Geographical distribution of Russian speakers
After the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917, derussification occurred in the newly-independent Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Kars Oblast, the last of which became part of Turkey.
The new Soviet Union initially implemented a policy of Korenizatsiya, which was aimed in some ways at the reversal of the Tsarist Russification of the non-Russian areas of the country.
[1] Vladimir Lenin and then Joseph Stalin mostly reversed the implementation of Korenizatsiya by the 1930s, not so much by changing the letter of the law, but by reducing its practical effects and by introducing de facto Russification.
[34] Research in 2005–2006 concluded that government officials did not consider Russian to be a threat to the strengthening role of the Azerbaijani language in independent Azerbaijan.
[citation needed] Russian is also spoken in Israel by at least 1,000,000 ethnic Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union, according to the 1999 census.
[40] The 2009 census reported that 10,309,500 people, or 84.8% of the population aged 15 and above, could read and write well in Russian and understand the spoken language.
In 2011, President Roza Otunbaeva controversially reopened the debate about Kyrgyz getting a more dominant position in the country.
However, the law also stated that all minority ethnic groups in the country have the right to choose the language in which they want their children to be educated.
The state has primarily promoted those trends through the educational system, which is particularly effective because nearly half the Uzbek population is of school age or younger.
[45] Since the Uzbek language became official and privileged in hiring and firing, there has been a brain drain of ethnic Russians in Uzbekistan.
As a result of emigration, participation in Russian cultural centers like the State Academy Bolshoi Theatre in Uzbekistan has seriously declined.
Two-thirds of them are actually Russian-speaking descendants of Germans, Greeks, Jews, Azerbaijanis, Armenians or Ukrainians, who either were repatriated after the Soviet Union collapsed or are just looking for temporary employment.
[citation needed] However, after Alexander Lukashenko became president, a referendum held in 1995, which was considered fraudulent by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, included a question about the status of Russian.
[citation needed] Bulgaria has the largest proportion of Russian-speakers among European countries that were not part of the Soviet Union.
[51] In 2010, the language inspectorate stepped up inspections at workplaces to ensure that state employees spoke Estonian at an acceptable level.
After overcoming the consequences of 2007 economic crisis, the tendency of emigration of Russian speakers has almost stopped, unlike in Latvia or in Lithuania.
[54] Until 2022 the popularity of Russian language was growing because of an increase in trade with and tourism from the Russia and other Russian-speaking countries and regions.
[56] In Eastern Finland, most prominently in its border towns, Russian has already begun to rival Swedish as the second most important foreign language due to high tourism rate from Russia throughout the past decades.
Exceptions are older signs remaining from Soviet times, which are generally bilingual Georgian and Russian.
[citation needed] The 1922 Constitution of Latvia, restored in 1990, enacted Latvian as the sole official language.
[citation needed] In contrast to the other two Baltic states, Lithuania has a relatively small Russian-speaking minority (5.0% as of 2008).
Outside Dobruja, the Lipovans of Romania live mostly in the Suceava County and in the cities of Iași, Brăila and Bucharest.
[74] In Dagestan, Chechnya, and Ingushetia, derussification is understood not so much directly as the disappearance of Russian language and culture but rather by the exodus of Russian-speaking people themselves, which intensified after the First and the Second Chechen Wars and Islamization; by 2010, it had reached a critical point.
[citation needed] In some cases, the abrupt changing of the language of instruction in institutions of secondary and higher education led to charges of assimilation, which were raised mostly by Russian-speakers.
On the other hand, before the war, almost a quarter of Ukrainians were in favour of granting Russian the status of the state language, while today only 7% support it.
[86] In the 20th century, Russian was a mandatory language taught in the schools of the members of the old Warsaw Pact and in other communist countries that used to be Soviet satellites, including Poland, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Albania, the former East Germany and Cuba.
The United Kingdom, Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Belgium, Greece, Norway, and Austria have significant Russian-speaking communities.
Sizable Russian-speaking communities also exist in North America, especially in large urban centers of the US and Canada, such as New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, Los Angeles, Nashville, San Francisco, Seattle, Spokane, Toronto, Calgary, Baltimore, Miami, Chicago, Denver and Cleveland.
In a number of locations, they issue their own newspapers, and live in ethnic enclaves (especially the generation of immigrants who started arriving in the early 1960s).
Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the overwhelming majority of Russophones in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn in New York City were Russian-speaking Jews.
