Why didn't USSR attempt to make Russian a lingua franca?

My dad grew up in Poland during the Cold War and he never learned English in school.  He didn't speak it his entire childhood.  They did try to teach him Russian though, and some of it stuck.  We can understand each other in Russian even today. He said they had this periodical he liked called Крокодил (Crocodile).  It would try to teach Russian with jokes and satire.  There were also radio stations all over Europe where they would have Russian language learning and even competitions you could compete in for recognition and prizes. (1) I can't find any record of them, but I am quite certain they existed.  It was supposed to be an "alternative" to Radio Liberty. (2) Also, English may be the world's number one second language, but it's far from being universally understood in the former Soviet Union, or for that matter in many parts of the world.  I've travelled extensively in Europe and Asia, and I can tell you right now English is hardly a universally understood language. When I'm abroad, maybe as a consequence of the places I travel, Russian gets me around a lot better than English does. So I guess the Soviet Union did try, and in spite of their best efforts, they were actually a little successful. (1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krokodil (2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Europe/Radio_Liberty

They definitely aspired, but English had gotten a leg up on Russian a few hundred years prior. As far as being the regional pan-Soviet Lingua Franca, though, they did well.

There was a gradual process of Russification [1], which already started in pre-Soviet times. In Slavic republics like Ukraine and Belarus it created a mixed pidgin languages like Surzhyk [2] and Trasianka [3]. In other republics the process of Russification was better correlated with presence of a large number of ethnically Russian or Russian-speaking colonists (i.e. for example Ashkenazi Jews) and/or ethnically mixed population or in many cases locals, who received higher education in Russian. People in Republics also tended to send children to Russian high schools, since they provided a better options to receive professional or higher education later. For example, in Azerbaijan Russian was widely used, but not in Georgia and Armenia. Likewise in Estonia and Kazakhstan about half of the population were Russian-speaking people. In the Russia proper several Finno-Ugric and Turkic speaking ethnicities where so heavily russificated (or russified?), so they essentially became part of Russian ethnicity. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russification [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surzhyk [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trasianka

In reverse chronological order:   As a communist country, many of Russia's trading partners were large scale deals with large national interests.  America has lots of countries doing business.  Therefore, the average businessman would probably be better off learning English than Russian.   English also was firmly established by the British Empire.  They spent a lot of effort spreading English as the language of trade.  The BBC had lots of international broadcasting offices to spread news, entertainment, and the British worldview.   But even before this English has a big advantage.  It's descended from two different roots - It's related to the Germanic languages and the Romance languages.  This is a huge advantage.   Many European languages descend from one of these roots, or were strongly influenced by them.  This gives people a leg up in learning English - most people can find some commonalities.  It's a bridge between the Germanic countries and the Romance countries.

What makes you think they didn't attempt that? They failed.

But that is what it was in the whole empire - and they did their best to impose it everywhere, in the colonies (Eastern Europe) or the pretendents - subservient states in Africa. But that did not work. People would not learn easily russian.

First, like many other answers, Russia did spread the language to Communist countries. The difference with English falls back to luck. The US didn't want to spread English as the Lingua Franca, however, given the the US is a country of immigrants, they had to take actions to make English easier to learn. This including the government paying Hollywood to make movies that you could understand without understanding English. This made it easier for foreigners coming the the US to learn English, and by extension, easier for people around the world to learn it. This also shrank the American English vocabulary to something around 2,000 words needed to speak 90% of the time. Compare this Russian, which is a language based on a rather homogenous people, with a rich linguistic history where learning the language is a lifelong quest. Evidence of this is in books like Master and Margarita. Russian as a language was never organized the way German and French were with the intention to teach foreigners. Stalin made the first attempt to make rules of the language, but anyone studying Russian today as a foreigner will see that there are more instances of exceptions to these rules than cases where the rules are followed. These things added up to make it difficult to spread the language, and as the US film culture spread through the world, it offered an organic means of growth in use.