Post-Genocidal Environment

Yuri Andrukhovych’s column struck a chord with his remark about how so many people here think of world culture in the Russian language. So did Mykola Neseniuk’s remark on how Ukrainian athletes, who know Ukrainian perfectly well, prefer to speak Russian. The psychological pressure a Ukrainian speaker faces here was also illustrated recently when my wife went out looking for Kyievski vidomosty, the Ukrainian language weekly digest of Kievskie Vedomosti: “Nobody here in Troyeshchyna reads Ukrainian,” she was haughtily told. In fact, in Soviet times the CPSU considered the Russian translation of Marx and Engels, not the original, “authoritative.” Soviet “internationalism” meant Russian, no more and no less.

It was not always so. In the 1920s the Ukrainian language was a perfectly acceptable medium for generating new ideas by people like executed writer Hryhory Kosynka, whose centennial is recalled here. In fact, since at that time one really had to know Ukrainian here, one-third of all Russian and Jewish children in the Ukrainian SSR were enrolled in Ukrainian language schools. But as Bohdan Krawchenko points out in his excellent Social Change and National Consciousness in Twentieth Century Ukraine, in 1933 those children were forcibly transferred to Russian-language schools, Ukrainian schools became schools for Ukrainians only, and the Ukrainian language was used only to adapt ideas generated in Moscow for the untutored natives. All things Ukrainian became localized, second- rate, and inferior, as one had to go to the Russian language to seek new ideas. Even my thoroughly Ukrainian wife, who as a matter of principle refused to speak Russian in public (unless someone really does not understand Ukrainian), admits that when she thinks about philosophy, she thinks in Russian, because all the books she read were in that language.

When the late Raphael Lemkin coined the word genocide in 1944, what he basically had in mind was the forcible replacement of one national pattern of life with another. That happened here, and coming to terms with its legacy will take much time and a whole nation relearning the meaning of pride in itself and what makes it unique. No one has anything against the Russian culture or language, but as long as Ukrainian remains second-rate in the eyes of the Ukrainians themselves, this nation will never be whole.