Sufficient legislation on language has long existed in Ukraine, offering generous – some say indulgent – guarantees for the Russian language and its speakers.
The binding legislation approved in 1989, “On Language in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic,” properly identifies the Ukrainian language as one of the decisive factors in the national selfhood of the Ukrainian people.
It called for the state to ensure the thorough development and functioning of the Ukrainian language in all spheres of social life, a principle that was subsequently adopted by the Ukrainian Constitution in 1996.
While giving priority to Ukrainian, the 1989 law also protects Russian language speakers, reflective of the Ukrainian people’s long history of tolerance towards its ethnic minorities.
The 1989 bill calls for the free development and use of the Russian language, which was buttressed in the Constitution of 1996, a document that goes even further in calling for the defense of the Russian language in Ukraine.
Specifically, it sets the conditions for the use of Russian, alongside Ukrainian, in state organs and enterprises. It allows for citizens to address state organs and enterprises in Russian, and for these institutions to respond in Russian.
The same bill allows for judicial proceedings to occur in Russian, including offering testimony and producing all documentation. It requires all state employees to command both Russian and Ukrainian and requires that students learn both languages, beginning in elementary school.
Therefore, the characterization offered by certain Western media (including the Associated Press and the Wall Street Journal) that the legislation approved by parliament on June 5 would allow the use of the Russian language in state institutions is false and misleading.
The Russian language has been alive and well in the state institutions of the majority of Ukraine’s oblasts and in most of Ukraine’s cities for the duration of the nation’s 20 years of independence. This is the case even after the alleged Ukrainianization during the Orange era [of ex-President Viktor Yushchenko and ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko], which barely occurred.
The Russian language ranks supreme the dialogue and documentation at state medical and banking institutions in most cities (and private ones, for that matter). It ranks supreme among state engineers, police officers, and tax inspectors.
In courts, the majority of testimony and verbal exchange occurs in the Russian language. The documentation in many courts in southern and eastern Ukraine is in Russian, and most of the judges and lawyers there speak in Russian during sessions and trials.
All this occurs in spite of the binding law calling for the Ukrainian language’s priority status because the law carries little weight, as in most spheres of Ukrainian life.
Linguistic matters are decided on a largely de facto basis, and the nation’s citizens have learned to get along more or less based on mutually accepted norms that have evolved without government interference.
Even if the law did matter in Ukraine, sufficient legislation already exists that offers Russian speakers comfortable conditions.
Given these facts, that begs the question of why the ruling Party of the Regions of Ukraine, with its parliamentary allies, decided on June 5 to cast 234 votes in favor of new language legislation, “On the Foundations of Language Policy.”
It was sponsored by alleged 2004 election falsifier Sergei Kivalov and provocateur-for-hire Vadim Kolesnichenko, who denigrates the Ukrainian language and culture at every opportunity he has in front of the media.
As the main reason, it’s worth noting that for the first time since the Orange revolts of 2004, the Party of Regions is no longer the most popular political force, according to an April poll conducted by the Razumkov Center, widely considered to be among the most reliable.
The Fatherland Party founded by imprisoned opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko is now most popular.
The Party of Regions has lost significant support among its electorate, particularly with such maneuvers as passing an oppressive tax code and cutting social payments to veterans of the Afghan War and 1986 Chornobyl clean-up, many of whom live in the party’s cradle of support in the southeastern oblasts.
Indeed on the very same evening that parliament approved the first reading of the language bill, it voted on another bill that creates the opportunity to cut such social payments even further in 2013. Not a bad distraction, eh?
Then there’s the economy. The stock market is down 33 percent year-to-date and the National Bank of Ukraine can’t sell enough five-year notes, despite interest rates of close to 14 percent.
The National Bank also reportedly burned through $1 billion of its international reserves in May alone, bringing them down to $31 billion. Most recently, Business Insider ranked Ukraine as among the world’s five governments most likely to default.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainian government stands accused by the opposition of plundering close to a third of the $10 billion in state funds spent on Euro 2012, the evidence for some of which exists.
In its desperation, the Party of Regions has turned to the sensitive and volatile language issue as its last trump card to activate its core support base of pro-Russian radicals.
Unfortunately, these elements care little for establishing rule of law and independent jurisprudence in Ukraine, which are issues that are far more relevant to most Ukrainians as tangibly improving their day-to-day lives.
These radicals, who number in the millions, suffer from ignorance of the history of the land that they walk upon, wanting to live in a Ukraine without ever encountering the Ukrainian language that they were raised to hold in contempt by Soviet propagandists.
Ironically, their leaders, including Kolesnichenko, claim to embrace European values, alleging their position is in line with the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages, a document whose letter and intent was to defend weak languages from extinction and to ensure their speakers retain the minimum of rights.
Yet Ukraine is unlike any other contemporary European nation since the state language happens to be the lesser spoken tongue as a result of the native people’s post-colonial, post-genocidal and post-totalitarian 20th century history. The same can be said for the Crimean Tatar language.
