Politburo

Politburo (pronounced pol-it-byoor-oh or poh-lit-byoor-oh)

(1) The executive committee and chief policymaking body of a Communist Party (often in lowercase).  In the English-speaking world, sometimes erroneously written as politbureau or in hyphenated form.

(2) A casual term for a senior policymaking body in a political organisation, generally consisting of members who either are appointed by the party in control of the organisation or who attain membership through their personal political affiliations (sometimes derogatory).

1917: From the Russian Политбюро́ (Politbjuró) as shortening of полити́ческое бюро́ (politícheskoe byuró) (political bureau).  As a general principle, a politburo, in general, is the chief committee of a communist party and often exercises executive authority. The German form is Politisches Büro abbreviated as Politbüro and, like the Spanish Politburó, is directly loaned from Russian.  Chinese uses a calque (政治局; Zhèngzhìjú in pinyin), from which the Vietnamese (Bộ Chính trị), and Korean (정치국, 政治局 Jeongchiguk) terms derive.

1917 and after

The first politburo was Russian, created in 1917 by the Bolsheviks, the initial membership of seven including Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky and Stalin.  Although the USSR’s Politburo was notionally the highest policy-making government authority, it was usually subservient to the office of General Secretary of the Communist Party, especially during Comrade Stalin’s (1878–1953; leader of the Soviet Union 1922-1953) time.  In an example of the re-branding which happened often in the USSR, it was known as the Presidium between 1952 and 1966.  Many communist nations adopted the model during the twentieth century but politburos exist now only in the five remaining communist countries, China, the DPRK (North Korea), Laos, Vietnam, and Cuba.  Those five long outlasted the Russian original which was dissolved in 1991 after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Old white men: the Twenty-sixth Politburo (1981–1986) of the USSR (1981 press release).

The last four leaders of the USSR (Leonid Brezhnev (1964–1982), Yuri Andropov (1982-1984), Konstantin Chernenko (1984-1985) and Mikhail Gorbachev (1985-1991) all appear here.

Nomenclature

Nomenclature (pronounced noh-muhn-kley-cher, noh-men-kluh-cher, noh-muhn-kley-choor or noh-men-kluh-choor

(1) A set or system of names or terms, the terminology used in a particular science, art, activity etc, by an individual, community or institution.

(2) The names or terms comprising a set or system.

1600-1610: From the sixteenth century French nomenclature, from the Latin nōmenclātūra (a calling by name, list of names), from nomenclator (namer), the construct being nōmen (name), from the primitive Indo-European root no-men- (name) + calator (caller, crier), from calāre (call out), from the primitive Indo-European root kele- (to shout); a doublet of nomenklatura.  In many cases, the words classification, codification, glossary, locution, phraseology, taxonomy & terminology will be synonymous and interchangeable.  The related forms include nomenclatural, nomenclatorial & nomenclative, nomenclaturally, nomenclator, nomenclatory (and the equivalent systems using exclusively numbers: numericlature.  The noun plural is nomenclatures.

In Ancient Rome a nomenclator was (1) the title of a steward whose job was to announce visitors and (2) a prompter who helped a politician seeking election recall names and pet causes of his constituents.  The meaning "systematic list or catalogue of names" is attested from the 1630s; that of "system of naming" dating from the 1660s while the modern sense of "the whole vocabulary or terminology of an art or a science" is from 1789.  In English, circa 1600, it also had the meaning “a name” but, being a complicated way of saying something simple, this quickly went extinct.

In the Soviet Union, nomenklatura was the "list of influential posts in government and industry to be filled by Communist Party appointees".  The origin of this predated the formal creation of the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; (Союз Советских Социалистических Республик, СССР the Russian abbreviation in Cyrillic, transliterated as SSSR in Latin script)) and was emblematic of the centralization of authority and decision making the party organization imposed almost immediately on the state.  It was too indicative of the way the dictatorial structure of the party, mapped onto the mechanism of the state would, disguised sometimes as a collective model, to almost the end distinguish the USSR from many of the non-communist models of authoritarian rule which flourished during the twentieth century, their corporatist nature often misunderstood because of the way the label “dictatorship” was applied.

Formalized during 1919-1920, the party’s system of control was created in the months after the revolution, the Politburo (a creation of the party’s Central Committee which, technically, exercised only the authority delegated by the committee) dealt with all matters of significance and thus reserved the key decisions exclusively for their remit, the routine and procedural matters handled either by the Orgburo (essentially the body which enacted the Politburo’s edicts and coordinated the regional organizations and thus best understood as a kind of party chancellery) or the famously bureaucratic Secretariat.  It was in the Secretariat (where the paperwork from the higher bodies tended to end up) that the need for a reliably indexed filing system to conquer the developing administrative chaos quickly became apparent and nomenklatura was part of the system.  Accordingly created was the Учраспред (Uchraspred), (the Department of Files & Assignments) which, operating rather as gangsters would run as HR department, handled the registration of party members and their subsequent allocation to positions below the higher-level appointments, which remained in the gift of the Politburo or Orgburo.

Comrade Vyacheslav Molotov (1890–1986; early Bolshevik, Soviet foreign minister 1939-1949 & 1953-1956), Edward R Stettinius Jr (1900–1949; US secretary of state 1944-1945 and ambassador to the UN 1945-1946 (“Stettinius the younger”, his father having been assistant secretary of war 1918-1921)) & Anthony Eden (1897–1977; thrice UK foreign secretary and prime-minister-1955-1957) at the foundation conference of the United Nations, San Francisco, 1945.

