Was at a bar/club in Kyiv last night with a group of Volunteers for a bachelor party, as one of our number was soon going home to marry the American girl he's been faithful to all of service. It was fun at first and I was dancing with some girls, but then found that my group had met a huge group of English speakers: people from Britain, America and Canada whose parents or grandparents had come from Ukraine. They all had been raised speaking Ukrainian and now were on a three week tour of the county, most of which were visiting their ancestral homeland for the first time.
There was a lot of cuties and I was ready to start macking when I got sucked into a conversation that took down the next two hours and left me fumming. We had tee-shirts for the bachelor party and the writing on the back was in Russian. "Why Russian?" we were asked. Because most of the people in our group spoke Russian. "But you're in Ukraine." Yeah, but we live in Russian speaking towns. "But you should speak Ukrainian in Ukraine." This is not the first time I've had this conversation with newcomers, who knee jerk think that everyone in Ukraine must have spoken Ukrainian until the USSR tried to stamp it out and now it is a matter of cultural rebirth to speak it again. To be Ukrainian you have to speak Ukrainian, goes the too-simple argument.
I got into education mode (let's point out I'd had four shots of vodka in the past two hours) and started explaining how historically much of what is now Ukraine was not part of what was originally "Ukraine". Other than a sliver of land controlled by the cossacks (and even that wasn't for long), most of Ukraine was a colony of other countries after the collapse of Kyivian Rus 800 years ago (where they didn't speak Ukrainian, but Old Slavonic). In those 8 centuries, the land known now as Ukraine was in bits and pieces, at various times under the control of the Scandinavians, the Lithuanians, the Polish, the Mongols, the Turks, the Russians, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Swedes and the Germans. To give you an idea of this, here are some famous authors: Joseph Conrad, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (whose writings gave us the term "masochim") and Mikhail Bulgalkov. If asked, they would tell you their nationalities are Polish, Austrian and Russian, respectively, but they were all born on what is now Ukrainian soil; it just didn't happen to be Ukraine at the time.
The "Ukrainian" identity is rather recent, coming about only during the surge of nationalism that gripped Europe at the turn of the 19th century, when intellectuals started piecing together a culture out of traditions found in villages. In fact, until the end of the 19th century, Ukrainians as an ethnicity were called "Ruthenian" and were in the same ethnic group as Belarussians. "Ruthenian" was the only distinct name they had for themselves if they thought of themselves as different from Poles or Russians or whomever, which they often didn't. That doesn't mean the Ukrainian culture invalid; in fact I am proud of Ukraine and its quest to find an identity. But while Ukrainian as a language was spread around the country, to say Ukrainians speak Ukrainian doesn't take into account that never in its history did a majority of the people living in what is now in the boundaries of Ukraine speak Ukrainian. The new edict from the government that Ukrainian is the national language and its efforts to train every Ukrainian in the language is part of a manufactured attempt to create national cohesion in a country that has never had it. Most of the political problems in the country today are because so much of Ukraine identifies itself differently and why regions like Crimea or the Donbass (which has most of the country's population and industrial capacity) keep threatening to break away. Both are predominantly Russian-speaking and constantly feel like THIER identity as Ukrainians are hijacked becaues THEY are told they are not Ukrainian if they don't get on board with an identity that mostly originated in a different part of the country.
Imagine, if in America, you were told that Texas has all the original American attributes and that to not adopt Texas traditions and the Texan dialect, you aren't American.
Is this wrong to try to create this identity? Well, that's up for debate. When I got here I thought it was a good idea. I shared every opinion voiced to me by those people in that bar. But when my Ukrainina friends or students complain that nationalists make them feel bad for speaking a language (Russian) that their families have spoken for as long as they can remember, a language that the nationlists themselves speak but refuse to in an attempt to have a seperate identity from Russia (a country that they, for better or worse, are culturally, ethnically and economically intwined with), I realized the issue was much more complex and gray than books or articles on Ukraine paint it as.
