Richard D. Anderson, Jr.

A half-century ago Harold Lasswell observed that "…nondemocratic elites demand superiority, …interpose barriers of ‘distance’ and ‘height’ between themselves and the rank and file." By contrast, "As communities move toward the democratic end of the scale, …[l]eaders reach out for the common speech, and adopt simple, man-to-man manners...."¹ Although political scientists in the United States largely failed to pursue Lasswell’s lead, in a variety of disciplines an enormous literature links political institutions and discourse.² The transition from Soviet to Russian politics presents yet another opportunity to test for this association. In this paper I address the larger question of whether Russian political discourse has changed from a despotic to a democratic type by examining some common metaphors.

By "discourse" I mean procedures for compiling and interpreting texts; by a "text" I mean any communicative event.³ As mental events, discourses are inferred from observation of regularities common to a body of texts. Changes in these regularities from one to another body of texts shift the meanings inferred from the texts by readers or hearers. Such shifts in meaning are the topics of extended literatures on content analysis, ideology and political culture. At the same time, discourse analysts find that texts also stimulate relational inferences that are not reducible to inferences of informational meaning.⁴ These relational inferences concern the social identities of the author and the audience, and in particular whether they do or do not share the same social identity.⁵ My concern here is not content, ideology, or political culture, but cues to social identity.

Metaphors may be able to act as cues to social identity by virtue of their capacity to shape what else people think about when they read or hear about politics. George Lakoff’s cognitive theory of metaphor holds that when a speaker uses a metaphor, the speaker maps from a source domain onto a target domain in the mind of the listener. The topic in the target domain is represented as unfamiliar to the listener, and the metaphor compares this unfamiliar topic to something in the source domain represented as familiar to the listener. In this theory each metaphorical utterance is also a speech act: it establishes or (more often) reinforces an understanding of the topic as similar to something that is not the topic itself.⁶ Such a theory implies that when rulers liken politics to something above or remote, audiences contemplating their relationship to their rulers think about such qualities as height and distance that separate them from the rulers. Then they understand themselves as separate from the rulers.

By cueing people to think about qualities that separate them from the rulers, political discourse might enhance the prospects for despotism and diminish those for democracy. Discourse might exert these effects through its capacity to cue awareness of social identity. For despotism to occur, society must be bifurcated between rulers and ruled, and everyone must know his or her place. The groups ruling despotisms of different types bear diverse names: nobles in a monarchy, soldiers in a military dictatorship, literati under the Son of Heaven, nomenklatura in communist authoritarianism. Whatever their names, these ruling groups have in common that they represent themselves as separate from and superior to the populations living under their rule.⁷

Democracy replaces the bifurcated identity characteristic of despotism with a single shared identity of citizenship that links governors to governed. Shared social identity is necessary to democracy because democracy exists only if citizens participate –vote, contact, contribute. A standard work on democratic participation comments: "People who identify closely with political contenders are more likely to participate in politics than people whose psychological identifications are weaker." Identification with political contenders "arises from the interaction of citizens and political mobilizers."⁸ By "interaction," of course, this standard work refers, albeit without its authors’ being aware of the reference, to a discursive process. Political campaigns are exchanges of texts, not all of them linguistic of course, but in every case dependent for their interpretation on linguistic texts. A democratic discourse can build political identification by exploiting, among other devices, the cross-linguistically common metaphor that maps choices onto physical sides (English "on the one hand…, on the other hand…"). Thus politicians and political parties are commonly described as either "right" or "left." In the act of voting, the voters identify themselves–metaphorically, "align," "side"–with politicians. The voter joins with the politician as a member of the "right" or the "left," constructing a political identity in the act of choosing. It is by presenting these choices that political discourse can encourage democracy. To cue identification, electoral politicians must furthermore present choices in a language that eschews the distinctive speech of rulers in favor of sounding like the people themselves. As the linguist Michael Geis observes, "the politically most efficacious language will be not exceptional language of the sort that attracts the attention of those interested in doubletalk, for instance, but rather it will be quite ordinary language."⁹

If undemocratic rule depends on making people think about the difference between rulers and ruled, while democratic institutions depend on making people think about their choices between political candidates and their identification with them, then three hypotheses about discourse follow. First, in the discourse of any undemocratic regime, metaphors that cue comparisons of political agents and activities to something different from ordinary experience will be unusually abundant. Second, for that regime to become democratic, these metaphors must decrease in frequency, while metaphors cueing identity between governors and governed by implicating choices must increase. Third, transitions to democracy must begin by dismantling the metaphorical apparatus of the old regime, as otherwise the cues encountered by people continue to isolate them from politics. The particular source domains onto which these metaphors map the target domains of difference, choice, and identity may vary from one natural language to another.

When some metaphors suitable for sustaining authoritarianism decrease, while other metaphors conductive to democracy increase, the question arises what this pattern indicates. It is not my claim that the discovery of such a pattern in a body of texts means that either the texts’ authors or the Russian audience are conscious of this pattern. Individual Russians may, moreover, vary widely in their conscious interpretation of each metaphor, to the point of disagreement (in conversation with Russians, I have personally experienced these vigorous disagreements). This is the well known problem of reader response, which linguists often eschew, claiming to be confining themselves to speaker’s meanings.

