Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  Following the dissolution in October 1993 of the Supreme Soviet and Congress of People’s Deputies-the leftover Soviet era legislature-Yeltsin continued to shape land relations. On October 27, 1993, Yeltsin issued a decree entitled “On the Regulation of Land Relations and the Development of Agrarian Reform in Russia,” which had an important impact on land relations until the end of the decade. This decree provided for the distribution of land deeds to owners of land and land shares, thereby creating the legal foundation for a land market. In December 1993, the new Russian ConLANGUAGE LAWS stitution guaranteed the right to private ownership of land. This right was reaffirmed in the Civil Code, adopted in 1994.

  Starting in 1994, a rudimentary land market arose, involving the buying and selling of land, including agricultural land. The land market was somewhat restricted in that agricultural land was to be used only for agricultural purposes. But the decree was an important first step and had the desired effect: By the end of the 1990s, millions of land transactions were being registered annually (although most were lease transactions).

  After seven years of heated political disagreement, a post-Soviet Land Code was passed and signed into law by President Vladimir Putin in October 2001. For the first time since 1917, a Land Code existed that allowed Russian citizens to possess, buy, and sell land. The most contentious issue, the right to buy and sell agricultural land, was omitted from the new Land Code.

  Following the passage of the Land Code, the Putin administration moved quickly to enact a law regulating agricultural land sales. By June 2002, a government-sponsored bill on the turnover of agricultural land passed three readings in the State Duma and was sent to the upper chamber, the Federation Council, where it was approved in July 2002. Near the end of July 2002, President Putin signed the bill into law, the first law since 1917 to regulate agricultural land sales in Russia.

  The law that was signed into force was very conservative, requiring that agricultural land be used for agricultural purposes. With the exception of small plots of land, such as household subsidiary plots, if the owner of privately owned land wished to sell his land, he was required to offer it to local governmental bodies, who had one month to exercise their right of first refusal before the land could be offered to third parties. If the land was offered to a third party, it could not be at a price lower than was originally offered to the local government. Owners of land shares were required to offer their shares first to other members of the collective, then to the local government, both of which had one month to exercise their right of first refusal. Only if this right was not used could the shares be sold to a third party, but not at a price lower than was originally offered to the local government. If the owner changed the price of his land (or his land shares), then the local government had to be given the right of first refusal again at the new price. The law established minimum size limits on land transactions and maximum size limits on land ownership. Finally, the law provided for land confiscation (as did the Land Code) if the land was not used, or was not used for its intended purpose, or if use resulted in environmental degradation. See also: AGRICULTURE; COLLECTIVE FARMS; LAND TENURE, IMPERIAL ERA

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Danilov, Viktor P. (1988). Rural Russia under the New Regime. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Medvedev, Zhores A. (1987). Soviet Agriculture. New York: Norton. Wadekin, Karl-Eugen. (1973). The Private Sector in Soviet Agriculture. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wegren, Stephen K. (1998). Agriculture and the State in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.

  STEPHEN K. WEGREN

  LANGUAGE LAWS

  The issue of language question has been the subject of recurring political, social, and ideological controversy in Russia since the fifteenth century. Both the intellectual elite and the state were involved in discussions of the issue. Until the 1820s they were primarily concerned with the formation and functions of the Russian literary language.

  EIGHTEENTH AND EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURIES

  Peter the Great’s educational and cultural reforms were the first direct state involvement in the language question in Russia. During the early eighteenth century, governmental orders systematically regulated and resolved the language system, which at this time was characterized by the progressive penetration of original Russian elements into the established Church Slavonic literary norm and by a significant increase in the influence of foreign languages. Peter’s program envisioned the creation of a civil idiom based on various genres of the spoken language, and the modernization and secularization of elevated Church Slavonic, whose resources were insufficient for adequate description

  LANGUAGE LAWS

  of the vast new areas of knowledge. At the same time, the language of the epoch was oriented toward Western European languages as sources of novel information and terminology, and thus there were many foreign borrowings. The tsar tackled this problem personally, requiring that official documents were to be written in plain Russian that avoided the use of obscure foreign words and terms. Peter’s nationalization of language culminated in the 1707 orthography reform. He decreed the creation of the so-called civil alphabet and removed eight obsolete letters from Church Slavonic script. However, in 1710, partly in response to criticism from the church, Peter reintroduced certain letters and diacritic signs into the civil alphabet. In spite of its limitations, Peter’s orthographic reform was a first step toward the creation of a truly secular, civil Russian writing system. It paved the way for three consecutive reforms by the Imperial Academy of Sciences in 1735, 1738, and 1758 that further simplified the alphabet.

