And then Dad went further. Much further. The Soviet government launched a policy called korenizatsiya –"indigenization" – which was essentially a state-sponsored program of national identity construction on an industrial scale.
Languages were standardized for the first time. School curricula were rewritten. Local administrations were staffed with people who spoke the titular language of each republic. In Belarus, where the overwhelming majority of the population spoke Russian in daily life, a distinct Belarusian literary language was codified from scratch and pushed into schools and government offices. And then (and this is where it gets really surreal) the Soviet state started changing people's last names. A directive instructed administrative authorities to record surnames in Ukrainian transcription, so "Nikolaev" became "Mykolaiev" and "Afanasenko" became "Opanasenko."
If that's not national social engineering on a state budget, I genuinely don't know what is.
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