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Language Politics in Independent Ukraine: Towards One or Two State Languages?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Dominique Arel
Dominique Arel*
Affiliation:
McGill University, Montreal, Canada
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Extract

The implementation of language laws in multilingual territories often leads to acrimonious political conflicts, as demonstrated by the recent experiences of Quebec, Estonia, Moldova and Slovakia, to name but a few. The pattern of such conflicts is remarkably similar. First, one group (generally, but not necessarily, the demographic majority) claims ancestry on a territory which it considers its “homeland”; then it succeeds in proclaiming its language (the main marker of group identity) the sole official language in the “public domain” of the given territory. This action triggers organized protest from the other linguistic group (generally the demographic minority), which feels aggrieved over such fundamental issues as group status, equal opportunity for upward mobility, and educational rights.

Type
Articles
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 23 , Issue 3: (Special Topic Issue) Implementing Language Laws: Perestroika and its Legacy in Five Republics , September 1995 , pp. 597 - 622
Copyright
Copyright © 1995 Association for the Study of Nationalities of Eastem Europe and ex-USSR, Inc. 

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References

Notes

1. Kiev, Defying, the two provinces of the industrial Donbas—Donets'k and Luhans'k—decided to conduct a four-question referendum on the day of the first round of Ukrainian parliamentary elections, on 27 March 1994. One question asked electors whether they were in favor of Russian being proclaimed a “second state language” in Ukraine, while another, more specific, question called for Russian to remain the language of “work, administration, documentation, education and science” on the territory of the Donbas “alongside with Ukrainian.” In Donets'k, 87.1% of electors were in favor of the former, and 88.9% supported the latter, while in Luhans'k, the figures were, respectively, 90.4% and 90.9% (Aktsent [Donets'k], 1 April 1994; Luganskaia pravda, 2 April 1994). Kiev declared the referendum illegal, since, according to the Constitution, regional authorities do not have the power to organize referenda.Google Scholar

2. According to 1989 Soviet census data, 34.4% of ethnic Russians living in Ukraine claim fluency in Ukrainian, meaning that they claim an active command of the language. With the possible exception of Crimean Russians, however, all understand Ukrainian with few problems.Google Scholar

3. One Ukrainian out of eight (12.2%) claimed Russian as a mother tongue during the 1989 Soviet census. As a point of reference, all other titular groups in the Soviet republics had scores of linguistic assimilation lower than 3%, except among the Moldovans (4.6%) and Belarusians (19.8%). For an analysis of linguistic assimilation in Ukraine, see Dominique Arel, “Language and the Politics of Ethnicity: The Case of Ukraine,” PhD dissertation, University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), 1994, Ch. 3. See also Roman Solchanyk's essay “Language Politics in the Ukraine,” in Sociolinguistic Perspectives of Soviet National Languages Isabelle Kreindler, ed. (Berlin: Mouton, 1985), pp. 57–105.Google Scholar

4. As indicated in note 3, the proportion of ethnic Ukrainians claiming Russian as a mother tongue was 12.2% in 1989, but most of this linguistic assimilation is taking place in the east and south (25.3% of Ukrainians living there, compared to merely 3.5% in the center and 0.9% in the west). In the city of Donets'k, mining capital of the Donbas, more than half of ethnic Ukrainians (56.2%) declared Russian as their mother tongue. See Arel, “Language and the Politics of Ethnicity,” Ch. 3, pp. 123, 129.Google Scholar

5. The “Left Bank” of central Ukraine, west of the Dnipro, was integrated into the Russian Empire in the 1650s, while the “Right Bank” joined Russia in the 1770s-90s, following the partitions of Poland. Most of eastern and southern Ukraine was open for settlement after Russia's victory over the Crimean Khanate in the 1780s. Western Ukraine, for five centuries under Austrian-Polish rule, was annexed to the Soviet Union only during the Second World War. (An exception to this is the Volyn' region, which had shifted back and forth between Austria and Russia.)Google Scholar

6. The main public forum was the literary weekly Literaturna Ukraina. For a highly critical account of how the law was prepared, see Stepan Pinchuk, “Zakon pro movy: real‘nist’ i perspektyvy,” Dzvin (L'viv), No. 9, 1990, pp. 75–84.Google Scholar

