Casablanca
or
A White Yurt for the Russian Language
On 21 September 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a “partial mobilization” of military reservists in Russia. The decision was made a day after the announcement of referenda on the annexation of the Donbas and Luhansk territories and the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions.
That night, the life plans of several hundred thousand Russian families were changed. “Relocation” (a word borrowed from the English) got underway for those not wanting to be conscripted and sent to the Russian-Ukrainian front or, as the Russian propaganda prefers to call it, to “the line of contact.”
Why am I even paying attention to the Russians’ term relokacia? Here in Kazakhstan, this side of the border with Russia, the country’s ancient nomadic culture is mounting significant effort to get back to its roots, symbolically at least. For a nomad, movement, the ability to move, to not be permanently attached to a finite area, is one of life’s highest values. In today’s Kazakhstan, this concept turns metaphorical. Krzysztof Czyźewski’s concept of borderland as an area crisscrossed by internal borders where the inhabitants speak different languages, pray in different temples, have different national identities is an illustration of the present situation of the Kazakhstani society as well.[1]
So, relocation. Georgia, Armenia, Turkey, Mongolia even: Mikhail Bulgakov’s drama Бег (Flight) is a story about Russian White Army officers who found themselves emigrants on the streets of the ancient city of Istanbul. Today, the soldiers and officers who had left Russia have lost a “quiet civil war” again, much like after 1917. More than 200,000 Russian men crossed the Kazakhstani border during the week following the 21st of September 2022. I say, “more than,” because Russians began to appear in Kazakhstan immediately after the start of the war in Ukraine, in February 2022 already. They are easy to recognize on the street: a backpack always on their shoulders, but not the kind locals occasionally carry —rather, a backpack that looks like a parachute. Perhaps a metaphor for their hope of one day returning home.
According to the Russian linguist Elena Zemskaya, there were four waves of migration in 20th century Russian history, the previous one being in the 1990s and Kazakhstan’s most recent period is an important part of this history. First, starting in 1935, there was the internal deportation of “unreliable” national minorities by the Stalin regime: Poles, Germans, Koreans, and the nations of the Caucasus. Next came the evacuation of scientists and creative intelligentsia during the Second World War. Today’s wave stirs different opinions in the Kazakhstani society: there were those who met the Russians with food and hot tea as soon as they crossed the border control; and there were those ready to drive them to the nearest city--taxi drivers with new, higher, tariffs.
Many of those welcoming the new arrivals wondered at the same time what thoughts these people smuggled in within their heads. Might there be a streak of acceptance for what their country’s government is doing right now? In the voice of one of those volunteers organizing temporary accommodation for the relocatees in their own homes: “the more men we take in, the fewer of them will be at the front, fighting against Ukraine.”
For the multi-ethnic state Kazakhstani society, relocatees from Russia turned out to be a mirror in which we see ourselves as a formed nation. For the last 30 years, we have been absorbing both the positive and the negative qualities of each other. This makes us who we are - Kazakhstanis.
One might think that the border with Russia runs somewhere in the north of Kazakhstan, but this isn’t exactly true. For the Russian border also exists in the minds of some Kazakhstani citizens--the minds of those locked in Russia’s information field, exposed to propaganda. The content of the Russian TV channels is more popular than local material, referring to advertisement price list, for instance; in fact, the dominance of Russian media has been a fact in Kazakhstan for the last 30 years. For the Soviet generation, people who lost everything with the collapse of the USSR, Putin’s propaganda hook of the rebuilding of the Soviet empire is a promise that works well here. And the community of those that had left Russia because of the anti-war position, including many Russian writers, has been reflecting on this problem.
Here, in the Polish city of Olsztyn (where I work), I spoke recently with the Russian journalist Nina who, having divorced her husband, a supporter of the Putin regime, came to Poland with her child.
I have also spoken with Natalya, a Ukrainian refugee who left the occupied territory near Sumy after a machine gun was pointed at her daughter. Her husband is fighting for the independence of Ukraine. In the middle of our meeting, she got a call from him, and her voice changed. She said that he also said hello to me. She smiled.
With both women, Nina and Natalia, I communicated in the Russian language.
