National-linguistic changes in the Karelian school in the postwar decade

The paper discusses language shift in schools of various autonomous entities of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, particularly of the Republic of Karelia, in the post-war period. The aim of the paper is to analyze the processes in school at the beginning of 1950-60ies and to reveal the trends in reforming and reduction of national school in Karelia and in other autonomous regions. To achieve the aim various sources have been analyzed: history books, scientific papers in journals, archival documents and others, which deal with the problems of development of national schools in detail. The paper describes how the mother tongue ceased to be used by the indigenous people, who shifted to the language with higher status, to Russian. The comparative historic method leads to the conclusion that language assimilation was inevitable. Despite the fact that the given process was connected with the problems in the national policy and was regulated at all the levels of the Soviet system, in many instances it was stipulated by global social, demographic and ethnical changes. To reveal the trends, the paper refers to many factors of the development of Russian language environment in the autonomous republics of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. For this purpose, autonomous entities are analysed regarding population size, ethnic composition, distance to centre, industrialization level.