On April 26, the Verkhovna Rada passed a strict new law mandating the use of the Ukrainian language in public places, businesses, the media, education and a range of other institutions. Reactions ranged from euphoria among its supporters to apocalyptic warnings of rozkol (meaning break-up in Ukrainian) from some speakers of Russian, Hungarian and other minority languages.
President-elect Volodymyr Zelenskiy, a comedic actor whose media products are mostly in Russian, struck a cautiously critical note. On Facebook, he wrote that while he believes Ukrainian should be the only state language, “…my principled position is that the government should enable development of the Ukrainian language by establishing stimuli and positive examples, and not bans and punishments.”
Nowhere is language policy more sensitive than in the government-controlled portions of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. Here Ukrainian is used in schools (not uniformly) and during some official functions, while Russian dominates community life and the media. Ukrainian is common only in some rural areas, and even here it is usually mixed with Russian in the surzhyk dialect.
Zelenskiy might well have preferred to leave this status quo in place, but is it what is best for Ukraine? To understand that, we must consider both the rights and aspirations of today’s Donbas residents, and the complex history of Ukrainian and Russian languages in the region.
The lands of today’s Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts were wrested from the Turks and Crimean Tatars by a diverse army of rural colonists. The majority were Ukrainians fleeing Polish rule, with a significant minority of Russian peasants fleeing serfdom. To this mix we should add the Don Cossacks, who spoke a Russian dialect but had a distinct cultural identity, and Greeks who were evacuated en masse from the Crimean peninsula to settle the Azov Sea coastal areas.
The last corner of the so-called “Wild Field” to be settled was the mineral-rich steppe we now call the Donbas. Its pattern of colonization was dramatically altered by the Industrial Revolution. Russians from infertile central provinces dominated the rapidly growing working class in coal mines and metallurgy plants, while Ukrainian villagers generally preferred to stay on their black earth farms.
For decades to come, this Russian-speaking proletariat would dissolve all other ethnic identities and languages, even when an influx of Ukrainians to cities in Soviet times made them the ethnic majority again in the Donbas.
In a bid to steal anti-Communist Ukrainian nationalists’ thunder, the Soviet government launched its “nativization” policy in the late 1920s and aggressively promoted Ukrainian language and culture. Moscow expended huge efforts in the Donbas, and though some workers greeted the initiative with enthusiasm, the majority opposed it bitterly.
They soon were vindicated when Stalin abruptly changed course on language policy, unleashing “national terror” on the Ukrainian-speaking elites and closing Ukrainian schools. This terror overlapped with forced collectivization and the horrific man-made famine of 1932-1933, the Holodomor, which destroyed the lifeways of independent farmers in the rural Sloboda Ukraine and Azov Sea regions.
National terror was not restricted to the region’s Ukrainians; it was also directed at German colonists and Greeks in Mariupol and surrounding areas. Sometimes multi-generational Greek dynasties were executed en masse on absurd charges of espionage.
And so began long decades of Soviet Russification, which wore away at the remains of Ukrainian identity in the region. In the 1960s and 70s there were periodic thaws in Soviet language policy that led to the opening of new Ukrainian schools and cultural groups, only to later face another crackdown.
The Soviet dissident Oleksa Tykhyi from Donetsk Oblast described how the Soviet system reserved only a token place for Ukrainian, requiring Russian as the means to all forms of academic and professional advancement. For voicing this belief, Tykhyi would be sent to a prison camp in the Urals, where he died.
As history shows, Russian is one of the indigenous languages of eastern Ukraine and not an alien element. But at the same time, Soviet coercion allowed Russian to expand its influence into new communities at the expense of Ukrainian, Greek and other traditional languages. With time, it took less and less state intervention to tip the balance towards Russian. Many people chose the language willingly based upon familiarity and a sense that it offered more opportunities.
Russian-speaking Donbas Ukrainians are a persistent cultural phenomenon that now stretches across multiple generations. When the tragic events in the Donbas began in 2014, every part of the drama took place primarily in Russian, including Russia-backed separatism and the patriotic opposition to it.
So what do these Russian-speaking Donbas residents think about the Verkhovna Rada’s decision to Ukrainianize public life?
Yuriy, a Kramatorsk taxi driver who is an internally displaced person from Donetsk, voices a widespread opinion in the region: “This is the final stage of dividing our society! Now all us Russian speakers will be second class citizens!” He quickly links the language question to that of historical identity, adding: “They (western Ukrainians) have their heroes, their (nationalist leader Stepan) Bandera, and in the Donbas we have our own. We should leave this all alone!”
Some opposition to the law comes from residents with very different politics from Yury. Serhiy Harmash is a pro-Maidan journalist who fled Donetsk in 2014 and runs the website OstroV. He wrote on Facebook about the Ukrainianization of media: “People are lazy and don’t like to be pressured. They will just change channels or go online. We are simply driving 40% of the country’s population into the Russian information sphere!”
But there are other points of view. Viktor and Valentyna work in Severodonetsk’s chemical industry and are cautiously supportive of the new law. Valentyna says, “I used to support two state languages. But in the end I’m for justice. Ukrainian has been repressed, treated like a second-class language, a village dialect. My mother was a teacher in Odesa and she remembers how Ukrainian teachers were like an underclass, they got less pay and less class time than Russian teachers. Mama always said (in Russian) that Ukrainian should be the only state language.”
Viktor grew up in the industrial city of Kriviy Rih, which is Zelenskiy’s home town. He remembers the day when the city’s outnumbered Ukrainian schools were abruptly closed during one of the periodic Soviet crackdowns on the language. This act of illiberalism convinced him that “if we will have no language, we will have no nation.”
These conflicting opinions demonstrate a difficult reality: historical justice and the personal rights and preferences of Donbas Ukrainians do not always overlap. If some residents see new restrictions on the use of Russian in public life as a necessary step toward state-building, many others see them as the new front in a culture war. It is difficult to see how the language question will not raise tensions in a region already wracked by four years of ideological division, violence, displacement and economic decline.
It is time for president-elect Zelenskiy to explain how “stimuli and positive examples” can split the difference between the status quo and the Verkhovna Rada’s coercive approach. The language law will be bitterly contested in the next parliamentary elections, drawing energy away from urgent issues and reawakening fault lines that appeared to have been smoothed over by Zelenskiy’s nationwide victory. For the sake of his own presidency and the country’s cohesion, he should put forward a third way.
Brian Milakovsky is from Maine and has been working in the humanitarian and economic development sector in eastern Ukraine since 2015. Before Russia’s war on Ukraine, he worked on forest conservation issues. He lives in Severodonetsk in Luhansk Oblast.
