In Russia, the war against “decadent values ​​of the West” calls for eradicating English on the streets, in the metro and in education.

In Russia, the authorities are hammering day by day that the country is at war, not against Ukraine, but against the West, especially the United States. A military war, but also an ideological and cultural one, which operates in defense of what Russian leaders call for.The Traditional values ​​of Russia“, which is ahead of”Western Decay Values”. Explanation of this option: An attempt to discreetly and gradually suppress the English language in a public place, school or even a metro station.

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In Moscow, there are countless shops, signs, advertisements that happily mix Russian and English, sometimes without translation. For educated young Russians, English is often a well-versed second language. But lately, signals from the top are raising fears that English is being pushed out of the public space. One deputy has already proposed that his training should not be compulsory in school, and last week, during a meeting with the leaders of former Soviet republics, Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin drove this point home: “Let’s learn our national languages! English is a dead language. It’s in the past.”

English is disappearing in the Moscow metro

If there are no official instructions yet, some are taking initiatives: New metro stations that have opened in Moscow in recent months have no signs in English. In the old ones, some panels appeared entirely in Cyrillic. At school, Anglo-Saxon culture can be controversial among students, Moscow-based teacher Alexandra recently said: “In my class, there’s no conflict about it, maybe they avoid it somehow. But sometimes some kids refuse to do their English homework. They say, ‘C’ is the enemy’s language, and we’re not going to learn it. Now”!”

However, this trend is opposed by a section of Russian society. Last month, students at a prestigious institute of physics and technology in Moscow asked the administration to stop learning Chinese instead of learning English.