Was Russian Language Dominant in the Soviet Union? - Cold War DOCUMENTARY 

The Swedish school in Ukraine was located in the village of Zmiivka/Gammalsvenskby in the south of Ukraine, not far from my hometown. It was founded in the 18th century by Swedish immigrants from the territory of present-day Estonia. The Swedish king visited the village about 10 years ago.

In Bulgaria we were obliged to study Russian at school. It was really compulsory. I studied Russian myself until 1991 - twice a week...

One thing to add about Belarusian - after 1918, there were efforts to both standardize and russify Belarusian. Some standardization was perhaps needed, but what was kept removed Polish influences and added more Russian elements. So, the Belarusian spoken by the grandparents of kids growing up in 1930 might have been very different. The same happened in Russia to standardize Russian and change some of the alphabet. Four letters were eliminated from the Russian alphabet in 1918, and some of those changes were imposed on Belarusian. And in Ukraine right now, the Russian occupied areas are removing those letters from signs in Ukrainian. It seems very much like a battle to keep Ukrainian and Belarusian follow Russian. My great-grandfather switched to more of the Moscow Dialect of Russian because it was the prestige language. The attitude during that time was speaking the dialects and even Belarusian was sounding like a country bumpkin. I think there's still that view by Russians about anyone speaking Ukrainian.

My husband grew up in Poland during the 70s and 80s. You bet he had to learn Russian! Matter of fact, he got so good at Russian that he did part of his college entrance exams in Russian.

Can you make a video, of why Lithuania was the only country in USSR never visited by USSR leaders apart from Gorbachev in 1990 ?

Insightful video as always - could you do one on the history of the Soviet Republic's sub-units, e.g. Abkhazia and South Ossetia vis-à-vis Georgia, please?

Thanks very much for that episode, it was very interesting for me, an amateur linguist. Pretty much every linguistic body within the ussr was of prescriptivist nature, ie they were deciding which language forms were “valid” and which weren’t. In case of tajiki, they Arabic loan words (remember, tajiki is a Persian language, of indo European origin) were largely replaced with Russian forms. The Russification of non soviet languages (like Polish) accelerated as well

"Then Stalin happened" Sums things up quite well.

17:08 even today many Kazakhs in Kazakhstan (especially in the cities) do not speak Kazakh on a confident level 21:47 language differences continue to make rural-urban divide even stronger

As you show a lot of nice and interesting historical footage of street live in the Soviet Union including public transport, maybe you could create (a) future episode(s) about the public transport system in the Soviet Union. It has some political aspects for sure like construction of railway lines, but maybe, there might have also been laws about which mode of transport had to be used. E.g. in GDR, there was the rule that railway transport has to be regularly chosen when distance is bigger than 50 km. Maybe, there were some rules like that in SU. Thanks a lot for your videos in general ☺️

That part about the necessity of having a common language for a potential conscript army reminds me of something I heard about another state that failed to do this prior to WW1: Austria-Hungary. They had the issue of Austrian officers barely able to communicate and give orders to their soldiers who spoke either Serb, Czech, Hungarian, German, Croatian, Romanian, Slovak, Slovene, and very few spoke Austrian if at all.

Coming from rural kyrgyzstan i can say this videos accuracy is awesome

Its always Christmas when Cold War uploads!! ❤

Status on languages when Lenin remembers me what we call in Spain "Linguistic inmersion", in which classes are given in the territorial language and only the national language is given as a subject, and in Catalonia works good, as they talk Spanish as well as in the rest of the country. I don't know how is learned in the Val d'Aran territory, as they have Occitan, Catalan and Spanish as their languages

The urban/rural split is such a common trope in history. Reminds me of the German speaking cities and Slavic or Baltic speaking farmlands of East Prussia - areas which are now independent ethnostates after the expulsion of the Germans after WWII.

Ty for all your work in putting these videos together. Informative, clear and I live the video backgrounds.

