LETTERS FROM ABROAD: Back in the U.S.S.R

I came to Kyiv on a fellowship to study Ukrainian, the country’s national language. This bellwether country finds itself at the forefront of the battlefield of Western ideals as it develops into a fledgling democracy and free-market economy. As a member of the Ukrainian Diaspora, I wanted to get in touch with my roots and relive some of the stories I’d been hearing since childhood. Languages always reveal much more than new words, and I hoped learning Ukrainian would give me insight into the country’s struggle to build an independent national identity.I went to a restaurant on my first day here, and had an apparently common experience. With just a little Ukrainian under my belt, I entered a traditional eatery and began looking at the menu. Though I had spent weeks preparing, I could not understand a word on the page. I flagged down my waitress and asked if this was, in fact, a Ukrainian menu. She looked confused and simply said: “Nyet. Russian.” When asked if I could have one in Ukrainian, her response was the first in a series of such replies to the same question: “We don’t have one.” If you think speaking Ukrainian in Ukraine would be an easy task, you would be mistaken.But this is less surprising than it might first appear. Though the official state language of Ukraine is Ukrainian, more than 50 percent of the population claims Russian as their mother-tongue . I find this fascinating in and of itself, but it is made more so by the government’s recent attempts to further undermine the role of Ukrainian in their own society today.To fully understand why the Russian language holds such sway in a country where only 17 percent of the population identifies itself as ethnically Russian requires history far outside the scope of this article. Hundreds of years of Russian imperialism, followed more recently by the thorough, and at times brutal, “Russification” by the Soviet Union, chased many Slavic languages into the shadows and installed Russian as the region’s lingua franca.During perestroika, Ukraine was finally allowed to claim Ukrainian as the state language in 1989. For the following 25 years, however, little was done to promote its usage or alter the language laws, and Russian still dominated the country as the language of choice. Attempts were made at “Ukrainization”, though they were often poorly thought out and even more poorly enforced.After the 2004 Orange Revolution , the Yushchenko regime began to pay more attention to language policy and introduced the first substantial changes. Ukrainian is now mandatory as the language of instruction in all schools and universities, though protection is granted to minority languages in some cases.Mandating the use of Ukrainian in schools, however, was deemed insufficient to promote its usage in everyday speech. Additional laws and presidential edicts were passed requiring an increase in the use of Ukrainian in mass media as well. Foreign films are required to be dubbed into Ukrainian (with the exception of Russian films). Television stations with nation-wide audiences are required to broadcast 75 percent of their programming in Ukrainian and all advertisements are exclusively in the state language. But as with many laws in Ukraine, there is a vast discrepancy between the written law and its enforcement. Moreover, as might be expected, Russia has fiercely opposed these changes in a number of diplomatic and legal arenas.In reality, the claim that Russian is a minority language being oppressed in Ukraine is unequivocally false. Apart from statistics showing the strength of its adoption throughout the country, I can attest to this fact from trying to communicate in Ukrainian in the nation’s capital. Though most people will switch to Ukrainian if asked, the initial language of communication is almost always Russian.Nevertheless, members of the current president Yanukovych’s ruling Party of Regions, have recently introduced draft legislation calling for an elevation of Russian language to official status to prevent its persecution.Some of the proposals within the new legislation go too far. In academia, for example, if a single student wants to have classes in Russian, the university would be required to accommodate the request. Additionally, a student could change his language preference in the middle of the year, even if only because he did not like his instructor or grades. Clauses in the legislation also call for relaxation of the already bendable rules on language in the mass media, opening the floodgates for more Russian influence.This academic example also has real-world implications. A local friend I spoke to worries that her younger sister will not be admitted into a university in Kyiv because she comes from the West and only speaks Ukrainian. If universities can choose which language to use, she fears, they will switch to the more international of the two: Russian. Others point to the example of Belarus, which adopted Russian as an official language in 1995. As of the 1999 government census, over 60 percent of the population speaks Russian at home. Academics familiar with the region claim the number of Belarusian speakers is now less than 15 percent of the population.Public opinion suggests the new law is a bitter pill that will not be happily swallowed. Though attention shifted recently to more economic matters – thousands demonstrated against what was viewed as an unfair tax policy – earlier protests were sufficient to table a vote on the language bill until further notice.Languages have an enormous impact on a society, from determining what news sources to turn to, to framing people’s thoughts on a multitude of political and cultural issues. Without protection against an increasing presence in the mass media, and with the bulwark of education space erased, many worry that Ukrainian will once again be wiped from the public sphere.As a defense mechanism that has seen them through tough times in the past, many Ukrainians are reacting to this possibility with their well known black humor. At numerous restaurants around the capital, menus to cheap, prix-fixe “business lunches” are printed with faded pictures of Soviet nostalgia under the heading “Back in the USSR.” Whether this will still be a joke in a few years remains to be seen. This image is being used under Creative Commons licensing. The original source can be found here .