96-654: Democratic Russia ( Russian : Демократическая Россия , romanized : Demokraticheskaya Rossiya ; abbreviation: ДемРоссия, DemRossiya ) was the generic name for several political entities that played a transformative role in Russia's transition from Communist rule . In 1991–1993, the Democratic Russia Movement was the largest political organization in the country and Boris Yeltsin 's base of political support. 1) Democratic Russia Election Bloc , association of candidates and their supporters in
192-674: A constitutional referendum on whether to adopt Russian as a second official language. According to the Central Election Commission, 74.8% voted against, 24.9% voted for and the voter turnout was 71.1%. Starting in 2019, instruction in Russian will be gradually discontinued in private colleges and universities in Latvia, and in general instruction in Latvian public high schools. On 29 September 2022, Saeima passed in
288-466: A new education law which requires all schools to teach at least partially in Ukrainian, with provisions while allow indigenous languages and languages of national minorities to be used alongside the national language. The law faced criticism from officials in Russia and Hungary. The 2019 Law of Ukraine "On protecting the functioning of the Ukrainian language as the state language" gives priority to
384-530: A 4-vote majority in the third round of voting; the adoption of RSFSR Declaration of Sovereignty on 12 June 1990 (officially celebrated in today's Russia as Independence Day); and the passage of key legislation that transformed Russia's political and economic system in 1990–1992. In March 1991, it set up an umbrella coalition with allied factions – "Democratic Platform", "Joint Faction of Social Democrats and Republicans" (formerly "Left Center"), "Radical Democrats", "Independents" and "Labor Union". This coalition, under
480-482: A brief struggle to regain control over DRM, Afanasyev and his one-time ally Marina Salye tried to build an alternative nationwide movement, but had to abandon this effort by late 1992. Meanwhile, DRM and all factions within it were rapidly losing activists and economic resources as market reforms progressed and most of DRM and Yeltsin's grassroots supporters became impoverished and overwhelmed with material concerns. DRM rallies attracted fewer and fewer participants, and it
576-422: A call for equal rights for all forms of property ownership and for the freezing of retail prices during the period of transition to the market (which was directly opposite to the liberalization of prices eventually implemented by Yeltsin and Yegor Gaidar at the start of the transition). The authorship of the bloc's name is attributed to one of its founding members and leaders, Mikhail Astafyev (subsequently one of
672-530: A formula with V standing for the nucleus (vowel) and C for each consonant, the maximal structure can be described as follows: (C)(C)(C)(C)V(C)(C)(C)(C) Gleb Yakunin Gleb Pavlovich Yakunin ( Russian : Глеб Па́влович Яку́нин ; 4 March 1936 – 25 December 2014) was a Russian priest and dissident , who fought for the principle of freedom of conscience in the Soviet Union . He was
768-558: A hard or soft counterpart, and the distinction is a prominent feature of the language, which is usually shown in writing not by a change of the consonant but rather by changing the following vowel. Another important aspect is the reduction of unstressed vowels . Stress , which is often unpredictable, is not normally indicated orthographically , though an optional acute accent may be used to mark stress – such as to distinguish between homographic words (e.g. замо́к [ zamók , 'lock'] and за́мок [ zámok , 'castle']), or to indicate
864-484: A language that "belongs to the European cultural space". The financing of Russian-language content by the state will cease, which the concept says create a "unified information space". However, one inevitable consequence would be the closure of public media broadcasts in Russian on LTV and Latvian Radio, as well as the closure of LSM's Russian-language service. In Lithuania , Russian has no official or legal status, but
960-588: A lesser extent the languages to the south and the east: Uralic , Turkic , Persian , Arabic , and Hebrew . According to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California , Russian is classified as a level III language in terms of learning difficulty for native English speakers, requiring approximately 1,100 hours of immersion instruction to achieve intermediate fluency. Feudal divisions and conflicts created obstacles between
1056-537: A member of the Moscow Helsinki Group , and was elected member of the Supreme Soviet of Russia and State Duma from 1990 to 1995. Gleb Pavlovich Yakunin was born into a musical family. He studied biology at Irkutsk Agricultural Institute. He converted from atheism to Eastern Orthodox Christianity at the end of the 1950s, after coming into contact with Alexander Men , and graduated from
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#17327729869681152-622: A minority language under the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities . 30% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 2% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. In Azerbaijan , Russian has no official status, but is a lingua franca of the country. 26% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 5% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. In Georgia , Russian has no official status, but it
