Ukrainian - a language in danger
USSR nosis is tragic. One of the largest peoples in Europe is disappearing.
In Ukrainian cities where millions of people live, such as Odessa and Kharkov, and where the native population predominates, there is not a single Ukrainian kindergarten, and in Depropetrovsk there are only two.
In Australia, where there are only about
THE USSR SUPREME SOVIET passed a Law on the Languages of the Peoples of the Soviet Union in April 1990. In the June 14 issue of Literaturna Ukraina, Dymytro Pylypchuk oulined an argument that he thought should be heard in the Ukrainian
Supreme Soviet for rejecting the law and adopting a law giving
Ukrainian the status of the language of the republic.
The article appeared under the following epigraph: "In national policy, facts are islands in a sea of lies." The article itself contains many facts about the actual policies followed toward the languages and cultures of non-Russian peoples, and their effects. At every point the author contrasted the policy of Stalin and his heirs unfavorably with Lenin's national policy. The editors noted that the author had asked that his fee for the article be turned over to the fund for blockaded
Lithuania. The following are major excerpts.
DOCUMENT
W
E HAVE always been told that in Lithuania, everything is in Lithuanian, just as in Georgia everything is in Georgian. But in the newspaper Sovetskaya Litva [the major unionist publication in Lithuania], we read a speech by the writer A. J. Juozenas-Baltusic at a session of the Supreme Soviet of the republic on granting Lithuanian the status of the official language:
"Where is this language? Such a loss makes you want to cry. As a writer for five decades, throughout all of Lithuania I have been looking for a typewriter with a
Lithuanian keyboard. And, I, an old man, a Communist, a deputy to the Supreme
Soviet, have been forced today to turn to a speculator-private businessman to change the keyboard on a typewriter that originally had a Russian keyboard, because that is the only kind sold."
It was a bolt out of the blue, when Literaturnaya Gazeta published the words of the well-known [Georgian] writer Otar
Chiladze about the
"ignorance of the
Georgian language in, if not all, most institutions and organizations" in Georgia! And in the [Russian language] paper
Molodezh Gruzii ["Youth of Georgia"), the senior academic at the Shota Rustaveli
Institute for Literature of the Georgian
SSR Academic of Sciences, Manana Girineishvili, wrote: "Most of our scholarly institutes conduct their work in Russian.
They do not even have Georgian typewriters."
In Izvestnik Vyshei Shkoly ["Higher
8 Education Reporter"), we read that in
International Viewpoint #189 • July 16, 1990
Frunze [a major city in the Kirghiz republic], at the start of 1988, 42% of Kirghiz students were not studying through their native language. In the Mari autonomous republic, the native language has not been the language of instruction in the schools for nearly twenty years."
The journal Narodnoe Obrazovanie informs us... "Out of 144 schools in Kazan [a major Tatar center], only three are Tatar. In just the last 12 years, the number of students in Tatar schools in the republic has shrunk by 400%."
We thought that maybe only here, and in Byelorussia, was the language of the native people so disregarded in the schools. But in Molodezh Gruzii, we read the account of a high school teacher, S.H. Tikaradze: "In our district there is a school where 20 out of 30 students are exempted from studying Georgian."
Increasing number cannot speak Ukrainian
Consider, good people, that out of 2,600,000 children in preschool programs in Ukraine, only 642,000 are being taught in Ukrainian. As a result, every six to seven years another two million are added to the number in the republic who cannot speak Ukrainian.
I would like the deputies of the Ukrainian parliament to consider one fact — out of every four children of Ukrainians, nearly three go through Russian language preschool institutions. The prog-
30,000 Ukrainians, in the cities of Sidney and Melbourne, there are 12 Ukrainiar schools, but in socialist Ukrainian cities where millions of people live, Donetsk, Dnepropetrovsk, Odessa, and Kharkov, there are practically none. In the capital of Ukraine [Kharkov], only one in five students studies Ukrainian. Not a single vocational-technical
Through the Stalin-Suslov "deformation" of our ideology, several generations of Ukrainians grew up in the cities of the republic whose attitude to their native language was not only nihilistic but often aggressively hostile. Is this not a shame for socialism? After this, is it possible to talk about any socialist ideals?
Fifty years ago, 80% of students studied in schools with instruction in Ukrainian. Today, it is less than half.
A sociological study showed that in the Zaporozhia district, only 1.2% of Ukrainian engineers there used Ukrainian in
Shortage of non-Russian books
How could it be otherwise when in the Soviet Union (in 1987) for economics students and specialists only 10% of published reference books, only 7.4% of scholarly books and 2.7% of practical manuals are in languages other than Russian.
Likewise, the percentage of titles of textbooks published in Ukrainian in the Ukrainian SSR for university students decreased from 86.9% in 1946 to 8% in 1980.
Likewise, throughout the country, textbooks for university students in all disciplines in languages of the USSR other than Russian, represented only 5.1% of those printed, while those in foreign languages represented more than twice as much!
We beat the drum about the fact that in the Soviet period nearly 50 peoples with previously unwritten languages got their own writing systems, so that books and brochures have been published in 92 languages of peoples of the USSR.
But we forget to say that at the time of the all-Union census in 1926, 194 nationalities were registered (and about the same number of languages!), but in 1979, only 101 ethnic groups were mentioned.
