All Topics  
Russification

 

   Email Print
   Bookmark   Link






 

Russification



 
 
Russification (in Russian
Russian language

Russian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, and the largest native language in Europe....
: ??????????? rusifikátsiya) is an adoption of the Russian language
Russian language

Russian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, and the largest native language in Europe....
 or some other Russian attribute (whether voluntarily or not) by non-Russian communities. In a narrow sense, Russification is used to denote the influence of the Russian language
Russian language

Russian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, and the largest native language in Europe....
 on Slavic
Slavic languages

File:Slavic europe.svgThe Slavic languages , a group of closely related languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup of Indo-European languages, have speakers in most of Eastern Europe, in much of the Balkans, in parts of Central Europe, and in the northern part of Asia....
, Baltic
Baltic languages

The Baltic languages are a group of related languages belonging to the Indo-European languages language family and spoken mainly in areas extending east and southeast of the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe....
 and other languages, spoken in areas currently or formerly controlled by Russia, which led to emerging of russianism
Russianism

Russianism, Russism, or Russicism is an influence of Russian language on other languages. In particular, Russianisms are Russian or russified words, expressions, or grammar constructs used in Slavic languages, languages of Commonwealth of Independent States states and languages of the Russian Federation....
s, trasianka
Trasianka

Trasianka or trasyanka is a Belarusian language–Russian language patois or a kind of interlanguage . It is often labeled "pidgin" or even "creole", which is not correct by any widespread definition of pidgin or creole language....
 and surzhyk
Surzhyk

Surzhyk , refers to a range of sociolects used by a considerable part of the population of Ukraine and adjacent lands. It is a Ukrainian language influenced by Russian language in which innovated Russian vocabulary is combined with Ukrainian grammar, pronunciation and common vocabulary....
. In a historical sense, the term refers to both official and unofficial policies of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union
Soviet Union

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a Constitution of the Soviet Union socialist state that existed in Eurasia from 1922 to 1991.The name is a translation of the , romanization of Russian Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, abbreviated ????, SSSR....
 with respect to their nation
Nation

A nation is a cultural and social community. In as much as most members never meet each other, yet feel a common bond, it may be considered an imagined community....
al constituents and to national minorities in Russia
Russia

Russia , or the Russian Federation , is a list of countries spanning more than one continent country extending over much of northern Eurasia....
, aimed at Russian domination.

The major areas of Russification are politics
Politics

Politics is the process by which groups of people make decisions. The term is generally applied to behaviour within civil governments, but politics has been observed in all human group interactions, including corporation, academia, and religion institutions....
 and culture
Culture

Culture is difficult to define. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions....
.






Discussion
Ask a question about 'Russification'
Start a new discussion about 'Russification'
Answer questions from other users
Full Discussion Forum



Encyclopedia


Russification (in Russian
Russian language

Russian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, and the largest native language in Europe....
: ??????????? rusifikátsiya) is an adoption of the Russian language
Russian language

Russian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, and the largest native language in Europe....
 or some other Russian attribute (whether voluntarily or not) by non-Russian communities. In a narrow sense, Russification is used to denote the influence of the Russian language
Russian language

Russian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, and the largest native language in Europe....
 on Slavic
Slavic languages

File:Slavic europe.svgThe Slavic languages , a group of closely related languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup of Indo-European languages, have speakers in most of Eastern Europe, in much of the Balkans, in parts of Central Europe, and in the northern part of Asia....
, Baltic
Baltic languages

The Baltic languages are a group of related languages belonging to the Indo-European languages language family and spoken mainly in areas extending east and southeast of the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe....
 and other languages, spoken in areas currently or formerly controlled by Russia, which led to emerging of russianism
Russianism

Russianism, Russism, or Russicism is an influence of Russian language on other languages. In particular, Russianisms are Russian or russified words, expressions, or grammar constructs used in Slavic languages, languages of Commonwealth of Independent States states and languages of the Russian Federation....
s, trasianka
Trasianka

Trasianka or trasyanka is a Belarusian language–Russian language patois or a kind of interlanguage . It is often labeled "pidgin" or even "creole", which is not correct by any widespread definition of pidgin or creole language....
 and surzhyk
Surzhyk

Surzhyk , refers to a range of sociolects used by a considerable part of the population of Ukraine and adjacent lands. It is a Ukrainian language influenced by Russian language in which innovated Russian vocabulary is combined with Ukrainian grammar, pronunciation and common vocabulary....
. In a historical sense, the term refers to both official and unofficial policies of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union
Soviet Union

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a Constitution of the Soviet Union socialist state that existed in Eurasia from 1922 to 1991.The name is a translation of the , romanization of Russian Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, abbreviated ????, SSSR....
 with respect to their nation
Nation

A nation is a cultural and social community. In as much as most members never meet each other, yet feel a common bond, it may be considered an imagined community....
al constituents and to national minorities in Russia
Russia

Russia , or the Russian Federation , is a list of countries spanning more than one continent country extending over much of northern Eurasia....
, aimed at Russian domination.

The major areas of Russification are politics
Politics

Politics is the process by which groups of people make decisions. The term is generally applied to behaviour within civil governments, but politics has been observed in all human group interactions, including corporation, academia, and religion institutions....
 and culture
Culture

Culture is difficult to define. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions....
. In politics, an element of Russification is assigning Russian nationals to leading administrative positions in national institutions. In culture, Russification primarily amounts to domination of the Russian language
Russian language

Russian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, and the largest native language in Europe....
 in official business and strong influence of Russian language on the national ones. The shifts in demographics
Demographics

Demographic or demographic data refers to selected population characteristics as used in government, marketing or opinion research, or the demographic profiles used in such research....
 in favour of Russian population
Population

File:Population density.pngIn biology, a population is the collection of inter-breeding organisms of a particular species; in sociology, a collection of human beings....
 are sometimes considered as a form of Russification as well.

Analytically, it is helpful to distinguish Russification, as a process of changing one's ethnic self-label or identity from a non-Russian ethnonym
Ethnonym

An ethnonym is the name applied to a given ethnic group. Ethnonyms can be divided into two categories: exonyms and autonyms .As an example, the ethnonym for the ethnically dominant group in Germany is the Germans....
 to Russian, from Russianization, the spread of Russian language, culture, and people into non-Russian cultures and regions, distinct also from Sovietization
Sovietization

Sovietization is term that may be used with two distinct meanings:*the adoption of a political system based on the model of soviet s .*the adoption of a way of life and mentality modelled after the Soviet Union....
 or the imposition of institutional forms established by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Communist Party of the Soviet Union

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the ruling political party in the Soviet Union and one of the largest Communist Party in the world....
 throughout the territory ruled by that party. In this sense, although Russification is usually conflated across Russification, Russianization, and Russian-led Sovietization, each can be considered a distinct process. Russianization and Sovietization, for example, did not automatically lead to Russification – change in language or self-identity of non-Russian peoples to being Russian. Thus, despite long exposure to Russian language and culture, as well as to Sovietization, at the end of the Soviet era non-Russians were on the verge of becoming a majority of the population of the Soviet Union
Soviet Union

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a Constitution of the Soviet Union socialist state that existed in Eurasia from 1922 to 1991.The name is a translation of the , romanization of Russian Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, abbreviated ????, SSSR....
.

