What's In a Name?

This crisis of naming involves multiple, apparently contradictory, understandings of its subject (usually "Russia") as well as divergent philosophies of naming. "Global Russian" downplays the "Russian" part of the designation, allowing it to mean whatever the speaker wants "Russian" to signify. "Global Russian" delights in linguistic slippage (to the point of slipping between languages): "Russian" is whatever the "Global Russian" speaker points to when they say "Russian." Crucially, it is a self-designation:  though there is plenty of room to criticize the Global Russian project for unacknowledged imperialist holdovers, "Russian" in this case is not imposed on subjects who reject the name.

The statist iterations of the "Russian World" project signal  what might be called "incantatory" naming, or "magical thinking":  here, the most important thing is the very fact of the assertion of the name.  There is nothing new about this; the path from the straightforward nationalist slogan during the Wars of Yugoslav Succession, "Ovo je Srbija" ("The is Serbia") that was slapped on a whole range of disputed territories to the much-derided Russian billboards in occupied Ukraine ("Russia Is Here Forever," which looked ironic once Russian forces left).  This is the linguistic logic of manifesto, which, regardless of any substantive content, rests on reasserting the existence of the document's subject ("We are Futurists," for instance).

It is a logic that is simultaneously aggressive and melancholic, a deliberately unequivocal assertion that responds to the unresolved loss of what had been thought to be a fixed referent.  At the heart of this crisis of naming is an inability or refusal to define what, exactly is being named, and what constitutes is semantic, geographical, and juridical borders.  Thus all the current names are inherently unsatisfying:  The Russian Federation (itself a truncated iteration of the "Russian ("Rossiiskaia") Soviet Federative Socialist Republic),  Russia (which describes what, exactly?), Rus' (which makes nostalgic and imperialist claims on Kyiv), the Commonwealth of Independent States (the umbrella association that replaced the USSR, and which barely registers now as an afterthought), the USSR itself (defunct, and built around the initially empty signifier of "Soviet"), the Russian Empire (which always seems on the verge of some sort of comeback). Nor should we forget the "Near Abroad" (the former Soviet states minus the Russian Federation) and  "Novorossiia" (a forgotten name revived for the purposes of post-2014 expansionism). The impoverished language for describing not just Russian statehood, but the imaginary community of Russianness, is combatted with utterances that appear to be merely constative ("This is Russia") but are politically performative ("We declare this to be Russia"), based on whatever evidence is convenient or can be manufactured (the bones of Russian heroes, allegations of Russophobic atrocities).

Just add water, and you get Russia

This crisis in naming has long held an obvious political dimension, in that Russia's leadership and media apparatus have abrogated for themselves the power (or at least, the veto power) over naming conventions throughout the former Soviet space. As early as 1995, Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin's government reversed the trend of calling the newly independent states by their preferred names. According to a list prepared by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Belarus was once again to be called "Byelorussia" and Kyrgyzstan "Kirighizia," although Moldova was formally designated the "Republic of Moldova" with the shortened form "Moldavia." Such inconsistencies are interesting, but not crucial. The policy, which matched a general hostility to the idea of changing linguistic norms out of consideration for minority and ethnic populations as "political correctness," reinforces the authority of the Russian state as naming power. The most significant faultline continue to involve Ukraine. Just as, in English, the use of the definite article ("the Ukraine") has been rejected as a diminution of Ukrainian statehood, so, too, do Ukraine's supporters ask that the Russian preposition used with the country's name be "v" (in) rather than the traditional "na" (on), which connotes a territory rather than a sovereign entity.

Next: What We Talk About When We Talk About Russia