Ukraine had been a Russian colony throughout their lives, and it was difficult for any of them to imagine it as anything else. Ukrainian, to many of them, was a “barnyard” language. As the Ukrainian communist Volodymyr Zatonskyi complained, “it is an old habit of comrades to look upon Ukraine as Little Russia, as part of the Russian empire—a habit that has been drummed into you throughout the millennia of the existence of Russian imperialism.”
