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

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

to the lavatory. Someone coming into the carriage took his seat. When

the passenger returned he said in his language that the seat belonged to

him. The man apologized and went into another carriage to find an

unoccupied seat. Among us it would have been inconceivable not to swear

at him and soon the whole carriage would have joined in.(54)

Finally, the connection of swearing to the Russian national character was often made implicitly. It is interesting to observe, for example, how often words for swearing, such as mat, bran', rugan', are preceded by an adjective that refers to Russianness, such as `choice Russian cursing' (otbornaia russkaia bran').(55)

II

THE SOCIAL USES OF MAT BY WORKERS

In investigating how workers used mat to construct social identities, enforce collective norms and maintain group boundaries, the historian is reliant upon the memoirs of revolutionary workers and on letters written by workers to the socialist press. A couple of caveats regarding these sources are in order. By definition, they were written by `conscious' workers, for whom swearing figured as a symptom of the degradation of the working class under capitalism or as an indication of the way in which capitalists and their agents sought to demean and diminish workers. Consequently, there is much in their testimony about the workplace, but little about the uses of mat in the home or neighbourhood; much about mat as insult, but little about its other functions. Secondly, because it was impermissible to print the words that were actually spoken, the sources give only a general sense of the ways in which mat operated and do not allow us to investigate lexicon. Complaints from workers sometimes report insults, but though unpleasant, these never involve mat as such (i.e., the taboo words relating to sexual and bodily functions). For example, a female employee of the George Borman chocolate factory in St Petersburg wrote: `the forewomen do not shrink from using words like "scum" etc.'. Here, the Russian word, though not a mat word, is abbreviated to `svol ...' (svoloch).(56) Another complainant tells us that tavern waitresses were treated worse than prostitutes, yet the insults she cites are `bitch' (sterva, quite a strong word, one of whose literal meanings is `carrion'), `mare' (kobyla), and `filth' (paskuda) -- nasty, to be sure, but probably a pale reflection of the language actually used.(57) However, it may not always have been the case that correspondents censored the language used to avoid offending public decency, for after the 1905 Revolution, verbal abuse, which to a contemporary western reader might seem rather mild, such as the insult `devil's head' (cherteva golova), came to seem grievously insulting to those at whom it was hurled. Male tavern employees complained bitterly about being called `son of a bitch' (sukin syn), `scoundrel' (merzavets), or `mangy pup' (parshivyi shchenok).(58) Such sensitivity connects to changes in the political context which had made workers increasingly assertive of their dignity.