Is the question I was asked the other day while guest-speaking on a podcast that details the war. At that moment, I didn’t think of sharing my personal experience to illustrate the meaning of the word, and simply said “It’s erasure of native [Ukrainian in this case] culture, and substitution of it by russian culture.” Truth be told, I could have done much better on describing the concept, as one can’t portray it enough in one simple sentence. Russification runs very deep and comes in many — often unexpected — forms, just like any colonization does… It aims to impose the idea of the colonizing nation’s superiority. In layman’s terms: “We are better than you and you must want to be us.”
I’ll tell you some personal stories that should, I hope, paint a clear picture on what it really means to live through and with Russification, but before that I want to give you a bit of a relevant background on my childhood.
My Home: A beautiful city in Western Ukraine, an hour away from the border with Poland — Lviv. Austro-Hungarian architecture. Cobblestone roads. Majority Ukrainian speaking. It’s often deemed to be the epicenter of all things Ukrainian, and propaganda often paints it as the root of all russian-hating and evil. Why? Our rich history of resistance movements, geographical proximity to Europe (that helped us dodge most things Russification), and the label of the Cultural Capital of Ukraine, of course.
My family: My dad is, as we like to joke in Lviv — a Banderite (a follower of Stepan Bandera. He truly isn’t, but russians like to think that we, western Ukrainians, have deemed Bandera — God, and under his supposed teachings frequent eating moscovite newborns for breakfast. Well, we obliged and adapted the rhetoric.) A Ukrainian patriot to the core, he was raised in a modest family, whose roots originate from a small town in Lviv region, populated mostly by the people carrying our last name. In other words, they founded the village and you can trace my heritage back to the beginning of times in the area, so to speak. A fact my father couldn’t be more proud of. No really, I recently did a DNA test and found out we have roots stemming from Cossacks in Zaporizhzhia — to which he said: “It can’t be. This thing is faulty. We are from Lviv.”
My mom comes from a family of immigrants, who until recently thought they were originally russian, though always identified as Ukrainian. Both of her parents, moved to Lviv from Moscow Region and Siberia in mid to late 1940s. If you ask them why, they’ll say “Well, I’m not sure. Perhaps we were running from the war.” Regardless, both of them adapted really well, my grandpa went on to become a celebrated Soviet Gymnast, highly respected in the sports community, and grandma built a baking business, known by most locals.
To sum it all up — I had bilingual parents. A typical day in our kitchen entailed me turning to my mom and speaking russian, only to switch to Ukrainian a moment later, when answering my dad. That might be why I flip flop between english and others with ease today. But i digress…
Russification: Remember that DNA test, that got rejected by my dad? Well, my maternal grand-parents did one too. As it turned out, they had not a trace of russia in their heritage. So… how did they end up there to begin with then, you ask? Well, the keyword here is Siberia. My great-grandfather was a Chernivtsi Jew, sent off into a … gulag, pretty much. Great grandma, though born in Novosibirsk, did not know much of her family history, as no-one was allowed to speak on it. Based on the DNA results her parents were of Ukrainian and Balkan ancestry, though. You do the math of how they wound up in the middle of the-cold-and-snowy-year-round-gulag-central nowhere, and why from that time on they chose to simply drop their origin history and teach their kids “you are a russian”…
My grandpa… well he doesn’t know his dad. He doesn’t even know the man, whose last name he has now carried for over 80 years. Why? they both were sent off to the Russo-Finnish Winter War as cannon fodder. The irony here? Turns out that his father’s ancestry was Baltic, according to that same nifty spit-in-the-tube. Yup, you guessed it, the Soviets sent a Baltic man to die in the conquest of a Baltic State. Oh, how poetic. Nataliya, my grandpa’s mom, passed her name along onto his first-born daughter, my mom, and left the world not having told us a lick about where we all come from. She didn’t know. The nifty test, however, did. She was Balkan, whose family, as well, most likely adapted the policy of “Just say we are russian, it’s easier that way”.
Now let’s go back to the 40s. So why did my grandparents really move to Ukraine? The so-called russian-hating West, nonetheless? Stalin. They moved, because grand old uncle Stalin encouraged families from far-remote regions to move to Lviv to “help develop it” under the guise of a booming labor need. In simple terms, my ancestors, albeit unwittingly, came to colonize. To Russify. Along with thousands of families alike, they settled in. What’s wrong with that, you might think? Well, provided they were russian-speaking, they hoarded nicer jobs, generously offered to them by the good ol’ commie party and seeped through into Ukrainian communities, unwilling to learn the language and forcing locals to adapt. You might say “Wow, I can’t believe this! In Lviv!?” Yes, in Lviv, where my grandmother has lived for over 70 years and still din’t manage to learn to speak Ukrainian. Why? She never had to.
