I was born and live in the Donetsk region. I am 46 years of age. I studied in Soviet schools and graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy at Lomonosov Moscow University. I have worked in schools, been held in prisons and camps, and worked in a factory. I currently work as a fourth-grade metal fitter and assembler.
I was taught, and I have taught, that man does not live by bread alone; that the meaning of life lies in doing good for people, in raising the material and cultural level of the people, in the search for truth, in the struggle for justice, national pride, and human dignity, and in a civic responsibility for everything that happens during my lifetime.
Who am I? What am I for? These questions have never left me. I have constantly pondered them, constantly searched and continue to search for answers.
Today, I think:
1) I am a Ukrainian. Not just an individual endowed with a certain appearance, the ability to walk on two limbs, the gift of articulate speech, the gift of creating and consuming material goods. I am a citizen of the USSR, and as a “Soviet person,” and, above all, as a Ukrainian, I am a citizen of the world—not as a rootless cosmopolitan, but as a Ukrainian. I am a cell of the eternally living Ukrainian people. Individual cells of any organism die, but the organism lives on. Individual people sooner or later die one way or another, but the nation lives on, for the nation is immortal.
“Love Ukraine, love it like the sun,
Like the wind, and the grass, and the waters.
In a happy hour and a moment of joy,
Love it in a time of adversity.”
— V. SOSIURA
I love my Donetsk region, its steppes, its ravines, its forest belts, its spoil tips. I also love its people, the tireless toilers of the land, of the factories, mills, and mines.
I have always loved it, and I love it today, it seems to me, in its time of adversity, of assimilation, of the indifference of my fellow Ukrainians to their national culture, even to their native language.
To love Ukraine and my Donetsk region as they were loved by T. Shevchenko, M. Drahomanov, I. Franko, V. Sosiura, V. Symonenko, B. Antonenko-Davydovych. I love it, as M. Yu. Lermontov, I. S. Turgenev, S. Yesenin, K. Paustovsky, and O. Solzhenitsyn loved Russia. I love it, and that I lack the skill and talent to glorify it further is not my fault, and I hope I will be forgiven for it.
2) I exist so that my people may live, so that its culture may be elevated, so that the voice of my people may worthily carry its part in the polyphonic choir of world culture. I exist so that my fellow Donbas natives may produce not only coal, steel, rolled metal, machinery, wheat, milk, and eggs. So that my Donetsk region may produce not only football fans, rootless academics, Russian-speaking engineers, agronomists, doctors, and teachers, but also Ukrainian specialists who are patriots, and Ukrainian poets and writers, Ukrainian composers and actors.
3) I am, apparently, a poor patriot, a weak-spirited man. Seeing the injustices done to my own people, the primitivism of people, and realizing the bitter consequences of the modern education and upbringing of children, the exclusion of millions of my kinsmen from the circle of cultural development, I content myself with satiety, with idle daydreams, with crumbs of culture just for myself. And I have neither the courage nor the will to actively fight for the fate of my dumb, browbeaten, downtrodden countrymen—the people of Donbas—for the flourishing of national culture in the Donetsk region, for the future.
It is not the fault, but the misfortune of ordinary people (that is, hardworking laborers and peasants), that by their will or with their tacit consent, the Ukrainian language and culture are being destroyed in the Donetsk region.
It is not a misfortune, but the fault of every intellectual, of everyone who has obtained a higher education and holds a position of authority, yet lives only to stuff his belly, indifferent as a log to the fate of his people, its culture, its language.
And should not the activities of the public education authorities, teachers, cultural institution workers, and all leaders in the field of assimilating millions of Ukrainians in the Donetsk region be classified as a crime? For such mass assimilation can only be called intellectual genocide.
