Ukraine Explainers

Ukraine can't afford to single-handedly fight off the biggest threat to NATO while also doing all the sanctions legwork.

We need your help.

Thank you.

We need to talk about today's 158-missile attack and how sanctions against Russia are failing Ukraine – and hurting trust among all allies.

A short visual thread explaining the economy behind today's attack and how the current sanctions regime has enabled it.

End.

This thread is based on our full explainer available here: buymeacoffee.com/uaexplainers/d…

Our favorite detail that didn't make it here is the connection between Ukraine's translation of Harry Potter books and the 1928 orthography 🧙‍♂️

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The 2019 edition brought back a lot of norms from 1928 and refreshed the language according to modern needs.

In the end, the generation of Executed Renaissance won. Moscow’s assimilation project lost, and Russia's 2022 invasion is set to reverse this loss.
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Ukraine even tried to revive the 1928 rules entirely in 1999, but the project never got approved by the government.

After the Russian invasion of 2014, Ukraine was fully ready to decolonize its language. In 2019, the updated Ukrainian orthography was approved.
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Luckily, the story of Ukrainian spelling rules didn't end in 1933.

As Ukraine reclaimed its independence, the spelling debate followed. Already in 1990, the letter “Ґ” was brought back to life.
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The “Russianness” was burned right into the Ukrainian language, feeding the “brotherly nations” myth and helping to assimilate Ukrainians for decades.

Ukrainians would learn the 1933 spelling rules for generations to come, not even realizing there ever was an alternative.
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What did the 1933 edition change?

It touched many word formation rules and replaced many Ukrainian sounds and words.

All these changes had one goal in mind: to minimize the differences between the Ukr and Ru languages, assimilating the Ukrainian language into Russian.
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So, as the Holodomor was starving millions of Ukrainians to death and the Ukrainian elites were purged, the new Stalin-appointed authorities went after the Ukrainian language.

By the end of 1933, the new Ukrainian orthography – created behind closed doors – was published.
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Almost all of the “vanished” writers were sent to the Gulag or executed, and some of them simply disappeared or committed suicide.

The great boom and the subsequent purge of Ukrainian intellectuals went down in history as the Executed Renaissance.
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Skrypnyk was fired in January 1933 and shot himself anticipating his arrest.

In May, the first writers got arrested. Mykola Khvylovy, a contemporary superstar writer, shot himself, too.

The number of published Ukrainian writers fell from 259 in 1930 to only 36 in 1938.
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By 1933, all this legal nuance didn’t matter.

Prominent Ukrainian writers and artists couldn’t get published and were excluded from public institutions.

The hunt began.
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The term Ukrainian “bourgeois nationalism” was designed to target everyone and anything Ukrainian.

Such accusations were completely ungrounded, as contemporary elites were devoted communists and prominent revolutionaries, like Skrypnyk.
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The Republics’ autonomy was fading as Stalin accumulated power. And, as Ukrainians were resisting forced collectivization, the Ukrainian identity became the enemy of the Union.

In 1932, the Party voted for the resolution: "On the Suppression of Nationalism in Ukraine."
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The 1928 edition was accused of directing the Ukrainian language closer to Polish and Czech, thus guilty of Ukrainian “bourgeois nationalism.”

Now, what the hell is Ukrainian “bourgeois nationalism”?
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The 1928 orthography showed how different the Ukrainian and Russian languages actually were.

Driven by imperialistic thinking, Moscow couldn’t accept Ukraine with a wholesome, distinct language. Ukraine had to remain a dependent “brotherly” nation fully aligned with Russia.
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The 1928 orthography wasn’t rebellious at all. It was the result of linguists and writers coming together to create spelling norms that would reflect Ukraine’s diverse dialects.

It quickly became clear that Moscow hated and feared the new spelling rules. Why?
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The effort was state-approved and led by Mykola Skrypnyk, a prominent Ukrainian Bolshevik who was a People's Commissar of Education of Ukraine at the time.

Skrypnyk gathered top talent at the all-Ukrainian spelling conference in 1927 and turned the idea into reality.
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In this window of opportunity, Ukrainian intellectuals created an all-Ukrainian orthography in 1928, a set of spelling rules for the written Ukrainian language.

Both Soviet Ukraine and Poland-ruled Western Ukraine were represented.
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After centuries of repression under the Russian Empire, the Ukrainian culture got almost a decade of relative freedom and state support in the 1920s.

In just a few years, Ukraine flourished with new, bold literary and art talent – the Ukrainian Renaissance was in full bloom.
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Let’s step back.

After reconquering most of Russia's former colonies from 1918 to 1920, the USSR feared a new wave of liberation wars.

That’s why the 1920s were the time of the “korenizatsia” policies that gave some level of cultural autonomy across the USSR republics.
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This is the story of two Ukrainian orthography editions published in 1928 and 1933 – and everything horrible that happened in between.

It's also a lesson in Soviet/Russian colonialism, showcasing how Moscow weaponizes language to conquer and dominate other nations.
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Today is the Day of Ukrainian Writing and Language.

Here’s just one episode of Russia’s centuries-long war against the Ukrainian language.

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As a Ukrainian person looking at everything that’s been happening in the world lately, here’s what I really, REALLY need people living in liberal democracies to understand as soon as possible.

This isn’t a pleasant conversation.

A thread.
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Hey everyone 👋

We’re on Blue Sky now! As always, gathering Ukraine supporters and curious minds 🇺🇦