Author's personal copy Language & Communication 32 (2012) 124–136 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Language & Communication journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/langcom Public information: The shifting roles of minority language news media in the Buryat territories of Russia Kathryn Graber University of Michigan, Department of Anthropology, 101 West Hall, 1085 South University Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1107, USA a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Available online 29 July 2011 Keywords: Mass media Multilingualism Language planning/policy Minority languages Russian Buryat a b s t r a c t In ‘multinational states’ such as the former Soviet Union and contemporary Russian Federation, minority language media have been developed for diverse ends. This article examines the changing roles of minority language news media over a century of language shift in the Lake Baikal region, where generations of Buryat speakers have been shifting to Russian. Drawing on archival materials and ethnographic research with media personnel and audiences, I show how linguists, journalists, and policymakers have directed minority language media practices in response to their own shifting conceptions of an existing, emergent, or contracting Buryat language public—and of media’s ideal or actual relationship to it. Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction One afternoon in the autumn of 2009, I sat sipping tea in the Siberian republic of Buryatia with Bulat,1 a senior journalist, and our conversation turned to death. Gazing pensively out the window at dry, yellow larch leaves swirling in the wind, Bulat confided that he doubted he had accomplished much in his life making Buryat-language media. Young people don’t care, he said, and our language will be dead within two or three generations. He added that I should go find myself a Buryat husband, teach our children English, and stop worrying about the news. It’s not ‘news’ (novosti) anyway, he said; it’s ‘olds’ (starosti), ‘only for an ancient people’ (tol’ko dlia starinnogo naroda).2 His dismissal of a life’s work struck me as uncharacteristically fatalistic, and I chalked it up to his temporarily dark mood. But Bulat was giving voice to an open secret: While there are still a handful of Buryat-language newspapers and daily television and radio broadcasts, the audience for minority language media in Buryatia has shrunk as language shift to Russian has progressed, and the future is indeed uncertain. Television and radio companies have difficulty finding young workers, and newspaper prose is beyond the ability of most urban youth. Widespread competence in Russian has obviated the need to use Buryat to give the latest price on potatoes or tomorrow’s weather report. Faced with some of the hardest economic conditions in the Russian Federation, government authorities and citizens of Buryatia periodically raise the familiar ‘inefficiency argument,’ suggesting that media should be produced in only one language, which would naturally be the one already most widely used: Russian. E-mail address: kegraber@umich.edu All personal names of living persons in this article are pseudonyms. I have replaced traditional Buryat names with other traditional Buryat names of the appropriate gender. 2 Transliteration of Russian and Buryat examples in this article follows the Library of Congress (ALA-LC) system for Cyrillic, except for those terms that already have well-known English spellings (e.g., ‘Buryat’), for ease of pronunciation with some personal names (e.g., ‘Sayana’), and for instances in which the original Buryat was already written in Latin script (e.g., Buriaad-Mongol Ynen). This is not perfect: the ALA-LC system was originally developed for Slavic languages, and the pronunciation of some characters in Mongolic languages differs slightly. The three ‘extra’ letters of the Buryat alphabet, TT, YY, and hh, are represented as Öö, Üü, and Hh respectively. Russian appears in italics and Buryat with underlining. All translations are mine. 1 0271-5309/$ - see front matter Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.langcom.2011.05.005 Author's personal copy K. Graber / Language & Communication 32 (2012) 124–136 125 Lest Buryat-language media appear obsolescent, however, it is worth considering whether a competent audience is necessary or sufficient for demand. Minority language media may play roles other than distributing information. A public might include individuals who cannot understand the referential content of media but who nevertheless circulate it, and take something from it—and who might even be concerned about the past, present, and future of ‘their’ language.3 Following early theorists of media (e.g., Tönnies, 2000[1922]), scholars tend to view mass media and society as dialectically co-constitutive, but journalists often emphasize one direction of influence or the other in their own appraisals of what they do. Bulat, for example, implies that a minority language public is a condition of possibility for his work as a journalist, with the survival of his own profession contingent on the continuation of a particular kind of society, a Buryat-speaking public—a public that he views as synonymous with an ‘ancient people.’ But many of his younger colleagues emphasize the opposite direction of influence, thinking of themselves as linguistic and cultural activists working for the development of a new Buryat-speaking public. A single media institution, while it may look monolithic from outside, contains a dramatic diversity of opinion over the basic question of how minority language media function—and are supposed to function—in a multilingual society. This article extends this observation into the past to examine how the goals and ends of minority language news in Buryatia have shifted over time, in the context of ongoing language shift. From a revolutionary manifesto in 1910 to a newsroom argument in 2009, I show how different actors in the Lake Baikal region of Siberia have imagined the relationship between Buryat-language news and the people who are supposed to be using and/or producing it. Proceeding chronologically, I highlight three distinct ways minority language media have been conceptualized and developed in Buryatia, with distinct goals vis-à-vis imagined publics. In the first historical example, when native activists perceived Buryats as a nascent nation, ready to develop national consciousness, they conceived of Buryat-language media as tools for discovering and producing national unity. In the second example, when out-group actors attempted to exert state control over Buryat territories via media and figured Buryats as a closed group to which they had only indirect access, they imagined minority language media as means for reaching and inspiring a public that was parallel to that of dominant Russian-language media. Finally, when state control was no longer tenuous—and when linguistic and cultural assimilation had produced the largely Russian-dominant population that Bulat now laments—minority language journalists began working to serve a subset of wider Buryat society, comprising integrated Buryats who periodically orient to a Buryat subpublic.4 Because these different conceptualizations reflect a common progression of indigenous assimilation and language shift, they may be generalizable to other colonial contexts in which minority language publics are sites of political struggle and sociocultural change (see especially Peery, 2012). While numerous studies of media and publics have theorized publics as inherently constructed, rather than a priori, categories, they have tended to take as their subject the imagined audiences of European or American media, or the development of Euro-American publics writ large (e.g., Barnett, 2003; Coleman and Ross, 2010; Habermas, 1989[1962]; Warner, 2002). I hope that the Buryat case will inspire more critical attention to how models of mass communication and their component parts—categories like language, speaker, and audience—change when imported into new historical and cultural contexts. Looking historically at the shifting roles of minority language news reveals the (shifting) imagined relationship between ‘a’ language and ‘a’ public—whether that relationship is already established or still shimmering in the ether as an ideal yet to be realized. 