Vasily Gatov
A Russian linguist closely examines how the
Russian Foreign Ministry’s communication has resurrected the creepy old Soviet
style.
Russian is a tough language to learn not because
of the complex tenses and six cases, but because the style of communication is what matters most. The
Russian style not only expresses the mood of the speaker or writer, a certain
political situation, or the time and circumstances of the moment; the Russian
style also “smells.” Or stinks.
Thus, Russian politics are all about the style
of expression, and the language used to convey a political message in Russia is
more than just a mere communication tool. It’s a cult and has been one since
1917.
Within the first year after the Bolshevik
Revolution, Lenin changed the Russian alphabet, the grammar, the syntaxes and
even the time: The country finally adopted the Gregorian calendar and
established time zones. But the most significant alteration occurred in
the style of Soviet discourse. Stalin later converted what wasn’t
even his native tongue (he grew up speaking Georgian) into a veritable arsenal
for warfare, redefining way state officials spoke, wrote and, regrettably,
thought. It was all done to mask his Big Lie in layer upon layer of obfuscation
and hidden meaning.
Stalin’s style was difficult to ignore because there were four main
foundations underlying it.
Self-questioning
Stalin’s classic essay “Marxism and the Issues of
Language Studies” gives a perfect example of this style: “The question arises,
what have changed in Russian language since the October Revolution? The
vocabulary shifted significantly, in a sense that it got amended with a large
number of words and idioms.”
The question here only “arose” because Stalin himself
raised it.
Metonymy
As developed in the Stalinist style, this is when the
speaker seamlessly assigns a much broader and encompassing name to refer to a
specific thing or constituency. Some pure examples remain in the Soviet
archives, such as this statement from 1976:
“Those forces in the West are capable of any deception method to
complicate the issue of the termination of the arms race.”
“Those forces in the West” refers to the American
military-industrial complex but note how much more ambiguously menacing the
reformulation is. “Forces” suggests a multitude with global reach.
Proactive
Commentary
This is when the speaker says something even if no one
is seeking his opinion. Overreaction laden with clichés of ideology and emotive
abuse is the defining feature. A classic form of such commentary was an
unsolicited “reaction to anti-Soviet hysteria in country X”.
The following quote, for instance, is taken from a
1977 Soviet communique:
“In China, (we observe) a widening scale of the
anti-Soviet campaign that is maintained by propagandistic institutions and
officials at all levels. Chinese press and other media distributes daily
obvious lies and slanders in regard to the USSR, those are not much different
from imperialist propaganda that has long discredited itself with the peoples
of the world.”
Now here’s one by Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander
Lukashevich, reacting to a U.S. State Department report on human rights in June
2015, which of course contained criticism of Russian human rights abuses:
“The report published on June 25 by The Department of
State of the USA on the conditions of human rights in the world, as with all
previous opuses, is plagued with politicized remarks and rude ideological stock
phrases. The document is nothing more than a serial specimen of American
mentorship and lecturing manner in the area of human rights. This manner is
grounded on a false logic of US’s infallibility and perceived problems other
states have on the issue.”
In neither case was Moscow’s response necessary. It
was freely offered, almost with a joyous expectancy of being able to get its
“retaliation in first.”
Criminal
Vocabulary
The Russian Civil War birthed a new gangland
vocabulary for everyday use to denigrate real and perceived opponents of the
Soviet order. It transcended Stalin’s own style to amplify the underlying mood
of belligerence, if not mercilessness.
In the 1930s, the Stalinist criminal vocabulary became
the subject of a famous satire, Golden Calf by
Ilia Ilf and Eugeny Petrov. The central character, Ostap Bender, is a talented
adventurist who tries to make his fortune on the edge of NEP (the New Economic
Policy, which constituted a temporary turn back to capitalism in the USSR from
1921 to 1930). In one of the episodes, Bender travels on the train with a group
of Soviet journalists whose verbal resources are maximally constrained by the
new rules on revolutionary reportage. Bender creates a dictionary of over 100
clichéd constructions which perfectly comply with the Party’s editorial
standards for journalism, he successfully sells it to the bored journalists who
can now use it as boilerplate.
