Soviet Russian? (Soviet Russian Viewed from Belgium)
Specialists of the Russian diaspora in Western Europe have noticed
a recurring feature in the emotional attitude (one might even say
passionate attitude) of Russian émigrés towards language
change in their country of origin (see Granovskaja,
Golubeva-Monatkina). Indeed, the socio-political changes of the
twentieth century have profoundly affected the linguistic approach of
the émigré confronted by the changes in his or her
mother tongue both at the oral and the written level (lexico-semantic
innovations, neologisms, new spelling, etc.). This complex context has
given rise to opposing value judgments about the status of
émigré Russian
and Soviet
Russian.
Research among Russian immigrants (first, second and third waves)
established in francophone Belgium (Wallonia and Brussels) indicates
that this opposition is especially marked in the first wave. Although
this linguistic concept was created by this wave of immigrants (the
White Russians), it deeeply influenced the following generations and
still exists nowadays. What, then, according to this category of
émigrés, are the distinctive features of Soviet Russian?
First, they are the expression of a type of behavior labeled
Soviet
for its negative connotations, due to the
dislocation of a tradition that has provoked the degeneration of
Russian culture and the proletarianization
of the elite
(a lack of culture in general and of white émigré
was often intended to
position the new arrival with respect to the Soviet system (Vy
sovetskij?
).
The attitude of émigrés towards the Soviet
language
was linked to the political divisions ranging from an
outright rejection of anything Soviet (some émigrés
still use old spelling conventions) to a more subtle analysis (the
heavy-handed stereotyped language of
The Soviet Russians have counter-attacked by criticizing the language used by the émigrés which, it is argued, is distorted by the majority language (in this case French), does not keep up with the times (modern technology being a case in point) and can generally be characterized by a gradual language loss.
The disappearance (officially at least) of the Soviet regime has
not radically modified the attitude of the migrant purists. The Soviet
myth has now given way to that of the New Russian, easily spotted in
the upmarket shops of Brussels. Although supposedly embracing the
values of the czarist empire, this new species is not more civilised
than before: it still has its proletarian roots and, moreover, is
Mafia-prone. The New Russian is also blamed for exacerbated
materialism and mercantilism and a willingness to embrace the American
mentality (They copy all the bad things from the
West
). From a linguistic point of view, the New Russians can
be said, on the one hand, to continue the tradition of the Soviet
speech, and, on the other hand, to develop it by resorting to massive
borrowing from English.