The tongue may not forgive

Why replacing a hard sign with a soft one leads to historical changes

On behalf of President Vladimir Putin, a government commission on the Russian language has been established in Russia. Purpose: to develop a coherent language policy, to determine uniform requirements for the creation of dictionaries and grammars containing language norms, to conduct an examination of the rules of Russian spelling and punctuation.

When the supreme power decides to deal with questions of linguistics, it signs a symbolic sentence for itself. Having won many military and political victories, having built a society from top to bottom, she comes in her pride to an attempt to regulate the language.

But, as I. Brodsky noted, the language is older and more powerful than the state.

And on this last attempt, power breaks down, just as the autocracy of the old woman from Pushkin's fairy tale broke down when she, seated in the royal chambers, decided to become the mistress of the sea, i.e. master the free element.

The fact that V.V. Putin decided to deal with the issues of linguistics is a good sign for those who still hope that, despite the reset, his current presidential term will be his last.

Exactly one hundred years ago, in 1920, by the end of the Civil War, when the Bolsheviks had already won on all fronts, V. I. Lenin allowed himself to be briefly distracted by the leadership of the language, writing an article “On the purification of the Russian language”, where he demands to expel foreign words and "declare war on the distortion of the Russian language."

Three years later, Lenin suffered a stroke, and soon he died.

In 1950 J. V. Stalin made an even more fundamental contribution to the science of language, writing the pamphlet Marxism and Questions of Linguistics, where he rejects the vulgarization of the class approach to language. The pamphlet ends with the catchphrase: "The introduction of Marxism into linguistics is, in my opinion, the way in which Soviet linguistics could be improved."

Linguists warmly thanked Comrade Stalin, but three years later the leader died.

In the early 1960s N. S. Khrushchev started a large-scale spelling reform, which was supposed to simplify spelling to such an extent that the first secretary himself, who graduated only from a parochial school, could be considered quite literate.

It was proposed to abolish the hard sign - to replace it with a soft one, and also to abolish the soft sign after the hissing ones: volume, entrance, daughter, mouse, youth, you know, you want . Write about after sizzling and after ts: black, burning, chicken, father, cucumbers . Adverbs to write together: in general, zaglaza . The alternations in the roots were canceled: growth, age, tan . And other innovations: hare, brochure, parachute ...

In September 1964, these proposals of the State Spelling Commission of the Academy of Sciences were published and met with the unanimous approval of the Soviet people. As early as October 12, newspapers enthusiastically wrote about innovations, about the coming steady increase in literacy.

But on October 14, a plenum of the Central Committee took place, at which Khrushchev was removed from power.

Following his political death, the reform immediately ordered a long life: the entire press began to ridicule it in unison as a manifestation of voluntarism, and the masters of the pen boldly declared that they would not eat “cucumbers”.

But the power of Khrushchev, like the power of Lenin and Stalin, has never been so confident and strong as in those historical moments when they decided to demonstrate it on questions of linguistics.

I am in no way predicting a grim end to the regime that established a government commission to regulate the Russian language, but on the basis of historical precedents, I wish to beware. It is no longer a matter of a hostile environment, and not even of rampant viruses. It is possible to win all political battles, defeat whites, fascists, cosmopolitans, revisionists, liberals, sanctions, pandemics, etc. and so on. But...

The tongue does not forgive those who encroach on its power.