Competing Identities of Ukraine's Russian Speakers

Volodymyr Kulyk

In the first decade after the breakup of the USSR, both local and Western ex­perts believed that Russians and Russian speakers might endanger the social stability or even the territorial integrity of the newly independent states they had found themselves in.

Two decades after those analyses, it is quite clear that this view was mistaken. Instead of successfully mobilizing in defence of their group inter­ests, Ukraine’s Russian-speakers have lost much of their distinct ethnocultural identity which should have driven such mobilization. In the face of the Russian aggression of 2014, most Russian-speakers, even in the seemingly pro-Rus- sian east-southern regions, allied with their fellow citizens rather than their linguistic ‘brethren’ across the border. As the analysis below will demonstrate, their spectacular choice in favour of Ukraine was based on inconspicuous changes in their ethnonational identity over the previous years. Rather than forming into a community distinguished by its main language, they had grad­ually been transformed from Soviet people into Ukrainians - without drastic changes in their language practice. While most of them remained primarily Russian-speaking, this is not how they would define themselves.

Making Sense of People Speaking Russian

In many publications of the early post-Soviet years, ethnic Russians in Ukraine and other former republics were viewed as clear-cut groups with a strong eth­nic identity, or even parts of one dispersed group which was often referred to as the “new Russian diaspora”.¹ People who had been registered as Russians by “nationality” in the last Soviet census of 1989 were assumed to constitute a real social collectivity strongly attached to their “ethnic homeland”.

Later, scholars came to recognize the inadequacy of treating the post­Soviet Russians as a diaspora, of which Russians in Ukraine formed a ho­mogenous part clearly distinct from the Ukrainian majority. Andrew Wilson was one of the first to emphasize that “questions of national identity in Ukraine cannot be understood via a crude contrast between ‘Ukrainians’ as the eponymous state-bearing nation and ‘Russians’ as a diaspora group of the Russian Federation”.⁴ The rejection of the majority-minority contrast was facilitated by a growing awareness among scholars dealing with Ukraine that in this post-imperial society “nationality” is not necessarily the most politically relevant of all ethnocultural characteristics. As a result of the Soviet regime’s ambiguous nationalities policies, millions of people embraced Russian as their main language but most of them retained their ethnic self-designation as Ukrainians. Accordingly, there was a large discrepancy between ethnicity and language, meaning that the ethnic and linguistic boundaries between the two main groups did not coincide.

In another important publication of the time, Paul Pirie emphasised that any categorisation including an unambiguous designation of “nationality” was inadequate in a society where “inter-ethnic marriage, language usage and urbanisation are all factors which contribute to mixed self-identification”.⁶ Therefore, many people identified with both ethnic groups, most frequently the Ukrainian and Russian ones, or did not have a stable identification with any of them, which often led to the preference for some pan-ethnic identity (in the 1990s this usually meant Soviet). Such ambiguous and unstable identi­fications were particularly widespread in eastern and southern Ukraine with its high level of urbanization, mixed marriages, and the predominant use of the Russian language by people of all “nationalities”.

The realisation of ambiguous lines between the two main groups and a tremendous regional variation in their relationship with each other led schol­ars to reconsider the likely ethnopolitical consequences of the presence of large numbers of Russians and Russian-speakers in post-Soviet Ukraine. First and foremost, a mismatch between ethnicity and language meant that key ethnop­olitical actors were not always sure what group they should seek to mobilize and represent. Simply put, Russophone Ukrainians could be seen as a “vital swing group” that the Russian-speaking entrepreneurs did not want to lose to the Ukrainian nationalist parties.⁷ For the Russian-speaking elites of the east and south, downplaying ethnicity in favour of language or some other unifying characteristic would mean a huge increase in the size of “their” group.

While most of the early studies of Ukraine’s Russians and Russian speak­ers focused on their political response to the post-Soviet reality, in the following years scholars became increasingly interested in their cultural response. In his study of the Russian-speakers in Ukraine and three other post-Soviet states, David Laitin sought to assess their readiness to assimilate into the newly dom­inant culture and/or adjust their ethnolinguistic identities. Laitin concluded that in Ukraine, similarly to Kazakhstan and in contrast to Latvia and Esto­nia, Russian speakers expected no significant gains from linguistic assimila­tion which, therefore, could not reach such a scale in society as to become ir­reversible. He argued that ethnic Russians and those titulars who had been linguistically assimilated under the USSR soon after its disintegration came “to see themselves - in conglomerate terms - as a ‘Russian-speaking popula­tion'”.⁹ Laitin failed to admit that Russian-speakers might seek to retain their accustomed language without making it a cornerstone of their identity or that they might change their language behaviour in some aspects without “tipping” into full-fledged assimilation. Moreover, as his analysis focused on comparison between different post-Soviet countries, his research downplayed the different dynamics in different regions within a certain country and the different prefer­ences of ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking titulars within his alleged con­glomerate.

