Book Excerpt: The Words Russians Use to Describe Life Under Authoritarianism

It can be difficult to recognize one’s home country drifting toward authoritarianism while living through it. Today’s dictators don’t necessarily wear military uniforms. In public speeches, they talk about freedom and democracy. Their subjects often have access to world class technology, visa free travel, and middle class comforts.

Russians, however, have generations of experience with the sense of unreality that characterizes life under an oppressive state. Russian literature, and the language itself, have often been at the forefront of resistance to the authorities—which has in turn shaped language and literature.

Under the Tsarist autocracy of the late 1800s, for instance, Russian satirist Mikhail Saltykov­-Shchedrin developed Aesopian speech—an ironic, coded vocabulary that obscures meaning from the authorities while allowing people in the know to communicate freely. During Soviet times, Aesopian speech was fine-tuned by satirists such as Fazil Iskander, whose tongue-in-cheek fables jabbed at corruption and tyranny.

In Putin’s Russia, language remains a way of coping with, making sense of, and ultimately making peace with the horrors of daily life in a land where ordinary people are all too often devoured by the leviathan of the state.

The terms below offer a sense of what life is like for those living under authoritarianism in Russia today. Western readers often think of tyranny as something that happens elsewhere. But authoritarianism can spread—read closely, and you might find striking parallels to warning signs in the United Kingdom, Israel, the United States, and beyond.

Riot police officers and supporters of jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny clash during a rally in Saint Petersburg, Russia, on Jan. 23, 2021. Anatolij Medved/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Vlast’: Power

The concept of vlast’ permeates Russian politics, as well as the conversations that Russians share about politics. Vlast’ literally translates to “power,” but it means so much more. Like poder in Spanish, it refers to state power and control, with the connotation of absolute or extreme power.

But sometimes, people use vlast’ to refer to the state or government itself, which is telling. For instance, Russians refer to policemen or soldiers as representatives of vlast’ (predstaviteli vlasti). Heads of state and government officials are called vlast’ imooshchie, literally “those who have vlast’.”

Language shapes politics and vice versa. Perhaps it is partly because of this association between the idea of power and the idea of a state—inherent in vlast’—that Russian politicians are so focused on capturing the state. In 1990, Putin’s former mentor Anatoly Sobchak, then a pro-democracy reformer, put it pithily: “We [democrats] have the power. Therefore, this is a democracy.”

It is obvious that those who trade in vlast’ are dangerous. If your president is threatening to use state mechanisms and supposedly apolitical government agencies to trammel his opponents—beware. There is a good chance that your leader believes that they wield not just power, but vlast’.

Russian President Vladimir Putin gives a speech at a forum of volunteers in Moscow on Dec. 6, 2017. Alexei Druzhinin/Sputnik/AFP via Getty Images

Byudjetniki: Budget people

Byudjetniki are the human material out of which tyranny is built. They cheer at Putin’s demonstrations, and they help falsify his elections. In Russia, byudjetniki are teachers, doctors, social workers, students, and bureaucrats—basically, anyone whose livelihood depends on the state. Byudjetniki literally translates to “budget people.”

In countries such as Russia, where the state operates the majority of schools and hospitals and state-owned corporations control key industries (such as gas and oil), byudjetniki constitute a significant percentage of population.

Byudjetniki live in a fear of the state, a system in which people’s incomes are tied to a leader’s whim. They are often called in as extras for pro­government rallies, where they simulate excitement with varying degrees of success. The lucky few are paid to attend, but many are simply told to show up, or else.

Students are threatened with expulsion if they miss a rally they are required to attend in lieu of class. Regional mayors and governors receive quotas for how many municipal workers should be dispatched. Workers might be bussed in from their factories under threats of termination. Byudjetniki support whoever promises them immediate benefits or stability, regardless of the long-term costs.

Zona: Special zone

Zona highlights the importance of physical space in politics. The term itself was popularized in the West by Andrei Tarkovsky’s iconic 1979 film, Stalker, and spread further through the eponymous 2007 Ukrainian video game. Both portray zona as a mysterious and deadly space filled with monsters and wonders.

In Russian, zona is also slang for “prison,” but it is integrated into a wide lexicon. Mediazona is the name of an exiled Russian media company. Zona is how people refer to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, the restricted area around the nuclear site. To enter a zona is to enter an environment where survival is not guaranteed. Zonas include Auschwitz, Gaza, the Donbas, and the gulag.

Zona is more commonly used than the literal Russian word for prison, tyur’ma. It’s a place whose owners allow violence by design. In Russia, the prison zona still serves as a benchmark for social norms, much as it did during Soviet times. Because so many people have been imprisoned, the zona’s norms have seeped into society at large.

What does this have to do with authoritarianism? Zonas are authoritarian by nature, and what happens inside a zona never stays there. There will be a breach, a leak, a revolt. If you allow violence to exist, even if you try to contain it, it will inevitably spread and reproduce further.

