[aaus-list] [Fwd: Window on Eurasia: Ethnic Russians in Ukraine Re-identifying as Ukrainians]

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---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Window on Eurasia: Ethnic Russians in Ukraine Re-identifying as
Ukrainians
From:    "paul goble" <paul.goble at gmail.com>
Date:    Mon, October 6, 2008 5:11 am
To:      "Paul Goble" <Paul.Goble at gmail.com>
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Window on Eurasia: Ethnic Russians in Ukraine Re-identifying as Ukrainians



Paul Goble



            Vienna, October 6 –More than three million ethnic Russians
living in Ukraine have re-identified themselves as Ukrainians since 1991,
nearly a thousand times the number of Ukrainians who may have dual
citizenship in the Russian Federation, a ratio that appears to be increasing
and is of increasing concern to Moscow.

            On the one hand, this pattern suggests that ethnic Russians in
Ukraine increasingly identify themselves with that country and its titular
nation, an attitude that makes it more difficult for Moscow to play this
ethnic card against Kyiv. And on the other, it points to the weakness of
Russian ethnic identity more generally, something few Russian nationalists
want to admit.

            In an interview posted on Moscow's Politcom.ru at the end of
last week, Nikolai Shul'ga, deputy director of the Kyiv Institute of
Sociology and head of the Foundation for the Support of Russian Culture
noted that the number of people in Ukraine identifying themselves as
Russians fell from 11.3 million in 1989 to 8 million in 2001 (
www.politcom.ru/article.php?id=6969).

            Emigration explains only a few hundred thousand of that 3.3
million decline, he said. Most of it reflects "ethnic conformism," a feeling
on the part of many there that it is "more suitable" to declare oneself an
ethnic Ukrainian, even if one speaks Russian and feels himself part of
Russian culture.

             Indeed, he continued, what is happening in Ukraine is a
separation of language and national self-identification, with the number of
Ukrainians who declared Russian to be their native language actually
increased by more than a million between the 1989 Soviet and 2001Ukrainian
censuses.

            There are at least three reasons for this: First, some of the
Russians who had re-identified as Ukrainians nonetheless declared Russian as
their native language. Second, the two censuses asked questions about
identity and language in a different order, with language first in the
former and identity first in the second, an order that by itself may have
contributed to this change.

            And third – and this may be the most important finding for both
Ukraine and the Russian Federation – the changes between the two censuses
suggest that for many but far from all people in Ukraine, national identity
and native language are not nearly as tightly linked as many have assumed in
the past.

            For Kyiv, this means that national identity in Ukraine is
increasingly strong, with people retaining their Ukrainian national identity
even if they continue or decide to begin to speak Russian, a pattern few
Ukrainian nationalists find acceptable but one that points to the success
rather than the failure of Ukrainian statehood.

            And for Moscow, this pattern means that promoting Russian
language in Ukraine as the Russian government and its allies continue to try
to do – most recently by a new website directed at Russian speakers in
Ukraine (www.rus.in.ua) – may not have the identity or political
consequences that the Russian government would like.

            Asked whether he believed that the number in Ukraine of those
who identify themselves as ethnic Russians will continue to fall, even if
the use of Russian continues to be widespread, Shul'ga said that over the
next several years "the number of Russians and Russian speakers will decline
significantly."

            Meanwhile, another report last week calls attention to another
aspect of the relationship between Russian and Ukrainian identity.  Next
year marks the centenary of completion of the tsarist program to resettle
Ukrainians (and others) in the Russian Far East in order to strengthen the
central Russian government's control of that region (
odnarodyna.ru/articles/4/305.html).

            The Ukrainians who were moved there called their place of
settlement "zeleniy klin" ['the green triangle"] and were able to maintain
not only their language but even their identity well into the 20th century
despite the efforts of the Soviet authorities to russianize and russify
them.

            The identity of this several hundred thousand-strong community
played a key role in the defeat of the White Russian forces in the Far East
during the Russian Civil War because the Whites unlike the Reds refused to
promise to respect the right of the Ukrainian nation to self-determination.

            Soviet researchers, émigré historians like Ivan Svit, and
American scholars like John Stephan pointed out that many residents in the
Far East retained their Ukrainian identity even when under pressure from the
Soviet authorities they learned Russian and declared themselves to be ethnic
Russians.**

*            (*In the mid-1980s, in a move few now recall, the United States
broadcast to the region from Japan in Ukrainian, the only time in the
history of US international broadcasting to the Soviet Union when the US
broadcast to a region in a language different than the one the Soviet
government declared was the language of the titular nationality.)

            And in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, some in the
Ukrainian parliament called for the recognition of the Zeleniy klin as
Eastern Ukraine, a proposal that went nowhere but did call attention to the
millions of people in the Russian Federation who continued to define
themselves as Ukrainians even if they had to declare something else.

            Now, this anniversary of the formation of the Green Triangle is
likely to call the attention not only of many in Moscow and Kyiv but of
analysts in the West that Ukrainian national identity is stronger than many
have thought and that Russian national identity for many, except when
supported by a strong state, may very well be weaker.
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