The linguistic behavior of the titular nationalities of the five Central Asian union republics of the Soviet Union illustrates that when groups with distinctive languages and cultural traditions come into contact with one another, very complex linguistic adjustments can occur. This essay examines the relationship between the continued use of the non-Russian languages as mother tongues and the spread of Russian as a second language among Central Asians. Central Asians display an interesting response to the conflicting pressures to learn Russian as an aid to upward social mobility and to maintain traditional languages as a sign of identity with the ethnic group. While remaining strongly attached to their national languages, they are simultaneously moderately attracted to Russian as a second language.

Language planning often aims to fix the statuses, roles, and functions of languages, and hence the choices among languages that speakers and writers make. This has been called “language status planning.” A second object of language policy, however, is the content and structure of languages themselves: vocabularies, sound systems, word structures, sentence structures, writing systems, and stylistic repertoires. Intervention of this kind is “language corpus planning.” The Soviet distinction between the “functional development“ of a language and its “internal development” or “enrichment” is parallel. Soviet language policies deal both with status problems (for example, how long and how widely should language X be used?) and with corpus problems (for example, how should language X be developed and regulated?). The Soviet Turkic languages exhibit these issues with particular complexity because of their number, their close interrelations, their similarity to a non-socialist country's language (Turkish), their dissimilarity to Russian, their pre-Soviet Arabic (if any) alphabets, and their traditions of borrowing from Arabic and Persian, associated culturally with Islam and perceived backwardness.

This study is an assessment of the theories and practices of teaching Russian to the local (indigenous) Turkic and Iranian speaking peoples of Soviet Central Asia. More specifically, it is a description of the processes by which the programs of teaching Russian as a second language (TRSL) are implemented in the classrooms of Central Asia. An investigation of methodologies in TRSL, qualifications of teachers, and some of the characteristics of the target group— the young Central Asians—sheds light on the factors accelerating or inhibiting the acquisition of Russian as a second language in this part of the USSR.

Just over two centuries ago, on July 21, 1774, at the village of Kuchuk.Kainardji, Russia and Turkey signed a peace treaty which not only marked one of history's great shifts in power relationships, but also became a continuing source of controversy among statesmen and scholars. Most of the terms of the treaty, which ended a six-year war, are clear, easy to summarize, and obvious in their impact. But articles 7 and 14, which dealt with the protection of Christianity in the Ottoman Empire and with an Orthodox church that Russia could build in Istanbul, have been subject to widely varying interpretations. The central question is whether Russia received, under these articles, a right to act as protector of Ottoman Christians. Many historians have contended that the treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji did confer such a guardian role on Russia, and some have adopted the opinion that the treaty, especially in this regard, was an example of “Russian skill and Turkish imbecility.“ Other historians have maintained that any such right, under the treaty, was vague. Still others have said it was nonexistent. A reexamination of the historical evidence is long overdue.

In January 1964, Western observers of the Soviet scene were startled by the publication of the major short works of Franz Kafka in Inostrannaia literatura, a leading Soviet literary journal. This event was all the more surprising because it came only a few months after a wide-ranging party campaign against “modernism” in the arts, with Kafka among those singled out for special condemnation. Publication was viewed as evidence of a possible new thaw, and received considerable attention in the Western press. Over ten years have now passed, and, in these days of the expulsion and incarceration of protesters and the suppression of dissent, it is timely once again to examine the fate of Franz Kafka in the land which for decades pretended that he did not exist. As the following pages will show, the debate over Kafka was much broader than his works themselves: it raised questions which were disturbing Soviet society and reflected, in microcosm, forces struggling to determine the very direction of Soviet life.

A Russian proverb knowingly reminds us that “the law is like a wagon-tongue —whichever way you point it, there it goes.” It is useful to remember this observation when examining the position of the Jews in the nineteenth-century Russian Empire. The legal basis for that position, which was characterized by exclusion and discrimination, has commonly been traced to the period from 1772 to 1796, when Russia's Jews first entered the empire in large numbers. This study will describe the creation of the legal “wagon-tongue” during the late eighteenth century, and will suggest that the legal precedents cannot be understood by only considering the directions in which the law was later to be pointed. Emphasis will be placed on the initial evolution of an ad hoc body of law, confused, contradictory, and ambiguous, capable of subsequent interpretation and elaboration with either sympathy or hostility.