People's Artist of Ukraine Maria Burmaka recalled the event that forced her family from Kharkov to abandon the Russian language once and for all. The singer’s father was a historian, so he had access to archives, where he was able to find enough evidence that Russia had been destroying Ukrainians for years solely because of their origin. This discovery played a key role in forming a clear position for the star’s family.

Burmaka spoke about this in the project “In essence”. The singer emphasized that from that moment on, her father even took away part of her school Russian-language literature, replacing it with Ukrainian textbooks.

" But, since he had access to the archives, at one point he said: “We were killed only because we were Ukrainians.”. They did everything just to destroy us. Our family will be Ukrainian-speaking" And we began to communicate in Ukrainian in a family in the center of Kharkov, which was completely Russian. I studied history at school, and my dad took a textbook from me in Russian and found it somewhere in Ukrainian. I was the only one who studied using such a textbook,” the artist shared..

According to Maria Burmaki, during the Soviet Union, everything Ukrainian was generally suppressed. The artist’s father was not even able to enroll in graduate school, because he was reproached for his “nationalist mustache”. However, as Burmaka noted, this situation did not destroy the Ukrainian identity in her father, but only strengthened it.

" He brought home works by Alexander Oles, Bogdan-Igor Antonich. There was nothing revolutionary there, it was just Ukrainian books and good poetry. Dad took me to the Slovo house in Kharkov and at the age of 12–13 he told me everything, because he knew it,” the singer noted.

Maria Burmaka said that her father finally “realized himself as a Ukrainian” at the age of 25. As the singer explained, his position came from a kind of internal resistance: “He told me: “They killed us.”. He said that Ukraine should not disappear and, perhaps, this is a chain in which you should be a tiny link. I grew up with this"