Russification (), Russianisation or Russianization, is a form of cultural assimilation in which non-Russians adopt Russian culture and Russian language either voluntarily or as a result of a deliberate state policy.
Russification was pursued by the governments of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, either as a goal in itself or as a consequence of policies aimed at centralization and modernization.
In politics, Russification can take the form of assigning Russian nationals to lead administrative positions in national institutions. In culture, Russification primarily consists of the hegemonization of the Russian language in official business and the strong influence of the Russian language on national idioms. The shifts in demographics in favor of the ethnic Russian population are sometimes considered a form of Russification as well.
Some researchers distinguish Russification, as a process of changing one's ethnic self-label or identity from a non-Russian ethnonym to Russian, from Russianization, the spread of the Russian language, culture, and people into non-Russian cultures and regions, distinct also from Sovietization or the imposition of institutional forms established by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union throughout the territory ruled by that party.Vernon V. Aspaturian, "The Non-Russian Peoples," in Allen Kassof, Ed., Prospects for Soviet Society (New York: Praeger, 1968): 143–198. Aspaturian also distinguished both Russianization and Russification from Sovietization, the process of spreading Soviet institutions and the Soviet socialist restructuring of social and economic relations in accordance with the ruling Communist Party's vision. (Aspaturian was a Soviet studies specialist, Evan Pugh Professor Emeritus of political science and former director of the Slavic and Soviet Language and Area Center at Pennsylvania State University.) In this context Russification cannot be confused with either Russianization or Sovietization. In fact, Russianization and Sovietization did not necessarily imply Russification as a process of changing the language and identity of non-Russian ethnic groups into Russian. Thus, despite long exposure to the Russian language and culture, as well as to Sovietization, at the end of the Soviet era, non-Russians were on the verge of becoming a majority of the population in the Soviet Union.Barbara A. Anderson and Brian D. Silver,"Demographic Sources of the Changing Ethnic Composition of the Soviet Union," Population and Development Review 15, No. 4 (Dec., 1989), pp. 609–656.
History The Russification of Uralic-speaking people, such as Vepsians, Mordvins, Maris, and Permians, indigenous to large parts of western and central Russia had already begun with the original eastward expansion of East Slavs. Written records of the oldest period are scarce, but toponymic evidence indicates that this expansion was accomplished at the expense of various Volga-Finnic peoples, who were gradually assimilated by Russians; beginning with the Merya and the Muroma early in the 2nd millennium AD.
In the 13th to 14th century, the Russification of the Komi began but it did not penetrate the Komi heartlands until the 18th century. However, by the 19th century, Komi-Russian bilingualism had become the norm and there was an increasing Russian influence on the Komi language.
After the Russian defeat in the Crimean War in 1856 and the January Uprising of 1863, Tsar Alexander II increased Russification to reduce the threat of future rebellions. Russia was populated by many minority groups, and forcing them to accept the Russian culture was an attempt to prevent self-determination tendencies and separatism. In the 19th century, Russian settlers on traditional Kazakh land (misidentified as Kyrgyz at the time) drove many of the Kazakhs over the border to China.(Original from Harvard University)
Russification was extended to non-Muscovite ethnographic groups that composed former Kievan Rus, namely Ukrainians and Belarusians, whose vernacular language and culture developed differently from that of Muscovy due to separation after the partitioning of Kievan Rus. The mentality behind Russification when applied to these groups differed from that applied to others, in that they were claimed to be part of the All-Russian or Triune Russian nation by the Russian Imperial government and by subscribers to Russophilia. Russification competed with contemporary nationalist movements in Ukraine and Belarus that were developing during the 19th century. Russian Imperial authorities as well as modern Russian nationalists asserted that Russification was an organic national consolidation process that would accomplish the goals of homogenizing the Russian nation as they saw it, and reversing the effects of Polonization.
In the Soviet Union After the 1917 revolution, authorities in the USSR decided to abolish the use of the Arabic alphabet in native languages in Soviet-controlled Central Asia, in the Caucasus, and in the Volga region (including Tatarstan). This detached the local Muslim populations from exposure to the language and writing system of the Quran. Until the late 1930s, the new alphabet for these languages was based on the Latin alphabet and inspired by the Turkish alphabet. In 1939–1940, the Soviets decided that a number of these languages (including Tatar, Kazakh, Uzbek, Turkmen, Tajik, Kyrgyz, Azerbaijani, and Bashkir) would henceforth use variations of the Cyrillic script (see Cyrillization in the Soviet union). Not only that, the spelling and writing of these new Cyrillic words must also be in accordance with the Russian language.