These limitations of the research conceded, in claiming that metaphors organize human understanding, Lakoff asserts the opposite of a claim that persons exchanging texts in a natural language know how its metaphors are shaping their understanding. Indeed, it is his distinctive contribution to have learned to recognize what had previously been obscure to himself and to other speakers. Because metaphorical processes work below the level of conscious awareness, native speakers’ testimony about their interpretations of metaphors is not decisive for arguments pursuing Lakoff’s theory. Despite the native speakers’ innocence of metaphorical processes, it is impossible for a language to display any uniform pattern unless the persons speaking that language converge on producing the pattern in question. Moreover, every speaker is (ordinarily) a hearer who has acquired the ability to speak by hearing. The procedures by which the speaker transforms meaning into text are the same ones used in reverse (after a muscle-moving channel has been replaced by a sound-analyzing channel) by the hearer to infer meaning from text. Consequently, patterns in the production of metaphor are evidence that there are patterns in the inferences of meaning, both informational and relational, and when the metaphors change, inferred social relationships change with them. As Dwight Bolinger comments, "the natural condition of a language is to preserve one form for one meaning, and one meaning for one form."¹⁰ In separate papers my colleagues and I have reported experimental evidence that whole texts exemplifying those used in the present study evoke very different responses from large samples of Russian readers and that the electoral texts are more capable of evoking identification.¹¹ While the whole texts used in those experiments include many cues other than metaphors (some of which I have analyzed in other papers¹²), it is known that metaphors are important cues used in deciding what a text means. Exactly how to describe the changes in the meaning that Russian audiences infer when they see democratic instead of dictatorial metaphors, or how far-reaching these changes may be, are admittedly open to more question, but one cannot put different metaphors in and get the same meaning out.

Across languages it is commonplace to find the metaphor "more is better," which maps from the source domain of physical size onto a target domain that combines difference with preference.¹³ Like virtually any monarchial or dictatorial discourse, regardless of ideology, authoritarian communist discourse borrowed this metaphor to signify the difference between politics and the everyday and to attach value to the former. Table 1 shows that the most common size terms became far less frequent as Russia became democratic.

As in later tables, the leftmost column of Table 1 lists the nominative singular of a basic form of a Russian lexeme commonly used as a metaphor in political discourse. The second column gives an English equivalent. The next three columns give the raw numbers of occurrences of derivative forms of this lexeme in three bodies of political texts taken from an authoritarian period in Soviet politics, from a transitional period, and from the initial electoral period. The rightmost columns give the ratios of the transitional and electoral occurrences to the authoritarian occurrences, adjusted for the relative size of the three bodies of text. The authoritarian corpus contains approximately 1.12 times as many words as the transitional corpus and 2.35 times as many words as the electoral corpus, and these factors have been used to compute the adjustment. Where the ratio shown is less than 1.0, the frequency of the metaphor has decreased; where the ratio exceeds 1.0, the frequency has increased. The authoritarian corpus consists of fifty speeches (or in one case, statements in an interview) by members of the Politburo between November 1964 and February 1985. The transitional corpus consists of fifty speeches, interview comments, or articles by members of the Politburo during 1989. The electoral corpus consists of fifty speeches, interview comments, or articles by politicians selected to encompass the full spectrum of Russian politics during October 1991 to December 1993, the initial period of electoral politics.

[Table 1 about here]

Two conclusions emerge from Table 1. First, all the terms for large size decrease in frequency from the authoritarian to the transitional to the electoral corpus. Second, in all cases with the possible exception of shirokii, "wide," the decrease begins in the transitional corpus. In the case of velikii, "great," the decline from the authoritarian to the transitional corpus is actually steeper than the decline from the authoritarian to the electoral corpus. Neither of these patterns is evident in the corresponding terms for the less salient size comparisons.

While this methodology has been chosen because 2500 contexts are obviously too many to analyze individually, selective examination of context shows how authoritarian discourse uses these metaphors to ascribe distinctiveness and to attach value to politics as compared to the everyday. Vysokii, "high," and its variants most often appear in communist discourse in two contexts. In the first context, the adjective is applied to some quality represented as a desirable consequence of regime policies or activities, as in (1), taken from the 1964 speech for the anniversary of the October Revolution by General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev.

In the other common context, "high" acts as a prefix that elongates adjectives: vysokoideinyi, "highly ideologically committed"; vysokokachestvennyi, "high quality"; vysokorazvityi, "highly developed." By adding vysoko-, Soviet speechwriters made use of the metaphor that "more of form is more of content," adding salience to regime goals by elongating the form of their expression.¹⁴ (Of course in some cases the metaphor has no political relevance, as for example when vyshe, "higher," is used to mean "aforesaid").

The representation of politics as existing above the citizen not only diminished in frequency in the immediate post-Soviet era, but its sign changed. From a positive attribution suggesting that the rulers and their goals were better than the people, in the electoral period "high" began to be used negatively, in an implicit rejection of the Soviet usage. In the electoral corpus, vysokii and its derivatives occur 52 times. Seven appearances are neutral. Sixteen refer to "high" positive qualities: "high professionalism," "supreme truth," "high executive discipline." The other twenty-nine occurrences all appear in negative contexts: a high degree of monopolization, an excessively high tax rate, stealing by "highly placed personages," a sarcastic reference to the "very highest co-permissions" needed for privatization of small business.

