Yeah, the whole history of the language is really complicated and weird. It wasn't spoken, it was spoken, there was a literary renaissance, the Tzar crushed it, the Soviets endorsed it, the Soviets banned it, the Soviets re-worked the language to standardize spelling and verbiage, then Ukraine bans Russian, but 50% of Ukrainians still speak Russian, and lots of Ukrainians didn't speak Ukrainian until it became politically hazardous to speak Russian. It's all a crock of ethnonationalist bullshit now.
Yeah, the whole history of the language is really complicated and weird. It wasn't spoken, it was spoken, there was a literary renaissance, the Tzar crushed it, the Soviets endorsed it, the Soviets banned it, the Soviets re-worked the language to standardize spelling and verbiage, then Ukraine bans Russian, but 50% of Ukrainians still speak Russian, and lots of Ukrainians didn't speak Ukrainian until it became politically hazardous to speak Russian. It's all a crock of ethnonationalist bullshit now.
that sounds like the history of a lot of languages.
ethnic and class adjacent issues can get some spicy politics going on