Smith Michael G. The official campaign for Russian language culture

Language and Power in the Creation of the USSR, 1917-1953. Chapter 7. — Walter de Gruyter, 2012. — pp. 143-160.The "great transformation" after 1928 highlighted rather than resolved the challenges posed by the democratization of national cultures. Nativization of Russian cadres was a remarkable success. A whole new generation of 'promoted ones' (vydvizhentsy) from the lower and middle classes entered higher education and acquired administrative power in the wake of the purges. The greatest beneficiaries were young Slavic men of peasant or worker origins. But these achievements were more about quantity than quality. The new jobholders were unprepared, both culturally and linguistically, for their new status. Most of them had poorly mastered Russian. Yet they came to manage the millions of peasant workers who migrated to the cities after 1928. Together these promoted ones and new city dwellers created a strange hybrid of city life, an "urban peasant subculture", by which they retained their previous rural communal contacts, their undisciplined work habits, and even the cultural dialects and identities of their home villages. They were torn between their own village values and the need to become something urban, something more "respectable", something more Russian.The nativization campaigns among the non-Russians also enjoyed impressive successes, with variations. They too had their newly promoted cadres in education and administration. But for all of its success, the government still faced a whole series of glaring "contradictions and limitations". The numbers of new jobholders, often simply achievements on paper, masked deeper and more abiding failures. Stalin's economic priorities dictated that the non-Russian promoted ones be placed at the lowest echelons of industry and the bureaucracy; or that where they held higher posts, be supervised by more efficient and reliable "Europeans". Even when natives were successful in achieving some upward mobility, their poor literacy, sometimes in their own native language but most often in Russian, placed severe limits on their career advancement.Mastering the 'great Russian literary language'
Political literacy for the languages of the east
Iosef Stalin's Utopian moment
Russifying the eastern scripts and schools