Abstract OUR objective in this book is to trace and illustrate the main changes that have taken place in the Russian language since the beginning of the twentieth century, and particularly those between 1917 and the late 1980s, a time which can be identified as the Soviet period, by now a reasonably complete stage in the history of Russia and the former Soviet Union. The period addressed in this book witnessed the unprecedented expansion of the standard Russian language, both stylistically and geographically. Around 1900, the range of functions of standard Russian increased, in some instances replacing Church Slavonic, in some instances with the emergence of new phenomena. Russian replaced Church Slavonic as the language of sermons (parallel to the maintenance of Church Slavonic as the language of liturgy); standard Russian emerged as the language of the courts (especially following the judicial reform of the 1860s), of political debate in the Russian Parliament (Duma), of growing business and trade, and as the language of poetry and prose read to large audiences from the stage of concert-halls and literary cabarets. Theatre, the most popular type of entertainment in Russia of the second half of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century, played a very important role in promoting a uniform language norm, especially in pronunciation; the role of theatre as the bearer of such a norm became clear by the mid 1Soos (Panov 1990: 94). In the twentieth century, radio, cinema, and television, gradually taking over from the theatre, gave the standard language the ability to travel, unknown in earlier periods; mass media, together with compulsory mass education, became much more effective than writing alone in acquiring new speakers for the emerging standard. These new speakers of the standard, in tum, had a profound effect on the language itself: never before had it borne the fingerprints of so many diverse speakers, many of whom were, following M. V. Panov’s characteriza tion, ‘new recruits to culture’ (Panov 1990: 18, 22).