Meera Srinivasan
Introduction
As the Russo-Ukrainian war seems poised to enter its fourth year, the war’s outsized toll on Russia’s ethnic minorities remains. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, ethnic minorities within ethnically non-Russian regions in Russia have been disproportionately targeted for conscription, dying at disproportionately higher rates than ethnic Russians. Meanwhile, under Russian President Vladimir Putin’s direction, the Russian government continues to erode civic protections for these ethnic minorities further, echoing the forced cultural assimilation policies of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. As Putin seeks to consolidate power further, it appears that Russia’s ethnic minorities will bear the brunt of the costs. However, only time will tell if the resultant frustration will materialize into something greater.
The History of Russification
Throughout Russia’s history, it has often enforced policies of Russification, a form of linguistic imperialism in which non-Russians abandon their native language or culture in favor of the Russian language and culture. Prior to the establishment of the Russian Empire, unplanned Russification occurred as Russians expanded eastward, interacting with and subsequently assimilating some of the local indigenous populations. Russification as a government policy was not enforced in an official capacity until the January Uprising of 1863 when Poles and Lithuanians revolted against Russian occupation. Tsar Alexander II moved to enforce Russification more heavily to quell rebellions by minorities within Russia, forcing them to adopt the Russian culture and language in an effort to squash separatist sentiment.
Following the 1917 Russian Revolution and the establishment of the multinational Soviet Union (USSR) in 1922, Russification policies took on a new tenor. In an attempt to reverse the effects of Russification on non-Russian nationalities, the USSR instituted a policy of korenizatsiya, or ‘nativization,’ declaring the equality of all national languages, with the goal of rapidly educating non-Russian ethnic groups and mobilizing them into the workforce in order to industrialize the economy. The stated goal, in the words of Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin, was for local ethnic groups to operate in a manner that was “socialist in content, national in form,” ensuring their cultures conformed with the socialist project of Soviet society while still operating in their native languages.
As Lenin’s successor Joseph Stalin further consolidated his power through an increasing emphasis on centralization rather than regional autonomy, nativization was cast aside and the Russian language and culture were promoted in official capacities. Over the course of Stalin’s increasingly totalitarian rule, Soviet language policy shifted dramatically. Soviet authorities abolished the use of the Arabic script in Turkic languages and switched to the Latin alphabet in the late 1920s, only to replace Latin with various Cyrillic alphabets by the late 1930s. In his quest toward centralization, Stalin cracked down harshly on local elites who seemed to prioritize the interests of their national group above that of the USSR, accusing them of “bourgeois nationalism” and arresting and executing several non-Russian communists. Some languages were even banned, with linguists being arrested by secret police and sent to labor camps or put to death. The end of nativization and the Cyrillization of national languages, in combination with a 1938 decree making the study of Russian compulsory, seemed to signal a deliberate shift back to Russification.
Nazi Germany’s invasion of the USSR during World War II would have far-reaching consequences for the USSR and its non-Russian nationalities. Soviet wartime propaganda, though free of communist ideology, was distinctly Slavic in imagery and reinforced Russian nationalism. The wartime period also saw Soviet artists and writers in the USSR embrace and celebrate the pre-Soviet Russian Empire, the leaders and history of which had been sanitized and reinterpreted in a more positive light. Following the Allied Powers’ victory in 1945, Stalin proposed a toast “to the health of our Soviet people and, before all, the Russian people,” commending them as “the leading force of the Soviet Union among all the nationalities of our country.” Lenin’s proclaimed vision of self-determination, linguistic or otherwise, for non-Russian nationalities had been effectively quashed by Stalin’s Russo-centrism. The pendulum had swung back definitively toward Russification, and it would remain there for decades to come.
In the post-Stalin era of the USSR, Russification policies took on a more moderate character but were never eliminated altogether. Soviet leaders justified Russification policies by arguing the utility of Russian as a lingua franca for Soviet citizens and directly mandated the teaching of Russian within the Soviet republics, referring to it as a “second mother tongue.” While national and regional languages continued to be taught across the USSR, the status of those languages was rapidly diminishing, with the total number of languages used as mediums of instruction decreasing dramatically between the 1960s and 1980s. This decline, in combination with policies that restricted the usage capacity of non-Russian languages and cultural perceptions that Russian was ‘higher’ or ‘more educated’ than other languages, led to an intensification in the adoption of Russian within non-Russian ethnic groups in the USSR.
Russification in Putin’s Russia
Following the collapse of the USSR in 1991, Russification continued to be enforced on the remaining non-Russian ethnic groups within the new Russian Federation. After becoming a member of the Council of Europe, the country ratified key documents pertaining to the civic protection of minority groups, including the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities. Initially, it seemed that language policy would be decentralized, with most decision-making concentrated in the hands of local leaders. The 2000 election of President Putin, however, would weaken this decentralization. Early educational reforms attempted to weaken regional power through centralization, which was accomplished in part through the standardization of school curriculums and subsequent declines in minority language instruction.
