PSCRP-BESA Reports No 50 (April 18, 2024)
On January 22, on Ukrainian Unity Day, President Volodymyr Zelensky signed Decree N 17/2024 “On the Territories of the Russian Federation Historically Settled by Ukrainians.” It listed the historical territories of Kuban, Starodubshchina, Northern and Eastern Slobozhanshchina, now part of Krasnodar Krai, Bryansk, Kursk, Belgorod, Voronezh and Rostov Oblasts of the Russian Federation. In this decree, Volodymyr Zelensky stressed that the Russian Federation is obliged to guarantee the rights of national minorities recognized by the global community (the decree mentions a number of documents, including the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages) to Ukrainians living on its territory, including the communities in the above-mentioned territories immediately adjacent to the Ukrainian border. At the same time, he instructed the Cabinet to develop, with the help of the Ukrainian World Congress, and submit to the National Security and Defense Council a plan of action to preserve the national identity of Ukrainians in the Russian Federation.
The fact that this plan is to be submitted to the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine in the context of a full-scale war with Russia cannot go unnoticed, as does the reference in Decree 17/2024 to the need to “develop relations between Ukrainians and peoples oppressed by Russia.” However, against the background of heavy fighting in Avdiivka and other parts of the front, the change of the AFU commander-in-chief, and the blocking by the U.S. Congress of a package of military aid to Ukraine, this decree went virtually unnoticed. The few comments on it that appeared in the Ukrainian media were mostly of a historical and cultural nature.
Ethno-cultural situation in the border regions in historical perspective
Experts are well aware of the ethnographic maps of the early twentieth century, indicating that at that time the territories listed in the decree of Volodymyr Zelensky were indeed mostly populated by Ukrainians. The map of the Ukrainian Republic, which includes said territories, presented at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, is also a well-known document. The ethnolinguistic boundaries of the Ukrainian ethnic territory were described as early as at the turn of the 19th – 20th centuries in the works of the ideologist of the Ukrainian national movement, historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky, who in 1917-1918 served as chairman of the Ukrainian Central Rada[1].
For historians it is no secret that in the Kuban People’s Republic, which existed in 1918 – 1920, the Ukrainian language was the state language along with Russian[2], that until 1925 Taganrog was part of the Ukrainian SSR, that in the 20s – early 30s Ukrainianization was carried out in the Ukrainian ethnic territories that were part of the RSFSR, which was later replaced by a policy of aggressive Russification. As a result of said Russification all Ukrainian educational and cultural institutions were eliminated there, and according to official statistics Ukrainians were transformed from the majority in these territories into an insignificant minority. Russian historian and demographer Vladimir Kabuzan described the dramatic changes in the ethnic composition of the Kuban population as follows: “The share of Ukrainians in the region at the end of the XIX – 20 years of the 20th century did not actually change (1897 – 29.4%, 1917 – 29.8%, 1926 – 30.3%), and they inhabited, with an absolute predominance, a significant part of the Kuban region. However, in the 1930s, the absolute majority of Ukrainians in the region changed their ethnic identity to Russian. (…) The Ukrainian ethnos, once dominant over the Russian in this region, completely lost its position here, and even on the territory of the former Land of the Black Sea Host, where the share of Russians was small and Ukrainians were practically the only inhabitants.”[3]
Thus, both experts and ordinary people in Russia and Ukraine who are interested in history know that a very significant (and sometimes predominant) part of the population of some territories of the Russian Federation on the border with Ukraine are Russified descendants of Ukrainians, who are registered as Russians by Russian statistics.
Ethnic nationalism vs. political nation-building
Nonetheless: Why did President Volodymyr Zelensky find it necessary, in the midst of the war, to issue a decree “On the territories of the Russian Federation historically inhabited by Ukrainians” and submit it to the National Security and Defense Council?
This seems to be an attempt to change the vector of the Russian-Ukrainian confrontation. So far, Russia has openly declared its desire to destroy Ukraine as a state and Ukrainian nation as a political idea. In doing so, the Russian leadership has relied on the chauvinistic and revanchist sentiments of the public at large – Russian and Russified – while simultaneously pursuing a policy of ousting the languages and cultures of national minorities from all spheres of life, with the exception of folklore festivals and the like, even in those regions of the federation that are still called “republics”. In this sense, the state campaign to popularize the song “I am Russian” by Russian singer-songwriter Yaroslav Dronov (better known as Shaman), which was forced to be sung in schools by non-Russian children, is telling and indeed symbolic.
Ukraine, on the other hand, has focused on political nation building, and unlike Russia, has avoided making territorial claims against its neighbors and citing “historical rights” as justification for such claims. Unlike Russia, which persistently seeks to turn Ukraine’s Russian and Russian-speaking population into its fifth column or at least an excuse to interfere in Ukraine’s internal affairs, Ukraine’s political leadership has never relied on the support of ethnic Ukrainians in Russia, whether they were government functionaries (e.g., Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration Dmitry Kozak) or members of the opposition (e.g., Alexei Navalny).
