They rap
once at a solid wooden door, then stand back.
The door
opens half way to reveal a man in forest green uniform, an automatic weapon
slung over his shoulder.
He shouts:
“Slava Ukraini!”
Visitors
call out the password in Ukrainian: “Heroyam Slava!” – Hail to Our Heroes!
And with
that, they descend into the red brick vaulted cellars of Kryjivka – an
underground restaurant in the theme of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. This
partisan group fought the Soviet Red Army for almost a decade, starting in
1944.
In that war,
long hidden behind the Iron Curtain’s veil of secrecy, 35,000 Soviet officials
and soldiers were killed — more than twice the number of Soviet troops killed
in Afghanistan during the 1980s. In reprisal, about 600,000 western Ukrainians
were “repressed” – one third executed, one third imprisoned and one third
deported to distant parts of the Soviet Union.
At Kryjivka,
the cellar walls are festooned with ghosts from that guerrilla campaign long
lost to history – handsome, sandy haired young men posing in the forest with
vaguely familiar uniforms; copies of Ukrainian language posters and pamphlets
from underground presses; and Russian language diagrams of forest encampments,
probably from Soviet counter-insurgency manuals.
At the
underground shooting range in Lviv’s Kryjivka restaurant, VOA video journalist
Austin Malloy nailed Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s secret police chief who directed
the Soviet Union’s post WWII counterinsurgency campaign in western Ukraine.
At the
entrance, my American-accented “Heroyam Slava” prompted the armed doorman to
give me a shot – of local vodka. Maybe thanks for the assistance — too little,
too late — that Washington sent to the Ukrainian guerrillas in the early 1950s?
But at a
table down below, I soon commit a linguistic faux pas. I ask for a beer in
Russian. A Ukrainian dining companion at my table almost whacks my hand. She
chides me: “No Russian spoken here!”
The gap
between Russia and western Ukraine is more than linguistic. Russia television
regularly airs old Soviet movies showing Ukrainian guerrillas as fascist
puppets of the Nazis, fanatics who fought on long after the war, ambushing
heroic Red Army units.
At Kryjivka,
where it was hard to find an empty table on a recent Monday night, there were
two traits common to the 100 or so patrons packed underground. Whether it was
the young man proudly posing for souvenir photos with a (decommissioned)
automatic weapon, or the two young women waiting for their turn to shoot an air
rifle at a paper target of Stalin’s secret police chief, they were all in their
20s and 30s, and they were all speaking in Ukrainian.
Above
ground, the linguistic landscape is the same. Over the last two centuries, the
name of this city has shifted according to tides of history: from Lemberg
(German) to Lwow (Polish) to Lvov (Russian) and now Lviv (Ukrainian).
Russia’s
influence fades as you move from east to west in Ukraine. For centuries, the
western quarter was ruled by either Poland or Austria. This western orientation
was cut short by Stalin’s annexation into the Soviet Union in 1939.
Before World War II, this was a Polish-speaking city. Later, as a western
colony of the Soviet Union, it was heavily Russian-speaking. But the influence
of Moscow faded with independence two decades ago. Lviv is now an
overwhelmingly Ukrainian speaking city. On a national level, many linguists
believe that Ukrainian language use is steadily spreading east.
Here, as in
Central Asia, Georgia, the Baltics and in Eastern Europe, the collapse of the
Soviet empire has meant a steadily shrinking footprint for spoken Russian. In
Ukraine, where Ukrainian and Russian are linguistically so close, this subtle
atrophying of Russian language skills has been overshadowed by fights over
language policy in Kyiv, the nation’s capital. Once a Russian speaking city,
Kyiv is now increasingly bilingual.
Outside
Lviv’s World War II memorial, I stopped Andrei, a 23-year-old cook who was
bicycling to work. Aiming to please, he strained hard to understand my
questions in Russian. He then replied in Ukrainian. It was not a political
statement. Here was a young Ukrainian who could not speak Russian.
Inside the
memorial, Austin Malloy, VOA’s Moscow-based video journalist, asked a gardener
– in Russian – if he could shut off his lawnmower in order to film. Standing 10
paces from a Red Army statue, the gardener barked back: “What’s your
nationality?”
When he
learned the request was not coming from a Russian, he shut off his lawnmower,
and wanted to chat, at length.
Across town,
at another World War II memorial, I stopped Sergiy, a 70-year-old retired
engineer. A veteran of the Soviet Army, he spoke Russian well. He said he had
used it every day at the factory where he worked. As we stood under a massive
Soviet-era statue of a Red Army soldier holding a sword, I asked him when was
the last time he spoke Russian.
He mulled.
He answered: “It must have been one year ago.”
Linguistic
Field Research: Marina, an architecture student from Odessa, Ukraine’s port on
the Black Sea, tells James Brooke she feels uncomfortable speaking Russian in
Lviv. Although she studied Ukrainian in school, she uses it rarely in
Russian-speaking Odessa. VOA Photo: Austin Malloy
On a park
bench, near a 17th century chapel, I talked with Marina, an architecture
student from Odessa, Ukraine’s Russian-speaking seaport on the Black Sea.
Embarrassed about making grammatical mistakes, she was using Russian in Lviv.
She said that put her on the defensive here.
Part of that
is geography. Eastern Ukraine has a 1,576 kilometer border with Russia. Central
Ukraine has a 891 kilometer border with Russian-speaking Belarus. And Western
Ukraine has a total of 2,200 kilometers of borders with Hungary, Moldova,
Poland, Romania, and Slovakia.
With the
Polish border a one-hour drive from here, Lviv, Western Ukraine’s largest city,
is closer to Warsaw or Budapest than to Kyiv. At Lviv’s International Airport’s
new $200 million terminal, the daily flight to Moscow is lost among a long list
of alternate destinations – Vienna, Munich, Prague, Warsaw, Krakow and Milan.
In town, the
roll call of 16 foreign consulates includes the standard list of neighboring
nations. But, there also are two unexpected ones, both legacies of Western
Ukraine’s diaspora of the last century: Brazil and Canada.
Poland’s new
steel and glass consulate – and the lines of visa applicants outside – testify
to the fact that on May 1, 2004, Ukrainians woke up to discover that they
needed visas to visit old friends and neighbors in Poland, Hungary and Slovakia
— all members of the expanded Schengen visa zone.
But, for
almost 150 years, Western Ukraine was administered by Vienna. Today, Lviv’s
younger generation sees visas to the West as obstacles that will pass with
time. When selecting a foreign language for study, Lviv high school students
choose Polish, German or English, over Russian.
On Lviv’s
Boulevard Dzhokhar Dudayev (named after the first president of secessionist
Chechnya), I stopped by Oculus, an optometrist. I asked the receptionist in
Russian, if she sold eyewash.
The
20-something woman struggled for a moment. Then, she asked hopefully: “Do you
speak English?”
James Brooke is the Voice of America’s Moscow
bureau chief, covering Russia and the former USSR. He is a former staff writer
with The New York Times, where he worked as a foreign correspondent in Africa,
Latin America, Canada and Japan/Korea. His blog can be found here.