An impressive regional differentiation had by then been demonstrated by Ian Bremmer (1994) in a study of the political and cultural preferences of ethnic Russians in three Ukrainian cities.

In the following decade, many authors revealed considerable regional differentiation in Russian-speakers' behaviour in both micro- and macro­analyses of language and identity processes. In particular, some micro-level studies found that Russian-speakers in different parts of Ukraine had come to feel Ukrainian based on their country of residence and citizenship, even if many of them also felt Russian based on their origin and/or accustomed language. Against the background of the traditional ethnolinguistic definition of Ukrainian identity in Lviv, these “new Ukrainians” saw the Ukrainian nation “rather as a civic community of compatriots, based on common feelings of belonging to the nation, land and loyalty to the state”.¹¹ In the predominantly Russian-speaking city of Odesa, the increased salience of civic Ukrainian identity paradoxically led to its projection onto the established ethnic cate­gorization of “nationality”, so that people considered themselves Ukrainian in both senses. This contributed to the blurring of the very categories of “Ukrainian” and “Russian” which people nevertheless considered meaningful.

On a macro-level, survey-based studies confirmed the observed reality of the unabated prevalence of Russian, which meant that most people who used to rely on it at the outset of independence continued to use it exclusively or pre­dominantly and pass it on to their children, in flagrant discrepancy with their increasingly Ukrainian ethnolinguistic identity.¹³ Moreover, examinations of the factors determining Ukrainian citizens’ political and cultural attitudes demonstrated that the region of residence was at least as strong a predictor as - in many cases, much stronger than - language use, native language, and nationality. This pointed to an essential heterogeneity of the populations defined by these characteristics.¹⁴ In one study specifically designed to verify Laitin’s argument about the salience of Russian-speaking identity, Lowell Bar­rington found that among people speaking Russian all or part of the time, the attachment to the self-designation as a “Russian-speaker” was much weaker than to those defined by citizenship and ethnicity.¹⁵ He also confirmed that ethnicity and region matter more than language in determining individual identities. In his conclusion: “As a result, there appears to be no single, unify­ing label that the Russian-speakers have found and accepted. Their status as a unified‘identity group’ is, consequently, ambiguous at best”.¹⁶ It is this study that I primarily build on in examining identity preferences of people speaking mostly Russian, seeking to demonstrate that most of them have acquired a salient Ukrainian identity without abandoning their accustomed language.

Competing Identifications of Russian-Speakers

My analysis of changes in ethnonational identifications among the Ukrainian population is based on three nationwide surveys conducted by the Kyiv In­ternational Institute of Sociology (KIIS) at various times before and after the Euromaidan protests and the Russian aggression of 2014. These surveys were conducted in February 2012, September 2014, and February 2017. Since the an­nexed Crimea and the occupied parts of the Donbas became inaccessible to Ukrainian sociologists after 2014, I excluded respondents from those territo­ries in the earlier surveys in order to make the data comparable. Therefore, sta­tistically significant changes in characteristics presented in the tables reflect changes in popular perceptions rather than in the territories controlled by the Ukrainian government. Broadly speaking, significant differences are those ex­ceeding 3 per cent.

The first question inquired about primary self-designation (“Who do you consider yourself primarily?”) and provided a list of alternatives related to ter­ritorial entities of varying scales. The comparison of responses from the two most distant surveys, 2012 and 2017, reveals diachronic changes in the relative salience of people's attachment to Ukraine vis-a-vis its competitors on both the sub- and supra-national levels, in particular a transformation brought about by Euromaidan and the war. Table 1 demonstrates the relative salience of var­ious territorially defined identities for those respondents who said that they spoke only or predominantly Russian in their everyday lives - against the back­ground of the Ukrainian population as a whole. Moreover, the Russian-speak- ers' responses are presented not only for Ukraine as a whole but also for its two geographical “halves”, one encompassing the west and the centre and the other the east and the south, with vastly different shares of predominantly Russian­speaking people and different histories of their residence on the respective ter­ritories.

