Сергей Медведев - The Return of the Russian Leviathan

A new enemy has appeared on the scene for the Russian authorities: the English language. A scandal erupted in the State Duma over a speech made by deputy Dmitry Gudkov in the US Senate in March 2013, which was critical of Russia. When he returned to Russia, the Duma Ethics Commission recommended that he be removed from the Duma on the grounds that his speech ‘was written and delivered in English’. Furthermore, Gudkov was charged with preparing his text in good English; in the opinion of the deputies this could be a sign of high treason.

Around the same time, the Chairman of the Cultural Commission of the Russian Federation Public Chamber, Pavel Pozhigaylo, who served in the Strategic Rocket Forces and also in the Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) of the Russian Armed Forces, gave an interview to the Voice of Russia radio station, where he said with military directness: ‘We have a small population and a serious demographic situation. So I am absolutely certain that for a period of time we shouldn’t teach foreign languages at all, so that people don’t leave the country. The Russian language is all they need. Russian literature is all they need.’ [25] https://pora-valit.livejournal.com/1258484.html . ‘Time to call a halt? Everything you need to know about emigration’ (in Russian), Voice of Russia radio station, 21 March 2013.

In Soviet times having bad English was a good sign for people in authority. Die-hard Soviet international affairs specialists Valentin Zorin, Yevgeny Primakov and Georgy Arbatov knew the language perfectly, but in international meetings they would speak with a heavy Russian accent in which you could hear the arrogance of a superpower: if you need to know what I’m saying, you’ll get it. And if we dig down even deeper, into the Stalinist era, then, according to a number of witnesses, foreigners in Moscow in the late 1930s were afraid to be heard speaking their own language on the street because they could immediately be arrested as spies.

In the 1990s and at the start of the twenty-first century there appeared among Russian politicians and in the business community bright young people with degrees from Harvard and who spoke wonderful English. They mixed on a par with their partners in the G8 and the World Trade Organization (WTO); but they are not the ones today who set the tone in Putin’s Russia with its Chekist vigilance and its paranoid searches for ‘foreign agents’ and ‘the hand of the US State Department’. The patriotic revelations of Pozhigaylo and the Duma’s démarche about Gudkov are typical of the political discourse in modern Russia, in which anti-Western pathos, cultural isolationism and aggressive provinciality have become the norm.

Russia has fallen way behind when it comes to foreign languages and overseas contacts. According to research carried out by the organization EF, English First, on the knowledge of English in forty-four countries where English is not the official language, Russia came thirty-second, behind the other BRIC countries, China, India and Brazil. According to data from sociologists from the Public Opinion Foundation, only 17 per cent of Russians know any foreign language; and a mere 20 per cent have ever been abroad (and that includes the countries of the former Soviet Union and largely Russian-speaking resorts in Turkey and Egypt). Statistics from the Federal Migration Service show that only 15 per cent of Russians hold a foreign travel passport, and only about half of those use it regularly.

It is almost impossible to hear a foreign language in the cinema or on television: all films and foreign programmes are dubbed. The dubbing industry is flourishing. The best actors and pop stars are brought in for this, and their names appear on the billboards in larger letters than the names of the director and the cast. Films in the original language with subtitles are shown only in selected cinemas in Moscow, or at closed screenings. It is a fact that hiring and watching films with subtitles is one of the cheapest and most effective ways of studying foreign languages, as the experience of North European countries and the Netherlands shows, where virtually the whole population has a good knowledge of English, especially the younger generation.

The same language war is taking place on the streets of Russia. The law on advertising forbids the use of foreign words in advertisements without a translation unless the foreign advertising slogan is a registered trademark. The Federal Anti-Monopoly Service wants to ban shops from using even the inoffensive word ‘Sale’, saying they should use the Russian words skidki (‘discounts’) or rasprodazha (‘sale’). Legal cases have already been brought in some parts of Russia against companies that have used foreign words in their advertising.

The supporters of language sovereignty often point to France as a country where cultural protectionism flourishes, where films are also dubbed (just like in Germany), and where there are quotas for the hiring of foreign films. They are even more enthusiastic in taking the USA as an example, where the population is perhaps even more ignorant than ours when it comes to travelling abroad and speaking foreign languages. But America and France can allow themselves this luxury. America is by rights the only global superpower, a major exporter of culture and the language standard bearer for the modern world. And France can do this because it is a cultural superpower, the ruler of a worldwide Francophone empire and the most popular country in the world for tourists.

Russia remains a country on the periphery of capitalism, squeezed into an inhospitable corner of Eurasia, and with a culture and a language that, throughout history, have been largely imported. There was a brief period in the twentieth century when we exported culture, when the world saw the dawning of the Russian avant-garde; and then we exported our social model and our image of modernization, educating in our universities and our academies hundreds and thousands of representatives from countries of ‘the Third World’. Today Russia has lost its empire, its territory, its reputation and its global attractiveness. It seems determined, too, to lose its population, for whom the Russian language is its native language; and even those native speakers have disastrously lost their literacy. In such conditions, to introduce linguistic isolationism just to satisfy national pride is suicidal for Russian culture. It will become simply a provincial sideshow, a subject of interest only for professional ethnographers and Slavists. The only way to preserve Russian culture is to broadcast it to the world. And for that you need English.

We shouldn’t be comparing ourselves to America; we should learn from our neighbours, such as Finland. Of course, the scale and the ambition there is not on a par with Russia’s, but the problems are similar. Like Russia, this is another country on the periphery, with a borrowed Western culture and a language that is out on a limb. The Finns acknowledged pretty quickly the lack of perspective in linguistic nationalism. Moreover, while the second language of the state is Swedish (even though no more than 5 per cent of the population speak it, it is compulsory to study it), in practice the third language is English. You hear it on the radio and on television; up to half of all university courses are taught in English (by Finnish lecturers to Finnish students); you can go up to just about anyone on the street – and this is not even counting policemen or state officials – and speak to them in English, and if they can’t answer you they will be embarrassed. What’s more, Finnish culture is in no way marginalized; on the contrary, it is becoming ever more competitive in the world. They export unique items, from design and electronics to consulting and educational services.