1248-586: A more social-democratic and socialist or in a more nationalist, anti-Western direction. The faction's biggest defeat was the ousting of Acting Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar by parliamentary majority in December 1992. It remained staunchly in Yeltsin's camp until the destruction of the parliament in September–October 1993. A number of formerly DR deputies won seats in subsequent elections to the new parliament,
1344-526: A qualitatively new entity can be said to emerge—the general language of the working class... capitalism has the tendency of creating the general urban language of a given society. In 2010, there were 259.8 million speakers of Russian in the world: in Russia – 137.5 million, in the CIS and Baltic countries – 93.7 million, in Eastern Europe – 12.9 million, Western Europe – 7.3 million, Asia – 2.7 million, in
1440-521: A smaller Coordinating Council (40-50 members representing functional units, collective members, and popular politicians). It was led by five to six co-chairs, a group that at different times included Ponomaryov, Yury Afanasyev (head of Russian State University for Humanities), Gavriil Popov (Chairman of the Moscow City Soviet who left DRM after his election as Mayor in 1991), Gleb Yakunin , Galina Starovoitova , Marina Salye et al. Some of
1536-413: A team of radical intellectuals (Leonid Batkin, Yury Burtin et al.), developed a critique of Yeltsin's economic policies and what they saw as his excessive authoritarian and nationalist bent after 1991. They wanted DRM to present Yeltsin with conditions of its continued support for his policies, a view that the rest of the leadership opposed. This led to their departure from DRM leadership in early 1992. After
1632-539: Is Belarusian, among ethnic Belarusians this share is 28.5%; the highest share of those who speak Belarusian at home is among ethnic Poles — 46.0%. In Estonia , Russian is spoken by 29.6% of the population, according to a 2011 estimate from the World Factbook, and is officially considered a foreign language. School education in the Russian language is a very contentious point in Estonian politics, and in 2022,
1728-481: Is a co-official language per article 5 of the Constitution of Kyrgyzstan . The 2009 census states that 482,200 people speak Russian as a native language, or 8.99% of the population. Additionally, 1,854,700 residents of Kyrgyzstan aged 15 and above fluently speak Russian as a second language, or 49.6% of the population in the age group. In Tajikistan , Russian is the language of inter-ethnic communication under
1824-401: Is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian , and a moderate degree of it in all modern Slavic languages, at least at the conversational level. Russian is written using a Cyrillic alphabet. The Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters. The following table gives their forms, along with IPA values for each letter's typical sound: Older letters of
1920-610: Is a post-posed definite article -to , -ta , -te similar to that existing in Bulgarian and Macedonian. In the Southern Russian dialects , instances of unstressed /e/ and /a/ following palatalized consonants and preceding a stressed syllable are not reduced to [ɪ] (as occurs in the Moscow dialect), being instead pronounced [a] in such positions (e.g. несл и is pronounced [nʲaˈslʲi] , not [nʲɪsˈlʲi] ) – this
2016-673: Is an East Slavic language belonging to the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family . It is one of the four extant East Slavic languages, and is the native language of the Russians . It was the de facto and de jure official language of the former Soviet Union . Russian has remained an official language of the Russian Federation , Belarus , Kazakhstan , Kyrgyzstan , and Tajikistan , and
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#17327729869682112-488: Is being used less frequently by Russian-speaking typists in favor of the extension of Unicode character encoding , which fully incorporates the Russian alphabet. Free programs are available offering this Unicode extension, which allow users to type Russian characters, even on Western 'QWERTY' keyboards. The Russian language was first introduced to computing after the M-1 , and MESM models were produced in 1951. According to
2208-624: Is called yakanye ( яканье ). Consonants include a fricative /ɣ/ , a semivowel /w⁓u̯/ and /x⁓xv⁓xw/ , whereas the Standard and Northern dialects have the consonants /ɡ/ , /v/ , and final /l/ and /f/ , respectively. The morphology features a palatalized final /tʲ/ in 3rd person forms of verbs (this is unpalatalized in the Standard and Northern dialects). During the Proto-Slavic (Common Slavic) times all Slavs spoke one mutually intelligible language or group of dialects. There
2304-573: Is more spoken than English. 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 , Portland , Chicago , Denver , and Cleveland . In a number of locations they issue their own newspapers, and live in ethnic enclaves (especially
2400-564: Is odd") – чу́дно ( chúdno – "this is marvellous"), молоде́ц ( molodéts – "well done!") – мо́лодец ( mólodets – "fine young man"), узна́ю ( uznáyu – "I shall learn it") – узнаю́ ( uznayú – "I recognize it"), отреза́ть ( otrezát – "to be cutting") – отре́зать ( otrézat – "to have cut"); to indicate the proper pronunciation of uncommon words, especially personal and family names, like афе́ра ( aféra , "scandal, affair"), гу́ру ( gúru , "guru"), Гарси́я ( García ), Оле́ша ( Olésha ), Фе́рми ( Fermi ), and to show which
