Back in the CCCP

The Russian government is obsessed with restoring the former greatness of the Soviet Union. The opposition considers that greatness to be illusory, but that doesn’t stop its members from drawing constant comparisons between the Putin era and various periods in Soviet history. 

Some boldly assert that Russia is reliving 1937, the height of the Stalinist Great Terror, while others argue that we’re still back in the early 1930s, since, after all, we haven’t yet gotten to the point of mass repression. Analogies with Brezhnev-era stagnation are also common. This comparison is disheartening since, on the one hand, the current regime feels much more dangerous and sinister. But on the other, it brings a ray of hope, since that stagnation eventually resulted in the system’s sudden collapse, and many Russians now live in the hope of seeing an equally abrupt and unexpected change in the near future. 

Like historical analogies generally, this line of thinking is extremely flawed, but at the same time, many phenomena of contemporary Russian reality are indeed similar to – if not outright duplications, rekindlings, or parodies of – Soviet-era ones. One sign of this is the return of various forgotten or semi-forgotten, inverted or reformulated words and expressions from that era. This edition of Survival Russian in Wartime explains a few.