Ukrainian, Russophone, (Other) Russian. Marco Puleri
not static but rather constantly fluid and unpredictably shifting.
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According to the last national census conducted in 2001,49 more than 130 ethnic groups live in the territory of Ukraine: among them, Ukrainians (77.8 per cent) and Russians (17.3 per cent) are the largest ones, while other major national groups are Belarusians (0.6 per cent), Moldovans (0.5 per cent), Crimean Tatars (0.5 per cent), Bulgarians (0.4 per cent), Hungarians (0.3 per cent) and Romanians (0.3 per cent). The official state language is Ukrainian (67.5 per cent of citizens indicated it as their mother tongue), but Russian (29.6 per cent) is still spoken by a large portion of the population.
Interestingly enough, “despite a decline in the population as a whole” and the insignificant migration rate of ethnic Russians to the Russian Federation, in 2001 “the number of people who declared their nationality as Ukrainian actually increased since the last Soviet census” (Stebelsky 2009: 77).50 This was first explained as the result of an “ethnic shift” in the self-identification of Russians, who now came to reidentify themselves as Ukrainians (Kuzio 2003). However, in his comparative analysis of the data reported in the last Soviet census in 1989 and the national one in 2001, Ihor Stebelsky (2009) reflected further on the reasons behind the controversial shift in self-identification among the population of Ukraine. He contested the categories used in the first Ukrainian national census, addressing the subtle nuances around the determination of ethnic and language-based identities in post-Soviet times. Stebelsky argued that in 2001, while many people re-identified as Ukrainians, most of them still declared Russian as their native language. He explained this discrepancy as the result of the Soviet nationalities policies, in which “the Soviet Union allowed for Ukrainian as a separate ethnicity, ←55 | 56→but continued to confer a much higher status on the Russian language and culture” (Stebelsky 2009: 78–79). This background led then to a situation where “many Ukrainians have adopted Russian as their preferred language, developed ‘multiple’ or ‘hybrid’ identities, and some (notably in Crimea) have become Russian in terms of their ethnic self-identification” (Stebelsky 2009: 79). Following these lines, Stebelsky (2009: 98) significantly emphasized that it was mainly “[s];ociopolitical perceptions of identity” that “probably played a significant role in the way people responded in 2001.” Most fundamentally, in post-Soviet Ukraine ethnic identity is no longer a legal category in Ukrainians’ internal passports: this suggests that, at the dawn of the 2000s, “the identification of non-Ukrainians as citizens of Ukraine” would emblematically imply a passage “to state or civic identity” (Stebelsky 2009: 80) rather than an ethnic one.
Accordingly, we can also grasp the complexity of the Russian–Ukrainian nexus through combining the ethnic criterion with the linguistic one: looking at contemporary Ukraine through these lenses, we can see three major groups in the country, that is, Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians, Russian-speaking Ukrainians, and Russian-speaking Russians (Arel, Khmel’ko 1996). Among these, throughout the last decades sociological research has emblematically reported that the last two groups do not represent a cohesive “community,” and that their identity/ies are much more fragmented than would be expected.51
As outlined in a study conducted by researchers at the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS), the definition of the ethnolinguistic structure of Ukraine can be fully comprehended only “when considering the phenomenon of individual bi-ethnicity” (Khmel’ko 2004: 15).52 According ←56 | 57→to surveys conducted throughout 1991–2003, Valerii Khmel’ko identified Ukrainian–Russian bi-ethnors as “the second largest ethnic group in Ukraine” (Khmel’ko 2004: 17). KIIS sociologists thus developed a “scale of bi-ethnicity,” which they projected over the territory of Ukraine:
The farther westward, the more monoethnic Ukrainians and the fewer Ukrainian-Russian bi-ethnors and monoethnic Russians we have. Conversely, the farther East and South, the fewer monoethnic Ukrainians, and the more Ukrainian-Russian bi-ethnors and monoethnic Russians […] among monoethnic Ukrainians the share of Ukrainophones is more than twice the share of Russophones, while among Ukrainian-Russian bi-ethnors, by contrast, the share of Ukrainophones is more than four time less than the share of Russophones.53 (Khmel’ko 2004: 18)
These results were corroborated by other studies undertaken throughout the first decades of the twenty-first century. According to comparative research on the citizenship identities of young people in the L’viv and Donbas regions conducted by Antonina Tereshchenko in 2005–2006, it appears that “only the Donbas region in the East shared the characteristics of the traditional borderland […] in particular, with respect to cultural hybridity and undecidability as regards people’s identification” (Tereshchenko 2010: 152). Moreover, the results of a 2016 survey, Changes in the Identity of Russians and Russophones in Ukraine (Zminy identychnosti Rosiian ta Rosiis’komovnykh v Ukraïni), further revealed the dynamic evolution of the idea of nation throughout the 2000s (see UCIPR 2016). As analyst Iulia ←57 | 58→Kazdobina concludes, “a number of Russian speakers started developing their Ukrainian civic identity long before the start of the current Russian aggression [that is, the war in East Ukraine starting in 2014],” and today, “it seems that for Russian speakers, bilingualism is a way to preserve their identity while at the same time integrating into the Ukrainian political nation, where Ukrainian is gradually replacing Russian as the lingua franca” (Business Ukraine 2017).54
The cases reported above suggest that throughout the last decades there has not been a real and static dividing line, based on the ethnolinguistic traits of the population, between the generally assumed social collectivities of “Ukrainians” and “Russians,” and “Russian speakers” and “Ukrainian speakers” in Ukraine. Indeed, this dividing line was fluid and subject to hybridizing trajectories and intersections with other identity markers. In an attempt to grasp the fluid character of post-Soviet identity affiliations, Peter W. Rodgers in 2008 recognized the regional category, rather than the ethnolinguistic one, as a suitable parameter for describing contemporary Ukraine. In his study Nation, Region and History in Post-Communist Transitions: Identity Politics in Ukraine, 1991–2006, Rodgers provided a tentative model for describing the regional composition of contemporary Ukraine: it was conventionally articulated in ten regions, according to the combination of linguistic, cultural and historical affiliations. He distinguished the Crimean Peninsula from other regions, as being “the only area of Ukraine, with an ethnic Russian majority”—according to the 2001 national census (58.5 per cent)—and the “least supportive of Ukraine’s state independence” (Rodgers 2008: 56), possessing a unique degree of political autonomy in the country until the contested annexation to the Russian Federation in March 2014. Then, he identified a southern region, including the areas of Kherson, Odesa and Mykolaïv. These territories, which were absorbed as new industrial centres into the Russian Empire in the late eighteenth century with the status of the province of “New Russia” ←58 | 59→(Novorossiiskaia guberniia), are characterized by a greater diffusion of the Russian language and culture, but “the region today is less urban, and ethnically Russian than other parts of Ukraine to the east” (Rodgers 2008: 57).55 Rodgers further identifies the north-central region (Poltava, Kirovohrad, Cherkasy, Kyiv, Chernihiv and Sumy), acknowledging its historical specificity: this was part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth until the mid-seventeenth century, and includes the historical lands that were inhabited by Cossacks. It passed then under Russian control with the Treaty of Andrusovo (1667), which ended the Russian–Polish war. As Rodgers (2008: 57) notes in his classification: “Although these areas were under Moscow’s control for a similar period of time as lands to the east and in the south, they have always retained a more ‘Ukrainian’ political outlook.” Significantly, even if in the late Imperial and Soviet