Uzbek politician calls for cutting down use of Russian language

An Uzbek politician has proposed cutting down the use of the Russian language in education and TV broadcasting, following a Russian historian’s claim that the Uzbeks did not exist before the 1917 Russian revolution.

Alisher Kadyrov, an MP and leader of the pro-government Milliy Tiklanish (National Revival) party, said that “lately, we have been hearing nothing but chauvinistic statements in Russian”, according to Uzbek media reports.

He said that the Russian government “only acknowledges [Russian] chauvinists’ strange behaviour”. “You get the impression that it is interested in such rhetoric.”

Kadyrov said that the Russian language “is used disproportionately widely” in Uzbekistan’s education system and on TV despite the fact that the share of the Russian-speaking population is below 3 percent.

“This disbalance must be corrected,” he said.

Kadyrov proposed adopting a law that would allow primary education to be given only in Uzbek, “because it is a native language of the overwhelming majority of Uzbekistan’s residents”.

He also proposed exchanging TV programmes with “our brothers — Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Turkmens, Turks, and Tajiks”, instead of broadcasting Russian content.

The remarks follow Russian historian Mikhail Smolin’s claims in a programme on the NTV channel that the Uzbeks and Kazakhs appeared as nations only after the 1917 Russian revolution.

Smolin said that the Uzbek, Kazakh, Azeri and other nations were created “voluntarily” by the Soviet government. “For example, the Uzbeks never existed before the revolution. There was no such ethnic group,” he said.

Earlier Russian radical nationalist writer Zakhar Prilepin proposed reuniting Uzbekistan and other neighbouring countries with Russia and declaring all documents on the Soviet break-up invalid.

The Uzbek Foreign Ministry summoned the Russian envoy to the country to inform him that the Uzbek government found Prilepin’s remarks “provocative”.

President Shavkat Mirziyoyev has recently criticised “powerful countries” for “taking the path of open pressure, confrontation and conflict”.

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