Issues involving language, culture, and identity are often not well understood even by the people who are actively involved in struggling with these concepts. The nations in the post-Soviet world are working in this area, but still have a long way to go.

In Rome, on 4 November 2000, Russia's justice minister, Yury Chaika, signed Protocol 12 to the Convention on Human Rights. The protocol states that:

"the enjoyment of any right set forth by law shall be secured without discrimination on any ground such as sex, race, colour, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, association with a national minority, property, birth or other status" (1).

Twenty-four nations signed the protocol -Ukraine among them. However, much of the Ukrainian population, at home in Ukraine, is apparently not acting according to the protocol.

The Ukrainian language, banned by the Russian tsars and later banned by the Soviets (2), is now the official language of Ukraine, but most people there, as is the case in many of the post-Soviet nations, still speak Russian. They were forced to learn Russian in school, they had to speak Russian to work, and they still speak Russian at home. This situation continues today; despite the fact that only "around 20% of Ukrainians are ethnic Russians. ...н more than 60% of the [Ukrainian] population of 51m[illion] speaks Russian" (3).

One continuing reason for this is that books in Ukraine are published in Russian; in an article in "The Guardian" (UK) titled "Ukraine Wages War on Russian Language", a book shop assistant stated: "We specialise in philosophy and those books haven't been translated into Ukrainian". In the same article, "another bookseller says the local authority is trying either to ban Russian publications or to slap on punitive taxes", but goes on to say that "the reason for the domination of Russian is simple. Nobody will put any money into publishing books in Ukrainian" (4).

It was the death of a folk singer that brought the situation reported in "The Guardian" to its current boiling point. Igor Bilozir, a popular Ukrainian folk-singer, was sitting at a cafe last spring playing Ukrainian songs. At the next table, a group of young Russians was singing songs in Russian. A fight in the street followed the Russians' demand that Bilozir stop singing in Ukrainian, and his refusal to do so. Bilozir died three weeks later as a result of injuries sustained in the fight. According to "The Guardian", "more than 100,000 people in Lviv [Lvov to the Russians] turned out for Bilozir's funeral" and "the next day the Patriots of Ukraine went on the rampage. Two ethnic Russian youths were arrested on suspicion of murder. One was released ... on bail and left the country, [and] the other is the son of the local deputy police chief. Expectations of a fair trial are low. A black cross, flowers and a picture of the songwriter mark the spot where he died. 'Igor Bilozir. Murdered Here by Russian-speaking Thugs', reads the inscription" (5).

Language is a hot issue. Why? Because it is so heavily tied to identity. The nations that have emerged since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 are trying to promote their own spirits of nationalism and of national identity, and language is a big part of individual country identity, as well as of the patriotism such emerging countries hope to foster among their people.

One backlash, however, of the overthrow of decades of russification in these countries, seems to be an increase in ethnic intolerance. Some of the young people quoted in "The Guardian" article were referred to as "skinheads" and Ukrainian nationalists were referred to as "Nazis preaching a gospel of ethnic intolerance" In Lviv, the ... city council has been trying to ban Russian-language pop music in bars and cafes and to close down a Russian-language radio station, and linguistic vigilantes have been cruising shops and kiosks, bullying retailers into dumping Russian literature, newspapers and CDs [,] ...н a tall order [when] Russian-language newspapers still outnumber Ukrainian 10 to one across the country (6).

Feelings are running high. Russian Orthodox churches in Ukraine have been vandalized, and anti-Russian graffiti are seen on walls around the country.

In Azerbaijan, the situation is less violent, but is just as confused. Azeris presently have their fourth alphabet just in this century: they went from Arabic to Latin (Roman), then to Cyrillic, and are now back to Latin (modern, with a few Turkish letters).
Azeri, or Azerbaijani, is spoken not only in Azerbaijan, where it is the official language (Article 21 of Chapter 2 of the Constitution of the Azerbaijan Republic (7)) but also in Iran, on the west bank of the Caspian Sea, as well as in parts of Austria and Georgia. About six to seven million people supposedly speak the language in Azerbaijan, but this figure is high if "speak" means "full literacy": the population of Azerbaijan is just over seven million, about one million of whom are displaced refugees from the conflict with Armenia.

