The Politics of Language in Non-Russian Elementary Schools in the Eastern Empire, 1865-1914

Just before midnight on 2 February 1870 the Council of the Ministry of Education, in the presence of the curators of the Kazan, Moscow, Odessa and St. Petersburg school districts, agreed on a policy for the education of non-Russians (inorodtsy) of the empire.1 Alexander II approved the hard-fought text on 26 March 1870 as the Regulation on Measures for the Education of Non-Russians Inhabiting Russia.2 The title suggests to the modern ear that the measures applied to non-Russians throughout the empire.3 The subsequent history of the regulation, however, makes it clear that the measures were intended to apply to the eastern and southeastern nationalities only. Thanks to the Regulation of March 1870, language policy in elementary education among many, but not all, of the peoples of the east followed a more nuanced course than did the better-known, openly repressive policies toward native languages in the western borderlands.4 Despite its original limited intent, however, the Regulation of March 1870 assumed by 1905 a prominent role in the discussion of language policy in the empire as a whole and exercised an important influence on the subsequent debate in the Duma about universal primary education. The debate about language in schools turned little on pedagogical principles. In 1909 the radical liberal pedagogue V I. Charnoluskii observed that not once in the nineteenth century was the question of the language of instruction addressed from