Why Is The Ukraine Government Disarming Its Citizens?

Your aids test came back, its alladeen.

I have never developed the ear for the Slavic languages, or maybe I’m just lazy. I’ve tried, but I just can’t do it – even motivated by attractive women who are working on their American English.

Oh well, I’m kind of amused by the “crackdown”. The guerrilla war against the Soviets didn’t finally lose all traction until the 1960s. The kids around Kyiv still go into the woods and dig up old Nazi bunkers – that mud is a great preservative. Maybe, just maybe a few folks will make a show of it, and throw the ‘authorities’ a broken Mauser or something. But emptying out the flower bed at home, let alone the dacha? Yeah, that’ll be the day.

I have an expat friend and his expat community. I’ve seen pics of some of the ‘private collections’ buried in underground storerooms. Getting Ukraine disarmed is about like getting the US unarmed – ain’t gonna happen.

>> What’s even more hilarious is that Ukrainian, as a modern language, did not exist until the 1990s when it was brought back from the dustbin of history and “modernized” as a point of vain nationalistic pride

This is a plain lie (which is popular with Russian nationalists, because it allows them to contest the existence of Ukrainians as a distinct ethnicity). Ukrainian never ceased to be a literary language in the western parts of the country (that weren’t occupied by Russia and hence Russified), and in the rest of it, it was always a spoken language. The revival of it as a nation-wide literary language began in 19th century, and extended considerably early under Bolsheviks (their policy known as “korenizatsiya”, look it up in Wikipedia for more).

“What’s even more hilarious is that Ukrainian, as a modern language, did not exist until the 1990s”

That’s one way to look at it, another is that the soviet government suppressed the language (and Ukrainian culture in general) when it took power by refusing to acknowledge it in any official capacity.

I wonder what language my grandfather spoke with his friends and family all his life, must have been just gibberish eh ?

Sorry guys, but it’s not a myth. The literary Ukranian that existed in the 80s has little resemblance to modern Ukrainian. The problem is that the modern vernacular borrows almost all post-19th century terms from a selection of other languages.

I learned Ukrainian in school in the late 80s. My favorite example is simple:

Translate helicopter into modern Ukrainian.

Oh oracle of commie history – tell us how the Russians came to arrive in the Ukraine and where oh where did the Ukrainians go? (without using the words stalin, genocide, starvation, Siberia)

Right… Because clearly the borders of modern Ukraine were 100% ethnic Ukrainian prior to 1900… I have to break this to you, but the Golodomor killed regardless of ethnicity… It was about social structure, not ethnicity… And was carried out by a Georgian, not a Russian.

Oh, and I will point out that Ukraine is the only former soviet republic whose economy was better off under the USSR. I find it ironic that the only thing that an independent Ukraine managed to accomplish in the past two decades is elect a more or less unbroken string of corrupt oligarchs… But I’m sure that some ukrop is going to find a way to blame Russia for that one as well…

>>Well, given that a large chunk of the population (a majority in the eastern part of the country) are ethnically >>Russian and feel discriminated against on a daily basis…

Oh, I love smell of propaganda bullshit. Same anger-emote, keyword level stuff that was pushed from every Russian TV during annexacition of Crimea.

I wonder if you have ever been to Ukraine, let alone Kiev. The country has it problems, like western portion (no exactly friendly to people of jewish exterior), and Donbass region (with its trademark breed of young thugs), but being Russian speaker in Kiev is not one of them.

(hint: “ukrop” gives you away like blaze orange ghillie, too ;-))

I was born in Kiev. I still own property there and have extended family live there. When was the last time YOU were in Kiev?

BTW. Ukrop is a great term to use for rabid Ukrainian nationalists and historical revisionists who make Nazis look moderate.

>> That’s one way to look at it, another is that the soviet government suppressed the language (and Ukrainian culture in general) when it took power by refusing to acknowledge it in any official capacity.

In the interests of fairness, it wasn’t just the Soviets, and the Soviets actually did some positive things.

In Imperial Russia, Ukrainian was, at best, ignored and derided as “peasant speech”, and at worst, actively suppressed. At no point was it treated as a serious language.

Soviets, on the other hand, early on (1920s) had a strong policy of encouraging cultural nationalism – this was part of Lenin’s platform, and the one that he seemed to have taken very seriously. One big part of it was encouraging the use of languages other than Russian in parts of the country that had non-Russian ethnic majorities or significant minorities. This was done by switching school education to those other languages, publishing books in them, encouraging their use in everyday life. In some places, they actually had to design writing systems for some more obscure languages (mostly in Siberia) and borrow words to fill their vocabularies to the level necessary for a modern society. For Ukrainian, that wasn’t needed, but even just making it the official language in Ukrainian SSR, switching schools to it, and massively increasing book publishing in it, was a big help.