The violent tactics leaders use when they rise to power inevitably become a violent system of governance—just look at the Russian Bolsheviks or the Italian fascists. The lesson to be gleaned is to not condone brutality when it appears limited in scope or because you think it will not impact you. Invariably, it will.

Kadyrovizatsia: Kadyrovization

Ramzan Kadyrov, for whom kadyrovization is named, is the longtime head of the Chechen Republic. Technically, Chechnya is one of Russia’s federal subjects, but de facto, Kadyrov rules it as personal fiefdom. Repressive policies are often tested in Chechnya before they are implemented elsewhere in Russia.

Since 2017, Kadyrov has overseen a brutal manhunt against queer Chechens, disappearing and torturing thousands of people. Chechnya also carried out Russia’s first forced apologies, in which security services post videos to social media showing roughed-up suspects apologizing for their crimes, all for the sake of humiliation. This is now a favored law enforcement practice across Russia.

Kadyrov is in charge of a part of Russia that is governed by a distinct set of laws. Parallel courts, disappearances, and wanton brutality are normal. This cordoning off of a territory is kadyrovization. There, oppression can be introduced and refined while citizens elsewhere remain blissfully unaware of what is taking place within their own borders. (But remember, violence rarely stays confined to the zona.)

Tsifrovoi gulag: Digital gulag

Democracy and the internet both arrived in Russia in the 1990s. Before the infrastructure for an independent press could fully develop, Russians were already online. When Putin came to power, he was able to strangle the country’s still-fragile free press, but the decentralized nature of the internet posed a serious challenge to the Kremlin’s censorship efforts.

In the 2010s, social media seemed to promise freedom around the world, from Cairo to Kyiv. After a Facebook post sparked Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution in 2013, the Kremlin clamped down on online speech. Countless websites were censored or shuttered, and users fled to foreign platforms—including, eventually, Telegram, which was launched by exiled Russian entrepreneur Pavel Durov.

In 2019, Russia’s parliament mandated that physical internet infrastructure be relocated to Russia in the name of sovereignty—in other words, to make it easier to control. China’s Great Firewall became Russia’s North Star. The Kremlin’s technology experts tested whether Russia’s internet could be separated from the global internet.

With the war in Ukraine, censorship became ubiquitous; new legislation passed in 2022 prohibited people from calling the war a “war,” even online. Russians started to call this system a digital gulag, or digital concertation camp: a prison with no walls and no escape, now that repression has gone digital.

Interestingly, the digital gulag has also proved convenient for many ordinary Russians. Government services have been streamlined into a single mega-app. People can book a doctor’s appointment in two clicks, and bank transactions have become instantaneous. But these conveniences have come with a major caveat: the loss of digital freedom.

The same state-developed app that allows residents to pay their utility bills has been utilized by the Kremlin to charge fines for protesting the war in Ukraine and even to send draft notices.

Members of the Wagner Group patrol near a tank outside a circus building in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, on June 24, 2023. AFP via Getty Images

Tank zastryal v vorotah tsirka: A tank stuck at the gates of a circus

Authoritarianism makes life feel absurd, like it is spinning in a mad frenzy. Suddenly, everything is post-truth, doublespeak, or a meme. Russians irreverently call the mayhem of authoritarianism blyadskiy tsirk, literally a “fucking circus.” In other words, tyranny is farce, a show, the wool over people’s eyes. In 2023, this phrase received an upgrade.

That June, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner Group, publicly feuded with Russia’s Ministry of Defense over the war in Ukraine and seized the key port city of Rostov-on-Don. His private army began marching toward Moscow, but they never reached the capital. Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko brokered a deal with Putin, who agreed to not to charge Prigozhin with treason if he dropped the rebellion.

One photograph from this one-day insurrection became famous: It captured a tank stuck in the gates of a circus in Rostov-on-Don. Cheery posters on each column surrounding the tank made for a ridiculous image. For Russians, memes of the Wagner tank became an illustration of this phrase—something that was too unbelievable to be true.

The hidden paradox of authoritarianism is that while it may appear stable from the outside, inside it is fragile and chaotic. A crisis can brew beneath the surface for years, only to erupt seemingly out of nowhere. And Prigozhin? Exactly two months after the rebellion, he was killed in a plane crash, along with everyone else on board.

Dna net: There is no rock bottom

Variations of this saying became popular in communist Poland and the Soviet Union. The meaning is simple and bleak: Things can always get worse. Those who experience democratic decline for the first time will be surprised each time a new boundary is crossed. The president and officials cannot just ignore the law, people will say. Or can they?

As authoritarianism creeps in, political and social norms will be broken over and over again. Russians witnessed this with former opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Surely they won’t just ban him from running in elections. Surely they won’t poison him. Surely they won’t jail him. Surely they won’t kill him. But they did.

Righteous citizens find themselves in a perpetual state of shock and disbelief. How could this be?, they ask. A cynical Russian would tell them to learn the lesson captured in the phrase “there is no rock bottom.” They might also add s dna postuchali—“there is knocking from below the bottom.” Whenever you think you’ve reached the bottom, authoritarians invent something new beneath it. What was once unthinkable becomes routine.