I used to live in Ukraine. In our region, Crimea, everybody speaks Russian and Russian only. Ukranian gouvernment is trying ti implement the use of Ukranian through state institutions and media like TV and radio, but people don't like it.

Hi Carmen!

I'm a native Belarusian. We all speak Russian and most of us don't use Belarusian in everyday speech although we do understand Belarusian. In our country these languages are both official and taught at schools but Russian is traditionally dominant. Very often people even get confused if they hear someone speak good Belarusian. Our attitude to Russians is difficult to describe in one word since all peole think differently, but in general I'd say it is positive. The times of the USSR greatly unite our peoples and especially it's true with respect to the older and middle-aged generations.

Hey Carmen,

i'm of russian-german origin and live here in kazakhstan. By the way this is a multikulturel country with many ethnic gruppes. There are original inhabitants who are called kazakhs and other people are russian, germans, chechens, uzbek and so on. All of us are kazakhstanis, this is the citizenship. We all live in peace here and there is no hate towards russians, cause all kazakstani peolple speak russian and this unites all of us. This is my native language too. I dont understand what do you mean by deep resentment? 

In last 5 years kazakhstan starts to become more national, more kazahk, to my regret, and perhabs in some generations russian wont be spoken here so widely anymore, which would be defenetly great lost for this country.

I like this country anyway and hopefully in the future it will develop quicker and peolple will here better.

Hi, Carmen!

Thanks for the question! My name is Zamira, I live in Kazakhstan. As it was mentioned before, Kazakhstan is multinational and multicultural country. Many people speak different languages. So bilingualism is highly developed here, as we speak russian and kazakh all the time. More than that, many of the people treat kazakh and russian as native tongues, and learn different other languages.

There is no negative feeling at all, because people got used to speak more than in one language, and no one forces you to speak exactly in one.

We live in a very friendly Goverenment.

Thank you everyone for the response! I will start learning Russian at my university next year :) Hopefully all the russian speakers out there will help me out since the russian at university is 9 hours per week!