Its domain was extended not by seaborne expeditions but overwhelmingly by military campaigns overland; hence it has come to occupy areas in a vast contiguous swath to the south and east from its homeland in the north European plain. Its bounds were expanded for the most part not by traders or missionaries, but by semi-nomadic Cossacks, explorers and military men: not out of enterprise, or a duty to win souls for Christ, but for reasons of rapine, and to b.u.t.tress the global interests of its state. Russia began its conscious existence with no natural defences against the Turkic-speaking Tatars to its south, and it remained without natural defences against its Slavic-speaking cousins in Poland to the west. It was on the periphery of the cultural area with which it identified, Christian Europe; but it occupied a plain that was easily accessible to horse invaders, and also crossed by a network of navigable rivers. Ice denied it access to the open sea for most of the year. Its only natural defences lay in the severity of its winters, the sheer stickiness of its land in spring and autumn, and the vast distances that its enemies would need to cross in order to penetrate it. Conditions favoured the growth and consolidation of a single large power, with defence in depth: that power we call Russia.

Nevertheless, there were points of similarity with the other successful empire-builders of Europe. There had been a commercial motive for the expansion eastward into Siberia, the drive of outdoorsmen to trap animals for their fur, just as the French, and later the British, were to do in the northern wilderness of Canada. The Russian Orthodox Church was for most of the last millennium a potent symbol of Russian ident.i.ty,* which accompanied the advance of Russia's forces across south-eastern Europe and north and central Asia to the Pacific Ocean. Since its language was pointedly an antiquated form of Russia's own, this resembles above all the imperial practice of the Church of England. And just like the British and the French in the nineteenth century, the Russian government consciously planned the later, stages of its global expansion. Central Asia, specifically the 'Silk Road' area of Turkestan south of the Aral Sea, was invaded in 1871-81 to protect the southern border, and as a prime source of cotton. Above all, the long-term spread of the Russian language within these vastly expanded borders was guaranteed by a flow of Russian-speaking immigrants out of the north-east into the newly Russian territories: after the 1861 abolition of the serfdom that had tied them to the land, half a million sought better fortunes eastward into Siberia in the rest of the nineteenth century.

The origins of Russian

The eastern Slavs who founded Russia were among the descendants of the Veneti who, as we have seen (see Chapter 7, 'Einfall: Germanic and Slavic advances', p. 304), populated the sh.o.r.es of the Baltic in the early first millennium AD; a large number of them had not travelled southward to populate the Balkans and invade Greece (see Chapter 6, 'Intimations of decline', p. 257), but had rather settled towards the east, in uneasy rivalry with Baltic tribes to their north-west, and the Uralian tribes, among them the Finns, to the northeast. Indeed, the claim is made that the majority of the original population of Rus were of Finnish descent and hence language. The Slavs would have settled among them in the first centuries of the second millennium.

These people spoke a language that was related to that of their German neighbours to the west, and that of their Baltic neighbours (Latvians, Lithuanians and Prussians) to the north, but noticeably softer in its tone, in that consonants were palatalised and often affricated before e and i:* as a result, the sounds s, c and are highly prevalent; compare the middle of the Lord's Prayer in the oldest forms of their languages: [note * on next page]

The eastern Slavs, whose language would go on to form modern Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian, almost close enough in form to be considered dialects, had been farmers rather than nomads, although the quest for furs was always a priority on their eastern frontier. By the end of the first millennium they were established in a vast forested area which ran from the Baltic coast near Novgorod due south to Kiev, and out to the east as far as Kazan. Although the people spoke Russian, their aristocracy was made up of Vikings (known as varyagi or Varangians), seafarers who had invaded along the waterways from the Baltic, and who at first would have been Norse-speaking, but like so many Germanic conquerors had given up their own language. They organised the Russians on the basis of capitals ever farther south, in Novgorod, Smolensk and, in 882, in Kiev. The Dvina and Volkhov were linked by portages with the Dnieper, and so communications were established with the Black Sea, and thence the Byzantine empire. In 988 this link resulted in the conversion of Vladimir ('conquer the world') and his Kievan court to Orthodox Christianity. In the following four centuries, the religion spread to cover the full range of eastern Slavs.

To the south of the Kievan domain was gra.s.sy steppe, dominated in the second half of the first millennium by a series of largely Turkic-speaking nomadic peoples on horseback, who kept arriving from the east, conquering and settling down as the new masters: Avars, Khazars, Bulgars, Magyars, Pechenegs, Kipchak-Polovtsians, Alans, and finally Genghis Khan's Mongols. There was persistent warfare over the period, immortalised in the first surviving work of Russian literature, Slovo o Polku Igoreve, the Lay of Igor's Campaign, set in 1054 and apparently written in the twelfth century: Ue, knyae, tuga umi polonila;

se bo dva sokola sltsta su otnya stola zlata

poiskati grada Timutorokanya,

a lyubo ispiti selomomi Donu.

