GLASNOST DEFENSE FOUNDATION'S DIGEST No. 179 (April 19, 2004)

Ukraine. Russian language ousted from Ukrainian television. Head of Russian Journalists' Union sees it as "senseless and harmful campaign".

By Mark Agatov ,
GDF staff correspondent in Ukraine
and the Autonomous Crimean Republic.

April 19 will be the last day of Russian-language broadcasts on Ukrainian television. Last week, the National Council for TV and Radio Broadcasting passed a decision to finally outlaw the Russian- language TV programs in the country.

Total Ukrainianization is in store not only for the companies broadcasting in the meter and decimeter wave ranges but also for the cable TV operators beaming to relatively small areas within Ukraine.

Boris Kholod, head of the TV and Radio Council, said: "We have concluded that if we ever want to preserve the Ukrainian nation, we must state it in all clarity that the language of TV broadcasting shall be Ukrainian". The TV companies daring to broadcast in Russian will be stripped of their licenses. Council deputy head Vitaly Shevchenko has announced the establishment of a working group to supervise compliance with the Council's decision banning the Russian-language programs from Ukrainian television.

According to Mr. Kholod, the Council is yet to work out regulations on the show of Russian-language films and programs, but he will recommend that the films purchased via Ukrainian Culture Ministry channels should be dubbed into Ukrainian.

The previous campaign to oust the Russian language products from Ukrainian television caused large-scale protests from the Russian-speaking residents of Ukraine in the late 1990s. However, the thousands-strong public actions and collective protests failed to make the republic's authorities change their mind. Over the past few years, Russian-language programs have vanished from some of the national TV channels altogether. The Russian TV channels ORT, RTR and NTV have been frozen even in those areas of Ukraine where Russian-speaking citizens make up the vast majority of the population. If politicians felt free to speak Russian, their statements would be sure to be dubbed into Ukrainian, and the politicians themselves would be unlikely to appear on TV anymore.

The demand for Russian-language broadcasts has generated appropriate supply: cable TV studios in the country's eastern districts have charged symbolic fees for connecting clients to their networks relaying Russian television programs. Naturally, this cannot but annoy the "Ukrainianizers" from the National Council, who have initiated a chain of legal proceedings against the cable company managers on charges of violating the Russian TV firms' copyrights. However, these cases fell apart in court because the head managers of the copyright holding companies - ORT, RTR and NTV - did not support the charges. After the end of the court hearings, people in a number of regions could watch their favorite TV programs via cable networks without any restrictions for several years. Kiev frowned, because Ukrainian TV companies' advertising market was suffering heavy losses, and it grew ever more difficult to influence viewers' opinion during election campaigns.

A way out was finally found: the National Council added a number of special provisions to the broadcasting licenses requiring the heads of cable television studios to show 11 Ukrainian channels on a mandatory basis, adding to them Russia's ORT channel so much favored by the viewers. The latter could not decline those unwanted services. For example, the so-called "social package for the poor" costing 6 grivnas per month, offered by the Simferopol-based TV company Zhissa, included ORT plus 8 Ukrainian channels. The situation in other Ukrainian cities was much the same. Significantly enough, part of the proceeds from the cable studio operations, gathered in the form of taxes, license fees, etc., have been used to finance the development of state-controlled Ukrainian television.

Igor Yakovenko, general secretary of the Journalists' Union of Russia, believes the National Council's decision on the Ukrainian electronic media's mandatory broadcasting in Ukrainian was a mistake. In his interview for the Interfax news agency, Mr. Yakovenko called the Ukrainianization campaign "yet another crazy idea and an attempt to use legislative bans as a means of dealing with problems that cannot possibly be solved in that way". "Cultural influence is a matter of intellectual competition; it depends on the viewer's actual preferences and free choices… What has happened in Ukraine is akin to attempts by Russia's domestic car manufacturers to ban the imports of foreign-made cars; in either case, those bans are far from meeting the consumer's interests," I. Yakovenko said, adding that personally, he sees the Ukrainian Council's decision as a "senseless and harmful" one.