Who are the Ukrainians, and what is modern Ukrainian national identity?
In Eastern Europe, which was dominated for centuries by multinational dynastic empires, the concept of nationality developed differently from Western Europe and North America. Instead of referring to themselves as members of a state (e.g., Americans), the subjects of the Romanov and Habsburg empires entered the age of modern nationalism by identifying with their ethnic nationalities (e.g., Poles, Serbs, Ukrainians).
As the empires collapsed at the end of World War I, some of these ethnic nations managed to obtain (they would often prefer to say “restore”) statehood based on the principle of national self-determination. Yet, the concept of nationhood was based on ethnicity, and a necessary distinction had to be made between members of the new state's titular ethnic group and citizens of other ethnic backgrounds. Because Ukraine regained its independence relatively late, in 1991, the notion of “Ukrainians" or the “Ukrainian nation" is still understood there as referring to ethnic Ukrainians. When one wants to include all citizens of the Ukrainian state regardless of their ethnicity, one would typically speak of “citizens of Ukraine" or “people of Ukraine." The Constitution of Ukraine proclaims as the source of state sovereignty the “Ukrainian people—citizens of Ukraine of all nationalities" and distinguishes between this civic concept of the nation and the ethnic “Ukrainian nation."2 In recent decades, however, speakers of the Ukrainian language have gradually come to accept a Western understanding of “Ukrainians" as all citizens of Ukraine. Such a linguistic change reflects the slow development of civic patriotism based on allegiance to the state rather than an ethnic nation.But in order to answer the question, we first need to understand the nature of the Ukrainian ethnic nation, which is also changing.
Nationalists believe in organic, primordial ethnic nations defined by blood, but modern scholars argue otherwise. They demonstrate that modern nations emerge when education and mass media help the masses “imagine" themselves as part of a nation. The folk culture of the peasantry served as the foundation of modern nations in Eastern Europe, but it took the effort of patriotic intellectuals to define ethnic nations within patchwork empires and to design from folk elements a modern high culture that could serve as a foundation of contemporary national identity.Ukrainians are an excellent example of this process, because the nation's modern name took hold only in the late nineteenth century, thanks to the efforts of the patriotic intelligentsia. Of course, the ancestors of modern Ukrainians lived on the same territories since at least the fifth century and were known under various names. Originally called the Rus people (Rusy, or Rusyny), they later became known as “Little Russians" in the Russian Empire and “Ruthenians" in Austria-Hungary. Looking for a name that would clearly separate their people from the Russians, local activists began propagating the appellation “Ukrainians" in the late nineteenth century. It was derived from the name of the land, Ukraine, meaning “borderland" and by then sufficiently established as the geographical designation for present-day central Ukraine. The name “Ukrainians" really took hold in the 1920s, with the creation of the Ukrainian SSR within the Soviet Union and the national mobilization of Ukrainians in Poland. However, even today some enclaves of East Slavic populations in the Ukrainian southwest and in neighboring Slovakia have preserved the historical name “Rusyns." Scholars disagree on whether they are a branch of the Ukrainian people that did not develop a modern ethnic identity or a separate ethnic group.
Perhaps more important, the concept of ethnic Ukrainians as a group separate from the Russians was something Ukrainian activists had to fight for. The Russian Empire recognized “Little Russians” only as a “tribe" of the Russian people and banned education and publishing in Ukrainian.
The Soviet Union acknowledged the existence of the Ukrainian nation and created the Ukrainian SSR as a national homeland for Ukrainians. However, in the long run, Soviet leaders emphasized the leading role of Russians in an East Slavic fraternal union of Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians within the Soviet Union. As a result, Russians were taught to see Ukrainians as their “younger brothers" rather than as equals. As for Ukrainians, during the postwar period in particular, the state encouraged them to identify with the Soviet Union in general, more than with their own republic, and to adopt the Russian language and culture. Creeping assimilation made considerable inroads in Ukraine by the end of the Soviet period. Since tsarist times, a share of ethnic Ukrainians identified themselves as native speakers of the Russian language, and this group grew in size during the postwar period. By the time of the 2001 census, 14.8 percent of selfidentified ethnic Ukrainians in Ukraine claimed Russian as their native language. Although it was not recorded by census-takers, more subtle opinion polls in the 1990s revealed the presence of people, especially in eastern Ukraine, who preferred to identify as “Soviets" rather than as Ukrainians or Russians. Some 27 percent of respondents in a 1997 nationwide opinion poll selected the answer “both Ukrainian and Russian" when asked to identify their ethnicity.3 Many self-identified Ukrainians also subscribed to the idea of a special connection to Russia.Modern Ukrainian ethnic identity continued to evolve during the post-communist period. The state-run education system did much to consolidate popular identification with the concept of the Ukrainian ethnic nation, marked by the Ukrainian language and folk traditions. At the same time, politicians discovered the language issue to be a convenient mobilization tool. Incapable of solving the grave economic and social problems during the postcommunist transition, political parties found it easier to fight over the “imposition" of Ukrainian on traditionally Russian-speaking or bilingual regions in eastern and southern Ukraine.
The Russian state next door also found it advantageous for its own internal political reasons to fan political rhetoric about the protection of Russian speakers against forced Ukrainization. In reality, however, what the opposing sides often try to present as a clear-cut conflict between the Ukrainian and Russian national identities in Ukraine is actually the painful process of overcoming the ambivalent Soviet legacy in the region. Hidden beneath the surface of supposed ethnic strife, one finds a conflict between the new Western-style civil society and the strong paternalistic state, the latter representing not only the Soviet past and the Russian present but also the ideal to which the Yanukovych regime aspired.The war in the Donbas, tragic as it is, has strengthened the concept of the Ukrainian civic nation identifying with the Ukrainian state, in part because the rebels identify so openly with Russia and are often Russian citizens. One can see from social media and footage from the war zone that Ukrainian volunteers and soldiers are more often than not also speaking Russian, meaning that they are fighting for a civic rather than an ethnic concept of Ukrainian identity. It is now up to the new Ukrainian authorities to cement this new civic patriotism with measures that link modern Ukrainian identity with democracy and inclusivity.