0010

belonging to this register has been made by Gasan Gusejnov. What began
as a modest venture of compiling a glossary of Soviet ideological idioms
for German students of Russian evolved into a 10-year research project
that resulted in the two-volume publication reviewed in this essay.

These two volumes form one cohesive unit, yet each one is a complete

and self-sufficient book. The volume titled Materials for a Russian Diction-
ary of Socio-Political Language of the 20th Century contains keywords and
phraseological units forming the basis of the current model of contem-
porary Russian discourse, which heavily relies on the language of
ideology. The second volume, Soviet Ideologemes in Russian Discourse of the
1990s, is based on Gusejnov’s Habilitation (Doktor Nauk dissertation),
which analyses the emergence and evolution of the Soviet ideological
language.

The abbreviation DSP that appears in the title of both books is intrigu-

ing, and was deliberately chosen for ambiguity. It does not stand for the
‘Dictionary of Socio-Political Language’ as the reader might infer. A
passion for stump compounds and acronyms that distorted the words and
made their meaning incomprehensible to the language user was a
hallmark of Soviet ideological speech. In the introduction to the diction-
ary Gusejnov explains that DSP may have different interpretations. It
could stand for a euphemistic label ‘for office use only’. In Soviet times,
these words were stamped on classified documents and censored books
preserved in special library departments and inaccessible to rank-and-file
readers. DSP could also be interpreted as material made of pressed saw-
dust and plywood, used for making cheap furniture. In the context of
Gusejnov’s research this alludes to ‘wooden Russian’ – one of the many
pejorative characteristics of the Soviet language of ideology. Still another
possible interpretation offered by the author is pre-Net concepts. This
interpretation implies that the language material included in the diction-
ary and analysed in the monograph is limited to written and oral sources,
while the Russian language of digital communication remains outside the
author’s purview.

The central question that Gusejnov poses in the monograph on Soviet

ideologemes is how changes that have occurred on the geopolitical map
of the former Soviet Union affect speech habits and the mental map of
the post-Soviet personality.

I now attempt a brief review of the contents of the monograph. It

consists of three chapters each divided into sections dealing with specific
problems of ideology and discussing ideologemes on various language
levels. In Chapter 1, the author analyses the notion of Soviet ideology and
its function in the discourse of the first post-Soviet decade. He shows that
one of the major roles of Soviet ideology was educational and targeted
the creation of a ‘new type’ of personality. Gusejnov formulates the

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360

hypothesis that the language of Soviet ideology that evolved in the Soviet
epoch and came to be known as ‘Newspeak’, ‘wooden Russian’ ‘news-
paper jargon’, ‘party slang’ or ‘bureaucratic style’ can be regarded as a
cultural and historical phenomenon in its own right. The author believes
that Soviet ideological language is a broader concept than the language
of official ideology. Since several generations of Soviet citizens were forced
to use it in various spheres of life, it became an inherent part of people’s
mentality. When the Soviet system collapsed and its ideology was no
longer in control of communication, many people realized it was difficult
for them to participate in free and straightforward discourse devoid of
prescribed formulas. The use of ‘ideologically correct’ models of
expression became an essential part of people’s speech habits and more
deeply, models of thinking. And so Newspeak did not disappear, but was
reshaped under the influence of changing social conditions. Moreover, the
version that continued functioning in the first post-Soviet decade revealed
some of its features that had been hidden during the Soviet epoch.

