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Abstract
Euromaidan and the subsequent Russian military intervention brought about a perceptible change in ethnonational identifications of Ukrainian citizens. Based on three nationwide surveys from various years, the present article seeks to measure this shift and explore its underlying factors and mechanisms. My analysis reveals considerable changes in ethnolinguistic identifications, practices of language use, and preferences regarding language policies of the state, which can be seen as a kind of bottom-up de-Russification, a popular drift away from Russianness. At the same time, I demonstrate that changes in identifications by nationality and native language are related to changes in the perceptions of these categories; that is, that they should be conceptualized as measuring people’s perceived belonging to both ethnic groups and civic nations. In other words, as people are shedding their Russianness in favor of Ukrainianness, they are also changing the meaning of being Ukrainian.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Funding
The 2012 survey was made possible by a grant awarded to me by the Shevchenko Scientific Society in the USA from the Natalia Danylchenko Fund. The 2014 survey was conducted thanks to a grant by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta from the Stasiuk Family Endowment Fund. The 2017 survey was funded from a grant that the Research Initiative on Democratic Reforms in Ukraine (RIDRU) received from the Kule Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Alberta.
Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to this issue’s editors and all participants in a special draft-discussion workshop at the Centre for East European and International Studies in Berlin on 22 September 2017 for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of the article.
Notes
1. The insistence on clear-cut categories arguably reflects the general purpose of the census to ensure “that everyone is in it, and that everyone has one – and only one – clear place” (Anderson Citation1991, 166).
2. A few studies examined perceptions of “what makes someone a Ukrainian?” (Wilson Citation2002) or “who belongs to the Ukrainian nation?” (Shulman Citation2004) and found that criteria such as consciousness of oneself as a Ukrainian, citizenship of the Ukrainian state, and respect for its laws and institutions were more important to the respondents than ethnic or linguo-cultural characteristics. However, such unspecified Ukrainianness was not explicitly equated with Ukrainian nationality and could be seen as a “subjective” alternative to that “objective” characteristic, while the (civic) nation could be seen as encompassing people of various (ethnic) nationalities, a view that public discourse indeed reflects (Kulyk Citation2017a).
3. Although the three surveys originally had samples of roughly equal size, with 2029, 2035, and 2040 respondents, respectively, the aforementioned truncation reduced the effective number of respondents in the 2012 survey to 1773 and in the 2014 one to 1868. It is worth mentioning that due to this truncation, survey figures in this article differ somewhat from those in my earlier publications based on the first two surveys.
4. To establish the significance of diachronic changes, I created a binary variable for each value of each analyzed characteristic (e.g. Ukrainian nationality or both Ukrainian and Russian native language) and examined the significance of differences between its values for each survey in both 2012–2014 and 2014–2017 pairs. As these functions are far from normal, I used a non-parametric method of comparing means, namely the Mann–Whitney U-test.
5. The acceptance of such mixed identifications is an important difference of the surveys from censuses, which reflects the two instruments’ different balances of analytical and political uses.
6. This hypothesis accords with micro-evidence of Odesa residents interpreting their newly developed Ukrainian identification as “having gained consciousness of [themselves] and thereby understanding that [they were] Ukrainian” (Polese and Wylegala Citation2008, 805).
7. This divergence was particularly noticeable among the younger generations, which tended to identify more strongly than older ones with the Ukrainian nationality and language (and be more supportive of state policies promoting them), while being more Russian-speaking in their language practice (Kulyk Citation2007, Citation2014).
8. At the same time, it may turn out that the use of scales actually helps the respondents to dodge the choice by locating their preferences somewhere in between, as Onuch and Hale (Citation2018) suggest. Further research is needed to draw a conclusion on this issue.