Predictably, the structure provided much scope for patronage, nepotism and factionalism but, handling annually thousands of movements, it nevertheless demanded efficient administration, something lacking until in 1921, Vyacheslav Molotov, just elevated to the Central Committee and Orgburo, was put in charge of the Secretariat.  Studious, serious (of the many photographs which exist, in few is he smiling) and with a mind which if not as quick as his colleagues was certainly thorough, he excelled in the role and though the more intellectually illustrious were inclined to decry his “needless and shameful bureaucratism", they couldn’t not be in awe of his capacity to spend long hours sitting at his desk, creating order our of what was a post-revolutionary mess, comrade Lenin (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov 1870–1924 and known by his alias Lenin; revolutionary, political theorist and founding head of government (Soviet Russia 1917-1924 and the Soviet Union 1922-1924) dubbing him “stone ass” (often misquoted as “iron ass”), a moniker later used (behind his back) by the negotiators from the West with whom he sat through many meetings and conferences during his long tenure as Soviet foreign minister, his intransigence legendary even by diplomatic standards.  Other ambassadors dubbed him "comrade nyet"; nyet a Russian word meaning a particularly blunt "No!".  "Stone ass" was most productive during those long sessions at his desk, producing endless streams of paper which fed a burgeoning bureaucracy; Lenin also dubbed him "comrade filing cabinet".        

Stone ass: comrade Molotov sitting at his desk.

The English nomenclature was a borrowing in the 1600s of the sixteenth century French which was from the Latin nōmenclātūra (assignment of names to things, mentioning things by name, a list of names).  Almost immediately, the word was picked up by many branches of science (most notably in botany or zoology) where it gained the definitive senses of “a systematic assignment of names” and later in the same century, “the technical terms within a science”.  The noun nomenklatura existed in Russian since the early nineteenth century but it was particular and well-publicized use by the Soviet communists which made it known in the West.  Understanding its implications, the Kremlinologists in the 1950s adopted nomenklatura when discussing bureaucracies and administrative structures in both the USSR and other communist states.

Memo: Team Douglas Productions, 29 July 2004.

Also of interest to students of nomenclature is the process by which the names of people can become objects applied variously.  As Napoleon, Churchill and Hitler live on as Napoleonic, Churchillian and Hitlerite, on the internet is a body of the Lohanic.  Universally, that’s pronounced lo-han-ick but Lindsay Lohan has mentioned in interviews that being a surname of Irish origin, it’s “correctly” low-en, a form she adopted early in 2022 with her first posting on TikTok where it rhymed with “Coen” (used usually for the surname “Cohen” which is of Hebrew origin and unrelated to Celtic influence).  For a generation brought up on lo-han it must have been a syllable too far because it didn’t catch on and by early 2023, she was back to lo-han with the hard “h”.  Curiously, while etymologists seem to agree that historically lo-en was likely the form most heard in Ireland, the popular genealogy sites all indicate the modern practice is to use lo-han so hopefully that’s the last word.  However, the brief flirtation with phonetic h-lessness did have a precedent:  When Herbie: Fully Loaded (2005) was being filmed in 2004, the production company circulated a memo to the crew informing all that Lohan was pronounced “Lo-en like Coen” with a silent “h”.

Samizdat

Samizdat (pronounced sah-miz-daht or suh-myiz-daht)

(1) A clandestine publishing system (really, an ecosystem of sometimes connected but often independent systems) within the Soviet Union, by which forbidden works of literature were reproduced and circulated (also called “underground publishing”).

(2) A work or periodical circulated by this system (a samizdat publication).

1966: A direct borrowing from the Russian самизда́т (samizdat) (self-publishing), the construct being сам (sam) (self) + изда́т (izdát), an abbreviation of изда́тельство (izdátelʹstvo) (publishing house, publishing), the word samizdat coined as a jocular allusion to the compound name of official Soviet publishing organs (Gosizdát for Gosudárstvennoe izdátel'stvo (State Publishing House)).  Even among historians of the Cold War opinion must still be divided on whether samizdat remains a foreign term (and thus italicized) or has been assimilated into English (and thus not italicized); whichever is used, use within a document should be consistent.  A samizdatchik was a person involved in the production or distribution of samizdat.  In English language publications, the first known use of samizdat was in 1966 but the word clearly was in use in the Soviet Union (and presumably elsewhere behind the Iron Curtain) at least as early as the late 1950s and the clandestine production, copying and distribution of works banned by church or state authorities had been practiced for millennia.  Samizdat & samizdatchik are nouns; the noun plural is samizdats or samizdaty.

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak’s (1890–1960), first edition, 1957.

The companion word was tamizdat, a direct borrowing from the Russian тамизда́т (tamizdát) literally “published there”, the construct being там (tam) (there) + изда́ть (izdátʹ).  That was a form of clandestine distribution in which writings published abroad were smuggled into the Soviet Union or other places behind the Iron Curtain.  Such works could be by foreign authors, by those in the Soviet Union or those in exile (self-imposed or otherwise); the definitional point was the publications were always banned.  A tamizdatchik was a person involved in the production or distribution of tamizdat although, as was the case with samizdatchiks, mere possession of a copy of something illicit could be enough for the security forces to apply the label; guilt by association often a popular legal device in authoritarian states.  The tamizdat tradition is less celebrated but there have been some notable titles.  Boris Pasternak’s (1890–1960) novel Doctor Zhivago was smuggled to Milan and there published in 1957 with Russian language copies soon appearing as tamizdats, swapped, bartered and sold in the vibrant underground trade in Moscow and Leningrad (the old imperial name Saint Petersburg restored in 1991).  The author was in 1958 awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature which didn’t best please the Politburo, compelling him to decline the award.  Times have changed and the novel is now part of the Russian high school curriculum.

