IN WHAT SENSE IS MODERN RUSSIAN 'POST-SOVIET'?

It is pretty much a common place to say that the Russian language has for the last ten to fifteen years been going through a period of considerable change or even upheaval. And it is a convenient piece of shorthand to describe the language that has been emerging during that period as 'post-Soviet Russian'. After all. in a strictly temporal sense it is no more than a statement of the obvious: the Soviet Union ceased to exist at the end of 1991; therefore present-day Russia is post-Soviet, and the language of post-Soviet Russia must be post-Soviet Russian. But the term post-Soviet does have another meaning, namely caused by, conditioned by, affected by or in some way related to the Soviet past; in other words not only post hoc, but propter hoc as well. The purpose of the present paper is to consider the question to what extent the present-day Russian language can be described as post-Soviet in this second sense, or, conversely, to what extent the developments of the last few years have nothing to do with the Soviet past, either because they relate to a Russian cultural history which encompasses the pre-Soviet period or, alternatively, because they parallel changes which are also taking place in languages which are entirely unaffected by the Soviet experience.

So what changes are taking place in (chronologically) post-Soviet Russian? These can, I would suggest, be summed up under four headings. Two of these headings consist of single word, that is globalisation and regionalisation, and it is no doubt relevant to our present purposes that these two terms can be identified with wider processes which are sometimes seen as taking place in relation to the nation state as a whole. The third and fourth headings require a little more linguistic prolixity: the former is the acceptability in public language of forms that had previously been excluded on one ground or another (other than geographical); the latter, for which the Russian term ernihestvo might be used, can be summed up as the increased use of various sorts of language game, such as puns, euphemisms and allusions.

To look first at globalisation, this must by definition be a phenomenon of widespread, if not universal occurrence. And just as cultural and commercial globalisation is widely perceived as being driven by forces originating in the United States, so linguistic globalisation is usually perceived as anglicisation. Indeed, there can hardly be a language where complaints have not been made with varying degrees of vociferousness and seriousness about the pernicious influence of English. A.D. Duličenko, in a perfectly serious, if avowedly puristic work on the development of Russian in the second half of the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s coins the term rusangl, and the parallels with the long-established franglais and the newer Denglisch are not exactly difficult to spot.

It would be difficult to argue that this perception of the role of English is unjustified: it has been calculated that over 90% of the recent borrowings into Russian come from English, though it is worth noting that only a minority, such as ri`ltor or hizburger, can be positively identified as americanisms. Nevertheless there are in my view good reasons for adopting the term globalisation.

The first point is that English is not the only source of neologisms: Russian putana [gloss], l[straciq and daczybao originate in Italian, Czech and Chinese respectively; the calques zapret na professi[ and ob]estvenno-pravovoe televidenie both come from German. The second point is that English is no more immune from this process than any language, as is illustrated by recently imported food terms, such as panini and fajitas, and EU jargon of the type represented by the phrase acquis communautaire. Then there is the vexed question of pseudo-anglicisms, words which appear to originate in English, but which, in fact, do not exist in that language' my favourite Russian example is f`js-kontrol;.

To see whether the process of globalisation affects Russian in way which can in any useful sense be called post-Soviet it is necessary to examine the process in more detail. If one were to ask the question to what extent globalisation undermines the boundaries between individual languages, a judicious answer a this stage might well be: not very much and mainly in specific contexts. The great majority of loan-words and calques that have appeared in the language fall within a fairly limited number of semantic areas. These are as follows:

(i) market economics and business, for example audit, biznes-plan, broker, vauher, deklarirovat;, diler, distrib;[tor, investor, kontrakt, lizing, marketing, mened'er, opcion, ofis, of(f)wor(nyj), prajs-list, prolongirovat;, promouter, ri`ltor, sponsor, sponsirovat;, taks fri, tender, trejder, f;[hersy;

