Svitlana Panova, Ukraine aEUR” Svitlana Panova, a prewar Ukrainian, spoke her native Russian language without much thought. Now, she has fled to Russia twice: fleeing Crimea in 2014 and fleeing from eastern Ukraine following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine this year. The Russian language is no longer a natural fit for her.
Panova, one million Ukrainians forced to flee Russia by war, says, “It’s difficult for me to switch into Ukrainian, but it’s for me to learn it for certain.” She is making her way through Lviv’s train station.
People from all walks of Ukraine are engaged in a heated conversation about the role of Russian culture and language in Ukraine’s social fabric. Is it possible for them to have a place in the future? This part of the country’s past is inherently toxic.
A third of Ukrainians named Russian their mother tongue in the 2001 census. In recent surveys, aEUR” has been a more common choice. The majority of Ukrainians also claim to speak Russian. Many people speak both languages in conversations. Some even use a Spanglish-type mashup named Surzhyk. Although Russian and Ukrainian are very closely related, it is not possible for both languages to be understood. The Russian Empire and the Soviet Union ruled Ukraine for centuries. At that time, Russian was the only lingua Franca required in schools.
After the pivotal 2014 pro–Western revolution in Ukraine, interest in Russian is declining. The Ukrainian language was a keystone of the nation’s efforts to establish a strong post Soviet self-identity. Many began to view language as an issue of national survival after Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24th.
Oleh Myrhorodskyy (57), a Russian-speaker hailing from Odesa in the south, said that “it is a question about our existence.” She quickly signed up to a Ukrainian-language course. “That is why everyone should put some effort into creating a national foundation. The language of that national foundation is “language.”
The online remote class was created shortly after the invasion began and filled quickly. Organizers claimed that more than 800 people registered within three days.
Russian is the language of choice for many interviews with Ukrainian refugees, which foreign viewers may see on television or hear on radio. Ihor Lysenko fled west to escape the conflict and points out that Russian is the common language of millions of Eastern Europeans.
After Russia’s attack on Ukraine, Lysenko’s wife Olha Lysenko left Russian. She returned to Russian several weeks later. Russian is her language and that of her family.
“Language is not an attachment to a nation for me.” She says that language is not tied to a particular territory. “So the Russian language, just like English, doesn’t make me feel disgust. It did in the first week of war. I switched completely to Ukrainian. However, the initial anger passed and, as my relative said, “It’s the language that the heart speaks.”
Artyom Dorokhov, a café owner in Odesa, shares another common opinion aEUR” that Ukraine is blessed with a wide range of languages and cultures. Although he was proud of his Russian heritage and never felt anti-Russian bias in his views, he says that the war has made him feel more pressure to speak Ukrainian to show his loyalty to Ukraine and not Russia.
Dorokhov states that silence is very close to being a hostile act right now. “All that we know about Russian literature and art has been destroyed by the current actions of the [Putin] regime.”
Many cities, including Kyiv, have started to remove Russian-related markers, monuments and signs. Odesa aEUR”, once a major port in imperial Russia, aEUR”, has established a commission to examine the future of some of its most important landmarks.
Oleksandr Babich (an Odesa native) says that Russian is my mother tongue. He sits on the monument commission. “But the war makes it more urgent for us to become Ukrainian. We don’t want anything to do with the Russians that are killing us.”
It will be difficult to unravel the city’s rich Russian history. Babich points out a house in which Nikolai Gogol, a Ukrainian-born writer, wrote Dead Souls. This house was also where Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s most prominent poet, lived.
The Potemkin Stairs aEUR”, a local landmark, are in question. They were featured in a Soviet silent film about a 1905 mutiny aboard a Russian battleship in Odesa harbor. There’s also the huge statue of Russian Empress Catherine the Great who founded modern Odesa in 1794, but who also oppressed Ukraine with her imperial politics.
Dorokhov likened this debate to the American South’s reckoning with Confederate monuments and statues: a cultural reckoning that overrides a history oppression. This one, however, is taking place amid a war with missile strikes erasing cities and neighborhoods and Russian troops being accused of war crimes and mass killings.
Moscow claimed that Russian-speakers were being persecuted in 2014 to justify its annexation. Similar claims were a major factor in the eight-year conflict between Russian-backed separatists and the Ukrainian army in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas.
The late 2010s saw the adoption by the Ukrainian government of new mandates and quotes to increase the use Ukrainians in education, media, and professional communication. The Kremlin promoted a wave propaganda claiming that Western anti-Russian forces were encouraging ethnocentric mandatory Ukrainization.
Putin wrote a famous historical screed in July 2021 claiming that Russians had “one people aEUR”, a single human being, bound by the common language and culture of Russia (Russkiy Mir). The concept is hated in Ukraine because of its sinister connotations.
In a March address, Volodymyr Zelenskyy (Ukraine’s President) stated that Russia is doing all it can to de-Russify the country. “You are doing it. In one generation. Und immer.”
Many call Russian soldiers “orcs”, or “Rushists” in this country, the former being a twist on “fascists”. Ukrainian officials warn of the danger posed by Russian-speakers living in Ukraine, who sympathize to Moscow.
Julia Bragina, a Russian-speaker, says that although it’s difficult to say, the Russians aren’t people anymore for us. She co-owns Odesa’s jazz club and theater. She says, “Yeah that’s mean an aEUR,” which is gross to say.”
Bragina hosted Russian musicians before the war and considered many of them her friends. She now considers their cultural influence to be tainted because so many Russian artists have been silent or supported it publicly.
Moscow passed new laws to criminalize referring to Russia’s presence as “war” or an “invasion in Ukraine. According to the Kremlin, it is engaged in a special military operation to “denazify” the Ukrainian leadership and protect Russian-speakers in the eastern Donbas.
Bragina, along with many others, believes that the difficult conversation about the unification of centuries of Russification within Ukrainian culture can be peacefully and with nuance. Babich believes it is a sign that the Ukrainian society can deal with complex problems without being enslaved by Putin’s regime.
