ABSTRACT
Violence is deeply ingrained in the linguistic culture of any society; however, the normative level, salience and the place of violence in the discursive repertoires vary substantially, reaching their peak in the ‘ages of extremes’ (Steinmetz 2011). Vladimir Putin began his ascendance to the pinnacle of Russian power with a verbal threat: when asked at a press conference in September 1999 how Russian authorities would react the terrorist attacks in Moscow attributed to the Chechen insurgents he promised to ‘finish them off in an out-house’ (RBK 2012). Twelve year later, his current presidency began with an insult. He called the people who took to the streets in protest against his return to power ‘bandar-logs’, the idle chatting monkeys from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, and compared their white ribbons – the symbol of their democratic values – to condoms. While the first presidential utterance was taken as a witticism even if of an ambiguous quality, 1 the second marked a watershed in the style of communication between the authorities and the public and became a pretext to the discursive shift to violence of some magnitude.
