A Russian Phrasebook for Surviving Authoritarianism

Summary

Podcast Summary: On the Media – “A Russian Phrasebook for Surviving Authoritarianism”

Date: May 27, 2026
Host: Brooke Gladstone
Guests: Maria Kuznetsova and Dan Storiev (Russian activists, human rights defenders, authors of the upcoming How to Survive: A Russian Phrasebook for Everyday Life in America)

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Overview

This episode of On the Media explores the language and strategies used in authoritarian societies, particularly those honed in Russia, and how these terms are becoming relevant for Americans experiencing democratic backsliding in the wake of President Trump’s 2025 return. Using insight from their own experiences and their upcoming glossary-inspired book, Maria Kuznetsova and Dan Storiev explain key Russian political terms, draw striking parallels to current American developments, and stress the importance of language as a tool for recognition and resistance.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Power of Language in Authoritarian Contexts ([01:40])

• Brooke Gladstone introduces the dilemma: “Sometimes it’s hard to find the words to describe exactly what’s going on, since so many of Trump’s moves are unprecedented in our democracy... We haven’t had time to coin the words with the specificity required...”
• The episode’s main focus: building a shared language—with roots in Russian experience—to understand and resist authoritarian tactics unfolding in America.

2. Glossary of Authoritarianism: Russian Terms Explained

Aesopian Speech ([02:40])

• Hidden lexicon or coded vocabulary that allows communication under censorship.
• Maria Kuznetsova: “It’s a hidden lexicon or a coded vocabulary that obscures meaning for the powerful while allowing you to communicate freely with your peers.” ([02:40])

Chulobitnaya / “Knee Bent Petition” ([03:11]–[04:15])

• The ritual of public, humiliating supplication to authority.
• Dan Storiev: “Chulobitnaya literally means you’re bowing so hard that you strike your head on the floor...people who need something...have to record these teary messages to Vladimir Putin asking him to intervene...” ([03:28])
• Maria Kuznetsova: “A huge and important part...is humiliation, and humiliation in this process is on purpose.” ([04:05])
• Brooke Gladstone draws parallels with loyalty displays under Trump: “Like Trump buying shoes that don’t fit for people to wear or have them all say he’s a gift from God in cabinet meetings.” ([04:15])
• Discussion of the Oval Office showdown with Zelenskyy as a real-life American example of ritual humiliation. ([04:22]–[04:43])

“Effective Manager” ([05:16])

• Reference to Soviet and Putin-era technocrats who are ruthless yet “efficient.”
• Dan Storiev: “In Soviet systems...they would run collective farms, they would run gulags. In some cases, it is a successful yet ruthless technocrat...within the Putin elite.” ([05:16])
• Links to American “corporate monarchy” advocates: “They advocate for something they call a corporate monarchy…just give up your freedom of speech, right?” ([06:34])

Manual Control / Rudnoja Upravlenia ([07:23]–[08:51])

• Centralization of all decisions to the top leader, creating bottlenecks and chaos.
• Maria Kuznetsova: “Manual control basically means that all of the bureaucrats are free to make any decisions, and every time they have to make one, every decision is just kicked off upstairs...” ([07:23])
• Parallels to US emergency response failures and bureaucratic paralysis.

Castling and Zeroing ([09:29]–[12:16])

• Castling: Power transfer maneuver to bypass term limits (e.g., Putin and Medvedev; possible US echo: Trump becoming VP under a loyal president).
• Zeroing/Abnulania: Constitutional resets to erase term limits just for the ruler.
• Maria Kuznetsova: “What Putin did...we kind of reset the terms. So basically, the exception of not having two presidential terms only applies to Putin...” ([11:21])

Political Technologists/Politechnologi ([12:16]–[15:49])

• Technocrats who stage the “performance” of democracy.
• “Electoral activities” instead of elections: “They are a performance...not about real policies...but the trickery political technologists use.” ([13:00])
• Examples: Dead Souls (fake or dead voters), ballot trickery with doppelgangers, e.g., multiple “Vishnevskys” running.
• Dan Storiev: “Putin’s political technologists created these two doppelgangers so that they could split the vote and get poor old Vishnevsky out of the race.” ([15:05])