The reduction in size metaphors made post-Soviet electoral discourse more similar to the Russian commonly encountered by the literate population. Table 2 shows the ratios of raw appearances by period for each pair of opposites listed in Table 1 (for semantic reasons, appearances of bol’shoi and krupnyi are combined, as are their opposites). The righthand column shows ratios for each opposition calculated from the frequencies counted by the team led by L.N. Zasorina, who looked at a broad range of Russian texts.¹⁵ For each pair except velikii-melkii, the electoral ratio is closest to the ratio found by Zasorina’s team, and even in the exceptional case the electoral ratio is closer than the authoritarian ratio. As Lasswell and Geis suggest, electoral politicians reach out for ordinary Russian.

[Table 2 about here]

During 1991-1993, politics in Russia stopped being larger than life. At least in the case of "high," the very concept began to apply to politics mainly in negative contexts.

As shown in Table 2, two metaphors declined in frequency after having been used to ascribe personal superiority to nomenklatura officials and their activities relative to the population and its activities: vospitanie and rabotnik.

[Table 3 about here]

Soviet rulers compared their polity to family life with themselves in the position of the parent. In ordinary Russian the term vospitanie is a dead metaphor referring to raising children. The translation "indoctrination" for its political uses by the Politburo wholly misses the point. Authoritarian Russian turned child-rearing into a metaphor for the Soviet state's relationship both to the individual and the society as a whole. Only eight authoritarian usages refer to child-rearing. While some of the remainder concern upbringing of "youth" (molodezh', which excludes children), sentence (1) quoted previously makes clear that adults are also subject to upbringing. The "working class," "those who labor" (trudiashchiesia, often translated "toilers"), the "masses," "people" (liudi), "cadres," "party members," and the "artistic intelligentsia" all appear as suitable patients of vospitanie. The agent of upbringing was the Party or Party official, although others also bore this responsibility. This is expressly stated in (2), in which former Central Committee Secretary Andrei Kirilenko’s second sentence emphasizes the distinctive responsibility of the Party.

Vospitanie deliberately casts the person in the role of child, belittling the citizen and the society relative to the Party. Russians were conscious of this meaning. Shown a Brezhnev speech in 1993 as part of an experimental study, a Muscovite spontaneously volunteered the comment that the speech "pursues an entirely deliberate goal... of lulling the people to sleep, persuading them of the thought that without the Communist Party they are nowhere, like a little child without its mother." In a book of interviews published at the end of the Gorbachev era, the scholar M.K. Ryklin said, "All these documents presumed an authoritarian obedience, the relation of a father to child, they were not directed at an adult person..…"¹⁶

Neither democratization nor democracy was compatible with such a representation of the rulers' relation to the ruled. In both the transitional and the electoral corpus various forms of the word vospitanie appear slightly more than one tenth as often as in the authoritarian corpus. In the electoral corpus this word is used exclusively in reference to bringing up children. As a metaphor for the superiority of officials to citizens, it disappears entirely.

Another metaphor of superiority was the authoritarians' self-appellation rabotnik, "official," but often translated by "worker." Rabotnik alternates with rabochii, morphologically an adjective, but used as a noun, which like rabotnik forms from the verb rabotat', "to work." In 1985 the Soviet sociolinguist I.F. Protchenko observed that rabotnik had long been obsolete in the meaning "worker." Rabotnik originated in the so-called "bookish" language based on South Slavic forms found in the Russian Orthodox Bible, while rabochii was originally an oral form. Until the nineteenth century they were semantically interchangeable. Over time as peasants taking factory jobs described themselves by the oral rabochii, the "bookish" term rabotnik became specialized to refer to those doing intellectual work: literaturnyi rabotnik, "person working in literature"; khudozhestvennyi rabotnik, "person working in fine arts."¹⁷ Soviet officials, identifying themselves by ideology with the working class but requiring, if they were to exercise power, a separate identity, appropriated the intellectual term to themselves -- hence partiinyi rabotnik, "party official," khoziaistvennyi rabotnik, "economic official."

Preservation of the idea that persons exercising political authority should define themselves as a special, higher order of persons juxtaposed by intellectual superiority to the ordinary working person would have obstructed movement toward democracy. Accordingly, relative to the authoritarian corpus, rabotnik occurs less than half as often in the transitional corpus and less than one quarter as often in the electoral corpus. In the electoral corpus, moreover, the term has reverted to its meaning of persons engaged in other than manual labor, losing its reference to government officials. It comes to mean "employee." In (3) the then privatization chief Anatolii Chubais discusses how he expects stock dividends to be distributed among shareholders once state-owned organizations become privately owned firms:

The only possible case of a reference to responsible officials of the government is again the clearly negative (4):

These metaphors of personal superiority that were abundant in authoritarian Russian became infrequent in the Politburo's Russian during the transition year 1989 and virtually disappeared from electoral Russian. When they did occur in electoral Russian, their meaning reverted to standard usage. Of course, authoritarian communist discourse mixed these metaphors of personal superiority with other metaphors of solidarity, such as ravenstvo, "equality," and tovarishch, "comrade." This mixture distinguishes the discourse of modern authoritarianism from that of traditional despotism, with which the modern variety shares the metaphors of superiority. But the mixture also tended to deconstruct the regime’s claims to egalitarianism. Perhaps for this reason, mentions of "social equality" (as opposed to equality of states or peoples) were infrequent in authoritarian communist texts.

