Educational Assimilation: Conversion of Schools to the Metropole's Language

As part of educational assimilation, aggressors may carry out a total, forced conversion of the teaching process in all educational institutions to the colonizer's language. Depriving the Indigenous people of the right to educate their children in their native language leads to a rapid rupture of cultural continuity and the complete integration of the local population into the aggressor's information space.

ID: T0114.003
Sub-technique of:  T0114
Tactic: Persistence
People: Ukrainians
Contributors: decolonial.ist project
Version: 1.1
Created: 21 April 2026
Last Modified: 9 August 2026

Procedures Carried Out


January 1769
C0044 Russification of Education and Religion (1769–1786)
G0009 Russian Empire
S0008 Government

The Russification of teaching in the country's principal institution of learning: from 1784 metropolitan Samuil Myslavsky introduced new classes of geography and history at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy with an order to conduct them "in pure Russian," and by his order of 26 October 1784 demanded that teachers and students observe "the rules of orthography proper to the Russian language" - teachers faced dismissal for lapses, and students expulsion from the clerical estate[1]. The unification was completed by the order of February 13, 1786: "to adopt immediately for the Kyiv Academy the mode of instruction legalized for all schools in the All-Russian Empire"[2] – the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy was transferred to the empire-wide mode of teaching.

January 1919
C0074 Soviet-Ukrainian War: Second Invasion and Resource Depletion (1919)
G0014 White Movement (AFSR)
S0012 Occupation and Controlled Administrations

On 3 August 1919 general Mai-Maevsky, head of the Whites' administration in Katerynoslav, Kharkiv, Kursk and Poltava provinces, issued in Kharkiv order No. 22, opening it thus: "I announce the basic provisions adopted by the Special Council on the question of 'Ukrainian schools.'" The first point was reversal: "All schools in which, before the appearance of the 'Ukrainian' authorities, instruction was conducted in Russian, and then, by order of the Ukrainian authority, the Little Russian language was made the language of instruction, must return again to instruction in Russian"[3].

The history and geography of Ukraine the order struck from the curricula: "The teaching of 'Ukrainian studies' (the history and geography of Ukraine) is abolished"[3].

Nine days later the commander-in-chief confirmed the same norm: in the address "To the Population of Little Russia" Denikin declared Russian the state language "over the whole expanse of Russia," leaving to Ukrainian the private schools and the first years of primary school - "to ease the pupils' assimilation of the first rudiments of knowledge"[4]. In Kyiv order No. 22 was applied in the autumn as well: a summary of the Soviet side on the situation in the city records that "in all schools the Russian language is being introduced as the state language"[5].

August 1937
C0080 NKVD National Operations and Institutional Russification (1937–1939)
G0010 USSR
S0008 Government

On 24 January 1938 the Orgburo of the Central Committee of the VKP(b), by its resolution "On the Liquidation of National Schools and National Sections in Schools," closed non-Russian schools throughout the Union, liquidating the national districts and village soviets on the same day[6][7]; on 13 March the resolution of the Central Committee of the VKP(b) and the USSR Council of People's Commissars No. 324 "On the Compulsory Study of the Russian Language in the Schools of the National Republics and Regions" made the metropole's language a compulsory subject in all schools of the republics[8]. Kyiv executed the decision on 10 April 1938: the Politburo of the Central Committee of the KP(b)U, "proceeding from the decision of the Central Committee of the VKP(b)," declared "the further existence of special national schools inexpedient and harmful" and resolved to reorganize the German, Polish, Czech, Swedish and other schools and technical colleges "into Soviet schools of the ordinary type," to liquidate national sections and classes at ordinary schools, colleges and universities, and, where there was nowhere to transfer the pupils, to transfer the institutions themselves to ordinary school curricula - "with instruction in Ukrainian or Russian"; the Odesa German Pedagogical Institute was turned into an institute of foreign languages, and all the work was ordered finished by 1 August 1938[9]. The Politburo wrote its justification into the resolution itself: "enemies of the people - Trotskyites, Bukharinites and bourgeois nationalists operating in the People's Commissariat of Education of the Ukrainian SSR - implanted special national German, Polish, Czech, Swedish, Greek and other schools, turning them into hotbeds of bourgeois-nationalist, anti-Soviet influence on children"[9]. The decision was given the form of a state act by the Council of People's Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR in its resolution of 29 June 1938 on the reorganization of special national schools, colleges and the Odesa German Pedagogical Institute: by 1 August 1938, 766 national primary, incomplete secondary and secondary schools were subject to reorganization into ordinary schools with (predominantly) Russian and Ukrainian as the language of instruction, and another 122 were merged with Russian and Ukrainian ones on the territorial principle - the count of the historian Liudmyla Yakubova[10].

References

  1. Митрополит Іларіон (Іван Огієнко). (1993). Українська церква: Нариси з історії української православної церкви (гл. XIII. Як цариця Катерина обмосковлювала Церкву Українську).
  2. Василь Лизанчук. (1995). Навічно кували кайдани.
  3. Гражданская война на Украине, т. 2 (1967), док. № 320; «Голос Юга», № 3, 8 августа 1919. (1919). Приказ главноначальствующего Екатеринославской, Харьковской, Курской и Полтавской губерний генерала Май-Маевского № 22.
  4. А. Деникин, обращение главнокомандующего ВСЮР (Таганрог, 12(25) августа 1919). (1919). К населению Малороссии.
  5. Гражданская война на Украине, т. 2 (1967); ЦГАОР УССР, ф. 2579. (1919). Сообщение о положении в Киеве при деникинской власти.