Selective Law and “Find the Man, Find the Crime” ([15:50]–[18:20])

• Selective legal persecution to intimidate and neutralize opposition.
• Maria Kuznetsova: “That gives me vibes of late Putin’s regime...you just decide who you don’t like...then you find anything on them.” ([16:35])
• Purpose is not always to jail, but to deter and silence: “The goal is to threaten you with the process.” ([17:58])

Infopomoika / “Information Dumpster” ([18:20]–[20:00])

• The deliberate creation of overwhelming and confusing low-quality information, driving public disengagement.
• Maria Kuznetsova: “What Putin’s regime decided to do is to create as many versions of reality as possible to confuse people and to encourage people to disengage...when people get confused and overwhelmed, they just disengage.” ([18:34])

Inner Immigration ([20:00]–[20:26])

• Retreat from public life in face of unchangeable political reality.
• Maria Kuznetsova: “Inner immigration is when a person who understands the political reality, who understands that democracy is under assault anyway, chooses to disengage...” ([20:05])
• Dan Storiev adds Russian idiom: “My house is at the edge of the village and so I don’t care what happens with the rest...” ([20:26])

Budgetniki (“Budget People”) ([20:53]–[22:40])

• State-dependent workers who can be coerced for regime goals (demonstrations, election activities).
• Examples in US: Trump’s DC military parade with forced attendance by troops. ([22:40])

Tusovka (“Little Get Together”) ([23:13]–[25:02])

• Dissent communities form tight social ‘bubbles’ prone to infighting and isolation.
• Dan Storiev: “These Russian dissonant communities, they’re prone to forming bubbles...and in the United States...when you look at the Democratic Party today...What is at the top of the headlines? Whether or not Democrats share a platform with Twitch Streamer Hasan Piker.” ([23:29])

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Memorable Quotes and Moments

• Brooke Gladstone: “Sometimes it’s hard to find the words to describe exactly what’s going on, since so many of Trump’s moves are unprecedented in our democracy.” ([01:40])
• Maria Kuznetsova: “A huge and important part of chulobitnaya is humiliation, and humiliation in this process is on purpose.” ([04:05])
• Dan Storiev: “Electoral activities—they are not really elections. They are a performance.” ([13:00])
• Maria Kuznetsova: “What I think people in America don’t understand right now is that sometimes this kind of political prosecution, its goal is not to put a person into jail. The goal is to threaten you with the process.” ([17:58])
• Maria Kuznetsova: “What Putin’s regime decided to do is to create as many versions of reality as possible to confuse people and to encourage people to disengage.” ([18:34])
• Maria Kuznetsova: “Do we need to call ourselves dissidents now? And I felt like it’s such a profound mind shift.” ([25:14])
• Dan Storiev (on the need for new vocabulary): “That’s the thing. You know how in several indigenous northern languages...you have dozens of definitions for what snow is...Similarly to how Russia...developed this special language which allows us to talk about authoritarian developments...” ([26:52])
• Dan Storiev: “Naming something is the first step towards resisting it.” ([29:15])

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Notable Timestamps

• [01:40] — Introduction of the episode’s theme: language for describing authoritarian tactics
• [02:40–04:43] — Key Russian glossary terms and parallels to US
• [05:16–08:51] — “Effective manager,” “manual control,” and consequences of centralized power
• [09:29–12:16] — “Castling” and “zeroing” explained (bypassing term limits)
• [12:16–15:49] — The role and methods of “political technologists”
• [15:50–18:20] — Law as selective weapon (“find me the man, I’ll find the crime”)
• [18:20–20:26] — “Information dumpster” and “inner immigration”
• [20:53–22:40] — “Budget people” as tools for regime legitimacy
• [23:13–25:02] — “Tusovka” and dangers of activist isolation and infighting
• [25:14–29:22] — The purpose of the phrasebook: giving Americans language to understand and resist authoritarianism

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Episode Takeaways

• The hosts and guests stress that many Americans lack the language or frameworks to identify and resist authoritarian techniques—language that Russians have developed over centuries of living under autocracy.
• Understanding and naming these patterns—Aesopian speech, chulobitnaya, manual control, political technologists, infopomoika, inner immigration—arm people against manipulation and disempowerment.
• The guests’ upcoming book aims to fill this linguistic gap for Americans, with the hope that naming these phenomena is the first step toward organized resistance.