The table's figures clearly demonstrate that both the Ukrainian population as a whole and its predominantly Russian-speaking part in particular became increasingly attached to their country of residence and thus inclined to iden­tify themselves primarily in national terms. At the same time, among Rus­sian speakers this identification is less predominant than among those people using primarily Ukrainian or the two languages equally, while identification with their respective localities remains stronger than in the other linguistic groups. Moreover, the gap between the Russian-speaking populations of the two geographical halves of the country not only persists but grows wider. In the west and centre, the Russian-speaking minority increasingly resembles the Ukrainian-speaking majority, while in the east and south the Russian-speak­ing majority lags behind in its identification with the Ukrainian state and na­tion. This gap vividly demonstrates the crucial importance of the regional di­mension of identity processes in Ukraine.

Table 1: Responses to the survey question: “Whom do you Consideryourselfprimarily" (February 2012 and February 2017, in %)

The second question compared Ukrainian identity not only with other territorial identifications but also with widespread identifications of other kinds including those defined by gender, religion, occupation, ideology, eth­nicity, and language. Unfortunately, this question was only included in the September 2014 survey so we can analyse post-Euromaidan priorities but not the evolution for the years of independence (see Table 2). When asked which of the listed twenty words best characterize them, being allowed to choose no more than three, respondents indicated their identification as “Ukrainians” more frequently than any other, even though the characteristic “man/woman” was almost as popular. Although the specific meaning of the word “Ukrainian” for a particular respondent remains unclear, whether civic, ethnic, or some combination thereof, the fact is that this self-perception is extremely salient in today's Ukraine. It is no wonder that people indicating their nationality as Russian were much less inclined to think of themselves as Ukrainians than those declaring Ukrainian nationality. More surprisingly, one in eight of self­designated Russians also considered it important to identify as Ukrainian, implying that the latter identification was for them primarily civic, and the former primarily ethnic. For all respondents using mainly Russian in everyday life, their identification as Ukrainians turned out to be much more salient than that as Russian-speakers, in a clear repudiation of the above-mentioned predictions of the formation of a distinct Russian-speaking community. While less inclined to identify as Ukrainians than those speaking predomi­nantly Ukrainian or both languages equally, most Russian speakers primarily identified themselves not in terms of language but rather in terms of gender, locality, or religion.

Similarly to the previous question, the two halves of Ukraine differed con­siderably in the identification priorities of their residents, particularly among those who usually spoke Russian. In the west and centre, Russian speakers were much more inclined to identify as Ukrainians than in the east and south where, in contrast, local and regional identifications were more prevalent. Not only were differences between the geographical parts commensurate with those between the two linguistic groups, but also inter-regional differentiation was more pronounced in the Russian-speaking group than the Ukrainian­speaking one. Perhaps most remarkably, even in the south-eastern part of the country people speaking predominantly Russian were more likely to think of themselves as Ukrainians than Russian-speakers or Russians, notwithstand­ing a strong emphasis by those regions' elites on the Russian language and culture as a crucial element of their distinct identity.

Table 2: Responses to the survey question: “Which ofthe words listed below best char­acterises you? Ifit is hard for you to choose one, indicate a few but not more than three main characteristics” (September 2014, in per cent; shown are figures only for twelve options that turned out to be most popular among all respondents)

It should be noted, however, that the increasing “Ukrainianness” of the Russian-speaking part of Ukraine’s population means that most of these peo­ple do not cease to be Russian-speaking when becoming (more) Ukrainian. Indeed, the share of those using predominantly Russian in their everyday life decreased only marginally for the first three decades of independence, not least because young people, while knowing the Ukrainian language bet­ter due to its increased use in education, did not speak it more than older generations who had been raised and schooled under the Soviet regime.¹⁷ Although more Ukrainian appeared in certain domains such as education, public administration, and family communication, in other practices the So­viet-induced predominance of Russian persisted or even increased, perhaps most importantly in the workplace and the media. Euromaidan and the war, while stimulating attachment to Ukrainian as the perceived national language and alienation from Russian as the perceived language of the aggressor, did not convince a considerable part of Ukraine's population to suddenly change their language practice. Although many people who used to speak almost ex­clusively Russian seemed to be more willing to use some Ukrainian, at least in certain practices, by no means did this change amount to a full-fledged switch from one language to the other, which would then be reflected in responses to the survey question on everyday language. The surveys of 2012 and 2017 show virtually identical distributions of respondents by the language they primarily use in everyday life, both in Ukraine as a whole and in each of its geographical halves. Public discourse, in particular social media, provided numerous exam­ples of both individual declarations of abandonment of the irreparably tainted language and objections to perceived infringements on the right to use it.¹⁸ Between these two extremes, most Russian speakers continued to rely on their accustomed language without commenting on this choice, thus manifesting their perception thereof as being perfectly normal. This has only changed after Russia's full-blown invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Explaining the Low Salience of Russian-Speaking Identity

