A taste for resistance

Philologist Gasan Gusejnov explains how Russian-speakers beyond the Kremlin’s control are learning to use language to undermine the Putin regime

By Dr. Gasan Gusejnov

I can clearly remember the shock I felt in the mid-1960s when I started meeting “first wave” emigrants in Moscow — people who fled Russia during the Civil War or in the first years after the revolution. They spoke much more quietly but with a kind of theatrical accent, carefully articulating every word and often inserting foreign words into their speech, pronouncing them in the same excellent English or French. These people spent 45–50 years in isolation from their native metropolis, maturing and integrating in another world. And the Soviet Russian language had become the moon to them.

But little by little, especially amid the “thaw” after Stalin’s death, the “old” language started returning gradually. Bit by bit, Soviet language made room in both its main dimensions: in official ideological speech (“wooden language,” as it was called) and in the speech of people who didn’t quite fit in. These castaways experienced the same disgust for both the language of the official ideology (which claimed to be prescriptive) and the language of high culture. Pretty much every person lived at the intersection of these three fields. No matter which field dominated, the other two were always there, as well.

The novelty of the Putin era, which will soon have lasted more than a quarter of a century, is twofold. First, Putin, the late firebrand politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and their ideological environment managed to unite two language fields: ideological language (despite the regime’s lack of a specific ideology) and the vile, rude, and hateful language of violence. In Putin’s speech cloaca, there’s simply no place for the language of culture, science, knowledge, and education.

An analysis of public speeches made by Putin or Zhirinovsky set against concrete actions taken by these Russian state figures (and many others) shows that these orators have relied on two basic discursive points: constant lies and constant threats. Both of these rhetorical components have broken through into real policies on several occasions: notably, during the last war in Chechnya at the start of the century and in the attacks on Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 and especially after February 24, 2022.

Over the past 20-odd years, hundreds of thousands of people have flowed out the Russian Federation. Of course, not everyone is consciously “fleeing Putin’s language,” but numerous in-depth interviews show that a leading cause for unhappiness among these people is the intolerance of the established public discourse of fear and threats.

Many prominent writers and scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs, artists and students, teachers, and also people without any specific profession have recently moved from Russia to other partially or completely non-Russian-speaking republics of the former USSR — from Latvia to Ukraine, from Kazakhstan to Georgia, and much farther abroad, too. One of the main impressions new arrivals in these countries have described is that the Russian language they encounter is different generally, not just in the tone and style of conversation. The same people who looked down on migrant workers not long ago for speaking Russian poorly now find themselves in an unfamiliar role. Emigrants have also adjusted to the fact that Russia’s state media is silent when it comes to things the rest of the world would have been screaming about for ages, though it’s just a conversation, not shouting, in a democratic society.

Since the February invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s public dialogue has drowned completely in lies and aggression. Millions of people somehow adapted to this and even began following the authorities’ orders. For example, instead of “explosions” they say “pops,” instead of “killed” they say “cargo 200” (using the military jargon for coffins in transport), and instead of “war” they say “special military operation” or just “SVO” (spetsialnaya voennaya operatsiya) for short.

This consent by tens of millions to repeat their masters’ lies has also forced hundreds of thousands of other people (maybe the number will actually reach the millions, with time) to leave their old community and appeal to the world with their own message: “We’re different Russians!”

Ukrainians make up an even larger cohort of Russian-speaking immigrants around the world. They’ve fled mostly to Europe (especially Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic) and not western Ukraine, much like the Russian-speakers from the country’s easternmost regions, where the Russian army invaded under the pretext of protecting these “Russians” from “Ukrainian Nazis” who were supposedly “banning the Russian language.”

At the same time, policies toward the Russian language are changing in Ukraine. Russian-language mass media is now broadcasting around the clock. The audience for several channels (for example, FREEDOM) is both the public inside the Russian Federation and Ukraine’s own Russian-speaking diaspora. The talking heads invited to appear on these stations are frequently bilingual (fluent in both Ukrainian and Russian), but even more often they’re Russian-speaking figures in the anti-Kremlin opposition.

Though the hosts and guests on these programs sometimes repeat elements of propaganda and military censorship, the material differs radically from Russia’s own censored media in terms of literacy, content, and logic: it’s the Russian political language that disappeared long ago from Russia’s mass media. You can find critical Russian-language political analysis in Kazakhstan and Georgia, where the media landscape is gradually adapting to the growing Russian diaspora. (According to my own observations, there are two countries whose artistic and scholarly elite fundamentally oppose the revival of Russian speech: Ukraine after 2014 and Georgia since 2008.)

