Call for Papers

The Government of Languages. Russians and Soviets in the face of Multilingualism

Workshop, Moscow, March 11-13, 2008

The attempts to regulate languages in their "russificating" as well as language rights protection aspects are often treated in historiography,  with a few recent exceptions, as secondary, and illustrative of the more general question of national identity construction and repression. The techniques through which the State governs a multilingual population, and the way the latter reacts to it, do not appear as a proper object to the historian. At best, they represent a domain of the history of linguistics.

Some problems of sources and methodologies partly explain this deficiency. During our workshop, we would like to understand how to build a political and social history of the administrative problem posed by a society not only poorly literate but also multilingual. Seeking the production of a cultural body unified around the Russian language, at least during certain periods, the Imperial and Soviet regimes have also tried to organize, preserve and remodel the great linguistic diversity of their space. Our workshop intends to study in detail the processes of language institutionalization by examining the reactions of Russian and Soviet subjects (from resistance to appropriation), and the way those reactions have influenced policies. We will try to see how inside the tribunals, schools, all levels of administration, army and political police, multilingualism has been taken into account and regulated. We will study the practical and symbolic dimensions of the construction of national language(s) by interrogating the utopias that any attempt at linguistic regulation has as its horizon. Above all, we would like to show how much this study refers to essential questions of Imperial and Soviet history: national constructions and imperial model, social and territorial integration (of the "peasants", of the "peripheries"), development of education and the race for modernization, the constitution of a public domain and of a civil society, the recognition of national rights, the functioning of State propaganda, the space allowed for Russian and non-Russian nationalisms. The workshop will be organized around short presentations of papers that will be distributed in advance to participants. Paper proposals are sought within the following themes:

1. A "russificating" empire (1840-1917)? Russification, administration and the constitution of a public space in a context of multilingualism.

-Russification in the different provinces of the West and East

-Russification in the conscripted army, at school

-The role of Churches

-Russification and Russian nationalism

-Resistances against russification

       The Russian central administration developed policies of administrative and legal unification, which also manifest themselves in the attempt to constitute a unified linguistic space around Russian, recognized as the State language in 1906. In the peripheries, the "russification" manifested itself in a variety of school-related or religious measures, not really seeking assimilation (except in Ukraine and Belarus) but much more the formation of imperial elites. In this session, our concern will be to confront the different projects of social integration and political engineering that have language as their support.

       2. From one regime to another (1905-1929). Languages, nationalism and civil societies between the Empire, during independent periods and in the Soviet Union.

-Nationalisms and literary languages

-Democratization and native languages.

-Language, the object of a right? Struggle for civic and linguistics rights

-National construction and languages institutionalization.

-Involvement of local intellectuals, purism and standardization

       During the second half of the 19th century, the political project of national reformists focuses on the evolution to modernity of the peasants, who have just been freed from serfdom. The formalization of language and the diffusion of written documents are thought of as avenues of transformation, by integrating peasants to a less local space than the one that defines the sphere of dialects, popular idioms and oral civilizations. This willingness to fight against the scattering of social spaces and to transform peasants into active and nationally integrated subjects crosses discussions on language, less at the central level than in the provinces. In this session, we will focus less on the centre than on the regions, and especially on the cultural and political struggles that sought the recognition of equality between languages and of linguistic rights, and which unblocked in part with the Revolution. We will put emphasis on the continuity of the projects and actors between the end of the imperial period and the Soviet Union.

       3. The centralized management of diversity. Linguistic rights, administration and propaganda in the USSR. (1917-World War II)

-The management of equalization.

-Literacy and propaganda

-The creation of alphabets

-Purity and modernization of Russian and other languages

       We will also study the impact of international linguistic rights resolutions, as well as the influence of new linguistic methods on the creation of alphabets. The programs of national elites, the ideas on linguistic rights are reclaimed, reworked and integrated by the Soviet government. The national languages, territorialized in the Republics and the autonomous regions, become government languages. Their status is guaranteed by the Constitution, which states that Soviet citizens possess the right to correspond with the central power in the language of their choice. We will be interested by the practical application of that right.
Very quickly, Soviet authorities seek to determine which languages must be recognized and institutionalized and which ones should be confined to strict private communication (vernacular). In the Soviet Union, a delimitation of the areas of communication unfolds, which corresponds to the usage spheres of the languages, while the location of their diffusion defines the outlines of the hierarchical areas of the public, regional and private domains.

       4. A new "russification»? Strengthening of national languages, diglossy, and the expansion of a model outside of the USSR (World War II-1980).

-Hierarchical organization of languages

-The situation of the Russian language and its teaching

-Repression of the peoples, end of linguistic rights and rehabilitations

-Extension of a multicultural model in Eastern Europe, the situation of the Russian language in conquered territory inside the Communist Bloc.

-Development of new communication supports.

       The hierarchical organization of languages defines the embedded linguistic areas from the most integrative, Soviet Russian, to the language of a Soviet Republic, to the one of national minorities. The latter see some of their prerogatives disappear; only the guarantee of an administrative territory, united or autonomous Republic or autonomous region gives right to support from the centre. The thaw of Khrushchev and the Brezhnev period are accompanied by a "russificating" component. This new russification is still poorly studied, and it will be complemented by the study of the diffusion of the Soviet multicultural model outside of the frontiers of the USSR during the after-war period. This period is finally characterized by the literacy and population mixture movement, which leads to the dual phenomenon of the strengthening of both Russian and regional languages, in a general context of great upheaval in terms of communication supports.

            5. The dislocation of the USSR and the new Russia

       The return of movements making language claim during the "thaw" years, but above all the dissident movement of the 70s leads to a re-politicization of the linguistic question. We will analyse perestroika, new regulations on languages and linguistic demands during the mobilizations for independence in a same historic continuum.
Finally, we will study the very contemporary period, including the distance between national minorities protection regulations (including the Russian-speaking one) and the practices seeking to guarantee the domination of the new national languages

-The situation of language rights in the nationalist movements of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.

-The differentiated situations of the Russian language in the ex-Soviet republics.

-The teaching of national and regional languages in Russia.

-The new standardization of the old Soviet languages.

-The influence of international and European law

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The Program Committee invites proposals for original papers. We particularly encourage submissions on recently archival collections.

Paper proposals (abstract of 750 words and CV) should be send in English, Russian or French, via email, before November 15, 2007 and final papers before January 30, 2008, to:

Juliette Cadiot,  EHESS, cadiot@ehess.fr, 33 6 66 98 30 71

Larisa Zakharova, Centre franco-russe en sciences humaines et sociales, larisazakharova@gmail.com, 7 916 756 26 50

Centre d'etudes des mondes russes, est europeen et caucasien (CERCEC, EHESS et CNRS. Paris)

Centre franco-russe des sciences sociales et humaines(CNRS-MAE. Ìîscou)

Agence National de la Recherche (Paris)