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Closing Remark

Dan Storiev: “Naming something is the first step towards resisting it.” ([29:15])

Transcript

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[Dan Storiev]

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[Brooke Gladstone]

This is on the Media's Midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Since taking office in January 2025, President Trump has moved quickly to consolidate his power and punish his enemies. Over the weekend, President Trump continued his

[Dan Storiev]

flurry of executive moves.

[Brooke Gladstone]

He fired at least 15 inspectors general.

[Dan Storiev]

President Donald Trump vowing to send guard

[Maria Kuznetsova]

troops to more US Cities.

[Dan Storiev]

The head of the Federal Communications Commission has warned that some broadcasters risk losing their licenses over their news coverage of the Iran war. Breaking news with former FBI Director James Comey. He has been indicted by a federal grand jury in North Carolina. This is over this controversial Instagram post from last year. Democrats are worried that the president might try to influence voter turnout in the

[Maria Kuznetsova]

midterms by doing things like sending in the National Guard or ICE agents to poll sites.

[Dan Storiev]

When you think of it, we shouldn't even have an election. That's what he told Reuters.

[Brooke Gladstone]

Sometimes it's hard to find the words to describe exactly what's going on, since so many of Trump's moves are unprecedented in our democracy. The frequent frantic declamations of authoritarianism, unbridled corruption and would be king but don't quite capture it. It's happening so fast, we haven't had time to coin the words with the specificity required to describe how the wheels are turning. That's why Maria Kuznetsova and Dan Storiev decided to write a glossary of sorts. It's called how to Survive A Russian Phrasebook for Everyday Life in America, and it'll be out in the fall. Maria and Dan worked as activists and human rights defenders in Russia for about a decade before put crackdowns made it too dangerous to stay. They now live abroad in exile. Maria, Dan, welcome to the show.

[Maria Kuznetsova]

Hi. So nice to be here.

[Dan Storiev]

Thank you. Thank you. Glad to be here.

[Brooke Gladstone]

You wrote that you wanted to share the wisdom of what's called Aesopian speech. When I was in Russia, I think the word closest to that was mizh duliniya in between the lines. It's a hidden lexicon or a coded vocabulary that obscures meaning for the powerful while allowing you to communicate freely with your peers or others in the know.

[Dan Storiev]

Yeah, it's something like that. The whole concept of it, it really goes back to the tsarist Russia.

[Brooke Gladstone]

I want to start with three concepts that you talk about. Rudnoja u pravlenia, which means manual control, and chelobitnaya, which means knee bent petition.

[Dan Storiev]

The manual control, it's a newer term, it comes from Putin era Russia, whereas chelybitnaya goes back to the times of Ivod the Terrible. And chelybitnaya literally means you're bowing so hard that you strike your head on the floor. In Russia, you see it all the time, where people who need something as basic as having their road paved in their city, they essentially have to record these teary messages to Vladimir Putin asking him to intervene and do something about this.

[Maria Kuznetsova]

I want to add to that that a huge and important part of Chulobitna is humiliation, and humiliation in this process is on purpose.

[Brooke Gladstone]

Like Trump buying shoes that don't fit for people to wear or have them all say he's a gift from God in cabinet meetings.

[Maria Kuznetsova]

Exactly.

[Dan Storiev]

I think there is no better example here. The showdown in the Oval back with Zelenskyy, when Zelenskyy was attacked by JD Vance and then by Donald Trump.

[Brooke Gladstone]

How can you dress like that?

[Dan Storiev]

Yes, how can you dress like that? Do you own a suit?

[Brooke Gladstone]

You never once said thank you.

