Putin-style ‘Grammar Nazis’: Linguistic authoritarianism as a tool of indoctrination and budget revenue

The language of a besieged fortress: from the ‘Concept’ to the ‘Fundamentals’

Since Vladimir Putin’s return to the Kremlin in 2012, Russian authoritarianism has sought to present itself as an anti-liberal ideological project. Following the launch of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and its evolution into a protracted war, these efforts have moved to the centre of state activity and taken on an increasingly coercive and repressive character. Over the past year, the Russian language itself has become one of the arenas for the regime’s ideological and repressive interventions.

A decisive step in the ideologisation of the linguistic sphere was the adoption of the ‘Fundamentals of State Language Policy’, approved by a decree of Putin on 11 July 2025. However, Putin’s ‘Fundamentals’ are not a standalone document; more than 70% of their content (according to an estimate by the AI model Claude Sonnet) reproduces the ‘Concept of State Language Policy’ approved by the government a year earlier. At the same time, the ‘Concept’ has been overlaid with an ideological preamble that reproduces the core tenets of late Putinism’s conservative statist doctrine and frames Russian statehood, and its official language, as a ‘besieged fortress’.

For example, whereas the 'Concept' states that 'in the sphere of state language policy there are problems arising, inter alia, from the intensification of globalisation processes in contemporary society and the incomplete nature of the regulatory legal framework governing language relations', the 'Fundamentals' replace the neutral term 'problems' in the same sentence with 'risks, threats and problems'. Moreover, while the 'Concept' lists four problems, the 'Fundamentals' enumerate five 'risks, threats and problems', four of which replicate those in the 'Concept', with the fifth being ‘attempts by certain foreign states to restrict (reduce) the scope of use of the Russian language’.

To the three objectives of language policy set out in the 'Concept', the 'Fundamentals' add a further three: 'ensuring national security and sovereignty in the linguistic sphere', 'strengthening the unity of the multinational people of the Russian Federation and a common civic identity', and 'ensuring the protection, support and development of the Russian language as the state language of the Russian Federation, as the language of the state-forming people, and as a native language' (see table). This formulation appears to imply that the protection of Russian in its three distinct guises requires three different policy approaches. The operative verbs, 'strengthening', 'ensuring' and 'protection', all point to the same underlying complex of state anxiety, to which the response is an impulse towards total control.

The objectives of state language policy according to the ‘Concept’ (2024) and the ‘Fundamentals’ (2025)

Finally, according to the ‘Fundamentals’, ‘the Russian language is one of the foundations of Russian statehood and is inextricably linked to traditional Russian spiritual and moral values’, and is also 'an important element of Russian and world culture, uniting the multinational people of the Russian Federation and other peoples of the world into a single cultural and civilisational community of the ‘Russian world’'.

Furthermore, whilst among the principal directions of language policy in the 'Concept' there appears the provision to 'create conditions for foreign citizens and their minor children to study the Russian language', this is absent from the 'Fundamentals'. Instead, the final item in the revised list of 'principal directions' formulates the directly opposite task of 'introducing a system of testing minor foreign citizens in their knowledge of the Russian language at a level sufficient for admission to Russian educational institutions'. In other words, where the earlier version emphasised adaptability and inclusion of the children of labour migrants, the Putin-era version prioritises their exclusion from the Russian education system.

Dismantling the towers of language: between the ‘Concept’ and the ‘amendments’

Although the 'Concept' lists among the key 'problems' both 'the absence of a federal executive body responsible for the formulation and implementation of state policy and regulatory legal oversight' in the language sphere and 'the unjustified use in official communication of foreign words that have commonly used equivalents in Russian', it is, on the whole, framed in a relatively liberal spirit and is to a significant extent concerned with preserving the linguistic diversity of the Russian Federation and protecting minority languages. For example, the 'Concept' mandates state support for education, publishing, media and cultural projects in the languages of Russia’s peoples, as well as measures for the digital development of linguistic diversity, including the creation of electronic dictionaries, text corpora and online translation tools. This reflects a comparatively advanced approach to the support of minority languages.

