The same language war is taking place on the streets of Russia. The law on advertising forbids the use of foreign words in advertisements without a translation unless the foreign advertising slogan is a registered trademark. The Federal Anti-Monopoly Service wants to ban shops from using even the inoffensive word ‘Sale’, saying they should use the Russian words skidki (‘discounts’) or rasprodazha (‘sale’). Legal cases have already been brought in some parts of Russia against companies that have used foreign words in their advertising.
The supporters of language sovereignty often point to France as a country where cultural protectionism flourishes, where films are also dubbed (just like in Germany), and where there are quotas for the hiring of foreign films. They are even more enthusiastic in taking the USA as an example, where the population is perhaps even more ignorant than ours when it comes to travelling abroad and speaking foreign languages. But America and France can allow themselves this luxury. America is by rights the only global superpower, a major exporter of culture and the language standard bearer for the modern world. And France can do this because it is a cultural superpower, the ruler of a worldwide Francophone empire and the most popular country in the world for tourists.
Russia remains a country on the periphery of capitalism, squeezed into an inhospitable corner of Eurasia, and with a culture and a language that, throughout history, have been largely imported. There was a brief period in the twentieth century when we exported culture, when the world saw the dawning of the Russian avant-garde; and then we exported our social model and our image of modernization, educating in our universities and our academies hundreds and thousands of representatives from countries of ‘the Third World’. Today Russia has lost its empire, its territory, its reputation and its global attractiveness. It seems determined, too, to lose its population, for whom the Russian language is its native language; and even those native speakers have disastrously lost their literacy. In such conditions, to introduce linguistic isolationism just to satisfy national pride is suicidal for Russian culture. It will become simply a provincial sideshow, a subject of interest only for professional ethnographers and Slavists. The only way to preserve Russian culture is to broadcast it to the world. And for that you need English.
We shouldn’t be comparing ourselves to America; we should learn from our neighbours, such as Finland. Of course, the scale and the ambition there is not on a par with Russia’s, but the problems are similar. Like Russia, this is another country on the periphery, with a borrowed Western culture and a language that is out on a limb. The Finns acknowledged pretty quickly the lack of perspective in linguistic nationalism. Moreover, while the second language of the state is Swedish (even though no more than 5 per cent of the population speak it, it is compulsory to study it), in practice the third language is English. You hear it on the radio and on television; up to half of all university courses are taught in English (by Finnish lecturers to Finnish students); you can go up to just about anyone on the street – and this is not even counting policemen or state officials – and speak to them in English, and if they can’t answer you they will be embarrassed. What’s more, Finnish culture is in no way marginalized; on the contrary, it is becoming ever more competitive in the world. They export unique items, from design and electronics to consulting and educational services.
Of course, our political elite is hardly likely to learn any lessons from little Finland. In their dreams they put themselves on a par either with the Roman Empire or with the USA; but behind these global illusions they are sinking ever deeper into the bog of cultural and linguistic isolationism.
WAR OF THE AVATARS
Russia is a unique country, always managing to find its own particular way of doing things. While the whole world (or the Western part at least) was declaring its solidarity with the victims of the terrorist act in Paris on 13 November 2015, when in one evening hundreds of people were shot in restaurants and in the Bataclan Concert Hall, yet another massive scandal exploded on social media in Russia. Tens of thousands of Russian Facebook users coloured their avatars in the red, white and blue of the French tricolour as a sign of mourning for those who had died in the Paris attacks; and then other, patriotic, users started to reproach them for the fact that they hadn’t mourned the 200 Russians who had perished when their aircraft exploded over Sinai on 31 October 2015, two weeks earlier. A ‘holy war’ erupted, a sacred Internet-war, about the right way to mourn, about what colours you should use for your avatar and where you should lay your flowers. Thousands of friendships, subscriptions and reputations fell victim to this war. In answer to the French flag, a Russian emblem was put forward: the silhouette of an aeroplane against a background of the Russian tricolour, stylized under the pacifist sign. Tens of thousands of users adopted this as their avatar. Some tried to act as peacemakers, colouring their profile photo horizontally in the Russian colours and vertically in the French.
In the nervous reactions of the Russian domestic networks to the terrorist attacks, substituting sympathy and solidarity for internal squabbles and blame, we could see the agonies of the Russian mass consciousness. The first diagnosis was one of resentment, a sense of being deeply wounded, a readiness to mourn for any reason, to search everywhere for Russophobia and a worldwide conspiracy against Russia. Indicative in this sense was the unanimous insult felt by Russian politicians and media at the cartoons published in the French weekly Charlie Hebdo, and which in their own peculiar way they immediately linked to the Sinai terrorist act (parts of the Russian aircraft fell on the Islamic fighters and it was deemed to be a ‘continuation of the bombing’). On the day the cartoons were published, according to the magazine’s own analysis of hits on its website, there were more viewings from Russia by a long way than from any other country – 42.5 per cent, two and a half times greater than from France itself. It looks as if Charlie Hebdo is much more popular in Russia (where hardly anyone can read French) than in France. So Russian ‘worldly sensitivity’ (vsemirnaya otzyvchivost), exalted by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quickly turns into international touchiness. It could be in Kiev, in Paris, or on the Internet; and a lack of attention is taken as an insult: they didn’t notice us! They didn’t appreciate us! They didn’t take account of us! This is true Lust am Leidenschaft, passion for suffering, as the Germans say who are familiar with this feeling; they lived through such a period of resentment during the Weimar Republic, which led, as we well know, to fascism. The American Slavist, Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, described this characteristic of Russian culture as ‘moral masochism and the cult of suffering’; a desire to be humiliated and insulted.
The second diagnosis one could make about the discussion on avatars is that this is hypocrisy. Those who had painted their avatars in the French colours were accused of being insensitive to people suffering in the Third World. A Facebook user from Krasnoyarsk, Dan Nazarov, published a horrible photograph of a terrorist act in Kenya, where, on 2 April 2015, Islamic terrorists blew up a university building in the city of Harris and shot 147 Christian students. He posed the rhetorical questions: ‘Did you hear about this in the media? Did people lay flowers outside the Embassy? Why are we so selective in our sympathy? One group are people; who are the others?’ (This received 13,000 likes and 20,000 re-postings.) The author’s reproach is, of course, justified – only not in our country. Russia is one of those places where such indifference to suffering in the Third World has become a virtue of the state; where federal television channels scare viewers with fables about refugees flooding Europe, where the terrorist acts in Paris were accompanied by malicious commentaries in the spirit of ‘they got what they deserved, messing around with their ideas of tolerance and openness’; but we’re not going to show any compassion for the Third World.