Tamizdat Inc

Founded in 1998 and now based in Brooklyn, New York, Tamizdat Inc. is a NPO (non-profit organization) dedicated to promoting and facilitating international cultural exchange.  It appears to be focused on pop culture and originally was established to assist musicians from Central and Eastern Europe reach broader audiences, its activities including organizing tours by bands and staging music festivals.  Prior to streaming services going mainstream, Tamizdat for some years in the early 2000s ran a bricks & mortar music shop and CD distribution centre based in Prague (capital of the Czech Republic) but more recently it seems most involved with assisting those involved in some form of “art” to gain visas to visit the US.  Presumably, serious operations like the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) view Tamizdat Inc with the same sceptical eye they cast upon subversive outfits like the Vatican or the Falun Gong.

The Culture of Samizdat, Literature and Underground Networks in the Late Soviet Union (2020) by Josephine von Zitzewitz.

Although used mostly by historians and political scientists, samizdat is an accepted term in the jargon of literary theory and its use is not restricted to the Soviet Union or the states behind the old Iron Curtain.  Within the discipline, the term denotes certain “underground writing” (self-publication), circulated in typescript or copies produced on photocopiers or other duplicating machines; what (in this context) makes it samizdat is content expressing views proscribed by the state.  The word entered Western consciousness in 1966 when details emerged of the Sinyavsky–Daniel trial, conducted in Moscow the previous year.  Andrei Sinyavsky (1925–1997) was a literary critic but it was the material he wrote under the pseudonym Abram Tertz which saw Moscow brand him a “dissident”.  That what he wrote was critical of the communist regime was bad enough but his texts were smuggled out of the country and published in the West before returning as contraband, thereby circumventing the state’s strict (and bafflingly inconsistent) censorship regime.

Obviously guilty as sin, Mr Sinyavsky and fellow malcontent Yuli Markovich (1925–1988) were convicted of anti-Soviet agitation in a “show trial” and remarkably, history records them as the first Soviet writers to be convicted solely on the basis of their written words.  Plenty over the decades had been sentenced (sometimes to death) on charges in some way involving what they’d written, but Sinyavsky & Daniel served six years in a penal colony just for the words.  For the Kremlinologists, the most intriguing aspect of the trial was the prosecutor revealing the existence of a large body of underground literature circulating within the Soviet Union so the point of this “show trail” was not to secure a couple of convictions (rarely difficult in a Moscow court) but to act as a warning to other dissidents.  Being a dissident was not easy and one of the under-appreciated difficulties was that the state quasi-tolerated what came to be called “official dissidents”; those who were permitted to be critical… up to a point.  This approach functioned both within the country as a “safety valve” and, for Western viewers, an indication things were not as repressive as anti-Soviet propaganda claimed.  Unfortunately, as the political climate shifted, “official dissidents” could find what was tolerated one month could be judged unacceptable the next with consequences ranging from tiresome to serious.

The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008), first edition, 1968.

Thus the attraction of adopting a pseudonym and publishing abroad, an additional benefit being duplicating machines were freely available in the West and hundreds or even thousands of copies cheaply could be produced in a way impossible in the Soviet Union where such machines were rare and their use diligently monitored.  As a form of deterrence, the 1966 Sinyavsky–Daniel show trial was not wholly effective because in 1968 the nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov (1921–1989) completed his essay Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence in which he described the anti-ballistic missile defense projects being explored by both Moscow and Washington as likely to increase the threat of nuclear war.  Initially distributed within the Soviet Union in samizdat, it was smuggled to the West and published in translation.  As a punishment, Sakharov was removed from his role in military research and restricted to studying theoretical physics.  Even more famous was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s (1918–2008) The Gulag Archipelago which, written between 1958-1968, was first published in Paris in 1968.  An exploration of the vast system of Soviet labor camps and penal colonies, the sprawling, three volume work included interviews, reports, statistics and an account of the author’s own experience as a Gulag prisoner.  In the West it remains the best known samizdat and prior to publication, the text in Russian did circulate in the Soviet Union although not until 1989 (in the days of Glasnost (openness) and Perestroika (restructuring) was it openly on sale in some bookshops.