2. Minority language news media in Buryatia Compared with the rich literature on other mass media, anthropological studies of news and journalism are few and quite recent (cf. Bird, 2010; Boyer, 2000, 2001, 2005; Hannerz, 2002, 2004; Hasty, 2005; Pedelty, 1995; Peterson, 2001, 2003; Ståhlberg, 2002), and the linguistic anthropological study of journalism has barely begun (cf. Catenaccio et al., 2011; Cotter, 2010; Van Hout and Macgilchrist, 2010). There is good reason, however, for linguists, linguistic anthropologists, sociologists of language, and other scholars broadly interested in language and society to turn their attention to news media. As members of a professional cadre of trusted knowledge workers, news journalists enjoy a particularly authoritative role in public discourse and in generating and maintaining language standards (Bell, 1991; Fairclough, 1995; Ferguson, 1983; Fowler, 1991; Goffman, 1981; van Dijk, 1988). Attending to journalists’ social positioning allows a better understanding of how certain codes, dialects, or other linguistic forms become invested with authority. Moreover, by attending not only to the linguistic form and content of media, but also to surrounding discourses about language and media, we can observe the dynamic, reflexive relationship between, on one hand, domains of media production and, on the other hand, the more general semiotic ideologies of the cultures within which those domains are embedded. Twentieth-century Russia provides rich historical ground for this type of project because journalism enjoyed a privileged position in Soviet life and became an ideological battleground in the post-Soviet period. Soviet news media were heavily ideologized and contested, and the debates they inspired are visible in many detailed Communist party documents, oral histories, memoirs, and ethnographic accounts (Gorham, 2003; Smith, 1998; Wolfe, 2005; Yurchak, 2006). Soviet nation-building in Siberia encouraged particularly explicit associations between language, nation, and territory (Balzer, 1999; Bloch, 2004; Grant, 1995; Slezkine, 1996), which have had—and continue to have—powerful effects in ongoing language contact and shift. Among native Siberians, Buryats have long been regarded as a darling ‘model minority’ for their relative pacifism, high 3 4 A public, in my analysis, is a collection of people oriented, however temporarily, around a mutually perceived, shared social fact. A more detailed chronicle of the development of Buryat-language media can be found in Graber (n.d.) Author's personal copy 126 K. Graber / Language & Communication 32 (2012) 124–136 Fig. 1. The Buryat territories of Russia in 2011. Aga and Ust’-Orda have recently been dissolved as autonomous administrative units, but they remain important to local conceptions of Buryat territory. (Map by the author; base layers from the Central Intelligence Agency, courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries, and OpenStreetMap and contributors.) education level, and compliance with the state’s changing political systems. According to the Marxist–Leninist evolutionary scale employed by early Soviet ethnographers, Buryats were relatively ‘nation-like’ and, while ‘backwards,’ less so than their Siberian neighbors to the north and east (Hirsch, 2005). Language legislation in the Russian Federation’s ethnic republics continues to protect and support ‘national’ languages like Buryat in key functional domains like media and education, on the principle that these are the native (meaning, in this case, ‘heritage’ or ‘ancestral’) languages of titular nationalities. In the last All-Russian census in 2002, Buryat had 368,807 self-reported speakers.5 Speakers are concentrated in the Republic of Buryatia, a semi-autonomous ethnic republic of the Russian Federation, and the neighboring Buryat regions (Fig. 1), with additional communities over the border in northern Mongolia and China. Within Russia, Buryat is currently considered a discrete language, and the Buryats are considered a discrete ethnic group—facts that have at least as much to do with political danger, border terror, and the peculiar development of nationalities policy in the Soviet Union as with objective measures of linguistic and cultural similarity. Some phonologists based outside the area consider Buryat a northern dialect of Mongolian (e.g., Svantesson et al., 2005), and dialect diversity within Buryat is so great that it strains the principle of mutual intelligibility. As the Lake Baikal region has been crisscrossed by successive generations of competing religious, political, economic, and social movements, it has served as a sort of battleground—and testing ground—for media projects that have worked both for and against this linguistic diversity. 3. Empowering a nascent Buryat nation: the pre-revolutionary period (–1917) At the time of Russian contact in the early 17th century,6 Buryats were identifiable as a number of northern Mongolic tribes with sophisticated agricultural and military capabilities. Russian travelogues identified the ‘braty’ or ‘bratskie liudi’ as a large 5 Rosstat (2004). This number is almost certainly inflated, due to the practice of self-reporting one’s ‘rodnoi iazyk’ (‘native language’) as one’s heritage or ancestral language, without regard to competence, but Buryat is undoubtedly one of Siberia’s most widely spoken languages. 6 The first documented direct contact between Russians and Buryats was a brief battle in 1628 or 1629 on the Angara River, but it is likely that there were earlier economic and personal contacts between local Buryats and fur traders, fortune hunters, exiles, and escaped convicts from European Russia (Abaeva and Zhukovskaia, 2004; Montgomery, 2005; Schorkowitz, 2001). Author's personal copy K. Graber / Language & Communication 32 (2012) 124–136 127 tribe of the Lake Baikal region, and the Russian state treated them administratively as a discrete native people (Abaeva and Zhukovskaia, 2004; Kivelson, 2006). But their status as ‘a’ people with ‘a’ language was anything but clear. Over the course of Russian colonization, linguistic diversity was further complicated by substantial disparities in literacy and in the degree of contactinduced change from Russian—thanks in large part to differential influence from missionaries in the 18th and 19th centuries. To simplify somewhat, Russian Orthodox missionaries concentrated their activities to the west of Lake Baikal, while Mongolian Buddhists from the Tibetan Mahāyāna tradition concentrated their efforts to the east. By the early 1900s, ‘Western’ or ‘Irkutsk Buryats’ had emerged as a distinct group characterized by Russian linguistic knowledge, personal names, habits, and dress, while ‘Eastern Buryats’ were increasingly being educated by Buddhist monasteries and traveling lamas literate in classical Mongolian and Tibetan, culturally tying them more strongly to Mongolia. In the late Tsarist period, the widening gulf presented problems for multiple parties. Imperial Russia maintained only a tenuous grasp of its eastern borders, and cultural bifurcation among the Buryats was not in the state’s interest because they served an important ambassadorial function, mediating and buffering relations between Russia, China, and Tibet (Andreyev, 2003; Rupen, 1964). Meanwhile, some Russian-educated Buryat elites were becoming increasingly agitated by Russification policies, and in the radically charged period following the Russian Revolution of 1905, this political dissatisfaction dovetailed with their growing interest in European theories of nationhood to create something like ‘national awareness’ (Montgomery, 2005, p. 133).7 It was in this context that scholars, missionaries, and political activists alike began to circulate language policy statements calling for greater unification of the Buryat language—and, by extension, ‘the Buryat people.’ One of the most interesting of these statements came in 1910 from a Buryat schoolteacher named Nikolai Amagaev and a young Buryat scholar-cum-nationalist-revolutionary named Ėlbek-Dorzhi Rinchino, writing under the pseudonym AlamzhiMėrgėn. Amagaev and Rinchino devised their own modified alphabet for Buryat,8 which they advocated in a dual-language pamphlet designed to be accessible to both Russian and Mongolian readers. Most of the pamphlet was concerned not with phonemic representation, but rather with the logistics of language standardization and national awakening. Existing attempts at writing Buryat had failed, they said, because they could not bridge the wide gaps between dialects and writing systems. The orthographic reforms they proposed would ‘create the soil and conditions for the emergence of a new general-Mongolian literary language’ that would be widely used not only by well-educated elites, but also by the ‘masses’ (1910, p. 38). Who exactly constituted ‘the masses’ was vague, and it is not clear what they imagined the literacy rate of their potential readers to be. But it is clear that they recognized them as mostly illiterate, in contrast to the Buryat intelligentsia of Irkutsk and the educated lamas of eastern Buryatia. They lamented the lack of ‘institutions of enlightenment’ that would teach and promote the use of a unified writing system for Buryat—in the absence of which various systems based on the Cyrillic, Latin, and vertical Mongolian scripts were then in competition. They laid out what they saw as the main problems and argued that there was ‘only one possible way’ forward: ‘through print’ (1910, p. 40). Specifically, they regretted that it was not possible to found a Buryat newspaper. Their argument presaged both Anderson’s (1991) thesis that print media create the conditions for imagining national communities and Silverstein’s (2000) observation that this process depends on standardized languages that are co-constructed rather than discovered. Amagaev and Rinchino would have agreed that media circulations are part and parcel of the language standardizing process, creating language communities while assuming them—because this is precisely what they wanted. What is remarkable about their pamphlet is the implicit distinction it makes between nations (which were, for them, discovered) and reading publics (which were created, through hard work and the right alphabet). They took for granted that there was some sort of single, unified, essential body of people, an already-existing, perhaps even primordial ethnic group, ‘the’ Buryat people (or Buryat narod). And yet, they did not claim to have discovered a single, unified language ‘out there in the world;’ they rather asked how they could make Buryats consider themselves speakers of a single, unified language, a public ready for further political ‘enlightenment’ and transformative projects. To the extent that Amagaev and Rinchino sought to make this public coextensive with the already-existing narod, their project was classically nationalist. In 1910, however, it remained a dream. Minority language newspapers were officially established only at the discretion of the imperial censor’s office in St. Petersburg, which was generally hostile to native language education and literacy efforts.9 While the Buryat intelligentsia was increasingly vocal on issues of ‘national enlightenment,’ it would be difficult to argue that there was anything like a ‘national public’ in Buryatia. It was only shortly later, however, in the massive nation-building projects of the early Soviet period, that minority language media became a key state technology making ‘modern, rational publics’ out of native Siberians. 4. Informing and performing a parallel public: the early Soviet period (1918–1959) One of the first projects of the fledgling Soviet state was to establish newspapers in Russian and local vernaculars to promote Bolshevik ideology and provide information channels to the distant peripheries. This was especially important in eastern Siberia, where the Civil War continued in fits and starts well into the 1920s, and where the native populace needed some 7 Much evidence from the late 19th and early 20th centuries points to the Buryat elites’ growing knowledge of—and identification with—national(ist) movements in Europe (Amagaev and Alamzhi-Mėrgėn, 1910, p. 38; Klements, 1907; Zhamtsarano, 1907). 8 Their alphabet was based on Agvan Dorzhiev’s modified version of the Oirat ‘clear script.’ For a fuller description of the scripts and alphabets that have been used for Buryat, see Arai (2006), Kara (1972, 1996), and Montgomery (2005). 9 The only attempt at a Buryat-language newspaper that we know of today was a bilingual tea trade publication called Žizn’ na vostochnoi okraine/Züün zügėi baidal (Life on the Eastern Frontier) that had been closed by state authorities in 1897 (Kim and Baldanov, 1994). Author's personal copy 128 K. Graber / Language & Communication 32 (2012) 124–136 Fig. 2. An announcement of Lenin’s death, calling for a day of mourning on January 26, 1924 (OPP IMBiT: MI-723). convincing. Bolshevik leaders grappled with the deceptively complex practical matter of distributing even the most basic information into the Buryat territories. Newspapers, cheaply and quickly produced on regional printing presses, had long been Lenin’s favored political organizing tool (Lenin, 1902), and they rapidly emerged as the new state’s preferred medium of mass communication. Bolshevik newspapers were locally printed in the regional capitals of Irkutsk, Chita, and Ulan-Ude (then Verkhneudinsk) and distributed to rural territories by horse and cart. Faced with a largely illiterate population,10 new Bolshevik journalists in the 1910s–1920s depended instead on well-placed native activists, such as schoolteachers, secularized lamas, and members of the Buryat intelligentsia, who would read state newspapers aloud for their local comrades. The earliest news published in Buryat therefore consisted mainly of illustrated announcements and instructions to be read aloud to illiterate herders. Some of these early materials introduced the iconography of the new state, the Buryat-Mongolian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (BMASSR), such as a notice announcing the death of Lenin with a line drawing of his famous profile flanked by lines of classical Mongolian script (Fig. 2). While the content in this case was standardized across languages and locations, it represents an important attempt to indigenize Leninism and forge a new socialist language in Buryat. Other early news publications propagandized the benefits of new social programs and provided information on how to navigate the new Soviet bureaucracy. For example, a 16-page informational pamphlet from the Buryat Cooperative Union (Fig. 3) instructs its readers, in painstaking