History

The earliest example of Russification took place in the 16th century in the conquered Khanate of Kazan
Khanate of Kazan

The Kazan Khanate was a medieval Tatar state which occupied the territory of former Volga Bulgaria between 1438 and 1552. The khanate covered contemporary Tatarstan, Mari El, Chuvashia, Mordovia, parts of Udmurtia and Bashkortostan; its capital was the city of Kazan....
 and other Tatar areas. The main elements of this process were Christianization
Christianization

The historical phenomenon of Christianization, the religious conversion of individuals to Christianity or the conversion of entire peoples at once, also includes the practice of converting native Paganism practices and culture, pagan religious imagery, pagan sites and the pagan calendar to Christian uses, due to the Christian efforts at Ch...
 and implementation of the Russian language as the sole administrative language.

Poland and Lithuania

One example of 19th century Russification was the replacement of the Ukrainian
Ukrainian language

Ukrainian is a language of the East Slavic languages of the Slavic languages. It is the official language of Ukraine. In some areas of Russia there are dialects, Balachka or Surzhyk, which are the Ukrainianized versions of the Russian language....
, Polish
Polish language

Polish , an official language of Poland, has the largest number of speakers of any West Slavic languages. Polish-speakers use the language in a uniform manner through most of Poland, and it has a regular orthography....
, Lithuanian
Lithuanian language

Lithuanian is the official state language of Lithuania and is recognised as one of the official languages of the European Union. There are about 2.96 million native Lithuanian speakers in Lithuania and about 170,000 abroad....
, and Belarusian
Belarusian language

The Belarusian language, or Belorussian is the language of the Belarusians and is spoken in Belarus and abroad, chiefly in Russia, Ukraine, and Poland....
 languages by Russian in those areas, which became part of the Russian Empire
Russian Empire

File:Russian Emperor Flag.jpgFile:Romanov Flag.svgThe Russian Empire was a state that existed from 1721 until the Russian Revolution of 1917....
 after the Partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It intensified after the 1831 uprising and, in particular, after the January Uprising of 1863. In 1864, the Polish and Belarusian languages were banned in public places; in the 1880s, Polish was banned in schools and offices of the Congress Kingdom, and research and teaching of Polish language, history or Catholicism were forbidden. This led to the creation of a Polish underground education network, which included the famous Flying University
Flying University

Flying University was the name of an Underground culture educational enterprise that operated from 1885 to 1905 in Warsaw, the historic Polish capital, then under the control of the Russian Empire, and that was revived between 1977 and 1981 in the People's Republic of Poland....
.

A similar development took place in Lithuania
Lithuania

Lithuania , officially the Republic of Lithuania is a country in Northern Europe, the southernmost of the three Baltic states. Situated along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, it shares borders with Latvia to the north, Belarus to the southeast, Poland, and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad Oblast to the southwest....
. Its Governor General, Mikhail Muravyov
Mikhail Nikolayevich Muravyov-Vilensky

Count Mikhail Nikolayevich Muravyov was one of the most reactionary Russian imperial statesmen of the 19th century. He should not be confused with his grandson, Mikhail Nikolayevich Muravyov, who served as Russian Foreign Minister between 1897 and 1900....
, prohibited the public use of spoken Lithuanian
Lithuanian language

Lithuanian is the official state language of Lithuania and is recognised as one of the official languages of the European Union. There are about 2.96 million native Lithuanian speakers in Lithuania and about 170,000 abroad....
 and closed Lithuanian and Polish schools; teachers from other parts of Russia who did not speak these languages were moved in to teach pupils. Muravyov also banned the use
Lithuanian press ban

The Lithuanian press ban was a ban on all Lithuanian language publications printed in the Latin alphabet within the Russian Empire, which controlled Lithuania at the time....
 of Latin and Gothic
Gothic script

Gothic script may refer to:* Blackletter* Gothic alphabet* Schwabacher...
 scripts in publishing. He was reported saying, "What the Russian bayonet didn't accomplish, the Russian school will." ("??? ?? ??????? ??????? ???? — ???????? ??????? ?????.") This ban, which was only lifted in 1904, was disregarded by the Knygnešiai
Knygnešiai

Knygne?iai were individuals who transported Lithuanian language books printed in the Latin alphabet into Lithuanian-speaking areas of the Russian Empire, defying a Lithuanian press ban in force from 1866 to 1904....
, the Lithuanian book smugglers, who brought Lithuanian publications printed in the Latin alphabet, the historic orthography of the Lithuanian language, from Lithuania Minor, a part of East Prussia, and from the United States into the Lithuanian-speaking areas of Imperial Russia. The knygnešiai became a symbol of the resistance of the Lithuanians against Russification.

The campaign also promoted the Russian Orthodox faith over Catholicism. The measures used included closing down Catholic
Catholic

Catholic is an adjective derived from the Greek language adjective , meaning "whole" or "complete". In the context of Christianity ecclesiology, it has a rich history and several usages....
 monasteries, officially banning the building of new churches and giving many of the old ones to the Russian Orthodox church, banning Catholic schools and establishing state schools which taught only the Orthodox religion, requiring Catholic priests to preach only officially approved sermons, requiring that Catholics who married members of the Orthodox church convert, requiring Catholic nobles to pay an additional tax in the amount of 10% of their profits, limiting the amount of land a Catholic peasant could own, and switching from the Gregorian calendar
Gregorian calendar

The Gregorian calendar is the internationally accepted civil calendar. It was first proposed by the Calabrian doctor Aloysius Lilius, and decreed by Pope Gregory XIII, after whom it was named, on 24 February 1582 by the papal bull Inter gravissimas....
 (used by Catholics) to the Julian
Julian calendar

The Julian calendar, a reform of the Roman calendar, was introduced by Julius Caesar in 46 BC, and came into force in 45 BC . It was chosen after consultation with the astronomer Sosigenes of Alexandria and was probably designed to approximate the tropical year, known at least since Hipparchus....
 one (used by members of the Orthodox church).

After the uprising, many manors and great chunks of land were confiscated from nobles of Polish and Lithuanian descent who were accused of helping the uprising; these properties were later given or sold to Russian nobles. Villages where supporters of the uprising lived were repopulated by ethnic Russians. Vilnius University
Vilnius University

Vilnius University , is one of the List of oldest universities in continuous operation and the largest university in List of universities in Lithuania....
, where the language of instruction had been Polish rather than Russian, was closed in 1832. Lithuanians and Poles were banned from holding any public jobs (including professional positions, such as teachers and doctors) in Lithuania; this forced educated Lithuanians to move to other parts of the Russian Empire. The old legal code
Statutes of Lithuania

The Statutes of Lithuania originally known as the Statutes of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania were a 16th century codification of all the legislation of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and its successor, the Polish?Lithuanian Commonwealth....
 was dismantled and a new one based on the Russian code and written in the Russian language was enacted; Russian became the only administrative and juridical language in the area. Most of these actions ended at the beginning of the Russo-Japanese War
Russo-Japanese War

The Russo-Japanese War or the Manchurian Campaign in some English sources, was a conflict that grew out of the rival imperialism ambitions of the Russian Empire and the Empire of Japan over Manchuria and Korea....
, but others took longer to be reversed; Vilnius University
Vilnius University

Vilnius University , is one of the List of oldest universities in continuous operation and the largest university in List of universities in Lithuania....
 was reopened only after Russia had lost control of the city in 1919.

Another example is the Ems Ukaz
Ems Ukaz

The Ems Ukaz, or Ems Ukase , was a secret decree of Tsar Alexander II of Russia issued in 1876, banning the use of the Ukrainian language in print, with the exception of reprinting of old documents....
 of 1876 which banned the Ukrainian language
Ukrainian language

Ukrainian is a language of the East Slavic languages of the Slavic languages. It is the official language of Ukraine. In some areas of Russia there are dialects, Balachka or Surzhyk, which are the Ukrainianized versions of the Russian language....
.