The audio equivalent of all this is magnitzdat, denoting material recorded on magnetic tapes that went on unlawfully to be circulated.  Originally, the audio tape recordings were of spoken text and took advantage of several quirks in the Soviet criminal code: (1) While citizens could not own printing presses or duplicating machines, they were permitted to own tape-recorders and by the mid-1950s, Japanese machines, although rare and expensive, had begun to appear and listening was often a communal experience, (2) although the production of more than six copies of a typewritten text was unlawful, there were no restrictions on duplicating recordings and (3) the only legal liability for the content of a recording accrued to those recorded, not those involved in production or distribution. The construct of magnitizdat was магнитофон (magnit(ofon)) (literally “magnetic tape recorder”) + изда́ть (izdát).  Because of the relatively small numbers of real-to-reel tape recorders available, behind the Iron Curtain, the printed samizdats & tamizdats had a much more profound and far-reaching effect but, in an indication of what might have been possible had the technology been available, by the late 1970s cheap, portable cassette tape players enjoyed wide ownership in Iran and the people around Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1900-1989; Supreme Leader, Islamic Republic of Iran, 1979-1989), then in exile in Paris, maintained an energetic programme of distribution to Iran of tapes containing his incendiary speeches against Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919–1980; last Shah of Iran 1941-1979).  Easily duplicated and shared within communities, the Ayatollah’s message spread probably at least as rapidly as would have occurred had he been allowed to broadcast on radio or television and the rest is history.

Lindsay Lohan, Confessions of a Broken Heart (Daughter to Father) (2005), 2Crow Bootleg.

Technically of course, a magnitzdat was conceptually similar to a “bootleg” recording, a form which in the West enjoyed in heyday in the 1970s & 1980s.  The term “bootlegging” dates from the late eighteenth century when it was used by British customs and excise officers to describe the trick smugglers used to hide contraband in their large sea-boots.  Since then, it’s been applied variously including (1) the distilling, transporting and selling of unlawful liquor (2) unlicensed copies of software and (3) unauthorized recordings of music and film.  In music, bootleg recordings began to appear in some volume in the 1960s and originally were often from live performances.  Frequently created from tapes of dubious quality with little or no editing, these bootlegs generally were tolerated by the industry because they tended to circulate among fans who anyway purchased the official product and were thought of just a form of free promotional material.  Later, when things became more organized and bootleggers began distributing replicas of official releases, the attitude changed and for decades the music and software industries fought ongoing battles against bootleg copies (which in some non-Western markets represented in excess of 90% of software installations).

Broken English (1979) by Marianne Faithfull (1946-2025).

Marianne Faithfull undeniably was beautiful but before Broken English her discography had been a predictable pastiche of any number of “girl singers” of the 1960s, the music rarely original, usually melodic and inoffensive but never with an arrangement hinting her output could be thought “interpretative”.  Broken English startlingly was different and rarely has a repertoire better suited a “gin soaked” voice.  However there was one track with lyrics deemed in some places “obscene” (the words now would raise barely an eyebrow) so in those markets the album appeared with the offending track deleted.  That led to a lively trade in “bootleg” copies (ie those produced for sale in less censorious jurisdictions) and before long most regulators bowed to reality, allowing their citizens to hear Ms Faithful sing the words many likely would hear while walking along city streets.

While obviously there can in form be similarities in samizdats, tamizdats, magnitzdats and bootlegs, the motives for their production and distribution differ.  “Bootleg copies” of this and that are money-making devices that generate profit by evading copyright, thereby denying the payment of royalties to those who hold the IP (intellectual property) or distribution rights whereas the Russian trio existed to publish material proscribed by state censorship.  Behind the Iron Curtain, for those involved in the means of production or distribution, there could be a profit motive (especially resellers in the “secondary market” and beyond) but the primary rationale was to avoid the censor’s pen.  Although philosophers have for millennia discussed and explained the nature of the institutions such as organized religion and what would come to be called “the nation state” (and latterly, political scientists have with increasing levels of complexity added to the literature), operating in parallel with theoretical niceties such as “consent”, “distributive justice” and “social contracts” is “power”.  Politics, as it is practiced, was detailed by the Florentine diplomat Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli, 1469–1527) in Il Principe (The Prince, 1532), a kind of “owner’s handbook” of power and its retention and its core dynamic is what’s now known as regime survival, an imperative which long predates Renaissance Italy and although tactics may vary, the strategy remains the same, whether in a besieged Constantinople in 1453, in the Führerbunker in 1945, in the Oval Office in 2021 or among Ayatollahs in Tehran in 2026.  Censorship is an important component in regime survival because if alternative thoughts are allowed freely to circulate, people might get ideas and princes, popes and presidents all well know where that may lead.

Court of the Star Chamber (1951), gouache on paper by Cecil Doughty (1913–1985).

Although created in the mid-twentieth century, the work is in the style of a "period correct" woodcut.  The Star Chamber was formed because of the courts of Common Law and Chancellery had become inefficient, rule-bound and susceptible to external influences and initially it functioned well but later (especially under the seventeenth century Stuarts) it became a tool of repression.

In the West, the notion of “freedom of speech” is a recent arrival; edicts banning “seditious and heretical works” were proclaimed in 1529 during the reign of Henry VIII (1491–1547; King of England (and Ireland after 1541) 1509-1547) who shortly would change his mind about what constituted “heresy”.  Within a decade of the first proclamations, laws were passed requiring books must be licensed for printing by Privy Council or other royal nominees, an indication the printing press in its time was as disruptive an influence as the internet and social media would later prove; in moves that would be applauded by later Soviet governments, in England and elsewhere in Europe, severe restrictions were imposed on the importation of foreign books.  Had these measures worked as intended, political and intellectual life would have been very different but in England (as in Europe), underground and unlicensed printing presses were soon active and often highly productive.  By 1557, the Stationers' Company (an outgrowth of the London craft guild of printers) was granted a “charter of incorporation” which stipulated only members of the company (or others holding a special patent) were allowed to print any work for sale in the kingdom.  In 1586, the Court of Star Chamber introduced an ordinance mandating that no printing press might be set up in any place other than London or the university towns of Oxford and Cambridge, the point being that in those places the state possessed the infrastructure to supervise what was being produced.  As the Star Chamber was inclined to do, under the act of 1637 it imposed harsh punishments upon transgressors and even after the court was in 1641 abolished by the Long Parliament the repression not only continued but the consequences for illicit printing became more severe.  Remarkable as it sounds, under the rule of Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658; Lord Protector of the Commonwealth 1653-1658), publishers and printers may have looked back on the administration of the Star Chamber as an enlightened period.  The puritanical Cromwell in 1655 actually banned all unofficial publications but this was found to create more problems than it solved and four years later the Rump Parliament permitted the printing of a limited number of licensed newsbooks but distribution was restricted.

