Russification
- This article is about the political term. For localization of computers and software, see Russification (computers).
Russification refers to both official and inofficial policy of
Imperial Russia and
Soviet Union with respect to their national constituents and to national minorities in
Russia propria aimed at the Russian domination. In a narrow sense,
Russification is used to denote influence of the
Russian language on other
Slavic languages.
The two main areas of Russification are
politics and
culture. Some consider shifts in
demographics in favor of Russian population to be a form of Russification as well.
In politics, an element of Russification is assigning Russian nationals to leading admistrative positions in national institutions.
In culture, Russification primarily amounts to domination of the
Russian language in official business and strong influence of Russian language on the national ones.
One of the examples of Russification was replacement of the
Polish language by Russian in areas of
Poland-Lithuania after
Partitions of Poland. In particular, after the
January Uprising of
1863, in
1864 Polish was banned in public places; in the
1880s Polish was banned in schools and offices of
Congress Kingdom.
A similar development was in
Lithuania: its Governor General
Mikhail Muravyov instituted a complete ban on
Latin alphabet and
Lithuanian printed matter. The ban was lifted only in
1904.
Still another example is
Ems Ukaz of
1876, banning the
Ukrainian language.
As a result of this policy, quite a few national languages, such as
Tatar and
Belarusian, were perceived by a significant part of population as "rural" or "uneducated" ones, not to say as "useless" for study at school.
In the Soviet Union, publications in technical and scientific journals with rare exceptions were in Russian. This had led to underdevelopment of modern technical and scientific terminology in national languages, further degrading the status of a national language.
While in almost all Soviet republics bilingualism was official, it was "asymmetric": the titular nation learned Russian, whereas immigrated Russians generally did not.
See also
External link
\n* De-Russification of Tatar