Paul Goble
Staunton, Mar. 3 – The conventional wisdom is that Belarusians began to use Russian because Moscow was promoting Russianization even though the Soviet government earlier on proclaimed a policy of Belarussification, but in fact, Artyom Buzinnyi says industrialization and urbanization played a far larger role.
That becomes obvious, the young Belarusian scholar says, if one examines the way in which languages developed in those parts of Belarus which were part of the Soviet Union before World War II and those parts which were part of Poland at that time (imhoclub.lv/ru/material/paradoksi_belorusizacii_22).
In the Soviet eastern portion of the republic, forced march industrialization and urbanization meant that Belarusians moved into urban areas at such a rapid pace that they had no choice to adopt Russian as their lingua franca and gradually their only language while in the western Polish part of Belarus, such rapid industrialization and urbanization didn’t occur.
The same was true in Ukraine between the portions that were Soviet before 1945 and those that were not added to Soviet Ukraine after that time, Buzinnyi says. And the influence of industrialization and urbanization on language use overwhelmed any attempts to promote the language of the titular nation.
According to Buzinnyi, Belarusians and Ukrainians should understand that what happened to them linguistically thus was not so much the result of a concerted effort at Russianization by Moscow that many currently believe than the consequence of broader socio-economic transformations.
The Belarusian author is undoubtedly correct that urbanization and industrialization played key roles in this process, but he clearly has an interest in downplaying Moscow’s role in promoting the use of Russian especially since World War II, a role that has left much of Belarus Russian rather than Belarusian speaking.
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