The Kremlin’s system of control can often seem like a mystery to western audiences. By understanding the Putin regime’s attempts to manipulate language, it is possible to gain a deeper insight into the authoritarian realities faced every day by Russian citizens.

The Kremlin has stated time and time again that its war in Ukraine will ensure the safety of the country’s Russian speakers. Far from achieving this goal, Moscow’s military threats will only diminish Russian’s status as a global language.

The modern Israeli state is deeply rooted in both Central Europe and Ottoman Palestine. It is a place where Central Europe’s dominant ideology of ethnolinguistic nationalism meets the post-Ottoman ideology of ethno-confessional nationalism.

The symbols and language of the 2020 Belarus protests circumvented the terminological deadlock of Belarusian identity, which for years had been attempted to be explained by national templates. Unconventional actions by the public have revealed a hidden picture of the mentality in Belarus, which has become a huge step towards a post-national future.

The ongoing Belarusian protests in addition to its obvious political aims, also solves a much more important issue. The public is abandoning the national template of self-determination as a civil order. For Belarusians in 2020, so many things have changed. For the first time in more than a quarter century, the authorities in Minsk felt a real danger to their existence and lost control over public opinion.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, the regime in Belarus has progressively made Belarusian into a monoscriptal language, with Cyrillic as its single official script. This Russification and the Union State with Russia appears to be Aljaksandar Łukašenka’s only constant programme for Belarus and its citizenry.

Former Russian Deputy Prime Minister and opposition leader, Boris Nemtsov, did not hold Belarusian dictator Aljaksandar Łukašenka in high esteem (in this text we allow the author to use the national Latin script for Belarusian as explained later on in this essay – editor’s note). Nemtsov deemed him to be “a Slavic Qaddafi. He is an outrageous murderer and dictator, a completely insane person. He has nowhere to retreat. It is not worth waiting for a velvet revolution to happen.” No one cared to listen.

The history of the politics of scripts in modern central Europe is characterised by the gradual limitation of their number. The re-emerging Rovás and Glagolitic scriptures could be used to foster regional revisionism and tension.

An interview with Roger Berkowitz, Professor of Political Studies and Human Rights and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities at Bard College. Interviewer: Simona Merkinaite.

The big Central European history of a little tail (ogonek)

A State Institute of Ukrainian Russian needs to be established as a matter of urgency.

On tacit antisemitism in academia.

The Russian language is the only 'big language' in the world to remain so closely connected to its parent nation-state, Russia. Despite the fact that it is used so widely across the post-Soviet sphere, there are no official country-specific varieties of the Russian language. This kind of ethnolinguistic nationalism is yet another mode by which Moscow influences the “near-abroad” and even European Union member states.

Russian-annexed Crimea has three official state languages. In practice, languages other than Russian are being squeezed out through a policy of persuasion, coercion and repression.