Russian folk tales in Ukrainian and the orange newspeak

[Harold F. Schiffman]

>>From Regnum.ru: 16:27 04.07.2006

Permanent news address: http://www.regnum.ru/english/664801.html

Russian folk tales in Ukrainian and the orange newspeak: Ivan Sernik on
the past and present of the Russian Language in Ukraine

There is no problem of the Russian language in Ukraine. Every statesman in
that country will tell you this and will skeptically smile: Does anybody
forbid you to speak Russian? Thats how the Ukrainian authorities
camouflage their policy for eradicating the Russian language from all the
spheres of life. Meanwhile, after the orange revolution and, especially,
in the last days we can see new combat actions unfolding at the
anti-Russian front. As you may know, Russian and Ukrainian are kindred
Eastern Slavonic languages they are so close that they can generally be
understood without translation. They both have common roots in the
language of the ancient Russian nationality at least, they have been
generally believed to, so far.

Today, however, there is another general concept in Ukraine: the viewpoint
of historian Mikhail Braychevsky, who says, just like his better-known
counterpart Mikhail Grushevsky (1866-1934), that Russians and Ukrainians
were initially separate nationalities and have never been a single whole.
Braychevsky goes even farther by concluding that there was no common
ancient Russian language at all. In fact, there was. Simply, it was a
written, literary language, like Latin in Western Europe, while in the
territory of the Ukrainian ethnos people spoke a language that later
developed into Ukrainian. With no evidence of ancient Ukrainian preserved,
Braychevskys conclusion cannot be proved, but is still officially accepted
by the Ukrainian historical science.

The modern Ukrainian language descends from the Poltava dialect, which was
recognized as classical, due mostly to the great Ukrainian poet Ivan
Kotlyarevsky (1769-1838), Ukrainian genius Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861)
and the writers and poets of the Right Bank Ukraine. In the Tsar and
Soviet times, Ukrainians were quite loyal to the Russian language and
perfectly understood it. It should be noted that before the revolution,
ordinary Ukrainians thought that Russian was their correct written
language. It should also be noted that after the October 17 1905
Manifesto, which gave the green light to Ukrainian press and book
publishing, many Ukrainians were puzzled when opening books in Ukrainian
and said that it was not their language. Before XX, the Tsar authorities
and science refused to recognize the Malorossiyan dialect as an
independent language. It was then that the two languages gradually mixed
into surzhik a dialect that is widely spread today in rural areas of
Southern and Eastern Ukraine and among old people in small towns.
Historically, the country spoke Ukrainian, while industrial centers, and
Donbass Russian. In the Western Ukrainian lands, which were part of the
Austrian Habsburg Empire, the local Galicians borrowed many German and
Polish words, but were still understood by people from the Right Bank.
This dialect was the work language of writer Ivan Franko (1856-1916).

Nationalist Central Rada came into power in Kiev after the February 1917
revolution. They, first, proclaimed autonomy and, later, when they lost
their real powers independence. One of the natural steps of the new
authorities and their successor, Keiser-imposed Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky,
was the policy of Ukrainization a policy Kiev-born Russian writer Mikhail
Bulgakov described as quite comical at times. Soviet regime was proclaimed
over most of Ukraine in 1920 (only Western Ukraine joined the revived
Poland). In the 1920s-1930s, the Communist authorities of the Soviet
Ukraine launched the policy of enrooting, i.e. mass and thoughtless
introduction of the Ukrainian language in the spheres of state
administration, education, and mass media. The Republican Communists
propagated Ukrainian with no care for regional peculiarities,
particularly, in Russian-speaking Donbass.

In the second half of the 1930s, enrooting was stopped as enrooters were
removed from power. It should be noted that when occupying Ukraine in
1941-1944, the Nazis actively propagated Ukrainian, particularly, in the
East and South. In the 1950s-1980s, Ukraine was heavily Russified, which
resulted in a dissident movement in the 1960s. Ukrainian dissidents
protested that, under the guise of internationalism, Moscow was conducting
an anti-Ukrainian colonial policy. Ukrainian intellectuals have always
been advocates of mother tongue, while they in Eastern Ukraine even
refused to talk with people speaking Russian. There were many
National-Patriots in the top party authorities too. For example, once
attending a political meeting of a military unit in Pre-Carpathian
Military District, the First Secretary of the Community Party of Ukraine
Pyotr Shelest demanded that it be held in Ukrainian even though the
soldiers were from all over the Soviet Union. It was his nationalism that
lost Shelest his seat in 1972. His successor from Dnepropetrovsk,
Brezhnevs friend Vladimir Scherbitsky spoke Russian often and a lot.

