Endless February

Talking About the War in Code

In August 2022, a well-known Moscow art gallery opened a show called “Black Calendar.” Against a dark-brown background, ghostly white figures engage in hand-to-hand combat, point weapons at one another, sink into swamps, cower in shelters, unroll endless coils of barbed wire, and peer out of lookout towers.

To fully appreciate the impact of these works on Moscow gallery-goers, you have to imagine the atmosphere in the capital of a country at war, where even pronouncing that word (to say nothing of voicing antiwar sentiments) can land you in prison. In stores, public transportation, at work, the elephant in the room is never mentioned – it’s too dangerous. Never in the history of modern Russia has voicing an opinion been treated so harshly. According to figures from the human-rights project OVD-Info, between February 24, 2022 and January 2023, 420 criminal and 5,600 administrative cases have been initiated. Approximately 20,000 people have been arrested, some for publicly protesting, others for social media posts, wearing a potentially antiwar t-shirt or button, or just for saying the wrong thing. At police stations, arrestees are often beaten.

So how does an art gallery get away with holding an anti-militarism show in the center of Moscow? The trick was to throw the powers that be off the scent by making the descriptions of the works as misleading as possible. While all of the paintings were dated 2022, it was emphasized that the series was begun in 2020, when the artist traveled to the North Pole. The curator wrote about some nomadic tribes battling a harsh climate and hostile natural environment to make a home for themselves.

This art show is not an isolated case. Even in government exhibition halls you can find veiled expressions of anti-government sentiment. As the director of one of Moscow’s district galleries (which are part of a government run and controlled program) put it: “I had a show in December 2022. It featured gloomy works about Russian chthon,[1] but overall it was absolutely neutral and safe and there were no problems getting it approved. The nose-thumbing was conceptual: a trousseau chest, an audio installation, and other details that together made a statement about brides, about how in Russia, in these dark times, there will be many fiancées who will remain just that forever on.”

Statements like these are made not only through art, but also in everyday life. Yellow and blue or funereal black clothing, pictures on social media incorporating the current number of days the war has been going on, or of someone holding the novel Nineteen-Eighty-Four – people find many ways to signal that they don’t support what is happening.

Of course, the war of metaphors is being primarily waged on the level of language. Over a year of war, Russian has been enriched with dozens of words and expressions to represent the new reality. This linguistic stratum has two components: the language of repression by the authorities, and the spontaneous language of resistance. The government demands that the war be called a “special operation,” that the invasion be called “defense,” and that occupied territories be described as “liberated.” The close resemblance between this vocabulary and the “Newspeak” of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has generated a multitude of memes and jokes starring the British author. One of the most popular goes like this:

“Did you know that they’ve put up a monument to Orwell in Russia?”

“Where?”

“Well, just about everywhere.”

This is the language of resistance.

“It’s become clear that you can say speak your mind only within a limited circle,” the gallery director responded when asked whether the word “war” is ever used within the gallery’s walls. “If I was giving a tour that included people I didn’t know, I would say something like ‘under the present circumstances.’ To sacrifice yourself for no reason, knowing that you’re not achieving anything, doesn’t feel right. Yes, that language of ambiguity has taken shape. Here, people move back and forth between frankness and neutral versions. That is, you say what you mean, when possible; otherwise you’re very evasive. Some people say ironically, ‘the so-called special operation,’ and sometimes these formulations are footnoted, along the lines of ‘the special operation, as it is generally referred to here.’”

“The current situation,” “in the present context,” “under our difficult circumstances,” “during hard times,” “in a perilous situation,” “in the world we find ourselves in” – you don’t have to be an oppositionist to understand that these formulations refer to “war” or “wartime.” There are also a multitude of memes that substitute the term “war” with the euphemism “special operation” in catchphrases: “Grandma always said, ‘Just let there be no special operation’” (a phrase often heard from the older generation during the late-Soviet period, without the euphemism, of course); “Do Russians Want a Special Operation?” (a nod to a famous 1961 antiwar song written by the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko[2]); “The Great Patriotic Special Operation” (Russians routinely refer to the portion of World War II after June 22, 1941, as “The Great Patriotic War”); “Star Special Operations” (instead of Star Wars); and “Special Operation and Peace” (the novel Tolstoy never wrote).

A good way to trace the deterioration of free speech in Russia is through a chronology of the protest actions taken by the artist Alisa Gorshenina. As the war was beginning, in February and early March of last year, when the word “war” had not yet been banned, she managed to walk around the city in a coat emblazoned with the phrase “No to War” in large letters.

Next, she made an outfit with this phrase, but encoded in the languages of Russia’s less numerous peoples. After that, even in those languages the artist had to limit herself to the word for peace (mir), and for International Day of Peace (May 1) she dressed up as an angel, her costume again inscribed with this word in Russia’s languages of limited diffusion.

