<div dir="ltr"><h1>Ukraine’s Explosive Language question<br></h1><div class="gmail-bottom-social-menu gmail-left-side">
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<a href="http://www.fairobserver.com/author/Brian%20Milakovsky">Brian Milakovsky</a></strong>
<p>Brian Milakovsky works on humanitarian issues in eastern Ukraine.
He has been living and working in Russia and Ukraine since 2009, when he
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</aside> <p><em>It
is no longer a sustainable social contract in Ukraine that the east can
be a Russian-speaking enclave and de facto ignore the state language.</em></p>
<p>The so-called “language question” has been a recurring motif of
political conflict in Ukraine for the past 25 years. Too often, debates
between proponents of obligatory <em>Ukrainizatsiya </em>(Ukrainianization) and of the two-language (Ukrainian and Russian) status quo have veered into culture war.</p>
<p>The question has proven particularly dangerous during the <em>actual</em>
war in eastern Ukraine that began in spring, 2014. In the first days
after the victory of the Euromaidan revolution, the Ukrainian parliament
repealed the Regional Languages Law of 2012, which the disgraced
ex-president, Viktor Yanukovich, had pushed through to placate his
Russian-speaking political base in the country’s southeast.</p>
<p>The repealing of the law’s certainly would not “make Russian
illegal”—it would only have limited its use in some public functions—but
this is how it was interpreted in much of the restive Donbas Region,
which was deeply upset by the ascension of pro-Western revolutions in
Kiev. The acting president vetoed the repeal, understanding the
disastrous effect the repeal was having on public opinion in the east.
But the damage was done.</p>
<p>Indeed, language rights became one of the main fronts of the
Moscow-backed Russian Spring project that engulfed Donetsk and Luhansk.
Living at the time in distant Vladivostok, I recall radio appeals to
Russians to join the Donbas “militias” to defend their common native
tongue. In the early days of the war, Moscow-based journalist <a href="http://reporter.vesti-ukr.com/art/y2014/n34/9219-dve-istorii-odnoj-vojny.html#.VJYb6sAA" target="_blank">Marina Akhmedova asked Donbas rebels what they were fighting against</a>.
They railed against the supposed humiliation of having Ukrainian
imposed on them: “We couldn’t read the labels on our medicine bottles!”</p>
<p>But while deep ideological fissures opened up in Ukraine, Kiev set
the dangerous language question aside. No serious restrictions were
imposed, and those regions of the Donbas under government control
continued their familiar Russian-speaking existence. However, this
hands-off approach ended several weeks ago, when President Petro
Poroshenko’s party introduced a draft law that would mandate near-total <a href="http://w1.c1.rada.gov.ua/pls/zweb2/webproc4_1?pf3511=60953" target="_blank">conversion to the Ukrainian language in schools and universitie</a>s, local government, print and online media, and even in stores and restaurants.</p>
<p>To judge the wisdom of such a move is necessary to answer several questions: Is <em>Ukrainizatsiya </em>a just policy? And is it necessary at this time of profound national crisis for Ukraine?</p>
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<h4><strong>Language of the Aggressor </strong></h4>
<p>The history of Luhansk Oblast (province) in the Donbas, where I
presently live, offers a compelling prism of which to answer this
question. Most of the initial settlers who braved nomadic and Turkish
raids in this dangerous steppe frontier were Ukrainian peasants. But
they were joined by fugitive serfs from overcrowded central Russia, Don
Cossacks and Balkan refugees from the Ottoman Empire.</p>
<p>The proportion of ethnic Russians increased greatly with the opening
of vast coal reserves and industrialization in the province’s south. But
when the Bolsheviks seized the region in 1917, it was an ethnic and
linguistic mosaic in which Ukrainian played a central role.</p>
<p>The Bolshevik’s language policy lurched wildly from enforced
promotion of Ukrainian in the 1920s (to the deep resentment of some
Russian-speaking proletarians) to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executed_Renaissance" target="_blank">mass repression of Ukrainian national activists</a>, which came on the heels of mass death of Ukrainian peasant farmers in the <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-25058256" target="_blank">artificial famine</a>
of 1933. This was followed by moderate promotion under Khrushchev and
finally to Russification as an instrument of pan-Soviet unity. In 1972,
