Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

by Nicholas Ostler

  The Slavic-language states of the west include not just Ukraine (Ukraína, ‘On the Border’) and Belarus (Byelarúsy, ‘White Rus’), but also Poland (Pólyša, ‘Open Plains’).* Early Russian expansion in this direction did not at first expand the area of Russian speakers, since the kingdom of Lithuania had taken advantage of the destruction of Kiev in 1240 to take over most of the western Russian lands. Later, in 1385, Lithuania entered into a close alliance with Poland through a dynastic marriage, and the two countries were formally confederated in 1569, so in attempting to regain the western Russians, the new power centre in Moscow was actually facing a struggle with Poland. When Ivan the Terrible took up arms in the sixteenth century, he was significantly less successful in expanding against this Christian kingdom to his west than he had been against the Tatars to his east. Twenty-five years of Livonian wars from 1558 served only to lose Russia its foothold on the Baltic, and to destabilise its monarchy. In the smútnoye vrémya, the ‘confused time’, that followed, Poland invaded and briefly held Moscow from 1610 to 1612. Nevertheless, when order was restored in Russia under the new Romanov dynasty in 1613, the westward pressure was reasserted, and gradually Moscow’s sway was increased: Smolensk, Kiev and the eastern Ukraine were gained by Tsar Aleksey in 1667; and the rest of the Ukraine and Belarus by Tsaritsa Yekaterina II (Catherine the Great) in 1772 and 1793.

  At this point, most of the Russian speakers were back under a Russian government, arguably for the first time since 1240, but a rebellion by Poland against the settlement of 1793 led to war, which Russia won decisively; the result was that almost immediately, in 1795, Russia gained control of the whole east of Poland up to the Neman and Dniester rivers, a situation that prevailed until the remapping of Europe that followed the First World War in 1918. Linguistically, this control had little effect: although the Polish language is fairly closely related to Russian, it is less so than Ukrainian and Belorussian; above all, the Poles’ political and religious history (as a Catholic nation) had been quite distinct, and in fact their literacy and general standard of living far exceeded those of the Russians. To start with, under Tsar Aleksandr I the country was accorded a separate constitution—but the Tsar found it hard to respect its terms; later, especially after 1863-4 (when Poland rebelled), attempts were made at ‘Russification’. Among other measures, Russian was imposed as the language for official business; and not only the University of Warsaw but all Polish schools were required to operate exclusively in Russian. This proved unworkable, and Polish survived.

  By contrast, about the same time, in 1863, a Ukrainian language law was introduced, far harsher, banning publication of all books in Ukrainian besides folklore, poetry and fiction, and was followed up in 1867 by a further ban on imports of such books from abroad; Ukrainian was prohibited on the stage too. This was more effective. Ukrainians were encouraged to see themselves as ‘Little Russians’—conveniently for the Russians, since only if Ukrainians could be classed with them would Russians make up a majority of the population in the empire.* The Minister of the Interior wrote in 1863: ‘there never has been a distinct Little Russian language, and there never will be. The dialect used by the common people is Russian contaminated by Polish influence.’45 And in 1867 the rector of Moscow University could make the appeal: ‘May one literary language alone cover all the lands from the Adriatic Sea and Prague to Arkhangelsk and the Pacific Ocean, and may every Slav nation irrespective of its religion adopt this language as a means of communication with the others.’46

  The separate identity of Ukrainian as a language with its own culture, its own republic within the Soviet Union and indeed, as of 1990, its own state owed much to the fact that these writs did not run over the border into Galicia, a Ukrainian-speaking enclave (south of modern Lvov) that had somehow remained outside Russia, inside the Austro-Hungarian empire. It contained 20 per cent of all Ukrainians. There Ukrainian spelling and Ukrainian expressions could flourish, without hindrance, on the printed page, to remind all Ukrainians of what they might be. Stalin ended the region’s independence in 1945, but to no long-term effect. Galicia went on to become the centre of the Ukrainian nationalist movement in the 1980s, the key to Ukraine’s secession from the Soviet Union.47

  Russian north then south

  In the north-west, Russia also managed to gain control of the principal Baltic-and Uralic-language areas. The Uralic areas of the north-east, mainly Karelia, had been hunting grounds of the Russians at least since Moscow had conquered the northern empire of Novgorod in 1472. The people here were indigenous, and their contact with the Russians, though started a century earlier than the other Siberians’, is essentially of the same type. Fundamentally they were ignored.

