This research deals with the history of Russophile and Ukrainophile orientations in eastern Slovakia between the two world wars. It is investigated how various modern national projects – on the periphery of a multinational state like the First Czechoslovak Republic – coexisted and competed for the right to represent the local East Slavic people. At the same time, the project researches into the concept of ‘national indifference’ and the limits of nationalist mobilization among a mixed population of the ethnic borderlands. The study has two components. The first one is an attempt to investigate the interaction between the nationalizing state and the two competing cultural politics of identity-making. The second one is to shift the focus of our attention from confrontation to mutual influence and blurred borderlines between the “Ukrainophile” and the “Russophile” projects and their activists in eastern Slovakia. The main ambition of this project is to add new insights to the study of regionalism in Subcarpathia / Zakarpattia, and also to answer more general questions on the challenges to transnational and transregional integration projects as represented by the Ukrainian idea on the one hand, and all-Russian (obshcherusskie) ideologies on the other.

A full-length study is available here.