So censorship was not invented by the Tsars or comrade Stalin (1878-1953; Soviet leader 1924-1953).  The significance of the Stationers' Company’s charter was that structurally it created a regime strikingly similar to that which prevailed in the Soviet Union in which the entire publishing industry could be thought “the government printer”.  What members of the company were compelled to do was record prospectively in the Stationers' Register any publications they proposed to print, something which has made research difficult for historians because not everything recorded ended up being printed.  Nevertheless, the Register remains an important source document of literary activity in the era and although the original purpose had been to prevent the spread of seditious publications, lawyers began to use the entries as evidence when attempting to assert copyright.  That was at the time too novel a notion to impress the judges but the register form part of the template for the first English Copyright Act (1709), which provided the framework on which the rights of writers and publishers would be codified.  Lawyers who experienced the often futile task of arguing their cases before the Star Chamber would have found the Tsarist and Soviet models regulating publishing refreshingly familiar and concepts such as samizdat & tamizdat would have needed little explanation.

Bone Music by Stephen Coates.  The x-ray discs are now minor collectables and while all those decades what Russians paid most influenced by what was claimed to be "on the cut", buyers now especially value the best images, skulls among the more desirable.

The ever inventive Russian youth were early adopters of bootleg recordings and combined recycling with a unique form of magnitzdat.  Because the Communist Party was as scared of rock music as it was of tracts about Western democracy and human rights, such sounds were banned and damned as subversive, decadent, capitalist, imperialist etc; in an authoritarian state, the exact form of the damnation is less important than the fact some label has been applied.  So, rock albums were hard to get but in Soviet homes gramophones (record players) were common so all that was needed was the media.  That was found in the rubbish discarded by hospitals, x-ray images turning out to be an ideal material for cutting the grooves which could be played on a gramophone.   Known by a variety of terms including ribs, music on ribs, jazz on bones or bone music, although the first were produced as early as 1946, most date from the 1950s & 1960s, cut into 7-inch discs (the size of the old 45 rpm “single”).  The machines used to “cut the grooves” were reputedly old 78 rpm phonographs, modified by skilled technicians, trained by the state to do stuff in the service of socialism.  Because of the nature of the material, they had a short life (managing a dozen plays was exceptional) and the quality was (by the standards of commercially produced vinyl pressings) appalling but alternatives were scarce and the improvised recording were cheap, often selling for a few kopeks with only the most desirable bands attracting more than a ruble.

Bone music: A early form of a digital disc.

That so many discarded X-rays were available in a nation in which usually there were shortages of just about everything except Vodka, was a product of circumstances.  With the breakdown of public health systems in the immediate aftermath of World War II (1939-1945) at a time when close to 20 million soldiers and displaced civilians were moving between countries, an increase in the spread of tuberculosis concerned the authorities and the Soviet government, like many, embarked on a vast programme of chest X-rays.  As a public health initiative it was a success but it resulted in large libraries of X-rays being stored in hospitals.  Because these contained a silver nitrate substance, they were a fire hazard and, after a couple of conflagrations, a twelve month limit was imposed on storage so hospital administrators were happy to give their old stocks to anyone who asked.  So, the input cost of the raw material was zero and the production costs were marginal which meant that even if the retail unit price of a bone music cut was less than a ruble, with high volumes, it was by Soviet standards a lucrative business model.  Customer satisfaction however was variable because, bought on street corners, the audio quality was unpredictable as was the content; until played, a buyer couldn’t be certain what they’d bought.  Noting the trend, the government passed a law banning the home-production of recordings of “a criminally hooligan trend” but rock ‘n’ roll was here to stay.

Proxemics

Proxemics (pronounced prok-see-miks)

(1) In sociology and psychology, the study of the spatial requirements of humans and animals and the effects of population density on behavior, communication, and social interaction.

(2) In linguistics, the study of the symbolic and communicative role in a culture of spatial arrangements and variations in distance, as in how far apart individuals engaged in conversation stand depending on the degree of intimacy between them.

1963: A portmanteau word, the blend mixed by US anthropologist and cross-cultural researcher Edward Twitchell Hall (1914–2009) for an academic paper published in 1963 (which built on ideas in his book The Silent Language (1959)), the construct being prox(imity) + -emics.  Proximity was a compound word, the construct being proxim(ate) +‎ -ity, from the Middle French proximité from the Latin proximitās & proximitāt-  from proximus (from the primitive Indo-European prokwismmos, from prokwe (from whence prope)).  The novel –emics was an extracted borrowing from the word phonemics (the study of phonemes or distinct units of sound in a language; phonology).  Proxemics is a noun, proxemical & proxemic are adjectives and proxemically is an adverb.  Proxemics (the study of the effects of the physical distance between people in different cultures and societies) is one of those words which appears to be a plural but is a singular form.  For those learing English it may seem strange proxemic is an adjective and proxemics a noun singular.

