More on Ethnic Russians in Ukraine Re-identifying as Ukrainians

The Russian identity is actually quite weak without strong state power, which is what the authors rightly noted. It is in a sense an artificial identity maintained by a strong authoritarian state, which actively promotes nationalism and promotes the propaganda of this identity.

But when ethnic Russians are placed in a democratic foreign environment, even where they speak Russian and are fully connected to the Russian culture, such as in Ukraine, the gravitating force of Russian central government precipitously declines.

They prefer to identify as Ukrainians even if they still regard their native language to be Russian. Since their children are mostly being educated in Ukrainian language, the next generation will identify with Ukraine even more.

Ukrainians are capable of maintaining their identity and even their language for 3-4 generations in a foreign environment like the US or even Russia. Russians dissolve much quicker without a strong state to support their identity. It's much harder to identify with an empire when you live outside of it. Ethnic roots are much easier to identify with. But Russian identity is more than ethnic, it's imperial.

The interesting thing is that many Ukrainian villages in Siberia still speak Ukrainian. It's also interesting that many Russians who still believe Russian is their native language, are nevertheless re-identifying themselves as Ukrainians.

Ukrainians have contributed a lot of manpower to the growth of the Russian empire. Many of the cities in Siberia were started by Ukrainian Kozaks, many of whom still identify as Kozaks. Interestingly enough, their ethnicity was recorded in their passports by the Russin imperial government as a "kozak" ethnicity. Obviously, such an ethnicity doesn't exist. It's simply a replacement for "Ukrainian". Mostly Ukrainian fought in the Russo-Japanese War, The Crimean War, The Finnish War, and so on. Many Ukrainians have been sacrificed in these imperial projects. Although obviously Ukrainians must be good warriors, if they weren't they would not have been used in this way.

Some of the people changing their identification may be ethnically mixed Russian-Ukrainians, who were recorded as Russian in the Soviet times and are now justifiably changing their identification to Ukrainian.

Some other people who have "changed" their identification are people who were recorded as Russians during Soviet times and even had their lasnames changed to look Russian in the 1930s, but are in fact ethnically Ukrainian.

A good example is Gen. Morozov, who knew that his mother was Ukrainian, but had assumed that his father was Russian until he discovered after his father's death that both his parents were Ukrainian.

My own grandfather's lastname was Turkulov, so I thought he was Russian. But I found out that his father's lastname was actually Turkul'. (I have a copy of his Soviet file documenting his arrest and murder by the government.) The -ov was simply added by the Soviet government on Stalin's orders. This was especially the case with all the Muslim people groups - practically all of them had the -ov added to their names.

It is also a known fact that some Ukrainian cosmonauts had their lastnames adjusted to look Russian to an international audience.

Ukraine's Ethnic Russians Re-identifying as Ukrainians

Interesting post by Paul Globe on his blog Window on Eurasia. The number of self-identified ethnic Russians had fallen from 23% to 17% in the decade after Ukraine's independence in 1991. And this number has likely fallen further in the intervening years.

The interesting conclusion derived from his analysis is that the Ukrainian ethnic identity is actually much stronger than the Russian ethnic identity. Ukrainians have been able to maintain their identity in Russian Siberia for over 100 years, even though they were forced to learn Russian and record in their passports they were ethnically Russian. (And who knows how many such "ethnic Russians" there are in Russia!) Many even had their lastnames changed by Stalin's machine to look Russian by adding the -ov ending. The interesting thing is that these people living in Siberia still speak Ukrainian and still self-identify as Ukrainians.

The Russian ethnic identity turns out to be much weaker, as ethnic Russians tend to dissolve in a foreign nation much quicker than Ukrainians do, even though assimilation rates are probably about the same for both ethnic groups. However, the Russian ethnic identity is too closely intertwined with a strong centralized state, and when this overweening government is absent, ethnic Russians tend to loose their identity fairly quickly. One conclusion could be that much of Russian identity is built on state propaganda. The other conclusion could be that the Russian identity has more to do with the Russian empire than with the Russian ethnicity per se, so when they leave the empire, they leave most of their identity behind.

The article illustrates the fact that the Russian ethnic identity has turned out to be fairly weak even in one of the most Russified nations in the world, Ukraine, as many self-identified ethnic Russians have switched to become self-identified ethnic Ukrainians with relative ease (while still maintaining Russian as their "mother tongue").

