Translator speaks to four representatives on the linguistic frontline
Much has been written in recent years about Vladimir Putin’s imperial ambitions in Ukraine. What this sometimes obscures is the fact that Russia already is an empire, and has been for centuries. Starting in the middle of the last millennium, Moscow’s rule slowly expanded across Eurasia—colonising Siberia, the Caucasus and what is now the Russian Far East.
Today, the vast territory of the Russian Federation is home to some 200 nationalities, speaking around 135 languages, according to the most recent census data. In both Tsarist and Soviet times, these non-Slavic groups—including speakers of Turkic, Finno-Ugric and Mongolic languages—were often brutally repressed.
After a brief respite in the 1990s under President Boris Yeltsin—who encouraged Russia’s regions to take “as much sovereignty as [they] could swallow” even as he launched a violent crackdown in Chechnya—these repressive tendencies have returned to the Kremlin.
The authorities have targeted people promoting minority languages, seeing them as a threat to Moscow’s increasingly centralised rule. Language teachers have been harassed, arrested, and driven out of the country. In one case, a speaker of Udmurt—a Finno-Ugric language spoken in central Russia—self-
immolated in protest against the
Kremlin’s language policies.
While some minority languages are spoken by millions of people in major cities, and others by just a few thousand in remote villages, all but a handful are now in decline. The teaching of regional languages used to be compulsory in schools. In 2018 it became optional—a move many activists experienced as a death knell for already endangered indigenous cultures.
Russia’s war in Ukraine has brought ever-greater domestic repression. But among some minority groups—especially those viewed by the Kremlin as “cannon fodder”, disproportionately represented on the frontline in Ukraine—it has sparked a reckoning with Moscow’s colonial mentality and an urge to reconsider local identities.
Translator heard from four speakers about their minority languages and how they are fighting to keep them alive.
Khandama Tudebei, 32, Buryat teacher and activist
Buryat is a Mongolic language spoken by around 270,000 people in Russia, primarily in the Siberian regions of Buryatia and Zabaykalsky Krai. These areas border Mongolia and have a significant Buddhist population.
When I was growing up in Zabaykalsky Krai, everyone around me spoke Buryat, though my mother mixed in a bit of Russian. Our teachers spoke the language very well so they might teach maths, for example, in Buryat, even though the curriculum was in Russian. You needed Russian for official communication, but everything unofficial was in Buryat. It’s my native language.
When I moved to Saint Petersburg for university it was a culture shock, like going to another country. It was difficult to adapt psychologically. Even though I’ve been speaking Russian since childhood, people constantly commented on how well I spoke it, as if they expected otherwise. They also made comments about my appearance. I was always having to explain that I had a Russian passport. That’s when I started to think more about my identity.
After university, I returned home and worked as a designer for a Buryat-language newspaper, but the salary was very low. I decided to leave for Mongolia, where I felt much more at home than in Saint Petersburg. We’ve got a shared culture and a similar language. I quickly picked up Mongolian and integrated into society.
After the war in Ukraine started, I became an anti-war activist. I helped set up the Buryat Information Center in [the Mongolian capital] Ulaanbaatar to support men fleeing mobilisation. We started promoting it, and I gave some interviews. People from the Russian security services began warning us to shut down. It felt dangerous because the border with Russia is so close. About a year and a half ago I came to Germany as a political refugee.
Buryat is very compact. One of my favorite phrases is toronto nyutag, which means something like ‘little homeland’ but conveys the ties to family and birth and the earth. It doesn’t translate exactly.
Now I do some translation and I teach Buryat and Mongolian online. Many of my students are [in diaspora] in America and Europe. Some young people who grew up not speaking Buryat now want to reclaim it. I think the war gave people a push to rethink their identities. That gives me hope, even if things inside Russia are getting worse every year.
I do want to go back one day, maybe to Russia, probably to Mongolia. Teaching Buryat is how I stay connected. It’s how I make sure it stays alive, for myself and for others.
Lana Pylaeva, 38, director of a Komi news website
Komi is a Finno-Ugric language spoken by around 150,000 people, almost all in the Komi Republic, to the west of the Ural mountains. The republic, the northernmost part of which is above the Arctic Circle, is rich in coal, oil, natural gas and timber.
I was born in Syktyvkar, the capital of the Komi Republic. At home, we spoke a mix of Komi and Russian, but with my grandmother, who lived in a village, we only spoke Komi. In school, everything was in Russian.
In the city, people thought of the Komi language as something rural and backward. Speaking Komi can give you an accent when you speak Russian, because the stress is always on the first syllable, and [ethnic] Russians are very sensitive to accents. That’s why in many families they wouldn’t speak the language with their children, so they wouldn’t have this accent and maybe problems in the future.
Our culture is deeply tied to the forest: parma in Komi. Before Christianisation, we were pagan, and our beliefs were based in nature. We had wooden idols, sacred groves. There’s a myth that the region instantly converted to Christianity [in the 14th century], but actually it took hundreds of years because people resisted. And still the forest is very special to us.
