Turning the pages back... August 2, 1987 (07/30/06)

Turning the pages back...

August 2, 1987

With the Russian language currently being promoted as a regional language in parts of Ukraine, an article by Dr. Roman Solchanyk carried 21 years ago in The Ukrainian Weekly reminds readers of how far we've come with this issue.

A report by the board of the Ukrainian Writers' Union published in 1987 in Literaturna Ukraina profiled schools in the major oblast centers in Ukraine and identified the language of instruction for each school. A presentation by Dmytro Pavlychko, head of the Commission for Ties between the Ukrainian Writers' Union and Educational Institutions, illustrated the dire state of Ukrainian-language education in Ukraine via a statistical breakdown of the number of Ukrainian, Russian and mixed schools by oblast.

According to Mr. Pavlychko, the problem was that the number of Ukrainian-language schools in the cities was completely out of line with their national composition. He also pointed out that Ukrainian and so-called mixed Ukrainian-Russian schools accounted for 28 percent of the total, while schools with Russian as the language of instruction constituted 72 percent.

However, Mr. Pavlychko found that the situation was worse since the mixed schools were "as a rule, in practice, Russian schools." This changes the statistical data to reduce the number of Ukrainian schools, which were predominantly found in rural areas, to 16 percent, with the Russian schools making up 84 percent, even though, out of the 25 oblasts, only Crimea had a Russian majority population.

This, according to Mr. Pavlychko, was the result of over 27 years of Soviet school legislation that allowed parents or guardians to determine in what language their children would be taught. If allowed to remain on the books, he estimated that Ukrainian schools would eventually disappear from the small towns and villages, with the Ukrainian language surviving only in Canada.

The responsibility for this, Mr. Pavlychko said lay not with the parents, or the hands of Moscow, "but the 'republican apparatus' at all levels, the overwhelming majority of which is composed of Ukrainians who have not been brought up on the culture of the international, but rather on indifference to the native language, on the illiterate Ukrainian-Russian jargon (surzhyk), and on the fear that love of the maternal language could be construed as a sign of nationalism."

To correct this, Mr. Pavlychko and his commission forwarded a letter to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR asking that the appropriate section of the Draft Statute on the Secondary General Education School be amended as follows: (1) the Ministry of Education and not parents should determine the language of instruction in schools in accordance with the national composition of the pupils and (2) the language, literature and history of the given republic should be made obligatory subjects in schools with Russian as the language of instruction.

Although no written response was received, "this document has found support among those to whom it is addressed." Mr. Pavlychko said that the Draft Statute was now being "reconstituted anew" which might explain why the All-Union Congress of Teachers, which would have been called upon to ratify the document, had been postponed until early the following year.

Other criticism on language from Mr. Pavlychko came when he said, "the only reason why higher education in Ukraine is conducted almost entirely in Russian is because of several thousand foreign students in the republic." He suggested that a separate university be established in Ukraine for foreign students and pointed out that Ukrainian had been dropped from university entrance exams.

Mr. Pavlychko posed the question, "What is needed for our language to be able to breathe expansively and peacefully?" The answer according to him, was a constitutional guarantee as in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, that would make Ukrainian the state language of the Ukrainian SSR.

But this is not enough, he added. It is necessary to introduce the strictest regulations with regard to the utilization of the Ukrainian language in the republic and a detailed code which would concretely detail those spheres of life where utilization of the Ukrainian language would be obligatory.

These resolutions, according to Dr. Solchanyk, marked a turning point in the relationship between the Ukrainian intelligentsia and the Communist Party.

Source: "Catastrophic language situation in major Ukrainian cities" by Roman Solchanyk, The Ukrainian Weekly, August 2, 1987.

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