Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-94fs2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-17T12:21:19.810Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Metaphors of Dictatorship and Democracy: Change in the Russian Political Lexicon and the Transformation of Russian Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Richard D. Anderson Jr.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Metaphors act as cues to social identities. Political discourse that communicates the distinctiveness of the rulers' identity sustains authoritarianism by cueing people to act as either oppressors or oppressed, while political discourse that cues identification by citizens with politicians promotes democracy by encouraging people to participate. In Politburo speeches from the era of Soviet authoritarianism, metaphors of size, superiority, distance, and subordination were abundant. These metaphors are suitable for emphasizing the separateness of politics from ordinary life and for communicating the inferiority of the populace. In Politburo speeches from the transition year 1989, these metaphors had already begun to decrease in frequency, while new metaphors, often borrowed from the discourse of international diplomacy, deconstructed the rulers' claims to continuing authority. In Russian political discourse from the first years of electoral politics, authoritarian metaphors decline even more sharply and are replaced by metaphors of choice and identification suitable for encouraging people to align themselves with electoral candidates.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 60 , Issue 2 , Summer 2001 , pp. 312 - 335
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2001

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. Lasswell, Harold D., “Style in the Language of Politics,” in Lasswell, Harold D., Leites, Nathan, et al., eds., Language of Politics: Studies in Quantitative Semantics (New York, 1949), 29, 31.Google Scholar

2. Some representative works in English include Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass., 1992); Corfield, Penelope J., ed., Language, History and Class (Oxford, 1991)Google Scholar; Duranti, Alessandro, From Grammar to Politics: Linguistic Anthropology in a Western Samoan Village (Berkeley, 1994)Google Scholar; O'Barr, William M. and O'Barr, Jean F., eds., Language and Politics (The Hague, 1976)Google Scholar; Burke, Peter and Porter, Roy, eds., Language, Self and Society: A Social History of Language (Cambridge, Eng., 1991).Google Scholar A specific study of discursive processes in the collapse of Soviet institutions is Michael Urban, The Rebirth of Politics in Russia (Cambridge, Eng., 1997).

3. Beaugrande, Robert de, “Text Linguistics in Discourse Studies,” in van Dijk, Teun A., ed., Disciplines of Discourse (London, 1985), 47.Google Scholar

4. Brown, Gillian and Yule, George, Discourse Analysis (Cambridge Eng., 1983), 1–3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. Anttila, Raimo and Embleton, Sheila, “The Iconic Index: From Sound Change to Rhyming Slang,” in Simone, Raffaele, ed., Iconicity in Language (Philadelphia, 1995)Google Scholar; Gumperz, John J., ed., Language and Social Identity (Cambridge, Eng., 1982)Google Scholar; Schiffrin, Deborah, Discourse Markers (Cambridge, Eng., 1987), 12 Google Scholar; Brown, Penelope and Levinson, Stephen C., Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage (New York, 1987), esp. 181-86.Google Scholar

6. Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago, 1980)Google Scholar; Johnson, Mark, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago, 1987)Google Scholar; Lakoff, George, “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor,” in Ortony, Andrew, ed., Metaphor and Thought, 2d ed. (Cambridge, Eng., 1993)Google ScholarPubMed; Sweetser, Eve, From Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphorical and Cultural Aspects of Semantic Structure (New York, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gibbs, Raymond W. Jr., “Figurative Thought and Figurative Language,” in Gernsbacher, Morton Ann, ed., Handbook of Psycholinguistics (San Diego, 1994)Google Scholar; Lakoff, George, Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know That Liberals Don't (Chicago, 1996)Google Scholar; Heine, Bernd, Cognitive Foundations of Grammar (New York, 1997).Google Scholar

7. The bifurcation of Soviet society has been widely recognized. For two examples, see Roeder, Philip G., Red Sunset: The Failure of Soviet Politics (Princeton, 1993), 29–30 Google Scholar; Jowitt, Ken, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley, 1992), 64–73, 127.Google Scholar

