1. This term was used by Valerii Tyshkov in a paper presented in Tel Aviv in October, 1993.
2. See Isabelle Kreindler, “A Second Missed Opportunity: Russian in Retreat as a Global Language,” International Political Science Review, Vol. 14, No. 3 (1993), p. 266.
3. Ernest Gellner Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 51–52.
4. One author writing in 1971 stressed that “the right of all languages to unimpeded development does not mean that all languages without exception…must certainly develop….” (O. P. Sunik, “Nekotorye problemy iazykovogo stroitel'stva v SSSR,” Voprosy iazykoznaniia, No. 6, 1971, p. 23). (I would like to thank Isabelle Kreindler for bringing this passage to my attention.) In a similar vein, almost a decade later, the Uzbek linguist K. Kh. Khanazarov claimed some small groups had “learned from their own experience that the creation of a writing system and publication of various kinds of literature in their languages did not correspond to their true national aspirations and interests….” (Reshenie natsional' no-iazykovoi problemy v SSSR [Moscow, 1981], p. 97, cited in A. S. Kalmyrzaev, Natsiia i obshchestvennoe soznanie [Alma-Ata: Kazakhstan, 1984] p. 194). On a more personal level, I recall that when I was conducting research in Tashkent in 1977, the Deputy Head of the Uzbek Language Department at Tashkent State University (Ghulam Sharipov) told me in approving fashion, “It won't take more than one five-year plan for there to be just one language in the USSR.”
5. Gellner p.35.