Category Archives: Language

Soviets were serial re-branders.

Beware! Communists may be in charge of your government, if they keep re-branding their departments. Consider, for example, this passage from The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: In the People’s Commissariat of Justice there was the Prison Administration (December, 1917), then the Central Penal Department (May, 1918) with a network of Provincial Penal Departments and …

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A Prison, No Matter What the Soviets Called It

Communists use words not only to obscure what they are doing but also to make others play catch-up with respect to what they are doing. For example, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in his book The Gulag Archipelago about how the Soviets had many names for prisons: Year after year other forms of existence for prisoners were also tried, …

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Communists Hide the Truth with Euphemisms

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in his book The Gulag Archipelago about how the Soviets avoided the term prisoners: The population of Ryazan [the location of a concentration camp set up in a former nunnery (Kazansky)] was very sympathetic toward the deprivees, as they were called. (Officially they were called not prisoners but “persons deprived of freedom.”) The Gulag …

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