ANALYSIS: Russia's largest national minority: Ukrainians in the Russian Federation (12/17/95)

ANALYSIS

Russia's largest national minority: Ukrainians in the Russian Federation

by Serge Cipko

When the World Congress of Ukrainians (WCU) recently admitted new members from countries beyond the West, it subsequently incorporated organizations representing several million Ukrainians scattered from Prague in the heart of Europe to Vladivostok in the Asian Far East. The number of Ukrainians now represented by organizations in the WCU has more than doubled, including the 4.3 million residing in the world's largest state - Russia.

The 2,373,250 Ukrainians in Russia who, according to the last Soviet census of 1989, live in the European parts of the federation (west of the Urals), along with 600,366 in Moldova, 291,000 in Belarus and 185,161 more distributed across the Baltic states - in total, some 3.44 million persons - constitute perhaps the largest single minority in Europe, aside from the Russians in the former Soviet republics.

Reporter Michael Kesterton, in an article titled "Rising Nationalism" in the Social Sciences column of Toronto's Globe and Mail (February 10, 1993), accorded such status to the 3 million Hungarians living in neighboring states, but it is clear that once the moderate estimates of Ukrainians in Poland (250,000), Romania (70,000), the Czech Republic and Slovakia (100,000) are also taken into account, then with nearly 4 million it is the Ukrainians, who, in Mr. Kesterton's terms, may well form Europe's largest minority after the Russians.

In Russia, the Soviet census of 1989 actually enumerated more Tatars than Ukrainians, but unofficial estimates of the latter are given more credence than the total formally reported. The Russian newspaper, Nezavisimaya Gazeta, for example, in reporting the convening of the First Congress of Ukrainians in Russia in October 1993, noted that the Federation of Ukrainians founded at that conference could "potentially represent the interests of 6 million to 8 million Russian Federation citizens."

What are the characteristics of this minority? Certainly it is one whose economic significance to the country is not matched by a corresponding political influence.

Ukrainians have historically made important contributions to the expansion of the Russian wheat frontier eastwards. Even as recently as the 1980s, tens of thousands of farmers from Ukraine were recruited to participate in colonization schemes in the Russian Far East, causing local alarm that Ukraine's own agrarian sector would suffer with such an exodus.

They are a significant labor force in the Russian oil and gas industries. According to the Ukrainian ambassador to Moscow in 1992, Volodymyr Kryzhanivsky, one-third of the oil workers in the Tyumen oblast in Siberia and almost half the construction workers are "transplants from Ukraine."

The deputy head of the Ukrainian Rodyna Society in Surgut stressed at the First Congress of Ukrainians in Russia in 1993 that since Ukrainians form such a large share of the labor force in the Siberian oil and gas industries, they should be considered a factor in determining the price and supply of these commodities to Ukraine.

Another delegate at the same congress, Vasyl Vilchak, head of Mria Ukrainian Cultural Society in Kaliningrad, spoke of a similar Ukrainian economic relevance in his region, a free trading zone, where Ukrainians exploit mineral and forestry resources which Ukraine is seriously lacking. The Ukrainians Mr. Vilchak represents, some of whom are in local government, also want to be considered commercial brokers between Ukraine and Russia.

On both counts, the Ukrainian government has been reluctant to accept any such proposals, the logic being that commercial transactions conducted with citizens of another country should not proceed without official sanction.

And in the axis of the Russian Federation itself, Moscow, Ukrainian "gastarbeiter" have been an emerging factor in the transport and service sectors, driving the capital's transit buses, and a pivotal element in the running of the local emergency medical services.

Thousands of Ukrainians have been flocking to the Russian metropolis in the last two years in response to the comparatively stronger Russian currency, thereby reversing a trend after independence in which the number of Ukrainians returning to Ukraine from Russia exceeded the volume moving northward.

In spite of their economic importance, however, the political clout of Ukrainians in Russia is immeasurably more limited than that of their Russian counterparts in Ukraine. They have been on Russian territory since the days of Kyivan Rus', but habitually subjected to irrevocable assimilatory pressures in subsequent centuries. Today's leaders of the minority now have to contend with an unevenness of national consciousness and frequently ambiguous, if not outright hostile, attitudes towards them on the part of local authorities.

However, steps have been made to mobilize the Ukrainian minority as a political lobby group. Their participation in the Congress of Nationalities of Russia in April 1994 has demonstrated that ethnic blocs will potentially become a feature of Russian electoral politics. The presence of an organized "Ukrainian vote" was even credited in 1993 with the ousting of a Ukrainophobe mayor in Vladivostok and his replacement with another more sympathetic to Ukrainian needs.

One can speculate on the extent to which this was truly a decisive factor, but in exceptional cases local Ukrainian pressure on regional authorities has paid off in the occasional provisioning of cultural services. But the question of such provisioning - still grossly inadequate - cannot be seriously resolved, Ukrainian leaders in Russia have repeatedly emphasized, until the federal government passes a law on minorities.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian communities in Russia have steadily amplified their links with Ukrainians in the West, ties which can only be expected to improve with their admission into the WCU. Some Ukrainians in the Far East have adopted their counterparts in Australia as the model to which to aspire. Ukrainians in Magadan have initiated ties with Ukrainians in Alaska with whom they hope to jointly publish a newspaper.

Such Pacific Rim contacts have parallels elsewhere in the Federation.

Ukrainians in the western parts of Russia, for instance, consider the Ukrainian community in Canada, which some have personally visited, and which operates within an official multicultural framework, as a standard to emulate.

Emigration will also serve as a personal bridge between communities. Take the case of the daughter of a Ukrainian cultural activist in the Kuban who was living in Vilnius and in 1992 was in Moscow preparing her papers to emigrate to Argentina. Her father rhetorically told a Toronto Ukrainian newspaper that he has "never been to Russia" because his own environment is Ukrainian. He admitted, however, that not too many of his neighbors in the region shared that opinion.

His daughter, should she ever have made the trip to Argentina, will have followed a trail already well-trodden by descendants of the Kuban Cossack Host. Among them, the late Antin Chorny, who once entertained with his bandura in packed Prosvita concert halls in Buenos Aires or before fellow Argentine workers in his factory workplace. The bandura, as one proud descendant of Kuban Cossacks, a citizen of Russia, proclaimed a few years ago, was once played more widely in the Kuban than in Ukraine.

Dr. Serge Cipko is the 1995-1996 Neporany Fellow and teaches the history of Ukrainians in Canada with the Center for Ukrainian Canadian Studies, St. Andrew's College, University of Manitoba. In September he presented a paper at the "Peoples, Nations, Identities: The Russian-Ukrainian Encounter" conference at Columbia University titled, "The Second Revival: Russia's Ukrainian Minority as an Emerging Factor in Eurasian Politics," and is the author of "Ukrainians in the Former Republics of the USSR outside Ukraine," in "Ukraine and Ukrainians Throughout the World: A Demographic and Sociological Guide" (ed., Ann Lencyk Pawliczko, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), and of "Ukrainians in Russia: A Bibliographical and Statistical Guide" (Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta, Edmonton, 1994).

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