Russian aggression and the fight against it accelerated the consolidation of the Ukrainian political nation, for which many people without Ukrainian ethnic roots became significant figures. Suffice it to mention Crimean filmmaker Oleg Sentsov, who remained loyal to Ukraine after the Russian occupation of Crimea in 2014, for which he was arrested by the FSB on terrorism charges, tortured and sentenced by the Russians to 20 years in high-security camps. When Oleg Sentsov was released as part of an exchange in 2019 and arrived in Kiev, he could not speak Ukrainian, but he learned the language in the following years. We are by no means talking about isolated cases. It can be argued that the full-scale Russian aggression against Ukraine led to the virtual disappearance of the Russian ethnic minority in the territories controlled by the Ukrainian government. This was primarily due to a change in ethnic self-consciousness, and partly already expressed in a change in the linguistic behavior of the formerly Russian-speaking citizens of Ukraine. The author visited Ukraine twice after the outbreak of the war and can confirm this first-hand. At the heart of these radical changes is the desire to distance themselves as much as possible from Russia as a state and from its dominant ideology of the “Russian world.”
Ethnic identity is not immutable
A quarter of a century ago, long before the current military and political upheavals, Russian ethnographer Sergei Savoskul suggested the possibility of changing the ethnic identity of ethnic Russians living in Ukraine. In particular, he wrote: “In the course of drawing up a research program on Russians in Ukraine, we put forward the hypothesis that one of the possible ways of their adaptation to the new ethno-political situation could be the change of their ethnic identity from Russian to Ukrainian. This possibility is facilitated by the cultural and linguistic proximity of Russians and Ukrainians, as well as by the widespread Russian-Ukrainian marriages. […] Judging by the results of the survey, our assumption that the ethnic identity of Russians in Ukraine is more blurred than that of Ukrainians has been confirmed. About half of Russians confidently identify themselves only with their ethnicity.”[4]
After the beginning of full-scale Russian aggression, even more rapidly than the change in the linguistic behavior of adult Russian-speaking citizens of Ukraine, there was a decrease in the use of the Russian language in education, which did not cause any public protests. In the 2022 – 2023 school year, only 1,362 schoolchildren received education in Russian in the territory controlled by the Ukrainian government (in Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv and Odessa regions). In addition, 3,950 schoolchildren studied Russian as a separate subject (on the eve of the full-scale Russian invasion, in the 2021-2022 school year, there were 454792 such students). It should be noted that at the same time, the Russian occupation authorities completely excluded the Ukrainian language from the sphere of education in the territories of Ukraine under their control. Thus, the Russian-Ukrainian “war of languages” became a direct continuation of the war between the Russian Federation and the Ukrainian state.
Are the ethnic minorities of the Russian Federation natural allies of Ukraine?
For the Ukrainian military-political leadership and Ukrainian society in general, it is obvious that the active phase of the war has turned into a protracted one. It may last for years and end only with the destruction of one of the adversaries.
The Russian leadership is now interested in freezing the conflict because it has realized that Russia is unable to break the resistance of the Ukrainian army and destroy Ukrainian statehood. This is openly stated by some influential Russian politicians. However, it is clear that even in the unlikely event that Ukraine agrees to a ceasefire on Russian terms (i.e., officially renounces its intention to liberate the occupied territories), it will only be a temporary lull, followed by a resumption of full-scale hostilities.
On the other hand, Ukraine, not receiving sufficient military assistance from its Western allies, is unable to turn the tide of the war in its favor. Moreover, even in an ideal scenario for Ukraine, if all occupied territories are liberated, Russia will not end the war, since from its point of view the conflict is existential in nature.
Under these circumstances, the Ukrainian leadership concludes that to end the war, it is necessary to destroy the Russian Federation as an empire seeking expansion and revenge, using a combination of military and propaganda means. The most important propaganda effort on this front is support for separatist movements of Russia’s ethnic minorities (this explains the decree’s mention of the need to “develop relations between Ukrainians and peoples oppressed by Russia”). Ukrainians are one of the largest ethnic minorities in Russia. According to the Russian census of 2021, there were 884007 Ukrainians living in the Russian Federation, including annexed Crimea. However, it is clear that in reality the number of people of Ukrainian ethnic origin in the Russian Federation counts many millions. Suffice it to mention that according to the last USSR census of 1989, 4362872 Ukrainians lived in the RSFSR. And this is without taking into account the millions of persons of Ukrainian nationality, registered as Russians, living in the Russian Federation, including the territories mentioned in the decree of the President of Ukraine.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, work aimed at strengthening or even reviving the Ukrainian ethnic consciousness of Russified Russian citizens of Ukrainian origin living in these territories was attempted by public organizations, in particular the Ukrainian World Coordinating Council. At that time, these efforts found no support from the Ukrainian state structures. Now, apparently, the situation has changed.
In conclusion, it is appropriate to remind that, having found itself in a protracted conflict with a brutal enemy, vastly superior in human and financial resources, the Ukrainian elite and Ukrainian society as a whole have repeatedly turned to the experience of Israel. Israel and international Jewish organizations can also serve as an example for Ukraine in terms of work (including illegal work) with originally ethnically close populations who have been acculturated and even assimilated in a foreign environment. And as the Israeli experience in this area shows, the revival of ethnic identity destroyed by Russification is possible.
[1] See, for example: M.S. Hrushevsky, Who Are Ukrainians, What They Want, Kyiv, 1991, p. 125.
[2] More on this: Vasyl Ivanis, Kuban’s Struggle for Independence, “Ukrainian Technical and Economic Institute”, Munich, 1968.
[3] V.M. Kabuzan, Population of the North Caucasus in the XIX-XX centuries. Ethnostatistical study, Institute of Russian History of the Academy of Sciences of Russia, St. Petersburg, 1996, pp. 112-113.
[4] S.S. Savoskul. Russians of the new Zarubezhye. Choice of fate, Moscow, publishing house “Nauka”, 2001, pp. 89-90.