"Kiev" to "Kyiv": The Word-War's Western Front

Beyond Ukraine: Our Very Own Politics of Pronunciation

Source: warspot.net

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Driving back Up North along the M1 from Bristol in early April 2022, and whilst listening to the The World Tonight on BBC Radio 4 about the Ukraine War, I had a moment of clarity. It dawned upon me that there had been a clear switch across the usual media organs regarding place-name pronunciation that signaled a sort of Ukrainianization of international terminology. Kiev had become Kyiv, Lvov had become Lviv, etc. I had heard this before, in the early weeks of the fighting, as commentators, correspondents, and anchors had stumbled clumsily through almost illegible pronunciations (if that makes sense?) of place-names in that great swathe of black earth between the Don and the Bug. Whether Russian words or Ukrainian, the degree to which these correspondents and pundits falteringly massacred the vocables indicated to me how they had evidently not cared one whit about the region until 48 hours previously, yet now they spoke with such passionate intensity. I remember thinking how this Ukrainianization in the reportage and media discussion was always likely to happen, and that it was an entirely understandable development, but I also recall noticing how something else was solidifying.

Until last year, Russian pronunciation and spelling of place-names in Ukraine were common across the Anglosphere, an enduring legacy of both historical habit and lay indifference. Once Ukraine was invaded, I had anticipated some gradual Ukrainianization of places-names as something quite natural, even anodyne, and that in time anglophones would doubtless shift over in good order – where appropriate – to more Ukrainian pronunciations. Then, as I sat there behind the wheel of my titchy Toyota somewhere outside Nottingham, there came a frisson of concern. There was something very contemporary about the insistent undertones in the new nomenclature. It wasn’t that they had just switched as a practical matter. They were making a point about it, and there was something in it that worried me, something familiar.

I have spent a large portion of my still relatively young life in the study of 20th century history, the Soviet Union, Cold War, Bolshevik Revolution, and the Second World War in particular. I knew that seamlessly replacing Kiev with Kyiv was not going to be easy. It is not a simple matter to disentangle the great array of thoughts signified through a complex concept from a word-sign that has for a long time expressed that concept. Kiev – that great crossroads of the Byzantine trade, that great node of migration between Baltic and Black seas, that great fulcrum of religious, cultural, and juridical dissemination, and the location of the then greatest military encirclement in history (600,000 Soviet soldiers) – cannot lightly be relabelled for those who have had a long acquaintance with it. It is a city so embedded in the complex, far reaching, and interconnected relations that have woven together all the Russias. Likewise, I suspected that for Kharkov to become Kharkiv – a place over which no less than four battles were fought between 1941-43 and that almost every person I know had never heard of until February 24th 2022 – there was also going to be a long period of transition.

It was at that moment, somewhere between Trowell and Tibshelf services, that it dawned upon me what was about to happen. I remember the moment and the thought clearly, because at that instant someone in an Audi A6 pulled off a 80 mph New Jersey Shuffle about three meters from the front of my packed Aygo, at which point I lost my train of thought. By the Junction 29 off-ramp, it had come back to me.

The opportunity for a cadre of inexpert, uninformed, and self-appointed pontiffs to enlist Ukrainian misfortune for their own domestic metropolitan ends would not be missed. The chance to condescend to us barbarous multitudes, and to assume the port of cultural norm-setter, would not go begging. It was only a matter of time. In fact, it had already happened.

On March 9th, an opinion piece published in the Washington Post had already taken exactly this tack. This precise issue of language and place-names in Ukraine had been seized upon by the Post to make a brief but instant political strike into the discourses of Transatlantic daily life. One Ben Dreyer had taken it upon himself to enlighten us with his homily on the matter, not from any particular knowledge or credentials on the Ukraine, Eastern Europe, or the Russian geopolitical space, but from his own theory playbook. The article is quite short, so it might be worth taking a peek at it now, if you have the time.

