7 ms·

19th-Century Lithuanians Who Smuggled Books to Save Their Language

75 points by lermontov 9y ago

anovikov 9y ago
I didn't know that, while i live in Lithuania for years. I know Russians tried to destroy old Belarusian ("Ruskaya Mova") language similarly though, and largely succeeded at that. This reminds of the evils of Communism so much that it makes me feel like Communist ideology in fact didn't mean much for Russians. It is an evil by itself, before or after Communism too.
- Mikeb85 9y ago
  And in Canada we tried to destroy native language and culture, as well as various immigrant cultures. My mom went to school before 'multiculturalism' was a thing, and was beaten by the teachers for speaking Ukrainian anywhere on the school grounds. And of course residential schools are a more known and somewhat more extreme example of the attempts to create homogeneous culture in Canada in the mid 20th century. Nearly every (large) nation on earth has done similar things.
- unabridged 9y ago
  It has nothing to do with communism, this is an example of authoritarianism. People like to conflate the two terms.
  - asveikau 9y ago
    I think you miss the point. I think the point is that what we today might think of as Cold War style rhetoric and rivalry has antecedents in the Russian empire and points earlier. I would even go so far as to say the whole thing is from the Great Schism. One side has the Latin alphabet and Western churches. Another side has Greek-derived Cyrillic and Orthodox church. Note in this article, the Russians are said to be removing religious shrines and trying to get the Lithuanian language to use Cyrillic instead of Latin characters. Both of these kind sound strange, but it's not really accidental symbolism. A couple months ago in the context of all the US-Russia political drama I was thinking of this... Some people say the current tension is trying to re-live the Cold War, but if you read about events from centuries ago the tension is all still there mostly in its present form. What if the whole point of conflict is really about how they learned to write and be Christians from Greeks?
    - Mikeb85 9y ago
      It absolutely dates back to the Great Schism. And the (Roman Catholic) west has constantly been antagonising the east. When the Orthodox requested assistance against the invading Muslims, the crusaders instead conquered for themselves, even sacking Constantinople. How about the Uniate churches? How many times have western powers (Poland-Lithuania, Germany, France, Great Britain, etc...) invaded or attempted to invade Russia? How many times has the west even allied themselves with Islamic empires to attack Russia? Even in modern history, there's a ton of anti-Serbian (read Orthodox) propaganda relating to the Balkans, ignoring the atrocities of every other side. How about the Greek default? The invasion of Cyprus by Turkey. The CIA in Chechnya. Colour revolutions (which all targeting majority Orthodox countries). And so on. Yes, it goes back to the Great Schism, however it's not Russia which has repeatedly attacked the west. It's not Russia which has a military alliance on the US or Europe's doorstep. And relating to Lithuania, the earliest conflicts between Lithuania and the then Duchy of Moscow were initiated by the Lithuanians. And today, NATO troops are in Lithuania. To respond to a 'Russian' threat we all know will never happen, given the whole NATO thing. Edit - Anyone want to explain how I'm wrong?
      - danharaj 9y ago
        You're claiming some extreme continuity between the politics of dozens of major political entities over thousands of years and your only supporting argument is that it makes sense to you.
        Mikeb85 9y ago
        And nearly every post in this thread, and likely the intent of the OP in the first place was to show continuity between the Russian Empire, Soviet Union, and current Russian Federation. In fact, it's exactly this rhetoric (Putin wants to bring back the USSR/Russian Empire) which is responsible for current western foreign policy.
      - FeatureRush 9y ago
        First your comment reads quite... emotional? Both aggressive and defensive, almost to the point that one wants to avoid the discussion, but you asked in the edit so I reply. I assume you deeply care about the subject, but you need to understand, that if you want others to understand and maybe adopt your view it's better to tone down, avoid many short accusing questions etc... Also defending/explaining war by "but they started first before" always put you in a bad light... Now, about how are you wrong. Wrong is too strong word here, I'm unfamiliar with many historical events you mentioned but I assume they really did happened. The general idea that Great Schism was a big source of tension, and directly and indirectly by events that resulted from it is and will be a source of tension, this is also true. The problem as I see it is the strength of this effect, you are right that it exists, but your comment reads as it was the dominating force that shaped this part of history, which many people not agree with. You also leave out many historical events that do not fit in, like Russia and Prussia working together to conquer PLC and later attacking Poland in 1939... Similarly when for example Napoleon attacked Russia, the west-east conflict was not the reason, it was just a tool to reinforce the conflict, and Napoleon actually wanted to conquer all and Russia was just one of many... Wars can start for more "practical" reasons too (like oil) and historical/religious/ethnic reasons will soon follow, they can be present but they are not always the main reason. Finally that bit about NATO troops could for some people change your comment from "comment about history" to "comment about politics pretending to be about history"...
- tetromino_ 9y ago
  Late tsarist Russia had simply imported the "progressive" Western European policy of suppressing minority languages and scripts. 19th and early 20th century Britain, France, Germany, Italy, etc. were all engaged in similar practices to erase the distinct languages and identities of their ethnic minorities in the name of "national unity". Here are just a few examples: > In the later 19th century, virtually all teaching in the schools of Wales was in English, even in areas where the pupils barely understood English. Some schools used the Welsh Not, a piece of wood, often bearing the letters "WN", which was hung around the neck of any pupil caught speaking Welsh. The pupil could pass it on to any schoolmate heard speaking Welsh, with the pupil wearing it at the end of the day being given a beating. [1] > Francization is also a designation applied to a number of ethnic assimilation policies implemented by French authorities from the French Revolution to present. These policies aimed to impose or to maintain the dominance of French language (which at this time was still a minority language in the numerical sense, despite being the prestige language of France and an increasingly important vernacular for writing, with the decline of Latin) and culture by encouraging or compelling people of other ethnic groups to adopt them, and thereby developing a French identity, at the expense of their existing identity. Coupled with this policy was the deliberate suppression of minority