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

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

We may note, finally, that because swearing was so strongly associated with Russia's lack of culture, it served as a recognized marker of Russian ethnicity. In a newspaper article of 1873, Dostoevsky grappled with the question of why Russians swore more than other nationalities, noting in his diary:

My intention was to prove the chastity of the Russian people, to show

that even if the people use foul language when they are in a drunken

state (for they swear incomparably less when they are sober), they do this

not out love of bad language, not out of the pleasure of swearing, but

simply out of nasty habit so that even thoughts and feelings that

are quite distant from obscenity become expressed in obscene words.

I further argued that to find the principal reason for this habit of

foul language one must look to drunkenness. When drunk, one's tongue

moves with difficulty yet one has a powerful desire to speak, and I

surmised that one resorts to short, conventional, expressive words. You

may make what you will of this conjecture. But that our people is

chaste, even when it is swearing, is worth pointing out.(51)

In its lack of pejorative tone, as well as in its bizarre conjecture that mat words fit the needs of drunken speech, Dostoevsky's view was typically idiosyncratic. More characteristic of attitudes to swearing among the intelligentsia in the late nineteenth century was Leon Trotsky, who in an article of May 1923, entitled `The Struggle for Cultured Speech', argued:

Swearing is the legacy of slavery, submissiveness, lack of respect for

human dignity, whether one's own or another's, and this is particularly

true in Russia... From the bottom [snizu], it expresses despair,

bitterness and, above all, slavery without hope. But the same obscenity

from above [sverkhu], coming from the throat of a nobleman or an uezd

police superintendent, is the expression of verbal superiority,

the slaveowners' self regard... Two sources of Russian bad language

-- that of the gentleman, the official, the police chief, well-fed,

with a plummy voice [s zhirkom v gorle], and the other voice,

hungry, desperate, overstrained.(52)

He went on: `We would have to ask philologists, linguists, folklorists if other nations have such unbridled, clinging [lipkaia; i.e., `sticky'], foul obscenity as we do. So far as I know, the answer is none or almost none'.(53) Swearing, like litter or disorder, thus served as a metonymy of Russianness by alluding to lack of culture (nekul'turnost') that was seen to be unfortunate lot of the Russian people. The young samovar-maker, A. Frolov, who had never set foot outside Russia, was sent by the Tula Social Democrats to attend a socialist conference in Tammerfors in December 1905. Sitting on a Finnish train, he was amazed:

They were simple folk -- I could tell this from their hands -- but they

were nicely dressed and didn't behave as we do. They didn't throw

cigarette ends on the floor or spit. The carriage was clean. They sat and

chatted in an orderly manner. I noticed one passenger go out, presumably