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Abstract

Ruthenians overwhelmingly came to Michigan between 1900 and 1914 as citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, where their ethnic (national) status was officially recognized and protected (at least formally). Their distinct identity was built around their Rusyn language, Ruthenian Rite Catholicism, connection to a cultural territorial homeland along the Carpathians (Ruthenia), and an overwhelmingly peasant-based village life generally led by sacerdotal families. However, the lack of a single administrative focus within the Monarchy’s multi-ethnicity meant that Ruthenians always showed a high degree of regional variation. With the collapse of the Monarchy in 1918, the polyvalent centrifugal tendencies rapidly accelerated so that no single post-Habsburg Ruthenian identity emerged. The lack of a specifically Ruthenian successor nation-state, meant that “Ruthenian” all but died as a category, replaced by numerous options based largely around the new nation-states of Central and Eastern Europe. These successor states regularly suppressed a specifically Ruthenian identity. Meanwhile, Ruthenians in Michigan not only took their identity cues from the homeland, but also confronted an overtly hostile Latin Catholicism that drove many, perhaps the majority, to convert to Orthodoxy—originally Russian but later also Greek. In addition, their diasporic experiences exacerbated rather than mitigated their differences, so that only a small number are now conscious of a distinctly Ruthenian heritage, and even that is defined in different terms than from before 1918. As Michigan Ruthenians splintered, they became Ukrainian, Slovak, Russian, Carpatho-Rusyn, Lemko, or other.

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