[Dan Storiev]

Exactly. What they expect isn't necessarily a thank you in a conventional sense of the word. What they expect is to have a chely bitnea bestowed on them.

[Brooke Gladstone]

There's another one of these terms that I think show the dangers of authoritarianism, at least as a mode of government. And you can apply them directly to America. Again, the phrase is, and you can say it in Russian, effective manager.

[Dan Storiev]

They denoted these technocrats within the Soviet systems who would run cities, they would run collective farms, they would run gulags. In some cases, it is a successful yet ruthless technocrat. And it became especially popular in post Soviet Russia. But then it became really popular within the Putin elite. Vladimir Putin and the rest of them being extremely impressed with the Chinese model, with the Singaporean model, with the UAE model, where you have pretty much zero political life, you have pretty much zero democratic freedoms and liberties, but at the same time, you have economic growth, the trains run on time and the streets are immaculately clean. And this is exactly what we see the contemporary Right. In America, people like Curtis Yarwin, for example, allegedly J.D. vance's favorite philosopher. People like Peter Thiel, this is exactly what they advocate. They advocate for something they call a corporate monarchy. And the argument that these people give is that we need to delegate all our power to the single executive. This concentration will make sure that the trains run on time, the streets are clean, you can walk alone at night, and so on and so forth. Just give up your freedom of speech, Right?

[Brooke Gladstone]

But why the hell then would they be throwing their support behind a clear incompetent where the economy is in free fall, the streets are not clean, there is civil unrest, and the whole thing. I don't know how to answer that question, but maybe it can lead us to the idea we haven't talked about yet, which is manual control. That word.

[Maria Kuznetsova]

What we see right now in America, what we see now in Russia is quite different from what we saw in dictatorships of the 20th century. Now, the regimes are very personalistic, and basically you find a person who is charismatic enough to lead the movement, and then you deal with all of the problems that arise with that. Manual control basically means that all of the bureaucrats are free to make any decisions, and every time they have to make one, every decision is just kicked off upstairs till it reaches the most powerful person in the country, or at least the minister. The problem with such system is that it stops reacting to routine tasks.

[Brooke Gladstone]

Tasks.

[Maria Kuznetsova]

Every task becomes political. And also problems are not resolved on time. We saw so many things like that with Vladimir Putin, when local authorities, for example, just didn't even want to react to emergencies because they didn't know if the federal government would approve of that. In America, there is a great example of that. Basically, Christine Noem wanted to approve all big spendings in dhs, which resulted in FEMA not getting money on time.

[Brooke Gladstone]

You're saying that by concentrating all of this power at the top, we are creating a situation where people are frightened to act on their own initiative to address problems.

[Maria Kuznetsova]

A lot of things about authoritarian regimes are in tension with each other, and it's kind of contradicting tendencies. And on one hand, we have effective managers who are ruthless and who just try to run Gulag efficiently. On the other hand, authoritarianism is often quite chaotic because it doesn't prevent problems in time. And it's actually, in that way, a fragile system that hurts a lot of people. It also makes a lot of things that should not be political. It makes them political again. Fixing the vote, having FEMA working on time, on the ground, stuff like that.

[Brooke Gladstone]

There are a couple of Russian phrases that both relate to leaders staying in power longer than legally allowed. And the words are in English, castling and zeroing.

[Dan Storiev]

Castling is in Russian, the chess move, right, where you shield your king with your rook. So Putin, at one point, when he needed to leave the presidency so that he wouldn't be breaking the law, what he did is he created out of thin air, replacement for himself. That replacement's name was Dmitry Medvedev, who indeed became a Russian president, but then ended up continuing the exact same policies that were going on under Vladimir Putin. And in fact, it was under Medvedev that Russia invaded Georgia in 2008.

[Maria Kuznetsova]

What can happen in the US potentially, and I don't see people talking about that enough, is I don't see any problem with Donald Trump returning to power as vice president while J. Devance or someone else becomes a president.

[Brooke Gladstone]

I guess that is possible. Donald Trump is not a young or healthy man. I think time may run out. We have seen, though, precisely something you've pointed out, that a lot of people in the 21st century or a lot of nations, China, Venezuela, they just changed the constitution to allow them to stay forever.

