Only Six Percent of the Newspapers in the Russian Federation and Two Percent of Journals There Now in Non-Russian Languages

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 12 – “Statistics on the periodical press in non-Russian languages – changes in the number of publications, their print runs, and their share of all publications – is one of the important indicators of the development and current state of the cultures of the peoples of Russia,” Nail Gyylman says.

            And what they show not only highlights the decline of both the media and their nations brought on by Russian nationality policy but the threat to the continued existence of the non-Russian peoples there, according to a detailed analysis of the changes in these figures between 1990 and 2020 carried out by the Tatar analyst (zamanabiz.blogspot.com/p/blog-page_76.html).

            Over that 30-year period, the number of newspapers in the minority languages actually increased slightly to 519, 6.6 percent of all newspapers in the country. Most of these outlets were district-level papers directed at rural residents of the older and middle-aged generation who are products of schools where instruction until recently was in those languages.

            But their total print runs were much smaller than those of Russian-language papers and amount to only about 1.5 percent of the total tirage of papers in the Russian Federation. Moreover, they are concentrated in five languages – with 60 percent of these papers and 71.5 percent of their print runs in only five languages – Tatar, Chuvash, Ossetian, Bashkir and Sakha.

            In 2020, Gyylman continues, there were 133 journals published in the non-Russian languages, about two percent of the total number of journals published in the Russian Federation. The total tirage of the non-Russian journals, however, was only 0.28 percent of the total, an indication that their print runs are very small.  

            And in the case of journals as in the case of newspapers, these are concentrated in only a few nationalities: almost 72 percent of the print rune in only three languages – Tatar, Bashkir and Sakha. There were very few journals and those which existed had very small print runs in the North Caucasus and elsewhere.

            The situation would have been even more dire had it not been for the Internet. Over the last 30 years, the number of newspapers in non-Russian languages and in Russian increased equally by about 65 percent. The number of journals in Russian doubled, while the number in non-Russian languages increased 1.7 times.

            In 1990, 33 numbers of journals were published for each resident of the RSFSR. Of this, there were five in Tatar for each Tatar, 2.9 in Bashkir for each Bashkir; and 1.7 in Chuvash for each Chuvash. The penetration of the market for all the others was microscopically small, Gyylman says.

            Over the last 30 years, the combined print run of journals in non-Russian language fell by 20.8 percent, with Tatar-language journals falling by 34.9 percent, Chuvash by 35.5 percent, Mari by 20 percent, and Bashkir by 12.2 percent. Non-Russian newspaper print runs now constitute only 1.5 percent of the total; non-Russian journals, 0.28 percent; and non-Russian books, 0.45 percent.

            The causes behind this trend include “the low level of knowledge of native languages as a result of the lack of opportunity to study it, the driving out of non-Russian languages from educational, socio-economic and political spheres, too few resources, and the absence of attention and interest by national elites,” Gyylman says.

            All of this reflects the outcome of a concerted nationality policy against non-Russian languages by Moscow and of the demographic and cultural changes of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s which began to manifest themselves only at the end of the20th century when the first generation which had grown up in cities and the majority of whom never studied and did not know well their native languages.”

            Together with economic problems, Gyylman says, “this led to a loss of interest among the younger generation of the majority of indigenous peoples to the non-Russian print media.” But the survival of some outlets shows that these are important to the future of these nations. If they come back, these nations will; if they don’t, the nations will likely cease to exist as well.