the <a href="http://www.istpravda.com.ua/articles/2012/02/5/71393/" target="_blank">Ukrainian dissident writer Oleksa Tikhiy</a>
wrote bitterly of the disappearance of his national language and
culture in the Donbas, as Russian was imposed as the exclusive language
of educational and professional advancement. Calling out the imperial
nature of this policy was enough to get Tikhiy sent to a Russian prison
camp, where he perished.</p>
<p>Today, Russian thoroughly dominates in Luhansk province, and not only
in the separatist-controlled industrial cities. Soviet language policy
obscured Ukrainian linguistic and cultural character even in the rural
north, where its roots run deepest.</p>
<p>Thus, reviving the Ukrainian language in Luhansk Oblast, as in much
of the country’s east and south, is a fitting and justified answer to
this earlier, deliberate marginalization.</p>
<p>But there must be limits. Repressive Soviet policies helped the
Russian language expand its range in eastern Ukraine but did not
establish it there. It can be legitimately considered one of the
indigenous languages of the Donbas, spoken by a significant proportion
of the region’s pioneers and their descendants.</p>
<p>Having asserted that <em>Ukrainizatsiya </em>would be a just policy
if it recognized the legitimate place of Russian in the cultural mosaic,
we need to understand whether Ukraine needs it right now<em>. </em></p>
<p>For proponents of the new law, pro-Russian separatism in the Donbas
shows the need to eliminate mixed loyalties and mixed identities once
and for all. They believe that the dominance of the “<a href="http://www.radiosvoboda.org/a/28141317.html" target="_blank">language of the aggressor</a>” makes that region’s residents susceptible to Russian world ideology.</p>
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<p>This concept legitimizes Moscow’s main propaganda point that Russian
speakers comprise an organic, transnational community with shared
identity and interests. But Ukrainian realities test this assertion. A
huge proportion of the volunteers that rushed to the frontline to fight
the separatists and their Russian allies speak the “language of the
aggressor.” So do most of the pro-unity local residents I have met.
Speaking Russian does not obstruct them from being patriots of Ukraine
if their hearts so direct them.</p>
<p>Furthermore, <a href="http://novosti.dn.ua/" target="_blank">many</a> of Ukraine’s <a href="http://olegponomar.livejournal.com/" target="_blank">most popular</a> <a href="http://zn.ua/" target="_blank">papers</a>, <a href="https://bykvu.com/" target="_blank">news websites</a> and <a href="http://ibigdan.livejournal.com/" target="_blank">blogs</a> express their uncompromising support for Ukrainian unity in the Russian language. Indeed, sweeping <em>Ukrainizatsiya</em>
of these news outlets would directly contradict another key policy goal
for Kiev: combatting the dominance of Russian media (especially
television) in the Donbas. It is crucially important that Ukraine keep
open lines of communication to Donbas residents. Will limiting the
ability of Ukrainian media to reach out to them in their native language
assist in that goal?</p>
<p>Ukrainian and Russian are related languages, perhaps as close as
Spanish and Italian. Nonetheless, gaining fluency in Ukrainian would
take at least a year of concerted effort. In wartime, many Donbas
residents will not find the opportunity to dig into their textbooks,
especially internal refugees struggling to eke out a survival wage, or
frontline civilians taking refuge in basement bomb shelters.</p>
<p>Put bluntly, this is not the time for Ukraine in the battle for hearts and minds.</p>
<h4><strong>How Much Coercion?</strong></h4>
<p>But the problem goes far beyond timing. All efforts to revive
national languages require some amount of coercion. Experience shows
that in moderate amounts coercion can produce more benefits than it
incites resentment and resistance, such as requirements that all foreign
films shown in theaters must be dubbed into Ukrainian. Many of my
acquaintances from eastern Ukraine (and even Kiev) initially resisted
this requirement, but with time realized that it was helping them
achieve passive bilingualism and communicate better with Ukrainian
speakers.</p>
<hr>
<blockquote>
<h3 style="text-align:center"><span style="color:rgb(153,153,153)">The
process should nurture and restore Ukrainian language and culture where
it has been extirpated, especially in the Donbas. But it should not seek
to tear out Russian identity that has roots in the region’s black earth
and chalk hills.</span></h3>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p>But there is nothing measured about the coercion in the draft law on <em>Ukrainizatsiya</em>.
