How Russian is Ukraine?

By Walter Kish

I  was analyzing some Ukrainian census statistics the other day and made some interesting observations.

Of course, the most talked about and controversial population statistics in Ukraine invariably are those related to nationality and language. In virtually every election since Ukraine’s independence, the parties and pundits invariably make political hay over the prominence of Russians and the Russian language in the Ukrainian national space.

On the one side are the Ukrainian nationalists who decry the dominance of Russian in day-to-day life throughout most of the country, and they demand aggressive pro-Ukrainian language support policies. On the other side, the vocal and financially endowed Russian minority demands equal status for the Russian language in all aspects of Ukrainian life. The foreign media, mostly ignorant of the facts, tend to divide Ukraine almost equally in two: a Russian east and a Ukrainian west. On top of it all, of course, big northern neighbour Russia still has designs on re-absorbing its former colony into the Great Russian fold, with most Russians still freely airing their perennial claim that Ukrainian simply doesn’t exist either as a distinct language or as an autonomous nationality.

So what are the facts? Well, according to the last official government census of 2001, 77.8 per cent of Ukraine’s population identified themselves as Ukrainian by nationality, as opposed to 17.3 as Russian. As for native language, 67.5 per cent claimed Ukrainian as their mother tongue versus 29.6 per cent who designated Russian. This is hardly the equal divide perceived by most foreigners.

Since the last census in 1989, there has been an increase of 2.8 per cent in Ukrainian and a 3.2 per cent decrease in Russian. From one point of view, these statistics and trends are encouraging for the Ukrainian side, yet from a more pragmatic perspective, one should note that more than three-quarters of Ukraine’s mass media (television, radio, newspapers, videos, magazines and book publishing) are in the Russian language, and most business and government activity is still conducted in Russian as well. As a result, actual usage of Russian is far higher than any of the language or nationality statistics tend to indicate. Until the actual usage of Ukrainian more closely approximates its statistical distribution across the country’s population, the nationalists have good cause to ask for preferential encouragement for the Ukrainian language.

As a side note, there is a strong movement among nationalist forces in Russia to reclaim Crimea as their own, noting that it is overwhelmingly Russian linguistically and ethnically, and that its transfer to Ukraine in the 1950s by Khrushchev was an administrative expediency and not justified politically.

An examination of the facts makes such assertions questionable. The 2001 census showed that 58.3 per cent of Crimea’s population was Russian, against 24.3 per cent Ukrainian and 12.5 percent Tatar, with a smattering of other nationalities including Armenians, Belorussians, Jews and others. True, the majority is Russian, but it is hardly overwhelming. In addition, the proportion of Russians in the Crimean population is declining – from 65.6 per cent in 1989 to the current 58.3 per cent. This is in large part due to the fact that Crimean Tatars have over the past decade been returning from exile in significant numbers. One should remember that until the Second World War, the majority of the population in Crimea was Tatar and not Russian. It was Stalin’s wholesale deportation of the Tatars to the Far East during the war that changed the ratios so significantly. Further, at current trends, Russians will be in a minority in Crimea within a decade.

Even in the so-called Russian heartland of Eastern Ukraine, the proportion of Russians is not as large as most people either claim or believe. In Donetsk, the ratio is 56.9 per cent Ukrainians, 38.2 per cent Russians; in Luhansk it is 58 per cent Ukrainians and 39 per cent Russians; in Zaporyzhia it is 70 per cent Ukrainians and 24.7 per cent Russians; in Kharkiv it is 70.7 per cent Ukrainian and 25.6 per cent Russian. In fact, the only places in Ukraine where ethnic Russians are in a majority are in Crimea, as mentioned earlier, and in the city of Sevastopol where they constitute 71.6 per cent of the population, largely due to the presence of the local Russian naval base.

So how Russian is Ukraine?  Well, ethnically and linguistically they are a small but significant minority. Unfortunately, for the time being, they wield a disproportionate and undue influence on the affairs and especially the cultural life of this nation.