The late Fred Halliday
– a Professor who once warned the London School of Economics against entangling
itself with the Gaddafi regime – thought
that the role of diasporas in the politics of their homelands is always
negative. The idea is expressed in a posthumous collection of his essays, Political Journeys (Saqi 2011).
Diasporas, especially moneyed ones, adopt a proprietorial attitude towards a
homeland to which they have little or no intention of returning, whether the
land is Armenia, Ireland or Israel. Diaspora organisations use their influence
to support hardline positions against local politicians when those are
inevitably tempted to pragmatic adjustments aimed at making peace with
neighbours who, in the diaspora view of things, are supposed to remain enemies
forever.
When it comes to soft power, to culture rather than guns,
diasporas unite around traditionalist, conservative positions. Culture is
something to be upheld and to remain the same, brought out for high days and
holidays but otherwise preserved in a well-funded museum. Living cultures, of
course, change all the time and those who inhabit them are lax about the
boundaries between their own and those of their supposed enemies.
In Ukraine,
for example, inhabitants are frequently polled and asked to identify themselves
as either Ukrainian or Russian speakers and willingly do so. However, those who
thus identify themselves are very often found mixing the two supposedly
distinct languages, with or without awareness of what they are doing. This may
well be true for a majority of the population, though those who are formally
classified as speakers of a mixed language, labelled Surzhyk, are counted at between 10 and 20 % of the population. I
think there is little doubt that is an under-estimate.
Left to their own
devices, most speakers gravitate towards mixing and that is something language
purists cannot tolerate. In France, the Academie
Française fights an unending rearguard action against it.
In relation to Ukrainian, diasporas, notably in the USA,
are on permanent alert to ensure that in writing about Ukraine, English language authors transliterate from good
Ukrainian versions of words rather than equivalent but bad Russian ones. Thus
it is that we have come to write about Kyiv
not Kiev. If you don’t want to annoy
your Ukrainian friends, but want to keep life simple, you can get by with a
very simple App which converts the G in
your translation to H and O to I,
and so on. So Kharkov (a
transliteration from the Russian version of the city name) becomes Kharkiv and the place name ending which
indicates a town goes from –gorod to
–horod. The list isn’t that long.
The
trouble with this way of trying to keep your friends happy is that you may end
up using words which are not simply anachronistic but, worse, may never have
been used by anyone until linguistic ideologues armed with their App inserted
them into the pages of Wikipedia and other online sources. An ideologue and
still less an App does not recognise that the road to error is paved with the
mechanical application of things which may be good enough for everyday rules of
thumb but not for more serious calculation.
Early on in her book, Red
Famine: Stalin’s War On Ukraine (2017), Anne Applebaum mentions the
well-known fact that “John Hughes, a Welshman, founded the city now known as
Donetsk”, about the spelling of which there seems to be no argument, and goes
on to say that it was “originally called ‘Yuzivka’ in his honour” (p 9).
Oh no, it wasn’t! Hughes had been invited to the Donbass
[Ukrainian Donbas] by Russia’s
Tsarist government in 1869. It was no modest undertaking that was projected:
Hughes formed an English company to raise three hundred thousand pounds for the
construction of an iron smelter, a rail-producing plant, the development of
coal mines, and the building of a long branch railway line to connect to the
main Russian network. All this is documented in fascinating detail in Theodore
H. Friedgut’s two volume work, published in 1989 and 1994 by Princeton
University Press, under the title Iuzovka
and Revolution, transliterating from the Russian Юзовка the name of this company town named after its founder. The Iu at the front can be replaced by Yu to avoid the un-English feel of the
former, but what tells us that this is a Russian word is the O in both the Russian original and the
English transliteration.
Iuzovka or Yuzovka was
briefly called Trotsk [after Trotsky]
in 1923 though even now that’s hard to document, was officially renamed Stalino in 1924, and converted to Donetsk in 1961. I don’t think anyone
ever called it Yuzivka. Yuzivka is an invention. It’s a fake
word and to use it anachronistically is to allow a historical falsification.
But when I googled Yuzivka I got 17
500 results, slightly ahead of Yuzovka,
well ahead of Iuzovka. The ideologues
have been very busy. It’s rather as if Flemish nationalists had gone through
the Internet converting all occurrences of the very old French-speaking city name Liége into Luik which is what road signs in Flemish-speaking parts of Belgium
now call it, sometimes to the confusion of naïve foreign motorists (they
confused me first time I tried to drive there).
In a historical work to use Iuzovka / Yuzovka does not
suppress the Ukrainian language or Ukrainian identity; it reflects the fact
that in the period of its existence until its name was changed, Iuzovka /
Yuzovka was an overwhelmingly Russian town, planted in the Donbass by the
Imperial government and built and managed by foreigners, of whom there were
many. Hughes himself died in St Petersburg in 1889, but he was only there
because he was negotiating deals for the Iuzovka plant.
Only by acknowledging that they did things differently in the
past, even named differently, can one then go on to consider how the
inhabitants of Iuzovka related to the surrounding and undoubtedly Ukrainian
countryside. Friedgut is blunt:
“The nearby Ukrainian peasants were not on the best of terms
with the mining settlements and viewed them as foreign both ethically and
ethnically…. The relatively few Ukrainians employed in the mines and metallurgy
works were also embroiled in ethnic tensions despite their acculturation to the
dominant Russian milieu of the region” (volume 1, page 208)
“The separation of Russians and Ukrainians remained
throughout the entire period [1869-1924]. Until the Soviet regime brought him
by force majeure, the Ukrainian
peasant was least inclined to enter the mines or factories as a hired worker,
and first to leave it in time of crisis. His ties to his village were strong
and directly at hand. The Donbass thus
remained within the Ukraine but not of it” (vol 1, page 331)
There was never a Ukrainian Yuzivka, only a Russian Iuzovka,
and that is one reason why we have a problem still today, not only with names
but with the guns of the Donetsk People’s Republic.
