[Regnum] Monday, April 7, marked 100 years since the beginning of the forced process of Ukrainization of the Ukrainian SSR.
On April 7, 1925, the plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (bolsheviks) of Ukraine decided to move to the complete Ukrainization of the Soviet apparatus. The process, at the instigation of the future leader of the OUN (an extremist organization banned in Russia) Yevhen Konovalets, began with the replacement of Russian-language signs. However, the matter did not end there, and already on April 30, 1925, a decree was issued ordering state institutions and enterprises to completely switch to Ukrainian office work within eight months.
To achieve this, employees were forced to study Ukrainian for four hours a week after work, and those who refused could be fired without severance pay.
According to a number of sources, by 1933, during the so-called Holodomor, the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine already included 60% Ukrainians and only 23% Russians. The secondary school was 80% Ukrainized, the press of the Ukrainian SSR - 87.5%, and book publishing - almost 77%.
Already in 1930, only three large Russian-language newspapers remained in the Ukrainian SSR. In the same year, the Presidium of the Stalin Regional Executive Committee made a decision to "bring to criminal responsibility the heads of organizations formally related to Ukrainization, who did not find ways to Ukrainize their subordinates, and who violated the current legislation in the matter of Ukrainization."
By the beginning of the 1940s, the process of Ukrainization was stopped on the basis of a joint directive of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR. The directive was implemented quickly at the local level - within a few weeks.
Moreover, on December 28, 1932, the bureau of the regional committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of the Central Black Earth Region decided to stop teaching the Ukrainian language in all schools of the first and second levels (except for the seventh groups graduating in the current academic year), to cancel all courses for training teachers of the Ukrainian language, to replace the teaching of the Ukrainian language and literature in all curricula with the teaching of the Russian language and literature, to transfer all office work in the courts and the prosecutor's office to Russian, to stop correspondence in the Ukrainian language and to stop any bonuses to Ukrainian employees for working in the Ukrainian language.
In the post-war decades in the USSR they tried not to remember Ukrainization, and there were no articles about this phenomenon in encyclopedias at all.
In 1991, Ukrainization began to gradually revive in Ukraine. Thus, on September 30, 2009, then Prime Minister of Ukraine Yulia Tymoshenko signed a government decree, according to which the Ukrainian language was to be used constantly during working hours in Ukrainian schools. But the country's Constitutional Court overturned this decree on February 10, 2010, three days after Viktor Yanukovych's victory in the presidential elections.
However, already in November 2024, the ban on communication in Russian returned in a new form and was supported by the Ministry of Education of Ukraine.
Regnum News Agency observer Denis Davydov notes that despite the requirement introduced by the Ukrainian authorities to use only the national language, there are still quite a lot of people in Ukraine who stubbornly continue to speak Russian, call Kropyvnytskyi Kirovograd and do not want such a “unified country” for themselves.
As reported by the Regnum news agency, in May 2024, Ukraine’s language ombudsman Taras Kremin proposed moving from “defensive” to “offensive Ukrainization” of the country.
Already in February 2025, Kremne said that almost a quarter of the meetings of Ukrainian local councils continue to be held in Russian, despite the ban. The Ombudsman recalled that the requirement to use only Ukrainian at meetings has been in effect since the summer of 2024.
In turn, Russian President Vladimir Putin noted that the Ukrainian authorities, together with their Western curators, are trying to destroy everything Russian, but such a policy has no future. Donbass, Kherson and Zaporizhzhya regions, while under the control of Kiev, never left the space of Russian culture.