This reflects the general dual language policy applied in Ukraine at those
times: on the one hand, the Ukrainian authorities removed Ukrainian from
school curricula and made Russian compulsory for secondary and higher
education, on the other hand, Ukrainian was widely spread on local radio
and TV, almost 50 percent of periodicals were in that language.
Ukrainian-speaking university entrants were given unofficial odds. In
fact, both languages were freely applicable. In the 1980s, almost all
Ukrainians spoke Russian and almost 50 percent of them admitted that they
preferred Russian in everyday communication. Frankly speaking, in cities
and among low-cultured groups, people speaking Ukrainian on an everyday
basis were regarded as peasants, second-sort people. At that time you
would hardly find any serious scientific or specialized literature in
Ukrainian.

Gorbachevs perestroika revived patriotic moods among ordinary people and
intelligentsia in Kiev and Galicia. Ukrainians displayed sharply growing
interest in their culture, history and language. People began to speak
Ukrainian readily and a lot. One could naturally expect that independence
of 1991 would bring happy times for Ukrainian and hard times for Russian,
but the first president Leonid Kravchuk started up quite slowly and
carefully. Sometimes they used material bonuses: teacher giving lectures
in Ukrainian enjoyed 30 percent rise in their wages.

The authorities of newly proclaimed Ukraine launched a multi-front attack
on their Russian-speaking compatriots: in education, mass media, state
administration, and book publishing. Under Kravchuk and later Kuchma the
language policy got into the hands of nationalists, who got down to work
with rolled-up sleeves. They, first, hacked up the Ukrainian-Russian
history, which is a subject for a special study. Official propaganda began
claiming that Russian-speaking Ukrainians are the product of centuries-old
forced Russification by Moscow. Nationalists joined in by calling all
Russian-speaking citizens the fifth pillar. Now too they continue
discrediting Russian by calling it the language of slang and pop.

More and more Russian schools were transformed into Ukrainian according to
the wish of children and parents. The Crimea was let be for a while. If in
Kiev and Central Ukraine nobody resisted, in Donbass people fought for
each such Russian school. In response to the anti-Russian campaign, people
in Donetsk and Lugansk regions held a referendum in 1994. Though having no
legal force, that referendum showed that almost 90 percent of the
8-million region wanted the Russian language to be preserved. Later, to
the great displeasure of the central authorities, the municipalities of
Donetsk, Kharkov and some other big Eastern Ukrainian cities began
applying Russian in their official documentation. In fact, the
anti-Russian campaign was developing in rising and falling waves. In the
mid-1990s, the Russian-speaking population rose again  this time against
the closure of the central Russian TV channels.

Under Kuchma, Ukrainization was actively developing. His ten-year rule was
the period of veiled marginalization of the Russian language. Article 10
of 1996 Constitution said that the state language in Ukraine was
Ukrainian, while Russian and other minority languages should be actively
supported by the state. All this remained just a good wish. The European
Charter for Regional and Minority Languages was twice adopted by the
Supreme Rada  to the wild hoots of Nationalists and National-Democrats
but both times forgotten. In the meantime, the President, the Cabinet, the
education and information ministries, the National TV and Radio Council,
the State Press and Information Committee  all full with Russophobe Kuchma
supporters  brainstormed day and night for new ways to suppress the Moskal
language. They imposed broadcasting quotas for regional and commercial TV
channels: no less than half of all their programs should be in Ukrainian.
Every month local authorities reported on how many schools they had
transformed into Ukrainian. In Kiev, Western, and Central Ukrainian
schools the Russian language was killed. Today, there are only 4 Russian
schools in the 3-million Kyiv. In central and regional administrations all
documentation and correspondence was Ukrainized.

Only economic executives and some ministers allowed themselves to speak
Russian. The vivid example was big government official Nikolay Azarov, who
was first the Chief of the Tax Service and in 2002-2004 the First Vice
Prime Minister of Ukraine. When speaking in the parliament he always faced
obstruction by the National-Democrats who did not care for what he was
saying, what they did care for was in what language he was speaking. One
more example: during a parliamentary meeting on urgent economic problems
MP Mikola Porovsky tried to prevent Vice Prime Minister Oleg Dubina from
holding the meeting in Russian. At last, he was shown the door.