However, by the time the ‘Concept’ was approved in June 2024, language policy had already become an arena of contestation between various lobby groups. The fact is that as early as February 2023, the Duma adopted amendments to the federal law on the state language,under which the Russian language became subject to direct government regulation. In particular, the amendments required that the use of 'Russian as the state language' conform to 'rules governing the use of linguistic means as set out in standard dictionaries, reference books and grammars’. In fact, a formally recognised list of normative dictionaries and grammars had existed previously, compiled by the Ministry of Education and Science and consisting of established academic linguistic resources. These included, for example, A. A. Zaliznyak’s ‘Grammatical Dictionary of Russian Inflection’. This collection of academic dictionaries and grammars describes the standard language norm, created independently of the objectives of state regulation, whilst the Language Act (in its previous version) recommended using them as a guide.

Under the revised law, however, both the ‘procedure for compiling and approving the list of dictionaries’ and the ‘requirements for compilation’ must be determined by a special government commission, whose own mandate and operating procedures are likewise to be approved by the government. This implies that, in place of the existing academic dictionaries and grammars, new ones are to be created under government auspices. The subsequent resolution ‘On the Approval of Requirements for the Compilation and Frequency of Publication of Standard Dictionaries’, specifies that these new dictionaries must determine 'which words or meanings of words may not be used in texts employed in spheres where the state language of the Russian Federation is mandatory'. In effect, the commission is tasked with constructing a version of 'Russian as the state language' distinct from Russian as such, that is, from standard literary Russian.

The resolution also sets out how the list of these new normative dictionaries is to be compiled and approved. Notably, expert review of the dictionaries is to be conducted by 'specialists holding candidate or doctoral degrees in philology and/or psychology and/or law'. While the involvement of psychologists in assessing the adequacy of representations of Russian linguistic norms is difficult to justify, the role of legal experts is specified in the same document: the commission is required to verify the absence in dictionaries, reference works and grammars of 'information that contradicts the Constitution of the Russian Federation and legislation of the Russian Federation and/or justifies unlawful behaviour'. It is rather difficult not only for linguists but even for non-linguists to imagine what information contained in a Russian grammar book could contradict the Constitution and which Russian words could justify unlawful behaviour.

It is notable, moreover, that the 'Concept of State Language Policy' adopted by the same government in 2024 makes no reference to the 2023 amendments to the law on the state language. Among its objectives, it mentions 'state support for the creation and publication of normative dictionaries, reference works and grammars, and rules of Russian orthography and punctuation, based on established usage, including their approval and reissue in accordance with established procedures'. In other words, it reflects the earlier practice whereby the government endorsed authoritative academic dictionaries not designed for regulatory purposes. The 'Concept' makes no mention of a government commission or of newly created ‘standard dictionaries’. Thus, in 2023–2024, Russian language policy existed in a state of institutional dissonance, and it is only with the 2025 'Fundamentals' that it is brought into a unified framework centred on 'preventing threats', 'ensuring sovereignty' and 'preserving traditional values'.

This shift was preceded by an extensive campaign to defend the purity of the Russian language against the‘contamination’ by foreign loanwords. In recent years, this has become a key political resource for a number of deputies, but above all for Elena Yampolskaya, the former chair of the State Duma Committee on Culture. She was among the principal lobbyists behind the amendments to the law on the Russian language and the idea of 'regulatory state dictionaries'. In May 2024, she moved from the Duma to the presidential administration as an adviser to Putin, and subsequently assumed the post of chair of the Presidential Council on the Russian Language, which in August 2024 was renamed the Council for the Implementation of State Policy in the Sphere of Support for the Russian Language and the Languages of the Peoples of the Russian Federation. It appears that it was within this body, under Yampolskaya’s auspices, that the government’s 'Concept' was reworked into the Putin-era 'Fundamentals'.

