The late Fred Halliday
– a Professor who once warned the London School of Economics against entangling
itself with the Gaddafi regime – thought
that the role of diasporas in the politics of their homelands is always
negative. The idea is expressed in a posthumous collection of his essays, Political Journeys (Saqi 2011).
Diasporas, especially moneyed ones, adopt a proprietorial attitude towards a
homeland to which they have little or no intention of returning, whether the
land is Armenia, Ireland or Israel. Diaspora organisations use their influence
to support hardline positions against local politicians when those are
inevitably tempted to pragmatic adjustments aimed at making peace with
neighbours who, in the diaspora view of things, are supposed to remain enemies
forever.
When it comes to soft power, to culture rather than guns,
diasporas unite around traditionalist, conservative positions. Culture is
something to be upheld and to remain the same, brought out for high days and
holidays but otherwise preserved in a well-funded museum. Living cultures, of
course, change all the time and those who inhabit them are lax about the
boundaries between their own and those of their supposed enemies.
In Ukraine,
for example, inhabitants are frequently polled and asked to identify themselves
as either Ukrainian or Russian speakers and willingly do so. However, those who
thus identify themselves are very often found mixing the two supposedly
distinct languages, with or without awareness of what they are doing. This may
well be true for a majority of the population, though those who are formally
classified as speakers of a mixed language, labelled Surzhyk, are counted at between 10 and 20 % of the population. I
think there is little doubt that is an under-estimate. Left to their own
devices, most speakers gravitate towards mixing and that is something language
purists cannot tolerate.
One consequence of this situation is that Ukrainian diasporas,
notably in the USA, are on permanent alert to ensure that in writing about
Ukraine, English language authors transliterate from Ukrainian versions of
words rather than the equivalent Russian ones. Thus it is that we have come to
write about Kyiv not Kiev. If you don’t want to annoy your
Ukrainian friends, but want to keep life simple, you can get by with just a few
rules of thumb: use H rather than G, I rather than O, and so on. The list
continues but it’s basically something a simple computer program can execute.
The trouble with this way of trying to keep your friends happy is that you may
end up using words which are not simply anachronistic but, worse, may never
have been used by anyone until linguistic ideologues got round to inserting
their imaginary versions into the pages of Wikipedia and a host of other online
sources. The ideologues or their simplistic computer programs fail to recognise
that the road to error is paved with the mechanical application of rules of
thumb.
Early on in her book, Red
Famine: Stalin’s War On Ukraine (2017), Anne Applebaum mentions the
well-known fact that “John Hughes, a Welshman, founded the city now known as
Donetsk”, about the spelling of which there seems to be no argument, and goes
on to say that it was “originally called ‘Yuzivka’ in his honour” (p 9).
Oh no, it wasn’t! Hughes had been invited to the Donbass
[Ukrainian Donbas] by Russia’s
Tsarist government in 1869. It was no modest undertaking that was projected:
Hughes formed an English company to raise three hundred thousand pounds for the
construction of an iron smelter, a rail-producing plant, the development of
coal mines, and the building of a long branch railway line to connect to the
main Russian network. All this is documented in fascinating detail in Theodore
H. Friedgut’s two volume work, published in 1989 and 1994 by Princeton
University Press, under the title Iuzovka
and Revolution, transliterating from the Russian Юзовка the name of this company town named after its founder. The Iu can be replaced by Yu to avoid the un-English feel of the
former, but what tells us that this is a Russian word is the O in both the Russian original and the English
transliteration.
Iuzovka or Yuzovka was
briefly called Trotsk [after Trotsky]
in 1923 though even now that’s hard to document, was officially renamed Stalino in 1924, and converted to Donetsk in 1961. I don’t think anyone
ever called it Yuzivka. Yuzivka is an invention. It’s a fake
word and to use it anachronistically is to allow a historical falsification.
But when I googled Yuzivka I got 17
500 results, slightly ahead of Yuzovka,
well ahead of Iuzovka. The ideologues
have been very busy.
In a historical work to use Iuzovka / Yuzovka does not
suppress the Ukrainian language or Ukrainian identity; it reflects the fact
that in the period of its existence until its name was changed, Iuzovka /
Yuzovka was an overwhelmingly Russian town, planted in the Donbass by the
Imperial government, built and managed by foreigners, of whom there were many.
Hughes himself died in St Petersburg in 1889, but he was only there because he
was negotiating deals for the Iuzovka plant.
Only by acknowledging that they did things differently in the
past, even named differently, can one then go on to consider how the
inhabitants of Iuzovka related to the surrounding and undoubtedly Ukrainian
countryside. Friedgut is blunt:
The nearby Ukrainian peasants were not on the
best of terms with the mining settlements and viewed them as foreign both ethically
and ethnically…. The relatively few Ukrainians employed in the mines and
metallurgy works were also embroiled in ethnic tensions despite their
acculturation to the dominant Russian milieu of the region (volume 1, page 208)
The separation of Russians and Ukrainians
remained throughout the entire period [1869-1924]. Until the Soviet regime
brought him by force
majeure, the Ukrainian peasant was least
inclined to enter the mines or factories as a hired worker, and first to leave
it in time of crisis. His ties to his village were strong and directly at
hand. The Donbass thus remained within
the Ukraine but not of it (vol 1, page 331)
There was never a Ukrainian Yuzivka, only a Russian Iuzovka,
and that is one reason why we have a problem still today, not only with names
but with the guns of the Donetsk People’s Republic.
© Trevor Pateman 2019. First published here April 2019
No comments:
Post a Comment