languages. Quickly after the end of the Ancien Régime, the new revolutionary government adopted a policy of promotion of French as a unifying and modernizing language, simultaneously denigrating the status of minority languages as bulwarks of feudalism, Church control of the state, and backwardness in general. In less than a year after coming to power (1792), the Committee for Public Instruction mandated that the newly expanded public education would be buttressed by the sending of French-speaking teachers to areas that spoke other languages. The 19th century saw this programme, and similar initiatives and wider cultural prorogatives, achieve many of its intended aims: the French language became much more expansive among the population, and by the 1860s, nearly 80 percent of the national population were able to speak French. [2] > The programme of Italianization was particularly forcefully applied in schools, aiming at the destruction of the German school system. As of 1928, Italian had become the only language of instruction in 760 South Tyrolean classes, affecting over 360 schools and 30,000 pupils. Likewise, German Kindergarten were required to use Italian, while substitutes were forced to shut down. German teachers were systematically dismissed on the grounds of "insufficient didactics", or transferred to the south, from where Italian teachers were recruited instead. Degrees from Austrian or German universities became valid only through an additional stay of one year at an Italian university. [3] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_language [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francization [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italianization_of_South_Tyrol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italianization_of_South_Tyrol
- danharaj 9y ago
  Even today, countries like France enact policies in order to suppress or exterminate languages that don't benefit the state. [1] When do you think Canada stopped trying to force its indigenous cultures into extinction? [2] Communism is not some essentially more evil ideology than the ideologies it competed with. Far more than ideology, the material interests of the ruling classes in all nations is what drives social and economic policy. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergonha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergonha [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_school_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_sc...
- sedachv 9y ago
  Your comment is absurdly wrong. Old Belarussian/Ukrainian is the circa-Early Middle Ages language of Kievan Rus that is the ancestor of modern Belarussian, Ukrainian, and Russian languages. What destroyed the use of Belarussian literary language in Lithuania/Belarus was the union with Poland - Polish gradually replaced Belarussian as a literary language. My grandmother was born in the 1920s in Western Belarus - Belarussian only became an official language and started being used in higher education again after Western Belarus was annexed to the Belarussian SSR after the end of WWII. In her town most people spoke Belarussian and few were literate in Polish. This was the case for most of Western Belarus, but the literary Belarussian language was only taught at the primary school level (in those towns that were fortunate enough to have schools), and there were very few Belarussian books published (to place this in context, some of the first books printed in a Slavic language were in Belarussian in the early 16th century). The literacy policies of Belarussian SSR is what revived the Belarussian language. What has happened after the fall of the Soviet Union is Lukashenko's government pursuing a policy of suppressing Belarussian as an official language in favor of Russian. Recently this has started to become a bigger issue of dissatisfaction in the country.
- fsloth 9y ago
  "This reminds of the evils of Communism so much that it makes me feel like Communist ideology in fact didn't mean much for Russians. It is an evil by itself, before or after Communism too. reply " No, it's the nature of old empires. All large empires have eradicated - or tried to eradicate - minorities at one point or the other. Not through genocide mind you - you don't have to destroy the genetic inheritance. It's sufficient to destroy cultural inheritance and implant the cultural identity of the master. Language is one of the strongest markers of cultural identity and thus it's understandable why it would be one of the things on the 'hit list' - and literature especially. Since we don't have an oral tradition anymore, destroying books effectively would have destroyed the cultural inheritance in a generation. Even Denmark quite forcefully tried to "civilize" Greenlanders in the 20th century with very bad mental health results.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
akoncius 9y ago
it is important to remember this book smuggling as a symbol that even small nation can resist against huge empire like soviet union. every effort counts, and as a result, we in Lithuania still use our language.
- danharaj 9y ago
  The Soviet Union did not exist at the time of the ban described in this article.
  - salesguy222 9y ago
    However the absolute monarchy of the Russian Empire did, and something tells me they might have been even more fanatical about censorship and imperialism than their Soviet successors...
  - malas 9y ago
    its predecessor existed - russian empire.
    - jerry40 9y ago
      I'm just curious who was an EU predecessor
      - georgecmu 9y ago
        In reverse chronological order: Third Reich, Napoleon's Empire, Holy Roman Empire, Western Roman Empire, Roman Empire
    - qb45 9y ago
      That's like blaming Hitler for WW1, though. The OP is very much not an example of fight with USSR.
      - akoncius 9y ago
        actually it's not. yes, governments were different in different war events, but it's a broader issue - Russia views ex-soviet (or even countries occupied before USSR) countries as countries which belong to Russia , so this policy/opinion/view continues through generations. so no, it's not like you are saying.
FeatureRush 9y ago
In the other parts of partitioned PLC similar fight for culture was happening. Sometimes I even think, that some barricades were purposefully installed in Polish culture so that it will win again. In school you learn about the importance of Polish, how it was suppressed and people who learned it in secret were heroes... In day-to-day life many people will oppose using English words when Polish can be used, I even witnessed situation where foreign quest was invited for a speech and during q&a someone not only asked the question in Polish (there was a translator so no problem) but even stressed that the question will be in Polish, because we are in Poland...
- owenversteeg 9y ago
  When I visited Poland I found stuff like that very interesting. In particular, the large, old city of Szczecin, which was completely German for many, many years (and at times only had a few thousand Poles in it.) When I visited it seemed 100% Polish, and it was almost as if there was no trace of German anything in the whole city. This all despite the city being completely Germanized for many years and being only 2.9 miles from the German border.

