What’s in a Name? For Many Non-Russians, Everything

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, March 7 – Many non-Russians would like to go back to the names and endings of names that were traditional in their national pasts, but at the same time, they encounter resistance from Russian teachers and other officials and fear that if they do so, they will create problems for their children who may study or work outside their home areas.

 

            And that tension, Tuvan journalist Sayana Mngush says, is being played out in non-Russian republics within the Russian Federation as well as in some of the countries which emerged in 1991 following the disintegration of the USSR, including quite prominently Kyrgyzstan (asiarussia.ru/news/6358/).

 

            Last year, she reports, the parents of only 300 of the 150,000 children born in that Central Asian republic gave their children the Kyrgyz language variants of their family names and patronymics, preferring instead to given them Russianized versions of each lest they face problems with local Russians or when studying or working in Russia.

 

            That figure led some Russian nationalists to claim victory in the naming wars (centrasia.ru/newsA.php?st=1425491640), but it also prompted Kyrgyz deputy Aizada Kutuyeva to propose new legislation that would encourage Kyrgyz parents to use the Kyrgyz names in order to preserve the nation but not prevent them from using Russian forms if they want.

 

            According to Mongush, the same problem exists in many of the non-Russian republics of the Russian Federation. In her native Tuva, she says, after enjoying an upsurge in the 1990s, the traditional national patronymics of “-oglu” and “-kyzy” are increasingly giving way to the Russian forms “-ovich” and “-ovna.”

 

             “The explanation is the same,” she continues.  Those with national names or patronymics increasingly face difficulties when they study or work outside their home areas. “A ‘non-Russian patronymic’” upsets many Russians and consequently non-Russians with one suffer “problems with discrimination.”

 

            Tuvan legislators have wrestled with this problem.  In 1996, they adopted a law suggesting that Tuvans should give their children patronymics ending in the traditional Tuvan way, and in an amendment to that law in 2010, they declared that even ethnic Russians in the republic should use the Tuvan forms rather than the Russian ones.

 

            In Sakha (Yakutia), which Mongush suggests has lagged behind other non-Russian areas in pushing national traditions with regard to names, prosecutors have managed to block proposals from legislators to require the use of Yakut patronymic forms “uola” and “kyyha” instead of Russian ones. But legislators are preparing a guide to Yakut names.

 

            In Tatarstan, Mongush says, the republic’s family law code specifies that parents may use the traditional “uly” or “kyzy” in place of the Russian “ovich” and “ovna” and that Tatars who earlier changed their names to bring them into correspondence with Russian by adding an “ov” or an “ova” can drop those endings, transforming a name like Basharov into Bashar.

 

            In Buryatia, the parliament adopted a law in 1999 calling for the use of Buryat first names, patronymic forms and family names, but that law has been ignored more than it has been followed. And it no longer applied to the Buryat Agin district which was united with the Russian-majority Chita oblast.

 

            Names are extremely important among the Buryats with many of them being able to name their ancestor back as many as 25 generations to times when their double hyphenated names were borrowed from Tibetan and Sanscrit and when children are given one name to hide them from evil spirits and then another later one to be used in public.

 

As a result, many Buryats are upset by the fact that there has been a corruption of their national naming system, Mongush says. That takes the form of adding the letter “a” to the Buryat names of girls in the Russian fashion even though in Buryat, there is no distinction of names by gender. Thus Oyun has become Oyuna, an insult to the nation’s language.

 

            But there is something far worse going on with regard to names in Buryatia, the Tuvan journalist says.  “Almost half” of Buryat women now have Russian first names not because their parents gave them those but because Russian teachers imposed them on their pupils despite this being an obvious affront to national dignity and a clear violation of Russian law.

 

            In offering his legislation about names this week, the Kyrgyz deputy spoke for many when he said: “A family name is an inheritance passed from generation to generation.” It “unites several generations and testifies to their links.” Consequently, a concern about names is a necessary “precondition for the preservation of the nation, its uniqueness and its culture.”