In the heart of Eurasia, across lands stretching from the foothills of the Caucasus to the frozen reaches of Yakutia, a once-vibrant chorus of ancient tongues still lingers—though barely. These are the Turkic languages, living witnesses to empires long gone, nomadic civilizations, the Golden Horde, and the khanates that once ruled independently. The voices of Kazan and Ufa, Yakutsk and Cherkessk, Makhachkala and Simferopol still echo. But today, that chorus is fading, drowned out by the monotone hum of a single state standard. Its melody is being shattered against a wall of indifference, incomprehension, and a policy of erasure centuries in the making.
This isn’t a story of natural evolution. It’s the story of a systematic linguicide. It’s the story of how an imperial machine—its banners changed but not its essence—methodically squeezes native tongues out of public life, out of the education system, and out of living memory itself. The official narrative paints a bright facade: colorful “Friendship of Peoples” festivals, national ensembles in embroidered costumes, constitutional guarantees, and proud lists of “state languages of the republics.” But that’s just a polished mask concealing a harsher, more tragic reality.
A Reality of Silence
That reality looks like a Tatar grandmother in Almetyevsk unable to speak with her grandson because he only understands Russian. It looks like a Nogai poet unable to publish in his native tongue because “there’s no market for it.” It looks like a Bashkir language teacher in Ufa forced to reassure angry parents that two hours a week of Bashkir won’t keep their child from getting into a Moscow university. It looks like a Crimean Tatar word spoken on the streets of Simferopol—not as casual conversation, but as a quiet act of civil disobedience.
Behind this erosion are not abstract forces of globalization. Behind it stand concrete historical choices: the conquest of Kazan and the burning of its archives, forced Christianization, Stalin’s deportations of entire peoples, the 1958 school reform that gutted national education, and, most recently, the language laws of the 2010s that buried the last remnants of linguistic sovereignty. This is not a random drift; it’s a centuries-long chain of events, each link binding the country’s linguistic diversity tighter until it breaks.
An Act of Memory
This article is not just a linguistic or historical study. It is an act of memory, a testimony. We’ll speak the language of facts, not sentiment: archival documents, census data, UNESCO reports on endangered languages, the words of historians and of the speakers themselves. We’ll trace the path from Moscow’s military conquest of Turkic states to today’s “soft” Russification—subtle, but no less effective than brute force.
This is an investigation into how languages die. Not suddenly, in some cataclysm, but slowly, quietly, from a thousand cuts: a bureaucrat’s shrug, a weary teacher’s compromise, a parent’s desire to give their child “better prospects,” and a state that sees diversity not as wealth but as a threat.
The time has come to strip away the glossy facade and face what lies beneath. The time has come to listen to the fading echo of conquered kingdoms—before it falls silent forever.
Paper Promises, Harsh Realities
Modern Russia brands itself as a multiethnic, multiconfessional state. Its Constitution (Article 68) guarantees “all peoples the right to preserve their native language,” and republics have the right to establish their own state languages. On paper, it’s a harmonious and tolerant framework. In practice, the linguistic reality—especially for Turkic tongues—tells a different story: one of quiet, systematic, and tragic decline.
This decline is no accident of globalization. Its roots run deep in the very architecture of Russian statehood, which for five centuries has expanded by subjugating, assimilating, and erasing Turkic peoples. The process unfolds in three acts: the imperial, the Soviet, and the contemporary. Each one different in method, but identical in outcome.
Historical Context: Expansion and the Dismantling of Turkic Statehood
Long before the rise of the Moscow principality, the Turkic peoples of what is now Russia had built rich traditions of statehood. Their incorporation into the Russian state was never a voluntary union—it was the outcome of long, grinding military campaigns aimed at conquest and assimilation.
The Fall of Kazan (1552)
The storming of Kazan by Ivan IV, better known as Ivan the Terrible, was more than just a battlefield victory. It was a civilizational rupture. As historian Andrey Belyakov writes in Servitors of Northeastern Rus, the conquest was followed by forced Christianization, the seizure of Tatar nobles’ lands and their redistribution to Russian landlords, and the destruction of Muslim religious and cultural centers. The Tatar language was stripped of prestige, relegated to the status of the “infidel” and the “unenlightened.”
The Conquest of Astrakhan (1556) and Siberia (late 16th century)
The pattern repeated itself: military defeat, dismantling of local governance, colonization of territory, and the imposition of Orthodoxy. Turkic languages in Siberia—including Siberian Tatar and Yakut—were cut off from broader cultural and intellectual networks for centuries.