It is downright punitive. No transition period is anticipated for
Russian speaking public officials or educators, and fines will be
imposed immediately, theoretically on a daily basis, for failure to
employ Ukrainian. “Language inspectors” will help enforce the
requirements that the state language be used in government offices,
schools and stores. No particular resources will be expended on helping
Russian speakers learn Ukrainian, besides the placement of textbooks in
public libraries.</p>
<p>The bill shares its punitive character the recent Ukrainian
“De-Communization” laws. They approached the task of a long-needed
honest reckoning with totalitarianism’s dark legacy by smashing and
scrubbing out all things Soviet while breathlessly <a href="http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/05/02/the-historian-whitewashing-ukraines-past-volodymyr-viatrovych/" target="_blank">whitewashing right-wing nationalism</a>.
No particular public dialogue or debate was involved, no real attempt
to engage or persuade those immersed in Soviet nostalgia. This was
history by diktat<em>, </em>which is to say entirely in line with the way history was treated in the Soviet Union.</p>
<p>The proposed <em>Ukrainizatsiya</em> bill also echoes early coercive
Soviet policy in method and intent, aiming to drive what millions of
eastern Ukrainians consider their native language out of the public
sphere and “into the kitchen.” Such a sharp change from the permissive
linguistic status quo of the past 25 years will release anti-Kiev and
pro-separatism political energies at the worst possible time.</p>
<p>I have seen after three years of war that many Donbas residents who
voted for separatism in the unofficial referenda of May 2014 are now
prepared to accept Ukraine if it can provide stability, relative law and
order and economic recovery. But a language policy that reaches into
nearly every aspect of their lives could re-ignite dormant ideological
anger. Even many pro-unity residents are frustrated that the government
in Kiev is stoking culture war rather than focusing on policies that
address their sharp decline in quality of life.</p>
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<h4><strong>Getting Ukrainizatsiya Right </strong></h4>
<p>The proposed law needs a dramatic overhaul, which re-focuses it on an
achievable goal: assuring the proficiency of all Ukrainian citizens in
their state language. That goal will be much better achieved by
establishing a realistic and implementable program and funding it
accordingly. The core of the <em>Ukranizatsiya </em>strategy should not
be fines for offenders, but investment in Ukrainian language adult
education. The latter is practically absent in the Donbas today.</p>
<p>That said, the right dose of obligation and coercion must be found.
It is no longer a sustainable social contract in Ukraine that the east
can be a Russian-speaking enclave and de facto ignore the state
language. The very least that should be expected of all Ukrainian
citizens is functional bilingualism.</p>
<p>But Russian speakers are likely to be far less alarmed and alienated by <em>Ukrainizatsiya</em>
if they think it will respect the limits of their linguistic-cultural
identity. The process should nurture and restore Ukrainian language and
culture where it has been extirpated, especially in the Donbas. But it
should not seek to tear out Russian identity that has roots in the
region’s black earth and chalk hills.</p>
<p><em>Ukainizatsiya</em> is too important and worthy a cause to be
reduced to an instrument of culture war. It must serve and not undermine
Ukraine’s identity as a pluralistic, multiethnic republic.</p>
<p><strong>The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.</strong></p><p><a href="http://www.fairobserver.com/region/europe/eastern-ukraine-russia-conflict-language-culture-news-10099/">http://www.fairobserver.com/region/europe/eastern-ukraine-russia-conflict-language-culture-news-10099/</a><br><strong></strong></p><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature">**************************************<br>N.b.: Listing on the lgpolicy-list is merely intended as a service to its members<br>and implies neither approval, confirmation nor agreement by the owner or sponsor of the list as to the veracity of a message's contents. Members who disagree with a message are encouraged to post a rebuttal, and to write directly to the original sender of any offensive message. A copy of this may be forwarded to this list as well. (H. Schiffman, Moderator)<br><br>For more information about the lgpolicy-list, go to <a href="https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/" target="_blank">https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/</a><br>listinfo/lgpolicy-list<br>*******************************************</div>
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