COMMENTARY: The socio-historical context of public language use and why English must be Ukraine's second language (PART I) (11/12/06)

COMMENTARY

The socio-historical context of public language use and why English must be Ukraine's second language

by Stephen Velychenko

PART I

Ukraine attained political but not economic or cultural independence in 1991. And because this happened peacefully, the old regime elite was not executed or exiled. These old leaders who remained in power after independence did almost nothing to remove the country from the Russian-language communications sphere ("movnyi prostir"). More specifically, they did nothing to dismantle the production and distribution infrastructure that kept Ukraine in the Russian-language communications sphere.

For Ukraine to become culturally independent, it must leave the Russian-language communications sphere and enter the English-language communications-sphere. There, it will become part of Europe and the world.

Towards this end, because the country now has a mixed economy, public language-use policies must not encompass only state institutions. They must also include global and domestic companies, which in Ukraine distribute and produce primarily in Russian.

Until such time as all kiosks at least in western and central Ukraine are filled with Ukrainian- and English-language paperbacks, glossy magazines, newspapers, CDs and DVDs, Ukraine will remain a Russian cultural colony isolated from the rest of the world or, at best, in contact with it only through the filter of Russian. This will perpetuate anti-Russian feelings within Ukraine and create friction between the European Union (EU) and Russia.

Ukraine's public language sphere became Russian because of deliberate government policies that took decades to realize.

First, up to 1917, tsarist policies forbade teaching and publishing in Ukrainian. The association of literary Russian with the empire also gave Russian social prestige. The failure of the national revolution in 1921 meant that this legacy was not overcome.

Second, between 1929 and 1947, centrally directed immigration and "ethnic dilution," combined with centrally planned deportations and millions of unnatural Ukrainian deaths, created large Russian-speaking urban enclaves in the country's easternmost provinces. Overall, between 1897 and 1989 the total number of Russians in Ukraine doubled.

Third, Soviet educational and media policies after 1929 channeled upwardly mobile non-Russian rural migrants into Russian-speaking culture and allowed urban Russian settlers to work and satisfy their cultural/spiritual needs in the Russian culture and language. This reinforced the pre-1917 pattern. Subsequent generations of urban Russian immigrant-settlers and assimilated migrants consequently saw no need to learn Ukrainian, spoke in Russian and were Moscow-oriented culturally and intellectually.

Finally, because independence came peacefully, these millions of Russian speakers produced by Soviet policies did not emigrate - as did the French from Algeria, the Japanese from Korea, the Dutch from Indonesia, Germans from Sudentenland, or the British from Africa or India. Ukraine's Soviet Russophile elites, meanwhile, remained in power and enacted no effective legislation to change Ukraine's linguistic status quo in the public sphere, nor did they cut Soviet-era distribution/production networks.

After 1991 most of the urban population accepted the legitimacy of the Ukrainian state, but few changed their language use or Russian intellectual/cultural orientation because the underlying infrastructure of the Russian-language communications sphere remained untouched. Since there was little Ukrainian-language material on the market, it made little sense to change language use. This is crucial to understanding the language issue, because choice is not made in a vacuum, but in specific circumstances.

It makes no sense to talk about "free choice" to use Ukrainian in Ukraine because, as of 2000, only 10 percent of the annual published book titles, 12 percent of magazines, 18 percent of television programs and 35 percent of newspapers were in Ukrainian. Everything else in is Russian. In addition, Ukraine is also flooded by Russian-language materials and broadcasts from Russia which, if included in calculations, would lower these percentages even more. Yet, Russian-speaking Russians are only 20 percent of the population. During the last two years the percentage share of Ukrainian-language newspapers and TV programming has risen, but the institutional infrastructure still directs the people toward Russian.

These disproportions stem primarily from continued Russian ownership of production and distribution rights for audio-visual and printed products within what was the USSR after 1991. Russian owners, like most people at the time, saw the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) as merely a new form of Russian domination in the old USSR. While some of them may have been extremist-nationalists, commercial concerns also explain that as owners they had no interest in making their Russian-language market smaller and losing profits by spending money on non-Russian-language products.

Their financial and/or personal interests in retaining the Soviet-built Russian- language communications sphere, thus, coincided with the Russophile sympathies of Ukraine's rulers to ensure that the institutional basis of Russian language use in Ukraine's public sphere remained untouched after 1991. There were no Ukrainians willing to buy them out afterwards. Today, Ukraine's oligarchs do not seem to be interested in creating a Ukrainian-language public space.

In Ukraine since 1991 there has been an institutional infrastructure for Ukrainian- language scholarship, high politics and high culture. But modern mass culture does not consist only of "the classics." It includes lots of written, filmed and recorded garbage. The yellow press in all languages sells millions of copies, while the quality press sells only tens of thousands. In Ukraine, the institutional infrastructure of mass culture is Russian. Private companies already producing tens of millions of copies for the Russian market dump their cheap products in Ukraine with no extra effort since they face no import restrictions. Or, they produce in branch plants and sell cheap locally.

Thus, Ukrainians not interested in scholarship, high politics, or high culture have little choice but to buy and watch cheap Russian/Russian-dubbed junk films and read cheap garbage newspapers in Russian, because there are no cheap Ukrainian-language junk films or garbage newspapers. Oligarchs like Rynat Akhmetov, Serhii Taruta and Hryhorii Surkis have made no effort to produce these kinds of cheap Ukrainian-language audio-visual products, mass circulation dailies or pulp-literature. Laws passed in 2006 have now lowered the percentage of contemporary foreign films screened with Russian dubbing/subtitles to approximately 65 percent, but whether the Yanukovych government will continue to enforce them remains to be seen.

Contrary to EU recommendations and Ukrainian law, both the government and the companies as of 2006 still refused to disclose who controls the country's radio and TV. What is known suggests Russians directly, or indirectly through Russophile Ukrainian oligarchs, control 90 percent of Ukraine's communications network. Russia's NTV, ORT, Alfa-Group and LukOil have controlling interest in Ukrainian channels 1 + 1, Inter, Novyi Kanal and STB, respectively.

Ukrainian-language TV programing during the last two years has risen to roughly 75 percent of all domestically produced content. But, while local politicians in the south and east block national channels and re-transmit Russian programs from Russia to local stations, the national government has never blocked Russian channels. Thus, as a percentage of all and not just national programming, Russian-language programs still dominate Ukrainian airwaves.

Ownership interests are reflected also in content bias. In June of this year for instance, neo-Soviet Russophile leaders assembled no more than 300 people, including Russian nationals, to stand outside a sanatorium in a Crimean town inhabited by American soldiers accompanying a shipment of military equipment that had not yet gone through customs. Ukraine's media, using close-angle rather than long-angle shots, presented these individuals as a "mass anti-NATO" demonstration. Only thanks to Ukraine's independent Dzerkalo Tyzhnia did people learn the truth of what had transpired and that the maximum that turned out for that little show was 1,500 on the day Yevhen Kushnariov came to give a speech.

Stephen Velychenko, Ph.D., is an associate of the Center for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies and a research fellow of the Chair of Ukrainian Studies, both at the University of Toronto. The article above will be published as "The Socio-Historical Context of Public Language-Use and Why English Must be Ukraine's Second Language" in Analiticheskie Obzory Tsentra Izucheniia Tsentralnoi i Vostochnoi Evropy 3 (2006) 14-18.

PART I

CONCLUSION

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