V. I. Lenin, in various works on the national question, called those Russians who treated the development of national cultures and languages with contempt, imperialists, scoundrels raised in the spirit of the most vile boorishness, executioners, lackeys of Tsarism, and Great-Russian chauvinists. And he called representatives of the small nations oppressed by Russia, who sought to introduce the Russian language and culture to the detriment of their own, Great-Russian bullies.
The USSR Minister of Education wrote in the newspaper *Izvestia* on October 31, 1972: “A person of great culture, who is formed by the Soviet school, is distinguished above all by the richness of his oral and written speech, a true command of his native language” (Emphasis mine. — O.T.).
I am an internationalist by conviction. I wish freedom, national independence, material well-being, and cultural development for the Vietnamese, Indian, and Arab peoples, for the peoples of Africa, Asia, America, and all others. On this earth, there should be no starving, colonial, backward, or small nations. Let every people live on its own land, let it create culture and science to the best of its ability and share its achievements with all the peoples of the world. I want the Ukrainian people, and in particular its part—the people of Donbas—to contribute its mite to the treasury of world culture.
I want every person to be able to live in their homeland, to enjoy its riches (both material and spiritual), so that there are no foreign colonists or planters bringing their “superior” way of life, culture, language, civilization, industrialization, etc., to the native peoples. I want any citizen in any corner of the world to have the real right to say: “I am a son of my people, I live on my own land, my people have no need of masters or gendarmes in the form of a foreign state, another people, or a single individual.” So that everyone could say to any intruder who scorns his people, culture, and language: “You came here an uninvited colonist, your ancestors conquered my people (or, through vile intrigues, deceit, bribery, and promises, got on their backs), but the age of colonialism and national oppression is over. I am the master of this land. You scorn my people. Get off my land!”
Language is one of the main characteristics of a nation. Language is the foundation of culture. The native language is the people's most precious treasure. The native language is the foundation of intellect, the native language is the basis of patriotism. Every person must protect and develop their native language. When the language dies, the culture dies. When the culture dies, progress ceases, and history begins to be made by the Neros, Bismarcks, Mussolinis, Hitlers, Stalins, and Mao Zedongs. And what kind of history that is, everyone knows.
The fate of the Ukrainian language and culture in the Donetsk region will be the subject of these writings of mine. I will not cite quotes about the importance and role of the native language, about every person's right to national self-awareness, about the right to use one's native language in one's homeland. You know this no less than I do. I will only try to paint a true picture of this matter in the Donetsk region.
Sadness and dread fill the soul when one analyzes what one sees all around. A complete indifference to everything beautiful, sacred, human. Ukrainian theaters have closed, and no one mourns them. Youth amateur activities are reduced to playing the guitar, listening to electric musical instruments in a restaurant or on a dance floor, and recording on a tape recorder. People believe in almost nothing—neither in God nor in communion. Old and not-so-old traditions and rites have been forgotten; evening gatherings, carols, shchedrivky, and Kupala songs have disappeared. And what is left? Mindlessly sitting in front of the “blue screen,” going to the cinema (“to kill time”), the bottle and the endless conversations around it about football, earnings, motorcycles, lotteries, and cynical sexual anecdotes.
In male company, profanity thrives—regardless of age or family setting. Often, a son will curse at his father with an elaborate string of profanities and receive a response in the same vein. Among my current colleagues at work, there is a conviction that it is impossible to work without profanity. Engineers and bosses curse at workers, workers curse at bosses, they curse in front of women and children, because profanity has become a kind of adornment of speech (“for connecting words,” as my colleagues say). No one thinks about how to speak correctly, what language should be spoken. Everyone simply speaks “like everyone else” and about what “everyone” talks about. One speaks only so as not to be silent.
