Николас Остлер - Empires of the Word - A language History of the World

These interventions may seem to have been strategically ill advised, since the Caucasus range was one of the few natural borders that the Russian steppes possessed. Now Russia was gratuitously offering hostages to fortune beyond it. But Russian strategists, used to defending boundless plains, seem to have been happy only with a forward policy. General Rostislav Fadeyev commented in 1860: ‘If Russia’s horizons ended on the snowy summits of the Caucasus range, then the whole western half of the Asian continent would be outside our sphere of influence and, given the present impotence of Turkey and Persia, would not long wait for another master.’ [626]

The price of these trans-Caucasian provinces was the ‘sixty years of Caucasian wars’, which was the title of General Fadeyev’s book. What was required was nothing less than the Russian conquest of the whole mountain range, simply in order to assure their access to the Christian south. The fighting was particularly bitter for having a religious edge: almost the whole area was (and has remained) Muslim. The conquest was achieved, but only through immense brutality, and the current struggles in Chechnya show that many resentments are still unassuaged 150 years later.

Russian became the language of administration and education in all these provinces—not of course of the Church or of the mosque. But in general it did not supplant the native languages of the region, which is one of the most linguistically diverse in the world. This was as true of the mountain peoples of the north as of the hyper-educated and cultivated Georgians and Armenians of the south. In their society, the Azeris too developed a literary language of their own. The Russian government, especially in the late nineteenth century, won few friends with its sporadic attempts to make the population more Russian, for example closing Armenian parish schools and replacing them with Russian schools in 1885, but then rescinding the order. Now that Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, after two centuries, have become independent nations, it can be seen that the penetration of Russian (measured by percentage of first-language speakers) remained very low. Armenia 2 per cent; Georgia 7 per cent; Azerbaijan 6 per cent. [627]

The story of Russia’s expansion into Muslim central Asia can be briefly told, since by this time Russia had cast itself very much in the same mould as the other great powers of Europe, anxious to guarantee as high a degree of control as possible within their ‘spheres of influence’. This vast area, which was always predominantly Muslim, seemed to have a different, more distant status than any other part of the empire: the Russians called its inhabitants inoródt sï , ‘aliens’. The conquest of the steppe-land of Kazakhstan, [165]begun under Catherine the Great in the late eighteenth century, was completed in 1848: it was thus opened up to settlers, rather on the same model as the American West that was being colonised at the same time.

In principle, linguistic (and religious) toleration was a feature of the Russians’ approach to this part of the empire. Whether the Tatars accepted the Christian faith (the Bible and catechism were available in Tatar in 1803) or remained with Islam, Tatar (i.e. Chagatay Turkic) was authorised as the administrative language for the steppes. In dealing with Muslim nomads, the Russians had to keep in mind that they always had the option of decamping over the border, or, more worryingly, that they might become a fifth column for the Ottomans. In general, therefore, they endeavoured to offer them an attractive option if they accepted Russian rule. Catherine II’s Holy Synod Act of 1773 established a religious directorate for Muslims in Russia, the muftiyya. She also decreed transit rights for Sunni Muslims who wanted to avoid Shia Iran on their pilgrimages to Mecca. And she even financed a Muslim religious school, a madrasa , in Bukhara. Muslims attended Russia’s military academies, had their own (volunteer) regiments, and even served as officers in ordinary Russian regiments—something very different from the contemporary practice of the British or French empires. [628]

But for all this, the steppes did become effectively Russified. It was the incidence of European settlers which really changed the linguistic picture: 20 per cent in 1887, 40 per cent in 1911, 47 per cent in 1939. [629]Khrushchev’s ‘Virgin Lands’ Policy of the 1950s added a further 1.5 million. (The number of native Russian speakers in Kazakhstan according to the 2000 Ethnologue is now 6.23 million, 38 per cent.) [630]

In 1854, Russia was defeated in the Crimea by its imperial peers, Britain, France and the Ottomans. Perhaps seeking some consolation, Russia immediately proceeded to the conquest of central Asia, due south of the Kazakh steppes. Colonial wars against natives without modern weapons were far easier to win, and somehow heartening for Europeans, as the opening quote from Dosteyevsky shows us.

The principal remaining powers in this area were the emirates of Khiva, Bukhara and Kokand. Despite the technical advantages of the incomers over the residents, the war took twenty-two years, and ended in 1876. Kokand, in the east, was annexed, but the other two emirates, Bukhara, which had contained the legendary Samarkand, and Khiva on the Caspian shore, were largely left as dependent powers. ‘Turkestan’ was created as a provincial envelope to hold these new acquisitions. Russia’s main concern came to be the development of intensive cotton cultivation in the Ferghana valley, and this attracted large numbers of settlers into the area, which is part of modern Uzbekistan. Nevertheless, settlement in these areas never reached levels comparable to those of the steppes to the north: the four corresponding modern states are (from west to east) Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, and their population of 39 million embraces only 9 per cent native Russian speakers. [631]

This completes our brief review of how Russian was spread by the Tsar’s empire. It remains to consider why it never became a prestige language: why, unlike all the other imperial European languages that established themselves far from Europe, it did not come to symbolise the conquered peoples’ aspirations to take part in a Westernised, globalised future. All the nineteenth-century European empires are now dissolved: but their languages are still used worldwide. Why is Russian, alone of the current top ten languages, set to lose speakers in the twenty-first century?

Four major institutions of the Russian empire had been crucial to the spread of Russian beyond its homeland in north-eastern Europe. They were the Orthodox Church, the army, the state bureaucracy and the educated elite—usually known in Russian as the intelligentsia. All these still exist in some form, but none of them, in the early twenty-first century, seem likely to remain lively, either as dominant forces or as sources of inspiration worldwide.

The Church had early attached itself to its local language, now usually known as Old Church Slavonic, but always felt to be Russian in an appropriately reverent version. Even in the midst of major liturgical reforms, an advocate of the old ways could write to the Tsar: ‘Say in good Russian “Lord have mercy on me”. Leave all those Kyrie Eleisons to the Greeks: that’s their language, spit on them! You are Russian, Alexey, not Greek. Speak your mother tongue and be not ashamed of it, either in church or at home!’ [632]Its distinctive domes rising among the huts provided the most recognisable signs of Russia as its domain spread out across Siberia; as long as there were Tsars, it legitimated them. Church schools were the main source of Russian literacy well into the eighteenth century. But it never recovered from the ‘Holy Synod’ reforms of Peter the Great in 1721, when he made himself supreme protector of the Church, abolishing its internal democracy from the parishes up, and so effectively making it into an arm of the state. Thereby both Tsar and Church, although mutually supportive, became quite cut off from the grass roots of Russian society. They became increasingly unable to take the risks of any popular involvement. A telling example came in the linguistic sphere when, in the aftermath of Napoleon’s 1812 invasion, the reforming Tsar Alexander I favoured the establishment of an Imperial Russian Bible Society, as a branch of the British and Foreign Bible Society: a multilingual publishing initiative was planned, but the project came unstuck on the proposal to distribute the Bible in prostóye naryéciye , ‘simple diction’, i.e. plain Russian. The evangelicals were cast as agents of ‘the Invisible Napoleon’, undermining the respect due to the word of God, and in 1821 the Russian Bibles were burnt on the orders of the Holy Synod. [166]