1905: The Linguistic Renaissance.

Joel of Far Outliers has another goodie from Culture.pl, European Nationalist Revolts in 1905, quoting an article by Zachary Mazur; this is the bit I thought belonged here: For the next two years following the events of January 1905, protests and strikes broke out all over the Russian Empire. […] In October, the tsar issued a decree that allowed for limited democratic freedoms of press and assembly and the formation of a parliamentary assembly, called the Duma. […] Prior to this moment, censorship had been stifling, strictly regulating the languages in which books could be published or theatre performed. Lithuanian, Yiddish and Ukrainian had been banned for decades. While the suppression of the Ukrainian language continued – seen as a threat to the Russian ‘heartland’ in a policy of identity erasure that remains tragically relevant today – Lithuanian, Yiddish and other suppressed languages finally began to gain legal recognition within the empire. Lithuanians gained the right to…