BOOK REVIEW

A study of linguicide of the Ukrainian language

"Ukrainian Language in the Twentieth Century: A History of Linguicide," edited by Larysa Masenko. Kyiv: Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, 2005. Hardcover, 399 pp, $25.

by Yuri Shevchuk

Today, 14 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, a visitor to Kyiv will find a confusing language situation. Outwardly, street signs, announcements in public transportation are all in Ukrainian. However, the majority of newspapers, most popular TV and radio programs, cinemas, bars, restaurants, etc. are solidly dominated by Russian.

The desire to reverse the assimilation of Ukrainians into the Russian imperial culture and revive the Ukrainian language motivated millions of those who championed independence in the late 1980s to early 1990s. Some advances in the Ukrainian cultural revival are now being undermined by assimilationist tendencies that take new and increasingly effective forms.

One such form that immediately catches the eye is the policy of Ukrainian-Russian bilingualism actively implemented by most leading broadcast and printed media, and at best unopposed or often tacitly promoted by the Ukrainian government and society at large.

The result is easy to see - the progressive collapse of the Ukrainian language culture in the spheres that, even under the Soviet regime, were considered bastions of Ukrainian literary norm: theater, radio and the press. The kind of Ukrainian one hears today in Ukrainian-language radio and TV broadcasts, and reads in the press is riddled with Russian at the levels of even those language sub-systems that are more resistant to external influences: phonology, morphology and syntax. By some twisted irony, the old Soviet policy of bringing Ukrainian closer to its "brotherly" Russian language is yielding massive fruit.

A notable aspect of this process is the surprisingly little resistance it meets from those it targets - millions who figure in the polls as Ukrainian speakers. This state of cultural passivity has largely remained unaffected by the Orange Revolution. The timid demands finally to adopt an orthography purged from Soviet distortions, to support Ukrainian book-publishing and film-making, and to increase Ukrainian content in broadcast media, Internet and computer market have either been ignored or actively opposed by the bureaucrats in charge. Ukrainian society seems to be overtaken by a cultural and linguistic paralysis. The younger generation that was expected to be free, or at least freer, from Soviet legacies reproduces imperial hierarchies of domination and control with an enviable enthusiasm.

This situation has deep historical roots. Revealing them, understanding how Ukrainians have, for decades and centuries, been reduced to "Little Russians" culturally, linguistically and pshychologically is the necessary step toward the recovery of a Ukrainian national and political identity.

The recently published book "Ukayinska Mova u XX Storichchi: Istoriya Linhvotsydu" (Ukrainian Language in the 20th Century: A History of Linguicide), is an important contribution to this process. Edited by the leading sociolinguist Larysa Masenko, chair of the Ukrainian language at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, the book is a compilation of texts, essays, and documents that, in their totality, present a picture of the consistent, calculated and relentless colonization of Ukraine in the sphere of language and culture.

Students of colonialism and empires, in their many forms known to humanity, whether Greek, Persian, Roman, Spanish, British or pre-Bolshevik Russian, will discover in this book a tool of political control and domination that was invented by Russian Communism.

The Ukrainian linguist Yuri Shevelov thus described it, "Government interference of any kind, and, in this particular case, by the Russian government, into the inner laws of a language was a Soviet invention and novelty. Neither the Poles, nor Romanians, nor Czechs, nor even the Russian pre-revolution administration resorted to it. They all used measures of outside pressure, they prohibited, whether in part or totally, to use Ukrainian in public, they imposed their state language through the educational system, they seduced Ukrainians by their culture and career opportunities, resettled them to non-Ukrainian territories while settling Ukrainian territories by members of the dominant nation. In addition to these classical methods the Soviet system introduces control over the structure of the Ukrainian language: proscribes certain words, syntactic structures, grammatical forms, rules of spelling and pronunciation, propagating instead others which are either closer to Russian or transplanted intact directly from Russian. Thus, in Soviet Ukraine, the conflict between Ukrainian and Russian languages is introduced from the exterior, extra-linguistic sphere into the language itself. The conflict took place not only in the human psyche, but inside the language."

This observation is key to understanding what happened to Ukrainian under the Soviet regime, and the present condition. "Ukrainian Language in the 20th Century" goes a long way toward providing a great deal of documentary evidence of the communist engineering in the language sphere.

The book follows the periodization that has become traditional: the first is the era of Ukrainianization, from the late 1920s to the early 1930s; the second, the purges and fight against bourgeois nationalism of the Stalinist period (1932 to mid-1950), and the third, language policies under Khrushchev and Brezhnev (mid-1950 to 1980s).

Reading the arguments of such leading participants in the language policy discussion of the 1920s as Minister of Education Mykola Skrypnyk, the linguists Olena Kurylo and Oleksa Syniavsky, one cannot help but see how directly and sadly pertinent their observations are to what we have now and how little the language situation has changed for the better since.