Ue sokoloma krilitsa pripsali poganixu sablyami,

a samayu oputasa vu putini elzni...

O Prince, grief has now taken your mind captive;

for two falcons have flown from their father's golden throne

to gain the city of Tmutorokan,*

or else to drink of the Don from their helmets.

The falcons' wings have now been clipped by the sabres of infidels,

and they themselves are fettered in fetters of iron...

At last the Mongols, const.i.tuted as the khanate of the Golden Horde, sacked Kiev and ended that city's hegemony of the Russians in 1240. Mongol suzerainty, entailing a heavy burden in tribute, came to be recognised all over the Russian territories, even in 1242 by Prince Alexander Nyevskiy up north in Novgorod, despite his recent victories over the Swedes and the Teutonic knights. It has been reckoned that this early subjection, which lasted for almost three centuries, and was definitively ended only by the victories of Ivan IV Grozniy ('the Terrible'), planted a lasting pessimism in the Russian soul, establishing a deep-seated tradition of serfdom at the bottom of society, and absolutism at the top.

The new Russian polity, when it came, would be based not on Kiev but on Moscow, 800 kilometres (by Russian measure, 750 verst) to the north-east. In 1328 the Orthodox Metropolitan moved his seat accordingly. Moscow had a good central position within Rus, and its triumph over the other city-states was partly due to the fact that it stayed unified, having the luck to produce a single male heir in each generation in the fourteenth century. The Grand Prince of Moscow, Dmitriy Donskoy, defeated the Mongols in 1380, and in 1480 Ivan III finally repudiated their suzerainty. The Moscow princes (knyazi) were going up in the world: about the same time, Ivan married Sophia Palaiologou, the niece of the last Byzantine emperor (deposed in 1453), and claimed to have inherited imperial status through a special donation of insignia from Constantinos Monomakhos (Byzantine emperor) to Vladimir Monomakh (Prince of Kiev) in the eleventh century. Moscow began to be represented as the Third Rome, and the monk Filofey of Pskov wrote to Ivan III at the end of the fifteenth century: 'Thou art the sole Emperor of all the Christians in the whole universe...For two Romes have fallen, the third stands, and there shall be no fourth.'44 In 1547, Ivan IV was the first ruler to be crowned not prince but Tsary, that is to say (in Russian p.r.o.nunciation) Caesar.* He went on to prove he deserved it by conquering and incorporating both the major remnants of the Golden Horde, the Turkic khanates of Kazan (in 1552) and Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea (in 1556). The local n.o.bility were absorbed into the Russian, and so a process of a.s.similation was begun. With these steps, Russians began their career of imposing themselves on other language communities, an imperial expansion of their language zone which would continue for the next three and a half centuries, and end up in the twentieth century with nominal coverage of the whole northern half of the land-ma.s.s of Asia.

Russian east then west

The greater part of this spread came about without the active initiative of the Tsar, his government or his armies. The immediate effect of the conquests of Kazan and Astrakhan was to remove the barrier to Russian penetration out towards the east; and this opportunity was soon taken up. The Stroganov family happened to hold the monopoly of fur-trading and salt-mining: they now engaged an army of Cossacks from the Don area, initially to protect against the khan of western Siberia, but then to attack the khan's capital on the lower Irtysh. The capital fell in 1582. Over the next fifty-seven years the Cossacks advanced rapidly and consistently, and in 1639 they reached the Pacific, founding the city of Okhotsk in 1648. They proceeded to move south down the coast to the Amur river, but were soon compelled by the Chinese to give up the area bordering Manchuria; the Sino-Russian border was defined, effectively for two centuries to come, at the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689.

Although their name is Turkic, the Cossacks spoke Russian. They were a large but miscellaneous group of hors.e.m.e.n, militant Christians, disorderly but proud, who had taken up nomadic ways in the long centuries of threat and domination by Turkic nomads, and were found all over the southern steppe country from Poland and Ukraine through to Kazakhstan. During their advance across Siberia, they built fortresses at the major river crossings, some of them now major cities (among them Tomsk in 1604, Krasnoyarsk in 1628, Yakutsk in 1632); but they only scantily settled the lands through which they advanced. They were followed by a dusting of soldiers, missionaries, tax-collectors (exacting the tribute, called by the Turkic name yasak, that was paid in fur pelts) and a very few Russian settlers, either peasants looking for land, or political exiles sent by the government; but the linguistic impact was at first thin. The Russians remained congregated along the major rivers, surrounded at first by a diversity of ancient Siberian peoples. Over the next three centuries, as extractive industries began to develop, they were joined by more settlers from the west.

