The U.S. and Global Security Review - Blog by Michael Novakhov

M.N.: "Who owns the Russian language?"  After the century of bloody revolutions, endless and continuing waves of emigration, Gulag and cultural decline, it is the World and the Russian speaking community outside Russia that owns and sustains the Russian language and Russian cultural heritage. Russia just rents it out.  Paul Goble             Staunton, April 23 – The bilingual Ukrainian poet Sergey Zhadan, who writes exclusively in Ukrainian, says that Russia “for the first time in its history has lost the monopoly on its own language,” a development that many in Russia find hard to accept and that even more in Ukraine see as a factor in the development of their country.             Aleksey Tsvetkov, a Russian poet, notes that “more than once” he has heard others say the same thing and that Zhadan’s observation is important both in explaining Vladimir Putin’s anger and the implications for Russia of a truly independent Ukraine ( inliberty.ru/blog/2303-Komu-prinad