In 1928, an official all-Ukrainian orthography was published. Five years later, Moscow murdered its authors and created new spelling rules that mirrored the Russian language. How and why did that happen?
Let’s take a step back.
The 1920s in Ukraine
After two centuries of bans and repressions under the Russian Empire, the Ukrainian language and culture finally got almost a decade of relative freedom and state support in the 1920s. At that time, after the 1917-1920 war of Ukrainian independence, the USSR was afraid of a new wave of national liberation movements in Russia’s former colonies. That’s why the 1920s were the time of the “korenizatsia” (”root-ization”) policies that gave some level of cultural liberties across the USSR republics. In the span of just a few years, Ukraine was flourishing with new, bold literary and art talent – the Ukrainian Renaissance was in full bloom.
In this window of opportunity, Ukrainian intellectuals created a standard, all-Ukrainian (including the Poland-ruled Western Ukraine) orthography in 1928. The effort was approved and led by Mykola Skrypnyk, a prominent Ukrainian Bolshevik who was a People's Commissar of Education of Ukraine at the time. He gathered top talent at the all-Ukrainian spelling conference in 1927 and made the idea into reality.
So, why was the 1928 edition so special? Well, it wasn’t, really. It was just the result of multiple linguists and writers coming together to create a set of spelling rules that would reflect Ukraine’s regional diversities and dialects. It was designed to mirror the Ukrainian verbal norms and unite all the variations under a common denominator. In other words, it was a pretty standard body of linguistic work.
The only problem was that the 1928 spelling system further demonstrated the difference between the Ukrainian and Russian languages: different transliteration rules for foreign words, different sounds, contrasting word formation rules, and more. All this piled up into an uncomfortable truth for Moscow: Ukrainian was not a funny local dialect – it was a wholesome language, much more distinct from Russian than Russians were ready to accept.
That’s why the Communist Party accused the 1928 edition of directing the Ukrainian language closer to Polish and Czech, which was a blatant piece of evidence of “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism,” a term that was used to demonize and repress anything or anyone Ukrainian.
As the Soviet national and economic policies started to change dramatically under Stalin’s rule in the late 1920s, the Ukrainian spelling rules became another battlefield in the war against Ukrainian identity.
Ukrainian “bourgeois nationalism”
In 1929, Stalin launched forced collectivization across the USSR and wrapped up the policies that gave freedom to non-Russian Soviet nations. Ukraine, the largest Soviet nation after Russia with rich agriculture and a strong class of farmers, was at the center of these changes.
Many farmer families were forced to join the Soviet “kolhoz” system, effectively abandoning their property and generations’ worth of hard work. Those who resisted collectivization were often sent to the gulags or shot dead.
In the sphere of cultural affairs, laughable accusations of “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism” suddenly became the basis for repressions against prominent Ukrainian figures. In 1932, the Party’s Central Committee approved a resolution, "On the Suppression of Nationalism in Ukraine," threatening all contemporary Ukrainian intellectuals and farmers. The accusations were, of course, completely fabricated – all contemporary elites were long-standing communists and many were prominent revolutionaries, like Skrypnyk. All of this didn’t matter.
Suddenly, prominent Ukrainian writers and artists couldn’t get published and were excluded from all Soviet institutions. The hunt was on.
Executed Renaissance and the Holodomor
At the same time, in 1932, to force Ukrainians to submit new policies, Stalin gave orders that started the Holodomor, a genocidal artificial famine that took the lives of 4.5 million Ukrainians, mostly villagers, across the span of two years.
The Ukrainian intelligentsia was already cornered by that time. Mykola Skrypnyk was fired in January 1933. His successor was directly appointed by Stalin and had a simple task: to reverse the policies of the 1920s and assimilate Ukrainian culture with the dominant Soviet/Russian culture.
In July of the same year, anticipating his arrest and execution, Skrypnyk shot himself in his office.
Just before that, in May 1933, the first Ukrainian writers got arrested, and one of the contemporary superstar writers, Mykola Khvylovy, shot himself for the same reason as Skrypnyk.
By 1938, the number of published Ukrainian writers went from 259 in 1930 to only 36 in 1938. Almost all of the “vanished” writers were sent to the Gulag or executed, and some of them simply disappeared or committed suicide. The great boom and the subsequent purge of Ukrainian intellectuals went down in history as the Executed Renaissance.
During the same time when the Holodomor was starving millions of Ukrainian villagers to death and the Ukrainian cultural elites were getting exterminated, the Stalin-appointed authorities issued the updated Ukrainian orthography at the end of 1933. Of course, they didn’t host any conferences or public hearings. Instead, they made all the changes behind closed doors.
How was the 1933 edition different?
In many little ways. It changed word formation rules and the rules of transliteration for foreign words, completely copying Russian blueprint. It completely deleted the Ukrainian letter ґ from the spelling, leaving only a similar letter г that corresponded to the Russian alphabet. It also introduced the letter ф across many cases where Ukrainians used either т or хв. Finally, a lot of inherently Ukrainian words were replaced with Russian or Russian-sounding words.
All these changes were aimed at one goal: to erase points of difference between the Ukrainian and Russian languages, thus assimilating the Ukrainian language into the Russian tradition.
The 1933 edition succeeded: wherever the studying of the Ukrainian language was still allowed, Ukrainians would study the 1933 orthography for generations to come, not even realizing there ever was a different set of rules. Children of independent Ukraine in the 1990s were still studying the same Russified version of their language.
This may sound like a minor set of changes, but it shaped the mindset and the self-image of so many Ukrainians. How can we not be brothers with Russians? Look at our languages, they are so similar!
That way, the Russification was expressed not only through the forced imposition of Russian language on Ukrainians combined with the institutional pressure on the Ukrainian language – it was also burned right into the Ukrainian language itself, feeding the “brotherly nations” narrative and ensuring frictionless assimilation of Ukrainian identity for decades.
Reclaiming Ukraine’s spelling rules
As the Soviet Union was weakening in the late 1980s, Ukrainian intellectuals tried to revive some authentic Ukrainian norms. For instance, in the 1990 edition, the letter ґ was brought back to life. The damage was already done: even now many Ukrainians prefer to only use г instead of ґ, making this letter barely alive. The 1993 edition was still very much a Russified set of rules. Ukraine tried to turn back to the 1928 system again in 1999, but the project was never fully approved by the government.
The legacy of the Russified language rules kept receiving a lot of criticism from prominent figures in culture and media, leading to occasional protests. For instance, the Ukrainian edition of Harry Potter ignored the acting transliteration rules and was translated by the 1928 rules. Also, the Ukrainian national TV channel STB used the 1928 edition for all of its news segments since 2009.
Finally, after Russia had occupied Crimea and started the war in eastern regions in 2014, Ukraine once again came back to the issue of decolonizing its own language. In 2019, the updated Ukrainian orthography edition was finally approved, bringing back a lot of norms from 1928, but also refreshing the language according to modern needs.
Curiously, a lot of the re-installed norms have been introduced with the condition that the old rules will still remain acceptable – leaving a lot of flexibility and space for transition.
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The story of Ukraine’s 1928 and 1933 orthography editions – viewed together with the Executed Renaissance and the Holodomor – is just one example of how Russia weaponizes language to colonize nations.
To further unlearn Russian imperial propaganda, listen to the oppressed voices and help Ukraine defend its freedom.