In the 1920s, the Ukrainian Commissariat of Education and a circle of progressive educators aimed to radically transform the educational system in Ukraine, and, as a consequence, the skills and mentality of its graduates. To do this, they would have to teach students in a language they understood. For nearly three-quarters of the juvenile population of Ukraine, this meant instruction in Ukrainian. Although this may have sounded like a simple proposition, it was not. Throughout the pre-revolutionary period, schools had educated Ukrainian children in Russian, and teachers, regardless of their ethnicity, were trained and accustomed to teaching in it. Pre-revolutionary publications, still widely used in Soviet schools, and even the early Soviet primers were overwhelmingly written in Russian. Ukrainian national leaders had made an attempt to set up a network of Ukrainian-language schools during the country's short-lived period of independence, but their attempts were disrupted by the chaos of civil war and the fall of successive governments. It was under Soviet patronage that the “Ukrainization” of the schools reached its greatest extent; however, it was an achievement that required effort, and real qualitative change in the language of instruction was gradual.

The significance of language and literature as formative to national identity is a major trope within studies of nationalism. The act of imagining and realizing a nation and a nation-state along these lines has been tackled from multiple angles including folklore, linguistics, historical studies of educational institutions and their curricula, with a prominent place reserved for textbook analysis. Even though historical studies for the most part have underscored the rapidity and novelty of these processes, a temporal claim that is part and parcel of the larger and fundamental assertion that nationalism is a modern phenomenon, these processes are negotiated over a period of decades. In Braudelian terms, the standardization of a national language would fall somewhere between conjoncture and événement.

What was Soviet patriotism? A definition of the term offered by the Soviet ideological apparatus in 1953—a “social, historically conditioned feeling of love for one's motherland“—raises more questions than it answers. Patriotism was a concept foreign to classical Marxism; indeed, the concept, along with the corresponding term “the Soviet people,” entered mass usage only in the mid-1930s, when the Soviet government moved away from class as the dominant paradigm for interacting with its society. The relationship of Soviet patriotism to nationalism, the predominant political identity in twentieth-century Europe, was also ideologically fraught. Patriotism was sharply distinguished from nationalism (natsionalizm) in the Soviet lexicon. The first referred to a healthy allegiance to a community that was consistent with universal values of enlightenment, justice and democracy; the second was a jingoistic and reactionary ideology utilized by the bourgeoisie to mislead the working class. Despite this distinction, Soviet patriotism was supra-national, not anti-national, as it “harmoniously combined” the national traditions of the different Soviet nations with “the common, fundamental interests of all working people in the USSR.”

From the historical and scholarly perspective, Russian-Ukrainian relations occupy a unique niche in inter-ethnic relations, as they are framed by long-standing “fraternal rivalry,” imperial and colonial experience, and a complex understanding of identity, which are still at work today. Although the phenomenon has been the subject of numerous studies, little has been done to explore their encounter in emigration. The scope of these works has been limited to examining the relations between these two groups in the familiar territory of their homelands (i.e. either in the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, or in the period following the dissolution of the Soviet Union), and scholars have usually not made a strict delimitation between the concepts of the homeland and hostland. But certainly, the Russian–Ukrainian encounter in emigration in the interwar period created its own discourse, which differed from the pre-revolutionary and Soviet discourses. Its main features are (1) further alienation and a feeling of difference between the two groups; (2) a growing metaphysical view of the homeland, accompanied by ethno-symbolic manifestations of national identity; and (3) a sense of mission to preserve their culture and identity from erosion engineered by the Bolsheviks.