Serhii Plokhy
speaker
375 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2024
last heard Mar 2024
Serhii Plokhy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And Donbass is a classical rust belt, and we know what happens with the cities that were part of the first or second wave of industrialization in the United States and globally. We know about social problems that exist in those places. Donbass is probably the most dramatic and tragic case of implosion of the Rust Belt, with the mines not anymore producing at the acceptable price.
The coal that they used to produce is people losing jobs. with the politicians looking for subsidies as opposed to trying very unpopular measures of dealing something and bringing new money and new investment into the region. So all of that became part of the story that made it easy for Russia, for the Russian Federation to destabilize the situation.
We have interviews with Mr. Gherkin, who is saying that he was the first who pulled the trigger and fired the shot. In that war, he became the Minister of Defense in the Donetsk People's Republic. You look at the prime minister, he is another person with Moscow residency permit.
So you see key figures in those positions at the start and the beginning, not being Russians from Ukraine, but being Russians from Russia and Russians from Moscow, closely connected to the government structure and intelligence structure and so on.
So that is the start and the beginning, but the way how it exploded, the way it did, was also a combination of the economic and ethnocultural and linguistic factors.
What we see, this is certainly the argument. This is certainly the argument. And a pretext, because what we see there is that there would be no, and there was no independent mobilization in Crimea either, in Crimea or in Donbass, without Russian presence.
Without Russian occupation, the fact of the Crimea, there would be no, and there was no before, at least in the previous five to six years, any mass mobilizations of Russians. There was none of such mobilizations in Donbas before Gherkin and other people with military with parts of military units showed up there. So it is an excuse. You've been to Ukraine.
You know that Russian language is not persecuted in Ukraine. If you've not been to Donbass or to the Crimea, it would be difficult to find one single Ukrainian school. Not that they didn't exist at all, but it would take quite an effort for you to find it, or sometimes even to hear Ukrainian language outside either of the institutions or the farmer's market. So that's the reality.
That's the reality that is clear, that is visible. So imagine under those conditions and contexts that someone is persecuting ethnic Russians or Russian speakers want to believe in something like that. One important precondition is never to step your foot in Ukraine.
Very roughly, before the start of the war in 2014, we can talk about parity between Russian and Ukrainian and also with, as you said, clearly Ukraine being a dominant language in the West and Russian being a dominant language on the streets, certainly in the East of the country. And then in between of that, to Poles, a number of these transitional areas.
And Ukraine, in my experience, and I visited a lot of countries, not all of them, and probably maybe I will be still surprised, but in my experience, This is the only truly bilingual country that I ever visited. I lived in Canada for a long period of time. There is Quebec and the rest. And in Ukraine, you can talk in either Russian or Ukrainian in any part of the country.
country, and you would be understood, and you would be responded in a different language with the expectation that you would understand. And if you don't understand, that means you don't come from Ukraine. That's the reality. The war and loss of the Crimea and partial loss of Donbass if it's major industrial areas, really shifted the balance toward mostly Ukrainian-speaking regions.
Also, what you see, and you clearly pointed to that, starting with 2014, even a little bit earlier, the younger generation chooses Ukrainian. as a marker of its identity. And that started in 2014, but we have a dramatic, dramatic shift after 2022. And on the anecdotal level, I can tell you that I speak to people who
be in Chernihiv at the time, this is east of Crimea, at the time of the Russian aggression and bombardment and so on and so forth, who had passive knowledge of Ukrainian but spoke all their life Russian. And they would speak Ukrainian to me and when I say, okay, why are you doing that? We know each other for decades and you used Russian. And he said,
I don't want to have anything in common with people who did that to us. There is a big, big push, of course, with this current war. Now, the question is whether this change is something that will stay or not. What is the future? Linguistic practices are very, very conservative ones.
And we at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute have a project called MAPA, Digital Atlas of Ukraine, and we were documenting and mapping different data in time. And what we noticed, a spike in the people's self-reporting of use of Ukrainian in 2014 and 2015 at the time of the start of the war when the threat was the most clear one. This is self-reporting.
That doesn't mean that people exactly do what they believe that they're supposed to do. And then return back to where it was by the year 2016 and 2017. So this dynamic can repeat itself. But given how long the war is going on, how big the impact, how big the stress is, and that the wave of the future is probably associated with younger people who are switching to Ukrainian.
So I would, my bet would be on Ukrainian language rising in prominence.
The idea is very conveniently presented already in the first paragraph, in the first sentences, really, of the article. where Putin says that for a long time I was saying that Russians and Ukrainians were one and the same people, and here is the proof. This is the historical, he develops his historical argumentation apparently with the help of a lot of people around him.
And he started to talk about Russians and Ukrainians being one and the same people one year before the start of the war in 2014. So in 2013, he was together with Patriarch Kirill on visit to Kiev, and there was a conference specifically organized for him in the Kievan Caves monastery, and that's where he stated that.
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