Russification

gigatos | June 12, 2022

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Summary

The word Russification refers to several different but complementary processes:

In politics, one of the elements of Russification is the appointment of Russians to key positions in the administration of national institutions. In the field of culture, Russification is first of all the domination of Russian in official exchanges, and its ascendancy over the other national languages. The demographic changes, with the massive arrival of Russian populations (colonization…) can also be considered as forms of Russification.

Some scholars distinguish Russification, i.e. the development of Russian language and culture, as well as the settlement of Russians in non-Russian regions and cultures, from Russification, a process of change of ethnic identity, with changes of ethnonym. In this sense, the spread of the Russian language and culture, the settlement of Russians in the context of Russification cannot be equated with the effects of cultural radiation. Although most people confuse the two notions, one does not necessarily lead to the other, and this in both directions.

The first attempts at Russification took place during the 16th century in the conquered regions of the Kazan Khanate and other areas previously under Tatar control. The main elements of this attempt were the Christianization of the population and the use of Russian as the only administrative language.

During the nineteenth century, one of the most blatant examples of Russification was the replacement of Polish, Belorussian and Lithuanian by Russian in the regions of the Republic of the Two Nations that came under the control of the Russian Empire after the successive partitions of Poland. Russification intensified after the 1831 revolt, and even more so after the January Uprising in 1863. In 1864, Polish and Belarusian were banned from public places. In the 1880s, Polish was banned from schools and offices in the Kingdom of Congress. The study and teaching of Polish, as well as the history of Catholicism, were also banned. This led to the creation of an underground network of Polish education, including the notorious Flying University.

The same kind of sequence of events took place in Lithuania. Its governor general, Mikhail Muraviov-Vilensky, forbade the public use of Lithuanian, and had Lithuanian and Polish schools closed. Teachers who did not speak these languages were brought from other parts of Russia to teach the children. Muraviov also banned the use of Latin and Gotic characters in publications. It was reported that he said: “What Russian guns could not accomplish, Russian schools would” (“что не доделал русский штык – доделает русская школа”). This ban, which was lifted only in 1904, was circumvented by the Knygnešiai, Lithuanian book smugglers.

After the uprisings, many manors and large tracts of land were confiscated from nobles of Polish or Lithuanian descent, accused of supporting the rebellion. These properties were later given or sold to Russian nobles. Villages that were home to rebel supporters were repopulated by Russians. The University of Vilnius, where the language of instruction was still Polish, was closed in 1832. Lithuanians and Poles in Lithuania were forbidden to hold public office, including the role of teacher or doctor. The Lithuanian educated elite was forced to move to other parts of the Russian Empire. The old civil code was dismantled and a new one, based on Russian law and written in Russian, came into force. Russian became the only administrative and legal language in the region. Most of these restrictions and prohibitions ceased at the beginning of the Russo-Japanese war, but others persisted. The University of Vilnius did not reopen until Russia lost control of the city in 1919.

Another example in the region, the Ems oukase of 1876 prohibited the use of Ukrainian.

The Russification of Finland (1899-1905, 1908-1917, sortokaudet or “time of oppression” in Finnish) was an official government policy of the Russian Empire aimed at permanently suppressing the autonomy of Finland.

In all the Eastern Bloc countries, Russian language courses, which became compulsory with the establishment of communism, were accompanied by the promotion of Soviet (rather than Russian) culture, which was given as an example, and which was often done to the detriment of local culture, judged archaic and carefully expunged from any Western European (cosmopolitan), philosophical (superfluous speculations) or religious (alienation) influence, as well as from any attempt at independent artistic creation (individualistic and decadent art). After 1965, this promotion of Soviet culture was attenuated, and the teaching of Russian remained compulsory only in Bulgaria.

In the Soviet-controlled areas of Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Volga Basin (including Tatarstan), Islamization had brought the Arabic alphabet into the writing of Turkic and Persian languages, but few people were literate. The Soviets first imposed the Latin alphabet for these languages, including the Turkish alphabet. However, in the late 1930s their policy changed when the Turkish government distanced itself from the USSR and deliberately turned to Europe. In 1939-1940, the Soviets decided that a number of these languages (including Tatar, Kazakh, Uzbek, Turkmen, Tajik, Kyrgyz, Azeri and Bashkir) should be written in the Cyrillic alphabet. This change was made under the pretext that it was the result of “demands of the working class”. It seems more likely that this change was part of the package of decisions that also led in 1938 to the regulation that every schoolchild in the Soviet Union should be able to read the Cyrillic alphabet, the vehicle of the language of inter-ethnic communication of the Union: Russian.