2496-402: Is recognized as a minority language under the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities . Russian is the language of 9% of the population according to the World Factbook. Ethnologue cites Russian as the country's de facto working language. In China , Russian has no official status, but it is spoken by the small Russian communities in the northeastern Heilongjiang and
2592-569: Is sometimes considered to have played a significant role in the formation of modern Russian. Also, Russian has notable lexical similarities with Bulgarian due to a common Church Slavonic influence on both languages, but because of later interaction in the 19th and 20th centuries, Bulgarian grammar differs markedly from Russian. Over the course of centuries, the vocabulary and literary style of Russian have also been influenced by Western and Central European languages such as Greek, Latin , Polish , Dutch , German, French, Italian, and English, and to
2688-585: Is spoken by 14.2% of the population according to an undated estimate from the World Factbook. In 2005, Russian was the most widely taught foreign language in Mongolia, and was compulsory in Year 7 onward as a second foreign language in 2006. Around 1.5 million Israelis spoke Russian as of 2017. The Israeli press and websites regularly publish material in Russian and there are Russian newspapers, television stations, schools, and social media outlets based in
2784-677: Is still commonly used as a lingua franca in Ukraine , Moldova , the Caucasus , Central Asia , and to a lesser extent in the Baltic states and Israel . Russian has over 258 million total speakers worldwide. It is the most spoken native language in Europe , the most spoken Slavic language , as well as the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia . It is the world's seventh-most spoken language by number of native speakers , and
2880-518: Is the stressed word in a sentence, for example Ты́ съел печенье? ( Tý syel pechenye? – "Was it you who ate the cookie?") – Ты съе́л печенье? ( Ty syél pechenye? – "Did you eat the cookie?) – Ты съел пече́нье? ( Ty syel pechénye? "Was it the cookie you ate?"). Stress marks are mandatory in lexical dictionaries and books for children or Russian learners. The Russian syllable structure can be quite complex, with both initial and final consonant clusters of up to four consecutive sounds. Using
2976-470: The 2011 Lithuanian census , Russian was the native language for 7.2% of the population. In Moldova , Russian was considered to be the language of interethnic communication under a Soviet-era law. On 21 January 2021, the Constitutional Court of Moldova declared the law unconstitutional and deprived Russian of the status of the language of interethnic communication. 50% of the population
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3072-1000: The Apollo–Soyuz mission, which first flew in 1975. In March 2013, Russian was found to be the second-most used language on websites after English. Russian was the language of 5.9% of all websites, slightly ahead of German and far behind English (54.7%). Russian was used not only on 89.8% of .ru sites, but also on 88.7% of sites with the former Soviet Union domain .su . Websites in former Soviet Union member states also used high levels of Russian: 79.0% in Ukraine, 86.9% in Belarus, 84.0% in Kazakhstan, 79.6% in Uzbekistan, 75.9% in Kyrgyzstan and 81.8% in Tajikistan. However, Russian
3168-413: The Constitution of Tajikistan and is permitted in official documentation. 28% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 7% used it as the main language with family, friends or at work. The World Factbook notes that Russian is widely used in government and business. In Turkmenistan , Russian lost its status as the official lingua franca in 1996. Among 12% of the population who grew up in
3264-584: The Ukrainian language in more than 30 spheres of public life: in particular in public administration , media, education, science, culture, advertising, services . The law does not regulate private communication. A poll conducted in March 2022 by RATING in the territory controlled by Ukraine found that 83% of the respondents believe that Ukrainian should be the only state language of Ukraine. This opinion dominates in all macro-regions, age and language groups. On
3360-721: The United States Census , in 2007 Russian was the primary language spoken in the homes of over 850,000 individuals living in the United States. Russian is one of the official languages (or has similar status and interpretation must be provided into Russian) of the following: The Russian language is also one of two official languages aboard the International Space Station – NASA astronauts who serve alongside Russian cosmonauts usually take Russian language courses. This practice goes back to
3456-705: The Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic . Gleb Yakunin was given amnesty in March 1987 under Mikhail Gorbachev . He was allowed to return to Moscow and worked again as a priest until 1992. He was rehabilitated in 1991. In 1990 Yakunin was elected to the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation and worked as deputy chairman the Parliamentary Committee for the Freedom of Conscience. He