  Throughout the eighteenth century, the language question dominated intellectual debate in Russia. During the first decades of the nineteenth century, linguistic polemics intensified with the emergence of Nikolai Karamzin’s modernizing program aimed at creating an ideal literary norm for Russian on the basis of the refined language of high society. Karamzin’s plan met with a heated response from conservatives who wanted to retain Church Slavonic as a literary language. His opponents were led by Admiral Alexander Shishkov. In December 1812, Emperor Alexander I encouraged the Imperial Russian Bible Society to translate and publish the scriptures in the empire’s many languages to promote morality and religious peace between its peoples. The society distributed tens of thousands of Bibles in Church Slavonic, French, German, Finnish, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Armenian, Georgian, Kalmyk, and Tatar in the first year of its existence. The publication of the scriptures in Russian, however, aroused strong opposition from the conventional Orthodox clergy, who eventually persuaded Alexander to change his position. In 1824 he appointed Admiral Shishkov to head the Ministry of Education. Shishkov terminated the publication of the Russian Bible and reestablished Church Slavonic as the sole language of scripture for Russians. 1860s TO 1917 Starting in the second half of the nineteenth century, imperial policy promoted Russian national values among the non-Russian population of the empire and established Russian as the official language of the state. The government exercised administrative control over the empire’s non-Russian languages through a series of laws that considerably, if not completely, restricted their functions and spheres of usage.

  These laws primarily concerned the Polish and Ukrainian languages, which were feared as sources and instruments of nationalism. Russification had been adopted as the government’s official policy in Poland in response to the first Polish uprising. After the second uprising, in 1863, Polish was banished from education and official usage. Russian became the language of instruction. Harsh censorship ensured that most of the classics of Polish literature could be published only abroad; thus, for instance, the dramas of the national poet, Adam Mickiewicz, were not staged in Warsaw.

  The suppression of Ukrainian culture and language was also a consequence of the 1863 uprising. Ukrainian cultural organizations were accused of promoting separatism and Polish propaganda, and in July 1863 Peter Valuev, the minister of internal affairs, banned th
e publication of scholarly, religious, and pedagogical materials in Ukrainian. Only belles-lettres were to be published in the “Little Russian” dialect. In 1875, renewed Ukrainophile activity again aroused official suspicion. An imperial special commission recommended that the government punish Ukrainian activists and ban the publication and importation of Ukrainian books, the use of Ukrainian in the theater and as a language of instruction in elementary schools, and the publication of Ukrainian newspapers. Alexander II accepted these ruthless recommendations and encoded them in the Ems Decree, signed in the German town of Ems on May 18, 1876.

  Belorusian was also regarded as a dialect of Russian, but was not officially prohibited because of the limited scope of its literature. Georgian was subjected to a number of severe restrictions. Imperial language policy was not liberalized until after the Revolution of 1905, and then only under enormous public pressure. From 1904 there had also been democratic projects for alphabet reform, championed by such famous scholars as Jan Bau-douin de Courtenay and Filipp Fortunatov. In 1912 the orthography commission submitted its propositions to the government, but they were never approved, due to strong opposition in intellectual and clerical circles. The implementation of the orthogLANGUAGE LAWS raphy reform, which again removed certain superfluous letters from the alphabet, came only in October 1918, when the Bolshevik government adopted the commission’s recommendations. when a measure of political and cultural self- determination was restored, that the various Soviet nations and their languages acquired a higher status.

  REVOLUTIONARY AND SOVIET LANGUAGE POLICY

  The language question had always been high on the Bolshevik political and cultural agenda. Soon after the Revolution, the Bolshevik government declared a new language policy guaranteeing the complete equality of nationalities and their languages. Formulated in a resolution of the Tenth Communist Party Congress in March 1921, this policy emphasized that the Soviet state had no official language: everyone was granted the right to use a mother tongue in private and public affairs, and non-Russian peoples were encouraged to develop educational, administrative, cultural, and other institutions in their own languages. In practice, this meant that the more than one hundred languages of the non-Russian population, of which only twenty had a written form, had to be made as complete and functional as possible. The revolutionary language policy was indisputably democratic in stance, but some observers argue that its real driving force was the new government’s need to establish its power and ideology in ethnically and linguistically diverse parts of the country. In any case, the language reform of the 1920s and early 1930s was unprecedented in scale. More than forty unlettered languages received a writing system, and about forty-five had their writing systems entirely transformed. During the 1920s a Latinization campaign created new alphabets and transformed old ones onto a Latin (as opposed to a Cyrillic or Arabic) basis. In February 1926 the First Turcological Congress in Baku adopted the Latin alphabet as a basis for the Turkic languages. Despite a few instances of resistance, the language reform was remarkably successful, and during the early 1930s education and publishing were available in all the national languages of the USSR. Between 1936 and 1937 a sharp change in Soviet nationalities policy led to a sudden decision to transform all of the country’s alphabets onto a Cyrillic basis. Complete Cyrillization was implemented much faster than the previous alphabet reforms. From the late 1930s until the late 1980s, Soviet language policy increasingly promoted russification. National languages remained equal in declarations, but in practice Russian became the dominant language of the state, culture, and education for all the peoples of the USSR. It was only at the end of the 1980s,

  THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION

  Article 68 of the 1993 constitution of the Russian Federation declares that Russian is the state language. Federal subunits of Russia have the constitutional right to establish their own state languages along with Russian. The state guarantees protection and support to all the national languages, with emphasis on the vernaculars of small ethnic groups. On December 11, 2002, however, President Vladimir Putin introduced amendments to the Law on Languages of the Russian Federation that established the Cyrillic alphabet as a compulsory norm for all of the country’s state languages. Supported by both chambers of the Russian parliament, this amendment was strongly opposed by local officials in Karelia and Tatarstan. Russian lawmakers are also concerned about the purity of the Russian language. In February 2003 a draft law prohibiting the use of jargon, slang, and vulgar words, as well as the use of foreign borrowings instead of existing Russian equivalents, was adopted by the lower chamber of the Duma but was rejected by the Senate. The language issue clearly remains as topical as ever in Russia, and state language policy may be entering a new phase. See also: CYRILLIC ALPHABET; EDUCATION; KARAMZIN, NIKOLAI MIKAILOVICH; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Buck, Christopher D. (1984). “The Russian Language Question in the Imperial Academy of Sciences.” In Aspects of the Slavic Language Question, Vol. 2: East Slavic, ed. Riccardo Picchio and Harvey Goldblatt. New Haven, CT: Yale Concilium on International and Area Studies. Comrie, Bernard. (1981). The Languages of the Soviet Union. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Gasparov, Boris M. (1984). “The Language Situation and the Linguistic Polemic in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Russia.” In Aspects of the Slavic Language Question. Vol. 2: East Slavic, ed. Riccardo Picchio and Harvey Goldblatt. New Haven, CT: Yale Concilium on International and Area Studies. Hosking, Geoffrey. (2001). Russia and the Russians: A History. London: Allen Lane.

  LAPPS

  Kirkwood, Michael, ed. (1989). Language Planning in the Soviet Union. London: Macmillan. Kreindler, Isabelle. (1982). “The Changing Status of Russian in the Soviet Union.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 33:7-41. Kreindler, Isabelle, ed. (1985). Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Soviet National Languages: Their Past, Present and Future. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Uspenskij, Boris A. (1984). “The Language Program of N. M. Karamzin and Its Historical Antecedents.” In Aspects of the Slavic Language Question. Vol. 2: East Slavic, ed. Riccardo Picchio and Harvey Goldblatt. New Haven, CT: Yale Concilium on International and Area Studies.

  VLADISLAVA REZNIK

  LAPPS See SAMI.

  LATVIA AND LATVIANS

  The Republic of Latvia is located on the eastern littoral of the Baltic Sea, and the vast majority of the world’s Latvians (est. 1.5 million in 2000) live in the state that bears their name. They occupy this coastal territory together with the the other two Baltic peoples with states of their own, the Estonians and the Lithuanians, as well as a substantial number of other nationality groups, including Russians. The complex relationship between this region and the Russian state goes back to medieval times. The modern history of this relationship, however, can be dated to the late eighteenth century, when the Russian Empire, under Catherine the Great, concluded the process (begun by Peter the Great) of absorbing the entire region. From then until World War I, the Latvian population of the region was subject to the Russian tsar. The disintegration of the empire during the war led to the emergence of the three independent Baltic republics in 1918 (Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania), which, however, were annexed by the USSR in 1940. They were formally Soviet Socialist Republics until the collapse of the USSR in 1991. Since then, Latvia and the other two Baltic republics have been independent countries, with strong expectations of future membership in both NATO and the European Community. The notion among political leaders in Russia that the Baltic territories, among others, were the Russian “near abroad,” however, remained strong during the 1990s.

  Before they were united into a single state in 1918, the Latvian-speaking populations of the Baltic region lived for many centuries in different though adjacent political entities, each of which had its own distinct cultural history. The Latvians in Livonia (Ger. Livland) shared living space with a substantial Estonian population in the northern part of the province. Those in the easternmost reaches of t
he Latvian-language territory were, until the eighteenth century, under the control of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and afterward part of Vitebsk province of the Russian Empire. The Latvians of Courland (Ger. Kurland), until 1795, were residents of the semi-independent duchy of Courland and Semigallia, the dukes owing their loyalty to the Polish king until the duchy became part of the Russian Empire. The final acquisition of all these territories by the Russian Empire was not accompanied by an internal consolidation of the region, however, and most of the eighteenth-century administrative boundaries remained largely unchanged. Also remaining unchaged throughout the nineteenth century was the cultural and linguistic layering of the region. In the Latvian-language territories, social and cultural dominance remained in the hands of the so-called Baltic Germans, a sub-population that had arrived in the Baltic littoral as political and religious crusaders in the thirteenth century and since then had formed seemingly unchanging upper orders of society. The powerful Baltic German nobility (Ger. Ritterschaften) and urban patriciates (especially in the main regional city of Riga) continued to mediate relations between the provincial lower orders and the Russian government in St. Petersburg.

  Most historians hold that a national consciousness that transcended the provincial borders was starting to develop among the Latvian-speakers of these provinces during the eighteenth century. The main national awakening of the Latvians, however, took place from the mid-1800s onward, and by the time of World War I had produced a strong sense of cultural commonality that manifested itself in a thriving Latvian-language literature, a large number of cultural and social organizations, and a highly literate population. Challenging provincial Baltic German control, some Latvian nationalists sought help in the Russian slavophile movement; this search for friends ended, however, with the systematic russification policies under Alexander III in the late 1880s, which restricted the use of the