“Language of the enemy”: Public discussions around teaching Russian as a foreign language in the Baltic states

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Multilingualism and Education in "Post-Soviet", Post-Colonial Spaces

Proposal

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, new independent states had to deal with the consequences of the imposition of Russian as the dominant language and the suppression of local languages which, for decades, had been a tool for exerting control and maintaining power in the USSR. In most cases, the reverse of the roles happened after 1991, with Russian becoming a minority language and its speakers – a minority, more or less prominent in terms of socio-economic contribution and political visibility. In the Baltic states, where Russian speakers constituted a significant proportion of the population, this “status reversal” resulted in serious changes in social status for them and, despite all integrational efforts, a prolonged coexistence of two parallel systems of primary and secondary education. At the same time, Russian, which had been an obligatory subject for all schoolchildren in the late Soviet Union, partly kept its position as a second language in schools: it was seen as a useful tool both for doing business with Russia and for providing services to local Russian speakers.
However, the issue of the Russian language in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania has always been a sensitive and complex topic in public discussions, which gained further prominence following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Since then, various language policy measures were implemented in all three Baltic states, aimed to restrict teaching of Russian and also its use in public space. These policies, on the one hand, was a result of changes in public opinion and political radicalization expressed by public figures; on the other hand, they triggered even more heated discussions and lead to further polarization within societies. What is more, these processes, although similar in their general direction (diminishing the presence of Russian), took place very differently in all three countries.
The paper examines public discussions surrounding the teaching of Russian as a foreign language in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in the aftermath of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It uses the data collected from official media (over 60 publications) and communication in Facebook public groups (over 1100 posts and 14,000 comments). By analyzing discourses that frame Russian alternately as a practical communicative resource, a legacy of imperial domination, and “the language of the enemy,” the study highlights how language learning becomes entangled with questions of security, cultural belonging, and memory politics. The findings show that while Russian retains value for regional communication and economic interaction, its symbolic weight increasingly overshadows its instrumental function. The paper argues that public debates on teaching Russian reflect broader struggles over decolonization, national resilience, and the reconfiguration of multilingualism in the Baltic space, and traces the differences in what on the surface appear to be very similar cases.(

Authors

• Kapitolina Fedorova, Tallinn University

• Natalia Tšuikina, Tallinn University School of Humanities