Rusyns, also known as Carpatho-Rusyns, Carpatho-Russians, Ruthenians, or Rusnaks, are an East Slavic ethnic group native to the Eastern Carpathians of Central and Eastern Europe. They speak Rusyn, an East Slavic language variety variously treated as either a distinct language or a dialect of Ukrainian. The majority of Rusyns are Eastern Catholics, although a minority practices Eastern Orthodoxy.
Rusyns primarily self-identify as a distinct ethnic group and are recognized as such in all countries where they exist, with the exception of Ukraine, which officially classifies Rusyns as a sub-group of Ukrainians. In Croatia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Serbia, and Slovakia, Rusyns have official minority status. Some Rusyns identify more closely with their country of residence (e.g. Polish, Slovak), while others self-identify as a branch of the Ukrainian people, which is a consequence of 40 years of Ukrainization since Stalin's time. According to historian Paul Robert Magocsi, after 1945 Communist authorities applied a Soviet policy that treated Carpatho-Rusyns as a branch of the Ukrainian nationality and Rusyn as a dialect of Ukrainian; he writes that Rusyn nationality and language were banned under Communist rule.
Rusyns are descended from an East Slavic population that inhabited the northeastern regions of the Eastern Carpathians. In those regions, there are several Rusyn groups, including Dolinyans, Boykos, Hutsuls and Lemkos. Since the Revolutions of 1989 toward the end of the 20th century, there has been a revival in Rusyn culture and identity. Of the estimated 1.7 million people of Rusyn origin, only around 110,000 have been officially identified as such in recent ( 2012) national censuses.
Ethnonyms The term Rusyn (, plural ) originates from the archaic ethnonym "Rus". The respective endonymic adjective has traditionally been ( m., f., n.), though () has also been used; even more so after 1989. In interwar Czechoslovakia, Ruthenia was called in Czech; sometimes rendered Rusinia or Rusynia in American-Rusyn publications.
Regional Identifiers Carpatho-Rusyn or Carpatho-Ruthenian () is the main regional designation for Rusyns, especially in North America. The term refers to Carpathian Ruthenia (), which is a historical cross-border region encompassing Subcarpathian Rus' (in northeastern Slovakia and Ukraine's Zakarpattia Oblast), Prešov Region (in eastern Slovakia), the Lemko Region (in southeastern Poland), and Maramureş (in north-central Romania). In the Lemko region, the endonym Lemko (pl. ) became more common in the twentieth century, along with Lemko-Rusyn since the 1990s.
The variant Rusnak (; plural: or Pannonian-Rusyn, Rusnatsi) was also (and still is) used as an endonym; particularly by Rusyns outside the Carpathians in Vojvodina, Serbia and Slavonia, Croatia. However, they may also be referred to as Vojvodinian Rusyns (), Bachka-Srem Rusyns (), or formerly as Yugoslav Rusyns ().
Other terms such as Ruthene, Rusniak, Lemak, Lyshak, and Lemko are considered by some scholars to be historic, local, or synonymic names for these inhabitants of Transcarpathia. Others hold that the terms Lemko and Rusnak are simply regional variations for Rusyns or Ruthenes. Rusyns have at times also been referred to as Uhro-Rusyn () in the regions of Prešov, Slovakia and Carpathian Ruthenia.
Carpatho-Russian From the mid 1800s and well into the mid 1900s, many Catholic and Orthodox Rusyns in Europe and the United States referred to themselves as Carpatho-Russians or sometimes as Carpathian Russians. This terminology was also popular with some foreign authors and was and is still being used within the Rusyn diaspora.
For example, the popular newspaper of the Byzantine (Greek) Catholic Church in the U.S. for decades known as the ‘Greek Catholic Union Messenger’, used the term Carpatho-Russian up until the 1950s (in the 1960s the term Ruthenian briefly came into vogue).
As well, the American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese, with as of 2010 over 10,400 members and 79 parishes in the United States and Canada (and founded by former Byzantine Catholic members), still uses the term Carpatho-Russian on a regular basis.
Finally, as of the 21st Century, one can often hear Rusyn Americans within the OCA and ROCOR Orthodox churches self-identify as Carpatho-Russian, and indeed, literature of both these Orthodox bodies commonly uses the terminology Carpatho-Russian to describe Rusyns.
Ruthenian
Since the end of the 11th century, the exonymic term Rutheni (Ruthenes) was also used by some Latin sources of western provenance as an alternative term for all East Slavs. During the rule of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the scope of Rutheni gradually narrowed to only refer to inhabitants of the East Slavic regions that now mostly belong to the states of Belarus and Ukraine.
After the Partitions of Poland, Rutheni "came to be associated primarily with those [East Slavs] who lived under the Habsburg monarchy" (and was used as an official designation in the Austrian Empire after 1843). In the Kingdom of Hungary, Ruthene was used as the official term for the Rusyn people () of Transcarpathia until 1945. During the early twentieth century the term "became even more restricted: it was generally used to refer to the inhabitants of Transcarpathia and to Transcarpathian emigrants in the United States", for whom the terms Rusyn and Carpatho-Rusyn are more commonly used since the 1970s.
In some non-Slavic languages, Rusyns may be referred to by exonymic or somewhat archaic terms such as Carpatho-Ruthenes or Carpatho-Ruthenians, but such terminology is not present in the Rusyn language. Exonymic Ruthenian designations are seen as less precise because they encompass various East Slavic groups and bear broader ethnic connotations as a result of varied historical usage.
