Learning to read and write is much easier if done in one’s mother tongue and, of course, greatly facilitates the spread of literacy. In this field, the Soviet Union made unprecedented achievements. Let’s look back at how it became a multinational state by giving education and the right to self-determination to its national minorities.
In any multinational and multilingual country, an important general problem of language policy is how to achieve and maintain unity in diversity, that is to say, how to secure federal cohesion and free communication among the different segments without impinging on the development of any constituent ethnic group or their language. Tsarist Russia was made up of many different nationalities, national minorities comprised over 50% of the entire population but minority languages were suppressed as a way to russify the country and publishing in such national languages was banned from the mid-nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. Many years before the Bolshevik revolution Lenin and some of his followers had outlined a plan for a policy of the equality of nationalities and languages; this was a reaction to the oppression of minority groups and languages. Lenin wanted all nationalities to have some opportunities to use their native languages as a counter to Tsarist oppression.
After the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the proletarian state was faced with the difficulty of having inherited an ethnically diverse country and they saw huge gaps between the centre and the peripheries. It was divided administratively in such a way as to pay due account to the existence and needs of different nationalities, which encouraged the growth of national cultures. On November 2nd, 1917 the Declaration of Rights of the People of Russia proclaimed:
‘1. The equality and sovereignty of the peoples of Russia.
2.The right of the peoples of Russia to free self-determination, even to the point of separation and the formation of an independent state.
3. The abolition of any and all national and national-religious privileges and disabilities.
4. The free development of national minorities and ethnic groups inhabiting the territory of Russia’.
This declaration was a way to solve the problems of past discrimination and oppression by the Tsarist regime. In 1923, the Soviet Communist Party launched the policy of Korenizatsiia (indigenisation or nativisation), which aimed to promote harmony between national and linguistic identity by establishing ethno-territorial autonomies to promote national cultures, languages, and cadres and to extending education among nationalities in their own languages to develop a multinational state. Korenizatsiia promoted the distinctive national identities among different groups through “the formation of national territories staffed by national elites using their own national languages,” as well as through “the promotion of symbolic markers of national identity: national folklore, museums, dress, food, costumes, opera, poets, progressive historical events, and classic literary works” . In this context, native languages were seen as “a means of social discipline, as a social unifier of nations, and as a necessary and most important condition of successful economic and cultural development” . Implemented as a part of the Soviet indigenisation policy in the 1920s and 1930s, the support of indigenous languages was accompanied by a rapid spread of mass education across the USSR. Over fifty nationalities that previously had no literature in their native languages were getting education in their own languages. Books andnewspapers were published in relatively large numbers, and original literature in the native language made noteworthy progress. Alphabets and principles of orthography had to be created for languages that had never been written before. Specialized terminologies were created since they were naturally lacking in languages that had been used only as regional spoken languages. A centre was set up to handle the general and theoretical problems, with local committees for the various languages. By the middle of the 1930s, native language schools were operating in all regions of the Soviet Union. In 1928 books were published in seventy national languages, and by 1934, textbooks were being printed in 104 languages. As a result of the Soviet “cultural revolution,” the number of children attending schools rapidly increased, especially in the republics of Central Asia where formal schooling was not available. During the first five years of Soviet rule, the number of children enrolled in schools increased 15 fold in Turkmen SSR, 18 fold in Kyrgyz SSR, 39 fold in Uzbek SSR, 57 fold in Kazakh SSR, and 225 fold in Tajik SSR. In essence, post revolution Russia showed the world what feats can be achieved in a socialist system.
References :
- The UNESCO Courier (July 1970)
- Fifty Years of Soviet Education – Nigel Grant
- The New Schools of New Russia – Lucy L. W. Wilson
- Education in Russia: The evolution of theory and practice – Natalia Kuznetsova and Irina Peaucelle
- On Education – Nadezhda Krupskaya
- Soviet Education – Nigel Grant
