This article examines how Russian mobile populations perceive the status of Russian language in the former Soviet republics. Approaching Russian language as contested imperial heritage, the article contributes to discussions on language as heritage and widens existing research on imperial heritage beyond tangible heritage. Moreover, it contributes to a more differentiated analysis of Russians’ relations to imperial heritage that goes beyond imperial nostalgia and aggressive imperial nationalism that fuels memory conflicts in the former Soviet space. The article draws on extensive qualitative research among Russian tourists and migrants for two research projects conducted between 2019 and 2023 in four different cities. It identifies four main frames for understanding Russian language as imperial heritage among Russian populations: Russian language as 1) a shared heritage, 2) an economic asset, 3) a discarded heritage and 4) a difficult heritage. These frames offer different interpretations of the status and valence of Russian language in former Soviet states. Despite important variations, understandings of Russian language tend to reproduce established centre-periphery relations and – even its critical orientations – show evidence of what historian Ann Stoler has called ‘colonial aphasia’, a difficulty of finding a language about Russia’s colonial relation to the Soviet periphery.
Pfoser et al. (Mon,) studied this question.
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