Ukrainizing the Ukrainian SSR

Even into the 1920s, as Ukrainians retained their majority of the popula­tion of the Ukrainian SSR, they did not dominate the larger cities and ur­ban areas. In 1926, almost all of them lived in the rural areas and maintained their peasant culture.⁴³ In this context, Ukrainians possessed an extremely low percentage (11 per cent) of their total population living in the cities, ranking behind Jews (77.4 per cent urban), Russians (50 per cent), and Poles (20.7 per cent).⁴⁴ Russians remained far more influential than the sta­tistics indicate.

In order to institutionalize the Ukrainian language in public, the Communist Party of Ukraine concentrated on using Ukrainian to raise the level of literacy and education in the republic. Of the entire population of the Ukrainian SSR in 1926, over 6,923,165 individuals were literate in Ukrainian and over 7,075,126 in Russian.⁴⁵ These statistics demonstrate the dominance of the Russian language in Ukraine and the difficulty of introducing Ukrainian into the public sphere.

The party and government sought to expand the “market of literates” by initiating a massive literacy campaign in Ukrainian. But the “struggle against illiteracy” floundered in the 1920s. By 1927 approximately five mil­lion individuals in Ukraine between the ages of ten and thirty-five still remained illiterate.⁴⁶ The number of literates increased during the 1920s, but at a slower pace than the Commissariat of Education anticipated. Despite the advances made by the Ukrainian language, the Russian lan­guage remained powerful in Ukraine.

Under the direction of Grigory Grinko (1920-2), Volodymyr Zatonsky (1922-5), Oleksandr Shumsky (1925-7), and Mykola Skrypnyk (1927-33), the Commissariat of Education became the main coordinating body for Ukrainization. On 27 July 1923, the Ukrainian Council of People’s Com­missars decreed the use of the Ukrainian language in all elementary schools within the next two academic years and introduced it as the language of in­struction in all professional schools and political-educational institutions. Soviet Ukrainian leaders commissioned the Commissariat of Education to identify all teachers who did not speak Ukrainian and teach them the lan­guage, while educating new cadres of teachers who could provide instruc­tion in Ukrainian. The decree also ordered an increase in the production of Ukrainian textbooks. The schools of the non-Ukrainian minorities would provide instruction in their native languages, but would also require either Russian or Ukrainian as a second language.⁴⁷ Throughout the 1920s, schools needed not only highly qualified Ukrainian-language teachers, but regular teachers as well. The teachers themselves did not welcome Ukrainization in a uniform manner. Some equated the Ukrainian language with provincialism and viewed it as “a distorted form of Russian”; others considered Ukrain­ization as one of the most progressive aspects of Sovietization.⁴⁸

By 1923, if the statistics are accurate, 76 per cent of primary schools con­ducted lessons in Ukrainian, and by 1925, when the Soviet Ukrainian gov­ernment decreed compulsory fourth-grade education for all children, 77.8 per cent.⁴⁹ During the 1932-3 school year, 88.5 per cent of all primary-school students received instruction in Ukrainian.⁵⁰ Despite this progress, the Ukrainian Politburo expressed dissatisfaction with the pace of Ukrainization, claiming that the policy neither satisfied the needs of the economy nor corresponded to the growth of the cultural needs of the workers and peas­ants.⁵¹ The drive to increase Ukrainian-language schools in Kiev and in other cities constituted a part of a larger campaign to promote Ukrainian as a modern, urban language, equal to Russian.⁵² But even in cities with an ever-increasing Ukrainian population, children of recent migrants from the countryside often attended Russian-language schools.⁵³

The majority of Ukrainian-language schools were located in the country­side and remained inferior academically, while Russian-language schools ex­isted primarily in urban areas and offered better instruction. One urban school contained more students than several rural schools combined.⁵⁴ In any case, oftentimes the authorities and teachers used a language “that bore little re­semblance to the Ukrainian the population recognized and employed.”⁵⁵

Overall, the quality of Ukrainian-language schools lagged far behind Russian-language schools in the 1920s and 1930s.

Ukrainization, in short, sought to eliminate national discrimination against Ukrainians and other groups and to reverse the Russification of the past without alienating non-Ukrainian groups, especially the Russians. The Soviet government established an extensive Ukrainian-language educational system, subsidized the publication and mass circulation of Ukrainian- language newspapers, journals, and books, expanded the Ukrainian-language theatre, and founded the Ukrainian-language radio and opera. Instruction in adult literacy schools took place almost entirely in Ukrainian. By 1931, the Soviet Ukrainian government published 80 per cent of all books and 90 per cent of all newspapers in Ukrainian.⁵⁸ Most importantly, the Soviet effort transformed a predominantly illiterate population into a literate and edu­cated one, despite the overall quality of instruction. According to official statistics that may not reflect reality, only 44 per cent of the population in Ukraine could read in 1926. Thirteen years later, this percentage allegedly doubled to 8 8.2.⁵⁹ Even if an exaggerated claim, most nineteenth-century Ukrainophiles would have enthusiastically approved.