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

Another institution which by its nature spread the use of Russian far and wide was the army. This was distinctive among its imperial competitors for its ethnic and linguistic unity. For the Military Commission of 1762-3, ‘the strength of the Army consists in, most basic of all, the existence of common language, religion, customs and blood’; a century later, Russian military commentators on the wars of 1859 and 1866 stressed the pure Russianness of their army in contrast with the Austrians’ ragbag of races and languages: at the time, 90 per cent of the soldiers were from the homeland area of Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine, and most Muslims were exempt from military service. [633]In a way, though, the ethnic purity of the force diminished the effect of its single language: if more non-Russians had been obliged to join up, more of them would have had to learn Russian. In fact, though, there was little scope for Russian veterans, having served for twenty-five years or more, to return to civil life after their service. They would typically end up in towns, as coachmen, domestic servants or schoolteachers. [634]In this way, they were less able to seed the spread of their language than, say, the retired soldiers of ancient Rome.

The bureaucracy, the visible arm of the Tsar’s government, was of course everywhere. But its influence in terms of spreading Russian discourse was less than might have been expected. Its higher levels were disproportionately (up to 20 per cent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) full of German speakers from the Baltic, ever since Peter the Great had recognised their special potential to carry through his reforms. [635]And the minimal scope of its functions, mainly the gathering of poll tax and the recruitment of troops, must have limited its role and interaction in society.

Finally, there was the intelligentsia. In a sense, it was this group almost alone which put Russian on the global cultural map, with the literary efflorescence that they achieved in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Peter the Great sparked it off, with his reforms aimed at creating a secular Russia, inspired by what he had encountered in his visits to Britain and above all Germany. Mikhail Lomonósov (1711-75), the greatest scholar of this era—who had somehow managed to promote himself out of an Archangel fisherman’s family—combined expertise in chemistry and linguistics, and started the task of defining a Russian literary language, one that would incorporate foreign borrowings and colloquial speech into the rather ponderous style inherited from Church Slavonic. A Russian Academy, modelled on the Académie Française, was established in 1783; it compiled a major dictionary in 1789-94, and defined a Russian grammar that was published in 1802. Although, as we have seen in considering the history of French, foreign influence remained strong in the Russian elite’s social life, the newly educated generations of Russian authors rose to the challenge of their new language, and included Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Turgenev, to name only the most famous. They took seriously the task of defining what Russian literature could do for Russia and the world. Most famously, Turgenev and Dostoyevsky both projected their ideas back to Pushkin at the celebrations in his memory in 1880: Turgenev said that Pushkin spoke to the educated nátiya , the nation that had come about through Peter’s reforms, but that the Russian naród , the people, would come to awareness through learning to read him; Dostoyevsky countered that Pushkin was intrinsically—and uniquely—universal in his appeal, something that gave Russia an immense advantage: ‘To become a genuine Russian means to attempt to bring reconciliation to the contradictions of Europe and to offer relief for Europe’s anguish in the all-human and all-embracing Russian soul.’ [636]

Amazingly, Russian writers did succeed in reaching an audience all over Europe, though inevitably more among Turgenev’s nátii than Dostoyevsky’s naródï. But the realisation of their cosmic aspirations at home was limited by the very narrow base of the intelligentsia within Russia itself, almost cut off from the vast majority of their public. General literacy of the Russian population was still not above 10 per cent in the early 1880s, although it rose rapidly thereafter, approaching 30 per cent among the under-fifties by the end of the century. [637]And of course, those who could read did not all have a taste for the highest, preferring adventure stories, romances and horoscopes. [638]

But the Russian intelligentsia made no attempt at all to make a place within their ideals for the Asian multitudes that their armed forces had exerted themselves so long, and so bloodily, to bring within the Tsar’s domains. From Ivan the Terrible’s conquest of Kazan to the conquests of the early nineteenth century, foreign nobility had always been recognised, and accorded property rights within the Russian system, when their own territories had been subdued; no effort had ever been made actively to involve them culturally. Occasionally, intellectuals from their own traditions who managed to get a Western education would try to devise an accommodation. The best example of this is the Crimean Tatar educationist Ismail Bey Gaspirali (who adopted the name Gasprinsky). Educated first in a village madrasa (Islamic religious school), he went to St Petersburg to learn Russian, and Paris to learn French. Next spending four years in Istanbul (1871-5), he returned to Crimea with the conviction that Russia’s Muslims must approach modernity through Russian, writing his first important book, Russkoye Musulmanstvo (’Russian Islam’), and long editing a journal, Tercüman-Perevodcik (’Interpreter’ in Tatar and Russian). Gaspirali’s peaceable views were not easily accepted in the Crimean Tatar community, but by 1905 his group had succeeded in founding over 350 schools, bilingual in Russian and Tatar. More revealing was the reaction from the Russians: rather than encourage this bridge-building from a potential ally, the authorities refused to allow Gaspirali to convene an all-Muslim congress; rather they worked to diminish the political participation of non-Russians (as well as workers and peasants), proposing an electoral law for the second Duma (’Parliament’) in 1907 with the preamble: ‘The State Duma, created to strengthen the Russian state, must be Russian also in spirit.’ Gaspirali made no more progress. [639]

What Russia always lacked, above all, was a bourgeoisie, a class of merchants and professionals of independent status and means, which could serve as a link, both for social mobility and for flow of income, between the governing class and the workers on the land. Large-scale trade and industrial development was rarely undertaken by Russians in the pre-revolutionary era; and the small educated classes never built up significant guilds or professional associations. Russia remained a polity dominated by the arbitrary, and in principle unlimited, powers of the Tsar; and the linguistic effects of this were that the Russian language nowhere developed a strong base in a community with aspirations and influence.

In short, at least until the twentieth century, Russia, although unified politically and militarily by the Tsar’s government, was not unified, nor even growing together, as a language community. In the Baltic provinces to the north-east, and the Muslim lands to the south, Russian was simply not penetrating beyond the ranks of settlers, and the small number of administrators.

This account of the spread of Russian has concentrated on the Tsar’s empire, because the Russian revolution of 1917, and the Soviet era that came after it, had little net effect on the language situation. Despite early expectations, and attempts at secession in all the non-Russian areas (including Belarus and the Ukraine), the new government proved able to reassert its control almost everywhere. Finland, by dint of arms, did manage to detach itself permanently; but the other Baltic states, which had a brief period of independence in the 1920s and 1930s, found themselves back under Russian control from 1940. Other parts of the empire were all back in the fold by 1922.