Grand Duchy of Finland

The Russification of Finland (1899-1905, 1908-1917, sortokaudet (times of oppression) in Finnish
Finnish language

Finnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland and by Finnish people outside of Finland. It is one of the official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden....
) was a governmental policy of the Russian Empire
Russian Empire

File:Russian Emperor Flag.jpgFile:Romanov Flag.svgThe Russian Empire was a state that existed from 1721 until the Russian Revolution of 1917....
 aimed at the termination of Finland
Grand Duchy of Finland

The Grand Duchy of Finland was the predecessor state of modern Finland that existed in its territory 1809–1917 as part of the Russian Empire....
’s autonomy.

Bessarabia/Moldova

Bessarabia
Bessarabia

Bessarabia is a historical term for the geographic entity in Eastern Europe bounded by the Dniester River on the east and the Prut River on the west....
 had been annexed by the Russian Empire in 1812. 1816 Bessarabia became an autonomous status, but only until 1828. In 1829, the use of the Romanian language was forbidden in the administration. In 1833, the use of Romanian language has been forbidden in churches. In 1842, the teaching in Romanian was forbidden for the secondary education schools, as well for elementary schools in 1860. The Russian authorities encouraged the migration the Romanians
Romanians

], 26 Nov 2004. Reprinted at , retrieved 18 Dec 2005.External links *...
 (Moldovans
Moldovans

Moldovans or Moldavians are the native population of the medieval Principality of Moldavia, which nowadays corresponds to 8 north-eastern counties of Romania , the Republic of Moldova, and small parts of Ukraine ....
) to other provinces of the Russian Empire (especially in Kuban
Kuban

Kuban is a geographic region of Southern Russia surrounding the Kuban River, on the Black Sea between the Don Steppe, Volga Delta and the Caucasus....
, Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan, also Kazakstan , officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a large Eurasian country in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Ranked as the List of countries by area as well as the world's largest landlocked country, it has a territory of 2,727,300 km? ....
 and Siberia
Siberia

Siberia , is the name given to the vast region constituting almost all of North Asia and for the most part currently serving as the massive central and eastern portion of the Russian Federation, having served in the same capacity previously for the Soviet Union from its beginning, and the Russian Empire beginning in the 16th century....
), while foreign ethnic groups (especially Russians and Ukrainians, called in the 19.th century "Little Russians") were encouraged to settle here. According to 1817-census, Bessarabia was populated by 86% Romanians (Moldovans), 6.5% Ukrainians, 1.5% Russians (Lipovans
Lipovans

Lipovans or Lippovans are the Old Believers, mostly of Russian people ethnic origin, who settled in Moldavia, in the Danube Delta, in Tulcea , in the Dobrogea region of eastern Romania, and in the southwestern part of Odessa Oblast , in Chernivtsi Oblast in Ukraine, as well as in two villages in North-Eastern Bulgaria and in Bukowina...
) and 6% other ethnic groups. 80 years later, in 1897, the ethnic structure was very different: only 56% Romanians (Moldovans), but 11.7% Ukrainians, 18.9% Russians and 13.4% other ethnic groups. During 80 years, between 1817 and 1897, the share of Romanian (Moldovan) population dropped by 30%.

The Moldovan language
Moldovan language

Moldovan , written in the Latin alphabet, is the name of the official language of the Moldova. The language spoken in Moldova is identical to Romanian language, sharing the same literary standard....
 introduced then by the Soviet authorities in Moldavian SSR
Moldavian SSR

The Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic , commonly abbreviated to Moldavian SSR or MSSR, was one of the 15 republics of the Soviet Union....
 was actually Romanian language
Romanian language

Romanian or Daco-Romanian ; self-designation: limba rom?na, ) is a Romance languages spoken by around 24 to 28 million people, primarily in Romania and Moldova....
 but written with a version of the Cyrillic alphabet derived from the Russian alphabet
Russian alphabet

The modern Russian alphabet is a variant of the Cyrillic alphabet. It was introduced into Kievan Rus' at the time of Vladimir I of Kiev's conversion to Christianity date....
. Proponents of Cyrillic orthography argue that the Romanian language was historically written with the Cyrillic script, albeit a different version of it (see Moldovan alphabet
Moldovan alphabet

The Moldovan Cyrillic alphabet is a Cyrillic alphabet and developed for the Romanian language/Moldovan language in the Soviet Union in the 1930s....
 and Romanian Cyrillic alphabet
Romanian Cyrillic alphabet

The Romanian Cyrillic alphabet was used to write Romanian language before 1860?1862, when it was officially replaced by Romanian alphabet, although Cyrillic remained in occasional use until circa 1920....
 for a discussion of this controversy).

Eastern Bloc

In all countries of the Eastern Bloc
Eastern bloc

During the Cold War, the terms Eastern Bloc, Communist Bloc or Soviet Bloc were used to refer to European annexed or expanded Soviet Socialist Republics of the USSR and Satellite state states, including members of the Soviet-dominated organizations Comecon and the Warsaw Pact....
 Russian language lessons were obligatory for the majority of pupils and students. After 1965, only in Romania were Russian language lessons not obligatory anymore.

Under the Soviet Union

After the 1917 revolution, authorities in the USSR decided to eradicate the use of the Arabic alphabet
Arabic alphabet

The Arabic alphabet is the writing system used for writing several languages of Asia and Africa, such as Arabic language, Persian language, and Urdu language....
 in Turkic
Turkic languages

The Turkic languages constitute a language family of some thirty languages, spoken by Turkic peoples across a vast area from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean Sea to Siberia and Western China, and are sometimes considered to be part of the proposed Altaic languages....
 and Persian
Persian language

name=Persian|nativename=|pronunciation=[f??r'si]|image=|caption=Farsi in Perso-Arabic script |states= Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Bahrain....
 languages in Soviet-controlled Central Asia
Central Asia

Central Asia is a region of Asia from the Caspian Sea in the west to central China in the east, and from southern Russia in the north to northern India in the south....
, in the Caucasus
Caucasus

The Caucasus or Caucas is a geopolitical region located between Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. It is home to Europe's highest mountain ....
, and in the Volga region (including Tatarstan
Tatarstan

Republic of Tatarstan is a federal subjects of Russia of the Russian Federation . Its size is 68,000 km? with a population of 3,800,000. Its capital is Kazan....
). This detached the local populations from exposure to the language and writing system of the Koran. The new alphabet for these languages was based on the Latin alphabet
Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumae alphabet, and was initially developed by the Ancient Romes to write the Latin....
 and was also inspired by the Turkish alphabet
Turkish alphabet

The Turkish alphabet is a Latin-based alphabet used for writing the Turkish language, consisting of 29 letters, a certain number of which have been adapted or modified for the phonetic requirements of the language....
. However, by the late 1930s, the policy had changed. In 1939–1940 the Soviets decided that a number of these languages (including Tatar
Tatar language

The Tatar language is a Turkic languages language spoken by the Tatars....
, Kazakh
Kazakh language

Kazakh is a Turkic languages language closely related to Nogai language and Karakalpak language.Kazakh is an agglutinative language, and it employs vowel harmony....
, Uzbek
Uzbek language

Uzbek is a Turkic languages and the official language of Uzbekistan. It has about 23.5 million native speakers, and it is spoken by the Uzbeks in Uzbekistan and elsewhere in Central Asia....
, Turkmen
Turkmen language

