“You're Soviet trash!—You're a liberass!”: The political life of social slurs

Abstract

This paper is about “social slurs,” or dysphemisms for collectivities and their members. Social slurs thrived in Russian politicized milieus of the 2010s, during the “two Russias culture war.” Examples of social slurs include mrakobesy, vatninki, bydlo (used for Putin supporters), and liberasty, demshiza, kreakly (used for regime opponents). For the benefit of US readers, these can be idiomatically translated as ignoramuses, rubes, sheeple, and liberasses, democrazies, bobos. In Russia, social slurs have been employed to attribute characteristics of enregistered social personae to both political supporters and opponents of the regime. These attributions, in turn, have been used to evaluate the conduct of participants in public life against the norms of interaction rituals central to modern political imaginaries.