ANALYSIS
The Russian language in Ukraine: a look at the numbers and trends
by Roman Solchanyk
Official Moscow is concerned about the fate of the Russian language in Ukraine.
At the end of January, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia handed a note to the Embassy of Ukraine in Moscow in which it expressed the hope that Kyiv would observe the terms of the bilateral treaty between the two countries when implementing its policies with regard to the Russian-speaking population in Ukraine. Among other things, the 1997 treaty obligates both sides to protect and promote the ethnic, cultural and linguistic features of national minorities in their respective countries.
Several days later, in a less diplomatic fashion, the Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry made public a statement that charged Ukraine with violating its own Constitution, which guarantees Russian and other languages of national minorities "free development, utilization and protection." This was followed by a ministry report made available to Interfax, which quoted the document as saying that "certain forces in Ukraine seem determined to create a phenomenon unseen in Europe before - to make the native language of the overwhelming majority of the population an outcast, reduce its status to marginal and possibly even squeeze it out."
And here is where the problems begin. To claim that Russian is the native language of the overwhelming majority of Ukraine's population is quite obviously nonsense. The last census, which was held in 1989, identified 32.8 percent of the total population as falling into this category. That figure, although over a decade old, has remained fairly stable. Public opinion polls conducted in 1994-1998 by the Institute of Sociology of the National Academy of Sciences in Kyiv show that the proportion of respondents who said that Russian was their native language ranged from 34.7 percent to 36.5 percent.
At the end of February, the Donetsk-based Slavic Party (formerly the Civic Congress of Ukraine) joined the fray, accusing the government of conducting its language policy on the basis of "Russophobia." The majority of Ukraine's population is Russian-speaking and 90 percent prefer to speak Russian, it insisted. Needless to say, the party did not find it necessary to specify how it arrived at its calculations.
Information coming from some government sources in Kyiv also raises questions. On February 12, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded to the criticism of its counterpart in Moscow with a statement that, among other things, said that 35 percent of students in Ukraine receive their higher education in Russian.
Several days later, Nina Karpachova, the human rights commissioner in the Ukrainian Parliament, issued her own statement, reporting the proportion of students taught in Russian as 57 percent. Ms. Karpachova was responding to her counterpart in Moscow, Oleg Mironov, who earlier had criticized Kyiv for imposing "forcible restrictions" on the use of the Russian language and urged international monitoring organizations to become more active in Ukraine.
The Ukrainian Foreign Affairs Ministry said that 1,195 newspapers are published in Russian, constituting 49.7 percent of the "overall number of Ukrainian periodical publications." It is not clear, however, whether these figures refer to Russian-language titles, single-issue print runs, or annual circulation, and whether periodicals also include journals.
The latest official data from the Ukrainian State Committee on Statistics, which is for the 1998-1999 school year, present the following picture:
By comparison, in the 1991-1992 school year 50 percent of pupils were taught in Russian; 76.6 percent of academic groups received their higher education in Russian; and in 1991, 48.8 percent of pre-schoolers were taught in Russian.
This is at the national level. In those regions of Ukraine that are home to large numbers of Russians and Russian speakers, the situation looks rather different.
In Crimea 98.1 percent of schoolchildren were taught in Russian in 1998-1999; in the Donbas the corresponding figure was between 87 percent (Luhansk Oblast) and 90 percent (Donetsk Oblast); in Zaporizhia Oblast it was 62 percent; in Kharkiv Oblast 53 percent; and in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast 41 percent. In short, the Russian language continues to largely predominate in these regions, although here too the proportion of primary and secondary school children taught in Russian has dropped.
Clearly, the Russian language has lost considerable ground in the educational system since independence. But given the accusations emanating from Moscow and the complaints that are increasingly voiced by Russian rights activists in Ukraine, probably the most important issue that needs to be addressed is whether Kyiv's policies in the educational and other spheres is limiting the role, status and functioning of the Russian language for what might be termed the pool of would-be users. The answer to that question depends on how these users are defined.
If "native language" is used as a measuring stick, then the data for general education schools and universities more or less overlaps - although the trend has been for Russian-language instruction to decline with every year. But the "native language" is not a very precise term. For some this could mean the language they know best and use most often; for others, it could a language that they are not able to converse in freely but to which they feel emotionally tied. In short, the "native language" may not be the best indicator of the language situation in Ukraine.
Another way of looking at language affiliation is to determine its use in the family setting. The polls mentioned above reveal that in Ukraine between 32.4 percent and 34.5 percent converse exclusively in Russian; another 26.8 percent (1997) to 34.5 percent (1995) use either Russian or Ukrainian depending upon circumstances. Interestingly, these figures are largely in line with the data for "native language." (Maybe this last category is not such an unreliable indicator after all.)
There is, however, a third way of gauging language affiliation, which some analysts, both in Ukraine and in the West, claim is the most objective. This is the language of "preference" or "convenience," which is the language that respondents choose to use during public opinion surveys. According to one source, Russian is the language of convenience for about 55 percent of the population; another source gives the lower figure of 43 percent. In any case, these data are significantly out of line with what is happening in Ukraine's schools and universities. The question of whether the language of convenience is in fact the most objective criterion for determining the language situation is another matter.
But there is something strange in all of this. In a recent article in a Moscow newspaper, the president of the Kyiv-based Foundation for the Support of Russian Culture in Ukraine reported that between 1994 and 1999 the proportion of Ukrainians who chose Russian as their language of "convenience" increased from 43.5 percent to 50.9 percent. The question that arises is: If the Russian language in Ukraine is under threat, being "forcibly restricted," declining in prestige, losing its viability, and the like, why are increasingly more people in Ukraine finding it "convenient"?
Dr. Roman Solchanyk is an international security policy analyst in Santa Monica, Calif.
Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, March 5, 2000, No. 10, Vol. LXVIII
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