>>513858701
my friend, that's a vulgar take - the russian language was enforced by a centralized State, but by nature, it would have been a continuum, where over geographic distances it would have been harder and harder to understand, but it would always be possible for any part of the linguistic continuum to understand the closest villages. It makes little to no sense to pretend that, by nature, the russian language would be so close between the furthest of siberia and Moscow. This is purely State interference and the creating of a prestige dialect through the choosing of cultural elites. I have at my home a russian edition of War and Peace, for example (it was a hard read for me)- the choosing, by the State and the aristocrat class, of this text, for example (among others) is what made the russian language the same over the territory of the russian-speaking world, because well-learned people would strive to replicate what held prestige in the cultural world they belonged to. This is true of all languages - the french State, as it became stronger, invented the notion of French from the patois of Paris and a few other prestigious cities of recognized poets, then pretended the thousand other variants of vulgar latins were actually patois of french. This is a vulgar attempt by the State to legitimize itself, and though myselt i find russian much more interesting than Ukrainian, i can't think for a second that if Kiev had remained the center of the russian world, russian wouldnt be completely different, and still claiming to be natural (it still wouldnt be ukrainian, which is a very galician and polonized variant of east slavic, but whatever).
please reconsider.