In contrast to Lasswell’s hypothesis that non-democratic elites use metaphors of distance to distinguish themselves from the populace, Soviet authoritarian discourse used metaphors of distance to accomplish a different purpose also suited to stabilizing a dictatorship: lending it an aura of permanence. Across languages it is commonplace for spatial metaphors to represent concepts of time. A frequent metaphor of distance in authoritarian Russian was the adjective dal'neishii, which morphologically is the superlative form of dal'nii, the more abstract of the pair of Russian adjectives that mean "distant." In standard Russian dal'neishii has become specialized as a spatial metaphor for that which ensues or might ensue in time, to be translated "the next," "subsequent," or "further." Table 4 shows the occurrences of this adjective and of the synonymous adverbial phrase i vpred’.

[Table 4 about here]

Soviet speechwriters used dal’neishii to imply that their policies, practices and activities would continue indefinitely, as in (5), taken from a speech by Brezhnev.

While dal'neishii exists in standard Russian, the exaggerated frequency of its use in Soviet texts turned it and its adverbial counterpart into hallmarks of authoritarian discourse. In this sense the distance metaphor also accomplished Lasswell’s function of setting authoritarian discourse and its bearers apart from ordinary Russian and its speakers, as dal’neishii made a text instantly recognizable as officialese.

Any term attributing permanence to the incumbents and their policies is obviously incompatible with democratic identity of voters who face a choice between temporary occupants of political office and with an open contest conducted by promising change. When democracy entered the agenda, both dal’neishii and i vpred’ decreased sharply in the Politburo's discourse and all but disappeared from the discourse of electoral politicians. In electoral usage the meaning also became more constrained. In (10) former President Yeltsin discusses responsibility for reform after a new Constitution decentralizes power from federal to regional authorities

Here Yeltsin clearly does not mean that the central authorities will permanently continue conducting reforms.

The obverse of metaphors that map superiority onto rulers is a set of metaphors that map subordination onto the ruled. Metaphors of subordination also interact with the attribution of permanence to the rulers’ policies by implying that the ruled cannot change their situation because some other agent has fixed or "given" the existing order. Authoritarian Russian prominently featured two particular metaphors of subordination, zadacha and stroit’, occurrences of which are shown in Table 5 together with the metaphor that displaces stroit’ in the transitional corpus. These metaphors served to perpetuate a contrast between despotism and democracy identified by the Russian political theorist Boris Kapustin when he remarks: "it is not the concepts of law and freedom that are distinguished, but law as the laying down of our will and law as something given [dannoe] to us from outside."¹⁸

[Table 5 about here]

While Russian zadacha translates as "problem" or "task," its etymology is quite different from that of these English words. "Problem" is etymologically something cast before, while "task" is etymologically something taxing or difficult. For neither English word is the motivation transparent to modern speakers. By contrast, the etymology of zadacha is transparent for Russian speakers. The noun is rooted in the verb "to give," and the nominalization -dacha is an act of giving or something given. Zadat' vopros remains the idiom for asking ("giving") a question, while reshit' zadachu means both "to solve a problem" and "to accomplish a task." Zadacha is also encountered together with verbs such as stoiat', "to stand," or postavit' , "to set" (in a standing position), as in sentence (7) from a speech by Central Committee Secretary Andrei Kirilenko in April 1970.

Each of these associations serves the purpose of narrowing the range of responses to be contemplated by the addressee. By its evocation of posing a question, mention of zadacha presupposes that an answer, not further questioning, is appropriate in response. By its evocation of solving a problem, mention of zadacha implies the appropriateness of resolution, reshitel'nost', in response. By its evocation of an assignment, zadacha presupposes an agent who assigns the problem to be solved or sets the task to be accomplished. In each context where it is found in association with forms of stoiat’ or postavit’, this agent is either named as the Party, as in (7), or discursively presupposed as the authoritative speaker describing the putatively objective situation on behalf of the Party.

As Table 5 shows, zadacha decreases in frequency in the transitional corpus and even more sharply in the electoral corpus, although the term remains relatively prominent. Transitional leaders and, to an even greater extent, electoral politicians are motivated to be selective in their use of such a metaphor. Like authoritarian rulers, both transitional leaders and electoral politicians want to "engage in the construction of conditions as problems."¹⁹ One purpose of campaigning is to focus voters’ attention on problems for which a candidate has a prior reputation for effectiveness and to distract the voters from problems for which their opponents have the same reputation.²⁰ To accomplish this purpose, campaigners must define problems. While seeking to define problems, at the same time electoral politicans who want voters to identify with them need to avoid the implications that the task is assigned by some separate agent, and they positively want to encourage voters to question goals set by electoral opponents. Thus metaphors like zadacha should be present in electoral texts but reduced in frequency relative to authoritarian discourse.