7. The Ukrainian language law was published in the central Ukrainian press (Radians'ka Ukraina in Ukrainian, Pravda Ukrainy in Russian) on 3 November 1989, under the title “Pro movy v Ukrains'kii RSR” (in Russian, “O iazykakh v Ukrainskoi SSR”). A draft of the law previously appeared in these papers on 9 September 1989.Google Scholar

8. The first president of Ukraine, Leonid Kravchuk, was elected on 1 December 1991, the day when 90% of the voters also endorsed the declaration of independence. Within ten days, following the creation of the CIS and international recognition, Ukraine became an independent state.Google Scholar

9. Odessa, In, there had been attempts to include on the 1 December 1991 referendum ballot a question as to whether Russian should be proclaimed a second regional state language (Ogonyok, 23 November 1991). The regional parliament eventually issued such a proclamation two years later (Khreshchatyk, 28 September 1993), after a campaign by the Odessa Civic Forum (Chornomors'ki novyny [Odessa], 22 April 1993). In Donets'k, one of the demands of striking miners, in June 1993, dealt with the status of Russian as a second state language (Kievskie vedomosti, 30 June 1993). The regional parliament then decided to have a referendum on that question in September 1993, coinciding with a statewide referendum on early election of the parliament and the president (Literaturna Ukraina, 5 August 1993). The latter never happened, and the Donets'k referendum on Russian as a second state language eventually took place during the Spring 1994 parliamentary elections.Google Scholar

10. That the shift to Ukrainian has not yet be completed is attested by a recent complaint of the Prosvita Society, a language watch group, that “official blanks, [and] forms…” in “organs of state power” are not yet in Ukrainian (Uriadovyi kur'er, 27 July 1993).Google Scholar

11. According to Art. 10 of the language law, “The acts of the highest organs of state power and administration of [Ukraine] are adopted in Ukrainian and published in Ukrainian and Russian.” The newspaper of the parliament, Holos Ukrainy, is issued in a parallel Russian translation, but the Cabinet of Ministers' weekly, Uriadovyi kur'er, is not. According to a legal specialist living in eastern Ukraine, all official literature in the field of law is now regularly published only in Ukrainian (Rabochaia gazeta, 10 August 1993).Google Scholar

12. Interview with miners of the Donets'k Strike Committee, Donets'k, 15 July 1993.Google Scholar

13. Many Ukrainians in the central region speak a melange of Ukrainian and Russian known as surzhik. Google Scholar

14. Art. 6 of the language law. Although the law indicates that officials and state employees must have a command of both Ukrainian and Russian, it indicates that employment cannot be denied due to insufficient knowledge of either. Since in practice everybody knows Russian, the article really refers only to individuals without a mastery of Ukrainian.Google Scholar

15. On the resolution in western Ukraine, adopted by the L'viv regional parliament, see Prosvita (L'viv), No. 31, December 1993. On the new policy of the Ministry of Education, see Donetskii kriazh, 12 March 1993.Google Scholar

16. “Vidomosti pro shkoly i uchnivs'ki kontynhenty z Ukrains'koi movoiu navchannia na terytorii Ukrains'koi RSR,” unpublished document of the Ministry of Education, 1990 [hereafter “Vidomosti pro shkoly”].Google Scholar

17. Such an estimate assumes that the proportion of Ukrainians to Russians among school-age children is the same as among the general population; this is a fair assumption since the birthrates of the two Slavic groups are similar. As Silver pointed out, however, this assumption is wrong when Russians are compared to titular groups with much higher birthrates, such as the Central Asians. See Brian D. Silver, “The Status of National Minority Languages in Soviet Education. An Assessment of Recent Changes,” Soviet Studies, 26, No. 1 (1974), pp. 28–40, at 37.Google Scholar

18. On the figure for the late 1920s, see Bohdan Krawchenko, Social Change and National Consciousness in Twentieth-Century Ukraine (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985), p. 89. On the figure for the early 1950s, see “Vidomosti pro rozpodil zahal'noosvitnikh shkil Ministerstva osvity URSR za movamy vykladannia,” (1951-52), Tablytsia 7, Derzhavnyi arkhiv im. zhovtnevoi revoliutsii, Ministerstvo osvity URSR, Viddil: Statystychnyi, Sprava No. 4 [hereafter “Vidomosti pro rozpodil”].Google Scholar

