tthnocide' in the Soviet Union
Bohdan Nahaylo
In recent months mass demonstrations in Estonia, protests by leading Georgian and Estonian intellectuals and the imprisonment of Ukrainian, Estonian and Lithuanian national rights campaigners for periods of up to 15 years, have once again highlighted the serious and intractable nature of the nationalities problem in the Soviet Union. New documents and information which have just become available outside the USSR confirm that, towards the end of the Seventies, the Soviet authorities launched an intensified programme of aussification' in the non-Russian republics, designed not only to promote the linguistic assimilation of their populations, but also to emphasise the primacy of things Russian in all spheres of Soviet life. They also reveal that, since the last major outburst of opposition to Russification in April 1978, which took the form of a huge public protest in Tbilisi in defence of the Georgian language, discontent and resistance among the non-Russians have been growing.
Despite the fact that the nationalities problem is potentially one of the most explosive challenges facing the Soviet leadership, relatively little attention is .paid to it by the Western press. Indeed, the Soviet Union and Russia are often treated as being one and the same thing. The • burning issue of `Russification' which confronts the USSR's more than 125 million non-Russians, almost half the entire population, is not always understood, and is sometimes erroneously considered to be simply a pejorative term for the spread of the knowledge and use of Russian, a process regarded either as an inevitable consequence of modernisation, or as something that is dictated by such practical concerns as language problems facing the Soviet armed forces.
This ignores the abundant detailed evidence provided over the years by the non-Russians, and supported by the statements of Russian democrats such as Vladi mir Bukovsky, Natalya Gorbanevskaya and Vladimir Maksimov that, behind a smokescreen of official double-talk, the Soviet authorities are engaged in a highly ambitious and blatantly discriminatory poli cy of cultural 'engineering' aimed at creat ing a new Soviet citizen in the Russian image. If the term Russification' fails to evoke an emotional response from a West ern observer, for most non-Russians in the USSR its meaning is perfectly clear. A Lithuanian samizdat journal, for example, has described it as 'denationalisation imposed with an iron fist', while its Ukrainian counterpart has coined the word 'ethnocide'.
The official Soviet line is that the nationalities problem in the USSR has long been solved by the elimination of the 'consequences of national oppression and inequality' inherited from the old Russian Empire and the creation of a model federation of more than 100 'free and equal' nationalities. In fact, for all its internationalist rhetoric, the Soviet state has from its very inception been plagued with the problem of Russian domi nance. Today, for instance, the Russians are officially described as the 'leading nation' of the multinational Soviet Union, the selfless 'elder brother' always ready to help the smaller nations. The language, culture and history of the Russians are prescribed for non-Russians not only as objects for glorification, but as the basis of the 'new historical community' — 'the Soviet people' — which the Soviet leadership claims has emerged in the last two decades as a result of the 'socialist reconstruction' of society and the 'drawing together of nations'.
It is against this broader background that in 1978 the Soviet authorities ihtroduced major new legislation to increase the already substantial level of Russianlanguage teaching in the non-Russian re publics. The fact that the relevant decree of the USSR Council of Ministers, No. 835, dated 13 October 1978, has still not been published in the Soviet press attests to the extremely sensitive nature of the language issue in the Soviet Union. On 6 December, the USSR Minister of Higher and Secondary Specialised Education, V.P. Elyutin, issued a directive hearing the same title as the decree — 'On Measures for Further Improving the Study and Teaching of the, Russian Language in the Union Republics'. The following May an all-Union conference entitled 'The Russian Language — the Language of Friendship and Cooperation of the Peoples of the USSR' took place in Tashkent. Its recommendations were in corporated into further instructions issued by the USSR Ministry of Education in June and July 1979. Briefly, the new measures to intensify Russian-language training cover every aspect and stage of the Soviet educa tional system, and go as far as to make compulsory for the first time the teaching of Russian in every non-Russian kindergarten and nursery.
Alongside the promotion of the Russian language as the 'language of international discourse', the Soviet authorities are attempting to devalue the importance of the non-Russian languages by emphasising that Russian is the sole gateway not only to the literature, culture, scholarship, science and technology of Russia but also to those of the rest of the world. Particularly in the latter fields, the non-Russian languages are arbitrarily being reduced to a superfluous status. In 1959, for example, the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR published 15 journals in Ukrainian and three in Russian, whereas since 1979, it has been publishing 32 journals in Russian, only eight in Ukrainian and two in both Ukrainian and Russian. The Academy of Sciences of the Byelorussian SSR currently publishes 11 journals, of which only three are in Byelorussian. All of this is facilitated in the universities and institutions of higher education of the non-Russian republics where, except for Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaidzhan, instruction in the Russian language is the rule rather than the exception.
