During the tsarist period, linguistic impact of Russians on Siberia was limited. Russia’s was a highly polyglot empire: many soldiers were Ukrainians and Belorussians, bureaucrats German, and the liturgical language was still Old Slavonic, so these institutions did little to bring Russian to Siberia. Furthermore, settlers came in limited numbers and mostly were concentrated in the plains of the country’s southern frontier (Pereltsvaig 2014, “Russification policies in Siberia”). However, until the 19th century Siberia was a promising economic prospect due to the fur trade, and the “conquest” of Siberia a source of pride for Russians just as Manifest Destiny would be for Americans (Bassin 1991). During this time, Russians slowly permeated the East, bringing their language and culture with them, and forming their own conceptions of the region’s aboriginal inhabitants.

In 1917, the Russian Revolution birthed the Soviet Union. Among the revolutionary ideals was a conviction that egalitarianism and equality would unite all the Union’s disparate peoples. It was the intent of the new government to grant autonomy to the Siberian peoples, including the right to use their own languages. No official language was established in the USSR, and party officials sought to use establish dominant status for local languages in their homelands (Pereltsvaig 2014, “Russification policies in Siberia”). In the 1930s, Cyrillic alphabets were created for dozens of languages and used in education. Unfortunately, this policy worked better in theory than in practice. The political and economic dominance of ethnic Russians and reliance on Russian for inter-group communication meant higher education, industry and government were dominated by Russians. Many Russians still perceived Siberians as primitive, backward people in need of “civilizing”. During the Stalinist years, repressive policies like resettlement, forced sedentarization of nomads, and persecution of wealthy indigenous community leaders and shamans threatened traditional ways of life (RAIPON). Furthermore, children were commonly taken from their families and forced to attend Russian boarding schools, which diminished inter-generational language transference. These policies were continued to varying extents by Stalin’s successors. Compulsory Russian education and continuing migration of ethnic Russians continued, and by the 1960s most Siberians knew Russian to some extent.
Today, Russian is very widely known by Siberians, but many still retain their native languages. Many republics within the Russian federation possess language rights, including Sakha, Tuva, and Buryatia. However, though these rights exist, Russian is still the de facto and de jure state language of the Federation. Additionally, conflicts exist between ethnic Russians and minority groups, particularly over land ownership and use. For example, the Mansi, Nenets and Khanty people are currently involved in a struggle with the Russian energy industry, which produces pollution and destroy the ecosystem upon which herdsmen and their reindeer rely (Maliuk et. al.) Though language preservation is in part linked to preservation of traditional lifestyles, Siberian peoples are also bringing their languages into the modern world with them.