Paul Robert Magocsi’s With Their Backs to the Mountains: A History of Carpathian Rus’ and the Carpatho-Rusyns (2015) is an ambitious book: it is both the first history of the territory Carpathian Rus’ from its prehistory to the contemporary period and the first history of the people indigenous to this territory, the Carpatho-Rusyns. As such, it is not inappropriate to suggest comparisons between Magocsi and his task and other paradigm-shifting, primordialist East Slavic historians. Yet, unlike Nikolai Karamzin’s 12-volume History of the Russian State (Istoriia gosudarstva Rossiiskogo, 1816–1829), With Their Backs to the Mountains’ organizing principle is not a political entity since Carpathian Rus’ has always been divided between multiple central and eastern European states. Instead, its narrative emphasizes the unity of a land and its people in the face of “geographic, political, religious, ethnolinguistic, and socio-climatic” divisions. In this respect, just as Mykhailo Hrushevs’kyi in his 10-volume History of Ukraine-Rus’ (Istoriia Ukraïny-Rusy, 1898–1936) strove to illuminate the history of Ukrainians living under different regimes, speaking different languages, and belonging to different confessions, Magocsi tells the story of the shared fate of Carpatho-Rusyns living in what he calls “the borderland of borders” (2015, 7).

While Magocsi could have entertained the idea that his history should be viewed alongside these other watershed works of “large nations” of the Slavic world, he has often eschewed comparisons with scholars turned nation-builders, preferring to describe himself as a scholar-adviser or scholar-advocate (Magocsi Reference Magocsi2008, 888). At the same time, the book’s title associates the first history of the Carpatho-Rusyns with that of a different stateless “small nation”: the Kurds. He explains that the most appropriate title would have been No Friends But the Mountains, which was, much to his chagrin, already used by John Bulloch and Harvey Morris’ study of Kurdish history (Bulloch and Morris Reference Bulloch and Morris1992). Instead, he chose With Their Backs to the Mountains to refer to the fact that the Carpatho-Rusyns have been “pushed gradually back from the lowlands and foothills toward the mountains,” which have served as “a kind of protective shield and refuge” (Magocsi Reference Magocsi2015, xviii).

Yet, while the image is meant to evoke a shared history between the Subcarpathian Rusyns south of the slopes and the Lemko Rusyns north of the slopes, it reveals the different orientations that the Carpatho-Rusyns have assumed for centuries. With their backs to the mountains, the two populations, in essence, are looking in different directions. The Subcarpathian Rusyns look to the south to Budapest or to the west to Bratislava, Prague, Vienna, and western Europe; the Lemko Rusyns look to the north to Krakow or Warsaw or to the east to L’viv, Kyiv, Moscow, and eastern Europe.Footnote ¹ Furthermore, if the past is often visually represented as being behind us and the future ahead of us, then the title gathers together a constellation of images that are not entirely forward looking. Thus, the search for a metaphor to link together disparate Carpatho-Rusyn communities proves to reify the tensions straining the book’s central premise. In fact, the title of its final chapter—“Carpathian Rus’—Real or Imagined?”—indicates that even the existence of the Carpatho-Rusyns as a distinct nation, for many, remains in question.

At the annual convention of the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies in November 2016, the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center invited a group of scholars from North America and Europe to address the core questions raised by With Their Backs to the Mountains, including the construction and evolution of national identity, the persistence of historic mythologies, the influence of imagined communities on real geographies, and the ethics and responsibilities of activist scholarship, or what George Grabowicz has called “The Magocsi Problem” (Grabowicz Reference Grabowicz2011, 113). The event, “‘Carpathian Rus’—Real or Imagined?: Debating Paul Robert Magocsi’s With Their Backs to the Mountains,” posed the hanging question of the book to the roundtable, which took the form of a pro-et-contra discussion.

In advance of the event, the organizers asked each participant to critique the portion of the book relevant to their area of expertise: pre-history to 1772 (Harvey Goldblatt), the Austro-Hungarian period (John-Paul Himka), religious and theological issues (Peter Galadza), the twentieth century (Valerii Padiak), and Carpathian Rus’ today (Chris Hann). Their comments, lightly edited for readability, are presented in this special section of Nationalities Papers along with an afterword by Magocsi, who responds to their commendation and critique.

Like a previous special section published in Nationalities Papers entitled “The Scholar, Historian and Public Advocate: The Academic Contributions of Paul Robert Magocsi” (Kuzio Reference Kuzio2011), the essays that follow consider the various lacunae of With Their Backs to the Mountains as a history of Carpathian Rus’ and the Carpatho-Rusyns. As designed, they contain corrections of factual errors, discussions of gaps or oversights in the historical narrative, and critiques of misreadings, overextensions, or retrojections of modern concerns onto the deep past of Carpathian Rus’. But it is the theoretical and ethical tensions that emerge from these essays that signal the potential of the book to be a touchstone for debate for years to come, a few of which are deserving of summary.

