Soft power, Russia and the former Soviet states: a case study of Russian language and education in Armenia^*

* This paper is partly based on Chapter II (Part Two) of my doctoral thesis. An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the 3rd Academic Swiss Caucasus Net (ASCN) Annual Conference on “Political Transformation and Social Change in the South Caucasus: Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan in Perspective”, which took place in Tbilisi, from 21 to 22 June 2013. Parts of this paper were presented at a Midi de la Recherche (Global Studies Institute, University of Geneva) on 27 May 2016.

Abstract

As in human relations, attraction can be an influential force in international relations. A well-known tool in Western countries, in Russia ‘soft power’ has come into play mainly under Putin’s presidency in the 2000s. This paper focuses on language and education as sources generating ‘soft power’. It looks first on the institutional framework progressively established to attract and integrate culturally the former Soviet space. Second, it studies the evolution of the Russian language and education in Armenia. The findings suggest that even if the previous decline in the usage of Russian has been reversed, the monopoly once enjoyed by this language seems to be over. Russian is promoted in a multicultural environment – alongside English, French, German or Chinese – which reflects the new geopolitical reality. Multicultural landscape characterises also the Armenian higher education system.

Keywords:

• Russian language and education
• soft power
• Armenia
• South Caucasus

Notes

* This paper is partly based on Chapter II (Part Two) of my doctoral thesis. An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the 3rd Academic Swiss Caucasus Net (ASCN) Annual Conference on “Political Transformation and Social Change in the South Caucasus: Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan in Perspective”, which took place in Tbilisi, from 21 to 22 June 2013. Parts of this paper were presented at a Midi de la Recherche (Global Studies Institute, University of Geneva) on 27 May 2016.

1. The rank system goes from 1 to 30 with1 being the highest. United States (1st, 77.96), United Kingdom (2nd, 75.97), Germany (3rd, 72.60), Canada (4th, 72.53), and France (5th, 72.14) are the five highest-ranked countries.

2. Russian is transliterated according to the ISO/R 9:1968 system.

3. Georgia was part of the CIS from 1993 to 2009.

4. IFESCCO cooperates with multilateral (international or regional) organizations. The cooperation with UNESCO (since 2008) includes projects such as ‘Running a Museum: 21st Century’, or ‘Arts Education in CIS countries: Building Creative Capacities for the 21st Century’.

5. These are mainly countries with a significant Russian population. In 2009, 8.3% of the total population of Belarus is ethnically Russian, 23.7% of Kazakhstan, and 7.7% of Kyrgyzstan according to the CIA World Factbook.

6. For example, in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Estonia, Latvia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova the percentage of Russian minorities exceeded 20% in the early 1990s (Demoskop Weekly).

7. The migration of Russians from the former Soviet republics into Russia was mainly due to the economic downturn of the republics and their nationalisation policies (including the focus on the national language).

8. It is worth mentioning that in the South Caucasus the tendency towards an ethnic homogeneity is observable in all three countries where the percentage of minorities has been dropping constantly since the 1990s. If in Armenia and in Georgia we observe this tendency occurring in parallel to the population decrease, in general, this is not the case of Azerbaijan, the only country in the region where we observe a population growth after the fall of the Soviet Union (ArmStat; Azstat; Demoskop Weekly; and GeoStat).

9. The Caucasus Research Resource Centers’ (CRRC) CB carries out annual surveys in the South Caucasus based on a nationwide sample. CRRC are research networks established in 2003 in Tbilisi, Yerevan, and Baku.

10. According to an Order of the Ministry of Education and Science of Georgia (2014), the second foreign language teaching in Georgian public schools will start from the fifth grade.

11. The data refer to ‘state and non-state day general education institutions’ in 2014 (as of October 2014).

12. It is worth noting that Russia, United States, and France are the top listed (1st, 2nd and 3rd respectively) home countries to the largest Armenian diaspora communities (the data vary from one source to another). Consequently, these Universities contribute, inter alia, to the reinforcement of ties between Armenia and Armenian diasporas.