Gusejnov discusses various meanings of the concept ‘ideology’,

comparing the ones accepted in contemporary western sociology and
political science to those that were endorsed by the Soviet partocracy. In
Soviet social sciences ideology was defined as a system of political, legal,
philosophical, moral, artistic and other views expressing interests and
needs of certain social groups. The group whose interests were claimed
to be dominant in Soviet society was the proletariat, and Lenin’s interpret-
ation and adaptation of Marxist theory that came to be known as
Marxism–Leninism was proclaimed to be the theory that met the inter-
ests of the proletariat. Gradually, Marxism–Leninism evolved into a cult
serving as the basis for understanding both natural and social phenom-
ena. Moreover, it was used as a mechanism for influencing the minds and
directing all activities of the society to the realization of the key idea, even
though the latter would change together with the person in power. The
Communist Party was presented as the exponent of Marxism–Leninism
and as such had the role of educator to the entire society. Texts created
by the party leaders reached the public through all the channels available
to the propaganda machine. These texts were to be used as guidelines for
‘correct’ behaviour, and as sources for developing the ‘correct’ worldview.
Constantly reproduced and quoted, they formed the dominating back-
ground of formal as well as informal communication.

Gusejnov points out that contrary to Marx, who thought that the prole-

tariat was capable of emancipating itself from bourgeois ideology and
ultimately of creating history, Leninist theory required that the proletariat
should first acquire the ‘correct’ ideology – the only means that would
enable it to acquire power over reality. Gusejnov’s multiple reiteration of
the adjective ‘correct’ is not accidental: the keynote of Lenin’s theory was

Yelenevskaya Language as a Reflection of Ideology

361

a conviction that it was correct in every respect. The invincible belief of
the masses in the validity of the theory could be achieved through
struggling against such an essential feature of a personality as introspec-
tion and the analysis of one’s own experience.

As follows from the title of the analytical part of Gusejnov’s study, the

main unit of his analysis is the ideologeme (cf. phoneme, morpheme)
defined as a ‘sign or a fixed set of signs guiding participants of communi-
cation to patterns of correct thinking, faultless behavior and warning them
against the forbidden’ (p. 14). Besides verbal, there are non-verbal ideolo-
gemes, such as traditional symbols (e.g. hammer and sickle), pieces of art
and architecture (e.g. portraits and mausoleums), posters, cartoons and
even tattoos. Gusejnov believes that non-verbal representations are linked
to and dominated by verbal forms of expressing ideology and thus are
also subject to philological analysis. The sense of utterances containing
ideologemes is not derived from their explicit meaning but relies
primarily on the subtext, or implicit information accessible only to
insiders. The subtext makes every utterance double-layered and forces
participants in public discourse to disregard explicitly expressed infor-
mation and look for hidden meanings.

The last section of Chapter 1 is devoted to the methods applied in inves-

tigating the language of ideology. The author relies on the method of thick
description developed by Geertz (1983), and successfully used in anthro-
pology and culture studies. In addition, he employs a combination of
linguistic methods, such as integrated language description, concept
construction, trained introspection and reconstruction of the non-verbal
world with the help of meta-language. According to Gusejnov, these
methods, evolved by the Soviet linguists Yu. D. Apresian, I. A. Mel’chuk
and A. K. Zholkovsky, were an attempt to liberate language studies from
the grip of ideology. These researchers rejected the double-layered
verbiage of Soviet social sciences in favour of the language that gener-
ously used elements of everyday speech, could maintain intergenerational
ties and prove that public discourse was capable of diluting aggressive
ideology.

In Chapter 2, Gusejnov convincingly shows that, recruited to be a

vehicle of ideology, the Russian language turned into a reservoir of ideolo-
gemes functioning on all linguistic levels, from a letter or an accent to an
entire text. He starts his analyses with the simplest levels of language.

Among the early reforms of the Soviet power was a spelling reform

conceived still in czarist times and implemented in 1918. By abolishing
four letters of the alphabet that were considered redundant and archaic,
reformers hoped to enable the illiterate to learn to read quickly. Their
second goal was ideological: the reform was viewed as part of the revol-
utionary rebuilding of the world aimed at dissociating the language from