75 points by lermontov 9y ago

I didn't know that, while i live in Lithuania for years. I know Russians tried to destroy old Belarusian ("Ruskaya Mova") language similarly though, and largely succeeded at that. This reminds of the evils of Communism so much that it makes me feel like Communist ideology in fact didn't mean much for Russians. It is an evil by itself, before or after Communism too.

Mikeb85 9y ago
And in Canada we tried to destroy native language and culture, as well as various immigrant cultures. My mom went to school before 'multiculturalism' was a thing, and was beaten by the teachers for speaking Ukrainian anywhere on the school grounds. And of course residential schools are a more known and somewhat more extreme example of the attempts to create homogeneous culture in Canada in the mid 20th century. Nearly every (large) nation on earth has done similar things.
unabridged 9y ago
It has nothing to do with communism, this is an example of authoritarianism. People like to conflate the two terms.
- asveikau 9y ago
  I think you miss the point. I think the point is that what we today might think of as Cold War style rhetoric and rivalry has antecedents in the Russian empire and points earlier. I would even go so far as to say the whole thing is from the Great Schism. One side has the Latin alphabet and Western churches. Another side has Greek-derived Cyrillic and Orthodox church. Note in this article, the Russians are said to be removing religious shrines and trying to get the Lithuanian language to use Cyrillic instead of Latin characters. Both of these kind sound strange, but it's not really accidental symbolism. A couple months ago in the context of all the US-Russia political drama I was thinking of this... Some people say the current tension is trying to re-live the Cold War, but if you read about events from centuries ago the tension is all still there mostly in its present form. What if the whole point of conflict is really about how they learned to write and be Christians from Greeks?
  - Mikeb85 9y ago
    It absolutely dates back to the Great Schism. And the (Roman Catholic) west has constantly been antagonising the east. When the Orthodox requested assistance against the invading Muslims, the crusaders instead conquered for themselves, even sacking Constantinople. How about the Uniate churches? How many times have western powers (Poland-Lithuania, Germany, France, Great Britain, etc...) invaded or attempted to invade Russia? How many times has the west even allied themselves with Islamic empires to attack Russia? Even in modern history, there's a ton of anti-Serbian (read Orthodox) propaganda relating to the Balkans, ignoring the atrocities of every other side. How about the Greek default? The invasion of Cyprus by Turkey. The CIA in Chechnya. Colour revolutions (which all targeting majority Orthodox countries). And so on. Yes, it goes back to the Great Schism, however it's not Russia which has repeatedly attacked the west. It's not Russia which has a military alliance on the US or Europe's doorstep. And relating to Lithuania, the earliest conflicts between Lithuania and the then Duchy of Moscow were initiated by the Lithuanians. And today, NATO troops are in Lithuania. To respond to a 'Russian' threat we all know will never happen, given the whole NATO thing. Edit - Anyone want to explain how I'm wrong?
    - danharaj 9y ago
      You're claiming some extreme continuity between the politics of dozens of major political entities over thousands of years and your only supporting argument is that it makes sense to you.
      - Mikeb85 9y ago
        And nearly every post in this thread, and likely the intent of the OP in the first place was to show continuity between the Russian Empire, Soviet Union, and current Russian Federation. In fact, it's exactly this rhetoric (Putin wants to bring back the USSR/Russian Empire) which is responsible for current western foreign policy.
    - FeatureRush 9y ago
      First your comment reads quite... emotional? Both aggressive and defensive, almost to the point that one wants to avoid the discussion, but you asked in the edit so I reply. I assume you deeply care about the subject, but you need to understand, that if you want others to understand and maybe adopt your view it's better to tone down, avoid many short accusing questions etc... Also defending/explaining war by "but they started first before" always put you in a bad light... Now, about how are you wrong. Wrong is too strong word here, I'm unfamiliar with many historical events you mentioned but I assume they really did happened. The general idea that Great Schism was a big source of tension, and directly and indirectly by events that resulted from it is and will be a source of tension, this is also true. The problem as I see it is the strength of this effect, you are right that it exists, but your comment reads as it was the dominating force that shaped this part of history, which many people not agree with. You also leave out many historical events that do not fit in, like Russia and Prussia working together to conquer PLC and later attacking Poland in 1939... Similarly when for example Napoleon attacked Russia, the west-east conflict was not the reason, it was just a tool to reinforce the conflict, and Napoleon actually wanted to conquer all and Russia was just one of many... Wars can start for more "practical" reasons too (like oil) and historical/religious/ethnic reasons will soon follow, they can be present but they are not always the main reason. Finally that bit about NATO troops could for some people change your comment from "comment about history" to "comment about politics pretending to be about history"...
tetromino_ 9y ago