By summer, it became clear that even mir was off limits, and Gorshenina (@alicehualice on Instagram, where she has nearly 100,000 followers) circulated photographs of herself in a blood-red dress holding a large pillow in the shape of a heart, on which the word for pain was written, again in the languages of Russia’s smaller ethnic groups. The evolution of the content used in these forms of protest represents the transition from direct expression toward allegory, understandable only in context.

Inevitably, today’s opposition draws on the experience of Soviet dissidents. Again quoting the gallery director: “It’s interesting, on one hand, to use Aesopian language, especially as our generation has never had to resort to that before. We didn’t have to, but we were very familiar with it, because it permeates the entire literary corpus and social commentary… I understand that this is a large and useful set of experience that will be beneficial, but, on the other hand, it’s disheartening, knowing that this is bound to come to an end, and things that are incisive and interesting in the moment will age quickly. That sort of work is hard to appreciate without a Talmud of footnotes, and if you’re not an art historian, you probably won’t be interested. That’s not a game I want to play, but I don’t seem to have a choice.”

In 1984, the Russian poet and essayist Lev Loseff, who emigrated to the United States in the 1970s, published the monograph, On the Beneficence of Censorship: Aesopian Language in Modern Russian Literature. In describing the phenomenon of Aesopian language, Loseff used the idea of “screens” and “markers.” The screen is the outer layer of an utterance that hides its essence from the censor. The marker is a sort of secret sign, a hint, that allows the initiated to understand the true meaning of the words. If we borrow this literary concept and apply it to, for example, the Black Calendar show, the misleading explanations of the paintings served as a “screen” and the show’s name as a “marker.” From the start of the full-scale invasion, the idea took hold of a sort of bewitched calendar or broken clock eternally stuck in February. The very word “February” has become yet another common stand-in for the word “war.” When people say “since February,” they mean “since the war began” and when they say “in February” they mean “when the war began.”

It is still early to talk about an established Aesopian language in literature. First, it will take time before new works can be written and published. Further, the situation for today’s authors is very different from what Soviet authors experienced. Dissident authors in Soviet times had a choice: to write “for the desk drawer” or to publish works written in Aesopian language. There was also the option of smuggling a text out of the country for publication in the West, but then it wouldn’t be read by people living in the Soviet Union. Today, borders remain more-or-less permeable. To get a banned work out of the country, it’s no longer necessary to find someone willing to sew it into the lining of their coat – all it takes is hitting “SEND” on an email. For example, antiwar Russian poetry, including translations into multiple languages, is being published on the website ROAR, created by the writer Linor Goralik, who currently lives in Israel. The site is blocked inside the Russian Federation, but all you need is a VPN to access it.

Children’s literature publishing has become an interesting phenomenon. Parents wishing to resist indoctrination need paper books offering an alternative, anti-militaristic perspective. Some independent publishers of children’s literature have managed to augment their catalog of such books, a sort of protest act in and of itself. For example, late last year at Non/fiction, a major book fair held in Moscow, the publisher Samokat had to remove the illustrated album Voina [War] from its display. The book was dedicated to the monstrosity of war in general, and was in no way tied to events in Ukraine, but it was released soon after the invasion, which looked rather bold. “We sent it to press in early March,” the head of the publishing company Irina Balakhonova said, “And this was the very time when there was nothing – no paper, ink, cylinders [due to disruptions from the imposition of sanctions], and we thought that, maybe the book would be ready in half a year, or in three months at the earliest. But it came out three weeks later, and we realized what great solidarity we have in the guild.”

Before year’s end, Samokat released several more books about war for children of various ages, produced at a greatly accelerated pace, some translated from other languages. One was a Russian book written over the past few months. In this case, there was no getting by without Aesopian language. The novella Sit and Watch, created by two authors hiding behind pseudonyms, consists of a monolog by a little girl whose family is suffering through bombardments. The geographic names are made up, and it’s not clear who’s bombing whom, but the book has rather obvious “markers,” from the fact that the girl writes about being stuck in an endless February, to parodies of the language of propaganda.

One lovely aspect of Aesopian language is that, even if the censors recognize a “marker,” they may be hesitant to point it out, since doing so puts them in the position of giving voice to an objectionable interpretation. A censor could be asked, “So why do you think it’s the Russian side being described as the aggressor?”

During the second half of the twentieth century, there was an entire genre of literature dedicated to the tragedy of war and how it should never be repeated. Publisher Balakhonova, who is no longer in Russia, described the quandary facing the powers that be: “They are the very people who grew up on Soviet antiwar slogans. They are also suffering from a sort of cognitive dissonance: ‘So what’s going on? Now children are going to be taught how to kill one another?’ I have trouble imagining them saying the words ‘We are a terrorist state.’ They are afraid to say those words, and we, of course, use that to our advantage.”

The invasion of Ukraine is not the only out-of-bounds topic. Other examples include regime change, revolution, or government coups. This taboo has generated true masterpieces of Aesopian language. One example is the use of Swan Lake. In the Soviet era, broadcasts of Tchaikovsky’s famous ballet being performed at the Bolshoi Theater appeared on television screens at times of momentous but awkward-to-discuss turning points, such as the deaths of Communist Party general secretaries and, most notably, the August 1991 coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev. These days, the name Swan Lake or even just the word “ballet” or the image of a ballerina – which is used in graffiti – serves as a sort of code for something truly awkward to contemplate from the Kremlin’s standpoint: the departure of a tyrant.

