Why are Russianized family names more common in Central Asia?

July 25, 2015 4:00 PM

Why are Russianized family names more common in Central Asia than other parts of the former Soviet Union?

Russianized family names are very common in formerly Soviet Central Asian countries, e.g. Абдулаев, Каримов, Турсунов. Yet there are plenty of nationalities in the former Soviet Union that generally do not have Russianized surnames: Georgians (Меладзе), Armenians (Каспарян), Jews with German surnames (Вайнштейн), Koreans (Цой), etc.

What is the history of Central Asians adopting Russianized last names and why didn't this happen with other nationalities? Was it imposed on them, or was it largely voluntary?

posted by pravit to Writing & Language (5 answers total)

I lived in Kazakhstan for 3 years so I have some thoughts as to Central Asia, but why this didn't occur in other soviet republics may be more speculation on my part.

Compared to the other countries, Central Asia has had a longer history with Russian colonization/cultural dominance efforts dating back to the Great Game era - during the late 19th century as part of the dominance there was a strong campaign supported by the Russian Orthodox church to russify the region likely due to the fact that Central Asians were majority Muslim populations (as compared to Armenia and Georgia?)

Those sorts of russification efforts only carried on through the Soviet Republic era - speaking with a lot of my colleagues who grew up in the USSR in Kazakhstan, I got the impression that traditional Kazakh culture, language, and religion was stamped out during the era (particularly in the northern regions that was closer to Kazakhstan) - schools emphasized Russian while Kazakh was spoken at home. As the regions became more firmly under the grip of the Soviet republics, adoption of Russified names became common practice - my colleagues had told me that speaking Kazakh and having an traditional kazakh style surname meant often meant you were targeted for discrimination because it implied your loyalties weren't with the Soviet Union, and for obvious reasons that was problematic for every aspect of life.

There's been an increasing practice since the fall of the Soviet Republic for Central Asian countries to take the reverse course nowadays - you see an increasing number of people registering the names of their children in the "traditional" style, along with widespread government adoptions of requirement of speaking and writing traditional central asian languages in order to get government work. Although for Central Asian countries where there is a lot of migration to Russia for work (and they thus face discrimination there) there continues to be a tradition of adopting a russified surname.
posted by Karaage at 4:55 PM on July 25, 2015 [3 favorites]

> Central Asia has had a longer history with Russian colonization/cultural dominance efforts

Yeah, this is it (aside from the colonization/cultural dominance thing, which didn't really apply when it started). Russians respected the cultural heritage of the Georgians, Armenians, Jews, and Germans (even if they didn't much like some of them), and in any case knew there was no chance of succeeding if they tried to get people named Meladze to change their name to Meladzov or whatever. Korean names are just too different; there's no way to Russianize them. But Turkic names were Russianized from the beginning of Russian contact with them, nigh on a thousand years ago; back then it wasn't a matter of cultural dominance but of just making them easy for Russians to say. And the Tatars were assimilated into the Russian ruling class, so they had no reason to resent it.
posted by languagehat at 5:40 PM on July 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

I can't remember if it gets into specifics about names, but "The Russian Empire: a multi-ethnic history" gives a good context to the diverse peoples of the Russian empire and why some were more russified than others.
posted by stowaway at 7:10 PM on July 25, 2015

Surnames entered Armenia and Georgia in the 19th century and we see them listed in church registries.
Fwiw, some Armenians and Georgians did add Russian endings to their names during the Soviet period.

Today in central Asia and Azerbaijan you see a lot of people dropping the Russian endings from their names. I'd say that 75% of my. Azerbaijani friends have done so, although their passport may have the Russian ending. Kids for sure rarely have the Russian endings.
posted by k8t at 8:35 PM on July 25, 2015 [3 favorites]

A text describing how trends in surnames and patronymics have changed over time in Uzbekistan. Search for "last name" or "patronymic."
posted by scrambles at 3:09 PM on July 26, 2015 [1 favorite]