This early expansion to occupy Siberia, taken together with the Russian heartland in the north European plain, accounts for most of the area that is now part of Russia. The non-Russian populations there were always too spa.r.s.e, and too remote from any non-Russian source of civilisation, to organise independent states.

This was emphatically not true of Russia's other neighbours, most of whom found themselves succ.u.mbing to Russian conquest in the four centuries of Russia's expansion. They fall into four groups: the Slavic-language states to the west; the Baltic and Uralic-language states to the north-west; the Caucasian states to the south; and the central Asian states to the south-east. As it happens, at the time of writing in the early twenty-first century, most of them have regained their independence, and are seeking to rebuild links with their pre-Russian pasts; the few that have not, notably the Chechens and Ingush of the Caucasus, are seeking more or less bloodily to secede. It is a notable fact about Russia's old colonies that very few of them value highly the historic links symbolised by use of the Russian language, or indeed the potential for collaboration that Russian would give them if accepted as a lingua franca. It is worth enquiring why, alone of the European imperial languages, Russian has left this rather poisoned inheritance.

The Slavic-language states of the west include not just Ukraine (Ukraina, 'On the Border') and Belarus (Byelarusy, 'White Rus'), but also Poland (Polysa, 'Open Plains').* Early Russian expansion in this direction did not at first expand the area of Russian speakers, since the kingdom of Lithuania had taken advantage of the destruction of Kiev in 1240 to take over most of the western Russian lands. Later, in 1385, Lithuania entered into a close alliance with Poland through a dynastic marriage, and the two countries were formally confederated in 1569, so in attempting to regain the western Russians, the new power centre in Moscow was actually facing a struggle with Poland. When Ivan the Terrible took up arms in the sixteenth century, he was significantly less successful in expanding against this Christian kingdom to his west than he had been against the Tatars to his east. Twenty-five years of Livonian wars from 1558 served only to lose Russia its foothold on the Baltic, and to destabilise its monarchy. In the s.m.u.tnoye vremya, the 'confused time', that followed, Poland invaded and briefly held Moscow from 1610 to 1612. Nevertheless, when order was restored in Russia under the new Romanov dynasty in 1613, the westward pressure was rea.s.serted, and gradually Moscow's sway was increased: Smolensk, Kiev and the eastern Ukraine were gained by Tsar Aleksey in 1667; and the rest of the Ukraine and Belarus by Tsaritsa Yekaterina II (Catherine the Great) in 1772 and 1793.

At this point, most of the Russian speakers were back under a Russian government, arguably for the first time since 1240, but a rebellion by Poland against the settlement of 1793 led to war, which Russia won decisively; the result was that almost immediately, in 1795, Russia gained control of the whole east of Poland up to the Neman and Dniester rivers, a situation that prevailed until the remapping of Europe that followed the First World War in 1918. Linguistically, this control had little effect: although the Polish language is fairly closely related to Russian, it is less so than Ukrainian and Belorussian; above all, the Poles' political and religious history (as a Catholic nation) had been quite distinct, and in fact their literacy and general standard of living far exceeded those of the Russians. To start with, under Tsar Aleksandr I the country was accorded a separate const.i.tution-but the Tsar found it hard to respect its terms; later, especially after 1863-4 (when Poland rebelled), attempts were made at 'Russification'. Among other measures, Russian was imposed as the language for official business; and not only the University of Warsaw but all Polish schools were required to operate exclusively in Russian. This proved unworkable, and Polish survived.

By contrast, about the same time, in 1863, a Ukrainian language law was introduced, far harsher, banning publication of all books in Ukrainian besides folklore, poetry and fiction, and was followed up in 1867 by a further ban on imports of such books from abroad; Ukrainian was prohibited on the stage too. This was more effective. Ukrainians were encouraged to see themselves as 'Little Russians'-conveniently for the Russians, since only if Ukrainians could be cla.s.sed with them would Russians make up a majority of the population in the empire.* The Minister of the Interior wrote in 1863: 'there never has been a distinct Little Russian language, and there never will be. The dialect used by the common people is Russian contaminated by Polish influence.'45 And in 1867 the rector of Moscow University could make the appeal: 'May one literary language alone cover all the lands from the Adriatic Sea and Prague to Arkhangelsk and the Pacific Ocean, and may every Slav nation irrespective of its religion adopt this language as a means of communication with the others.'46 The separate ident.i.ty of Ukrainian as a language with its own culture, its own republic within the Soviet Union and indeed, as of 1990, its own state owed much to the fact that these writs did not run over the border into Galicia, a Ukrainian-speaking enclave (south of modern Lvov) that had somehow remained outside Russia, inside the Austro-Hungarian empire. It contained 20 per cent of all Ukrainians. There Ukrainian spelling and Ukrainian expressions could flourish, without hindrance, on the printed page, to remind all Ukrainians of what they might be. Stalin ended the region's independence in 1945, but to no long-term effect. Galicia went on to become the centre of the Ukrainian nationalist movement in the 1980s, the key to Ukraine's secession from the Soviet Union.47

