Ukrainization: Encyclopedia II - Ukrainization - Ukrainization after the Russian Revolution

Ukrainization - Ukrainization after the Russian Revolution

Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Russian Empire was broken up. In different parts of the former empire, several nations, including Ukrainians, developed a renewed sense of national identity. In the chaotic post-revolutionary years, Ukraine went through several short-lived independent and quasi-independent states (see Ukrainian People's Republic), and the Ukrainian language, for the first time in modern history, gained usage in most government affairs. Initially, this trend continued under the Bolshevik government of the Soviet Union, which in a political struggle with the old regime had their own reasons to encourage the national movements of the former Russian Empire. While trying to ascertain and consolidate its power, the Bolshevik government was by far more concerned about many political oppositions connected to the pre-revolutionary order than about the national movements inside the former empire.

The widening use of Ukrainian further developed in the first years of Bolshevik rule into a policy called Korenization ("putting down roots"). The government pursued a policy of Ukrainization (Ukrayinizatsiya, actively promoting the Ukrainian language), both in the government and among party personnel, and implemented an impressive education program which raised the literacy of the Ukrainophone rural areas. Newly-generated academic efforts from the period of independence were co-opted by the Bolshevik government. The party and government apparatus was mostly Russian-speaking but were encouraged to learn the Ukrainian language. Simultaneously, the newly-literate ethnic Ukrainians migrated to the cities, which became rapidly largely Ukrainianized—in both population and in education.

The policy even reached those regions of southern Russian SFSR where the ethnic Ukrainian population was significant, particularly the areas by the Don River and especially Kuban in the North Caucasus. Ukrainian language teachers, just graduated from expanded institutions of higher education in Soviet Ukraine, were dispatched to these regions to staff newly opened Ukrainian schools or to teach Ukrainian as a second language in Russian schools. A string of local Ukrainian-language publications were started and departments of Ukrainian studies were opened in colleges. Overall, these policies were implemented in thirty-five administrative districts in southern Russia.

Starting from the early 1930s, the Ukrainization policies were abruptly and bloodily reversed. "Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism" was declared to be the primary problem in Ukraine. Ukrainianized newspapers, publications, and schools were switched to Russian. The vast majority of leading scholars and cultural leaders of Ukraine were imprisoned, deported, or shot, as were the "Ukrainianized" and "Ukrainianizing" portions of the Communist party. The so-called Great Terror in Ukraine reached its climax in 1933, presaging the Soviet Great Purge of 1937–38. Soviet Ukraine's political autonomy was completely destroyed. See Ukrainian language#Persecution and russification.

The 1930s in Ukraine were also characterized by other upheavals: rapid industrialization was accompanied by urban immigration from the Ukrainian countryside and from Russia, while forced collectivization and artificial famine (Holodomor) ravaged the rural areas.

In the following fifty years the Soviet policies towards Ukrainian varied between quiet discouragement and suppression to persecution and cultural purges. All effects of Ukrainization were undone and Ukraine gradually became Russified to a significant degree. These policies softened somewhat only in the mid-to-late 1980s and were completely reversed again in newly-independent Ukraine in the 1990s.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Ukrainization after the Russian Revolution", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki