The Republican Language Laws

Why language came first

There is a reason language stood near the front of the demands that broke out in the republics after 1988. It was the point at which compulsory Russian produced concrete disadvantage, and it was also a demand that could be raised lawfully, since the union constitution already recognised the standing of republican languages. Passing a language law was a far safer first step than speaking of independence.

The laws resembled one another. They made the titular language the state language; governed its use in administration, the courts, schooling and public signage; and required officials to acquire competence in it within a set period. Russian was usually named alongside as the language of inter-ethnic communication.

Where it turned into conflict

The same law produced opposite results in different places. Moldavia made Romanian the state language in August 1989 and returned it from Cyrillic to the Latin script, the only change of writing system inside the USSR before its collapse; the heavily Russian-speaking left bank of the Dniester refused, two scripts came to coexist, and this fed the Transnistrian conflict.

In Georgia the drafting and passage of the language law in 1988 and 1989 brought mass protests in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, because it made Georgian compulsory in schools and required competence in it for university admission. A measure restoring the language rights of the majority within a republic appeared, to the minorities inside that republic, as a new barrier.

What it shows

The union's answering legislation of April 1990 came late: by the time Russian was written into law as a state language at union level, fourteen republics had already made their own languages official.

The sequence shows how the institutions left by korenizatsiya worked in the end. Every republic had schools, universities, an academy and a writers' union operating in the national language, and it was the people those institutions had trained who drafted and argued the language laws. On the road to the nationalities crisis, language was both the content of the demand and the means of organising it.