Despite her open political stance against the war, which forced her to quit her job, leave Russia and travel to Poland with her son, Nina says that, because of her Russian citizenship, she is experiencing certain bureaucratic difficulties. At the same time, the support of Polish friends helps her to not give up. We talk during her meeting at the “Masha” language center: right as the war began, people started coming here to hear from visiting Russians about what was happening in Russia.
The audience is seated. Nina’s boy helps set up the projector. After a few months at the local school, he already speaks Polish quite well. Will this language be of use to him if Nina is not given the opportunity to stay in the country? Also here is Natalia's daughter Zlata, who needed to see a psychologist: her mother had mentioned that hearing the sound of a plane flying over Olsztyn, Zlata would lie down on the pavement. Now she is on the floor, playing. The two children are almost the same age.
The following day, we drove four hours to Krasnogruda from Warsaw: the day before the news broke about a missile incident on Polish territory; in other, better, news, another rocket was launched to the moon, for first time since the Cold War period. I prefer news in Polish. Following local news is a long-time habit.
In Krasnogruda, where we found ourselves together later in the evening and will be staying for the next four days, we met up with Ukrainian colleagues - poets and now not only poets, but also activists, for in Ukraine it is now impossible to remain just a poet or a writer. At formal and informal meetings, we communicate in English…
Later I will be in Warsaw: on buses and trams, I will constantly be hearing Russian and Ukrainian from people wearing other people's donated jackets and carrying their children in other people's donated strollers. As a researcher in sociolinguistics, I have for the past year been collecting information about what is happening in Facebook social media groups of Ukrainian refugees in Poland. When the number of group members skyrocketed in February 2022, it became clear to me that these pages are mainly for Ukrainian refugees. People are posting ads to help set up practical daily life in Poland, another country, even a very hospitable one. Many problems need to be solved in a short period of time. Members of these groups use both the Ukrainian and the Russian language, just as was the case in Ukraine before the war.[2]
While I am with all my heart with Ukraine, it seems to me that sooner or later Ukraine will have to find a way to accommodate the Russian language. For a section of this country’s population are native speakers of Russian, a language “belonging” to another nation; the people themselves are Ukrainians.
This situation with Russian speaking Ukrainian refugees is also changing the Poles’ perception of the Russian language. One way or another, it becomes a marker of this conflict, spoken as it is by both Russians and Ukrainians. One of my students in Olsztyn, when asked why he studies Russian, answered in the questionnaire that the Russian language and culture have a special kind of sadness.
My flight from Warsaw back to Almaty goes through Frankfurt: during the long trip I’m trying to concentrate on the offerings of the entertainment system, and eventually get stuck on Casablanca once again.
Russian aggression against Ukraine caught Kazakhstan in the midst of its decolonization process. The preservation of the Russian language was one official justification of that invasion in the Russian propaganda. But the invasion just catalyzed the process of destruction of the concept of russkiy mir— the “Russian World.”
The classical post-colonial discourse assumes, first of all, that the colonized, the colonizers, and their descendants seek the possibility of reconciliation within the space of historical memory, for instance by giving voice to all victims, and by making public all the facts of violence. The case of Kazakhstan has an important feature: one part of the population had found itself here not by choice but as a result of deportations of nationals from different parts of the USSR conceived and carried out between the 1930s and late 1940s by the Stalin regime. The Kazakhstani society’s attitude to this legacy is ambiguous and is related to the new community formed in the USSR - the Soviet people. Not much time has passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union. There is no particular day when the world changed irreversibly and when people born and raised in the USSR accepted that change overnight.
At the core of the Kazakhstani national idea lies the nomadic culture of the Kazakhs. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Soviets tried to change this culture violently. As is well known, that intervention led to this region’s version of Ukraine’s Holodomor, the Great Famine. A third of the Kazakh population died or emigrated; the rest survived, traumatized. In its wake, the Soviet regime’s massive deportations to Kazakhstan of various nationals completely changed the Kazakh Federal Republic’s demographics. According to a 1989 statistic, before the collapse of the USSR, ethnic Kazakhs made up only half of its population.
The current language situation is also part of the country's history. Russian language is our colonial heritage. It was forced on us at the cost of tremendous suffering, and we have the right to use it however we want.
Neither Russia nor any other state has a monopoly on the Russian language. A language simply cannot be monopolized, it is a living, constantly evolving materia. The current view of sociolinguists is that the Russian language belongs to the family of polycentric languages, and as such has several centers of development, besides Kazakhstan for instance also Belarus, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan.
