Reflecting the changing realities brought on by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russian society was rocked that year by an explosion of new words and expressions. Since then, things have settled down a bit: the Russian language, like the Russian people, has adapted to circumstances. Some expressions have persisted; others have fallen out of use.
This issue, we’re focusing our discussion of the Russian language on the most striking neologisms that emerged from the war’s first year, highlighting words linked to the main milestones of that gut-wrenching time.
Antiwar Russians lost no time in coining these terms – which might translate as “almost a swastika” and “semi-swastika” – for the Latin letter Z that cropped up on military hardware and in social media memes in the early days of February’s full-scale invasion. To this day there is no universally accepted explanation for why this letter became a symbol of the Russian armed forces. One of the more convincing theories is that the letters Z and V were simply painted onto military hardware to indicate which military command they belonged to (Z for за́падный or western; V for восто́чный or eastern), only to have these functional scribbles appropriated by propaganda, for lack of any better prowar symbols.
For the antiwar camp, Z in particular became a metaphor for the absurdity and senselessness of everything that was happening. But there are those who believe that the popularity of the Z makes perfect sense. After all, putting two of them together, you can form a swastika, and Russian “zed-patriots” have a clear affinity for xenophobic, Nazi-esque ways of thinking. (For more on the role the Z has taken on in Russian, see our Spring 2024 issue (“На́ши в Украи́не, Ва́ши на Украи́не”).
Another neologism with roots in the Second World War is the neologism блицкри́нж (blitzcringe). When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, he was planning to perpetrate the same sort of blitzkrieg (German for “lightning war”) that had worked so well for him in Western Europe. Soviet forces thwarted this plan, a fact that has become central to Russia’s historical narrative. Evidence that Putin was counting on a quick takeover of Ukraine and a triumphant march through Kiev prompted associations with Hitler’s blitzkrieg. Indeed, few believed that Ukraine would be able to repel Russia’s military onslaught for long. But by early March, oppositionist pundits were already commenting that Putin’s “blitzkrieg had turned into a blitzcringe.”
Toward the end of March 2022, Russian authorities declared Meta, parent company of both Facebook and Instagram, to be an “extremist organization,” and its social media platforms were blocked throughout Russia. It even became illegal to mention Facebook or Instagram, resulting in the euphemistic formulation “запрещённая социа́льная сеть (banned social network). This, in turn, immediately inspired a whole slew of ironic nicknames along the line of нельзя́грам (loosely, “not-allowed-gram”) and запрещёнобук (bannedbook).
Twitter was also blocked, but it was not so popular here as to cause a major disruption. Instagram, on the other hand, was so important to Russians that two analogs immediately appeared: the state-run ро́ссграм (Russgram), a patriotic app for sharing pictures, and the гру́стнограм (Sadgram), a black-and-white version of Instagram for dejected Russians featuring a broken-heart logo. Neither platform managed to build a large user base, and most Instagram fans continue to access the banned network via a VPN.
In contemporary Russia, the concept of импортозам́ещение (import substitution) goes back to the sanctions imposed after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. In 2022, when Western companies fled the Russian market en masse, import substitution reached a whole new scale, and new words emerged to describe various aspects of the process. Терем́ок is the name of a popular café chain serving traditional Russian fare (also the name of a popular Slavic folk tale, the term is used for sturdy wooden houses from centuries past). Native chains of this sort won big after the departure of their foreign competitors, but the term теремокиза́ция (Teremokization) is used to poke fun at all the clumsy attempts to replace well-established internationally renowned companies with homegrown businesses.
Russia’s attempt to replace foreign brands offered fertile ground for word play by jokesters and marketers alike. For example, if you hear someone refer to Z-до́нальдс, you’ll probably realize they’re deriding Russia’s MacDonalds knock-off, which was given the odd and difficult name of: “Вку́сно и то́чка” ("Delicious – Period," as in there’s no arguing about this chain’s gastronomical delights).
On the marketing side, not every Russian consumer might fully appreciate the layers of meaning hidden beneath the name of one replacement brand: Ushiqlo (Уши́кло). The name sounds rather strange to the Russian ear: it denotes a new textile and clothing brand, combining a phonetic association with the Russian verb to sew (шить/уши́ть) and the popular Japanese clothing manufacturer and retailer Uniqlo (whose own name represents a contraction of the words “unique” and “clothing”).
More broadly, another word used to characterize the overall import substitution process is икеязамеще́ние (Ikea replacement). As in the case of теремокиза́ция, the awkward phonetics are part of the spoof. For Westerners, it might be as hard to imagine the transformative effect Ikea had on middle class Russian households as it is for Russians to imagine a Russian brand that could fill the home décor gap left by the Swedes’ departure.
