Language Politics Through Pilates

One of my goals for this summer was to find Pilates studios in both Chișinău and Yerevan. After having to take a semester off from exercise last fall due to mono, I wasn’t going to take another hiatus again if I could help it! As it turns out, Pilates has been a great way to keep in shape and get some language immersion while I’m abroad. My Pilates classes are also a helpful prism for understanding the language situations in both Moldova and Armenia.

Chișinău, Moldova

In Moldova, I found a fitness studio just a few minutes’ walk from my house. While the owner of the studio was clearly a native Moldovan/Romanian speaker, she was happy to inform me that instruction was in Russian. My level of Romanian is pretty low, so I was happy to hear it. In the locker room, much of the chit-chat was in Romanian, but a fair amount of Russian was thrown in. The instructor, Katya, was a graduate of a local physical education department who took training courses in Pilates in Odessa. She taught the class entirely in Russian, which was probably how she learned to teach Pilates—although Odessa is in Ukraine, the instruction almost certainly would have been in Russian. I don’t remember her ever speaking to anyone in the class in Romanian, although I can’t rule out that she knew it. At any rate, the other ladies in the class were a mix of Romanian- and Russian-speakers, and all were quite happy to chat with me in either Russian or English, depending on their knowledge of the latter.

For Chișinău, having classes in Russian makes sense. Russian is the sort of lowest-common-linguistic denominator in Moldova. If you’re a Romanian-speaker over the age of 35, you definitely learned the language in school. If you went to school in independent Moldova, you may not have learned Russian in school (it is no longer a mandatory subject), but you certainly heard enough of it from watching TV and going about your daily life to pick up a working knowledge. 

Chișinău has long been a multilingual city. In the days of the Russian Empire, Chișinău was an island of diversity in a sea of Moldovan villages. In 1897, its population was 45.9% Jewish, 27% Russian, 17.6% Moldovan, and 3.1% Ukrainian. Russian would have been the common language for the educated and upwardly mobile back then, although certainly Yiddish and Moldovan Romanian would have been spoken by those communities amongst themselves. After a major pogrom in 1903, many Jews fled the city. When Romania incorporated Bessarabia in 1918, Romanian authorities saw Russification as the enemy and implemented policies to promote the Romanian language, much to the chagrin of Russian-speaking minorities in the territory. During World War II, the Romanian/German authorities who occupied the city herded the city’s few remaining Jews into a ghetto before deporting them. The character of this one-time Jewish city had been dramatically altered in just forty years.  

The Moldovan SSR (red) within the Soviet Union

After defeating Germany and its Romanian ally in the war, Soviet authorities set about rebuilding the capital of the new Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic. The devastated republic needed new factories, schools, and hospitals. By and large ethnic Slavs were sent to the new republic to establish them. Authorities in Moscow refused to let authorities at the republican level set limits on the flow of population. The increases in the ethnic Slavic population of Moldova and the Baltic republics of Estonia and Latvia at this time form the the foundation of accusation that Moscow intentionally diluted of the native population of these republics with ethnic Slavs. (Similar to the argument today that China has encouraged Han Chinese to move to Tibet.) Leaving those arguments to the side, we can say that the character of Chișinău remained quite diverse. The post-war period also was a time of urbanization in the Soviet Union, which meant that there were Moldovan migrants from the countryside flowing into the capital as well. Today they say that different regions of the capital have different linguistic identities based on when they were built and which ethnic groups happened to be moving into the city at the time.

Soviet educational policy after World War II encouraged a sort of lopsided bilingualism: non-Russians learned Russian, but it didn’t work the other way around. In the 1920s and ‘30s, before Moldova was part of the Soviet Union, it had been basically mandatory to receive your education in your native language. The study of Russian actually became compulsory in non-Russian schools only in 1938. In the postwar period, this changed. After 1959, parents were allowed to choose whether they wanted their child to be educated in their native language or in Russian. Because the best educational and career opportunities were in Russian, this had the effect of eroding attendance at native-language schools across the USSR. Meanwhile, ethnic Russians who lived in the non-Russian republics weren’t expected to learn the language of the republic they lived in. As a result, by 1989, only about 10% of Russians spoke Moldovan (as the language was called at the time). This contributed to common complaints about Russians who had lived in the republic for decades, but couldn't say much more than "bună ziua" [hello] in Moldovan.

Another factor contributing to this lopsided bilingualism was the fact that the Moldovan SSR also had one of the highest rates of intermarriage in the Soviet Union, which also tended to spread the use of Russian. Ethnic Russians weren’t expected to learn Moldovan, so a mixed household was likely to use Russian. As Russian was considered the “language of interethnic communication,” it was the default language in mixed social situations in general.

As the Soviet Union began to collapse, many Soviet republics, including Moldova, passed language laws to reverse the creeping linguistic Russification of the post-war period. Independence has reversed many of the postwar phenomena that were resented by the majority Moldovan population. In the 2004 census, the population of the city is now two-thirds Moldovan and about 20% ethnic Slavs. The tide seems to have turned back toward Romanian in Chișinău. Today on the streets you hear probably two-thirds Romanian, about one-third Russian. Most advertisements and signs are in Romanian. But Russian remains strong in many areas, including business. You can still speak to just about anyone on the street in Russian, and you’re likely to get a response. After spending about a month in the city, I only encountered a few people who didn’t know Russian at all.

For all of these reasons then, it’s a wise business decision for a Romanian-speaking business owner to run a fitness center with classes in Russian. Although Romanian is on the rise in Chișinău, if you want your services to be available to the largest number of people, Russian is the way to go.

