NATIONAL COUNCIL FOR SOVIET AND EAST EUROPEAN RESEARC H TITLE : CHANGING PATTERNS OF RUSSIAN POLITICAL DISCOURSE : A Dictionary of Russian Politics, 1985 - Presen t AUTHOR : Elliott Mossman CONTRACTOR : University of Pennsylvani a PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR : Elliott Мossman COUNCIL CONTRACT NUMBER : 805-04- DATE : December, 199 1 The work leading to this report was supported by funds provided by the National Council for Soviet and East European Research . Th e analysis and interpretations contained in the report are those o f the author . "Changing Patterns of Russian Political Discourse : А Dictionary of Russian Politics, 1985 - Present " An Executive Summar y The changing patterns of Russian political speech since 198 5 reflect the breakdown of "command" political structures an d increasing recourse to a "war of words" over the tokens o f legitimacy : nation, the West, the restoration of history , ecology, human rights . Background . Totalitarian states use political discourse t o create an illusion of legitimacy : words in these "logocracies " are stripped of their normative meanings and given new meaning b y those who control usage . As the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu put s it, the Soviet regime historically has been an oligarch y characterized by a monopoly on language . 1 The monopolisti c practices began with Lenin's efforts to replace the Frenc h revolutionary vocabulary with a special terminology of Leninis t coinage and usage, but it was Stalin who perfected the monopol y on language . Linguistic choice diminished as he strove fo r axiological contrast with no linguistic neutral ground ; the regular use of superlatives eliminated grounds fo r differentiation ; the language was extensively bureaucratized an d militarized, in an effort to reduce the dichotomy civil-military ; finally, East and West took on Manichean properties in th e language, with loan words stigmatized and Slavic roots revered . Quantitatively, the end result of this rigid control ove r 1 Libеr, No .2 (August 22, 1990), p .3 . The point is not lost o n such spectator-participants as Vaclav Havel : see his "Words o n Words," New York Review of Books, January 11, 1990, p .6 . language was that, until the 1960's, the standard vocabulary o f Soviet newspapers had been reduced to 1,500 words, wit h practically no new political speech evident . Language dissidence, in reaction to the Leninist an d Stalinist legacy, became the hallmark of political speech in th e 1970's and 1980's . Many of the terms that were canonized earl y in the Gorbachev era derive from the dissident struggle to ope n up a political discourse stifled by the State-Party monopoly . The loan word "consensus" arrives in Russian in the writings o f Andrei Sakharov, and then migrates to Gorbachev's vocabulary, a s do several of Gorbachev's early policy labels : for example , Sakharov's "Memorandum to the General Secretary TSK КР SS Comrad e L .I . Brezhnev," 1972, long circulating in samizdat and onl y officially published in the registered press in 1990, is th e earliest identified source of the pattern of proximate occurrenc e "glasnost' -demokratizatsiia in opposition to zastoi . " Glasnost' . The logocratic practice that dominated Sovie t Russian political speech for seventy years remains visible in th e new words coined since the emergence of glasnost' in 1987 ; indeed, glasnost' is prima facie evidence of logocentric policy . "Perestroika" is a prominent example of the state's remainin g capacity to strip a word of meaning : it is so discredite d linguistically that it is now the object of parodies, such a s "perestruktirovanie" and the pejorative "perestroishchiki"' Th e tendency in Soviet politics toward "an all-embracing idle chatte r spilling over into linguistic meretriciousness" was criticized a s 2 one of seven centrifugal tendencies in Soviet society in а prominent 1989 analysis of Soviet politics . 2 It is more likely , however, that diversification of political discourse is а welcome development in а society starved for pluralism . Countervailing linguistic strategies have also developed i n the period of glasnost', many of them marked linguistically b y the political struggle with the logocracy : -- words coined in the dissident and later the democrati c press are "coopted" into official discourse ; -- foreign loan words are borrowed heavily from English , mostly from the domain of the social sciences ; -- words with negative, often anti-nationalist connotation s are attributed to the democratic opposition ; -- words from a military vocabulary are used to legitimiz e bureaucratic functions ; -- structural features of the language are employed t o create categories of political opposition to the status qu о ante ; -- words are coined to fill "empty sets" in the Leninist political vocabulary . It is clear that political discourse is increasingly an arena fo r the struggle to disestablish the centrist logocratic tradition . Language, Nation and the West . Political speech has bee n most reactive to the idea of nation unleashed by glasnost' . Th e 18th century term "rossiiane" has been retrieved to refer to th e 2Academician G .V . Osipov et al, Sotsial'naiaisotsial'no- politicheskaia situatsiia v SSSR : sostoianieiprognoz, Moscow : Moscow State University Press, p .4 . 