Paul Goble
Staunton, Feb. 23 -- The places in
what is now the Russian Federation where Ukrainians resettled at the end of
imperial times are referred to as “wedges” (kliny). The largest and most
famous of these are in the Far East (“the green wedge”) and in the Kuban (“the
almond wedge”). But those are far from the only such wedges of this kind
scattered across Russia.
(For
more on the wedge issue in general, see jamestown.org/program/kyiv-raises-stakes-by-expanding-appeals-to-ukrainian-wedges-inside-russia/, jamestown.org/program/kremlin-worried-about-ukrainian-wedges-inside-russia/
and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2016/06/a-real-wedge-issue-ukrainian-regions-in.html and especially the sources cited
therein.)
Russian officials typically argue that
these regions are fully integrated and that those who were Ukrainian in the
past have assimilated, but sometimes these officials express fears that Kyiv will
succeed in exploiting these communities against Moscow, comments that suggest
that even Moscow doesn’t fully believe its own claims.
But lest these claims be challenged,
Russian officials have done what they can to restrict investigations and
reports about the wedges. And thus any reporting about them is precious,
especially when it concerns wedges other than the green in the Far East and the
almost in the Kuban which remain far better on.
Among the wedges which have suffered
from the least coverage are the Blue Wedge which is located in Omsk Oblast just
north of the Russian border with Kazakhstan (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/07/a-rare-report-from-blue-wedge-ukrainian.html) and even more the Yellow (Zhovty
klin) in the Volga valley.
But two articles by Ukrainian
historian Borys Hunko (abn.org.ua/en/history/yellow-klyn-ukrainian-volga-region-the-history-of-the-struggle-for-freedom-and-language/
and abn.org.ua/en/history/yellow-klyn-ukrainian-volga-region-the-history-of-the-struggle-for-freedom-and-language/) provide details on a community few
know about.
The first describes the way in which
this Ukrainian wedge came into existence and traces the rise of a Ukrainian national
movement there in the 1920s and then again in the 1990s and the way in which
Moscow suppressed that movement and sought to ensure that the Yellow Wedge
would cease to exist as an organized structure. It is almost elegiac in tone.
The second, however, describes the
nature of identity among the population, an identity far more complicated than
Moscow or many Ukrainians elsewhere suspect, and outlines the steps the
residents of the Yellow Wedge need to take in alliance with other ethnic groups
in that region to defeat Muscovite imperialism and thus have a chance for a
better future.
According to Hunko, Volga Ukrainians
“clearly recognize their difference from the dominant ethnos, ‘the Muscovites’
but at the same time do not always identify themselves with Ukrainians in the
general national sense of the word.” Instead, they “define themselves as ‘neither
Russian nor Ukrainian.’”
And that in turn means that “the
term ‘khokhol,’ which in imperial discourse often has a pejorative meaning,
within the community itself is devoid of negative meaning” and for many and on
many occasions viewed positively, even though it is fragmented village by
village with each seeing its identity as local rather than national.
The appearance of an identity based
on the survival of a home language and home practices was “not an internal ‘choice’
of the community but rather the direct result of Moscow’s colonial policy aimed
at severing Ukrainians from their own historical and cultural roots” even as it
did not immediately join them completely to the Russian nation.
Because they are small in number and
generally a minority in local populations, the Yellow Wedge “cannot act as an
independent force,” he argues. Instead, “their path lies through an alliance
with those forces which strive for the complete dismantling of the imperial
system,” with Tatars, Chuvash, and others including regional Russians who want
the same thing.