In 2017, Putin announced that children in ethnic republics must not be forced to receive instruction in languages that are not their mother tongues, later reinforcing the role of the Russian language as the state language and ordering audits of schools in ethnic republics to verify if minority language instruction was voluntary or compulsory. During the audits, first conducted in the ethnic republics of Bashkortostan and Tatarstan, inspectors found that minority language instruction in some schools was indeed compulsory, resulting in the mass firing of teachers and thrusting the issue into the political spotlight. Following Putin’s statements, minority language classes were abolished in several regions. Putin’s comments, alongside a high-profile court case in which a local woman filed a complaint in the Russian Republic of Tatarstan because her son was required to study the Tatar language in school, are emblematic of a broader language controversy that has only intensified with time. In 2018, the lower chamber of the Russian parliament, the State Duma, adopted amendments that strengthened the role of the Russian language while simultaneously blocking ethnic republics from requiring the compulsory study of regional languages. In the year following the passage of the controversial legislation, Albert Razin, a scholar and activist in the Udmurt Republic, self-immolated in protest, believing that the legislation posed an existential threat to the Udmurt language.
Some of the controversy hinges on a distinction between different forms of Russianness—whether one is russkiye, referring to ethnic Russians, or rossiyane, referring to ethnic non-Russian citizens of the Russian Federation. Putin’s 2020 amendments to the Russian Constitution seem to affirm the status of ethnic Russians as the state-building people of the Russian Federation, defining a Russian citizen as russkiye as part of a broader effort to further assimilate ethnically non-Russian populations. Ethnic minorities believe that the amendments place them at further risk for marginalization, arguing that it contradicts Russia’s longstanding principle of multiculturalism. In 2021, the State Duma passed a bill that, on its surface, aims to protect endangered languages by expediting the approval process for orthography norms. Linguistic activists argued that the bill would instead enable Moscow to exercise more control over minority language instruction within ethnic republics and regions.
Russification, Minorities, and the Russo-Ukrainian War
Putin, like Stalin before him, continues to consolidate power in an increasingly totalitarian state through the use of Russian nationalism and suppression of ethnic minorities. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, this suppression has only worsened. Mobilization for the war has hit ethnic Republics especially hard. Ethnic non-Russians are overrepresented within the number of total casualties relative to their population share, with many being sent to the front lines without any training or even first-aid kits. Many of these deaths occur in Russian infantry units, which typically consist of soldiers who are poorer and less-educated. Of the ten Russian regions with the highest mortality rates in Ukraine, six of the regions are located in Siberia and Eastern Russia. Republics such as Tuva and Buryatia are among the most hard-hit, with Buryat men being 75 times more likely to be killed than men from Moscow. Buryatia, like other such ethnic republics, is among the Russian federal subjects with the lowest GDP per capita; poor economic prospects and rampant government corruption make a career in the Russian military an attractive option for men in these republics.
Many speculate that, by conscripting ethnic non-Russians from poorer, remote regions rather than from relatively progressive and populated areas like Moscow, Putin hopes to minimize the appearance of civil unrest by spreading any potential protests across a large land area. Additionally, some posit that the inflaming of ethnic tensions via misleading reports regarding Russian war crimes in Ukraine, in combination with the mass mobilization of ethnic minorities, is part of a concerted effort by Putin to weaken and control potential resistance among these groups. Notably, Putin has neglected to mobilize men from Chechnya, an ethnic republic that saw two bloody wars in the 1990s, resulting in the region being put under Russia’s direct control in May of 2000. This is also in service of his goal to centralize power; by minimizing Chechen casualties, Putin seeks to keep Chechnya’s leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, in a favorable position with the general public, allowing Kadyrov to act with quasi-autonomy in order to keep the region stable.
As Putin continues the turn from a civic vision to an ethnic vision of Russia, further marginalizing and eroding the power of ethnic minorities, Russia’s longstanding history of multiculturalism continues to be wielded as an ironic justification for the officially named “special operation” in Ukraine. By casting Russian soldiers as fighters against ‘Nazism’ in Ukraine, alleging ill-treatment of Ukraine’s Russian-speaking minority, and holding ethnic minority festivals and concerts in the newly occupied Ukrainian territories, Russian authorities seek to further legitimize Russia’s wartime narrative.
In response to the high death tolls faced by ethnic minorities in the war, language activists have taken to linguistic advocacy in order to assert their agency and call for an end to the war, often doing so in their native languages. Activists have established anti-war organizations, promoted digital campaigns, and created multi-ethnic forums that marry their anti-war activism and language advocacy. In response, the Russian government has designated several minority rights organizations as extremist organizations, labeling them as “structural divisions” of an alleged “Anti-Russian Separatist Movement.” One such organization is the Free Buryatia Foundation, an organization aimed at providing professional legal assistance to soldiers who refuse to go to the front. This decision parallels an earlier decision by Russian authorities to similarly criminalize LGBTQ+ activism by labeling advocacy organizations as “structural units” of an alleged “international LGBT movement.”
As the war’s toll mounts, it is possible that resistance may emerge from the ethnic republics most affected by the conflict. However, given the Russian government's aggressive suppression of dissent on its steady path to totalitarianism, such resistance faces formidable challenges. The systematic targeting of ethnic minorities’ advocacy organizations, paired with the criminalization of broader social movements, demonstrates the state’s readiness to quash any opposition under the guise of national security. Ultimately, meaningful change to the current status quo remains a distant prospect.
Comentários