Derussianization

For the first time, derussification manifested itself in the newly independent states that emerged after the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917, such as Poland, Finland, Georgia, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. In this case, it often constituted discrimination against the Russian language as a reaction of the peoples conquered in the past to a period of intense (sometimes violent) Russification.

Kars Oblast

Main article: Kars Oblast

About the former Russian and, wider, Russian presence in the map indicate the remnants of houses with a typical Russian architecture of the end of the XIX - beginning XX century.

After the Treaty of Moscow (1921) finally transferred the Kars Oblast and a number of adjacent territories to Turkey, almost all Christians, who made up 47% of the population according to the 1897 census, left these territories. The share of Slavs in the region, which at that time was 10.6% of the population (including Russians themselves— 7.7%), dropped to zero. The Greek, Armenian and Georgian communities ceased to exist.

Russian Orthodox Church of St. Sofia, 1907, Harbin as the remains of Russian influence in the city

In the period between 1945 and 1969, the derucilification of Harbin ended, which at the peak of white emigration in the 1920s had an almost 300-thousand Russian-speaking population. Most of the remaining reissigrate in the United States, Australia, or returned to the USSR.

In the first years of Soviet power, a mechanism of indigenization was launched in many nationally autonomous entities of the USSR, which was designed to protect the special interests of the titular nations. Therefore, despite the promotion of the Russian language as a means of interethnic communication, began the demographic decline of the Russian population in most national autonomies with the parallel growth of various national diasporas in Russia itself.

Thus, in the context of the population explosion in the Asian national republics of the USSR, Russians began to be actively displaced from all spheres of education and employment (except for more complex technical professions) even in those regions where they constituted the vast majority, such as Bishkek and Almaty. The growth of internal migration also led to increased competition for land and housing. Under these conditions, from the end of the 1960s, the Russian population basically began a gradual process of repatriation to the territory of the RSFSR.

Kazakhstan used Latin letters from 1929 to 1940, after which the country switched to Cyrillic during the reform. Prior to that, the Arabic script was used there.

On September 28, 2017, the Parliament of Kazakhstan held a hearing at which the draft of the new alphabet based on Latin was presented. The alphabet will consist of 25 characters. The project of the alphabet was presented by the director of the coordination and methodical center of language development Erbol Tleshev. According to him, the alphabet was compiled taking into account the language system of the Kazakh language and the opinions of experts. Director of the Institute of Linguistics Erden Kazybek said that each letter of the alphabet will mean one sound and will not include additional graphic characters.[2]

On October 27, 2017, the President of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev signed a decree on the translation of the Kazakh alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin. The document, published on October 27, envisages a gradual transition to Latin graphics by 2025. The decree also approved a new alphabet.[3]

On February 26, 2018, the President of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev during a meeting with the Minister of Information and Communications Dauren Abayev ordered to translate the activities of the state authorities exclusively into the Kazakh language. This transition will take place in stages.[4]

On June 4, 2018, the Constitutional Court of Moldova declared the law "On the Functioning of Languages on the Territory of the Moldavian SSR" obsolete. This law gave a special status to the Russian language in the country. The 1989 law, which gave Russian the status of a language of international significance and guaranteed the use of Ukrainian, Russian, Bulgarian, Hebrew, Yiddish, Gypsy, and other ethnic groups living in the country to meet national and cultural needs.

According to the 2014 census, the share of ethnic Russians in the country is only about 4%, so the special status of the Russian language "leads to discrimination against other ethnic groups living in Moldova.".

This caused considerable outrage in Russia.

In fact, the process began at the same time as the collapse of the USSR, but since the issue of decommunization was a much bigger problem, it received relatively little attention in a single dimension. These processes turned out to be closely connected and initially took place, mostly spontaneously and unsystematically. As the process of decommunization in Ukraine is almost over by 2022, after the beginning of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, some progress began in the issue of derussification.

Against the background of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, de-Russification began in Ukraine. In villages and towns, street names were changed and Soviet-Russian monuments were demolished.[5] Not only architectural structures but also street names related to Russia have been de-Russified. Changes were made in Lviv, Dnipro,[6] Kyiv[7] and Kharkiv. In turn, Ivano-Frankivsk became the first city in Ukraine to be completely free of Russian place names.[8]

As of April 8, 2022, according to a poll by the sociological group Rating, 76% of Ukrainians support the initiative to rename streets and other objects whose names are associated with Russia.[9][10]

On April 21, 2022, the Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine Oleksii Danilov stated that the total derussification of business, politics and many spheres of Ukrainian life is inevitable "we will not have anything Russian left here".[11]

Since the collapse of the USSR, the number of countries officialy using the Cyrillic script has shrunk, which can also be considered a signs of derussianization. The script has ceased to be used in Azerbaijan, Moldova, Turkmenistan and partly in Uzbekistan. In Kazakhstan, a complete transition of the Kazakh language From Cyrillic to Latin by 2025 is scheduled.[12]

• Demolition of monuments to Alexander Pushkin in Ukraine
• Demolition of monuments to Vladimir Lenin in Ukraine
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