An indication of what lies behind the present wave of aussification' was disclosed by a report in the March 1979 issue of the journal Narodnoe obrazovanie. Shortly before Decree No. 835 was set in motion, the USSR Minister of Education, M.A. Prokofiev, 'emphasised that the question of studying the Russian language in the national schools is being viewed, above all, from the standpoint of the drawing together of nations as an objective law of development of socialist society'. This and many similar statements indicate that the Soviet leadership is intent on accelerating the integration of the Soviet state in a race against time. Confronted with demographic processes which, according to one prediction made in 1978 by the Soviet demographer M.B. Tatimov, will by the year 2000 reduce the Russian share in the USSR's population to some 46 per cent, the response has been to launch a vigorous campaign promoting linguistic and cultural homogenisation. Significantly, no corresponding measures have been announced to teach non-Russian languages spoken in the USSR to the 23.9 million Russians living outside the Russian Federation.
In April 1979 Lithuanian dissenters were the first to sound the alarm after obtaining confidential details about the draft recommendations prepared for the conference in Tashkent. They warned that the proposals signalled a new wave of `Russification' that was more subtle, yet potentially more damaging, than similar Tsarist measures and they appealed for its condemnation by the outside world. Several months later more than 5,000 Lithuanians signed a statement addressed to the authorities in Moscow and Vilnius in which they demanded that Lithuanian children not be taught Russian in nurseries and that citizens of the Lithuanian SSR be allowed to exercise their constitutional right to education in their own language.
The extent of the increasing discontent among the non-Russians can be gauged from two other important documents. The first is an undated open letter addressed to Leonid Brezhnev and the Georgian party leader, Edward Shevardnadze, from 365 members of the Georgian intelligentsia, including some of Georgia's most respected academicians. The signatories protest against a number of administrative measures aimed at extending the use of the Russian language in Georgian educational establishments such as the requirement that university dissertations be submitted for approval in Russian, the introduction of lectures in Russian rather than Georgian for special disciplines in higher and specialised secondary educational establishments, and changes in the school syllabuses which have increased the number of hours of instruction in Russian. Moreover, the signatories, while strongly disapproving of the 'propagation' of the concept of bilingualism, express their concern that the Georgian language is being artificially excluded from science and that not enough attention is paid to the teaching of the history of Georgia.
The second document is a similar protest from 40 Estonian intellectuals addressed to Pravda and various newspapers in Estonia. Dated 28 October 1980 and entitled 'An Open Letter from the Estonian SSR', it sets out to explain why a number of large demonstrations took place in Estonia last October. The signatories confirm that thousands of people, mainly students, took part in the protests, and that these manifestations were an expression of national indignation and insecurity. The signatories list a number of examples of conditions which they claim are contributing to the `Russification' of the republic and causing distress, fear and uncertainty among Estonians about their national identity. They then make the following proposal: 'Every Estonian within the boundaries of the Estonian SSR possesses the self-evident right to an Estonian language secondary and higher education and to use Estonian in spoken or written form in conduct of business. We think that a legislative confirmation of this principle by the Supreme Soviet of the Estonian SSR would go a long way towards normalising the present unhealthy situation.' The protestors conclude by stating that they want Estonia to 'become and remain a land where not a single person will suffer insults and handicaps because of his or her mother tongue or ethnic origin'.
Similar sentiments, often expressed in stronger language, have been voiced over the years by numerous representatives of the non-Russians. Even harsh penalties have not deterred them from speaking out. In December 1979, for example, Yuri Badzyo, a 45-year-old Ukrainian philologist was given a 12-year sentence of imprisonment and internal exile for writing The Right to Live, the most penetrating critique of the Soviet nationalities policy since Ivan Dzyuba's 1965 masterpiece Internationalism or Russification? The most recent trial of a national rights campaigner, however, took place only two weeks ago when the Estonian, Mart Niklus, was given a 15-year sentence — a severe punishment indeed for pointing out an acute problem which officially no longer exists.
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