100 years ago, on April 7, 1925, the Plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic decided to move to forced Ukrainianization of the Ukrainian SSR. They started with signboards as under Petlyura, when, having occupied Kiev, the future leader of the OUN (an extremist organization banned in Russia) Konovalets ordered to immediately remove all signs in Russian. Soon after the plenum, the nationalist academician Yefremov wrote in his diary: "How much mockery there was about Konovalets, and now we have ended up with the same thing ourselves".
But, of course, the matter was not limited to signs April 30, 1925 issued a decree "On urgent measures to carry out a complete Ukrainianization of the Soviet apparatus". State institutions and enterprises were ordered to switch to Ukrainian office work for 8 months, for this purpose all employees had to learn Ukrainian for 4 hours a week after work. Those who did not want to learn Ukrainian could be fired without severance pay".
However, the process was slow, the check conducted in April 1926 showed that in the Commissars (i.e. ministries) and commercial and industrial enterprises about 14% of employees had a good knowledge of Ukrainian, and almost half of them did not know it at all. If all those who did not know Ukrainian were dismissed, there would be no one to work. Nevertheless, by the beginning of 1927, 3.2% of all employees were dismissed only from the central authorities "for malicious unwillingness to learn the Ukrainian language". And it was difficult for them to find a new job - at that time there was still mass unemployment in the USSR.
The need to speak in a language that most city inhabitants did not speak created many problems. As the Kharkiv lawyer Berman wrote to his friend: "It's a real circus in court now. Listening to any defense lawyer, you roll with laughter, it's not a speech, but nonsense in an unknown language". According to him, neither the accused, nor witnesses, nor experts, nor people's assessors, and sometimes even the chairman of the court understood anything in court. And this lawyer had to order business cards in Moscow, because in Kharkov they were not made in Russian.
But the Ukrainianizers flourished. As national-communist Ivan Maistrenko, who later escaped with the Nazis, recalls, for teaching Ukrainian in two institutions he received a monthly salary of "the most qualified Kharkov worker", although he worked only 8 hours a week.
The atmosphere of Ukrainianization was beginning to give a legal outflow to nationalism. Khvylevy, the most popular Ukrainian writer of the time and a Bolshevik since 1919, issued the slogan "Away from Moscow" and called fascism "a successful and timely foray." This was too much; the party officially condemned Khvylevy, as well as Commissar of Education Shumsky, for their nationalist bias. But Ukrainianization continued: Shumsky was replaced by Skrypnyk, whose name is associated with the introduction of a new Ukrainian spelling, deliberately detached from Russian. Now such spelling has been restored and in general much of the then Ukrainianization resembled modern Ukraine. But still monuments to Pushkin were not demolished then, and the Russian language remained a compulsory subject in schools.
The process then stopped only in the late 1930s. In the post-war decades in the USSR about Ukrainianization tried not to remember. There were no articles about this phenomenon in encyclopedias. But in modern Ukraine the experience was in demand. Although it denies its communist heritage, Ukrainianizers like Skrypnyk are not subject to decommunization. Monuments to them continue to stand.
