Soviet Language Policy in Central Asia

INTRODUCTION The Russian Revolution of October 1917 resulted in a transfer of power from the autocratic Tsar Nicholas II to the Bolshevik Party and the subsequent establishment of the world's first socialist state. The victorious revolutionaries inherited from the Tsarist regime a politically, culturally, and linguistically complex situation, with over 100 million citizens speaking no less than 150 different languages. The possibility that some of these groups might take advantage of the opportunity to assert their independence during this time of national upheaval presented the new Soviet rulers with a serious challenge. Preventing the Russian Empire from disintegrating into a host of smaller entities, as so many other empires had done in the past, was a high priority on the agenda of the new government. Beyond this, however, the primary concern of the new Soviet regime was to spread the doctrine of Communism among the different peoples within the borders of the nowdefunct Russian Empire, with the ultimate goal of establishing an egalitarian Communist society in which differences were minimized as much as possible. Various strategies were employed to consolidate Bolshevik power in the fledgling Soviet Union and to build the foundations of a Communist society. One of the most important of these was the language policy that the Soviets adopted in dealing with the non-Russian nationalities. Recognizing the crucial role that language plays in nationality affairs, the new regime instituted a number of significant steps to guide the development of the non-Russian languages in conformity with the overall goals of the Communist Party. This paper will examine the unfolding of the Soviet linguistic policy in that part of the USSR now known as Soviet Central Asia. The area contains five of the fifteen constituent republics of the Soviet Union: the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR), the Kirghiz SSR, the Tajik SSR, the Turkmen SSR, and the Uzbek SSR. Each is named after the dominant ethnic group within that republic. Since the overall picture of Soviet language policy in Central Asia cannot be seen by just examining one aspect of that policy, this paper will be concerned with several, namely the development of literacy, alphabet reform, the influence of Russian on the Central Asian languages, and the growth of bilingualism in Central Asia.