The Languages Russia Almost Forgot
It may seem like an unusual undertaking. A group of writers who fled Russia for political reasons has founded a PEN Center that, while analyzing the repression of literature in their homeland, has embarked on something less expected. The Center challenged the assumption that the Russian language should occupy a dominant place within Russia itself, launching a decolonial project to support the literature of indigenous peoples and of various minority ethnic groups.
To begin with, consider the languages spoken by the founding members themselves: Udmurt, Bashkir, Kumyk, Avar, Finnish, Komi, Dolgan, German, and Tatar. Together, the founders plan to organize seminars for translators, publish anthologies, and increase the visibility of these literatures in the hopes of fostering new generations of authors, translators, publishers, and readers.
More than 150 languages are spoken in Russia, and the guardians of Russian literature have always treated them with an air of superiority.
The relationship has often been that of a metropolitan culture toward its internal periphery. Russian writers and intellectuals eagerly situated themselves within the company of other post-imperial literatures, while paying scant attention to other literary traditions in their own country. Even today, jokes about indigenous peoples and stereotypes about their supposed cultural backwardness are considered acceptable in ways that might be unthinkable in other literary cultures.
Russian writers can harbor ressentiment, wounded pride, and a desire to be admitted into the global literary establishment as an equal after a long period during which publishers treated literature from the once-powerful Soviet state as a kind of exotic curiosity. Gulag, suffering, terror? That is your ticket into bookstore shelves as long as you keep in mind that all your literature’s true achievements belonged to the age of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov.
Russian literature has yet to undergo a post-colonial turn, let alone a conscious de-colonial one. One of our goals is to make up for lost time.
We feel well-positioned to take on this task, because we do not see literature as an individualistic or alienated form of labor. To the contrary, we place great value on collective action and have participated in a variety of activist initiatives. Although our ranks include several authors whose works have been translated into numerous languages and recognized with major literary awards, we run the project in a deliberately non-hierarchical manner.
We have inherited a heavy legacy, not least because previous generations of Russophone writers have often been reluctant to acknowledge this legacy openly.
The relationship between the Russian Empire and the languages and literatures of its many ethnic groups follows colonial patterns. After the 1917 revolution, the picture appeared to change dramatically. Communism proclaimed equality for all rather than privilege for a select few, a principle reflected in the policy of korenizatsiya (indigenization), which remained in effect during the first fifteen years of Soviet rule. Numerous languages were given written scripts, local writers and intellectuals received state support, and children were educated in their native languages. In many regions, administrative work and documentation were conducted in local languages as well.
Lenin’s rationale was that local nationalisms could not be defeated outright. They first had to be exhausted and then phased out as historical relics. Stalin abandoned this strategy and essentially reverted to the tsarist government’s colonial policy.
By the late 1930s, local councils, cultural institutions, and ethnic autonomous entities had been subordinated to larger republican structures. Languages that had recently adopted Latin-based alphabets were forcibly converted to Cyrillic, a disruption that set back the development of many local literary traditions. From that point on, writers, playwrights, and screenwriters were expected to legitimize the Kremlin’s policies. Their works had to celebrate industrialization, collectivization, and Soviet modernization while remaining silent about the industrial pollution of their lands, the stripping away of their rights, and the imposition of the Russian language.
This had tragic consequences. By the time the USSR collapsed, nearly one in five of its citizens –from the Far East to the Caucasus – felt uncomfortable speaking their native language and had poor writing skills in it, if they could write it at all. Behind this discomfort was a widespread misconception that speaking an indigenous or minority language marked a person as poorly educated or uncultured.
It is tempting to argue that the old patterns simply persisted in post-Soviet Russia. That would be an oversimplification. During the 1990s, the Kremlin partially revived aspects of the Leninist approach to linguistic and cultural diversity. Indigenous languages were reintroduced into school curricula across many of the republics, while newspapers, books, and translations appeared in local languages. Linguists, researchers, and cultural activists arrived from abroad to document and support traditions that had long been neglected.
However, this renaissance lasted only as long as the early Soviet indigenization policy. By the mid-2000s, Putin had stifled regional autonomy, following in Yeltsin's footsteps. Yeltsin had crushed the Chechen independence movement in two wars.
The impact on non-majority literatures was dismal. Only a few members of the intelligentsia continued to cultivate traditions in certain indigenous languages. In schools, Russian once again eclipsed all other languages. Following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin recognized the growing visibility of de-colonial anti-war movements and responded by introducing official observances such as the Day of the Languages of the Peoples of Russia (September 8) and the Day of Indigenous Small-Numbered Peoples (April 30), as well as sponsoring a handful of publications. Its main response to de-colonial activism remained criminal prosecution.
The life of the poet Gennady Aygi reflected many of these transformations. Born in the 1930s in Chuvashia, a predominantly Turkic-speaking region on the middle Volga about 600 kilometers (370 miles) east of Moscow, he grew up speaking Chuvash in his native village. He began writing in Chuvash at an early age and soon saw his work published in local newspapers. A literary prodigy, Aygi was widely regarded as the future great poet of Soviet Chuvashia, which is precisely why he was sent to study in Moscow.
There he encountered Boris Pasternak, who reportedly advised him to choose a “larger instrument,” and so Aygi shifted to writing in Russian.
He continued to write in Chuvash throughout the years, and the poems were widely published and read in his homeland. After 1991, Aygi continued producing anthologies of literature and mythology and promoting their translation into languages worldwide. He also assisted Eva Lisina in translating the Bible into Chuvash.
Despite Aygi’s achievements as a cultural ambassador, the Chuvash language continued to struggle for status, particularly in urban areas. Fewer than half of the republic’s schoolchildren chose to study it beyond a basic level. Internationally, Aygi was known primarily as a Russian-language poet.
Working in such an environment is difficult, but vitally important. The Russian state itself has underscored this truth. Andrei Lugovoi, a State Duma deputy, has publicly called for our PEN Center to be designated an “undesirable organization.” Lugovoi is the same individual whom a 2016 British public inquiry, chaired by Sir Robert Owen, identified as one of the killers of Alexander Litvinenko.
Under Russian law, such a designation would expose the project’s organizers and participants to criminal prosecution. Fortunately, few countries are willing to extradite individuals on such grounds. Even so, it means that our work with anyone inside Russia will require far greater security precautions than we had originally anticipated.
Amid the war in Ukraine, we are in a position to provide a voice and institutional support for the literatures of Russia’s many peoples; to help those who remain inside of Russia to bear witness to their experience; and to examine what is happening to Russian literature itself, burdened as it is by the dark threads of ressentiment and violence that are one aspect of its historical legacy.
*Among other public founders are: Dinara Rasuleva, Sergei Lebedev, Lana Pylaeva, Daria Serenko, Svetlana Edygarova, Elena Kostyuchenko, Alla Gutnikova, Liza Alexandrova-Zorina, Maria Rajer, Iana Kuchina. Others remain anonymous due to security concerns.
Nikolay Kononov is a Russian-language writer based in Berlin. He is the author of The Populist: The Untold Story of Pavel Durov and Telegram.