Russian north then south

In the north-west, Russia also managed to gain control of the princ.i.p.al Baltic-and Uralic-language areas. The Uralic areas of the north-east, mainly Karelia, had been hunting grounds of the Russians at least since Moscow had conquered the northern empire of Novgorod in 1472. The people here were indigenous, and their contact with the Russians, though started a century earlier than the other Siberians', is essentially of the same type. Fundamentally they were ignored.

Estonia and Livonia came only much later, and brought with them a fair amount of European experience from the German colonists who had occupied them in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; they were wrested from Swedish control by the great Russian moderniser Tsar Petr I ('Peter the Great') in 1721 as part of his long-standing campaign to find Russia secure access to the Baltic. Farther south, Lithuania and Latvia were gained along with Poland in 1795; and farther north, Finland was incorporated in 1809 by Aleksandr I, on terms rather favourable to the Finns, after another successful war against Sweden.

Among these areas, the penetration of Russian immigrants, and of the Russian language, was only significant in the Baltic areas, especially Estonia and Latvia. But here, perversely, the German influence remained very strong; indeed, the traditional power structure of German-speaking Ritterschaften, 'knighthoods', persisted as an intermediate level of government until the revolution in 1917, so loyal were the German Ritter to the Tsar. But the toleration of this un-Russian hold-out did begin to wane in the late nineteenth century: Russian was introduced in administration and the courts in the 1880s, and Russian-language schools were encouraged, with an attempt to make the language compulsory at all but the introductory level. In 1893 Dorpat University, in Tartu, was converted into Yuriev, a strictly Russian-language inst.i.tution. But when in 1899 the next Tsar, Nikolay II, tried similar language measures in Finland, there was a general boycott of Russian inst.i.tutions, and in 1904 the Russian governor-general was a.s.sa.s.sinated. Since Russia was at war with j.a.pan at the time, the Russians chose to play it safe, and restored the Finns' liberty to use their own language, as guaranteed in the const.i.tution that the Russians themselves had given them.

The drive behind the Russians' takeover of the Baltic regions had been their need for access to trade. This motive also played a part in the beginnings of Russia's push south, but this could hardly be represented as naked Russian aggression, since raids into their territory from the last of the Turkic khanates, the Crimean Tatars, had been persistent since the sixteenth century. Russian strength grew in the seventeenth century, until they felt that something could be done; but it was only after a further century of attempts to put down the Tatars that in 1783 Catherine the Great at last defeated and destroyed their state. In 1792, she was then able to found Russia's princ.i.p.al warm-water port, Odessa on the Black Sea. This soon became a highly Russianised area, with continuing Russian immigration, and Tatar emigration, on a ma.s.sive scale. Most of the Tatars went west and south into the Ottoman empire, which still surrounded most of the Black Sea coast.*

But in the spread of Russia's empire southward, this degree of Russian-language penetration was exceptional. The major reason for the extension of Russian in this direction was the rather curious one of an alliance with Georgia.

South of the Caucasus mountains, the two Christian peoples of Georgia and Armenia, each quite clearly marked out by their unique languages, confronted Muslim empires to their south: the Ottomans and the Persians. Catherine the Great, in the same year in which she overcame the Crimean Tatars, prevailed on King Irakli of the eastern Georgian princ.i.p.ality of Kartalina-Kakhetia to enter into the Treaty of Georgievsk, whereby Russia would guarantee Georgia's integrity against its (Muslim) enemies, in return for control of its foreign policy. Georgia was seen as a useful buffer on the edge of the Muslim south. Catherine died in 1796, but she and her successors interpreted the treaty in an extremely one-sided way: they did not aid the Georgians against the Persian invasion in 1795, but from 1801 to 1806 they proceeded to annex first Kartalina-Kakhetia, and then all the other Georgian princ.i.p.alities, uniting and so strengthening them, but as a Russian province. They also made war on Persia itself, taking in the neighbouring (Turkic-speaking) territory of Azerbaijan in 1805. Armenians too for a time became enthusiastic members of the Russian empire, especially when Russia defeated both the Persians and the Ottomans, incorporating the Armenian province of Yerevan (1828) and briefly occupying the north-eastern quarter of Anatolia (1829). This guaranteed a ma.s.sive influx of Armenians into all parts of the Caucasus, but especially the Nagorno-Karabagh area of Azerbaijan.