A second metaphor of subordination is the continuous refrain of stroitel'stvo, "building" or "construction," that runs throughout communist authoritarian texts. While frequently discussing building projects, builders, various ministries of building industry, and delays in completion of building, Soviet speakers also used "construction" in a variety of metaphorical contexts: building communism, building socialism, building the new world, social-cultural building. Stroitel'stvo translates as "building" or "construction," and without doubt native speakers of Russian respond to the communist usage by thinking about the activity of building. At the same time, the translation diverts attention from a second, admittedly etymological but still transparent association of stroitel’stvo. The root stroi is also a separate lexeme (occurrences of which are included in the counts in Table 5) retaining its older meanings "order," "array," "military formation,"²¹ as well as having acquired the political or economic meaning "regime." Stroino, an adjectival form, is the command given to order soldiers to form ranks. In Russian the activity of building is a transparent metaphor of putting into order. Russians cannot read, hear, utter or write stroitel’stvo without activating, however briefly and however unconsciously, the morpheme stroi, which remains what linguists call a "productive" element in word formation. If, as Lakoff argues, metaphors are meaningful because they are nested in a set of associated images, stroitel’stvo is a metaphor of order as well as construction.

In the form characteristic of the authoritarian era, the construction metaphor became less frequent during the transition year 1989, with appearances in the metaphorical usage declining to less than forty percent of the authoritarian total. Of course, the frequency of perestroika and its variants increased sharply, from twelve in the authoritarian corpus to 715 in the transitional corpus. But perestroika was the opposite of a metaphor of subordination. Gorbachev made this opposition explicit. In (8), when he defines the goal of perestroika ("authentic" as opposed to "real" or "developed" socialism), he consciously inverts authoritarian symbolism:

Perestroika, "re-ordering," necessarily referred to a period of transition from the former order to a new one, and Gorbachev further symbolized the rejection of an imposed order by ostentatiously rejecting what he claimed were demands from Party officials that he specify the precise shape of the new order to come. In July 1989, summarizing deliberations by senior Party officials convened to evaluate the elections to the new Congress of People’s Deputies, Gorbachev said:

Gorbachev’s critics took note of his refusal to describe the new order. Reflecting on perestroika after Russia's independence, the journalist Eduard Volodin (an adviser to Communist leader Gennadii Ziuganov) would comment that perestroika referred not to any definite condition but merely to change. Charging its authors with refusing to define the outcome of change, Volodin interpreted perestroika as simply the destruction of the Soviet order.²³ Arkadii Udal'tsov, the former editor of Literaturnaia Gazeta, echoed this perception in an interview in October 1992: "There was nothing more meaningless than Gorbachev's speech for a Russian ear. That’s probably something new for you to hear.... I hear a flow of words from which nothing, not one thought flows out."²⁴

In the electoral corpus the "construction" metaphor dwindles again. Perestroika also disappears, occurring ten times, three times in disparaging reference to the period 1985-1991, and six times in the phrase strukturnaia perestroika, "structural reorganization," of the economy (plus once as perestroika proizvodstva, with equivalent reference). Rejection of the Soviet metaphor is visible in (9), from an article attributed to Vladimir Zhirinovskii in his flysheet Sokol for August 1993, in which the writer plays on the contrast between literal and authoritarian meanings:

Another sign that post-Soviet politicians were rejecting the authoritarian usage of stroit' was the word's emergence in the post-Soviet corpus as figurative language, "live" metaphor. In (10) the writer and activist Aleksandr Prokhanov urges communists and nationalists to unite in advance of knowing the details of a common program.

Of course (8), (9) and (10) are most meaningful to those habituated to reading about "construction of socialism." All three invert Soviet symbolism of order. The rejection of stroitel’stvo as a metaphor for politics, other than in overtly figurative expressions, removed yet another difference between political and ordinary Russian, and the difference that was eliminated was a cue to subordination.

If metaphors of size, personal superiority, distance, and subordination cue people contemplating politics to think of it in terms of an extraordinary activity suited for persons unlike themselves, popular entry into politics would depend on cueing people to think of themselves as politically competent. During 1989 the discourse of the Gorbachev Politburo repositioned the Soviet people as the Party’s equals, but at the same time preserved the dichotomy separating Party from people. Like segregationist doctrines of "separate but equal" at one stage of the conflict over civil rights in the United States, this discourse was self-deconstructing. Table 6 lists selected metaphors that increase in frequency in the transition corpus but decrease in the electoral corpus.

[Table 6 about here]

As stroi declined, obshchestvo, "society," emerged. For a despotism reliant on communicating separateness from the people, a term such as obshchestvo requires delicate handling, for it is a nominal form of the adjective obshchii, "common." Society in Russian is metaphorically the commonality or community, not an abstraction of Latin origin, with its roots in a metaphorical extension of the idea of companionship, only faintly evocative through its sharing of a root with familiar terms like "association." Because the idea of community is seditious for any rulers who depend on maintaining strict separation between oppressors and oppressed, in 1797 Emperor Paul I formally banned the word obshchestvo in favor of sobranie, "gathering."²⁵ It was presumably for the same reason that some of the oppressors who formed the seditious Society of Decembrists chose to call their association a "community." Obshchestvo does frequently occur in the authoritarian corpus, but in sixty percent of the occurrences its meaning is restricted by such definers as "communist," "socialist," "our," "new," or "Soviet," or by rhetorical variants on these forms. In the unmodified cases, society is a collectivity subject to transformation from capitalist to socialist (22 cases), to which the individual owes an obligation (20 cases), subject to leadership or control (10 cases), or otherwise the recipient of something (17 cases). There are no cases in the authoritarian corpus in which society is an independent agent or a locus where something happens that is out of control.

