At the last census, Russian-speakers were a fifth of the total population, or eight million people. One might consider this a very significant minority. This number reflects those who only speak Russian, but the language is in fact preferred by more than four out of ten citizens. This is not all. In spite of Ukrainian being the only official language of the country, 80% of state broadcasting is in Russian, as are 81% of books and newspapers. In musical production this figure rises to 90%. Considering these numbers, it might appear surprising that most of the people continue to speak Ukrainian, not forgetting that the two languages are very similar. They have a common root, both originating in Ruthenia, the confederation of small kingdoms that, in the Middle Ages, revolved around Kiev.
Statistical figures would make Ukraine very similar to the rest of the former Soviet republics, with the exception of the Baltic states, where Russian remains a “high” language, while indigenous languages are considered little more than a dialect. After independence in 1991, Kiev did not make knowledge of Ukrainian a condition of citizenship. It is another common trait with the former Soviet republics, excepting of course the Baltics. It has crystalized the existence of the “Russian” community. It is made up of immigrants from all the Soviet republics. More often than not, they are not even ethnic Russians, but find a unifying identity in the language. The 300,000 Byelorussians, for example, are the second ethnic minority of the country, but they are russified.
Next to this phenomenon are the assimilated speakers, who feel they are Ukrainians, not failed Russians, although they often look favourably to Moscow. The eastern areas of Ukraine were continuously under the Czars from the middle of the 17th century to 1917. The south was annexed during the Russo-Turkish wars between the 18th and 19th centuries and was re-settled. These settlers came from neighbouring provinces, mainly Ukrainians and Russians, as well as, to a lesser extent, Germans from the lower Volga, made to move by Catherine II.
Continuous assimilation campaigns by the Czarist authorities inculcated the idea that the Ukrainians were a subset of the Russian nation and their special identity was a result of the hybridization that came about during the previous period of Polish-Lithuanian dominance. The area of Kiev, which later became part of the empire, had enjoyed relative cultural autonomy until the middle of the 19th century, by virtue of its famous academies and the influence of some of the local nobility. But even this oasis of freedom was brutally suppressed when nationalism began taking root. The only area of Ukraine that could recognize its sense of identity was the region ruled by the Habsburgs between 1775 and 1918, thanks to Vienna’s tolerance of nationalities. Later, the Soviet authorities were to soften the tone of Czarist rule, exalting instead folk particularism, but effectively continuing the russification programme.
Cultural and geographical duality is a one of the Ukraine’s peculiar characteristics and includes, among its consequence, exasperated localisms. This does not only apply to the division of the country into two almost homogeneous areas. Within these two areas there are as many particular realities as there are historical regions, both to the east and the west, to the extent that, following independence, the adoption of a federal system was seriously considered. They opted for regionalism. The fear with federalism was that half the country could be directly controlled from Moscow [G. Sasse The New Ukraine: A State of Regions in “Ethnicity and Territory in the Former Soviet Union: Regions in Conflict”, Routledge, New York, 2002, pp. 69–101].
The Galicians, for example, feel themselves to be the repository of the national identity. Further west, some of the trans-Carpathians describe themselves as “Ruthenians”. In most cases, this identity is not viewed as antithetical to being Ukrainian. “Ruthenian” is a random adjective. Historically, it refers to a unifying concept, but from the end of the 19th century, it was also adopted by some communities to mark their own specificity and, at times, their extraneousness to the Ukrainian nation. In the case of Trans-Carpathia, this particularity comes from mixing Hungarian with the local dialect. Hungary in fact controlled the region for almost a thousand years.
In the east, the Crimean Peninsula has, instead, considered itself a separate entity ever since 1954, when Khrushchev detached it from the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic to “donate” it – so the story goes – to Ukraine. Before the controversial Russian annexation in 2014, the region was the only one that enjoyed the status of an autonomous republic. Additionally, the Donbas, divided into various districts, is in fact so closely integrated with southern Russia to have experienced population exchanges from one area to the next since the days of the industrial revolution during the Czarist period.