Some historians evaluating the Soviet Union as a colonial empire, applied the "prison of nations" idea to the USSR. Thomas Winderl wrote "The USSR became in a certain sense more a prison-house of nations than the old Empire had ever been."
Korenizatsiya
Stalin's Marxism and the National Question (1913) provided the basic framework for nationality policy in the Soviet Union.. The early years of said policy, from the early 1920s to the mid-1930s, were guided by the policy of korenizatsiya ("indigenization"), during which the new Soviet regime sought to reverse the long-term effects of Russification on the non-Russian populations.For a general timeline of Soviet policy towards the nationalities, see the Russian-language Wikipedia article on "Nationalities policy of Russia" (:ru:Национальная политика России). As the regime was trying to establish its power and legitimacy throughout the former Russian empire, it went about constructing regional administrative units, recruiting non-Russians into leadership positions, and promoting non-Russian languages in government administration, the courts, the schools, and the mass media. The slogan then established was that local cultures should be "socialist in content but national in form." That is, these cultures should be transformed to conform with the Communist Party's socialist project for the Soviet society as a whole but have active participation and leadership by the indigenous nationalities and operate primarily in the local languages.
During this timeframe, the Ukrainian SSR experienced a language and cultural revival as prior policies prohibiting the use of Ukrainian language were lifted and efforts were made to promote Ukrainian culture.
Early nationality policies shared with later policy the object of assuring control by the Communist Party over all aspects of Soviet political, economic, and social life. The early Soviet policy of promoting what one scholar has described as "ethnic particularism"Yuri Slezkine, "The USSR as a Communal Apartment, Or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism," Slavic Review 53, No. 2 (Summer 1994): 414–452. and another as "institutionalized multinationality",Rogers Brubaker, "Nationhood and the National Question in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Eurasia: An Institutionalist Account," Theory and Society 23 (February, 1994): 47–78. had a double goal. On the one hand, it had been an effort to counter Russian chauvinism by assuring a place for non-Russian languages and cultures in the newly formed Soviet Union. On the other hand, it was a means to prevent the formation of alternative ethnically based political movements, including pan-IslamismThis was not focused simply on religion. In the Revolutionary and immediate post-Revolutionary period, after at first coöpting jadidist Tatar Sultan Galiyev into a leadership position in the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), the Soviet regime soon turned to fight against his project and ideas for uniting Muslim peoples in a broader national liberal movement. and pan-Turkism.See Slezkine (1994) and Ronald Wixman, Language Aspects of Ethnic Patterns and Processes in the North Caucasus, University of Chicago Geography Research Series, No. 19 (1980). One way of accomplishing this was to promote what some regard as artificial distinctions between ethnic groups and languages rather than promoting the amalgamation of these groups and a common set of languages based on Turkish or another regional language.Wixman (1980). One scholar has pointed out that the basic task of defining "what was a nationality" was assigned to ethnographers immediately after the formation of the USSR in 1924, and that they were asked to work quickly so that a population census could be taken with accounting by nationality. In contrast, the only complete imperial Russian census in 1897 did not use nationality at all as a category but instead used religion and language as ethnic markers. See Francine Hirsch, "The Soviet Union as a Work in Progress: Ethnographers and Category Nationality in the 1926, 1937, and 1939 Censuses," Slavic Review 56 (Summer 1997): 256–278.
The Soviet nationalities policy from its early years sought to counter these two tendencies by assuring a modicum of cultural autonomy to non-Russian nationalities within a federal system or structure of government, though maintaining that the ruling Communist Party was monolithic, not federal. A process of "national-territorial delimitation" (:ru:национально-территориальное размежевание) was undertaken to define the official territories of the non-Russian populations within the Soviet Union. The federal system conferred the highest status to the titular nationalities of union republics, and lower status to the titular nationalities of autonomous republics, autonomous provinces, and autonomous okrugs. In all, some 50 nationalities had a republic, province, or okrug of which they held nominal control in the federal system. Federalism and the provision of native-language education ultimately left as a legacy a large non-Russian public that was educated in the languages of their ethnic groups and that identified a particular homeland on the territory of the Soviet Union.
After Stalin begun reversing this policy, Russification of the constituent republics of the USSR intensified, with prominent cultural figures executed. In Ukraine, the Executed Renaissance refers to the many prominent figures during the cultural renaissance under Lenin who were subsequently repressed and executed under the Stalinist government's Russification policy.
World War II