Paul Goble
Staunton, July 17 – Sakha is rapidly assuming the role of the leader of non-Russian republics, in place of Tatarstan, the largest and traditionally the one that has guided the others and other republics such as Buryatia and the ones in the North Caucasus that have engaged in more protests in the past.
But with regard to the language issue, Sakha activists and officials were the first to protest Moscow’s decision that Russian is the native language of all the peoples of the country, a step that lowers the status of those languages and opens the way to the Russianization and Russification of all non-Russians.
And now, Sakha activists in the Sakha Congress have launched a campaign to get all the non-Russian republics to fight new cuts in non-Russian language instruction this fall, cuts that will halve the number of hours devoted to the study of those languages in the schools of the republics (business-gazeta.ru/article/677754).
What this will mean for the other non-Russian republics and as far as Moscow’s reaction is concerned is uncertain, but this shift at a minimum should mean that Western observers of the Russian Federation should pay more attention to Sakha (Yakutia) than they have in the past as a bellwether of where non-Russian reaction to Moscow’s policies is likely to be going.
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