  Estonia and Livonia came only much later, and brought with them a fair amount of European experience from the German colonists who had occupied them in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; they were wrested from Swedish control by the great Russian moderniser Tsar Pëtr I (’Peter the Great’) in 1721 as part of his long-standing campaign to find Russia secure access to the Baltic. Farther south, Lithuania and Latvia were gained along with Poland in 1795; and farther north, Finland was incorporated in 1809 by Aleksandr I, on terms rather favourable to the Finns, after another successful war against Sweden.

  Among these areas, the penetration of Russian immigrants, and of the Russian language, was only significant in the Baltic areas, especially Estonia and Latvia. But here, perversely, the German influence remained very strong; indeed, the traditional power structure of German-speaking Ritterschaften, ‘knighthoods’, persisted as an intermediate level of government until the revolution in 1917, so loyal were the German Ritter to the Tsar. But the toleration of this un-Russian hold-out did begin to wane in the late nineteenth century: Russian was introduced in administration and the courts in the 1880s, and Russian-language schools were encouraged, with an attempt to make the language compulsory at all but the introductory level. In 1893 Dorpat University, in Tartu, was converted into Yuriev, a strictly Russian-language institution. But when in 1899 the next Tsar, Nikolay II, tried similar language measures in Finland, there was a general boycott of Russian institutions, and in 1904 the Russian governor-general was assassinated. Since Russia was at war with Japan at the time, the Russians chose to play it safe, and restored the Finns’ liberty to use their own language, as guaranteed in the constitution that the Russians themselves had given them.

  The drive behind the Russians’ takeover of the Baltic regions had been their need for access to trade. This motive also played a part in the beginnings of Russia’s push south, but this could hardly be represented as naked Russian aggression, since raids into their territory from the last of the Turkic khanates, the Crimean Tatars, had been persistent since the sixteenth century. Russian strength grew in the seventeenth century, until they felt that something could be done; but it was only after a further century of attempts to put down the Tatars that in 1783 Catherine the Great at last defeated and destroyed their state. In 1792, she was then able to found Russia’s principal warm-water port, Odessa on the Black Sea. This soon became a highly Russianised area, with continuing Russian immigration, and Tatar emigration, on a massive scale. Most of the Tatars went west and south into the Ottoman empire, which still surrounded most of the Black Sea coast.*

  But in the spread of Russia’s empire southward, this degree of Russian-language penetration was exceptional. The major reason for the extension of Russian in this direction was the rather curious one of an alliance with Georgia.

  South of the Caucasus mountains, the two Christian peoples of Georgia and Armenia, each quite clearly marked out by their unique languages, confronted Muslim empires to their south: the Ottomans and the Persians. Catherine the Great, in the same year in which she overcame the Crimean Tatars, prevailed on King Irakli of the eastern Georgian principality of Kartalina-Kakhetia to enter into the Treaty of Georgievsk, whereby Russia would guarantee Georgia’s integrity against its (Muslim) enemies, in return for control of its
foreign policy. Georgia was seen as a useful buffer on the edge of the Muslim south. Catherine died in 1796, but she and her successors interpreted the treaty in an extremely one-sided way: they did not aid the Georgians against the Persian invasion in 1795, but from 1801 to 1806 they proceeded to annex first Kartalina-Kakhetia, and then all the other Georgian principalities, uniting and so strengthening them, but as a Russian province. They also made war on Persia itself, taking in the neighbouring (Turkic-speaking) territory of Azerbaijan in 1805. Armenians too for a time became enthusiastic members of the Russian empire, especially when Russia defeated both the Persians and the Ottomans, incorporating the Armenian province of Yerevan (1828) and briefly occupying the north-eastern quarter of Anatolia (1829). This guaranteed a massive influx of Armenians into all parts of the Caucasus, but especially the Nagorno-Karabagh area of Azerbaijan.

