Teacher Valeria Hukova teaches students Ukrainian. Speaking Ukrainian in the street could invite name-calling, or worse.īut all that is changing, and at speed – over the decade since the Maidan protests against the Russian-leaning government in 2013, and all the more so since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February last year. But visitors from Ukrainian-speaking rural areas would often switch to Russian as soon as they got off the bus or train. The surrounding countryside, albeit transformed by the appalling losses of the Holodomor – in which up to 4 million people died of starvation as a result of Joseph Stalin’s forced agricultural collectivisation policy between 19 – remained predominantly Ukrainian-speaking.Īs recently as the late 1990s, Ukrainian was considered the language of uneducated country people in urban Kharkiv, which you might hear spoken at the market, by those who had come into the city sell their produce. In the meantime, during the Soviet period, large numbers of Russians immigrated to Kharkiv and to other cities in the east and south of the country to work in Ukraine’s burgeoning industries. These trailblazing writers – the focus of the city’s Literary Museum – are known as Ukraine’s “ executed renaissance”. Hundreds of writers were shot, deported, or sent to the gulag others took their own lives. Publishing literature in Ukrainian was outlawed from the mid-19th century.Ī period of official “Ukrainianisation” followed the October revolution of 1917, with a lively avant garde, Ukrainian-language literary scene springing up in Kharkiv.īut from 1933 onwards the novelists, poets, journalists and playwrights of this brief modernist flowering were brutally suppressed. Under the tsars, Russian was the language of officialdom and education. Kharkiv, about 18 miles (30km) from Ukraine’s eastern border, has long been a majority Russian-speaking city.

That made him Oleksa, after Oleksa Dovbush, an 18th-century outlaw of the Carpathian mountains. Think of a historical figure, he said: a leader of rebels.

The military guy chipped in next, more fluently, saying that he would go by his army callsign. Pretty soon “Natalya” was guessed correctly, to a chorus of, “Oh, that’s a great name!” and “I wish I were called Svitlana or Natalya!” I associate it with something big – and not in a good way, it’s clumsy.” “I have a very long name,” she said, in less than perfect Ukrainian, “and it’s very rough. The general’s name is Valerii Zaluzhnyi, and she was Valeria Hukova.Ī middle-aged woman with auburn hair and an amber necklace took her turn. “But let’s do it indirectly.” Her name, she explained with a suitably patriotic flourish, was like that of the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces.Īn easy one to guess. “Let’s introduce ourselves,” said the teacher.

The long call book