On the history of the international activity of the Central Carpatho-Russian Council in Siberia (1919)

In the autumn of 1918, the Central Carpatho-Russian Council was created in eastern Russia with the goal to liberate Galician, Bukovina, and Ugric Rus “from under the Austro-Magyar yoke” and reunify them with Russia. The leaders of the organization, who supported the anti-Bolshevik movement, set the task of informing the population of Russia and the leadership of the Entente countries and the USA about their intentions. They attempted to influence the decision-making process related to the future fate of the Carpathian lands by the participants of the Peace Conference in Paris. One of these attempts was to send to the USA and Europe a delegation of three representatives -Semyon Bendasyuk (1877-1965), Mikhail Sokhotzky (1878-1962), and Ilya Tziorogh (1880-1942). This article aims at reconstructing the course of the mission and assessing its consequences, which will allow highlighting an understudied episodes of the international activities of the Central Carpatho-Russian Council and detailing the biographies of the delegation participants. The main source for the study was the correspondence between employees of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian government, Admiral Alexander Kolchak and members of the Central Carpatho-Russian Council from the funds of the State Archive of the Russian Federation. The author concludes that the mission of the Carpatho-Russian delegates failed due to a complex of reasons related to the course of the trip itself as well as the international situation. Struggling through financial and transportation difficulties, the Carpatho-Russians also turned out to be dependent on factors that they could not influence - the results of the Civil War in Russia and the decisions of the Entente countries and the United States.