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From the early 1920s to the mid-1930s: “Indigenization

The early years of Soviet nationality policy, from the early 1920s to the mid-1930s, were characterized by indigenization (korenizatsia), a period during which the new Soviet regime adopted a policy of “equality among cohabiting nations” that halted the Russification of non-Russian populations. When the regime tried to establish its control over the whole area of the former Russian Empire, it tried to create regional administrative entities, recruiting non-Russians for positions of responsibility, and promoting the use of non-Russian languages in government administration, courts, education and media. The slogan then in use was that local cultures should be “socialist in content but national in form”: border populations such as Karelians or Moldovans were then recognized as Finnish or Romanian respectively, and their autonomous republics were to play the role of “prefiguration of socialist Finland” or “socialist Romania” in accordance with the projects of the Communist Party, in order to achieve a world communist society (the coat of arms of the USSR symbolizing this project). The government could then count on the active participation and charisma of personalities from the indigenous nationalities, who however acted in their local language.

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From the end of the thirties to the end of the war: the Russian language in the spotlight

The first measures of nationality policy had this in common with those that followed: they were intended to ensure Communist Party control over all aspects of the political, economic and social life of the inhabitants of the Soviet Union. The initial Soviet policy of promoting what scholars later called “ethnic particularism” or “institutionalized multinationality” had two aims, however. On the one hand, it was to counter Russian chauvinism by reserving a place for non-Russian languages and cultures in the newly formed Soviet Union. On the other hand, it was a way to avoid the formation of political alternatives on a national basis, such as pan-Islamism. In order to achieve these goals, the regime resorted to what may be seen by some as the enhancement of relatively artificial differences between the different components of ethnic groups and their different languages, rather than promoting their grouping into large regional entities with related languages, such as around the Turkic languages, or other language families.

The policy of nationalities in the Soviet Union in these early years sought to suppress both of these tendencies, allowing a small measure of cultural autonomy for non-Russian nationalities within the federal system or governmental institutions, while at the same time demonstrating that the Party was monolithic and not federal. The federal system gave the highest responsibilities to the union republics, and secondary positions to representatives of the autonomous republics, autonomous provinces and autonomous okrugs. In all, some 50 nationalities were represented in the federal system through republics, provinces and autonomous okrugs. Federalism and the provisions for teaching local languages meant that many non-Russians were strongly marked by their culture and ethnicity, and thus identified strongly with a particular territory of the Soviet Union.

However, there was a notable change in policy in the late 1930s. The purges had already begun in some regions (especially in Ukraine) in the early 1930s. The 1929 purge in the Crimean SSR resulted in the ouster of Veli Ibrahimov and his political entourage, and was reversed in Ukraine in 1933 (as a result of the Holodomor). This decision was motivated by his alleged “nationalist deviance” and led to the “Russianization” of the government, education and media in this SSR. In addition, a special alphabet for Crimean Tatar was created on this occasion, to replace the pre-existing Latin alphabet. At that time, of the two dangers identified by Stalin in 1923, bourgeois nationalism (actually local nationalism) became the greater threat, in the face of Great Russian chauvinism. In 1937, Faizullah Khojaev and Akmal Ikramov were in turn replaced as heads of the Uzbek SSR, and in 1938, during the Third Moscow Trial, they were convicted and executed for their participation in anti-Soviet nationalist activities.

The Russian language became more and more important in the everyday life of Soviet citizens. In 1938, Russian became a compulsory subject in all Soviet schools, including those in which non-Russian languages remained the language of instruction for other subjects (mathematics, physical or social sciences). In 1939, non-Russian languages that had been guaranteed transcription in Latin alphabet were given new alphabets based on Cyrillic. A rational reason for these decisions was the approach of war, knowing that the language of command in the Red Army was Russian.