Yerevan, Armenia

In Armenia, the situation is quite different. Here I go to Shoonch (“breath” in Armenian), a Pilates and Yoga studio located in the center of the city. Unlike my gym in Moldova, which was located in a neighborhood on a small street outside of the center of the city, this studio is considerably fancier (it has air conditioning!) and caters to a more elite clientele.

Can you feel the A/C?

The instructor Luci is definitely a classic Pilates instructor—she’s intense and no-nonsense, but she also clearly has fun teaching the class. 

Pilates with Luci at Shoonch

Probably my favorite part of the class is when we get out the Pilates balls and basically bounce around on them in a semi-controlled fashion for about ten minutes while listening to Michael Jackson. (I never realized until I started coming to Europe that people actually liked his ‘90s stuff.) Whoever decided that bouncing on a ball while listening to pop music counted as exercise was a genius.

This is actually a pretty good song...

Almost equally fun for me is trying to follow the instructor as she weaves Russian into her Armenian. Although the class is taught in Armenian, Russian phrases often pop up in her sentences, and she sometimes slips into Russian for a minute or so before switching back to Armenian. She seems to use Russian for emphasis, another tool in her explanatory arsenal. The language switching seems mostly unconscious, but still purposeful: “Ok, you didn’t catch what I was saying? Here, I’ll give it to you another way.” Overall, I’d guess that the class ranges from 10-30% Russian. It would be challenging, although not impossible, to follow her without at least a decent grasp of Armenian.

In Yerevan, ethnic diversity doesn’t play nearly the same role in the linguistic scene as in Chișinău. Interestingly, however, the cities started from a similar place in the late nineteenth century. In the 1897 census, the Yerevan’s population of 29,000 was divided nearly evenly between Armenians and Azerbaijanis at 43% apiece. The balance had already started to shift in favor of the Armenians in the years before before the 1917 revolution. An influx of migrants fleeing the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire in 1915, the wrenching upheaval of the brief, chaotic period of Armenian independence from 1918 to 1920, and outbursts of intercommunal violence between the region’s Armenians and Azerbaijanis all played a role in the dramatic transformation of the city’s demographics. By the mid-1920s, Armenians were nearly 90% of the city’s population. Throughout the Soviet period, there were waves of migration to Soviet Armenia from other Soviet republics and the Armenian diaspora, which only increased the proportion of Armenians in the capital city.

The Armenian SSR (red) in the Soviet Union

Russians have never had a particularly strong population presence in the South Caucasus, even during the days of the Russian Empire. Armenia was also Sovietized several decades before Moldova, at a time when there was relatively less encouragement for ethnic Slavs to migrate to other Soviet republics. As a result, the Russian language came to Yerevan mostly through the educational system, and not the presence of ethnic Russians. The majority of Armenians attended schools where the language of instruction was Armenian, but toward the end of the Soviet period, perhaps a quarter of Armenians were studying at schools in which Russian was the language of instruction. Russian schools were thought to be better, and mastery of Russian opened doors to education and better jobs. My host mother in Armenia, no slouch in the patriotism department, told me she would have sent her sons to Russian schools if she had been able to—most of the Russian schools closed in the early ‘90s when they were in elementary school.

Another factor beyond the Soviet educational system, government, and mass media that brought the Russian language into daily life was the presence of Russian-speaking Armenians who had migrated to Soviet Armenia from other parts of the USSR. Like many minorities who had lived outside “their” republic, they had linguistically assimilated to Russian. So, for all of these reasons, it is not uncommon, even today, to encounter Armenians who speak Russian in the home or are more comfortable speaking Russian in certain circumstances. Even though Yerevan’s small communities of Azerbaijanis and Russians almost all left as a result of the war between Azerbaijan and Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh and the economic collapse after the fall of the Soviet Union, respectively, the increasing homogenization of the city did nothing to dislodge the place of Russian in Yerevan.

My Pilates instructor’s use of Russian thus makes a lot of sense in this context. During the Soviet period, Russian had been a ubiquitous part of life for urban Armenians, even those who spoke Armenian at home. Although the younger generation was educated in Armenian, they still learned Russian as a foreign language in school. Moreover, they grew up watching Russian cartoons, used Russian textbooks at the university, and almost certainly have relatives who work in Moscow. Here you don’t see the resentments that have developed between Romanian- and Russian-speakers in Moldova. There is no lopsided bilingualism here. Everyone knows Armenian, but most people are comfortable in Russian too. Bouncing back and forth between languages is natural for them.

As illustrated by the different linguistic situations in my Pilates classes in Moldova and Armenia, former Soviet republics can be surprisingly different. I find the Soviet Union fascinating to study because it has characteristics of both an empire and a modernizing state. While Soviet authorities did much to homogenize the population of their centralized, industrialized state, like imperial authorities they also used a variety of strategies to govern a very diverse population. They struck “separate deals” with different national groups. Russian became a ubiquitous part of life in both Armenia and Moldova as a result of the Soviet experience, but in very different ways.

Further Reading

Peter Blitstein, “Nation-Building or Russification?: Obligatory Russian Instruction in the Soviet Non-Russian School, 1938-1953,” in A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, edited by Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin, 253-274 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

Matthew H. Ciscel,  "Reform and relapse in bilingual policy in Moldova." Comparative Education 46, no. 1 (2010): 13-28.

Michael F. Hamm, "Kishinev: The character and development of a Tsarist Frontier Town," Nationalities Papers 26, no. 1 (1998): 19-37.

Isabelle T. Kreindler, “Soviet Language Planning Since 1953,” in Language Planning in the Soviet Union, ed. Michael Kirkwood (London: Macmillan Press, 1989), 50-56.