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De-Russification Movement in Irad

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The de-Russification movement in Irad is the set of policies and social changes, beginning in the late Soviet period, that reduced the place of the Russian language and of Russian and Soviet names in Iradi public life. Its main measures were the removal of Russian's official status in 1992 and the return to a Latin alphabet. Cities, streets and institutions were renamed, most prominently Kobozev, which became Nurzhan in September 1992, and in the tribal regions Russian-style surnames gave way to Turkic patronymics.[1][2] The process has been uneven. In the cities of the Irad Special Economic Zone (ISEZ), Russian remains the de facto lingua franca and most people keep Russian-style surnames, while in the Autonomous Tribal Regions (ATR) Iradi is the only language of public life and patronymics are almost universal.

Background

In the early years of the Iradi Soviet Socialist Republic, the Soviet policy of nativization (korenizatsiia) standardized the Iradi language in a Latin alphabet (1928) and promoted Iradi cadres. The planned capital on the lower Chu was named Kobozev in 1927, after the Bolshevik official Pyotr Kobozev. By 1937 nativization had been abandoned. Schools switched to Russian-only teaching, Iradi was suppressed in print, and the 1941 Cyrillic Mandate imposed the Cyrillic alphabet.[3] Soviet registration practice also gave most Iradis Russian-style surnames, formed by adding -ov or -ev (feminine -ova, -eva) to a father's or grandfather's name. Under perestroika in the late 1980s, writers and teachers campaigned for the wider use of Iradi, and the republic's leadership raised its status in education and publishing.

Measures

Language and script (1992–1997)

After the First Iradi Civil War of 1992, the territorial arrangement made Iradi and English the official languages, and Russian lost its official status. The Provisional Government and the territorial administration restored a Latin alphabet in 1992. The Territorial Legislature then adopted the 1995 Latin Orthography Revision, which fixed the present 32-letter alphabet. The Language and Education Reform Act of 1997 made the Latin script compulsory in public administration and instruction in Iradi and English compulsory in public schools, with Russian reduced to an optional foreign language.[2] In the cities, English rather than Iradi largely replaced Russian as the language of advancement, and some scholars therefore describe the reforms as Anglicization as much as de-Russification.[5]

Place names (1992–1993)

In September 1992, in a speech in the city, Provisional President Amanbek Alimbekov renamed Kobozev as Nurzhan. The name is a Kipchak Turkic word meaning "light of life", and Alimbekov described the city as a "guiding light of industry" that would lead Irad to a new dawn after the ruin of the civil war.[3] The Toponymic Heritage Statute, passed by the interim Territorial Legislature in 1993, confirmed the renaming and restored Turkic and Sogdian names to streets, districts and reservoirs. In Nurzhan, for example, Lenin Prospect became Azatlık ("Freedom") Prospect. Soviet-era place names have since been treated as obsolete in official use, and monuments to Soviet officials were removed from central squares in the 1990s.[1]

Personal names

Naming conventions changed along the line between town and countryside, a division later fixed by the 2007 partition (see Iradi name):[4]

  • Tribal patronymics. From the 1990s, rural and tribal families dropped Russian-style surnames in favor of the Turkic patronymic pattern: a given name followed by the father's name and uulu ("son of") or kyzy ("daughter of"). The Tanıp chief Bektur Zhumabek uulu, recorded in Soviet documents as Bektur Zhumabekov, and his sister Klara Zhumabek kyzy are examples. In the ATR the patronymic form is now almost universal.
  • Urban surnames. In the cities most people kept surnames in -ov, -ev or -ova, partly because property, education and employment records had been issued in those forms. The family of Governor Erlan Toktarov and the oil executive Kamran Bekzatov are examples. Registry data analyzed in 2019 showed that more than 90 percent of adults in the three cities carried such surnames.
  • Shortened surnames. Since the territorial period some younger urban professionals have dropped the Russian suffix. Lieutenant Governor Aidar Maksat, registered at birth as Maksatov, has used the shortened form since his student years.

Generational dynamics

Attitudes to de-Russification differ sharply by age. Older urban Iradis educated in Russian, the self-described "Russos", have often viewed the reforms with skepticism (see Russos of Nurzhan). The Urban Iradi Millennials grew up in Russian-speaking homes but were schooled in English and Iradi after 1992. Urban young people born since the late 1990s have embraced Iradi as a marker of identity (see Iradi language revival). In a 2022 survey of urban residents by Talas State University, Russian was the main home language of 61 percent of respondents over 60 but of 29 percent of those aged 18 to 25.[5]

Debate

Supporters of the reforms regard them as the restoration of an identity suppressed under Soviet rule, and note that they were carried out without large-scale violence between communities. Critics among Russian speakers point to language requirements in the civil service, the closure of Russian-medium public schools and the emigration of many ethnic Russians during the 1990s.[6] The Russian share of the population fell from about 11 percent in the 1989 Soviet census to 4 percent in the official 2018 count. Kamran Bekzatov and other Russo figures call for Russian to be restored as an official language, a proposal the Democratic Party of Irad has rejected. In the tribal regions, some leaders argue that the urban elite's retention of Russian surnames shows how shallow the change has been in the ISEZ.[4]

References

  1. ^ Territorial Legislature of Irad (1993). Toponymic Heritage Statute. Territorial Gazette, Talas.
  2. ^ Journal of Central Asian Linguistics (2022). 'Orthographic Reform and Toponymic Restoration in Irad.' Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 88–104.
  3. ^ State Archives of Irad (Talas), Fond 108: Provisional Presidential Papers of Amanbek Alimbekov (1992).
  4. ^ Central Asian Demographic Review (2019). 'Surnames and Patronymics in Post-Soviet Irad.' Vol. 12, pp. 41–60.
  5. ^ Talas State University, Institute of Sociology (2022). Urban Language Survey: Talas, Nurzhan and Iyık Janyl. Talas State University Press.
  6. ^ Eurasian Political Quarterly (2024). 'The Petroleum Oligarchy: Kamran Bekzatov and the Russo Faction.' Vol. 31, Iss. 2, pp. 88–104.
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