The force of Russian language in the Soviet Union was not much different than force of the state language in the Western democracies. In France - Breton, Occitan and Basque are almost extinct now. In the UK there pupils were beaten by teachers for speaking Welsh or Scots Gaelic. In the US native American languages and Hawaiian are also almost extinct. There are dozens more examples

In 70s and 80s finding a ukrainian school in Kyiv was almost impossible. Vast majority of schools taught in russian, and even though ukrainian language was officially part of the curriculum it usually wasn't taught, reason being lack of teachers. Even supposedly ukrainian schools did a lot of the curriculum in russian, simply because there was no teachers who knew ukrainian well enough to teach kids. Higher education was 100% russified, ukrainian wasn't even an option in entrance exams, all the lectures were in russian and all the tasks had to be submitted in russian. It was similar in Kharkiv and most of the other cities in Eastern, Central and Southern parts of Ukraine. There is a book called "Education in Soviet Ukraine" by John Kolasky aka Іван Коляска, canadian-ukrainian communist who went to study in, well, soviet Ukraine in '63. Dude even got kicked out of Communist Party of Canada for what he wrote there.

You should do a beyond series that goes through the repercussions of the USSR break up.

I enjoy all of your videos, but this was especially interesting! The insights about their reasoning behind language changes in the different time periods was something I hadn’t heard before

13:20 Russian became compulsory in 1938 13:56 avoid translating documents 14:14 military necessity 14:36 build communism in a single state 14:54 promote unity 21:21 urban-rural split

This has a lot of parallels with how languages went into decline in other empires, continuing in newly-independent states. Notably the decline of the Irish language and native languages in Africa.

>Be someone >Soviet citizen >Finishes all my intense training to become a Spetsnaz soldier >Ready to fight for the USSR and her allies >Told a minute later after i'm finished that the USSR is no more >Officer tells me that there's no reason continue on Imagine being that soldier and learning you've wasted all of that time only to learn the country you're ready to defend and fight for is no more. Feels bad man.

This is a great series. Please do a video about Lao civil war and the American involvement, also videos about Vietnam war and South Vietnam.

I want an episode about the attitude of France toward minority languages such as breton, basque, occitanian and corsican languages. To this day, it hasn't ratified the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.

They taught Russian in school but also the language of the country and sometimes you also had an option of another language, such as German. And if you look at formal documents you would see both languages. Books were also readily available on both languages and from writers of Russian descent and the descent of the country. My mom learnt Russian, Latvian and German in school. If you were from a small village well it depends on the availability of teachers. In the west now there are plenty of schools that have more resources available to them cause they are in populated areas and plenty of schools that don't have the resources cause they are not so populated.

I am Belorussian and I approve of this message.

Brilliant video, I'd never thought about this before, but its a great point. So glad that you made this video! As one fellow RU-vidr to another, keep up the great work!

