Linguistic determinism and the history of early Soviet language planning

Abstract

The idea of an international artificial language emerged in Russia in the 18th century. By the end of the 20th century in Russia and the USSR 80 projects of such languages were created. After the revolution of 1917 the ideology of internationalism first accepted the idea of an international language (as the rise of the Esperanto movement in the 1920s and the first half of the 1930s shows), but in the second half of the 1930s this movement was destroyed, as it impeded the development of national languages and the function of Russian as the language of interethnic communication. In the discussion about what ‘Marxist linguistics’ should be like, the first interlinguists E. K. Drezen and Ė. Spiridovic also took part.