On 10 September, a 79-year-old sociologist, Albert Razin, picketed the local parliament in Izhevsk, the capital of western Russia’s Udmurt Republic. Razin held a placard reading “Do I have a motherland?” and a quote from a well-known Soviet Avar poet, Rasul Gamzatov: “If tomorrow my language will be forgotten, I am ready to die today.” Then he set himself on fire. He died in a hospital a few hours later, with burns on over 90% of his body.
For years, Razin, an ethnic Udmurt, had tried to bring attention to what he viewed as the perilous situation for his native language and cultural heritage from changes in Russian laws and policies.
Razin was one of several academics who signed an open letter in June 2018 against a proposed amendment to the national education law, which would end mandatory instruction in native languages for republics and other areas that have two or more official or state languages.