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the culture of the oppressors. But the change in the alphabet had serious
repercussions. Gusejnov mentions the most relevant of them: first,
despite expectations, the reform lowered the level of literacy among those
who had learned to read before 1918. Second, it weakened etymological
ties of words used in modern language to their sources and as a result
made it harder for Russian speakers to learn other Slavic languages.
Third, phonetic expediency was inflated at the expense of meaning, and
the semantic discrimination function of the abandoned letters was lost.
Finally, many classical texts of Russian literature and virtually all
religious literature became inaccessible to most of the readers. Gusejnov
is far from advocating a conservationist approach to language: he is
aware that any language reform inevitably results in gains and losses. In
his opinion, the worst harm was done by the interference in the natural
development of the language and the vigorous attempts at its regimen-
tation. He concludes that it was the first limitation of language freedom
in Soviet Russia that gradually developed into one of the major social
evils brought by the Soviet power. No wonder discussions of the ideo-
logical meaning of the spelling reform of 1918 were censored until the
late 1980s. When the ban was lifted, the reform became a subject of philo-
logical research and debates in the public discourse. In addition, one of
the ‘expelled’ letters (

Ъ) reappeared in the 1990s and came to be used in

two key words of the perestroika period, ‘bank’ and ‘merchant’. By
quoting various media sources Gusejnov shows that this comeback was
not mere nostalgia, but another ideological move – a symbol of the break-
away from the Soviet past.

Besides the letters of the pre-reform and post-reform alphabet,

Gusejnov analyses the ideological role of accent (pronunciation, inflec-
tion, intonation), an ephemeral linguistic sign. Exaggerated and often
distorted, specific accents imitated pronunciation patterns of whole
ethnicities populating the USSR. Each one had its own connotations,
mostly pejorative and they were widely used in folklore, particularly in
xenophobic jokes. Other accents mimicked mannerisms of cult personal-
ities, for example Lenin or Stalin, whose manner of speech was canon-
ized for actors playing their parts in plays and movies. The message
carried by an accent could vary across time. A case in point is the Ukrain-
ian accent in Russian. It used to be a marker of uneducated, unrefined
speech often used to impersonate simpletons. In the 1960s and 1970s,
when Leonid Brezhnev was the general secretary of the Communist Party,
his south Russian pronunciation similar to the Ukrainian accent was
derided as a symbol of bureaucratic stupidity. After the disintegration of
the USSR, particularly during the periods of friction between Russia and
the Ukraine, the representation of Russian as a ‘normal’ language and
Ukrainian as merely its distortion became an argument not only in

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363

informal discourse, but also in the press. This and many other examples
analysed by Gusejnov enable him to show that the paternalistic approach
of the Russian ‘Big Brother’ to ethnic minorities reflected in the language
was bred in the Soviet period and did not disappear in the first post-
Soviet decade. On the contrary, in the absence of censorship it became
more militant and more openly chauvinistic.

In Chapter 2, the reader also learns about the ideologically charged

inflexions, prepositions, names of money and of such key words of the
Soviet epoch as the names of punitive organizations. The longest section
in this chapter is devoted to ideologically biased toponyms, anthro-
ponyms and ethnonyms that invaded the Russian language in the Soviet
era. Gusejnov indicates that the scope and frequency with which towns,
villages, streets and institutions were renamed in the USSR is unmatched
in world practice. He compares patterns of renaming in pre-revolution-
ary, Soviet and post-Soviet Russia and concludes that toponyms were
never viewed as just names, but as an aid to ideology. One of the most
obvious motives for renaming towns and villages in czarist Russia was
the Russification of foreign names (e.g. St Petersburg

→ Petrograd,

Ekaterinstadt

→ Ekaterinograd).