***
Today, Vladimir Putin has resurrected Stalin’s four
foundations of style and encouraged his diplomats and government officials to
employ them with the same frequency and purpose as his Soviet forbears.
I have analyzed all official communications of the
Russian Foreign Ministry from September 2011 to June 2015, indexed them, and
run them through a specific linguistic software called Voyant Tools, based on
Stanford Natural Language processing toolkit. The total database consists
of 2.5 million words, and 21,765 documents. Here’s what I found.
Self-Questioning
Self-questioning is barely present in Foreign Ministry
statements until fall 2012, with the occasional use of a formulation such as,
“Some partners of Russia question that…” But starting in 2013, when Putin took
a harder stance against the West, self-questioning became much more frequent.
The method skyrocketed in 2014, reaching 188 total uses, most commonly deployed
by the nameless “press statements” on behalf of the Foreign Ministry, Foreign
Minister Sergei Lavrov, and Foreign Ministry Spokesman Alexander Lukashevich.
Official press statements are much less speculative
and rarely employ Stalin’s favorite tool: a meager 25.
Lavrov is a great fan of self-questioning. He holds 66
of 189 uses of the formulation “the question arises” and its manifold
variations.
The winner of self-questioning, however, is
Lukashevich, with 101 uses, but some of his briefings and statements just repeat
Lavrov’s earlier sentiments.
Metonymy
Likewise, metonymy has made a comeback. Consider this
comment by Lavrov in his November 2013 Address to the State Duma:
“Some countries are guided with an opportunistic
interest to circumvent the global limits on the use of force in international
relations… It’s obvious for us that some countries exercise the power they
possess more frequently and tend to redraw the guiding principles of
international relations.”
He means only one country.
Since the beginning of the Ukraine crisis, however,
the frequency of Stalinist metonymy grows. “Western partners,” “hegemonic
force,” “some country that imagines itself a policeman of the world”—all these
become have become frequent stand-ins for “White House” or “United States.”
Criminal
Vocabulary
Putin himself is famous for deploying Bender-like
formulations. He uses “whack” like an Italian mobster when he refers to what
Russia will do to terrorists. Another favorite: “If my grandmother had
balls, she’d be my grandfather,” used to derisively dismiss what he considers a
non-possibility, such as the capacity for the post-Yanukovych Ukrainian
transitional government to perform.
Typically, professional diplomats don’t resort to
gangland jargon, but in Putin’s Russia, the exceptions are subtly smuggled
in.
For instance, one Foreign Ministry briefing on June
29, 2012, read, in Russian, “Americans prefer to pull down their allies rather than take their
interests into account.” To the untrained reader, this sounds hostile but
ho-hum. However, the usage here of the verb, opustit (“to pull down”), in the Russian
criminal argot refers to homosexual rape. Opustit, in fact, refers to how tougher inmates make
weaker ones their “bitches.”
Proactive
Commentary
When Russia abandoned its Soviet identity in 1991, its
Foreign Ministry’s language changed accordingly. Diplomats attempted a sober
neutrality and a more rational mode of communicating with the outside world.
Until 2007, Russian diplomacy maintained a formal, if sometimes murky, style
which rarely conveyed a single, unambiguous meaning. Moscow knew that its
post-Soviet leaders would need wiggle room to dodge and obfuscate; in a
democracy, climb-downs from original “official positions” were inevitable in the
course of engagement other countries.
But in 2007, at the Munich Security Conference, Putin put aside this new
mode of Russian “diplospeak.” He presented the idea that the collapse of the
USSR “was the largest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.”
This was hardly unambiguous and signaled a calcification in the Russian view of
recent history. Further, Putin blamed the West in seeking to humiliate Russia,
thus wakening the “sleeping beasts” of the Soviet style.
I was working in Russian media at the time and remember this grim return
to form quite well.
First, the vocabulary zombies crept back into
conservative pro-government newspapers. The language again started to resemble
the stochastic cocktail of Pravda, the old Party daily, as well the Benderist GoodFellas jargon. Today, these styles are
everywhere.
