The social meanings of swearing: workers and bad language in late imperial and early Soviet Russia

Past & Present, August, 1998 by S.A. Smith

Rech' bez mata -- shchi bez tomata

(Russian proverb)(1)

Not least of the shocks that followed the collapse of Communism in Russia was the entry into the public domain of words that had never been seen in print before. Russian has an extraordinarily fertile vocabulary of obscenity, but in both imperial and Soviet Russia, for reasons of public decency and censorship, the publishing of swear words was absolutely forbidden. The easing of censorship which accompanied the end of Communism smashed the taboo on printing words that had long been out of sight yet seldom out of earshot. Not only in the explosion of pornography, but also in serious writing, authors seized on the opportunity to convey ordinary speech in all its offensiveness and coarse humour, and to write about sexual matters in explicit detail. In particular, the work of Eduard Limonov, whose writing had been published in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, acquired notoriety because of its deliberate flouting of conventions of literary quality and good taste.(2) In addition, the lifting of censorship reawakened academic interest in Russia's rich lexicon of bad language, and in obscenity within popular culture more generally. Material on bawdy folk tales, lewd chastushki (four-line, rhymed ditties on a topical or humorous theme), verses, proverbs, sayings, puns and anecdotes, much of which had been collected in the nineteenth century, was published for the first time by ethnographers, folklorists and linguists.(3) So far, however, little attention has been paid by historians to the changing meanings and social uses that have attached to bad language.

Because swearing exists in many different forms, from the deadliest curse to a joke between friends, from a withering expression of contempt to a mild expression of annoyance, it is impossible to reconstruct the range of meanings that swearing carried in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Russian society in their entirety. Much of the meaning of swearing depends upon context, upon the shared values and intuitions of the speaker and the addressee, and this is extraordinarily difficult for the historian to reconstruct. In addition, censorship of the sources means that it is virtually impossible to know the actual words used. It is, however, possible to examine what swearing as a generic phenomenon meant for the more articulate sections of society. This article seeks to explore the representations and usages of swearing among Russian workers as a way of shedding light on the relationship of government and the intelligentsia to the common people in a period of rapid social change and political turmoil. First, it examines the ways in which swearing was represented in the discourse of the educated public from the late nineteenth century, showing how it carried different meanings in relation to ethnicity, class and gender but, above all, served to connote the cultural backwardness of Russian society. Secondly, it examines the social uses of obscene language by workers, especially as a mechanism of enforcing and eschewing specific class and gender identities. Thirdly, it shows that because obscene language carried a heavy freight of social meaning, it became a political issue for those who sought to advance the cause of the working class; and, finally, the article outlines the campaigns against bad language that were undertaken between the 1905 Revolution and the demise of the Bolsheviks' 'struggle for cultured speech' at the end of the 1920s.

In his survey of the history of swearing in the English language, Geoffrey Hughes writes that `in many cultures swearing is fascinating in its protean diversity and poetic creativity, while being simultaneously shocking in its ugliness and cruelty'.(4) Russian swearing is no exception to this generalization. In modern Russian the word for obscene language is mat, a word closely related to the word for `mother' (mat').(5) The origins of the word are obscure, but may refer specifically to `mother-oaths': i.e., aspersions cast on the honour of one's mother.(6) In time, mat came to denote all the taboo words which relate to the genitalia and to sexual and bodily functions. What is remarkable about Russian swearing, in contrast to swearing in many other European languages, is that it does not have an explicit religious content: for instance, it does not breach the Third Commandment against taking the Lord's name in vain. Blasphemy is not a standard feature of Russian swearing -- the name of God, Jesus or the Virgin Mary being seldom invoked.(7) Yet though mat words relate exclusively to what one might call the lower physical faculties, some of the emotional and moral charge which they carry derives from the fact that they were seen, historically, to disparage things sacred. The literary scholar, Boris Uspenskii, has suggested that the origins of mat lie in the cult of the pagan goddess, Mokosh', who functioned as an earth mother. In his view, the prevalence of obscenity in Russian peasant culture is rooted in pagan fertility cults, a hypothesis borne out by the prominence of ribald language and licentious ritual in marriage rites and festivities connected with the agricultural cycle.(8) Mat acquires historical visibility only after the coming of Christianity, conventionally dated from the baptism of Vladimir I, prince of Kiev, in 988, when the church began to proscribe its use as part of the battle to extirpate paganism. In due course, the cult of Mother Earth was absorbed into the cult of the Mother of God (Bogoroditsa), which may explain the connection which existed in popular religious belief between mat, the Virgin Mary, the earth and one's own mother.(9) Typical of ecclesiastical proscriptions against maternaia bran' is a homily dating back to at least the seventeenth century, dubiously ascribed to St John Chrysostom, which explains that mat is sinful, first, because it insults the Mother of God; secondly, our own mothers; and, finally, `our third mother', the earth which feeds and nourishes us.(10) This trope was dear to the hearts of Old Believers, who consistently linked the use of mat to paganism and heresy, but the idea of the `three mothers' was never lost in mainstream Orthodoxy, even though in later centuries the church objected to swearing principally on the grounds that it offended against Christian chastity.(11) It is this transmutation of the cult of Mother Earth into the cult of the Mother of God which may explain why, in spite of its non-religious content, mat carried the taint of blasphemy.(12)