Establishing Ukrainization

Despite the formal Soviet recognition of the extensive linguistic autonomy of the non-Russian nationalities in the early 1920s, the exact position of the Ukrainian language in the Ukrainian SSR remained uncertain.

Even as late as 1923, Dmitrii Lebed, the second secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, actively promoted the “Theory of the Struggle of the Two Cultures.” Recognizing the sharp dif­ferences between the urban and rural areas in the Ukrainian SSR, this the­ory favoured the Russified, proletarian urban areas over the largely Ukrainian rural areas. Lebed in effect described Russian culture in Ukraine as urban, advanced, and revolutionary and the Ukrainian culture as rural, backward, and counter-revolutionary. He asserted that to introduce the Ukrainian language “in the party and working class under the present po­litical, economic, and cultural relations between the cities and villages means to adopt the lower culture of the village in preference to the higher culture of the city.”²²

Many prominent communists, Ukrainians and non-Ukrainians alike, opposed this interpretation. Prior to their merger with the Communist Party of Ukraine in March 1920, the Borotbist Party, the former left wing of the Ukrainian Party of Social Revolutionaries, proposed the idea of en­couraging the development of Ukrainian culture.²³ Mykola Skrypnyk, the influential Bolshevik commissar of justice, adopted the idea in 1922.

On 25 April 1923, the Russian Communist Party issued a resolution at its Twelfth Congress emphasizing that party activists would conduct all propaganda and agitation in the native languages of the non-Russian na- tionalities.²⁴ This marked the start of a concerted effort by the central par­ty to introduce preferential policies favouring the non-Russians, especially the Ukrainians.

This April resolution followed the decisions of the Allied Council of Ambassadors to award Galicia to Poland on 14 March 1923 and of Moscow’s Communist International (Comintern) to actively exploit the political crisis in Germany with the German Communist Party (KPD).²⁵ Both groups jointly planned an insurrection in Hamburg, then cancelled it at the last minute, on 21 October, as local units initiated armed actions against the police. This revolution’s failure, the last major pro-communist uprising in Europe after the Russian Revolution, caused the Soviet politi­cal leadership to abandon all hope for an immediate worldwide revolu­tion. They now re-emphasized the New Economic Policy and moderate nationalities policies in order to stabilize and rebuild the USSR after a decade of war, revolution, Civil War, famine, and utter chaos.

On 16 July 1923, Vlas Chubar, a Ukrainian, became the chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, replacing Rakovsky, who became Soviet ambassador to Great Britain. Eleven days later, the Ukrainian Council of People’s Commissars issued a decree on the Ukrainization of elementary schools and cultural institutions. This document emphasized the necessity of making the language of instruction at these institutions conform to the nationality of its students and urged the publication of more textbooks in Ukrainian and in other languages.

The Soviet Ukrainian government issued one of its most decisive de­crees in regard to Ukrainization on 1 August 1923:

The Worker-Peasant Government of Ukraine declares it to be essential to centre the attention of the state on the extension of the knowledge of the Ukrainian language. The equality, recognized until now, of the two most widely used languages in Ukraine - Ukrainian and Russian - is not sufficient. As a result of the very weak development of Ukrainian schools and Ukrainian culture in general, the shortage of required school books and equipment, the lack of suitably trained personnel, experience has proven that the Russian language has, in fact, become the dominant one.

In order to destroy this inequality, the Worker-Peasant Government here­by adopts a number of practical measures which, while affirming the equality of languages of all nationalities on Ukrainian territory, will guarantee a place for the Ukrainian language corresponding to the numerical superiority of the Ukrainian people on the territory of the Ukrainian SSR.²⁶

The decree obliged all officials dealing with the public to learn Ukrainian. It also demanded that the language of all official documents and correspon­dence gradually change from Russian to Ukrainian, although Russian and other non-Ukrainian languages could be used locally. Subsequent resolu­tions and decrees ordered all state institutions, newspapers, and state- owned trade and industrial organizations to adopt Ukrainian instead of Russian as their working language. These measures created a policy giving preference to Ukrainians entering the party, government, and other impor­tant organizations. Not only did this policy seek to overcome the separa­tion between the rural Ukrainian and the urban Russian worlds, but by introducing Ukrainian into the urban public sphere, it undermined the sta­tus of the pre-revolutionary “bourgeoisie” living in the cities. As envisioned by its promoters, Ukrainization would not introduce bilingualism, but overturn “the existing language hierarchy whereby Ukrainian would sup­plant Russian as the ‘first’ and primary language of public discourse.”²⁷

Whereas the August 1923 decree did not define the equality of Ukrainian and Russian within the framework of a Ukrainian demographic majority, a follow-up decree in April 1925 set the ambitious goal of establishing Ukrainian linguistic hegemony within the republic. Russian would remain Ukraine’s link with the political capital in Moscow and therefore would continue to be a mandatory subject in all Ukrainian schools.

