Compulsory Russian

What changed in 1938

Russian had been taught under korenizatsiya as well, but not as a requirement. The 1938 decree closed the route through a national school that did not pass through Russian. The stated grounds were practical: military service, technical training and the movement of personnel across the union.

Script policy moved with it. Languages that had received Latin alphabets under Latinization were converted to Cyrillic from 1936, and their orthographies were adjusted towards Russian. Together the two measures left a pupil learning Russian with one set of letters instead of two.

'The language of inter-ethnic communication'

The programme of the Twenty-Second Congress in 1961 introduced the category of the Soviet people and, with it, defined Russian as the language of inter-ethnic communication. The phrase grants Russian a de facto common-language status without placing it above the others. Nothing was forbidden to the republican languages; what was set was how far they could take you.

The line was pressed again in the late 1970s. The Tashkent conference of May 1979 called Russian the language of the friendship of peoples and urged teaching it from kindergarten, and a decree of the Central Committee and Council of Ministers in 1983 split Russian classes in national schools and paid their teachers more.

Where the resistance came from

The clearest case is Tbilisi, 14 April 1978. When a draft of the new republican constitution moved to drop Georgian as the sole state language, twenty thousand people came into the streets, and the first secretary, Shevardnadze, cleared the retention of the clause with Moscow. Armenia and Azerbaijan pre-emptively declared their own languages official rather than face the same.

The policy's actual effect is debated. Knowledge of Russian did spread, yet the censuses of the 1970s and 1980s show that titular nations largely held on to their mother tongues. Russian spread as a second language without displacing the first, and that imbalance surfaced as the demands behind the republican language laws after 1988.