And that's what these visitors knew of Ukraine: what was taught to them at the "Ukrainian schools" they told me they attended to learn about their ancesteral history and culture, and of course what their parents and grandparents taught them. But anyone who was in the diaspora would have been fleeing the crimes of the Soviet Union and of course this would make them nationalistic, rendering their opinons valid but biased, especially of what it's like on the ground in Ukraine today.
In my opinion you CAN'T go around trying to shovel under the Russian langauge and culture because that's as bad as what the Soviets were trying to do to Ukrainian language and culture (let me make the point, though, that I live in a predominantly Russian speaking city and speak Russian, so am unduly influenced by their views). My point is: let people speak what they want to speak, identify as they want to identify. It's just so ironic because Ukrainian culture IS Russian culture and vice versa. As slavs they share common cultural and linguistic anscestors and are much, much, much more alike than they are different. Most of what is Ukrainian "culture" is what is not shared by Russia, Belarus and Moldova (and even then they argue; some say bortch is Russian, others Ukrainian; the same for matroishka (nesting) dolls).
I was shouted down by several members of the group for all these opinions and angrily so. To a Ukrainian-American or Ukrainian-Canadian, Russia is the enemy and West is best. I was told I didn't know anything about Ukraine, that they'd been studying it their lives. They WERE Ukrainian, they said ("I'm a Ukrainian who just happens to live in Canada" said one guy who later admitted this was his first time in Ukraine). One guy in particular and and I argued for a long time because he refused to belive that perhaps, having lived here for two years and with the resulting intensive study of Ukrainian history, politics, culture and language, I might know a few things that someone who was visiting Ukraine for the first time might not. I've heard a lot about Cuba from my family and read a lot of books on it, but I'd like to think I'd let my assumptions be challenged if I visited Cuba and met an Australian who lived there for two years. This dude actually started getting in my face. I was calm, but he started yelling, calling me a retard and an idiot. He thought that everyone in Ukraine should speak Ukrainian, period. "They can speak what they want in their homes, but in the streets, in schools, they should speak Ukrainian because this is Ukraine," he said. I'm from America, but I don't speak American, I said. I speak English. The name of a country does not determine what it's people speak. The people do. Anything else is manufactured. I was reminded of the Spanish/English arguement in America, which he tried to pull in, but the two are dissimilar: students learning in a Spanish school in America are likely not to learn English, which may hold them back in a predominantly English speaking country. Ukraine is neither predominantly Ukrainian nor Russian speaking. Areas are predominantly one or the other, but you can hear both in every city in the country, it just depends what percentage or even how much the two intermixed. This guy didn't even realize that most places simply spoke dialect mixes of the two: because that's the nature of language. What it is in a book is never what it is on the street. He had never even heard of that or the word "surgic", the Ukrainian word for the mixed dialects, but then again, he doesn't live here.
He was also pissing me off because some things he "knew" were flat out wrong. He traced his ancestry to the Harkov oblast and I know that to be a Russian speaking oblast (I visited it last summer and Elizaveta, one of the Ukrainian girls I've dated lives there; Russian is the language she speaks at home), so I thought it was strange he was so gung-ho Ukrainian. When that was pointed that out, he said everyone in Harkov spoke Ukrainian and if they did speak Russian, it's becaues they felt forced to. I brought in Sean, who lives there, and he calmly explained that as a teacher trainer living in that oblast, he travelled around it regularly, was on a first name basis with hundreds of its teachers and only two of those he knew could speak Ukrainian. "90 percent of Ukrainians speak Ukrainian. I read that on Wikipedia!" the guy yelled. "That may be," said Sean calmly, "I'm just telling you what I know from living there." I realized the conversation was going nowhere and had to devolved into issue entrenchment and excused myself, letting Sean take over. Then I realized that my more combative nature had kept me in it for that long, and by then it was 3:30 AM and the group was packing up to leave. No cuties to hit on and I was annoyed beside.
Grrr.