Paul Goble
Staunton, June 5 – Many have
wondered why Vladimir Putin waded into nationality policy last July with his
call to make the study of all non-Russian languages voluntary while keeping
instruction in Russian compulsory, a position that has proved to be extremely
unpopular among non-Russians.
But there is a good explanation, political
geographer Dmitry Oreshkin says, and it is this: “Putin is beginning to feel a
loss of control … looking at what is taking place in Ukraine or more accurately
in Belarus and also in Kazakhstan, the center feels that if things proceed
further, something like a ‘Tatarstan identity’ will appear” (rosbalt.ru/moscow/2018/06/04/1708008.html).
And so a decision was made in the Kremlin to
“quietly prevent that,” the scholar says. But it hasn’t proved as quiet as
Putin had hoped.
In reporting this, Rosbalt journalist
Leonid Smirnov notes that putting Putin’s idea into law is more complicated
than many imagined. First, he cites the
fact that many non-Russian parents don’t want their children to study non-Russian
languages or perhaps even Russian but rather English or some other foreign language.
Second, he reports that the authors of the
legislation have agreed to form yet another working group to draft revisions in
the bill because as one of its authors Alena Arshinova notes, “we have to think
together how to motivate children and their parents to study native languages without
using administrative methods.”
And third, he cites the observation of Academician
Valery Tishkov, former director of the Moscow Institute of Ethnology and
Anthropology and close advisor to Putin on ethnic issues, that whatever the law
says, Russia will have to live with regional differences in how languages are
handled because the situations in some republics are so different than they are
in others.
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