Just before and during the Second World War, Stalin deported (through population transfers) entire nations to Central Asia and Siberia, for fear that they would favor the Wehrmacht: a very visible admission of unpopularity for the regime. Suspected in advance of collaborationism, the Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, Chechens (in 1944), Ingush (also in 1944), Balkars, Kalmyks and others were deported, for the most part, to the desert areas of Kazakhstan. Shortly after the war, he deported many Ukrainians, Moldovans and people from the Baltic States to Siberia.

After the war, the leading role of the Russians in the family of Soviet nations and nationalities was further encouraged by Stalin and his successors. This was clearly underlined by Stalin”s speech on the Victory Day in May 1945:

“I would like to raise a toast to the health of our Soviet people and, above all, to the Russian people.”

“I drink, first of all, to the health of the Russian people, because in this war they have won general recognition as the driving power of the Soviet Union, among all nationalities of our country.”

In citing the Russian nation as first among equals, Stalin made a 180-degree turn from his statement twenty years earlier, when launching the policy of indigenization, that “the first task of the Communist Party is to vigorously combat the reminiscences of Great Russian chauvinism. Although the official literature on nationalities and the use of national languages continued to speak in the following years of 130 equal languages in the Soviet Union, a kind of hierarchy was endorsed in practice, in which certain nationalities and languages were given special assignments or considered to have different long-term futures.

For example, after the annexation in 1940 by the Soviet Union and the creation of the Moldavian SSR, the local Moldavian regional identity, until then included in the larger group of Romanian speakers, is promoted to the rank of ethnic and national identity “different from Romanians” with the adoption of a Cyrillic alphabet for their language (still in use in 2018 in the Moldavian Republic of the Dniester). The USSR also deported the “Moldavians”, repeating, in a more efficient way (thanks to the railway and motorization) the policy of the Tzars in Bessarabia.

From the end of the 1950s to the 1980s: an extensive “Russianization

An analysis of textbook editions shows that education was made possible for at least one year and at least at the level of the preparatory course, in 67 languages, among 134 counted in 1940. The educational reforms undertaken after Nikita Khrushchev became First Secretary of the Communist Party in the late 1950s initiated a process of replacing non-Russian schools with Russian schools, first for those nationalities with low status in the federal system, for those who were few in number, and for those who were already relatively bilingual. Initially, this process was orchestrated by the principle of “voluntary parental choice”. But other factors came into play as well, including the size and former political status of the ethnic group in the Soviet federal hierarchy and the bilingualism of the parents. By the early 1970s, schools teaching in non-Russian languages were teaching in 45 languages, and seven other indigenous languages could be studied for at least one school year. By 1980, instruction was possible in 35 non-Russian languages for citizens of the Soviet Union, half of what was possible in the early 1930s.

Mastering the importance of federalism and non-Russian languages had always been a strategic tool for expanding and maintaining the hegemony of the Communist Party. From a theoretical point of view, however, the official party doctrine was the erasure of national differences and the disappearance of nationalities as such. In the official party line, as defined in the Third Program of the CPSU by Nikita Khrushchev at the 22nd Congress of the CPSU in 1961, while the program noted that ethnic distinctions could be made to disappear within the Soviet Union, and that a single idiom, a kind of lingua franca, would be used by all nationalities of the Soviet Union. “The erasure of national differences, especially linguistic ones, is a process that is considerably more spread out in time than the erasure of class differences. At that time, however, Soviet nations and nationalities were undergoing a twofold process, aimed on the one hand at the enhancement of national identities and on the other at their rapprochement (сближение – sblizhenie) into a stronger union. In his Report to the Congress on the Program, Khrushchev used even stronger terms: he indicated that this procedure of rapprochement (sblizhenie) into larger national units could probably lead to the fusion (слияние – sliyanie) of these nationalities.

