EDITORIAL: Affirmative action needed in Ukraine (07/29/01)

EDITORIAL

Affirmative action needed in Ukraine

With the advent of independence, there were great hopes for the future of Ukraine - for improvements in all spheres of life. Not least among them was the hope that the Ukrainian language would experience a rebirth and that the Russification once imposed from above would vanish. That has not happened, according to two scholars from Ukraine who recently delivered lectures in the New York/New Jersey area. (Stories about their presentations appear on page 12 of this issue.)

According to Dr. Oleh Romaniv, president of the Shevchenko Scientific Society (NTSh) in Ukraine, after a brief resurgence of the Ukrainian language following the declaration of Ukraine's independence in 1991, came a new intensified Russification. Government officials who were members of the old Soviet nomenklatura continue to use Russian, speaking Ukrainian only when it is to their advantage to do so. The mass media promotes the Russian language, and Russian books outnumber Ukrainian-language volumes. Even the Internet and computers promote Russification. No one seems to notice, or care, that Ukrainian is the state language of Ukraine.

Similarly, Dr. Yaroslav Isaievych, director of the Krypiakevych Institute of history, observed that, though independence brought many freedoms, such as the freedom of speech, the much-anticipated flowering of publishing and literary activity in the Ukrainian language did not take place. "On the contrary," he wrote in a recent article for Suchasnist magazine, "the Ukrainian book is dying right before our eyes, unprotected by anyone, not the government, not the public ..." The reason: independent book publishing was destroyed by centuries of colonial/imperial policies, and, while Russian publications, aided by Russian tax breaks for books intended for export, flood the market, Ukraine's publishers get no break, no assistance from their government. And the leaders of Ukraine have not seen fit to remedy the situation.

It was in 1989 that the Parliament of Ukraine voted to make Ukrainian the state language. Ten years later, in December 1999, came a ruling by the Constitutional Court, which stated that Ukrainian, as the state language, has pre-eminence in matters of government and education. And still the Russian language is used by government officials, there is a shortage of Ukrainian-language textbooks, the Ukrainian media remains overwhelmingly Russian, and Russian books, videos and recordings dominate the market. Let's face it: Ukraine does not control its own information sphere.

That reality was acknowledged by Dr. Mykola Zhulynskyi, who headed the Ukrainian Council on Language Policy that in January 2000 presented a detailed plan for buttressing the use of the Ukrainian language in various spheres. The intent of the program was, in Dr. Zhulynskyi's words, "to create a normal climate for the acceptance of the Ukrainian language, to raise its prestige and to utilize a series of needed measures so that the language gathers new impulses for further development to become a consolidating factor within our society." The program aimed to raise the language proficiency of Ukrainian citizens (especially that of government officials) to enforce a minimum language requirement for broadcasting, to de-Russify the sports and tourism spheres, to promote Ukrainian-language school instruction and to develop a tariff system for foreign publications brought into Ukraine.

So, what happened since then? Well, frankly, as far as we know, nothing. Nothing more was heard, and the proposal now appears to have died.

So, is it hopeless? Not according to Dr. Romaniv, who expressed hope that national-democratic forces still can and will unite into an effective coalition and that the government will set up programs to effectively promote something that we, and other writers in this paper, have previously called for: "affirmative action" for the Ukrainian language.

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