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

Galicia (a composite territory that consisted of so-called Red Ruthenia and Lesser Poland) was not always a region hostile to Russia and Russians, as one might think when looking at recent events. It is hard to believe that in the very same cities where the chant “whoever doesn’t jump is a Moskali” 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, and in Galicia there were hundreds of thousands of them. They lived in their historical homeland—on the 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 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 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 was “fighting against ‘Russophilism’ because it is dangerous for the state.” Lists of politically unreliable citizens began to be compiled, into which, with Austrian pedantry, all Rusyns who had “compromised” themselves were entered: those who 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 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 contradictions between the Ukrainian and Russian populations, encouraged “informing” on unreliable people in every possible way, often with material rewards. Thus, judging by the official Austrian “Appeal to Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews” from 1915, the “delivery of a person who will be caught in espionage or in propagating Moscophile ideas” was rewarded with “50–500 crowns.” As a result, it was fairly quickly possible to establish contact with the local population and often, by their hands, to resolve the “Rusyn question.” V. Vavryk, a former Talerhof prisoner, in his book “Galician Rus in 1914,” gives the following testimony: “In the village of Zapytov, 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 became массовый in 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 the Horodok district 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 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.” Testimonies about the killings of Rusyns were periodically published in the Russian-language press. 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” (“Carpathian 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’” (“The Talerhof Almanac,” 1924, p. 35).

The tragedy in Przemysl, which occurred 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 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.

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. 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, Talerhof, was created, filled on an ethnic principle. The camp was located near the Abtissendorf railway station, and now on this site there 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. Besides Talerhof, other camps were also created, the best known of which is Theresienstadt—in northern Bohemia, not far from Prague.

However, in the autumn of 1914, when the first trains from Galicia with arrested Rusyns began arriving in Talerhof, there was still no actual camp—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 literally on the ground, using improvised means to arrange daily life. The camp administration did not even provide dishes. They drank and ate from найденных 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 bean broth; at noon, the same kind of beet soup. Sometimes—salted turnips and a piece of herring.” As a result, in the first winter more than 1,100 people died from 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 the arrested Russians are innocent, but they were arrested so as not to become them.”

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