukrainian population had crossed the summits of the Carpathians and was living on the southern slopes.⁠8

The population was poor and backward and had little opportunity for large-scale joint action. Most of the educated or semi-educated classes were more or less pro-Hungarian in sympathy and in 1918, with the collapse of the Hungarian regime, had taken refuge in Budapest. Some steps had been taken to educate the Catholic clergy of the Byzantine Rite, and the Russians had sought to influence the Orthodox. All in all the population in these isolated mountain valleys was perhaps the least integrated all of the Ukrainians and represented the attitude which had generally prevailed a century earlier in Lviv and elsewhere before Ivan Franko and his associates had begun their work.

The slowness of the revolution in this area made it impracticable after the fall of Lviv for the Carpatho-Ukrainians to join the Western Ukrainian Republic. The dismemberment of Hungary made it impossible for them to remain in that state. By the late spring of 1919 public opinion, if we may speak of it at this time, inclined toward a union with Czecho­slovakia and this was duly carried out. In return the region was promised local autonomy, that same elastic word that was heard so often in 1917 and 1918, and its own diet, although the Czechs carefully refrained from deciding whether the language of the people was Ukrainian or Russian.⁠9

Possession of the area was important to the Czechs with their  p122 fear of a revived Hapsburg empire and of Hungarian irredentism, for it gave them land connection with Romania and thus with the independent states of the Balkans. This was especially desirable in view of the clashes between the Czechs and the Poles, and the fact that their other neighbors, Germany, Austria and Hungary were their bitter enemies.

Relations between Prague and the province ran an uneasy course but there was not the train of uprisings and violence that marked Ukrainian-Polish contacts. The conflicts were largely confined to the political, educational and administrative spheres. The Czecho­slovak government did an enormous work in establishing schools and other modern institutions but it staffed these largely with Czechs and Slovaks at the expense of the educated natives of the province, whom it suspected of being under Hapsburg influence.

There can be little doubt that the Carpatho-Ukrainian leaders thought of the proposed union with Czecho­slovakia in the same terms as those that had held prewar Hungary within the Hapsburg Empire. They regarded it as an independent state within the Czecho­slovak Republic and predicated a Ruthenian or Ukrainian governor appointed by the president of the republic and choosing his own administration. The final agreement included in the Minority Treaty signed by Czecho­slovakia spoke of "the widest autonomy compatible with the unity of the Republic," a separate diet, and the filling of "official positions so far as possible by natives."

In reality the Czechs placed the administrative power in the area in the hands of Czech officials. When they appointed a native governor, his powers were extremely limited. The local diet that had been promised was never introduced. It seems likely that the Czechs were waiting until they could train in Prague a new generation of men fit for high posts, while the return of many of the old semi-intellectuals from Budapest after the Hungarian financial reforms introduced by Jeremiah Smith in 1924 sharpened the demands for a rapid transfer of the province into the hands of is population. In 1928 there  p123 was a reorganization of the government by Prague but the administrative institutions in Podkarpatska Rus were not acceptable to the population.⁠10

The founding of new schools spread knowledge of the writings of the great figures of Ukrainian literature and strengthened the sense of Ukrainian nationality in large parts of the population. This was counterbalanced by a growth of Russianism reminiscent of the old Muscophile party in Eastern Galicia. The Czechs wavered between support of the two elements.⁠11

The Prague government could not decide whether the province was to be a link between the Czecho­slovak Republic and the Soviet Union, whether it was to be a Ukrainian center to give an example to the Ukrainians under Polish rule, or whether its chief value was to be as a link between Czecho­slovakia and Romania. At various times it adopted each of these three policies. Communism of a sort was rife. Yet the general trend was distinctly upward, despite the increased hardships brought into the area by the depression of 1929. Yet, again, the growing rapprochement with the Soviets as a foil to Hitlerism and the unrest among the Sudeten Germans in the western part of the republic led the government to look with some disfavor on the Ukrainian tendencies. It is very possible that the future of the region was considered in the negotiations leading up to 1935 and the Czechoslovak-Soviet alliance.

On the whole it must be concluded that period between the wars was profitable to the population of this area. However galling Czech rule might have been, it undoubtedly brought educational and political training to a region that had been almost completely deprived of them. It developed a group of men who thought in terms of the province, men whose primary interests were with the people of the region. In this sense it prepared for the brief restoration of independence to the area which came for a few days amid the preparations for World War II.

---

The Author's Notes:

1 See Poland, pp381 ff.

2 The idealistic Pan-Slavism had been founded by the Lutheran Slovak, Jan Kollar, publishing in 1814 his collection of sonnets, Slavy Dcera (The Daughter of Slavs). This inspired many of the Czech developments and indirectly had a great influence upon Taras Shevchenko and the Ukrainian movement as a whole. At the time of the foundation of the Czecho­slovak Republic, there was a sharp cleavage between the openly pro-Russian and anti-Bolshevik policies of Dr. Karel Kramar and the attitude of President Masaryk and Dr. Edward Benes, who hoped for continued co‑operation with Russia despite the Bolshevik government. See R. W. Seton-Watson, History of the Czechs and Slovaks (London, New York, 1943), p314.

3 See Seton-Watson, op. cit., p339.

4 The authenticity of this was denied by Dr. Jan Papanek, New York Times, August 30, 1948.

5 See Buell, op. cit., p344.

6 Velyka Istoriya Ukrainy, p867.

7 Velyka Istoriya Ukrainy, pp867 f.

8 See Hrushevsky, op. cit., pp427 ff.

9 The Treaty of Saint Germain (Articles 10‑13) provided for the autonomy of the area (Podkarpatska Rus) and also stated, "Yet these deputies (to Prague) will not enjoy the right of voting in the Czecho­slovak Diet in all legislative matters of the same type as those assigned to the Ruthenian Diet." (Article 13). Dr. Jiri Hoetzel in an article "The Definitive Constitution of the Czecho­slovak Republic" prefixed to a text of the Constitution, Prague, 1920, p12, stresses that by inserting the provisions of the Treaty as paragraph 3 of the Constitution, "the Republic clearly shows that she desires fully to guarantee the autonomic existence of the territory of Russinia." This paragraph promises Carpathian Russinia "the widest measure of self-government compatible with the unity of the Czecho­slovak Republic." Other provisions specify that the laws passed by the Diet shall be approved by the President of the Republic and listed separately and that the Governor shall be appointed by the President and responsible also to the Diet and that "public officials shall be selected, in so far as possible, from the population of Russinia" (op. cit., p22). The question of language was handled in paragraph 6 of a law dated February 29, 1920, declaring the Czecho­slovak language the official language of the State. "The Diet which shall be set up for Russinia shall have the right reserved to it of settling the language question for this territory in a manner consonant with the unity of Czecho­slovak State. Until this settlement has been made, this law shall apply, due regard, however, being paid to the special circumstances of that territory in respect to language" (op. cit., p49).

10 Velyka Istoriya Ukrainy, pp860 f.

11 Dr. Josef Gruber, Czecho­slovakia, A Study of Economic and Social Conditions (New York, 1924), p9, shows this ambiguity by citing the census of 1921 which gives "Russinians (Great Russians and Ukrainians) 461,849."

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