- Portals
- The Current Year
- ED in the News
- Admins
- Help ED Rebuild
- Archive
- ED Bookmarklet
- Donate Bitcoin
Contact an admin on Discord or EDF if you want an account. Also fuck bots.
Russification
|
RUSSIAN MONGOLIANS? |
|
BREAKING NEWS!! RUSSIAN AUTHORITIES JUST BANNED UKRAINIAN LANGUAGE TEXTBOOKS IN SCHOOLS AS PART OF FULL RUSSIFICATION MODE!!! |
—Nikita Khrushchev | ||
Russification (aka "how to turn everyone into Great Value™ Russians) is the epic state-sponsored cosplay project where non-Russians are told to drop their native language, culture, and soul in exchange for a lifetime supply of vodka, Cyrillic, and tsar-worship. Whether you asked for it or not, if you were within breathing distance of the Russian Empire or the USSR, you were automatically enrolled in Mother Russia's Cultural Makeover Program™.
Back in the day, the czars and later the Red Mafia—sorry, Soviets—decided that the best way to unite the empire wasn't tolerance or respect, but good ol’ linguistic bulldozing and bureaucratic gaslighting. If you ran a school in Poland, spoke Tatar at home, or dared to write poetry in Ukrainian, surprise: now you’re teaching Pushkin, praising Peter the Great, and filling out forms in a language your grandma thinks is demonic chanting.
Politically, Russification means slapping a Russian in charge of your national government, even if he can’t find your country on a map. Culturally, it’s replacing your folk songs with balalaikas and pretending samovars are an upgrade. And if enough ethnic Russians move into your town, guess what? It's no longer "your" town. It's Mini-Moscow, population: everyone but you.
Now, some academic types like to split hairs with terms like Russification, Russianization, and Sovietization, as if it makes a difference whether you're being rebranded by an empire, a dictatorship, or a really enthusiastic culture club. But here’s the TL;DR: if you weren’t Russian, you were getting Russianed—one way or another.
And by the time the Soviet Union was collapsing like a drunk Cossack, non-Russians were still resisting the urge to slap on a ushanka and sing the national anthem. Turns out, decades of forced cultural assimilation doesn't actually erase identity. Who knew?
History
Once upon a czarist hangover, the mighty Russian state had a vision: "What if everyone, and I mean everyone, was Russian?" Thus began the Great Cultural Reboot, also known as Russification, or as some call it, "Ctrl+C Russian, Ctrl+V Everywhere." The victims? A motley crew of Uralic tribes, Turkic speakers, Central Asian empires, and any unfortunate ethnicity that wasn't already chugging kvass and quoting Pushkin.
The Vepsians, Mordvins, Maris, and friends were just vibing in western Russia when Slavs came east with cultural colonization DLCs. The process was simple: give up your tongue or we'll rename your village and move in. It worked so well, even the Komi had no idea what hit them until the 18th century. By the 19th, they were speaking Russian fluently and regretting life choices.
After a little mishap called the Crimean War, Tsar Alexander II decided ethnic cleansing lite was the best medicine. Russification was the post-failure therapy. Nomads were pushed east, peasants were imported west, and the "Kyrgyz" (they meant Kazakhs, but cartography was hard) found themselves in China, probably asking for directions back to their steppe.
Forget your silly border fantasies. The Imperial playbook said: "You're not a country, you're a dialect." Russophilia was the cult, and the Imperial government had the Kool-Aid. Ukrainian and Belarusian nationalism was viewed like a software virus—something to patch out in the next imperial update.
1920s: Latin alphabets for everyone! 1930s: Wait, no. Cyrillic for all! Arabic, Latin, ancient scripts? Not Russian enough. Rewrite, rebrand, recode. Even the Quran couldn’t escape the alphabet swap. If it didn’t conform to Soviet Cyrillic policy, it was vaporware.
In the 1920s and 30s, the USSR tried out indigenization, also known as the "We Promise This Isn't Colonization" phase. Non-Russians were promoted. Local languages got their 15 minutes of fame. But behind the scenes, the main goal was to prevent pan-Islamism and pan-Turkism from patching together a competing operating system.
By the late 1930s, the vibe shifted. Nationalism = bad, Russian dominance = pogchamp. Stalin's purge update deleted regional leaders like they were browser cookies. Education went from "learn in your own tongue" to "better memorize Dostoevsky or else."
Entire ethnic groups got uninstalled and sent to Siberia or Central Asia, especially if someone sneezed near a German soldier. Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, Chechens, and more got shuffled like a cursed Steam library.
From 1945 onwards, Russian was the "language of inter-ethnic friendship" – the friend who crashes on your couch and never leaves. Education? In Russian. TV? Russian. Books? Mostly Russian. Native tongues? Optional add-ons, frequently discontinued.
Khrushchev's idea of "rapprochement" meant, basically, "You will all blend into one glorious Soviet Smoothie." Brezhnev softened the tone, but the blender stayed on. By the 1970s, kids in urban areas learned Russian whether they liked it or not. Rural regions held out, but even they had to sing the anthem in Russian.
