Robert Lindsay: The Record of Communist Language Policy

In this article Robert Lindsay compares communist linguistic policy with the hostility to minority languages that is often found outside of communist states especially as more nationalist regimes have taken power.

The situation is rather more complex that he suggests. The pre-WWI German Empire supported non-German language school systems although Germanization was generally the goal especially in Polish regions, but Germany had only been unified in 1870, and creating a German national identity among speakers of German dialects was a work in progress.

The pre-WWI Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires were if anything more supportive of multilingualism. The bulk of the Austro-Hungarian population did not speak any German dialects while the leaders of the Russian Empire were highly ambivalent about non-Russians that became Russianized.

Soviet policy may have in part been a continuation of Czarist policy, but in some ways the Soviets may have been more intolerant than the Czarists.

During the early Soviet communist period, Turkic speakers often switched from writing their languages with Arabic-derivative scripts to using variants of Roman scripts. Later the Soviet authorities forced the use of Cyrillic-derived scripts on these languages.

As a matter of state policy, the Soviet government distrusted nationalities that had a considerable population outside Soviet territory. It put the Soviet leadership, both Jewish and non-Jewish, into a tricky position vis-a-vis ethnic Ashkenazim, who were critical to the consolidation of the Soviet state. As a consequence the Soviet Union and especially the Jewish section of the Soviet communist party tended to reject granting Jews or more specifically ethnic Ashkenazim full national status, and the Soviet Ashkenazi leadership chose to suppress Yiddish in order to act as the quintessential Soviet class or stratum.

When Yiddish cultural activity was permitted, the Jewish section invariably pushed for differentiation between Soviet and non-Soviet Yiddish in terms of vocabulary and orthography.

A similar sort of linguistic intolerance has characterized Zionist Jews, and it seems to be increasing. (See Knesset Hawks Move To Strip Arabic of Official Status in Israel ...)

Language is probably another area where the mentality of Zionist and Soviet Ashkenazim overlaps. (See The Pattern of Ethnic Ashkenazi Genocidalism: The Jewish Century by Yuri Slezkine.) Sphere: Related Content