The adjusted frequency of obshchestvo triples in the transitional corpus, while at the same time the proportion occurring in the context of the limiting definers decreases from nearly sixty percent to less than one-third, and in many of these cases the meaning of the definer has changed. For example, "new" comes to mean "new with respect to the Soviet past" rather than "new with respect to capitalism." When society remains a collectivity subject to leadership, the leader changes, as in (11), said by Gorbachev in January 1989.

More important, society emerges as a site for actions separate from those of the party or as an actor capable of independent agency, as in (12) or (13), both from speeches by Gorbachev:

In the electoral corpus, as the Communist Party becomes simply a competitor for power, not a monopolist, the need for its complement "society" dwindles, whether as the object of the party's definition or as a potential interlocutor. Thus obshchestvo appears only one third as often (not counting three references to stock companies and one sarcastic mention of a "society" of perestroika figures), and then commonly in contexts like (14), from Yeltsin's June 1992 speech on constitutional reform.

The autonomy of society from the Party in the transitional corpus is accompanied by a recasting of society's role from object of party control or leadership to equal partner. One metaphorical vehicle for this emancipation of society was dialog. While occurrences of dialog are relatively infrequent even in the transitional corpus, the significance of the term outweighs its frequency. Dialog belongs to a class of Latinate words that strikingly penetrated political Russian during 1985-1991. Table 6 shows the change in the frequencies for all variants of some of these words. What is interesting about these words is that in every case there is a Russian counterpart with a Slavic etymon. In some cases, for example the pairs negativnyi/pozitivnyi and otritsatel'nyi/polozhitel'nyi, the Slavic counterpart is interchangeable in its semantics (as opposed to its pragmatics). In other instances, particularly kontseptsiia, which means a conception in the sense of a general design, and konstruktivnyi, defined as helpful for the future,²⁶ neither zamysel, "intention," nor plodotvornyi, "fruitful," are especially close substitutes. In all cases except stabilizatsiia/stabil'nost' ("stabilization"/"stability") the adjusted ratio of transitional to authoritarian occurrences exceeds or equals the adjusted ratio of electoral to authoritarian cases.

The choice to use Latinate words instead of freely available Slavic counterparts affected the representation of the Party’s relation to society. In transitional discourse these words were being used metaphorically with respect to their authoritarian meaning. In the authoritarian corpus all these words are encountered, with very few exceptions, exclusively in discussions of diplomacy. Dialog, for example, occurs only in the context of negotiations between rival states. Even the East European ally-possessions do not engage in dialog with the Soviet Union. Thus to describe party and society as engaging in dialog was to place them on the equal footing that Soviet spokesmen had sought to affirm for their country in world affairs. By introducing terms from diplomacy into discussion of domestic politics, Gorbachev and his fellow Politburo members reinforced the message communicated by their affirmation of society's capacity to act separately from the party. By taking words that had been appropriate for discussing interactions between sovereign states and extending their meanings to interactions between rulers and ruled, the Gorbachev Politburo implicitly denied the party's former claim to superiority over the people. Post-Soviet electoral politicians, denying the separation of political elite from the people, largely abandoned the diplomatic metaphor, with the one exception of stabilizatsiia/stabil'nost', which became confined mainly to discussions of fiscal and monetary policy or to social peace.

The discourse of the Gorbachev Politburo preserved the metaphorical separateness of the ruling Party while diminishing its metaphorical size and superiority and the metaphorical permanence and orderliness of Soviet rule. If Gorbachev and his Politburo fellows sought to preserve authoritarian rule, this discursive behavior was self-defeating. Their choices retained a discursively identifiable target for Russian democrats to attack while informing both the enforcers of rule and the formerly compliant popular audience that formerly rigid political identities had turned labile. If the new discourse was the result of an ongoing compromise pitting democratizers led by Gorbachev who wanted to eliminate metaphors of rule against anti-democrats who wanted to preserve them, with the democratizers gaining power and moving the compromise in their direction during 1989, then a discourse that preserved authoritarian traits on one dimension while abandoning them on others is the outcome to be expected. Once democracy had been achieved, there was no reason to retain the diplomatic metaphor that had achieved a compromise solution, and post-Soviet electoral politicians rejected it.

