The political party “Unity”( “Sodruzhestvo”) started its public initiative aimed at protecting the official language, Russian, in Kyrgyzstan. As was announced in the official statement of the party issued earlier this week, the Russian language, which has traditionally served in Kyrgyzstan as a tool of interaction between representatives of more than 80 nationalities living in the country, nowadays suffers multiple oppressions and general deprivation.

Party activists started collecting signatures of Kyrgyz citizens willing to protect Russian language from populist measures of the government when it was announced that as of January 2007 all official and business documentation in the country is to be translated into Kyrgyz language. This decision followed ongoing actions by nationalists claiming the deprivation of the state Kyrgyz language in Kyrgyzstan.

Discussion about the status of Russian started in Kyrgyzstan shortly after the collapse of the USSR when newly independent countries marching in the parade of sovereignties launched ideological campaigns against the “oppressive influence” of Russian culture. At that time hundreds of thousands Russian speaking citizens of Kyrgyzstan were forced out of the country. As a result the Kyrgyzstan’s industrial, scientific and cultural development started backsliding due to the fact that best specialists abandoned the republic they’d been considering their motherland for decades. As the research of Kosmarskaya revealed Russian speakers leaving the country in 1998 pointed towards worsening discrimination against the Russian speaking group.

Later, Askar Akaev and his government started taking measures to try to keep those who speak Russian in the country. For a almost a decade the situation in the sphere remained more or less stable. Though a group of “enthusiasts” again started stirring public’s mind with the idea of forceful nationalization of the political and social discourse in the country. The demands of the proponents of a compulsory and aggressive “kyrgyization” of the country included a whole range of ambitious plans starting from making Kyrgyz language prevailing in classrooms and in mass media to translating the whole data of official documents from Russian into Kyrgyz with cosmic speed.

These measures though were characterized as draconian and short sighted not only by the Russian-speaking population but by the Kyrgyz intelligensia as well. As Almazbek Atambaev emphasized at the opposition rally in Bishkek on March 27, the idea of translating all official and business documentation into Kyrgyz starting January 2007 is not only unrealistic and populist but is aimed at depriving all representatives of other nationalities who doesn’t speak Kyrgyz. He pointed out that this can indeed split the country and hamper political and economic stability.

As activists of “Unity”(“Sodruzhestvo”) emphasized in their statement the situation with a speedy translation of data will not only impede the development of official practices on the international level but will also force Russian speaking specialists to leave their working places. Together with the idea of making Kyrgyz the only official school language it’ll obviously endanger normal development of the country with its economy and education being mainly oriented towards Russian markets and being massively supported by Russian donors.

It’s also important to stress that only the project of translating scientific, economic and political data into Kyrgyz will cost more than one billion soms from the State budget. Indeed, this is a very strange financial priority considering that about 60% of the population is impoverished, with pensions and subsidies not even covering the minimal price of the consumer’s food basket and with no hopes for the improvement in the near future due to the state financial deficit. Thus the “national” project of regaining a national identity through the speedy restoration of the national language seems to be not only at the expense of hundreds of thousands Russian-speaking citizens of Kyrgyzstan but at the expense of the majority of the population.