Victim of Galicians 1 Kopeck 1915.
Yegoryevsk Uyezd Zemstvo Board.

Galicia (a composite territory that consisted of so-called Cherven Rus' and Lesser Poland) was not always a region hostile to Russia and Russians, as one might think when looking at events of recent times. It is hard to believe that in the very same cities where “whoever doesn’t jump is a Moskal” is shouted, a hundred years ago tens of thousands of people openly spoke of their loyalty to the Russian language, Russian culture, and Orthodoxy. Such people were called Rusyns, who in Galicia numbered in the hundreds of thousands. They lived in their historical homeland—on land inhabited by their ancestors for many centuries—despite the fact that by the beginning of the 20th century Galicia had already belonged to the Austrian Empire for more than 100 years. In 1772, as a result of the First Partition of Poland, Galicia passed to Austria.

Immediately before the war, the Austro-Hungarian authorities launched a campaign directed against the Rusyns. Most often they were accused of spying for Russia. In 1910 the Austro-Hungarian authorities closed most Rusyn organizations in the region, and in 1913, in Ugrian Rus', the Marmaros-Sziget trial began, at which 32 people were sentenced to prison terms for converting to Orthodoxy. In 1911 the governor of Galicia, M. Bobrzynski, declared in the Galician Sejm that he “was fighting against ‘Russophilism’ because it is dangerous for the state.” Lists began to be compiled of politically unreliable citizens, into which, with Austrian pedantry, all Rusyns who had “compromised” themselves were entered: they spoke Russian, supported their representatives in the Sejm, or simply identified themselves as Russians. The core of such lists consisted of “zealous Russophiles,” who were to be “closely watched, and if necessary—arrested.”

All of this was preparation for a full-scale tragedy for the Rusyns that came during the war. The Austrian authorities, playing on the contradictions between the Ukrainian and Russian population, encouraged “informing” on the unreliable in every way, often with material rewards. Thus, judging by the official Austrian “Appeal to Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews” of 1915, the “delivery of a person who will be exposed in spying or propagating Muscovophilism” was rewarded in the amount of “50–500 crowns.” As a result, it proved fairly quick to establish contact with the local population and often, by their hands, to resolve the “Rusyn question.” V. Vavryk, a former prisoner of Thalerhof, in his book “Galician Rus' in 1914,” provides the following testimony: “In the village of Zapytiv, on the denunciation of Khomyak, the Austrians drove people out of the village into an open field, tied them with ropes and chased them around like that all day, and toward evening hanged 15 people.” Often entire villages were arrested.

With the outbreak of the war in August 1914, coercive actions against the Rusyns took on a mass character. The official authorities of Austria-Hungary no longer even thought about observing formal legality, justifying everything by wartime. The same V. Vavryk describes what happened in the village of Tsunev in Horodok county as an example of anti-Russian terror that swept Galicia in 1914: “Austrian soldiers arrested 60 peasants and 80 women with children. The men were separated from the women and placed by trees. A Romanian soldier threw a noose over their necks and hanged them one after another. After a few minutes the other soldiers took the bodies down, and the living were finished off with bayonets.” In the Russian-language press, testimonies of Rusyn killings were periodically published. They killed brutally: in the village of Rechky “they hanged the peasant woman Poronovych for the fact that, having learned in Uhniv of the approach of the Russian army, she told her neighbors about it” (“Prykarpatska Rus',” 1914, No. 1432); in another village gendarmes “organized a hunt for peasants when they were leaving the church after the Divine Service,” arresting about 30 people. And the 74-year-old peasant Mykhailo Zverok later said that he was arrested on August 24 on the denunciation of one of his fellow villagers—“for reading the newspaper ‘Russkoe Slovo’” (“Thalerhof Almanac,” 1924, p. 35).

Standing apart is the tragedy in Przemysl that occurred on September 15, 1914. On that day, right on the streets of the city, a crowd of local residents beat to death 44 arrested “Muscophiles,” mainly peasants and members of the clergy. Among the dead was Maria Mokhnatska, the 17-year-old daughter of a priest. The fate of her family is a typical example of what happened to entire Rusyn families in Galicia: her father, Fr. Ignatiy, was in Austrian captivity and died immediately after his return, and her brother was shot by the Austrians in 1915.

In the very first weeks of the war, in August 1914, all the prisons of Lviv were filled with Rusyns (more than 2,000 people), who were accused of spying for Moscow. A reasonable question arose: what to do next with a population deprived of rights (no one stripped the Rusyns of Austrian citizenship!). As a result, the Austrians found a solution unprecedented in European history—the first concentration camp on the continent, Thalerhof, was created, filled on an ethnic principle. The camp was located near the Abtissendorf railway station, and now on that site there is... the military and civil airport of Graz (Austria). Thalerhof became the prototype for Nazi concentration camps such as Dachau, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and others. In addition to Thalerhof, other camps were created, the most famous of which is Theresienstadt—in northern Bohemia, near Prague.

However, in the autumn of 1914, when the first trainloads from Galicia with arrested Rusyns began to arrive at Thalerhof, the camp itself did not yet exist—there were not even barracks, and people (the youngest prisoner was only a few months old, the oldest was 91) were forced at first to sleep, in the literal sense, on the ground, using improvised means to arrange their daily life. The camp administration did not provide even dishes. They drank and ate from old cans they found. According to former inmates (their stories and testimonies formed the basis of the 4 volumes of the “Thalerhof Almanac,” published in the 1920s–1930s), the food was very meager: “In the morning they received a bean decoction, at noon—the same kind of beet soup. Sometimes—salted turnip and a piece of herring.” As a result, in the first winter more than 1,100 people died from typhus, starvation, and other diseases.

In total, between 20,000 and 30,000 people passed through Thalerhof, accused only of calling themselves “Rusyns” and Orthodox. According to various data, between 2,000 and 3,500 people died in the camp. The persecution of the Rusyns ended only on May 10, 1917, when the new emperor of Austria-Hungary, Karl I, decided to abandon the practice of ethnic genocide, and the camp was closed. In his rescript the emperor wrote: “All the arrested Russians are innocent, but were arrested so as not to become them.”

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