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.
Based on the verb запреща́ть (to prohibit, forbid), this is prison slang for banned items somehow smuggled in, such as narcotics or books. The term also filtered into general usage for things that were banned during various periods of Soviet history, such as Western films, records, books, and hard currency. Anything that wasn’t widely available was suspect, because obtaining it likely involved that aforementioned foreign currency and the black market, whether the item in question was acquired abroad or in a special Берёзка (birch tree) store set up for foreigners or certain privileged classes of Soviet society. Such stores sold “enemy” chewing gum, Coca-Cola, instant coffee, and canned goods. Ordinary Soviet citizens were not supposed to set foot in these establishments.
In 2014, when Europe introduced economic sanctions after the occupation of Crimea, the items that disappeared from store shelves were nicknamed санкцио́нка (based on the word for “sanctions”) or запрещёнка. One sorely missed category was fine French, Dutch, and other high-quality cheeses. “Вот, запрещёнки вам привезли́, прям как в совке́…” (Here, we brought you some contraband, just like back in Soviet times…”) friends returning from Europe would say as when they came for dinner bearing Camembert. [1] Although the term запрещёнка was not widely used during the Soviet era, it evokes a strong association with that period, when stores were generically uniform and poorly supplied and cheeses made with bacteria were banned due to health concerns.
This legendary term (which combines the adverb там – “there” – with the root of words associated with publishing – изда́тельство/изда́ть) has made a comeback, along with the phenomenon itself. Indeed, the current version almost perfectly mirrors the Soviet one: the term applies to uncensored Russian-language texts published outside Russia by political emigrants. A crucial difference is that today most books and periodicals exist in electronic as well as paper form, and borders are generally more porous than in Soviet times. In the olden days, тамизда́т was smuggled inside coat linings, the instrument cases of touring musicians, and the cages of wild animals. They were even cast into the sea, in the hope that they might wash up on the right shore. Now, it can take just a couple of clicks to access forbidden literature from some borderless cloud. Nevertheless, people still refer to those foreign publications as тамизда́т.
This term is often used for consumers of тамизда́т and запрещёнка. It originated during the Spanish Civil War and referred to Franco-aligned forces ready to rise up within Republican-controlled areas. In the Soviet Union it was used during the Second World War and Cold War to refer to any oppositionist groups, to conjure up the specter of an invisible army within the country that was aiding and abetting its external enemies. The Russian government has breathed new life into this term by actively using it in its propaganda.
In 2014, the expression arose when a journalist asked Putin to explain the difference between a “fifth column” and “the opposition.” He responded: “A fifth column is people who are being used, who carry out whatever the interests of another state dictate, and they are used as an instrument for attaining political goals that are alien to us.”
Non-hyperbolic responses to hardball questions are a thing of the past. These days TV anchors accuse anyone against the war of being part of a “fifth column,” not stopping short of calling them scum, vermin, filth, and internal enemies, or simply враги́ наро́да (enemies of the people). That last epithet hearkens back to Stalinist lexicon, when this label was often tantamount to a death sentence.
Short for иностра́нный аге́нт, this is now a legal designation imposed by the Russian Ministry of Justice on people deemed to be “conducting political activity in the interests of a foreign state and receiving funding from that state.” The expression is widely used as a contemptuous smear against anyone with liberal views. Although this particular wording didn’t exist in Soviet times, it echoes the formulaic branding of “foreign spies” and “saboteurs” who needed to be brought to justice.
“От иноаге́нтов к врага́м наро́да” (From foreign agent to enemy of the people) reads a 2022 headline on the Radio Liberty website, referring, of course, to those who today bear the иноаге́нт stigma and tomorrow could be simply shot. The opposition often uses lexical parallels to highlight the connection between today’s repressive machinery and its Soviet forerunner. For example, the persecution of two figures in the Russian theater – the director Evgenia Berkovich and playwright Svetlana Petriychuk – is being referred to as the театра́льное де́ло (The Theater Case), and recent searches and arrests within the world of publishing, based on accusations of distributing queer literature, have been labeled де́ло изда́телей (The Case of the Publishers). These formulations echo those used for Stalin-era campaigns against specific professional groups, such as the 1951-53 де́ло враче́й (literally, the case of the doctors, but usually translated as “The Doctors’ Plot” within Anglophone historiography) and the де́ло гене́тиков (The Case of the Geneticists, most strongly associated with Trofim Lysenko, whose pseudoscientific ideas about heredity resulted in thousands of arrests and executions of scientists who stuck to more evidence-based theories), among others.
