On Russia’s New Official Dictionary and the Language of Authoritarianism

Russia has a new official dictionary. The Explanatory Dictionary of the State Language of the Russian Federation, compiled by St. Petersburg State University, with the assistance of the legal department of the Russian Orthodox Church, has joined the list of official reference materials within the Russian Federation.

The dictionary, which defines authoritarianism as “the most effective form of governance in difficult times” and bans the word жопа (ass), is (as is frequently the case in such situations), less a catalog offering a description of the Russian language as it is spoken in 2025 than it is a prescriptive ideological document.

The dictionary’s compilers make no secret of the fact that they operated under the directives of Vladimir Putin’s 2022 Presidential Decree that made the “protection of traditional Russian spiritual and moral values, culture and historical memory” a national strategic priority. Vladimir Putin, along with his allies in the Russian Orthodox Church, has for nearly two decades now weaponized “traditional Russian spiritual and moral values” not only as means of squashing dissent at home but also as a powerful element in Russia’s aggressive, expansionist geopolicy.

In Africa, the United States, and Europe, Russia has sought to portray itself as a defender of traditional values and Christian civilization, paying particular attention to squelching/rebuking[?] progressive policies related to gender and sexuality, and in doing so courting the sympathy and support of reactionaries abroad. This means that Russia’s new values-based dictionary is a problem for us all.

By defining political concepts in moral terms, banning forms of everyday speech, and placing linguistic authority in the hands of the state and the Church, the dictionary attempts to narrow not only expression but imagination itself.

Without a doubt, gender and sexuality play a central role in the linguistic landscape the dictionary attempts to create, mirroring the topic’s role in Russia’s global moral crusade. The dictionary notes that same-sex marriage is a homosexual intimate union between a man and a man or a woman and a woman, condemned by the Russian Orthodox Church and not supported by the Russian state,” while declaring a church marriage is “a family union concluded according to church rites, making it not temporary but eternal.” (Here one can note the nod to a difference between the Western and Eastern Christian theologies of marriage. In the Orthodox church marriages do not last until “death do us part” but “unto the ages of ages.”). Moreover, homosexuality is defined as “a form of sexual deviation” while life is “a traditional Russian spiritual and moral value: the period of a person’s existence from conception and social formation through death.”

The centrality of linguistic control in the authoritarian’s playbook is obvious, the topic of countless studies and novels. Unsurprisingly, Russia, with its long record of authoritarianism, has a particularly rich history. While Westerners are likely most familiar with Soviet-era linguistic controls, including the enforcement of Russian as the principal language of education and daily life throughout the Soviet Union and the euphemisms that inspired Orwell’s Newspeak, the history of linguistic repression in Russia is much older.

Beginning in the early modern period, language became central to the formation of national identity and the consolidation of the modern state. For example, the Académie française, charged with “regulating” the French language, was founded in 1635 and has survived not only the French Revolution, but also the many political regimes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Similarly, when the Greek state was founded in the 1820s, the “language question,” which pitted Demotic Greek, the spoken vernacular of everyday life, against Katharevousa, a reconstructed and classicized form of Greek, became one of the principal battlegrounds on which the new state, defined by an ancient culture, sought to negotiate national identity, political authority, and continuity with the classical past, creating a topic of hot debate into the 1980s.

In this sense, Russia was not unique. When Peter the Great undertook his reform projects in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, language quickly emerged as one of their central targets, an emphasis that continued after his death. Alexander Pushkin owes his place in the pantheon of Russian literary figures in no small part to the fact that his poetry most fully realized the reformers’ ideal of a literary language that blended Church Slavonic, spoken vernacular Russian, and Western European stylistic influences.

Yet, even in Pushkin’s lifetime, his Westernized style was falling out of favor. By the reign of Tsar Nicholas I (r. 1825–1855), the promise of Petrine cosmopolitanism had faded and a new more insular view of culture–and language–was beginning to take shape. Nicholas’s education minister Sergei Uvarov promoted the doctrine of Official Nationality, a comprehensive cultural program which argued the foundations of Russian identity rested on a triad: Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality.

While Uvarov would oversee Pushkin’s literary canonization, he also promoted a linguistic regime that was the polar opposite, one that sought to tie Russian culture and the Russian language to an austere moral vision, articulated and policed by the Russian Orthodox Church. The Russian language, given a near sacred quality, was expected to reflect “Russian values” and not be used as a tool for experimentation or critique. The press and publishing industries operated under strict and expanding censorship regimes that limited not only what could be said, but how it could be said.

The Putin regime’s new dictionary is as much, if not more, in the image of Uvarov’s cultural regime than anything that could have been cooked up by the Soviets. Yet there is an irony to the Uvarov period. Namely, the moment which saw the Russian state attempt to exert its most stringent control over the Russian language, the most important and global flowering of Russian literature began. Not only did Pushkin spend the end of his life in the era of Uvarov, but Gogol would publish Dead Souls and Mikhail Lermontov would spend the majority of his brief life and the whole of his career within it. (And Lemontov’s was a life that notably included two exiles in its short twenty-six years, a clear indicator of the repressiveness of the era.)

Despite making no end of referencing Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, it would seem the Russian president has not fully internalized the moral difficulties of their work.

Perhaps even more significantly, it was during the reign of Uvarov and his tsar that the men whose names would become synonymous with the global impact of Russian literature came of age, formed intellectually in this atmosphere of constraint: Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy. Both Turgenev’s liberalism and Dostoevsky’s moralism, and Tolstoy’s…well, let’s call it moral complexity, are very much the product of the repressive atmosphere in which they grew as men and writers.

Their prose too, as scholars often note, was a product of the era’s censorship. It is this censorship that produced the irony, allegory, and psychological depth that for many today defines the “Russian novel.” Uvarov’s efforts to narrow the Russian language and limit its possibilities within a narrow moral framework with sharp lines between the permissible and the forbidden in the end produced some of the most expansive, psychologically complex, and morally ambiguous literature the world has ever known.

It is a lesson the Putin regime seems not to have learned. Despite making no end of referencing Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, it would seem the Russian president has not fully internalized the moral difficulties of their work. The new dictionary is compiled on Uvarov’s old premise that language can be controlled enough that any challenge to “traditional Russian values” becomes not only unspeakable, but unthinkable as well.

And this is where Russia’s new official dictionary will inevitably fail as a political instrument. Like Uvarov’s doctrine of Official Nationality and his efforts at linguistic repression, it rests on the premise that language can be purified, disciplined, and aligned with a morality approved by church and state. By defining political concepts in moral terms, banning forms of everyday speech, and placing linguistic authority in the hands of the state and the Church, the dictionary attempts to narrow not only expression but imagination itself.

Yet that is the thing about the human imagination. It doesn’t take well to rules. And one might hope that this most recent attempt to limit the storied history of the Russian language will once again backfire.