Last November, the Pushkin Russian Language Institute announced its choice of 2024 Word of the Year. The “winner” chosen by the panel of Russian language scholars was Пу́шкин (Pushkin). True, 2024 marked 225 years since the beloved writer’s birth and events were held to commemorate this anniversary, but still… in terms of nonsensicalness, this choice is rivaled only by the one triumphantly announced by several publishers at Moscow’s December book fair, who decided that мир (peace) was what Russia was all about in 2024.
These selections were absurd not only in the Orwellian sense of being completely out of sync with reality, but also because 2024 offered such a bountiful field of candidates. The events and attributes of wartime continue to be copiously reflected in the lexicon. For this edition of our exploration of contemporary Russian, we have identified ten words and expressions that would surely have been top 2024 word-of-the-year contenders if only an independent panel of judges had been allowed to select them.
In all fairness, it should be noted that this word (quadrobers in English, and probably the 2024 neologism that caused the most stir in Russia) was included in the Pushkin Institute’s list of other “key words.” As the Institute noted in its social media posts: “Unlike other candidate words, it is distinguished by unquestionable novelty and an explosive growth in popularity.” Quadrobing (or quadrobics – the word originally emerged as an analogy with aerobics) is practiced by a subculture of people who imitate the behavior and appearance of four-legged animals by dressing up and moving on all fours.
Why didn’t this word beat out “Pushkin,” the most over-used and time-worn word imaginable? After several instances where children pretending to be animals acted violently toward their peers, quadrobing became a prime target for officials, who blamed the craze on the West and proposed banning the practice, which, of course, is exactly what placed this weird word at the center of the country’s attention.
“Washington and Brussels are losing their dominance,” State Duma Chairman Vyacheslav Volodin wrote on his Telegram channel. “To continue ruling the world, they are implementing a ‘Dehumanization’ project… Today we find ourselves at a point where people are being pushed toward a rejection not just of their gender identity, but also their human identity. By suggesting trying out the role of animals, make-believe characters, and mythical beings. These displays look like play and joking around only at first. They mask a serious program of rejecting humanity and everything that is human.”
Probably best translated as “family studies,” this word is a portmanteau created using the same formula by which many academic fields have been named in Russia: by coupling the subject of study with the word вéдение (the nominal form of the verb вéдать, an archaic equivalent of the verb “to know”). Семьевéдение has joined the ranks of, for example, “литературовéдение” (literary studies) and краеве́дение (regional history studies) as an academic subject, and in September 2024 it was added to the fifth- through ninth-grade curriculum. Its goal is to promote “understanding of the family and traditional family relations as a value in the life of modern humans.” As stated on the site of the Institute for the Development of Education, another goal of the course is to provide citizens a patriotic education and a sense of their “Russian identity.”
This word combines the im- prefix (as in иммигра́ция/immigration) with “-patriation,” as in “repatriation.” In early 2024 a report appeared on the TASS federal news agency about a forum in which Putin participated. At the forum, Irene Cecchini, an Italian student studying at the Moscow State Institute of Foreign Relations, made a speech proposing that it be made easier for foreigners who support Russian values to move to the country. By summer, a presidential decree to that effect – “Concerning Providing Humanitarian Support to Individuals Sharing Traditional Russian Spiritual-Moral Values” – appeared. In accordance with the decree, a program was launched whereby applicants meeting the specified criteria would be eligible to apply for a residency permit under simplified procedures; specifically they would be exempted from quotas and the requirement that they speak Russian.
A flurry of articles appeared in the state-run media proclaiming this innovation “a window of opportunity to alleviate the workforce deficit,” which tells us what was really going on. Underlying all the loud talk about values was an attempt to solve the shortage of workers caused by the siphoning off of manpower to fight in Ukraine and the flood of antiwar Russians leaving the country. This supposition is supported by the fact that the photograph illustrating one such article shows women in hijabs, suggesting that people from neighboring Muslim countries (who are much more likely to “impatriate” than Western Europeans) would be welcome as импатриа́нты.
It’s hard to say whether this measure will help alleviate the worker shortage. News about it was quickly drowned out by other events, and импатриа́ция has hardly become a household word. Nevertheless, it is interesting not only in its own right but because of how it was introduced. One trick today’s Russian leadership inherited from its Soviet-era predecessors is pretending to submit to public pressure when in fact they are just serving their own purpose. The act put on by Putin and Cecchini, who suggested the name for the program, is typical of the sorts of staged exchanges this practice has traditionally featured.
This neologism translates as “semi-emigration” and applies to departure from Russia, whether as a fait accompli or kept open as an option for the hazy future. The topic of quitting Russia remains a hot one and continues to generate new expressions. In the form полуэмигрáнт (i.e., a person who engages in полуэмигра́ция), it belongs to the same semantic club as релокáнт, уехáнт, оставлéнец and возвращéнeц (relocator, departer, remainer, and returner – see "Touchpoints," RL, Summer 2023, and "From Blitzcringe to Gasogeddon," RL, Summer 2024).