Vladimir Putin is sometimes accused of wanting to restore the USSR, no longer based on internationalist ideology but as a Russian nation-state that subjugates its minorities. To some extent, this plan (if it ever existed) is now being implemented by the diaspora settling in Central Asia and the South Caucasus, as well as in the Baltic states. Unlike the former Soviet Union, however, the new Russian diaspora isn’t tasked with the function of “keeping watch” over the “national periphery.” Moscow professors, as was the case during the Second World War, have already started teaching in the universities of Tashkent, Almaty, Bishkek, and even Tbilisi, where apprehensions about Russians are strong, albeit tempered by local hospitality.

The Russian language also remains a lingua franca for many people from the Tuva, Buryatia, or Volga regions when they find themselves abroad. The concept of “Russian as a language of intercultural interaction” allows members of ethnic minorities to broaden their usage of Russian in parallel with the development of their own languages. This happens even when they face discrimination on the basis of ethnicity. In parallel, Russia’s official narrative predominantly presents the former Soviet republics as bent on persecuting and even exacting revenge against Russians for the USSR’s “historical transgressions.”

But what makes today’s cohort of Russian-speakers leaving the country distinct from the refugees who escaped between 1918 and 1921 during the Civil War or in the 1940s after the Second World War? How are they different from the “third wave” emigrants who fled during the Cold War? The answer has to do with both the new technologies that have emerged and the new awareness among these people of their potentially low status abroad. For many, the Russian language is still of paramount importance — more meaningful than material wealth or spiritual bonds. Even many immigrants from Ukraine who end up in places like Germany are committed to preserving the Russian language.

At the very start of the conflict, many in Ukraine, as well as Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the diaspora, extended the discourse of the war with Russia to relations between the two languages. The intelligentsia of largely Russian-speaking cities like Odesa began not only studying Ukrainian but also using it in conversations on social media. As the war expanded and the Russian army seized territories in Ukraine’s predominantly Russian-speaking east, however, the fight against the invasion became (for some) a war against the Russian Federation for the right to the Russian language itself.

Thanks to the expansion of Russian-language broadcasting from the Ukrainian side, it’s become clear that Ukraine’s resistance is devoted not just to upholding Ukrainians’ right to their own language but also to denying Putin’s Russia the right to its cynical abuse of the Russian language.

This is where the direction of Ukraine’s future language policies coincides with the vector of language policies adopted spontaneously by minorities in Russia, who were legally deprived in 2018 of the capacity to develop their own languages. Over the past quarter of a century, the Putin regime and its supporters have transformed public communication in Russian into a cesspool. This is why any attempt to describe clearly what is happening now in Russia simultaneously exposes all the ways in which the language is abused, from the criminal slang that animates politics to countless conspiracy theories and the Russian Orthodox Church’s ecclesiastical rhetoric.

Less than a year has passed since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and millions of Russian-speaking Ukrainians and hundreds of thousands of refugees from Russia have been learning to use Russian as a language of resistance against the Putin regime. In Russian, Ukrainian refugees and mass media report on the Russian army’s crimes in Ukraine. Speaking this same language, Russian citizens use the Internet to report the authorities’ crimes inside Russia itself.

These events caught the Slavic community in the West by surprise. Traditional interactions with Russia’s scientific and academic institutes have ceased, and those in Europe and the United States who adhere to Putin’s “Russkiy Mir” revanchism have been thrown into some confusion. Meanwhile, in Russia’s former colonies (in Central Asia, the South Caucasus, the Balkans, and the nations of the Baltics and Eastern Europe), universities and schools are already receiving an influx of refugees from Russia. The growth of online education also keeps the Russian language from becoming obsolete.

Russian-speakers — especially young ones — are developing a taste for language resistance, and they’re getting support in this from the new media, whether it’s NEXTA in Poland, Priamyi and Current Time in Ukraine, Dozhd and Meduza in Latvia, or others elsewhere. Of course, there are pockets of cultural resistance still inside Russia, but the state media does everything possible to isolate the diaspora as an “insignificant minority of misfits” from the “true-to-itself majority” in the metropolis. In other words, the Russian authorities are well aware of the threat they face from free speech, wherever it is practiced.

Translated from Russian by Kevin Rothrock