PROPAGANDISTIC WARTIME LEXICON—SHIFTING LINGUISTIC NORMS
On February 24, Russia’s attack on Ukraine was not only a violation of international law and the sovereignty of another country, but also evidence of collapse of the fundamental functions of language as a means of organization and communication, as well as an instrument of diplomacy and treaties. The war’s outbreak shocked millions of people across the world; they faced the powerlessness of language, the impossibility to describe and convey, with any tools presently at hand, their feelings of what was occurring. It turned out that words were not enough, that words were incapable of expressing the deep feelings that arose out of the ruins of the language-contract, the language of reason.
Jerry Fodor asserted that language is, first of all, a tool to express one’s thoughts, a means of thinking. With the help of language, the brain stabilizes mental activity, explains, and analyzes; language, by doing so, serves as a type of “saving island,” a balance. Without language, the human species would hardly be able to organize a developing society with lasting social ties, to transmit experience and cultural heritage from generation to generation, which would lead to the domination of animal instincts and base needs simply due to the lack of effective means of societal organization. Such instincts concern, among other things, the desire for homicide. Language, not nuclear weapons, is the evolutionary mechanism of restraint meant for cooperation and coexistence.
It would be wrong to count February 24 as the starting point for changes in the Russian language—it is, rather, its apogee. The propaganda developed in recent years (if not decades) has become a symbol of linguistic degradation, something happening at an increasing pace. The degradation lies in the substitution of ideas, the distortion of thoughts, and the language of manipulation; and soon after the war began, there was even a transformation of the basics of spelling in the Russian language—the replacement of the Cyrillic “Z” with the Latin “Z,” the symbol of the “operation” in Ukraine. Such replacements occurred both in the names of some regional publications and newspapers and in the Telegram channel for the Federal Service for Supervision and Communications, Information Technology, and Mass Communications (“KuZbass,” “RoskomnadZor,” “Zabaikal’e”). Beyond this, the level of linguistic aggression on such an unprecedented scale is striking.
“Nazism,” “denazification,” “genocide,” extermination,” “punishers,” “Nazi militants,” “devouring one’s own children” (during the revolution), and “anti-people junta” (2014, 2016, 2018, 2022)—all this dark, terrible, and inhuman rhetoric has been falling upon listeners of the Russian state television channels for the last ten years. Few of them, unfortunately, critically comprehend the information they receive. If we try to understand the reason for such egregious linguistic cruelty and hateful linguistic provocation, then two goals come to light. In principle, they lie on the surface.
The first goal is the obvious incitement of hatred and enmity (Article 282 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation); it is the awakening of “blind rage,” in which a person is often unable to control their actions. For the majority of the world’s inhabitants, the concepts of “Nazism” and “genocide” are sharply, negatively colored. They have an entire complex of associations that evoke inhuman pictures of the crimes of fascism. For the people of Russia, “Nazism” and “genocide” are particularly painful subjects for obvious reasons, as the Second World War came to practically every home and every family. The unceremonious manipulation of these concepts can only be aimed at resurrecting in the public’s consciousness the Second World War, serving as a trigger for both associations and memories of the horrific evidence associated with it. We tend to react more strongly to emotionally charged concepts like these, but with them, a poisonous context begins to penetrate the general consciousness. In this propaganda, there is a substitution of the antagonist. The “world evil” is no longer Nazi Germany but Ukraine. And all the accompanying contexts and representations are built around “Nazi Ukraine.”
The crimes of fascism are studied in schools and universities across Russia, and its horrors are described in countless books and memoirs of eyewitnesses. Unfortunately, there are few remaining living witnesses of the Second World War left. Because of this, we (both in Russia and abroad) encounter thousands of “individual” notions of Nazism. These notions differ greatly depending on the erudition and depth of the question’s study, but they agree on one thing: Nazism is inhuman, merciless, terrifying. Therefore, propaganda, appealing to such scenes and with them, to collective memory, evokes sheer horror. The audience of Russian political and news programs doesn’t “double-check” these concepts presented to them on TV in search of the true meaning of the words, which creates a distorted picture of what is happening in Ukraine. As a result, many are convinced of the correctness and necessity of military action since they are aimed at the destruction of “Nazis.” This propaganda acts as both suggestion and pressure on those not adopting a critical view of the world.
