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Feedback National Unity Day on 4 November has, in this year of 2026 – declared the Year of Unity of the Peoples of Russia – been stretched out like an accordion: at the beginning of November, and every year from now on, there will be an entire International “Peoples of Russia” Week. Responsibility for organising it lies with the Office of the Russian Security Council and Roscongress. On offer is a “business programme”: three days of panel discussions on the “distinctive Russian civilisational model” and its promotion around the world, plus a separate youth day, a film forum, an All-Russian Forum of National Unity and much more besides. The prevailing genre will apparently be – to borrow a line from Alexander Galich – “matins for peace at the House of Culture”.
The international dimension of the Week, in essence, has nothing to do with the peoples of Russia; it concerns countries “that share the relevant spiritual and moral values”. Noteworthy here is the presence at the panel sessions of a landing party from the International Movement of Russophiles (IMR) – exposed in its day by The Insider and caught out over its ties to the Russian Foreign Ministry, the security services and the notorious oligarch Konstantin Malofeev. The IMR was placed under EU sanctions in December 2025, and investigative journalists predicted that it would meet “the same inglorious end as previous Kremlin puppet organisations”. Yet the old beast is still breathing: 11 representatives of Balkan countries, as well as of African countries, India, Italy and Romania, are taking part in a session entitled “Russophilia as a Reflection of the Russian Historical and Civilisational Model”, and they crop up elsewhere in the programme too.
Only one of the Week’s declared aims has even an indirect bearing on the peoples of Russia (other than ethnic Russians): “Implementing state ethnic policy and enhancing its effectiveness”. It is worth recalling that the Russian Federation’s ethnic policy has two aspects: forging a Russian civic nation and supporting the cultures of the country’s various peoples. The latest versions of strategic documents on the subject show the second aspect shrivelling and the first swelling, along with a tendency to use the word and concept russkiy (Russian in the ethnic sense) where rossiyskiy (pertaining to Russia as a federative country) should be said.
The same trick can be seen on the website of the Year of Unity of the Peoples of Russia. It has a section on the “Values of the Year”, some of which are expressed in strikingly odd Russian: for example, “Unity – it’s about the common, not the different” (in Russian: «Единство – про общее, а не разное») or “Russia – a family of families” («Россия – семья семей»). To summarise briefly its explanation of what unites the different peoples who make up the country’s population: we are drawn together by shared values, history, culture and heroes. The chief value is a strong family, and many families together make up “our great power”. “The Russian language and Russian culture unite all the country’s inhabitants and form the basis of our identity.” A “single cultural code” “rests on the heritage of russkaya culture and absorbs the traditions of all the country’s peoples”, and so “a distinctive rossiyskaya culture is born, which develops thanks to the Russian language as the language of interethnic communication”. “The russkiy people became the core around which other ethnic groups united, while preserving their own identity and culture.”
Now keep your eye on the conjuror’s hands: “Athletes, scientists, warriors, cultural figures – all of them, regardless of ethnicity, bring glory to Russia. The word russkiy becomes an honorary title for them: a russkiy scientist, a russkiy champion, a russkiy hero.” Finally, there is the value of “Shared Identity”: “All-Russian civic identity is the awareness of oneself as part of a single political nation, despite ethnic and cultural diversity. This unique experience took shape in our country historically: first as russkiy subjecthood, then as the Soviet community, and today as the rossiyskaya civic nation. To the whole world, we are russkiye.”
The same verbal shift can be seen in the description of a session of the International Week entitled “The Russian Model: A Culture of Managing Diversity, Best Practices”. First comes a mention of “traditional Russian [rossiyskiye] values”; then the two words appear side by side as perfect synonyms – “How can the rossiyskaya (russkaya) model of governance be made even more efficient and effective in today’s rapidly changing world?” – and by the end of the description only the word russkiy is left (“Should the fundamentals of the russkaya model of governance be taught at universities?”).
The russkiy bias is also evident in the Week’s other aims, which include “comprehensive support for the Russian language”; “strengthening international humanitarian cooperation, including through multilateral ties with Russian-speaking communities and regional diaspora associations abroad”; and, for good measure, “promoting traditional values as the foundation for the harmonious development of the individual and society” and “protecting historical memory and service to the Fatherland”.