A good general video covering most of the policies, even if not touching on the Baltics and Soviet Moldova (odd ones out?:) If I may, from direct personal experience on the so-called optional study of Russian and on the Russian language in the army, as well as on one concrete language: 1. The idea that language "options" would exist and be conveyed to the parents (forget about pupils/students, they were "underage"), even if those options would be present in laws, was ab initio foreign to the USSR. No one would ever discuss any "options" with anyone, language or otherwise. Do you think my parents were given options or they'd ask, if they knew? They didn't even know of options, and my mother was a teacher herself. I will accept that I haven't asked my School Director (Principal) about it these days, though she is alive and we are still in touch. Options? That's not the best way to put it. Options existed on paper, but were possibly unknown to the educators and were never voiced, I'd say that's closer to what actually happened. P.S. on options - I had a wonderful teacher of the Russian language and enjoy its knowledge thoroughly, it makes me "richer" in, I dare say, intellectual way. 2. Only on Soviet Moldova (Soviet part of Moldova) the only Latin language "republic" in USSR - it was transitioned by USSR from Latin to Cyrillic, even if ultimately allowed to speak its language, as a constituent of USSR. In reality, "speak human!" is what my mom was told, for example... The towns did have "Middle Schools" that people suspected were mixed Russian-Moldovan (Sred'naya Russko-Moldavskaya Shkola) to promote Russian language. Suspicion is not a fact, but middle schools were not "middle", they were from the 1st-ToTheLast10th grade and full time with Russians, who never could crack one word in the local language. Imagine navigating that without being forced "by circumstances" to learn Russian. At the countryside, that wouldn't happen, as the Russians did not "migrate" (were brought in) after WWII to the rural areas. That does mean that the "Moldovan" language was the local "constituent" language on paper, but it was only spoken when Russians were absent. This is how "linguistic legislation" differs from reality. And delo-proizvodstvo (official paperwork) would shift to Russian, if a Russian speaker was there, in towns it was almost entirely in Russian, no questions asked. There is a good book in German, by Klaus Heitmann, 'Sprache und Nation in der Republik Moldova" that describes why linguistic identity was a national identity in Moldova and that explains why it was dangerous for USSR. For a good comparative analysis, with caveats, now a separate language is "dangerous" in Ukraine for Russia... By the way, as of the independence, there is no "Moldovan" language in the Moldovan schools, the "maternal" language studied according to the unified state curricula is Romanian (see how the other, "official", part of Moldova - the one with the capital city, administration, etc united with Wallachia and created Romania meanwhile, electing a Moldovan prince as the 1st king of Romania at the beginning of that process. God forbid anyone mentions that even today in the Russian media or recognizes that Moldovan is Romanian, in Kremlin driven media. Why, I wonder (well, not really)?) 3. As I commented to another user here, the issue of the Russian language in the army remained a real problem until the 80s, especially in cases of conscripts from Central Asia and Caucasus, so the argument with the "language for army" being "reasonable" was often turned upside down by the reality itself. I lived or worked or visited some parts of USSR. Nope, Russian did not ensure uniformity in the army. Hence, one can ask herself/himself if that was a mere justification in a unified and mono-thinking, mono-party political "singularity", while the Russian was conveniently present there from empire times. You know, imperialism can have many facets, who said it MUST be necessarily capitalist? (pardon my caps).

Censuses is the standard plural for English. But census is also the plural of census in Latin.

Can you do life in Central Asia under Soviet rule, Baltic States under Soviet rule, Cuban Revolution and the missile crisis, Grenda, Falkland Wars, El Salvador civil war, Crack epidemic, Korean airline got shootdown, Black Panther Party in the 60s and 70s Cuban Boatlift, and Soviet-Afghan war etc

In Kazakh SSR, Kazakhs were second-class citizens. Kazakh schools were a rare thing. My grandma remembers a moment when she was insulted for speaking Kazakh language in a bus. In Kazakhstan. After that she decided to raise her children in Kazakh only in spite of all restrictions. Speaking Kazakh language was prohibited in Russian schools (nearest Kazakh school was 250 km away).

Wow. Such a well researched video. Kudos from a Kazakh born in Kazakh SSR

In a way this actually helps to contextualize the Ukrainian (maybe) War at the moment, thank you David.

local languages are always suppressed wherever you go, like in North Africa, there was a bilingual Arab-French policy in Tunisia and denigration of Berber speakers by mocking their tattooed parents, like my grandparents.

Excellent episode. Thanks for delving into this subject which is so often ignored by monolingual English-speakins media. Diolch yn fawr iawn - hynod ddiddorol.

More than 100 ethnicities ? This is also the case in the contemporary federation.