[Dan Storiev]

And this is what zeroing is. Zeroing or Abnulania, it's just basically canceling your term limits. What happened in Putin's case is that he. Masha, maybe you could explain it better than I can.

[Maria Kuznetsova]

Yeah, right. So the thing that Putin ran into, and a lot of leaders do, is that it's really hard to change constitution. It's not only American case where constitution is very rigid, but even in countries where processes are easier to make amendments, often the presidential amendments are hard to change. What Putin did basically was officially, we still have term limits in Russian constitution. Putin just proposed that because we are changing constitution substantially in 2020, and we had this severed referendum that ran for seven days all over Russia, to do that, we kind of reset the terms. So basically, the exception of not having two presidential terms only applies to Putin and it apply again to everyone after him.

[Brooke Gladstone]

Right. The clock stopped for Putin.

[Maria Kuznetsova]

Yeah. Basically.

[Brooke Gladstone]

You wrote about politechnologi or political technologists. These are people who exist to maintain the illusion that an undemocratic system is working democratically. Some call that illiberal democracy. Can you tell me about some of the more creative ways Putin's political technologists manage to pull this off?

[Dan Storiev]

These people treat politics as a machine. Right. It's something that you can engage with technologically, cynically, and without actually believing in anything.

[Brooke Gladstone]

They don't really have any values, but they know how the thing works and they know how to mess with it.

[Dan Storiev]

That's absolutely right. The term that we use in the book is electoral activities. They are not really elections. They are electoral activities. They are a performance. And everything within this performance isn't about the real policies of the candidates as much as it is about the various trickery that political technologists use. For instance, in Russia, we have something called the Dead Souls. Now, the Dead Souls, of course. It's the title of the amazing novel by Russian imperial writer Nikolai Gogol.

[Brooke Gladstone]

It's a hilarious book.

[Dan Storiev]

Yes. Anyway, we actually have many cases in Russia where during the elections or electoral activities, you have people voting. Again, quote, unquote, voting. And these people, they might have died years and years ago, or they may never have existed in the first place. And coincidentally, they always tend to vote for Vladimir Putin or they vote for his favorite party, the United Russia. But this sort of trickery wasn't invented in Russia. It's not new. In the US presidential election of 1876, Democrats were the pro slavery party. Back then, the Democratic candidate, Samuel Tilden, his ballots were actually decorated. In some instances, they were decorated with illustration of Abe Lincoln right beside Tilden's name. And so the illiterate Republican voters would mix those two up, and they would end up voting for a pro slavery Democrat rather than a Republican.

[Brooke Gladstone]

And you give a very contemporary example in Russia that echoes that, having to do with Boris Wischnevsky running in a city council election in St. Petersburg.

[Dan Storiev]

So what happened with Vishnevsky is one day he looked at the list of candidates running against him, and lo and behold, he saw two more Wisnevskys who were running on behalf of pro Putin parties. And those two Vishnevskys, one of them legally changed his name, and both of them grew out their beards so they would resemble Vishnevsky some more. So Vladimir Putin's political technologists basically created these two doppelgangers so that they could split the vote and get poor old Wisnevsky out of the race.

[Brooke Gladstone]

That's what you call election activities.

[Dan Storiev]

That's right.

[Brooke Gladstone]

There's a Russian phrase, we've heard it here quite a lot. Svoim sio chushim zakon, which means everything for our own, for others, the law. You know another phrase? Bilbi chaloveyak.

[Dan Storiev]

Bilby chalavek.

[Brooke Gladstone]

Yeah, give me the man and I'll find the crime. And all of these involve what in English is called undesirables, also a Russian term. These three terms have really Uncomfortable echoes here at the moment, but one I really want you to focus on is this term intercolonization. I think it's a really cool term, Masha.