When Stalin took over, he saw any sort of nationalism as a threat to his consolidation of power, and shut the program down, reversing many of its achievements.

After Stalin, it was partially reversed again, but never got to the level it was under Lenin. All the constituent national republics would still have their native language designated as co-official alongside Russian, and local schools would teach it as a second language; but it was more of a formality at that point, and most people still used Russian as their first and primary language everywhere.

@int19h I’m not sure where you got the idea that a modernization of Ukrainian was not needed who it was brought in as the other official language of the Ukraine SSR. I learned the language that was used then, and it was rather easy because it borrowed almost all 20th century terms from Russian. This was not the language of Bohdan Khemlnytsky. That language, while perfectly adequate for everyday use, lacked the modern vocabulary to be used as an official language in a modern Soviet Republic.

What pisses me off, as a native Russian speaker who was born in the Ukrainian SSR, is how the Ukrainian government went through and stripped Russian words out of the official language and replaced them with ridiculous substitutes pulled out of Western European languages.

Example…

Helicopter -> Pre 1991 Ukrainian -> Vertolyot
Helicopter -> Post 1991 Ukrainian -> Ghelycoptyor

It mildly annoys me, as it basically means that I can’t speak the language anymore without descending into a weird amalgam of Russian and Ukrainian. (Fun fact, my Russian has some Ukrainian bleedover as well with using expressions like “sho”.) I can see how native Russian speakers who actually have to live there and deal with the government on a regular basis might be pissed about needing to use a language they never learned to live in a country where they were born for no real logical reason.

To put it into into a parallel that American natives can better understand… Imagine if New Mexico, Arizona and Utah adopted Navajo as the official language after it have been “modernized” by filling in missing terms with Chinese.

Has it occurred to you that the process that you describe has happened in the past in reverse (in the USSR, under Stalin’s policies of making everything uniform and closer to Russian – the history of Belarusian alphabet and Taraškievica is another similar story); and this was not inventing new things, but rather restoring Ukrainian to its pre-russified state?

Obviously, as a native Russian speaker, it would feel to you like more familiar words are replaced by less familiar ones. But it’s the native Ukrainian speakers (i.e. people who learned it as a first language from their parents, essentially) who meaningfully “own” the language, and have the most say in what it should and shouldn’t be like.

>> To put it into into a parallel that American natives can better understand… Imagine if New Mexico, Arizona and Utah adopted Navajo as the official language after it have been “modernized” by filling in missing terms with Chinese.

Not quite. It’s as they had Navajo as official language before (one of the two), but with numerous English borrowings from the period of US control. And then they decided that they wanted to make Navajo the only official language, and remove all those English borrowings, and go back to the older version of the language that had Spanish borrowings instead (because pure Navajo just doesn’t have words for many modern concepts, so you have to borrow from somewhere else).

In case of Ukrainian, the two other languages that heavily affect it are Russian and Polish, largely because pretty much the entirety of today’s Ukraine was at some point a part of either Russia or Poland (or successor states that preferred Polish in that area, such as Austria-Hungary). Consequently, for a very long time, there simply wasn’t a single well-defined language, but rather what the linguists call a “dialect continuum”, ranging from the most polonized dialects in the West, to the most russified dialects in the East.

And when they got to actually establishing the literary standard for the language in the 19th century, most of the work was happening in the West – because Austrians were much less concerned about it than Russians, and didn’t persecute those doing it as heavily. Consequently, the literary standard was derived from the speech in the western regions that had very little Russian influence on them for the past 700 years, but a lot of Lithuanian and Polish influence.

That’s all well and good, but a large number, possibly a majority, of Ukrainians born prior to 1990 are native Russian speakers, not Ukrainian speakers. (I am a perfect example as while both my mother and maternal grandparents spoke Ukrainian, as a family we spoke almost exclusively Russian due to my father’s Kuban cossack roots.) Don’t you think that they might feel a slight bit alienated if they can’t even speak the new language of their own country?

The reality is that the Kiev government has abused Donbas for decades. They turned it from a prosperous industrial region into a third world shithole. Is it any surprise that they took the opportunity to secede when they had it? Is the government in Kiev (that didn’t represent them in any way) then morally justified in using military force to prevent them from seceding?