bureaucratic detail, how to form a cooperative and run meetings. In addition to being informative, this pamphlet clearly raises Buryat to the status of an official language of business and administration—a feature of progressive Leninist language policy that would not last. In images like that gracing the publication pictured in Fig. 3, Buryat-language publications also began to instantiate an ideal of interethnic brotherly love—what would later become known as the ‘druzhba narodov,’ or friendship of the peoples—that remains central to the self-conception of the Republic of Buryatia today. Like Amagaev and Rinchino before them, the producers of these native language texts did not expect their immediate readers to be the unwashed masses, but they did want to reach that audience. The problem for Bolshevik propagandists was one of access. Agitators-propagandists, in ‘agitprop’ brigades of the Red Army, were deployed from Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Eastern Europe to the Soviet peripheries to pursue a broad strategy of winning over the people by winning over the local elite, whom they hoped to train as Bolsheviks and translators. However, early attempts at Buryat-language publishing suffered from a dearth of journalistic, linguistic, and technological expertise. There was not yet a professional cadre of Buryat-language journalists, so the first news texts were produced through translation. Üür (Dawn), published in 1920 and often credited as the first Soviet newspaper in Buryat, consisted of articles written in Russian by a Bolshevik army propagandist, the Czech satirist Jaroslav Hašek, that were then translated by his Buryat-literate coeditors, Dava Damdintsyrenov and Ardan Markizov (Dondokov, 1960; Montgomery, 2005; Namzhilova, 2001). Early informational publications like those pictured in Figs. 2 and 3 were also translations from official Russian announcements. Heavy reliance on translation effectively required newspaper workers to be conversant—and preferably literate—in both Russian and Buryat. But most of Buryatia’s activist intelligentsia (e.g., Rinchino, co-author of our 1910 10 See Hirsch (2005), K. (1901), Montgomery (2005), and Troinitskii (1905) for estimates of literacy rates and the limitations of this data. Author's personal copy K. Graber / Language & Communication 32 (2012) 124–136 129 Fig. 3. A Russian peasant and Buryat herder, easily identifiable to readers by their facial features and dress, shake hands on the front page of an instructional booklet published by the Buryat Cooperative Union, 1924 (OPP IMBiT: MI-557). manifesto) had left for St. Petersburg or Mongolia or were otherwise occupied in revolutionary activities. Translation work in the early Soviet period thus fell to a handful of Bolshevik sympathizers, among whom linguistic expertise was stretched thin. Beyond these difficulties, early Soviet journalists encountered practical technological problems peculiar to printing in multiple languages and scripts. Wartime paper shortages plagued early Buryat-language publications like Üür and limited their print runs, and newspapers in every language were poorly produced. Typesetting in the classical Mongolian script presented an additional conundrum, and the lack of type and typesetters prevented Buryat-language news publication on several occasions when Russian-dominant revolutionary authorities desperately wanted it. This problem is exemplified in an early Buryat national newspaper, Golos Buriat-Mongola (Voice of the Buryat-Mongol), published in 1920 in Chita by the Revolutionary Central Committee of the Buryat-Mongols of the Far Eastern Republic, a short-lived state that served as a buffer between war-wracked Soviet Russia and Japan during 1920–1922. Articles in Golos make clear that establishing a Buryatlanguage press was a major priority in the Far Eastern Republic (e.g., Garbatovskii, 1920), and that Golos was meant to become the bilingual newspaper of an autonomous Buryat political region—though meanwhile it was published only in Russian on topics relevant to ethnic Buryats. The editors announced in the first issue that they were ‘taking steps toward the organization of typesetting also in Buryat-Mongolian’ (Golos Buriat-Mongola, 1920), for which they had enlisted the help of some unnamed typesetters from Mongolia (Golos Buriat-Mongola, 1921). It was nearly a year before a Buryat-language newspaper, Shėnė baidal (A new life), was finally published in the Far Eastern Republic.11 In sum, the early Soviet state used Buryat-language media primarily to make information available to its distant peripheries, depending on local elites as intermediaries. Later, however, Soviet historians and journalists (e.g., Dondokov, 1960) would soundly criticize early efforts like Golos Buriat-Mongola for focusing too much energy on the intelligentsia (most of whom were condemned as ‘bourgeois nationalists’ in the purges of the 1930s) and undervaluing the socially transformative power of native language newspapers for the proletariat. While well-educated Buryats provided an initial point of access to ‘the masses,’ the ultimate goal of Soviet Buryat-language media was to create a direct, bi-directional line of communication between the individual Buryat and the State. Buryat-language news media were intended to function as a transformative state technology, going well beyond the ‘mere’ dissemination of information to existing elites, and serving instead as institutions of propaganda and enlightenment. State propagandists and journalists reworked the relationship between Buryat-language news and a Buryat language public through three major techniques: organizing proletarian correspondents, professionalizing new Buryat journalists, and encouraging literacy within the general populace. The first technique responded to the need to address, as the editors of Zhurnalist (Journalist) put it in 1923, ‘every stratum of the population using different formats, but in one communist language’ (quoted in Smith, 1998, pp. 38–39). Political agitators aimed to enact more direct connections between journalists and readers, so that the newspaper (and thereby the state) would not only be ‘intelligible’ to ‘the people,’ but also appear to emanate from them. This concern was by no means limited to Buryatia, or to minority language news media. Newspapers throughout the Soviet Union organized new cadres of worker correspondents (rabkory) and village correspondents (sel’kory), who would localize broader projects like agricultural collectivization by reporting on a single farm’s milk production or trac11 Shėnė baidal later moved to Ulan-Ude and became the basis for the Buryat-language version of Buriat-Mongol’skaia Pravda, the BMASSR’s flagship Buryatlanguage publication. Author's personal copy 130 K. Graber / Language & Communication 32 (2012) 124–136 Fig. 4. Buddhist lamas are portrayed conducting rituals with texts in Buriat-Mongolun Ünėn 82(369), November 18, 1929 (left) and 64(351), 13 September, 1929 (right). tor technology (Fitzpatrick, 1994). The rabkory and sel’kory also served a linguistic purpose, infusing newspapers with proletarian authenticity and forging a new ‘voice’ between the ideological slogans of Bolshevism and the everyday vernacular of the peasantry (Gorham, 2003). In Buryatia, as elsewhere, forging this ‘new voice’ posed a difficult challenge to both the amateur journalists writing in a tenuously standardized minority language and the editors charged with translating and correcting their communiqués (e.g., NARB, f. 1, op. 1, d. 433, protocol 2). The second technique, professionalizing new Buryat journalists, was in part a response to the immediate need for Buryatspeaking experts to take a leadership