if before 1991 (the date is, of course, conditional) the Russophone writer of Ukraine [russkoiazychnyi pisatel’ Ukrainy] thought to be part of a well-defined system, then now, in order to preserve his own identity, he has to realise his own particular position in relation to the literary processes in Russia and Ukraine […] Everything new in art is created as usually in marginal areas, “on the margins” of the ossified official culture. There is no other way. Otherwise, the only alternative can be assimilation, or “internal emigration.” The Ukrainian school of Russian literature (or the Russian school of Ukrainian literature?) has not taken shape yet, and, probably, will not take shape soon, but, nevertheless, it will arise.68 (Nazarenko 1998)
Okara’s and Nazarenko’s positions reflect the two main directions of the cultural debate in the 1990s.69 Language as an instrument of artistic ←69 | 70→expression and its social role in the new post-Soviet nation are the main issues around which the alternative interpretations of the position of the Russophone phenomenon within the frame of the Ukrainian national canon took shape. There is no doubt that the debate intensified especially in light of the unprecedented freedom and opportunities enjoyed by cultural actors in the national literary arena in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse. As retraced by Ihor Kruchyk in his 2014 article “Children of a Soviet Widow” (“Dity radians’koї vdovy”), “under the new circumstances some writers founded their own publishing houses or journals,”70 and much more often than in Soviet times we witnessed the publication of Russian-language anthologies and the birth of literary prizes and festivals. Broadly speaking, on the one hand in Ukraine, together with “the possibility of publishing,” “the construction of de-ideologised hierarchies” in the literary field became conceivable; on the other in Russia, “magazines and publishing houses began to print ‘new Russians’ from Ukraine much more intensely than it was in Soviet times” (Kruchyk 2014).71
It was throughout the 2000s, then, that the highly controversial internal political debate in Ukraine, together with the deterioration of social and political relations with the Russian Federation under Vladimir Putin, further polarized the intellectual community around the language issue. Whereas at the dawn of the new millennium Taras Kuzio could observe how the Ukrainian “post-Soviet nation- and state-building project” was “therefore bound up with a debate over how this identity will be constituted and in what manner its neighbours will be ‘Others’ ” (2001: 358), it was still language that represented “an important aspect of creating difference for the ‘Self’ in the relation to the ‘Other’ ” (2001: 348). Within this frame, in the national intellectual and political context we gradually witnessed the formation of “language ideologies” (Kulyk 2007), marking conventional boundaries between the Ukrainophone and the Russophone discourses:
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I distinguish these discourses on the basis of respective language ideologies, which represent the language processes of Ukraine as a relationship of interaction/struggle between the two main languages and their language groups (or rather ethnical-language, following the traditional tie between language and ethnicity, and the absence of a clear distinction between ethnic and language identities in Ukrainian society), and I define them as Ukrainophone [ukrainofonnyi] and Russophone [rusofonnyi] […] The characterising trait of the Russophone and Ukrainophone discourses is their orientation in defense of the interests of their “own” group at the expense of the “other’s” interests.72 (Kulyk 2007: 300)
Thus, the language debate came to be not only “about ‘form’, but also about ‘content’ ” (Zhurzhenko 2002b: 17). As Zhurzhenko emphasized (2002b: 17), the language debate involved broader cultural perspectives on the content of the national identity, especially whereby gradually “[i];n independent Ukraine a hierarchy of cultures (and languages) has emerged and Ukrainian has turned out not to be dominant.” The contested ideologization of culture in the internal political debate led historical memory and language categories to acquire a conventional social relevance, reflecting the interests of competitor groups on a regional and a national scale (Zhurzhenko 2002b; Bilaniuk 2005; Moser 2013). Thus, even if the country’s cultural policies were