These interventions may seem to have been strategically ill advised, since the Caucasus range was one of the few natural borders that the Russian steppes possessed. Now Russia was gratuitously offering hostages to fortune beyond it. But Russian strategists, used to defending boundless plains, seem to have been happy only with a forward policy. General Rostislav Fadeyev commented in 1860: 'If Russia's horizons ended on the snowy summits of the Caucasus range, then the whole western half of the Asian continent would be outside our sphere of influence and, given the present impotence of Turkey and Persia, would not long wait for another master.'48 The price of these trans-Caucasian provinces was the 'sixty years of Caucasian wars', which was the t.i.tle of General Fadeyev's book. What was required was nothing less than the Russian conquest of the whole mountain range, simply in order to a.s.sure their access to the Christian south. The fighting was particularly bitter for having a religious edge: almost the whole area was (and has remained) Muslim. The conquest was achieved, but only through immense brutality, and the current struggles in Chechnya show that many resentments are still una.s.suaged 150 years later.

Russian became the language of administration and education in all these provinces-not of course of the Church or of the mosque. But in general it did not supplant the native languages of the region, which is one of the most linguistically diverse in the world. This was as true of the mountain peoples of the north as of the hyper-educated and cultivated Georgians and Armenians of the south. In their society, the Azeris too developed a literary language of their own. The Russian government, especially in the late nineteenth century, won few friends with its sporadic attempts to make the population more Russian, for example closing Armenian parish schools and replacing them with Russian schools in 1885, but then rescinding the order. Now that Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, after two centuries, have become independent nations, it can be seen that the penetration of Russian (measured by percentage of first-language speakers) remained very low. Armenia 2 per cent; Georgia 7 per cent; Azerbaijan 6 per cent.49 The story of Russia's expansion into Muslim central Asia can be briefly told, since by this time Russia had cast itself very much in the same mould as the other great powers of Europe, anxious to guarantee as high a degree of control as possible within their 'spheres of influence'. This vast area, which was always predominantly Muslim, seemed to have a different, more distant status than any other part of the empire: the Russians called its inhabitants inorodtsi, 'aliens'. The conquest of the steppe-land of Kazakhstan,* begun under Catherine the Great in the late eighteenth century, was completed in 1848: it was thus opened up to settlers, rather on the same model as the American West that was being colonised at the same time.

In principle, linguistic (and religious) toleration was a feature of the Russians' approach to this part of the empire. Whether the Tatars accepted the Christian faith (the Bible and catechism were available in Tatar in 1803) or remained with Islam, Tatar (i.e. Chagatay Turkic) was authorised as the administrative language for the steppes. In dealing with Muslim nomads, the Russians had to keep in mind that they always had the option of decamping over the border, or, more worryingly, that they might become a fifth column for the Ottomans. In general, therefore, they endeavoured to offer them an attractive option if they accepted Russian rule. Catherine II's Holy Synod Act of 1773 established a religious directorate for Muslims in Russia, the muftiyya. She also decreed transit rights for Sunni Muslims who wanted to avoid Shia Iran on their pilgrimages to Mecca. And she even financed a Muslim religious school, a madrasa, in Bukhara. Muslims attended Russia's military academies, had their own (volunteer) regiments, and even served as officers in ordinary Russian regiments-something very different from the contemporary practice of the British or French empires.50 But for all this, the steppes did become effectively Russified. It was the incidence of European settlers which really changed the linguistic picture: 20 per cent in 1887, 40 per cent in 1911, 47 per cent in 1939.51 Khrushchev's 'Virgin Lands' Policy of the 1950s added a further 1.5 million. (The number of native Russian speakers in Kazakhstan according to the 2000 Ethnologue is now 6.23 million, 38 per cent.)52 In 1854, Russia was defeated in the Crimea by its imperial peers, Britain, France and the Ottomans. Perhaps seeking some consolation, Russia immediately proceeded to the conquest of central Asia, due south of the Kazakh steppes. Colonial wars against natives without modern weapons were far easier to win, and somehow heartening for Europeans, as the opening quote from Dosteyevsky shows us.

The princ.i.p.al remaining powers in this area were the emirates of Khiva, Bukhara and Kokand. Despite the technical advantages of the incomers over the residents, the war took twenty-two years, and ended in 1876. Kokand, in the east, was annexed, but the other two emirates, Bukhara, which had contained the legendary Samarkand, and Khiva on the Caspian sh.o.r.e, were largely left as dependent powers. 'Turkestan' was created as a provincial envelope to hold these new acquisitions. Russia's main concern came to be the development of intensive cotton cultivation in the Ferghana valley, and this attracted large numbers of settlers into the area, which is part of modern Uzbekistan. Nevertheless, settlement in these areas never reached levels comparable to those of the steppes to the north: the four corresponding modern states are (from west to east) Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, and their population of 39 million embraces only 9 per cent native Russian speakers.53

The status of Russian

This completes our brief review of how Russian was spread by the Tsar's empire. It remains to consider why it never became a prestige language: why, unlike all the other imperial European languages that established themselves far from Europe, it did not come to symbolise the conquered peoples' aspirations to take part in a Westernised, globalised future. All the nineteenth-century European empires are now dissolved: but their languages are still used worldwide. Why is Russian, alone of the current top ten languages, set to lose speakers in the twenty-first century?

