On the eve of the V Russkiy Mir Assembly in St. Petersburg on November 3, the leadership of the Russkiy Mir Foundation held a meeting with journalists at Dom Knigi on Nevsky Prospekt. Executive Director of the Foundation Vyacheslav Nikonov spoke about the organizations work and achievements over the past year and the outlook for the future.
– This year the Russkiy Mir Foundation with gratitude has made use of a gracious invitation to hold our traditional, and fifth in our history, Russkiy Mir Assembly in St. Petersburg. The fifth assembly will bring together here on the banks of the Neva a large number of guests and participants. We expect that 600 guests from 75 countries throughout the world will take part in the work of our assembly. Furthermore, the group of participants and guests from cities and regions of Russia has significantly expanded.
As has become a good tradition, the work of our assembly is taking place on the eve of National Unity Day. And many of the participants of the Russkiy Mir Assembly will on the following day take part in the official events dedicated to this important state holiday.
The main questions poised for the assembly and subsequently becoming its theme is: “Will the world speak Russian?” – does not come with a precise answer. Even with all my enthusiasm I would be careful in assessing our prospects for ‘catching and passing’. We should have a clear understanding of the fact that the number of people on the planet speaking Russian is unlikely to get close to the number speaking, for example, Chinese or Hindu.
Speaking of numbers, when talking with the deputy minister of education in China (the country has 300,000 schoolchildren studying Russian), I asked how many schoolchildren are there in China. And the answer was: a lot more people than total population of Russia. The situation with the Russian language in the world is not rosy. We can note that over the past 20 years the Russian language disappeared at a catastrophic rate. If at the time of the collapse of the socialist system there were estimated to be 350 million people who understood Russian, then now the most optimistic estimates put this number at no more than 300 million. We lost 50 million speakers in 20 years – no other language in the world has disappeared at such a rate. But I would emphasize that the situation has changed in recent years, albeit remaining troubling.
The mission of the Russkiy Mir Foundation is to promote interest in the Russian language, to revive the former system of studying Russian. The situation is changing. According to a survey commissioned by the Russkiy Mir Foundation in CIS countries asking the question: would you like your children to speak Russian? – the worse results were in Moldova, where ‘only’ 87.4% replied in the affirmative. In the rest of the countries 98-99% of the respondents replied in the affirmative.
It has become clear that the interest in the Russian language in the former republics of the USSR is based not only on historic and cultural commonality with Russia. To a large degree this is dictated by economic pragmatism. It is impossible to live without knowing Russian. It is impossible to get a good education, to find a good job and to move up the career ladder.
While such a process is understandable in the CIS, then how can we explain the fact that similar movement has been seen in all the countries of Eastern Europe? Representatives of Western concerns – banks and corporations which have already overpowered the national companies of former socialist countries, are using their branches in Eastern European countries largely for the purpose of establishing good ties with Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and other countries. Russian is becoming the language of communication, and without knowledge of this language an employee is of no interest to his Western bosses.
In the 1990s Russian language was in 16th place among those studied by schoolchildren. In friendly Bulgaria it was 14th. But today the Russian language in both Poland and Bulgaria comes in second only to English, ahead of German and Spanish. And as I already mentioned 300,000 schoolchildren in China are studying Russian. And the number of university and graduate students studying the language is also on the rise.
Today in the United States there are three thousand Russian language schools operating. Interestingly, the largest number are in Texas, where the economy is largely based on the oil industry and space exploration.
In New York State the election pamphlets for the governors’ primaries were printed in Russian. The Russian speaking diaspora was able to lobby this. By the way, Russian-speaking Americans are the most affluent ethnic minority in America…
I hope that the assembly will help to analyze the current situation, and its results can be used to stake out a course for further movement, further development of our mission…
