On 30 June 2014, Russian writers and artists organised a nationwide event to ‘commemorate’ profanity (mat). The event was called Abanamat, and was a response to amendments to the Law on the Russian Language that took effect on 1 July 2014, banning the use of obscene language in film, theatre and public performances of music or literature. Abanamat brought together writers, actors, musicians and artists in nine Russian cities and featured readings and performances of texts, songs, films and plays that contain mat. The subtitle of the event solemnly stated that: отныне великий и могучий только на улицах и кухнях (Abanamat, Kazan).

Six months later, amid heated debates over Andrei Zviagintsev's prize-winning film Leviathan (2014), prominent members of the Russian film community, including Nikita Mikhalkov and Fedor Bondarchuk, appealed to Prime Minister Dmitrii Medvedev to reconsider and possibly revise the law (Karev and Krizhevskii 2015). Leviathan tells a miserable story of suffering, corruption and human cruelty, and abounds in profanity. The film premiered on Russian screens on 5 February 2015, but in order to fulfil the new requirements for distribution certificates, obscene language had to be deleted. Medvedev passed the open letter to Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinskii, but the reaction from the Duma's Culture Committee was negative. Committee chairman Stanislav Govorukhin rejected the appeal by advising artists to recall Turgenev's famous poem in prose:

These two statements – one being the announcement of the Abanamat protests against the law, the other the official rejection of the filmmakers’ appeal to amend it – are but two voices in the larger debate on the role of obscene language in Russia(n) today. Interestingly, the two opposing voices both cite one and the same source in support of their case, Turgenev's famous dictum about ‘the great and mighty Russian language’. In Russian language culture over the last hundred years or so, this citation, and in particular the two adjectives ‘great and mighty’ (velikii i moguchii), have indeed been used in many contexts as a synonym for the Russian standard language (russkii literaturnyi iazyk).