The second goal, which is partly a consequence of the first, is to maintain the fear and anxiety currently present within the population. Such language is meant to intimidate and frighten. Some examples from recent years: “punishers,” “nationalists,” “the right sector” (2014), “Nazi militants,” “they are not the state,” “self-radicalization,” “the regime is committing atrocities” (2016); “mockeries,” “genocide,” “bloodstained crimes,” “Nazis,” “anti-people junta” (2022), “we will take the whole of Ukraine, completely” (2018). This is the language of strength, power, and superiority. And from Vladimir Putin’s address to Ukrainian soldiers: “Your fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers did not fight against the Nazis, defending our common Homeland, so that today’s neo-Nazi could seize power in Ukraine. You took an oath of allegiance to the Ukrainian people and not the anti-people junta, which is robbing Ukraine and mocking these very people.” In this statement can be clearly traced the manipulation of cultural memory and the memory of the Second World War, on the one hand, and emotional jargon on the other. In the thirties and forties, Victor Klemperer wrote: “The language of the Third Reich aims to deprive a person of their individuality, deafen them, turn them into a brainless and will-less unit of the herd, which is whipped and driven in whatever direction wished. This is the language of mass fanaticism.” The rhetoric of Russian state propaganda is now aimed at exactly this “deafening” of the audience and the poisoning of reason. Among other things, all these concepts are located outside the active vocabulary of most Russian speakers (the frequency of the word “Nazism” = 2.3/million; “junta” = 1.3/million; but the word “peace” = 714/million). They also lie beyond the bounds of the everyday linguistic code of Russian speakers used to communicate across different circumstances and different places. The endless repetition of these words, like a mantra to war, “takes root in consciousness.” Sooner or later, they become active units of a native speaker’s vocabulary, which in turn changes their mental vocabulary. Moreover, such rhetoric is used to demonstrate the “strength” and “might” of the government, forming in the speaker confidence in security and protection.
At the same time, due to the lack of these concepts used by propaganda in active lexicon, a person is overwhelmed by this onslaught, being unable to determine the etymologies of complicated concepts and the contexts of their use (Ivan Davydov, 2022; Mikhail Rubin et al). Thus, one can only rely on previous experience, which varies due to many factors: the breadth and depth of one’s knowledge, education, personal relationship to what is happening, and family history. All of this, for example, may determine if the speaker will be able to transfer their knowledge of the military junta in Myanmar to the current situation, establishing that the Ukrainian state has nothing to do with it. Or to consider that a Jew is unlikely to become a Nazi.
The frequency of using the aforementioned concepts has grown sharply in recent years, and many listeners and readers already know these keywords and react to them; the long-term plan of the Russian government’s rhetoric is a systematic, gradient increase in linguistic aggression and the intervention of extremely negative vocabulary across all possible platforms. As a result, a linguistically created artificial space is being formed in Russia, a kind of gray zone where people convinced of the correctness of the war, stupefied and dispirited, are being held hostage. And this space is extremely strained and negatively charged, as its inhabitants are able to begin expressing their anger using the linguistic instruments given them by propaganda. The keywords will remain unchanged, and the rhetoric won’t change, but it will serve as a justification for real, aggressive actions.
Humanity is logocentric. We live within the bounds of defined linguistic codes and use socially stratified language. People in large cities, for example, generally speak in a language not identical to those in small towns; scientists and professors often don’t navigate language in the same way as speakers without formal education. But now, there’s a splintering of established individual linguistic norms, an intervention of concepts extraneous to everyday speech. The aggressive implementation of fundamentally foreign, culturally, and emotionally negatively determined concepts creates an imbalance. The customary linguistic scheme is destroyed and, since the speaker needs to find peace in “language as a means of thinking,” hateful concepts are integrated in everyday speech, thereby losing their cultural, historical, and etymological significance for the speaker. This is quite probably one of the reasons for removing any reference to Ukraine from Russian history textbooks (Nesterova, 2022).
Thus, it is worth regretfully recognizing that it is not only the war, the unprecedented economic crisis, and the growing isolation of Russian culture that will forever change Russian society and leave their mark on it. The language will also change, due to this spread of unprecedented anti-Ukrainian propaganda, and be marred by distorted and altered concepts taking root in the consciousness of the Russian people. And after the war, renewed negative connotations will also take root with them. This is another catastrophe that will overtake Russian speakers who are unable to resist this spread.
Translated by Samuel Driver