Is Putin’s Nationality Policy Going to Make Non-Russian Languages into Secret Codes of Survival?

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 10 –Lennart Meri, quondam president of Estonia, famously observed that Estonians had survived for centuries by speaking their language as a secret code others could not or at least did not learn – only three percent of Russians living in Estonia in 1989 said they knew Estonian -- and therefore really could not and did not know what the Estonians were thinking.

            That observation springs to mind after the comments of Farid Mukhametshin, the speaker of the State Council of the Republic of Tatarstan.  He told a forum at a youth camp that there was a compelling reason that Russians should want to learn Tatar if they live in Tatarstan even if now, thanks to Putin’s policies, they aren’t compelled to.

            “When two Tatars on a tramway are speaking to each other in their own language, the Russian or an individual of another nationality will begin to be concerned: aren’t they up to something against me?”  To avoid that unsettling situation, Mukhametshin said, they will want to learn Tatar (azatliq.org/a/30044305.html and idelreal.org/a/30045213.html).

            What the State Council speaker did not say but what his listeners almost certainly took away from what he did is that this is an equally compelling reason for Tatars – and other non-Russians as well – to study their national languages even if they now have to take them as electives.

            That is perhaps the only way they can, as President Meri observed, maintain the secret code that will preserve their nations – and eventually allow them as it has the Estonians to take the steps necessary to recover their independence.