Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

by Nicholas Ostler

  Another institution which by its nature spread the use of Russian far and wide was the army. This was distinctive among its imperial competitors for its ethnic and linguistic unity. For the Military Commission of 1762-3, ‘the strength of the Army consists in, most basic of all, the existence of common language, religion, customs and blood’; a century later, Russian military commentators on the wars of 1859 and 1866 stressed the pure Russianness of their army in contrast with the Austrians’ ragbag of races and languages: at the time, 90 per cent of the soldiers were from the homeland area of Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine, and most Muslims were exempt from military service.55 In a way, though, the ethnic purity of the force diminished the effect of its single language: if more non-Russians had been obliged to join up, more of them would have had to learn Russian. In fact, though, there was little scope for Russian veterans, having served for twenty-five years or more, to return to civil life after their service. They would typically end up in towns, as coachmen, domestic servants or schoolteachers.56 In this way, they were less able to seed the spread of their language than, say, the retired soldiers of ancient Rome.

  The bureaucracy, the visible arm of the Tsar’s government, was of course everywhere. But its influence in terms of spreading Russian discourse was less than might have been expected. Its higher levels were disproportionately (up to 20 per cent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) full of German speakers from the Baltic, ever since Peter the Great had recognised their special potential to carry through his reforms.57 And the minimal scope of its functions, mainly the gathering of poll tax and the recruitment of troops, must have limited its role and interaction in society.

  Finally, there was the intelligentsia. In a sense, it was this group almost alone which put Russian on the global cultural map, with the literary efflorescence that they achieved in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Peter the Great sparked it off, with his reforms aimed at creating a secular Russia, inspired by what he had encountered in his visits to Britain and above all Germany. Mikhail Lomonósov (1711-75), the greatest scholar of this era—who had somehow managed to promote himself out of an Archangel fisherman’s family—combined expertise in chemistry and linguistics, and started the task of defining a Russian literary language, one that would incorporate foreign borrowings and colloquial speech into the rather ponderous style inherited from Church Slavonic. A Russian Academy, modelled on the Académie Française, was established in 1783; it compiled a major dictionary in 1789-94, and defined a Russian grammar that was published in 1802. Although, as we have seen in considering the history of French, foreign influence remained strong in the Russian elite’s social life, the newly educated generations of Russian authors rose to the challenge of their new language, and included Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Turgenev, to name only the most famous. They took seriously the task of defining what Russian literature could do for Russia and the world. Most famously, Turgenev and Dostoyevsky both projected their ideas back to Pushkin at the celebrations in his memory in 1880: Turgenev said that Pushkin spoke to the educated nátiya, the nation that had come about through Peter’s reforms, but that the Russian naród, the people, would come to awareness through learning to read him; Dostoyevsky countered that Pushkin was intrinsically—and uniquely—universal in his appeal, something that gave Russia an immense advantage: ‘To become a genuine Russian means to attempt to bring reconciliation to the contradictions of Europe and to offer relief for Europe’s anguish in the all-human and all-embracing Russian soul.’58

  Amazingly, Russian writers did succeed in reaching an audience all over Europe, though inevitably more among Turgenev’s nátii than Dostoyevsky’s naródï. But the realisation of their cosmic aspirations at home was limited by the very narrow base of the intelligentsia within Russia itself, almost cut off from the vast majority of their public. General literacy of the Russian population was still not above 10 per cent in the early 1880s, although it rose rapidly thereafter, approaching 30 per cent among the under-fifties by the end of the century.59 And of course, those who could read did not all have a taste for the highest, preferring adventure stories, romances and horoscopes.60

