The Wednesday Morning Fights (at the Rada, not the Garden)
Sergei Yolkin
2010
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This cartoon is from two years ago… “the more things change, the more they stay the same”… pass the jug…
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Last week, fists flew in the Ukrainian parliament over the latest attempt to grant the Russian language a measure of official status in the country. Fat politicians brawled with other fat politicians, whilst outside, an angry crowd protested. From her jail cell, former Prime Minister Yuliya Timoshenko denounced the bill as a “crime”. Earlier, she had characterised it as an apparently sacrilegious assault on “an issue that’s holy for many of us”. Timoshenko, who could not speak Ukrainian until she was 36, is a demagogue. Nevertheless, the word “holy” reveals the extremes of passion felt on this subject. Politically and culturally, language is a hot kartofel (or should I say kartoplia?) in the Ukraine and the “Russian Question” provokes defensive outrage from Ukrainian nationalists.
I witnessed Ukrainian language policies in action in 2005, when I visited Kiev. I confess that I thought it rather strange that many people were speaking Russian, but all of the signage was in Ukrainian. The apotheosis of absurdity came when I watched a Russian action movie, where the credits were in Ukrainian, but the language of the film was Russian. Pretentiously, there were English language signs on some government buildings, but nothing in Russian. I also recall a story about a town in the Western Ukraine, where some micro-fascists had banned Russian pop from the airwaves. The struggle to impose the Ukrainian language by force on the country’s large Russian-speaking population, about 30% of the total, has a long pedigree. In his fascinating book, The Affirmative Action Empire, Terry Martin details a barking-mad attempt in the early revolutionary period to compel everybody working in government administration to switch from Russian to Ukrainian in two years… a move that Moscow endorsed in order to defeat “Great Russian Nationalism”. It failed because it was a stupid idea, and ground to a complete halt when Stalin, a Russifying Georgian, came to power.
Of course, it’s natural that many Ukrainians feel anxious about their language. Russia is a powerful neighbour located right next door. The Ukraine has only been independent for 20 years, and nationalists fear that the use of Russian will divide the nation, and threaten its very identity. However, the country already has sharp divisions, and what, in fact, is that identity? It’s not as if all those Russian speakers in the Eastern Ukraine and the Crimea arrived last week to destabilise a hitherto homogenous Ukrainian culture. Most Russians living in the Ukraine were born there. The only reason the Russian-speaking Crimea is part of the country because Nikita Khrushchyov “gifted” it in 1954 to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the Ukraine’s union with Russia. The Russian Empire captured New Russia in the south-eastern Ukraine in the 18th century, and both Russians and Ukrainians settled there. For centuries, there was no border, and Kiev is the “mother city” of Russians and Ukrainians alike. Russian is also the lingua franca of most of the other long-established ethnic minorities in the Ukraine.
The millions of Russian speakers in Ukraine are hardly interlopers, then. Some are as “indigenous” as the ethnic Ukrainians themselves. Therefore, it isn’t surprising that many object to the policy of forced Ukrainisation, active since the 1990s, which has seen education in the Russian language largely eradicated and eastern and southern government offices conducting business in a tongue predominantly spoken in the western half of the country. Embarrassingly, the independent and democratic Ukraine is more oppressive in this regard than was Brezhnev’s USSR was in 1970. At that time, in the autonomous region of Tatarstan, 70 percent of schooling was conducted in Tatar, not Russian. By 1990, schooling in Tatar had dropped to 24 percent. By 2001, however, the figure was at 49.3 percent and rising. Thus, Russia… the Grand Villain of Ukrainian nationalism… grants its linguistic minorities more rights than the independent democratic Ukraine.
Perhaps, I’m more relaxed about language because although I’m Scottish, I speak Standard English, not Gaelic, and don’t feel any less Scottish for it. I freely admit that the Scots and the English are very similar, just as Ukrainians and Russians are very similar. Life is too short to dwell on the narcissism of small differences. Meanwhile, in Texas, I see Spanish language signs all the time, most often in big stores, because the politics of immigration aside, it’s good for business if your clientele can read the signs. Second-generation immigrants assimilate and become bilingual, because if you don’t learn English you’re doomed to a life of low-paying menial jobs.