In the first post-revolutionary period, the epidemic of renaming was

triggered by the desire to erase all traces of the old life. The new Soviet
fashion of naming places in honour of the founding fathers of the Com-
munist idea, or of distinguished Bolsheviks and party officials led to the
emergence of dozens of towns and villages bearing the same, or nearly
same, name (e.g. Leningrad, Leninakan, Leninabad, Leninogorsk and so
on). The analysis of the corpus of toponyms on Soviet maps carried out
by Gusejnov reveals that the choice of the leader for any particular
geographic name was not random, but followed the rules of political hier-
archy. Big cities in the centre and in the republics were named after Lenin
or Stalin, smaller ones had to reconcile themselves to honouring less
important party figures. Stalin’s purges, which did not spare his accom-
plices, caused another wave of renaming: those who were deposed and
imprisoned were no longer suitable for commemoration. Their names
were erased from the maps and sometimes replaced by successors. But
these too could be thrown into oblivion just a few years later. After the
Second World War, the process of renaming continued. The general
tendency was to make new toponyms less individualized than their
predecessors. Instead of commemorating individuals, Soviet authorities
turned to commemorating ideologemes themselves, the trend that
spawned ‘Builders’’ streets, ‘Innovators’’ boulevards, ‘Victory’ parks and
so on virtually in every town. The attitude of the people to the juggling
of the names was mostly negative. Some old names remained in everyday
use for years because the new ones were considered ugly and were

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derided in urban folklore, in the media and especially in movies. The
scope of anger caused by what Gusejnov calls a ‘renaming orgy’ became
clear only in the early 1990s, when a massive movement of reinstating
historic names began throughout the entire territory of the former Soviet
Union. But this trend stalled halfway in the mid-1990s because in many
cases it was too difficult to determine which of the previous names was
the most justified from the perspective of history and would not be
contested by the local population. As a result, some of the towns were
renamed but the regions retained their Soviet names, forming absurd
combinations. A case in point is St Petersburg, which is the administrative
centre of the Leningrad region.

The practice of using names of cult figures has not been eradicated on

the territory of the former Soviet Union, only the names have changed.
Gusejnov gives revealing examples of Ukrainian towns. For instance, in
Ivano-Frankovsk about a third of the streets have been renamed since
1991. Moreover, the renaming was symmetric: Soviet ideologemes were
replaced by Ukrainian ones, and names of Soviet public figures by the
names of those Ukrainian politicians or military commanders who were
considered notorious in Soviet times. Gusejnov concludes that when pref-
erence is given to ideology, honest reflections about history are
suppressed. It may well happen that a new twist in the political life of
the countries of the former Soviet Union will reactivate the process of
renaming, and we will see a new selection of names that will suit the
interests of new elites.

The last section of Chapter 2 is devoted to quotations from Stalin’s

writings that have survived to the present day and have become an
integral part of contemporary Russian phraseology. Furthermore, they
still function as ideologemes. The abundance of quotations and allusions
in contemporary Russian discourse is one of its most striking features.
One reason for this is the habit of reinforcing one’s own opinions by
seeking the support of recognized authorities. As if unable to stop
communicating with the help of Lego blocks borrowed from the ‘classics
of Marxism–Leninism’, Russian speakers keep renegotiating their
meaning. Naturally, the pool of popular Russian clichés is not restricted
to Lenin’s and Stalin’s sayings but includes numerous allusions to litera-
ture and movies, as well as quotations from other leaders of the country.
Besides the appeal to authority, an important function of allusions is a
renovation of the sense of the original. When a cliché is paraphrased or
inserted into a context incompatible with the original, the result is the
creation of a new sense and the purpose is often to expose its inconsis-
tency, absurdity, or brutality.

