Paul
Goble
Staunton, December 22 – Events in
Ukraine have intensified concern among both Russians and non-Russians in the
non-Russian republics of the Russian Federation about the role their respective
languages should have with each side now viewing any concession to the other as
potentially damaging not only to its linguistic concerns but also to its ethnic
interests.
In November, Natalya Fyodorova
recounts in the current issue of “Sovershenno-Sekretno,” disputes about
languages in Ukraine prompted a congress of Russian educators to demand that
Russian be given the status of a native language in addition to that of a state
language in Russia (http://www.sovsekretno.ru/articles/id/4505/).
That change would mean that Russian
speakers in the non-Russian republics would have even more chances to opt out
of non-Russian language instruction in the schools and to challenge the
requirements in some republics that those seeking government jobs now the language
of the titular republic involved.
Speaking to the Moscow meeting,
Mikhail Bogdanov, the vice president of the St.Petersburg Parents Committee,
said that this had to happen becaue the current situation is one which has been
giving rise to problems for a long time and may soon create a crisis “on the
background of what is occurring in Ukraine.”
As it has been on so many issues,
Tatarstan is both the bellwether of changes in nationality policy and the place
where conflicts over it have tended to break out earlier and more clearly than
in other smaller non-Russian republics, according to Fyodorova who said that is
why she has been examining the situation there.
“Like all langauges with the exception
of Russian, the Tatar language suffered a great deal in Soviet times,” being
driven out of official life almost completely.
At the moment of the dissolution of the USSR, there was only one Tatar
gymnasium. But then the situation began to change with Tatar officials seeking
to promote Tatar in ways that Russians felt threatened Russian.
One pro-Russian analyst in Kazan,
Rais Suleymanov, described this as “a period of national revenge.” “If under Soviet power, Tatar was studied in
city schools only as an optional subject, now just as much time is devoted to
Tatar as to Russian” and that is something most Russians and some Tatars
oppose.
On the one hand, as Tatar scholars
like Rafael Khakimov acknowledge, the Tatar textbooks are very poor, having
been written by linguists rather than educational specialists: there simply weren’t
any of them available and few are being trained. And on the other, parents of
children of both nationalities worry about the consequences of this shift on
future prospects.
The reason for such conerns,
Fyodorova says, is tha the introduction in 2008 of a standard graduation
examination in Russian meant that those who had gone to school in predominantly
Russian oblasts and krays had a certain advantage over those who had studied in
non-Russian republics like Tatarstan.
The former were given more hours of
Russian instruction and thus were able to do better on these tests. Most Russians, even those sympathetic to the minorities,
did not want to see their children’s prospects suffer as a result of such language
policies. And many non-Russians preferred to see their children get ahead
rather than spend time on a language they might not use.
Not only did such Tatar parents recognize that
their children could easily live in Tatarstan, at least in the cities, their
entire lives without having to speak a word of Tatar, but they recognized that
Tatar, thanks to the Soviet system, lagged behind Russian in absorbing new
foreign words from English.
Thus, Tatar and
other non-Russian languages as well have been subject to a double hit, but
precisely because they have been many nationalists are arguing that the system
has to be changed to ensure that their languages and thus their nations do not
die. That in turn has provoked some
Russians and now, thanks to the Ukrainian events, it is moving toward the
boiling point.
Proponents of
each side are digging in: the Tatars because they see their language under
threat – in 2012 only 43 percent of Tatar pupils studied in Tatar, down from 48
percent in 2009 – and Russian speakers because they see their children’s
prospects restricted if Tatar instruction is maintained or increased.
And while Kazan
officials and activists insist that ethnic peace is more important to them than
anything else, the situation that is emerging there and likely in other
republic capitals as well suggests that keeping the peace is going to be
increasingly difficult – especially given what is happening in and being said
about the situation in Ukraine.
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