From the start, those who took part in the initial post-February-2022 wave of emigration thought of it as something temporary and not very serious: they left in a hurry, hoping to wait out the bad times and return a bit later. Some people did return fairly quickly, but since the bad times didn’t end, some left again. Others are still just thinking about leaving, while still others have grown accustomed to having a foot in two different countries over the course of three years of war. Such is often the case for men who settled in nearby countries like, for example, Armenia, and have been able to periodically visit their families. Many families are spending at least a small part of the year abroad, maintaining a rented apartment as a toehold in case an urgent need to relocate arises but mostly continuing to live in Russia, where healthcare is less expensive and grandparents are available to look after the kids.
Our first non-neologism has a straightforward translation: exchange. It was the clear frontrunner vocabulary word last August and a candidate for not only the word of 2024, but of several decades. To this day, if you want to bring up the fact that Putin exchanged sixteen political prisoners for the spy Krasikov and several other Russian citizens arrested in the West, you need only utter this one word and everyone will know what you’re talking about. Even as we see an accelerated pace of prisoner exchanges between Russia and the United States, this event will always stand out as the one that might have saved Alexei Navalny but did not. Incidentally, a group of independent experts who select an annual word of the year under the leadership of the Russian-American philologist Mikhail Epstein named “Navalny” as deserving that distinction for 2024. This is the first time in the 17 years the group has been selecting a word to capture the year’s zeitgeist that they have chosen a surname.
Despite the dashed hope that Navalny might have been saved by an exchange, this swap was nevertheless the first piece of good news and cause for celebration the opposition has had since the war began. For the authorities, this was reason enough to keep обмен off any list of word-of-the-year candidates.
The Powers That Be continue to develop their fluency in Newspeak,* labeling concepts with words that mean their opposite and generally refusing to call a spade a spade. In recent years, the versatile word ситуа́ция (situation) has become a handy euphemism both for officials and members of the general public wishing to stay out of trouble. You can use this word to describe the war itself or any associated phenomena. The phrases “в теку́щей ситуа́ции” (in the current situation) or “в ситуа́ции, в кото́рой мы все оказа́лись” (in the situation we all find ourselves in) capture Russia’s changing reality, with its прилёты, мобилиза́ция, полуэмигра́ция, семьеве́дение, репре́ссия, страх (drone attacks, mobilization, semi-emigration, family studies, repression, and fear).
However, in 2024, ситуáция took on a new, very specific coloration when Putin deftly used the word to refer to Ukraine’s capturing of a sizable swath of Kursk Oblast. This gave rise to a flood of nervous joking, with the anthropologist Alexandra Arkhipova sharing on her popular Telegram channel one piece of dark humor in circulation: “Пора́ Росси́йскую Федера́цию переименова́ть в Росси́йскую Ситуа́цию” (It’s time to rename the Russian Federation the Russian Situation).
Russia’s official media have their own set of expressions to refer to Ukraine’s incursion deep into the country, including “вне́шнее возде́йствие” (external action/impact) or “вооружённая провока́ция” (armed provocation). The Newspeak glossary is constantly expanding, and there are a couple of unique precedents that we can’t resist mentioning, even if they haven’t gained wide popularity: сооруже́ние безопа́сности (safety structure, better known as an “air-raid shelter”) and ка́псула уедине́ния (isolation capsule, in other words a personal, portable bomb shelter, big enough for a family and supplies), both noted by Alexandra Arkhopova as consumer products inspired by “the situation.”
This word (slow-down) is another euphemism worth mentioning and a possible short-lister for pivotal events of the year.
Soon after Russia’s full-scale invasion, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter were blocked in the country, along with an ever-growing list of independent media that now required a VPN to access. However, for a long time the government did not deprive the public of access to YouTube. The site is exceptionally popular among ordinary Russians, who greedily consume its useful educational videos and park their children in front of the app’s plentiful cartoons. For a long time, this popularity served as a counterweight to the fact that big-city “liberals” use it to watch videos by oppositionist journalists. There was constant talk about the possibility that YouTube would be blocked, but it wasn’t until the summer of 2024 that the government finally got around to doing so. Still, officials were reluctant to call it блокиро́вка (blocking), so the phenomenon was referred to as “замедле́ние” and “деграда́ция” (degradation), among other euphemisms.
None of this happened overnight. It was a gradual process: in some places video-hosting continued to work, in others it worked more slowly, and in still others the app didn’t work at all. But there was hope that this was temporary and that the “slow-down” would be just that, rather than a total blocking of beloved shows. People started joking that soon the government would start handing out ration cards for YouTube, the way the Soviet one did for bread and other essentials.
Then, in November, the pro-Kremlin media began sharing a report from the film director Karen Shakhnazarov about how, in a personal meeting with Putin, he had spoken out about the inexpediency of заморо́зка (freezing) YouTube. “Vladimir Vladimirovich said that he would look into it,” Shakhnazarov shared. As in the case of Irene Cecchini’s импатриа́ция proposal, this sounds like the classic stage-managed voice of the people reaching the wise ruler. Everyone awaited a miracle.
