Podkarpatská Rus

At the post-war peace conference in Paris in 1919, it was decided that the territory of the former Hungarian Russia, also known as "Zakarpatsko" or "Podkarpatská Rus" in Czech language or "Carpathian Ruthenia" in English, would be included in the newly formed Czechoslovak state.

From the national point of view, it was quite a complicated area. Due to the fact that the country belonged to the territory of the Kingdom of Hungary for several centuries, Hungarians were strongly established there. Jews held a significant share of the population, and the Slavic ethnic group of Ruthenians had the largest representation, but it was not yet clearly nationally defined. On the one hand, the Ruthenians were influenced by long-term Hungarianization, and on the other hand, they also showed a rather diverse national orientation, whether Ukrainian, Russian or one, based on the idea of ​​the existence of an independent Ruthenian nation. The incarnation into the Czechoslovak state thus seemed to be a good compromise solution for the representatives of this group in view of the territorial-political situation at the time. The reality then disappointed part of the Ruthenian elite, but in general, in terms of cultural and national development, the twenty-year existence in the Czechoslovak Republic had quite beneficial effects for the Ruthenians. A kind of culmination of this process was the proclamation of an independent Carpathian Ukraine in the days of March 1939, when the rest of Czechoslovakia was broken. However, this state unit had only a poppy life when it disappeared after the subsequent occupation of the rest of Subcarpathian Russia by the Hungarians.

During the period between the world wars, a large number of Czechs lived in the Carpathian Ruthenia region, who for the most part worked in the civil service as representatives of the local self-government, officials, gendarmes and soldiers. This second and revised edition of the detailed Map of Carpathian Ruthenia, published in Mukachevo by Novotný and Bartošek publishers, is one of the reactions to the increasing number of trips of Czech and Slovak residents to this area; in this case, the main target group were tourists who description of the country and an overview of hiking trails. One of the surviving copies is now in the possession of the Military History Institute in Prague.