If democracy depends on identifying politicians with their voters by cueing people to recognize choice, then it is not enough to abandon undemocratic metaphors. New metaphors must emerge during transitions to democracy and spread as electoral politics takes hold. In the Russian political texts dating to 1992 and 1993 included in the electoral corpus for this study, the right-left metaphor ubiquitous in established democracies is remarkable for its infrequency. During 1992-1993, "right" or "left" developed unstable reference. Before August 1991 "left" had referred to the anti-communists. Gorbachev describes opponents of his reforms with kak konservativnogo, tak i levacheskogo tolka, "of both the conservative and the leftish persuasion."²⁷ During 1992 Communists began to reclaim the label "left," while economic reformers accepted the label "right" and nationalists tried to monopolize it. Communists and nationalists then formed, in October 1992, a self-proclaimed "unified left-right opposition" (the short lived Front for National Salvation) against Yeltsin and the economic reform, which Yeltsin then banned in retaliation for the participation of some of its leading figures in the disorders of 3-4 October 1993. By the argument in this paper, it is quite likely that the anti-democratic opposition’s decision to call itself both "left" and "right" expressed (whether consciously or not) its rejection of democratic choice as a principle for organizing Russian politics. This background of confusion over the meaning of "right" and "left" during 1991-1993, before these categories settled down into their meanings today, may account for the infrequency of this particular metaphor of sides in the electoral corpus.

While "left" and "right" are rarely used, the metaphor of sides does become increasingly prominent, and to a degree belied by the absolute frequencies presented in Table 7. The term storonnik, "partisan," analyzes into the morphemes storon(a), "side," and "-nik," a suffix of agency: "one who takes a side." As in English the parties to a fight or disagreement can be called metaphorically storony, "the sides." Also as the English idiom "on the one hand..., on the other hand..." is a metaphor for choice, so is Russian s odnoi storony..., s drugoi storony, "from one side..., from the other side...." Thus storonnik is a metaphor in which participants in political choice are represented as taking sides. Protivnik similarly analyzes into protiv-, "against," and -nik: "one who is against." As in English the term is a metaphorical use of representing disagreement as a matter of occupying opposite sides. A Russian can say ia -- protiv... "I am against...." Associated with the metaphor of "sides" is the usage of spektr, "spectrum," to designate the sides in combination.

[Table 7 about here]

While the metaphor of sides against each other occurs relatively frequently in the authoritarian corpus, too, the relative frequencies hide changing contexts. All but three of the authoritarian mentions refer to storonniki/protivniki in discussions of diplomacy or war. In the three exceptions, protivnik is used once in reference to enemies of the Bolsheviks and twice in reference to dissidents explicitly linked with foreign powers. Moreover, since the Soviet Union is always a storonnik and protivniki are always foreigners, the sides in the metaphor are unilateral. In short, in the authoritarian corpus the metaphor of sides characterizes international not domestic politics. In the transitional corpus the metaphor of sides continues to characterize international politics but domestic references begin to appear. In the electoral corpus, taking sides and being against characterize domestic politics.

The appearance of sides in politics leads in turn to the concept of a political spektr, "spectrum," and once again the meaning changes. In authoritarian Russian spektr referred to a range of policy issues, as in former General Secretary Konstantin Chernenko's discussion of "Soviet-Polish ties across their full spectrum -- in politics, economics, culture, ideology, international affairs." In the transitional corpus spektr appears six times in the authoritarian sense and three times in reference to the "societal-political spectrum" or the "spectrum of moods." In the electoral corpus spektr appears seven times, only once in reference to a range of issues and six times in reference to a range of political parties or attitudes.

A "spectrum" in turn implies a range of colors. Terms for basic colors are used as metaphors in reference to contemporary politics eight times as often in the electoral as in the authoritarian corpus. This ratio significantly understates the actual change, while the decrease from the authoritarian to the transitional corpus is equally misleading. All thirteen contemporary references in the authoritarian corpus are uses of the word chernyi, "black," in the phrase chernaia metallurgiia, "ferrous metallurgy." Even krasnyi and belyi ("red" and "white") are confined to historical contexts, e.g., mentions of the Red, later renamed Soviet, Army or of "white guards" in the Civil War, or to place names (Krasnodar, Belorussiia). In the transitional corpus, colors begin to designate political alternatives, as in (15):

In the electoral corpus colors represent political groupings or parties. The assertion in (16) and the quite similar injunction in (17) use color metaphors to construct a political spectrum that implies both choices and identities for the reader:

A metaphor of opposition and identification was the noun region (together with its adjectival form regional'nyi). The one occurrence in the authoritarian corpus is a 1984 reference to the "regional... balance of power" in Europe. In the transitional corpus region is frequently used in reference to diplomacy, but it also begins to designate parts of the Soviet Union. In the electoral corpus region becomes the standard word for a political subdivision of Russia—even though each of them retained the formal title of oblast’, krai, respublika, or okrug. As Table 7 shows, region displaces oblast'. (At the same time respublika also decreased in frequency, although not as sharply, but respublika is literal rather than metaphorical in Russian.)

Russians may well have shifted to region merely for the convenience of a single term that would encompass all the various formal administrative titles. At the same time, the choice of region committed them to a metaphor that signified a revision of the hierarchical relationship between the national government in Moscow and the governments of the federal units. Region was a new word in Russian. It did not even appear in the relevant volume, published in 1961, of the multi-volume Academy dictionary. Only the adjectival form regional’nyi was listed.²⁸ By 1983 region did enter the relevant volume of the four-volume Academy dictionary, with the definition "broad area [obshirnyi raion] corresponding to several provinces [oblasti] of the country or several countries, unified by economic-geographic or other traits."²⁹ Usages in the transitional corpus conform to the 1983 definition. By contrast, in the electoral corpus the usage changed. A word referring to a unit larger than an oblast’ now designated an oblast’.

