Ukrainians in Russia - Ukrainian Life in Post-Soviet Russia

Ukrainian Life in Post-Soviet Russia

The Ukrainian cultural renaissance in Russia began in the last years of the 1980s, with the formation of the Slavutych Society in Moscow and the formation of the Ukrainian Cultural Centre named after T. Shevchenko in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg).

In 1991, the Ukraina Society organized a conference in Kiev with delegates from the various new Ukrainian Community organizations of the Eastern Diaspora. By 1991, over 20 such organizations were in existence. By 1992, 600 organizations were registered in Russia alone. The Congress helped to consolidate the efforts of these organizations. From 1992, regional congresses began to take place, organized by the Ukrainian organizations of Prymoria, Tyumen Oblast, Siberia and the Far East. In March 1992, the Union of Ukrainian organizations in Moscow was founded. In May of that year - The Union of Ukrainians in Russia.

In 1992, for the first time a term called "Eastern Diaspora" was used to describe Ukrainians living in the former USSR, as opposed to the Western Ukrainian Diaspora which was used until then to describe allUkrainian diaspora outside the Union. The estimated number of Ukrainians living in the Eastern Diaspora is 6.8 million, and while those in the West is approximately 5 million.

As of February 2009 about 3.5 million Ukrainian citizens stay in the Russian Federation. They mostly work in Moscow and the majority of immigrants works in the building sphere. According to Ambassador of Ukraine to the Russian FederationVolodymyr Yelchenko there were no state school in Russia with a program for teaching school subjects in the Ukrainian language as of August 2010; he considered "the correction of this situation" as one of his top priority tasks.