What happens when an official language spoken by the majority of the country’s population
loses its status and becomes overnight a language of an ethnic minority? What factors affect
the maintenance, transmission, and attrition of such a language? The 1991 collapse of the
Soviet Union created a unique controlled experiment enabling scholars to observe how this
situation might unfold simultaneously in fourteen countries previously united by the same
political system and now embarking on their own nation-building trajectories. In the years
1992–1996 several teams of sociolinguists and political scientists conducted large-scale
surveys and ethnographic studies in these countries to examine the initial effects of the
new language policies (Laitin 1998; Landau and Kellner-Heinkele 2001; Lebedeva 1995;
Savoskul 2001; Smith et al. 1998). In the decade that followed, several scholars conducted
in-depth investigations of sociolinguistic and educational changes in the context of a single
country (Bilaniuk 2005; Ciscel 2007; Korth 2005; Meckovskaja ? 2003; Sajbakova ? 2005)or a group of countries (Hogan-Brun 2005a, 2005b; Kolstø 2002). The purpose of this
paper is to offer a comparative overview of this recent work, focusing on the current status
and use of Russian in the post-Soviet space.
Each subsection will compare and contrast the situation of Russian in a subgroup
of neighboring countries to understand the similarities and differences in their Russianlanguage
policies and practices. I will begin by examining the relationship between
language policies that define the status of Russian in each country, institutional practices
that shape educational and employment opportunities, and private practices that reveal the
current status of Russian and the future of its maintenance and transmission. The latter
discussion will highlight studies conducted with members of the youngest generation whose
schooling took place in the post-Soviet era, after 1991. These developments will then be
analyzed taking into consideration historic, sociopolitical, socioeconomic, demographic,
and linguistic factors, the interplay of which shapes diverse linguistic outcomes in
geographically close areas.
Throughout, the description of the demographic situation in the countries in the wake of
the break-up of the USSR will be based on data from the 1989 Soviet Census (Goskomstat
SSSR 1991). The description of the present demographic situation will rely on the census
data provided by the countries in question and on the 2004 report of the Russian Center of
Demographics and Human Ecology (CDHE) (Aref’ev 2006).1 Following the conventions of
the field, throughout the discussion, the term Russian-speaking population will encompass
ethnic Russians, members of titular nations, and members of ethnic minorities who
designate Russian as their dominant language or preferred language of interaction.