Teaching Immigrant Children Russian Not the Panacea the Kremlin Believes, Experts Say

Paul Goble

    Staunton, May 11 -- A recent spate of violent crimes by the almost 800,000 minor children of migrant workers in the Russian Federation is sparking demands in some quarters that Moscow ban such immigrant children from accompanying their parents when the latter come to Russia to work.

    Such an approach would almost certainly contribute to an acceleration in the decline of Central Asians and Caucasians willing to come to Russia. Consequently, the Kremlin has placed its hopes on Russifying such migrants by insisting that they learn Russian, a policy that reflects Putin’s view of the centrality of language as far as ethnic identity is concerned.

    But experts at the Federal Service for Supervision in Education and Science (Rosobnadzor) say that teaching immigrant children to speak Russian will be insufficient to correct the problems that these young people present (versia.ru/testy-po-russkomu-yazyku-ne-reshat-problemu-rosta-prestupnosti-sredi-detej-migrantov).

    They are proposing other methods, including special classes in schools, to acculturate immigrant children although it is far from clear whether the Kremlin is prepared to commit the kind of resources that such an effort would entail or even whether those steps in addition to promoting Russian language would be sufficient.

    A discussion at the end of Soviet times highlights why just promoting Russian language competence may not be the panacea that Putin and his regime think and that it is even possible that ensuring that Central Asia and Caucasian youth who do learn Russian will have experiences that could further alienate and radicalize them.

    At that time, it was recognized by many Soviet experts and some Western ones that a notional Central Asian who did not know Russian and could not get an important job would see that not as a form of ethnic discrimination but as the result of his own failure to have the linguistic competence needed to get it.

    But a Central Asia who did learn Russian and still was passed over for such a job would inevitably conclude that he was being discriminated against because of his nationality, something that in many cases would lead anyone passed over to adopt an increasingly nationalist and anti-Russian position.

    And it was even recalled by some Western observers, including the author of these lines, that the experience of other countries confirms this: After all, British control of India was not threatened so much by Hindi speaker peasants as by an English-trained lawyer named Gandhi; and the Irish did not become radically nationalist until they stopped speaking Gaelic.