19. In 1937, Stalin closed all Ukrainian schools in the Russian Federation, which meant that Ukrainian schools in Crimea, then part of Russia, also disappeared.Google Scholar

20. Narodne hospodarstvo Ukrainy u 1991 rotsi: Statystychnyi shchorichnyk (Kiev: Tekhnika, 1992), pp. 196-97. The situation was at its worst in Crimea, with no Ukrainian school at all in the whole peninsula (24.8% Ukrainian population) and in the Donbas with a mere 4.4% of schoolchildren being taught in Ukrainian (51.1% Ukrainian population). The population data are from the 1989 census.Google Scholar

21. The crucial indicator in the language politics of schools, as far as ethnic groups are concerned, is not the proportion of schools per language of instruction, but the proportion of school-age children enrolled in schools per language of instruction. Because of a lower population density in the countryside, where virtually only Ukrainian schools can be found, the proportion of Ukrainian schools in Ukraine was quite high (74% in 1988-89, “Vidomosti pro shkoly”), but this masked the fact that the average number of pupils enrolled in Russian schools, all located in cities, was more than three times greater than the average number of pupils in Ukrainian schools, located both in urban and rural areas (“Rozpodil zahalnoosvitnykh shkil ta uchniv za movamy navchannia z 1950 po 1990 rik,” unpublished document of the Ministry of Education, 1990).Google Scholar

22. In 1951-52, 55% of ethnic Ukrainian children in urban areas of the Donbas province of Luhans'k were enrolled in Russian schools. The figure was 19.4% for the urban areas of Donets'k, the other Donbas province, and 25.3% and 22.7%, respectively, for the urban areas of the southern oblasts of Odessa and Kherson (“Vidomosti pro rozpodil”).Google Scholar

23. , Arel, “Language and the Politics of Ethnicity,” Ch. 4, pp. 156-158.Google Scholar

24. Bilinsky, Yaroslav, “The Soviet Education Laws of 1958-1959 and Soviet Nationality Policy,” Soviet Studies, 14, No. 2 (1962), pp. 138-157.Google Scholar

25. Narodnoe obrazovanie i kul'tura v SSSR: statisticheskii sbornik (Moscow: Finansy i statistika, 1989), pp. 88–91; translated in, Contemporary Soviet Society: A Statistical Handbook Michael Ryan, ed. (Hants., England: Edgar Elgar, 1990), pp. 128-130.Google Scholar

26. Since 1975, however, all dissertations—even those produced in non-Russian institutions—had to be written in Russian, in order to be approved by Moscow-based central educational authorities (Gerhard Simon, Nationalism and Policy Towards the Nationalities in the Soviet Union [Boulder, CO: Westview, 1991], p. 325).Google Scholar

27. The very first paragraph of the first article dealing with education (Art. 25) reads: “The freedom of choice of the language of instruction of children is the inalienable right of the citizens of [Ukraine].” That paragraph was inserted at the last minute during the parliamentary debates preceding the adoption of the law. In an earlier draft, what had been deemed inalienable was the right of children to be educated in their mother tongue. See the speeches of Deputy Heorhii Kriuchkov (Odessa), stenographic report of the October 1989 session of the 11th convocation of the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet, pp. 282-283, 292-293.Google Scholar

28. , Statewide, the increase in enrollment in Ukrainian schools remained minimal—from 44.6% in 1988-89 to 45.1% in 1991-92 (“Vidomosti pro shkoly” for the 1988-89 data; Narodne hospodarstvo Ukrainy u 1991 rotsi, pp. 196-197, for 1991-92 data).Google Scholar

29. Decree No. 123 of the Ministry of Education, issued in September 1992. See Kievskie vedomosti, June 30 1993, and Literaturna Ukraina, 29 July 1993.Google Scholar

30. Interview with Pavlo Kyslyi, Deputy Chairman of the Parliamentary Commission on Education, Kiev, 7 July 1993.Google Scholar

