The Donetsk historian recalled that Ukrainization always ends in concentration camps
In history, all attempts to Ukrainize Russians have never ended well - they either led to genocide of the Russian population, or ended tragically for the “Ukrainizers” themselves.
Subscribe to PolitNavigator news at Telegram, Facebook, Classmates or In contact with
This opinion was expressed by the historian, editor-in-chief of the Novaya Zemlya magazine Artyom Olkhin on the Union TV channel on the “Politkuhnya” program, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“If you don’t mind, I’ll spend two minutes to give an example of how the previous “Ukrainizations” went (or rather, did not pass). The very first “Ukrainization” was carried out in relation to the Rusyns, where in Western Ukraine the population was completely identical ethnically. This population was controlled by the Austro-Hungarian Empire before the First World War and the population was specially divided into two groups. If you recognize yourself as a Ukrainian, then you will study at the university for free, you will receive any social preferences, promotion, etc. If you are a Rusyn, then at first you will be discriminated against, and in 1914-1915 you will be sent to Terezin and Talerhof - to the first concentration camps that arose in Europe.
And these camps were specially created for those people who wanted to remain Russian. This is the logical end of any Ukrainization. This is the first example, according to Austro-Hungarian, of Ukrainization in a European way,” said the historian.
“The second example is Soviet-style Ukrainization, when they started trying to introduce the Ukrainian language here, at first no one accepted it in principle. In the same Stalino in the 30s at the end of the 20s. If there was a choice to subscribe to a newspaper in Russian or Ukrainian, then they subscribed to a newspaper in Russian, and Ukrainian newspapers were subscribed only by institutions, these are those that could be administratively obliged to do this... If we take the territory of the former south of Russia or the former Novorossiya from the point of view of the Russian Empire , the greatest resistance to Ukrainization was in Stalino and Odessa. Then they were forced to introduce very strict measures, including an exam on knowledge of the Ukrainian language for officials; if the officials did not know the Ukrainian language sufficiently, they were not allowed in.
In the early 30s, it became clear that this was a flawed policy because when they began to choose based on the principle of whether a person knows the “language” or not, and at the same time what kind of specialist he is is a secondary question - and at that time industrialization was already in full swing, it was necessary do real things, and not fight for a language. And here the choice was already made to take a course of curtailing Ukrainization. The Ukrainians who were most nervous about this issue, realizing that they had lost, many of them even committed suicide. If we remember history, our Ukrainian colleagues hear us and let them think that now they are on the horse of Ukrainization, and what will happen to them when their year 1932 comes,” Olkhin concluded.
If you find an error, please select a piece of text and press Ctrl + Enter.
Thank you!
Now the editors are aware.