Now, as then, the issue of rescuing Ukrainian from the pervasive and corrupting influence of Russian is of existential importance, the crucial difference being that the mass media and the information revolution objectively accelerate Russification at all levels and leave no sphere of communication unaffected by Russian. What earlier took decades to accomplish now may take a year.

Now, as then, the absence of an orthography that is scientifically sound, free from alien influences and binding for all, paralyzes the entire Ukrainian-speaking community and results in a linguistic chaos that facilitates all kinds of hybrids and undermines the very concept of the Ukrainian literary standard.

Now, as then, the discussion seems to be taking place between the proponents of Russophile and Polonophile orientation who seem to be speaking past one another to the exclusion of the argument that should, from the start, have been central in the discussion: namely, how to return to the living speech of the Ukrainian people, how to activate and support the mechanisms of language regeneration that have deep roots in the Ukrainian language tradition, how to make Ukrainian literary standard closer to the popular speech cleansed of elements imposed from the outside, how to adapt it to the needs of the information age.

The pronouncements of some leading champions of Ukrainianization, represented in the first part of the volume, will strike the reader by a positive charge, creative enthusiasm, large scale of thinking and optimism that are noticeably absent in today's public discussion. The majority of politicians eschew the language issue as politically radioactive. Those who continue to speak about the issue politicized it to such an extent as to preclude any possibility of a national consensus-building.

This is a striking paradox in a nation where large majorities of citizens across the language lines are sympathetic to the cause of the revival of the Ukrainian language, provided that such a proposition is made in non-politicized terms. One would wish for an even greater representation of such positive thinking in the book.

Reflecting its subtitle "History of Linguicide," the book provides a wealth of evidence of the many-pronged assimilatinist policies conducted by the Soviet regime in Ukraine. These are texts of two kinds.

The first are programmatic documents of the Communist Party that articulate its positions on specific language issues, in particular on orthography, development of scientific and special terminology, grammar, word-formation and general vocabulary.

The other are publications by Soviet Ukrainian linguists on the same issues and ways of implementing Moscow's policies. How very clearly and unequivocally those positions were articulated is manifest in the titles of the documents. Here are some typically telling examples: "To Remove and Destroy Nationalist Roots on the Language Front," "Nationalist Threat on the Language Front," "To Finish Off the Enemy," "Against Bourgeois Nationalism and Falsifications," "Against Nationalism in Mathematic Terminology." These and other similarly worded titles meant physical destruction or prison terms for the accused.

Of particular interest are the publications by linguists that were intended to give the scientific, linguistic and ideological justification to these positions. The reader who is abreast of the current political discourse in Ukraine will be surprized by uncanny similarities in idiom between the positions of the Soviet regime and those vocalized nowadays by the proponents of the Soviet-era Ukrainian orthography or state status for the Russian language. This is not only because some of the mouthpieces of the Communist regime, like academician Vitalii Rusanivsky, are still around and quite vocal, but primarily because this language ideology is actively reproducing itself in post-Soviet conditions, finding its supporters at the highest levels in independent Ukraine.

Granted, the Ukrainian public is more or less aware of the fact that its language was the subject of Soviet policies aimed at its dissolution in the "great and mighty Russian language," yet it will be a revelation to most readers to find in the reviewed volume a chapter whose title sounds as if it were taken directly from George Orwell's 1984 - "Register of Repressed Words."

This final section of the book - and its perhaps most compelling achievement - comprises about 670 items, entire words or separate meanings, that were banished from the Ukrainian language by Communist assimilationists as either "dialectal, artificial, archaic, obsolete, Polish or alien to the language of the masses." Many of these words are quickly regaining their rightful status. Yet, many others over the decades became forgotten and are now rejected as, exactly and ironically, what their repressors delared them to be: "Polish," or "archaic," etc. Every Ukrainian should read this chapter very carefully.

Familiarizing the reader in considerable detail with the Soviet mechanisms of repression, the book helps to assess the extent of damage inflicted upon Ukrainian and restore the moral perspective on the current condition of the Ukrainian language, a perspective that too often seems to be absent in today's public discourse.

Developing the language in all the spheres of modern life, without exception, means restoring a basic human right that millions of Ukrainians have been denied under the Soviet regime and, by act or ommission, is being denied even today. Assessing the damage is an indispensible part of a larger project of building a democratic society in Ukraine free of the legacies of the Soviet colonial past.

Published with the financial and intellectual support of the Shevchenko Scientific Society (U.S.A.) "Ukrainian Language in the 20th Century: A History of Linguicide" is an important contribution to this cause.

The book was named among the most important publications of the year at the 2005 Book Publishers Forum in Lviv.

The book may be ordered from: Shevchenko Scientific Society, 63 Fourth Ave., New York, N.Y. 10003-5200. Price: $25 plus $3 for shipping.

Yuri I. Shevchuk is lecturer of Ukrainian language and culture, department of Slavic languages, at Columbia University.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, October 16, 2005, No. 42, Vol. LXXIII

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