Sometimes words emerge to express disdain rather than to encode messages. The neologisms nedosvastika [not quite a swastika] and polusvastika [semi-swastika], rather apt descriptions of the Latin letter Z that has been turned into a sign of prowar “patriotism,” knock this symbol off its semantic foundation. And by changing just one letter, the Russian word for mobilization, mobilizatsiya has become mogilizatsiya (“gravization”), a dark reference to the hole in the ground where so many Russian soldiers are ending up. Meanwhile, Putin himself has acquired a whole array of insulting new nicknames: the tsar, the top thief, the deranged grandfather, the bunker dotard, the dwarf, the KGBshnik [KGB agent],[3] and others that are unprintable.

The street artist Misha Marker created a piece that plays cleverly with both restrictions on free speech and the name of the man who started the war. A sign he put up in a St. Petersburg neighborhood features the name and patronymic of Russia’s president leaving blank spaces where the letters M I R, which spell the word for “peace,” would have been: VLADI  VLADI  OVICH. The result is a double entendre: not only did the president abolish peacetime life; he also banned the very word “peace.”

The anthropologist Alexandra Arkhipova sees in this sort of work a defining feature of contemporary Russian circumlocution, which has taken on a new function beyond the usual one of conveying a secret message and sending a signal to the like-minded. “This language’s objective is to demonstrate, through its very existence, the presence of censorship and the violation of freedom of speech and civil rights,” Arkhipova said. “I publish something in obviously Aesopian language to demonstrate that I cannot speak openly – this is what such messages tell us.”

Sometimes the “screen” is so transparent and the signaling of the “marker” so striking that this demonstrative function becomes central. Arkhipova calls this language “meta-Aesopian,” offering the example of a popular flier put up in the first months of the war that read: “Lost dog by the name Mir.”

“The flier, which features no calls to action, no instructions, no QR codes, no information about protests, is just a metaphor,” the anthropologist explained. An expanded version (with QR code leading to a video about Russian crimes in Bucha) of the flier reads: “On February 24, a not very nice man with signs of Botox treatments to his face stole Peace from us! Without Peace prices go up, credit cards get canceled, it becomes harder to get essential medicines. Unless Peace is returned, he will steal Freedom, Calm, and Hope!” Such fliers are part of a genre, the rebirth of Soviet conceptualism, which used stock phrases from Soviet officialese. They play on the standard phrases that we see in urban signage. For example, after the start of the mobilization parody advertisements began to appear such as: “We can provide a COFFIN to every home.”

But naturally, the more transpaarent the “screen” and obvious the “marker,” the more dangerous it becomes. Darya Ivanova, who was arrested for putting up these fliers, was beaten at the police station and charged with disparaging Russia’s armed forces.

But not all expressions of protest result in punishment: repression is still being applied selectively. Although one work from the Black Calendar show had to be removed, overall it was allowed to proceed without incident. On the other hand, the Tretyakov Gallery, which had been playing it safe, faced a sudden inspection in January 2023 to check for “the presence of any signs of destructive ideology.” Its director, Zelfira Tregulova, soon had to step down. But so far, not a single author publishing on the ROAR website has been visited by the police. However, the poet Artyom Kamardin, who participated in a provocative “anti-mobilization reading,” now faces criminal charges. Furthermore, it is now known that police used some metal weights to rape Kamardin during the arrest, and that they beat his girlfriend and a neighbor who were in the apartment at the time.

The word voina [war] sometimes slips out of the mouths of officials, and Putin himself used it in December 2022. That has not stopped authorities from prosecuting other people who have used that word. There was even an instance when charges were brought against a lawyer using the word in her defense of people being tried for a poster with the words “No to War.”

So you can never be sure whether you’ll face consequences for speaking out. Some people endure demonstratively brutal arrests to intimidate others. Suppression permeates the atmosphere, sometimes seeping into supposedly safe spaces. Even among gatherings of like-minded people, the topic of war is often avoided, either out of habit or despair.

And even for Russians who have left the country, speaking out can entail consequences, since most have vulnerable relatives, property, and important business back home. “Of course I’m scared,” publisher Irina Balakhonova admitted. “But I’ve been scared for 20 years now, for as long as Samokat has existed. For me, unlike many others, what is happening is not a total surprise. I know this country quite well, thanks to my father, who made me the daughter of a political prisoner who spent 15 years in a Soviet prison. Over the time that the publishing house has existed, I’ve gotten used to it: there hasn’t been a year when we weren’t afraid of censorship, repression, disgrace, or some other measures… But we also realize how this will all end. There was already a time when, before our eyes, everything came to an end when the Soviet state was finished. And the freedom that will emerge will be the kind you get only from a spring that, being tightly coiled, explodes with such force there’s nothing left of it.”