Another four million people in Iran speak Azeri; part of Iran used to belong to the Azeris, and is still often referred to as "Southern Azerbaijan" in the Azeri press. According to a January, 2000, report from the Institute for War and Peace Caucasus Reporting Service, "there are currently around 30 million ethnic Azeris living in Iran, nearly half of the country's population, mainly in two north-western regions known as Eastern and Western Azerbaijan" (8).

From the Turkic subgroup of the Altaic language family, Azeri, or Azerbaijani, forms the Southwestern, or Oghuz, branch of the family, whose primary dialects include the Northern, Southern, Eastern, Western, Central, Eastern Anatolian, Northern Iranian, and Southern Iranian Azerbaijani dialects.
Traditionally, Azeri was written in Arabic script, and Arabic writing can still be seen on many of the older structures in Azerbaijan (notably the Shirvanshah's Palace - some of which dates from the 15th century - in Baku, Azerbaijan. When we were there, all of the old facing stones from the top of the parapets were lying on the ground undergoing renovation, and the flowing Arabic script was still remarkably clear).

In 1924, the Soviet government introduced the Roman script in Azerbaijan, and in 1940, the Cyrillic. Stalin gave each of the Turkic nations in the area its own variation of the Cyrillic alphabet, just to make it more difficult for those Turkic countries to communicate with each other.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, anti-Russian sentiment in Azerbaijan prompted the Azeri government to order the change from the Stalin-enforced Cyrillic Azeri alphabet to a Latin one. As in Ukraine, in Azerbaijan, textbooks, newspapers, and other books and publications have not kept up with government decree, even though Article 21 of the Constitution says that "Azerbaijan Republic provides development of the Azerbaijani language" (9). Research materials available for university students in Azerbaijan are sparse, and much of what is available is not in a language known to the group needing access to it. Some of the young people in Azerbaijan today do still read Cyrillic Azeri, but the rate of those who do is decreasing rapidly. Many do recognize the Russian alphabet, because the use of Russian is still widespread. In Azerbaijan, as in Ukraine, most people still speak Russian, even at home.

In Azerbaijan, however, unlike in Ukraine, Russian is still seen as a "status" language. Under the Soviets, Russian was the power language, in Azerbaijan and elsewhere in the Soviet Union. The Azeris are big on power, and for some for them, Russian has not completely lost its charm. There is a big, nationalistic push in Azerbaijan to reintroduce the Azeri language, and Azeri language, literature, and culture classes are being taught in the schools. Official business is supposed to be conducted in Azeri, but in fact, it often cannot be, because some of the officials do not know the Azeri language themselves. When I worked in Azerbaijan, many of our official documents were duplicated in both English and Russian иC but usually not in Azeri. Even when we brought a cat we had adopted out of Azerbaijan and back to the United States, his papers were in Russian.

Essentially, for the emerging post-Soviet world, "language" is everything; it embodies or contains all other issues. A culture shapes its language, and a language shapes its culture, in a very chicken-and-the-egg kind of way. Time, politics, and circumstances have shaped the Russian (and his collateral) world in such a fashion that his very identity is often in question, and this causes the Russian (and Russia's other ex-Soviet citizens) to cling to language in an especially intense way - language is the primary part of what such a person has that he feels that he knows that he owns for himself; everything else was owned by the collective, and before that, by the tsars, or the khans. Though property in the post-Soviet world is now to be "privatized", in fact, privatization is often happening either slowly or not at all. For the common man, this usually still means that someone else - someone big, with money, power, and authority - owns everything. Language can be owned by anyone.

This was illustrated very succinctly recently following the escape of several former high Georgian officials from a Tbilisi (Georgia) prison hospital. Ten days after the escape, three of the officials were betrayed to the present Georgian authorities by a peasant farmer. The farmer told the Georgian police that the three men "had demanded bread and cheese [from him] 'with unnecessary rudeness'" (10).