31. , Unfortunately, precise regional and urban breakdown of school enrollment are not yet available; thus, these figures are estimates.Google Scholar

32. Interview with Raisa Sidorova of the Kiev City Division of the Ministry of Education, Kiev, 8 July 1993.Google Scholar

33. Prosvita (L'viv), No. 14 (June), 1993; Vechernii Kharkov, 13 May 1993.Google Scholar

34. Literaturna Ukraina, 29 July 1993.Google Scholar

35. Interview with Sidorova; Osvita, 4 June 1993.Google Scholar

36. Interview with Sidorova. Mykhailo Bilets'kyi, a Kiev-based journalist, participated in that exchange. For reference to administrative pressure on Russian schools to change their language of instruction, see a letter by officials of the cultural “Rus”' society, Holos Ukrainy, 28 October 1992.Google Scholar

37. Osvita August 27 1993; Literaturna Ukraina, 29 July 1993.Google Scholar

38. Kievskie vedomosti, 23 October 1993; Interview with Liubov' Petrovskaia, school official, Kiev, 11 December 1993.Google Scholar

39. Osvita, 21 August 1993.Google Scholar

40. Interview with Deputy Minister of Education Anatolii Pohrybnyi, Kiev, 19 July 1993. For decades, it was the choice to send children to Ukrainian schools which was very restricted in urban areas of eastern and southern Ukraine.Google Scholar

41. While the Belgian criterion is strictly territorial, Quebec's is not ethnic per se, but based on the educational background of parents: if at least one parent of the child has gone to English school in Canada, then the child is eligible to English schools. That renders ineligible the children of immigrants—the real target of the law—as well as the great majority of French-speaking children, since virtually all of their parents went to French school.Google Scholar

42. Art. 28 of the language law established the principle, while a decree issued simultaneously with the law indicated that this article was to be implemented within a period of five to ten years. The law seemingly made exceptions to this rule for territories where a majority of the population is of another nationality, but in fact this is quite ambiguous. See below, note 75.Google Scholar

43. Osvita, 25 June 1993.Google Scholar

44. Although the teaching of Ukrainian was, in principle, mandatory as a second language in Russian schools, in the 1970-80s, many students were exempted, if their parents requested such. That practice was decried by nationally-conscious Ukrainians in the glasnost' era and has apparently been discontinued in most places since the language law was adopted. In Crimea, however, it still continues (interview with Crimean sociologist Yurii Prozorov, Montreal, 23 March 1994).Google Scholar

45. Only three of the nine provincial capitals of the east and south have ethnic Russian majorities (Donets'k, 53.6%; Luhans'k, 54.2%; and Simferopol, 71.6%). All of them, however, have Russophone majorities, i.e., majorities of inhabitants of Russian, Ukrainian and other ethnic background claiming Russian as a mother tongue. This ranges from 53.3% for Kherson to 90.0% for Simferopol (unpublished 1989 Soviet census data).Google Scholar

46. Interview with Oleksandr Charodeev, deputy of the Ukrainian parliament, Kiev, 26 July 1993; Odesskii vestnik', 9 April 1993.Google Scholar

47. As Walker Connor showed in a seminal article in the early 1970s, only 9.1% of all states in the world could qualify as “nation-states,” i.e., “being essentially homogeneous from an ethnic viewpoint.” Ukraine is thus no exception. Connor, “Nation-Building or Nation-Destroying?” (1972), reprinted in Ethnonationalism. The Quest for Understanding (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 29.Google Scholar

48. Data from the 1989 census indicate that 28.6% of the eastern city of Kharkiv claimed Ukrainian as mother tongue. According to a survey conducted by Jerry Hough, of Duke University's East-West Center in January 1992 (results still unpublished), only 7.1% of Kharkiv residents speak exclusively Ukrainian at home, and an additional 5.1% speak both Ukrainian and Russian. A similar pattern seems to hold in the southern city of Odessa: census data indicate that 24.3% of the population claim Ukrainian as mother tongue, but I. M. Popova's survey found that only 7% speak it at home (Odesskii vestnik', 13 April 1993). Were “Russophone” to be defined in terms of language used at home rather than claimed mother tongue, then the proportion of Russophones in Ukraine would probably exceed 40%.Google Scholar