Take, for instance, this Foreign Ministry Press Department
statement on Macedonia from last May:
The news published by the Serbian media about the
detention in Macedonia of some Montenegrin, who assisted the Kosovo Albanian
extremists is a convincing proof of the plans run from outside that presume
loosening the political situation in the country, trying to push it into the
abyss of a color revolution. This is proof that Western organizers of such catastrophic
scenarios prefer to exercise their proxy using the Ukraine, and now Macedonia,
as citizens of those countries which, like Montenegro, are attracted by the
lure of NATO. The more than obvious danger for Europe is now provoking chaos in
the Balkans, spiraling conflict in the region, which has has not yet recovered
from the bloodshed of the 1990s.
The first sentence is 32 words in Russian! And note the context:
Macedonians protested against corruption and the feebleness of their own
government in countering it, with some calling for an end to Macedonian-Russian
cooperation on a notoriously crooked gas pipe project. They also called for
faster accession into NATO. Finally, the Foreign Ministry is actually reacting
to Serbian press speculations about events in a
neighboring country, rather than to any on-the-ground, factual information.
This is the classic proactive commentary of the bad old days.
I mentioned earlier that the thug’s lexicon is particularly noisome to
the Russian speaker. This is intentional because the Foreign Ministry, despite
its remit, is actually communication to a domestic rather than international
audience.
To some extent, this irony can even be quantified.
A data analysis I performed of Foreign Ministry
communication from September 2011 to June 2015 shows that a mere 10 percent of
the statements contains a direct call to action (“do something, change
something”). Another 14 percent is suggestive (“it’s time to think about…” or
“our partners have to think about…”). This 24 percent can thus be viewed as
written for a foreign audience.
However, some official statements are “factual,” such as the reporting
on a meeting between Lavrov or his deputies with foreign officials. These
constitute 18 percent of the total. Then there are those statements and
interviews that attempt to “explain” Russian foreign policy, from global
warming to the war in Ukraine. These statements are meant exclusively for
Russians and are often untranslated into any other language. They constitute 75
percent of all Foreign Ministry communications. And sometimes the Russians
they’re geared toward are in fact other agents of the Putin regime.
Consider this masterpiece published by Ministry on the day after former
deputy prime minister and opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was murdered:
We assume that support and protection of the human rights should be a
goal rather than a tool of the political fight. In the European Council on
Human Rights we oppose politicization of human rights and a compulsory export
of standards that are typical for an isolated group of states as if those
standards are global. It’s unacceptable to exploit the human rights agenda to
undermine the principles of the international laws and UN Charter, to substantiate the incursion with the internal affairs and violent scenarios of
the solution of contradictions and arguments, establishment of economic
sanctions. Such actions only deteriorate the situation in the “target” country
and contribute to further violations of human rights.
This statement was meant to explain Lavrov’s participation in the UN
Human Rights Conference in Geneva, taking place that week. The real ear
for this denunciation of “politicized” human rights—i.e., human rights as they
apply to Russia—is in fact the siloviki in the Kremlin. The Russian Foreign
Ministry was telegraphing its loyalty to Moscow.
Haifei Huang, a researcher from University of California Riverside,
published a very
interesting study last year, in which he explained the signaling theory of propaganda. In the
modern world, he said, information is much less censored and restricted—but the
institutions that engage in political communication must send “signals” to the
superiors and subordinates. Also, they have to demonstrate that they are loyal
purveyors of the propaganda wherever and whenever they are charged to
distribute it.
To the Western, democratic imagination, this sounds bizarre and
redundant. Consider how odd it would be for the U.S. State Department to
reaffirm its commitment to Barack Obama’s foreign policies, which it is
duty-bound to carry out in the first place. But under authoritarian regimes,
public declarations of fealty, couched in the discourse of statecraft, are
everyday occurrences. Under Stalin, professions of embracing the party line
were daily occurrences. Putin has revived them.
The problem, though, as Huang points out, is that signaling can reach
everyone including those it’s not intended to. The Foreign Ministry’s messaging
may show an unwavering line to Russians, but foreign embassies read and
translate and disseminate these back to their capitals, and Western
correspondents relay them in international newspapers. The impression given is
that of an arrogant, thin-skinned and geopolitically psychotic nation, whose
interests can only be misunderstood and inevitably transgressed.
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