Language Policy and Planification in the USSR: the Category of Nationality

Abstract

The Soviet Union constructed a social and cultural category (nationality) on the basis of a series of parameters which basically sprang up from language policy and planification (LPP) of the first years after the Revolution. LPP went through different stages with correspondingly diverse consequences, and contributed to configurate a peculiar imaginary about the idea of nationality, both about the founding and the interpretation of a category that’s perceived even today as being generally immanent and perpetually inheritable. The article lays out the origins and the different stages of the LPP in the USSR, and infers that the category of nationality and its social and historical implications are nowadays its most tangible remains.