961.61/3–2150
The Chargé in the Soviet Union (Barbour) to the Secretary of State
No. 332
Problems of Philosophy No. 2, 1949 (published in late February, 1950) carries a 10 page article entitled “J. V. Stalin on the Development of National Languages in the Epoch of Socialism” by T. P. Lomtev which explains that when world socialism is achieved national languages and other national differentiations will wither away and there will emerge an international language—Russian. This transformation from national languages to an international language is to be a most natural one and it is emphasized carefully that there will be absolutely no compulsion involved in the adoption of the international language (Russian). National languages are to develop and flower, but, for the purpose of strengthening economic, political and cultural cooperation among the peoples of the socialist nations, an international language will evolve.
[Page 1129]Lomtev sketches the great advances made since the October Revolution by the Communist party and Comrade Stalin in developing the Russian language and using it to enrich the national languages in the Soviet Union.1 He mentions that there existed a group of local bourgeois nationalists, calling themselves defenders of the native language who were guilty of the following rather contradictory faults: a) They replaced international and particularly social-political terminology with their own provincial expressions; b) They “strove for an orientation towards foreign languages, belittling the significance of the Russian language in every way. The Byelorussian and Ukranian nationalists clogged up their native language with aristocratic elements from the Polish; the Moldavian nationalists strove to drag into their language salon-gentry elements of the Rumanian language [etc.].…2 This was in essence a policy of betrayal of the national interests of their peoples, a policy of cosmopolitanism.”; and c) They artificially inseminated local expressions in order to obstruct the penetration of Russian terms into their native language, and “thereby reduced the native language to a level of a provincial-local oblast dialect”. Fortunately this line of language development collapsed after it was found out. The writer explains that the Great Russian language represents the foremost culture in the world and is the language of the Russian people, which, according to Stalin “is the most outstanding nation of all the nations which make up the Soviet union”.
The American colonizers, Lomtev writes, are endeavoring to impose English as a single world language, on the trumped-up grounds that it is the superior language because of its lack of inflections. According to the article this is a purely racial theory; Marxism-Leninism teaches, and Soviet science has proved that the cultural-historical role of a language is determined not by its gramatical structure, but by the culture it represents, and naturally the Russian language represents the superior culture.
The evolution of a single world language is described as a gradual process, which will parallel world social and economic development. In [Page 1130] the first stage of transition from world capitalist economy to a single world socialist economy there cannot be a single world language, but national languages will undergo a socialist transformation. In the second stage en route to world socialism national languages and an international language will exist side by side, or, according to Comrade Stalin, there might possibly emerge during this stage several zonal economic centers of individual groups of nations with a separate common language for each group. The Russian language of course “will indubitably play a decisive role for many socialist nations in the formation of a zonal international language”. Finally these zonal economic entities will unite, the state will wither away and an international language will emerge. This final stage cannot be reached, however, until capitalist encirclement vanishes and national languages and cultures achieve their full flowering under socialism.
The Embassy previously has commented on the stress given in the Soviet press, and in public addresses by important Party figures, to the preeminence of the Great Russians over other constituent groups of the USSR. The present article goes even further in its blatant assumption that Great Russian “culture” (a word of which the Soviets are inordinately fond) has a world civilizing mission. The comparison with similar Nazi pronunciamento cannot be overlooked.
First Secretary of Embassy
- Stalin criticized the theories and opinions of the well-known philologist Nikolay Yakovlevich Marr (1864–1934) and his “disciples” in a long article in Pravda for June 20, 1950, entitled “On Marxism in Linguistics.” This was followed by answers to several questions sent to him by individuals, which were published in the magazine Bolshevik in numbers 12 and 14. Marr and his followers had asserted, among many of their theories, that all languages had developed in consequence of sociological, and particularly class, influences. Stalin held the position that the Russian language had developed as an unique achievement of which only the genius of the Russian people was capable. He declared that the sooner linguistics got rid of the un-Marxian errors of Marr and his school the rounder it would be.↩
- Ellipsis in the source text.↩