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.
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