3552-668: The 1990 election for the Congress of People's Deputies (CPD), the legislature of RSFSR (Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic, Russia's official name within Soviet Union), and for the regional and municipal Soviets. The bloc was formed in January 1990 at a conference of about 150 candidates for the Congress and local elections and their campaign workers. The conference adopted a Declaration drafted by Lev Ponomaryov , Sergei Kovalev , Viktor Sheinis et al. The bloc's platform included
3648-519: The 20th century, Russian was a mandatory language taught in the schools of the members of the old Warsaw Pact and in other countries that used to be satellites of the USSR. According to the Eurobarometer 2005 survey, fluency in Russian remains fairly high (20–40%) in some countries, in particular former Warsaw Pact countries. In Armenia , Russian has no official status, but it is recognized as
3744-471: The Belarusian society the Russian language prevails, so according to the 2019 census 6,718,557 people (71.4% of the total population) stated that they speak Russian at home, for ethnic Belarusians this share is 61.4%, for Russians — 97.2%, for Ukrainians — 89.0%, for Poles — 52.4%, and for Jews — 96.6%; 2,447,764 people (26.0% of the total population) stated that the language they usually speak at home
3840-507: The Duma as candidates of other formations, such as "Yavlinsky-Boldyrev-Lukin" election bloc, the future Yabloko . DPR formed its own faction in the Duma, winning 5.5% of the vote, but soon also became split over Yeltsin's economic policies and failed to win seats in the 1995 and subsequent elections. DRM ceased to exist as an independent political force by 1994. A rump organization, led by Ponomaryov, Starovoitova et al., maintained its presence on
3936-535: The Federal Assembly, where they joined new factions across the political spectrum, from pro-Yeltsin "Russia's Choice" (Lev Ponomaryov and Gleb Yakunin ) to the pro-Communist Agrarian Party. Democratic Russia caucuses or blocs were also formed in the spring of 1990 in regional and local Soviets by deputies that won their seats with the support of the DR Election Bloc. These factions controlled
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4032-532: The Great and developed from the Moscow ( Middle or Central Russian ) dialect substratum under the influence of some of the previous century's Russian chancery language. Prior to the Bolshevik Revolution , the spoken form of the Russian language was that of the nobility and the urban bourgeoisie. Russian peasants, the great majority of the population, continued to speak in their own dialects. However,
4128-590: The Institute of Russian Language of the Russian Academy of Sciences, an optional acute accent ( знак ударения ) may, and sometimes should, be used to mark stress . For example, it is used to distinguish between otherwise identical words, especially when context does not make it obvious: замо́к ( zamók – "lock") – за́мок ( zámok – "castle"), сто́ящий ( stóyashchy – "worthwhile") – стоя́щий ( stoyáshchy – "standing"), чудно́ ( chudnó – "this
4224-526: The Middle East and North Africa – 1.3 million, Sub-Saharan Africa – 0.1 million, Latin America – 0.2 million, U.S., Canada , Australia, and New Zealand – 4.1 million speakers. Therefore, the Russian language is the seventh-largest in the world by the number of speakers , after English, Mandarin, Hindi -Urdu, Spanish, French, Arabic, and Portuguese. Russian is one of the six official languages of
4320-683: The Moscow Patriarchate and the KGB. He published code names of several KGB agents who held high-rank positions in the Russian Orthodox Church including Patriarch Alexius II , Metropolitans Filaret of Kyiv , Pitrim of Volokolamsk, and others. The Russian Orthodox Church defrocked Yakunin in 1993. Gleb Yakunin was one of the organizers of the Democratic Choice of Russia political alliance in 1993, prior to
4416-595: The Moscow Theological Seminary of the Russian Orthodox Church in 1959. In August 1962 he was ordained a priest and was appointed to the parish church in the city of Dmitrov , near Moscow . Together with the priest Nikolai Eschliman, Yakunin wrote an open letter in 1965 to the Patriarch of Moscow , Alexius I , where he argued that the Church must be liberated from the total control of
4512-807: The Russian alphabet include ⟨ ѣ ⟩ , which merged to ⟨ е ⟩ ( /je/ or /ʲe/ ); ⟨ і ⟩ and ⟨ ѵ ⟩ , which both merged to ⟨ и ⟩ ( /i/ ); ⟨ ѳ ⟩ , which merged to ⟨ ф ⟩ ( /f/ ); ⟨ ѫ ⟩ , which merged to ⟨ у ⟩ ( /u/ ); ⟨ ѭ ⟩ , which merged to ⟨ ю ⟩ ( /ju/ or /ʲu/ ); and ⟨ ѧ ⟩ and ⟨ ѩ ⟩ , which later were graphically reshaped into ⟨ я ⟩ and merged phonetically to /ja/ or /ʲa/ . While these older letters have been abandoned at one time or another, they may be used in this and related articles. The yers ⟨ ъ ⟩ and ⟨ ь ⟩ originally indicated
4608-458: The Russian principalities before and especially during Mongol rule. This strengthened dialectal differences, and for a while, prevented the emergence of a standardized national language. The formation of the unified and centralized Russian state in the 15th and 16th centuries, and the gradual re-emergence of a common political, economic, and cultural space created the need for a common standard language. The initial impulse for standardization came from