Eschewing topics profoundly less relevant for the Russo-Ukrainian war – geopolitical consequences, international aid logistics, historical causes, the complexities of ethnocultural threshold spaces – Dreyer chose instead to focus his piece on “the immense meaning of ‘the’”. Not at all hyperbolic, Dreyer’s deep dive into the micro-aggressions of language use was as erudite as it was unexpected in the post-2020 Washington Post. The gist was that we had better not take our time in transitioning to the new set of phonemes, lest we wish to betray our backwardness and contribute to imperialism. The problem?

Ukraine, not ‘the Ukraine,’ I’d jotted down in my to-do notebook a couple of weeks ago. “Kiev/Kyiv.” “Zelensky(y).”

The thinking behind this?

Ukraine is an independent country and has been so since it declared itself free of the moldering, moribund Soviet Union in 1991 — more than 30 years ago, I underline. It is not “the Ukraine” — that is, not a province, not a territory, which is indeed the whiff given off by that “the,” as in, reaching back into history, “the Levant” or “the Crimea”.

He emphasizes thirty years, as though that were some profound timeframe. In light of the historical depth to the cultural politics of the region, thirty years may as well be thirty minutes. However, the message is a straightforward one. There is no excuse for non-compliance with the new linguistic rules determined from a desk at the Washington Post. The glib condescension goes on…

This column should have been a slam-dunk: a little copyeditorial erudition and explication, a few historical quotes for context and support, perhaps a digression into Bombay and Mumbai, or Burma and Myanmar, maybe a joke or two — how about a sly reference to the 1953 novelty pop hit “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)”? (“If you’ve a date in Constantinople / She’ll be waiting in Istanbul.”)

For those not in the know, his allusion to Bombay and Burma – to which he could have added Saigon, Madras, Rangoon, Mysore, and Ceylon – is an oblique expansion of the issue into the broader one of historical imperialism. He is insinuating that any further dalliance with Russian spellings, pronunciation, or naming conventions, is to perpetuate imperialism in general. Don’t take my word for it.

I wondered whether it’s even worth the keystrokes to explain the imperialist smell of the simple article “the”.

Forget pronouns! We now have imperialism in an article. But even if we were inclined to be drawn onto the battlefield of grammatical micro-aggressions, does the argument necessarily follow on its own terms? ‘The’ Ukraine. What about ‘The’ Old Kent Road or ‘The’ North? In general, the definite article can just as likely signify affection or native familiarity than imperialist contempt. What if the article has come with the imported noun, a product of another culture in another time and place? More plausibly and to the point, the definite article could well give us a hint as to just how contested the whole issue of Ukraine’s place in the region has actually been. Putting the awesome thirty-year timeframe aside for a moment, ‘The’ Ukraine sits beside other politically non-committal geographical expressions. ‘The’ Steppe, for example, is populated by people who have a distinct mode of living, relationship with the climatic and physical environment, but who neither speak a common tongue nor worship at the same alter. Is the use of an article imperialist here? Or is it ironically something that expresses indefiniteness from an outside perspective (where else would our perspective come from)?

I should point out that I am not questioning seriously the Ukrainian claim to nationhood. I am questioning the legitimacy of automatically designating as imperialist anyone who persists with a definite article. These are highly convoluted matters that have not been fully dried out through the wringer of history, so I’m not sure it is right to make such unequivocal connections.

Basically, we’re back to the same old uncharitable and one-dimensional interpretations that seem to be a compulsion for those in this mindset. Just because something could be true, it is true. That is the incessant line of thought. No context, no self-restraint, no plurality, no mercy. Like a tedious bore who tells the same joke over and over again, irrespective of setting or company, and totally indifferent to the way in which words can have a gamut of meanings when they stand alone.

The temptation to bring ‘Euro-centrism‘ into the discussion is not far behind – “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)”. It’s not clear how this is relevant, but the compulsion to jam this particular issue into the frame cannot be resisted, whether it is apposite or not. Then we come to Kiev.