Four major inst.i.tutions of the Russian empire had been crucial to the spread of Russian beyond its homeland in north-eastern Europe. They were the Orthodox Church, the army, the state bureaucracy and the educated elite-usually known in Russian as the intelligentsia. All these still exist in some form, but none of them, in the early twenty-first century, seem likely to remain lively, either as dominant forces or as sources of inspiration worldwide.

The Church had early attached itself to its local language, now usually known as Old Church Slavonic, but always felt to be Russian in an appropriately reverent version. Even in the midst of major liturgical reforms, an advocate of the old ways could write to the Tsar: 'Say in good Russian "Lord have mercy on me". Leave all those Kyrie Eleisons to the Greeks: that's their language, spit on them! You are Russian, Alexey, not Greek. Speak your mother tongue and be not ashamed of it, either in church or at home!'54 Its distinctive domes rising among the huts provided the most recognisable signs of Russia as its domain spread out across Siberia; as long as there were Tsars, it legitimated them. Church schools were the main source of Russian literacy well into the eighteenth century. But it never recovered from the 'Holy Synod' reforms of Peter the Great in 1721, when he made himself supreme protector of the Church, abolishing its internal democracy from the parishes up, and so effectively making it into an arm of the state. Thereby both Tsar and Church, although mutually supportive, became quite cut off from the gra.s.s roots of Russian society. They became increasingly unable to take the risks of any popular involvement. A telling example came in the linguistic sphere when, in the aftermath of Napoleon's 1812 invasion, the reforming Tsar Alexander I favoured the establishment of an Imperial Russian Bible Society, as a branch of the British and Foreign Bible Society: a multilingual publishing initiative was planned, but the project came unstuck on the proposal to distribute the Bible in prostoye naryeciye, 'simple diction', i.e. plain Russian. The evangelicals were cast as agents of 'the Invisible Napoleon', undermining the respect due to the word of G.o.d, and in 1821 the Russian Bibles were burnt on the orders of the Holy Synod.*

Another inst.i.tution which by its nature spread the use of Russian far and wide was the army. This was distinctive among its imperial compet.i.tors for its ethnic and linguistic unity. For the Military Commission of 1762-3, 'the strength of the Army consists in, most basic of all, the existence of common language, religion, customs and blood'; a century later, Russian military commentators on the wars of 1859 and 1866 stressed the pure Russianness of their army in contrast with the Austrians' ragbag of races and languages: at the time, 90 per cent of the soldiers were from the homeland area of Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine, and most Muslims were exempt from military service.55 In a way, though, the ethnic purity of the force diminished the effect of its single language: if more non-Russians had been obliged to join up, more of them would have had to learn Russian. In fact, though, there was little scope for Russian veterans, having served for twenty-five years or more, to return to civil life after their service. They would typically end up in towns, as coachmen, domestic servants or schoolteachers.56 In this way, they were less able to seed the spread of their language than, say, the retired soldiers of ancient Rome.

The bureaucracy, the visible arm of the Tsar's government, was of course everywhere. But its influence in terms of spreading Russian discourse was less than might have been expected. Its higher levels were disproportionately (up to 20 per cent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) full of German speakers from the Baltic, ever since Peter the Great had recognised their special potential to carry through his reforms.57 And the minimal scope of its functions, mainly the gathering of poll tax and the recruitment of troops, must have limited its role and interaction in society.