[Maria Kuznetsova]

Basically, authoritarians start to use law just for their own purposes, while still pretending that having some law implemented is a thing of democracy. They also start to use law selectively. And that's what phrases like find me a man and I will find you a crime refers to. And we actually have such a prominent example right now in the United States. It's what's going on with James Comey and the fact that they're trying now to prosecute him based on an Instagram post that had 100 likes. That gives me vibes of late. Putin's regime, actually, you just decide who you don't like. You decide who you want to prosecute, and then you find anything on them. That's why, for example, us as Russian activists, we always know that we either have to be saints or we have to be nuns. You have to be absolutely clear on everything, so they cannot find anything on you. You have to follow absolutely all tax regulations to a letter. Ideally, you don't have any secrets that you are afraid of coming out into the world, because then they have leverage over you. It's also what I think people in America don't understand right now is that sometimes this kind of political prosecution, its goal is not to put a person into jail. The goal is to threaten you with the process. And it doesn't matter how this process ends. It basically deters a lot of people in power from even attempting to say something against the wannabe dictator.

[Brooke Gladstone]

So let's turn to infopomoika, basically an information dumpster. And it's a phrase that depicts how tyranny can corrupt our perception of reality.

[Maria Kuznetsova]

Basically, what Putin's regime decided to do is to create as many versions of reality as possible to confuse people and to encourage people to disengage. In Russian, we use a phrase, we will never know the whole truth, which means that there are so many contradictory versions out there that it's impossible to find what really happened. What Russian propaganda does is creating a lot of content of low quality. That's what we call infodumpster. But it's everywhere, hundreds of channels, on all social media. It's on television, it's in newspapers, it's maybe even in the comments. And Russians use a lot of troll farms to even, you know, engage in that way with people. You create so many things that journalists have no time to fact check them all. People get confused and when people get confused and overwhelmed, they just disengage the idea here. Because like, I think like people misunderstand that modern dictators, like they want you to believe what they do or they want to put you in prison. No, they actually much better off if you just don't do anything. You stay at home or you emigrate. That's where the concept of inner immigration comes in.

[Brooke Gladstone]

So that's another Russian phrase we should highlight, inner immigration.

[Maria Kuznetsova]

Inner immigration is when a person who understands the political reality, who understands that democracy is under assault anyway, chooses to disengage and only spend time doing their personal things and basically shut themselves from politics.

[Dan Storiev]

To add to inner immigration and to how important apathy is for modern dictatorships, another Russian saying is, and it basically means my house is at the edge of the village and so I don't care what happens with the rest of township. It rhymes in Russian and it doesn't really rhyme in Eng, but that's sort of the idea you disengage as much as possible.

[Brooke Gladstone]

This relates to another Russian phrase, budget people.

[Dan Storiev]

Oh, yes, you have these large swaths of population who are dependent on their livelihood on the state. And in Russia, it's quite a huge segment of the population. It's doctors, it's teachers, it's bus drivers, you name it. Okay? Because only recently Russia was Soviet Union. And in the Soviet Union you basically had no private employment, right? Everyone was employed by the state. And so that means that these people are very susceptible to pressure. Especially when you need to pull off some sort of electoral activity. You need to provide some warm bodies for a demonstration in front of the American Embassy, for example, which is something that happens surprisingly often. You don't actually need to do this organically. All you gotta do, you gotta send a top down letter to a factory or a school and say, okay, tomorrow at 1pm I need 100 people at this location with posters and flags. And whoever doesn't show up will get their pay docked, will get fired, will get expelled from a university. They love doing this with students, by the way. The main purpose of creating this budget, Niki people, is to justify and legitimize authoritarian rule.

[Maria Kuznetsova]

There is a good example of how big ethniki starts to form in the United States. It's when for the last year parade that Donald Trump organized, he made thousands of military personnel to come to D.C. and they had to sleep on the floor in some barracks. And then to perform for the wannabe dictator on his birthday parade with no people watching. We saw that, you know, there Were, like, no audience, basically. And these troops were through empty streets.

[Brooke Gladstone]

That's an excellent example. Can we have a quick discussion of Tusovoka and how that relates to both the Russian and American scene right now? It's literally a little get together.