8. Rosenstone, Steven J. and Hansen, John Mark, Mobilization, Participation, and Democracy in America (New York, 1993), 19, 36.Google Scholar

9. Geis, Michael L., The Language of Politics (New York, 1987), viii.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. Bolinger, Dwight, Meaning and Form (New York, 1977), x.Google Scholar

11. Anderson, Richard D. Jr., “Speech and Democracy in Russia: Responses to Political Texts in Three Russian Cities,” British Journal of Political Science 27, no. 1 (January 1997): 23–45 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Anderson, Richard D. Jr., Chervyakov, Valery I., and Parshin, Pavel B., “Words Matter: Linguistic Conditions for Democracy in Russia,” Slavic Review 54, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 869-95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12. Anderson, Richard D. Jr., “'Look at All Those Nouns in a Row': Authoritarianism, Democracy, and the Iconicity of Political Russian,” Political Communication 13, no. 2 (April-June 1996): 145-64CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Anderson, , “Pragmatic Ambiguity and Partisanship in Russia's Emerging Democracy,” in Feldman, Ofer and Landtsheer, Christ'l de, eds., Politically Speaking: A Worldwide Examination of Language Used in the Public Sphere (Westport, Conn., 1998).Google Scholar

13. Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 22-24.

14. Ibid., 127.

15. Zasorina, L. N., ed., Chastotnyi slovar’ russkogo iazyka (Moscow, 1977).Google Scholar

16. Biurokratiia i obshchestva (Moscow, 1991), 220.

17. Protchenko, I. F., Leksika i slovoobrazovanie russkogo iazyka sovetskoi epokhi: Sotsiolingvisticheskii aspekt, 2d exp. ed. (Moscow, 1985), 151-64.Google Scholar

18. Boris Kapustin, “Sovremenna li rossiiskaia vlast'?” Strategiia, 1998, no. 1:129 (emphasis in original).

19. Edelman, Murray, Constructing the Political Spectacle (Chicago, 1988), 13 Google Scholar; see also Donald Schoen, “Generative Metaphor: A Perspective on Problem Setting in Social Policy,” and Robert J. Sternberg, Roger Tourangeau, and Georgia Nigro, “Metaphor, Induction and Social Policy: The Convergence of Macroscopic and Microscopic Views,” both in Ortony, ed., Metaphor and Thought, 137-63, 277-303.

20. Petrocik, John, “Issue Ownership in Presidential Elections, with a 1980 Case Study,” American Journal of Political Science 40, no. 3 (August 1996): 825-50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21. Chemykh, P. Ia., Istoriko-etimologicheskii slovar’ sovremennogo russkogo iazyka, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1993), 2:211.Google Scholar

22. “Zakliuchitel'noe slovo M. S. Gorbacheva na soveshchanii v TsK KPSS,” Pravda, 21 July 1989, 1.

23. Eduard Volodin, “Slovar’ perevernutogo vremeni,” Sovetskaia Rossiia, 12 September 1992.

24. Arkadii Udal'tsov, interview, Moscow, 21 October 1992.

25. Protchenko, Leksika i slovoobrazovanie russkogo iazyka, 127.

26. Sovremennyi slovar’ inostrannykh slov (Moscow, 1993), 303, 308.

27. “Zakliuchitel'noe slovo M. S. Gorbacheva na Plenume TsK KPSS 25 aprelia 1989 goda,” Pravda, 27 April 1989, 2.

28. Slovar’ sovremennogo russkogo literaturnogo iazyka (Moscow, 1961), 12:1103.

29. Slovar'russkogo iazyka, 4 vols. (Moscow, 1983), 3:694.

30. Chernykh, Istoriko-etimologicheskii slovar’ sovremennogo russkogo iazyka, 1:586.

31. See, for example, Scott E. Lively, David B. Pisoni, and Stephen D. Goldinger, “Spoken Word Recognition: Research and Theory,” and David A. Balota, “Visual Word Recognition: The Journey from Features to Meaning,” both in Gernsbacher, ed., Handbook of Psycholinguistics.

32. Sovremennyi slovar’ inostrannykh slov, 516.