Finally, there was the intelligentsia. In a sense, it was this group almost alone which put Russian on the global cultural map, with the literary efflorescence that they achieved in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Peter the Great sparked it off, with his reforms aimed at creating a secular Russia, inspired by what he had encountered in his visits to Britain and above all Germany. Mikhail Lomonosov (1711-75), the greatest scholar of this era-who had somehow managed to promote himself out of an Archangel fisherman's family-combined expertise in chemistry and linguistics, and started the task of defining a Russian literary language, one that would incorporate foreign borrowings and colloquial speech into the rather ponderous style inherited from Church Slavonic. A Russian Academy, modelled on the Academie Francaise, was established in 1783; it compiled a major dictionary in 1789-94, and defined a Russian grammar that was published in 1802. Although, as we have seen in considering the history of French, foreign influence remained strong in the Russian elite's social life, the newly educated generations of Russian authors rose to the challenge of their new language, and included Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Turgenev, to name only the most famous. They took seriously the task of defining what Russian literature could do for Russia and the world. Most famously, Turgenev and Dostoyevsky both projected their ideas back to Pushkin at the celebrations in his memory in 1880: Turgenev said that Pushkin spoke to the educated natiya, the nation that had come about through Peter's reforms, but that the Russian narod, the people, would come to awareness through learning to read him; Dostoyevsky countered that Pushkin was intrinsically-and uniquely-universal in his appeal, something that gave Russia an immense advantage: 'To become a genuine Russian means to attempt to bring reconciliation to the contradictions of Europe and to offer relief for Europe's anguish in the all-human and all-embracing Russian soul.'58 Amazingly, Russian writers did succeed in reaching an audience all over Europe, though inevitably more among Turgenev's natii than Dostoyevsky's narodi. But the realisation of their cosmic aspirations at home was limited by the very narrow base of the intelligentsia within Russia itself, almost cut off from the vast majority of their public. General literacy of the Russian population was still not above 10 per cent in the early 1880s, although it rose rapidly thereafter, approaching 30 per cent among the under-fifties by the end of the century.59 And of course, those who could read did not all have a taste for the highest, preferring adventure stories, romances and horoscopes.60 But the Russian intelligentsia made no attempt at all to make a place within their ideals for the Asian mult.i.tudes that their armed forces had exerted themselves so long, and so bloodily, to bring within the Tsar's domains. From Ivan the Terrible's conquest of Kazan to the conquests of the early nineteenth century, foreign n.o.bility had always been recognised, and accorded property rights within the Russian system, when their own territories had been subdued; no effort had ever been made actively to involve them culturally. Occasionally, intellectuals from their own traditions who managed to get a Western education would try to devise an accommodation. The best example of this is the Crimean Tatar educationist Ismail Bey Gaspirali (who adopted the name Gasprinsky). Educated first in a village madrasa (Islamic religious school), he went to St Petersburg to learn Russian, and Paris to learn French. Next spending four years in Istanbul (1871-5), he returned to Crimea with the conviction that Russia's Muslims must approach modernity through Russian, writing his first important book, Russkoye Musulmanstvo ('Russian Islam'), and long editing a journal, Terc.u.man-Perevodcik ('Interpreter' in Tatar and Russian). Gaspirali's peaceable views were not easily accepted in the Crimean Tatar community, but by 1905 his group had succeeded in founding over 350 schools, bilingual in Russian and Tatar. More revealing was the reaction from the Russians: rather than encourage this bridge-building from a potential ally, the authorities refused to allow Gaspirali to convene an all-Muslim congress; rather they worked to diminish the political partic.i.p.ation of non-Russians (as well as workers and peasants), proposing an electoral law for the second Duma ('Parliament') in 1907 with the preamble: 'The State Duma, created to strengthen the Russian state, must be Russian also in spirit.' Gaspirali made no more progress.61 What Russia always lacked, above all, was a bourgeoisie, a cla.s.s of merchants and professionals of independent status and means, which could serve as a link, both for social mobility and for flow of income, between the governing cla.s.s and the workers on the land. Large-scale trade and industrial development was rarely undertaken by Russians in the pre-revolutionary era; and the small educated cla.s.ses never built up significant guilds or professional a.s.sociations. Russia remained a polity dominated by the arbitrary, and in principle unlimited, powers of the Tsar; and the linguistic effects of this were that the Russian language nowhere developed a strong base in a community with aspirations and influence.

In short, at least until the twentieth century, Russia, although unified politically and militarily by the Tsar's government, was not unified, nor even growing together, as a language community. In the Baltic provinces to the north-east, and the Muslim lands to the south, Russian was simply not penetrating beyond the ranks of settlers, and the small number of administrators.

The Soviet experiment

This account of the spread of Russian has concentrated on the Tsar's empire, because the Russian revolution of 1917, and the Soviet era that came after it, had little net effect on the language situation. Despite early expectations, and attempts at secession in all the non-Russian areas (including Belarus and the Ukraine), the new government proved able to rea.s.sert its control almost everywhere. Finland, by dint of arms, did manage to detach itself permanently; but the other Baltic states, which had a brief period of independence in the 1920s and 1930s, found themselves back under Russian control from 1940. Other parts of the empire were all back in the fold by 1922.

One thing that did change under the Soviets was language policy. Whereas, as we saw, the policy of the Tsars, even in their last decade, was 'to strengthen the Russian State, and keep it Russian in spirit', the Soviets' official policy for the Union was almost the polar opposite. In principle, all the peoples of the Union were to be equal; there would be no official language. Furthermore, everyone had rights, not only to the use of their own languages for all purposes, but also to education in them. Russian evidently remained the only choice for communication among different parts of the Union; one thing that did not change after the revolution was the centralised control of the country as a whole.