No miracle came. YouTube continued to be blocked, and Russians now need a top-notch VPN to access it. Meanwhile, the authorities are playing Whack-a-Mole against VPNs, quite successfully slowing-down all the popular free services.
Last year the widely used Viber messaging app also became inaccessible, and there is talk of blocking all other apps that enable international messaging.
This word (elections) did make the Pushkin Institute’s short list. Indeed, 2024 was a presidential election year in Russia, and those elections were referred to as вы́боры Пу́тина (the Putin elections). The whole process felt inauthentic, and it was unlikely that people would buy the idea of this word taking first place.
For example, the popular language and grammar reference site gramota.ru did not even include вы́боры on their list of candidates. Being neither a government mouthpiece nor exempt from censorship, gramota.ru made the excuse that вы́боры is not a new word. They wound up naming the borrowed вайб (vibe) Word of the Year, even though it entered Russian parlance a good decade ago. It may not be as old hat as “Pushkin,” but it isn’t a very convincing choice. Then again, considering the repression vibe, not to mention the vibe of hate toward everything Western, and the constant calls by Duma members to abolish foreign words, the choice was a bold move by gramota.ru.
As for the election itself, people didn’t pay much attention. The opposition was still crushed by Navalny’s death, and for other Russians, the event had even less significance. The replacement of Putin by Putin has become as much a part of the natural order as the changing of the seasons. Then in the fall, the Duma elections, which predictably returned most members of Putin’s United Russia party to parliament, also passed with little hype, which earned them the designations ти́хие or стери́льные вы́боры (the quiet or sterile elections). The same could be said of March’s presidential “электора́льные мероприя́тия” (electoral measures/undertakings), as the exiled political scientist Yekaterina Shulman usually refers to them in her popular YouTube commentaries. Russians seemed to get a lot more excited about the US presidential elections, so maybe that is what increased the number of clicks on election-related articles and video links, thereby influencing the Pushkin Institute’s decision-making.
Russian rocket engineers have a tradition of naming the weaponry they produce after trees: the Кедр (Swiss pine), the То́поль (poplar), and the Бук (beech). Another tree-rocket, the Орéшник (hazel), came up during a speech Putin gave last November, in which he proclaimed that this rocket system was used in recent strikes against Ukraine.
Ballistic rockets ascend thousands of kilometers above earth into space. On their way down, gravity propels them toward their target. Due to the huge speed they accumulate, these rockets are very hard to intercept, unlike more common cruise missiles (which are крыла́тые or “winged” in Russian). Although Russia and the United States have only agreed to warn each other before launching an intercontinental ballistic missile, and the strike in question involved a medium-range ballistic missile, Russia warned the US about it. This suggests that the main point of using this weapon for the strike was to provoke alarm, especially given the fact that it caused relatively little damage.
Ruslan Leviev, an independent military analyst, pointed out that ballistic rockets are much more expensive and much less precise than cruise missiles. “I call the non-nuclear variety полити́ческие раке́ты (political rockets),” Liviev said. “It’s as if Putin is showing that he’s ready to move from words to deeds, he’s brandishing a nuclear cudgel.” But this sabre rattling is truly frightening. Pro-Kremlin bloggers are threatening a worldwide орехопáд (literally, a nut-fall, analogous to a водопа́д or waterfall). By the end of the year, the оре́шник was all anybody was talking about in Russia. In most cases, Russians are as frightened of it as other peaceful earthlings would be, but the weapon fills some with a self-satisfied confidence in their country’s invincibility.
These two terms – the apology sweater, the turtleneck of apologies – are memes that emerged early in 2024 and quickly faded into the background amid the unending stream of dramatic events, beginning with Navalny’s death and ending with the орéшник strike. But this new fashion trend à la russe is emblematic and worthy of inclusion in our list.
It all began back in late 2023 with a notorious го́лая вечери́нка (naked party), a private pre-New Year’s shindig at a Moscow club where scantily clad celebrities let loose, as captured in photos and videos that circulated on-line, causing an uproar that echoed for months. Pilloried by the Russian media for being disrespectful of the Special Military Operation and traditional spiritual-moral values, the stars began to record apology videos. In them, their contrition looks extremely fake and some parties to the scandal didn’t hide the fact that they were arm-twisted into making their apologies, if they wanted to continue making a living and avoid having their performances canceled. In contrast to their minimal attire at the party, in the videos the celebrities dressed extremely modestly, with almost no makeup, in subdued colors, and taking care not to show any body parts, including the neck: buttoned-up shirts, casual knit sweaters, and turtlenecks, inspiring some clever mockery, including a fake ad for apology attire.
This launched a new tradition of contrite and self-deprecating videos designed to compensate for any lapses a celebrity might be guilty of, and always in the same style, as if a new dress code had been established for the genre. The Moscow brand Grek even released a special apology turtleneck: a roomy top with a remarkably high collar and the word “извини́те” (forgive me) written in white letters against a black background in several languages.
If it weren’t so expensive, this turtleneck could be extremely popular among the semi-emigrants, to help them apologize for their Russian passport when abroad and to their older relatives when they’re back in Russia.
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