Hasan Huseynov. Speech and violence

Speech and violence
Hasan Huseynov

Publication date: December 29, 2000

The collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917 led to the emergence of a number of small independent national states (Poland, Finland) and an attempt to build a new state on the principles of a federation of equal peoples. Russian statehood had to give way to statehood of a class, or supranational, type; From this first attempt, some nodes remain to this day, poorly integrated into the system. If Lenin’s strategy was to build a federation of peoples on the ruins of the empire, the national development of which was to break out of the shackles of statehood, then the strategy of Stalin and his entourage was to create in a historically short period of time a state in which the Russian people would have to give up everything for the assimilation of foreigners - a monstrous imperial formation with the ideology of a dwarf national state. During the implementation of this strategy, over the course of three generations, the list of peoples inhabiting the country was reduced (for example, the Talysh and Mingrelians disappeared into the Azerbaijanis and Georgians, respectively); Attempts were made to exterminate peoples by deportation to places where, at best, they were threatened with assimilation into larger ethnic groups.

The current state of interethnic relations in the USSR should be recognized as a whole as pre-crisis, and for some regions (Transcaucasia) downright critical. Among the Russian population of the country, there is growing dissatisfaction with “ungrateful” foreigners who are “greedy” on their fertile southern lands (if we are talking about southerners) or who do not want to share their higher economic and national-cultural achievements (if we are talking about the Baltic republics). Among the foreigners themselves, there is growing dissatisfaction with the “big brother” - the Russians, who are imposing their strategic goals (cotton destroying orchards - on the Uzbeks, virgin lands instead of cattle breeding - on the Kazakhs, chemical production - on the Armenians, nuclear power plants - on the Ukrainians, and similar traditional motives for the mass consciousness) and enjoying the status of a people of the first rank, personifying the entire Union, which is not accidentally called a union of republics , and not a union of peoples .

The fundamental question for mass consciousness remains the question of the identity of Soviet power and the power of Russians, an identity that alone seems legitimate and traditionally justified (for example, “optimal experience in solving military-strategic problems”: October , 1988, #5, p. 172), and others find it unacceptable and in need of revision. Even the official condemnation of nationalism and chauvinism presupposes a double scale: Russian nationalism is condemned only at the stage of chauvinism, or the expression of national superiority over other peoples; foreign nationalism is condemned already at the stage of defending one’s cultural identity or legal rights (this was precisely the reaction to the demand of the Crimean Tatars to be allowed to return to their homeland).

One of the indicators of the dynamics of crisis development is the linguistic state of society, which has developed over the past five to six decades and has great destructive potential. The linguistic situation in the country at the moment in the near future can be characterized as semi-lingualism . Organic semi-lingualism as a consequence of “doublethink” is expressed in the devaluation of the “upper” levels of the language, responsible for the “storage” of fundamental values, and a significant rise in foul language, especially swearing as a speech “lubricant”, ensuring the radical degradation of large communities of native speakers. Functional semilingualism is officially classified as “bilingualism.” At the same time, the Russian language, acting as an intermediary language, serves the spheres of ideology, politics, “high” literature and culture, and at the same time “low” areas of speech behavior, while the native language of the local population serves the middle, everyday sphere. At the watershed there is a linguistic neutral zone that cannot be served by either one or the other language of a “bilingual person.”

The disintegration of the speech pattern of Russian speakers is also facilitated by their role as an intermediary language in a multinational country. Along with the existence of a fairly large bilingual stratum, which has some influence on the development of both languages, we must not lose sight of the apparently no less semilingual stratum - people who do not speak, within the generally accepted norms for a literate person, either the language of their people or Russian . The problem is especially acute for the most mobile part of this stratum - young men who have served in the army and are leaving their native places or are ready to return home with a forever established image of the Russian word.

The inability for a semi-lingual to convey by verbal means what most worries, pleases or frightens, over the years accumulates in him an explosive burden of mentally unprocessed experiences: the more painful and monotonous they are, the more necessary the corresponding verbal expression becomes for them. So you need to chew dry and rough food more. But there are no words or the words are wrong. The semi-lingual is, in essence, alienated from the human community. His behavior is unpredictable; he himself cannot warn of an impending explosion. When there are many such semilinguals, almost always marked by inescapable affectation, and they are also gathered together, any, even the most inconspicuous, conflict, in principle, resolved only by words, gives rise to brutal violence. Semilingualism, therefore, is not only a linguistic disease, but an ethnosocial disease of the 20th century crowd.

This, in our opinion, is one of the explanations for the phenomenon of the Sumgayit massacre.