The consensus of district governors, and of the political-economic groups supporting them, is founded to a significant extent on particularisms. They maintain control over the territory and most probably have significant influence in the ongoing civil war. There is no other explanation for the fact that one side of the Donbas is in flames, while the other is only occasionally touched by conflict. For some time, the main national political parties have limited themselves to acting as a loudspeaker for powerful local interests, placing ideological aspects in second place since President Kuchma’s failed attempt to impose himself on the governors at the beginning of the century. Yanukovich’s Party of the Regions openly catered to the interests of eastern cliques, while the Yushenko-Tymoshenko ‘Orange people’ although parties with a united project, resigned themselves to represent western interests.
The ethnic minorities follow a different logic, frequently opportunistic. The Polish minority quite clearly assumes pro-western positions, but the community is reduced to being almost non-existent with a little more than 140,000 members. This may appear paradoxical considering the role Warsaw has historically played in Ukraine’s history, second only to Moscow’s. Until the end of 1945 there were millions of Poles in Ukraine. Beyond their traditional homelands in the northwest regions, which they held for half a millennium and came under Warsaw between 1920 and 1939, they were important communities in all the main cities of the rest of the country, from Kiev, Kamienetsk and Zhitomir to Kharkov and Odessa. They held positions at every level of society, but most significantly in the merchant and land-owning classes.
These communities were destroyed by Stalinism, through deportations and executions, or during the Holodomor, the horrific artificial famine that decimated the population during the 1930s. There was a population exchange between Warsaw and Moscow when the Soviet Union annexed the north-western provinces after the Second World War. Following these hardships, today the most notable Polish minorities are near Zhitomir Kamenetsk and Kiev, all cities that are far from the current Polish border, while a few thousand remain in Lviv. Being dispersed across a vast area, the Poles did not benefit from the protection envisaged for other minorities, such as the Hungarians or Romanians.
Thanks to agreements between Warsaw and Kiev after 1991, a number of Polish-language state schools, going from kindergarten through high school, were established. Nowadays they are attended by a few thousand students. The Polish minority appears definitely to be more assimilated than integrated. Of the more than 140,000 registered members, barely 20,000 consider Polish their first language, about 40,000 speak it correctly and the rest have a superficial knowledge of the language. There are many more Ukrainian citizens of Polish origin, which some estimate to be around a million, based on data of Roman Catholic baptisms and their surnames.
Before his fall in 2014, most of the Hungarian minority in Trans-Carpathia looked with interest to Yanukovich, who had promised them increased “cultural autonomy”. This was expected to result in broader discretion for local authorities to interfere in a number of significant public state appointments, ranging from education to local media, all currently decided by Kiev. Concentrated in a strip of land 100 km by 30 km between the Hungarian and Slovakian borders, the 180,000 members of the Hungarian minority still live as if the Treaty of Trianon, signed almost a century ago, was just a chiffon de papier. They are a clear majority of the population in small rural centres. Eighty percent speak only Hungarian; barely one in ten is able to correctly speak Ukrainian. This is surprising when you consider that Stalin tried to disperse them through deportations. Additionally, they did not enjoy any official protection until 1990. Communist countries tended to set aside the problem of minorities so as to not fuel revanchism. In 1990, the first post-Communist government in Budapest and the last Soviet government in Kiev began a lengthy series of bilateral agreements.
Today, bilingual equality is in effect, as also witnessed by road signs. The local state broadcast facility has programmes in Hungarian. Members of this minority can avail themselves of an educational system in their language, from primary school to university. The University of Uzhgorod has an independent section entirely in Hungarian, which essentially trains teachers. The educational cycle has been saved. However, most of the graduates find it difficult to find work in the Ukrainian labour market, which is already limited.
The only alternative to working in the fields is to emigrate to Hungary, which Budapest views favourably as Orbán sees this as a remedy to the dramatic demographic fall because of the large Hungarian diaspora, with almost three million people spread across the seven neighbouring countries. The ease with which a Hungarian passport can be obtained is part of this logic, but above all there are attempts to use minorities as an instrument of pressure on neighbouring countries. But Kiev has never opposed this, although it is officially illegal to hold dual citizenship.
Kiev has not even done this with the Romanian minority, even when there was a surge in requests for Romanian passports shortly after that country joined the European Union. The question of the Romanian minority is a sticking point in bilateral relations, which are otherwise quite good. Bucharest says Kiev is underestimating the numbers, resorting to an accounting trick since Ukraine conducts a separate census for Romanians and Moldovans.
