ABSTRACT
An important, perhaps the most important specific feature of the contemporary Soviet life is the magic or words. The Soviet political language is self-contradictory. Although its meanings tend to be devoid of ambiguity, its fracture of the world into polarities of good and evil destroys whatever coherence and inner logic it might have otherwise possessed. The Soviet language has two basic components: fictions that communist ideology proclaims as reality and realities that are portrayed in the guise of fictions. This has led to two diverse but not opposite categories in the Soviet language. The first consists of phenomena-words, which, even if they distort fact, bear some correspondence to Soviet realities. The second category consists of fiction-words, which project images devoid of any correspondence to Soviet reality. On the eve of the 1990s Soviet society lacks clear political contours or a stable social content. The Soviet language immediately responds to the overarching confusion.