The scope of the phrase “rapprochement-fusion” (sblizhenie-sliyanie) formulated by Khrushchev was slightly modified, however, when Leonid Brezhnev replaced him as General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1964 (a position he held until his death in 1982). Brezhnev claimed that sblizhenie would eventually lead to a complete “unity” (единство – yedinstvo) of nationalities. The term “unity” was relatively ambiguous, since it could mean both the maintenance of distinct national identities within the Soviet Union, albeit with greater similarities and closeness between them, and the complete disappearance of ethnic differences. In the political context of the time, sblizheniye-yedinstvo was seen as a relaxation of the process of Russification as conceived during the Khrushchev era and his concept of sliyania. At the 24th Party Congress in 1974, however, it was mentioned that a new “Soviet people” (Советский народ) was being formed on the territory of the USSR, a people with a common language – the language of the “Soviet nation” – which was none other than Russian, a denomination consistent with the role that Russian already held on the territory among the sister nations of the Soviet Union. This new community was called a people (but in this context, narod implied an ethnic community, not just a community of a political or civic character.

Thus, until the end of the Soviet era, a certain doctrinal rationalism was used with regard to certain stages of the implementation of political decisions, in the fields of education and media. First, the transformation of many “national schools” (национальные школы) into institutions teaching in Russian, accelerated under Khrushchev in the late 1950s, was continued during the 1980s. Then the new doctrine was used to justify the prominent place of Russian as the “language of communication of internationality” (язык межнационального общения) in the USSR. The use of the term “internationality” (межнациональное) rather than the more conventional “international” (международное) emphasized the internal role of Russian, rather than its use as a language of international exchange. The fact that Russian was the most widely spoken language, and the fact that Russians were the most numerous in the country were also widely exploited to justify the place of Russian in government, education, and the media.

At the 27th Congress of the CPSU in 1986, chaired by Mikhail Gorbachev, the 4th Party Program reiterated the formulas presented in the previous Program:

“The characteristics marking the inter-national relations in our country continue to be both the enhancement of nations and nationalities, and their strong and voluntary rapprochement on a basis of equality and fraternal cooperation. No artificial push or constraint of objective development trends are admissible here. In a long-term historical perspective, this development will lead to the complete unity of nations.”

“The equal rights of each of the citizens of the USSR to use their native language and the free development of these languages will also be ensured in the future. While learning Russian, which has been voluntarily accepted by the Soviet people as a means of communication between different nationalities, in addition to the language of the nationality of each, increases the access of everyone to the discoveries of science and technology and Soviet and world culture.”

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Linguistic and ethnic Russification

The progress made by Russian as a second language and the gradual relegation of other languages was tracked by Soviet censuses. The censuses of 1926, 1937, 1939 and 1959 included an item on “mother tongue” (родной язык) and one on “nationality.” Those of 1970, 1979 and 1989 added ones on “other languages of the peoples of the USSR” that a person could “freely master” (свободно владеть). The explicit purpose of this new set of “second language” questions was to control the spread of Russian as a language of communication of internationality.

Each of the official homelands of the Soviet Union was considered to be the unique, unchanging and perpetual territory of a national entity, its language and culture, while Russian was considered to be the language of interethnic communication for the entire Soviet Union. As a result, for most of the Soviet era, and especially after the policy of indigenization was halted in the late 1930s, non-Russian speaking schools did not have equal access outside the territory of their respective ethnicity, defined by ethnically based administrative units; the same was true for all cultural institutions. Occasionally, exceptions were made as a result of ethnic rivalries rooted in history, or in the case of old attempts at assimilation between non-Russian ethnic groups, such as between the Tatars and Bashkirs in Russia, and among the main nationalities of Central Asia. For example, even in the 1970s, schooling was possible in six different languages in Uzbekistan: Russian, Uzbek, Tajik, Kazakh, Turkmen and Karakalpak.

Although officially all languages were equal and therefore had the same status, it could be observed that in most SSRs, in practice, Russian bilingualism

Another cause of the mixing of nationalities and the increase in the use of the Russian language was inter-ethnic marriages, leading to family Russification. People from these marriages were encouraged to define themselves as Russians, whether or not one of the parents was Russian. For example, the majority of children born to Russians and Ukrainians in northern Kazakhstan chose Russian citizenship on their international passports at age 16. During the last decades of the Soviet Union, ethnic Russification (or ethnic assimilation) was very rapid among some nationalities, especially among Karelians and Mordvins. This process was neither general nor uniform: among children born of a Russian-Estonian union living in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, or of a Russian-Latvian couple living in Riga, the capital of Latvia, or of a Russian-Lithuanian couple living in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, many chose the nationality of their non-Russian parent. In general, the effects of linguistic and ethnic Russification are complex and cannot be interpreted from a single factor, such as education policy. Observations should also be cross-referenced with characteristics such as the traditional cultures or religion of the ethnic group studied, their rate of urbanization, their contact and exposure to Russian, etc.