(ii) a parliamentary and multi-party political system, for example: imid', imid'mejker, inauguraciq, legitimnyj, lobbi, lobbirovat;, ma'oritarnyj, m`r, parlament, proporcional;nyj, senator, spiker, spih, spihrajter, `lektorat;

(iii) sex and violence, for example: bojfrend, gej, gej-klub, gomoseksual, lesbiqnka, masturbaciq, onanizm, orgazm, seks-wop, strip-wou, flagellqciq, frigidnyj> killer, r`ketir;

(iv) the mass media, for example: blokbaster, klip, mass media, n;[smejker, prajm-tajm, press-reliz, prod[ser, slogan, spot, tabloid, tok-wou, triller, wou, wou-biznes, `kskl[zivnyj;

(v) Western-style mass consumption, a category which includes, but is not restricted to terminology related to the fast-food industry, for example: Big-Mak, gamburger, Makhiken, popkorn, xot-dog, hizburger> bukmeker, lifting, pirsing, supermarket, tajmwer, turoperator, flaer.

(vi) Technology, a category which has been expanded in recent years by an influx of computer-related terminology. Examples include Internet, modem, monitor, mul;timedia, mul;timedijnyj, nekompatibel;nyj, noutbuk, pejd'er, printer (matrihnyj, lazernyj), processor, server, skaner, fajl;

(vii) Youth culture, for example: di-d'ej, singl, tinejd'er;

(viii) Sport, for example bodibilding, kikboksing, lajnsman, transfer.

These categories are not watertight: it could be argued that flaer could belong to the categories of mass consumption, youth culture or even the mass media. From a slightly different angle, the highest division of the Russian football league is, like similar structures in other countries, keen to carve out for itself a separate identity; calling itself the prem;er-liga, it has published on its web-site a manifesto which could be and probably is a word-for word translation of the sub-MBA jargon used by businesses all over the anglophone world to promote their activities. As this slightly jaundiced comment indicates, what seems to be happening is the creation of a series of international jargons: a jargon of business, an international football jargon, an international jargon of fast-food, or of computerisation and the Internet and so on.

In so far as this is the case Russian is merely playing its role in a general international process, but there are two points to note. The first is that not all of the categories mentioned above fit into this process. Borrowings in the category of a parliamentary and multi-party political system, as well as many in the categories of sex and violence and the mass media do not really belong to this process of the creation of international jargons. To that extent globalisation in Russian does contain a post-Soviet element: it is fair to say that the rapid and drastic changes that have been made to the political system and to the structure and content of the mass media in the period since 1990-91 have resulted in greater number of loan-words and a more varied pattern of borrowing than might have the case otherwise. To give a specific example, the appearance of the words parlament and spiker in the period following 1991 can be attributed to a many commentators to avoid using the corresponding Soviet terms, which were still technically correct, but had already acquired undesirable political connotations.

The other point concerns perceptions. Russian has always been hospitable to foreign influences (and not only in vocabulary), and therefore the present influx of foreign words is one sense nothing new. if, however, one takes the eight semantic categories mentioned earlier, by my estimation only two of these, sport and technology, provided a regular supply of generally accepted loan-words into Russian during the Soviet period. A third category, youth culture, also provided a number of loan-words, but these for the most part were either marginal or entered a sort of anti-Soviet underground language. Indeed one reason for the import of anglicisms was a desire to dissociate oneself from Soviet reality. It follows from this that a substantial proportion of the words borrowed since the collapse of the Soviet Union, in so far as they belong to categories not generally represented in the earlier period, come inevitably to be associated with the post-1991 changes, and even when they do not relate directly to the politic process, they acquire an extra political charge. In this sense the process of globalisation, although it is essentially the same process as is taking place in a great many languages, has a specifically post-Soviet element which affects the way in which foreign influences are perceived by many users of the language.

