Resisting Russification in Soviet Ukraine through Literary Translation: The Voice of Mykola Lukash
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Soviet totalitarian regime not only violated human rights, it pursued an aggressive policy of assimilation, seeking Russian cultural and linguistic hegemony over all Soviet republics. Literary translation was no longer viewed as an apolitical activity and became an ideological weapon and an efficient “means of forced cultural change” (Monticelli). Regime ideologues sought control over both the selection of “reliable” authors / texts for translation and the ways in which these texts were interpreted in the target languages. This policy led to the appearance of massive translations from Russian literature and a widespread practice of indirect translations, with Russian intermediary texts as a criterion of fidelity. In Soviet Ukraine, however, this Russification policy went further and targeted the Ukrainian language itself; this resulted in the lexicographical deactivation of many authentic Ukrainian words and their substitution with Russian counterparts. Extensive repressive practices and tight ideological constraints gave rise to translators’ activism and cultural resistance and inspired translators to take on new roles. The case of Mykola Lukash (1919–88), whose name went down in the history of Ukrainian translation as a symbol of resistance, illustrates some of the social roles performed by translators to resist Russification. Lukash’s actions as translation gatekeeper, cultural custodian, and language guardian exemplified the importance of personal agency and a firm occupational identity for translators who opposed assimilation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".