Modern Russian history through the New Year addresses Julia Kuznetsova CLEAR Group UiT – Arctic University of Norway juliakzn@gmail.com This research project is similar in part to the work Abstract of Cvrček and Fidler (2013) that analyzes Gustáv Husák’s (President of Czechoslovakia 1975-1989) This paper presents a corpus analysis of the New Year addresses. Cvrček and Fidler used data addresses that the leaders of the Soviet from the Czech National Corpus and investigated Union and Russia deliver every year before these data via keyword analysis (a method that the New Year. The content of a New Year statistically identifies words that are more frequent address is strongly codified and usually in the investigated text than in the general contains references to important events of linguistic patterns of the language; see Scott and the previous year. Analysis of the ways that Tribble 2006, Baker and Ellece 2011). Cvrček and the lexical patterns used in the New Year Fidler found correlations between the appearance addresses are transformed and follow of certain keywords in the New Year addresses and changes that have occurred in the Soviet historic events. For example, in the aftermath of Union and post-Soviet Russia provides the 1968 normalization and Charter 77 human information about the ways linguistic units rights movement in Czechoslovakia when alliance reflect political realities. with the USSR became particularly important, the word sovětským ‘Soviet’ appeared in the New Year 1 Introduction addresses for years 1975 and 1978. Martial law in Poland and American sanctions of Poland in 1981 In Russia during the Soviet regime the correlate with the words světě ‘world’ and napětí Communists banned Christmas along with all other ‘tension’ in Husák’s address at the end of the year religious holidays. As a result, in Russia, New 1981. The rise to power of Gorbachev in 1985 Year’s Eve has replaced Christmas as the major brought topics of disarmament (odzbrojení) and winter holiday and has become associated with international affairs (mezinárodní) into the New many traditions. One of these traditions is the Year address discourse. Not only is the appearance President’s New Year address, which is shown on of keywords important, but sometimes the absence television before the Kremlin clock bell strikes of an expected keyword might be important, too. midnight. This tradition started with Brezhnev’s For example, Cvrček and Fidler show that New Year address, broadcast on December 31, traditional Soviet discourse elements such as drazí 1970, and has continued even after the fall of the ‘dear’ and lidu ‘people’ appear in almost every Soviet Union. This paper investigates how the New Year speech between 1975 and 1987; language of the New Year addresses is affected by however, both of these words disappear with the the political situation of each relevant year. collapse of the Soviet regime and fall of the Berlin Changes in the use of the words in the New Year Wall. addresses reflect the important changes that have Function words have been shown to correlate occurred over forty-five years. significantly with their authors’ intentions. For 34 example, Baker (2006: 145) in his study of the fox in this edition, instances where the word Rusko hunting debates in the British House of Commons ‘Russia’ occurs provide important information shows that the pronoun I is a significant keyword about the ways Russia is portrayed. In their study, for the group that opposes fox hunting, but not for Fidler and Cvrček use a representative corpus of the proponents of fox hunting. The speakers who written Czech texts published in 2014-2015 as a were against fox hunting frequently used reference corpus. In the referent corpus, Rusko expressions such as I believe or I think. By ‘Russia’ most frequently occurs in the nominative contrast, pro-hunters did not use first-person case, indicating that it performs the syntactic role pronouns because their intent was not to be of an active agent that is in charge of the event in personally associated with the sport. Instead, they which it is involved. However, in ‘Sputnik’, Rusko used use impersonal phrasing such as Most people ‘Russia’ is attested more frequently in indirect with common sense would say…. cases – dative, instrumental, and accusative – Another example that illustrates the importance which serves to show Russia not as an active actor, of functional markers in discourse analysis comes but as a patient upon which an action is directed. from a study by Fidler and Cvrček (forthcoming) In this article, I take into account the function in which Fidler and Cvrček analyze texts that are words that are among the 100 most frequent words in Czech and appeared in March 2015 in the and analyze the additional information that is Russian web portal ‘Sputnik Czech Republic’ (a provided by the use of pronouns in the New Year Russian news and opinion portal). They show that addresses. Figure 1. Correspondence analysis of 100 most frequent words in the New Year addresses: clustering of years. 35 I employed correspondence analysis (CA), a 2 Analysis method that combines provided variables and finds the dimensions that explain the most variation in The goal of this project is to use the collection of the data (Yelland 2010), to analyze the matrix. the New Year addresses in order to show that the However, correspondence analysis only finds lexical features of a collection of different texts are dimensions that explain the most variation in the alone sufficient to cluster them. For this project I data; it is the task of the researcher to interpret have collected the New Year addresses given in those dimensions. I show that the two most Soviet Union and Russia at the end of the years important dimensions in the New Year addresses 1970 through 2015. I extracted 100 of the most are the political system (Dimension 1) and the frequent words among all the New Year addresses economic situation (Dimension 2). and produced a matrix with the 100 most frequent Figure 1 presents the results of the words as the rows of the matrix and the years from correspondence analysis. The years (designated as 1970 to 2014 as the columns of the matrix. Each points in the graph) when the New Year addresses cell of the matrix contains the frequency of a word, contained similar words with comparable measured in ipm (items per million), in the New