One of my fellow assembly workers described his life this way: “You finish your shift, come home, eat, play dominoes, watch TV, football, fool around with the wife, sleep, and then it all starts over again.” Others, after work, think about working on their garden plot, repairing, adding on, rebuilding, watering, sleeping, and then “it all starts over again.” Still others, after work, find some odd job “by contract” to earn money for a motorcycle, a car, a cooperative apartment... Or just for a bottle. At work, too, there are many different concerns. Getting nails, making some part for one's own motorcycle, or for a kinsman or neighbor for a bottle, getting paint, a plank of wood, grabbing a bag of coal, lime, salt, or something else. And not out of poverty, not out of greed, but only because you can't buy it in a store, and sometimes simply out of habit.
And what about people of intellectual labor, people with an education, the intelligentsia—what are their concerns? What do they do in their free time from work? I know the teaching profession best. They have notebooks to check, visits to the parents of underachieving students with requests to increase control (forcing them to do homework, forbidding them to go to the cinema or watch TV, not allowing them to read books outside the curriculum), household chores, domestic work, and “raising their ideological level and professional qualifications.”
As for raising the ideological level, this means, for example, studying the 4th chapter of the history of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), written by J. V. Stalin, for several decades. Studying independently and in circles, speaking at seminars or showing their notes to the propagandist. No one considers themselves to be at a sufficient ideological level; everyone studies, that is, they make plans, outlines, and reports. Raising one's qualifications means reading a journal in one's subject, methodological guides. For all this, too, plans for independent work are drawn up, and reports are made at methods meetings and associations. Probably no one would dare to say that he (or she) has already sufficiently raised his ideological level and professional qualifications and can work with children like a human being, read and think without an approved plan. Such a person would probably be taken for a madman or an enemy of the people.
One cannot do without household chores. There are no maids, because what would you pay them with? And it is not customary. A rural teacher cannot do without a household farm (garden, poultry, piglet), for where else would a rural teacher get vegetables, fruits, and meat? And without high art (theater, music), without literature, new ideas, travels, wanderings, etc., without knowledge of the language, it turns out that one can teach children excellently and bring them up wonderfully.
Agronomists have no free time at all. In the field from dawn till dusk, and at home there is only time to sleep. A similar situation with leisure time exists for many workers with irregular working hours.
For the technical intelligentsia and employees of research institutions, work often continues after hours, in particular, through discussions of production problems. The technical intelligentsia and scientists are busy reading numerous journals and newspapers, sitting in front of the “blue screen,” or at the chessboard... It is now fashionable to know everything in the world. What animals and birds live on the most remote island, how many Hitlers there were, all the versions of Hitler's death, sympathizing with the fate of Nikos Theodorakis and Angela Davis, knowing that there is even such a thing as bird's milk... Knowing everything. And for what purpose? The answer is always the same: “Well, of course! You have to keep up with events.” And, voting for a resolution like “Freedom for Angela Davis!,” “Freedom and independence for the people of Angola!” or “Freedom for Bangladesh!,” people with education, heads of enterprises or institutions, do not notice what is happening right next to them: their native language is dying, millions of people, including themselves and their own children, are being intellectually crippled. And no one ever raises these problems anywhere. Why? Due to a lack of knowledge? I do not think so. An inability to think logically? I don't believe it. Most likely, it is due to that all-knowingness, the massive flow of entertaining information, the inability to focus one's attention on a living, concrete matter, the indifference to the fate of one's own people.
It seems that today's intellectual squanders his energy and knowledge on stuffing his own belly and on pleasing bureaucrats and officials, to the ruin of his providers—the Ukrainian toilers of the hammer and sickle. It is hard to believe that any of the intelligentsia think that their scholarships, professorships, lecture halls, and laboratories were given to them, former students, by some coryphaeus of all sciences or a group of wise men. After all, everyone understands that this is the materialized labor of peasants, workers, and service sector employees. The contribution of Ukrainian laborers has been and remains perhaps the greatest in the entire USSR. And for the sacrifices that the Ukrainian working people have made (voluntarily or involuntarily—it makes no difference), the intelligentsia, including that of Ukrainian origin (you cannot call it Ukrainian, because Ukrainian culture, traditions, and language have become alien to it), pays them back with disdain and contempt.