  But the Russian intelligentsia made no attempt at all to make a place within their ideals for the Asian multitudes that their armed forces had exerted themselves so long, and so bloodily, to bring within the Tsar’s domains. From Ivan the Terrible’s conquest of Kazan to the conquests of the early nineteenth century, foreign nobility had always been recognised, and accorded property rights within the Russian system, when their own territories had been subdued; no effort had ever been made actively to involve them culturally. Occasionally, intellectuals from their own traditions who managed to get a Western education would try to devise an accommodation. The best example of this is the Crimean Tatar educationist Ismail Bey Gaspirali (who adopted the name Gasprinsky). Educated first in a village madrasa (Islamic religious school), he went to St Petersburg to learn Russian, and Paris to learn French. Next spending four years in Istanbul (1871-5), he returned to Crimea with the conviction that Russia’s Muslims must approach modernity through Russian, writing his first important book, Russkoye Musulmanstvo (’Russian Islam’), and long editing a journal, Tercüman-Perevodcik (’Interpreter’ in Tatar and Russian). Gaspirali’s peaceable views were not easily accepted in the Crimean Tatar community, but by 1905 his group had succeeded in founding over 350 schools, bilingual in Russian and Tatar. More revealing was the reaction from the Russians: rather than encourage this bridge-building from a potential ally, the authorities refused to allow Gaspirali to convene an all-Muslim congress; rather they worked to diminish the political participation of non-Russians (as well as workers and peasants), proposing an electoral law for the second Duma (’Parliament’) in 1907 with the preamble: ‘The State Duma, created to strengthen the Russian state, must be Russian also in spirit.’ Gaspirali made no more progress.61

  What Russia always lacked, above all, was a bourgeoisie, a class of merchants and professionals of independent status and means, which could serve as a link, both for social mobility and for flow of income, between the governing class and the workers on the land. Large-scale trade and industrial development was rarely undertaken by Russians in the pre-revolutionary era; and the small educated classes never built up significant guilds or professional associations. Russia remained a polity dominated by the arbitrary, and in principle unlimited, powers of the Tsar; and the linguistic effects of this were that the Russian language nowhere developed a strong base in a community with aspirations and influence.

  In short, at least until the twentieth century, Russia, although unified politically and militarily by the Tsar’s government, was not unified, nor even growing together, as a language community. In the Baltic provinces to the north-east, and the Muslim lands to the south, Russian was simply not penetrating beyond the ranks of settlers, and the small number of administrators.

  The Soviet experiment

  This account of the spread of Russian has concentrated on the Tsar’s empire, because the Russian revolution of 1917, and the Soviet era that came after it, had little net effect on the language situation. Despite early expectations, and attempts at secession in all the non-Russian areas (including Belarus and the Ukraine), the new government proved able to reassert its control almost everywhere. Finland, by dint of arms, did manage to detach itself permanently; but the other Baltic states, which had a brief period of independence in the 1920s and 1930s, found themselves back under Russian control from 1940. Other parts of the empire were all back in the fold by 1922.

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

  An immediate practical policy was to build mass literacy. This process had begun under the tsars, but the continuation was triumphantly successful, as the censuses showed. In 1897, 28.4 per cent of those aged between nine and forty-nine had been able to read; in 1920, the figure went up to 44.1 per cent; by 1926 it was already 56.6 per cent; in 1939, 87.4 per cent; in 1959, 98.5 per cent; and in 1970, 99.7 per cent.62 Since this included literacy in languages other than Russian (even in 1970, only 77.5 per cent claimed to have Russian as a first or second language63), a necessary precondition of this was provision of effective writing systems for the country’s languages. Russian orthography was simplified in 1918 to be more phonetic, mostly by replacing the letters i, θ and , which did not have a distinct pronunciation. (They can still be seen in the passage of Dostoyevsky that begins this section.) Other languages of the Union that had no writing tradition were given alphabets. In the 1920s, these were based mostly on Latin letters, since this alphabet had been most thoroughly developed by phoneticians. The systems often involved considerable skill by Soviet linguists in fixing a standard form among dialects, balancing considerations of majority usage with mutual intelligibility and ease of acquisition. By and large stability was achieved, creating dozens of new ‘literary languages’ (literaturnïye yazïki). Then the nature of the political power situation began to make itself felt.