1980s: Soviet People™ Arrives
A new meta-ethnic identity was born: the Soviet People, whose language was Russian, whose TV was Russian, and whose ethnic identities were... uh, pending.
1989 Census: Congratulations, You Are Now Russian
By the fall of the USSR, millions of Ukrainians, Belarusians, Tatars, and others were basically Russian in language if not in paperwork. Assimilation was so aggressive, you could be born Tatar, speak only Russian, and still be asked to dance in traditional costume for a parade.
Post-Soviet Patch: Federation.exe After 1991, things got even buggier. Indigenous languages were patched out with new bills. Native instruction hours dropped to "barely functional." In 2019, one Udmurt activist literally self-immolated over language laws. Indigenous languages? Endangered. Cultural memory? Actively deleted.
2022: Censuses Confirm Mass Alt-F4 The most recent Russian census reads like a death toll for minority identity: Chuvash? Down 25%. Udmurts? Down 30%. Mordvins and Komi-Permyaks? Game over.
Russification: Because One Language to Rule Them All Always Ends Well
By country/region
So, Russia rolled into the South Caucasus like an uninvited wedding guest in the 1800s, thanks to a couple of treaties with Iran (Gulistan and Turkmenchay—basically Persia rage-quit). By 1830, Baku and company were getting fresh Russian instruction whether they wanted it or not. Azeris weren’t thrilled until some enlightened dudes said, “Hey, what if we taught Russian AND Azeri?” Boom—first Russian-Azeri school, 1887. Cue hundreds more and even a women’s college before the Soviets stormed in with the patch notes.
Russians, Armenians, Azeris, and even your neighborhood Jewish grandpa spoke fluent Dostoevsky. By 1970, tens of thousands of Azeris were logging into Russian as their native language like it was the hot new MMO.
Russification here was an on-again, off-again toxic relationship from the 18th century until Soviet sunset. Brief break for Belarusization in the 1920s before Big Brother USSR said, “Nope, back to Russian.” And when Lukashenko took the wheel in 1994, he pressed the Russify button harder than ever. Goodbye Belarusian, hello Ministry of Nostalgia.
The Russification of Finland, aka sortokaudet (“times of getting steamrolled”), was an effort by the Russian Empire to turn Santa’s favorite country into a subfolder of Moscow. Finns weren’t having it, rebelled quietly, and eventually said, “Screw this, we’re independent” in 1917. Bonus: a famous painting even shows Mother Finland defending her laws from a double-headed eagle. Symbolism level: 100.
Post-WWII, the USSR said, “Hey, nice German city, shame if we renamed everything, expelled everyone, and forgot to maintain the castles.” They replaced the population, bulldozed the past, and called it Kaliningrad. Modern result? A Soviet Minecraft biome with ghost infrastructure and extra Cyrillic.
In 1885, a Russian ukaz said, “All your official business is now in Russian.” By 1944, Soviet occupation doubled down—Latvian cities became Russian language zones, whether Latvians liked it or not. National Communists tried to resist with language bills and cultural laws in the 1950s, but the Kremlin clapped back with purges and a bilingual school system that mostly forgot about the Latvian part. By the ‘60s, Russian class hours doubled, Latvian hours shrank, and Latvians needed to learn Russian just to get a dentist appointment.
By the ‘70s, even local workers had to speak Russian because if there was one Russian in the room, the meeting switched to his language. Equality.exe had stopped responding.
Lithuanians got hit with the no-Latin-script patch after the 1863 Uprising. Russian was the new black. Schools, government, even churches had to ditch their mother tongues. But the Lithuanians fought back with underground printing and knygnešiai (book smugglers), delivering Latin-alphabet contraband like literary rebels.
Poles, meanwhile, got the full imperial nerf package: banned language, beatings in school, secret classes in grandma’s kitchen. By the early 1900s, Polish kids were fluent in whispering rebellion.
The Empire acquired Bessarabia and said, “Cool story, Moldovans. Now speak Russian.” Romanian was banned in schools, then churches, then life. Settlers came, Moldovans left, and by 1897, the ethnic ratio did a 180. By Soviet times, the language got Cyrillic’d, the culture got adjusted, and the past got memory-holed.
Ukraine: From Valuev to Putin, a Legacy of ‘No Ukrainian Allowed’
Starting with the Valuev Circular in 1863, Ukraine got told, “Your language doesn’t exist.” Plays, books, lectures in Ukrainian? Blocked. Soviet rule flipped briefly to korenizatsiya, then turbo-reversed. By the late USSR, many Ukrainians were Russian-speaking by state design. Even post-2014, in Crimea and Donbas, Putin brought back subtle (read: forced) Russification like it was vintage policy.
Want to write in your own alphabet? Tough. Want to speak your own language? Treasonous. Want to not be assimilated? There's a train to Siberia leaving in five.
Roll the end credits...