Here's the full text of the article:

Window on Eurasia: Ethnic Russians in Ukraine Re-identifying as Ukrainians
Paul Goble

Vienna, October 6 – More than three million ethnic Russians living in Ukraine have re-identified themselves as Ukrainians since 1991, nearly a thousand times the number of Ukrainians who may have dual citizenship in the Russian Federation, a ratio that appears to be increasing and is of increasing concern to Moscow.

On the one hand, this pattern suggests that ethnic Russians in Ukraine increasingly identify themselves with that country and its titular nation, an attitude that makes it more difficult for Moscow to play this ethnic card against Kyiv. And on the other, it points to the weakness of Russian ethnic identity more generally, something few Russian nationalists want to admit.

In an interview posted on Moscow's Politcom.ru at the end of last week, Nikolai Shul'ga, deputy director of the Kyiv Institute of Sociology and head of the Foundation for the Support of Russian Culture noted that the number of people in Ukraine identifying themselves as Russians fell from 11.3 million in 1989 to 8 million in 2001 (www.politcom.ru/article.php?id=6969).

Emigration explains only a few hundred thousand of that 3.3 million decline, he said. Most of it reflects "ethnic conformism," a feeling on the part of many there that it is "more suitable" to declare oneself an ethnic Ukrainian, even if one speaks Russian and feels himself part of Russian culture.

Indeed, he continued, what is happening in Ukraine is a separation of language and national self-identification, with the number of Ukrainians who declared Russian to be their native language actually increased by more than a million between the 1989 Soviet and 2001 Ukrainian censuses.

There are at least three reasons for this: First, some of the Russians who had re-identified as Ukrainians nonetheless declared Russian as their native language. Second, the two censuses asked questions about identity and language in a different order, with language first in the former and identity first in the second, an order that by itself may have contributed to this change.

And third – and this may be the most important finding for both Ukraine and the Russian Federation – the changes between the two censuses suggest that for many but far from all people in Ukraine, national identity and native language are not nearly as tightly linked as many have assumed in the past.

For Kyiv, this means that national identity in Ukraine is increasingly strong, with people retaining their Ukrainian national identity even if they continue or decide to begin to speak Russian, a pattern few Ukrainian nationalists find acceptable but one that points to the success rather than the failure of Ukrainian statehood.

And for Moscow, this pattern means that promoting Russian language in Ukraine as the Russian government and its allies continue to try to do – most recently by a new website directed at Russian speakers in Ukraine (www.rus.in.ua) – may not have the identity or political consequences that the Russian government would like.

Asked whether he believed that the number in Ukraine of those who identify themselves as ethnic Russians will continue to fall, even if the use of Russian continues to be widespread, Shul'ga said that over the next several years "the number of Russians and Russian speakers will decline significantly."

Meanwhile, another report last week calls attention to another aspect of the relationship between Russian and Ukrainian identity. Next year marks the centenary of completion of the tsarist program to resettle Ukrainians (and others) in the Russian Far East in order to strengthen the central Russian government's control of that region (odnarodyna.ru/articles/4/305.html).

The Ukrainians who were moved there called their place of settlement "zeleniy klin" ['the green triangle"] and were able to maintain not only their language but even their identity well into the 20th century despite the efforts of the Soviet authorities to russianize and russify them.

The identity of this several hundred thousand-strong community played a key role in the defeat of the White Russian forces in the Far East during the Russian Civil War because the Whites unlike the Reds refused to promise to respect the right of the Ukrainian nation to self-determination.

Soviet researchers, émigré historians like Ivan Svit, and American scholars like John Stephan pointed out that many residents in the Far East retained their Ukrainian identity even when under pressure from the Soviet authorities they learned Russian and declared themselves to be ethnic Russians.

(In the mid-1980s, in a move few now recall, the United States broadcast to the region from Japan in Ukrainian, the only time in the history of US international broadcasting to the Soviet Union when the US broadcast to a region in a language different than the one the Soviet government declared was the language of the titular nationality.)

And in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, some in the Ukrainian parliament called for the recognition of the Zeleniy klin as Eastern Ukraine, a proposal that went nowhere but did call attention to the millions of people in the Russian Federation who continued to define themselves as Ukrainians even if they had to declare something else.

Now, this anniversary of the formation of the Green Triangle is likely to call the attention not only of many in Moscow and Kyiv but of analysts in the West that Ukrainian national identity is stronger than many have thought and that Russian national identity for many, except when supported by a strong state, may very well be weaker.