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Comment by stackedinserter | Hacker News Reader

USSR didn't try to "exterminate" Ukrainian, where did you get this? We spoke Ukrainian all my childhood, it was taught at school, there were TV shows, magazines and newspapers in Ukrainian. It was alive and very actively used, at least in 80's.

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I know some Ukrainians who say the exact opposite— Russian was taught in schools, all the big important jobs went to Russians, at firms where Russian was spoken, government business was conducted in Russian, and so on. It’s curious how these accounts can be so different, so I’m going to choose to believe the folks I’ve met in person on many occasions.

Russian was and is used because it's a common denominator, like English here in Canada. French is actually forced into our education, media and public jobs. But yet, English is a standard language in companies, government and so on. Does it mean that Canada "exterminating" French?

> I’m going to choose to believe the folks I’ve met

It's totally up to you who to believe. Just make sure that what they say matches reality. And reality is that Russian is still used in majority of Ukrainian companies as standard language, even after 30+ years of independence. We work with contractors from Ukraine and they all communicate in Russian perfectly well.

I had a Ukrainian friend and I thought he'd told me that Russian was strongly encouraged. I thought the state had a stronger policy towards making sure everyone spoke russian.

I just looked it up and it appears that wasn't something the USSR ever really did.

It would have been the normal thing to do. But the USSR went the other way because it was committed to the idea of being several separate soviet republics, so it pushed the idea of Ukrainian language and culture as something distinct from Russian in order to present the idea of a Soviet Ukrainian Republic as something distinct from the Soviet Russian Republic.

It was "strongly encouraged" in the way that English is "strongly encouraged" in any US company. 3/4 of the company can speak Hindi but in all hands meeting everyone speaks English because it's the only language that everyone in the room understands and speaks (poorly, lol).

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