Kyiv or Kiev?

People, real people that aren’t me, are talking about you transliterate Cyrillic into English. For once in it’s life, How could you be so Chartless is relevant to the present day!

The chart above shows the usage of ‘Kyiv’ in blue and ‘Kiev’ in red in the United states over the past 90 days.  Both spellings refer to the capital city of Ukraine. Ukraine, of course, is constantly in the news because of the ongoing impeachment hearings of President Donald Trump. You can even track the days of the hearings based on the spikes in searches for Kiev.

In mid November, it seemed like the world changed overnight. Now, if you Google ‘Kiev’, Google will tell you that you mean Kyiv. The New York Times and other news outlets have switched from Kiev to Kyiv. So why is this? Basically, it’s a concerted effort to shift how we talk about Ukraine into a less Russocentric mode.

Ukraine and Russia have a long and entwined history. Before either were nation states as we know them today, there was the Kievan Rus’, a loose federation that includes parts of modern Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. The capital and center of the Kievan Rus’ was the city of Kyiv. With the decline of the Byzantine Empire and the Mongol Invasion, The Kievan Rus’ splinted and shifted north, with Moscow eventually becoming the center and capital of Russia. Russia later conquered and incorporated Belarus, and parts of Ukraine in the Russian Empire. The Russian Empire was later overthrown by the Bolsheviks, who established the USSR, which again included all three nations. Because Russian often was, and currently is, the dominant political force of the three, we typically think of Ukraine and Belarus in Russian terms. Ukraine was sometimes referred to as Little Rus, and Belarus means White Rus. The word Ukraine is derived from the Russian and Polish words meaning borderlands, which is why you sometimes hear Ukraine called the Ukraine, essentially ‘the frontier.’

However, Ukraine is a current United States ally and NATO partner, while Russia has, and is attempting to interfere in the democratic process of the United States. And as part of the United State’s efforts to establish more stable democratic countries in the world, the US is trying to bring Ukraine into better contact with itself and western Europe, while separating it from Russia. Likewise Russia is attempting to reassert control in Ukraine through its annexation of the Crimean Peninsula and armed conflict in Eastern Ukraine (where a majority of Ukrainians speak Russian). As part of this realignment effort, American institutions are changing how they spell Kyiv.    

In Ukrainian, the capital is spelled ‘Kиïв’ and in Russian it is spelled ‘Kиeв’. ‘И’ is transliterated as a ‘y’ in Ukrainian, and as an ‘i’ in Russian. ‘В’ is transliterated as ‘v’ in both languages. ‘e’ remains ‘e’ in English, and ‘ï’ is transliterated as ‘ji’ (pronounced ‘yea’ as in ‘yeast’). This gives us ‘Kyiv’ as a Ukrainian transliteration and ‘Kiev’ as a Russian transliteration. However, the pronunciation is the most marked difference.  

There’s a part in War and Peace where it is noted that Prince Andrei, a Russian officer, pronounces the name Kutuzov like a Frenchman, ‘ku-tu-ZOV’, and not like a Russian, ‘ku-TU-zov’. The audiobook I was listening to was read by an Englishman who pronounced the name ‘KU-tu-zov’. Russian tends to emphasize the second syllable of a word giving us the expected English pronunciation ‘ki-EV’. Ukrainian, on the other hand, is more like English (or Polish) where the emphasis is placed on the first syllable, giving us the ‘new’ pronunciation ‘KEEV’ (this is also why we say the Polish ‘VOD-ka’ and not ‘vod-KA’).

So while it’s pretty clear from previous installments of How could you be so Chartless that I’m a bit of a Russophile, I’m willing to make the switch in this case. I love old Russian books and authors, like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, and new Russian books and authors, like Shishkin and Tolstoya, but I don’t love Putin’s Russia, its efforts to destabilize the United States, or it’s invasion of Ukraine. Saying ‘Kyiv’ may be a small step to resisting Putin’s regime, but it’s a deliberate step that American institutions, and I, are taking.