Is It Better To Speak Russian Or To Die ?

Fighting against a new Russification, Ukrainians and Georgians’ refusal to speak Russian stands in striking contrast with the linguistic monopoly that the language holds in Bielorussia or Central Asia. To speak or not to speak Russian in former USSR countries, that is the question.

Upon their arrival in Georgia, foreigners are warned : woe betide anyone who dares speak Russian! Though most Georgians understand the language, Russian speaking tourists are usually faced with the locals’ complete mutism and disapproving faces. In Kyrgyzstan, one could be surprised to experience the complete opposite experience, where not speaking Russian is seen as an anomaly. When shop fronts, conversations on the streets of the capital Bishkek, or even the local navigation app ‘2GIS’ are mainly in Russian, non-Russian speakers may struggle with finding their footing.

Call Me By Your Name, Luca Guadagnino, 2017

After becoming viral on social media thanks to the movie Call Me By Your Name, the question “Is it better to speak or to die ?” embodies all the challenges of the Russian language. In countries fighting Russia’s invasions such as Georgia and Ukraine, a consensus was reached to stop speaking the attacker’s tongue. Silence, while destroying all attempts of communication between speakers, can then become an eloquent answer to resist a new Russification : Russia may have stolen their land, but they’ll never steal their tongue. 

On the Asian continent, Kyrgyzstan’s example highlights the difficulties of detaching oneself from what I call linguistic colonization. Home to a wide range of Uzbek, Russian, Dungan, Uighur or Turk ethnic minorities due to immigration and its nomadic history, Russian acts as an interethnic language even decades after the fall of the Soviet Union. Most of all, for a country depending on the flourishing of Russian-Kyrgyz relations to develop its economy, to speak Russian is a matter of survival.

Russia and Russian, an ideological battlefield

With only one letter difference, Russia, the country, and Russian, the language, have been widely thought of as synonymous – so much so that one cannot seem to exist without the other. Though language is an important part of the construction of national identity (Thiesse, 2014), it is not inherent to only one country. Because of the Soviet Union, the Russian language has been used as a lingua franca in all the former Soviet Socialists republics ; but contrary to popular belief, the language was not forced on the populations. 

Aware of the vastness of its territory and the mosaic of ethnicities who inhabit them, the Soviet Union actually encouraged the development of regional languages though korenizatsiia, what we can translate as “indigenization”. In Central Asia especially, Soviet programs in Uzbek, Kazakh or Kyrgyz were created to encourage non-Russians to join the communist party  and become a part of the new “Soviet man”. 

When russification occurred, it was part of the cultural process to make Russians out of Poles, Kyrgyz, Kazakh or Uzbeks under the Russian Empire, or through modernization and industrialization under the Soviet Union. “Any non-Russians wishing to pursue a career beyond the confines of their own native republic thus needed to possess a sophisticated knowledge of Russian”, writes History scholar Theodore R. Weeks. Despite the promotion of cultural diversity, Russian was therefore used as the “all-union” language : primus inter pares, first among equals.

As a result, Russian is still nowadays an official language in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Belarus, where Russian is more spoken in daily urban life than local languages such as Kazakh, Kyrgyz or Belarusian. Mostly because of their political affinity with Russia, these republics have not broken away from the linguistic legacy inherited from the USSR.

It’s a different story in Georgia or in Ukraine, where physical warfare has turned into a war of words. According to Novaya Gazeta Europe, language has become a “battleground” in Georgia. In Tbilisi, numerous tags in English or in Georgian catch the eye in the streets’ walls, strategically located in the Vake and Vera districts, a haven for Russian expatriates. Among them, “Never Back To USSR”, “Ruzzia, Terrorist State” or even “Better Dead Than Red”.  

Since the war in both countries, most native Russian speakers have refused to speak Russian and made an effort to learn either English, Ukrainian or Georgian. For tourists visiting from all over the world, speaking Russian immediately comes with suspicion ; since words are never only words. For those who lived through the war, just hearing Russian is enough to provoke panic attacks, reports independent Russian newspaper The Insider. A stark reminder of how language carries trauma and instantly creates distinction between the enemy and the ally, even years after the war.

Putin’s ambitions towards a new Russification

Heir to Russia’s imperialist tradition, Vladimir Putin has been undertaking a new wave of Russification. Created in 2007, the Russkyi Mir Foundation promotes the Russian language in the whole world, contributing to building a Russian diaspora empire thanks to soft power. In response, bordering countries such as Latvia in 2023 and Estonia in 2024 have respectively switched to a monolingual Latvian and Estonian education system, thereby lowering the number of Russian-speaking youth population. 

These policies aimed at distancing the Russian language are not viewed favourably by the Kremlin. Under the pretext of “protecting Russian citizens”, any (alleged) resistance to this new Russification is brutally repressed. In June 2022, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated in an interview to the BBC that “the Russian language was banned in Ukraine”, which therefore justified the “special military operation” conducted in Ukraine for the past four months. A massive distortion of reality, when most of the Ukrainian population were Russian speakers before the war. As the table below shows, only 38% of Ukrainians spoke mostly Ukrainian in 2004, the rest of the population speaking either more Russian, or using both languages equally.

