Russification
- This article is about the political term. For localization of computers and software, see Russification (computers).
The two main areas of Russification are politics and culture. Some consider shifts in demographics in favor of Russian population to be a form of Russification as well.
In politics, an element of Russification is assigning Russian nationals to leading admistrative positions in national institutions.
In culture, Russification primarily amounts to domination of the Russian language in official business and strong influence of Russian language on the national ones.
One of the examples of Russification was replacement of the Polish language by Russian in areas of Poland-Lithuania after Partitions of Poland. In particular, after the January Uprising of 1863, in 1864 Polish was banned in public places; in the 1880s Polish was banned in schools and offices of Congress Kingdom.
A similar development was in Lithuania: its Governor General Mikhail Muravyov instituted a complete ban on Latin alphabet and Lithuanian printed matter. The ban was lifted only in 1904.
Still another example is Ems Ukaz of 1876, banning the Ukrainian language.
As a result of this policy, quite a few national languages, such as Tatar and Belarusian, were perceived by a significant part of population as "rural" or "uneducated" ones, not to say as "useless" for study at school.
In the Soviet Union, publications in technical and scientific journals with rare exceptions were in Russian. This had led to underdevelopment of modern technical and scientific terminology in national languages, further degrading the status of a national language.
While in almost all Soviet republics bilingualism was official, it was "asymmetric": the titular nation learned Russian, whereas immigrated Russians generally did not.