49. Art. 27, par. 5 of the language law states: “The teaching of Ukrainian and Russian in all general educational schools is mandatory.”Google Scholar

50. “Bazovyi navchal'nyi plan seredn'oi zahal'noosvitn'oi shkoly z Ukrains'koi movoiu navchannia na 1993-1994 navchal'nyi rik,” unpublished document of the Ministry of Education.Google Scholar

51. Ibid. See also Abraham Brumberg, “Not So Free At Last,” The New York Review of Books, 39, No. 17 (22 October 1992), pp. 56–64.Google Scholar

52. Between 1970-82, the circulation of Russian newspapers in the Soviet Union increased by 37%, while that of Ukrainian newspapers increased by only 13% (Roman Szporluk, “The Press and Soviet Nationalities: The Party Resolution of 1975 and Its Implementation,” Nationalities Papers, 14, nos. 1-2 (1986), pp. 47–64. In 1986, in the Soviet Union there were 0.47 book titles in Russian for every Russian, and only 0.04 in Ukrainian for every Ukrainian (Ya. K. Rebane, “Izmeneniia natsional'noi struktury, mezhnatsional'nye otnosheniia i iazykovaia situatsiia v Estonskoi SSR,” Sovetskaia etnografiia, No. 2, 1989, pp. 4-17.Google Scholar

53. As of 1988, only 7% of films in the catalogue of films produced in Ukraine were in the Ukrainian language. Virtually all films shown on TV, or available on videocassette, were either in Russian or dubbed in Russian (Radians'ka Ukraina, 6 December 1988; Literaturna Ukraina, 18 October 1990).Google Scholar

54. , Szporluk, p. 63; Solchanyk, “Language Politics in the Ukraine,” p. 87.Google Scholar

55. Art. 33 of the language law.Google Scholar

56. Interview with Zinovii Kulik, Director of Ukrainian Television, conducted by the author's research assistant Liudmila Maiorova, Kiev, August 1993.Google Scholar

57. In the words of a journalist from southern Ukraine: “The Russophone population, not receiving enough information in the Russian language, is pushed to turn on Ostankino or Maiak (Moscow radio)… . He who provides information forms public opinion” (Odes'ki visti, 18 February 1993).Google Scholar

58. Interview with Kulik. A law, “O televidenii i radio,” adopted on 21 December 1993, did contain such a provision (Vremia [Kharkiv], 4 January 1994).Google Scholar

59. Russophone activists take very seriously what they call “the threat of cutting off the Ostankino broadcasts in the near future” (Nash Donbass [Donets'k], January 1993). A reduction in Ostankino broadcasting would most probably also be opposed by non-Russified Ukrainians, since most would admit that Ostankino programs are of a higher quality than those broadcast on the Ukrainian channel.Google Scholar

60. Interview with Kulik; author's observations. The Kiev newspaper editor Vitalii Karpenko claims that all 31 private TV channels in the provinces of Mykolaiv (south) and Luhans'k (east) broadcast exclusively in Russian. Karpenko adds that this constitutes a violation of the language law, but, as we saw above, the law is ambiguous on this point (Vechirnii Kyiv, 11 June 1993).Google Scholar

61. Recent surveys show that residents from Ukraine now read one newspaper, generally a local one, or none at all—down from four or five a few years ago (Holos Ukrainy, 28 August 1993). Moreover, the Ukrainian publishing industry is dependent on Russia for its printing paper, and the imposition of high tariff duties by the latter has meant steep increases in subscription prices (Odesskii vestnik', 30 March 1993).Google Scholar

62. In 1992, 38.1% of the book titles published in Ukraine were in Ukrainian. As for the number of copies published for these books, only 28.1% were in Ukrainian, compared to 56.7% in 1988. Ukrainian books thus fared much better in the Soviet era (Narodna hazeta, No. 27, 1993; Literaturna Ukraina, 25 March 1993).Google Scholar

