Buriat language policy, 19th c.-1928: A case study in Tsarist and Soviet nationality practices

One way of approaching the study of Tsarist and Soviet nationality practices is to investigate official treatment of non-Russian languages. "Buriat Language Policy, 19thc.-1928" examines Tsarist and Soviet policies towards the language of the Buriats--a Mongol-speaking people numbering around 400,000 who inhabit Siberia's Lake Baikal region--between the early 1800s and the first signs of waning Bolshevik support for Buriat cultural autonomy at the end of 1928. (Prior to the nineteenth century, the Tsarist regime was indifferent to native-tongue issues among the Buriats.) Here, I emphasize several key aspects of language policy: education, publishing, writing systems, and the use of the native language in official institutions and the workplace. Developments in these areas were crucial for the expansion of the Buriat language's social roles. The autocracy rarely encouraged the use of Buriat and Written Mongolian (the Buriats' literary tongue) in these spheres and often took measures to discourage it. Although the February revolution removed official barriers to linguistic survival and development, it also ushered in a destructive era of civil conflict that hampered Buriat efforts to expand the use of their language. The Bolsheviks vowed to promote the use of minority tongues, but the need to secure victory in the Civil War and to cope with the devastation left in its wake initially occupied their energies and resources. Beginning from the creation of the Buriat-Mongol ASSR in 1923, the Bolshevik regime, in contrast to the autocracy and the liberal but short-lived Provisional Government, actively attempted to put Buriat on an equal footing with Russian by encouraging the use of Buriat in workplaces, official institutions, schools, and publishing. These efforts, which resulted in modest but encouraging successes by the end of the 1920s, strongly suggested that the Bolshevik leadership would continue to encourage the use of Buriat in public life. But the abrupt surfacing of politically-motivated attacks on Written Mongolian by Party officials in December 1928 presaged an end to the regime's initial encouragement of Buriat linguistic particularism. Bolshevik multiculturalism was not to survive the Stalinist "Great Retreat" from the cultural pluralism and experimentation of the NEP era.