Revolution: The Birth of the Soviet Union

The Soviets did not appear to use the administrative divisions of the Tsars. And instead crafted their own. The Republics of the Soviet Union now correspond quite neatly with the largest linguistic groupings in the Soviet sphere. This is early research, and needs further study.

Despite early expectations, and attempts at secession in all the non-Russian areas (including Belarus and the Ukraine), the new government proved able to reassert its control almost everywhere. Finland, by dint of arms, did manage to detach itself permanently [ed: ignoring Finlandization]; but the other Baltic states, which had a brief period of independence in the 1920s and 1930s, found themselves back under Russian control from 1940. Other parts of the empire were all back in the fold by 1922.

One thing that did change under the Soviets was language policy. Whereas, as we saw, the policy of the Tsars, even in their last decade, was 'to strengthen the Russian State, and keep it Russian in spirit', the Soviets' official policy for the Union was almost the polar opposite. In principle, all the peoples of the Union were to be equal; there would be no official language. Furthermore, everyone had equal rights, not only to use their own languages for all purposes, but also to education in them. Russian evidently remained the only choice for communication among differents parts of the Union; one thing that did not change after the revolution was the centralized control of the country as a whole.1

When the Soviet Union collapsed, it did so along the Soviet Republic borders it had set up.

The Belarussian language is spoken by a majority of people of Belarus, and by not many other people. Geographically, the closer to Russia in Belarus one gets, the large the proportion of people who speak Russian first. This is a similar pattern as found in the Ukraine . This is an example, apparently, of slow, physical linguistic drift.

Russian was taught to all students in Soviet Union schools. The closer to Russia one was, the more useful Russian would be, and the more people one might find to communicate with in an ad hoc fashion, e.g. someone comes to your neighborhood to buy something.