Probably never before has the Ukrainian intelligentsia as a whole been so alien and detached from the working people (workers and peasants) as one can observe in our Donetsk region today.
The fate of the workers and peasants in Ukraine before the revolution was hard. They worked in the fields from dawn till dusk, gave birth to, fed, and raised 8–12 children, passing on the achievements of previous generations to their descendants. The work of the laborers was not easy either. I am not going to idealize the past, but it is a fact that the people did not live by bread alone; they created songs, dances, fairy tales, and legends, of which hundreds of thousands have been collected in our country. In the years of my childhood, evening social gatherings were still alive. On a quiet summer evening, you could hear the songs of girls and young men in my hamlet of Izhivka, and they reached my ears from neighboring villages (Klynove, Virolyubivka, Oleksiievo-Druzhkivka). As for work, today's collective farmers work no less, if not more. Work in the collective farm field or on the farm, on the household plot, with one's own livestock and poultry, going to the market, buying, acquiring, building... All this practically takes up all their time, and for intellectual life, even for rest, there is very little left. Workers generally expend less physical effort, but work, queues, and commutes also take up a lot of time, and so the cultural level, both in the countryside and in the city, is getting lower and lower: songs are not heard, except perhaps at weddings, christenings, or seeing someone off to the army after a drink. Palaces of culture and clubs only show movies and sometimes arrange dances. There are almost no young people in the villages. The village in the Donetsk region has already ceased to be Ukrainian; many newcomers have appeared. This is written about in newspapers and sociological studies, calling this process progressive, one of internationalization. I personally see nothing either progressive or international in this. It leads to a lowering of the level of culture, to the destruction of the age-old traditions of the people, to the corruption (and at times, perhaps, the complete destruction) of the Ukrainian language.
Perhaps I am unable to see the great shifts, the rise in the cultural level of the people, the collective responsibility, patriotism, and high moral qualities of the workers and intelligentsia? Perhaps I am looking at life through dark glasses? Many (countless) times I have questioned my observations and thoughts, looking for errors in my conclusions as laid out in these notes. And I could not find justification for what I saw, could not imagine a rosy future. Everything related to culture in today's life seems to me meaningless, absurd. And the future appears tragic and empty.
But maybe this is how it should be? (Every man for himself, and God, the congress, or the Plenum for all). Perhaps this is the logical path for the development of culture in the Donetsk region today? But no. It cannot be so.
Scientific workers constitute 10.4% of the entire Jewish population of the USSR, 3% of the Georgian, 2.1% of the Russian, 0.9% of the Ukrainian, and 0.8% of the Belarusian (from the book by V. Kychko, *Zionism—the Enemy of Youth*). What can these figures mean? That Belarusians are 13 times dumber than Jews and 2.6 times dumber than Russians? That Ukrainians are, correspondingly, 11.5 and 2.3 times dumber? Probably not. So how can this be explained?
I would explain it, based on my observations in the Donetsk region, by:
1) The siphoning of material resources from Ukraine;
2) The upbringing and education of Ukrainian children in the Russian language (through “native speech” and “native literature”);
3) The neglect of Ukrainian patriotic education due to the theory of a “single fraternal cradle,” the theory of “two native languages,” and the theory of the merger of “fraternal peoples into a single great Soviet people.”
I do not believe in the chosenness of any people, I do not believe in the greatness of peoples and languages, I do not believe in the merging of peoples, I do not believe that in 10, 100, or 600 years my Ukrainian people will cease to exist. As an internationalist, I sincerely wish the chosen people (the Jewish people), the great Russian people, and all other peoples of the world to live on their own land, to work for the benefit of their peoples, to increase the percentage of scientists to 15, 20, or 50%. Let every nation help other nations, including my Ukrainian nation, but not by means of the “internationalization” of the Donetsk region, not by merging nations, not by sending specialists from Leningrad or Novosibirsk to Donbas, while sending Ukrainian specialists to Kazakhstan or the Urals.