Rus'
Several endonyms such as Rus' and Rusyn were used widely by the East Slavs of Kievan Rus' during the medieval period. Common endonymic use of those terms continued through the life of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Parallel, medieval Latin terms such as Rusi, Russi or Rusci are found in sources of the period and were commonly used as an exonym for the East Slavs.
History
Origins There are different theories to explain Rusyn origins. According to Paul Robert Magocsi, the origin of the present-day Carpatho-Rusyns is complex and not exclusively related to the Kievan Rus'. The ancestors were the early Slavs whose movement to the Danubian Basin was influenced by the Huns and Pannonian Avars between the 5th and 6th centuries, the White Croats who lived on both slopes of the Carpathians and built many hill-forts in the region including Uzhhorod ruled by the mythical ruler Laborec, the Rusyns of Galicia and Podolia, and Vlach shepherds of Transylvania. It is thought that the Croats were part of the Antes tribal polity who migrated to Galicia in the 3rd-4th century, under pressure by invading Huns and Goths.Gluhak, Alemko (1990), Porijeklo imena Hrvat [Origin of the name Croat] (in Croatian), Zagreb, Čakovec: Alemko Gluhak. pp 115–116Paščenko, Jevgenij (2006), Nosić, Milan (ed.), Podrijetlo Hrvata i Ukrajina [The origin of Croats and Ukraine] (in Croatian), Maveda, pp 84–87. Sedov, Valentin Vasilyevich (2013) . Славяне в раннем Средневековье [Sloveni u ranom srednjem veku (Slavs in Early Middle Ages)]. Novi Sad: Akademska knjiga. pp. 444, 451, 501, 516. . George Shevelov also considered a connection with East Slavic tribes, more specifically, the Hutsuls, and possibly Boykos, argued to be the descendants of the Ulichs who were not native in the region. As the region of the Ukrainian Carpathians, including Zakarpattia and Prykarpattia, has since the Early Middle Ages been inhabited by the tribes of Croats, in Ukrainian encyclopedias and dictionaries, and the Great Russian Encyclopedia, the Rusyns are generally considered to be the descendants of the White Croats.
Anthropology According to anthropological studies, the Eastern Carpathian population makes one of the sub-regional clines of the Ukrainian population, which can be regionally divided into Eastern and Western Carpathian variants. In the study by M. S. Velikanova (1975), the skulls from a medieval necropolis near the village of Vasyliv in Zastavna Raion were very similar to the contemporary Carpathian population, and according to S. P. Segeda, V. Dyachenko and T. I. Alekseyeva this anthropological complex developed in the Middle Ages or earlier, as descendants of the medieval Slavs of Galicia and carriers of Chernyakhov culture along Prut-Dniester rivers, possibly with some Thracian component. According to the data, the population has the lowest admixture in Ukraine of Turkic speaking populations, like Volga Tatars and Bashkirs, while in comparison to other populations they have similarities with neighbouring Eastern Slovaks, Gorals of Poland, Romanians, some groups of Czechs and Hungarians, Northwestern Bulgarians, Central and Northern Serbians, and most Croatians.
Population genetics The 2006 mitochondrial DNA study of Carpathian Highlanders – Boykos, Hutsuls and Lemkos people – showed a common ancestry with other modern Europeans. A 2009 mitochondrial DNA study of 111 samples found that in comparison to eight other Central and Eastern European populations (Belarusian, Croatian, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Ukrainian), the three Rusyn groups have a greater distance between themselves than these populations, with Boykos showing the greatest distance from all and did not cluster with anyone because have atypically low frequencies of haplogroup H (20%) and J (5%) for a European population, while Lemkos are closest to the Czech and Romanian (0.17) population, and Hutsuls closest to the Croatian (0.11) and Ukrainian (0.16) population.
The 2014 Y-DNA studies of 200 Pannonian Rusyns in the region of Vojvodina, Serbia, found they mostly belong to haplogroup R1a (43%), I2 (20%), E-V13 (12.5%), and R1b (8.5%), while I1, G2a, J2b, N1 between 2.5 and 4.5%, and J1, T, and H only in traces of less than 1%. They cluster closest to the Ukrainian and Slovak population, "providing evidence for their genetic isolation from the Serbian majority population". The 2015 Y-DNA study of 150 men from Zakarpattia and Chernivtsi Oblast (Bukovina), found they mostly belong to R1a1a1*(М198), I2a (Р37.2), R1a1a1 (М458) ranging around and less than 30%, with E1b1b1a1 (M78), R1b1b2 (M269), and I1 (М253) ranging between 4-14%. The sampled population is most similar to other Ukrainians, while the Bukovina population slightly "differs from the typical Ukrainian population" because it has the highest percentage of I2a (>30%) and the lowest percentage of R1a (30%) in Ukraine. Bukovina's percentage of I2 is similar to near Moldovan and Romanian population, while the highest percentage is among South Slavs in Western Balkans. It was concluded that although bordered by diverse nations, the Carpathians seemingly were a barrier decreasing gene flow southward of N1c (М178), R1a (М198) from the region, and northward of E1b (М78), R1b (М269), J (М304) and G (М201) to the region.
Early history The general usage of 'Rusyn' by East Slavs dates back to over 11 centuries, its origin signifying the ethnic tie to the political entity of Kievan Rus', which existed from the late ninth to the early 13th century. The East Slavs mixed with other peoples over centuries, including in the south with Iranian and later with Germanic peoples, in the west with Baltic peoples, in the east with Finnish and Turkic peoples.