Empirical research

Proxemics is the study of human use of space and the effects that population density has on behavior, communication, and social interaction.  It’s one of a number of disciplines in the study of non-verbal communication, including semiotics (sign language), haptics (touch), kinesics (body language), vocalics (para-language), and chronemics (structure of time).  Analogous with the way animals use urine and physical posturing to define their territory, the idea is that humans use personal space and concrete objects to establish theirs.

The theory suggests there are four types of distances people keep: intimate (up to 18 inches (.5m)), personal (18 inches to 4 feet (.5-1.2M)), social (4 to 10 feet (1.2-3m)), and public (over 10 feet (3m+)) although those are the distances chosen deliberately by individuals; forced closeness such as experienced on public transport are not part of proxemics.  The theory exists within the discipline of behaviorism and is thus observational rather than being derived from explicit instruction which is why personal distance and physical contact varies by culture, the physical distance between communicators indicating also the nature of their relationship.  Beyond relationships, proxemics attempted to explain other cultural and anthropological phenomena, such as the organization of built environments and living spaces, furniture, walls, streets and fences all being arranged in ways that delineate territory, whether for living, working or meeting others; territories historically existing to provide comfort for inhabitants and induce anxiety in intruders.

Practicing pre-pandemic proxemics: The septuple of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Politburo's Standing Committee at the Eighteenth Congress of the CCP, Beijing, China, November 2012.

Note the social distancing, an indication of early planning for the COVID-19 pandemic.  The unfortunate fellow (second from left) who spoiled the photograph by wearing the wrong color tie, was expelled from the party and transferred to the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) as deputy assistant sanitation inspector.  Still, it does indicate how good things can be if things are not troubled by decadent Western concepts such as the imposition of DEI (diversity, equity & inclusion) legislation.  In some matters, Donald Trump (b 1946; US president 2017-2021 and since 2025) has learned much from the CCP.    

Practicing pandemic proxemics: Lindsay Lohan in Dubai, April 2020, group photograph of a nonuple, expressing thanks to Dubai Police Force for their help during the difficult time.

Leftover

Leftover (pronounced left-oh-ver)

(1) Usually as leftovers; food remaining uneaten at the end of a meal, especially when saved for later use.

(2) Anything left or remaining from a larger amount; remainder.

(3) A casual (and disparaging) term used in the People's Republic of China to describe women still un-married after the age of twenty-six. 

1878: A compound word left + over; the construct being a noun use of verb phrase left over.  The meaning is always in the sense of left (“remaining, abandoned”) + over (“excess”).  Left is from the Middle English left, luft, leoft, lift & lyft, from the Old English left & lyft (air, atmosphere) from the Proto-Germanic luft with which may be compared the compared the Scots left (left), the North Frisian lefts, left & leefts (left), the West Frisian lofts (left), the dialectal Dutch loof (weak, worthless), and the Low German lucht (left).  Over is from the Middle English over from the Old English ofer from the Proto-Germanic uber (over), from the primitive Indo-European upér, a comparative form of upo; akin to the Dutch over, the German ober & über, the Danish over, the Norwegian over, the Swedish över, the Icelandic yfir, the Faroese yvir, the Gothic ufar, the Latin super, the Ancient Greek ὑπέρ (hupér), the Albanian upri (group of peasants) and the Sanskrit उपरि (upári).  The hyphenated left-over (remaining, not used up) is from 1890 as a noun meaning "something left over" is from 1891.  The sense of (the almost always plural) leftovers “excess food after a meal" (especially if re-served later) dates from 1878.  In this sense, Old English had metelaf.

Leftover women

Sheng nu (剩女; shèngnǚ), most often translated as "leftover women" is a phrase (usually considered derogatory), which describes Chinese women who remain unmarried by their late twenties.  First promulgated by the All-China Women's Federation (ACWF) as a promotion of government programmes, it’s been used in other countries but remains most associated with People's Republic of China (PRC).  As a demographic phenomenon, it was once unexpected because the conjunction of the PRC's one-child policy and the disproportionate abortion of female foetuses had led to a distortion in the historic gender balance.  Births in China since the one-child policy was introduced in 1979 have averaged 120 males for every 100 females compared to a global ratio of 103:107.

A bride with four suspected leftovers.

The term appears to have entered common-use in 2005-2006 and seems first to have appeared in the Chinese edition of Cosmopolitan.  Unlike most of Cosmopolitan’s editorial content, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took it seriously and instructed the ACWF (a kind of cross between the CWA (Country Women’s Association) and the PLA (People’s Liberation Army) to publish articles stigmatizing women still unwed by their late twenties.  Borrowing from Maoist tradition (if not theory), the ACWF provided a useful analysis of the problem, concluding that while “pretty girls” didn’t need much education to find a rich partner, “average or ugly” ones who seek higher degrees thinking it will “increase their competitiveness” in the marriage market are delusional; all that happens is they become old “…like yellowed pearls."  The rhetorical flourishes aside, they had a point.  As the numbers of highly educated women rose, the numbers of potential husbands they found acceptable did not.  What the distorted gender balance created by the one-child policy and the selective-sex abortion preferences had produced was an increasingly educated and middle-class female minority not impressed by a less schooled and more rural male majority. 