(Side note here: she made sure her younger child, my aunt, spoke Ukrainian and went to a Ukrainian school. Because, and I quote: “We are Ukrainian, you are Ukrainian, you should live in a Ukrainian information space.”)
Now, we move on to me. Born in ’94, in freshly Independent Sovereign Ukraine, eager to breathe the air of unrestrained national identity. You’d think Russification would be done with at this point. I’d think so too… But both of us will be wrong in making that conclusion. Ukraine was young, our leaders were the same old guys from commie party, our info space was largely dictated by that of russia. And so it all began again. But subtly now.
So I, a 10 or so year old child in Lviv, who spoke russian fluently, felt superior to my Ukrainian-Speaking classmates, who didn’t. Did my parents ingrain that in me? No. The media did. russian shows did. russian movies did. Literature did. I remember watching shows that all glorified the “mighty” russian culture. Until the mid 2000s our channels broadcast what Moscow fed to all us Post Soviet Satellites, and worst of all our channels were too new to have the funds to dub it in Ukrainian. Those shows put Russians on the pedestal of the Slavic world. See, it so happened that I’m good at languages, and that I speak the kind of “proper” literary Russian, with no “Ukrainian accent”. The kind, where russians couldn’t tell that I’m from Ukraine. I often (in my later life) was asked by them if I’m from St. Petersburg. And as a 10 year old the “passing for a russian” made me feel as better than most my peers. Why wouldn’t I? When Moscow shines The Kremlin on TV and fills your dreams with images of one day living on Arbat St., like all successful people do?
I’m lucky, I’m incredibly lucky that my parents upon hearing these views explained to me that there is nothing shameful in being Ukrainian and mono-lingual and not passing for russian. Parents who explained exactly why this worldview is wrong and damaging. Parents who insisted I learn my history. I learn traditions. I deep dive into culture. Oh, and to all my Ukrainians: that summer instead of having fun with friends my dad made me read Тарасові Шляхи. A 400 ish pager autobiography, detailing Taras Shevchenko’s struggle against the Russian regime. I hated him for it then. I couldn’t be more grateful now. But … how is it that my parents still had to face this issue with their child? The extent of Russification.
In mid 2000s Novy Kanal, verbatim translated as New Channel, entered Ukrainian info space, largely oriented towards youth. The good ol’ Soviet-echoing shows became no more and Latin-American Series became center stage. All dubbed with a Ukrainian Voice-Over. I recently had a conversation with a friend, wondering, why we watched so many telenovellas as teens. We couldn’t understand what drove our producers to land specifically on shows like Floricienta (Argentina), Rebelde Way (Argentina), The Woman with A Scent of Coffee (Colombia), Clone (Brazil) and etc… Looking back at it, I understand that our barely formed media didn’t have the resources to execute our own shows and resorted to filling the air with literally anything that wasn’t russian, and something tells me that those were the only shows we could afford to buy the rights to.
Fast forward to my junior year. Foreign Lit class. Our teacher assigns that we memorize a russian author’s poem to recite. A one page long monstrocity that isn’t double-spaced and doesn’t rhyme. Aaaaaand you are allowed to recite it in the language of the original (not the Ukrainian translation) for an extra credit grade, if you wish, but there is a catch: only if you can speak that same proper Russian with no Ukrainian accent. Reason? Oh, miss educator was originally from Mordor and deemed our western pronunciation as somewhat of an ear bleed. Now, we are in Lviv. Out of my whole class the only two people capable of doing so, were I and another guy, as we used Russian at home with native speakers. Why would Ukrainian kids be required to recite Russian poems for an extra credit without an accent? Why would we have no accent in a foreign language? Why were we not given the same option for french poems? English? German? Spanish? We learned them all in Ukrainian translation. Would she have cared if we didn’t have pristine pronunciation while trying out for reciting those? She wouldn’t have. I got my extra credit. I soothed her colonizing ears. I was so proud of my grade.
Now, writing this piece over a decade later, I feel ashamed. I should have stood up. I should have reported her. I should have gone to the media. I should have made some noise. I shouldn’t have basked in the glory of having been successfully colonized.
And then you in the West ask why we, Ukrainians, aim to remove russian from our space completely, and whether it’s infringing upon people’s rights. All of the above is why. Russia and russian infringed upon our rights. I hope that in the near future, no kid will feel inferior for speaking their native language in their own country; no kid will feel superior for having fallen victim to imperialism; no kid will have a seed of doubt that being just Ukrainian is more than enough.
The End.
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Much gratitude,
Yulia.