It may be difficult for us, in the West, sitting in our positions of comfort and comparative affluence, to imagine just how important such an idea of being polite while you take something from me could be. In the case of this farmer, word choice, delivery of words chosen, and the attitudes expressed by the speakers, were all part of the impact of language on the farmer's future actions (and on the ultimate fate of those three Georgian escapees). Considering all of this, then, is "language" not just the words? What is "language", then, and what is its function?

Basically, language means communication. More specifically, a "language" is a set of symbols or expressions (verbal, for a living spoken language, or signs, for a signed language like American Sign Language) bound by a very specific set of rules, and in which the symbols are then used to generate the expressions through which communication between people who use the same "language" is possible. The rules, or the syntax (the order in which the symbols are combined), plus the morphology (the study of how phonemes - basic (meaningless) sounds that can alter the meaning of the resultant morphemes, which then do have meaning, but not syntax or grammar), together make up the grammar (the relationships and functional combinations through which symbols are used in communication) of a language.
Note that "symbols" need not be "words standing for one thing". In many cases, they are not. Mildred Larson, in "Meaning-based translation: a guide to cross-language equivalences", (Annex 2) gives the example of "the existence of a single Vietnamese word" meaning "someone leaves to go somewhere and something happens at home so that he has to go back home" (11).

This kind of variability in languages and language structures means that symbols only mean exactly what they mean in the source language, a fact that has been causing translators to pull out their hair since the first time anyone learned two languages and then tried to do translation. The best we can hope for is to try to set up a correspondence of the general sense of meaning, if possible, between one language and another. Sometimes it works, but sometimes there are unbridgeable gaps.
For example, some languages have whole tenses or moods that other languages do not have. English has six tenses: three simple, and three compound. French has fourteen tenses: seven simple, and seven compound.

Even without giving more explanation here, it should be obvious that direct translation from French to English will sometimes be impossible; there simply will be some things that cannot be said in the target language.

The French literary tense is Le Passeж Simple - Past Definite or Simple Past tense. It is a literary tense, not ordinarily used in conversational French or in informal writing, and usually found in writing such as history and literature. Le Passe Compose (Past Indefinite or Compound Past tense), on the other hand, is used in conversation, in correspondence, and in informal writing.

This means that a French-speaking person who sees Le Passe Simple has an automatic trigger: "I'm looking at literature now". When he sees Le Passe Compose, he says: "Oh; this is something real we're talking about".

Albert Camus used this to his advantage. L'Etrangere (The Stranger), by Camus, is written in Le Passe Compose. This was shocking! It meant that it automatically appeared to Camus' readers that everything in the story is happening right now: just from the tense, and the fact that Camus was not using the French literary tense. We can't do this in English. Therefore, L'Etrangere by Camus cannot actually be translated into English; it will not have the same effect. The target language, then, English, will not support the translation; the translation just cannot mean the same thing Camus intended.

Sometimes the difficulty of translation is not as much the particulars of language as it is the particulars of concept. Consider the Azerbaijani (from the Oriental) concept of an aksakal. This word encompasses "elder", "tutor", "leader", "sage" "wise man", "advisor" "counselor", "holy person", and much more. Literally, the word aksakal translates as "ak" - white or gray - and "sakal" - beard. If translated simply as "graybeard", however, only a reader in a culture venerating the wisdom of age would even begin to grasp the intention of the original word.

This difficulty of translation is also apparent in the case of abstract concepts. Take, for example, the word security. The Russian word for "security" is bezopasnost' (most people have at least a passing acquaintance with this word: it is the "B" in "KGB" - Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, or State Securities Committee). "Byez opasnost'" means, literally, "without danger". That isn't exactly what comes to mind when we think of the KGB, is it?

Translation involves other issues, as well, such as the difficulty of moving from a gender marked language to a non-gender marked one, and how to keep the true meaning of the original work when translating in this direction. This has been important in the recent flood of translation of some of the South American authors, whose works often deal with male/female issues in a way that may not be quite so apparent once translated into English.

