Ukrainization
Even though the southern Ukrainian village did not come out in definitive support of the forces that propagated the Ukrainian or the panRussian idea during the Civil War, the results of those revolutionary developments, especially the existence of independent Ukrainian states and the subsequent formation of the Ukrainian SSR, clearly changed the balance of forces between supporters of the Ukrainian and the pan-Russian national projects.34 Molodyk was an open supporter of the wave of Ukrainization during the postrevolutionary period.
When the revolution broke out, he was eleven years old. He attended a four-year school and was directly affected by the changes in its curriculum. They were introduced by a teacher who exchanged Russian textbooks for Ukrainian ones and announced that instruction would henceforth be given in Ukrainian. The teacher also explained to the pupils that they were Ukrainians and not Little Russians, related the history of Ukraine to them, and 'read some' of Taras Shevchenko's Kobzar (Minstrel) in class. According to Molodyk's memoirs, the transition to Ukrainian was problem-free, as the students spoke the language and easily acquired the alphabet. Molodyk even specifies the date on which Russian textbooks were exchanged for Ukrainian ones: 22 February 1917.35 In all likelihood, the textbooks appeared somewhat later, and the author's memory played him false in this instance, conflating the events of several months (for example, at the meeting of 12 February [Old Style] there could as yet have been no mention of the Central Rada under the leadership of Vynnychenko and Hrushevsky, as Molodyk writes), but his reminiscences about the dramatic yet fluid reorientation of the pupils' identity deserve to be trusted: the teacher's personality, his Ukrainian history lesson, and his reading from the Kobzar obviously imprinted themselves on the author's memory.In the course of the 1920s, the balance of forces in the contest between the pan-Russian and Ukrainian national projects in Ukraine was clearly changing in favour of the latter. The prohibitions of 1863 and 1876 were receding into the past, and the Ukrainian project was steadily taking control of a new and potent instrument - the educational system. If Vasyl Rubel's grandparents had been schooled in Church Slavonic and he himself, as well as Zamrii, Yaroshenko, and Alekseev, in Russian, Molodyk was already acquiring the rudiments of knowledge in Ukrainian. Part of his memoir is written in literary Ukrainian, while Rubel wrote in dialect, and the older writers (graduates of Russian elementary schools), whose language contained a heavy admixture of Ukrainisms, nevertheless wrote in Russian. The Kobzar and the Ukrainian history lesson were instruments of national mobilization and cultural reorientation of the Ukrainian peasantry, but they still had to compete with the Russian-language Gospels and the 'book by Gogol' mentioned in Alekseev's memoirs. It was no easy competition. Molodyk, for instance, having completed the four-year school in 1919, continued his education privately at first, and then, from 1922, at the Oleksandrivsk (later Zaporizhia) vocational school in Russian: there were no Ukrainian-language textbooks, and the Ukrainian language was taught only as a subject. Recalling his education at that school, he automatically went over to Russian, in which he wrote most of his memoirs. Before enrolling in the vocational school, Mol- odyk read the Russian classics - not only Gogol but also Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Goncharov, whose works he found in his uncle's library.36 Oleksandr Zamrii also found the works of Leo Tolstoy in a relative's private library. He read twelve volumes of the classic writer 's works and even decided to name his son, born in 1923, Lev. The name was clearly unknown to his fellow villagers, and some registry official wrote it down as 'Leonid.' The offended Zamrii noted in his memoirs: 'Such was the level of our literacy.'37 In this context, literacy was associated with the Russian language and Russian literature.
