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Words Matter: Linguistic Conditions for Democracy in Russia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Richard D. Anderson Jr. ,
Valery I. Chervyakov  and
Pavel B. Parshin
Richard D. Anderson Jr.
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of California, Los Angeles
Valery I. Chervyakov
Affiliation:
Institute of Sociology, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow
Pavel B. Parshin
Affiliation:
affiliated with the Ministry of Science and Technical Policy, Moscow
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Extract

How does language influence politics? Usually when this question is posed, it is understood to concern relations within a polity among communities whose members speak different languages. Our concern, however, is what contribution politicians’ language may make to the choice between authoritarianism or democracy. Of course, we reject any reduction of that determination to language alone.

The study of change in political Russian during the Soviet and post-Soviet era has concentrated on the consequences of variation in content. As Meyer observed, during the Soviet period scholars mainly evaluated the degree to which “routine thinking in terms of the official doctrine … [exerted] an effect on actions taken or not taken…” Remington called attention to the existence in the Soviet period of “two interdependent but opposed codes,” one for “the ritualized world of public life” and the other for private interaction—a difference that, as early as 1960, Tucker had traced back to origins in tsarist Russia.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 54 , Issue 4 , Winter 1995 , pp. 869 - 895
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1995

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References

We thank Professor Tamara Moiseevna Dridze; Professors Kathleen Bawn, Shanto Iyengar, John Petrocik, Stephen Ansolabehere, Bernard Grofman, Sara Melzer and John Heritage for methodological advice; and Professor Anne Anderson of the UCLA School of Law for a particularly useful suggestion. We also thank Nicole Waters, Claudia Palme and Zach Selden for research assistance. The Academic Senate, International Studies and Overseas Programs, and the Center for European and Russian Studies at UCLA, the Center for German and European Studies at UC Berkeley and the National Council for Soviet and East European Research funded the project. None of these advisers, assistants or sources of funding bears responsibility for content.

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