My grandmother-in-law, born in Pskov Oblast in North-Western Russia, was eventually sent to Riga, Latvia in early 1950 (she was in her early 20s then). This was a program of "raspredeleniye" (distribution), that foresaw that the graduates of Soviet high schools would be given a limited choice of places where they were about to work. The granny wanted to go somewhere to Siberia, but at those years only borderland republics were foreseen - a politics of crawling russification at work. She was lucky to get Latvia, because the she was the best student of here year. At the time, Lavtia was re-occupied for not more than She says that initially there was a program to teach Russians Latvian. But then, as she says "Khruschev came and rolled the program out". Another story was told to me by an ethnically Russian physics professor, born in 1930 and raised in, afaik, Kyrgyzstan. At the mixed ethnic school he attended, he was to learn both Russian and the local language, but the teacher of Kyrgyz was very lack on that. He was giving every Kyrgyz a 5 = A and every Russian a 4 = B, no matter the level. The future professor never learned the language. A third story was told to me by my granddad - he brought it from Mordovia, where he's been sent to by his University. A local teacher was complaining that she had to study her local language at school, which she considered useless and would've preferred to learn French instead.

I know a lady from East Germany and she said that she had to learn Russian in school but primarily spoke German.

Imagine living in a “country” with hundreds of very different languages. We need a vid on the Soviet housing.

I dated a woman that was from Baku and she didn't speak any Azeri. She moved around a bit growing up within the Eastern Bloc and always had schooling in Russian.

I think it is an important fact that although there was a concerted effort to convert scripts of the constituent republics to a cyrillic script, the Georgians and the Armenian soviet republics were the only two that managed to hold on to their scripts throughout the process.

Very interesting as always. I think it is important to mention events of 1978 in Georgia while discussing Soviet language policies and politics. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_Georgian_demonstrations

Can you do the 1968 USSR invasion into Czechoslovakia?

As some one who's family immigrated from USSR from Modern day Uzbekistan from what I know until Stalin's Death everything about languages was normal and every nationality spoke as it wanted, After Krusov's reforms he started the "Russofication" of the USSR which meant bringing the Russian languages and culture to every corner of the USSR, thats why my grandparents speak Uzbek since they were born in the 30-40's and my parents speak mainly russian (the were born in the 60's), The Russification period happend mainly to the large citys and republics capitals, so you will see more Russian speaking people from places like Tashkent, Douchambe, Kiev, Minsk and Baku and less from the less developed villages and areas of the USSR.

I live in France and what I can say is that the USSR was a paradise for local languages compared with France. Turkey also had an anti-local languages policy. So can we say that Warsaw pact countries were less tolerant than Nato countries during cold war, as far as local languages are concerned ? Well it depends on the country but I think we can say that USSR was in fact much more tolerant than 2 big Nato countries like France and Turkey. It would be also interesting to study the USA policy towards native American languages during cold war. I think we can say the US government did not help those languages as much as the Soviet gov helped local languages.

So Stalin, who was from the Georgia Republic, decreed all citizens of the USSR, become more Russian.

Before being overly critical of Russia, let us remember that we have had several attempts at "English only" education, Even in California, they banned bilingual education for several years. Now bilingualism is encouraged, but the focus still is on English education.

To latinisation the russian language ? This could be interesting and unusual.

Language of interethnic communication ? A bill about the officialisation of this was rejected a while ago in the Republic of Moldova.

Thanks

I went to school in the 60s and 70s in Scotland and you would bet the belt for speaking Scots repeatedly, unless it was Rabbie Burns and I doubt anyone was taught in Scots Gaelic.

How about communication within the Warsaw Pact? Specifically in the military, did they have a standard set of Russian words to communicate between troops of different nationalities?

13:36 I feel like Cyrillic and Latin should get together and make a baby, instead of all this pointless switching back and forth between two equally inadequate alphabets. There is only one language the Latin alphabet actually fits neatly, that's Italian. The rest of us are forced to corrupt it a thousand different ways. Cyrillic has a marginally better inventory of letters, but is still difficult to switch to because of the conflicting use of similar letters. There must be a way to create a hybrid that is unambiguously legible to users of either, right? I mean I'm not seriously expecting anyone to actually do it, but it would make a cool background element for some sci-fi cyberpunk type TV series or movie, or even video game, I reckon.

