Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation

by Serhii Plokhy

Another, less obvious, import from the West was the practice of basing the literary language on the vernacular. Until then it had been based largely on Church Slavonic, a language created by medieval Christian proselytizers to convert the Slavs and later used as the language of liturgy and belles lettres in the Orthodox Slavic lands, including Muscovy and the Ukrainian and Belarusian territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It was a language that united Great, Little, and White Russia but belonged to the past, not to the future. The state bureaucracy created by Peter required a new secularized language to run the state. The chancery language of the Muscovite bureaucracy, also based largely on Church Slavonic, was not suited to that purpose. Thus, Peter introduced a simplified (“civil”) script and often encouraged his subordinates and the translators of Western works to write as simply as possible, avoiding the high style of Church Slavonic.