Having defended a doctoral dissertation on the Ukrainization policy of the 1920s, I cannot pass over in silence the announcement by Prime Minister Yushchenko of additional measures to strengthen the role of the Ukrainian language and the Russian Federation’s “concern” over this latest move to “destroy the Russian language population.” Actually, having gone through more than one official instance in Kyiv, where Ukrainian is neither spoken nor understood, I can imagine that there are a large number of bureaucrats in a cold sweat over the prospect of being tested for their proficiency in Ukrainian. I also assume that some of our readers will be ready to say, “Look how the Ukrainians are getting nationalistic. Ethnic conflict will soon break out.”
I doubt that there will any conflict, although there will be irritated bureaucrats. As one local expert on the national question, former President Leonid Kravchuk, once told me, “Everyone understands that official monolingualism is the only way to secure de facto bilingualism. Otherwise Ukrainian would just disappear from public life in large areas of the country.” He was right, and favoring the Ukrainian language is an essential part of consolidating Ukraine’s independence. Because for Ukraine independence means primarily independence from Russia as much as Canadian independence objectively means independence from the United States (and who could want a better neighbor than Canada?). The only real justification for political independence is that a country is different from its neighbors, and one such important difference is language. If there is no difference, one might as well fold up Ukrainian statehood, join Russia, and prepare local mothers to pack their boys off to Chechnya as they once did to Afghanistan. I think this not the best possible option.
There is always a dilemma between making one’s own culture attractive to those who might want to share it and alienating those who do not. Thus far the government’s measures are a far cry from the bureaucratic forced Ukrainization of the 1920s, which did provoke resentment and not without reason. Rather they seem, a well-balanced attempt to increase the utility and thus the attractiveness of the Ukrainian language and culture in Ukrainian society. This is good for the Ukrainians, Ukraine, and everybody who lives here.