4704-458: The Soviet era can speak Russian, other generations of citizens that do not have any knowledge of Russian. Primary and secondary education by Russian is almost non-existent. In Uzbekistan , Russian is the language of inter-ethnic communication. It has some official roles, being permitted in official documentation and is the lingua franca of the country and the language of the elite. Russian
4800-635: The Soviet state. The letter was published as a samizdat ("self-published", i.e., underground press ). In retaliation for this, he was forbidden to continue his priestly ministry in the parish in May 1966. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn supported Gleb Yakunin and Nikolai Eschliman in his letter to Patriarch Alexius. In 1976 he created the Christian Committee for the Defense of the Rights of Believers in
4896-551: The USSR. He published several hundreds of articles about the suppression of religious freedom in the Soviet Union. These documents were used by dissidents of all religious denominations . Yakunin was arrested and convicted for anti-Soviet agitation on 28 August 1980. He was kept in the KGB Lefortovo prison until 1985, and then in a labor camp known as "Perm 37". Later, he was punished by involuntary settlement in
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#17327729869684992-467: The United Nations. Education in Russian is still a popular choice for both Russian as a second language (RSL) and native speakers in Russia, and in many former Soviet republics. Russian is still seen as an important language for children to learn in most of the former Soviet republics. In Belarus , Russian is a second state language alongside Belarusian per the Constitution of Belarus . 77% of
5088-434: The Yeltsin administration, tried to revive the movement by making it adopt a platform focused upon banning former senior CPSU and security services officers from public service. In the 1993 election to the newly created Federal Assembly, DRM participated as a collective founding member of "Russia's Choice", the most pro-Yeltsin bloc, led by Gaidar. However, it was not viewed as a significant partner, and its top leaders ended at
5184-415: The bottom of "Russia's Choice" list of candidates. Thus, Ponomaryov, DRM's preeminent leader after Afanasyev's departure, was listed under no. 67 and ended up without a Duma seat until he was able to fill the slot of a deceased Duma member in 1994. Eventually he and Yakunin left Russia's Choice over Chechnya War. Other DRM founders and former leaders, such as Viktor Sheynis and Vladimir Lysenko, were elected to
5280-403: The broader sense of expanding the use of Russian alongside or in favour of other languages. The current standard form of Russian is generally regarded as the modern Russian literary language ( современный русский литературный язык – "sovremenny russky literaturny yazyk"). It arose at the beginning of the 18th century with the modernization reforms of the Russian state under the rule of Peter
5376-567: The common goal of removing the CPSU from power, but internal factions immediately emerged both on the left and on the right. DRM actively supported Yeltsin in his struggle against Soviet leadership, including Gorbachev. It was much more divided over local politics, particularly the high-speed privatization initiated by Moscow and St.Petersburg authorities (including its own former leaders and candidates) that many viewed as rigged in favor of Communist-era establishment and "the mafia". In foreign policy, DRM
5472-482: The core membership of the bloc upon the opening of the Congress in May 1990. Its initial membership stood at around 60, but it had the support of allied factions ("Democratic Platform" and "Left Center") set up by other deputies elected with the support of the DR bloc; together, they wielded large influence over unaffiliated deputies. It played the key role in the election of Boris Yeltsin as the Congress' Chairman (speaker) by
5568-572: The country. There is an Israeli TV channel mainly broadcasting in Russian with Israel Plus . See also Russian language in Israel . Russian is also spoken as a second language by a small number of people in Afghanistan . In Vietnam , Russian has been added in the elementary curriculum along with Chinese and Japanese and were named as "first foreign languages" for Vietnamese students to learn, on equal footing with English. The Russian language
5664-512: The early years of Vladimir Putin 's presidency. Other collective members: Memorial Society ; Independent Miners' Union; Moscow Voters' Association (MOI); Voters' Club of the Academy of Sciences (KIAN); Moscow Tribune; Shield – Association of Afghan War Veterans; The Holocaust Fund; Moscow Anti-Fascist Committee; Union of Russia's Youth (SMR); Young Russia Union; Association of Ethnic Communities of Moscow; etc. Russian language Russian
5760-903: The fact that many of its candidates still retained their membership in the CPSU). This pressure was a major factor leading to the decision of the USSR Supreme Soviet in March 1990 to drop Article 6 from the Constitution. The bloc won the plurality of seats in the election on 4 March 1990 (about 300 out of 1,068), but many of those elected on its slate initially did not join its caucus in the CPD. The bloc also won majorities in key local Soviets, including Moscow and Leningrad, as well as Sverdlovsk and other major cities, which enabled it to form municipal governments in Russia's major cities. 2) Democratic Russia Caucus , or faction, in CPD, formed from