Perhaps the main factor contributing to the low salience of Russian-speaking identification is a lack of clear boundaries between Russian-speaking people and the rest of Ukraine's population. What seems unambiguous in survey data using one of the more or less arbitrary criteria for defining “Russian speakers”, proves to be messy in real life, where both language practice and ethnolinguis­tic identity are anything but clear-cut. Most people in today's Ukraine use both Ukrainian and Russian in their everyday lives, albeit to greatly varying degrees, and very many, 21 per cent by self-designation in the 2017 survey, combine the two languages more or less equally. Moreover, even among those who speak predominantly Russian, many still consider Ukrainian to be their native lan­guage; in the 2017 survey, this share was 13 per cent, while a further 36 per cent claimed to have two native languages. Whether this choice is informed by eth­nic origin, the idea of Ukrainian as the national language for all citizens, or other considerations, people care about their perceived native language no less than the language they usually speak - as clearly demonstrated by their prefer­ences regarding the language situation and language policy which many sur­veys have inquired about.¹⁹ Such a discrepancy between ethnolinguistic iden­tity and language practice was an outcome of Soviet policies that promoted identification among Ukrainians with the Ukrainian nation and“its” language, on the one hand, and a reliance on Russian as the main language of social mo­bility and inter-ethnic unity, on the other. After the proclamation of indepen­dence, this discrepancy persisted and even increased as ever more people iden­tified as Ukrainians without speaking much of the eponymous language.²⁰ As the above analysis has demonstrated, the tendency became stronger after the Maidan and the outbreak of war, hence the discrepancy grew even greater.

For one particular aspect of ethnolinguistic diversity to become much more salient than others, the state, or some other influential actor, would have to emphasize this aspect in their policies and discourses. Over three decades of independence, however, the Ukrainian state has mostly refrained from such an emphasis, even if it has prioritised the Ukrainian language and thus given some advantages to its speakers. The promotion of Ukrainian, usually far from aggressive, did not result in any systematic discrimination against speakers of Russian, most of whom could still use their preferred language in the workplace, when communicating with public servants, and in other practices.²¹ Even in education, where a shift toward Ukrainian was perhaps the most perceptible, most of those who wanted their children to be taught in Russian (and this by no means included all the people who spoke mainly Russian themselves) had, until very recently, no problem finding schools or classes which could provide such services. To be sure, many Russian-speakers considered themselves, or people like them, to be discriminated against, and their share was higher than among those speaking mainly Ukrainian. How­ever, this asymmetrical view of discrimination had much to do with the former group being accustomed to enjoying the full range of communicative practices in their preferred language, a custom that the latter group had never had a chance to acquire. Yet, even at the peak of the promotion of Ukrainian under PresidentViktorYushchenko, 57 percent of Russian-speaking respondents in a 2006 survey by the sociological centre Hromadska Dumka stated that they had never encountered manifestations of language-based discrimination against

Russian-speakers, while only 13 per cent claimed that they had encountered such manifestations quite often.²²

Related to the lack of large-scale discrimination against Russian-speakers is a strong presence of political actors (seen as) representing the interests of this constituency. Having the full scope of political rights, Russian-speaking citizens were able to elect politicians to positions within local councils, the national parliament, and sometimes even the presidency who they hoped would protect their right to use their preferred language. The best-known example of such a language-related vote was the victory of Leonid Kuchma in the presidential election of 1994, thanks to overwhelming support by Russian- speakers, much of which was predicated on his campaign promise to elevate the legal status of Russian.²³ Although, upon election, Kuchma refused to take steps to guarantee the uninhibited use of Russian in all social domains, Rus­sian-speaking voters repeatedly brought enough Russian-friendly candidates to parliament who then managed to block the most radical Ukrainianization measures during the presidencies of Kuchma and Yushchenko. Moreover, these votes eventually ensured the victory of Viktor Yanukovych who launched a counteroffensive against Ukrainianization, culminating in the passing of a new language law in 2012 that elevated the status of Russian, thereby legal­ising its actual prevalence in most social domains. This victory, as well as the earlier successes ofYanukovych's party in the parliamentary elections of 2006 and 2007, stemmed from a mobilization of Ukraine's eastern and southern constituencies by the anti-Orange elites who emphasized proximity to Rus­sia and the reliance on the Russian language as those regions' core values.²⁴ While obviously detrimental to identification with Ukraine as a whole, this mobilization did not prioritize linguistic identity but regional and local ones, thus not only contributing to their prevalence in the east and south but also to the alienation of these regions' residents from their compatriots in the west and centre, which also meant disunity of the Russian-speaking population nationwide. Moreover, in seeking power across the entirety of Ukraine, rather than just its eastern and southern parts, Yanukovych and his associates had to balance their support for the Russian language with a recognition of the value of Ukrainian, just as their opponents mostly refrained from explicit de-legitimization of Russian and its speakers. Indeed, no major party ever presented itself as representing only one of the two main language groups or geographical halves of the country, even if some came to be widely seen as such. The lack of institutionalization of ethnolinguistic differences was no less important for national unity than the representation of different groups in power bodies and their influence on policymaking.

