Citizens of Former Soviet Republics View the Russian Language as a Remnant of the Soviet Union

[Harold Schiffman]

April 1, 2008
Inheriting Language
By Dmitry Babich
Russia Profile


Citizens of Former Soviet Republics View the Russian Language as a
Remnant of the Soviet Union

Whether the Russian language will be able to survive, a question that
may have seemed irrelevant just 10 or 15 years ago, is suddenly
becoming ever more pressing, as the language is spoken less and less
outside the country's borders. Likewise, the onslaught of mass culture
and the decline of education standards among the poorer strata have
led to the trivialization of Russian, both in the former Soviet
republics and in Russia itself.  This problem has a few causes rooted
in recent history. In many areas outside Russia that have been
traditionally populated by ethnic Russians, the spoken language has
lost the support of the state. Most former Soviet republic governments
show no interest in helping their citizens, including ethnic Russians,
to learn Russian, or to use it freely on their territory. Some of
these states are even attempting to squeeze Russian from the public
sphere, including education, mass media, science and entertainment.

Strange as it may seem from the outside, the citizens of these newly
independent states frequently oppose such governmental policies. For
them, Russian is often the native tongue, or the language of learning
and high culture, an old and important link to European civilization.
In this situation, Russian language outside of Russia can be preserved
and developed mostly by the efforts of civil society, with little
support from the state. How willing are people in Kazakhstan or
Ukraine to use Russian, to study it, to teach it to their children or
to hear it on the radio? Are they ready to oppose their governments'
attempts to close the schools that teach in Russian, or to muzzle
private television channels retranslating Russian news programs?

Recent surveys conducted by the Moscow-based Naslediye Yevrazii
(Eurasia Heritage) foundation revealed that the answers to these
questions vary from country to country, but all have one thing in
common: time is not on the side of the Russian language. Unless the
trend is reversed, having lost its position in the public sphere,
Russian language may disappear from people's homes, the last vestige
of resistance to governmental language policy.

A case in point

The situation in Ukraine is typical. The country has the biggest
Russian diaspora—more than 8 million people, according to the official
Ukrainian census of 2001, which some said artificially lowered the
number of ethnic Russians. "As memories of the Soviet epoch recede
further into the past, the number of people supporting the idea of
giving Russian the status of second state language in Ukraine is
dwindling," said Yevgeny Kopatko, the President of Research and
Branding Group (R&B), a Kiev-based center which conducted opinion
polls on the subject. "In November 2006, only 45 percent of Ukrainians
supported Ukrainian being the only state language in the country,
while 52 percent of respondents favored the idea of having Ukrainian
and Russian as two state languages. In February 2008, the majority (55
percent) supported the monolingual status quo, and the idea of a
bilingual state was supported by 41 percent."

While Ukraine remains a bilingual country, the idea of framing this
situation legally by proclaiming Russian the second official language
no longer enjoys the support of the majority of its citizens. Some
supporters of a Ukraine with two official languages have taken a
radical stance. In 2008 a new category of respondents emerged—people
favoring Russian as the only state language for Ukraine (3 percent).
This position is also understandable—the new "orange" Ukrainian
leadership launched a campaign to replace Russian with Ukrainian in
certain tentative spheres. For example, according to new laws, all
foreign movies shown in Ukrainian movie theaters, including Russian
ones, will have to be dubbed in Ukrainian. This caused turmoil among
viewers in Russian-speaking regions in southern and eastern Ukraine,
who can't stand watching familiar movies in Ukrainian both on
television and in the cinema. Movie theater owners in Russian-speaking
Crimea even organized a strike, claiming that this policy would solely
encourage the spread of pirated copies of American and Russian movies
dubbed in Russian.

But most people can adapt to anything, and as hopes for some kind of
integration between Russia and Ukraine wane, more and more Russian
speakers grudgingly accept the idea of Ukrainian as the only state
language. The idea of equalizing the status of Russian and Ukrainian
that won a landslide victory in 1994 for Ukraine's former President
Leonid Kuchma is losing its once potent power to mobilize voters.
"According to our polls, 55 percent of Ukrainian citizens lament the
fact that for some groups of the country's population, it is
impossible to get a higher education in the native language," R&B's
Kopatko said. Meanwhile, polls conducted by the Eurasia Heritage
foundation revealed that only 41 percent of Ukraine's population would
like to see the status of Russian elevated. Another 43 percent say
that they would be happy to leave the current status of Russian as
vague. In some regions, Russian is treated as a foreign language (in
western Ukraine), or as a language of an ethnic minority (in the
center and east of the country).

"There is no discrepancy between these two figures. This only means
that people slowly adapt to the current situation, not because they
like it, but for lack of any hope for improvement," Kopatko explained.
"As all of Ukraine's universities teach their classes in Ukrainian,
more and more Russian-speaking parents send their children to
Ukrainian secondary schools in order to make them more competitive in
adult life."

