SUMMARY:

This article examines the ways in which members of the Carpatho-Rusyn intelligentsia who considered themselves Russians (also known as Russophiles) integrated into the Soviet intelligentsia after World War II. Tracking the careers and works of the two Carpatho-Rusyn Russophiles, Petr Lintur and Petr Sova, the author argues that, paradoxically, the Russophiles played an essential role in the Ukrainization of the farthest western Ukrainian territory, Transcarpathia. Before 1944, when the Red Army came to the region, Russophiles were the main opponents of Ukrainian nationalists and claimed that the broader region of Carpathian Rus’ belonged to the Russian cultural space. However, the complex Soviet nationality policy solved this conflict, favoring Russians as the most progressive and state-bearing nation of the Union and Ukrainian nationalist aspirations to “reunite” Transcarpathia with Ukraine. In this framework, Lintur and Sova sacrificed their aspirations to make Transcarpathia Russian, and in return received the privileged state-bearing position of Russian cadres in the Soviet model of Friendship of the Peoples. In the end, to fully join the Soviet intelligentsia, the Carpatho-Rusyn Russophiles had to become either Soviet Ukrainians, as Sova de facto did, or Soviet Russians, the choice Lintur made, for which he faced recurring criticism.