Abstract

This paper addresses the historical background of three Soviet-era tropes – loss of culture, loss of literacy, and loss of intergenerational and interethnic harmony – commonly used in the Russian media’s discussions of the Kazakh alphabet shift from Cyrillic to Latin. I seek to prove, here, that mainstream Russian publications still maintain a deeply Soviet worldview when discussing issues of language in the former Soviet republics, relying heavily on the notion that the USSR “gave” them a number of “gifts,” namely the culture, literacy, and harmony
that they now perceive Kazakhstan to be losing. I will analyze each trope from both a historical and a literary perspective, beginning each sub-section by placing each trope in its Soviet linguistic context and proceeding to analyze its usage in contemporary mainstream Russian publications.
Keywords: post-Soviet, Central Asia, media studies, Kazakhstan, Soviet history, Russian media, culture, alphabet.