By the mid-30s, the Turkic and Iranian-speaking peoples of the USSR were transferred from the Latin and Arabic script to the Cyrillic alphabet (which was then called the Russian alphabet). The transition to the Cyrillic alphabet was caused by the need to separate these peoples from their co-religionist peoples and neighbors - both those who were experiencing the beginning of the “Islamic Renaissance” (Iran, the Arab world), and those who, like the USSR, were embarking on the path of secularization of state life ( Sunni Turkey under the leadership of the Young Turk triumvirate and especially Ataturk).

In the case of Azerbaijan, the transition to the Cyrillic alphabet sharply contrasted native speakers with their neighbors - Georgians and Armenians, who retained the traditional writing system. Over time, this seemingly insignificant intervention in the linguistic and cultural sphere gradually led to a decline in the prestige of the native language in the “Russian shirt” and the Russian language as an intermediary language. At the same time, the prestige of Arabic and Persian languages ​​as traditional languages ​​of Islam and Islamic culture increased. Walking along the rows of the Leningrad market in Moscow in the summer of 1988, the author noticed cardboard labels with Arabic writing placed here and there in front of trays with fruits from Central Asia. It is safe to say that not a single one of the market visitors (and few of the sellers) could read what was written - “apricots”, “figs”, “dried apricots”, without first looking at the contents of the tray. The Arabic inscription is a sign, if not of a new situation, then, in any case, of a process that has just taken shape.

The speech preferences developed by native speakers are of strategic importance for any national culture. If for Armenians or Georgians their native language certainly takes first place in any proposed list of languages, then for speakers of most other languages ​​of the peoples of the USSR the picture may turn out to be different. In an environment of developing semi-lingualism, the decline in the authority of the Russian language directly affects the degradation of the native language in its literary embodiment.

At the same time, the value of oral creativity in the native language increases and attention to gradually more ancient incarnations of the national tradition increases: among Muslim peoples this is an interest in the Islamic and pre-Islamic history of their people. Orientation towards phantom values ​​(metaphor - from phantom, amputated to eternity in physiology) stimulates attempts to present the language of the “big brother” as a secondary formation in relation to the “East” as a whole. Local lower classes and workers in the “arts, sciences and crafts” assign the Russian language the role of a mediator at the intersection of political language (“the language of power”) and foul language. The native language, deprived of historical past and spiritual values ​​for its speakers (for Muslims of Islamic civilization), will be valued the more highly, the more these values ​​are returned to them. At the same time, its importance and independence will be exaggerated, and foreign-language neighbors will perceive it more and more hostilely, especially if maximum favorable conditions have not been created for their languages ​​("minor", "third", etc.) (Azerbaijani in Armenia, Armenian in Azerbaijan, Georgian in Armenia, etc.).

In the course of the instinctive or conscious overcoming of functional semi-lingualism, officially recognized as “bilingualism,” a significant simplification of both languages ​​has already begun, which can be called “enrichment” only in the sense in which this term is used in metallurgy: trying to cleanse the language of “alien” impurities, he is doomed to ever more noticeable degeneration. The harbingers of the process of general impoverishment of language - both for semi-lingual speakers of one language and for semi-lingual bilinguals - were writers expressing both isolationist (V. Belov, V. Rasputin) and internationalist (Ch. Aitmatov) views, in which there is nothing neither constructive, nor even utopian constructive. It is difficult not to share the anger of the representatives of a great nation with those who for decades tore Vladimir Solovyov out of Russian culture, trying to slip matryoshka dolls in his place. “Folklorization,” which degrades any culture, unfortunately becomes one of the grounds for the generally false conclusion about the presumption of beneficial and productive interaction between Russian pre-revolutionary culture and the Russian autocratic system: self-deception is also a type of cultural semi-lingualism.

The polarization of “national nihilism” and nationalism deprives the truly bilingual (more precisely, multilingual) layer of real influence on mass consciousness. From the point of view of nationalists, the historical past of the language is certainly preferable to its current state, although the future of the Russian language is, paradoxically, bright and joyful. Multilingual speakers of Russian, in the overwhelming majority of cases, see the main threats as coming from outside or arising through the fault of “treacherously” Russified foreigners. Mass consciousness practically does not register the internal sources of the collapse of language, culture and economy.

The general picture of the linguistic neighborhood is such that native speakers in all regions of the country note an increase in the conflict of linguistic coexistence. The intensity of the spread of semi-lingualism is such that in order to resolve any interethnic conflicts, it will incite violent methods. Anti-Semitism in conditions of general interethnic tension can be used as a traditional element of the ideology of national conspiracy of large ethnic groups against small nations, with unpredictable consequences for the fate of the country.

