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Accepted Paper:
Culture Shock: The Russian Media's Soviet-Style Response to the Kazakh Alphabet Shift
Leora Eisenberg
(Harvard University)
This paper addresses the historical background of three Soviet-era tropes – loss of culture, loss of literacy, and loss of intergenerational and interethnic harmony – commonly used in the Russian media’s discussions of the Kazakh alphabet shift from Cyrillic to Latin. I seek to prove that mainstream Russian publications still maintain a deeply Soviet worldview when discussing issues of language in the former Soviet republics, relying heavily on the notion that the USSR “gave” them a number of “gifts,” namely the culture, literacy, and harmony that they now perceive Kazakhstan to be losing via its alphabet shift. I will analyze each trope from both a historical and a literary perspective, beginning each sub-section by placing each trope in its Soviet linguistic context and proceeding to analyze its usage in contemporary mainstream Russian publications, such as Pravda and Izvestiia.