role in organizing the rabkory and sel’kory. It became a priority of the state to build cadres fast and professionalize them into new ideals of Soviet journalism. Professionalizing specifically Buryat journalists was also, however, part of the broader movement of korenizatsiia, or ‘indigenization.’12 Korenizatsiia followed Leninist and early Stalinist nationality policy, which explicitly emphasized local language development, suppression of ‘Great Russian chauvinism,’ and the principle of national self-determination. As the state worked quickly to train new cadres in Soviet political ideology and basic journalism, they focused on minority populations—though not all minorities were emphasized equally. Particular efforts were made to support schools, textbooks, and newspapers for languages whose speakers already could be— or would conceivably soon be able to be—considered a viable, ‘nation’-like public.13 In Buryatia, this meant that other officially recognized languages, most notably Ewenki (a.k.a. ‘Evenki’ or ‘Tungus’), were de-prioritized in language planning, including media production. Beyond elevating Buryat over other native languages, korenizatsiia effectively changed the face of Buryat-language journalism by shifting emphasis for qualification from linguistic ability in Buryat to ethnic and gender identity. In the 1920s, ‘Buryatization’ (oburiachivanie) of state apparatuses like the newspapers primarily aimed to incorporate ethnic Buryats into the workforce (NARB, f. 1, op. 1, d. 433, protocol 24). The Ministry of Culture aggressively recruited young Buryats, especially women, to work alongside the ethnic Russians and Jews who had been running Buryatia’s newspapers and to attend meetings, ideological training sessions, and professionalization seminars in distant Moscow. The third technique, encouraging literacy, targeted what would become the audience for Buryatia’s freshly indigenized print. Regional newspapers like Ünėn, the flagship Buryat-language version of Pravda,14 were central in a broader campaign to create an active and politically empowered socialist populace through literacy. Posters and articles encouraged Buryats to take advantage of adult literacy classes. Literacy and enlightenment campaigns ran well into the 1950s in the form of ‘reading huts’ and ‘red yurts’ (krasnye iurty) sprinkled in rural areas throughout the BMASSR (NARB, f. 955, op. 1, d. 507). Would-be enlighteners worked to revolutionize textual practices, in the process disparaging existing forms of authority that were incompatible with a Soviet ideal of proletarian empowerment. Books that had been worshipped as ritual objects and used by Buddhist lamas were now remade into objects for the direct use of all citizens. While the Buryat of the past accepted a blessing on the head from a text-as-ritual-artifact (Fig. 4), the Buryat of the bright and glorious Soviet future would have in his (or her) own hands a book, and thus the means to drive a tractor or build a city (Fig. 5). Through active engagement with state-produced texts, newly empowered Buryats would become rational, modern Soviet citizens both reflective and constitutive of state ideology. Mass media became the means by which Soviet citizens, including Buryats, performed their own commitment to communist principles, and by which the State performed its commitment to safeguarding ethnic equality. News media publicized the artistic and industrial accomplishments of the Soviet Union and spread the imagery of Stalinism, patriotism, 12 Korenizatsiia has also been analyzed as ethnic particularism (Slezkine, 1996) and affirmative action (Martin, 2001). See Hirsch (2005) for an excellent discussion of these decisions and the ideologies behind them. 14 These are abbreviated titles; flagship newspapers of the BMASSR and its successor republics have gone through a series of name changes but have always included ‘Pravda’ and ‘Ünėn’ (Truth) in their titles. 13 Author's personal copy K. Graber / Language & Communication 32 (2012) 124–136 131 Fig. 5. An artist imagines an ideal Soviet socialist future in Buriat-Mongolun Ünėn 67(354), September 24, 1929. Fig. 6. Workers of the Karl Marx collective farm of the Zakamensk district are photographed reading Buriat-Mongoloi Ünėn. Published in the same newspaper, 21(5692), February 1, 1949. and socialist realism into borderlands like Buryatia, localizing what might otherwise seem distant through regional versions of Pravda. Meanwhile, radio developed from a short-wave amateur technology into a phenomenally successful Soviet-wide system of state-run studios. In Buryatia, state broadcasts began in 1931, and the republic’s radio service quickly became an integral part of the news media scene, particularly under Stalin’s direction in the 1940s–1950s. Newspapers and radio emerged as the central tools of propaganda, and their incorporation into daily life became and remained a key indicator of ‘proper’ public engagement. Throughout the Soviet period, editors and officials paid assiduous attention to the number of letters their newspapers received and how they were handled. In Buryatia, the editorial boards of the Buryat- and Russian-language newspapers routinely compared not only the number of letters different departments received, but also the number of letters the respective newspapers received (NARB, f. 930, f. 3843). These numbers were taken to be direct, statistical evidence of the interest level and engagement of readers, tantamount to proof that media personnel were doing Author's personal copy 132 K. Graber / Language & Communication 32 (2012) 124–136 their jobs (or not doing their jobs, as was sometimes accused).15 For a Soviet citizen, subscribing to the newspaper, sending letters, appearing in photographs like that of Fig. 6, or simply being observed reading the newspaper fulfilled an important public duty. Alexei Yurchak (2006) has emphasized the importance of ritualistically citing official discourse, gleaned largely from party news. Workers at a collective farm visited by Caroline Humphrey in 1967 took tremendous pride in having their quota fulfillments and accomplishments detailed in the local newspaper; at the same time, they kept copies of central newspapers ‘locked in glass-fronted bookcases’ in a library that ‘appeared to be seldom frequented’ (2001, p. 19). Even now in the post-Soviet period, some offices and households subscribe to the flagship Buryat-language newspaper, Buriaad Ünėn, despite having no one around who actually reads Buryat, simply because they feel they should. In 1938, at the height of Stalin’s purges, language policy in the Soviet Union was abruptly changed to privilege the Russian language in education, official documents, and party terminology. In a series of orthographic reforms, state authorities in Moscow attempted to standardize Russian-origin borrowings in all the languages of the Soviet periphery, ridding news discourse of regionalisms and opening languages like Buryat to greater Russian influence (Graber, 2009; Smith, 1998). Paradoxically, what looked like a policy of Russification was accompanied by an intense effort to institutionalize equality between Buryat-speaking and Russian-speaking publics as part of one single, broader Soviet public. Assimilating the Buryat language public into a broader Soviet public thus involved two processes, seemingly at odds: sublimating nationalism in favor of interethnic unity while putting Russian and Buryat on exactly even footing in separate-but-equal institutions. By the end of the purges in Buryatia, ‘national’ issues—including native language education, national self-determination, shamanic and Buddhist religious practice, and Buryat language purism—had been removed from the realm of debate. Much of Buryatia’s intelligentsia, including early native language media activists like Amagaev and Rinchino, had been killed or exiled from the party under accusations of ‘bourgeois nationalism’ or pan-Mongolism, or for coming from families who owned too many cattle to be trusted.16 Buryat-language news media continued to publish cultural items like poems, but they increasingly stuck to standard Soviet topics. A. Abidiin’s poem ‘Raadio,’ printed in Buriaad-Mongol Ynen in 1939, exemplifies this new emphasis. Characters in Raadio ask who is speaking the wondrous political news of socialism and democracy emanating from radios on the street, in the community club, and in the brigade: ‘Who is that, where [is it] from?