Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [236]
The separate identity of Ukrainian as a language with its own culture, its own republic within the Soviet Union and indeed, as of 1990, its own state owed much to the fact that these writs did not run over the border into Galicia, a Ukrainian-speaking enclave (south of modern Lvov) that had somehow remained outside Russia, inside the Austro-Hungarian empire. It contained 20 per cent of all Ukrainians. There Ukrainian spelling and Ukrainian expressions could flourish, without hindrance, on the printed page, to remind all Ukrainians of what they might be. Stalin ended the region’s independence in 1945, but to no long-term effect. Galicia went on to become the centre of the Ukrainian nationalist movement in the 1980s, the key to Ukraine’s secession from the Soviet Union.47
Russian north then south
In the north-west, Russia also managed to gain control of the principal Baltic-and Uralic-language areas. The Uralic areas of the north-east, mainly Karelia, had been hunting grounds of the Russians at least since Moscow had conquered the northern empire of Novgorod in 1472. The people here were indigenous, and their contact with the Russians, though started a century earlier than the other Siberians’, is essentially of the same type. Fundamentally they were ignored.
Estonia and Livonia came only much later, and brought with them a fair amount of European experience from the German colonists who had occupied them in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; they were wrested from Swedish control by the great Russian moderniser Tsar Pëtr I (’Peter the Great’) in 1721 as part of his long-standing campaign to find Russia secure access to the Baltic. Farther south, Lithuania and Latvia were gained along with Poland in 1795; and farther north, Finland was incorporated in 1809 by Aleksandr I, on terms rather favourable to the Finns, after another successful war against Sweden.
Among these areas, the penetration of Russian immigrants, and of the Russian language, was only significant in the Baltic areas, especially Estonia and Latvia. But here, perversely, the German influence remained very strong; indeed, the traditional power structure of German-speaking Ritterschaften, ‘knighthoods’, persisted as an intermediate level of government until the revolution in 1917, so loyal were the German Ritter to the Tsar. But the toleration of this un-Russian hold-out did begin to wane in the late nineteenth century: Russian was introduced in administration and the courts in the 1880s, and Russian-language schools were encouraged, with an attempt to make the language compulsory at all but the introductory level. In 1893 Dorpat University, in Tartu, was converted into Yuriev, a strictly Russian-language institution. But when in 1899 the next Tsar, Nikolay II, tried similar language measures in Finland, there was a general boycott of Russian institutions, and in 1904 the Russian governor-general was assassinated. Since Russia was at war with Japan at the time, the Russians chose to play it safe, and restored the Finns’ liberty to use their own language, as guaranteed in the constitution that the Russians themselves had given them.
The drive behind the Russians’ takeover of the Baltic regions had been their need for access to trade. This motive also played a part in the beginnings of Russia’s push south, but this could hardly be represented as naked Russian aggression, since raids into their territory from the last of the Turkic khanates, the Crimean Tatars, had been persistent since the sixteenth century. Russian strength grew in the seventeenth century, until they felt that something could be done; but it was only after a further century of attempts to put down the Tatars that in 1783 Catherine the Great at last defeated and destroyed their state. In 1792, she was then able to found Russia’s principal warm-water port, Odessa on the Black Sea. This soon became a highly Russianised