Language, a battle for the soul of eastern Ukraine

Kharkov, one of the most “Russian” cities in Ukrainegradually learns to speak Ukrainian in order to take away the Kremlin’s arguments to claim this territory with a Russian-speaking majority.

“It is a great contribution to the defense of the country. Because Russia imposes war on us and considers that these territories belong to it since people speak Russian. ‘If they speak in Russian, it means they are ours.’ But that is not the case and we show it to them”, commented the Ukrainian businessman Andréi Polysh.

an urgent matter

The Russian has a constant presence in the streets of Járko and can be heard in the fragments of conversations of passers-by, in telephone calls.

This contrasts with the signs and advertisements in stores and businesses, all in Ukrainian in compliance with the language law that prioritizes the use of this language in public services.

“Unfortunately, Kharkov is now a Russian-speaking city, but I think that everything will change,” says Polysh.

He welcomes the fact that children study Ukrainian in schools and that businesses and stores are required to use this language to serve customers, although he clarifies that if someone requests services in Russian, they are answered without any problem.

“Ukrainization is taking place very gradually,” stresses Yulia Agueyeva, a journalist and philologist, firmly convinced that Ukrainian is destined to prevail over Russian.

heading to the ukrainian

A process that began in 1996, five years after independence, adds Aguéyeva, recalling that Ukrainian first reached the universities, then they began to teach it in schools, and then it was established as the language to be used in all documentation.

“Later radio and television were made Ukrainian, and from this year all print and digital media will have to have a version in Ukrainian,” he says.

The journalist, who heads the news portal “Kharkov Today”, assures that all Kharkovites understand and accept this situation and “Russian speakers begin to listen and begin to understand” the Ukrainian ‘mova’ (language).

“People try to distance themselves from Russia” despite the fact that the vast majority of residents of the city, just 40 kilometers from the Russian border, are tied to it by family ties, says local photojournalist Sergey Kozlov.

Pro-Russian resistance

Still, not everyone is satisfied with official policies that “softly impose” the Ukrainian language as the main means of communication.

“I have been speaking Russian for almost seventy years, I always have, and I feel this as an imposition that makes me uncomfortable,” a man who prefers to remain anonymous told Efe.

“I am from here and I feel Ukrainian. But as a citizen I have the right to speak in the language I learned at birth and not be forced to use another. I live in a multinational country,” she insists.

The Ukrainian as a political posture

Polysh began learning Ukrainian in 2014, after fully immersing himself in the Donbas conflict, in which he supports the Ukrainian military from the “Kharkov is with you” fund.

“This marked the turn that made me start to move away from the Russian and towards the Ukrainian. There are people willing to give their lives for the Homeland”, he says.

The businessman affirms that in the city Ukrainian prevailed in the 19th century and even in the 1930s, but the Holodomor, the great famine caused by the forced collectivization of the land in the 1930s, added to the industrialization of the region drastically changed the situation.

“At that time many people died, carriers of the language, many arrived as a labor force from various parts of the Russian Empire and, although they spoke different languages, they had Russian as a unifying language,” he explains.

Documentary filmmaker Igor Pigrebbinsky recalls that after the famine “up to 270 trains with settlers arrived in the region annually, coming from the Russian swampy areas, the Kostroma, Vologod regions, among others.”

Many of them were destined for the Donbas region, which is rich in coal and which required a large amount of labor.

Russian ambitions

It was a tragic process, he says, since the founder of the Bolshevik state, Vladimir Lenin, “supported the Ukrainianization of the country and the creation of schools in Ukrainian because he wanted to fight against the Russian imperial past.”

“Many Ukrainian schools were opened in Kharkiv, where language carriers came from other regions, such as Vinnitsa. But when (Iósif) Stalin arrived, they all ended up in front of the wall,” he says.

That is why, he assures, that when the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, says that in Kharkov “‘they speak Russian, then this is our land’, we ask ourselves, is it not the other way around, that Russia is our land?”

And, although he is convinced that “being a Russian-speaker is not a disadvantage in Ukraine, it is a good thing for the country”, he argues that the Russian spoken in Kharkov “is not identical to the one spoken in Russia” and does not serve as an argument for territorial ambitions.

“Since the time of Ivan the Terrible, he has always had aspirations regarding our territory, they even stole our name. Where does Russia get the name from? From ancient Kievan Rus. They didn’t call it the Muscovite Empire, but the Russian Empire,” he asserts.

And, he concludes, “how can you imagine the Russian Empire without the mother of Russian cities, Kiev?”