Soviet Linguistics - An annotated bibliography for accessible English-language resources - Ordered thematically
Most papers may be found here.
When the Bolsheviks finally came to power in 1921, they began to make language policy for the hundreds of official and minority languages across the country. This brief and non-exhaustive bibliography will look at particular language policies, how linguistics and academics changed, the reaction to Western Indo-European-obsessed bourgeois linguistics, and the quest for a "Soviet linguistics."
These are all accessible texts and all are English-language.
This area is interesting for the following reasons: it was a giant landmass that the Bolshevik's inherited; it's the birth of sociolinguistics in the Soviet Union; the Bolsheviks had to fight a civil war on top of ending their part in WWI with the Brest-Litovsk Treaty; the Muslim Turkic-world comprised much of central Asia with its own cultures; ~130 different languages, many with no standard written form.
Comrie, B. (1981). The languages of the Soviet Union. Cambridge England: Cambridge University Press.
Paper here
Gloveli, G. D. (1991). 'Socialism of science' versus 'socialism of feelings': Bogdanov and Lunacharsky. Studies in Soviet Thought, 42(1), 29–55. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00818646
Paper here
This paper is a great introduction to socialist philosophy and praxis a la two very different personalities in Bogdanov (science) and Lunacharksy (feelings). Firstly, it's good to note that this volume in Studies in Soviet Thought came out in July 1991 and the Soviet Union dissolved on December 26, 1991. The journal would publish for another year until November 1992, but then continued as Studies in East European Thought in June 1993 with the issue's theme being "Marxism and the Socialist Idea in Russia Today." So this article was written and published in the few remaining twilight days of the Soviet Union and it begins with "In the USSR at present the discipline of history is undergoing a profound crisis which involves a radical reappraisal of values."
Indeed! It's a critical and valuable look at Bogdanov and Lunacharsky's legacy in light of fresh ways of finally talking about War Communism, all of it darkened by the question of who sowed the seeds that lead to Stalinism.
The crux and summation of the paper rests on a letter from Bogdanov to Lunacharksy and hoping to draw him away from Lenin ("a crude chess player") and Trotsky ("a conceited actor"), and really militarism in general. Bogdanov seeks to create a real proletarian culture where it is very clear to determine which is proletarian culture and which is not. "For me, comradely relations are fundamental to the new culture." The militarism of Lenin and Trotsky have broken away from the "logic of socialism in the name of the logic of war communism." Also: "The workers'-soldiers' party is objectively only a soldiers' party. Thus so, Gloveli notes that Lunacharksy was "drawn into the process of construction of the Stalinist dictatorship" and this letter was Bogdanov's attempt to save his comrade, despite knowing that it was likely too late. Although this whole paper veers away from linguistics, it reminds us to step back and look at proletarian culture, what it could have been, and the vast gap between Marxist socialism ("the logic of the factory") and War Communism ("the logic of the barracks").
Grenoble, L. A. (2003). Language policy in the soviet union. Dordrecht ; Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Paper here
Krysin, L. (1977). Social Linguistics in the Ussr. Language in Society, 6(2), 229-246. doi:10.1017/S0047404500007284
Paper here
Podoroga, V. (1993). Can Marxian thought be separated from totalitarian ideology? Studies in East European Thought, 45(1), 67-69.
Paper here
Answer: Maybe? This is the first issue of the new Studies in Eastern European Thought after it was re-named after the dissolution of the USSR. "Marxism as an ideology serving the state--a terrorist mentality for decades--is no more." We see, as in other readings, a note about culture and cultural development.
Smith, M. G. (2012). Language and Power in the Creation of the USSR, 1917-1953. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. doi: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110805581
Paper here
A fantastic analysis that really spans all of the categories listed here: policy, academia, philosophy of language, etc.
Law firm “Crisis Management Group,” & Sergey A., P. (2018). Nationalities policy of the first year of the soviet regime. Journal of Siberian Federal University. Humanities & Social Sciences, 11(5), 795–813. https://doi.org/10.17516/1997-1370-0271
Paper here
Ornstein, J. (1959). Soviet Language Policy: Theory and Practice. The Slavic and East European Journal, 3(1), 1-24.
Paper here
Brandist, C., & Chown, K. (2010). Politics and the theory of language in the USSR, 1917-1938: The birth of sociological linguistics. London: Anthem Press.
This is a chronological set of essays that range from topics like pre-revolution linguistics to the bitter reaction to "bourgeois linguistics" in the early years of the revolution up to the 1930's. One essay focuses on the academics of Stalin and nation-building. Surprisingly little is mentioned of Marr and Japhetism except for an occasional awareness of official dogma.
Here are my notes and highlights from the text.
Paper here
Reznik, V. (2007). Succession or subversion: professional strategies of soviet cultural revolution. The case of nikolai marr. Slavonica, 13(2), 150–167. https://doi.org/10.1179/174581407X228957
Paper here
As a framework, Reznik uses Bourdieu's theory of the scientific field and professional strategies to describe the academic environment before and after 1917. Reznik traces Marr's ascent through the academy, to his professional societies, to his building of an institutional framework. The paper explains Japhetic Theory but doesn't get bogged down. It's the first article I've seen that provides an academic biography, his published findings in Theses and Investigations in Armenian-Georgian Philology, and his part in the Cultural Revolution.
"For all his anti-bourgeois fervour Marr was, in fact, a respectable St. Petersburg professor, an intellectual, who sought to advance high culture and support it with an institutional framework."
