Paul
Goble
Staunton, May 16 – Vladimir Putin
routinely asserts that Russian speakers abroad, a category which includes both
those of ethnic Russian background and others who use Russian in their daily
lives, are not only a single nation but one that requires the continuing protection
of the Russian state.
But a new study shows that the
nature of this category is rather different, that in fact Russian speakers are “not
a community, not a diaspora, and not a single ethnos” and that they do not feel
a part of a Russian nation but do continue to feel “a connection” with Moscow
and the Russian state.
That focus, on the state rather than
on the community, not only sets them apart from many of the peoples Russian
speakers live among but also goes a long way to explain Moscow’s approach to
them, an approach based on the provision of Russian-language Moscow media and
especially Moscow television.
Maksim Rudnyev, a sociologist at
Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, led a study of Russian speakers in
Estonia, Israel, Latvia and Ukraine in order to determine the relationship
among language use, Russian culture, and the cultures of the peoples among whom
the Russian speakers live (ng.ru/stsenarii/2014-04-22/10_language.html).
He concluded that differences
between the values of Russian speakers and those of the peoples they live among
are at least “partially connected with the influence of the language factor”
and that Russian speakers abroad are more similar to Russian-speaking residents
of the Russian Federation than they are to the representatives of other
cultural-linguistic groups who live with them in any particular country.”
Rudney cites Estonia as the case
where this divergence is greatest. Russian speakers there as far as values are
concerned are “very similar” to Russian speakers in the Russian Federation and “extremely far in their values
from their Estonian-speaking neighbors” in that Baltic country. The situation
in Ukraine is similar but not quite as marked.
“Compared
with other cultural linguistic groups,” the Moscow sociologist continues, Russian
speakers have not become self-organized diasporas. Instead, “they more often identify with the
Russian state than with the Russian people (ethnic or non-ethnic).” And that
pattern “intensified especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union.”
At the same time, Rudnev continues,
it is important to recognize that “Russian speakers living outside the borders
of Russia are not a single ethnos” because there are many non-Russians among
them. In Israel, “the overwhelming majority of Russian speakers are Jews, and
in Ukraine, a significant part are ethnic Ukrainians. In Estonia and Latvia,
[this group includes] Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians and Jews.”
The
distinctiveness of the Russian-speaking groups outside the Russian Federation “consists
almost exclusively in their ‘Russian speakingness’ and what arises from this:
in their greater (in comparison with the titular groups) involvement in the use
of Russian-language media and other Russian-language cultural information and
in their greater identification with Russia as the center of the
Russian-language world.”
A
partial explanation for this, Rudnyev continues, is that they were socialized and
spent part of their lives “in the conditions of the former USSR.”
Rudnyev’s
research was based on the assumption that “the Russian-language population of
these various groups would be closer in values to the Russians speakers of
Russia and other countries than to the titular population of ‘their’ country.” And it used scores on ten values in order to
rank these groups.
“It
turned out,” he writes, “that the titular population of each of the four
countries considered was more different from Russians than the Russian speakers
living in these countries.” In Estonia, Estonians were different from Russian
Federation residents on nine of the ten measures, whereas the Russian speakers
in Estonia were different from the latter on only one.
In
Israel, this relationship was nine to five, in Ukraine, also nine to five, and
in Latvia, eight to seven. Clearly, “the Russian language definitely played an
important role in the formation and strengthening of values,” something Rudnyev
says “could be connected with recent history.”
Despite
the 23 years since the end of the USSR, the sociologist continues, Russian
speakers living outside the Russian Federation “have not formed a strong
identification with the titular peoples and states.” And the new Russian-speaking
generation has “reproduced “Russian (Soviet) culture,” a culture based on the idea
of Russians as “’the elder brother’” of the others.
One result of
this, he suggests, is that Russian speakers in this countries have not yet
accepted the idea that they are “a minority.’” Instead, they continue to view
themselves as part of something larger and to share the values of that larger
entity.
But there are differences in the
values of Russian-speakers among these countries relative to the values of
Russian speakers in the Russian Federation.
The Russian speakers of Estonia are closest to the Russians of the
Russian Federation. The Russian speakers in Ukraine and Israel are somewhat
less close. And the Russian speakers in Latvia are the most different.
One reason for that pattern in
Latvia, Rudnyev says, may be that “the majority of [Russian speakers] living in
that republic speak Latvian as well as Russian.” Another is that those who
speak Russian and those who speak Latvian in Latvia “live in one and the same
locations: in Latvia, geographic separation into ‘national’ districts is much
less noted than in Estonia or Ukraine.”
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