The Russian language collateral victim of hybrid warfare

For the past 30 years, the use of the language has been steadily decreasing outside the national borders. This contrasts with the attempted revival of ideology in the former Soviet countries (and beyond). From Moscow the accusation of an attack on 'Russian culture'. A defence that is not nostalgia for Soviet times, but to 'defend multinational Russia and dialogue between truly free countries'.

Moscow (AsiaNews) - The use of the Russian language outside national borders has been steadily decreasing for over thirty years, after the end of the Cold War. This becomes more and more a problem in the face of the revival of the ideology of Russkij Mir, which presupposes an increasingly vast union between people and peoples who feel that Russia is the country capable of taking care of moral, religious and social expectations in all continents.

Not only that, but as a consequence of the conflict in Ukraine, and other crisis situations in which Russia is involved, many areas are trying to discredit, replace and "decolonize" even many areas in which Russian is still widely spread. To this we must add the process of demographic decline in Russia itself, which has less and less possibility of spreading the presence of its fellow citizens everywhere.

As the vice-president of the State Duma, Petr Tolstoy, a descendant of the great writer of the late nineteenth century, said in recent days, "the Russian language must become the language of communication between the nations of all the former Soviet republics".

Today, in this sense, only Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan remain more attached to the common linguistic past, while Armenia, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and the other post-Soviet countries are now increasingly abandoning the use of Russian.

According to Tolstoy, "in all countries from which hundreds of thousands of migrants come, Russian language schools must be opened", renewing the integration system destroyed in the 1990s.

According to the parliamentarian, this should happen at the expense of the states from which the working migrants arrive in Russia, using part of the earnings that they send to their families back home. The Moscow government itself has implemented various initiatives to support the opening of Russian-speaking schools in Central Asia and other countries.

The Russian language is considered on par with the local one in Belarus and South Ossetia, while in Kyrgyzstan, Abkhazia and Kazakhstan it is one of the official languages, with some limitations. Russian is accepted as a usable language for some public functions in Tajikistan, Israel and even in some US states and in some regions of Australia.

The number of Russians living abroad is estimated at between 30 and 40 million, especially in Central Asian states such as Kazakhstan (5 million 800 thousand), Uzbekistan (2 million 420 thousand), United States (850 thousand), Tajikistan (580 thousand), Turkmenistan (530 thousand), Brazil (70 thousand) and Canada (60 thousand).

At the recent meeting of CIS leaders in Bishkek, President Vladimir Putin announced that an “International Association for the Russian Language” will be opened in Sochi; it will have the task of spreading Russian throughout the world "as a very important element of consolidation of the entire post-Soviet space, and an instrument of international communication".

According to the Russians, the relevance of the role of the Russian language on a global level is confirmed by the West's strategy of "global hybrid war against Russian culture", as Tolstoy states; a strategy that aims to use all the means of information space to fuel "controllable chaos" with which to achieve "lacerations in the field of linguistic security" of Russia. The algorithms of this hybrid model act in the information sphere, according to this thesis, to "control the sphere of culture and worldviews from behind the scenes".

The objective is to lead the masses to disorientation and relaxation, to the point of "destroying the traditional, moral and spiritual values of the Russian people and the peoples linked to them". These processes would be very evident in the countries involved in the current conflict such as Ukraine and Moldova, but also in the Baltics and the Caucasus and even in a Russian-friendly country such as Serbia.

The defense of the Russian language therefore serves not to return to Soviet times, but "to defend multinational Russia and dialogue between truly free countries".