Ukrainian, Russophone, (Other) Russian. Marco Puleri

of Ukrainians, nor is there one today” (2009: 57).

45 Here my research will be mainly focused around the complexity of Ukrainian–Russian relations. An analysis of the colonial history of Polish domination in Western Ukraine and its impact on Ukrainian culture and society, which has been the focus of several studies published in the last decade (e.g. see Korek 2007; Ładykowski 2015), lies outside the scope of this work.

46 “Знаю только то, что никак бы не дал преимущества ни малороссиянину перед русским, ни русскому пред малороссиянином. Обе природы слишком щедро одарены Богом, и как нарочно каждая из них порознь заключает в себе то, чего нет в другой, — явный знак, что они должны пополнить одна другую.”

47 The controversial reception of Gogol’ and Shevchenko has been under the focus of several studies for decades (e.g. Luckyj 1971; Grabowicz 1982). In this section I touched on some of the crucial points of the issue; however, an in-depth analysis of the debate lies outside the scope of this book.

48 According to the British scholar, after the unexpected explosion of the USSR in Ukraine, symptomatically “there was no real revolution” (Wilson 2015: 102). Wilson identifies the alliance between the Communist elite and the “minority nationalist movement” as the key to understanding the reasons behind the political opportunity to support Ukrainian independence in 1991. In his view, this explains “why the country tried to have two catch-up revolutions in 2004 [i.e. the Orange Revolution] and 2014 [i.e. the Euromaidan Revolution].”

49 See: http://2001.ukrcensus.gov.ua/eng/results/general/ (08/2019). The second All-Ukrainian population census was postponed several times throughout the second decade of the 2000s. At the time of the writing of this book (July 2019), the new census has been scheduled to be held in late 2020.

50 As Ihor Stebelesky (2009: 77) highlights in his study entitled Ethnic Self-Identification in Ukraine, 1989–2001: Why More Ukrainians and Fewer Russians?: “While their numbers [i.e. the numbers of Ukrainians] increased from 37.4 to 37.5 million, or by 122.6 thousand, the number of those who declared their nationality Russian decreased from 11.4 to 8.3 million, or by about 3 million people. As a result, the share of the declared Ukrainians and Russians shifted dramatically, from 72.7 and 22.1 percent in 1989, to 78.1 and 17.3 percent, respectively, in 2001.”

51 In his comprehensive reconstruction of Russians’ and Russophones’ identity formation in Ukraine, Kulyk (2019a) retraced the origins and nuances of the sociological debate around the issue in the last decades. For the sake of clarity, it is worth noting that here we report only some of the crucial dynamics of the point in question.

52 As the KIIS sociologist Valerii Khmel’ko explained in an interview for Radio Liberty: “[…] after the standard question about nationality—what nationality do you consider yourself—we also ask another question: do you consider yourself only a Ukrainian or only a Russian, or to some extent do you consider yourself both? As a result, it turned out that a quarter of the population consists of people who—in one way or another—do not consider themselves monoethnic. Most of these people […] are Russian-Ukrainian bi-ethnors” (Fanailova 2014a; […] после стандартного вопроса о национальности, кем вы себя считаете по национальности, задаем еще дополнительный вопрос: считаете ли вы себя только украинцем или только русским, или в какой-то мере считаете себя так же и другим. В результате выяснилось, что у нас четверть населения –– это люди, которые в той или иной мере себя считают не одноэтничными. Больше всего таких людей […] это русско-украинские биэтноры).

53 “Чим далі на Захід, тим більше моноетнічних украïнців, і тим менше украïно-російських біетнорів та моноетнічних росіян. І навпаки, чим далі на Схід і Південь, тим менше моноетнічних укрaїнців, і тим більше украïно-російських біетнорів та моноетнічних росіян […] серед моноетнічних украïнців частка украïномовних більш ніж вдвічі перевищує частку російськомовних, а серед украïно-російських біетнорів, навпаки, частка украïномовних більш ніж вчетверо менше за частку російськомовних.”

54 The study was conducted by the Ukrainian Center for Independent Political Research (UCIPR) and based on six focus groups from regions under the control of the Kyiv government (L’viv, Kyiv, Kramators’k, Kharkiv, Vinnytsia and Kherson, April–May 2016).

55 Since 2014, in the aftermath of the contested annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas, the term “Novorossiia” has emblematically experienced a new resurgence in Russian nationalist circles, based on its dual meaning in announcing a “new Russia” including the territories of the former imperial province (Laruelle 2016).