The Romanians are primarily concentrated in the district of northern Bukovina, today the district of Cherivtsi, where they enjoy rights similar to the Hungarians in Trans-Carpathia. The Moldovans are, instead, dispersed over a much larger area, which goes from northern Podolia to the Black Sea; a vast area bordering the Republic of Moldova. The protection of this minority is more precarious. Bucharest would like the extension of protection rights to all those they consider to be members of their national minority, citing Ukrainian census numbers in support of their position. The Romanian minority is the only one that has grown in 20 years, going from 110,000 to 160,000, while the Moldovan minority has shrunk from 275,000 to 210,000. [S. Gerasymchuk Intherethnic relations, Minority rights and Security Concerns: A Four Country Perspective: Ukraine Moldova, Romania Hungary, Un. Kiev, 2008, pp.47-50].
In fact, the languages are the same, even if the two communities identify with two separate countries whose relations have not always been warm. Separated from Romania in 1941, Moldova is an original model of assimilation that was advanced during the Stalinist era. First of all, local differences were emphasized in a forceful manner with the imposition of the Cyrillic alphabet, abandoned only in the 1980s. Additionally, a strong russification programme took place with population transfers and deportations and the consolidation of various ethnic-territorial pockets in order to ensure the republic remained unstable, all very close to the Ukrainian border. One is Transnistria, which is controlled by Russian speakers. The other is Gagauzia, an archipelago of ethnic islands wedged between southern Moldova and Ukraine and inhabited by a people of Turkish origin who are loyal to Moscow.
A significant Bulgarian minority of 150,000 is concentrated in the same area. Russified during the Soviet period, the community is enjoying a cultural revival thanks to joint efforts by Kiev and Sofia. Today, this minority can count on a number of public educational institutions taught in the Bulgarian language, from primary schools to high schools. Kiev also supports the media. The radio programmes teaching Bulgarian transmitted from state broadcasting in Odessa are noteworthy. In spite of this, this minority remains loyal to Moscow [M. Kosienkowski The Republic of Budjak: Next in Line?, “New Eastern Europe”, Varsavia, 2015.
The 250,000 Tartars of the Crimea, who are descendants of the people who lived on the peninsula at the time of the Czarist conquest, speak Turkish, are Muslim and fairly anti-Russian. Deported by Stalin, they were only allowed to return to the area in the 1980s, where they make up 12.5% of the population. From then on the Tartars have always remained isolated. This is, in part, self-imposed in as much as the members of this community prefer to meet in their self-governing body, the Meijilis, not recognizing the legitimacy of the local parliament. The Russian majority in Crimea has always discriminated against the Tartars, applying pressure on their self-government, preventing them from receiving educational and media support as ordered by Kiev. The members of this minority were never elected or were under-represented in the local parliament. Relations with Kiev were also not easy, especially when the Meijilis began claiming territorial autonomy for the Tartars. [N.Belitser Нвидимая борьба крымских татар продолжается…, Tatar Crimean Information Centre, 2002 and Crimean Authonomy: Positive and Negative aspects in terms of Ethnic Confict (paper) University of Uppsala, 2003]
Finally, the now almost extinct German-speaking minority at one point also concentrated in Crimea, is also worthy of mentioned. There were almost 300,000 before the Second World War, but were decimated by deportations and executions. After 1991, a vast majority of their descendants opted for citizenship offered them by the Federal Republic of Germany.
In the quarter century that has passed since independence, where possible Kiev has tried to put into practice advanced forms of support for its minorities. Their territorial concentration makes it easier to improve their condition, because an idiom obtains the status of a regional language especially if spoken by 10% of the population in a district. Ukrainian-speaking communities in EU countries, such as Hungary and Romania, do not enjoy similar guarantees. This, to a certain extent, may be because there are very few of them. But it must be remembered that on the basis of agreements signed during the 1990s, the signatories committed themselves to implement reciprocity. For the moment, Kiev has not raised objections, in order to avoid disagreements with countries belonging to that European Union it looks to as a haven. On the other hand, the protection of minorities is considered an investment in their de-russification.