5856-413: The factory and the industrial plant their local peasant dialects with their phonetics, grammar, and vocabulary, and the very process of recruiting workers from peasants and the mobility of the worker population generate another process: the liquidation of peasant inheritance by way of leveling the particulars of local dialects. On the ruins of peasant multilingual, in the context of developing heavy industry,
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#17327729869685952-557: The fall of 1991, its members of more nationalistic orientation distanced themselves from Yeltsin's policies that led to the dissolution of the USSR and his encouragement of more autonomy for ethnic republics within Russia proper. Most of them walked out of DRM's 2nd Congress in November 1991 and left the DR Faction by the end of the year. This included DRM's largest constituent member at the time, Democratic Party of Russia (DPR), that
6048-402: The final reading amendments that state that all schools and kindergartens in the country are to transition to education in Latvian . From 2025, all children will be taught in Latvian only. On 28 September 2023, Latvian deputies approved The National Security Concept, according to which from 1 January 2026, all content created by Latvian public media (including LSM ) should be only in Latvian or
6144-505: The generation of immigrants who started arriving in the early 1960s). Only about 25% of them are ethnic Russians, however. Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union , the overwhelming majority of Russophones in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn in New York City were Russian-speaking Jews. Afterward, the influx from the countries of the former Soviet Union changed the statistics somewhat, with ethnic Russians and Ukrainians immigrating along with some more Russian Jews and Central Asians. According to
6240-480: The government bureaucracy for the lack of a reliable tool of communication in administrative, legal, and judicial affairs became an obvious practical problem. The earliest attempts at standardizing Russian were made based on the so-called Moscow official or chancery language, during the 15th to 17th centuries. Since then, the trend of language policy in Russia has been standardization in both the restricted sense of reducing dialectical barriers between ethnic Russians, and
6336-450: The key role in organizing mass rallies in Russia's major cities that pushed forward democratic political reforms and liberal economic agenda, bringing 100,000 people in the streets of Moscow for its largest rally in February 1991. It also played a central role in mobilizing grassroots resistance to the abortive August 1991 hardline coup against Gorbachev and Yeltsin and defeating it. By this time, membership in DRM reached 300,000, which made it
6432-402: The largest nationwide political organization when CPSU ceased to exist in the aftermath of the coup in late August 1991. It was also the closest to Yeltsin's administration and played a significant role in the events that led to the formation of Yegor Gaidar 's government in November 1991 and subsequent dissolution of the USSR. At that point, it rapidly began to lose influence and membership. In
6528-417: The leaders of nationalist opposition to Boris Yeltsin), who insisted upon including "Russia" in its name. Gavriil Popov , Sergei Stankevich and Nikolay Travkin were elected as coordinators of the bloc. In the run-up to the elections, the bloc spearheaded mass rallies in Russia's cities, campaigning for the removal of Article 6 from the Soviet Constitution that codified the CPSU's one-party rule (in spite of
6624-425: The leaders, like Afanasyev and Popov, were recently senior career members of the CPSU; a few, like Yakunin, came from dissident underground and had never joined CPSU. The movement's leadership established a number of subsidiary organizations carrying its brand, including Democratic Russia Fund and a weekly newspaper Democratic Russia . The overall political orientation of its leadership was liberal and united around
6720-418: The majority of votes in key cities, including Moscow and Leningrad. Their subsequent history mirrored the path of the DR caucus in the federal parliament. 3) Democratic Russia Movement (DRM) was a political organization formed by October 1990 by Democratic Russia MPs, their allies in the Soviet parliament, grassroots pro-democracy and/or anti-communist organizations and unaffiliated political personalities. It
6816-426: The margins of national politics (both as DRM and as its short-lived subsidiary, Federal Party Democratic Russia ). Its members remained divided between supporting Yeltsin vs. Yavlinsky, until it was de facto absorbed by the pro-Yeltsin Union of Rightist Forces in the 1999 election. The parties and most of the NGOs that were its collective founders and members also ceased to exist, de facto and in most cases de jure, by
6912-399: The name of Democratic Russia Parliamentary Bloc and other names, held sway in the Russian parliament until spring 1992. In 1992–1993, the faction, led by Ponomaryov, lost members and allies mostly as a result of growing opposition to economic reforms and the shift of power toward the executive. Many of Yeltsin's erstwhile supporters in the parliament gradually abandoned him, moving either in
7008-524: The northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region . Russian was also the main foreign language taught in school in China between 1949 and 1964. In Kazakhstan , Russian is not a state language, but according to article 7 of the Constitution of Kazakhstan its usage enjoys equal status to that of the Kazakh language in state and local administration. The 2009 census reported that 10,309,500 people, or 84.8% of
