The politics of language in Ukraine (12/30/79)

The politics of language in Ukraine

by Roman Solchanyk

The following article appeared in the November 21 edition of the Ukrainian Echo.

In recent weeks the Soviet Ukrainian media have displayed more than the usual amount of sensitivity to charges of linguistic Russification of Ukraine.

Over the year, such accusations have been frequently voiced in the Ukrainian-language press in the West, especially with regard to the USSR's language policy in the educational system. Since the end of 1978, however, the polemics have increased noticeably, no doubt in response to the new measures taken by the Ministry of Education of the Ukrainian SSR to improve and expand the teaching of Russian in the republic's non-Russian schools.

The changes that will be forthcoming in Ukraine are part of an all-union effort to increase the study and teaching of Russian in schools where the languages of instruction are other than Russian.

The most important aspects of the plan approved by the Ukrainian Ministry of Education for the period 1979-85 include: (1) introducing the teaching of Russian in Grade 1 in all general education schools with Ukrainian as the language of instruction beginning with the second semester of the 1980-81 school year; (2) increasing the number of hours devoted to Russian-language study in Grades 2 and 3 of the general education school; (3) expanding the network of schools with intensive study of Russian from 17 to 200; and (4) improving the system of extracurricular activities designed to provide with more fundamental knowledge of Russian.

These measures have provoked a great deal of concern among Ukrainians living abroad, especially in view of the already well-established position of the Russian language in Ukraine.

A listener to Radio Kiev from France, for example, wrote the editors and asked whether it is true that Russian is the state language in Ukraine.

The response came from Mykola M. Pylynsky, a philologist and head of the Department of Culture of the Ukrainian Language of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Linguistics, who maintained that "the Ukrainian language as a language of government institutions has been an accomplished fact for more than 60 years." As an example of "the privileged status" of the Ukrainian language in Ukraine, Pylynsky stated that 80 percent of the republic's schools were Ukrainian-language schools, although Ukrainians constituted only 75 percent of the population of the Ukrainian SSR. Several weeks later, Radio Kiev broadcast another commentary by Pylynsky. This time he noted that 85 percent of Ukraine's schools used Ukrainian as the medium of instruction in all disciplines.

The discrepancy between the two figures, although somewhat puzzling, is not really that important. Various Soviet sources have published data showing that over the past 20 years the percentage of Ukrainian-language schools has remained fairly stable, at between 81 percent and 85 percent. Indeed, in this respect the situation has not change since the 1932-33 school year, when 86 percent of schools in Ukraine were Ukrainian-language schools.

The number of pupils attending Ukrainian-language schools is quite another matter. In this case, Soviet sources are not nearly as informative. In the 1936-37 school year the figure was 80 percent. The latest detailed statistics are for the 1967-68 school year. They reveal that 62 percent of the pupils in Ukraine received their instruction in Ukrainian, while 37.2 percent were taught in Russian.

Since that time the percentage of pupils attending Ukrainian-language schools has dropped even further. At the end of 1973 former Ukrainian Minister of Education Aleksandr M. Marynych noted that 10 years earlier 70 percent of Ukraine's pupils were being taught in Ukrainian. He added that in 1973 the number had declined to almost 60 percent. This means that about 40 percent of the pupils in Ukraine are attending Russian-language schools. Yet the number of Russians in Ukraine was only 19.3 percent in 1979.

In light of these statistics, Pylynsky's platitudes concerning "the flourishing Ukrainian language" are far from convincing.

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