This article is based on lectures by Kateryna Shymkevych, PhD in History, Associate Professor at the Department of Law and Public Administration of the Zaporizhzhia Institute of Economics and Information Technologies (ZIEIT).
Russification was never a natural process in which people simply chose a "more convenient" language. It was a state policy that Moscow pursued consistently from the 17th century to the present day. Its aim was not merely to make Ukrainians speak Russian, but to erase the very idea that a distinct Ukrainian people exists, with its own language, history, church and statehood.
The Institute of History of Ukraine of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine defines Russification as a state policy whose ultimate goal was the political loyalty and linguistic and cultural assimilation of the non-Russian peoples of the empire, and later of the USSR. It had several dimensions: language, culture, the church, books and literature, history and self-identification, territory and, ultimately, the physical extermination of people.
From Peter I to the Ems Decree
After the Cossack Hetmanate came under Moscow's rule, the empire gradually restricted everything that set Ukrainians apart. In 1720, a decree by Peter I banned the printing of new books in Ukraine other than church books, and even those had to conform to Russian editions. In the second half of the 18th century, Catherine II abolished the Hetmanate and the Zaporozhian Sich, and the Ukrainian language gradually disappeared from education.
In the 19th century, the bans became open. The Valuev Circular of 1863 halted the publication of educational and religious literature in Ukrainian, and its author, Interior Minister Pyotr Valuev, summed up the empire's position with the phrase that a separate "Little Russian" language "never existed, does not exist and cannot exist". The Ems Decree of 1876 went even further: it banned printing in Ukrainian, importing Ukrainian books from abroad, staging Ukrainian plays, singing Ukrainian songs at concerts and teaching in Ukrainian in primary schools. These bans formally remained in force until 1905.
Ukrainisation as a trap
The Ukrainian Revolution of 1917–1921, the Ukrainian People's Republic, Skoropadsky's Hetmanate and the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences showed Moscow that it had failed to destroy Ukrainian identity. The Bolsheviks therefore chose a different tactic: the "Ukrainisation" of the 1920s. It gave a boost to Ukrainian education, literature and theatre, but it also had another purpose: to bring the language under control and raise loyal party cadres.
After the Holodomor of 1932–1933, which, according to the Ptoukha Institute for Demography and Social Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, claimed around 3.9 million lives, Ukrainisation was rolled back. The Kharkiv orthography of 1928, adopted at the All-Ukrainian Orthographic Conference, was revised in 1933 to bring Ukrainian closer to Russian.
The 1933 orthography was drawn up by a new commission headed by Andrii Khvylia, without any public discussion. Its preface stated outright that the previous rules had supposedly artificially separated Ukrainian from Russian. The changes affected every level of the language:
The letter «ґ» (g) was removed from the alphabet; it was restored only in 1990.
Endings were brought closer to Russian ones: «радости», «смерти», «вічности» (radosty, smerty, vichnosty – "of joy", "of death", "of eternity") became «радості», «смерті», «вічності» (radosti, smerti, vichnosti).
Of parallel forms such as «бабів» and «баб», «хатів» and «хат», only the one that coincided with Russian was kept.
The remnants of the dual number, which the 1928 orthography had established as the norm, were abolished: «дві руці», «три вербі», «чотири хаті» ("two hands", "three willows", "four houses") turned into «дві руки», «три верби», «чотири хати».
Foreign words were rewritten on the Russian model: «катедра» became «кафедра» ("department"), «міт» became «міф» ("myth"), «авдиторія» became «аудиторія» ("auditorium"), and «павза» became «пауза» ("pause").
At the same time, native vocabulary was purged from dictionaries and replaced with words closer to Russian. In this way «городина» was displaced by «овочі» ("vegetables"), «садовина» by «фрукти» ("fruit"), «родзинки» by «ізюм» ("raisins"), «обрус» by «скатертина» ("tablecloth"), and «часопис» by «журнал» ("magazine").
Scientific terminology dictionaries of the 1920s were confiscated and destroyed, and their compilers were repressed as "bourgeois nationalists" and "wreckers".
Mykola Skrypnyk, the initiator of the 1928 orthography, took his own life that same year, 1933. Only now is the Ukrainian language recovering some of these losses: the 2019 orthography once again allows, for example, «радости» and «міт» as equally valid variants.
The generation of writers, scholars and artists that emerged in those years was destroyed – it came to be called the "Executed Renaissance". In 1938, the resolution "On the compulsory study of the Russian language in the schools of the national republics and regions" made Russian mandatory in all schools.
Soviet-style "friendship of peoples"
After the Second World War, Russification became quieter but more systematic. The school reform of 1958–1959 allowed parents to "freely" choose their children's language of instruction. In practice this meant that Ukrainian became optional, while Russian became the language of careers, cities and prestige. In the 1970s and 1980s, especially after the 1983 resolution on "improving" the study of Russian, teachers of Russian received extra pay, classes studying Russian were split into smaller groups, and Ukrainian was increasingly portrayed as a "peasant" language.
Those who resisted were persecuted: the trial of the "Union for the Liberation of Ukraine" in 1930, the Great Terror, the arrests of the Sixtiers and dissidents in the 1960s–1980s, the death of Vasyl Stus in a labour camp in 1985. At the same time, Moscow was changing the ethnic composition of the population: the deportation of the Crimean Tatars in 1944, Operations "Vistula" and "West" in 1947, forced resettlement from border areas, and the famines of 1921–1923 and 1946–1947.
Appropriated history
The deepest Russification concerned memory. As early as the Muscovite princes – from Ivan Kalita to Ivan III (the "gatherer of the Rus' lands") – Moscow was proclaimed the sole heir of Kyivan Rus'. Peter I appropriated the very name "Rus'" by renaming the Tsardom of Muscovy the Russian Empire. The imperial concept of the "triune people", and later the Soviet concept of "brotherly peoples" with Ukrainians cast as the "younger brother", had a single aim: to tie Ukrainian history to Russian history and deny Ukrainians the right to their own choice.
Why language and history in particular? Because they are what sustain national identity and the understanding that we are not Russians. A people that believes its language is merely a "dialect" and its state a "misunderstanding" is easier to assimilate and easier to convince that its land has been "Russian since time immemorial".
Russification today
This policy did not remain in the past. Since 2014, Russia has been carrying out total Russification in the occupied territories of Ukraine: it closes Ukrainian schools, removes Ukrainian books, teaches children according to Russian curricula and forces people to obtain Russian passports. Propaganda repeats the same claims as a hundred years ago, only in new packaging: "Ukraine was created by Lenin", "the Ukrainian language does not exist", "Galicia was annexed by Stalin", "Crimea was Khrushchev's gift". The goal is also the same: to prove that nothing genuinely Ukrainian – no state, no history, no territory, no church – has ever existed.
Ukraine still feels the consequences of three centuries of Russification: millions killed in the 20th century, a marginalised language, an imposed inferiority complex and faith in the "big brother". But since 2014, and especially since 2022, Ukrainians have been consciously breaking this dependence – returning to the Ukrainian language, studying their own history and no longer letting Moscow decide who they should be. The process of "de-brotherisation" is irreversible.