Gusejnov analyses why Stalin’s numerous sayings proved to be so tena-

cious despite the trauma experienced by the nation between the 1920s

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365

and the 1950s, and despite the ban on Stalin’s texts in the years of
Khrushchev’s and Brezhnev’s rule. At the peak of the purges in the 1930s,
it was not uncommon for a person to be sent to a gulag for making a slip
of the tongue when quoting Stalin’s words. Therefore, unlike other verbal
formulas these were indispensable for expressing ‘correct’ opinions, yet
treacherously dangerous. After Stalin’s cult was exposed, his sayings
came to be used to express the opposite of what their author meant. For
instance, one of his most famous utterances, ‘Life has become better, life
has become more cheerful’, today signifies the dramatic deterioration of
any situation and is repeated over and over again in poetry, prose, essays
and informal conversations. On the other hand, others of Stalin’s sayings,
such as the opening of his address to the nation at the beginning of the
Second World War and the maxim ‘Cadres determine everything’ still
retain the pragmatic function of directives. Today, many language users
are already unaware of whose words they are repeating; nevertheless, the
logical structure of Stalin’s sayings and their pragmatic function remains
transparent to them. Whether deliberately or unwittingly, those who
reproduce them capitalize on the exaltation and rhetorical power of the
original. Gusejnov remarks that dozens of Stalin’s quotations presented
as full utterances or only as fragments have become suitable for virtually
any context and any medium, including the internet. The abolition of
censorship brought by perestroika led to the rejuvenation of many
obsolete Soviet clichés in the first post-Soviet decade. And Stalin’s sayings
form a significant part of Soviet ideological ‘antiquities’.

The third and last chapter of the monograph is devoted to obscenities

(mat) as a distinct layer of the language of ideology. Prudish and hypo-
critical, Soviet literary criticism and linguistics stubbornly ignored this
reservoir of imagery and word play as a means of expressing emotions.
Only in recent years, together with emerging interest in conversational
analysis, urban informal talk and contemporary speech genres, have
Russian linguistics made obscene language a topic of research. Gusejnov
is the first to investigate its role as an alternative to official Soviet ideology,
a popular shadow ideology providing Russian speakers with surrogate
freedom in the period when social and cultural life was restricted by
severe censorship.

The supratext of mat is a continuous description of sexual intercourse.

In the course of centuries, a few basic terms have evolved into a complex
and constantly expanding system of derivatives used to denote objects,
people, actions, states, qualities and feelings. Since official Soviet
discourse was ruled by norms and standards of ‘high culture’, mat was
hypocritically claimed to be the register primarily used by criminals and
prisoners and was associated with antisocial activities. The criminal code
defined it as ‘deliberate actions severely violating the social order and

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openly expressing disrespect to society’. But although it was claimed to
be the periphery of the lexical system, in reality mat was constantly
updated, used in different speech genres and by virtually all sectors of
the society. Refusing to admit that the use of mat was an essential part of
people’s speech behaviour, Soviet philology treated it as ‘anti-behaviour’
and ‘anti-culture’.

Gusejnov distinguishes three main functions of the existence of mat.

First, it was used by the party elite as an emotional jargon, a means of
uniting insiders. This was a traditional pre-revolutionary function of mat
that had been observed, documented and described as a specific feature
of the speech of low and middle classes by Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Chekhov
and Gorky. The second function also stems from tradition: simple folks
always resorted to mat to describe hardships and the hopelessness of life.
Therefore, mat flourished in places and institutions in which people’s
freedom was suppressed. Finally, despite the purism of language policies,
mat turned into a mass language game. Used to give vent to frustration,
it was a source of people’s verbal creativity and a reservoir of folk wit.
The ability of mat to develop using all the potential of Russian morphol-
ogy and syntax, as well as its emotional power and ubiquity have
triggered the mystification of mat in the mentality of the layperson.
Moreover, in the last decades of Soviet power, some writers and poets
viewed it as the embodiment of Russian boldness and spiritual power.

Gusejnov is aware that by revealing the role of mat as an opposition to

the ruling ideology, he is challenging conventional views on this language
phenomenon as the jargon of the lower classes. In fact, current attempts
of some philologists to perpetuate mythologization of mat confirms
Gusejnov’s conclusions that its important function is to disrupt the
prescribed norm. He admits that the ideological function of Russian
obscenities is only secondary to others that had been in use before the
Soviet era and will most likely survive in the future, but he claims that
for the period of history which he has investigated, this role should not
be underestimated. Since the goal of the ideology was to replace under-
standing by the manipulation of clichés that served as components of the
‘correct’ worldview, mat disrupted the artificial constructs of official
ideology by being direct and transparent. In addition, it helped alleviate
the stress of life under the Soviets by deriding the exaggerated serious-
ness of official propaganda.