This special section begins with remarks by Harvey Goldblatt, who rightly characterizes With Their Backs to the Mountains as a work self-consciously positioned within a national-patriotic tradition.Footnote ² While many scholars have been critical of this aspect of Magocsi’s scholarship, Goldblatt insists that such an historiographic approach is not only a legitimate way to conceptualize Carpathian Rus’ but is a useful exercise because it exposes the constructedness of other neighboring national-patriotic traditions, whether Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, or Hungarian. He observes that while the origin of a distinct Carpatho-Rusyn identity “remains problematic throughout most of the historical periods discussed,” nevertheless he calls the book a “most notably crafted study” that lays the groundwork for establishing scholarly conventions about “an envisioned complete Carpatho-Rusyn identity.”Footnote ³ Here, Goldblatt’s use of the term “craft” is an apt one, for it hints at the Greek concept of techne—that is, an activity whose end is the creation of a concrete object or the achievement of a particular goal, rather than the search for disinterested knowledge—and thus draws attention to the tendentious nature of the book.

In a similar vein, John-Paul Himka, the second contributor, opens by addressing the tension between the “fully blown Carpatho-Rusyn consciousness” that structures the book’s narrative and the “long historical experience” that slowly but surely gathered together the raw materials for its eventual, if belated, emergence. Himka accepts With Their Backs to the Mountains’ historiographic narrative about a unified Carpathian Rus’, one which he describes as the most interior of a series of larger concentric circles surrounding it, including Ukraine, Russia, East Slavdom, or Rus’. Where scholars “make the cut,” Himka proposes, is the central question hanging over the book. Since the spheres formed by culinary, literary, material, musical, performance, and visual culture are largely unexplored in Magocsi’s history, Himka makes the case that not only do they deserve more robust discussion but that their investigation would likely lead to different matrices and networks constituting the contours of Carpathian Rus’. In this respect, the book will undoubtedly call upon a new generation of scholars to strengthen or chip away at its central premise by discovering new prisms through which to look at Carpathian Rus’ and stretching the circle, to use Himka’s metaphor, to include more diverse sets of data.

While Goldblatt and Himka deal with the theoretical tensions at the heart of With Their Backs to the Mountains, the following two contributors—Peter Galadza and Valerii Padiak—draw attention to the convergence of the book’s ethics and politics in light of contemporary Ukraine’s antagonism toward the Carpatho-Rusyns of the Transcarpathian oblast'. Indeed, Magocsi’s latest work enters a political ecosystem at a time when Ukraine finds itself at war. For this reason, Galadza registers the sensitive nature of publishing a history many will interpret as being in support of “political Rusynism,” a formulation used in the Ukrainian press to refer to—and, most typically, to attack or discredit—Carpatho-Rusyns who seek recognition as a national or regional minority. Oftentimes, opponents of the Carpatho-Rusyn movement will elide “political Rusynism” and “separatism,” a misrepresentation that has empowered the most aggressive, if not opportunistic, critics to call upon the Ukrainian government to ban the use of the term “Rusyn” and “the Rusyn language” altogether (Belei Reference Belei2017, 15).Footnote ⁴

With these political issues in mind, Galadza pivots to emphasize the “honesty” of With Their Backs to the Mountains in the author’s attempt to advocate for the unity of Carpatho-Rusyn history while maintaining his scholarly objectivity. And he concludes with the hope that Professor Magocsi’s many and multifaceted contributions to Ukrainian scholarship will be “fully reciprocated” by his skeptics. Put differently, whether one accepts Magocsi’s narrative or not, recognizing the right of a Carpatho-Rusyn history to exist is more than a matter of scholarship. It is a matter of justice, something that brings the reception of the book into the realm of the ethical.

We could also restate Galadza’s hopeful remark in more functionalist terms, as others have done, and wonder whether Magocsi’s contributions to Ukrainian scholarship are a gesture to court Ukrainian sympathy for the Carpatho-Rusyn cause? Or a shield to defend himself as a de facto Carpatho-Rusyn nation-builder against attacks that he is anti-Ukrainian? Or even as a reserve of intellectual capital that he could “cash in” for scholarly recognition of the Carpatho-Rusyns?

The issue that Galadza touches upon is what Alexander Motyl has referred to as the Magocsi “paradox,” that is, the seemingly contradictory relationship between his Ukrainian scholarship that contributes so much to the nation and his Carpatho-Rusyn scholarship that many view as a threat to it. In fact, Motyl has represented Magocsi’s Ukrainian scholarship as a logical—if not calculated—maneuver necessary for the theoretical justification of the existence of the Carpatho-Rusyns as a distinct nationality. “Magocsi’s Rusyn nation-building activities do not contradict his Ukrainian scholarship,” Motyl observes: “Quite the contrary, Magocsi has effectively become a Ukrainian nation-builder (malgré soi, if you will), precisely because he needs an ontologically distinct Ukraine in order to make the case for a Rusyn nationality” (Motyl Reference Motyl2011, 107). Similarly, Serhii Plokhy has argued that Magocsi’s multiethnic approach to Ukrainian history, however praiseworthy for its rich, inclusive panorama of the country’s past, allows him to create “space for the construction of […] Carpatho-Rusyn history” (Plokhy Reference Plokhy2011, 120).Footnote ⁵