Before 1917, there were Russian, German, and Jewish schools in the Donetsk region. For example, in the Bakhmut uezd, there were 272 Russian schools, 54 Jewish schools, and 37 German schools. There was not a single Ukrainian one (according to A. I. Havoi's book *A Brief Historical-Geographical Description of the Bakhmut Uezd*, Bakhmut, 1906). After a short period of Ukrainization (1917–1934), a new wave of persecution began during the time of Stalin's cult of personality. The cult has supposedly been debunked and condemned, but its consequences regarding language and culture in the Donetsk region remain.
I believe in the industriousness, vitality, and creative abilities of my fellow Donbas countrymen. They have become indifferent to their native language and culture as a result of the top-down programmed mixing of people of different nationalities, the destruction and sending of a significant part of the Ukrainian intelligentsia far from Ukraine, the dispatch of specialists from other republics to the Donetsk region, and the spineless, faceless nature of the Ukrainian specialists who remained in their homeland. Millions of people cannot fail to awaken their curiosity, understanding, and then conscious work in the field of elevating their native culture, a sense of human dignity and national pride. I believe that such consciousness will inevitably come to my Donetsk region. And I would like this to happen as soon as possible. National facelessness is a disease far more severe than alcoholism, and it must be fought no less actively than alcoholism and hooliganism.
Every great writer cared for the purity of language and urged against using foreign words without necessity. Turgenev wrote: “The Russian language is so rich and flexible that we have nothing to take from those who are poorer than us.” Every Frenchman or Spaniard, Czech and Serb, Greek and Turk, etc., would say the same. I think the same about the Ukrainian language. Why, for example, “kruzhka” when we have “kukhol,” “kvarta,” “horniatko”; why “halstuk” when we have “kravatka”; why “kostior” when we have “bahattia,” “vohnyshche,” “vatra,” and so on.
The Russian language is not threatened with extinction; it can afford to borrow from other languages, sometimes awkwardly and inappropriately for its norms. For the Ukrainian language, this is death, because it loses its identity, which has been destroyed over hundreds of years by many colonizers, colonists, and assimilators.
The Ukrainian language is not an invention of bourgeois nationalists, not a Polish intrigue, not a result or manifestation of anti-communism. It is the language of a living 40-million-strong people. And, unfortunately, now, in an era of development of nations and national cultures, words that do not correspond to the norms of the Ukrainian language are often forcibly introduced. For example: “ploshcha,” “ploshchadka,” “protsent,” “botinky,” “lymon,” “deviat hodyn desiat khvylyn,” “kofe naturalne,” “nosky cholovichi,” etc., when we have “maidan,” “vidsotok,” “cherevyky,” “tsytryna,” “desiat na desiatu,” “kava,” “shkarpetka.” The struggle for the purity of the language for the Ukrainians of the Donetsk region, where there is an extraordinary diversity of incoming elements, takes on special importance and should become the basis for the struggle against assimilation.
All newspapers, including *Radianska Donechchyna*, publish a lot of material about the equality of peoples and languages, about the flourishing of nations and nationalities—both large and small. A particularly large number of them have been appearing in connection with the preparations for the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the formation of the USSR. But nothing appears about the shortcomings in the development of national culture and the Ukrainian language in the Donetsk region.
The foundation of any people's culture, I repeat, is its native language. The rich, colorful, melodious, and musical Ukrainian language, which the people carried through centuries of hardship, humiliation, decreed destructions, and contempt, now serves only a small percentage of people in the Donetsk region, and only for domestic use. The Ukrainian language has been completely forced out of universities and research institutions. It is not heard in enterprises, schools, or kindergartens in numerous cities. It is disappearing even in the villages. Is it possible to speak of flourishing culture under such conditions? Freedom and the cultural level of the people are the basis of progress, of a truly human life.