  These interventions may seem to have been strategically ill advised, since the Caucasus range was one of the few natural borders that the Russian steppes possessed. Now Russia was gratuitously offering hostages to fortune beyond it. But Russian strategists, used to defending boundless plains, seem to have been happy only with a forward policy. General Rostislav Fadeyev commented in 1860: ‘If Russia’s horizons ended on the snowy summits of the Caucasus range, then the whole western half of the Asian continent would be outside our sphere of influence and, given the present impotence of Turkey and Persia, would not long wait for another master.’48

  The price of these trans-Caucasian provinces was the ‘sixty years of Caucasian wars’, which was the title of General Fadeyev’s book. What was required was nothing less than the Russian conquest of the whole mountain range, simply in order to assure their access to the Christian south. The fighting was particularly bitter for having a religious edge: almost the whole area was (and has remained) Muslim. The conquest was achieved, but only through immense brutality, and the current struggles in Chechnya show that many resentments are still unassuaged 150 years later.

  Russian became the language of administration and education in all these provinces—not of course of the Church or of the mosque. But in general it did not supplant the native languages of the region, which is one of the most linguistically diverse in the world. This was as true of the mountain peoples of the north as of the hyper-educated and cultivated Georgians and Armenians of the south. In their society, the Azeris too developed a literary language of their own. The Russian government, especially in the late nineteenth century, won few friends with its sporadic attempts to make the population more Russian, for example closing Armenian parish schools and replacing them with Russian schools in 1885, but then rescinding the order. Now that Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, after two centuries, have become independent nations, it can be seen that the penetration of Russian (measured by percentage of first-language speakers) remained very low. Armenia 2 per cent; Georgia 7 per cent; Azerbaijan 6 per cent.49

  The story of Russia’s expansion into Muslim central Asia can be briefly told, since by this time Russia had cast itself very much in the same mould as the other great powers of Europe, anxious to guarantee as high a degree of control as possible within their ‘spheres of influence’. This vast area, which was always predominantly Muslim, seemed to have a different, more distant status than any other part of the empire: the Russians called its inhabitants inoródtsï, ‘aliens’. The conquest of the steppe-land of Kazakhstan,* begun under Catherine the Great in the late eighteenth century, was completed in 1848: it was thus opened up to settlers, rather on the same model as the American West that was being colonised at the same time.

  In principle, linguistic (and religious) toleration was a feature of the Russians’ approach to this part of the empire. Whether the Tatars accepted the Christian faith (the Bible and catechism were available in Tatar in 1803) or remained with Islam, Tatar (i.e. Chagatay Turkic) was authorised as the administrative language for the steppes. In dealing with Muslim nomads, the Russians had to keep in mind that they always had the option of decamping over the border, or, more worryingly, that they might become a fifth column for the Ottomans. In general, therefore, they endeavoured to offer them an attractive option if they accepted Russian rule. Catherine II’s Holy Synod Act of 1773 established a religious directorate for Muslims in Russia, the muftiyya. She also decreed transit rights for Sunni Muslims who wanted to avoid Shia Iran on their pilgrimages to Mecca. And she even financed a Muslim religious school, a madrasa, in Bukhara. Muslims attended Russia’s military academies, had their own (volunteer) regiments, and even served as officers in ordinary Russian regiments—something very different from the contemporary practice of the British or French empires.50

