Politics

Carpatho-Rusyns have never been motivated to play a role in Canadian political life. They have, however, been actively concerned with the fate of their European homeland. As early as 1919 Vasyl Hladyk from Winnipeg represented Canada in a three-person Carpatho-Rusyn delegation from North America that went to the Paris Peace Conference in order to lobby the peacemakers on behalf of the European homeland. Their desire was to see the entire Carpathian region united with Russia. This same goal was promoted by the Union for the Liberation of Carpathian Rus’ in Canada, established in 1920 in Winnipeg by R.M. Samilo.

Canadian Rusyns were active once again on behalf of their homeland following World War II. In 1951 a recent immigrant, Vasilij V. Fedinec, founded in Hamilton, Ontario, the Rada Svobodnoj Podkarpatskoj Rusi v Exili (Council of a Free Sub-Carpatho-Ruthenia in Exile). This organization, which published the monthly journal Rusin/Ruthenian (New York and Hamilton, Ont., 1952– 60), joined Czech and Slovak political émigrés in Canada and the United States to protest the Soviet Union’s annexation of Subcarpathian Rus’, its imposition of a Ukrainian identity upon Rusyns, and its destruction of the Greek Catholic Church. On the other side of the political spectrum was the newly arrived Lemko-Ukrainian writer and newspaper publisher Iuliian Tarnovych (pseudonym Iuliian Beskyd), who opposed Soviet communism but welcomed its Ukrainian nationality policy. Tarnovych represented that group of Rusyns and Lemkos who in the homeland had become convinced that they were only a regional branch of the Ukrainian people, and who therefore believed that they should work closely in the immigrant setting with fellow Ukrainians in the struggle to liberate Ukraine from Soviet oppression. Different still were the older immigrant groups in the Lemko Association and the Society of Carpatho-Russian Canadians, which aggressively praised communism except for its imposition of a Ukrainian identity in the homeland.