Натисніть кнопку "дзвіночок". Нажмите на кнопку "звонок". Please press the bell button. Pulsar el boton de campana. Klingelknopf drücken, bitte. Больше языков не знаю....

Hey! Thanks for the awesome video. May I please ask you, could you provide the resources that you used for the video? I am doing a research on this topic, and would greatly appreciate your help!

Interesting! Thanks

In the last years in Belarus the policy of derussification was intensified by the sole president of the country.

I always debate to myself how much turning a multinational, multiethnic and multilinguistic empire into a more centralized nation with a shared sense of culture and history. I speak English, French, (both due to a being a mixed binational, biracial, and bicultural person) and Spanish, and I am learning Italian and Catalan as well as plan on learning Maghreb Arabic (and may try more in the future). All these languages and its mother country have interesting relations with politics and history. English became a national language in the UK through London's increasing dominance and centralization before becoming an international language throughout the former British Empire, and then it's most successful former colony, the US, through its overwhelming political, military, economic and cultural dominance since the 1950s turned it into the de facto international language of science, trade and culture. French due to France's political, military and cultural dominance over Europe for centuries become the language of the elites of Europe, be it the royal courts, the aristocrats, inteligencia, etc. In France, there was also a brutal crushing of most regional languages and dialects, with my grandmother telling me it was illegal to speak the local dialect in the schoolyard. However, this also allowed when school became mandatory in the 1880s for a greater sense of national unity. Until the 1950s, more than a century since France became secondary to Britain in the world, French was the language of elites, and still has a big rule due to its former empire. Spanish (where it's even greater) still has many regional variants in Spain, which has led to preservation of more regional cultures and a semi-federal system of power. Of course, in Latin America due to time and mixing of indigenous and Spanish cultures as well as other immigration has led to different accents and expressions. Catalan despite efforts for crushing it in the 19th and 20th century, has stayed alive and is now flourishing in the culturally Catalonian regions in Spain and France. Luckily, the EU allows even more autonomy for this culture and allows people to cross borders easily. Arabic though there are national and regional variants, has allowed a shared sense of culture throughout the Arabic world allowing science, arts, ideas and religious changes to spread easily due to a common standard international version. And the Arab language was spread in the 8th and 9th centuries.

Your hash tags seem to be off, they’re reflecting the Algerian war episode

Well, in a lot of former Soviet republics with languages very different than Russian, quite a few people understand enough Russian to help you get around and converse.

A few comments: 1) Prior to 1917, only Rabbies were required to speak Russian. The shtetls' language was Yiddish, including schools. Everyone was literate, the tradition of jewish education was going back millenia - but it had nothing to do with ideas of communism. Traditional Yiddish schools were all closed in 1930 (assuredly in Belorussia). Children had to go to new schools and learn using new textbooks in Russian, full of communistic rhetoric and "Lenin lives, Lenin will live'. 2) The "official" primary school's textbooks were only in Russian... for a very long time 3) Translating and publishing school textbooks in local languages was sooo slow, took so long time, that it was not finished even by 1989. Often, by the time the textbooks were properly translated and published, locals already lost their languages, only old people could talk it. 5) After collapse of USSR, many natives of Siberia could return to their original lifestyle, settled along rivers in traditional style, a family per every 50km of riverrun, earned their livelihood in traditional way, only occasionally coming to "civilisation" to exchange fur on ammunition and gas. But ... they use only Russian language, even in families. Their original languages are gone forever.

Excellent video 📹 Recently, 2021, I read that Kazakhstan is going to use the Latin script instead of the Cyrillic script. How strange.

I like how the host ends these video's. My compliments to all those who made this video a reality.

