ANALYSIS

RFE/RL NEWSLINE Vol. 4, No. 148, Part II, 3 August 2000

Language and Nationalism in the Post-Soviet Space

By Taras Kuzio

A battle is raging over language in the post-Soviet space. Soviet nationality policies left a legacy of 25 million Russians and many more "compatriots," that is, Russian speakers, in countries of the former USSR excluding Russia. Moscow sees the continued use of the Russian language in former Soviet states with large numbers of Russophones as ensuring its continued influence over these countries.

Russia has therefore praised Belarus and Kyrgyzstan for elevating Russian to second state language and official language respectively, and Kazakhstan’s President Nazarbaev for proposing a CIS Fund to Promote the Russian Language. In June, Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested that if Moldova raised Russian to a second state language, Moscow would cease supporting the separatist Transdniester. And last month Russia released its new foreign policy concept, which seeks to "obtain guarantees for the rights and freedoms of compatriots" and "to develop comprehensive ties with them and their organizations." Currently, the State Duma is drafting a bill on the status of the Russian language in the CIS.

By contrast, states such as Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Ukraine are downgrading the status of Russian. In Ukraine, the language question has been the source of heated exchanges with Russia since last December, when the Constitutional Court ruled that all state officials should know and use Ukrainian and suggested how the constitutional provision for Ukrainian as the sole state language could be enforced. Deputy Prime Minister for the Humanities Mykola Zhulynskyi drew up a program for expanding use of the Ukrainian language, and a draft law was placed before the parliament that replaced Russian with Ukrainian as the "language for inter-communication" in Ukraine.

In fact, Ukraine’s policies on enhancing the Ukrainian language are similar to those advanced by President Putin, who in January established a Council on the Russian Language that aims to enhance the use of Russian both at home and abroad. One of the council’s first moves was to order the Ministry of Education to fine Russian officials who have a poor command of Russian.

This summer, Russia and Ukraine began to trade accusations after nationalist demonstrations in Lviv followed the death of Ihor Bilozir, a popular singer who was killed by two Russophones after he refused to stop singing Ukrainian songs. The Lviv Oblast Council responded by limiting the use of Russian in public places, including popular music in cafes, and in business circles. Radical nationalist parties formed volunteer squads to monitor the application of these new rules.

On 7 June, the Russian Foreign Ministry condemned the "anti-Russian hysteria" sweeping western Ukraine, and 10 days later, Russian Ambassador to Ukraine Ivan Aboimov complained about the alleged official encouragement of the Russophobic campaign against the Russian language. The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry rejected these allegations and the right of Russia to speak on behalf of Russians and "compatriots." The Russian State Duma, for its part, provoked further tensions by accusing Ukraine of having violated the provisions on national minorities in the May 1997 Russian-Ukrainian treaty. It went on to demand that Putin adopt the necessary measures to halt the alleged discrimination. The Ukrainian parliament rejected all the Duma’s accusations as a "manifestation of interference in the domestic affairs of a sovereign state."

The increased use of Ukrainian in education throughout the 1990s has inevitably led to a commensurate decline in the use of Russian. The Ukrainian parliament sees this as "the Ukrainian authorities’ intention to secure the inalienable and natural right of Ukrainian citizens to use their mother tongue," and it has rejected accusations that this is in any way "racially discriminatory." Within the CIS, according to the Ukrainian lawmakers, Kyiv’s nationality policies are "balanced and far-sighted," leading to "interethnic accord and peace."

In claiming that Ukraine had violated the 1997 treaty, the State Duma pointed to Article 12, which outlines the obligation of both states to ensure the ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and religious identity of national minorities in each country. The status of Ukrainians in Russia and Russians in Ukraine was the subject of a visit to the two countries by OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities, Max van der Stoel, last month.

However, it is Russia—not Ukraine—that has breached Article 12. Although the 4.5 million-strong Ukrainian community constitutes the second-largest national minority in the Russian Federation (after Tatars), they do not have a single Ukrainian school, theater, or newspaper. Parishes of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Kyiv Patriarch have been forcibly abolished. In Ukraine, where Russians are the largest minority, constituting 22 percent of the population, 33 percent of pupils and students are enrolled in Russian- language schools and universities. And also in Ukraine, 1,193 newspapers are published in Russian, compared with 1,394 in Ukrainian. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarch continues to boast the largest number of parishes.

While the Lviv Oblast Council resolutions detailing language requirements in the private sector are excessive, the region remains more tolerant than either the Donbas or Crimea. A Sotsis-Gallup opinion poll on ethnic tolerance found Crimea to be the most intolerant among Ukraine’s regions. Although Ukrainians make up a quarter of the Crimean population, only four of 582 Crimean schools (0.69 percent) are Ukrainian, and only one out of 392 publications on the peninsula is in Ukrainian. In the Donbas, where Ukrainians constitute 50 percent of the population, the proportion of pupils in Ukrainian language schools is still only 10 percent.

The author is honorary research fellow, Stasiuk Program on Contemporary Ukraine at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta.

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