Geographic distribution of leftover women, People’s Republic of China.

“Leftover women” seemed the choice in print but on the internet, the punchier 3S or 3SW (Single, Seventies (referring to the then prominent 1970s birth cohort) and Stuck) was also used instead of sheng nu.  There is an equivalent term for men, guang gun (bare branches (ie men who do not marry and thus do not add branches to the family tree)); shengnan (leftover men) does exist but is rare.

CCP demographers had expressed concerns about the social and economic implications of the one-child policy as early as the 1990s.  In the new century, the policy was first selectively relaxed, then revised to permit additional children for those selected by the CCP as desirable breeders and, on 31 May 2021, at a meeting of the of the CCP Politburo, the three-child policy (三孩政策) was announced.  The session, chaired by Xi Jinping (b 1953; CCP general secretary 2012- & PRC president 2013-), followed the release of the findings of the seventh national population census which showed the number of births in mainland China in 2020, at twelve million, would be the lowest since 1960, an indication of the demographic trend causing the ageing of the population.  The Xinhua state news agency then announced the three child policy would be accompanied by supportive measures to “maintain China's advantage in human resources” but surveys suggested the section of the population the CCP would like to see produce three children per household were generally unwilling to have even two, the reason overwhelmingly the high cost of living in Chinese cities.  The announcement on 26 July 2021 permitting Chinese couples to have any number of children was thus greeted by most with restrained enthusiasm.

Leftover no longer: Lindsay Lohan's engagement ring.  Ms Lohan announced her engagement in 2021, marring the following year.  In 2023, a post confirmed reports of her pregnancy. 

The problem of re-production is not restricted to the PRC, the birth rate in South Korea now down to around .8 per woman while a rate around 2.1 is necessary if the population is to be sustained.  What exacerbates the problem in the PRC is the simple lack of women of child-bearing age, caused by the distorted male/female live-birth rates in the decades following the imposition of the one-child policy and any vague hope the long stretches of lock-downs may have encouraged procreation were not realized.  Despite that disappointment, the CCP wasn't discouraged and embarked on a new propaganda campaign making it clear to young women that having babies was part of their patriotic duty to the motherland: pregnancy was now compulsory.  In the West, the decline in the birth rate has for some time been thought a problem, largely because of the impending acceleration in the distortion between those of working age (paying into the system) and those not generating income (extracting from the system).  Of late however, influenced by the un-anticipated rapidity in the advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, theorists are re-visiting the models and pondering the implications.

Gulag

Gulag (pronounced goo-lahg)

(1) The system of forced-labor camps in the Soviet Union (with initial capital).

(2) Individually, a Soviet forced-labor camp (usually with initial capital).

(3) By association, any prison or detention camp, especially one used for political prisoners (usually not with initial capital).

(4) Figuratively, any place regarded as undesirable or one perceived as being a “punishment-post” (not with initial capital).

(5) Figuratively, any system used to silence dissent (not with initial capital).

1930-1931: From the Russian ГУЛА́Г (GULÁG, GULag or Gulág), the acronym (Гла́вное управле́ние исправи́тельно-трудовы́х лагере́й (Glávnoje upravlénije ispravítelʹno-trudovýx lageréj) translated usually as “Main Directorate of Corrective Labor Camps” but also, inter alia, “Chief Administration of Corrective-Labor Camps”, “Main Directorate for Places of Detention”, “Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps” etc.).  The noun plural was Gulags.

An example of the way in which a bland acronym (like the 1933 Gestapo (an abbreviated form of the German Geheime Staatspolizei (the construct being Ge(heime) Sta(ats)po(lizei), literally “secret state police”) can become a byword for something awful, although technically, the acronym GULag (Glávnoje upravlénije ispravítelʹno-trudovýx lageréj (Main Directorate of Corrective Labor Camps)) didn’t come into use until 1930, the origin of what quickly would evolve into a vast, nation-wide network of concentration camps lies in the legal device created almost immediately after the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in 1917.  This was the concept of the “class enemy”, a logical crime to gazette under Marxist-Leninist theory and one that could be applied literally to anybody, regardless of their conduct; it was essentially the same idea as the crime of “unspecified offences” which appears in the judicial sentences of some authoritarian states.  Russia, as many of the Bolsheviks knew from personal experience, had a long tradition of “internal exile” and the new regime extended this concept, creating concentration camps for class enemies where convicts were required to perform useful manual labor (forestry, mining, quarrying etc).

