Discursively Stabilized Meaniings of Soviet Political Discourse in Russian, Ukrainian and Belorusian Dictionaries

The paper discusses the reflection of modes of Soviet political discourse in Soviet and post-Soviet Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian standard explanatory dictionaries. The authors analyse the dictionary entries representing vocabulary units that have the meanings with modal orientation to the ideological position of the Soviet political discourse. Considering the vector of the Soviet political ideas, the authors used a source list of lexical units with politically conditioned stabilised modal meaning fixed in Russian dictionaries of Soviet and post-Soviet periods. The Soviet and post-Soviet dictionaries of other Slavic languages contain dictionary entries reflecting the meaning of equivalent lexemes and their derivatives with different degree of equivalence (if any). Their content was analyzed considering the specificity of official position of the government in relation to the Soviet political regime. The hypothesis that the political position of a government in relation to the Soviet political regime is reflected in standard explanatory Slavic languages dictionaries has been partially proved. The Slavic language dictionaries of the former USSR republics published in the Soviet times are focused on the reflection of Soviet political discourse modality due to both political unity of the republics and the specificity of lexicographical tradition. The modern change in political attitudes and state status did not result in such far-reaching changes in principles of reflection of Soviet political modality in the Ukrainian Dictionary, as it might have been expected. In the most contemporary Russian language dictionaries the distance representation of the meaning under study is even more active.

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