Marr "rejected Indo-European linguistics for its obsession with European languages and 'dead' written sources, and ultimately came to accuse all European linguistic research of being inherently racist."
Reznik sets up the article as a decision by opponents for intellectual dominance: either succession--the less risky strategy of embracing the Marxist New Teaching on Language and ousting the older scholars who weren't ideologically trained--or subversion, an all-in strategy employed by Polivanov, a committed Marxist who rejected the New Teaching and had his own Marxist linguistics alternative to Marrism. This alternative took a jab at Marr's general assumptions and instead offered a Marxist linguistics that would "rely on factual information" and would outline a method that developed "socio-group (class) dialectology and to study the evolution of language in its interconnection with the evolution of a human collective." Ultimately, Polivanov lost the battle by underestimating the bureaucracy and the institutional framework: he lost positions in both capitals and exiled to central Asia.
Naturally, this paper will lead to more readings on Polivanov and other Marxist linguists who worked to change the direction of the discipline in the 1920's and 1930's.
Leezenberg, Michiel (2014). Soviet Orientalism and Subaltern Linguistics:: The Rise and Fall of Marr’s Japhetic Theory. (2014). In The Making of the Humanities, vol. III: The Making of the Modern Humanities (p. 97). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Paper here
This paper is precisely what we needed to trace the roots of anti-West or anti-bourgeois humanities (and linguistics). Leezenberg examines the work of Trubetzkoy--the founder of structuralist phonology and a proponent of the Eurasianism movement--as well as Marr. "Marr is as notorious as Trubetzkoy is famous." Here Leezenberg places the scientific debate in context and mentions that Marr's criticism of German philology turned out to be founded: alongside (and independently) Trubetzkoy, both claimed that German philologists spread Aryan supremacy speculations atop linguistics lineage. Comparative linguistics itself was racist, and Marr would study two problem languages in the story of Indo-European linguistics: Georgian and Armenian. Marr is quoted as saying "struggle for nationality, and against nationalism." We see Marr's more endearing traits in this article than in others. He wishes to acknowledge Muslim contributions to the cultures of the Caucasus, in sharp deviance from the near-total focus on the Christian past. Trubetzkoy was critical of Marr saying that his "new linguistic doctrine" is no different from Western linguistics and by choosing this path they cut themselves off from progress in the field in Europe. Also he said that a critical review of Marr's article ought to be done, not by a linguist, but by a psychiatrist.
Murra, J. V. (1951). The Soviet linguistic controversy. New York: King's Crown.
Paper here
Shlapentokh, D. (2011). The fate of nikolai marr’s linguistic theories: the case of linguistics in the political context. Journal of Eurasian Studies, 2(1), 60–73. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.euras.2010.10.003
Paper here
This is a great summation of Marr's academic work and ambition alongside explanations of how he kept his prowess even as Stalin was gearing up for the purges (beginning in 1936--Marr was dead by 1934). "Marr had great ambitions to be the creator of a linguistic theory that could explain the origin and evolution of world languages in a new way." His energy and ambition helped him to push and defend his academic status. The core of his theories is that we ought to reject attachment "of a particular language to a particular racial/ethnic group" and see that languages plasticity made it "possible to create one language for all of humanity." (Quoting Thomas (1957)). This is all during the rise of Esperonto.
According to Marr, the Japhetic language family spread from the "Caucacus and Asia Minor to the Iberian Peninsula" and they were the toilers. He didn't believe that the elite and the toilers could speak the same language then. The Indo-European languages were the elites and they broke apart the Japhetic language family and dried up mutual comprehension. Shlaptentokh then shows how Marr related linguistic domination to socio-enonomic and political domination. We see his critique of bourgeois linguistics echoed in other articles above: in fact the concept of succession as both a method of self-preservation and a way to promote their careers (Reznik) is described also in Shlaptentokh: "those who followed fashionable theories and subjects and those who accepted the dominant interpretations of these subjects had a much better chance of promoting their careers than those who did not follow the rules." It's an interesting paradigm that Marr helped to set up and enforce this environment of domination: "Marr's invectives against his enemies inadvertently helped the regime to eliminate those whom the regime regarded as troublemakers."
Marr's ideology was opposed to Slavism (as working with the Indo-European linguist tree) but found a complicated connection to Eurasianist linguists who seem to have hastened the end of Marr's adoration by the regime by pushing forward (or getting out of the way of) Russian ethnocentricism and an environment that would not work with late Stalin Russian nationalism. As National Bolshevism gained traction, Marr's theories, which were actually "ideological misfits" even earlier in the 1930's, could no longer be supported. Shlapentokh goes on to explain that the idea then was ethnic Russians were indigenous people, the most laudable people of the region, and that other languages' affects on Russian ought not to be overestimated. Mikhankova, who knew how to navigate the ideology landscape, re-imagined or re-focused Marr's work: Russians and other Slavs built the Kievan state, the Slavic languages had developed internally, Marr was extremely critical of the primitive West, and Marr was a "good Russian patriot."
Of course this praise would stop when Stalin weighed in on Marr.
Marr's disregard and inability to place ethnic Russians and the Russian language at the center of his theories was ultimately why he was condemned by Stalin and ultimately not considered a prominent linguist today--that, and his incorrect ideas about language confluence, I assume. This essay near the end goes down a Stalin tangent, which of course is interesting for the legacy of Marr, but seems a little like it was meant for another essay. That and a few other oddities like "Marr was pretty much aware..." that made me think a bit was pulled from the air. Overall, a winding but very good essay on Marr, his theories, and his rise and fall from prominence.