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BOOK REVIEW
A study of linguicide of the Ukrainian language
by Yuri Shevchuk
Ukrainian Weekly, 16 October 2005
[reprinted with permission]
"Ukrainian Language in the Twentieth Century: A History of Linguicide,"
edited by Larysa Masenko. Kyiv: Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, 2005. Hardcover,
399 pp, $25.
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.
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