7104-616: The opening of the Constituent Assembly of Russia called by the Russian president Boris Yeltsin . He became a State Duma delegate representing the party " Democratic Russia " in 1996. He created the Committee for Defense of Freedom of Conscience in 1995. He criticized the law "On Freedom of Conscience and Religious Associations" adopted by the Duma and made numerous statements in support of human rights in Russia . As
7200-515: The other hand, before the war, almost a quarter of Ukrainians were in favour of granting Russian the status of the state language, while after the beginning of Russia's invasion the support for the idea dropped to just 7%. In peacetime, the idea of raising the status of Russian was traditionally supported by residents of the south and east . But even in these regions, only a third of the respondents were in favour, and after Russia's full-scale invasion , their number dropped by almost half. According to
7296-461: The other three languages in the East Slavic branch. In many places in eastern and southern Ukraine and throughout Belarus, these languages are spoken interchangeably, and in certain areas traditional bilingualism resulted in language mixtures such as Surzhyk in eastern Ukraine and Trasianka in Belarus. An East Slavic Old Novgorod dialect , although it vanished during the 15th or 16th century,
7392-446: The parliament approved a bill to close up all Russian language schools and kindergartens by the school year. The transition to only Estonian language schools and kindergartens will start in the 2024-2025 school year. In Latvia , Russian is officially considered a foreign language. 55% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 26% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. On 18 February 2012, Latvia held
7488-453: The peasants' speech was never systematically studied, as it was generally regarded by philologists as simply a source of folklore and an object of curiosity. This was acknowledged by the noted Russian dialectologist Nikolai Karinsky , who toward the end of his life wrote: "Scholars of Russian dialects mostly studied phonetics and morphology. Some scholars and collectors compiled local dictionaries. We have almost no studies of lexical material or
7584-459: The population aged 15 and above, could read and write well in Russian, and understand the spoken language. In October 2023, Kazakhstan drafted a media law aimed at increasing the use of the Kazakh language over Russian, the law stipulates that the share of the state language on television and radio should increase from 50% to 70%, at a rate of 5% per year, starting in 2025. In Kyrgyzstan , Russian
7680-418: The population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 67% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. According to the 2019 Belarusian census , out of 9,413,446 inhabitants of the country, 5,094,928 (54.1% of the total population) named Belarusian as their native language, with 61.2% of ethnic Belarusians and 54.5% of ethnic Poles declaring Belarusian as their native language. In everyday life in
7776-479: The pronunciation of ultra-short or reduced /ŭ/ , /ĭ/ . Because of many technical restrictions in computing and also because of the unavailability of Cyrillic keyboards abroad, Russian is often transliterated using the Latin alphabet. For example, мороз ('frost') is transliterated moroz , and мышь ('mouse'), mysh or myš' . Once commonly used by the majority of those living outside Russia, transliteration
7872-472: The proper pronunciation of uncommon words or names. Russian is an East Slavic language of the wider Indo-European family . It is a descendant of Old East Slavic , a language used in Kievan Rus' , which was a loose conglomerate of East Slavic tribes from the late 9th to the mid-13th centuries. From the point of view of spoken language , its closest relatives are Ukrainian , Belarusian , and Rusyn ,
7968-491: The respondents), while according to the 2002 census – 142.6 million people (99.2% of the respondents). In Ukraine , Russian is a significant minority language. According to estimates from Demoskop Weekly, in 2004 there were 14,400,000 native speakers of Russian in the country, and 29 million active speakers. 65% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 38% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. On 5 September 2017, Ukraine's Parliament passed
8064-679: The survey carried out by RATING in August 2023 in the territory controlled by Ukraine and among the refugees, almost 60% of the polled usually speak Ukrainian at home, about 30% – Ukrainian and Russian, only 9% – Russian. Since March 2022, the use of Russian in everyday life has been noticeably decreasing. For 82% of respondents, Ukrainian is their mother tongue, and for 16%, Russian is their mother tongue. IDPs and refugees living abroad are more likely to use both languages for communication or speak Russian. Nevertheless, more than 70% of IDPs and refugees consider Ukrainian to be their native language. In
8160-459: The syntax of Russian dialects." After 1917, Marxist linguists had no interest in the multiplicity of peasant dialects and regarded their language as a relic of the rapidly disappearing past that was not worthy of scholarly attention. Nakhimovsky quotes the Soviet academicians A.M Ivanov and L.P Yakubinsky, writing in 1930: The language of peasants has a motley diversity inherited from feudalism. On its way to becoming proletariat peasantry brings to