This expression evokes a police officer or special services agent who plays an archetypical role in Soviet humor as the all-seeing eye of the state. He is always watching and knows where, when, and what you’re talking about. He can appear at any moment.
In the Soviet Union, this phrase was often used as a straightforward form of address for a member of law enforcement holding the rank of major. In post-Soviet life, it has been transformed into a meme (above). While messaging or talking on the telephone with friends about something not politically kosher, a modern Russian might nervously address the comrade major listening in on the conversation, or meekly remind him, “Comrade Major, I’m just some nobody minding my own business.”
Comrade Major is also someone to whom one might pass on valuable information about other people, as in inform on them. The concept of the доно́с (denunciation), the lodging of a complaint with the authorities about someone’s ideologically incorrect behavior, whether a neighbor or a group-chat member, is another reemerging blast from the past, bringing with it the need to behave cautiously and refrain from sharing your true views and lifestyle with people you don’t know well. Sociologists refer to the return of a культу́ра доно́са – a culture of denunciation. Meanwhile, ordinary Russians live in constant fear: anyone could inform (донести́) on you if, for instance, you happen to believe that the war on Ukraine is criminal, you work for a Western company, or you are involved in a same-sex relationship.
The return of repression and the suppression of dissent has revived past practices of resistance and evasion. Soviet citizens developed a truly virtuosic ability to communicate with those they trusted using allegorical speech and subtleties that would go right over Comrade Major’s head. Today’s Russians are again mastering this art. One tool in this art is эзóпов язы́к. This term is being used more broadly than it was in Soviet days. Back then, the expression was mostly applied to the practice of getting materials past censors by expressing opinions through allegory in literature and social commentary. Now the term is being applied to all aspects of speech under totalitarianism: omission, euphemism, and a wide variety of other tricks.
One common technique used to signal a worldview without explicitly expressing it is to display a book. Let’s say you go to Parents’ Day at your child’s school and you see, lying on the teacher’s desk, a children’s book about human rights that was published by the now-abolished Memorial Foundation, or really any book published by a non-mainstream publisher known for liberal views. You can be sure that it was put there for a reason. The teacher is signaling to parents in the know that, in this classroom, an effort is made to avoid government propaganda. It would be impossible to make this explicit due to the danger of донóс.
Since most people lived in small apartments in Soviet times, the main gathering place was the kitchen. While the children and grandparents were asleep in the other rooms, this is where the middle generation got together to drink tea or vodka, discuss banned books, and vent anger at the Kremlin. Such dissident venting sessions were called “ку́хoнные разговóры” (a related but quite different phenomenon from the English language’s kitchen-table “conversations” or “issues,” which usually are economic in nature).
Today, criticism of the authorities has similarly moved to the kitchen, in the metaphysical sense if not the physical one. These days, some people have larger apartments, enabling less cramped gatherings in living rooms, but the conversations that take place there are still ку́хoнные, in the sense of being quiet and secretive – you wouldn’t want Comrade Major to get wind of them. The digital equivalent of the Soviet-era kitchen is Telegram’s “secret chat” option, which allows for messages to quickly “self-destruct.”
There are related expressions – “ку́хонная интеллиге́нция” and “ку́хонная (or ironically but incorrectly кухо́нная) оппози́ция” – (the kitchen intelligentsia/opposition) – applied to people who quietly resist without ever publicly protesting. These expressions are sometimes used derogatorily, but even expressing disagreement behind closed doors is a form of internal resistance and a way of giving the government the finger behind its back. Recently, a related concept has emerged, the “но́вые ти́хие” (new silent) – Russians who are against the system and maybe even take part in some anti-Putin initiatives but do it as cautiously as possible and never speak out publicly.
