Pity the people of Transcarpathia. On second thought, better not.
But there is no way the foreign traveler can avoid contemplating the rotten fate of the inhabitants of the region.
Their unhappy lot is striking because they live snug against the Hungarian and Slovak borders and on the other side of a rugged mountain range from the rest of Ukraine. Even by Ukrainian standards, they are not rich. Compared to their Hungarian and Slovak neighbors, who are not exactly wealthy, they are destitute.
Crossing the international boundary into their compact domain is like descending into an earthly hell. Make the passage by car and wait, and wait, for several hours for less-than-efficient and less-than-polite customs officers to allow you the privilege of entry into Ukraine.
Upon leaving the fenced border zone, make sure the doors are locked as you pass children and women in tattered clothing trying to sell cigarettes, vodka, hand-woven baskets and Japanese appliances in damaged packaging. Go slow to avoid popping a tire on roads as cratered as the moon.
Make the passage by train and you are confronted with child beggars in your carriage at the first stop in the town of Chop.
On the platform, the same bedraggled children and women hawk Turkish cookies, odd brands of Cola, potato pancakes and cooked chickens for the journey ahead. Passengers with gold teeth and frayed track suits come on board struggling with absurd numbers of ratty pieces of luggage. If there is any doubt remaining that you’ve entered a new sociological dimension, watch the workers change European-gauge rail car undercarriages for the wider-axled standard used in the former Soviet Union.
Once moving, in car or train, much of the rural scenery is distinctly ex-Soviet. Bicycles and horse carts are sights as common as battered old cars and trucks.
Men armed with wood-handled sickles work the fields. Women do road work. Cows and geese wander at will. Every building needs a paint job. Hulking factories with pipelines and power lines running in every direction stand idle behind locked gates. Busts of Lenin outnumber commercial billboards. But look closer, and the region is an ex-Soviet oddity. The crumbling, old buildings in the towns are vaguely pretty, with sturdy walls and elaborate facades. This is a mark of the old Hapsburg Empire.
Even more specifically, Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Protestant churches can often be found in the same village. Houses vary wildly in design. Some look just like the square houses with high, pointed roofs just across the Hungarian border.
Others resemble the multi-windowed, vine-covered dwellings of east Slovakia. There are still more designs distinct from the low-lying, rectangular houses surrounded by wooden fences found in much of the rest of rural Ukraine.
This is a sign of the region’s unique ethnic mix.
The Hungarian and Slovak minorities are large, though smaller than the ethnic Ukrainian minority. A few Poles, Czechs, Germans, Romanians, Jews and Russians can also be found. The largest group is the Russenes, Orthodox Christians who speak a dialect not far removed from Church Slavonic. Most of them would deny being Ukrainians, a claim accepted by many of their ethnic Ukrainian neighbors.
Back to the hellish poverty of the region: it is mainly a product of geopolitics.
Transcarpathia became part of Ukraine only in 1945, when Stalin took it from Czechoslovakia after driving out the Nazis. Before two decades of rule from Prague, orders came from Hapsburg Vienna by way of Budapest. For centuries before that, local Hungarian nobles called the shots.
Through it all and down to the present day, a degree of inter-ethnic harmony rare for Eastern Europe has prevailed. That leads the outsider to ponder the tragedy of 1945. Stalin’s land grab drew a stark line around the region, completely cutting it off from Central Europe.
Now Stalin and the Soviet Union are dead, but new geopolitical realities ensure that the border will remain where it is. As Hungary and Slovakia move more or less rapidly toward prosperous and democratic Europe in coming years, Transcarpathia will remain stuck in the hopeless East.
The visitor can wonder what might have been had history gone differently. The hard-pressed Transcarpathians are too busy scraping by to do the same.
Bill Reynolds is the Kyiv Post’s associate editor.