Kazakhstan has its own educational system with programs in Russian; Russian-language textbooks are written and published; the concept of trilingualism, that is, the study of Kazakh, Russian, and English in the institutions of compulsory education has been introduced. The Russian language has its official status in Kazakhstan. The population of Kazakhstan is 19 million: over 70 % are ethnic Kazakhs, almost all of them declare to speak state Kazakh language fluently. 30% of population are representatives of other ethnic groups. Over 90% of the population speaks and understands Russian language, but only 25% of non-Kazakh ethnic population declares itself to have adequate knowledge of the Kazakh language. For them, Russian as intercommunication language is critical.
I would lie if I said that the Russian aggression didn’t force the drive to use Kazakh language in more discourses, but this process involves all ethnical groups. Kazakh language is becoming in greater demand, yet Kazakhstan remains a sustainable area for Russian language.
That situation is sustainable, too, for the Russians who have crossed the Kazakh border in the wake of Russia’s mobilization. Most of them have now already left for third countries but there are those who remain are trying to learn Kazakhstani. In Kazakhstan, we use many borrowings from Kazakh language, and even have our own palyanica, a “test word” to ascertain that one is a local speaker. The word “tenge” (the name of the country’s currency unit) is a marker of Kazakhstani regional variant of Russian, and its mispronunciation automatically indicates your status as a foreigner— as a Russian, who may be the part of the “Russian World” — itself a concept that can’t exist anymore as the centralized power ruling the post-Soviet colonies.
A new model of political union of the countries where Russian language is in use is needed, perhaps along the lines of Francophonie. Drawing on the work of the cultural historian Ilya Kukulin,[3] only a dialogue of equal cultures that use the Russian language seems possible. A new, completely decentralized organization is needed. Then it will be possible to re-establish academic ties and to rebuild cultural ones. The current situation and its development embody the end of centralization, including of the Russian language.
Today, when Russia is trying to live the reality of the Russian World and wants all of us to live in this reality so as to serve the interests of its empire, this sounds like utopia.
There is even a public discussion about the disappearance of the Russian language. What I am certain of is that after the peremoga, the situation of the Russian language will need to be completely revised—but the process should get underway now.
For this is not only an issue in post-Soviet countries. In parent chats in Scotland, teachers have to explain that students speaking with a Russian accent have nothing to do with Russia's aggression.
We thus have to revise status of Russian language here, in Kazakhstan, where I’m writing this essay. Today Kazakhstan is a space of multiple, parallel, realities—hence the Casablanca analogy. With people stuck in transit both physically and metaphorically, Kazakhstan has become a borderline for the Russian language, and a potential platform for re-thinking Russian as polycentric language.
Notes:
1. Krzysztof Czyżewski, “Line of Return. Practicing ‘The Borderland’ in Dialogue with Czesław Miłosz.” Michigan Quarterly Review, Fall 2007.
2. See Yuriy Serebriansky, “Language Distinctions in the Polish Segment of Facebook – Russophone Groups. forthcoming in Przegląd Wschodnioeuropejski, 06/2024. Eastern Europe Research Centre University of Warmia and Mazury, Olsztyn. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4585-0725
3. Ilya Kukulin, “Diary Excerpts. Marginalia (Bertolt Brecht’s Flüchtlingsgespräche, ‘Refugee Conversations’), Translated from the Russian by Prokhor Alexandrov. ROAR, # 1, April 2022, https://roar-review.com/ROAR-First-Issue-9b481dcf93ce4ff696ec537cad10f3a9 (accessed 2/23/23).
Yuriy SEREBRIANSKY is a Kazakhstani author of Polish origin, literary translator, and cultural researcher. His prose, poetry, and non-fiction have appeared in Kazakh, Russian, Polish, Swiss and American literary journals, and have been widely translated. In 2010 and 2014, he received the Russkaya Premia award for his novels Дорожная пастораль and Пражаки; he is currently Editor-in-Chief of the Kazakhstani Polish diaspora magazine Ałmatyński Kurier Polonijny, and the prose editor of Literatura. A member of Kazakh PEN and Polish Literary Translators Association, he directs the Almaty Writing Residency. Yuriyserebriansky.com