Did the presidents of independent Ukraine promote a united national identity?
Ukraine's first president, Leonid Kravchuk (term of office 19911994) was uniquely qualified to promote a Ukrainian national identity because he had spent decades destroying and controlling it in his previous career as a Communist Party ideologist.
A long- serving functionary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, he headed the Propaganda and Agitation Department before his elevation in the late 1980s to secretary for ideological questions. After decades of fighting against any and all suspected manifestations of Ukrainian nationalism, he knew better than any other apparatchik what it took to build a new nation-state. He was also well aware of just how well the party's assimilationist agenda had been implemented during the late Soviet period, because he had overseen the party's inculcation of a supranational Soviet identity and the promotion of “eternal” Russo-Ukrainian friendship, in addition to the creeping promotion of the Russian language in Ukraine.When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the political elites in Ukraine and other republics changed their colors quickly. By then, the more dynamic functionaries, like Kravchuk, were well on their way toward abandoning communist ideology and the notion of historical Russian guidance. What they embraced instead defies easy explanation; suffice it to say that it was not an exclusive Ukrainian ethnic nationalism claiming Ukraine for Ukrainians. The foundational documents of the new Ukrainian state embraced an inclusive, civic concept of the Ukrainian nation and named the “people of Ukraine," rather than ethnic Ukrainians, as the source of sovereignty. At the same time, some concepts reflective of ethnic nationalism received wide circulation, in particular that of independent Ukraine as the completion of the Ukrainian nation's long struggle for independence. Accordingly, it followed that the state “owed" it to ethnic Ukrainians to elevate the Ukrainian language and culture to “official" status, much like French language and culture in France, for example.
The new state's old elites also found cultural Ukrainization politically expedient. It secured for them the support of the national- democratic political parties, which saw the state as an instrument for the ethnic nation's “awakening" and commanded electoral support in the westernmost regions. More generally, however, the turncoat functionaries truly wanted their own nation-state, simply because ruling it outright seemed vastly preferable to governing at the Kremlin's pleasure. Affirming Ukraine's cultural identity as separate from Russia's thus also served their pragmatic interests. For the majority of ordinary citizens, most of whom were bilingual to some degree, Ukrainization meant simply a change in language usage patterns, with the language previously reserved for home and cultural festivities now becoming the state language. After all, 72.7 percent of the population identified as ethnic Ukrainians during the census of 1989, and 64.7 percent claimed Ukrainian as their mother tongue. In other words, for them it was a heritage reaffirmed rather than a foreign identity imposed. However, the language question quickly became politicized.
President Kravchuk introduced Ukrainian as the language of administration, strengthening it as the language of instruction in schools and as the language of the national media. These policies went hand in hand with his other state-building measures and the assertion of Ukrainian sovereignty. In the early 1990s, Ukraine also distanced itself from the Russian-dominated CIS and created its own full-fledged ministries and embassies abroad. The Kravchuk administration promoted public use of the blue-and-yellow flag, the “trident” state emblem, and the anthem “Ukraine Has Not Yet Perished"—all long used by Ukrainian nationalists and now causing a backlash among those nostalgic for the red flags and the Russo-centric culture of the Soviet past. Because he had neglected painful economic reforms, however, Kravchuk's political opponents succeeded in linking his emphasis on building the nation-state with economic crisis and rampant corruption.
In 1994 Kravchuk was defeated by his former prime minister, Leonid Kuchma, who promised economic reforms and the promotion of Russian as a state language. Yet, Kuchma never attempted this latter task because he, too, realized that his power was vested in the existence of an independent Ukrainian state. Instead, he continued Kravchuk's policies of cultural and administrative Ukrainization, particularly during the mid- to late 1990s. Kuchma realized the dangers of getting too close to Russia both culturally and politically. He even published a book entitled Ukraine Is Not Russia (2003).For all this, Kuchma's electoral victory in 1994 and the parliamentary elections held earlier that year—both of which clearly showed the political division of the country into western and southeastern “halves"—confirmed the language issue as the new rallying cry of Ukrainian politics. West of the Dnipro River, the Ukrainian language became shorthand for both Ukrainian nation building and Western-style democracy, whereas east and south of it, the defense of the Russian language became associated with nostalgia for a paternalistic Soviet state, now retrospectively remembered as more “Russian” that it had really been. Politicians on both sides found it much easier to exploit this divide than to pursue painful reforms or nurture a unifying national identity. The voting boundary gradually moved eastward in subsequent years, as more regions switched to the “pro-Ukrainian" side in 2004, for example, but the divide remained in place.4