As to Kiev and Kyiv, that’s simpler: Kyiv is the appropriate transliteration of the Ukrainian name of the country’s capital, whereas Kiev is the name of the city in Russian… It doesn’t take a big thinker, I think, to understand why the Ukrainians would prefer the one over the other.

Fortunate we are to have an authority at the Washington Post to tell us what is appropriate, and indeed to tell us what Ukrainians prefer. Doubtless many Ukrainians would agree with him, but others perhaps not. Why? Who cares! Why would that be important? What is important is that we all engage in the micro-politics of language use and make sure that we do not deviate from its new orthodoxies. The specifics of Russo-Ukrainian relations can go whistle.

It’s instructive to just dwell on the tone of the piece as well. Despite his efforts to assume a jocular and laid-back tone throughout, which actually comes across as passive aggressive, the authentic voice comes through in the last paragraph.

Those of us who follow publishers’ usages and standards at least as much as we set them out will continue to watch the Zelensky(y) matter with interest — and will be reminded that words, even “the” small ones, even their smallest components, can carry a big meaning.

This was all sadly predictable. The policing of language has become a pathology in certain quarters, and this paragraph demonstrates three features of it. In a recent article by Andrew Doyle – excerpted from his book The New Puritans (2022) – he identifies all three of them. The first feature is the intimidating assurance that they will be diligently monitoring us, notwithstanding the disarming tone of indifference that otherwise suffuses the piece. The second feature is the strategy of capturing style guides and dictionaries, rewriting the definitions they contain, and then innocently referring to them as sources. Wittingly or not, Dreyer hints at this instrumental circularity. The third feature is the willingness to make big political plays upon micro-mundanities, without a shred of reflexive awareness regarding the potential effects this can have upon public discourse, not to mention our mental health. Doyle points to how “they have embraced the belief that language is either a tool of oppression or a means to resist it”. This in itself is not entirely without merit, but it rapidly becomes so when “[l]anguage is reduced to a series of cyphers intended only to bolster oppression or resist it”, as Doyle points out.

Language can indeed be powerful. Dreyer is right that “innocuous-looking shifts in nomenclature can carry significant content,…”, but, wait for it, “… and one does well to keep up.” This is what they can’t resist. Rather than using language analysis to open up syntax to individual and original thought and interpretation, they use it to close down, instruct, and to assert doctrine with menacing prissiness. They abuse the study of language to enforce their crude interpretive framework upon us, while the rest of us are struggling sincerely to understand something quite demanding.

The loss of context sensitivity is disastrous, as we saw with the imperialism of ‘the‘. Every nominal is a perspective from somewhere. How can one really assert with such certainty the legitimacy of one particular perspective, without getting one’s feet wet? How many people know that Ukrainian Lviv is not just Russian Lvov, but also Polish Lwów and German Lemberg?¹ Who in the Atlantic sphere really gets the historical layers in a region where so many socio-political, linguistic, and religious entities have encountered one another and intersected? Few, I would venture, which is fine, if one adopts a certain cautious humility when joining the discussion. But Dreyer doesn’t demonstrate any delicacy in his approach to the relationship of Russia to Ukraine, Russians to Ukrainians, or the way in which language use is so very hard to distill in the accretions of the social lifeworld, especially in a region with such a history of overlapping identities, experiences, and stories. He doesn’t seem to be aware of the tremendous subtleties that exist beneath the hermeneutic blanket he throws over the area.

The grand schema terraforms the landscape in its own image, for its own inappropriate purposes, with no regard to the lines of identity and difference, centre and periphery that weigh heavily on what one historian has named the Bloodlands of modern European history.² Attention might better be paid to the likes of Solzhenitsyn, who wrote of this in the Brezhnev period.

The fact that the ratio between those who consider themselves Russian and those who consider themselves Ukrainian varies from province to province of the Ukraine will cause many complications.³

Solzhenitsyn works through the ‘complications’.

