02/09/2003 | ВІЙ

Даний текст, написаний таким собі Олегом Варфоломеєвим, який "базується у Києві".
Текст взятий із базованого у Чехії англомовного сайту "Transitions Online", який подає інформацію про центральну та Східну Європу.
В даному тексті пан Варфоломеєв пробує дати своє власне пояснення результатів перепису населення в Україні.

Notes from Kiev:
Where Have All Those Russians Gone?
 
They haven't gone to Russia and they haven't stopped speaking Russian. For natural or not quite natural reasons, 3 million Russians now say they are Ukrainians.
by Oleg Varfolomeyev
KIEV, Ukraine--Imagine a country whose largest ethnic minority shrinks by 27 percent over a decade while no decline in the dominant ethnic group is recorded. Is it war, genocide, pogroms? Are neighboring countries flooded by hordes of refugees? No, nothing like this has happened to Ukraine, a country proud to be one of the few former Soviet republics to have been spared war or ethnic conflict over the past decade.
Something, though, must have happened to about 3 million of Ukraine's ethnic Russians, if preliminary data from the Ukrainian census released a month ago is true. Between the last Soviet census in 1989 and the first Ukrainian count in December 2001, the number of ethnic Russians in Ukraine dropped from about 11.3 million to 8.33 million, while their share of Ukraine's (shrinking) population dropped from 21.7 percent to 17.3 percent. Over the same period, the share of ethnic Ukrainians grew by 5.1 percentage points, to 77.8 percent.
There has been no mass migration of Ukrainian Russians to Mother Russia, even though living standards are higher there. Indeed, it is mostly ethnic Ukrainians from economically depressed western Ukraine who have been migrating en masse to neighboring Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and further west in search of jobs.
Ukrainian nationalists offer the following explanation to the Russian puzzle, which seems to coincide with the official point of view: Those millions of "missing" Russians were not Russians at all, but Ukrainians who used to identify themselves with the ethnic group that dominated the Soviet Union--Russians--either for career considerations or worse, due to assimilation fostered by the Soviet regime. Now, in an independent Ukraine, those Ukrainians can freely state who they are.
But were this true, it would be hard to explain why the number of people identifying themselves with other ethnic groups, traditionally numerous in Ukraine, also shrank dramatically over the decade: Belarusians by 40 percent, Poles by 35 percent, Moldovans by 20 percent, Bulgarians by 12 percent, and Jews by almost 80 percent (true, many Jews emigrated, but was it really such an exodus?). If it were so convenient to be Russian in the Soviet Union, why did those people call themselves Belarusians, Poles, Moldovans, Bulgarians, and Jews in 1989, but preferred to "become" ethnic Ukrainians 12 years later?
The reality is that ethnic minorities are being assimilated in Ukraine. But is this assimilation imposed or is it voluntary? Volodymyr Kulyk of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences believes that this process is natural. This is "a change in the identification of many people who now deem it natural for a Ukrainian citizen to be Ukrainian," Kulyk says. "This does result in assimilation, because most people do not care much about their ethnic origin and are ready to declare themselves 'normal' citizens."
True, it must be easy for a Russian who shares the same skin color and Eastern rite with a Ukrainian and speaks a very similar language not to care that much about ethnic origin. Such indifference is certainly more difficult for Azeris and Roma, and neither group's share of the population dropped.
But do Russians really not care? Interestingly, in Crimea--the only Ukrainian area where Russians dominate numerically and where assimilation is therefore less likely--the ethnic Russian population decreased by 11.6 percent only, according to the census; at the same time, in the nationally conscious west of the country, about half of the people who had identified themselves as Russians a decade ago preferred to say that they were Ukrainians.
It is rumored that President Leonid Kuchma used to identify himself as an ethnic Russian when he lived in the Soviet Union. He is a Ukrainian now. Would Kuchma, who still speaks Ukrainian with difficulty, have won a landslide victory in the western areas in the re-election of 1999 had he "officially" remained an ethnic Russian? And why has the share of self-identified ethnic Russians always been lower among government officials than among the population in general?
These must be tough questions. Not to be an ethnic Ukrainian is not exactly a liability, but it is not considered quite "normal" either. Despite being home to Europe's largest ethnic minority, Ukraine persists in not giving any official status to this minority's language--Russian. Thousands of formerly Russian-language schools have switched to Ukrainian, the official language. Orthodox priests are converting to Ukrainian. And businessmen, for fear of a backlash, abstain from placing Russian-language ads on national TV.
Getting Russian-speakers to switch to Ukrainian, though, appears much harder than forcing schools and advertisers to change. In a country whose capital, Kiev, is still dominated by Russian in unofficial settings, from kindergartens to bureaucrats' offices (a reality that, of course, is itself not quite normal), the number of people who regard Russian as their mother tongue dropped by just 3.2 percent to 29.6 percent.
But who can tell how many self-identified Russophones will go the way of 27 percent of ethnic Russians by the next census? Assimilation, whether for better or for worse, whether natural or not quite, is continuing, encouraged by the Ukrainian state. Oleg Varfolomeyev is a Kiev-based journalist.