63. In other former republics, the language law, while not formally amended, has nonetheless been partly superseded by other laws. In Estonia, for instance, the new citizenship law makes citizenship for most Russophones eventually dependent on language skills in Estonian. In Ukraine, however, the citizenship law adopted in the fall of 1991 granted automatic citizenship to all residents of the republic at the time of independence (“zero option”) (Demokratychna Ukraina, 10 October 1991). As for the new Constitution, which had gone through four drafts as of early 1994, it has yet to be adopted.Google Scholar

64. Interview with Pohribnyi. Mr. Pohribnyi headed the commission. See also Narodna hazeta, No. 44, 1993.Google Scholar

65. Interview with Ivan Yushchuk, vice-chairman of the Prosvita Society, 19 July 1993.Google Scholar

66. , See, for instance, an appeal of the Prosvita Society, “Vidrodzhenniu ukrains'koi movy—derzhavnu uvahu!” published in various newspapers in July 1993. See also an appeal by cultural figures (Kul'tura i zhittia, 18 July 1992).Google Scholar

67. A special commission in charge of the implementation of this “State Programme” was created in 1990, but when its chairman left the government, the commission was forgotten (Narodna hazeta. No. 44, 1993).Google Scholar

68. Observations of the author, who visited these three cities in the summer of 1993.Google Scholar

69. In the province of Ternopil', there are apparently no longer any Russian schools (Kievskie vedomosti, 23 October 1993). The 1989 Soviet census listed 7.2% of Russians in the city of Ternopil'.Google Scholar

70. Interview with Leonid Hromovyi, Director of School No. 65, the only Ukrainian school in Donets'k, Donets'k, 13 July 1993.Google Scholar

71. This includes not only the “leftist” parties (Communist Party, Socialist Party, Peasant Party), and the Russophone pressure group “Civic Congress of Ukraine,” but also the alliance of factory directors and new entrepreneurs, “Interregional Bloc of Reforms,” headed by the former Prime Minister Leonid Kuchma and former Vice-Speaker of Parliament Volodymyr Hryn'ov.Google Scholar

72. This notion of bilingualism was already propounded when the draft of the language law was debated in 1989 (Pravda Ukrainy, 28 October 1989).Google Scholar

73. Art. 3, par. 2 of the language law. The next paragraph adds that in cases where no “national” group constitutes the majority in a given locality, then the language of local organs can be either Ukrainian or a language “acceptable to the whole population,” i.e., Russian.Google Scholar

74. Crimea proclaimed Russian as “official” language, and Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar as “state” languages in the fall of 1992 (Roman Solchanyk, “The Politics of Language in Ukraine,” RFE/RL Research Report, 2, No. 10, [1993] p. 3), but the status of the latter two languages is largely symbolic, since Russian remains the hegemonic language of administration on the peninsula.Google Scholar

75. A “Declaration of the Rights of Nationalities,” issued by the Ukrainian parliament a month before the December 1991 referendum on independence, was even more ambiguous about the actual criterion to be used in determining official bilingualism in regions. The Declaration stated that another language could have the same status as Ukrainian wherever a certain nationality “is living compactly” (kompaktno prozhivae), without mentioning whether a majority was needed to qualify as “compact.” The July 1992 Law on National Minorities made it clear, however, that a majority was indeed needed, an ethnic majority (Russian) to boot, not a linguistic (Russians + Ukrainians claiming Russian as a mother tongue) majority. This would mean that Russian would not be able to function as a regional state language outside of Crimea.Google Scholar

76. Art. 7 of this draft indicates that “in sites of compact settlement of one or several national groups, the language acceptable to the majority of the population…can be used as an official language, along with Ukrainian, in state organs and institutions.” See “Konstitutsiia Ukrainy. Proekt. V redaksii vid 26 zhovtnia 1993 r.,” inserted in central Ukrainian newspapers, November 1993.Google Scholar

77. Arel, Dominique, “Federalism and the Language Factor,” Unpublished paper presented at the Annual Conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Phoenix, November 1992.Google Scholar

78. , Reportedly President Kravchuk “without diplomatic good manners” told deputies from Crimea: “How can (you) talk about Ukrainization…when on the peninsula there are no Ukrainian newspapers and no Ukrainian schools or kindergartens?” (Osvita, 25 June 1993).Google Scholar