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Ukrainization (or Ukrainianization), in general, is the state policy to increase the prominence of Ukrainian language and/or representation of Ukrainian people within state institutions, mostly, but not exclusively, within Ukraine. It has been cited as a reverse of Polonization and Russification. Some Russian organization of modern Ukraine consider the implementation of these policies to be a forced assimilation. For a detailed discussion of modern language issues, see Ukrainian language.
Ukrainization after the Russian Revolution
Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Russian Empire was broken up. In different parts of the former empire, several nations, including Ukrainians, developed a renewed sense of national identity. In the chaotic post-revolutionary years, Ukraine went through several short-lived independent and quasi-independent states (see Ukrainian People's Republic), and the Ukrainian language, for the first time in modern history, gained usage in most government affairs. Initially, this trend continued under the Bolshevik government of the Soviet Union, which in a political struggle with the old regime had their own reasons to encourage the national movements of the former Russian Empire. While trying to ascertain and consolidate its power, the Bolshevik government was by far more concerned about many political oppositions connected to the pre-revolutionary order than about the national movements inside the former empire.
The widening use of Ukrainian further developed in the first years of Bolshevik rule into a policy called Korenization ("putting down roots"). The government pursued a policy of Ukrainization (Ukrayinizatsiya, actively promoting the Ukrainian language), both in the government and among party personnel, and implemented an impressive education program which raised the literacy of the Ukrainophone rural areas. Newly-generated academic efforts from the period of independence were co-opted by the Bolshevik government. The party and government apparatus was mostly Russian-speaking but were encouraged to learn the Ukrainian language. Simultaneously, the newly-literate ethnic Ukrainians migrated to the cities, which became rapidly largely Ukrainianized—in both population and in education.
The policy even reached those regions of southern Russian SFSR where the ethnic Ukrainian population was significant, particularly the areas by the Don River and especially Kuban in the North Caucasus. Ukrainian language teachers, just graduated from expanded institutions of higher education in Soviet Ukraine, were dispatched to these regions to staff newly opened Ukrainian schools or to teach Ukrainian as a second language in Russian schools. A string of local Ukrainian-language publications were started and departments of Ukrainian studies were opened in colleges. Overall, these policies were implemented in thirty-five administrative districts in southern Russia.
Starting from the early 1930s, the Ukrainization policies were abruptly reversed. In the following fifty years the Soviet policies towards Ukrainian varied between quiet discouragement and suppression to persecution and cultural purges. All effects of Ukrainization were undone and Ukraine gradually became Russified to a significant degree. These policies softened somewhat only in the mid-to-late 1980s and were completely reversed again in newly-independent Ukraine in the 1990s.
Derussification in 1991-2004
Since 1991, independent Ukraine has made Ukrainian the only official state language and implemented government policies to broaden the use of Ukrainian. The educational system in Ukraine has been transformed over the first decade of independence from a system that is overwhelmingly Russian to partly Ukrainian. The government has also mandated a progressively increased role for Ukrainian in the media and commerce. In some cases, the abrupt changing of the language of instruction in institutions of secondary and higher education, led to the charges of Ukrainization, raised mostly by the Russian-speaking population. However, the transition lacked most of the controversies that surrounded the de-Russification in several of the other former Soviet Republics.
In two presidential elections (1994 and 2004), the adoption of Russian as a second state language was an election promise by one of the main candidates (Leonid Kuchma in 1994, Viktor Yanukovych in 2004). This promise contributed to Kuchma's win by bringing him the support of the eastern and southern regions but after the electoral win, Kuchma did not follow on his pledge to make Russian a state language in two 5-year terms of his presidency. A similar promise by Yanukovych might have also increased the turnout of his base, but it was rebutted during the campaign by his opponent (Viktor Yushchenko), who pointed out that Yanukovych could have already implemented this change while he was Prime Minister should this have really been his priority. (Yanukovych eventually lost that presidential election).