My Czech best friends parents all know Russian because they were forced to learn it at school Ask anyone in Czech Republic if they know Russian that was born just after WWII and they will all say NO, even though they were taught it in school.

I wonder when will come out a about the situation in Cuba in the 1950s and about Castro.

Very informative and interesting. About the video itself: you're killing me man! What are you cutting to a 3/4 angle for??? Who the heck is that guy talking to and what is he looking at?? A second ago it was the viewer! I suppose it's because your editor thinks 🤔 you are boring? Or is it to actually ruin the continuity of your presentation - because it does.

How did I never notice the little Vault Boy in the front there?

It’s important to note that Ukraine did not have *Ukrainian* language schools, even though Ukrainian orthography and literature had been in existence for quite a while…and the situation for Ukraine got worse under Stalin.

Thanks! Very good video as always. I just want to point out, that the Cyrillization in the late 30s wasn't just some kind bureaucratic process, but went hand in hand with large scale purges as the first-generation intellectuals of smaller nations of Russia had been the main promoters of these newly-made Latin alphabets and these people were now accused of nationalism and arrested, deported and murdered.

Had this Question from long time, Thank you

During the cold war, Mongolia was called the 16th Soviet country. They began to use the Russian charactern. I'm learning Mongolian. Now, many people suggest that I learn the teaching materials of Russian characters first, because it's more scientific. The Russians have studied Mongolian and made new learning rules. At the end of each teaching video, the teacher will rewrite the words with Russian charactern . I found that Russian charactern are indeed easy to remember. But my purpose is to study ancient Chinese history. Mongolian charactern and their ancestors play an important role in this，If I learn Mongolian through Russian character ，I can't succeed

Every large country did pretty much the same thing to promote the major languages at the cost of other minority languages. The US also drove its French-speaking communities to extinction in the early 1900s.

Can u do a asian nations situations in cold war era and the proxy wars of us and ussr

And now in Belarus everyone speaks only Russian.

My mother had to study Russian at school in the 1950s, in highschool and I think also university, but did not remember a word of it. Fortunately, I studied French and English , but my peers that studied Russian could barely speak it, although English was a piece of cake to learn. I am Romanian. I am not saying there are no Romanians that can speak Russian well, just that many of us were not interested in learning it, and given a choice would rather study English.

Thank you for another very informative episode. As far as the plural form of census goes, I'm leaning toward censuses, but I don't know myself lol. God be with you out there everybody. ✝️ :)

The problem, that most peasants in Russian before revolution, had no education. Even my grandmother that was born in an intelligent family haf only four classes. As usual this classes were or at home or at a church school . And the alphabet that for example have most Asian republics was russian , because they even had no at their own ,or it was almost forgotten. The exception were Baltic rebublics and few Caucasian where was ancient culture and elite .

As Latinisation of the Turkic languages has been brought up, in the post-Soviet period (1991 on), only two of the fifteen former Soviet republics have done away with their Cyrillic alphabet in favor of the Latin alphabet: Moldova (given that the Bessarabian territory was a part of Romania prior to WW2/Great Patriotic War; some in both Romania and Moldova want the latter be formerly reunited with Romania), and Kazakhstan (which like Turkey under Kemal Attaturk, decided against Arabic script as the Turkic languages are very rich in vowels sounds; Arabic is constant rich, thus the Arabic script was found wanting by Attaturk and thus went to adapting the Latin alphabet for use with the Turkish language).

when will you conclude the cliffhanger yall left on the videos on operation gladio, its been 8 months

Video idea: how was race was viewed in the USSR?

So fascinating and yet sad for those in the Soviet Union who spoke other languages and slowly lost their identity. One fun fact that's somewhat related to this. The teacher I had for biology and chemistry in high school was from Bulgaria. While it obviously wasn't a part of the Soviet Union, he could speak both Bulgarian and Russian. Idk if it was because he had Russian roots of some sort, he learned Russian out of interest, or if Russian was required or somewhat required for those living in the Soviet bloc.

