Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

During the Russian empire’s first great educational reform in 1804, Tsar Alexander I permitted some non-Russian languages to be used in the new state schools but not Ukrainian, ostensibly on the grounds that it was not a “language” but rather a dialect.14 In fact, Russian officials were perfectly clear, as their Soviet successors would be, about the political justification for this ban—which lasted until 1917—and the threat that the Ukrainian language posed to the central government. The governor-general of Kyiv, Podolia and Volyn declared in 1881 that using the Ukrainian language and textbooks in schools could lead to its use in higher education and eventually in legislation, the courts and public administration, thus creating “numerous complications and dangerous alterations to the unified Russian state.”