generally “flexible and gradualist” and “the identities and cultural practices associated with them” have been “very fluid” (Giuliano 2019), it was paradoxically after the so-called “revolutionary cycles” in 2004–2005 (“Orange Revolution”)—and then in 2013–2014 (“Euromaidan Revolution”), as emphasized by Minakov (2018: 61), that “the Ukrainian political space converted itself into a ‘conservative situation’ ”. In this ideological field “created by binary oppositions,” it is the state that offers “value orientations for sociopolitical interaction” (Minakov 2018: 58). Deprived of space for ideological opponents, “ongoing political antagonism in Ukraine has come to characterize relations […] between ←71 | 72→ethno-linguo-cultural groups” (Minakov 2018: 62) supporting two different types of conservatism: “one calling for the preservation of ‘national statehood’, and another one characterized by a desire to protect Soviet ‘achievements’ and to overcome ethnicity” (Minakov 2018: 62). The ideological field has thus been alternatively appropriated and used by regional financial–political groups (see Minakov 2019) while promoting their political campaigns, creating the ground for polarization and contestation over opposite identity projects in the Ukrainian public debate. Thus, the Orange Revolution—a series of civil protests taking place primarily in Kyiv from November 2004 to January 2005, which brought about the decision to annul the victory of Viktor Ianukovych in the run-off vote of the 2004 presidential elections following allegations of electoral fraud—first “opened the Pandora’s box of identity politics and deepened regional cleavages in Ukraine” (Zhurzhenko 2014a: 255). On the one hand, Viktor Iushchenko’s Our Ukraine appropriated and rehabilitated Ukrainian nationalism in the “essentialized” version of Galicia in the West, and on the other Viktor Ianukovych’s Party of Regions in the “electoral fortresses of Donetsk and Luhansk drew on neo-Soviet symbols and narratives” (Zhurzhenko 2014a: 255). Until 2014, as Gorbach (2019) emphasized, “this kind of polarization was a game for two players,” which “used this tool to easily harvest votes in their respective, more or less equally sized, regions.”
It was not by chance that in 2011 Abel Polese, in his study on language and identity in Ukraine, could still wonder: ‘Was it really nation-building?’ (Polese 2011).73 State interference in cultural processes made harsher the struggle in the domestic sphere, which came to have a rather contradictory ←72 | 73→pattern in terms of state-led policies on the eve of Euromaidan. Thus, if under Leonid Kuchma, the second president of Ukraine (1994–2005), we witnessed an ambivalent course of national cultural policies,74 it was in the aftermath of the Orange Revolution that under Iushchenko (2005–2010) the new political elite “sought to build an inclusive civic identity but put it on a strong Ukrainian ethnocultural basis” (Kulyk 2016: 593). The tension then reached its zenith during Viktor Ianukovych’s presidency (2010–2014), when in July 2012 the new law On the Fundamentals of the State Language Policy (Pro zasady derzhavnoï movnoï polityky)—n. 5029-VI, submitted by deputies Serhii Kivalov and Vadym Kolesnichenko, was passed. Eventually, this new bill on the protection of minority languages secured the official use of Russian in many regions “not alongside but instead of Ukrainian” (Riabchuk 2015: 147).75 Riabchuk’s commentary on the passing of the law clearly reveals the impact of the controversial cultural policies adopted under Ianukovych’s presidency on the intellectual debate:
The bright idea of European bilingualism has been rejected by Ukrainophones because they do not believe it is viable in a lawless post-Soviet country, quite reasonably suspecting that any bilingualism here would be Soviet, rather than European. And Russophones are not interested in European bilingualism because they still enjoy the Soviet-style bilingualism that suits their needs much better. All they need is merely to legitimize their right to ignore Ukrainian and to preclude any possibility of changes. The Kivalov-Kolesnichenko bill is just one of many attempts to ensure the dominance of one group over another. (Riabchuk 2012)
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The proliferation of commentaries and interviews in which contemporary writers and literary critics debated the language issue, in the period shortly preceding the outbreak of the Euromaidan protests in November 2013,