An example of such a scenario can be considered the anti-Armenian policy in the Karabakh issue. The immediate consequences of this policy are an explosion of nationalism in Azerbaijan, the growth of anti-Armenian and anti-Azerbaijani sentiments among Russians and “northerners” in general, and in the future - the strengthening of feudal isolationism both in Azerbaijan and in other republics of Transcaucasia. What prevents central government bodies from getting rid of a narrowly pragmatic, unsystematic and, in general, unpromising approach to solving interethnic problems? This is not the first time that the Jewish and Armenian issues have been raised, and their solution is only possible if linked to the country’s common problem of national violence, which can be defined more broadly as a problem of structural violence .

The Russian question is at the center of this problem. Let's consider it in the refraction of foreign mass consciousness, taking into account the linguistic circumstance that the Russian population of the USSR in most cases gives the languages ​​of other peoples of the country 4-5th places in a 4-5-place scale of values, experiencing in general a deep alienation from foreigners as in the European part, and in the republics where the majority of the population is non-Russian.

The ambiguity of the state structure created according to the Stalinist recipe is manifested in the propaganda of “multinational unity” against the backdrop of the overwhelming superiority of Russians in the highest echelons of power, the army, and science.

The degeneration and physical destruction of the intelligentsia and progressive clergy during times of mass repression and devastating wars led to the dominance in wide circles of Russian society of ideas about the “reduction of Russian living space,” the dominance of foreigners, the sabotage of foreigners, the conspiracy of the Jewish Freemasons, etc. In turn, among the peoples of Central Asia and the Muslims of Transcaucasia, all these processes stimulated the spread of unofficial (“barbarized”, “fanaticized”) Islam.

Intellectual workers in Russia are also gripped by mass psychosis, noisily discussing their status as “Russian intelligentsia,” because they seriously believe that origin and occupation are a sufficient basis for such qualification. This intelligentsia imposes on the Russians the national identity of a small people, surrounded by a sea of ​​​​non-Russians - “Chuks”, “Chuchmeks”, “Chukchis”... It is characterized by anti-Bolshevism, Stalinism and criticism of Lenin for attempting to destroy a state built on national violence. For the idea of ​​equality, the idea of ​​a federation of peoples, and not a union of autonomous bantustans created by Stalin and his heirs.

Mass consciousness is not able to critically comprehend this range of issues, and they are either uncritically accepted as a guide to action or uncritically rejected. There is a polarization of fundamental national values ​​with the prospect of growing centrifugal tendencies. The ugliest creation of mass consciousness can unfold in reality quickly and irreparably, as in Sumgayit. Therefore, the first steps in resolving the national issue should not be administrative measures, but a preventive mass campaign through all information channels, including:

a) public recognition by the Government of the USSR of the severity of national problems and the need for a deep restructuring of interethnic relations;

b) the resulting lifting of the taboo on discussing national issues, with the obligatory equal publication of polar and compromise points of view on the entire range of problems. One should not be afraid of mutual claims appearing in the press; a fair solution is possible only through an open discussion of reality;

c) the announcement of a nationwide competition for fellows of the Council of Nationalities (not from among the nomenclature persons) to travel to multinational countries of the world - from Switzerland and Yugoslavia to Australia and Canada - for a period of 1-3 months in order to study the rich and broad experience of a public report on these trips;

d) publication in the languages ​​of the peoples of the USSR special issues of the newspaper Izvestia , dedicated, among other things, to legal, subordinate and illegal acts in the field of national relations;

e) promotion of national cultural centers of the association and all forms of educational activities of all peoples without exception;

f) creation of a sociological and historical center for the study of the national question; at the beginning of its activity, such a center would have to report directly to one of the members of the Politburo and publish a monthly open magazine.

Administrative measures, oddly enough, in the era of perestroika could be aimed at expanding the apparatus in charge of interethnic relations (in particular, the creation of national departments and large departments), as well as the development of legislation on the transformation of the USSR into a legal federal state . Without urgent preventive and non-violent intervention in the sphere of stereotypes of mass consciousness (already developing into psychoses), intervention carried out only through the word, the listed and other acute problems of national relations are faced with ignorance, incompetence of local authorities and confusion of central departments, not accustomed to doing without the use of force .

Honest recognition of common difficulties and peaceful overcoming of them on a purely legal basis is a worthy and still feasible path to ridding a great country of structural violence.

First published in the magazine "XX Century and the World", #8, 1988