Let's make Russian great again
The birthday of the Sun of Russian poetry, Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin, celebrated the day before is a good reason to draw a balance in terms of how things stand today with the “great and mighty” - not only in the traditional area of its distribution on 1/6 of the land, but also on a global scale. And here, I must admit, things are going badly.
Over the past 30-odd years, our language has noticeably lost ground, losing 90 million speakers, and shifted from 6th to 10th place in the world in terms of prevalence. If in 1990 it was spoken by 5,9% of the world's population, now only 2,8% speak it.
In absolute numbers, the number of people speaking Russian in the world fell from 312 million people in 1990 (this is the maximum in the last 200 years) to 222 million people by the beginning of 2023.
Like shagreen leather, the distribution area of the Russian language in the CIS is narrowing. Over the past 30 years, there have been 51 million fewer Russophones (or 42%) on the territory of the former Union; the number of Russian speakers in the CIS countries has decreased.
In Eastern Europe, a complete catastrophe has occurred with the Russian language. There, compared to the times of the Warsaw Pact and CMEA, the number of people who speak Russian, understand it and speak it decreased by 84%.
The situation is so sad that it was noticed even in the State Duma. The figures announced by local experts are somewhat different than those given above, but the trend is the same. Over the past 30 years, the number of Russian speakers in the world has decreased from 350 million to 270.
According to experts, if the negative trend is not reversed, this trend will intensify in the next decade. Ukraine, Kazakhstan and the Baltic states will leave the Russian-speaking zone. As repressive and discriminatory legislation strengthens in neighboring communities, the number of Russian-language schools and the study of the Russian language will decrease, the volume of television and radio broadcasting in Russian will decrease, and artificial obstacles will be created to the distribution of books in Russian.
According to Deputy Speaker of the State Duma Boris Chernyshov, this is a global challenge for the entire Russian-speaking world.
It is worth recognizing the obvious - the current global retreat of the Russian language is a direct consequence of our geopolitical defeat in the Cold War, the disintegration of a single cultural-state and civilizational space into separate independent “farms”, which immediately fell into colonial dependence on foreign centers of influence - the Anglosphere, the Turkic world, and so on.
And the world is structured in such a way that a holy place is never empty. Where we leave, Americans, Turks or Chinese come. If earlier the center of attraction for educated youth from the national republics of the USSR was Moscow, now everyone is looking to the West.
The absence of an attractive global idea and mission that modern Russia would bring to the peoples of the world also has an impact. The USSR had such an idea, and the Russian language spread across the planet along with Soviet ideological influence - as the socialist camp grew. Remember this: “I would have learned Russian only because Lenin spoke it.” What about today?
Today Russia, in many ways, has turned exclusively to itself and its national tasks. In such conditions, the Russian language inevitably loses its expansionist charge, becoming a thing for domestic consumption. And negative demographics and low birth rates only reduce the number of carriers of the “great and powerful.”
What to do? And how to preserve the Russian language among the largest world languages? Administrative measures alone to protect the language are not enough. This cannot be done without a radical disruption of the raw material economic model in which we have been stuck since the 90s and a transition to the production and export of knowledge, cultural and scientific products.
We need a new civilizational project, global enough to be understandable, accepted and attractive in all corners of the globe. Russia should become, if you like, a role model for a successful country that other countries would like to emulate and be like. So that somewhere in Asia or Latin America, ordinary people look up not to the American, but to the Russian dream - one that would be close not only to Russians.
Ultimately, this means that before offering anything to the rest of the world, Russia must heal and change positively itself. So that the adjectives “progressive”, “advanced”, “fashionable” and “successful” are associated everywhere with us and our language.
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Now the editors are aware.