Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (112 page)

At quarter-past six [in the] morning, Tuesday, [15 March] I was woken up by banging in the courtyard. At first, I had thought they were beating carpets… Jumping up, I looked out of the window… and dived straight under my bed. In the archway to the back street a boy was standing with a smoking revolver in his hand. Rifles were banging off, and from the other side came the rat-tat-tat of a machine-gun.

Then I realized that the Czech gendarmes and military were at last making the long-planned attack on the Sitch… Two tanks arrived and it seemed likely that gendarmes would soon come bursting up the stairs…

Suddenly there was an appalling noise of splintering glass, and a shower of bullets came whizzing through the windows… We were all lying flat on our stomachs on the cold cement floor, but the porter crept along and gingerly opened the door. All eyes were transfixed as the opening gradually widened. Across the threshold two legs were lying immobile. I thought their owner was dead. Then… a man came crawling out of the room, followed by two others. They were Slovak lorry drivers…

About half an hour later a messenger arrived from [Father-President] Voloshyn and ordered the Sitch to surrender. He said that the Hungarians had taken advantage of internal dissension to renew their claims… and all were to combine together to keep them out…

The square… was still absolutely deserted. All the heavy iron shutters were down… The only living things in sight were a horse, standing in an unattended cab… and a soldier looking very comic as he crouched behind the petrol pump and covered a nearby window with his rifle… In the hotel everyone’s nerves were getting strained. The little waiter took refuge in drink. ‘The Czechs are pig-dogs, the Poles are pig-dogs,’ I heard him shouting… The restaurant was a shambles; no furniture, the mirrors shattered, the curtains torn down, the walls pitted by bullets, dirt and paper everywhere…

Life at once returned to normal. In a few minutes I saw a peasant from Apeza, with a bundle of carpets over his shoulder, hawking along the street, and a Jew setting off with a chicken under his arm to be killed by the ritual slaughterer. The outside of the hotel [was] all pitted and blackened… The Sitch barracks had had every single window blown out…

Czech rule was shortlived. At one o’clock it was announced over the wireless that Slovakia had proclaimed its independence. This inevitably meant the end of the Czechoslovak State, and the future of Carpatho-Ukraine was in the balance… In the afternoon, a Council of Ministers decided that it would follow Slovakia’s example. So the slaughter of forty people in the morning had been to no purpose…

At about six-thirty, in falling snow, we all collected outside the Government building to hear the Proclamation of Independence. There were [some] seven hundred persons present… Father Voloshyn, the Prime Minister, Gren-Zedonsky, a patriotic writer, and other representative persons spoke from the balcony. A new Ministry was announced… No one demonstrated, no one sang, no one even raised a patriotic shout for the new Republic. Even after the speeches there was little enthusiasm. Gendarmes… guarded the doors, and Czech soldiers… preparing for evacuation, continually ploughed their way through the crowd… The people seemed drugged by bewilderment.

No mention had been made in the speeches of German protection. Voloshyn was still full of hope, but so far a telegram which had been sent to Hitler at midnight on Monday-Tuesday, asking that Carpatho-Ukraine should be accepted as a full German Protectorate, had not been answered… We went to bed in a free Ukraine.
³

The next day, 16 March, dawned with the Republic still intact:

On our last morning in Chust, we were woken by the Sitch marching down the street and singing patriotic songs. They had been released from gaol, had been re-armed and were to take over the defence and policing of the country. The Czechs… were in full retreat. Boxes were being carried downstairs, furniture, bicycles and people were being piled on to lorries. A small boy was waiting for transport with a huge white pig held by a rope round its hind leg.

The Ukrainians were at last a free people. Every house was flying a yellow and blue flag. Blue and yellow were in every buttonhole, on every horse, on every café table. The Jews, in terror, were even painting bands of blue and yellow round their shop windows. The first meeting of the Diet, so long postponed, was to take place that very afternoon. Apart from the Government, we seemed to be the only people in town who knew that the Hungarians were advancing. But where were the German aeroplanes?…

With the country’s future decided both the McCormicks and ourselves felt that there was no reason for stopping longer.

So the Anglo-Americans decided on evacuation:

But what route should we leave by?… We piled fifteen pieces of luggage into my ten-pound car, while the McCormicks, C and five more pieces of luggage were squeezed into a taxi, whose driver we had bribed heavily…

When we left [Khust] at mid-day all the gendarmes had disappeared. The streets were being policed by the Sitch and by German colonists [wearing] swastikas… We felt as if we were leaving helpless children to be slaughtered.

At Sevlus, some fifteen miles west of Chust, we found a very different scene. Not a single flag; and all the shops were shut. I suggested that it might be as well to inquire from the local commander [about] conditions on the frontier. We went into… the headquarters of the frontier guard. We… eventually found [the commandant] across the road. The remnants of the Czech Army were to evacuate the town in ten minutes, he said, and the Hungarians were only three kilometres away.

‘I suppose we can go through all right?’ asked Mrs McCormick.

‘You can of course do whatever you like,’ he said, ‘but listen!’

From down the road came the steady rat-tat-tat of a machine-gun.

‘We shall have to go back,’ I said.

‘Oh no, it will be quite all right,’ said Mrs McCormick, ‘we’re Americans, no one will shoot at us.’…

We hurried back, ran our cars into the [Polish] Consulate’s garden and were given coffee and liqueurs… while the battle went on outside. There was a good deal of noise, but… no one seemed to get killed. From the verandah we heard the command ‘Forward, boys!’ and saw the first Hungarians, the ‘irregulars’, with rifles slung over their shoulders on pieces of string, come clambering over the fence…

Then came the Hungarian Army. Most of them were old warriors, some with falling moustaches, and they drove in aged cars most of which had been [requisitioned]… The local population, the majority of which is Hungarian, gave them a hastily improvised welcome. As many Hungarian flags [had been] hidden away… as there had been Ukrainian flags in Chust…

As soon as the troops had passed, a lawyer in the house opposite darted out and put a Hungarian name-plate on his door. It was the fifth time he had changed it in the last twenty years, he said.