Turkmen is the name of the national language of Turkmenistan. It is spoken by approximately 3,430,000 people in Turkmenistan, and by an additional approximately 6,000,000 people in other countries, including Iran , Iraq , Syria , Afghanistan , and Turkey ....
, Tajik
Tajik language

The Tajik language, or Tajik Persian, or Tajiki, is a modern variety of the Persian language spoken in Central Asia. An Indo-European languages language of the Iranian languages language group, most speakers of Tajik live in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan....
, Kyrgyz
Kyrgyz language

Kyrgyz or Kirghiz is a Turkic languages and, together with Russian language, an official language of Kyrgyzstan. It is most closely related to Altay language and more distantly so to Kazakh language....
, Azeri
Azerbaijani language

Azerbaijani is a language belonging to the Turkic languages language family, spoken in southwestern Asia, primarily in Azerbaijan and northwestern Iran....
, and Bashkir
Bashkir language

The Bashkir language is a Turkic languages....
) would henceforth use variations of the Cyrillic alphabet
Cyrillic alphabet

The Cyrillic alphabet is a family of alphabets, subsets of which are used by five Slavic languages national languages as well as non-Slavic . It is also used by many other languages of Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Siberia and other languages in the past....
. It was claimed that the switch was made "by the demands of the working class."

Early 1920s through mid-1930s: Indigenization

The early years of Soviet nationalities policy, from the early 1920s to the mid-1930s, were guided by the policy of korenizatsiya
Korenizatsiya

Korenizatsiya sometimes also called korenization, meaning "nativization" or "indigenization", literally "putting down roots", was the early Soviet Union nationalities policy promoted mostly in the 1920s but with a continuing legacy in later years....
 ("indigenization"), during which the new Soviet regime sought to reverse the long-term effects of Russification on the non-Russian populations. As the regime was trying to establish its power and legitimacy
Legitimacy

:selfref|For the...
 throughout the former Russian empire, it went about constructing regional administrative units, recruiting non-Russians into leadership positions, and promoting non-Russian languages in government administration, the courts, the schools, and the mass media. The slogan then established was that local cultures should be "socialist in content but national in form." That is, these cultures should be substantively transformed to conform with the Communist Party's socialist project for the Soviet society as a whole but have active participation and leadership by the indigenous nationalities and operate primarily in the local languages.

Late 1930s and wartime: Russian comes to fore

Early nationalities policy shared with later policy the object of assuring control by the Communist Party over all aspects of Soviet political, economic, and social life. The early Soviet policy of promoting what one scholar has described as "ethnic particularism" and another as "institutionalized multinationality", had a double goal. On the one hand, it had been an effort to counter Russian chauvinism by assuring a place for the non-Russian languages and cultures in the newly formed Soviet Union. On the other hand, it was a means to prevent the formation of alternative ethnically based political movement
Political movement

A political movement is a social movement working in the area of politics. A political movement may be organized around a single issue or set of issues, or around a set of shared concerns of a social group....
s, including pan-Islamism
Pan-Islamism

Pan-Islamism is a political movement advocating the unity of Muslims under one Islamic state often a Caliphate. While Pan-Arabism, a ideology often in competition with Pan-Islamism, advocates the unity and independence of Arabs regardless of religion, pan-Islamism advocates the unity and independence of Muslims regardless of ethnicity....
 and pan-Turkism
Pan-Turkism

Pan-Turkism is a political movement aiming to unite the various Turkic peoples into a modern political state, a confederation, or an economic union closely resembling that of the European Union....
. One way of accomplishing this was to promote what some regard as artificial distinctions between ethnic groups and languages rather than promoting amalgamation of these groups and a common set of languages based on Turkish or another regional language.

The Soviet nationalities policy from its early years sought to counter these two tendencies by assuring a modicum of cultural autonomy to non-Russian nationalities within a federal system or structure of government, though maintaining that the ruling Communist Party was monolithic, not federal. The federal system conferred highest status to the titular nationalities of union republics, and lower status to titular nationalities of autonomous republics, autonomous provinces, and autonomous okrugs. In all, some 50 nationalities had a republic, province, or okrug of which they held nominal control in the federal system. Federalism and the provision of native-language education ultimately left as a legacy a large non-Russian public that was educated in the languages of their ethnic groups and that identified a particular homeland on the territory of the Soviet Union.

By the late 1930s, however, there was a notable policy shift. Purges in some of the national regions, such as Ukraine
Ukrainization

Ukrainization is a policy of increasing the usage and facilitating the development of the Ukrainian language and promoting other elements of Ukrainian culture, in various spheres of public life such as education, publishing, government and religion....
, had occurred already in the early 1930s. Before the turnabout in Ukraine in 1933, a purge of Veli Ibrahimov and his leadership in the Crimean ASSR in 1929 for "national deviation" led to Russianization of government, education, and the media and to the creation of a special alphabet for Crimean Tatar to replace the Latin alphabet. Of the two dangers that Stalin had identified in 1923, now bourgeois nationalism (local nationalism) was said to be a greater threat than Great Russian chauvinism (great power chauvinism). In 1937, Faizullah Khojaev
Faizullah Khojaev

Faizullah Ubaidullaevich Khojaev . b.1896 Bukhara—March 1938, Moscow was an Uzbeks politician.Khojaev was born in to a family of wealthy traders....
 and Akmal Ikramov were removed as leaders of the Uzbek SSR
Uzbek SSR

The Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic , also known as the Uzbek SSR for short, was one of the republics of the Soviet Union since its creation in 1924....
 and in 1938, during the third great Moscow show trial
Trial of the Twenty One

The Trial of the Twenty-One was the last of the Moscow Trials, show trials of prominent Bolsheviks, including the Old Bolsheviks. The Trial of the Twenty-One took place in Moscow in March 1938, towards the end of Joseph Stalin Great Purge....
, convicted and subsequently put to death for alleged anti-Soviet nationalist activities.

Russian language gained greater emphasis. In 1938, Russian became a required subject of study in every Soviet school, including those in which a non-Russian language was the principal medium of instruction for other subjects (e.g., mathematics, science, and social studies). In 1939, non-Russian languages that had been given Latin-based scripts in the late 1920s were given new scripts based on the Cyrillic alphabet
Cyrillic alphabet

The Cyrillic alphabet is a family of alphabets, subsets of which are used by five Slavic languages national languages as well as non-Slavic . It is also used by many other languages of Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Siberia and other languages in the past....
. One likely rationale for these decisions was the sense of impending war and that Russian was the language of command in the Red Army
Red Army

The Red Army was the armed force first organized by the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War in 1918 and, in 1922, became the army of the Soviet Union....
.

