Russification

This article is about the political term. For localization of computers and software, see Russification (computers).

Russification is an adoption of the Russian language 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 on Slavic, Baltic and other languages, spoken in areas currently or formerly controlled by Russia. In a historical sense, the term refers to both official and unofficial policies of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union with respect to their national constituents and to national minorities in Russia, aimed at Russian domination.

The major areas of Russification are politics and culture. 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 in official business and strong influence of Russian language on the national ones. The shifts in demographics in favour of Russian population are sometimes considered as a form of Russification as well.

History

The earliest example of Russification took place in 16th century in the conquered Khanate of Kazan and other Tatar formations. The main element of this process was Christianization and stating the Russian language as administrative language.

One of the examples of Russification was the replacement of the Polish, Belarusian and Lithuanian languages by Russian, in areas of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which became part of the Russian Empire after the Partitions of Poland. 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.

A similar development took place in Lithuania. Its Governor General, Mikhail Muravyov, instituted a complete ban on the Latin and Gothic scripts of Lithuanians printed matter, as well as a ban on publically speaking in Lithuanian. Mikhail Muravyov was reported as saying, "What the Russian bayonet didn't accomplish, the Russian school will" ("что не доделал русский штык—доделает русская школа.") This ban was disregarded by the Knygnešiai, Lithuanian book smugglers. It was lifted only in 1904. Lithuanian and Polish schools were closed; teachers from other parts of Russia, who did not speak these languages, were moved in to teach pupils. The campaign of promoting the Russian Orthodox faith over the Catholic one, (by closing down Catholic monasteries, officially banning the building of new churches and giving some of the old ones to the Russian Orthodox church, banning Catholic schools and establishing state schools with teaching of Orthodox religion instead, requiring Catholic priests to preach only officially approved sermons, in the case of marriage between a Catholic and Orthodox person requiring the Catholic to change his or her religion, requiring Catholic nobles to pay 10% of profits additional tax, limiting the amount of land a Catholic peasant could own, the switch of the calendar from Gregorian to the Julian one (at the time the earlier was used by Catholics and the latter by the Orthodox peoples), etc.) is also usually viewed as part of Russification campaign. As well, after the uprising many manors and great chunks of land were confiscated from those nobles of Polish and Lithuanian descent, who were accused of helping the uprising; later these properties were given or sold to Russian nobles. In a similar way some villages (ones, where there were many supporters of the uprising) were repopulated by ethnic Russians. Vilnius University, where the language of instruction had been Polish rather than Russian, was closed in 1832. Lithuanians and Poles were banned from having any public jobs (including those of teachers, doctors, etc.) in Lithuania; thus educated Lithuanians were displaced to other parts of the Russian Empire. The laws were changed into the Russian ones that were written in the Russian language - this language became the only administrative and juridical language in the area. Most of these actions as well were stopped due to Russo-Japanese War; others took a longer time to be reversed (e.g. Vilnius University was reopened only in 1919, after Russia had lost control of the city).

Still another example is Ems Ukaz of 1876, banning the Ukrainian language.

In November 1914 the Finnish press published the Russian secret program for a complete Russification of Finland.

After the 1917 revolution, the USSR authorities decided to eradicate use of Arabic alphabet used in Turkic and Persian languages in Soviet-controlled Central Asia, Caucasus and Volga region (for instance, in Tatarstan). The new alphabet in the 1920s for these languages was based on Latin alphabet, usually inspired by the Turkish alphabet. It was decided to switch to Latin alphabet, as Soviet leaders believed in the 'World Communist Revolution'. However, by the mid-1930s there was a switch of policy towards restoration of some institutions of the Russian Empire. In 1935-1939 these languages (including Tatar, Kazakh, Uzbek, Turkmen, Tajik, Kyrghyz, Azeri, Bashkir) were switched to use variations of Cyrillic alphabet (based on the alphabet used for the Russian language). But in 1939-1940 all those languages were switched to Cyrillic alphabet, as was said by the demands of working class.

