Congratulations to Rachel Applebaum of the Department of History, winner of the 2023 NEH winner for her work, A Global History of Russian: From Soviet World Language to Putin’s “Russian World,”
A Global History of Russian: From Soviet World Language to Putin’s “Russian World,” is a book about Russian language politics during and after the Cold War. The book tells two interrelated stories. The first focuses on official Soviet campaigns during the Cold War to use Russian abroad as a form of soft power. These campaigns built upon domestic efforts to enshrine Russian as the common language of the linguistically diverse peoples of the USSR. By the 1960s, the Soviet government was actively promoting Russian in all three worlds of the Soviet geopolitical imagination: the socialist countries; the western, capitalist countries; and the “developing countries” in the Global South. The second story focuses on how local government officials, academics, and ordinary people in each of these “worlds” promoted and participated in Russian language study to assimilate, contest, or engage Soviet power. The book, in this way, details the global proliferation of Russian in the context of Cold War competition between the Soviet Union and the United States; decolonization; and international debates about educational reforms. To conclude the book, I examine how Soviet efforts to promote Russian as a world language have informed the Putin administration’s concept of the “Russian World”—a community of Russian speakers inside the Russian Federation and beyond its borders, united by a unique “civilizational mission” and opposition to the West.
Congratulations, Dr. Applebaum!
