Memoirs of Galician Victim of Austro-Hungarian Genocide Published in Moscow

Hieromartyr St Maksim Sandovich of Lemkovshchyna, murdered by the Hapsburg authorities

Moscow, 11 July 2007 (Interfax):

The memoirs of Vasily Vavrik, a prisoner of the Tallerhof death camp near Graz, Austria are about the first Russian genocide in the early twentieth century, the extermination of the Russian Orthodox population in Galicia and Carpatho-Russia right before World War I. The Ukrainian department of the CIS Institute and the Conservative Club published The Genocide of Carpatho-Russian Russophiles: A Silenced Tragedy of the Twentieth Century as a joint project.

“The book about the Tallerhof Genocide is our answer to those who accuse Russians and ‘Moscow’ of organising the Ukrainian famine (holodomor) in 1932-1933, when peasants were exterminated because of their social class, not their ethnic background. Generally, the book provides a systematised answer to those who encourage political Russophobia and who try to impose a guilt complex on Russians”, Kirill Frolov, the head of the Ukraine department of the CIS Institute and the press secretary of the Union of the Orthodox Citizens said to Interfax.

The book deals, on the one hand, with the history of the Russian national revival in Galicia and Carpatho-Russia in the late 1890s and early twentieth century. It included many Uniates coming back to the Orthodox Church, so one saw on major church feasts as many as 400 church processions crossing the Austrian border to come to the Pochaev Lavra. On the other hand, the book describes the Austro-Hungarian imperial genocide of Russians on those territories, including the political trials of “Russophile” clergy and common folk who became Orthodox or spoke Russian. It also tells about the death camps and mass killings that took over 60,000 lives. The book evaluates the role of the “Ukrainian-Austrian party” on the course of those events.

Interfax-Religion

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