Late tsarist Russia had simply imported the "progressive" Western European policy of suppressing minority languages and scripts. 19th and early 20th century Britain, France, Germany, Italy, etc. were all engaged in similar practices to erase the distinct languages and identities of their ethnic minorities in the name of "national unity". Here are just a few examples: > In the later 19th century, virtually all teaching in the schools of Wales was in English, even in areas where the pupils barely understood English. Some schools used the Welsh Not, a piece of wood, often bearing the letters "WN", which was hung around the neck of any pupil caught speaking Welsh. The pupil could pass it on to any schoolmate heard speaking Welsh, with the pupil wearing it at the end of the day being given a beating. [1] > Francization is also a designation applied to a number of ethnic assimilation policies implemented by French authorities from the French Revolution to present. These policies aimed to impose or to maintain the dominance of French language (which at this time was still a minority language in the numerical sense, despite being the prestige language of France and an increasingly important vernacular for writing, with the decline of Latin) and culture by encouraging or compelling people of other ethnic groups to adopt them, and thereby developing a French identity, at the expense of their existing identity. Coupled with this policy was the deliberate suppression of minority languages. Quickly after the end of the Ancien Régime, the new revolutionary government adopted a policy of promotion of French as a unifying and modernizing language, simultaneously denigrating the status of minority languages as bulwarks of feudalism, Church control of the state, and backwardness in general. In less than a year after coming to power (1792), the Committee for Public Instruction mandated that the newly expanded public education would be buttressed by the sending of French-speaking teachers to areas that spoke other languages. The 19th century saw this programme, and similar initiatives and wider cultural prorogatives, achieve many of its intended aims: the French language became much more expansive among the population, and by the 1860s, nearly 80 percent of the national population were able to speak French. [2] > The programme of Italianization was particularly forcefully applied in schools, aiming at the destruction of the German school system. As of 1928, Italian had become the only language of instruction in 760 South Tyrolean classes, affecting over 360 schools and 30,000 pupils. Likewise, German Kindergarten were required to use Italian, while substitutes were forced to shut down. German teachers were systematically dismissed on the grounds of "insufficient didactics", or transferred to the south, from where Italian teachers were recruited instead. Degrees from Austrian or German universities became valid only through an additional stay of one year at an Italian university. [3] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_language [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francization [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italianization_of_South_Tyrol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italianization_of_South_Tyrol
danharaj 9y ago
Even today, countries like France enact policies in order to suppress or exterminate languages that don't benefit the state. [1] When do you think Canada stopped trying to force its indigenous cultures into extinction? [2] Communism is not some essentially more evil ideology than the ideologies it competed with. Far more than ideology, the material interests of the ruling classes in all nations is what drives social and economic policy. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergonha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergonha [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_school_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_sc...
sedachv 9y ago
Your comment is absurdly wrong. Old Belarussian/Ukrainian is the circa-Early Middle Ages language of Kievan Rus that is the ancestor of modern Belarussian, Ukrainian, and Russian languages. What destroyed the use of Belarussian literary language in Lithuania/Belarus was the union with Poland - Polish gradually replaced Belarussian as a literary language. My grandmother was born in the 1920s in Western Belarus - Belarussian only became an official language and started being used in higher education again after Western Belarus was annexed to the Belarussian SSR after the end of WWII. In her town most people spoke Belarussian and few were literate in Polish. This was the case for most of Western Belarus, but the literary Belarussian language was only taught at the primary school level (in those towns that were fortunate enough to have schools), and there were very few Belarussian books published (to place this in context, some of the first books printed in a Slavic language were in Belarussian in the early 16th century). The literacy policies of Belarussian SSR is what revived the Belarussian language. What has happened after the fall of the Soviet Union is Lukashenko's government pursuing a policy of suppressing Belarussian as an official language in favor of Russian. Recently this has started to become a bigger issue of dissatisfaction in the country.
fsloth 9y ago
"This reminds of the evils of Communism so much that it makes me feel like Communist ideology in fact didn't mean much for Russians. It is an evil by itself, before or after Communism too. reply " No, it's the nature of old empires. All large empires have eradicated - or tried to eradicate - minorities at one point or the other. Not through genocide mind you - you don't have to destroy the genetic inheritance. It's sufficient to destroy cultural inheritance and implant the cultural identity of the master. Language is one of the strongest markers of cultural identity and thus it's understandable why it would be one of the things on the 'hit list' - and literature especially. Since we don't have an oral tradition anymore, destroying books effectively would have destroyed the cultural inheritance in a generation. Even Denmark quite forcefully tried to "civilize" Greenlanders in the 20th century with very bad mental health results.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