Leaving aside the problems of freedom, I will continue to describe the situation of my native language in the Donetsk oblast, as it is, in my opinion, extremely deplorable and critical.
In our republic, the state language is (according to the Constitution of the Ukrainian SSR and the USSR) Ukrainian. The language of communication, naturally, should also be Ukrainian. The Russian language is the language of interethnic understanding.
Under the tsars, without knowledge of the Russian language, a person could not and had no right to hold any state positions; they would not be appointed to a leadership position in an institution or at an enterprise, nor would they be admitted to school, because Russian was the language there. In the Russian Empire, only the Russian language was recognized as the state language, while all other languages (according to Purishkevich) were “dog dialects,” including Ukrainian. The revolutions of 1917 put an end to national oppression and opened the way for the development of the national languages and cultures of all peoples and nationalities of the former Russian Empire.
During its dominant position in the empire, the Russian language was widespread among non-Russians and served as a tool for destroying the “dog dialects.” Now, in the USSR, there is no single state language, there is no obligation to learn the Russian language (it is studied voluntarily). The Russian language is only a tool for an Estonian to understand an Armenian, or a Yakut a Moldovan. It is needed to save costs and not to translate a scientific work from Ukrainian into Kyrgyz or from English into the 100 languages of the peoples of the USSR, if that work is of interest to only 10–15 specialists in each nation. Knowledge of the Russian language allows for a quicker and broader acquaintance with the achievements in science, culture, and art of various, especially small, peoples of the USSR. The assertion that the Russian language is better, superior, greater, or mightier than Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Kyrgyz, or Avar is chauvinism. And such assertions are quite common in newspapers, on the radio, not to mention in everyday conversations, particularly here in the Donetsk region.
In the Donetsk region, as far as I know, the university and all other higher education institutions use the Russian language. Is this normal? Obviously not. Each individual has the right to choose their language and place of residence, but the language of a university, of higher education institutions, must be the language of the sovereign state, which is Ukraine, Estonia, Italy, or any other state.
In the Donetsk oblast, there are 2.7 million Ukrainians, 1.9 million Russians, 103 thousand Greeks, as well as Belarusians, Jews, Armenians, Tatars, and others. The Voroshylovhrad oblast has a similar national composition. But the Donetsk region is not a state, but a constituent part of Ukraine. The Russians and other peoples in it do not have the right to autonomy or to be a constituent part, like Quebec in Canada, or the Tatars, Udmurts, or Yakuts in the Russian Federation, or the Adjarians or Ossetians in Georgia, and so on. Russians and others should know the Ukrainian language, or at least tolerate, if not respect, the culture, traditions, and customs of the people among whom they live. Russian-speaking universities in the Donetsk region are a violation of the state's sovereignty. People who live in the Donetsk region and scorn the Ukrainian people can be compared to the colonists and planters who, for example, the Spanish or English were in America, India, and Australia in the 17th century, or the Germans, Bulgarians, and Greeks on the lands of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, including in the Donetsk region, by the grace of Catherine the Second in the 18th century.
National consciousness awakens first and foremost in the intelligentsia. The study of their people's past, ethnography, folklore, and literature begins. It continues with the opening of universities in the native language and concludes with the education of the entire people. This is how it was in the past for colonially dependent peoples: in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Ukraine. I would wish for such a course of history for the modern Donetsk region as well. And this is all the easier, since the official national policy in the USSR is aimed at the comprehensive development of nations and nationalities.
Therefore, in Ukraine, and in the Donetsk region in particular, higher education institutions should be Ukrainian-speaking. Universities should provide not only knowledge in some field of science or technology but also cultivate Ukrainian patriots, patriots of the Soviet Union, and humanists.
