Toward a History of the "Soviet Language" (Sovyaz): Archival Documents, Electronic Sources, and the National Corpus

Abstract

The subject matter of this paper is the "Soviet language" (SovYaz for short), a variety of Russian that was used in official contexts during the Soviet period. The use of the term "Soviet language" does not signify a commitment to viewing it as a language or a dialect in the linguistic sense. The question of whether SovYaz is, in fact, a social dialect sensu stricto, is beyond the scope of this paper and irrelevant to its purposes, although the materials presented here may help clarify the argument. This study of SovYaz seeks to utilize three relatively recent developments: newly opened archives with previously unimaginable sources of linguistic data; abundant searchable texts in electronic form; and a powerful new research tool, the National Corpus of the Russian Language (NCRL). The goal is methodological--to illustrate an approach to the study of SovYaz made possible by these new developments. The paper makes extensive use of the following procedure. First, a feature of SovYaz is identified in two documents selected for close reading, one a newspaper article, the other a top-secret NKVD report. That feature is then traced through other sources, including NCRL. The evolution of the feature is followed from the pre-revolutionary period to later times, sometimes all the way to the 21st century. Finally, the feature is described in some detail. In my experience, the emergence of the National Corpus makes possible a research methodology that transcends a close reading of selected documents but works well with it.