The law on the books, as weak as it is, is the last remaining safeguard for the Ukrainian language. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian Constitution calls for the Russian language to coexist with the Ukrainian language, according to several court rulings that interpreted Article 10.
Violating this principle, the Kivalov-Kolesnichenko bill creates the architecture for Russian to replace Ukrainian entirely with its 10 percent rule, requiring state institutions to accommodate languages in a given population center that are spoken by at least 10 percent of its residents.
The bill thereby dismantles safeguards in the few remaining institutions where the Ukrainian language is flourishing, namely education, voiceover dubbing in cinema and mass media advertising.
The legislation claims to defend such minority languages as Crimean Tatar or Bulgarian, yet there’s no chance that state organs – often lacking funds to pay heating bills or to buy floor cleaning soaps – can accommodate each 10 percent minority in a given district.
Conflicts will become inevitable between the various minorities and the default language will be the majority language in most regions, which is Russian.
The Kyiv Post has printed letters to the editor complaining about the presence of the Ukrainian language, such as voiceover dubbing in cinemas (Ukrainian-language dubbing is non-existent in DVD sales).
Foreign university students have also complained about courses taught in Ukrainian (though much of the coursework, particularly in mathematics and the natural sciences, has been in the Russian language).
Such complaints reveal indifference to the suffering of the Ukrainian people, who were persecuted, and often killed, for asserting their right to live in an environment that provides for the comfortable functioning of the indigenous language of most of these lands.
These complainers should consider that the Finnish language was subjugated centuries ago to the Swedish language, a policy supported by Finland’s own elite. Similarly, the Czech language was once subjugated to German by its own elite too. Ukraine’s so-called elite is no different, embracing Russian and laying the groundwork for the eradication of Ukrainian.
Among those voting for the language bill on June 5 were Ukraine’s wealthiest oligarchs – billionaire Rinat Akhmetov, Kernel Group founder Andrei Verevskiy, mega millionaire banker Aleksandr Buriak and Kharkiv business mogul Aleksandr Feldman.
Therefore, Ukrainians themselves are partly to blame for foreigners holding such attitudes because unfortunately, many citizens disrespect their own history and heritage after decades of Soviet totalitarianism and Stalinist genocide.
Beyond such issues of basic respect however, Westerners ought to consider the geopolitical consequences of the language issue.
Political experts are increasingly drawing parallels between the Russian government’s current approach to Ukraine and Adolf Hitler’s Anschluss policy, which eventually led to the invasion of Austria and Czechoslovakia and annexation of the Czech Sudetenland, where Germans lived.
In this context, the Kivalov-Kolesnichenko bill has a few new clauses that deserve particular attention, such as defining one’s native language as “the first language that an individual mastered in earlier childhood.”
Russian-speaking Ukrainians, who make up the vast majority of Ukraine’s urban residents, have long held to the tradition of reporting that their native language is Ukrainian, despite speaking Russian on a daily basis (at least in public). That’s typical of a post-colonial society.
The new legislation seeks to redefine as native Russian speakers those who would typically categorize themselves as native Ukrainian speakers.
This strategy was employed in the Republic of Georgia, where more than 85 percent of the population of South Ossetia was extended Russian passports, in large part on the basis of them being native Russian speakers.
Such events would serve as the basis for the Russian government to intervene militarily in Ukraine. Those skeptical need only to turn the 2008 South Ossetian War, in which the Russian government defended its actions by claiming the duty to protect its citizens, wherever they may be.
The groundwork for Anschluss is already being laid in Crimea, whose residents are being propagandized by mass media, schools, and even summer camps into thinking they are ethnic Russian (with Ukrainian surnames) with loyalties to Moscow (instead of Kyiv). Many are reported to have Russian passports in their possession, despite Ukrainians laws forbidding dual citizenship.
Ukraine’s foremost political experts, such as author Serhiy Hrabovsky and Ihor Losiev of Kyiv Mohyla Academy, have already sounded such alarm bells.
It’s up to Western leaders, both in the private and public sectors, to realize that the Ukrainian language is just as much about geopolitics as it is about culture and heritage. Fortunately, the U.S. government has pursued a wise policy of offering strong support for the Ukrainian language.
Corporations such as McDonald’s have also shown a firm commitment to the Ukrainian language, playing contemporary Ukrainian music in its restaurants and keeping its menus in Ukrainian even in Russian-speaking cities as a sign of respect for the Ukrainian state and its history.
It’s just as important for Western business leaders, lawyers, academics and politicians to demonstrate that same support by tolerating the Ukrainian language, if not learning the basics themselves and encouraging its use among staff and employees.
Not only do their future business prospects hang in the balance, but so does the future of Ukraine as an independent state based on Western, European values.
Zenon Zawada is the former chief editor of the Kyiv Post.