Linguistic globalisation, however perceived, is undoubtedly central to the development of post-Soviet Russian. Regionalisation, on the other hand, is much more marginal, at least within the confines of the Russian Federation. One peculiarity of the various events of the 1990s is that they seem to have resulted in a closer match of language and nation state among the Slavs than has existed at any time in history, and in general the development of nation states and the history of language politics in Central and Eastern Europe have not created the sort of conditions that in recent years have favoured the status of such diverse linguistic entities as Catalan, Corsican, Bavarian and even Ulster Scots. As far as Russian is concerned, Lomonosov's claim in his essay O pol'ze knig tserkovnykh v rossiiskom iazyke that 'Narod rossijskij po velikomu prostranstvu obita[]ij, ne vziraq na dal;noe rasstoqnie, govorit povs[du vrazumitel;nym drug drugu qzykom v gorodax i selax' is probably over-complacent, but it is generally true that Russian does not on the whole have regional forms which differ significantly from the standard language and which have sufficient prestige that people might want to use them in, for example, the mass media. There are perhaps two partial exceptions to this, namely the language of the Don Cossacks (which can be considered a russified form of Ukrainian) and the dialects of Siberia, and it is significant that these forms have made a limited appearance in literature, most notably in the novels of Sholokhov and Rasputin. For the most part, however, regionalisms have been eschewed both in literature and the mass media, and where they have occurred, representations of regional speech have tended to be restricted to a small number of stylised features: there has, for example, been nothing on Russian television, even in the post-Soviet period, to compare with those programmes that depend for their effect on the more or less authentic reproduction of regional speech, whether it be comedy programmes, such as the BBC's Rab C. Nesbitt and Austrian television's Tohuwabohu, or regionally based soap operas of the type represented by Coronation Street and EastEnders.

Even in the post-Soviet period there has been only limited use of regional language, most strikingly in the television satire programme Tuwite svet, but there is no real evidence of any campaign or even a desire to raise the status either of regional language in general or of any specific variety. A case can be made for saying that the absence of public representations of regional speech is a consequence of Soviet attitudes: notwithstanding (or possibly even because of) the pronounced regional features present in the speech of more than one Soviet leader, the official view of regional language was mostly negative, a policy which had the imprimatur of no less an authority than Maksim Gor'kii. Nevertheless, the absence of any significant change since 1991 suggests that the low status of regional language is not a mere cultural accretion or imposition of the Soviet regime, but reflects a more deep-rooted reality. Not everything that happened in the Soviet period is necessarily culturally or politically Soviet.

If regionalisation has had little effect inside Russia, the position outside the country is rather more complicated: one phenomenon which is in one way or another to be attributed to the existence of the Soviet Union is the creation of a large Russian diaspora:, a group which now consists not only of the various waves of emigration that ended up in France, the United States, Germany and Israel, but also of the Russian communities who remain in the newly independent states that occupy the post-Soviet space. It seems inevitable that where significant russophone communities exist, the language will acquire regional features if only to reflect local reality: thus in Estonia the term gosudarstvennyj qzyk is used to translate Estonian riigikeel (i.e. Estonian), while the Russian of Israel borrows from Hebrew words such as caxal. In Ukraine and Belarus the juxtaposition of communities speaking closely related languages has led to the creation of mixed forms known respectively as sur'ik and trasqnka, and it would appear that the former has become a generally recognised linguistic entity which plays a specific role in Ukrainian cultural life. These regional forms which develop outside Russia can, it would seem, properly described as post-Soviet.

The third development that has been taking place in post-Soviet Russian can perhaps be described most simply as a stylistic liberalisation of the language. This developments is in my view no less important than the creation of new vocabulary, and indeed for the non-native speaker of Russian (and especially anglophone users of the language) it is in some ways more important, since it is the changes under this heading, rather than the inflow of western-influenced words and phrases, that make the present-day language arguably much more difficult to understand than its Soviet predecessor.

