CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR _CARPATHO-UKRAINE_ The fate of Carpatho-Ukraine was quite different. It was represented in the negotiations that led up to the formation of the Republic of Western Ukraine, but when the Western Ukrainian armies were forced eastward by the Poles, the district was left isolated and the various groups came together and decided upon union with Czechoslovakia. The ideas of the population on this point were somewhat hazy. They envisaged a situation where they would form a state within a state, possessing practically complete autonomy, very similar to the position of Hungary in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In this connection they were also influenced by the Slovaks, who had dreams of holding a similar status. On the other hand, the Czechs certainly thought of a unified state of the same general type as France and it was the Czech ideas that were carried out in practice. On the whole the population of Carpatho-Ukraine was far more undeveloped politically and nationally than were the other sections. There were practically no schools in the area and what schools there were conducted instruction in Hungarian. The Hungarian government also had been extremely effective in imbuing the educated classes of its minorities with the idea that their future depended upon merging their own interests with those of the dominant Magyars. As a result there were few, outside of the clergy, who had any vital understanding of the cause of the people. Besides that, the Ukrainian revival in these northern Hungarian counties had not progressed as far since 1848 as it had among the other sections of the Ukrainian people. While there was an active Ukrainian group in the area, there were also many people who insisted, contrary to all philological and cultural facts, that their language was an archaic dialect of Russian and they looked to Russia for all improvement in their status. This was particularly true of the Orthodox in the area, even though their bishops were still nominally dependent upon the Patriarch of Constantinople who retained the same vague powers of control that he had in mediaeval Kiev. Many of these people, even when they desired to be free of Hungarian control, still treasured some sort of belief that they should be attached to Russia and refused to consider merging their lot with that of the other Ukrainians. Economic conditions were very bad and the mountainous nature of the country was responsible for difficulties in communication between the various mountain valleys, which formed the headwaters of the rivers flowing down into the Hungarian plains to the south. Many of the younger men and women emigrated or at least went down to Hungary as seasonal laborers and the relations with the northern slopes of the Carpathians were rather weak.