Today, the encyclopedia says that there are about 130 languages in the USSR, but we overlook the fact that in a given year books and pamphlets are in fact published
YOU WANT TO GET the second year - in the age of glasnost' - that
USSR only three in other languages of the Soviet
Union, although
23.9 million non-
AT GORBACHEV? JOIN THE QUEUE! in only 58 to 67 languages of peoples in the USSR, newspapers in 55, magazines in 44, and there are TV broadcasts only in 40. And only 39 were used in instruction
However, in the preface to the yearbook Pechat' SSSR v 1937 godu ["The Press in the Soviet Union" in 1937], it says that in 1934-1937, textbooks were published in 90 languages of peoples of the USSR. How can it be that in 50 years, 50 languages have disappeared from
This was not a natural process. It was Stalin's jesuitical ideology, it was Suslov's jesuitical ideology, it was the repressive apparatus used against dissiit was the work of those who applied the ideological directives.
Likewise, in V Shcherbitsky's first year as first secretary of the CC of the Ukrainian CP, 3.3 million copies of Russian literary works were published in the republic. In the following year, 1974, it was 9.9 million, three times as much.
In the first year of Shcherbitsky's stewardship, Russification of university textbooks was pushed hard (in the first eight years of his rule the number of Ukrainian titles in this area decreased 5.7 times). There were massive closures of Ukrainian
I would like to point out that Lenin sharply criticized the census of Russia's years, only the first volume has appeared" and "on the question of the native language of students there is only a report on the Russian language. The part on Byelorussian and Little Russian [Ukrainian] has been banned. The full data have been banned. It is forbidden to know the truth about the language spoken in the families Census data not published in periodical press
And now, in the age of computers, the data of the 1979 all-Union census were published only six years later, and this is sus has not lished in the periodical Not long ago, response to my request, the ministries of education of several republics said that they had no data on the language of We also know Lenin's description of Russia as a "prison house of peoples. Lenin wrote, "Nowhere in the world is there such oppression of the majority of the popu-
But in Czarist Russia, Russian books and pamphlets represented 80.8% of publishing. In the first decade after the revolution, this decreased somewhat. But already in the 1950s, it had climbed back to the imperial level, and in 1987-1988, it had grown to 86.7%.
In one of Lenin's notebooks, with the heading "not for publication" there is a
"They are beginning to respect the party, if there is paper and technical resources." The with its chauvinist centralism not only "correctly understood" but transformed the order, adding itself if there is paper, printing and technical facilities."
Today, any serious cultural activity is restricted by the center "because of the lack of paper." And the republics cannot use as they like that part of the all-Union pie that falls to them. Obviously, unlimited subscriptions for the central newspatightening limitations on paper, not for the central publishing houses many publishing houses in the republics.
In 1988, out of 29.7 billion printed sheets of books and brochures published in the USSR, only 6.7 billion were printed in the non-Russian republics. It would be just, then, to demand that the little bit of paper given to the republics be used primarily for the national-cultural needs of the titular peoples.
However, in fact in the year referred to, in Ukraine 1,200,000,000 sheets were in Russian; in Byelorussia, it was 841 million, in Kazakhstan, 273 million; and
In 1984 and all the years of perestroika, the number of sheets printed in Russian outside the borders of the Russian federation has exceeded the number of sheets printed in all the other languages of the
Number of Ukrainian periodicals dropping
In 1988, in the Russian Federation, 143 new Russian newspapers appeared, and
At the same time, in Ukraine the number of Ukrainian newspapers and other periodicals dropped to 30, while the number of Russian-language ones increased to
The 1979 statistics showed that out of the 23.9 million Russians living outside the Russian Federation in other Soviet republics, 19.4 million admitted that they other language of the Soviet
The law I oppose is unconstitutional Article 45 of the constitution of the USSR calls for assuring citizens the ability to study in their native language. The Law on the Language of Peoples of the USSR, instead of doing this, calls for creating the conditions for citizens of the USSR to study in their own languages.
It need only be added that Part Two of Article 7 of the Law on Languages of Peoples of the USSR strengthens the obliga. tion to study the Russian language, and in Part Four provides for exemption from having to learn the languages of the
Thus, the law that was supposed to protect the smaller, disregarded and poorly defended languages in fact promotes the already strong Russian language.
Every one of us has to understand that, there is a difference between "education and training through the native language" and "teaching of the native language."
The latter means instead of a rounded education in the native language giving only lessons in the native language in schools and kindergartens. This cunning sabotage can be the first step to total abolition of the constitutional guarantees of
Leninist principles abandoned
The Leninist principle of "freedom of the native language" is transformed into the Law on Language of the Peoples of the USSR into a "free choice of the language of instruction."
In putting the stress on the rights of citizens to freely choose their language of instruction and not proposing the right of citizens to education through their native language, the Law on the Languages of the Peoples of the USSR in fact undermines Article 36 of the constitution of the USSR, which guarantees the possibility for people to use their native language. [The author concluded by noting Lenin's definition of slavery, ending "I appeal to you, let us get up off our knees." * 1. V. Shcherbitsky replaced Petr Shelest, who had made certain concessions to Ukrainian national feeling, opening the way for the Ukrainian renaissance of the 1960s. Shcherbitsky established a neo-Stalinist regime that only began to change in the fall of 1989, 9 when he was removed from his post. July 16, 1990 • #189 International Viewpoint