The long-standing use of national markers on official documents was probably more than an anecdotal factor delaying the process of ethnic Russification. For example, the “nationality” of citizens of the Soviet Union was written on their internal passports at the age of 16, and depended mainly on the nationality of the parents. Only children of mixed marriages could choose their nationality from among those of the parents. In addition, a nationality was recorded on the school record, on the military service certificate (for men), and on the work books. Although the question of nationality on the census was considered to be purely subjective and not defined by the official nationality on the passport, the definition of official nationality on so many official documents may well have reinforced non-Russian identities. In some groups, such as the Jews, the ambiguous use of such official nationality on identity documents was seen as a sign of discrimination against them.

Another factor that contributed to a relaxation of ethnic Russification was that in the late 1960s the flow of Russians to the non-Russian SSRs decreased, and then the balance was reversed. There was a large emigration of Russians from Armenia and Georgia, although the number of Russians in these two SSRs continued to increase during this period, due to natural increase.) In Central Asia, the 1970s did not show a clear trend, but the following decade was marked by strong Russian emigration. In the Baltic SSRs and the Soviet West (Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova), the trend of Russian emigration was only really noticeable in the 1980s. Moreover, due to a difference in fertility rates among the different nationalities, the proportion of Russians in the population fell to 51 per cent in the 1989 census. In the previous decade, Russians accounted for only 33 per cent of the increase in the Soviet population. If these trends had continued and the Soviet Union had not disappeared, the Russian population would have become a minority of the Soviet population by the turn of the 21st century.

Pejorative and slang ethnonyms designate in Central and Eastern Europe the Russians: Katsap and moskal, and their variants.

After the breakup of the Soviet Union, a vast movement of rehabilitation of local identities and “de-Russification” took place in most of the non-Russian republics, which promoted their banned national symbols to the rank of symbols of sovereignty and their local language to the rank of “language of inter-ethnic communication, Russian ceased to be the lingua franca (in Russian язык межнационального общения, iazyk mejnatsionalnogo obchtchenia), which in practice forced Russian-speaking settlers to learn the language of the country or become second-class citizens. Names and place names were returned to their local forms. However, Russian remained the second official language in Belarus, Ukrainian Crimea, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The names of the five Central Asian republics (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan) and Azerbaijan were not derussified; Cyrillic remained the alphabet in force not only in Central Asia, but also in Mongolia. In fact, geopolitically, despite the attempts of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the government of Mikheil Saakashvili in Georgia, only the three Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which have joined the European Union and NATO) have left the Russian sphere of influence.

Russian remains, officially or unofficially, the language of inter-ethnic communication, trade and business in all the republics of the former USSR, except for the three Baltic republics. In Belarus and Kyrgyzstan Russian is the second official language; in Kazakhstan and Moldova its official status is that of “language of interethnic communication” which in practice exempts Russian speakers in these states from knowing the official languages of their countries. In Ukraine, this was one of the hot issues in the 2004 presidential election: Viktor Yanukovych was in favor of adopting Russian as a second official language, while his rival Viktor Yushchenko was against it.

In the autonomous republic of Crimea, Russian was an official language even before the territory was attached to Russia in 2014. In the rest of Ukraine, despite the official policy of the Ukrainian government, Russian is still widely used on television and remains the majority language spoken in the east and south of the country. The situation is identical in Kazakhstan, except that Russian is the majority language in the northern half of the country. In both Ukraine and Kazakhstan, though less vigorously in the latter, there have been attempts to make the local language the language of the press and television, but these initiatives have met with only limited success. In Belarus, the same attempts stopped in 1994, when Alexander Lukashenko came to power; since then, most exchanges and writings in administration, education and jurisdiction are in Russian.

In Russia itself, the republic of Tatarstan tried in 1991 to switch to the Latin Tatar alphabet, but in the meantime the Cyrillic alphabet was the only one allowed for the official languages of Russia, so it had to give up.

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