Perhaps, if Ukrainian politicians could concentrate less on punching each other in the face and focus more on giving Ukraine a prosperous future, the language issue would become less contentious. Anybody with ambition who wanted to play in the big leagues would be motivated to learn the language of the unitary centre, which is Ukrainian and will remain so. Russian speakers might look over the border at their cousins and feel pity. They might even read a volume of Taras Shevchenko’s poetry by choice instead of as a legal obligation in school. Well, OK, that last one’s probably going a bit far. However, you get my drift.
1 June 2012
Daniel Kalder
RIA-Novosti
http://en.rian.ru/columnists/20120601/173793426.html
Voices from Russia 
Ruling Party of Regions Wins Ukrainian Election – 99.84% of Votes Counted
Tags: 2012 ukrainian legislative election, Communist Party of Ukraine, European Union, Fatherland, Great Russia, political commentary, politics, right-wing, Svoboda Party, Ukraine, Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform, Verkhovna Rada, Viktor Yanukovich, Viktor Yanukovych, Viktor Yushchenko, Yulia Tymoshenko, Yuliya Timoshenko, Yuliya Timoshenko Bloc
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On Saturday, the Ukrainian Central Election Commission said that the ruling Party of Regions won 29.99 percent of the party list vote with 99.84 percent of the ballots counted after the election for seats to the Verkhovna Rada. The Batykivshchina (Fatherland) Party led by jailed former Prime Minister Yuliya Timoshenko came in second with 25.53 percent, and former boxing champion Vitaly Klichko’s Udar (Punch) Party came in third with 13.95 percent. The Communist Party of the Ukraine (KPU) came in fourth with 13.18 percent, and the nationalist Svoboda party gained 10.44 percent. The remaining parties didn’t get past the 5 percent minimum threshold to enter parliament.
The Party of Regions also won the constituency district vote. The election took place on 28 October, with a mixed vote system. Half of the Rada deputies are chosen from party lists on a proportional representation vote, and the other half stand for election in discrete constituencies. The Ukrainian Central Election Commission will announce a final vote tally, with all ballots counted, on Monday at 11.00 local time (13.00 MSK 09.00 UTC 04.00 EST 01.00 PST 17.00 AEST). So far, the Central Election Commission has accepted all the ballots from 188 of 225 regional election commissions. OSCE monitors said the election was not sufficiently transparent and noted an imbalance in the use of administrative resources in the course of the election as well as a disparity in access to media resources among the contending parties. Earlier on Saturday, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs, Catherine Ashton, criticised the Ukraine for not having a result declared for the election five days after the vote.
3 November 2012
RIA-Novosti
http://en.rian.ru/world/20121103/177177791.html
Editor’s Note:
For those who are interested, the following table shows the proportion of the vote gained by the various major factions in the last three elections (must have won at least 5 percent in one election, bold type indicates a gain in votes over the last election):
30.0
11.8
25.5
7.3
14.0
4. KPU
13.2
20.0
10.4
6. Our Ukraine
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23.6
7. Ukrainian Socialist
N/A
6.9
8. United Social Democrats
6.2
The above vote led to the following allocations of seats in the Rada (bold type indicates a gain in seats):
187
101
103
22
40
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32
65
37
—-
—-
112
—-
23
—-
24
The Our Ukraine (the Yushchenko gang) bloc has imploded. The two minor Socialist parties have fallen off the map, too. Fatherland (Timoshenko’s bunch) appears to have peaked, and is on the downturn. The Party of Regions is holding its own, and the KPU is coming back from a disastrous collapse in 2006. What’s worrisome is the rise of Svoboda and Udar, but there were 72 Yushchenko deputies in 2007 and 77 Svoboda/Udar deputies in 2012. It looks like the Yushchenko voters went for the two extreme right parties, actually diluting their influence. It shows you the level of intelligence amongst the rightwing… namely, not much. In short, not much change.
If one counts the Regions/KPU deputies together, one comes up with the following total of pro-Russian deputies:
219
202
207
166
That is, these two pro-Russian parties have 30 percent more seats than in 2002… that doesn’t bode well for the Galician nationalists, which is why they probably bolted from Yushchenko’s faction and cast their lot with the Far Right Svoboda. This probably means that a Ukrainian rapprochement with Russia is on the way in the middle-future (five to ten years down the road). America’s great attempt to weaken Great Russia by wresting away the Ukraine has probably failed. Sic semper tyrannis…
BMD