Before and during World War II, Stalin deported
Population transfer in the Soviet Union

Population transfer in the Soviet Union may be classified into the following broad categories: deportations of "anti-Soviet" categories of population, often classified as "enemies of workers", deportations of nationalities, labor force transfer, and organized migrations in opposite directions to fill the ethnic cleansing territories....
 to Central Asia
Central Asia

Central Asia is a region of Asia from the Caspian Sea in the west to central China in the east, and from southern Russia in the north to northern India in the south....
 and Siberia
Siberia

Siberia , is the name given to the vast region constituting almost all of North Asia and for the most part currently serving as the massive central and eastern portion of the Russian Federation, having served in the same capacity previously for the Soviet Union from its beginning, and the Russian Empire beginning in the 16th century....
 several entire nationalities for their suspected collaboration
Collaborationism

Collaborationism, can describe the treason of cooperation with enemy forces Military occupation one's country. As such it implies Crime deeds in the service of the occupying Power , including complicit with the occupying power in murder, persecutions, pillage, and economy exploitation as well as participation in a puppet government....
 with the German invaders: Volga German
Volga German

The Volga Germans were ethnic Germans living along the River Volga in the region of southern European Russia around Saratov and to the south. They maintained German culture, German language, traditions and churches: Evangelical Church in Germany, Reformed Church, Roman Catholicism, and Russian Mennonite....
s, Crimean Tatars
Crimean Tatars

Crimean Tatars or Crimeans are a Turkic peoples ethnic group originally residing in Crimea. They speak the Crimean Tatar language. They are not to be confused with the Volga Tatars....
, Chechens, Ingush
Ingush

Ingush may refer to:* The Ingush language* The Ingush people, an ethnic group of the North Caucasus...
, Balkars
Balkars

The Balkars are a Turkic people of the Caucasus region, the titular population of Kabardino-Balkaria. Their Karachay-Balkar language is of the Ponto-Caspian subgroup of the Northwestern group of Turkic languages....
, Kalmyks, and others. Shortly after the war, he deported many Ukrainians
Ukrainians

Ukrainians are an East Slavs ethnic group primarily living in Ukraine, or more broadly?citizens of Ukraine . Some 200 years ago and times prior to that, Ukrainians were usually referred to and known as Rusyny ....
 and Balts
Balts

For the similarly named ethnic group inhabiting northern Pakistani Kashmir, see Balti peopleThe Balts or Baltic peoples , defined as speakers of one of the Baltic languages, a branch of the Indo-European languages family, are descended from a group of Indo-Europeans tribes who settled the area between lower Vistula and upper D...
 to Siberia as well.

After the war the leading role of the Russian people in the Soviet family of nations and nationalities was promoted by Stalin and his successors. This shift was most clearly underscored by Communist Party General Secretary Stalin's Victory Day toast to the Russian people in May 1945:

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


I drink, before all, to the health of the Russian people, because in this war they earned general recognition as the leading force of the Soviet Union among all the nationalities of our country.


Naming the Russian nation the primus inter pares
Primus inter pares

Primus inter pares , the first among equals, or first among peers is a phrase which indicates that a person is the most senior of a group of people sharing the same rank or office....
 was a total turnabout from Stalin's declaration 20 years earlier (heralding the korenizatsiya
Korenizatsiya

Korenizatsiya sometimes also called korenization, meaning "nativization" or "indigenization", literally "putting down roots", was the early Soviet Union nationalities policy promoted mostly in the 1920s but with a continuing legacy in later years....
 policy) that "the first immediate task of our Party is vigorously to combat the survivals of Great-Russian chauvinism." Although the official literature on nationalities and languages in subsequent years continued to speak of there being 130 equal languages in the USSR, in practice a hierarchy was endorsed in which some nationalities and languages were given special roles or viewed as having different long-term futures.

Late 1950s to 1980s: Advanced Russianization


1958-59 education reform: parents choose language of instruction
An analysis of textbook publishing found that education was offered for at least one year and for at least the first class (grade) in 67 languages between 1934 and 1980. However, the educational reforms undertaken after Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Khrushchev

Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, following the death of Joseph Stalin, and Premier of the Soviet Union from 1958 to 1964....
 became First Secretary of the Communist Party in the late 1950s began a process of replacing non-Russian schools with Russian ones for the nationalities that had lower status in the federal system or whose populations were smaller or displayed widespread bilingualism already. Nominally, this process was guided by the principle of "voluntary parental choice." But other factors also came into play, including the size and formal political status of the group in the Soviet federal hierarchy and the prevailing level of bilingualism among parents. By the early 1970s schools in which non-Russian languages served as the principal medium of instruction operated in 45 languages, while seven more indigenous languages were taught as subjects of study for at least one class year. By 1980, instruction was offered in 35 non-Russian languages of the peoples of the USSR, just over half the number in the early 1930s.

Moreover, in most of these languages schooling was not offered for the complete 10-year curriculum. For example, within the RSFSR in 1958-59, full 10-year schooling in the native language was offered in only three languages: Russian
Russian language

Russian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, and the largest native language in Europe....
, Tatar
Tatar language

The Tatar language is a Turkic languages language spoken by the Tatars....
, and Bashkir
Bashkir language

The Bashkir language is a Turkic languages....
. And some nationalities had minimal or no native-language schooling. By 1962–1963, among non-Russian nationalities that were indigenous to the RSFSR, whereas 27% of children in classes I-IV (primary school) studied in Russian-language schools, 53% of those in classes V-VIII (incomplete secondary school) studied in Russian-language schools, and 66% of those in classes IX-X studied in Russian-language schools. Although many non-Russian languages were still offered as a subject of study at a higher class level (in some cases through complete general secondary school – the 10th class), the pattern of using Russian language as the main medium of instruction accelerated after Khrushchev's parental choice program got under way.

Pressure to convert the main medium of instruction to Russian was evidently higher in urban areas. For example, in 1961-62, reportedly only 6% of Tatar
Volga Tatars

Volga Tatars are a Turkic_languages people, most of whom occupy the west central portion of the Ural Mountains....
 children living in urban areas attended schools in which Tatar
Tatar language

The Tatar language is a Turkic languages language spoken by the Tatars....
 was the main medium of instruction. Similarly in Dagestan
Dagestan

The Republic of Dagestan , older spelling Daghestan, is a federal subjects of Russia of the Russia ....
 in 1965, schools in which the indigenous language was the medium of instruction existed only in rural areas. The pattern was probably similar, if less extreme, in most of the non-Russian union republics
Republics of the Soviet Union

The Republics of the Soviet Union were, according to the Article 76 of the 1977 Soviet Constitution, Sovereign Soviet Socialist states that had united with other Soviet Republics to become the Soviet Union....
, although in Belarus and Ukraine schooling in urban areas was highly Russianized.

Doctrine catches up with practice: sblizhenie-sliyanie (rapprochement and fusion of nations)
The promotion of federalism and of non-Russian languages had always been a strategic decision aimed at expanding and maintaining rule by the Communist Party. On the theoretical plane, however, the Communist Party's official doctrine was that eventually nationality differences and nationalities as such would disappear. In official party doctrine as it was reformulated in the Third Program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Communist Party of the Soviet Union

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the ruling political party in the Soviet Union and one of the largest Communist Party in the world....
 introduced by Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Khrushchev

Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, following the death of Joseph Stalin, and Premier of the Soviet Union from 1958 to 1964....
 at the 22nd Party Congress in 1961, although the program stated that ethnic distinctions will eventually disappear and a single lingua franca would be adopted by all nationalities in the Soviet Union, "the obliteration of national distinctions, and especially language distinctions, is a considerably more drawn-out process than the obliteration of class distinctions." At the present time, however, Soviet nations and nationalities were undergoing a dual process of further flowering of their cultures and of rapprochement or drawing together (????????? – sblizhenie) into a stronger union. In his Report on the Program to the Congress, Khrushchev used even stronger language: that the process of further rapprochement (sblizhenie) and greater unity of nations would eventually lead to a merging or fusion (??????? – sliyanie) of nationalities.