/It’s from Moscow!’ They hear broadcasts from the North Pole about adventuring outward from the glaciers of Rudolf Island, and programs from Irkutsk showcasing piano music and the writings of Gorky, Pushkin, and Mayakovsky (Abidiin, 1939). Native Buryat literature was encouraged in both Buryat- and Russian-language formats, and building a Soviet Buryat literature became a primary goal for cultural enlightenment in the republic. Like Abidiin’s poem, this Buryat literature developed as a carefully controlled Soviet Buryat literature emphasizing Buryatia’s position within the Soviet Union. Well into the 1970s, Buryat literary writers and editors worked under intense pressure to illustrate the ‘friendship of the peoples’ and the essential unity of the Soviet people (Chakars, 2009). At the same time, it was a priority to ensure that media be produced in equal parts in Russian and Buryat. Many newspapers were published as duplicated (dublirovannye) versions, meaning that the Russian and minority language versions were as close to identical as possible. This was the cheapest, most efficient strategy for dual-language media production, because it basically meant having one editorial staff and one process of approval with a couple of extra translators. Even newspapers that were not perfect duplicates of one another carefully produced the same amount of text, approximated the same quality, ran similar stories, made heavy use of translation, and tried to share photographers and reporters. The same pattern was followed in radio and, later, television stations: equipment, translated scripts, and even interviewees were frequently shared between Russian and Buryat production teams. The physical and topical similarity of the media put Russian and Buryat very visibly and self-consciously on equal footing. It also suggested that Russians and Buryats were actually members of one public, a Soviet public, with similar, if not identical, needs as an audience. Minority language media were to provide equal access to identical information, and to perform the institutional equality of languages and their speakers. 5. Moving from parallel public to subpublic: the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods (1960–present) Over the coming decades, however, this role would change. An era of rapid industrialization and urbanization in Buryatia in the 1960s was accompanied by what was, in retrospect, dizzying language loss. Archival records of editorial meetings show that media producers during this time period were troubled by language attrition among their would-be audience members. Television and radio workers began to complain in the 1960s that they could not record quality interview materials due to a lack of competent speakers.17 Buryat-language newspapers saw a continuous decline in the number of letters they received, especially in contrast to the perpetually overflowing mailbox of Russian-language Pravda, and they began to worry about the advanced age of their staff.18 To publicly raise the inefficiency argument would have been anathema to the Soviet 15 A higher party organization, the Committee of the Oblast (Obkom), would occasionally condemn both the Russian- and Buryat-language newspapers for inadequate work with readers’ letters to the editors. These criticisms were taken very seriously. See, e.g., NARB, f. 3843, op. 1, d. 19, p. 80 (1980); d. 23, p. 12 (1982). See also Fitzpatrick (1999, pp. 164–189) and Humphrey (1989, pp. 158–159). 16 Amagaev was convicted for being a kulak (a wealthy farmer) and Rinchino for his nationalist activities and support of pan-Mongolism (Montgomery, 2005). 17 NARB, f. 914, op. 1, d. 8, p. 141 (1962); d. 20, p. 44 (1973); d. 22, p. 6 (1974); d. 34, pp. 3, 67 (1980). 18 On the shrinking number of letters received by Ünėn see, for example, NARB, f. 3843, op. 1, d. 1, pp. 8–14 (1969); d. 3, p. 22 (1971); d. 5, p. 92 (1973); d. 17, p. 80 (1979). On the advancing age of Buryat-language newspaper journalists and their concern over finding new cadres, see NARB, f. 3843, op. 1, d. 17, p. 69 (1979). Author's personal copy K. Graber / Language & Communication 32 (2012) 124–136 133 doctrine of institutionalized equality, but periodically throughout the 1960s–1980s, minority language media personnel seem to have been subtly questioning their own raison d’être. Yet in terms of the sheer quantity of material produced, the post-war period through the early 1980s was a kind of golden age for Buryat-language media. Where was all of that newsprint and airtime going? One possibility is that this was a lateSoviet institution simply going through the proverbial motions, for an audience of no one. But in fact, subscription and viewing rates appear to have remained high, even during intense language shift. And people cared: in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as media support structures disintegrated before people’s eyes, Buryat politicians, editors, and activists within the renamed Republic of Buryatia fought successfully to save much of the Buryat-language television, radio, and press. A more likely explanation is that minority language media over the late Soviet period were taking on a new role in Buryat society. Media were shifting from serving more informational and state-symbolic roles to serving a more culturally-symbolic role. Concomitantly, the use of Buryat in news media shifted from fulfilling a practical need to functioning as an ‘enregistered emblem’ of a Buryat social persona (Agha, 2007). Television, radio, and newspaper staffs increasingly differentiated content and even style, implicitly acknowledging (or imagining) the different interests and demands of a Buryat versus Russian audience. Buryat-language media personnel were faced with an audience that increasingly could—and did—go to Russian sources for their news, and while state-supported Russian- and Buryat-language institutions were not exactly in competition with one another, the shift did encourage specialization. As media producers increasingly assumed a bilingual audience, a division of labor emerged between Russian and Buryat, according to which Russian functioned more as the language of international politics, economics, and ‘hard news,’ while Buryat carried more ‘soft news,’ including human interest stories, history, and ‘cultural’ topics such as music, dance, poetry, and tradition.19 Newspapers, radio, and television in Buryatia were functioning more and more like what Debra Spitulnik described at Radio Zambia circa 1990: institutions rationalizing both an ambitious state ideology of ‘ethnolinguistic egalitarianism’ and its ‘opposite,’ a sociolinguistic hierarchy (1998, p. 182). By the end of the Soviet period, minority language media thus looked as if they addressed what Michael Warner (2002) has called a ‘subpublic.’ It was not a ‘counterpublic,’ by Warner’s definition: Buryat-language media in these years were very much the product of Soviet institutions, and we would be hard-pressed to find a great deal that was subversive in such media’s production or consumption. Nor was this public parallel to a Russian-speaking public; despite the appearance of maintaining parallel media production and parallel audiences, neither journalists nor readers were under the illusion that Buryatlanguage media served a public that was ‘equal’ in sociopolitical power. The minority public increasingly targeted by journalists was rather a subset of the general population, linked by interests, media circulations, and discourses that did not counter mainstream publics, but supplemented them. To the extent that Buryat ‘national’ issues like native language use and religious practice had been sidelined, language and media policy in the late Soviet period had successfully suppressed Buryatness while appearing to support native language media. At present in the Republic of Buryatia, the entire Soviet period is often remembered for this hypocrisy: Buryats young and old, now interested in cultural and linguistic revitalization, point to events of the 1960s to early 1980s as fundamentally repressive, hypocritical, and even traitorous, as proof that Soviet policy was intentionally designed to stifle Buryat selfawareness (samosoznanie) and cultural identification. This puts journalists who worked through the 1989–1992 transition years in an awkward position. Buryat-language journalists who worked in the late Soviet period sometimes dismiss their own (or each other’s) entire careers as nothing more than ‘ideology’ or ‘performance’—or, like Bulat, as time wasted on a disappearing people. But performance does not necessarily entail cynicism. It is all too easy, in retrospect, to dismiss the public display of communist fervor as insincere—as many older Russians do now as they reflect on their own actions in the late Soviet era. Yet at some junctures, even journalists who carefully toed the party line reflect on the utter sincerity and ‘faith’ that they felt in the late Soviet period. Moreover, late-Soviet-era journalists and their audiences maintained a sort of tacit agreement that texts would include both a state-approved surface-level meaning and a ‘second meaning.’ ‘Reading between the lines’ and ‘looking below the surface’ for multivalency became basic skills on which journalists and other writers depended (Humphrey, 1989; Pesmen, 2000; Sinyavsky, 1988). To the extent that freedom accompanied opacity, journalists working in minority languages possibly had more space between the lines. Oyuuna, who worked as a radio and newspaper reporter for a regional newspaper in the 1980s, echoed the sentiments of some of her age-mates in stressing that Buryat-language media were never totally transparent to party higher-ups in Moscow and even in Ulan-Ude, who were monolingual in Russian. Even before glasnost’, she said over tea, finger pointed in the air for emphasis and eyebrows raised, you could find a ‘unique Buryat voice’ (osobyi buriatskii golos) in mass media if you knew how to read, watch, and listen. When glasnost’ burst onto the scene in 1986, it suddenly became incumbent upon journalists to reveal what was not working in the Soviet socialist system, i.e., what everyone had been thinking but had left unsaid. In Buryatia, the ‘what’ was apparently the national issues that had been sublimated over the past few decades. The late 1980s and early 1990s saw a reemergence of Buryat nationalism, with a rhetorical return to the nation-building days of the 1920s. A new goal for Buryat-language media emerged in this context: news media were now supposed to revitalize the nation by revitalizing the language. Both Pravda and Ünėn began publishing mini-lessons on Buryat, featuring not only topics related to animal husbandry and village life (for which Buryat had long been a dominant language), but also topics related to urban life, such as how to shop for clothing and buy tram tickets. By all accounts, Buryat use in the cities at the time 19 For further discussion of this division of labor and Buryat media’s functional shift, see Graber (n.d.). Author's personal copy 134 K. Graber / Language & Communication 32 (2012) 124–136 was minimal and even actively frowned upon as anti-social, nationalistic, and against the druzhba narodov, so these Buryat mini-lessons appeared in the newspaper as an implicit call to action. Since 1991–1992, the disintegration of Soviet institutions and the adoption of something like a market economy have generated few new fora for Buryat-language media, serving rather to intensify the ‘subpublic’ specialization of minority language media. The position of Buryat-language media in this brave new era is complicated by the evolving and often fraught relationship between traditional state-funded journalism on one hand and, on the other hand, a kind of crude market-driven journalism heavily dependent on corporate ties, barter, and blat, or ‘grease for the wheels,’ sometimes unsympathetically translated as ‘bribery’ (cf. Ledeneva, 1998; Ries, 2002). This latter form of journalism is championed by no one but is necessitated by an increasing dependence on advertising revenues. ‘Independent’ journalism is practically anathema in this context, and ‘independence’ (nezavisimost’) never proved a salient category for the Buryat-language journalists I surveyed and interviewed. This is not to say that anyone is satisfied with minority language media’s dependent situation either. Federal policy within the Russian Federation has recently shifted away from the idea of the multinational state toward federalism, and away from the principle of political autonomy based on ethnonational criteria—changes that jeopardize the political future of the Republic of Buryatia (Graber and Long, 2009). As noted above, language legislation in the Republic still provides for Buryat-language state media. But the amount of time dedicated to Buryat-language television and radio broadcasting is being slowly whittled away, and staffs reduced, producing no small amount of anxiety. At the same time, there is no immediate danger of Buryat-language news media being discontinued outright. The production of Buryat-language newspapers, radio programs, and nightly television news is absolutely central to Buryatia’s self-image—and to Buryats’ peaceable acceptance of federal Russian policies that increasingly downgrade Buryatia’s status. The overwhelming majority of media personnel and audience members surveyed in my research argued that funding Buryat-language media is the responsibility of the state, and often expressed an unwillingness to even consider the possibility of alternative forms of funding. The same conviction does not apply for funding other regional minority languages within the Republic of Buryatia, such as Armenian and Ewenki, which reflects the importance attached to Buryat as the titular language; its funding symbolically proves Buryats’ national cultural autonomy. There have been some attempts to begin commercially funded Buryat-language television news programming, and at least one foreign evangelical Christian organization, the Far East Broadcasting Company, has attempted to found a Buryat-language radio station. Thus far, these projects have not come to fruition, but the fact that they have been attempted at all suggests that there is a perceived market (whether of rubles or souls) for new media production in Buryat. The potential market value generated by a Buryat-language broadcast lies not in its direct audience (i.e., those who actually actively consume it and comprehend it) but in its ability to tap into and motivate an indirect audience, a larger, richer, younger, more urban and upwardly mobile public of cosmopolitan Buryats rediscovering their