Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 7 – Many
non-Russians would like to go back to the names and endings of names that were
traditional in their national pasts, but at the same time, they encounter
resistance from Russian teachers and other officials and fear that if they do
so, they will create problems for their children who may study or work outside
their home areas.
And that tension, Tuvan journalist
Sayana Mngush says, is being played out in non-Russian republics within the
Russian Federation as well as in some of the countries which emerged in 1991
following the disintegration of the USSR, including quite prominently
Kyrgyzstan (asiarussia.ru/news/6358/).
Last year, she reports, the parents
of only 300 of the 150,000 children born in that Central Asian republic gave
their children the Kyrgyz language variants of their family names and
patronymics, preferring instead to given them Russianized versions of each lest
they face problems with local Russians or when studying or working in Russia.
That figure led some Russian nationalists
to claim victory in the naming wars (centrasia.ru/newsA.php?st=1425491640),
but it also prompted Kyrgyz deputy Aizada Kutuyeva to propose new legislation
that would encourage Kyrgyz parents to use the Kyrgyz names in order to
preserve the nation but not prevent them from using Russian forms if they want.
According to
Mongush, the same problem exists in many of the non-Russian republics of the
Russian Federation. In her native Tuva, she says, after enjoying an upsurge in the
1990s, the traditional national patronymics of “-oglu” and “-kyzy” are
increasingly giving way to the Russian forms “-ovich” and “-ovna.”
“The
explanation is the same,” she continues.
Those with national names or patronymics increasingly face difficulties
when they study or work outside their home areas. “A ‘non-Russian patronymic’”
upsets many Russians and consequently non-Russians with one suffer “problems
with discrimination.”
Tuvan legislators
have wrestled with this problem. In
1996, they adopted a law suggesting that Tuvans should give their children
patronymics ending in the traditional Tuvan way, and in an amendment to that
law in 2010, they declared that even ethnic Russians in the republic should use
the Tuvan forms rather than the Russian ones.
In Sakha
(Yakutia), which Mongush suggests has lagged behind other non-Russian areas in
pushing national traditions with regard to names, prosecutors have managed to
block proposals from legislators to require the use of Yakut patronymic forms “uola”
and “kyyha” instead of Russian ones. But legislators are preparing a guide to
Yakut names.
In Tatarstan,
Mongush says, the republic’s family law code specifies that parents may use the
traditional “uly” or “kyzy” in place of the Russian “ovich” and “ovna” and that
Tatars who earlier changed their names to bring them into correspondence with
Russian by adding an “ov” or an “ova” can drop those endings, transforming a
name like Basharov into Bashar.
In Buryatia, the
parliament adopted a law in 1999 calling for the use of Buryat first names,
patronymic forms and family names, but that law has been ignored more than it
has been followed. And it no longer applied to the Buryat Agin district which
was united with the Russian-majority Chita oblast.
Names are
extremely important among the Buryats with many of them being able to name
their ancestor back as many as 25 generations to times when their double hyphenated
names were borrowed from Tibetan and Sanscrit and when children are given one
name to hide them from evil spirits and then another later one to be used in
public.
As a result, many Buryats
are upset by the fact that there has been a corruption of their national naming
system, Mongush says. That takes the form of adding the letter “a” to the
Buryat names of girls in the Russian fashion even though in Buryat, there is no
distinction of names by gender. Thus Oyun has become Oyuna, an insult to the
nation’s language.
But there is something far worse going on with regard to
names in Buryatia, the Tuvan journalist says.
“Almost half” of Buryat women now have Russian first names not because
their parents gave them those but because Russian teachers imposed them on their
pupils despite this being an obvious affront to national dignity and a clear
violation of Russian law.
In
offering his legislation about names this week, the Kyrgyz deputy spoke for
many when he said: “A family name is an inheritance passed from generation to
generation.” It “unites several generations and testifies to their links.”
Consequently, a concern about names is a necessary “precondition for the
preservation of the nation, its uniqueness and its culture.”
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