While region expressed only a geographic expanse, the alternative oblast’ was etymologically a metaphor of possession, a noun form of the verb obladat’, "to own." Both words formed in turn from the transitive prefix ob- plus the verb vladet’, "to rule."³⁰ Linguists justifiably doubt ordinary speakers’ consciousness of etymology. Nevertheless, if "spreading activation" models of comprehension³¹ have any merit, it would be impossible for a Russian speaker to recognize oblast’ without at least momentarily, pre-consciously, activating obladat’, "own," while if oblast’ analyzes as the morphemes ob- and -last’ rather than as a single morpheme, then vlast’, "power" would activate as well. Because words activated together with the target word are easily confused with it and help to shape the reader or hearer’s response, to call provinces oblasti is at the very least to encourage conflation of their relationship to the central government with being possessions in the power of the central government. To call a province region, on the other hand, first, metaphorically enlarges the province by using a term which continues to denote a group of provinces,³² second, compares its relationship with Moscow to that of a foreign part of the world, and, third, leaves unanswered the question of what form the relationship should take.

Oblast' disappeared from political discourse, despite its retention in formal names of administrative units, just before the national government began redefining its relationship to local authorities and even, in some cases, negotiated formal treaties with them. The metaphorical implications of region were suitable for promoting this process. By its vagueness, region implied that there were choices to be made. By comparing each province to a larger unit, region biased those choices in favor of the provinces. To the extent that Russians identify themselves with their localities, these implications of the metaphor provided a basis for identification with local elected officials and with national politicians who put the term into circulation.

Once again, I argue neither that political speakers adopted the metaphor of region with any intent to achieve these effects, nor that Russian audiences are aware of its implications. Instead I argue that the choice of region has different consequences than continuing to talk about oblasti or adopting any of the variety of alternatives that might have been chosen instead. It would have been possible to use sub"ekty (the technical term in the Constitution), to introduce zemli ("lands," a term that was rejected because it figured in a proposal to consolidate existing regions into larger, even more powerful units), to revive the Imperial term gubernii (as was later done with gubernatory to designate officials whose formal title usually remained glava administratsii), to apply provintsii (which bears the same negative connotation as English "provincial"), or to extend raion (with the same etymon, and used in the dictionary definition as a partial synonym, but designating a smaller, subordinate unit).

Indeed some speakers and writers did make some of these choices, as in (18) and (19). In (18) the radical democrat Valeriia Novodvorskaia described local authorities’ attitude toward the pre-1993 Russian Constitution:

In (19) an official of a short-lived party claiming to represent regional interests explains its goals in self-deconstructing language that suggests immediately why the party failed:

Sub"ekty would have been legalistic, zemli even stronger than region, gubernii and provintsii demeaning, and raion belittling and confusing. No term could have been neutral with respect to the power of local authorities relative to the center. The one that was chosen signified an increase in their power by metaphorically enlarging them.

At the same time as metaphors of choice identifying politicians with their voters do emerge in electoral discourse, the discourse of electoral politics is much less distinctive than that of authoritarian rule. The authoritarian corpus features a small number of terms that appear very frequently, while there is no such concentrated vocabulary in the electoral corpus. Inasmuch as electoral politics lacks a special vocabulary, electoral politicians in Russia have reached out for the common speech.

Metaphors likening politics to qualities distinct from ordinary experience dwindled as Soviet authoritarianism gave way to the transitional leadership of the Gorbachev Politburo and dwindled further as Soviet communism was replaced by electoral politics. Metaphors abundant in the Gorbachev Politburo’s discourse deconstructed the superior authority of the Party by presenting party and society as separate but equal. Metaphors whose frequency increased in the discourse of the initial electoral period (October 1991-to December 1993) compared politics to an activity of taking sides or choosing colors and opened the relationship between central and regional authorities to redefinition in favor of the latter. Electoral discourse became more similar to ordinary Russian.

Inasmuch as these changes began in the discourse of the Gorbachev Politburo, the causal arrow does not run from electoral institutions to changes in discourse. While an institution partly elected by the people in elections which in some districts were fairly contested, the Congress of People’s Deputies, did emerge during 1989, the Politburo members whose utterances are analyzed in this paper did not stand for popular election. They occupied their seats in the Politburo by the same institutional procedures that had been used to choose Brezhnev’s Politburo. The discourse of Gorbachev’s Politburo was not responding to an exogenous event in the form of the appearance of an electoral institution. Instead its members changed their discourse as they changed the institutions. Their partial abandonment of authoritarian discourse was followed by the appearance of new, more fully electoral institutions.

If encounters with metaphors influence identification with political speakers, the metaphors of Soviet authoritarian discourse were suitable for bifurcating political identity between rulers and ruled, while the transitional metaphors undermined this bifurcation, and the electoral metaphors were appropriate for building identification between voters and politicians through the act of choosing. That is, change in Russian political discourse has been such as to promote the emergence of democracy, if only in the sense of electoral politics, in Russia.