Geographical distribution of Russian speakers

This article details the geographical distribution of Russian-speakers. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the status of the Russian language often became a matter of controversy. Some Post-Soviet states adopted policies of derussification aimed at reversing former trends of Russification, while Belarus under Alexander Lukashenko and the Russian Federation under Vladimir Putin reintroduced Russification policies in the 1990s and 2000s, respectively.

After the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917, derussification occurred in the newly-independent Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Kars Oblast, the last of which became part of Turkey.

The new Soviet Union initially implemented a policy of Korenizatsiya, which was aimed partly at the reversal of the Tsarist Russification of the non-Russian areas of the country.^[1] Vladimir Lenin and then Joseph Stalin mostly reversed the implementation of Korenizatsiya by the 1930s, not so much by changing the letter of the law, but by reducing its practical effects and by introducing de facto Russification. The Soviet system heavily promoted Russian as the "language of interethnic communication" and "language of world communism".

Eventually, in 1990, Russian became legally the official all-Union language of the Soviet Union, with constituent republics having the right to declare their own regional languages.^[2][3]

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, about 25 million Russians (about a sixth of the former Soviet Russians) found themselves outside Russia and were about 10% of the population of the post-Soviet states other than Russia. Millions of them later became refugees from various interethnic conflicts.^[4]