Ukraine or Little Russia?

Any unbiased observer can see that the Ukrainian language, not Russian, needs protection in today’s Ukraine. Those in doubt should spend a day on the streets in Kyiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Kirovohrad, Kherson, Cherkasy, Vinnytsia, Chernihiv, in any of many district centers, ride in the buses or fixed-route taxis, listen to FM stations, take a look at newsstands, visit bookstores, cafes, grade schools, even universities. Russian reigns everywhere (well, except in Western Ukraine — Ed.).

Does this mean that Ukrainians are disowning their mother tongue? The last census would seem to indicate the opposite: 67.5% of the population pointed to Ukrainian as their native language, 2.8% more than in 1989. If only that 67.5% actually used the language! What we have is a curious phenomenon of platonic love: Ukrainian is the mother tongue, but communicating in Russian is somehow easier.

Ukrainians are a traumatized nation. Ukrainian national self-denial was stimulated by Catherine II who lured the Cossack brass into submission by bestowing Russian noble titles and privileges. The whole nineteenth century was marked by restrictions levied on the Ukrainian language, while encouraging characters like Yuzefovich and Shulgin in Kyiv and Russophiles in Halychyna, who played the role of a the fifth column. This nation lost millions in the twentieth century as the result of mass deportations, civil war, exodus of Ukrainian intellectuals, manmade famines, purges, “reshuffling” the population in the Soviet empire, and unceasing witch hunts for “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists.” Could all this have passed without aftereffects?

Today’s Ukrainians ought to know all this only too well. Language is, after all, not only a means of communication, but also an indicator of national dignity and historical memory. Borys Hrynchenko wrote to Mykhailo Drahomanov: “The Muscovite tongue means that people speaking it will have Muscovite ideas...” After more than a hundred years we are still trying to answer those same charmed questions: Ukraine or Little Russia? Who are our forefathers? Quo vadis?

The notion of Little Russia, with its inferiority complex and defeatism, is wound in our body politic that never heals. I would call it the number one problem shedding light on a number of aspects of Ukraine’s current history. Its presence in the lingual domain is also quite obvious. Numerous noteworthy recommendations were voiced during the March parliamentary hearings On the Functioning of the Ukrainian Language in Ukraine. In fact, if Verkhovna Rada approved and if all the branches of government had carried them out, the situation would then have changed for the better.

It would if: the cabinet included a central executive authority responsible for language policy; Verkhovna Rada passed a new law On Languages providing for a real mechanism to protect and assert Ukrainian as the official language in all spheres of public life, along with legal consequences for violating this; the government worked out a concept of the nation’s language policy and attendant national program of the development, functioning, and studies of the Ukrainian language to 2010; the state did protect the Ukrainian-language press, television, and book publishing; and those wielding power showed enough will to wage a policy to this effect.

If all this happened, we would before long have a different situation with the Ukrainian language — and this situation would in no way hamper any of our ethnic minorities.

It is important for the authorities to send understandable signals to society. In the early 1990s it became even fashionable to use good Ukrainian. But then came 1994, when we heard from the highest rostrum that the national idea “did not work,” and that Russian had to have an official status — in other words, that we had to have two official languages. The consequences were rapid in coming. Now we hear that we should let Russian and Ukrainian compete freely. It would be like an athlete and an Auschwitz inmate competing in a race. The Ukrainian language with its tragic old and latter-day history needs protection from the state and society...

Now that another presidential campaign is underway, the old game is being replayed, with all those in various political groups shouting about a special status for Russian. Once again we are trying to figure out whether we live in Ukraine or Little Russia.