oratore

Drops into criminal slang is part of Putin’s kit. Part of his chilly magnetism is cultural. He is widely admired for his command of the language. Here, too, contrast is everything. Lenin was the last ruler of the country who could speak an educated Russian. Stalin’s Georgian accent was so thick he rarely risked speaking in public. Khrushchev’s vocabulary was crude and his grammar barbaric. Brezhnev could scarcely put two sentences together. The less said of Yeltsin’s slurred diction the better.

Perry Anderson: Russia's Managed Development (London Review of Books)

It really seems that Vladimir Putin is some kind of “mad scientist” -figure, cruelly intelligent compared to his predecessors, those drunk marionettes of unstable times - execpt of course Lenin, who was a orator and propagandist in Cicero's sense of the word. It’s peculiarly interesting that Perry Anderson refers to criminal slang… that language was formerly an undeground discursive formation, antithesis to formally rigid speech of soviet state; it was own language of voros, criminals and tattooed outcasts whose system of symbolic figures (in Barthes' sense) was very complicated… I recently wrote an essay about bard lyrics on Soviet era (Kerberos-magazine 4/2006) – these singer-songwriters from Okudzhava to Vysotski utilized the criminal slang in their radical songs; and still, altough borrowed property of criminals, it was an underground language, contratext… but now it seems that language of voro can be used referentially as part of the rhetorical equipmnet of stern and in no way antiauthoritarian political leader when wooing people on your side; it’s not an anti-language anymore, but has assimilated to language of hegemony and power – and Putin does this intentionally, he really is mad scientist, especially when compared to G. W. Bush, whose moronic comments, slips of tongue and hubridic rhetorics that first heightened his popularity are now as transparent as cellophane.