It is generally known that in Soviet times all public language, which means effectively everything that was printed and all formal spoken language (for example in political speeches or the broadcast media) was kept within fairly narrow stylistic bounds. One of the functions of the various layers of editing and censorship that lay between the original text and publication was to ensure that what appeared before the reader, listener or viewer was kept free of anything that was linguistically unsuitable. The category of the linguistically unsuitable was made up of a number of different elements: prominent among these are: extremely colloquial language (prostorehie), the various forms of slang known as 'argon (on which more later) and obscene (or even risqué) words and phrases, i.e. mat and its associated euphemisms.

The rigorous policing of language may seem typically Soviet, and it accords well with the extreme caution and exaggerated concern for seemliness and decorum which characterised cultural life in the Stalin and post-Stalin periods. There is, however, more to it than that. The language dispute at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can be interpreted as a conflict between those who wished to open up the language to foreign influences, but at the same time to keep it within narrow stylistic bounds, and those who supported purism, but stylistic diversity. In this sense Soviet language policy can be seen more as a continuation of the former approach than as something qualitatively new.

It should also be noted that stylistic liberation is, like linguistic globalisation, a phenomenon which is by no means restricted to Russian. Though the precise form it takes varies from language to language, the widening of boundaries and the breaking of linguistic taboos is characteristic of most, if not all European languages. Developments similar to those described for Russian can be found in French and Polish (albeit less widespread in the latter case), and even in English I would draw your attention to the increased use of colloquial vocabulary and syntax in broadsheet newspapers and on national broadcasting stations, not to mention the occasional claims and counter-claims which surface over who was the first to utter a particular four-letter word in a given context.

It is necessary to say a few words about 'argon. This is a term which is surprisingly difficult to define, but one, not very helpful version might be: 'argon. is a collection of words and expressions which are associated with the criminal world and other sub-cultures and which by the common consent of users, recipients and lexicographers is deemed to belong to 'argon.. In fact, most words making up 'argon., even if they came to be associated principally with other sub-cultures, originate in the special language of criminals. It was a category of language regarded as unacceptable in Soviet times; indeed, it is still sometimes described as belonging to something called 'nenormativnyj leksikon'. Since the end of the Soviet system 'argon. has quickly found its way into the mainstream: many terms, including some which were relatively unknown in the early nineties, are now so widely used that they can hardly be regarded as retaining any of the characteristics of 'argon. at all [hand-out]. Classical examples of the public use of 'argon. include President Putin's threat of what he was going to do to the Chechens (mohit; v sortire) and perhaps ought to include the charming phrase which a seventeen-year-old girl used on national television to accuse her boyfriend of humiliating her (opustil menq ni'e plintusa).

It is sometimes said that one reason for the spread of 'argon. in post-Soviet Russian is the fact that the Soviet system, by increasing both the numbers and the categories of people who made first-hand acquaintance with the penal system, ensured that a much wider range of people became familiar with 'argon. than would otherwise have been the case. This is undoubtedly so, but there is no clear evidence of cause and effect. Various forms of slang and unconventional language have entered mainstream communication in languages other than Russian, and 'argonizaciq. can more readily be perceived as part of a much wider, international phenomenon.

This is not to say that 'argon. does not have its specific characteristics. Though it is not strictly speaking a Soviet phenomenon, in that it a continuation of the secret languages of criminals found in the nineteenth century, it undoubtedly acquired certain cultural accretions in the Soviet period, something which brings us back to the question of perceptions. It is significant that many commentators who criticise the effects of globalisation also bemoan the stylistic liberation, and in particular the use of 'argon.. This is a marked change from the traditional pattern of attitudes to language use which I described earlier, and it reflects a perception that associates both stylistic liberalisation and linguistic globalisation with the new political dispensation. Here too, the post-Soviet element of the change is the perception of the change, rather than the change itself.

