• Dessalines@lemmy.ml
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    13 hours ago

    You’re not going to find many books to the effect of, “see how hegemonic we aren’t”, so you mainly need to look at how the ussr treated republics within it, and especially preserved national minorities.

    The USSR academy of sciences published works in many languages, same for the state publishing houses.

    There are also some longer works on the languages of the USSR, because there was such a diversity of them and the constitution mandated their protection, but I haven’t read them.

    Compare with the US (wiped out every indigenous language), or the UK (tried to do the same for Irish and Welsh). It’s always projection with these anticommunist westerner historians.

    You can see the diversity here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_Soviet_Union

    • Perhaps also read https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russification then, which is linked on that page. It explains how the Soviets:

      • Forced other languages to use cyrillic if they didn’t before, aligning the spelling of words with Russian
      • Made Russian a mandatory subject in schools
      • In mostly urban areas made sure education was primarily provided in Russian
      • Made indigenous people learn Russian, but Russian immigrants to those areas did not learn the indigenous language there

      These were all policies aimed at “unifying” the various cultures in the Soviet Union and strengthening control.

      Early Soviet Union is as you described, promoting various cultures and languages. Lenin saw that as a way to gain favour with the local populations. Later leaders however went down a different path.