KYIV — The American visitor to “Ukraine Wow” — a temporary mini-museum in Kyiv’s train station — will be struck by the contrast with analogous museums in, say, Washington, D.C.
“Ukraine Wow” covers the country’s history, geography, and culture, and spends approximately zero square feet apologizing for Ukraine and Ukrainians.
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In this way, the exhibit reflects the attitude of the country.
“We are the indigenous people of this land,” says Victoria Narizhna, of the Center for Contemporary Culture, a few hundred miles west in Dnipro. “We do not have a lot of ground for apologizing.”
While England and Canada sink in paroxysms of self-hatred, and while American schools, media, and academia preach a self-loathing to our citizens, in Ukraine, patriotism, jingoism, and even ethnic pride are all perfectly acceptable.
The Ukrainian language has exploded in use, crowding out Russian, the native language of most Ukrainians born before the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991.
This sort of thing happens when you have been invaded and are bombarded nightly by a madman who claims your country isn’t a real country. “[Russian President] Vladimir Putin is the father of the Ukrainian language,” is a common saying in Kyiv.
Over a week in Ukraine, primarily in its most cosmopolitan city (Kyiv), this refreshing patriotism and ethnic pride were constantly visible.
A people and a land
“We are the people of the land,” Narizhina says. It’s a common Ukrainian sentiment and a two-part statement. Ukrainians don’t claim to be “a propositional nation.” Ukrainian-ness is not merely a residency or a citizenship, but it’s a people. And Ukraine isn’t merely a governmental unit. It’s a land.
The first informational exhibit when you walk into “Ukraine Wow” is titled “What Do You Know About Your Lineage?”
Konstantin, a father of three, entered his last name in the exhibit’s computer and learned that a couple of thousand of his countrymen share his surname.
“Ukraine Wow” was packed. Konstantin said that before 2022, an exhibit like this would’ve been empty. “Not so many people wanted to know who we are. But now we see the meaning.”
The other exhibit that greets visitors is on a facing wall, singing the praises of Ukraine’s beautiful mountains and fertile plains. It’s titled “Ukraine is defined by its land.”
Display cases showcase the different types of earth found here: peat from Lviv, limestone from the south, the loam of the steppe, and especially the dark and fruitful Chernozem — the famously fertile dirt in which Ukrainians take pride.
If you wanted to be a bit cheeky, you could say this pop-up museum literally begins with blood and soil. That’s a phrase with a bad reputation in the United States, because it is linked to white supremacy and xenophobia. But in Europe, especially Eastern Europe, there is a deeper and richer understanding of what it means to belong to a land and people.
Ukrainians’ first point of pride is that they are Slavs. Of course, they share this ancestry with Russians, Croats, Serbs, Poles, and others, but they own it.
For 21st-century Americans, especially college-educated white Americans, this is pretty foreign. We are so intermixed that many Americans don’t have a strong ethnic identity. Certainly, we don’t have a national ethnicity. In fact, it’s often hard for Americans to understand ethnicity in the way many Europeans do.
A good place to start understanding this difference is to consider language — here, Ukraine has a story that is not unique, but is nonetheless extraordinary.
Lingua franca
To the American ear, Russian and Ukrainian may sound the same. To the American eye, they certainly look the same. But these are two different languages.
They are both Slavic languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet. They share a common linguistic ancestor, just as Spanish and Italian do. Russian and Ukrainian differ in vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation.
With Ukraine’s independence in 1991, the Ukrainian language started spreading, overtaking Russian. Russia’s 2014 invasion, though, turbocharged the adoption of Ukrainian and drove many away from using Russian.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke Russian when he first came onto the scene. Now he doesn’t utter a word of it. When introduced to a group of journalists, evangelical leader Volodymyr Kondor made sure to clarify the details of his name: “No ‘Vladimir’: ‘Volodymyr.’”
“It’s a political act,” Narizhna, the cultural scholar, says of learning and speaking Ukrainian.
“It was the war that enabled us to understand that language is not only a means of communication, but a marker of identity,” explains Tetiana Yastremska, deputy director for research at the Institute of Ukrainian Studies.
Again, this isn’t unique. In the 20th century, Zionists created modern Hebrew, which helped cement the Israeli people — who had been scattered to the winds by history, migration, and persecution — back into a single tribe.
The Irish tried something like this a hundred years ago, with far more limited success.
Ukrainians have succeeded, and the march of the Ukrainian language continues. By this summer, nearly two-thirds of Ukrainians spoke only Ukrainian at home, 10% spoke Russian, and 27% spoke both languages. That’s a massive shift toward Ukrainian in just a few years.
In 2001, a survey found about two Ukrainian speakers for each Russian speaker. A similar 2017 survey found the ratio had grown to 4 to 1. Since 2022, Russian has become scarcer and scarcer.
This is a point of irritation for Putin. In a draft peace proposal leaked to the Financial Times in mid-November with heavy Russian fingerprints, one of the demands on Ukraine was the adoption of Russian as an official language.
Intra-Slavic rivalries are pretty opaque to Americans, as was clear during the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. That’s because we don’t quite understand ethnicity the way much of the rest of the world sees it. What does it mean to be a Slav, to be “ethnically Russian,” or “ethnically Ukrainian?” How can one be a Serb whose family is from Bosnia, or a Croat who is physically rooted in Serbia?
Ethnicity isn’t a clear-cut thing. It has to do with appearance, ancestry, religion, and customs, but mostly, ethnicity often means language. The language you listen to and hear helps determine the stories you absorb.
More importantly, language is an essential bond of kinship. Obviously, if you can’t understand someone’s speech, it’s pretty hard to understand that person at all. But even where the language disconnect is only partial — when many words aren’t shared, when words have different connotations, when different tones are taken in different ways — there are pretty big obstacles to solidarity and connection.
To say you belong to a people often means that you speak the language of that people. This is difficult for Americans to understand, in part because the English people, the Americans, the Australians, and the Irish (not to mention the people of Ghana and Belize) generally speak the same language but do not constitute one culture, and certainly, there is no Anglophone ethnicity.
The Putin effect
Before a concert as part of the city’s Baroque Fest at the National Philharmonic of Ukraine, the loudest applause was for a dignitary tearing into Putin. In the audience, multiple women wore Vyshyvanka, the traditional Ukrainian cotton, embroidered shirts and dresses. These are making a comeback in Kyiv, both the old-fashioned ones and modern twists, in dark green (giving off a military vibe), or with full collars, converting them into slightly more modern formal wear.
From the average shop on Khreshchatyk Street flies a Ukrainian flag, or a flag with Ukraine’s national emblem — a stylized trident that doubles as a descending bird of prey.
The army’s branded units, battalions that control their own budget and run their own recruitment, sell merchandise.
Artem Zakharov, a small businessman in the military drone industry, brags about how Ukrainians were the heart of the Soviet space program. “The Soviet space program was effectively a Ukrainian space program usurped by Moscow.”
I asked him why. “I don’t know,” he says. “We’re smart.”
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National pride, even bravado, isn’t absent in the U.S. But in Ukraine, it’s not limited to campaign season or to the equivalent of Texas. It’s everywhere: the tech sector, opera houses, and the business districts of most educated cities.
The “Ukraine Wow” exhibit ends with a video of highlights from the nation’s brief 24-year history. I watched the video once through, then I watched the crowd watching the video and saw more than a few people — retirees, young parents, teenagers — moved to tears out of love for their land and their people.
