Death, deceit, dehumanization: War permeates the Russian language

Coded vocabulary and semantic shifts are dramatically transforming the language not just of soldiers, but of the Russian public at large. Russian “newspeak” distorts both current reality and interpersonal relationships, reducing human beings to monetized units and denying the values of all but the Russian state.

The past year has brought two indicators that sweeping changes are taking place in the Russian language: 1) publication of a two-volume Explanatory Dictionary of the State Language of the Russian Federation (vol. 1 & vol. 2, see previous report in the Barents Observer), and 2) leakage of over 9000 personal appeals to Tatyana Nikolaevna Moskalkova, the Russian Commissioner for Human Rights (discovered by Echo of Moscow and further analyzed as a Dictionary of War by Aleksandra Arkhipova and Yuriy Lapshin), over 70% of which come from soldiers and their family members. While on the one hand the Explanatory Dictionary was imposed from the heights of the Kremlin, and on the other hand the Dictionary of War has emerged from the grassroots of individual despair, these two perspectives on modern Russian vocabulary are mutually reinforcing and reveal a coherent direction of metamorphosis.

Especially prominent in the Dictionary of War are two ways to speak of death. “Two hundred”, a code for “dead” that goes back to the Afghan war, yields a derived verb: “make two hundred” (and intransitive “become two hundred”), specifying death at the hands of Ukrainian forces. By contrast, “make zero” designates death inflicted by one’s own commander, a reprisal for refusal to go into the combat zone. Both terms invoke mathematical detachment from the reality of dying, part of a larger pattern including “three hundred” = wounded (also a continuation from the 1980s), and “five hundred” = deserter (an innovation of the current war), which when derived as a verb means “accuse of desertion”, another tactic used by commanders to terrorize their troops. 

An alphabet soup of abbreviations further clouds connection to difficult realities. “LBS” is the “line of combat contact” (the battlefield). “BP” is “missing in action” (a status that stands between families and death benefits). “V-status” designates those who have signed contracts from penal colonies in hopes of expunging their crimes, but who are destined to remain at the bottom rung in the hierarchy of military personnel. “SOCH” stands for “unauthorized departure from a military unit”, basically desertion, sometimes mockingly connected with the name of a resort town, as in the slang phrase “go to SOCHI”.

The dividing line between civilian life and miliary service is drawn distinctly, demarcating a place “beyond the ribbon” where normal laws do not apply, from whence one cannot expect rescue or deliverance, regardless of wounds, illness, or the expiry of one’s contract. “Getting written off” = release from service is a distant illusion, almost never achieved. Ultimately a soldier becomes merely “meat”, a modern rendition of “cannon fodder”, whose sole purpose is to use up ammunition from the other side. Separation from one’s identity is signaled by use of call names such as “Wild Boar” and “Executioner”, a practice that has under the current war of aggression spread from the upper ranks to all combat personnel. Depersonalization of the self and identity are reinforced by the Explanatory Dictionary that defines a wide range of intimate human concepts, among them “life”, “family”, “dignity”, “mercy”, as “traditional spiritual and moral values of the Russian state”. This Dictionary further dictates to the populace that that a “patriot” is someone who is “prepared to make personal sacrifices and perform heroic deeds for the sake of the motherland”, and that “authoritarianism” is “the most effective form of government during difficult times for a country”, underpinning the absolute authority of commanders.

The very word “Ukraine” has been disappearing from Putin’s vocabulary (cf. our longitudinal study), a practice mimicked also in appeals to the Commissioner of Human Rights. Since it is illegal in Russia to use the word “war”, words that would even imply a war are ruled out, including “occupied” or “captured” territories. Instead, the public, the press, and the Kremlin resort to “freed territories”, “reunited territories”, and “new territories/regions”. These clumsy circumlocutions are misleading, suggesting the effacement of Ukraine as a sovereign state. 

Especially disturbing is rampant corruption fueled by enormous bonuses, payments, and death benefits, promises that often go unfulfilled. These sums often mean that a dead soldier is worth more than he could conceivably earn in all the rest of his life, creating an unsustainable economy of death. The vulnerable situation of soldiers is particularly exploited by commanders, who extort huge sums from families for supposed protections, steal soldiers’ bank cards, and demand that soldiers pay for equipment and downed drones. “Black widows” register fictitious or coerced (by means of alcohol) marriages to reap rewards for their “losses”.

The authors of the Dictionary of War emphasize that military vocabulary has leaked into all layers of civilian life. Children play at “making each other zero” and get bullied in the schoolyard because their fathers are “SOCH”.