Language has always been a problem for Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma. When Russian-speaking Kuchma was elected president in 1994 and switched to Ukrainian, he was the butt of students’ jokes who criticized his poor language skills.
Five years later, the problem is much more serious: not only does Kuchma have no clear language policy, he seems to have different ones for different parts of the country, depending on whether a particular region is Russian- or Ukrainian-speaking.
Under the country’s constitution, the Ukrainian language has the status of the national language, meaning that all government and educational institutions have to operate in Ukrainian.
During five years of his presidency, the president acted along the lines of the Constitution, promoted the language and used it himself in official occasions. All this ended when the re-election time came.
During his latest trip to the Simferopol, the capital of Crimean peninsula where the vast majority of the population is Russian, Kuchma said that education in some parts of Ukraine could easily be in Russian, and said that Russian ‘should not feel like a foreign language in Ukraine.’ Indeed it doesn’t in Simferopol.
The local university operates in Russian, and only one local school has Ukrainian as the language of teaching. The school has 10 applicants for each place every year.
Meanwhile, at his latest press conference in the capital Kyiv on Sept. 6, Kuchma was reluctant to talk about language issues, and got noticeably upset when he received questions about his language policy from the floor.
Taras Shamaida, a Kyiv city local council deputy, said at this press conference he was worried that the number of Ukrainian-language book and newspapers has been going down in the last five years, and asked the president what he is doing not to make Ukrainian feel like a foreign language in Ukraine. The president was obviously upset.
‘What do you know to ask such the president such questions? Where did you hear that? I am going to build a state for the Ukrainian people, and I’m not going to work according to your scenario,’ he said.
Asked why his wife speaks Russian in public and during official events, the LANGUAGE, president lost his temper once again:
‘Read the Constitution, and stick to it, like my wife does … Stop playing big politics, which has nothing in common with real life,’ he advised.
Also, in Simferopol, the president talked to voters about his decree issued in June, which allows Russian speakers to take university entrance exams in the Russian language. In Kyiv he said this decree came from the Education Ministry.
Experts say that this decree was supposed to earn some votes from densely populated, Russian-speaking eastern and southern regions in Ukraine. Instead, it provoked criticism in strongly nationalistic western Ukraine, and was condemned by just about every national party and public organization.
‘If we don’t do something to promote the Ukrainian language now, in another generation or two we’ll have the same situation as in Ireland,’ said Shamaida, who is also a member of Rukh, one of the largest national democratic parties in Ukraine.
According to polls, around a half of Ukraine’s 50 million people speak Russian at home, and almost 23 percent say they speak both Russian and Ukrainian. The number of Russian-speakers tends to be higher among young people and in cities, where youth is trying to escape from poor dilapidated villages.
A majority of the population would like to give Russian some sort of official status.
Kuchma, who himself came to Kyiv from the Russified eastern region of Dnipropetrovsk, ran for the presidency of Ukraine in 1994 on a strictly pro-Russian platform. He did not speak any Ukrainian, promoted economic integration with Russia, and promised that the Russian and Ukrainian languages would, under his rule, be given an equal status.
Now, when it’s time to vote again, both Russian and Ukrainian speakers get equally confusing messages, and are equally puzzled what the next language policy would be if Kuchma gets re-elected.