Gusejnov is well equipped with a wealth of examples to defend his

position. He provides subtle analyses of political chastushki (ditties) that
use obscene language to symbolize and subvert power and party leaders,
including Stalin. Then he compares two groups of slogans and official
ideologemes that were used as propaganda and directives for the general
population and prisoners, and shows semantic and pragmatic parallelism

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367

of the two. Almost all of them had shadow versions, parodies that were
generously spiced with mat and destroyed the persuasive power of the
original. The reader also learns about the artistic use of mat in poetry and
prose and about partocrats’ attempts to pretend they were close to simple
folks by using mat. Gusejnov seeks to show that the more intense were
the attempts of Soviet ideology to recruit ‘high literature’ and the national
cultural heritage to be the vehicle of people’s indoctrination the vaster
was the application of mat, the more powerful its opposition to hypocrisy
and subtext.

Chapter 3 also deals with the use of mat in the first post-Soviet decade.

When the norms guiding various aspects of social life began to change,
it was mat that was summoned by Russian speakers to simplify the
perception of and adaptation to the unknown and unfamiliar. After years
of underground existence, mat emerged in public discourse. Gusejnov
shows that the attitude to the fall of language taboos in society is ambiva-
lent. He believes that it is caused partially by the lingering habit of segre-
gating acceptable and unacceptable layers of vocabulary and the inability
to read a text without trying to interpret the subtext. Today public opinion
is polarized and ranges from uncritical approval of the integration of
obscenities into public speech to uncritical rejection of mat. The data of
the first ever sociological survey enquiring about the use of mat by Russian
speakers and cited in Chapter 3 vividly show that whatever people
preach, practice testifies to the widespread use of obscene language
among the population. Gusejnov concludes that not only social freedom
but also language freedom has turned out to be a difficult test for Russian
society. The process of returning to normality in social life is viewed as
returning to common sense, but it is accompanied by fast and unexpected
changes in all spheres of life. To digest them Russian speakers mobilize
the familiar weapon, mat.

As mentioned earlier, the validity of Gusejnov’s analyses and

conclusions is supported by enormous language material. Only a small
part of it is used in the monograph, the bulk of the corpus is scrupulously
documented and classified in Materials for a Russian Dictionary of Socio-
Political Language of the 20th Century. The author does not concentrate on
morphological structure, syntactic functions or stylistic characteristics of
the words and phraseological units but puts them into the context of
extended quotations enabling the reader to see their natural environment
with a wide repertoire of connotations. Examples illustrating each entry
range from single sentences to long excerpts from prose, poetry and
folklore. Entries are arranged in chronological sequence and illustrate
semantic changes that have occurred over time. This approach shows the
logic of the historic evolution of ideologemes from the primary and official
nucleus to the paraphrasing and reinterpretation that occur on the

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periphery of ideology. The book consists of two parts and divides ideolo-
gemes chronologically: those used in the 1990s and those used in the
Soviet period. The system of cross-references enables the reader to trace
semantically related ideologemes used in the 1990s and in the Soviet
period and indicates the direction of semantic changes. The volume is
supplied with three appendices: a chronological index of literature, an
alphabetical list of sources and abbreviations, and an index of names. All
of this makes the dictionary reader-friendly and simplifies the search for
specific items.

The two volumes of DSP complement each other: one by validating

theoretical findings, the other by putting ideologemes into their philo-
logical and semiotic context and providing clues to their interpretation.
Both books are stimulating reading, dynamic and thought provoking.
Gusejnov’s work informs and enhances the quest for understanding how
Soviet ideology captured the minds of the people. But at the same time
his important contribution is in documenting and analysing material that
shows the people’s opposition to ‘zombification’. Resistance was deliber-
ate and conscious as expressed in dissident literature, and naive and
unconscious in folklore and spontaneous speech. Just as the abbreviation
DSP in the title of Gusejnov’s books allows for multiple interpretations,
so can his work be used for multiple purposes by a variety of scholars
ranging from linguists and anthropologists, to historians and sociologists.
Moreover, they are likely to attract all those who are interested in contem-
porary Russian language and culture.