The бутербро́декс, also referred to as и́ндекс ко́фе с бутербро́дом (the coffee and sandwich index) or и́ндекс за́втрака (the breakfast index) is a playful Russian response to The Economist’s Big Mac Index. The data points underlying this index are the prices of breakfast foods popular among Russians: a cup of coffee and a piece of bread topped by meat and/or cheese. This term circulated in the state-controlled media, which tried to lend a cheerful, lighthearted tone to its inflation reporting, papering over bad news and obscuring the hard facts amid a host of irrelevant details.
The “basket” of goods used to calculate the бутербро́декс includes a loaf of white bread, ham, butter, cheese, cucumber, instant coffee, and sugar. Living standards were relentlessly falling, and by the end of 2022, prices had risen by approximately 20 percent. But as the state-run news agency RIA reported it, the бутербро́декс was sometimes up, sometimes down – nothing to see here.
In response to sanctions and Europe’s plans to gradually wean itself of Russian petroleum, in 2022 Putin embarked on a program of retaliation. Russia stopped delivering gas to Poland and Bulgaria in April and to Germany in September. All summer and fall, Russian propaganda was predicting a catastrophic shortage of gas for some European countries during the winter of 2022-23 – энергоге́ддон (energy Armageddon) or газоге́ддон (gas Armageddon), along with a looming Ice Age. These expressions and the very prospect they described were very popular among pro-government Russians: the anger prompted by fear of the changes that were taking place were successfully deflected westward and soothed by a satisfying sense of gaining the upper hand. But then, instead of economic collapse and helpless shivering, Europe experienced nothing worse than energy price increases, and these catchy neologisms are now mere relics of history.
Meanwhile, the war ground on, and as a new phenomenon began to scar Ukraine’s physical landscape, it left its mark on Russia’s linguistic one: БПЛА (БесПило́тные Лета́тельные Аппара́ты, unpiloted flying vehicles), дро́ны (drones), пти́чки (birdies). These autonomous aircraft are also referred to by the names of specific models: the Iranian Шахе́д (as in Shahed-136 and Shahed-129) and its Russian-made counterpart, the Гера́нь (literally, geranium, Geran-1 and Geran-2). Russia’s military collaboration with Tehran has generated much international discussion, and it emerged that a shipment of Iranian drones reached Moscow even before the 2022 full-scale invasion. That fall, the EU and UK sanctioned the Iranian company that produces the Shahed. The Russian-Iranian collaboration spawned a new catchword to refer to the partnership: тегера́нь, which adds the soft sign at the end of the name for the Russian version of Iran’s drone design (Гера́нь) to the name of Iran’s capital (Тегера́н).
In late September 2022, Putin announced a mobilization, and young men began to leave the country in droves. They primarily fled to neighboring countries that Russians could enter without a visa: Armenia, Georgia, and Kazakhstan. At that point, to the collection of nicknames applied to war-fleeing immigrants – the neutral релока́нт (relocator), the pejorative уеха́нт (combining the verb “уе́хать” with the релока́нт suffix), the humorous уйти́шник (combining another verb for departing, уйти́, with айти́шник or IT specialist) – was added сентябрёнок or “child of September,” by analogy with октябрёнок, a child of October, as in the October Revolution. (For more on релока́нты, see “Touchpoints,” Russian Life, Summer 2023). Октябрёнок was the term used for members of Soviet children’s first political organization, to which virtually all children belonged in grades one through three, after which they joined the Young Pioneers. Сентября́та (the plural of сентябрёнок) came to be used for those fleeing the September mobilization. Those who fled the country even earlier – in February, immediately after the invasion was launched – earned the nickname of февраля́та.
But of course people were setting out to make new lives in other countries throughout 2022, and somehow March came to be a catch-all for any month of departure, yielding мартобрёнок (singular) or мартобря́та (plural). This probably has to do with a tradition dating back to the nineteenth century of using марто́брь (Marchober) to designate “any old month.” In the twentieth century, the coinage was given new life by Joseph Brodsky in a 1975 poem that started “Ниотку́да, с любо́вью, надца́того мартобря́…” (From nowhere, with love, on the nth of Marchober…). What makes this connection so poignant is that the poem was written in emigration and to some extent is dedicated to that phenomenon: the poem represents an intensely emotional message to a beloved left behind in the homeland. The poem’s protagonist is “nowhere” and writes from an émigré’s hearth-less “Marchober.”
Sadly, the vocabulary of специа́льный вое́нный ру́сский язы́к (special military Russian language) continues to metastasize. In future issues we will look at familiar words whose meanings have been changed by war, concepts dating back to Soviet times that have reemerged, as well as some of the stranger expressions spawned by the war.
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