The last years of Kuchmas rule were the hardest for Russian. First, they
obliged unprepared doctors to record diagnoses in Ukrainian, which led to
confusion in case histories. Second, they adopted a law on publicity
stipulating that one must advertise exclusively in Ukrainian or pay fine.
Though being quite acute, the language problem was not, certainly, the
biggest concern at those transition times when hardly every man had money
for bread. Still, there were certain tensions in the Russian-speaking
regions and these tensions were aptly used by politicians during
elections. Like in the Pavlovs dog test, they remembered Russian only when
they had to get votes in the South-East and the Crimea.

It should be noted that when in family and with close friends Kuchma and
many ardent Ukrainophiles preferred speaking the cursed language. In the
meantime, they were changing the Ukrainian language itself. They were
trying to make it less like Russian in vocabulary, phonetics and syntax.
Many Ukrainian words were just copies of their Russian equivalents, some
terms were lacking at all. So, they had to invest them by borrowing lots
of words from the Galician dialect  words that were incomprehensible for
those who learned Ukrainian in Soviet schools. In other cases, they just
invented words or borrowed them from other languages (mostly from
English). There is a whole institute working on this. For example, Russian
vertolyot was replaced by helicopter, militsioner by militsiant
(militiaman). Besides, some media kept using dialecticisms. Vice Prime
Minister for Humanitarian Issues Mykola Zhulinsky even proposed reforming
Ukrainian orthography: for example, to write katedra instead of kafedra
(chair, rostrum, department) or parlyament instead of parlament. He was
not supported though. In the meantime, Estonians showed keen interest in
the Ukrainian language problem and suggested replacing the Cyrillic
alphabet by the Latin one. They said this would bring the country back
into the European cultural-historical space.

The Maidan staged as a nationalist revolution left the Russian language
even less chances to survive in Ukraine. In fact, nobody believed
President Viktor Yushchenkos promises that the rights of Russian-speaking
citizens would not be infringed upon. For the first time in many years,
Russian disappeared from central offices. Information policy got tougher.
The new authorities tried to cancel the licenses of several disloyal and
mostly Russian-speaking channels.

Today, 75 percent of TV and cinema news products should not only have
subtitles but should be dubbed into Ukrainian. With most of the programs
and TV series relayed from Russian TV, the blow is again on the Russian
language. Even more, TV companies and producing centers are obliged to
translate Russian programs at the own expense. As a result, TRK Ukraina, a
TV company broadcasting all over Ukraine, is forced to spend on this
novelty as much as $160, 000 a month. Translated Russian folk tales have
become a local original genre. The central authorities are making their
first attempts to open Ukrainian schools in the Crimea. They have made
Ukrainian compulsory for legal proceedings.

The only sphere they are failing to Ukrainize yet is book publishing.
Today, only 10 percent of the books published in Ukraine are in Ukrainian,
which is several times less than in the period of Soviet Russification.
The reason is quite simple: book-publishing is a market, and still in
demand on this market are books in Russian, except for some reference- and
text-books. Meanwhile, the authorities do not hurry to publish Ukrainian
books at their own expense. Instead they will fight Russian books by
raising import and other taxes. In May-June 2006 they in the Cabinet went
as far as to impose import restrictions and are now just one step from
banning the import of Russian books at all. True, they promise that the
restrictions will not be applied to classical Russian literature.

The fate of the long-suffering European Charter for Regional and Minority
Languages is quite exemplary. Twice dismissed but still in office Justice
Minister Sergey Golovaty said on May 12 2006 that his ministry is drafting
amendments to the law On the Ratification of the European Charter of
Regional and Minority Languages because it contains a number of juridical
and translation mistakes. Particularly, it qualifies Russian and
inexistent Jewish as minority languages. Hence, this law cannot be
implemented. The justice and foreign ministries are now drafting relevant
changes and will submit them to the parliament very shortly. Due to this
Jesuit policy, the language of almost 40 percent of Ukrainian citizens has
lost even the status of minority language. Indeed, how can one classify as
minority language the language spoken by almost half of a countrys
population?

