Ukrainians in Kazakhstan
The Ukrainians in Kazakhstan are an ethnic minority. At the 1989 census it had 896,000 citizens, which was 5.4 percent of the total population. This number fell, also due to emigration to Russia and Ukraine, to 796,000 people in 1998 and to only 456,997 in the 2009 census .
history
From the end of the 18th century, several waves of voluntary and involuntary Ukrainian settlers came to Kazakhstan. The first Ukrainians to arrive were exiled Hajdamaks , members of paramilitary Ukrainian peasant and Cossack gangs who were deported to Kazakhstan by the Russian government after the failed Koliivshchyna uprising in 1768 .
A larger group of ethnic Ukrainians in Kazakhstan was a great wave of settlers who, from the late 19th century onwards, came from almost all regions of Ukraine that were part of the Russian Empire at that time . These voluntary emigrants were looking for more opportunities and free land and at the turn of the century they numbered around 100,000 people in Kazakhstan and the neighboring regions of Russia. This movement expanded significantly after the agricultural reforms of Russian Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin in the early 20th century. Between 1897 and 1917 the proportion of the Ukrainian population in Kazakhstan rose from 1.9 percent to 10.5 percent. They tended to settle in the northern regions of Kazakhstan, which most closely resembled Ukraine in climatic terms. In 1917, Ukrainians made up approximately 29.5 percent of the population of Aqmola Oblast and 21.5 percent of the population of Turgai Oblast . In the 1926 census, 860,000 Ukrainians were registered in Kazakhstan.
In the 1930s, during the forced collectivization in the Soviet Union , 64,000 Ukrainians were forcibly deported to Kazakhstan with their families as so-called kulaks (any peasant family that did not live in the poorest conditions could be affected) .
After the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland in 1939, Ukrainians were deported to Kazakhstan from the western areas of Galicia and the Volhynia . Further forced resettlements followed if those affected were suspected of being close to the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists . About 8,000 Ukrainians were deported to forced labor camps near Karagandy . Some of them stayed in the area after they were released. The Ukrainians who arrived after the First World War set the tone in social and cultural life.
Cultural life of the Ukrainians
The assimilation of the Ukrainians was not originally intended by the Kazakh government and it supported the independent preservation of Ukrainian culture and language. To this end, a Ukrainian newspaper was founded and Ukrainian organizations can work freely in Kazakhstan. In 2009 there were 20 Ukrainian cultural centers that maintained and promoted Sunday schools, choirs and folk dance groups. In the capital Nur-Sultan (Astana until 2019) there is a Ukrainian high school and a Sunday school. The common suffering of the Kazakh and Ukrainian peoples in the hands of the Soviets is emphasized by Kazakh-Ukrainian activists.
Although the Ukrainian language is still important in rural areas with compact Ukrainian settlement and is actively supported by the Kazakh government, most Ukrainians speak predominantly Russian in everyday life. As a result of the adaptation to Russian culture, the proportion of the Ukrainian population in Kazakhstan who declares the Ukrainian language their mother tongue has fallen from 78.7 percent in 1926 to only 36.6 percent today. Many Ukrainians join forces against the Kazakh majority society with the Russian minority also living there. So there is a certain cultural divide in the Ukrainian community of Kazakhstan between those who retain a political and cultural identity of Ukraine (mainly descendants of immigrants from the mid-20th century) and those who have been culturally and linguistically Russified (the descendants of those who previously emigrated to Kazakhstan).
The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church has been operating in Kazakhstan since the arrival of the exiles from western Ukraine during and after World War II. Until 1978 the services took place in private houses in Karagandy and thereafter in the first Roman Catholic church building consecrated in Kazakhstan that year . The first house of worship in the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was consecrated in 1996. In 2009 there were nine Ukrainian Greek Catholic parishes. In 2002, Grand Archbishop Ljubomyr Husar , the head of the church at the time, visited the local believers.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b "The Ukrainians: Engaging the 'Eastern Diaspora'". By Andrew Wilson . (1999). In Charles King, Neil Melvin (Eds.) Nations Abroad . Westview Press, pp. 103-132.
- ↑ a b c d e f Ukrainian World Coordinating Council website ( Memento of the original from August 19, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ a b c d e Bhavna Dave. (2007). Kazakhstan: ethnicity, language and power . Psychology Press, pp. 133-134
- ↑ Ukraine - Kazakhstan Relations, taken from the website of the Ukrainian Embassy in the Russian Federation, accessed March 2009.
- ^ Website of the Ukrainian Catholic Church of Kazakhstan, accessed March 21, 2009