The “Peoples of Russia” Week is billed as “a key event for strengthening the unity of the multi-ethnic people of Russia and developing international humanitarian cooperation”. The mantra of “strengthening unity” runs through the entire programme, along with other endlessly repeated verbiage such as “the distinctive Russian civilisational model”, “a great sovereign state” or the notorious “common cultural code”. Every time, one is tempted to add “whatever that means”…
Yet however many times the incantations about national unity are repeated, and however many common “values” are invented that supposedly hold together Russia’s fraying ethnopolitical landscape, they will not bring any more interethnic harmony. Let us not be fooled by fine-sounding declarations of support for the diversity of peoples and languages against a backdrop of real Russification, both political and linguistic, of xenophobia and racism, of the unchecked expansion of movements such as Russian Community and, of course, of the military aggression of the “Russian world” against Ukraine.
One of the sessions of the International “Peoples of Russia” Week is entitled “The International Decade of Indigenous Languages in Russia and the World” and raises questions that are far from idle: “Our country can offer its own experience of combining Russian as the language of interethnic communication with systematic support for the languages of the country’s peoples. Which interim results of the Decade’s implementation in Russia can be considered successful? Which models of language preservation in education have proved their worth and become established practice?”
In September 2026, the interim results of the Decade were announced by the Scientific Centre for the Preservation, Revival and Documentation of the Languages of Russia at the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The linguists counted 155 languages in use in Russia. Twenty-five languages are not at risk of disappearing, but 23 of them have a “metropole” – in other words, they are state languages of other countries (Armenian, Bulgarian, Tajik and so on). So if these are subtracted from the total number of “safe” languages, only two remain that face no threat at all: Russian, of course, and – guess what – Russian Sign Language. All the other languages of the peoples living in the Russian Federation are vulnerable, including the “titular” languages of the autonomous republics and regions, which would seem to have large numbers of speakers.
“Piecemeal measures are catastrophically insufficient to revitalise languages. Ideally, every language needs everything that has so far been created for Russian,” the media quote the institute as recommending.
The Centre’s database of language revitalisation practices contains a hotchpotch of information, from published textbooks (of Buryat, for example) to links to library catalogue cards or regional news items from various years reporting that courses in such-and-such a language have opened in such-and-such a district. It reads more like a collection of reminiscences about what once happened – and perhaps still happens – in the regions when it comes to learning and promoting native languages. And the patchy format of the database suggests that language revitalisation is not faring well.
The most vulnerable are those languages that linguists have classified as moribund, or dying. Among them are Southern (Kolyma) Yukaghir, described as non-functioning, and Northern (Tundra) Yukaghir, “with intergenerational transmission broken throughout its entire range”. The sorry state of the languages of the small-numbered Indigenous peoples and the need for decolonisation were recently discussed by Yukaghir leader Vyacheslav Shadrin on the sidelines of an OSCE human rights conference in Warsaw:
“…Cultural rights: what is needed is a move from decorative folklore to linguistic sovereignty. This must also mean linguistic decolonisation – switching the entire education system to a bilingual footing, creating fully fledged national schools where our languages are not just subjects of study but languages of instruction – and protecting our intellectual property. In my view, the main marker of successful decolonisation in the future will be a shift from the majority seeing our peoples as ‘benefit recipients’ or ‘vulnerable sections of the population’ to recognising us as fully fledged actors with historical rights to our lands, our culture and our political voice.”
Vyacheslav Shadrin is living in forced exile, as are other activists and defenders of Indigenous peoples’ rights persecuted by the Russian authorities.
Several entries in the database of the languages of the peoples of Russia are devoted to the village of Andryushkino in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), covering Sunday schools and other ways of learning Yukaghir. In April this year, the head of the village reported that 72 men from Andryushkino had gone to the war and 22 of them had been killed. Most of the dead were Yukaghirs, including the grandson of the Yukaghir writer Nikolai Kurilov. A local resident told journalists:
“And what has it all come to? Who did we raise? We raised our children for death. They themselves complained that the language was disappearing. But how is it supposed to survive if its speakers are being killed?!”
If defending the rights of Indigenous peoples is treated as extremist and terrorist activity, if activists of national movements and Indigenous communities are squeezed out into exile, and if the population of Indigenous peoples’ traditional territories is drawn into a criminal war, there will soon be nothing left to revitalise.
Olga ABRAMENKO is an expert at Anti-Discrimination Centre Memorial – Brussels.
First published on the Radio Liberty blog (original in Russian).