3 ethnically Russian population, as distinct from the Russian - speaking (russoiazynchnyi) population that has preempted the ter m russkii . Archaic syntax and other stylistic devices are employed in order to evoke Russian as distinct from modernized Europea n roots . The most heated battles occur over the legitimate term for a political phenomenon . Conservatives introduce veз ternizm as a term to stigmatize the liberal tradition of zapadnichestvo ; entrepreneurial activity is lampooned by the ludicrous coinag e individual'shchik ; overtones of National Socialism ("Lebensraum" ) are invoked in zhiznennoe prostranstvo ; Solzhenitsyn bids t o replace perestroika with a set of terms deriving from obustroit' . Structurally, the language is employed to undermine a n opponent's political doctrine, and often etymology (Slavic versu s Western European) is one of the weapons as well . Thus, th e democratic reformers attack the Center for its psevdoperestroika , while the hardliners counter with lzheperestroika ; Centrists try to retain the socialist mantle with a campaign agains t lzhesotsializm . The language is employed semantically an d structurally in order to fill in the blanks in politica l development that has been retarded by the exclusive Leninist politics . А Leninist language in which there was only the ter m sotsialisticheskii vybor is augmented by the coinag e demokraticheskii vybor . The democratic opposition's policy o f "destructivism" is visible in the category of coinages tha t utilize the prefix "de-" : "deofficialization," "desovietization, " 4 "demonopolization," "departization," "deideologization, " "destatization," "depoliticization . " It is likely that the August coup d'etat and its aftermat h (dubbed the "August Revolution") will perpetuate the tendencie s the previous six years of linguistic change have established . "Debolshevization" has been added to the list, while th e banishment of the Party has provided Soviet politics with th e opportunity for a new term -- partization -- that is in harmony with its root . Although Communist authority remains in what ar e now termed "Communist refuges," most former Party members becam e what are derisively termed "Communist mutants ." The struggl e over a Western reference point in new vocabulary continues i n post-coup speech (parteigenosse), as the massive borrowing o f Western terms to describe unprecedented phenomena continues , e .g ., "collaborationist," "Regent of the Russian Monarchy, " "junta" and "putsch . " "A Short Dictionary of Russian Political Terms 1985-Present " (available upon request from the offices of the National Counci l for Soviet and East European Research), documents the use of a representative 300 new political terms . It is the core of th e 2,500 entry "Keywords in Russian Politics since 1985 : A Lexica l and Critical Commentary," to be completed by September, 1992, an d published by Oxford University Press in 1993 . September, 1991 Elliott Mossman 5 Changing Patterns of Soviet Political Discourse , 1985 -- Present Elliott Mossman University of Pennsylvania 1 Soviet political discourse is undergoing а process of change in the era of perestroika. In order to better understand the nature and extent o f these changes we have to compare the patterns of th е present day and traditional Soviet political speech . The Soviet state as а totalitarian system is often c alled a logocracy, or government by words, functioning to create an illusion of legitimacy, on e that conceals reality while it retains an encoded connection to it . А specific feature of Soviet political discourse has been that its primary element, th e word, is stripped of immanent meaning and given new meaning by thos e who control its use . Vaclav Havel pointed out in his speech on th е occasion of receiving thе West German publishers' and book dealers' Peace Prize that th е essence of thе dissidents' fight for civil rights against th е communis t totalitarian regime often consisted in unmasking а communist terminology with its fictional semantics and restoring th е real meanings of words . He said : At last I reach thе beautiful word "peace." I have read it for forty years in our country on every roof and in every report. An allergy to this beautiful word has been created in me and my compatriots , because I know what it has designated for forty years: armies , powerful and gaining in strength, which allegedly ar е defending peace . Sevеral Don Quixotes of "Charter-77" and their younger colleagues of thе Independent Association for Peace succeeded in rehabilitating thi s word and restoring its original meaning despite th е lengthy process of systematically stripping the word "peace" of its proper sense and , moreover, filling it with a meaning opposite to its dictionary meaning . 2 We had to paу dearly for this semantic "perestroika," i .e., for turning thе word "peace" upside down.