In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Russian elite used a plethora of languages, situated in a complex web of shifting social values. This chapter charts the development of this multilingualism. Looking closely at the nature of language hierarchies in imperial Russia through a close study of a variety of archival materials, it questions the oft-repeated narrative of a Russian high society speaking predominantly French, to the detriment of their Russian skills. The chapter also examines whether the Russian case is, as is often claimed, unique, and argues that multilingualism in Russia shared characteristics with elite multilingualism found in other places and times.

Eastern Europe and the USSR had large German minorities. In the USSR this dated back to Catherine the Great, who in 1763 issued a manifesto inviting Germans to settle and colonize land on the Volga in exchange for tax and legal privileges. During Gorbachev’s Perestroika the German minorities began making use of the West German law of return that immediately granted them citizenship as Aussiedler – a consequence of the ethnobiological definition of German nationhood (but why, assimilated, tax-paying, Germanophone second-generation descendants of Turkish labor migrants wondered, should russified descendants of labor migrants to eighteenth-century Russia have easier access to citizenship than they?). Chapter 6 charts the history and lived experience of the 2.3 million Aussiedler who immigrated since 1987 and who have remained largely invisible in public consciousness. The chapter title encapsulates their fraught situation of dual non-belonging: discriminated against in the postwar Soviet Union as “fascists,” they hoped to rejoin fellow Germans when emigrating, yet in reality were excluded as “Russians.”

Succession in Russia was a matter of paternal designation, a practice not a written law, until 1722. The 1722 law had no relationship to “absolutism,” but it did frame succession in a Western context. Succession was in actuality contentious throughout the eighteenth century, until Tsar Paul proclaimed primogeniture as the law in 1797.