An immediate practical policy was to build ma.s.s literacy. This process had begun under the tsars, but the continuation was triumphantly successful, as the censuses showed. In 1897, 28.4 per cent of those aged between nine and forty-nine had been able to read; in 1920, the figure went up to 44.1 per cent; by 1926 it was already 56.6 per cent; in 1939, 87.4 per cent; in 1959, 98.5 per cent; and in 1970, 99.7 per cent.62 Since this included literacy in languages other than Russian (even in 1970, only 77.5 per cent claimed to have Russian as a first or second language63), a necessary precondition of this was provision of effective writing systems for the country's languages. Russian orthography was simplified in 1918 to be more phonetic, mostly by replacing the letters i, and , which did not have a distinct p.r.o.nunciation. (They can still be seen in the pa.s.sage of Dostoyevsky that begins this section.) Other languages of the Union that had no writing tradition were given alphabets. In the 1920s, these were based mostly on Latin letters, since this alphabet had been most thoroughly developed by phoneticians. The systems often involved considerable skill by Soviet linguists in fixing a standard form among dialects, balancing considerations of majority usage with mutual intelligibility and ease of acquisition. By and large stability was achieved, creating dozens of new 'literary languages' (literaturniye yaziki). Then the nature of the political power situation began to make itself felt.

The Soviet Union had remained, like imperial Russia before it, steadfastly governed from the centre, since 1918 more specifically from Moscow. The de facto dominance of Russians, therefore-admittedly leavened by much greater social and political mobility-began to take precedence over the theoretical equality of all, especially when it became clear in the 1930s that the Soviet Union was alone in having set up a stable Marxist-oriented regime, now surrounded on all sides by enemies. Now the primacy of Russian began to seem more important, even comforting; and in the 1930s, by choice or force, all the different nationalities (except for the Baltics, Georgian, Armenian and Yiddish) came to declare in favour of switching their orthographies to some variant of the Cyrillic alphabet used for Russian. The strange fact that the boundaries of the socialist world were coincident with those of the old Russian empire was now suffused in quite a different light. As a later apologist put it: Because [Russian] is the language of the Union's most developed nation, which has guided the country through its revolutionary transformations and has won itself the love and respect of all other peoples, the Russian language is naturally being transformed into the language of communication and cooperation of all the peoples of the socialist state. This has been produced by... a replacement of previous psychological barriers by bonds of brotherly friendship, mutual trust and mutual help.64 Russian was now in a position to make major strides. Universal education was a reality, and Russian was introduced as a compulsory subject in all schools. Far more than under the tsars, it should have been possible for it to become known and used by everyone throughout the country. Somehow, though, this did not happen. As we have already noted, in 1970 there were still 22.5 per cent who claimed not to have effective command of it. Whether through the survival of traditional communities-especially in central Asia-or the preservation of resentment at Russian dominance-especially in the Baltic-many continued to contrive to live their lives without Russian.

When the Soviet Union was dissolved on 1 January 1992, all its const.i.tuent republics, including Ukraine and Belarus, split off as independent states. The prospects for Russian in education, and hence as a long-term lingua franca among the old parts of the empire, were immediately diminished.

But although the use of Russian can no longer be enforced across the extent of the old Union, it has inevitably become an important political token, with different nuances dependent on local history. Among the Baltic states, Latvia and Estonia are setting linguistic exams to force their resident Russians to prove competence in their own languages; these are unnecessary in Lithuania, where the Russian-speaking minority is so much smaller.* The Belarusian government is maintaining Russian as its working language, after a radical shift in policy in 1995, and demeaning its own national language. Republics with large Russian-speaking minorities inhabiting a single region, notably Moldova and Kazakhstan, have to be highly judicious in balancing the degree to which they can a.s.sert their majority language. In Kazakhstan Russian is recognised as a language of official communication, and it remains a standing joke how poor politicians' command of Kazakh tends to be. In central Asia, by contrast, there has been a discernible resurgence of national language use-and decline of Russian-among the political cla.s.ses who were actually among the most prolific Russian speakers before independence.65 Here, as in the Baltics, English is growing in use as a second language. Only in Siberia, Rus's oldest colony, can it be said that use of Russian is secure, and probably still gaining speakers. Sadly, this is because most of Siberia's indigenous language communities are highly endangered, their traditional way of life shattered by the presence among them of large numbers of European Russians. They are too small, too isolated, and too weakened, to be able to envisage any future but collaboration with Russians.

Everywhere, use of Russian is more significant as a sign of feelings about the Soviet past, and of aspirations for the future, than as a practical choice of means of communication with the neighbours. Russian, even after the fall of communism, remains a highly ideological language.