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

Galicia (a multi-component territory that consisted of the so-called Red Ruthenia and Lesser Poland) was not always a region hostile to Russia and Russians, as one might think judging by recent events. It is hard to believe that in the very same cities where the chant “who doesn’t jump is a Muskal” is heard, 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; in Galicia their numbers reached hundreds of thousands. They lived in their historical homeland, on land inhabited by their ancestors for many centuries before, 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 began 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 Ugric 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, stated in the Galician Sejm that he “fights against ‘Russophilism’ because it is dangerous for the state.” Lists of politically unreliable citizens began to be compiled, into which, with Austrian pedantry, were entered all Rusyns who had “compromised” themselves: spoke Russian, supported their representatives in the Sejm, or simply identified themselves as Russian. The core of such lists consisted of “zealous Russophiles,” who were to be “kept under close watch, and if anything happens—arrested.”

All of this was preparation for a full-scale tragedy for the Rusyns that came during the war. The Austrian authorities, playing on 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” from 1915, “delivering a person who will be caught in spying or propagating Moscophilism” was rewarded with a sum of “50–500 crowns.” As a result, it was quite quickly possible to establish contact with the local population and often, by their hands, to solve the “Rusyn question.” V. Vavryk, a former Talerhof prisoner, in his book “Galician Rus in 1914,” gives 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 war in August 1914, coercive actions against the Rusyns took on a mass character. The official authorities of Austria-Hungary no longer thought about observing even formal legality, justifying everything by wartime. The same V. Vavryk describes what happened in the village of Tsunev in Horodok district as an example of anti-Russian terror that engulfed Galicia in 1914: “Austrian soldiers arrested 60 peasants and 80 women with children. The men were separated from the women and placed by the trees. A Romanian soldier threw a noose over their necks and hanged them one after another. After a few minutes the other soldiers took down the bodies, and those still alive were finished off with bayonets.” In the Russian-language press, testimonies about the killings of Rusyns 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 about 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 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 ‘Russkoye Slovo’” (“Talerhof Almanac,” 1924, p. 35).

The tragedy in Przemysl on September 15, 1914 stands apart. That day, right on the city streets, a crowd of local residents beat to death 44 arrested “Moscophiles,” mostly 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 characteristic example of what happened to whole 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.

Already in the 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. The reasonable question arose of what to do next with a population deprived of rights (no one deprived the Rusyns of Austrian citizenship!). As a result, the Austrians found a solution unprecedented in European history: the first concentration camp on the continent, Talerhof, was created, and it was filled on an ethnic principle. The camp was located near the Abtissendorf railway station, and now on that site is a military and civilian airport of Graz (Austria). It was Talerhof that became the prototype for Nazi concentration camps such as Dachau, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and others. In addition to Talerhof, 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 in Talerhof, 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 91 years) were forced at first to sleep literally on the ground, using improvised means to arrange daily life. The camp administration did not even provide utensils. They drank and ate from found old cans. According to former prisoners (their stories and testimonies formed the basis of the four volumes of the “Talerhof Almanac,” published in the 1920s–1930s), the food was very meager: “In the morning they received a decoction of beans, at noon—the same kind of soup made from beets. Sometimes—salted turnip and a piece of herring.” As a result, in the first winter more than 1,100 people died of typhus, hunger, and other diseases.

In total, between 20,000 and 30,000 people passed through Talerhof, 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 arrested Russians are innocent, but were arrested so that they would not become such.”

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