References

Geertz, C. (1983) ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’,

in Robert M. Emmerson (ed.) Contemporary Field Research: A Collection of
Readings, pp. 37–59. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company.

Krysin, L. P. (2004) Issledovania po sovremennomu russkomu iazykui i sotsiolingvistike

[Investigations into Contemporary Russian Language and Sociolinguistics].
Moskva: Iazyki slavianskoi kul’tury.

Matveeva, T. V., ed. (1996) Russkaia razgovornaia rech kak iavlenie gorodskoi kul’tury

[Russian Conversation as a Phenomenon of Urban Culture]. Ekaterinburg: Argo.

Ries, N. (1997) Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation During Perestroika. Ithaca, NY

and London: Cornell University Press.

Ryazanova-Clarke, L. and Wade, T. (1999) The Russian Language Today. London

and New York: Routledge

Shaposhnikov, V. (1998) Russkaia rech 1990-kh. Sovremennaia Rossia v iazykovom

otobrazhenii [Russian Speech in the 1990s. Contemporary Russia and its Reflec-
tion in the Language]. Moskva: MALP.

Zemskaia, E. A., ed. (1996) Russkii iazyk Kontsa XX stoletia (1985–1995) [The Russian

Language of the End of the 20th Century]. Moskva: Iazyki russkoi kul’tury.

Yelenevskaya Language as a Reflection of Ideology

369

résumé:

Les problèmes de la recherche qui avait été censurée par l’Union Sovié-

tique, sont maintenant accessibles au grand public, parmi eux, l’influence de
l’idéologie soviétique sur la langue russe et la mentalité des gens. Le compte rendu
de cet essai analyse le rôle qu’a joué le jargon idéologique soviétique dans la
création d’un ‘nouveau type’ de personnalité. L’auteur se demande pourquoi la
langue qui a empêché l’expression claire et sans détours a-t-elle survécu au
système de la politique soviétique et affect encore de nos jours la communication
de la Russie post-soviétique. De nombreux exemples de discours formel et non-
formel illustrent comment la langue russe est devenue la base d’éléments ayant
un sens idéologique qui fonctionne à tous les niveaux linguistiques, depuis une
lettre ou un accent jusqu’à un texte entier.

resumen:

Los problemas de investigación que fueran censurados en la URSS han

salido a la luz, entre ellos, el influjo de la ideología soviética sobre la lengua rusa
y la mentalidad de los hablantes. El trabajo reseñado en este ensayo analiza el
papel desempeñado por la jerga ideológica soviética en la creación de un ‘nuevo
tipo’ de personalidad. El autor cuestiona por qué la lengua que impide la expre-
sión franca sobrevivió al sistema político soviético y aún afecta la comunicación
en la Rusia post-soviética. Numerosos ejemplos de discurso formal e informal
ilustran cómo la lengua rusa se convirtió en una represa de unidades cargadas de
sentido ideológico que operan en todos los niveles lingüísticos, desde una carta
o una tilde hasta un texto entero.

Biographical Note:

Maria Yelenevskaya is a senior teaching associate at the

Department of Humanities and Arts, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology,
Haifa. She teaches courses of English for Specific Purposes for graduate and
undergraduate students and coordinates the work of the computer-assisted
language laboratory of the Technion. She has published in the areas of sociolin-
guistics, media research, immigration studies and cultural anthropology.
Together with Larisa Fialkova, she has recently published the book A Russian
Street in the Jewish State: Research on the Folklore of the Émigrés of the 1990s in Israel
(Moscow: Russian Academy of Sciences, 2005).

Address:

Department of Humanities and Arts, Technion-Israel Institute of Tech-

nology, Haifa, Israel. [email: ymaria@techunix.technion.ac.il]

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