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

One thing that did change under the Soviets was language policy. Whereas, as we saw, the policy of the Tsars, even in their last decade, was ‘to strengthen the Russian State, and keep it Russian in spirit’, the Soviets’ official policy for the Union was almost the polar opposite. In principle, all the peoples of the Union were to be equal; there would be no official language. Furthermore, everyone had rights, not only to the use of their own languages for all purposes, but also to education in them. Russian evidently remained the only choice for communication among different parts of the Union; one thing that did not change after the revolution was the centralised control of the country as a whole.

An immediate practical policy was to build mass literacy. This process had begun under the tsars, but the continuation was triumphantly successful, as the censuses showed. In 1897, 28.4 per cent of those aged between nine and forty-nine had been able to read; in 1920, the figure went up to 44.1 per cent; by 1926 it was already 56.6 per cent; in 1939, 87.4 per cent; in 1959, 98.5 per cent; and in 1970, 99.7 per cent. [640]Since this included literacy in languages other than Russian (even in 1970, only 77.5 per cent claimed to have Russian as a first or second language [641]), a necessary precondition of this was provision of effective writing systems for the country’s languages. Russian orthography was simplified in 1918 to be more phonetic, mostly by replacing the letters i, θ and , which did not have a distinct pronunciation. (They can still be seen in the passage of Dostoyevsky that begins this section.) Other languages of the Union that had no writing tradition were given alphabets. In the 1920s, these were based mostly on Latin letters, since this alphabet had been most thoroughly developed by phoneticians. The systems often involved considerable skill by Soviet linguists in fixing a standard form among dialects, balancing considerations of majority usage with mutual intelligibility and ease of acquisition. By and large stability was achieved, creating dozens of new ‘literary languages’ ( literaturnïye yazïki ). Then the nature of the political power situation began to make itself felt.

The Soviet Union had remained, like imperial Russia before it, steadfastly governed from the centre, since 1918 more specifically from Moscow. The de facto dominance of Russians, therefore—admittedly leavened by much greater social and political mobility—began to take precedence over the theoretical equality of all, especially when it became clear in the 1930s that the Soviet Union was alone in having set up a stable Marxist-oriented regime, now surrounded on all sides by enemies. Now the primacy of Russian began to seem more important, even comforting; and in the 1930s, by choice or force, all the different nationalities (except for the Baltics, Georgian, Armenian and Yiddish) came to declare in favour of switching their orthographies to some variant of the Cyrillic alphabet used for Russian. The strange fact that the boundaries of the socialist world were coincident with those of the old Russian empire was now suffused in quite a different light. As a later apologist put it:

Because [Russian] is the language of the Union’s most developed nation, which has guided the country through its revolutionary transformations and has won itself the love and respect of all other peoples, the Russian language is naturally being transformed into the language of communication and cooperation of all the peoples of the socialist state. This has been produced by… a replacement of previous psychological barriers by bonds of brotherly friendship, mutual trust and mutual help. [642]Russian was now in a position to make major strides. Universal education was a reality, and Russian was introduced as a compulsory subject in all schools. Far more than under the tsars, it should have been possible for it to become known and used by everyone throughout the country. Somehow, though, this did not happen. As we have already noted, in 1970 there were still 22.5 per cent who claimed not to have effective command of it. Whether through the survival of traditional communities—especially in central Asia—or the preservation of resentment at Russian dominance—especially in the Baltic—many continued to contrive to live their lives without Russian.

When the Soviet Union was dissolved on 1 January 1992, all its constituent republics, including Ukraine and Belarus, split off as independent states. The prospects for Russian in education, and hence as a long-term lingua franca among the old parts of the empire, were immediately diminished.

But although the use of Russian can no longer be enforced across the extent of the old Union, it has inevitably become an important political token, with different nuances dependent on local history. Among the Baltic states, Latvia and Estonia are setting linguistic exams to force their resident Russians to prove competence in their own languages; these are unnecessary in Lithuania, where the Russian-speaking minority is so much smaller. [167]The Belarusian government is maintaining Russian as its working language, after a radical shift in policy in 1995, and demeaning its own national language. [168]Republics with large Russian-speaking minorities inhabiting a single region, notably Moldova and Kazakhstan, have to be highly judicious in balancing the degree to which they can assert their majority language. In Kazakhstan Russian is recognised as a language of official communication, and it remains a standing joke how poor politicians’ command of Kazakh tends to be. In central Asia, by contrast, there has been a discernible resurgence of national language use—and decline of Russian—among the political classes who were actually among the most prolific Russian speakers before independence. [643]Here, as in the Baltics, English is growing in use as a second language. [169]Only in Siberia, Rus’s oldest colony, can it be said that use of Russian is secure, and probably still gaining speakers. Sadly, this is because most of Siberia’s indigenous language communities are highly endangered, their traditional way of life shattered by the presence among them of large numbers of European Russians. They are too small, too isolated, and too weakened, to be able to envisage any future but collaboration with Russians.

Everywhere, use of Russian is more significant as a sign of feelings about the Soviet past, and of aspirations for the future, than as a practical choice of means of communication with the neighbours. Russian, even after the fall of communism, remains a highly ideological language.

There are four main reasons why an imperial language lives on after the dissolution of the empire that spread it.

The first is because it remains the language of the people who dissolve the empire. This can be called the creole reason. It was true of all the American colonies that fought and obtained independence from their mother countries in Europe: in every case, in the Thirteen Colonies of Great Britain, in Mexico, in the republics of Central and South America, and the kingdom of Brazil, the people who made the revolutions were not the indigenous people but the descendants of the European colonists, who were as attached to the metropolitan language as the mother country herself. Likewise it maintained Afrikaans in South Africa, and French in Canada and Algeria. In some sense, the settlers’ language communities have continued unbroken.

The second reason is because the newly independent countries want to retain a link, of trade or culture, perhaps even of defence, with the metropolitan power. This can be called the nostalgia reason. It is part of the reason why French has hung on in sub-Saharan Africa. It is also why there is still a trace of Spanish in the Philippines, and also why East Timor, independent in 2002, opted to continue—or rather resurrect—its use of Portuguese.