2004 Public Opinion Poll, Kyiv International Institute of Sociology

If one could argue that the use of Ukrainian in the administrative sector has grown exponentially in recent years, especially with the 2022 Law on National Minorities (Communities), that is not at the expense of the Russian language which is protected by the Ukrainian Constitution. The tenth article guarantees “the free development, use and protection of Russian, and other languages of national minorities”. It is however true that the number of Russian-speakers in Ukraine nowadays has fallen sharply, as the chart below demonstrates. In the Southern and Eastern region under Russian attack, the percentage of people who speak only Russian has fallen by almost half, while the percentage of Ukrainian speakers has grown exponentially between 2020 and 2025.

In Georgia, attempts to russify the country through language have always met strong resistance, the 14th April 1978 revolt being the highlight. As Moscow tried to amend the constitution and remove Georgian as the sole official language, mass public protests took place in Tbilisi, leading the Soviet regime to give up. The 14th of April is now celebrated in the whole country as Mother Language Day. 

Nowadays, Putin’s attempts of russification are largely dismantled by the pro-European sentiment fostered by the young generation. The disappointment in the “Georgian Dream” government discouraged even the older, who were the most likely to continue speaking Russian. To avoid this new russification, silence is preferable to speaking the language of the invader – even when those who speak it are not from Russia. 

“People, especially the older generation, still speaking Russian create a comfortable atmosphere for Russians. I feel like it’s unfair the way they’re so happy in Georgia, when Georgian people are struggling in their own country. It also has a lot to do with respect. Lots of Russian families have been here for more than 10 years, and they don’t feel the need to learn our language or our traditions because people still talk Russian with them”, explains a young activist involved in the Georgian resistance. For younger generations, English may be an effective replacement, but the lack of another “international language” remains tricky for the older generation who speak only Georgian and Russian.

Out of the “post-Soviet space”, towards Europe

Although both Georgia and Kyrgyzstan are a part of what is commonly referred to as “post-Soviet space”, the ambivalent attitude of these two countries towards the Russian language demonstrates perfectly the lack of uniformity inside this area – and why the term “post-Soviet space” is heavily criticized. According to Georgian diplomat Valeri Chechelashvili, “post-totalitarian space” could be a more suitable designation since it does not lump all the “Soviet Socialists republics” together indiscriminately, but still denounces the common oppression endured by all of them. 

Nowadays, language policies with a European focus are slowly taking shape in Georgia: while the Georgian language is spoken more than ever, the teaching of English in schools has replaced that of Russian. A logical linguistic policy for modern Georgia, which sees itself as part of Europe. “Considering how much damage Russia did to us as a Nation, and how much it interfered – and still does – in our development, I’m very against speaking Russian at all, even though I speak it quite well. I blame Russians for the fact that the Georgian language lost its educational purpose. There is no academic literature available in Georgian because it was influenced by Russians in archives. The majority of documents are in Russian only”, explains a Georgian activist.

According to her, the Russian language acted as a “political and ideological weapon” for the Russian Empire and the USSR: “just like the Russian society thought French was elegant and borrowed French terms, the same thing happened in Georgia but towards Russia. You can find a bunch of wrong, falsified words in our own language. A lot of Georgians use Russian words in everyday life, even though Georgian alternatives are available. So everytime someone tells me Russian is beautiful, I tell them I can’t appreciate the language of the people responsible for war crimes in my country. They tried to force Russian into our language, our society, our space… Their presence made our language weak and our being just harder.”

It’s another matter in Central Asia, where Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan have chosen to abandon the Cyrillic alphabet in favor of Latin ; but this attempt to break away from the legacy of Russian linguistic colonization is proving difficult. For now, both states are “stuck in a transitional state” where Cyrillic and Latin scripts “are used interchangeably”, explains Central Asian media Novastan.

“I speak, therefore I am”

Contrary to a lingua franca like Russian, the uniqueness of Armenian and Georgian makes those languages the embodiment of their Nation. Because of their own writing system, unbound by any alphabet, and their guttural sounds difficult to pronounce for those who aren't used to them, those languages are not widely studied abroad. Speaking Georgian or Armenian is therefore a tool to identify a fellow countryman, both within and outside the territory. As Lebanese-American writer Vehanoush Tekian wrote: “In the first decades of diaspora, language was our longing. Then it turned into our shield, and ultimately into our self-consciousness.” For Georgia just like Armenia, a diaspora nation where more Armenians live outside of their home country than inside, language is the sound of survival and resistance embodied.

It’s another matter in Kyrgyzstan, where the government is walking a fine line between promoting the Kyrgyz language and not offending the Kremlin’s delicate sensibility. In July 2023, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov criticized current Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov’s decision to require that 60% of television and radio are broadcast in Kyrgyz, and that all government officials be proficient in Kyrgyz. Whilst government policies aimed at promoting the Kyrgyz language are thus being hampered, the public is stepping up to the plate. 

After aligning themselves with Russian naming conventions (–ov for men, –ova for women) due to administrative requirements under the Soviet Union, the Kyrgyz people have started reverting to the traditional naming system. From February 2025, men can officially add to their surnames uulu (“son of”), and women kyzy (“daughter of”). More and more young people are also proudly displaying Kyrgyz language and nationality on social media, despite the ban on TikTok. It may be a long way for Kyrgyzstan to claim its linguistic independence, but not a dead end.

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About the author: 

Salomé Aldeguer-Roure is a French journalist who previously worked in Kyrgyzstan for Central Asian media Novastan. She studied Modern Literature at Sorbonne University and Social Sciences at Sciences Po Paris, before entering a Master in Journalism. Her interests include languages, politics and photography.