Evolution of political media rhetoric in Russia: a comprehensive linguistic analysis

The relevance of the study is determined by the need to comprehend the transformation of Russia’s public political language against the backdrop of radical socio-political shifts in the 20th-21st centuries and the digitalization of the media environment. The aim of the study is to identify and linguistically describe the systemic shifts in the political media rhetoric of the USSR and Russia and to determine the specifics of their impact on the structure of the Russian language. The methodological basis integrates critical discourse analysis and linguistic methods. The empirical material includes a sample of texts of political media communication from 1920s to the 2020s (press, leaders’ speeches, TV and digital content). Lexical-semantic, syntactic, metaphorical, intertextual and diachronic corpus analysis (Russian National Corpus) were applied. Diachronic analysis has distinguished three evolutionary phases with systemic impact on the Russian language. The era of the monologue was characterized by a ritualized, clichéd idiolect with complex syntax, nominalization, and semantic inversion of basic concepts. The era of communicative chaos radically transformed the language structure: semantic instability of terms, legitimization of criminal jargon, syntactic reduction, and fragmentation of the collective subject (“we”). The modern era of managed polylogue has established a strategy of “selective complexity”, i.e. the technological variation of linguistic codes from bookish syntax to digital agrammatism and the hybridization of official discourse with Internet slang. The author proves that the evolution of political media rhetoric in Russia is a process of permanent structuring of the grammatical, syntactic and lexical foundations of public speech in the Russian Language. Its specificity lies in the technological modernization of archaic ritual models of communication, where the Russian language acts simultaneously as the object and the key instrument of this transformation.