Over the three-plus years since the war began, the art world has found new forms of existence – or maybe not exactly “new.” They all bear a striking resemblance to Soviet-era phenomena. It would be impossible to show art in a major art gallery that could be interpreted as representing a blatant or even subtle protest. But small, grassroots exhibitions held in abandoned garages, tiny auditoriums at the edge of town, or even in private apartments start to look a lot like the Soviet-era кварти́рные вы́ставки (apartment exhibitions) and can attract rather large numbers of visitors. Just as in Soviet times, it isn’t easy to find out about such events if you don’t travel in the right circles. Only members of trusted networks of friends are included, to make sure that Comrade Major is kept out of the loop.
This is an odd word with a complicated set of connotations. Constructed out of the verb “to return” (возвраща́ть), it is basically an altered form of the Soviet-era term невозвраще́нцы, used for touring performers, cargo-ship crew members, or government officials who, finding themselves overseas, decided to seek political asylum and not return home, with the negative не- suffix chopped off. Today’s возвраще́нцы are Russians who left their country after the full-scale 2022 invasion of Ukraine but then decided to return.
Exact statistics are hard to come by, but at this point, those who precipitously fled the country in recent years, not knowing how the situation would develop, are faced with a choice: they can either put down roots in a foreign country or return home. Some are choosing to “upgrade” their place of emigration, trading, for example, Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, or Serbia for a more developed European country. They are also trying to switch from remote, online work to something more local, signing long-term leases, and taking language courses. Basically, members of this group are sparing no effort at building a life for themselves on foreign soil. But there are some – возвраще́нцы – who, after weighing the pros and cons, are returning home and adapting to a changing Russia, drawn by aging parents and other remaining relatives, as well as familiar ways of life on their native turf. The word sounds ironic, but it rather precisely captures the situation and is not necessarily a slur.
The Battle of Kursk is one of the most famous turning points of the Вели́кая Отéчественная войнá, or Great Patriotic War, as Russians refer to World War II. The taking of the Kursk salient in 1943 marked a decisive shift in favor of the Red Army and was the site of a huge battle involving two million men and several thousand tanks and planes. The Battle of Kursk holds a place of honor within Soviet and Russian history, and anyone who has ever spent time in a Soviet or Russian classroom has heard of it. So, when Ukraine launched an offensive into Kursk Oblast, analogies were bound to emerge.
Ukrainian forces entered Kursk Oblast late in the summer of 2024, and intense fighting followed that soon started to be referred to using the same name as the 1943 face-off. In mid-August, the state news agency TASS published an article comparing the Ukrainian armed forces’ invasion of Kursk Oblast with the Nazi actions in 1943. Its author claimed: “attempts are being made, despite the entire experience of history and the postwar development of Germany, to use neo-Nazism and Russophobia to rewrite the outcome of the Second World War and inflict a strategic defeat on Russia.” In other words, on the basis of geographic coincidence, propaganda is trying to reawaken from the depths of Russians’ collective subconscious memory the image of a fiendish foe who was once defeated outside Kursk and must once again be expelled from there.
The Russian Federation has made repeated attempts to establish patriotic youth organizations. The latest such initiative, the resurrection of the famous young-naturalist movement, was announced in 2022. The history of the юннáт (short for ю́ный натурали́ст) movement began right after the 1917 Revolution and was part of an overall project to create an enlightened person of the future.
In the 1930s, young naturalist stations were set up in forested parks all across Russia. Schoolchildren studied animals and plants, conducted biological experiments, and gained hands-on experience in agriculture. By the late Soviet period, every curious schoolchild from an upstanding Soviet family was reading the «Ю́ный натурали́ст» magazine and participating in юннáт clubs. Today, the young-naturalist phenomenon is hardly universal, but the site of the youth organization Движе́ние пе́рвых (literally: “The Movement of the First” but suggestive of something like “the Forefront Movement” – a feeble attempt at replicating the Soviet-era Pioneer movement founded in 2022) features a page where schoolchildren are invited to become young naturalists to “get to know nature” and help it ”through good deeds.”
