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Abstract
The importance the Soviet government placed on language and language planning in the creation of identity and space with a view to the ultimate creation of a Soviet culture is here explored through the lens of geolinguistics. Linguists, poets, and politicians were organized to educate each ethnic group and to socialize them within communism. Using the country of Tajikistan as an example, a new language, Tajiki, was created and implemented throughout all education curricula. That this language was never fully embraced by the population shows the difficulty in political language planning as well as the resilience of language as a measure of cultural identity in the face of a government's effort to ultimately supplant it with the more acceptable “international” language of Russian. Given that the current government of Tajikistan is still made up of former Soviet officials, it comes as no surprise that it has continued to use literary Tajiki as one of the primary bases for Tajik culture as expressed in the Republic of Tajikistan. The effort expended on this creation, the continued allegiance to it, and the overall value of using language and geography as a lens for understanding culture will be explored in this paper.
Notes
1. As translated by R. Tuzmuhamedov, the appeal was to “All-Working Muslims of Russia and the East” in 1917 in the “languages of the peoples of Russia and the East” to “(a)rrange your life freely as you think fit” (Tuzmuhamedov 1973, p. 70).
2. This line of thought continued for decades, especially into the Khrushchev years. Of interest is a piece in Kommunist in 1959 by a Kazakh, N. Dzhandil'din, who said that Kazakhs who only wanted their children to study Kazakh were a manifestation of bourgeois nationalism against which one must fight (Dzhandil'din 1959).
3. This work was written between 1936–38, but was not published until 1976.
4. The article “The Russification of the Tadzhik language” breaks it down as follows: from The Tadzhik-Russian dictionary, published in 1954, there are 40,000 words of which 31,427 are basic Tajik words, 2,333 are Russian, and 986 are Russo-Tajik hybrids (Russification 1958).
5. See especially his open letter to “Comrade Tolis” Maktubi kushoda ba rafiq Tolis dated 12 December 1948 and appearing in Sharqi Surkh, as reported in Bechka 1980.
6. This was explicitly written out in Natsional'nye shkoly RSFSR za 40 let that students in the 10-11 classes had to know the principal rules and correct Russian as well as have the ability to read and understand artistic and scientific literature, express orally and in written form that which they have read, and express their own thoughts in Russian. The year 1938 was a later date than the Soviet government wanted due to the paucity of Russian teachers.
7. The noted professor of oriental studies in the Soviet Union, B.M. Grande, believed this to be the case since in the Latin alphabet the vowels were written.
8. In a pointed rebuttal to this position, Stefan Wurm calls this a “monstrous exaggeration, and appears to be another anticipation of the desired future scope of russification … it can be spoken of as the second native language of non-Russian speakers only in some areas where the Russian and native populations are thoroughly intermingled” (Baskakov 1960, Appendix I, 58).
9. The Tsarist government aimed this process mostly at European minorities (especially Poles, Finns, and Ukrainians). The attitude towards Central Asians was more one of condescension and discrimination, which also bred nationalism (Shaheen 1956).
10. As translated in “Soviet language policy: continuity and change” by Jacob Ornstein, pp. 129-30.
11. See as an example V.I. Lenin's draft resolution “O Sovetskoi vlasti na Ukraine” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 39.
12. This data, as noted earlier, has been challenged by Wurm who underscores the urban nature of bilingualism due to Russian migration (Baskakov 1960, Appendix 1, p. 58).
13. The area comprising modern day southern Tajikistan was still within the boundaries of the Emirate of Bukhara as were the Tajiks of Bukhara so these numbers would only include those Tajiks within Tsarist Russian boundaries, notably Samarqand Province and those in the Ferghana Valley.
14. Silver found that 8.3% of urban non-Russians in the Soviet Union spoke Russian as a native language as apposed to 1.4% of rural non-Russians. In terms of speaking Russian as a second language, 63.7% of urban non-Russians spoke Russian while 44% of rural non-Russians spoke Russian (Silver 1978).
15. Davlatov and Mulloev in the UNESCO working document Educational financing and budgeting in Tajikistan bring up the possibility of a “lost generation”. This could be true if Tajikistan manages an economic revival and can stem the tide of illiteracy. If not, then this educational crisis will continue into the foreseeable future and it will not be just one generation that is “lost”.