Lexical bonds, repressive pillars and fiscal prospects

On 30 April 2025, the V.V. Vinogradov Institute of the Russian Language’s website published the first four normative ‘state dictionaries’: ‘Orthographic Dictionary of the Russian Language as the State Language of the Russian Federation’, ‘Orthoepic Dictionary of the Russian Language as the State Language of the Russian Federation’, ‘Dictionary of Foreign Words’ and ‘Explanatory Dictionary of the State Language of the Russian Federation’ (in April 2026 these were supplemented by dictionaries of antonyms, synonyms, paronyms, abbreviations and toponyms). In accordance with the 2023 amendments, all of these dictionaries have legal status and define the 'permissible' lexical composition of Russian as a state language. This is in some respects analogous to the use of internet 'whitelists' to control undesirable content: aside from the explicitly permitted resources, all others are effectively prohibited.

In the year and a half since the government commission was established,it would have been impossible to produce entirely new dictionaries. Accordingly, just as the Putin-era 'Fundamentals' overlay the existing 'Concept' with an ideological superstructure, the 'state dictionaries' are based on pre-existing works of the relevant type, subjected to ideological censorship to varying degrees. As expected, the most controversial has been the explanatory dictionary (The Barents Observer reported in detail on the principles of its preparation, ideological features and authorship). It is based on the Great Explanatory Dictionary edited by S. Yu. Kuznetsov, although its word list has been significantly reduced. The resulting 'state dictionary' contains unexplained gaps in basic Russian vocabulary, including the absence of words such as 'love', 'faith' and 'hope', alongside more predictable omissions such as 'Stalinism' or 'Gulag'. Furthermore, as noted by the authors of The Barents Observer, targeted alterations to definitions and usage examples for terms that feature prominently in the Putin-era ideological narrative, which is increasingly assuming the status of an 'official ideology'. The head of the state dictionary’s ‘development’ team, lawyer and Rector of St Petersburg State University Nikolai Kropachev, stated explicitly that ‘the dictionary is becoming a practical tool for implementing state policy on the preservation and strengthening of traditional Russian spiritual and moral values’.

In particular, the definitions of 21 terms included in the list of ‘traditional values’ from the relevant Kremlin policy document, approved by presidential decree on 9 November 2022, have been revised. For example, the definition of 'mercy' in Kuznetsov’s dictionary ('a readiness to provide assistance, to show leniency out of compassion and humaneness; such assistance or leniency itself') is replaced by two new meanings: a state-endorsed one ('a traditional Russian spiritual and moral value: a benevolent and caring attitude towards others, manifested in compassion, humaneness, a willingness to offer selfless assistance, to understand and forgive') and an Orthodox Christian one ('in Orthodoxy: a moral feeling arising from spiritual compassion or an active form of repentance'). Where a 'traditional value' is defined in the presidential document as a specific collocation, that collocation is given a separate entry in the dictionary, not simply 'family' but 'strong family', and not 'memory' but 'historical memory'. In this way, the explanatory dictionary of the state language functions as a kind of ideological reference code for the 'Putin narrative', embedded within a truncated version of Kuznetsov’s original work.

Alongside the codification of 'traditional values', the explanatory state dictionary also reflects elements of the current geopolitical agenda. The term 'authoritarianism', for example, is characterised as 'the most effective form of governance in difficult times for the country', while the entry for 'enemy' is supplemented with a primary meaning defined as 'one recognised by sovereign authority as hostile to the people, the authorities and the state'. The word 'regime' is illustrated with the example 'the Kyiv regime', which is itself accompanied by additional explanatory notes in line with the standardised history textbooks associated with Vladimir Medinsky.