Why are we so exasperated by Ukrainian nationalism, by the desire of our brothers to speak, educate their children, and write their shop signs in their own language?…why does their desire to secede annoy us so much? Can't we part with the Odessa beaches? Or the fruit of Circassia?⁴

Implicit in this passage is the problem. He address ‘brothers’, while acknowledging the legitimacy of their self-determination. It could not be more imbricated. The current Russo-Ukrainian war will have polarized feelings, and I could be mistaken, but I would imagine that there are many who share something of the sentiment expressed in Solzhenitsyn’s summary. It is unlikely that his position is unique.

For me this is a painful subject. Russia and the Ukraine are united in my blood, my heart, my thoughts. But from friendly contact with Ukrainians in the camps over a long period I have learned how sore they feel. Our generation cannot avoid paying for the mistakes of generations before it.⁵

The history – so painful, so difficult, so insoluble. To draw strategically sweeping and unequivocal lines of moral asymmetry in this trickiest of settings is not merely fruitless, but actively harmful. To speak so confidently of imperialism in matters so mundane and intimate, and to then make trans-historical analogies across huge geopolitical distances, is like performing surgery with a machete. To approach this terrain from the position of high abstraction will not help those actually touched by the conflict in Ukraine, even if it does open a door to language politicking on the part of those in the West who cannot resist the temptation.

Let’s try a little thought experiment for clarity’s sake. Suppose the government of an independent Scotland decided to ‘transliterate‘ the spelling of Glasgow to Glazgi, Glazgae, or some such similar. In folky and democratic deference to our brothers and sisters of the Clyde, a Scottish government might feel the need to embrace the flinty authenticity expressed phonetically by many Glaswegians, and in so doing erect another ethnocultural differentiator of the kind often necessary for buttressing political sovereignty and self-determination. Am I an imperialist, if I don’t turn without hesitation to the new terminology? Presumably the answer would be “Yes, you are English, so hands off our Scotland!” But there are problems. My patrilineal forebears were denizens of the very same Caledonia from which I am to be excluded. I have relatives – uncles, cousins, and an aunt – who were born/live there. I was, until the day before yesterday in this hypothetical Day 1 of an independent Scotland, a citizen of the same country – Great Britain.

Then what of Glazgow/Glazgi itself? There are fewer quintessentially British cities in the United Kingdom. From the Act of Union (1707), to which the city’s "Nobilitie, Gentry, Magistrats and [bourgeois] inhabitants" were generally favourable,⁶ Glasgow became a bastion of Unionism until 19th century Irish immigration and 20th century de-industrialization complicated the tableau. Regardless, from the beginning of its 18th Century ascent to commercial greatness the city’s riches and renown were woven tightly into the Atlantic and world trade. Under the Union Jack, Glasgow was bound into the British Empire and all the resonances, complexities, associations, and connections it has entailed to the present.

I met a woman a few years ago in San Fransisco, who came from the Balkans. When I asked where exactly, the answer came back – “Yugoslavia”. “Hmm, don’t you mean Serbia, or Croatia, or wherever?” “No, I mean Yugoslavia”. That’s what she grew up with and that’s what she had always considered herself to be. Does this mean that she was an accidental imperialist, a post-Tito revisionist implicitly endorsing the power projection of Belgrade apparatchiks in some kind of nostalgic revanchism? No, no more than we are French imperialists for writing about Cologne, as opposed to Köln. Yugoslavia is simply what furnished the universe of meaning in which she grew up and was socialized, just as I grew up in a family and social milieu that was explicitly British more than English. One wonders whether the Dreyers of this world would consider her use of ‘Yugoslavia’, and my continued use of ‘Britain’, as some species of dead-naming that needs to be strong-armed into the programme.