After the [Hungarian] Colonel had come and drunk sherry with the [polish] Consul we proceeded on our way. We were in Ukrainian registered cars – but no one stopped, or even questioned us.
⁴

Hungarian forces pushed steadily forward, dispersing all opposition and arresting both Czechoslovak and Carpatho-Ukrainian officials. During the afternoon, Budapest radio announced that
Kárpátalya
had been reunited with the motherland after twenty-one years’ separation. Hitler had secretly authorized the action. By the evening, it was all over. The Hungarians captured Khust. Most of the Rusyn leaders escaped into Romania. The Sich fought on in the mountains. Hundreds were killed outright, while more than 1,000 reached Bratislava, only later to find their way into German camps.
⁵
On 17 March Hungarian soldiers occupied the Polish frontier and completed their short campaign. They were met by Polish units, who helped them deal with captured Sich Guards. Prisoners suspected of coming from the Polish side were taken into Poland. The others were taken by their captors to the banks of the Tisa river, and (reportedly) massacred. The Hungarians then crossed into Slovakia to secure the frontier zone there.

These events, though they involved military action, a substantial death toll, the invasion of a member state of the League of Nations, and the suppression of a democratic government, might well qualify as a prelude to the Second World War. Alas, they very rarely find mention.

Carpatho-Ruthenia survived much of the war under Hungarian rule in relative quiet. But in 1944 the long-delayed arrival of the Nazis paved the way for the Holocaust’s last major operation and the extermination of the entire Jewish population. The arrival of the Red Army in turn spelled disaster for the Hungarians, many of whom were deported to the Gulag. A Czechoslovak delegation which hoped that the Soviets would relinquish control made a brief appearance, but swiftly departed. The Revd. Voloshyn, who had passed the war teaching quietly in Prague, was taken to Moscow and shot.
⁶

Fifty years of Soviet silence followed. In 1991 Zakarpattia resurfaced as a district of independent Ukraine, in 2002 the Revd Voloshyn was officially declared a Hero of Ukraine. In October 2008 an Orthodox priest from Uzhgorod, Abbot Dmitri Sidor, assembled a group of Russophiles, all conveniently armed with Russian passports (exactly as their counterparts in South Ossetia), and publicly announced the restoration of the Republic of Carpatho-Ruthenia.
⁷
Once again, the world paid no attention whatsoever.

III

In the eyes of most Westerners, nothing could be more ‘Ruritanian’ than the story of Carpatho-Ukraine’s one-day republic. All the necessary ingredients are present: a diminutive East European country; a squabbling mix of obscure ethnic groups; a mass of near-unpronounceable names in unfamiliar languages; a brew of ‘fanatical nationalisms’; and a tragi-comic outcome for which the Ruritanians alone need be blamed.

These attitudes about Eastern Europe have surfaced many times in the thinking of Western intellectuals. They are part of a widespread, but often unspoken assumption about Western superiority. They are implicit in several of the influential theories of economic history, such as those of Immanuel Wallerstein
⁸
or Robert Brenner, and explicit in works of political science by Hans Kohn,
⁹
Ernest Gellner
¹⁰
and John Plamenatz.
¹¹
In one of his choicer passages, Plamenatz contrasts the healthy ‘civic nationalism’ of Western countries with the supposedly unhealthy nationalism of their Eastern counterparts. Western nationalism, Plamenatz maintains, was ‘culturally well equipped’. ‘They had languages adapted… to progressive civilisation. They had universities and schools… importing the skills prized by that civilisation. They had… philosophers, scientists, artists and poets… of world reputation. They had medical, legal and other professions… with high standards.’
¹²
In other words, their inherently liberal attitudes were supposedly born from superior education and culture.

From this one might deduce that Eastern Europe had no modern languages, no schools or universities (like Prague or Kraków), no scientists (like Copernicus) or poets (like Pushkin), and, despite the lawyer of Sevlus who dashed out to change his name-plate, no professionals. ‘What I call eastern nationalism has flourished among the Slavs as well as in Asia and Africa… and Latin America,’ Plamenatz explains. ‘I could not call it non-European, and have thought it best to call it eastern because it first appeared to the east of Western Europe.’
¹³
In other words, the inherently illiberal attitudes of Eastern Europe were supposedly derived from inferior culture. It may not be completely irrelevant that Plamenatz, though an Oxford don, was born in Cetinje in Montenegro, the son of King Nikola’s prime minister-in-exile (see
Chapter 12
). A similar air of deprecation pervades the ethnic slurs and jokes purveyed by the science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov, who would habitually translate them into a Ruritanian context, not mentioning any real countries by name. A well-known conflict-resolution game, ‘Equatorial Cyberspace’, uses a highly nationalist country called Ruritania as the base model for its conflicts.

The critical dimension in these false scenarios can be found in an ingrained leniency towards the conduct of the Great Powers and of Western countries in general. Any group of Ruritanians can be made to look ridiculous if one omits to make the necessary comparisons. In the case of the break-up of Czechoslovakia, for instance, it is not irrelevant to ask how the crisis started. Is the wild nationalism of the East Europeans to be condemned, and the measured civic nationalism of Adolf Hitler (who stirred up the conflict to begin with, and incited others to follow his example) to be praised? In the wider context of Ukrainian politics, are the minor iniquities of minor parties to be highlighted while the colossal mass murders in Soviet Ukraine are passed over in silence?