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

  Because [Russian] is the language of the Union’s most developed nation, which has guided the country through its revolutionary transformations and has won itself the love and respect of all other peoples, the Russian language is naturally being transformed into the language of communication and cooperation of all the peoples of the socialist state. This has been produced by… a replacement of previous psychological barriers by bonds of brotherly friendship, mutual trust and mutual help.64 Russian was now in a position to make major strides. Universal education was a reality, and Russian was introduced as a compulsory subject in all schools. Far more than under the tsars, it should have been possible for it to become known and used by everyone throughout the country. Somehow, though, this did not happen. As we have already noted, in 1970 there were still 22.5 per cent who claimed not to have effective command of it. Whether through the survival of traditional communities—especially in central Asia—or the preservation of resentment at Russian dominance—especially in the Baltic—many continued to contrive to live their lives without Russian.

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

  But although the use of Russian can no longer be enforced across the extent of the old Union, it has inevitably become an important political token, with different nuances dependent on local history. Among the Baltic states, Latvia and Estonia are setting linguistic exams to force their resident Russians to prove competence in their own languages; these are unnecessary in Lithuania, where the Russian-speaking minority is so much smaller.* The Belarusian government is maintaining Russian as its working language, after a radical shift in policy in 1995, and demeaning its own national language.† Republics with large Russian-speaking minorities inhabiting a single region, notably Moldova and Kazakhstan, have to be highly judicious in balancing the degree to which they can assert their majority language. In Kazakhstan Russian is recognised as a language of official communication, and it remains a standing joke how poor politicians’ command of Kazakh tends to be. In central Asia, by contrast, there has been a discernible resurgence of national language use—and decline of Russian—among the political classes who were actually among the most prolific Russian speakers before independence.65 Here, as in the Baltics, English is growing in use as a second language.§ Only in Siberia, Rus’s oldest colony, can it be said that use of Russian is secure, and probably still gaining speakers. Sadly, this is because most of Siberia’s indigenous language communities are highly endangered, their traditional way of life shattered by the presence among them of large numbers of European Russians. They are too small, too isolated, and too weakened, to be able to envisage any future but collaboration with Russians.

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

  Conclusions

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

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

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

  The second reason is often found in alliance with a third, which can be called the unity reason. A colonial power inevitably imposes a single language on a domain, which ends up being essential to maintaining it as a coherent unit. When the power changes, the language may change too (as for example it did when Spanish replaced both Nahuatl and Quechua in different dominions of the Spanish empire). But quite likely it does not, especially where there is no new conqueror but simply the culmination of a struggle for independence. In that case, the colonial language may linger on: this is another reason for the persistence of French in so many countries of sub-Saharan Africa: it just would not be practicable to administer Cameroon in any one of its 270-plus indigenous languages. And this is, perversely, why Malay was taken up as the unifying ‘Bahasa Indonesia’—by the Dutch just as much as the Indonesian government that followed them.

  There is a fourth reason, the globality reason. A country may persist with an imperial language, not because it gives a link to the old colonial power, but because it provides a means to transcend it. This is very widely true of countries that maintain or adopt English i
n the current era; but it is just as truly the motive for the Russian elite’s adoption of French in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

  The apparent failure of the Russian language to survive strongly where its speakers’ empire is no more can be viewed more clearly in the light of these four reasons.

  The creole reason applies only in Siberia, since by and large it is only here that the Russian imperialists settled in large enough numbers to overwhelm the indigenous people. They are approaching this sort of concentration in Estonia and Latvia, and less so in Kazakhstan: but the power there—and hence the linguistic future—has ultimately remained with the previous inhabitants.

  The need to retain nostalgic links with the Russians is not widespread in the old Soviet realms; sadly, their old subjects seem to remember little with affection from the long centuries of Russian power. But there is one exception: Belarus, whose government is actively seeking betterment through closer links with Russia, and whose enthusiasm for Russian is correspondingly strong.

  By and large, the different republics can achieve substantial unity, each on its own territory, through use of its own language; there is no unity reason to persist with Russian, except in Russia itself, whose Siberian territories are by far the most multilingual in the old empire. And as we have seen, the tiny language communities there are too weak to put up substantial resistance to the unifying grip of organisation in Russian.

  Finally, as to globality: sadly too for Russian, in the current age of world communications, it is very evident that the most profitable links are not to be had with the doyens of Russian culture; other lands appear to be freer, more stylish, more powerful and, above all, richer.