akoncius 9y ago

it is important to remember this book smuggling as a symbol that even small nation can resist against huge empire like soviet union. every effort counts, and as a result, we in Lithuania still use our language.

danharaj 9y ago
The Soviet Union did not exist at the time of the ban described in this article.
- salesguy222 9y ago
  However the absolute monarchy of the Russian Empire did, and something tells me they might have been even more fanatical about censorship and imperialism than their Soviet successors...
- malas 9y ago
  its predecessor existed - russian empire.
  - jerry40 9y ago
    I'm just curious who was an EU predecessor
    - georgecmu 9y ago
      In reverse chronological order: Third Reich, Napoleon's Empire, Holy Roman Empire, Western Roman Empire, Roman Empire
  - qb45 9y ago
    That's like blaming Hitler for WW1, though. The OP is very much not an example of fight with USSR.
    - akoncius 9y ago
      actually it's not. yes, governments were different in different war events, but it's a broader issue - Russia views ex-soviet (or even countries occupied before USSR) countries as countries which belong to Russia , so this policy/opinion/view continues through generations. so no, it's not like you are saying.

FeatureRush 9y ago

In the other parts of partitioned PLC similar fight for culture was happening. Sometimes I even think, that some barricades were purposefully installed in Polish culture so that it will win again. In school you learn about the importance of Polish, how it was suppressed and people who learned it in secret were heroes... In day-to-day life many people will oppose using English words when Polish can be used, I even witnessed situation where foreign quest was invited for a speech and during q&a someone not only asked the question in Polish (there was a translator so no problem) but even stressed that the question will be in Polish, because we are in Poland...

owenversteeg 9y ago
When I visited Poland I found stuff like that very interesting. In particular, the large, old city of Szczecin, which was completely German for many, many years (and at times only had a few thousand Poles in it.) When I visited it seemed 100% Polish, and it was almost as if there was no trace of German anything in the whole city. This all despite the city being completely Germanized for many years and being only 2.9 miles from the German border.