Except at Official Functions, Russian Soldiers Fighting in Ukraine Never Refer to Themselves as ‘Liberators,’ Russian Philologist Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 30 – Putin and his propagandists routinely refer to Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine as “liberators,” but Aleksey Tikhonov, a Russian philologist, says that he has found no cases where the soldiers call themselves that except at official propaganda functions where they have to hew the line.

            That is just one examples of the way in which official terms have not caught on, the scholar who now teaches at the University of Zurich says. But the failure of propaganda to be accepted is also highlighted by the way in which those who do use these terms given them radically different meanings (svoboda.org/a/nazvatj-voynu-voynoy-kak-i-pochemu-menyaetsya-yazyk-rossii-i-ukrainy/33865662.html).

            Some Russians and many Ukrainians are now using the word “liberator” in a highly ironic sense, with some even suggesting that before the Russian soldiers can liberate anyone else, they must liberate themselves and their own country, something that hasn’t happened and doesn’t appear likely to.

            In the course of a lengthy interview, Tikhonov describes the way soldiers on both sides of the line have adapted language to make their suffering easier to take; but perhaps most important, he discusses not just how war affects language but how language has an impact on war – and thus why rulers care so much about the language used.

            For governments, especially those which are engaged in aggression and violation of human rights, the philologist says, using bureaucratic language helps them to project the idea that war is in fact “part of ordinary life and nothing particularly different from it. But this acquires new meaning when the leaders start talking about war and fighting a war.

            During the first several years of his war, Putin insisted on calling it a special military operation and punished those who called it a war; but now the Kremlin leader and his propagandists call it a war because they can no longer hide from those taking part and others affected that it is precisely that.

            But when leaders start talking about war, Tikhonov says, they are showing that they are committed to fighting to the death, a position that is superficially attractive as far as they are concerned but one that opens the door to doubts among the population and often in the past the defeat of those who decide to talk about war all the time.