  But for all this, the steppes did become effectively Russified. It was the incidence of European settlers which really changed the linguistic picture: 20 per cent in 1887, 40 per cent in 1911, 47 per cent in 1939.51 Khrushchev’s ‘Virgin Lands’ Policy of the 1950s added a further 1.5 million. (The number of native Russian speakers in Kazakhstan according to the 2000 Ethnologue is now 6.23 million, 38 per cent.)52

  In 1854, Russia was defeated in the Crimea by its imperial peers, Britain, France and the Ottomans. Perhaps seeking some consolation, Russia immediately proceeded to the conquest of central Asia, due south of the Kazakh steppes. Colonial wars against natives without modern weapons were far easier to win, and somehow heartening for Europeans, as the opening quote from Dosteyevsky shows us.

  The principal remaining powers in this area were the emirates of Khiva, Bukhara and Kokand. Despite the technical advantages of the incomers over the residents, the war took twenty-two years, and ended in 1876. Kokand, in the east, was annexed, but the other two emirates, Bukhara, which had contained the legendary Samarkand, and Khiva on the Caspian shore, were largely left as dependent powers. ‘Turkestan’ was created as a provincial envelope to hold these new acquisitions. Russia’s main concern came to be the development of intensive cotton cultivation in the Ferghana valley, and this attracted large numbers of settlers into the area, which is part of modern Uzbekistan. Nevertheless, settlement in these areas never reached levels comparable to those of the steppes to the north: the four corresponding modern states are (from west to east) Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, and their population of 39 million embraces only 9 per cent native Russian speakers.53

  The status of Russian

  This completes our brief review of how Russian was spread by the Tsar’s empire. It remains to consider why it never became a prestige language: why, unlike all the other imperial European languages that established themselves far from Europe, it did not come to symbolise the conquered peoples’ aspirations to take part in a Westernised, globalised future. All the nineteenth-century European empires are now dissolved: but their languages are still used worldwide. Why is Russian, alone of the current top ten languages, set to lose speakers in the twenty-first century?

  Four major institutions of the Russian empire had been crucial to the spread of Russian beyond its homeland in north-eastern Europe. They were the Orthodox Church, the army, the state bureaucracy and the educated elite—usually known in Russian as the intelligentsia. All these still exist in some form, but none of them, in the early twenty-first century, seem likely to remain lively, either as dominant forces or as sources of inspiration worldwide.

  The Church had early attached itself to its local language, now usually known as Old Church Slavonic, but always felt to be Russian in an appropriately reverent version. Even in the midst of major liturgical reforms, an advocate of the old ways could write to the Tsar: ‘Say in good Russian “Lord have mercy on me”. Leave all those Kyrie Eleisons to the Greeks: that’s their language, spit on them! You are Russian, Alexey, not Greek. Speak your mother tongue and be not ashamed of it, either in church or at home!’54 Its distinctive domes rising among the huts provided the most recognisable signs of Russia as its domain spread out across Siberia; as long as there were Tsars, it legitimated them. Church schools were the main source of Russian l
iteracy well into the eighteenth century. But it never recovered from the ‘Holy Synod’ reforms of Peter the Great in 1721, when he made himself supreme protector of the Church, abolishing its internal democracy from the parishes up, and so effectively making it into an arm of the state. Thereby both Tsar and Church, although mutually supportive, became quite cut off from the grass roots of Russian society. They became increasingly unable to take the risks of any popular involvement. A telling example came in the linguistic sphere when, in the aftermath of Napoleon’s 1812 invasion, the reforming Tsar Alexander I favoured the establishment of an Imperial Russian Bible Society, as a branch of the British and Foreign Bible Society: a multilingual publishing initiative was planned, but the project came unstuck on the proposal to distribute the Bible in prostóye naryéciye, ‘simple diction’, i.e. plain Russian. The evangelicals were cast as agents of ‘the Invisible Napoleon’, undermining the respect due to the word of God, and in 1821 the Russian Bibles were burnt on the orders of the Holy Synod.*