cultural, spiritual, and linguistic roots. The direct audience still exists, but has taken on a different kind of value. There are members of Buryat society who actively prefer to get their news in Buryat rather than Russian—primarily elderly Buryats, living in villages where eastern dialects more closely approximating the literary standard are spoken. Buryat-language journalists in Ulan-Ude are well aware that their direct audience is based in the villages, and they specifically target a rural population with much of their content. They also tend to value this audience highly, mainly for emotional and familial reasons. In the capitalist logic of the media market, however, the village audience, surviving largely outside the cash economy, is practically useless for generating ad revenue; its value is primarily symbolic. In other words, if contemporary news media were exclusively or even mainly ‘about’ conveying information, they would no longer be produced in Buryat. The inefficiency argument would have taken over years ago, perhaps in the 1970s. Instead, Buryat-language media are viable mainly as pedagogical tools, as symbols of national vitality, and as conduits of local culture. Knowing some Buryat, even if only a few words or a formulaic holiday toast, can be tremendously helpful in demonstrating self-identification and ‘samosoznanie.’ In an important sense, Buryat words have become metonymic for Buryat culture, as encapsulated in publicly performable modes such as dance, song, and dress. One hundred years from Amagaev and Rinchino’s manifesto, a newspaper in Buryat does not speak to the elites of a nascent Buryat nation, but rather demarcates a Buryat language public as a subset or sub-network within a larger, multilingual and increasingly Russian-speaking Buryat people. Some journalists now actively work to expand the Buryat language public by educating members of the Buryat narod who might identify Buryat as their native language (rodnoi iazyk) on census forms but do not use it in daily life. When asked in interviews, questionnaires, and informal conversation about their primary goal, by far the most common response from Buryat-language journalists is language preservation (sokhranenie). (This response stands in notable contrast to that of Russian-language journalists, who generally report something about informing the populace.) However, journalists and other language elites in Buryatia are currently quite divided in their opinions of how Buryat-language media should develop, and of how different possible modes of Buryat should be used. These opinions are largely informed by competing conceptions of the Buryat language public, both real and ideal. At one end of the spectrum, stalwarts of the literary tradition tend to assume an older, established Buryat language public that is an emanation of the Buryat narod and should be taught its own roots in order to carry them forward. Advocates of purism actively try not only to exclude new mixed forms incorporating Russian into Buryat, but also to erase old Russianisms in Buryat by excavating even older words of Mongolian origin (similarly, see Swinehart, 2012). At the other end of the spectrum, many television and radio workers see younger semi-speakers of Buryat as prospective members of a Buryat language public whom they must recruit, and they reach out to them by consciously incorporating more Russian words, phrases, transitions, phatics, and so on into their Buryat. Mixed forms, it is hoped, will encourage comprehension and put potential audience members at ease. Author's personal copy K. Graber / Language & Communication 32 (2012) 124–136 135 The difference of opinion proceeds in part from the fact that television and radio workers broadcast interviews and therefore need ‘the public’—whatever it is, and however linguistically competent it may be—to talk back. Sayana, a television anchor, made this point vehemently after an argument with another journalist over the inclusion of a particularly Russianheavy interview riddled with ‘umm’s and pauses. It was late afternoon, and they were co-editing a story to run in both Russian and Buryat, having gathered materials simultaneously in both languages in the morning. As usual, the Russian-speaking interviewees had given more relevant, fluent, and extensive material than the Buryat-speaking interviewees. Sayana’s colleague despaired over the mistakes made by their interviewee and suggested either cutting the footage or doing a voiceover in ‘better’ Buryat (both common solutions), but Sayana was adamant that it be kept. ‘What is worse?’ she demanded of me later, rhetorically. ‘That they speak badly, or that they do not speak at all?’ 6. Conclusion As a century of minority language media development in Buryatia has demonstrated, the relationship between news media and publics is neither static nor organic. It is subject to the manipulation of individual actors and to the grand, transformative projects of enormous states. In this article, I have examined the relationship between minority language media and their imagined public(s) as a historical product, in order to foreground the ever-shifting, ever-contingent role of Buryat-language media in Buryat society, and in Russian society more generally. I hope that this approach has helped to explain the ambivalence and frustration of native language journalists like Bulat and Sayana. For them, the ends of minority language news media are not always clear, and they do not necessarily correspond to the stated goals of their institutions. They remind us that ideological diversity is a feature of institutions, however hegemonic and unitary they may appear from outside. This is perhaps especially the case within the cultural institutions of stateless languages under conditions of language shift, when language becomes a hot-button issue and a touchstone for larger questions of cultural survival. Would-be revitalizers work to articulate a strong relationship between informational minority language media and a minority language public that can be mobilized by them. But because linguistic competence is in question, that public is a shifting target, its nature changing generation to generation and year to year. Acknowledgments Field research for this article was generously supported by the Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship Program (SSRC-IDRF) with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad program of the US Department of Education, a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant No. 0819031, and the University of Michigan. Writing was supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and by a grant from the SSRC Eurasia Program with funds provided by the US Department of State under the Program for Research and Training on Eastern Europe and the Independent States of the Former Soviet Union (Title VIII). For comments on sundry versions of this paper, I am grateful to Judith T. Irvine, Alaina Lemon, Emily McKee, Barbra Meek, Jesse Murray, Richard F. Nance, Zhanara Nauruzbayeva, Mikaela Rogozen-Soltar, Perry Sherouse, Karl F. Swinehart, Sarah G. Thomason, Susanne Unger, Suzanne Wertheim, and anonymous reviewers. Special thanks to Nikolai Tsyrempilov for assistance with the IMBiT archival materials referenced herein. All faults lie with the author. 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Zhamtsarano, Ts., 1907. Narodnicheskoe dvizhenie buriat i ego kritik. Sibirskie voprosy 21, 16–21; 23, 17–20; 25, 15–21. Kathryn Graber is a doctoral candidate in linguistic anthropology at the University of Michigan. Her research to date has focused on multilingualism, the political economy of language, mass media, and intellectual property in Russia.