The friendly, the hostile, and the indifferent

A desire to study and spread Russian is becoming one of the main
eligibility requirements for aid from Russia-based NGOs and government
bodies to diaspora populations. "Of course we are going to help
primarily those people who value the Russian language," said
Vyacheslav Nikonov, the executive director of the Russki Mir (Russian
World) foundation, which cooperated with Eurasia Heritage in examining
the attitudes of the population of former Soviet republics to Russian.
"It makes no sense to send textbooks and teachers to people who do not
want to study."

On Feb. 29, at the Russky Mir foundation's headquarters, Eurasia
Heritage presented a report in which all former Soviet republics were
divided into three categories based on the population's attitude
toward studying Russian. The first group included countries where
Russian language still has strong positions and people have a
relatively good chance of getting an education in Russian—Belarus,
Kazakhstan and Ukraine among them.

The second group was made up of countries where, despite certain
problems, people are generally willing to study Russian or even to be
educated in Russian. These countries included Armenia, Kyrgyzstan,
Moldova and Tajikistan. In Kyrgyzstan, Russian even received the
status of an "official" language, the highest possible position in a
former Soviet republic, besides Russia itself and Belarus, where
Russian is the second state language.

Countries where studying Russian is largely problematic due to
limitations imposed by the state and the disapproval of a significant
share of the population make up the third group. These "problematic"
countries include Georgia, Azerbaijan and Lithuania. Latvia and
Estonia were also placed in this group, although sizable Russian
minorities residing there make the situation somewhat peculiar. Polls
were not conducted in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, but their
governments' actions limiting the use of Russian likewise make them a
part of the third group.

"I think this is very useful research and we are going to use it in
our work," said Nikonov. "Of course, we are primarily interested in
working with the second group, but we shall continue our work in the
countries of the other two groups as well."

Nigyar Akhundova, a counselor of the Azerbaijani embassy in Moscow,
said he didn't agree with the report's conclusions on the attitude
toward the Russian language in Azerbaijan. "It is enough to look at
the number of Russian language newspapers in Baku to see that Russian
is not discriminated against," he said. According to an opinion poll
conducted by Eurasia Heritage and the Eurasian Monitor company, only 7
percent of Azerbaijanis believe that the status of Russian in
Azerbaijan needs to be elevated, and only 14 percent think that more
hours should be dedicated to studying Russian in schools. In
comparison, the same poll reveals that a higher status of Russian was
approved by 71 percent of Armenian citizens and 68 percent of
Kyrgyzstanis.

Igor Zadorin, the executive director of the Eurasian Monitor polling
agency explained that certain misunderstandings stem from regional
differences. "Russian is spoken more in big cities, where the
population is usually more educated and more ethnically diverse," he
said. "In Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, Russian has a sort of a
cult status among local intelligentsia. The situation is very
different in rural areas and this was reflected in the poll." What
makes people in some former Soviet countries more interested in
Russian than other countries? Most analysts point to economic motives.

"The fact that Russia is a major destination for labor migration from
Tajikistan and Moldova may explain the relatively high level of
interest in Russian studies in these countries (45 and 27 percent
respectively)," Zadorin explained. "The other major influence is the
state of relations between the two countries. In Georgia, 45 percent
of the people are opposed to increasing the number of schools where
Russian is taught." However, there are nuances in the Georgian
situation as well. Iago Kachkachishvili, president of the
Tbilisi-based Institute of Social Research and Analysis, pointed to
the fact that the 45 percent of Georgians mentioned by Zadorin oppose
the Russian-sponsored spread of Russian language studies, and not
Russian language studies in general. "We are dealing with a very
sensitive attitude to what Georgians consider interference by Russia
into their internal affairs," Kachkachishvili said.

In those post-Soviet countries that failed to build civil societies
(Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan) the sphere of Russian language use is
shrinking much faster than in relatively democratic Ukraine or
Moldova, although this gets little attention in Russian and
international press. Turkmenistan, for example, is the only country in
the former Soviet Union where Russian universities have no affiliates.
In Uzbekistan, a transfer to the Latin alphabet and a requirement for
state employees to speak the state language led to a rapid loss of
interest in Russian. Total absence of legal opposition to the
autocratic rule of Turkmen and Uzbek leaders makes protecting the
rights of Russian minorities problematic.

"Russian language should be presented not as a part of the Soviet
heritage with all the post-imperial myths associated with it, but as
an effective instrument of cooperation among the people of the new
independent states," concludes the Eurasia Heritage report.

http://www.russiaprofile.org/page.php?pageid=Culture+%26+Living&articleid=a1207054292


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