Testimonial | The cultural and identity challenge of Ukrainians

When I was growing up in Odessa (Ukraine) in the 1980s, my whole family spoke Russian, all our neighbors spoke Russian, and almost everyone I met in the city spoke Russian to me as well.

Eugene Lakinsky
Gatineau

I went to a Russian-speaking kindergarten, then to a Russian-speaking school, where Ukrainian was only taught two hours a week.

Behind the omnipresence of the Russian language, however, there was a hidden reality: my grandparents came from Ukrainian-speaking families, from the Ukrainian region of Donbas. They lost their language gradually, during their adult life. I never heard them speak their mother tongue, but my grandfather kept his Ukrainian accent and many Ukrainianisms.

This is also the case for the majority of Russian-speaking Ukrainians. In four out of five cases, we had grandparents, great-grandparents and sometimes parents who spoke Ukrainian. Russified towns are surrounded by Ukrainian-speaking villages.

At Odessa Polytechnic University, almost all of my classmates communicated in Russian. It was only later that I discovered that some of them, especially in villages and small towns, spoke Ukrainian at home. Social prejudice made them linguistic chameleons: their language was perceived as “rural”.

Odessa was not unique there: it was also the case in most major cities in southern, eastern and central Ukraine. In the west of the country, the inhabitants of the big cities have succeeded in keeping Ukrainian, which often leads them to be taxed as “nationalists”.

Many people spoke Ukrainian as children, but switched to Russian, as this language was perceived as “more prestigious”. For, despite Ukraine’s independence (in 1991) and official unilingualism, Russian remained, de facto, ” the business language. Until very recently, it was not easy to get service in Ukrainian in most major cities in the country.

The truth must be told: we Russian-speaking Ukrainians are the children and grandchildren of assimilated people. During the 19th^andbut especially of the XX^and century, millions of Ukrainians switched from Ukrainian to Russian. How else could it be, if all major companies and institutions operated only in Russian?

Most of the documentation, in all areas, was only in Russian. Almost all films in cinemas and on TV were only in Russian (not even Ukrainian subtitles!).

And yet, we remain functionally bilingual. Anyone growing up in Ukraine can understand Ukrainian and Russian, as both are present in the public space. When you order your lunch in Ukrainian, a Russian-speaking waiter understands you, and vice versa. We are not “two different peoples”, but one people, partly assimilated linguistically, but keeping its identity. Kind of like the Irish.

Today, many Russian-speaking Ukrainians are returning to their historical language (I am). Russian speakers in particular become writers and poets of the Ukrainian language. Some are beginning to campaign for the re-Ukrainization of the country. Others prefer to keep Russian as their main language.

This is our cultural and identity challenge. A complex, sensitive question, without simple solutions. But Ukraine is capable of facing it and resolving it on its own.

However, since at least 2004, Vladimir Poutine exploits the linguistic question in Ukraine, by proclaiming himself the “defender of the Russian-speaking populations” and by finding there a pretext for, initially, political interferences, then for military interventions.