In response to this new orange wave of suppression, the Kharkov, Donetsk,
Lugansk, Nikolayevsk and Zaporozhie regional administrations and the
Sevastopol, Dnepropetrovsk and Krivoi Rog municipalities decided in 2006
to recognize the Russian language as regional language in line with the
European Charter for Regional and Minority Language. Like in the times of
Kuchma, the Kiev authorities ordered the prosecutors office to make it out
with the Russophile officials in the regions and to issue protests, but
the prosecutors office tarried for some reason and, as a result, got it
from the president. On May 19 Presidential Advisor Markiyan Lubkivsky said
that Yuschenko was so worried by the news that the Russian language was
given regional status that he was going to raise this issue at the
National Security Council. The Public Prosecutor sent inspectors to look
into the legality of the decisions of the above-mentioned regional and
municipal authorities. The inspectors found the decisions illegal, and the
local prosecutors ruled out to revoke them. The authorities refused, and
the prosecutors summoned them to court. One such suit  against the
Dnepropetrovsk Municipal Council  has already been lost. Nationalists in
Donetsk have also failed their suit. Meanwhile, the President keeps
kicking the decision by explaining to everybody that there is no such
concept as regional status in the Constitution and, consequently, the
decision is unconstitutional. They forget that the ratification of the
European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages by the Supreme Rada
has made it part of the Ukrainian legislation.

The question is: Why do the official Ukrainian authorities  irrespective
of presidents  dislike the Russian language so much? There is one much
more important answer than just the notorious struggle with the colonial
past. They hope that by de-Russifying Ukraine they will manage to create a
united Ukrainian nation, to destroy their fifth pillar. By expelling the
Russian language, they show their reluctance to cooperate with Russia. In
fact, they are preventing any possibilities of not only union but even the
least integration. If there is no language and cultural-historical unity
there can be no unity at all. Besides, the officials and Nationalists
perfectly understand  and ex Supreme Rada Speaker Vladimir Litvin openly
said that  that if the two languages are given equal status and functions,
the Ukrainian language will lose. This will be a knock-out for a great lot
of people promoting their local cultural product and defying any rivalry.
It is they who are flinging mud at Verka Serdyuchka and are trying to
debar the Russian show business, literature and TV from their home market.

So, what do we have as a result? The Ukrainian language has taken deep
roots in almost all the spheres in Ukraine. Almost everybody understands
it  if not speaks. Have people in Ukraine begun to speak Russian less in
their everyday life? Yes, they have. The number of Russian speakers is
decreasing. In fact, the Russian language has been sent to periphery. The
great cultural and scientific achievements in Russian remain inaccessible.
The rights of millions of citizens are infringed upon. A whole generation
of half-educated and nationally narrow-minded people are growing up  in
fact, they dont speak well neither language. And one can hardly expect any
improvement in the near future. One can hardly expect the present
authorities and the Supreme Rada to amend Article 10 of the Constitution
and to recognize Russian as the second state language. This will require
300 votes, including by the orange MPs. Nor do the Russian speakers in
Ukraine have a united movement for protecting their rights. Their most
consistent supporters are Natalia Vitrenko with her Progressive Socialist
Party and the Communists. In the Party of Regions who won the elections
under the slogan: Lets Protect the Russian Language! there are both people
who care for this problem and those who can make it an object of haggle
with Kiev.

In the past 15 years of Ukraines independence, the Russian authorities
have done nothing to protect the Russian language and those speaking it in
Ukraine. So, it seems that only revolution  similar to that at Maidan  can
lead to the recognition of the Russian language in Ukraine.

Ivan Sernik

>>From 1999-2006 REGNUM News Agency
http://www.regnum.ru/english/664801.html

[Moderator's note: "enrooting" was part of early Soviet language policy,
known in Russian as 'korenizatsia'.  See, e.g. James E. Mace article at:

http://www.ukrweekly.com/Archive/1984/268425.shtml

where he states that "In 1923, the 12th Party Congress formally adopted
the policy of korenizatsia, which literally means "taking root," but whose
meaning is better conveyed by the world "indigenization." Ukrainization,
the Ukrainian version of korenizatsiya, was designed to give the Soviet
Ukrainian state a veneer of national legitimacy by actively recruiting
Ukrainians into the party and state apparatus, switching official business
to the Ukrainian language, and supporting Ukrainian cultural activities."
(hs)]