8256-786: The two. Others divide the language into three groupings, Northern , Central (or Middle), and Southern , with Moscow lying in the Central region. The Northern Russian dialects and those spoken along the Volga River typically pronounce unstressed /o/ clearly, a phenomenon called okanye ( оканье ). Besides the absence of vowel reduction, some dialects have high or diphthongal /e⁓i̯ɛ/ in place of Proto-Slavic * ě and /o⁓u̯ɔ/ in stressed closed syllables (as in Ukrainian) instead of Standard Russian /e/ and /o/ , respectively. Another Northern dialectal morphological feature
8352-511: The use of the language has some presence in certain areas. A large part of the population, especially the older generations, can speak Russian as a foreign language. However, English has replaced Russian as lingua franca in Lithuania and around 80% of young people speak English as their first foreign language. In contrast to the other two Baltic states, Lithuania has a relatively small Russian-speaking minority (5.0% as of 2008). According to
8448-643: The world's ninth-most spoken language by total number of speakers . Russian is one of two official languages aboard the International Space Station , one of the six official languages of the United Nations , as well as the fourth most widely used language on the Internet . Russian is written using the Russian alphabet of the Cyrillic script ; it distinguishes between consonant phonemes with palatal secondary articulation and those without—the so-called "soft" and "hard" sounds. Almost every consonant has
8544-468: Was co-author of the law concerning "freedom of all denominations" that was used for the opening of churches and monasteries throughout the country. Gleb Yakunin was a member of the committee created for the investigation of the Soviet coup attempt of 1991 and chaired by Lev Ponomaryov , and thereby gained the access to secret KGB archives. In March 1992 he published materials about the cooperation between
8640-556: Was constituted as an umbrella organization to include both collective and individual members, including political parties. It was the largest and most influential democratic organization in Russia's contemporary history. The organizing committee of the movement was set up in June 1990. DRM held its first, constituent congress in Moscow on 20–21 October 1990. It was governed by two bodies, a Council of Representatives, of over 250 people delegated by regional affiliates and collective members; and
8736-405: Was first introduced in North America when Russian explorers voyaged into Alaska and claimed it for Russia during the 18th century. Although most Russian colonists left after the United States bought the land in 1867, a handful stayed and preserved the Russian language in this region to this day, although only a few elderly speakers of this unique dialect are left. In Nikolaevsk, Alaska , Russian
8832-421: Was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 19% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. According to the 2014 Moldovan census , Russians accounted for 4.1% of Moldova's population, 9.4% of the population declared Russian as their native language, and 14.5% said they usually spoke Russian. According to the 2010 census in Russia , Russian language skills were indicated by 138 million people (99.4% of
8928-437: Was part of the moderate opposition to Yeltsin in 1992–1995; as well as smaller parties, such as Russian Christian Democratic Movement and Constitutional Democratic Party – Party of People's Freedom, that in 1992 joined the hardline National Salvation Front and other radical opposition groups and ceased to exist by 1994. On the other hand, a number of liberal democrats, such as Yuri Afanasyev and his Independent Civic Initiative,
9024-415: Was pro-Western, supportive of foreign minister Andrey Kozyrev , and advocated closer relations with European institutions. It was neutral or supportive with regard to independence movements in Soviet republics. In November 1991, DRM's 2nd Congress protested against an early attempt to dispatch Russian troops to Chechnya to overthrow its breakaway government, after which this operation was aborted. DRM played
9120-605: Was soon outperformed in this regard by the nationalist and leftist opposition. The rump organization remained one of the most consistently pro-Yeltsin during the 1992–1993 power struggle between Yeltsin and the legislature . This led to the withdrawal of SDPR that took part, together with RPRF, in the creation of the future Yabloko in the fall of 1993. DRM tried to compensate for its decline by setting up short-lived umbrella associations, such as "Democratic Choice" and "Joint Committee of Democratic Organizations of Russia". Galina Starovoitova , who became one of its co-chairs after leaving
9216-402: Was the sixth-most used language on the top 1,000 sites, behind English, Chinese, French, German, and Japanese. Despite leveling after 1900, especially in matters of vocabulary and phonetics, a number of dialects still exist in Russia. Some linguists divide the dialects of Russian into two primary regional groupings, "Northern" and "Southern", with Moscow lying on the zone of transition between
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