70th anniversary of the annexation of Subcarpathia to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic

On 29 June 1945, the Soviet-Czechoslovak Treaty was signed in Moscow, which meant the annexation of Subcarpathia (Zakarpattia Oblast) to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, itthon.ma reported.

Situated in the Carpathian Mountains of western Ukraine, Subcarpathia is the only Ukrainian administrative division which borders upon four countries: Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania.
According to the 2001 Ukrainian Census, the population of Zakarpattia Oblast is 1 254 614. This total includes people of many different nationalities of which Hungarians, Romanians, and Rusyns constitute significant minorities in some of the province’s cities, while in others, they form the majority of the population.

For a long time, the lands of Subcarpathia were part of the Kingdom of Hungary which eventually transformed into the Hungarian part of Austria-Hungary until the latter’s demise at the end of World War I. It approximately consists of four Hungarian counties: Bereg, Ung, Ugocsa, and Maramaros.

The Treaty of Trianon, which formally ended World War I, annexed Subcarpathia to the newly formed Czechoslovakia with a supposedly equal level of autonomy as Slovakia and Bohemia-Moravia-Czech Silesia. Nevertheless, such autonomy was granted as late as in 1938, after detrimental events of the Munich Conference; until then this land was administered directly from Prague by the government-appointed provincial presidents or elected governors. The Munich Agreement was a settlement permitting Nazi Germany’s annexation of portions of Czechoslovakia along the country’s borders mainly inhabited by German speakers, for which a new territorial designation “Sudetenland” was coined. The purpose of the conference was to discuss the future of the Sudetenland in the face of ethnic demands made by Adolf Hitler.

In October 1938, Avgustyn Voloshyn, president of the independent Carpatho-Ukraine, established an autonomous Rusyn government. By the First Vienna Award on 2 November 1938, arbiters from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy sought a non-violent way to enforce the territorial claims of the Kingdom of Hungary, in revision of the Treaty of Trianon. It separated largely Hungarian-populated territories in southern Slovakia and southern Carpathian Rus from Czechoslovakia, and awarded them to Hungary. Hungary thus regained some of the territories in present-day Slovakia and Ukraine that it had lost by the Treaty of Trianon.