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CHAPTER 3 CREATING SOVIET PEOPLE: THE MEANINGS OF ALPHABETS After an extraordinary concert the klezmer band Simkha gave at Kazan’s House of Actors , Nur apa, a Tatar-speaker, introduced me to the Yiddish-speaking leader of the mostly Jewish band. She presented him as Leonid Dawidovich, pronouncing the [v] in his patronymic like a [w], as the letter would be pronounced in Tatar. He responded, “I’m actually Leonid Davidovich—it was Russians who made it [w].” Nur apa nodded gravely with deep-seated recognition. Field notes, Kazan, 25 April 2000 Neither of the participants in this exchange spoke Russian as a native language . Yet, they both took for granted that formally introducing the band’s leader required following the Russian convention of addressing a person by first name and a patronymic constructed according to Russian morphology. Rather than question the appropriateness of using a Russian convention, the speakers focused on the pronunciation of a particular letter and treated that as the imposition of Russian cultural dominance. This chapter begins to address the question of why people in the former Soviet Union think that language equals culture. It describes how Soviet nationalities policies made a direct link between languages, groups of people, and resource allocation based upon a cultural evolutionary model. It explores the relationships between the languages ethnic groups speak and the alphabets used for writing those languages. It demonstrates the ways intellectuals and politicians communicate ideas about cultural evolution obliquely using alphabets and how perilous these communications can be.1 Finally, it reveals that alphabets may be more dangerous today than they were during the Soviet Union’s formative period. In 1999, the Tatarstan government adopted a Latin-based alphabet for Tatar language, which had been written in Russian-based Cyrillic letters since 1938. Schoolchildren began learning the new alphabet in 2000. In 2002, the Russian Duma outlawed that alphabet as a threat to national security and mandated that all official languages of the Russian Federation be written in Cyrillic. That same year, Tatarstan stopped teaching schoolchildren the new Latin alphabet. Then, in 2004, the Tatarstan government 110 Nation, Language, Islam took its case to Russia’s Constitutional Court, which threw the suit out. As of 2011, the status of Tatar’s Latin alphabet remains in flux. When I visited Kazan in 2006, someone gave me a Tatar book in the new alphabet and, when I asked whether printing the book wasn’t illegal, insisted that it was okay because private—not government—money funded its publication . Many Tatar online publications continue to use Latin instead of Cyrillic , but by doing so they are breaking the law and potentially putting themselves at risk of prosecution. The situation seems absurd. What does it matter to the Russian authorities what letters Tatars use to write their own language? A great deal, it turns out. In order to understand why it matters to Tatars and Russians alike what alphabet Tatar is written in, it is necessary to know the trajectory of language development in the Soviet Union during the first decades of the country’s existence. While the Soviet central government engaged in great efforts to promote the country’s various languages in the 1920s as part of a campaign to support the advancement of hundreds of non-Russian minority groups, after the mid-1930s, the general trend shifted to one of persistently promoting Russian language above all others.2 Historically, this trajectory parallels one according to which Russian national culture became increasingly the standard against which non-Russian cultures’ evolutionary development was measured. That is, adopting Russian’s Cyrillic alphabet as a model for the alphabets of the Soviet Union’s other languages illustrates one way in which the Soviet state forced non-Russians to live with Russian linguistic and cultural hegemony. Since the 1920s, five different orthographic systems—some of which were modifications to already-existing alphabets—have represented Tatar language. The three significant changes were from Arabic script to a Latin alphabet in 1926, from Latin to Cyrillic in 1938, and the post-Soviet efforts to re-implement a “perfected” Latin script. Each change from one orthographic system to the next has been spurred by fundamental ideological transformations in the political order of the region. For Tatars and other non-Russians, attitudes about orthography have served as significant indicators of integration into and disaggregation from the Russian-run state, while Russians’ attitudes towards different alphabets indicate fluctuations in the strength of collective xenophobia. My discussion of Soviet...

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