While politicians kept the fragile balance between the interests of Ukrainian- and Russian-speakers, members of both alleged groups increas­ingly perceived themselves as Ukraine’s citizens or simply Ukrainians due to their participation in many practices prioritizing this identity, from ed­ucation to traveling with a Ukrainian passport to watching Ukrainian sport teams compete with foreign ones. By the second decade of independence, this identification prevailed in both of the main language groups and in all macro-regions of Ukraine, even if the anti-Orange mobilization somewhat undermined its strength among the Russian-speakers of the east and south. The outbreak of war with Russia in 2014 brought Ukrainian citizens a new experience of defending one’s country and/or expecting an attack by a foreign army, an experience that was widely claimed to have increased both identi­fication with Ukraine and alienation from Russia. As a result, even in these regions, people predominantly speaking Russian by no means thought of themselves primarily as Russian-speakers or Russians, two identifications whose combined popularity in the 2014 survey did not exceed that of their self­perception as Ukrainians. In the west and centre, the prevalence of Ukrainian identification was much stronger. Both the great regional variation of Russian­speaking identification and its low salience compared to the Ukrainian one clearly demonstrates that there is no unified Russian-speaking identity group, just people outside of Russia who continued speaking primarily Russian. After February 2022, many of them found it problematic to continue speaking Russian, a language which they came to associate with the enemy.

Acknowledgment

The 2012 survey was funded by a grant awarded to me by the Shevchenko Scien­tific Society in the USA from the Natalia Danylchenko Endowment Fund. The 2014 survey was made possible by a grant awarded by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta, from the Stasiuk Family Endow­ment Fund. The 2017 survey, designed in collaboration with Henry Hale, was funded from our research budgets at George Washington University and Yale University, respectively.

Notes

1 Shlapentokh, The New Russian Diaspora.

2 Kolstoe & Edemsky, Russians in the Former Soviet Republics; King & Melvin, NationsAbroad.

3 Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed.

4 Smith et al., “Rethinking Russia's post-Soviet diaspora,” p. 121.

5 Arel & Khmelko, “The Russian Factor and Territorial Polarization”.

6 Pirie, “National identity and politics”, p. 1079.

7 Smith et al., “Nation-Building in the Post-Soviet Borderlands,” p. 119.

8 Smith & Wilson, “Rethinking Russia's post-Soviet diaspora,” p. 855.

9 Laitin, Identity in Formation, p. 33.

10 Janmaat, Nation-Building in Post-Soviet Ukraine.

11 Polese & Wylegala, “Odessa and Lvov or Odesa and Lviv”, p. 798.

12 Sovik, Support, Resistance and Pragmatism.

13 Kulyk, “Soviet nationalities policies”.

14 Barrington & Faranda, “Reexamining region, ethnicity, and language in Ukraine”; Kulyk, “Language identity, linguistic diversity”.

15 Barrington, “Russian-Speakers in Ukraine and Kazakhstan”.

16 Ibid., p. 152.

17 Kulyk, “The demography of language practices”.

18 Kulyk, “Language and identity in Ukraine after Euromaidan”.

19 Kulyk, “Language identity, linguistic diversity”.

20 Kulyk, “Soviet nationalities policies”.

21 Kulyk, “The demography of language practices”.

22 Kulyk, “Language policy in Ukraine”.

23 Arel & Khmelko, “The Russian Factor”.

24 Kulyk, “Language policies and language attitudes”; Kulyk, “Language pol­icy in Ukraine”.

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