There may be other difficulties, too, more conceptually based: if a language had no terms with which to represent the concept of an afterlife, for example, many religious texts, translated into that language, would lose much (perhaps most) of their meaning. Sometimes, too, there just isn't a word for something in one of two languages being compared, and substitutions have to be made; Russian, for example, has no word for "thumb". In Russian, the thumb is called "big finger": bolshoi' palets. I'm not certain that the discussion about man being set apart from the apes by his opposable thumb would carry quite the same weight if we were discussing man's opposable big finger.

It is clear that when we speak of language, we cannot only mean "just the word": context has a great deal to do with meaning. In this sense, "context", then, means culture.

In the post-Soviet world, the culture of the people has become garbled. The Soviets conducted an experiment: they took hundreds of millions of people, with histories and traditions and roots and values, and tried to make them over into one mold: that of homo sovietii: literally, "council man".

It didn't work - not quite. However, an enormous amount of damage was done to the cultural identities of most of the people who were a part of the experiment.

Culture, ideally, in the sense in which it relates to language, ought to mean those qualities about a people that make them (and, through succeeding generations, keep them) unique: their ideas, skills, patterns of behavior, art, folklore, history, and customs. This idea of "culture", however, was in direct opposition to that envisioned by the Soviet Union, and even the Soviets recognized this. In "How Rational Is the Behavior of Economic Agents in Russia?", Leonid Malkov stated: "Russia now endures a transition period from one type of cultural pattern to a new one. This means that for some time we can expect coexistence and maybe conflicts, between the representatives of different cultural groups. For many conflicts, the roots will be found in the clashes of cultural paradigms" (12).

A paradigm is a pattern or model, usually one accepted by most of the people in a community or group because of the effectiveness of the paradigm in explaining simply something that is really complex. If the Soviets sought to achieve cultural homogeneity through the application of a paradigm - and they did - then their plan has to have been to remake the ideas, skills, patterns of behavior, art, folklore, history, and customs of all groups making up the Soviet Union into the same culture. There could be no possible outcome for such a plan but the destruction of the cultures of the groups involved, and this is, indeed, the result of the Soviet experiment.

In "Bitter Lands: Displaced Peoples of the Former Soviet Union: The Last of the Tofalar: A people's identity lost to Soviet rule" by Michael Slackman, Luba, a Tofalar woman from southern Siberia, says: "We are Russified[;] we do not even know our own language ...н We want to sing traditional songs, but we don't even know how" (The Tofalar were a nomadic people of Siberia, said to have fought in the armies of Genghis Khan) (13).
Sometimes the people of the post-Soviet world have claimed that they have not lost their own cultures. Bulgarian President Stoyanov, delivering a speech at a Bulgarian State Dinner attended by US President Bill Clinton, the text of which was released by the American White House in November of 1999, said: "...нIn Bulgaria fanatic communist ideology meant everything, and the human being was nothing". He was speaking about the newfound friendly relationship between Bulgaria and the United States.

"It's difficult for me to ... try to define the relations between ...н Bulgaria and the United States of America because, for 45 years, the communist regime [of Bulgaria] daily pledged its love to the Soviet Union. It was an imposed love which was thrust upon us by force, and it had nothing to do with the affinity ... the Bulgarians felt for the Russian people".

President Stoyanov went on to say:
"Mr. President, you are paying a visit to a country whose roots lie deep in the soul of the European civilization; and a people which has gone through trials and tribulations, but in the face of many difficulties has managed to keep its identity, its language, its religion and its culture intact" (14).

If it is, indeed, true that the Bulgarians escaped the deculturization of most of the rest of the Soviet states, then by Stoyanov's own words it was under incredible conditions:

"...н the human being was nothing..." and "it was an imposed love which was thrust upon us by force...н". With the people being devalued and forced to conform even to having their feelings defined by their Soviet overlords, it is difficult to see how ideas, skills, art, folklore, and the other aspects of culture could survive in such an environment.

Perhaps the answer to this question may be found by investigating the idea of identity, and how it relates to language and culture.

Identity implies specific existence: individuality. Social psychology suggests that identity can be shaped or modified over time by contact with another. In this way, culture in its true sense has had an effect on the identities of the post-Soviet peoples.