The Caucasus and the Black Sea (18th–19th centuries)
The incorporation of Kumyks, Nogais, Karachays, and Balkars into the empire came at a staggering human cost. The Caucasus War (1817–1864) ended with mass killings and the forced exile—known as muhajirism—of hundreds of thousands of Circassians, Abkhazians, and Nogais to the Ottoman Empire. Those who stayed faced an aggressive Russification campaign. The Russian historian Nikolai Dubrovin observed that the imperial administration considered cultural and linguistic homogenization essential for controlling the region; local languages and traditions were treated as obstacles to governance.
The Steppe Khanates (18th–19th centuries)
The absorption of Kazakhstan and Central Asia followed a similar trajectory. The dismantling of the Kazakh Khanate and the brutal suppression of national uprisings—led by figures like Kenesary Kasymov and Isatay Taimanov—shattered traditional social structures. Turkic languages, once the mediums of governance, law, and diplomacy, were pushed to the margins.
The Machinery of Imperial Russification
Three tools proved decisive:
- Religion as a Weapon
The Orthodox Church became the spearhead of assimilation. “New Christians”—Turks who converted—were rewarded with privileges. Those who held onto Islam or indigenous faiths were punished with systemic discrimination. Conversion always came tethered to the Russian language and the abandonment of native speech. - Administrative and Economic Pressure
Russian was the exclusive language of bureaucracy, courts, the military, and higher education. Advancement—whether professional or social—was unthinkable without fluency in Russian. Economic leverage reinforced the cultural squeeze. - The Education Gap
Until the late 19th century, the idea of schools in native languages wasn’t even on the table. “Enlightenment” for so-called inorodtsy (“aliens”), as they were officially labeled, meant learning Russian—nothing more. The infamous Statute on the Inorodtsy of 1822, authored by reformer Mikhail Speransky, appeared to grant rights to indigenous peoples but in practice locked them into second-class status, setting the stage for cultural marginalization.
By the Early 20th Century
The Turkic peoples of the empire, stripped of their statehood, had been reduced to largely agrarian communities—politically powerless and economically underdeveloped. Their languages survived in households, songs, and folklore, but had been erased from courts, governance, education, and public life. They were branded as markers of “backwardness” and “provincialism.” By then, the foundations had been laid for even deeper tragedies to come.
The Soviet Modernization Project: Linguicide in the Name of “Progress” and “Friendship of Peoples”
The Soviet experiment carried within it a profound paradox. On the one hand, it promised nations the unprecedented right to self-determination and pledged to nurture their cultures. On the other, it was precisely in the Soviet era that the decline of Turkic languages became systematic, sweeping, and ultimately irreversible.
1920s–Early 1930s: Korenizatsiya — The Short Spring of Native Languages
After the revolution, the Bolsheviks—eager to win over non-Russian populations—launched a policy known as korenizatsiya, or indigenization. The idea was to promote local languages and cultures, develop alphabets for peoples who had none, and train cadres from within their own communities.
For Turkic languages, it was nothing short of a renaissance. A new Latin-based script, the Yanalif (short for “new Turkic alphabet”), was created for Tatar, Bashkir, Azerbaijani, Kumyk, Nogai, and others. Latinization felt natural: it distanced these languages from the imperial-era Cyrillic tradition while linking them to the broader Turkic and international world. Schools and theaters opened. Newspapers and books flourished. By 1932, more than 90 percent of Tatar schoolchildren in Tatarstan were receiving instruction in their native tongue.
1930s–1950s: The “Great Break” and Stalin’s Linguicide
As Stalin consolidated power, priorities shifted. Unitarism and central control became non-negotiable. National languages, once celebrated, were now branded as threats—seeds of nationalism that could splinter the state.
The Cyrillic conversion of the late 1930s delivered the decisive blow. Officially justified as “integration into Russian culture” and “ease of use,” it in practice cut Turkic peoples off on three fronts:
- From their own historical record, written for centuries in Arabic script.
- From the international Turkic world, many of whom had embraced Latin script.
- From their own parents’ generation, schooled in Yanalif.
This created generational fractures and locked away archives from younger readers. Turkologist Edkham Tenishev would later call the shift “an act of forced cultural reorientation.”
