NO RUSSIAN IN THE LAND OF POTEMKIN.
Russian-speakers continue to struggle with Ukraine’s language laws,
despite the election of Viktor Yanukovich
A newcomer to Odessa, a city
of 1 million people on the Black Sea coast of Ukraine, gets
a strange feeling. Everyone in the street speaks Russian, but all the
street signs, shop names and advertising are in Ukrainian. The two
languages are so close that it does not require too much effort
to guess the meaning of a sign, even if you only know one
of the languages.
A newcomer to Odessa, a city
of 1 million people on the Black Sea coast of Ukraine, gets
a strange feeling. Everyone in the street speaks Russian, but all the
street signs, shop names and advertising are in Ukrainian.
The two languages are so close that it does not require too much
effort to guess the meaning of a sign, even if you only
know one of the languages. And for a true Odessite, this difference
is even less of a problem than for a person from any other
city in the world. The "pearl by the sea," as Odessa was called
after its founding in the late eighteenth century by Catherine the
Great, the city in its golden age was a "porto franco," a free
trade zone and the most ethnically diverse city of the Russian empire.
Jews, Greeks, Bulgarians and people of every possible other creed felt
themselves at home here. Later, this fact helped émigrés from Odessa feel
at home in New York, where they make up most of the unique
Brighton Beach community. However, in Odessa as in New York,
in Moscow as in Tel Aviv, the language in which Odessites
of various backgrounds communicate with each other is Russian. Inside
the city itself, the discrepancy between the spoken language and the written
one is explained by Ukraine’s language laws, which continue
to view Ukrainian as the country’s only state language.
The citizens of Odessa, known worldwide for their humor, have put
up with worse things, including three long years of Nazi occupation
in a city known for its Jewish heritage, so they play the game
the Ukrainian government forces them to play. After all, the famous
Potemkin villages, where Catherine’s famous courtier created an illusion
of prosperity for foreign visitors, are located on the outskirts
of Odessa. After Russia won this territory from the Turks in the late
eighteenth century, the northern coast of the Black Sea was settled
by Russians and Jews, and was called New Russia (Novorossiya). Eager
to please Catherine and her foreign guests, Potemkin took them
on a tour of this "last frontier" of Russia, showing them
the newly settled villages. One of the visitors, a Prussian king,
however, had the indelicacy of noticing the same cow with a damaged
left hind hoof in three "affluent" villages. Later, the Bolsheviks, sure
of their grip on power in the Soviet Union, merged this
territory with Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which bordered Novorossiya
on the north. And so, when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991,
Ukraine became an independent country and Odessites suddenly woke
up as Ukrainians. Since then, the entirely new kind of Potemkin
village was constructed at the same site, ostensibly called "One
Nation — One Language."
Street signs, however, are not the biggest inconvenience. The biggest
inconvenience is the old Soviet and new Russian movies, which Odessites
love, but which the law requires to be dubbed in Ukrainian. This
is done both in movie theaters and on television. The affluent
Odessites can watch Russian television via satellite dishes, but what about the
poorer ones who want to hear their beloved actors’ real voices and not the
faceless translation?
"This situation is absurd. People just stopped going to the movies,"
said Viktor Leskov, a bearded citizen of Odessa talking
to me on Yevreyskaya street. "Why does the government want
to make idiots out of us? Why do they keep pretending that they
liberated us from our own language? Why do I need to stop
speaking my mother tongue?"
Since the victory of Viktor Yanukovich in the presidential election
earlier this year, the situation changed somewhat.
"We are trying to solve the problem by showing movies with
Ukrainian subtitles," said Dmytro Tabachnik, the new Ukrainian minister
of education. "We are also planning to let the minorities pass
their entrance exams in their native languages."
This second comment tackles Ukraine’s second biggest language problem.
In order to force the children from Russian-speaking regions learn
Ukrainian, the two previous administrations—of presidents Leonid Kuchma and
Viktor Yushchenko—made Ukrainian the only language in which the
universities and other institutions of higher learning could hold their
entrance exams. Besides a Russian-speaking minority numbering in the
multi-millions, Ukraine also has small Hungarian and Romanian minorities.
However, speaking about the Russian minority per se is considered
politically incorrect in Ukraine, so Tabachnik, already under attack
from those who support the language laws, speaks about all minorities. His plan
is to show that the liberalization of language policy will
benefit not only Russians.
"We are going to found Ukrainian-Polish universities in our two
countries. We hope that a return to cooperation with Russia
in scientific field will make both Russian and Ukrainian scientists more
quoted in the global scientific media," Tabachnik said. "We also want
to return studies of Russian classical fiction to Ukrainian
schools."
Under the Yushchenko administration, Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Bulgakov, Lev
Tolstoy and other Russian writers were studied in Ukraine
as "foreign" authors, which means that they were studied only marginally,
despite the fact that Ukrainian schools have a long tradition
of studying these authors, some of whom (like Bulgakov) were born
in Ukraine, grew up here or wrote volumes about the country—in
Russian. According to Tabachnik’s plans, Ukrainian secondary school
students will be given an opportunity to study these authors
in original and not just in Ukrainian translation as part
of a special new course on World Literature.
Tabachnik’s plan provoked an outcry from Ukraine’s "Orange" opposition,
which sees these studies as a betrayal of national culture.
It is interesting to note that some Western scholars
of Ukraine, while poking fun at President Yanukovich’s inability
to pronounce correctly the name of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova,
support the drive against Tabachnik. This—despite the fact that
a continued "de-Russification" of secondary education may lead
to fewer and fewer children actually knowing who Akhmatova was.
Yanukovich is a native of Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine, and
there is already a serious rift inside the team that helped him win
the election as the president is accused by many
of dragging his feet on the language reforms that he promised
during the campaign. These reforms include giving regions, including Odessa,
the right to give Russian the status of an official, although
not state, language. Recently, Yanukovich explained that Ukrainian will stay
Ukraine’s only state language. According to polls, Odessa citizens are
fine with Ukrainian as a state language, but find the idea
of Russian as a foreign language unacceptable. The idea
of Russian language as "foreign" in this land of Potemkin
villages is a lot like a typical Odessa joke—both funny and
bitter at the same time.
Dmitry Babich, special to Russia Now
http://rbth.ru/articles/2010/08/04/no_russian_land_potemkin.html
|