Finally, a central function of the codification of ‘Russian as the state language’ is the 'reduction in the use of foreign words that have commonly used equivalents in Russian', a goal explicitly set out in the 'Fundamentals of State Language Policy'. As Elena Yampolskaya promised during the discussion of amendments to the law on the state language, once the state dictionaries were created, 'we will immediately rid ourselves of all these ‘opens’, ‘sales’, ‘food courts’, ‘cashbacks’, of this servile jargon'. In the conception advanced by proponents of linguistic purity, the 'state dictionary of foreign words' is intended to define exhaustively the list of permissible borrowings.

In practice, however, the published state dictionary of foreign words, like the other dictionaries, was produced by the Institute for Linguistic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences on the basis of pre-existing works that were not designed for regulatory purposes. As a result, it largely reflects the conventions of classical academic lexicography, cataloguing and describing the 'foreign component' of the Russian lexicon, that is, words of foreign origin borrowed since the eighteenth century, many of which have long since been fully assimilated and are no longer perceived by speakers as foreign, such as 'ballet' or 'cosmos'. At the same time, a significant share of more recent and less stabilised vocabulary is simply omitted.

It is nonetheless the normative and prohibitive function of the state dictionary of foreign words that has become central to policy, because the government and legislators have devised repressive mechanisms to enforce it. Two weeks before the approval of Putin’s ‘Fundamentals of Language Policy’, the Duma approved amendments to the Consumer Rights Act and the Act on Shared-Equity Construction of Multi-Family Buildings, which introduced the concept of ‘information intended for public consumption by consumers’, which, as the authors of the amendments, who do not have a perfect command of the Russian language, insist, ‘must be provided in Russian as the state language of the Russian Federation’.

These amendments entered into force on 1 March 2026. From that date, any 'information for consumers' and the naming of residential construction projects must be rendered exclusively in Cyrillic and using vocabulary contained in the state dictionaries. Responsibility for verifying compliance with the lexical corpus of 'Russian as the state language' is placed on businesses, while enforcement relies on existing provisions of the administrative code relating to consumer protection (Articles 14.3, 14.5 and 14.8), allowing for fines of up to 500,000 roubles.

Thus, while a professional association of coaches may exist, the use of the word 'coach' in consumer-facing information, for example in advertising, may incur fines. Another inconsistency arises from the fact that the lexical coverage of the four principal state dictionaries does not align. For example, the term ‘car-sharing’ appears in the state orthographic dictionary, whilst the word ‘cashback’, which frequently features in banking advertisements, appears in both the orthoepic and orthographic dictionaries, yet neither is present in the state dictionary of foreign words. In other words, one may write and pronounce these words, but one may not use them to ‘produce information for public consumption’. Clarifications issued by Rospotrebnadzor, the consumer protection authority, a few days after the law came into force, specified that foreign words should be checked exclusively against the state dictionary of foreign words. A further paradox of this model of linguistic sovereignty is that its stringent provisions do not apply to registered trademarks. As a result, the ubiquity of advertising for Wildberries across Russia poses no challenge to linguistic sovereignty, whereas the use of the word ‘coach’ does.

In its current form, this framework of sovereign language policy may, for a time, serve as a source of budgetary revenue through the volume of fines imposed on businesses for using words that fall outside the corpus of ‘Russian as the state language’, at least until firms adapt by systematically checking advertising materials and user documentation against the state dictionary of foreign words. A more significant concern, however, may lie in the next stage of regulating public language practices. The law on Russian as the state language identifies eleven spheres of application, including advertising, media output, film screenings, public performances of artistic works and, following the 2023 amendments, 'other spheres determined by the legislation of the Russian Federation'. It is therefore conceivable that film producers and distributors, as well as theatres, concert venues and museums, may in due course be required to verify their content for compliance with 'Russian as the state language'.

Ultimately, linguistic sovereignty à la Putin represents a striking combination of security paranoia, obscurantism, a drive towards prohibition, fiscal greed, and the poor quality of core regulatory instruments.