MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
George Orwell's novel "1984" features a government that changes the language so that people can only say accepted things. It turns out that something like this is happening in reality.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Russia is doing this. They've published a new explanatory dictionary of the state language of the Russian Federation.
MARTIN: Take, for example, the definition of marriage.
EILISH HART: It says that same sex marriage is condemned by the Russian Orthodox Church and not supported by the Russian state.
MARTIN: That is Eilish Hart, an editor with Meduza, an independent Russian media outlet operating in exile.
INSKEEP: A Russia specialist, Sergey Radchenko of Johns Hopkins, noticed the definition for hegemony, a word for one country dominating others.
SERGEY RADCHENKO: The example used to demonstrate Hegemony was American hegemony. So obviously, this is seen as something dangerous and terrible for Russia.
MARTIN: As opposed to how they define authoritarianism.
RADCHENKO: The most efficient system of government for times when a country finds itself in the state of a crisis. The authors of the dictionary wanted to put a positive spin on it in order to support the idea that Russian authoritarianism is actually a good thing.
INSKEEP: The Russian Orthodox Church and the Justice Ministry contributed to this dictionary. Eilish Hart says that reflects President Vladimir Putin's push toward, quote, "traditional values" and the crackdowns on opposition and criticism that followed Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
HART: Almost like a kind of virtue signaling. And we've seen this from the Russian state, where in terms of their messaging directed abroad, they really try to portray Russia as this bastion of traditional values.
MARTIN: In keeping with Russia's constraints on free speech, Hart says this dictionary not only codifies how the state uses language, it excludes some words altogether.
HART: There's some omissions that feel very kind of ideologically charged or that seem like an example to sort of whitewash or rewrite history. So, for example, words like gulag - so the name of the Soviet system of forced labor camps. That's not in there. The word Stalinism isn't in there.
INSKEEP: Stalinism, for the record, is defined by Merriam-Webster as Joseph Stalin's theory and practice of communism, quote, "marked, especially by rigid authoritarianism, widespread use of terror and often emphasis on Russian nationalism." Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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