in practice the Russian language returned to dominance in both higher education and public life. Millions assumed that any association with Ukrainian language or history was toxic, even dangerous, as well as “backwards” and inferior. The city government of Donetsk dropped its use of Ukrainian; factory newspapers that had been publishing in Ukrainian switched to Russian.45 The universities of Odessa, which had recently adopted Ukrainian, also went back to teaching in Russian. Ambitious students openly sought to avoid studying Ukrainian, preferring to be educated in Russian, the language that
...more
