But there
are many who shirk from accepting it as a language of choice. This reality
requires the democratic opposition to avoid the trap of making the language a
dominant issue in the upcoming parliamentary elections.
My
perspective on language is similar to that of many who left Ukraine during World
War II and came to America because they had no taste for the regime made in
Russia.
One of my
friends played traditional music with his guitar. I remember the tune and
lyrics of a song he played which he learned in Halychyna as a teenager.
Translated: “Raven flies across a gully, and is cawing while flying. Young girl
in the forest is walking and crying.” Simple words — the same song my mother
knew from her native Poltava Oblast.
Many people
in Ukraine feel as one nation because of the sentiment that comes from a common
cultural heritage, despite long, divisive occupation by foreign powers.
In a
contrast, many others in Ukraine feel very Russian, as a result of the 300
years of russification under Moscow’s rule. A Ukrainian song I mentioned would
mean nothing to them. So far, so good in terms of tolerance. Could be better,
but that’s what it is.
But then
here is something that doesn’t add up. My friend’s and my own parents, like
hundreds of thousands of others, had to leave their country in a mass exodus
because, in the words of Ukraine’s greatest poet Taras Shevchenko, “Our land is
not our land.”
As a matter
of record, 13 official “ukase” (orders) had been issued from Moscow between 1720
and 1895 banning the use of Ukrainian language and printing in the public
sphere, schools and churches included.
Under the
Soviet regime, after an initial “Ukrainization” in the 1920s that ended up with
the wiping out of most of the Ukrainian cultural elite and was followed by the 1932-33
Holodomor, the pressure was more subtle. Nonetheless, in 1990 the Supreme
Soviet of the USSR, reaffirmed the Russian language as the official language
for all republics of the Soviet Union.
Today,
Russian speakers in Ukraine face nothing, concerning the Russian language, like
the savagery of Moscow’s prohibitions imposed on the Ukrainian language. In
fact, Russian is still dominant in Ukraine – in business, in print, in much of
the media, and in schools in the southeast of the country.
And so,
when referring to the latest linguistic trick in Ukraine’s parliament that
opened the door to an official status for the Russian language, one may ask:
Who is kidding whom?
The Russian
language is so entrenched that, if the upcoming parliamentary elections in
Ukraine were shaped as the show of linguistic preference, the Ukrainian side
would lose probably by the same few percentage points as the former Prime Minister
Yulia Tymoshenko lost her presidential bid in 2010.
Face it,
for the Ukrainian side to win, the defining issues in the upcoming elections
must be the socio-economic agenda, the human rights and lawlessness in the
government.
Organized crime
is an endemic phenomenon arising from the regional tradition and culture in the
southeast, well known in the Soviet era as a cat-and-dog battleground between the
Soviet police state and the free-wheeling criminal underground, eternalized in
the region’s traditional Russian language folklore.
No one
should doubt that the existence of Ukraine as a country with its own civilized
identity hinges on changing the present regime.
And so, the
numbers in the upcoming elections matter the most. When elections are rigged,
as they will be, the true outcome will be obvious anyway if the actual numbers
for the democratic opposition are strong.
The fallout
of rigged elections this time is unpredictable, unlike in the 2004 presidential
elections – when the opposition had definitive plans to take over the streets
if election results are falsified, as they were, showing Yanukovych with a
winning hand.
All signs
show that Yanukovych is now doing what
he can to shore up potential cracks within his government, going as far as
appointing Russian imports for the top positions in the defense ministry and in
the security service.
When asked
what is likely to happen, I apologized for not being clairvoyant. And, by the
way, it is much easier to see the fallacy in claims such as in a recent article:
“A 15 second look at the world map will reveal plenty of independent countries
for which the presumed axiom (Nations die when deprived of their language) does
not hold from Austria to Australia to Belgium to Brazil”.
This claim
is spurious because none of the mentioned countries was deprived of its
language. Moreover, even when separated by thousands of miles, the centripetal
pull of a common language is strong. It took some doing for the USA in the 18th
century to get rid of the British lordship, which hanged on to Canada and
stubbornly played the role of “mother country” until recent times. Now, of
course, Canada has a good neighbor relationship with the United States that is
always problematic between Ukraine and Russia, judging from Russia’s
devastating record in Ukraine. It is precisely the language, the Ukrainian
language that has been and still is Ukraine’s bulwark of identity.
As for
Austria and Belgium, they require no axiom. Austria welcomed the German embrace
in 1938. It exists today as an independent country by the grace of treaty
guarantees from World War II victors in the late 1940s.
As for
Belgium, it became an independent country when its francophone majority
rebelled against Dutch rule in 1830. Leave it to others to explain Lichtenstein
and Monaco. Cheers for them.
Boris Danik is a retired Ukrainian-American living
in North Caldwell, New Jersey.