Crimea is an even better example as that region had been a Russian enclave since the 1700s and was only transferred to Ukrainian control in the past 50 years. The overwhelming majority of the residents are both ethnically Russian and native Russian speakers. Why shouldn’t THEY get to decide which country THEY want to belong to?

They can speak the language that they want – no-one has banned speaking or writing in Russian. What they can’t do is communicate with the government using that language.

Now, for the record, I do believe that language policy of Ukraine is wrong, and they should have taken some clues from Canada and especially Ireland instead, and either make Russian co-official, or at least let separate regions declare it as official.

The latter is actually where things currently are, since the corresponding “regional languages” law from Yanukovich era is still in effect – they have briefly repealed it after Maidan, but almost immediately reinstated it because of the outcry.

It may well be that Russian will yet become co-official. While the official Russian narrative is that the conflict is “Russians vs Ukrainians”, the truth is that most people who fight on Ukrainian side actually speak Russian as the first language (and are not ashamed of that in the slightest), and quite a few consider themselves ethnically Russian. In other words, they consider Ukraine to be a civic nation-state, not an ethnic nation-state, and so don’t see a problem with being Russian-speaking Russians while also being patriotic Ukrainian citizens.

As far as the rest – Kiev government has not specifically abused Donbass. To remind, Yanukovich – that guy who was president for 4 years – was from Donbass. Did it make things better? No. It’s because every region in Ukraine is basically governed by local oligarchic elites, the struggle between which manifests as struggle over the control of the central government in Kiev. So whoever is currently in charge, they don’t abuse other regions, but they do favor their own region for pork allocation.

Donbass is economically in the shitter because it only makes sense as a part of a much larger industrial network, and one that hasn’t existed for many decades now. What does it do? The first thing that most people who are familiar it will think of is coal. But it’s crappy coal quality-wise, it’s not cheap – so in many cases it’s not competitive even at-cost – and overall reliance on coal has been going down and will keep doing so. Then there’s metallurgy, but there’s also nothing there that doesn’t exist elsewhere – in particular, Russia has its own metal mines – and, again, it’s not very cost-effective, using old processes and technologies while everyone else had moved on. The whole region needs massive infrastructure investment and government job programs to stop being the “vodka rust belt”.

It’s also why Russia didn’t annex Donbass. It simply doesn’t have any economic value that is anywhere even close to recouping the costs of taking it and holding it, and the risks in foreign relations that would result from it.

C’mon man. Donbass is a shithole, for the same reason downtown Pittsburgh is – it’s a rustbelt town, that has had the industries that supported it disappear.

Being from Kyiv, you of all people should know that the Russians brought tons of their manual-laborer-class into those regions to do that work. When that work was no longer necessary, they were all going to get retrained for rocket science, no? Oh yeah, they stayed in that bottle of vodka, same as when they actually were distracted by work on occasion.

The expats I know are about your age, many had parents that were apparatchiks or ranking military, they were still Ukranians at heart, and as such, looked down on the Russian imports as foreigners.

@int19h My parents were born and raised in Odessa (not Texas) came here in the mid 70s. Between them my aunts, uncles and pretty much anyone in Brooklyn who came here at that time does not speak a word of Ukrainian. On the other hand my wifes cousins who came here in the 90s speak fluently. Hope this info helps your convo.

I actually pulled a well known propaganda poster from Google images. Who hosts it is irrelevant.

swrge, after reading your posts, I think i misunderstood you.

Yes, I’m well aware of some ‘internally displaced’ from the eastern regions – though most are going to Russia since Vlad is promising them the world. Delivering nothing, but still… Why would they ever go west? They’re certainly not wanted by Kyiv residents, and these are cretins want to reanimate Stalin.

I have no idea about Crimean refugees leaving for anywhere but Russia. It was a Russian warm-water port, they have always been mostly Russian imports (dregs mind you) and have always behaved as such. Expat Ukrainians I know hated going there since it was basically like visiting Russia – signage in Russian, lousy food, lousy service, dirty beaches. hostile people.

Western Ukraine wants to move beyond golden loaves of bread. They really don’t care what Russians in the east want.

Same ‘racism’ for those who cling to UK coal mining. The business is gone, it was great while it lasted, but it’s been replaced. It isn’t coming back.

You have seen the videos from Donetsk, Slovyansk, Druzhkova, yes? The Russians came, they local denizens had their ‘revolt’ and that culminated with knocking over a liquor store and them all getting drunk. Were it not for the Russkies, they would have been content as long as they could get a bottle of vodka.