This cringeworthy linguistic Frankenstein word is jarring due to its echoing of октября́та (the name of a Soviet-era school-based patriotic organization for children aged seven through nine built out of the word for October – as in the October Revolution – and the suffix used for the young of a species) in combination with the sinister name Wagner, the private military company known for the brutality of its mercenary forces. This “patriotic” youth organization held its first meeting at St. Petersburg’s Wagner Center in early 2023. The organizers brought children together with legislators and security force members, presented computer games that enabled children to launch virtual drones, and shared plans for the organization’s future. That summer Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner company, was killed soon after an abortive attempt to storm Moscow. Wagner was disbanded and the club, along with its disturbing name, fell off the radar. But the semantics and phonetics of this word are such that, once you’ve heard it, it’s hard to unhear.
In February and March of 2025, Presidents Trump and Putin actively demonstrated a mutual desire not only to resolve conflicts, but also to make economic deals. Journalists and pundits immediately recalled the word разря́дка, which had disappeared from use but was once quite the buzzword. In its day, it was as ubiquitous as перестрóйка (perestroika).
Putin not only proposed to Trump that they collaborate on projects to extract Russia’s rare-earth metals but also announced that he liked the idea of reducing military spending. Alexey Pivovarov, the host of the popular YouTube channel “Реда́кция” (editorial office), commented “то́ есть, говоря́ языко́м про́шлой холо́дной войны́, предло́жена не то́лько разря́дка, но и разоруже́ние” (in other words, putting it in terms of the previous Cold War, the proposal is not just for détente, but also disarmament). The talk of potential international deals also brought back memories of the term “совме́стное предприя́тие” (joint venture), which was used in analogous cases of cooperative undertakings between the Soviet Union and Western businesses. Alas, as we now know, neither joint ventures nor relaxing of tensions accompanied by disarmament were in the cards, at least for now. Instead, as of early August, the talk was of yet another “раке́тного кри́зиса” (missile crisis).
IN SUMMARY, RATHER exotic and retro Soviet-era formulations have been retrieved from Grandma’s upper shelf, dusted off, and brought back into fashion. What’s more, these expressions are being used by two irreconcilables – both those who oppose and those who support Kremlin policies. The former are using them ironically, facetiously wringing their hands over the thought of returning to such vestiges of socialism as хозрасчёт (хозя́йственный расчёт or “economic accounting,» a planned-economy term whereby enterprises were supposed to keep expenses in line with revenue), госприёмка (Госуда́рственная приёмка проду́кции предприя́тий or State acceptance of enterprise products – basically state-imposed quality control) or even worse.
The authorities, on the other hand, are turning to former narratives in utter seriousness. As recently as the 2000s, for example, we saw the rebirth of стройотря́ды (or студотря́ды – student construction brigades, usually formed during summer breaks, where young people travel to some site to perform physical labor). In Soviet times, this was a way of compensating for the lack of workers on major construction projects. Contemporary студотря́ды helped out, for instance, in building facilities for the 2014 Sochi Olympics.
In another case of lexical recycling, in February 2025, the oppositionist publication Meduza reported on information leaked from the Kremlin that Putin was planning to bring back the политру́к (short for полити́ческий руководи́тель or political supervisor), a position responsible for the ideological correctness of thought by members of the military or civilian factories and institutes.
Most of these words sounds ridiculous and are fodder for humor. The layer of dust that has gathered over them is too thick – they don’t fit well into contemporary reality. Even the Kremlin understands this. There’s a reason they didn’t try to reuse the name “Pioneer,” instead rebranding basically the same youth movement phenomenon as the “движéние первых.” But there are some terms from the past – like “тáмиздат” or “кварти́рные вы́ставки” – that so perfectly capture present phenomena, it’s a shame not to reuse them.
[1] The term совок, translated here as “Soviet times,” literally means dustpan, but because of its shared root with the term “Soviet,” it came to be used as pejorative slang for things, people, and phenomena associated with that era.
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