Why I made an Interslavic version of this site
I was born in Moscow, live in Almaty, and have spent most of my life building things on the internet: communities, companies, software, music, and books.
In a sense, I grew up in two internets at once. Russian was my native language and social space; English was my window into global technology culture. But between those two large spaces there was almost no room for the neighboring Slavic internets. They existed right next door, yet we rarely crossed paths.
I have always been interested in how technology extends a person.
A telescope lets us see farther. The iconoscope turned an image into a signal and sent it across a distance. The telephone made it possible to speak with someone who was not nearby. But one of humanity’s most powerful gadgets appeared long before electricity.
It is language.
Language carries a thought from one mind to another, preserves a person’s voice after death, and brings together people who have never met. It does not merely transport a finished thought — it helps assemble it. It determines which distinctions we notice, which connections we can build, and which ideas we can hold at all. We speak a language, but in a certain sense language also speaks through us.
My teacher, the philosopher Efim Ostrovsky, taught me to see language this way: language is a gadget and an operating system for thought.
We usually treat language like weather. We are born inside it and assume it is a natural part of the world. It seems that reality exists first, then we see it and give what we see names. But language is already installed between the world and our perception. It sorts reality, draws boundaries, creates categories, and suggests what matters and what should remain invisible. Like any operating system, it has an architecture, limitations, old versions, and updates.
You can remain an ordinary user. Or you can try to become an engineer: take language apart, configure it, design it, and test it on real tasks. That is what drew me to Interslavic.
A gadget for a specific job
No language is better than every other language at everything, just as a hammer is not better than a screwdriver. One language preserves a people’s memory, another connects global business, and a third describes a scientific field with precision.
Interslavic was designed for a particular task: helping speakers of different Slavic languages understand one another without years of study and without having to switch to English. Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Serbian, Czech, Bulgarian, and the other Slavic languages diverged, but kept many common roots and structures. Interslavic assembles this shared layer into a working tool. It belongs to no single country and does not compete with national languages. Its purpose is more modest: to provide an additional channel of understanding between people.
The Slavic internet, meanwhile, is divided into national segments. People in Poland, Ukraine, Serbia, Czechia, Bulgaria, and Belarus discuss similar ideas, build similar projects, and face similar problems while barely encountering one another. According to W3Techs, sites in Slavic languages together make up around eight percent of the web whose content language can be identified. The Slavic internet is large enough to be visible and fragmented enough that its participants rarely meet. When they do meet, it usually happens in English.
English works extremely well as a global protocol; I write and work in it constantly. Interslavic is not trying to replace it. It opens a different direction of connection. I am interested in a simple question: do related cultures always need an outside intermediary to hear one another? Can someone in Poland read my story without a Polish translation? Can the same text be understood in Serbia, Czechia, Bulgaria, and Ukraine?
Reasoning alone cannot answer that. You have to turn the gadget on.
A field test
The Interslavic version of my site is not a marketing localization. I do not expect it to bring millions of readers or noticeably increase book sales. Perhaps a few hundred people will read it regularly. Perhaps fewer.
A language becomes real not when it acquires a perfect grammar, but when people meet, joke, argue, write letters and books, describe new technologies, and agree to make something together in it. While a language lives only in dictionaries and textbooks, it resembles a device that was never taken out of the box.
I decided to take it out of the box.
What it extends
The value of a technology lies not only in what it can do, but in what becomes possible for a person because of it. Language expands the circle of people we can hear. That, for me, is the value of Interslavic.
It does not erase differences between cultures or create the illusion that all Slavic peoples are the same. On the contrary, a shared linguistic layer helps us see differences more clearly: where our meanings align, where they diverge, and where a similar form conceals a different historical experience.
We are used to seeing language as a monument to history that must be preserved and passed on. But language is also a technology of the future. New communities require new ways of reaching agreement, and new technologies change how we describe the human being, intelligence, authorship, and work. If we can design artificial intelligence, virtual worlds, and global digital platforms, we can consciously design tools for human understanding too.
I do not know whether Interslavic will become a mass language. But scale is not the only measure of a technology’s value. Sometimes it is enough for a small tool to solve a problem that nobody before it tried to solve in quite the same way. This site is my small contribution to that experiment.
Language is a gadget. Interslavic is one of its new builds.
If you understand this page, the prototype is already working.