Moldova

Both the Russian empire and the Soviet Union promoted policies aimed at reducing the size and the cultural autonomy of the Moldovan or Romanian ethnic group(s) of Bessarabia. The deportation of Moldovans and Romanians were accompanied by the immigration of Slavic populations, particularly Russians and Ukrainians. The most used inter-ethnic communication language throughout this time was the Russian language, which lead to russification, especially among the elite.

The Moldovan language introduced then by the Soviet authorities in Moldavian SSR was actually Romanian language but written with a version of the Cyrillic alphabet derived from the Russian alphabet. 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 and Romanian Cyrillic alphabet for a discussion of this controversy).

Soviet Union

In the Soviet Union, publications in technical and scientific journals were mostly in Russian; this led to underdevelopment of modern technical and scientific terminology in national languages, further degrading their status. While formally all languages were equal, in almost all Soviet republics the Russian/local bilingualism was "asymmetric," as in India: the titular nation learned Russian, whereas immigrant Russians generally did not learn the local language.

During the Soviet era, each of the Soviet Socialist Republics (or Autonomous Republics) inside the Soviet Union were regarded as the eternal and only area 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, schools where non-Russian Soviet languages would be taught weren't available (with a few exceptions) outside the respective ethnically based administrational units of these ethnicities; the same could be said about the cultural institutions. Due to this reason many of the non-Russian communities that existed in the Soviet Union outside their respective administrational units eventually russified. This includes both the tradtional communities (e.g. Lithuanians in the northwestern Belarus (see Eastern Vilnius region) or the Kaliningrad Oblast (see Lithuania Minor)) and the communities that appeared during Soviet times (e.g. Ukrainian or Belarusian workers in Kazakhstan or Latvia, whose children attended primarilly the Russian-language schools and thus the further generations are primarilly speaking Russian as their native language; for example, for 56,91% of Estonia's Ukrainians, 69.76% of Estonia's Belarusians and 36.96% of Estonia's Latvians Russian is the native language). Russian language as well changed the Yiddish and other languages as the main language of many Jewish communities inside the Soviet Union. The children born in mixed families where one of the parents was speaking Russian as the native language were also more likely to be raised as Russians. The situations that are explained here continues to exist in the Russian Federation and it's autonomous units and, as well, to some extent, a few other former-Soviet countries (see "Present times").

Present times

Many people allege that Russification policies continue in other ex-Soviet territories, mainly in Belarus under Alexander Lukashenko's government and in the unrecognized de facto independent republics of Transnistria in Moldova and Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia. Some international NGOs argue that Russification policies are occurring in republics inside the Russian Federation like Mari El, but Putin's administration has denied these accusations, and retorted by charging that the NGOs are attempting to destabilize the Volga Republics, as they had, according to the opinion of Russians, done to Chechnya in the past.

The republics of Karelia, Chechnya and Tatarstan in Russia also tried to switch their alphabets to Latin, but 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.

Critics cite these rationale as remnants of policy of Russification.

Russian is the language of higher education, trade and business in all regions of Russia. In Kazakhstan, Belarus and Kyrghyzstan Russian has been declared an official language (in Kazakhstan its official status is "Language of interethnic communication"). In Ukraine this issue was one of the issues in the 2004 presidential election: Viktor Yanukovich supported making Russian a state language while Viktor Yushchenko 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 the circulation of Russian language newspapers is high all over the country[http://www.ejc.nl/jr/emland/ukraine.html#1 (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; most of the administrative, educational and legislative business in Belarus is carried out in Russian.

References

External links

De-russification/Tatarization (PDF)
Russification in Lithuania
The Civic Identity of Russifying Officials in the Empire’s Northwestern Region after 1863 by Mikhail Dolbilov (PDF)
Permanent mission of Caucasian Institute for Democracy Foundation opened in Tskhinvali – Regnum News Agency (Russia), 9 december 2005
Tatarstan Rejects Dominant Role of Russians – Kommersant, 6 march 2006

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