There is, however, one aspect of stylistic liberalisation which can almost unambiguously be considered post-Soviet. Russian is unusual, if not unique among European languages in one respect, namely that stylistic liberalisation has been bi-directional: though it could be argued that they were following a Karamzinian precept, the Soviet practice of eschewing archaic language and Church Slavonic was undoubtedly influenced first and foremost by political considerations. The new dispensation has seen not only the return to the public domain of writing on religious topics, as might be expected, but also a fashion, perhaps now abating somewhat, for the use of archaisms and Church Slavonicisms in purely secular contexts. [hand-out; old letters]

The final development is, like regionalisation, one which attracts relatively little notice, but it is more important to Russian than regionalisation. This is the tendency for various sorts of language games, a phenomenon which I suggested earlier might be called ernihestvo. This consists of puns and other forms of word-play, allusions, catch-phrases and so on, as well as other forms of linguistic jokes, such as the mixing of different styles or the use of inappropriate styles. One aspect of this last element is the cultural and linguistic phenomenon known as steb. This term, which comes from a verb meaning 'to whip' and which is or was generally regarded as being a 'argon expression, arose in the 1970s. It is usually defined in terms of the parodic use of inappropriate styles in the context of 'sni'enie' (literally 'lowering'). Steb is not purely a linguistic term: perhaps the apotheosis of steb was the notorious rock version of the Soviet national anthem performed by Igor' Ugol'nikov and others and shown on television in November 1991. Its linguistic manifestation can perhaps best be described as the use of 'low' language to describe 'high' matter or, conversely, the use of 'high' language to describe 'low' matter. It manifests itself most obviously in the parodic use of Soviet political language [hand-out], though it is not necessarily restricted to political contexts. Examples of non-political steb would include the notorious parody of Pushkin's Skazka o care Saltane or the so-called Evangelie ot mit'kov.

Linguistic ernihestvo is, like the other developments we have looking at today, not something unique to Russian. Puns and allusions have been the staple of British newspaper headlines since the 1960s; Italian television has a programme about food called Eat parade, a curious example of a pun using English elements that works only in Italian. The use of word-play and allusion is modern language is illustrated in, for example, the supplement of words of the year that the newspaper Libération puts out every December.

When it comes to steb, however, the position is a little more complicated. After all, the parliamentary sketch column, which appears in every British broadsheet newspaper, reflects the use of inappropriate language to describe politics, but no-one has ever considered this a cultural phenomenon worthy of its own name and definition. The point of steb is that a game of subverting hierarchies; it therefore depends for its effect on the existence of generally accepted linguistic-cultural hierarchy. In Western Europe that hierarchy, if it ever existed, has largely disappeared; in the Soviet Union it was maintained with the additional complication that the top position was occupied by political language. It follows from this that steb, as it relates to the Russian language of 1991 and after, is by definition a post-Soviet phenomenon.

To attempt a conclusion, it would seem that the answer to the question posed in the title of this paper is rather complex. In terms of its general development Russian fits into a pattern which is found quite widely in European languages, and there is nothing specifically post-Soviet about globalisation, regionalisation, stylistic liberalisation or ernihestvo. When, however, one examines each of these phenomena in detail, it is possible to find within each certain elements which are direct consequences on the previous Soviet reality. In some instances this is more a matter of perception than of anything else: even though they may be found in a wide range of languages, certain aspects of globalisation and stylistic liberalisation come for particular reasons to be associated with the change of political dispensation. In other instances, as with sur'ik and steb, it is possible to identify real phenomena which would not have come into existence without the Soviet Union.

There is one final point to make. In general the developments which we have been examining here began in Western European languages several decades ago, mostly in the 1960s, and have therefore been taking place gradually and over a period of up to 40 years. Because of the cultural isolation of the Soviet Union over three-quarters of that period, Russian found itself at the beginning of the 1990s having to catch up very rapidly. If the changes themselves are not specifically post-Soviet, the speed at which they have taken place most certainly is.