Officials Had a Year to Learn Ukrainian: The “Ukrainization” That Began in 1923

On August 1, 1923, in Kharkiv, the capital of Soviet Ukraine, a decision to change the language of government offices was signed. Officials already working in government offices were to learn both Ukrainian and Russian within a year; anyone who failed to do so would be dismissed unconditionally. New hires, too, were in principle required to know both languages.

The series of policies pursued by the Communist Party and government of Soviet Ukraine from the 1920s into the early 1930s is called “Ukrainization” (українізація). This article deals with a Soviet policy from about 100 years ago, distinct from independent Ukraine’s language policy. The current State Language Law is covered in our article on the 2019 State Language Law.

The Ukrainian Version of the Soviet Union’s Broader “Indigenization”

The Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine (IEU), from the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS) at the University of Alberta, describes Ukrainization, in its entry “Ukrainization” (1993 print edition), as the Ukrainian version of the Soviet-wide policy of “indigenization” (коренізація, korenizatsiia). It also states that, since Ukrainians were the largest non-Russian ethnic group in the Soviet Union, indigenization went further there than in the other republics.

According to the Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine’s (ESU) entry on “Korenizatsiia” (written by Yurii Shapoval, 2014), this policy was endorsed at the 10th (1921) and 12th (1923) congresses of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), and the term “korenizatsiia” became established after the 12th congress. It was a policy built around cultivating party and state cadres from local ethnic groups, education in the native language, and the publication of ethnic cultures. The IEU cites continued rural resistance and the party’s own recognition that Soviet nationality policy was failing as the background, and writes that indigenization’s aim was to “give an appearance of national legitimacy” to the Soviet system in the non-Russian republics.

The Two 1923 Decisions

The specifics of Ukrainization were set out in two decisions issued by the Soviet Ukrainian government in the summer of 1923. Both appear in issue No. 29, 1923, of the government’s official gazette, the Collection of Laws and Orders of the Worker-Peasant Government (Збірник узаконень).

The text of the August 1 decision consists of 26 items in all. Item 1 states that “the languages of all nationalities in Ukraine are equal”; Item 2 that citizens of any nationality may use their native language in dealings with state bodies; Item 3, citing the large number of Ukrainian speakers, designates Ukrainian as the language given priority in official communication; and Item 4 names Ukrainian and Russian together as the “most widely used languages.” In districts and towns where a national minority formed a majority, that minority’s language became the language of government offices (Item 6).

The provisions concerning officials were strict. New hires at state bodies were limited to people who knew both languages, and if someone without Ukrainian was hired as an exception, they were obliged to learn it within six months (Item 20). Those already employed were to learn both languages within a year (Item 21), and would be dismissed unconditionally if they failed to learn Ukrainian (Item 22). The People’s Commissariat of Education (equivalent to a ministry of education) was ordered to open Ukrainian-language courses for officials, both short courses of up to three months and longer ones of up to nine months (Item 25). The decision’s preamble also states that the requirement for officials to know Russian would remain in place.

According to the ESU, of the roughly 12,000 senior officials in party and state bodies in 1923, only 797 said they knew Ukrainian. In the 1926 census, of Soviet Ukraine’s population of just over 29 million, more than 23 million were Ukrainians, just over 22 million named Ukrainian as their native language, and about 4.5 million named Russian (ESU).

How It Played Out in the Capital, Kharkiv

All the decisions were signed in Kharkiv. According to the IEU, the writer Vasyl Blakytnyi became editor-in-chief of the government organ Visti VUTsVK (Bulletin of the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee). Oleksandr Shumsky, who became People’s Commissar of Education (equivalent to a minister of education) in 1925, took charge of Ukrainization and all cultural policy, and from 1927 Mykola Skrypnyk took over, rapidly Ukrainizing universities and other higher education. Writers’ organizations and the buildings of the capital are covered in our article on Kharkiv as the capital.

The IEU states that the share of the urban population that was Ukrainian rose, between 1923 and 1933, from 38% to 50% in Kharkiv, from 27% to 42% in Kyiv, from 16% to 48% in Dnipropetrovsk (today’s Dnipro), and from 7% to 17% in Odesa. The period of Ukrainization also coincided with the period of migration from villages to towns.

The Figures for Schools, Newspapers, Books, and the Party

Ethnicity and language were not the same thing. According to the IEU, as of January 1927, 52% of full and candidate members of the Communist Party of Ukraine were Ukrainian, but only 31% named Ukrainian as their native language. Among industrial trade-union members (1929), 48% were Ukrainian, 32% spoke Ukrainian at home, 43% could read Ukrainian, and 38% could write it.

There was also pushback. According to the IEU and ESU, Yuri Larin argued in 1925 that Ukrainization infringed on workers’ national rights, and in 1927 Grigory Zinoviev, then at odds with Stalin, denounced Ukrainization as a policy that helped the Petliurists. Shumsky, meanwhile, was attacked as having led a “nationalist deviation” under the party leadership (ESU).

The Reversal in the Early 1930s

According to the ESU, a decision on grain procurement issued on December 14, 1932, by the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party and the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR, while calling for Ukrainization to proceed “correctly,” simultaneously ordered a struggle against “Petliurists” and others, and this marked the end of Ukrainization. The IEU writes that the state-caused famine of 1932–33, the party purges, and the wide-ranging repression of Ukrainian cultural figures marked the end of Ukrainization (see our article on the Holodomor and our article on the “Executed Renaissance”).