Khrushchev's formula of rapprochement-fusing (sblizhenie-sliyanie) was moderated slightly, however, when Leonid Brezhnev
Leonid Brezhnev

Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev was General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1964 to 1982, serving in that position longer than anyone other than Joseph Stalin....
 replaced Khrushchev as General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1964 (a post he held until his death in 1982). Brezhnev asserted that sblizhenie would lead ultimately to the complete "unity" (???????? – yedinstvo) of nationalities. "Unity" was an ambiguous term because it could imply either the maintenance of separate national identities but a higher stage of mutual attraction or similarity between nationalities, or the total disappearance of ethnic differences. In the political context of the time, sblizheniye-yedinstvo was regarded as a softening of the pressure toward Russification that Khrushchev had promoted with his endorsement of sliyanie. The 24th Party Congress in 1971, however, launched the idea that a new "Soviet people
Soviet people

Soviet nation was an ideological demonym and proposed ethnonym for the population of the Soviet Union. It first appeared in official usage in the 1970's....
" (????????? ?????) was forming on the territory of the USSR, a community for which the common language – the language of the "Soviet people" – was the Russian language, consistent with the role that Russian was playing for the fraternal nations and nationalities in the territory already. This new community was labeled a people (????? – narod), not a nation (????? – natsiya), but in that context narod implied an ethnic community
Ethnic group

An ethnic group is a group of humans whose members identify with each other, through a common heritage that is real or presumed.Ethnic identity is further marked by the recognition from others of a group's distinctiveness and the recognition of common culture, linguistic, religion, human behaviour or Race traits, real or presumed, as indic...
, not just a civic or political community.

Thus, until the end of the Soviet era, a doctrinal rationalization had been provided for some of the practical policy steps that were taken in areas of education and the media. First of all, the transfer of many "national schools" (???????????? ?????) to Russian as a medium of instruction accelerated under Khrushchev in the late 1950s and continued into the 1980s. Second, the new doctrine was used to justify the special place of the Russian language as the "language of internationality communication" (???? ???????????????? ???????) in the USSR. Use of the term "internationality" (???????????????) rather than the more conventional "international" (?????????????) focused on the special internal role of Russian language rather than on its role as a language of international discourse. That Russian was the most widely spoken language, and that Russians were the majority of the population of the country, were also cited in justification of the special place of Russian language in government, education, and the media.

At the 27th CPSU Party Congress in 1986, presided over by Mikhail Gorbachev
Mikhail Gorbachev

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev is a Russian politician. He was the last General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, serving from 1985 until 1991, and also the last head of state of the USSR, serving from 1988 until its collapse in 1991....
, the 4th Party Program reiterated the formulas of the previous program:

Characteristic of the national relations in our country are both the continued flourishing of the nations and nationalities and the fact that they are steadily and voluntarily drawing closer together on the basis of equality and fraternal cooperation. Neither artificial prodding nor holding back of the objective trends of development is admissible here. In the long term historical perspective this development will lead to complete unity of the nations....


The equal right of all citizens of the USSR to use their native languages and the free development of these languages will be ensured in the future as well. At the same time learning the Russian language, which has been voluntarily accepted by the Soviet people as a medium of communication between different nationalities, besides the language of one's nationality, broadens one's access to the achievements of science and technology and of Soviet and world culture.


Linguistic and ethnic Russification


Some factors favoring Russification
Progress in the spread of Russian language as a second language and the gradual displacement of other languages was monitored in Soviet censuses. The Soviet censuses of 1926, 1937, 1939, and 1959, had included questions on "native language" (?????? ????) as well as "nationality." The 1970, 1979, and 1989 censuses added to these questions one on "other language of the peoples of the USSR" that an individual could "freely command" (???????? ???????). The explicit goal of the new question on "second language" was to monitor the spread of Russian as the language of internationality communication.

Each of the official homelands within the Soviet Union was regarded as the eternal and only homeland of the titular nationality and its language, while the Russian language was regarded as the language for interethnic communication for the whole Soviet Union. As such, for most of the Soviet era, especially after the korenizatsiya
Korenizatsiya

Korenizatsiya sometimes also called korenization, meaning "nativization" or "indigenization", literally "putting down roots", was the early Soviet Union nationalities policy promoted mostly in the 1920s but with a continuing legacy in later years....
 (indigenization) policy ended in the 1930s, schools in which non-Russian Soviet languages would be taught were not generally available outside the respective ethnically based administrational units of these ethnicities; the same could be said about the cultural institutions. Some exceptions appeared to involve cases of historic rivalries or patterns of assimilation between neighboring non-Russian groups, such as between Tatars and Bashkirs in Russia or among major Central Asian nationalities. For example, even in the 1970s schooling was offered in at least six languages in Uzbekistan
Uzbekistan

Uzbekistan, officially the Republic of Uzbekistan , is a Landlocked_country#Doubly_landlocked_country country in Central Asia, formerly part of the Soviet Union....
: Russian
Russian language

Russian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, and the largest native language in Europe....
, Uzbek
Uzbek language

Uzbek is a Turkic languages and the official language of Uzbekistan. It has about 23.5 million native speakers, and it is spoken by the Uzbeks in Uzbekistan and elsewhere in Central Asia....
, Tajik
Tajik language

The Tajik language, or Tajik Persian, or Tajiki, is a modern variety of the Persian language spoken in Central Asia. An Indo-European languages language of the Iranian languages language group, most speakers of Tajik live in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan....
, Kazakh
Kazakh language

Kazakh is a Turkic languages language closely related to Nogai language and Karakalpak language.Kazakh is an agglutinative language, and it employs vowel harmony....
, Turkmenian
Turkmen language

Turkmen is the name of the national language of Turkmenistan. It is spoken by approximately 3,430,000 people in Turkmenistan, and by an additional approximately 6,000,000 people in other countries, including Iran , Iraq , Syria , Afghanistan , and Turkey ....
, and Karakalpak
Karakalpak language

Karakalpak is a Turkic language mainly spoken by Karakalpaks in Karakalpakstan , as well as by Bashkirs and Nogay. Ethnic Karakalpaks who live in the Provinces of Uzbekistan tend to speak local Uzbek dialects....
.

While formally all languages were equal, in almost all Soviet republics the Russian/local bilingualism was "asymmetric," as in India
India

India, officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and outlying territories by total area country by geographical area, the List of countries by population country, and the most populous liberal democracy in the world....
: the titular nation
Titular nation

Titular nation was a term introduced in the Soviet Union to denote nations that give rise to titles of autonomous entities within the union: Republics of the Soviet Unions, autonomous republics, autonomous regions, etc., such as Byelorussian SSR for Belarusians....
 learned Russian, whereas immigrant Russians generally did not learn the local language.

In addition, many non-Russians who lived outside their respective administrative units tended to become Russified linguistically; that is, they not only learned Russian as a second language but they also adopted it as their home language or mother tongue – although some still retained their sense of ethnic identity or origins even after shifting their native language to Russian. This includes both the traditional communities (e.g. Lithuanians
Lithuanians

Lithuanians are the Balts ethnic group native to Lithuania, where they number a little over 3 million people. Another million or more make up the Lithuanian diaspora, largely found in countries such as the United States, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Russia, United Kingdom and Ireland....
 in the northwestern Belarus
Belarus

Belarus is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe, bordered by Russia to the north and east, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, and Lithuania and Latvia to the north....
 (see Eastern Vilnius region) or the Kaliningrad Oblast
Kaliningrad Oblast

Kaliningrad Oblast Kaliningrad Oblast forms the westernmost part of the Russian Federation, but it has no land connection to the rest of Russia....
 (see Lithuania Minor
Lithuania Minor

Lithuania Minor or Prussian Lithuania is a historical ethnography region of Prussia , later East Prussia in Germany, where Prussian Lithuanians or Lietuvininks lived....
)) and the communities that appeared during Soviet times (e.g. Ukrainian
Ukrainians