Meanwhile, Stalin’s purges decimated the intellectual class—poets, scholars, educators, and writers like Galimdzhan Ibragimov in Tatarstan. Their “crime” was defending cultural identity. Their disappearance crippled the intellectual backbone of Turkic languages.
Then came the deportations. In the 1940s, entire peoples—Crimean Tatars, Karachays, Balkars, Nogais—were herded into trains and dumped across Central Asia and Siberia. Torn from their homelands, banned from speaking their languages publicly, stripped even of the right to acknowledge their culture, these communities were forced into rapid assimilation. Their languages shrank into whispered codes of family life—secret, fragile, laced with fear.
The Post-Stalin Era: Quiet Russification
Khrushchev and Brezhnev rolled back the open terror, but the machinery of assimilation never stopped. It simply shifted into a softer, administrative gear.
The school reform of 1958 was the pivot point. It abolished compulsory study of native languages. Parents were “encouraged” to place their children in Russian-language tracks. Prestige evaporated almost overnight. Speaking Tatar, Bashkir, or Nogai became synonymous with lack of opportunity.
Russian dominated every institution that mattered: higher education, the sciences, the military, the Communist Party hierarchy, and heavy industry. Turkic languages were pushed into the shrinking ghetto of kitchen talk and folklore.
Urbanization accelerated the squeeze. Russian-speaking settlers poured into Bashkortostan, Tatarstan, Yakutia, and beyond. Virgin Lands campaigns redrew the ethnolinguistic map. In cities, Russian was the only language that mattered.
The numbers told the story. By 1989, only 67 percent of Tatars in Tatarstan still claimed Tatar as their mother tongue. Among Bashkirs, the share had fallen to around 60 percent. Schools teaching in Turkic languages dwindled fast. Even in rural republics, classroom time for native languages was reduced to a token gesture.
Parents, convinced that Russian was the key to “a better life,” often switched at home, depriving their children of linguistic practice.
The Soviet Paradox
On paper, the USSR created national republics and draped them with the symbols of statehood. In practice, it finished the empire’s work. Languages were standardized, retooled, and placed at the service of ideology. Then, one by one, they were erased from meaningful domains of life. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed, the prestige of Turkic languages had been hollowed out, their future left hanging by a thread.
The Russian Federation Today: Neo-Assimilation and the Struggle for Survival
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the early 1990s “parade of sovereignties” gave Turkic peoples within Russia a fleeting hope of national and linguistic revival. But that moment proved short-lived. The modern era has been defined not by renaissance but by a rapid rollback—replaced with a harsher system of centralization, unitarism, and what can only be called neo-assimilation.
The 1990s: A Decade of Hope
In republics like Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Sakha (Yakutia), and Tuva, language laws granted co-official status to Russian and the titular Turkic languages. Schools, cultural centers, and media in native tongues began to re-emerge. There were even attempts to return to the Latin script—Tatarstan passed a law in 1999 adopting Latinization, only for it to be blocked by Moscow. For a moment, it seemed as if a long-suppressed cultural spring might finally blossom.
2000s to the Present: Centralization and the End of Autonomy
Vladimir Putin’s rise to power marked a decisive turn toward the “strengthening of the vertical of power.” The effects on linguistic rights were devastating.
Federal legislation became the main tool of suppression.
- The Education Law revisions of 2007 and 2012 stripped away mandatory instruction in republic languages, downgrading them to “optional” subjects to be studied only voluntarily and at the expense of time allocated for Russian.
- The 2018 amendments followed a storm of complaints from parents in Tatarstan and other republics about being “forced” to study Tatar. Moscow’s response was swift: no regional language could be taught at the expense of Russian. Overnight, classroom hours for native tongues collapsed. As Rosobrnadzor chief Lyubov Glebova bluntly put it, “The Russian language must not suffer.”
Erasing the Educational and Cultural Infrastructure
Today, in most republics, full-time schools in Turkic languages are virtually nonexistent. Instruction in native tongues has been reduced to one or two hours a week, often taught from uninspired textbooks by teachers working under constant political pressure.
Civil activism and independent media pushing for language rights face relentless pressure. Groups like the All-Tatar Public Center are routinely marginalized, smeared as “extremist,” or accused of “inciting interethnic strife.” Television in native languages has been shuttered, print outlets throttled, and audiences deliberately curtailed.