Language seems to be used for nationalism in places like Ukraine or Kazakhstan but given that most of them speak to seem Russian in the big cities and whenever I encounter them on RU-vid or while travelling, I think it must have become the dominant language throughout most of the USSR.

I think the Soviet government did deliberately blurred the multi-nationalist nature of the country to the outside world. They loved the outside world thinking the country as ‘Russia’. For example I did observed some 1930s / 50s Intourist posters showing some idealized regional scenes of Odessa Ukraine and Batumi Georgia etc, and the captions at the bottom of the posters say ‘USSR (Russia)’.

Yes

What Stalin did for Russification is strange given he was himself Georgian.

Ok I've told my comrades to press the bell button in Cryllic

"And then Stalin happened" - that's an understatment!

I hear you say teaching in Burjat and Karelian languages stopped in 1958. What was the purpose of maintaining ‘autonomous’ republics inside the Russian ‘Federation’ for those ethnic group's after teaching in their languages ceased?

I’m a coin collector. I would love a history of Soviet coinage and its political message.

Then Stalin Happened. That sums up the final result of socialism.

You could take a look at the Soviet Esperanto movement. How it went from being sort of supported but not really to completely banned and its leaders shot in the Great purge.

In Baltic countries, even today there is a widespread idea that Russian has untranslatable expressions and is thus more suitable to express certain ideas. This might be true, but this describes every living language on the Earth. Usually, when you ask those people for an example, they give something that is pretty easily translatable. When you give them the translation, they say something like "But it’s still not the same thing, it sounds better / more precise in Russian". Their perception is skewed by emotions, essentially.

Strange thing that some of national minorities even resisted introduction of communication in their native languages. For instance some 1/3 of Byelorussians didn't speak Belorussian in early 1920-ies and some Kuban Cossack were against learning standardized Ukrainian since it was very different from their own local dialect. Not to mention that local nationalism in former Russian Empire wasn't prominent, gaining very little seats in Duma in 1905. There was something called "rossiisky" identity which doesn't really mean identifying with Russian as nation or language (russky), rather to the state. RSFR even had rossiisky in it's name rather than Russian, and RSFR for some time had less national institution and autonomy compared to other republics (until 1930 that is). This identity lead to some German interrogators confused when questioning Ukrainian and other defectors in 1941, because some of them mention their hopes of Germans liberating Russia.

Considering the current geopolitical climate in eastern europe would it not be more prudent to examine whether there are ANY laws in Russia which are enforced without bias afforded by comrade Pukin, language or otherwise. First law that springs to mind.....Don't invade your neighbour.....you may like his lawn but you cant park your tank on it.

. More than 100 nations? More like 500.

Had a 1 quarter UW course on the many ethnicities in USSR 1988 taught by a Jewish anthropology prof from Leningrad

14:43 - 14:45 nice contradiction

Thank you for the video. It's very interesting to see esome ideas from the different point of view that I was taught at school and then, in college. The point is that I have been born and raised in Russian-originated family in Lithuanian SSR. As I am child of early 1980s, I can still remember some things in Lithuania of those times. As far as I remember, in city of Klaipeda (formerly, Memel) there hasn't been such thing as language discrimination before 1991. Bilingual signs, people of both Lithuanian and Russian origins used to work together. Communication language of staff has been usually selected as per origin of national majority in the staff. So, for example, my parents didn't have to speak lithuanian at all, as majority of their colleagues were Russian-speakers. But my aunt used to work among staff where the majority were of Lithuanian origin, so even during the USSR time she spoke Lithuanian very good. Some areas in Lithuania, such as Kaunas or Panevezys were 100% Lithuanian speaking. One ex-military officer that used to serve next to Kaunas told me, that he had to learn the local language because local people didn't want to speak or learn Russian language. They would not sell you anything in a shop or any food-serving facility if you didn't speak any Lithuanian :)

i like david !