KYIV – Many of us from the Third Wave diaspora community simply can’t enjoy Kyiv the same way our American counterparts do. Our parents and grandparents were from a Ukraine of a different era, when Russian was strictly the language of the enemy. It was entirely foreign to us.
So when we visited the capital of Ukraine (or lived here for some time), it was an utter disappointment. Not only did many Kyiv residents continue to hold the centuries-old views of Ukrainian as a peasant language and decline to engage in conversation, but very often, they insisted on switching to English.
This tactic would kill two birds with one stone: avoid being seen in public speaking the peasant language, and impress others with one’s knowledge of English, which is a mark of high status and culture.
I’ve witnessed a dozen instances in which a waiter or waitress responded in Russian to an order placed by a Ukrainian-speaking person from the diaspora. Dr. Lada Roslycky even documented a few years ago how the staff of one Kyiv sushi restaurant was instructed to speak only in Russian.
Sometimes they’d switch to Ukrainian if they comprehended the outrageous notion that a foreigner speaks Ukrainian. Otherwise, they’d try their high school English as if speaking Ukrainian in public was just too unbearable.
I personally experienced a dozen of these incidents. When an electronics salesman responded in Russian to a question I had in 2005, I asked him whether he spoke Ukrainian. “Yes,” he replied, but continued speaking to me in Russian (as I responded in Ukrainian).
I went to a sandwich shop for three years, with the saleswoman never once switching to Ukrainian for me. After all, I had spent 12 years in school learning Ukrainian. And all I got in return was my effort being utterly ignored.
When a journalist colleague visited me from Volyn and witnessed this, she voiced her outrage and scolded the saleswoman for her rudeness. “Don’t worry,” I told my colleague, trying to calm the situation. “This happens all the time in Kyiv.”
These daily struggles were never an issue for Americans, who were more than happy to learn some Russian. Their experience in Ukraine wasn’t a missionary trip to preach the gospel of “The Need to Speak Ukrainian.”
It’s tough enough to keep urging one’s own kids to speak Ukrainian. This is the tragedy of the Ukrainian people: rarely have we had a place to be ourselves, to even speak our language. And when independence came, all we could ask is to be tolerated in Kyiv, where the majority of the people didn’t know, or didn’t want to speak Ukrainian.
Americans, and all foreigners for that matter, are able to simply enjoy Kyiv without this cultural frustration.
Indeed, I noticed some Kyiv residents found these people to be much more amiable because they came without the baggage of linguistic moral indignation (as if speaking Ukrainian were a moral issue, which it simply isn’t for residents of Kyiv or most cities of Ukraine).
All that being said, there’s no denying that, should you visit Kyiv this summer, you’ll hear more Ukrainian being spoken than ever. You’ll find people more receptive to your speaking Ukrainian. Heck, they might even respond in Ukrainian!
Without a doubt, the change has been dramatic since the days of Viktor Yanukovych, when speaking Ukrainian meant that you were some kind of nationalist or, of course, from western Ukraine.
Speaking Ukrainian is now stylish, as are embroidered shirts. “Ukrayina ponad use” (Ukraine above all else) used to be a slogan for the nationalist nuts. Now it’s the official slogan for the Channel 5 television news network.
I’ve noticed more waiters and waitresses responding in Ukrainian, when they rarely used to. The same goes for taxi drivers and salespeople.
Ironically, we can thank Vladimir Putin for all this. With his armed invasion and sponsorship of terrorism, he’s done more to turn Ukrainians toward the culture and language of their ancestors than anyone could have ever done.
In another dose of irony, the leading advocate of the Russkii Mir (Russian World) has buried any hope for Russkii Mir in Ukraine. Even if a Novorossiya state is carved out (and I share Dr. Alexander Motyl’s view that that’s highly unlikely), it will never be a part of Russia. It will only be a satellite of Russia, at best.
Despite all this, Ukraine remains the land of paradoxes, and the situation with language is no different. You would think that in this latest time of crisis and trial there would be no doubt that Ukrainianization is the only way to go, in terms of language policy. You would think that Ukrainians would realize that there is no greater guarantee of an independent Ukraine than a Ukrainian-speaking Ukraine.
Not so. What we are now witnessing is that the use of the Russian language is being defended as much as by the Russian-speaking Europhiles as it had been when the Russophiles were in charge.
These folks include journalists Vitaliy Portnikov and Liudmyla Nemyria, who insisted on ukrlife.tv in December 2014 that Ukraine’s bilingualism “is not a problem at all, but it’s a victory.” (I doubt they would feel that way if they were native Ukrainian speakers.) Pro-European Union activist Aksynia Kurina is among the fiercest opponents to Ukrainianization.
Then there’s Vitaliy Sich, a journalist whom I admire for his fierce devotion to Euro-integration. He continues to publish his Novoye Vremia news site and magazine exclusively in the Russian language. “Russian needs to be urgently made the second state language,” he wrote on his Facebook page on March 1, 2014 (that’s after the Donbas mafia’s flight). “It has been such de facto a long time already. Nothing will change but it will calm people…”
Even former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili declared in December that Ukraine’s bilingual status “needs to be underlined, that is to say it’s your strength.”
I believe it would be Ukraine’s strength if the Ukrainian language were fully protected and promoted. But veteran activist and politician Oles Doniy, whose interview is published in this issue (see page 1), agrees with me that the Ukrainian language is not the least bit protected by the state.
In my first years of living and reporting in Ukraine, I had equated Euro-integration with Ukrainianization. I naturally thought they went hand-in-hand.
So when the European Business Association held a press conference in the Russian language in 2010, I staged a protest by distributing fliers calling for European organizations to support the use of Ukrainian. Guess what? They looked at me as if I were from outer space.
Most Europeans prefer to learn and speak Russian. And they see no connection between a Ukrainian-speaking Ukraine and a European-integrated Ukraine. In their minds, a Russian-speaking Ukraine can be integrated into Europe just as easily and they entirely embrace the notion of a bilingual Ukraine (which, in my view, means the slow death of the Ukrainian language in the present absence of fierce state protections).
Mr. Doniy admits to being an idealist when saying that he thinks Kyiv will be Ukrainian-speaking one day.
I consider myself a realist. Although Ukrainian is stylish at the moment in Kyiv, it will be a mostly Russian-speaking city for at least the next half century.
And if Russian tanks were to roll into Kyiv tomorrow, it would return to being overwhelmingly Russian-speaking overnight. Let’s hope and pray it never comes to that.
In the meantime, enjoy Kyiv’s embrace of the Ukrainian language while it’s still fashionable!