Urbanization and Demographics
The forces unleashed in the Soviet era have only intensified. Young people leave for cities where Russian is the sole language of ambition, education, and career. Rural communities are hollowed out, and with them, the last strongholds of Turkic speech.
The Numbers Behind the Tragedy
The data—both from Russia’s own censuses and from UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger—paint a grim picture.
- Crimean Tatar: Classified by UNESCO as “severely endangered.” In 2010, some 260,000 people declared it their mother tongue, but far fewer actively spoke it. After Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, schools in Crimean Tatar began shutting down, textbooks went out of print, and activists faced increasing repression. Human rights monitors say the number of children receiving instruction in the language has been cut by more than half.
- Nogai: Teetering on the edge of extinction. With a population of roughly 100,000–120,000 spread thinly across Dagestan, Karachay-Cherkessia, and Stavropol, Nogai has little chance to sustain a cohesive cultural space. Studies by the Russian Academy of Sciences show only 20–30 percent of Nogais—mostly elders—speak the language fluently. Among urban youth, it is virtually absent. Media in Nogai are almost nonexistent.
- Karachay-Balkar: Around 300,000 speakers, but under pressure. Though officially recognized in Karachay-Cherkessia and Kabardino-Balkaria, in practice its role is shrinking. Russian dominates in schools and cities. UNESCO notes a steep decline in intergenerational transmission.
- Kumyk: With a population of about 400,000 in Dagestan, the language is officially deemed “vulnerable.” In rural areas it survives, but in cities it is fading fast. Efforts since the 1990s to bolster Kumyk in schools and universities have sputtered without systemic state support.
- Tatar: The largest Turkic language in Russia, with more than 5 million speakers, yet also in peril. In 1926, 98 percent of Tatars declared Tatar their native tongue; by 2010, that number had dropped to 83 percent. Among young people in cities, fewer than half speak it fluently. In Moscow and St. Petersburg, the numbers are lower still. The 2017 abolition of mandatory Tatar classes in Tatarstan struck a crippling blow. UNESCO now lists Tatar as “vulnerable.”
- Bashkir: With about 1.2 million speakers, its situation is even more precarious than Tatar. Officially co-equal in Bashkortostan, in practice it is hard to hear Bashkir even in Ufa, the republic’s capital. Russian dominates education, media, and urban culture. Even in rural areas, Bashkir is steadily retreating.
The Harsh Verdict
The Russian Federation presents itself as a multiethnic, multilingual state. On paper, its constitution enshrines the right of all peoples to preserve their native languages. In reality, Turkic tongues are being driven into extinction zones. Their survival depends on family transmission, grassroots activism, and the resilience of small communities—set against a powerful state that sees linguistic diversity as a liability, not a resource.
Languages of Siberia: On the Brink of Silence
The smaller Turkic languages of Siberia face the bleakest prospects. The Siberian Tatar tongue—its status disputed, sometimes dismissed as merely a dialect—has only a few thousand active speakers left. Shor, once spoken across the taiga, counted just 2,800 speakers in the 2010 census, with fewer than a thousand still using it daily. Chulym Turkic is practically gone, with fewer than a hundred elderly speakers hanging on. Dolgan, spoken on the northern edge of the continent, has about a thousand active speakers, most of them aging fast. For these languages, each passing year doesn’t just mean time lost; it means dozens of lives gone, and with them, irreplaceable fragments of memory and tradition.
A Tragedy by Design
The decline of Turkic languages in Russia is not an accident of history, nor a byproduct of globalization. It is the deliberate outcome of centuries of state policy. From military conquest and forced Christianization, through the Soviet project of “modernization” and linguistic erasure, to today’s strategy of neo-assimilation under the slogans of a “united people” and a “Russian civic nation,” the pattern is unmistakable.
The system is engineered to make preserving one’s native tongue not only impractical but actively disadvantageous—socially, economically, and often politically. A language is tolerated as folklore, as the stuff of costumes and festivals, as an elective course with no bearing on real opportunity. It is stripped of utility, reduced to a cultural trinket.
This is not just policy—it is a quiet humanitarian catastrophe. With every elder who dies without passing on their speech, with every child who grows up unable to speak the language of their ancestors, an entire universe disappears: a worldview, a body of wisdom, poetry, songs, and centuries of historical memory. Russia proclaims its diversity, but in practice it is systematically erasing the very core of that diversity—the languages of its peoples. And this erasure is not slowing down. It is accelerating.