Ukrainians are an East Slavs ethnic group primarily living in Ukraine, or more broadly?citizens of Ukraine . Some 200 years ago and times prior to that, Ukrainians were usually referred to and known as Rusyny ....
 or Belarusian
Belarusians

Belarusians or Belorussians are an East Slavs ethnic group who populate the majority of the Belarus and form minorities in neighboring Poland , Russia, Lithuania and Ukraine....
 workers in Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan, also Kazakstan , officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a large Eurasian country in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Ranked as the List of countries by area as well as the world's largest landlocked country, it has a territory of 2,727,300 km? ....
 or Latvia
Latvia

Latvia The Latvians are a Baltic peoples culturally related to the Estonians and Lithuanians, with the Latvian language having many similarities with Lithuanian language, but not with the Estonian language....
, whose children attended primarily the Russian-language schools and thus the further generations are primarily speaking Russian as their native language; for example, for 57% of Estonia's Ukrainians, 70% of Estonia's Belarusians and 37% of Estonia's Latvians claimed Russian is the native language in the last Soviet census of 1989. Russian language as well changed the Yiddish and other languages as the main language of many Jewish communities inside the Soviet Union.

Another consequence of the mixing of nationalities and the spread of bilingualism and linguistic Russification was the growth of ethnic intermarriage
Intermarriage

Intermarriage may refer to:*Interreligious marriage*Interracial marriage*Cultural exogamySee also:*Cultural assimilation...
 and a process of ethnic Russification -- coming to call oneself Russian by nationality or ethnicity, not just speaking Russian as a second language or using it as a primary language. In the last decades of the Soviet Union, ethnic Russification (or ethnic assimilation) was moving very rapidly for a few nationalities such as the Karelians
Karelians

The Karelians are a Baltic Finns ethnic group living mostly in the Republic of Karelia and in other north-western parts of the Russian Federation....
 and Mordvinians. However, whether children born in mixed families where one of the parents was Russian were likely to be raised as Russians depended on the context. For example, the majority of children in families where one parent was Russian and the other Ukrainian living in North Kazakstan chose Russian as their nationality on their internal passport at age 16. However, children of mixed Russian and Estonian parents living in Tallinn
Tallinn

Tallinn is the capital and largest city in the Republic of Estonia and of Harju County. It occupies a surface of 159.2 km? in which 397,617 inhabitants live....
 (the capital city of Estonia
Estonia

Estonia , officially the Republic of Estonia is a country in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by Finland across the Gulf of Finland, to the west by Sweden across the Baltic Sea, to the south by Latvia , and to the east by the Russia ....
), or mixed Russian and Latvian parents living in Riga
Riga

Riga the Capital of Latvia, is situated on the Baltic Sea coast on the mouth of the river Daugava River. Riga is the largest city in the Baltic states....
 (the capital of Latvia
Latvia

Latvia The Latvians are a Baltic peoples culturally related to the Estonians and Lithuanians, with the Latvian language having many similarities with Lithuanian language, but not with the Estonian language....
), or mixed Russian and Lithuania
Lithuania

Lithuania , officially the Republic of Lithuania is a country in Northern Europe, the southernmost of the three Baltic states. Situated along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, it shares borders with Latvia to the north, Belarus to the southeast, Poland, and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad Oblast to the southwest....
n parents living in Vilnius
Vilnius

Vilnius is the largest city and the Capital of Lithuania, with a population of 555,613 as of 2008. It is the seat of the Vilnius city municipality and of the Vilnius district municipality....
 (the capital of Lithuania
Lithuania

Lithuania , officially the Republic of Lithuania is a country in Northern Europe, the southernmost of the three Baltic states. Situated along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, it shares borders with Latvia to the north, Belarus to the southeast, Poland, and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad Oblast to the southwest....
) most often chose as their own nationality that of the titular nationality of their republic – not Russian. More generally, patterns of linguistic and ethnic assimilation (Russification) were complex and cannot be accounted for by any single factor such as educational policy. Also relevant were the traditional cultures and religions of the groups, their residence in urban or rural areas, their contact with and exposure to Russian language and to ethnic Russians, and other factors.

Some factors impeding Russification
A factor that may have retarded the process of ethnic Russification was the long-established practice of using nationality labels on official documents. For example, the "nationality" of Soviet citizens was fixed on their internal passports
Passport system in the Soviet Union

The passport system in the Soviet Union underwent a number of transformations in the course of its history. In the late Soviet Union citizens of age sixteen or older had to have an internal passport....
 at age 16, and was essentially determined by the nationality of the parents. Only the children of mixed marriages had a choice: they could choose the nationality of one of their parents. Furthermore, an individual's nationality was inscribed on school enrollment records, military service cards (for men), and labor booklets. Although the census question on nationality was supposed to be only subjective and not determined by the official nationality in an individual's passport, the fixing of official nationality on so many official records may well have reinforced non-Russian identities. Among some groups, such as Jews
History of the Jews in Russia and the Soviet Union

The vast territories of the Russian Empire at one time hosted the largest Jewish diaspora in the world. Within these territories the Jewish community flourished and developed many of modern Judaism's most distinctive theological and cultural traditions, while also facing periods of intense antisemitism discriminatory policies and persecutions....
, the ubiquitous use of such an official nationality on identity papers and records was viewed as a factor that fostered discrimination against them.

Another factor that may also have begun to reduce pressure toward ethnic Russification was that beginning in the late 1960s immigration of Russians to some of the non-Russian republics slowed down or reversed. There was a net outmigration of Russians from Armenia
Armenia

Armenia , officially the Republic of Armenia , is a landlocked mountainous country in South Caucasus between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea....
 and Georgia
Georgia (country)

Georgia is a transcontinental country in the Caucasus region, located at the dividing line between Europe and Asia. It is bordered by the Russia to the north, Azerbaijan to the east, Armenia to the south, and Turkey to the southwest....
 in the 1960s (though because of natural increase the number of Russians still increased during this decade). There was also essentially no net immigration or outmigration of Russians in Central Asia
Central Asia

Central Asia is a region of Asia from the Caspian Sea in the west to central China in the east, and from southern Russia in the north to northern India in the south....
 in the 1970s, and by the 1980s there was a net outmigration. To the Baltic republics and in the Soviet west (Ukraine
Ukraine

Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It is bordered by Russia to the east; Belarus to the north; Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary to the west; Romania and Moldova to the southwest; and the Black Sea and Sea of Azov to the south....
, Belarus
Belarus

Belarus is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe, bordered by Russia to the north and east, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, and Lithuania and Latvia to the north....
, and Moldavia
Moldavia

Moldavia is a geographic and historical region and former principality in Eastern Europe, corresponding to the territory between the Eastern Carpathians and the Dniester river....
), there was only a trickle of net immigration of Russians by the 1980s. Furthermore, because of differential fertility rates among ethnic groups, the Russian share of the population of the Soviet Union as a whole declined to just 51 percent by the time of the 1989 census. In the preceding decade Russians had comprised just 33 percent of the net increase in the Soviet population. Assuming that these trends continued, Russians were likely to lose their status as a majority of the Soviet population around the turn of the 21st century.

Present times

While Belarusian and Russian are both official languages of Belarus
Belarus

Belarus is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe, bordered by Russia to the north and east, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, and Lithuania and Latvia to the north....
, Alexander Lukashenko
Alexander Lukashenko

Alexander Grigoryevich Lukashenko has served as the President of Belarus Belarus since 20 July 1994. Before his career as a politician, Lukashenko served as a military officer and worked as a director for manufacturing plants and farms....
's regime has been pursuing a policy to replace Belarusian with Russian through its control of the school curriculum, including replacing Belarusian-language textbooks on Belarusian geography and history with ones in Russian.

