by Alina Bykova
Although I was born in Ukraine, I spent most of my life identifying as Russian. This was not meant to be a political statement by any means, but it started to feel uncomfortably political in 2013 when the Maidan protests started. Over the last seven years, this tension has led me to re-examine my identity as a Russian-Ukrainian, and it brought me to the Ukrainian for Reading Knowledge course at HUSI. Learning Ukrainian at Harvard this summer inspired me to ask myself important questions about who I am and what it means to be a member of the Ukrainian diaspora.
For many years, I felt estranged from my Ukrainian culture and heritage. My great-grandmother was the last person in my family to speak Ukrainian. Born in a selo just south of Kyiv in 1920, it was her first, and likely her only language until her teens. Although she married into a Soviet military family and went on to live in Russia and Kazakhstan (before eventually settling in Odesa), she always spoke with a Ukrainian accent, and Ukrainian words inevitably found their way into her Russian speech until the end of her life.
I was born in Odesa, a majority Russian-speaking city, to a mostly Russian-identifying family, and I moved to Canada as a child. When I was younger, I didn’t particularly question my identity, or think about what it meant in the context of being a Ukrainian immigrant and a member of the diaspora. My entire family spoke Russian, and it was my native language. Many of my relatives had been born in Russia, and my great-grandmother’s Ukrainian-speaking tendencies were usually disregarded as a personal quirk, rather than traces of a language that had been suppressed for centuries. In my family, Ukrainian was dismissed as a “peasant’s language” that was inferior to Russian. Even recently, when I announced that I was going to study Ukrainian at the Harvard Summer School, my decision was met with confusion by numerous family members.
Growing up, I certainly felt more Russian than Ukrainian. I was raised on a steady diet of Soviet cartoons and films. And it was definitely easier to tell my peers in Canadian elementary school that I was Russian, rather than explaining that I had been born in Ukraine (a country many Western kids couldn’t find on a map) to a Russian-speaking family. At the time, I didn’t realize that there were millions of other Russian-Ukrainians like me out there.
At university, while pursuing both my bachelor’s and master’s degrees, I wanted to join Slavic students’ associations, but I worried that I didn’t belong in the Russian student club, nor the Ukrainian one. I wasn’t from Russia, so I felt alienated from that student group - but no one in the last three generations of my family had spoken Ukrainian either, and I’d never owned or worn an embroidered shirt, which seemed like a prerequisite for being part of any Ukrainian diaspora organization, especially in Canada, which has the largest Ukrainian population in the world outside of Ukraine itself. Especially after the war in Ukraine started, I was concerned that I would be viewed with hostility in both Russian and Ukrainian circles.
While I knew a lot about my family history, and about the history of Russia and the Soviet Union as a whole, it wasn’t until I started my master’s degree in 2017 that I started to read comprehensively about the repression Ukrainians had faced for centuries under the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. During graduate school, I also met Yaromyr, an exchange student from Ukraine, and we became close friends. He told me a lot about the country from a personal perspective, and consistently encouraged me to learn more about the region. After he left Canada, we stayed in touch, which helped me sustain and grow my knowledge of the country.
A personal turning point for me came in winter 2019, when I went to Russia for two months to do independent research for my master’s thesis. It was my first time visiting the country, and I was really excited. I had been dreaming of travelling there since I was a child, and I was sure that my trip would reveal to me important things about the Russian culture in which I had been raised. As a Russian-Ukrainian living in Canada, I had spent most of my life searching for belonging in a community, and I was optimistic that I might feel at home in Russia.
Upon my arrival, however, I quickly found that Russia was not entirely what I expected - while I was enthralled by Moscow and the other cities I visited, very few things felt familiar to me. Within my first hours on Russian soil, upon exiting Sheremetyevo Airport and getting on the express train to Moscow’s Belorussky Station, I was immediately surprised and thrown off by subtle differences I noticed between “ordinary” Russians, and the people I had grown up with in Odesa and in diaspora communities in Canada. Something difficult to quantify, something about the atmosphere of the place, and the way people spoke to each other and carried themselves felt alien to me. As I watched the Moscow suburbs roll by past the window on our way into the city, I began to realize that perhaps I had never been as Russian as I imagined. Compared to people I saw around me, I didn’t feel very Russian at all. I was a foreigner.
That winter, I also met up with Yaromyr in Kyiv. After over a month of lonely and intensive research in Russia, I almost cried when the plane landed in Boryspil Airport - it felt like I had come home. I’d been to Kyiv many times, but I’d mostly spent my days with elderly relatives and their Russian-speaking friends, and I rarely went out or heard everyday Ukrainians interacting with each other. During my 2019 trip, Yaromyr and I ate in stylish cafes and met up with other Ukrainian youth, and I felt ashamed that while everyone around me spoke Ukrainian, I was forced to use either Russian or English. Speaking English felt more comfortable than Russian at times. While many Ukrainians are bilingual, and it is acceptable to speak Russian in large parts of the country, including Kyiv, I was saddened by the fact that I had been born in Ukraine but couldn’t speak the dominant language. I felt that in speaking only Russian, I could not fully support the values of the Maidan movement. When I spoke Russian to servers at the cafe, they answered me in Ukrainian, and I realized that I would likely never feel at home in the country of my birth unless I spoke the majority language. That was when I decided to learn Ukrainian.
On one of our last days together in Kyiv, Yaromyr and I went to the beautiful St. Andrei’s Church, which sits atop a hill overlooking the Andriivs'kyi Descent and the Dnieper River. As we stood on the viewing platform, looking down at the snow-covered city, Yaromyr said to me, “This is your city, too, you are always welcome here, and you are a Ukrainian as well.” I have come back to his words many times since then, especially when I feel unsure of who I am and what my duelling identities mean to me and perhaps others.
It was also Yaromyr who sent me a link to the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute’s summer program and encouraged me to apply. I felt a lot of apprehension in the lead-up to the course, fretting over whether I would be good enough, but once it started, learning Ukrainian felt natural and rewarding. My Ukrainian comprehension has increased exponentially over the last seven weeks, and I am grateful that I have had this opportunity. While I am by no means totally fluent, and my Ukrainian needs a lot of work, I feel that after years of searching for answers, I finally have more clarity and confidence. Learning the language has helped me feel more comfortable and legitimate as a member of the Ukrainian diaspora.
Nonetheless, speaking about my identity isn’t easy, because while this topic is personal for me, what I have to say also goes beyond that, pointing to larger problems of Russification, repression, and generational trauma that affect millions of people. Being a Russian-Ukrainian was never political for me, until it was, and speaking about my life and experience ultimately means reflecting on the historical and political context of the present situation, and saying things that not everyone may agree with. But acknowledging the difficult history of language and identity politics in Ukraine is important, even if it is uncomfortable, and I think it is necessary for my growth as a Ukrainian person - after all, I am a product of those politics.
At the end of it all, I wish my great-grandmother was still alive today so that I could speak Ukrainian with her and show her that her native identity and culture is going through a powerful resurgence in modern Ukraine and beyond. Learning Ukrainian has shown me the beauty of the language and of my heritage, and it has empowered me and helped me realize that I am a Ukrainian, even if this identity was not a home for me in previous years. I am proud to explore and celebrate my Ukrainian roots, and grateful that I am able to do it at an exemplary institution like Harvard. There are up to 20 million Ukrainians living outside of Ukraine today, and I believe it’s time that I took my place among them, for I am Ukrainian, too.