frequencies are seen to be close to each other, Year address delivered in a given year. For whereas the years when the New Year addresses example, the word bol’šoj ‘big’ appears three times exhibited different distributions of frequent words in the New Year address delivered in 1970. The are seen to be far from each other. Figure 2 length of the New Year address that year was 605 presents the same factor map that also plots words. Therefore, in the cell at the intersection of Dimension 1 versus Dimension 2, but here the the row for the word bol’šoj ‘big’ and the column clusters of years are delineated according to for 1970, we have 4958.68 = (3/605) * 1 000 000. political system (ellipses). Post- Soviet Soviet Perestroika Figure 2. Political system during a year: Soviet period, reformation period (Perestroika), and Post-Soviet period. Dimension 1 clearly distinguishes among the (right blue ellipse). Thus, Dimension 1 represents a Soviet years (left red ellipse in Figure 2), scale of Soviet socialism versus democracy. This reformation years, also known as Perestroika observation also is supported by the words that (middle purple ellipse), and post-Soviet years have the most impact on Dimension 1. The words 36 rabočij ‘worker’, sovetskij ‘Soviet’, socialističeskij Dimension 1 and are indicative of the democratic ‘socialistic’, leninskij ‘Lenin’s, and partija ‘party’ political system. Figure 2 thus shows that the most positively correlate with Dimension 1 and are important dimension for the 100 most frequent clearly indicative of Soviet socialism. However, words in the New Year addresses is the political the words prezident ‘president’, Rossija ‘Russia’, system of the country. and graždanin ‘citizen’ negatively correlate with Figure 3. Personal pronouns and the word narod ‘people’: Dimensions 1 and 2. Dimension 2 is an economic indicator that Similarly, the words that negatively correlate with distinguishes between plentiful years and hungry Dimension 2 also point to abundance. These words years. This phenomenon can be observed if we are pust’ ‘let’, rebenok ‘child’, novogodnij ‘New compare Dimension 2 with the price of a barrel of Year’s’, drug ‘friend’, vmeste ‘together’, prazdnik oil. Oil and gas were the main exports of the Soviet ‘holiday’, sem’ja ‘family’, which together portray Union and are still the main exported resources in a picture of a large family enjoying the New modern Russia (Ellmann 2006:3). High oil prices Year’s Eve meal. On the other end of scale, we tend to reflect a plentiful year, whereas low oil find the words delo ‘business’, mnogo ‘many’, and prices most likely indicate that the country faced put’ ‘path’, suggesting that in economically tough an economically challenging year. Dimension 2 years leaders tend to talk about the path ahead and correlates with the inflation-adjusted price of a the many things that must be done. Thus, we see barrel of oil1 : r = -0.37, P = 0.01. The correlation that the second dimension in the New Year is negative, so the bottom portion of Figure 2 addresses indicates the economic situation of the illustrates the hungry years, whereas the top country. portion reflects the plentiful years. The words that It is interesting to pay attention also to the use of contribute mostly to Dimension 1 are related personal pronouns that appear among the most semantically to the meaning of the dimension. frequent words. Figure 3 contains few of the 100 most frequent words distributed on the same map as shown in Figures 1 and 2. In Figure 3 personal 1 Data from Historical Crude Oil Prices; inflation is pronouns such as ja ‘I’, my ‘we’, and vy ‘you adjusted. 37 (plural)’ are highlighted in blue. Interestingly, all Russian web portal Sputnik Czech Republic. In these pronouns are gathered on the right side of the Language in Politics in Slavic-speaking Countries. map, which is the side associated with the post- Ellman, Michael. 2006. The Issues. In Ellman, Michael Soviet years. By contrast, the Soviet years contain (ed.). Russia's Oil and Natural Gas: Bonanza Or only one word that is compatible with personal Curse? London, New York, Delhi: Anthem Press, 3- pronouns in meaning – narod ‘people’, highlighted 14. in red. This grouping of pronouns indicates a Historical Crude Oil Prices. Electronic resource. URL change from more collective thinking, which is http://inflationdata.com/Inflation/Inflation_Rate/Hist characteristic of the Soviet era, to more personal orical_Oil_Prices_Table.asp. Accessed on November interactions, which is characteristic of the post- 20, 2015. Soviet era. Scott, Mike and Christopher Tribble. 2006. Textual Patterns: Keyword and Corpus Analysis in Language 3 Conclusions Education. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Thus, by simply observing the 100 most frequent Yelland, Phillip M. 2010. An introduction to words that appear in the New Year addresses, we correspondence analysis. The Mathematica Journal can identify the political system of the country for 12, 1-23. that year and whether the year was economically difficult. We see that the New Year addresses reflect historical changes in modern Russia. Each New Year address is connected to the year when it was given and thus always reflects the political climate of that year. Analyzing ways that the lexical patterns used in the New Year addresses are transformed and follow the changes that have occurred in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia will provide us with information about how linguistic units reflect political realities. The corpus of the New Year addresses is a small manageable corpus where each text has a ritualistic predictable structure, which makes it a perfect testing ground for linguistic analysis. The findings of this study can later be extrapolated and used for analysis of larger collections of historical documents in order to discover ways that such findings reflect historical events. References Baker, P. 2006. Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis. London: Continuum. Baker, Paul and Sibonile Ellece. 2011. Key Terms in Discourse Analysis. New York/London: Continuum International. Cvrček, Václav and Masako Fidler. 2013. Keyword analysis with a Usage-Based Perspective: A Preliminary Study in Czech. Presentation at AATSEEL. Boston, MA. January 3-6, 2013. Fidler, Masako and Václav Cvrček. Forthcoming. More than keywords: Discourse prominence analysis of the 38