Paul
Goble
Staunton, October 20 – Viktor Girzhov,
the head of the Ukrainians of Moscow Union who was recently denied entry into
Russia, says that the number of Ukrainians in the Russian Federation has
declined by a million over the last decade not because of deaths or departures
but because of their re-identification as Russians.
Girzhov says that the efforts of the
Russian authorities to shutter Ukrainian organizations in Russia and to prompt
ethnic Ukrainians living there to re-identify as ethnic Russians began long
before the war in the Donbas (gordonua.com/news/society/CHislennost-ukraincev-v-Rossii-sokratilas-na-1-mln-Oni-ne-uehali-ne-umerli-prosto-nazyvayut-sebya-russkimi-102487.html).
And he suggests that if there is no
reaction from Kyiv or from the international community, the current Russian
government will take even more harsh steps in this direction, closing down the
remaining Ukrainian organizations, exiling their leaders, and forcibly
re-identifying Ukrainians as Russians. Unfortunately, there has been little
outcry.
Girzhov, who had been living in
Moscow for 20 years, is married to a Russian citizen, and is the responsible
secretary of the Ukrainian Congress of Russia was taken off the Kyiv-Moscow
train on October 14 and told by Russian border guards that he could not enter
Russia for five years.
This was hardly unexpected, he
suggested. Moscow has done the same to others, and Russian officials have asked
him “why [he] lives in Russia and speaks against it?” Moreover, they have closed several Ukrainian
organizations over the past five years which were part of the Ukrainian
Congress of Russia.
He said that he was certain that “the
FSB cannot make such decisions independently” and that “all this was done consciously
and at a minimum with the agreement of Vladislav Surkov and that of the latter
with Vladimir Putin himself.” He suggested that this is part of a Kremlin
effort to “cleanse the [Russian] information space of Ukrainian influence.”
Moscow began its current efforts to
destroy Ukrainian public organizations in 2010 when it liquidated first the
Union of Ukrainians of Russia and then the Federal National-Cultural Autonomy
of Ukrainians of Russia. Ukrainian
activists created the Ukrainian Congress of Russia, but the Russian justice ministry
has refused to register it.
But perhaps the most pernicious
thing the Russian authorities have done is to set up nominally Ukrainian
organizations which in fact are anti-Ukrainian in their essence. Thus, the
president of the Ukrainians of Moscow organization routinely says that “Russians
and Ukrainians are a single nation” (lifenews.ru/news/159758).
“This
is an absolutely Ukrainophobic Kremlin project,” Girshov says, “the task of
which is to create the image of freedom of national minorities.” Its leader is
someone who has never worked a day of his life in a Ukrainian movement but who
enjoys direct access to and support from the Moscow authorities.
Despite all this, the Russian
Federation still has “the largest Ukrainian diaspora in the world,” with some
two million people, of whom 254,000 live in Moscow. But “as a result of repression and
assimilation, we have already lost almost a million fellow citizens.” In 2002,
there were three million ethnic Ukrainians there; in 2010, only two million.
“The rest did not
die and did not leave the Russian Federation; they simply rejected their roots
and ceased to position themselves as ethnic Ukrainians. To a certain extent one
can understand why. But this is the result of moral and psychological pressure
which began long before the war and as we see is continuing,” Girshov says.
Girshov says that he plans to
continue to work for the good of Ukraine but on Ukrainian territory as it is
unlikely he’ll be able to go back to Russia anytime soon. His wife will be
joining him in a few days. As to his sons, the question is open: they may have
problems getting passports because of what has happened to him.
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