Whether one takes a generous (Galadza) or critical (Motyl, Plokhy) view of Magocsi’s Ukrainian and Carpatho-Rusyn scholarship, the attempt to make sense of the tension between what would seem to be the multicultural liberalism of A History of Ukraine: The Land and Its Peoples (1996, 2010) or his recently co-authored Jews and Ukrainians: a Millennium of Coexistence (Magocsi and Shtern Reference Magocsi, Robert and Petrovsky-Shtern2016) and the national-patriotic conservatism of With Their Backs to the Mountains all too often transforms these studies into commodities within an economic transaction or, at worst, characters within a Faustian bargain taking place in the soul of its author: in exchange for promoting Ukrainian culture, Magocsi receives the power of a Carpatho-Rusyn nation-builder. Thus, formulations like “the Magocsi problem” or “the Magocsi paradox” are bound to reduce the existence or non-existence of Carpatho-Rusyns or Carpathian Rus’ to an epiphenomenon of a single individual, a formulation which ignores the right of the hundreds of thousands of individuals who identify as Carpatho-Rusyn to have a history of their own.

Indeed, the following contributor, Valerii Padiak, celebrates With Their Backs to the Mountains as a major milestone because it is “written from the perspective of Carpatho-Rusyns.” But by plainly stating this seemingly obvious fact, he draws attention to the substantial differences in the conditions of academic production in Carpathian Rus’, where since the end of World War II scholars have been forced to subordinate intellectual inquiry to political concerns. And as a professor and publisher based in Uzhhorod, Ukraine, where the politicization of history continues to be an issue, Padiak himself is no stranger to these realities. Recently, his publishing house, which has released nearly a hundred titles about Carpatho-Rusyn culture, became the target of the journalist Oleksandr Havrosh, who accused Padiak of stoking “Ukrainophobia” and “Transcarpathian separatism” and whose campaign, in part, successfully pressured the regional governor’s office to force the Transcarpathian Regional Library to end its publication agreement with the V. Padiak Publishing House (Havrosh Reference Havrosh2017). As such, Padiak emphasizes that Magocsi is the only scholar who could have written this history because of his “freedom to create” and ability to maintain “scholarly objectivity,” luxuries which Carpatho-Rusyn scholars working in Ukraine do not yet fully enjoy.Footnote ⁶ Finally, Padiak draws attention to the style of With Their Backs to the Mountains by noting that the book is written in a “scholarly” yet “popular” register, modifiers which correspond to its two intended audiences: academics and Carpatho-Rusyns themselves. Thus, Padiak highlights the fact that the book is capable of reaching a broad public and, as such, has the power to raise the national consciousness of Carpatho-Rusyns at home and abroad.

In the end, only time will tell whether With Their Backs to the Mountains will exert a substantial influence on its Carpatho-Rusyn readership. While Padiak takes an optimistic view of the book’s ability to inspire, Chris Hann, the final participant in the roundtable, is skeptical about its prospect to be the cornerstone for a nation-building project in central Europe today. If the Soviet destruction of much of the Carpatho-Rusyn cultural patrimony and the strong political headwinds in contemporary Ukraine were not enough, Hann observes that rural-urban migration has led many in Carpathian Rus’ to assimilate into the cultures of surrounding states. Others, in response to unstable economic conditions, have been forced to prioritize the difficulties of daily life over the romantic struggle for national recognition. In short, Hann soberly observes that the “realities” on the ground do not entirely correspond to the “imagined,” unified Carpathian Rus’ outlined within Magocsi’s book, and he casts doubt on the possibility that the third national awakening will ever meaningfully take root.

But perhaps the best way to judge With Their Backs from the Mountains is not whether it succeeds in inspiring a movement in support of what Magocsi calls “ethnocultural emancipation” on both sides of the Carpathians. As he explains in his response to the roundtable, the book is not his own prescriptive vision for Carpathian Rus’; instead, it gathers together the intellectual constructs of Carpatho-Rusyn national awakeners throughout the centuries and weaves them into a new master narrative. What is at stake, he insists, is “whether the construct can hold its own.” In this sense, I might suggest that we should resist viewing the book as the primordialist masterwork of a world-renowned scholar turned nation-builder, however difficult it may be.Footnote ⁷ Just as the primordialist vision of Ukrainian history put forth by Hrushevs’kyi was rethought and revised by Magocsi in his A History of Ukraine, the narrative of Carpathian Rus’ that unfolds over the course of With Their Backs to the Mountains is deliberately, if not coyly, in search of its Magocsi to reconceive it. By writing an insider’s history—rather than, say, a fully-fledged multiethnic history of Carpathian Rus’, the land and its peoples, or a truly transnational history of Carpathian Rus’ as a crossroads of western and eastern Europe— Magocsi has produced a text that will be a touchstone—and, inevitably, lightning rod—for the generation of scholars eager to move beyond an ethnonational lens.Footnote ⁸ Thus, let us view the book as a deliberately provocative text, one that openly invites its readers to question its premises, something like the first musical phrase in a call and response. The essays that follow are some of the first responses from the chorus of scholars who, we predict, will be debating Paul Robert Magocsi’s With Their Backs to the Mountains for many years to come.