We'll come back to this in a moment, but let us return briefly to the Ukraine. Since the age of Kievan Rus and the early Rurik dynasty, the complexities and interconnections involved in that region of the great rivers centred on Kiev have been immense.⁷ On his co-hosted Triggernometry podast (and elsewhere), Konstantin Kisin has pointed to the danger in uninformed Western commentary on the Russian-Ukrainian situation. Himself born into a not untypical matrix of Russo-Ukrainian relations, Kisin has drawn explicit attention to the difficulties in disentangling the Gordian knot of social, cultural, political and linguistic associations in the Russo-Ukrainian sphere that has been tying itself up for millennia. When an unsophisticated schematic is applied to this setting from without, the outcome is all-too-often the steamrolling over nuance or the projection of one’s own narrow interpretive agenda onto a terrain that deserves more intellectual respect.

My point is not to glide over the power politics of the region in the name of complexity. There are asymmetries of power and domination at work in the region. The legacy of the Russian and Soviet empires cannot be ignored, just as there have been and still are asymmetries between England and Scotland. However, they are nevertheless shaded by other considerations. What of the asymmetries within Scotland between the Highlands and urban lowland, between oil-booming Aberdeen and the old industrial core, or between proles and bourgeois? Is the fundamental asymmetry really between Scotland and England or between Scotland and the metropole? As a provincial English Northerner, am I really a potential oppressor of Scots, or do I share a common condition with them in the shadow of our great metropolitan city-state? When all is said and done, we have to question whether it is right to proclaim unilaterally that the use of such and such a place-name necessarily signifies a particular political position or even perpetuates a particular socio-cultural discourse. To understand place-names requires context sensitivity and cautious nuance, rather than the application of templates.

All this is not to say that a person cannot bracket the geo-historical smörgåsbord and take a coherent ethical stance vis-a-vis the Russo-Ukrainian war. I for one would oppose the military invasion of Ukraine by the armies of the Russian state. The point is to confront the finger-wagging over here, particularly when it is driven by political motives ulterior to the apparent topic. When embedded into the lifeworld, rather than deployed as a catchphrase from on high, the politics of place-names is incredibly involved. Lecturing and moralizing are not just counterproductive, but philistine. It is not cosmopolitan, but entirely uncosmopolitan, to take the opportunity offered by ethnocultural conflicts to gesticulate and hector the public. But then this is the author of Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style. A jokey subtitle one suspects, but a completely unsurprising one, given how common it is for the passive-aggressive to paste their sermons with the disarming rhetoric of a half-joke. The sub rosa lecture can always be laughed off with a bit of insincere self-dep.

If I’m starting to sound peevish, it is because this stuff is not harmless. It demoralizes people unfairly, discourages sincere discussion, puts the policeman insight the head, and encourages the simplification of profoundly difficult problems that require well-informed and sophisticated engagement. Most importantly, my aim here has not really been to comment upon the politics of the Russo-Ukrainian war, for what I know on the matter is dwarfed by what I don’t. It is to draw attention to the dubious use made of that politics by third parties in the Transatlantic space, against which we must always guard. It is to reveal power politics couched in the sententious tones of the pseudo-critical, who speak about oppression from the olympus of metropolitan power down to the contadini of the hinterlands. Maybe we should be less concerned with the micro-aggressions contained in the use of ‘the‘, and be more concerned with the macro-aggressions contained in flippant micro-articles such as the one put out on March 9th by the Washington Post.

Endnotes

1. The German name reflects the centuries long presence of German-speaking bourgeoisie and Jews predominant in many Eastern European commercial cities up to the 20th Century than it does any imperialist Drang nach Osten.

2. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010).

3. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: Volume III, p. 46.

4. Ibid., p. 45.

5. Ibid., p. 45.

6. Christopher A. Whatley, The Scots and the Union (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), pp. 23, 29.

7. Geoffrey Hosking, Russia People and Empire, 1552-1917 (New York: HarperCollins, 1998); Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (London: Penguin, 2016); Boris Kagarlitsky, Empire of the Periphery (London: Pluto Press, 2007), pp. 26-44.