[Dan Storiev]

Literally, Tusovichka is a little party, a little get together, people hanging out. But what it means in the parlance of Russian dissidents is that these Russian dissonant communities, they're prone to forming bubbles. And within these bubbles, people work together, they go to protest together, they date within these bubbles.

[Brooke Gladstone]

I wouldn't understand that, Dan, because I live in Brooklyn.

[Dan Storiev]

Exactly. So if you've ever been involved with, like, student activism, you will probably know what I'm talking about or just activism in general. And that's a problem within both Russian opposition circles, which ended up fighting between each other significantly more than they fought Vladimir Putin. And in the United States. Because in the United States, for example, when you look at the Democratic Party today, what is the Democratic Party doing? Is it 100% focused on defeating Donald Trump? Not really. Is it 100% focused on providing an alternative and positive vision for America that every American can get behind? Not really. What is at the top of the headlines for the past few weeks is whether or not the Democrats should share a platform with Twitch Streamer Hasan Piker. Right. So you have this constant infighting that is incredibly detrimental to the overarching cause.

[Brooke Gladstone]

Right. You've said that one of the key principles of this book is that language matters. What was your intention in assembling this phrasebook of Russian words?

[Maria Kuznetsova]

Okay, so I moved to the United States a couple of years ago, and when Trump came back to power, I started to see a lot of similarities with what I knew from Russia. And the problem was that I saw a lot of my friends, and I went to Harvard at the time, not being able to understand what was going on and not being able to see that some of the things that were happening were actually authoritarian. And again, not even being able to name what was going on, because that's the first step toward trying to work and resolve the problem. So I posted something on the Instagram to the effect of, oh, hey, do you know how these phrases can be translated or how we can explain them? Because I feel like people around me don't understand what's going on. I also started to have my American friends directly ask me for advice on how to live in such circumstances. I was talking to one of my friends who was at the Democratic Party, and he was asking me for advice and he asked me, so do we need to call ourselves dissidents now? And I felt like it's such a profound mind shift. And very early on, even before Trump officially took office, but after he won elections, people started to understand that the dynamics has changed, but they lacked a

[Brooke Gladstone]

language that they could apply to the consequences and the techniques of the people who oppose democracy.

[Dan Storiev]

That's the thing. You know how in several indigenous northern languages, like Siberian Yupik, for example, you have dozens of definitions for what snow is, the kind of snow, you know, the snow with ice falling, snow, lying snow, lying down, et cetera. It's just because these people live around and within, I guess, the snow, similarly to how Russia had existed for so long, for literal centuries under the boat of authoritarian regimes. And that means that Russians have developed this special language which allows us to talk about authoritarian developments, which allows us to categorize them, and which also allows us to talk about them in the open without actually being thrown in jail. That's a very important component of this. And so I Remember watching in 2025, the detention of Rumeza Ozturk, who was a PhD student at Tufts University, and she was detained effectively for her pro Palestinian stance. She was kidnapped by masked, plain clothed agents out in the open, just snatched up and dragged away. When you grow up in Russia, these kind of images, they immediately resonate with you just instantly. And we have the exact vocabulary to describe these plain clothed officers, right? We call them silviki or eshniki, but in English you gotta say plain clothed officers, right? You have to say this whole construction of terms and that. I think that's kind of the difference between this Ethiopian language that is utilized by Russian activists, Russian dissidents and academics, that we have this vocabulary to describe a dictatorship and Americans just don't. And this is exactly why we wanted to write this book, so we could help our American friends name the things happening around them. Because naming something is the first step towards resisting it.

[Brooke Gladstone]

Well, thank you both very much.

[Maria Kuznetsova]

Thank you.

[Dan Storiev]

Thanks for having us on.

[Brooke Gladstone]

Maria Kuznetsova and Dan Storiev are authors of the upcoming book how to Survive Authoritarianism, A Russian's Phrasebook for Everyday Life in America. It comes out on September 29th.

[Dan Storiev]

You can get the book anywhere the books are sold.

[Brooke Gladstone]

Thanks for listening to this week's midweek podcast. Make sure to catch the big show out before dinner time on Friday. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

[WNYC Announcer]

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