Tatarstan
Tatarstan

Republic of Tatarstan is a federal subjects of Russia of the Russian Federation . Its size is 68,000 km? with a population of 3,800,000. Its capital is Kazan....
 republic tried to switch its alphabet to Latin, however the Latin alphabet was officially banned for Russia's official languages. This position was officially explained with two reasons:
  • switching languages required finances, which are limited,
  • it would be difficult to make older generations accept the new language/alphabet.


Russian is the language of higher education, trade and business in all regions of Russia. In Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan, also Kazakstan , officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a large Eurasian country in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Ranked as the List of countries by area as well as the world's largest landlocked country, it has a territory of 2,727,300 km? ....
, Belarus
Belarus

Belarus is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe, bordered by Russia to the north and east, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, and Lithuania and Latvia to the north....
 and Kyrgyzstan
Kyrgyzstan

Kyrgyzstan , officially the Kyrgyz Republic, is a country in Central Asia. Landlocked and mountainous, it is bordered by Kazakhstan to the north, Uzbekistan to the west, Tajikistan to the southwest and People's Republic of China to the east....
 Russian has been declared an official language (in Kazakhstan its official status is "Language of interethnic communication"). In Ukraine, this was an issue in the 2004 presidential election: Viktor Yanukovich supported making Russian a state language while Viktor Yushchenko
Viktor Yushchenko

Viktor Andriyovych Yushchenko is the third and current President of Ukraine. He took office on January 23, 2005.As an informal leader of the Our Ukraine, he was one of the two main candidates in the October–November 2004 Ukrainian presidential election, 2004....
 opposed it. The current government is unwilling to make Russian a state language. However, despite official government policies, the Russian language is widely used on television and the circulation of Russian language newspapers is high all over the country (in the eastern and southern parts of Ukraine Russian is the dominant language). The situation is similar in Kazakhstan. In both Ukraine and, to a lesser extent, Kazakhstan, there have been attempts to make the titular languages the main languages for the media and the press (this is referred to as derussification in those countries), but these have had limited success. In Belarus, such attempts stopped in 1994, with the ascent of Alexander Lukashenko
Alexander Lukashenko

Alexander Grigoryevich Lukashenko has served as the President of Belarus Belarus since 20 July 1994. Before his career as a politician, Lukashenko served as a military officer and worked as a director for manufacturing plants and farms....
; most of the administrative, educational and legislative business in Belarus is carried out in Russian.

General references

  • Anderson, Barbara A., and Brian D. Silver. 1984. "Equality, Efficiency, and Politics in Soviet Bilingual Education Policy: 1934-1980," American Political Science Review 78 (December): 1019-1039.
  • Armstrong, John A. 1968. "The Ethnic Scene in the Soviet Union: The View of the Dictatorship,” in Erich Goldhagen, Ed., Ethnic Minorities in the Soviet Union (New York: Praeger): 3-49.
  • Aspaturian, Vernon V. 1968. "The Non-Russian Peoples," in Allen Kassof, Ed., Prospects for Soviet Society. New York: Praeger: 143-198.
  • Azrael, Jeremy R., Ed. 1978. Soviet Nationality Policies and Practices. New York: Praeger.
  • Bilinsky, Yaroslav. 1962. "The Soviet Education Laws of 1958-59 and Soviet Nationality Policy," Soviet Studies 14 (Oct. 1962): 138-157.
  • Hajda, Lubomyr, and Mark Beissinger, Eds. 1990. The Nationality Factor in Soviet Politics and Society. Boulder, CO: Westview.
  • Kaiser, Robert, and Jeffrey Chinn. 1996. The Russians as the New Minority in the Soviet Successor States. Boulder, CO: Westview.
  • Karklins, Rasma. 1986. Ethnic Relations in the USSR: The Perspective from Below. Boston and London: Allen & Unwin.
  • Kreindler, Isabelle. 1982. "The Changing Status of Russian in the Soviet Union," International Journal of the Sociology of Language 33: 7-39.
  • Lewis, E. Glyn. 1972. Multilingualism in the Soviet Union: Aspects of Language Policy and its Implementation. The Hague: Mouton.
  • Silver, Brian D. 1974. "The Status of National Minority Languages in Soviet Education: An Assessment of Recent Changes," Soviet Studies 26 (January): 28-40.
  • Silver, Brian D. 1986. “The Ethnic and Language Dimensions in Russian and Soviet Censuses,” in Ralph S. Clem, Ed., Research Guide to the Russian and Soviet Censuses (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press): 70-97.
  • Thaden, Edward C., Ed. 1981. Russification in the Baltic Provinces and Finland, 1855-1914. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0691053146
  • Wixman, Ronald. 1984. The Peoples of the USSR: An Ethnographic Handbook. New York: M.E. Sharpe and London, Macmillan.


See also


  • Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and National Character
    Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and National Character

    Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality was the guiding principle of public education in the Russian Empire, proposed by Russian Minister of Education Count Sergey Uvarov in his report to Nicholas I of Russia....
  • Education in the Soviet Union
    Education in the Soviet Union

    Soviet Union education was organized in a highly centralized government-run system. Its advantages were total access for all citizens and post-education employment....
  • Korenizatsiya
    Korenizatsiya

    Korenizatsiya sometimes also called korenization, meaning "nativization" or "indigenization", literally "putting down roots", was the early Soviet Union nationalities policy promoted mostly in the 1920s but with a continuing legacy in later years....
  • Population transfer in the Soviet Union
    Population transfer in the Soviet Union

    Population transfer in the Soviet Union may be classified into the following broad categories: deportations of "anti-Soviet" categories of population, often classified as "enemies of workers", deportations of nationalities, labor force transfer, and organized migrations in opposite directions to fill the ethnic cleansing territories....
  • Prometheism
    Prometheism

    Prometheism was a political project initiated by Poland's J?zef Pilsudski. Its aim was to weaken Tsarist Russia and its successor state, the Soviet Union, by supporting nationalism independence movements of the major Ethnic groups in Russia that lived within the borders of Russia and the Soviet Union....
  • Russophobia
    Russophobia

    Anti-Russian sentiment covers a wide spectrum of prejudices, dislikes or fears of Russia, Russians, or Russian culture, including Russophobia....
  • Soviet nation
  • Sovietization
    Sovietization

    Sovietization is term that may be used with two distinct meanings:*the adoption of a political system based on the model of soviet s .*the adoption of a way of life and mentality modelled after the Soviet Union....
  • Polonization
    Polonization

    Polonization is the acquisition or imposition of elements of Polish culture, especially Polish language, as experienced in some historic periods by non-Polish populations of territories controlled or substantially influenced by Poland....
  • Germanization
  • Germanisation of Poles during Partitions
    Germanisation of Poles during Partitions

    After Partitions of Poland in the end of 18th century, the Kingdom of Prussia and later German Empire imposed a number of Germanisation policies and measures in the newly gained territories, aimed at limiting the Polish ethnic presence in these areas....


External links

  • (PDF)
  • (PDF)
  • – Regnum News Agency (Russia), 9 December 2005
  • Kommersant
    Kommersant

    Kommersant is a commerce-oriented newspaper published in Russia. , the circulation was 131,000.The newspaper was initially published in 1909, and it was closed down following the Bolshevik seizure of power and the introduction of censorship in 1919....
    , 6 March 2006