I am in favor of Ukrainian boys and girls studying in Moscow, Tbilisi, Riga, Paris, or London. Let them know different peoples, their languages, and cultures, and bring their achievements to their own people, as did T. Shevchenko, M. Lysenko, I. Franko, Rasul Gamzatov, Gandhi, Ho Chi Minh, and many other progressive figures of the Ukrainian and other peoples. They learned foreign, sometimes superior, cultures in order to bring their knowledge to their own people, to raise its cultural, socio-political, and scientific-technical level.
I am also in favor of Russians, Georgians, Vietnamese, and young men and women of other nations studying in Donetsk universities. This brings peoples closer, mutually enriches them. But foreigners in Donetsk universities should study in the Ukrainian language. Only then will they gain not only specialized knowledge but also get to know our people, its culture, its customs, and will carry their knowledge about Ukraine to their own peoples.
Only pitiful outcasts are indifferent to where they live and whom they serve. They are ready to sell their own mother for money. A true patriot, even when not living on his own land, serves his own people, feels its pains, wishes it immortality, and works for it to the best of his ability and means. A striking example of this is the Armenians all over the world, especially their intelligentsia.
It is impossible to imagine the English government or anyone else opening a French- or German-speaking university or higher education institution in London, an English one in Spain, or some non-Russian one in Moscow or Yaroslavl. But in the Donetsk region, all higher education institutions (I emphasize—all!) are Russian-speaking.
A specialist, in the course of 5–6 years of study in a foreign language, loses the remnants of his knowledge of his native tongue and is unable to speak at a scientific or technical meeting in his native language (he does not know the terminology). And often, even a doctor or a teacher cannot speak to their patients and students in their native language. Is this not a paradox? In the 20th century! In a nation that has a universally recognized thousand-year history and culture?!
Russian-speaking specialists kill the interest in the native language in those they lead, serve, and teach. Because of the Russian-speaking nature of specialists and leaders, most people get the impression that their native language is inferior and develop a desire to use exclusively the “superior” Russian language. And so “surzhyk” is born (a mix like “stulka,” “hrechka,” “khata,” “zhmenia;” using “khvirtka” instead of “kalytka;” “stavok” instead of “prud;” “kavun” or “kaun” instead of “arbuz;” “harbuz” instead of “tykva,” etc.). And there is no need to even mention the phonetics. Some are inclined to call such a “surzhyk” the Donbas language. A mechanical mixture of two fully formed and developed languages cannot live long, and the carriers of surzhyk—those who use it—have been, are, and will be ridiculous in the eyes of both a Ukrainian and a Russian. And in the spread of “surzhyk,” I repeat, the leading role belongs to the so-called Russian-speaking Ukrainian specialists.
One of the most difficult problems in almost all times and for all peoples has been the problem of adolescents. It is often spoken and written about, including in the Soviet press. The question is constantly raised: what to occupy teenagers with? How to organize their leisure time? How to involve them in socially useful work? How to prevent delinquency, hooliganism, and the like? The question is raised, but there is still no solution. Parents, school, the Komsomol, various committees, and the police are helpless. No less acute than in other areas, this problem stands in Donbas. So what are the reasons why teenagers are indifferent to learning, why there are so many idlers and hooligans among them? The main ones, in my opinion, based on observations in the Donetsk region, are:
1) A terrible mixture of people. Everyone brings their own traditions and morals (often of a low standard) to the Donetsk region. A complete indifference to the traditions, beliefs, moral norms, and language of the indigenous population—the Ukrainians. They go to Donbas, as a rule, people who are indifferent to our homeland, those who are looking for “long rubles,” a “free and good life.”
2) Formal learning and primitive upbringing of children, starting from the cradle. Children are mostly not hungry, they are dressed, but they are left with a vacuum in their souls.
3) Primitivism in adult life.
4) Formalism and bureaucracy in the work of children's and youth organizations.
5) The absence of ideals. Communism for children is a vague and distant ideal. For example, when someone asks me what it is, when it will be—I cannot say anything. Moreover, I do not know where to read about it. And what can be said about children.
