Where Are the Homelands of Western Ukrainian Russians?

Abstract

This article contains an analysis of the identity of Russians and Russian-speaking persons living in the Lviv oblast in Ukraine, on the basis of interviews collected by the author in the years 2011–2012. The article combines anthropological, sociological, and politological perspectives, and examines the following questions: Is Eastern Galicia, after the fall of the USSR, treated by the interviewees as a ‘private homeland’, or is it entirely foreign to them culturally (as being a post-Habsburg, ‘western’ area)? Did Ukraine become their ‘ideological homeland’ or does only Russia appear in that role? Did Russia, after 1991, become a ‘foreign homeland’ and did they themselves enter into the role typical of a national minority, experiencing discrimination in the nationally oriented state’ of Ukraine? The author does not give unequivocal answers to these questions, but he nevertheless provides convincing data to confirm the failure of independent Ukraine’s integration policy toward its Russian and Russian-speaking citizens. In his opinion, it failed at the national level and especially in Eastern Galicia, whose symbolic sphere has been dominated by the ideology of Ukrainian ethnic-cultural nationalism.