Stuck at his home in Kyiv, Mykhailo Revenko listened to the sound of loud explosions. It was March 2022. Russian troops were on the outskirts of the Ukrainian capital, their tanks on the move. The fate of his country hung in the balance.
“There was a curfew. My job had stopped. I suddenly had a lot of time. I didn’t want to watch movies so I pulled a book from the shelf,” Revenko said. A native Russian speaker, he decided to improve his Ukrainian. “I went to a Ukrainian school and knew the language. But I needed to work on my vocabulary,” he recalled.
Revenko started with The Hunters and the Hunted, a 1944 novel by the dissident and anti-Soviet Ukrainian writer Ivan Bahrianyi. He then read Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front in a Ukrainian edition, as well as a translated work by the Swedish author Fredrik Backman.
Next he devoured Footprints on the Road by Valerii Markus, a Ukrainian soldier and popular blogger. Markus’s bestselling novel draws on his experiences fighting in the Donbas region in 2014, after Vladimir Putin kickstarted a war in the east, and sent special forces to take over Crimea.
By April 2022 Revenko, a 39-year-old project manager, had switched from speaking Russian to Ukrainian. His partner, Tetyana – they met at school and fell in love sometime later – did the same. So, it turned out, did all of his colleagues at work, including one who had previously dismissed “that Ukrainian crap”.
Until last year Kyiv was largely a Russian-speaking city. A survey in January revealed that since Putin’s invasion a year ago, 33% of Kyivans have adopted the Ukrainian language. About 46% said they had been speaking Ukrainian for a long time. Another 13% remain Russian speakers.
Ukrainians are bilingual. Ukrainian has traditionally been spoken in the west of the country with Russian more prevalent in the south and east. The most prominent switcher is Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who grew up in the central Russophone metallurgical city of Kryvyi Rih.
As president, Zelenskiy addresses his citizens and foreign parliaments in Ukrainian or English. He speaks Russian only when urging Russian soldiers to surrender, or when pointing out Putin’s actions to Russian citizens, whose understanding of the war shaped by state TV bears little resemblance to reality.
Revenko said he still talked Russian to his mother, Luba. She grew up in Troitske, a village close to the Russian border in Luhansk province, and occupied since May. He acknowledged that the older generation found it harder to swap, and said Luba backed his decision. His grandfather spoke Surzhyk, a rural dialect mixing Ukrainian and Russian, he said.
“I have never been a nationalist. Now Russia has made me one,” Revenko said. The only time he now uses Russian in everyday life is when he swears. “There is less cursing in Ukrainian. The words are not quite as strong. My habit of swearing in Russian has continued,” he admitted.
The decline of Russian among its native users in Ukraine is ironic. One of the reasons Putin gave for subjugating the country was to “save” its Russian speakers. Since February the Russian army has killed thousands of Russian-speaking civilians, destroying Mariupol entirely and pounding the southern city of Kherson since its liberation in November.
In occupied areas, the Kremlin has banned Ukrainian from schools and universities, and forced Ukrainian teachers to use a Russian curriculum. Ukrainian-language books have been removed from libraries and sometimes burned. Children are now being a taught a Kremlin-approved version of history. It asserts Ukraine was never a state or a sovereign nation.
In January Ukraine’s leading liberal university, the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, banned the Russian language from its campus. Rector Serhiy Kvit, a literary critic and former education minister, said the decision was taken after internal academic discussion. Eight students and staff members have so far died on the frontline, he said. Their framed photos hang on the corridor next to his office.
The university uses Ukrainian and English as working languages. It was founded in 1615, closed down by the Soviets in the 1920s, and reopened in 1991 after Ukraine’s independence. “The decision isn’t about penalties. It’s about culture within our learning community. Language is a frame for culture,” Svit said.
Ukraine had suffered discrimination and persecution for centuries, he added. Russians burned Ukrainian language books back in 1622, with Ukrainian plays and texts subsequently outlawed amid a campaign of Russification. “We see the same politics today of eliminating Ukrainian language and sometimes Ukrainians themselves,” he said.
Svit said he understood that many patriotic Ukrainians spoke Russian, including around half of Ukrainian soldiers. Students would still be able to consult Russian books and histories in the university library. “They are not going in the bin. We are not burning anything because we are not barbarians. It’s not our way,” he said.
The new ruling recognised the sacrifice by previous Ukrainian thinkers, he suggested, including the poet, translator and dissident Vasyl Stus, who died in 1985 in a Soviet gulag. “The communists and imperial Russians killed a lot of intellectuals over the Ukrainian language,” he said. “It’s a very sensitive issue for us. We see it from the point of view of a post-colonial country.”
Nataliya Popovych, the cofounder of a new Ukraine cultural centre in Copenhagen, said the shift was especially noticeable among teenagers and young people. “It’s hugely important. It’s a choice people make not just in their public communications but in how they are going to bring up their children.”
She added: “It’s not just about speaking. It means learning more about Ukraine’s history and culture. There is a generational shift. We have a generation of kids who have not been Russified, and who grew up in a free Ukraine.” A graduate of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, she pointed out that Russian was “never a part of campus life”.
According to Ukraine’s culture minister, Oleksandr Tkachenko, Russia’s removal of Ukrainian books is part of a wider assault on national heritage. He said 1,500 cultural objects had been destroyed over the past year, with museums deliberately shelled and vandalised, and objects looted.
“We’ve seen the banning, confiscation and burning of Ukrainian books and the illegal removal of cultural valuables including documents from archives. These are all signs of cultural genocide in a scale that has not happened since the second world war.”
Revenko said he expected Russian to vanish from Ukraine in the next 10 years. Once Mikhail, he changed his name last year to the Ukrainian Mykhailo. What was his favourite Ukrainian word? “Faino,” he replied. “It means pretty good, wonderful, excellent.”