Azerbaijan, for example, sits at the crossroads of East and West. On the old Silk Route, Azerbaijan has long been visited by travelers; Marco Polo went there. The Romans made it all the way to Azerbaijan, and left carvings of their own on the rocks near the Paleolithic cave paintings and carvings in the Gobustan region of Azerbaijan.

The Mongols ran over the area. The paintings on the walls of the khan's palace at Shemakha have pictures of battle scenes reflecting this part of the country's history.

One of the most famous poets of Azerbaijan, Nizami Ganjavi, wrote in Persian and was supported by the Persian court. (Nizami is claimed by Persia, Iran, and Azerbaijan, but he was from Ganja, which is the second largest city in Azerbaijan.) Azerbaijan has had other good poets and artists, and has had a rich artistic history; Azeri carpet art, particularly, is internationally renowned.

The Arabs brought Islam to Azerbaijan, and Arabic writing. The influence of Islam is still present, even though Azerbaijan is, by law, a secular nation: the Azeri Constitution separates religion from the state, says that all religions are equal before the law, and that the educational system is a secular one. Iran, along with Azerbaijan the only other Shiite Muslim nation, tries to exert its influence in Azerbaijan, rebuilding mosques and funding projects of interest to the Iranians, but the Azeris have often been nervous of powerful, once controlling neighbors, and they are cautious in their relationships with Iran, as well as with other countries under whose control or influence they have lived at various periods of their history.

Russia, of course, has also had control of Azerbaijan. The Russian tsars, and then the Soviets, controlled Azerbaijan for many years, except for a brief period of independence in 1918, which ended with the Bolshevik revolution. Azerbaijan re-achieved its independence in 1991.

Turkey has also had much influence in the country; the Azeri language is a Turkic language, with about 80% common vocabulary between the languages of Turkey and Azerbaijan.

All of these factors, and more - oil, among the most notable of the others - have affected and still affect what makes up the identity of "an Azeri". Unfortunately, Azerbaijan has changed hands or influences so many times, that its people have become something like chameleons - they can take on the cloak of whoever happens to be in control of them at the time. The problem with this has sometimes been that while the Azeris were fooling everyone else about who they are, they were also, perhaps, fooling themselves as well.
All of these influences do still exist in Azerbaijan today, as well as the very powerful influence of the West (though this is lessening somewhat of late, with Azerbaijan leaning toward strengthening its ties with Moscow).

So how do Azeris define their identity? So far, they haven't; it's under construction. If you ask a room full of Azeris what kind of people they are - and I have - you won't get a single answer; you'll get a chorus of different answers.

While Azerbaijan's case may be a little more dramatic than that of some of the other post-Soviet states, it is not atypical. Most of the other post-Soviet nations are in a somewhat similar situation.

So what do we know? Well, we know that language is an important factor, and that we have many people who are not Russian, but for whom Russian is their primary language. Moreover, many of these people actively dislike Russians, with ethnic intolerance seeming to be on the rise.

We also know that a true understanding between groups speaking different languages cannot be accomplished solely on the basis of a one-to-one correspondence of meanings between the languages; languages are too dissimilar for understanding to be achieved in this way.

Most of the post-Soviet world is still working on identity, so identity is out, too, as our means of establishing communication. This means that if we want to understand each other, we're left with culture as our most viable option.

Remember that in the post-Soviet world, culture is often pretty shaky, too; that Tofalar woman in Siberia didn't know her own language, and wanted to sing the songs of her heritage, but didn't even know what they were.

Culture, however, is in most cases not totally lost; where records of any kind exist, it can be relearned. This is, perhaps, the real answer to working out the place of the post-Soviet world within the rest of the world, now that the Iron Curtain is down, and we have the chance to make that integration. First, the peoples of the world whose cultures were forcibly eradicated by the policies of the Soviet Union must relearn their own cultures, so that they know who they were; then they can find their - perhaps changed - most probably changed, but not necessarily for the worse - own identities. Cultural exchange is the true means of communication between peoples. The post-Soviet world, however, must find out what its cultures are, before it can effectively participate in such an exchange.

NOTES