“And finally, I was asked the most essential thing – when have you decided to write in Ukrainian?” – the Ukrainian novelist Taras Prokhasko shared his frustration at the interview by a German reporter, short after the full-scale invasion. “How I do explain to them that for all my life, not me, nor thousands of other litterateurs (even hopelessly Soviet) haven’t written a word in non-Ukrainian?”

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If Taras encounters such questions in what was always Ukrainian-speaking Ivano-Frankivsk, what is there to say about people in the East? Even some Ukrainians have no idea that at the very Russia frontier many people never ceased to speak Ukrainian and foster their national heritage. As for Russophones, they in recent years, and especially since 2022 switched to Ukrainian en masse, tired of disclaiming assumed political sympathies for the northern neighbor. The assumption reflects Russia’s narrative and state ideology where every Russophone belongs to the “Russian World.” Eventually, for the majority in Ukraine, the “language of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky” (“Tolstoyevsky” as Ukrainians now call it) was hardly a choice but a result of forced Russification. It lasted for centuries, served imperial subjugation, and every Ukrainian experienced it, at least in mild forms, as myself.

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Kyiv, 1980, I am a 5-year-old troublemaker for my parents.

 

First, I refused a speech therapist to correct my burring “r,” a perennial phonetic Jewish insignia. One Jewish girl in a kindergarten later taught me some speech exercise, and it forever disappeared. My parents sighed with relief. Antisemitism in the Soviet Union is a separate matter. 

 

Second, I asked suddenly – still don’t know where I got that idea – to transfer me to a Ukrainian-language kindergarten. “A nationalist has grown!” cried my stepmother seeing the key to family welfare in keeping away from politics.

 

My claim indeed might sound political. In the earlier decade, my Ukrainian schoolteacher was imprisoned for publicly reciting Taras Shevchenko’s poetry. Others were detained for

bringing flowers to his monument. I was stubborn and eventually sent to a Ukrainian kindergarten. But school had to be Russian. Among the five neighborhood schools, the only Ukrainian-language one was the weakest, with lean prospects for its graduates. A standart education policy in Kyiv.

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Despite the aspiration, I was not able to actually speak Ukrainian until age 14 when I went to a summer camp in the west of Ukraine. There, I and several kyivan kids escaped to pick some mushrooms. From the forest on the meadow a man emerged, eyes burning,

mustaches sticking, and spoke to us. We stood frozen, not grasping a word. But having read a lot of folklore, I recognized in him Oleksa Dovbush, an 18 c. liberation movement leader, memorized in legends akin to Robin Hood. All the plugs in my brain crashed, and I understood – he just asked what time it was. Since then, I have spoken fluent Ukrainian. I simply could not stand the simulacrum we studied in Kyiv, rewritten and sounding as a mock version of Russian. A coffin, our poetess Lina Kostenko wrote, that Ukrainian could never fit into, because “They’re stupid. They took the measure from your humiliations – not from your distinction.”

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Russification took different forms. The most tragic is known as the 1933-34 Holodomor, an artificial famine Stalin imposed on the countryside persistent in retaining Ukrainian culture. Harvests and livestock confiscated; villages besieged by the Red Army. No food whatsoever. There were cases of cannibalism. My grandma remembered a depleted, half-dead skeleton once having appeared in Kyiv. They tried to escape and reach cities where very few people knew about the ongoing genocide that took about 4 million Ukrainian lives.

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Besides the regular imperial reasons, Russia was so obsessed about eliminating Ukrainian heritage because, I believe, the culture oppressed throughout 400 years, assumes a mysterious dominance over the oppressor.

 

As it happened in case of Volodymyr Ivasyuk. His songs aired on the radio might have inspired my idea to speak Ukrainian. He started songwriting and gained first popularity while still in school. In a couple of years, every band in the USSR, and many abroad, played his songs. In the 1970s, they broke through the only allowed in the USSR official “pop” that nurtured patriotic feelings to the boundless Soviet motherland. Western music was, naturally, forbidden, and its fans hunted down.

 

And here appears Ivasyuk. Ukraine became a trend debunking the fostered stereotypes of a rustic, “breadbasket of the USSR,” land. In the 1960s, she experienced a renaissance in poetry, literature, cinema, and music. Volodymyr Ivasyuk expanded this effect to the mass audience. Soon after “the sixtiers” got under repressions. Yosyf Zisels, a dissident, human rights activist, and now co-chair of VAAD (Association of Jewish organizations and communities of Ukraine), explains that the KGB itself used to organize folk or literary clubs to attract “nationalists” and subsequently arrest all those Ukrainian poetry lovers. Ivasyuk lived under KGB surveillance, but they couldn’t simply arrest him, I guess, due to his enormous popularity. Then he vanished on 24 March, 1979. On April 18 two random passer-byes found his body in a noose in the Brukhovytsky forest near Lviv. He was 30 years old.

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“The established cause of death of citizen Ivasyuk was self-hanging. Rumors about other circumstances of V.M.’s death is a fiction,” a newspaper wittily entitledFree Ukraine reported. It was the KGB’s handiwork, people believed, whispering horrific details: a mutilated body, pierced eyes. On the day Volodymyr vanished, two guys saw him being shoved into a car. They were never called as witnesses: both found dead soon thereafter. 

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The case was closed. In an independent Ukraine, the case became an indicator of Russian influence on Ukraine’s politics: under pro-Ukrainian presidents it was reopened, under pro-Russian closed. The last time it was resumed was in 2014, after the Revolution of Dignity.

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It’s yet ongoing. On the last update in 2021, the investigationresults established that Volodymyr was hanged already dead.Ivasyuk’s funeral turned into a quiet mass protest with flowers instead of posters, and handwritten Ukrainian poetry slipped under. Police removed them, the next day people piled new armfuls. That wrestling with the flowers lasted for a month.

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Chervona Ruta, “The Red Rue,” was his most popular song. A legend of a yellow flower once a year flourishing red, making one who finds it always succeed in love, fascinated Volodymyr in his teens. He set out to travel throughout the mountains, to the highlanders, and found more folk tales about it. And perhaps the flower, or how he made everyone love him.