The cancelled lesson: a hundred years of Erzya in school

In today's Republic of Mordovia, a region on the Volga in central Russia, the Erzya language — a Finno-Ugric tongue spoken mainly here and in neighbouring regions — is, as a rule, taught like this: from the second to the fourth grade it is a subject on the timetable; from the fifth to the seventh it is, more often than not, an "extracurricular activity"; after the seventh, nothing. Three years of lessons, three years of a club, then silence. To understand how the language arrived at this arrangement, you have to rewind a hundred years — because today's "extracurricular" status is not the beginning of the story but its seventh or eighth act, and we are obliged to remember all the earlier ones: they explain both what happened and what can still be done.

Act one: school in Erzya. Through the 1920s and the first half of the 1930s the country pursued korenizatsiya, the early-Soviet policy of building administration and schooling in local languages, and Erzya was not a subject but the language of instruction: children in Erzya villages learned arithmetic and natural science in Erzya. A whole infrastructure was built around this school: by the mid-1930s a literary standard (based on the dialect of the village of Kozlovka), the first language conference (1933), textbooks — and a whole network of teacher-training colleges across the country, from Saransk to Petrovsk, Lukoyanov and Sterlitamak, preparing teachers of the mother tongue. Remember this network: it shows what counted as normal when a school in the mother tongue was built in earnest.

Act two: dismantling. From the second half of the 1930s, education in non-Russian languages outside the national autonomies was wound down — the decisive step being the decrees of 1938. Inside Mordovia the mother-tongue school held on longer, but in 1958 the all-Union education law gave parents "the right to choose the language of instruction" — a formula worth remembering word for word, as it will return — and from the 1959/60 school year instruction in Erzya and Moksha shrank from seven grades to the first three. By the early 1970s the Mordovian ASSR still had 391 national schools with 77,000 children — 36.9% of the republic's pupils; 156 of these schools were Erzya, with 36,000 pupils. A third of all schoolchildren in a national-language school: half a century on, the figure reads like fantasy.

Act three, all but forgotten: the experiment with compulsion. In the mid-2000s Mordovia took a step rare even by Russian standards — from 2006 the study of Erzya or Moksha became compulsory for every pupil in the republic, regardless of ethnicity. Sceptics predicted protests and overload. It turned out otherwise: as an analysis of the Mordovian experience on the Finno-Ugric portal Uralistica put it, "the sceptics' fears were not borne out, and the negative reactions soon exhausted themselves." Most telling was a survey in one third-grade class: asked "do you enjoy studying Erzya/Moksha?", 23 of 29 pupils answered yes — five of them Tatars — and not one said no; among their parents, though, opinion split — 8 in favour, 10 against, 8 unsure. The children took to the language more easily than the adults.

Act four: the 2018 reversal. A federal law made the study of one's native language voluntary and application-based, and Mordovia moved it into the "variable part of the curriculum," which each school shapes for itself. Compulsion — which had proved that it worked — was abolished not because it had failed but because the logic of 1958 had prevailed once more, returning under the same slogan of "the right to choose." Today's official formula sounds proud: "Erzya and Moksha are studied by children in every school in the republic" — and it is even true, so long as you do not ask exactly how: a subject only in grades 2–4, most often a club in grades 5–7, nothing in the senior grades; in Saransk schools an Erzya child may end up in a Moksha class — whichever teacher is available is the one who teaches. The system was described more precisely than any formula by its own top official: "I didn't know the language at all. Not a single word," admitted the head of Mordovia, Artyom Zdunov, holding forth in a televised phone-in on the benefits of studying one's native language. And beneath the official report that the languages are "studied in every school," a reader left a comment we cite as a document of the era: "Let the Mordva study their own language. You mustn't force it on others."

Act five, invisible from Saransk: the diaspora. Most Erzya live outside Mordovia, but there are no exact figures for them: the census counts Erzya and Moksha together as a single "Mordva," and activists' own estimates run well above the census numbers. Even by those estimates the picture is the same everywhere: in Samara, Penza and Ulyanovsk oblasts — the largest centres of the diaspora — the language can be studied at only a handful of schools per region, and only as an elective of one or two lessons a week, while in Tatarstan, Nizhny Novgorod oblast and Chuvashia such schools can be counted on one hand. For two-thirds of the people, school Erzya is at best an hour or two of an elective, and typically nothing at all.

What is left from the Soviet era? The textbooks exist: in 2010–2012 the Mordovian Book Publishing House issued 64 textbooks of Moksha and Erzya for all grades, and by the 2026/27 school year new Erzya textbooks for grades 5–9 are reaching schools; the activist Arpad Valdaž has shown that even a physics textbook written in Erzya from scratch is possible. Teachers are trained by mother-tongue departments in Saransk's universities, in-service courses run, and Erzya teachers win competitions — such as Olga Dorofeeva of the Tavla education centre in Saransk, who reached the national final of the "Best Teacher of Native Language and Literature" contest. All of this is honest work by honest people inside a structure arranged so that their subject ends in the fourth grade. Not a single school teaches in Erzya; all vocational and higher education is in Russian only.

Conclusions, and a forecast. The history of the Erzya school is not a gradual decline but three man-made ruptures: 1938, 1958 and 2018 — the last two carried out with the very same instrument, "the right to choose," granted under conditions where every incentive points the same way. Yet the same history also holds two proofs of reversibility: korenizatsiya showed that a school in Erzya can be built within a decade, and the experiment of the 2000s showed that compulsory Erzya in the classroom is accepted even by children of other nationalities. From this the central conclusion follows. Under its own constitution, the Russian Federation has taken on the responsibility of guaranteeing everyone the right to an education in their native language. The Erzya cannot exercise that right — not at university, not even at school. Spain is not a federal republic but a monarchy, and yet the Basques have a university that teaches in Basque; the Erzya have not a single school that teaches in Erzya, and no vocational or higher education in it at all. What is at stake, then, is not a club or the goodwill of an individual school, but an unmet constitutional obligation of the state. The only way out is to restore to the Erzya the same opportunities in education that Russians have: the same right to a school, a university and a profession in one's native language that the Russian language and its speakers enjoy. Valks will keep the school question under constant watch — and to parents facing the declaration form for "the choice of native language," we offer a reminder: that box has a history, and in it your choice is the one thing the system cannot make for you.