The early camps, authorized by decree in April 1919, were the prisoner of war (POW) facilities which had become redundant after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918) which concluded hostilities between Russia and the Central Powers although the first model camp was in the White Sea region, in what were once the Orthodox Church's monastery buildings on the Solovetsky Islands and the first prisoners were anti-Bolsheviks, mostly left-wing intellectuals and members of the White Army.  The Cheka, the Russian secret police (the first in the alphabet soup of the names adopted (Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKGB, NKVD, SMERSH, MGB, (most famously) KGB & FSB), was allocated the role of administration.  Reflecting the love secret police everywhere have for mysterious acronyms, the Cheka created SLON (Northern Camps of Special Significance) as an administrative template for the Solovetsky Islands which, briefly, was the only camp complex in the Soviet state.  The number of concentration (usually described as “correctional labor”) camps grew sufficiently during the 1920s to outgrow the bureaucratic structures initially formed by the Cheka and in 1930 the GULag was created as a separate division of the secret police which worked in conjunction with the Soviet Ministry of the Interior overseeing the use of the physical labor of prisoners.  Although the camps were sometimes used for those guilty of “normal” criminal offences, the great majority of inmates were political prisoners who were sometimes genuine political dissidents but could be there for entirely arbitrary reasons or even as victims of personal vendettas.  In these aspects there are parallels with the Nazi's concentration camps which also worked as systems of coercion, punishment & repression although the GULag never had a programme industrially to exterminate an entire race.  There was another striking similarity in the camp architecture of the two dictatorships which were nominally ideological opponents.  The German equivalent of the GULag, the Konzentrationlager is remembered for the words Arbeit macht frei (work makes you free) rendered in wrought iron above the gates of Auschwitz I; the inscription через труд (through labor (ie get back home through working)) was the message at the prisoners' entrance to the Magaden camp in Siberia.      

What is sometime neglected in the history of the GULag (and other systems of concentration camps) is that while it is well-understood as part of a system of repression, there were genuine attempts to locate the camps in places where the labor extracted from the inmates could be applied to the maximum benefit for the state, something of great significance because in 1929 comrade Stalin (1878–1953; Soviet leader 1922–1953) announced a programme of rapid industrialization and the first of a succession of five-year plans. In support of this, the Politburo abolished any distinction between political and other crimes and intruded a unified network of camps to replace the hitherto dual prison system.  From this point, accelerating from the mid-1930s, archipelagos of camps were built (substantially by the prisoners) close to sites of huge economic projects such as a canal from the White Sea to the Baltic Sea, gold mining in Kolyma and lines of communications such as the Baikal-Amur Mainline.

The GULag’s second great growth spurt happened during Stalin’s “Great Terror” in 1936-1938 when the upper echelons of the Communist Party, the armed forces, the civil service and even the GULag management were subject to purges and while there were many executions, most were sent to the camps which, never designed for such numbers, were unable to handle the mass influx and the already high death rate increased sometimes threefold.  During comrade Stalin's great purges, the (whispered) joke was that the Russian population consisted of (1) those in the gulag, (2) those just released and (3) those about to go back.  On a somewhat smaller scale, rapid inflows also happened in the early years of World War II because of the need to imprison those deported from territory just occupied by the Soviet Union (Eastern Poland, the Baltics, Bessarabia) but this pressure on capacity was more than off-set by the sudden release of many prisoners to meet the needs of the Red Army which had suffered massive losses in the Nazi invasion.  Needing troops, all was suddenly forgiven and it wouldn’t be until 1945 that the numbers in the camps began again to trend upwards, reflecting the waves of arrests among the ranks of the Red Army, former German POWs and ethnic minorities, including Soviet Jews.  The Cold War also fed the GULag.  In 1948-1949, Stalin launched the construction of new megalomaniacal projects, including the Volga-Don Canal, new power stations, dams, and communications, among them the Dead Road and a tunnel and railway to Sakhalin Island, both of which, despite a horrific death-toll, proved impossible to build and were cancelled when Stalin died in 1953.

After Stalin’s death, an amnesty was announced for many of those serving sentences for criminal offences and almost all of those deemed to have committed “minor offences” were released although political prisoners remained imprisoned and it wasn’t until “the thaw” under Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971; Soviet leader 1953-1964) that widespread releases were ordered after almost four million political crime cases were reviewed and in 1957, as one of a number of reforms, the GULag was abolished and most of the camps shut down.  Khrushchev himself announced that the Soviet economy would no longer based on the slave labor of prisoners which, as a piece of economic analysis was true but while the numbers of political prisoners fell, they did not disappear although they tended now to be only imprisoned for genuine opposition to the regime, dispatched most frequently to labor camps in Mordovia or in camps clustered around the Urals. The conditions remained grim but the death rates were tiny compared to those suffered in Stalin’s time but what also disguised the extent of post-Stalinist repression was than many dissidents were technically not imprisoned but instead declared insane and incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals, many of which closely resembled prisons.  There, the “insane” were often subject to cruel & unusual “medical” procedures.

The number of people who passed through the GULag can never exactly be known but, using archival material which became accessible after the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991, historians have estimated between 15-18 million were imprisoned and the death-toll may have been almost 10%, the overwhelming majority of whom were from Russia or the constituent republics of the USSR but others were foreigners, mostly Czechoslovaks, Poles, Hungarians & Frenchmen.  The network of camps dotted around the USSR consisted of almost 500 administrative centres, each running as few as dozens or as many as hundreds of individual camps, historians having documented just under 30,000.  In the West the term GULag became widely known only after the publication in 1973 Russian of novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's (1918–2008) three-volume The Gulag Archipelago, described by the author as "An Experiment in Literary Investigation" which he wrote between 1958-1968, using documentary sources including legal papers, interviews, diaries, statements and his personal experience as a GULag prisoner.

Map of the GULag camp distribution, Plain Talk magazine, 1950.

However, both the system of slavery and the word “GULag” had, during comrade Stalin’s time, been publicized in the West, remarkably accurate maps published in 1950 in the US in Plain Talk (A US anti-communist monthly magazine, 1946–1950) magazine but, despite it being the high Cold War, the revelations didn’t resonate in public consciousness as they would a generation later when Solzhenitsyn released The Gulag Archipelago.