6) The low prestige of intellectual professions (low pay, hard work, precarious position, alienation of the specialist).
Parents also think about social problems, silently and patiently endure injustice, queues, shortages, and speak about them perhaps only among themselves, or over a bottle. At the price of honor, conscience, deceit, with the help of a bribe, sometimes to the detriment of their closest ones, they obtain petty benefits (scarce goods), profitable (though shameful) positions or places. This is done in front of the children, and rarely does a child not grow a protest, even in school years, that cannot be expressed to parents, teachers, or the Komsomol leader. Fraud at home and on the street—and the hammering of bright ideals at school; boredom, primitivism, nausea in life—and a happy childhood in the movies, on the “blue screen”; philistinism and complete indifference to everything around—and heroism, self-sacrifice in literature, newspapers... Can such contradictions arouse enthusiasm, a desire for a feat, for serving the truth? After all, when real life problems are not discussed in the press, at meetings, in the classroom—the thought involuntarily arises in children: “Why study, when knowledge is for nothing, when a semi-literate worker has more benefits than an engineer or a teacher, when they stand next to each other in a queue and patiently, silently endure various injustices. So why study?” Children know and see that some parents in positions of authority obtain scarce goods not in a queue, not from resellers at the market, but in another way, “with home delivery.” Can this motivate active learning? No.
My generation, those who are now 40–50 years old, grew up and were brought up during the period of repressions against the intelligentsia, fear for their own lives and the lives of their loved ones, material shortages, war, post-war ruin, mass movements of huge numbers of people and entire nations. This hard time did not bypass the people of Donbas. Instead of creating good, people adapted to evil, sought to satisfy their stomach's needs, dreamed of how to survive, and gradually lost their national traditions, culture, and language. And such frightened, disillusioned, intellectually castrated people today are the parents, teachers, and mentors of children and youth.
A child's first book in school is the “Bukvar” (Primer). Having learned the letters, the child begins to read books like “Rodnaya rech'” (Native Speech), then “Rodnaya literatura” (Native Literature). But in the Donetsk region, it is “native” for only a third of the children. From the second grade, they begin to study the Ukrainian language. For the vast majority of children, it is their native language, but it is presented not as a native language, but as German, English, or any other foreign language that one can know haphazardly. For some reason, even in the primary grades of Ukrainian-language schools, there is no textbook called “Native Language,” but simply “Ukrainian Language.” The term “native language” has the rights of citizenship only in relation to the Russian language. Why?
To raise conscious citizens and patriots on a foreign language basis is the same as building a house on sand without a foundation. The building may collapse at the very beginning of construction or fall down after its completion, burying with its stones both those who will live in it and its neighbors.
Russian-language schools in the Donetsk region impoverish and rob children not only in terms of their native language but also in other respects, particularly intellectually. As a result of the dismissive attitude towards their native language, often the entire humanities cycle of basic sciences is despised, including the Russian language and literature. More worthy of attention, from the children's point of view, are often mathematics, physics, and chemistry, rather than literature, history, and geography.
Schooling should be conducted in the children's native language. This was advocated by all the great pedagogues of the world. Who has ever thought that it is better for children to learn in a foreign language? Now in Moscow, Leningrad, and other cities, there are special schools where English is the language of instruction. But not a single teacher in those schools will tell their students that the Russian language can be learned haphazardly, that one can not know it. I have heard that there are such special schools in Ukraine as well. Some subjects are taught in English, some in Russian, and Ukrainian is studied as a subject. How much will the graduates of such schools know of their native language? Probably very little, or nothing at all.
In ordinary secondary Russian-language schools, of which there are 90–95% or even more in the cities of the Donetsk region, children study the Ukrainian language for 9 years (in eight-year schools—7) and cannot speak or even read it, because there is no application for their native language on their native land. And this is already a tragedy. Ukrainians read the works of Ukrainian writers in Russian translation.