During the period from 1923 to 1932, the Soviet government endorsed the policy of Ukrainization for several reasons. First, the government sought to neutralize emergent Ukrainian nationalism by publicly con­demning tsarist oppression of the non-Russians and by encouraging the development of Ukrainian culture. Second, Ukrainization would help to legitimize Soviet rule by differentiating its nationalities policy from its tsarist predecessor and “by debunking engrained prejudices against Ukrainian culture.”³⁰ Third, the policy provided a convenient means of mobilizing and preparing the population for the impending moderniza­tion of the USSR.³¹ Since it was much easier to educate the new cadres in their native language, the party emphasized the Ukrainian language in the student’s primary, secondary, and technical education. Fourth, Ukrain­ization had foreign policy implications: the Soviet solution of the nation­al question would demonstrate the superiority of the Soviet system, not only to the seven million Ukrainians living outside the boundaries of the USSR, but also to the restive Western colonies in Asia.³² The national stage of Soviet policy would precede the communist stage.

This policy played a major role not just as a language transformer, but also as “an instrument of political and social management within the non-Russian areas.”³³ In light of its importance, the Soviet authorities sought to regulate language choice and how it would be employed in the public sphere of the non-Russian areas.

Despite the party’s public support for this policy, it provoked unusually strong resistance among Russians and the Russian-speaking urban popu­lation, which received mixed signals from the authorities.³⁴ According to George Y. Shevelov, a prominent linguist who lived through this era,

Torn from its only real potential social basis, imposed by a non-Ukrainian party and state machine, deprived of sincerity and spontaneity, consistently counter-balanced by anti-Ukrainian measures, Ukrainization appeared to the average Russian or pro-Russian city dweller as a kind of a comedy, occasion­ally having some dramatic overtones but still above all a comedy. He learned in what circumstances and to what degree he had to reckon with this official facade, and he learned that it was wise not to transgress boundaries. He knew that, by law, those officials who did not have a command of Ukrainian were to be fired: he also knew that whereas a messenger, a typist, or a secretary was occasionally dismissed on these grounds, the high functionaries... were in practice excused from Ukrainization. He knew that whereas signboards were scheduled to be redone in Ukrainian, behind the facade the old Russian bu­reaucratic machine continued to exist.³⁵

Even some Ukrainian speakers became uneasy with Ukrainization. Victor Kravchenko, a student at the Kharkiv Technical Institute in 1930-1, asserted that

in theory we Ukrainians in the student body should have been pleased. In practice, we were as distressed by the innovation as the non-Ukrainian mi­nority. Even those who, like myself, had spoken Ukrainian from childhood, were not accustomed to its use as a medium of study. Several of our best professors were utterly demoralized by the linguistic switch-over. Worst of all, our local tongue simply had not caught up with modern knowledge; its vocabulary was unsuited to the purposes of electrotechnics, chemistry, aero­dynamics, physics, and most other sciences.

What should have been a free right was converted, in its application, into an oppressive duty.

Yet, despite Kravchenko’s implication that Ukrainian became the pri­mary language in the public sphere of Kharkiv, Soviet Ukraine’s capital, it did not dominate most of the urban centres in southern or eastern Ukraine. Many Russified rural areas in this region also viewed Ukrainization as un­necessary.³⁷ As Ukrainization represented a soft-line policy, not a hard­line one, the Communist Party and the Soviet government did not provide any mechanisms for the total enforcement of the Ukrainization decrees. Nevertheless, the party understood its potential to change the power rela­tionships in the non-Russian areas.³⁸

By 1927, the total number of individuals fired for not learning Ukrainian “certainly exceeded five hundred and may have been as high as one thou­sand.”³⁹ But this figure was quite small considering the enormous amount of passive resistance the Russian-speaking party and working class gener­ated in the urban areas.⁴⁰ The Russian-speaking bureaucrats, most of the long-term Russian and Jewish urban residents, most of the working class, and most of the Russian-speaking intelligentsia (especially engineers and technical workers and instructors in the institutions of higher education) opposed the introduction of a Ukrainian-speaking public sphere.⁴¹ Even some of the higher-ranking members of the CP(b)U, especially in the east­ern and industrial areas, decried “forced Ukrainization.” Implementing this policy in the towns and cities sharpened the divisions between advocates of pro- Ukrainization and anti- Ukrainization and among Ukrainians, Russians, and Jews. In regard to Ukrainization, it was easier to admit and promote Ukrainians in the party, working class, and trade unions than to transform the Russian-speaking public sphere into a Ukrainian-speaking one.⁴²