Later there was the Soviet Union, which did a lot of damage. Many settlers came, developed the mining industry, and started building the railways. They had this dream of ‘developing the North’ and to teach the natives how to do things right. My grandmother, who didn’t speak Russian, suddenly found herself needing to work in a Russian-speaking environment. She did hard physical labour, chopping wood, because she had no education. She told me about how badly she was treated and how she couldn’t understand anything.
All this was on her own land.
The linguistic structure of Komi is very different to Russian. We don’t use gender, and we have many cases instead of prepositions. Speaking Komi feels different to me: not just intellectually, but physically. When I speak Russian, I’m fine, I can say whatever I want, but when I speak Komi I feel something in my body. There’s a melody to the language.
In 2019, I joined the team at Komi Daily, a news site that started during protests against a landfill that was planned in the area for Moscow’s rubbish. We try to tell the truth: about our culture, the environment, the war. The government has labelled us a “terrorist organisation”. They say we’ve called for independence, which we haven’t, just self-determination: control over our land and our language. I live in Europe now and I haven’t been back to Russia since 2021.
Despite everything, I have hope. There’s growing interest, especially among young people in Komi music, crafts, even food. Without hope, this work I do would be impossible.
Marsel Ganeyev, 29, queer Tatar language activist
Tatar is a Turkic language with around 3.2 million speakers in Russia, mostly in Tatarstan, a Muslim-majority republic some 500 miles to the east of Moscow. It is also widely spoken in diaspora, including in Central Asia.
I grew up in southern Kazakhstan. My dad is Tatar, my mum is a mix of Russian and Khakas [an indigenous Siberian ethnic group], but we mostly spoke Russian at home. My dad would occasionally use Tatar. Just emotional expressions, small phrases. Things like “I love you” or “give me your hand”. Then he would complain that we could not speak Tatar well even though he never taught us.
When I was 23, I was reading a children’s book with my niece and I was really aware I couldn’t read it properly. After that, I had a look for resources and I saw there was an online school, fully free, supported by the Ministry of Education in Tatarstan. You could join every day and there would be a teacher who would speak with you for an hour. It was a very positive experience.
A while later I switched to speaking with my dad in Tatar. I was curious how it would be between us. And it actually changed a lot because I’m gay and it was difficult for my parents to accept that. Russian is a very gendered language, and my dad would ask: did you find a girlfriend? In Tatar, you just say the word partner. It made it much easier for him to talk about and brought us closer together.
When I went to Tatarstan six months before the war, I made a commitment to only speak Tatar while I was there. About 70 percent of people understood me, and half of them responded in Tatar. I ended up at a music festival in the centre of [the capital city] Kazan, and there was this rapper called Usal on the main stage, covered in pink oil and glitter. The crowd was waving Tatar flags and chanting for the release of a political prisoner. Things you couldn’t imagine saying in Russian, people were singing loudly in Tatar.
There’s this idea that Tatar, like all minority languages in Russia, is dying. But what I saw was resistance. People find ways to speak and remember. There’s a strong music scene and media.
I started making a podcast in Tatar and noticed that a lot of my guests consciously chose to learn the language, often as adults, because they felt something was taken from them. That’s striking.
Tatar is softer than other Turkic languages. It has this word, moñ—a kind of nostalgic, beautiful sadness, like saudade in Portuguese. It’s deeply linked to music. When a song has moñ, it’s not just pretty. It’s got history, longing and soul.
Afanasiy Efimov, 40, former Sakha language teacher
Sakha, also known as Yakut, is a Turkic language with around 450,000 speakers. It is primarily spoken in the Sakha Republic (Yakutia) in Russia’s Far East.
I was born in a small village in Sakha. Life was simple but hard. There was farming, hunting and fishing. In the winter it could get to minus 70 degrees celsius, and in the summer it was boiling hot and there were lots of mosquitos. I worked with my dad doing haymaking, construction, whatever we could find.
When I was growing up, almost everyone around me spoke Sakha. Until I went to school, understood very little of Russian.
Back then, we had six hours a week dedicated to Sakha: two hours for language, two for literature, and two for national culture. Now it’s optional and most children don’t do it at all. After I graduated I became a teacher of the Sakha language—just for a couple of years because the money was so bad, before I went into business.
In the years since I was teaching everything has changed little by little for the worse. Many children don’t know Sakha at all, even in small villages. If things continue the way they are, the language will die.
It’s Russification: colonial policies and a colonial mentality. There’s no requirement to know Sakha, not even in the region itself. But if you don’t speak Russian, you can’t work in government, or for the oil company or in the police. There’s this idea that to succeed, you need to be Russian. That’s why many Sakha parents stopped giving their kids traditional names, because they are too hard to pronounce for Russians and people abroad.
[Moscow’s] view is that if the people have no language, there’s no people, so you can govern them however you like.
There are many sacred concepts in our culture. We believe in spirits of the land, fire, water. When we talk about rivers or lakes, we don’t use names, we just call them ebee. It’s a word that shows respect and a little bit of fear.
I left Russia in 2023 with my family after I started speaking out against the war. They were sending so many of our people. Now we live in California and I work as a car mechanic. But I still speak the language at home with my kids. I tell them stories, teach them traditions. We celebrate Yhyakh, the Sakha New Year, in June. As long as we continue doing this, the Sakha people are still here.