The field in which Ukrainian culture made definite progress was that of the theatre, where the previous tsarist prohibitions on the Ukrainian language had been less effective than in relation to the printed word, while the genre itself did not require such costly measures as the printing of Ukrainian textbooks and literature. Under the date of 21 January 1918, Yaroshenko noted that he had attended a theatrical performance of V chadu kokhannia (In the Vapours of Love). His comment was reserved: 'a cheerful little experience, but not overly so.'38 Molodyk dates the beginnings of Ukrainian theatre in his village to 1924, when economic and cultural life revived under the influence of the New Economic Policy: 'Songs again resounded in the village; weddings, revelry, and evening parties began again. Reading rooms and clubs opened, and amateur choirs, music groups, and drama groups appeared in them. People staged Ukrainian plays on their own initiative: Natalka-Poltavka [Natalka, the Girl from Poltava], Svatannia na Honcharivtsi [Matchmaking in Honcharivka], Nazar Stodolia.' According to Molodyk, peasants were glad to go to clubs, and churches and clubs even became involved in a kind of competition for attendance.39 Clearly, both institutions competed for the same blocks of time - Sundays and holidays. In this connection, it is interesting that on the day after attending the theatre Yaroshenko went to church and to the bazaar and then took part in a village meeting.40
The linguistic and cultural Ukrainization proclaimed in 1923 and intensified in 1926 clearly influenced the southern Ukrainian village and found its reflection on both the conscious and unconscious levels in the peasant 'histories.' Most interesting in this regard is Yaroshenko's diary, where, beginning with the entries for 1924, the number of Ukrainian words increases sharply, and the language gradually turns from Russian with numerous Ukrainisms into Ukrainian with numerous Russianisms.
This becomes particularly apparent in the brief meteorological records towards the end of the diary. Here, the transition to Ukrainian may be dated as having occurred in June 1924. If the entry for 1 June notes, in Russian, redkie dozhdi (infrequent rain) and khoroshuiu pogodu (good weather), the following entry (for 15 June), in Ukrainian, reads zharko i vitry, doshchiv malo (hot and windy; little rain).41 In the diary itself, the author goes over mainly to Ukrainian in his entries for 1926.42 The Russian language makes an ever more confident return to the diary in the late 1930s, which can be explained by the cumulative effect of the author's functioning in the generally Russian- language milieu of industrial Zaporizhia: he moved to a suburb of that city, the settlement of Khortytsia, in 1930. The change reflected the defeat of linguistic Ukrainization in the cities. In education and culture, the Soviet Ukrainian leaders of the 1930s sought to do no more than maintain the achievements of the late 1920s.Another witness of the advance of Russian in Ukrainian towns of the 1930s was the youngest of our authors, Serhii Cipko. The only book in his parents' village home was Shevchenko's Kobzar, but once in town, where the author found himself after his father had been dekulakized and arrested, it was necessary to learn Russian. The Russian language was dominant on the streets of southern Ukrainian cities, as well as in all official institutions, and the peasants gradually began to use a creole called surzhyk. As Cipko says about his forced move to Dnipropetrovsk (formerly Katerynoslav) in the early 1930s, 'the city was highly Russified, and people in the city spoke Russian; at first their language seemed strange to me, but in time I, too, began to speak surzhyk.'43 When Cipko enrolled in the Mariupol technical college, the language of instruction was Russian. Ukrainian was taught as a subject, the hours devoted to it were progressively reduced, and after the academic year 1935-6, when the teacher of Ukrainian was arrested, the language ceased to be taught.
But even earlier, as Cipko attests, the technical college treated Ukrainian as a second-class language: there was no requirement to pass an exam in it, as there was, for example, in the case of Russian. The whole atmosphere in the city was hostile to the Ukrainian language and culture. Cipko was long galled by the mockery that he endured from Russian girls for his occasional use of Ukrainian words, and, as he himself notes, it helped strengthen his Ukrainian consciousness. Recalling this episode towards the end of his life, Cipko wrote, 'It angered me greatly, and I thought to myself: you intruders have come to our Ukraine; you eat our bread; and yet you have the effrontery to make fun of our language.'44Although insults to the native language aroused indignation, yesterday's peasants did not venture to express it aloud: after all, as Cipko writes, 'Later they began to try people for their nationality.'45 Thus waves of peasant migrants like Yaroshenko and Cipko, forced out of the village by the policy of collectivization and attracted to the towns by the advance of industrialization, were introduced to higher culture through the medium of the Russian language and literature. The lower rungs of peasant migrant culture were served by Ukrainian-Russian surzhyk, which in most cases did not develop into any literary language. The creole in which Yaroshenko wrote the concluding sections of his diary may serve as a good illustration of these realities of the post-Ukrainization era.