Did Putin Really Say That?
Was it THE greatest catastrophe of the century?
Some Languages don’t have words for ‘a’ or ‘the’
As an academic, I’m sometimes playing my part in ‘science’ by correcting the English in manuscripts written by non-English speaking scientists. Much of this is trying to find a better, or more concise way of saying something. Sometimes, it’s a struggle to work out what the author is trying to say in the first place. I’ll write to say what I think they want to say, and then ask the author, ‘Is this what you meant?’ But perhaps a third of what I do — is either insert an article, typically the word “the”, or correct a “the” to an “a”.
A foreign academic might write, for example:
“Best fossils come from Jurassic”
I’d suggest:
“The best fossils come from the Jurassic”.
A disclaimer — I’m no expert in English. In fact, I failed my final highschool English exam (perhaps because I refused to read some of the course material, but that’s another story). But as a native English speaker, knowing where to stick “the” and “a” is pretty much second nature. However, there are languages where specific words to distinguish between a definite thing and an indefinite thing, don’t exist. I’m thinking of Russian (see Christian 1961 for some comments on the linguistics of the issue) and Chinese. Of course, the speakers of these languages are usually well aware of the distinction, they just have other ways of showing it. For example, Wikipedia (Russian Grammar) gives an example of one way you can do this in Russian:
“The use of a direct object in the genitive instead of the accusative in negation signifies that the noun is indefinite, compare:
Я не вижу кни́ги = ‘I don’t see a book’ or ‘I don’t see any books’
and
Я не ви́жу кни́гу = ‘I don’t see the book’.”
It’s just that the average Russian scientist with a reasonable grasp of English will still struggle to get the details of their translation right (far easier to run it past an English colleague).
Putin makes a statement about the breakdown of the USSR
Vladimir Putin said something in 2005 that has frequently been repeated, particularly by his critics. The frequency that mention of this particular ‘quote’ comes up suggests it’s widely regarded as hint into Putin’s deeper thinking, or intentions’.
What Putin apparently said, was:
“крушение Советского Союза было крупнейшей геополитической катастрофой века”
One way of translating this is:
“The breakdown of USSR is the greatest tragedy of the century.”
Note the two instances of “the”. Neither of these are actually directly in the Russian. They have to be inserted to make grammatically correct English, and at the same time, keeping the original meaning.
This translation implies that Putin apparently believes that neither the Second World War, nor the First, were the greatest tragedies of the 20th century — but the breakdown of a particular empire. Certainly to me, that sounds very ‘suspicious’.
Now, if you want to, and plenty of folks do, you can draw some implications from Putin’s quote. If the fall of the USSR is at the top of someone’s person tragedy list, the inference might be that “Putin wants to reestablish the USSR” — and see the current invasion of Ukraine in that context. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, I don’t know (although Putin himself said (Quoted in Cohen, 2019): “Anyone who does not regret the breakup of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants its rebirth in its previous form has no head”. I guess a lot hangs on “in its previous form”!).
As one example, Heidi Blake, in her book ‘From Russia with Blood’ wrote:
“the president had finally showed his true KGB colors when he branded the collapse of the USSR ‘the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the twentieth century’”,
and then, presumably in reference to this, as well as other quotes, wrote of “Putin’s bellicose rhetoric”. So there are consequences here. Getting the little words right can make the difference between a relatively benign statement and war-talk.
On the other hand, in his book, ‘War with Russia?’, Stephen Cohen wrote:
“He [Putin] is obsessively misquoted as having said, in 2005, ‘The collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century’ … What he actually said was ‘a major geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century’”.
So what’s going on here?
I dug back a little, and, thanks to the references in Cohen’s book, I found that there was been a lively exchange about this quote on the website ‘Johnson’s Russia List’ in 2014. I also didn’t locate the earlier files on this exchange, but these ones are sufficient. Likewise, the official files are apparently on the Kremlin website, but I couldn’t locate them.
Initially (I can’t find this file), Anders Åslund, Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, translated Putin’s words as:
“the collapse of the Soviet Union was the biggest geopolitical disaster of the century.”
This view was then challenged (I can’t find this file either) by Patrick Armstrong, who translated the words as:
“…the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century.”
Åslund retaliated, pointing out that in their official English translation of Putin’s words, the Kremin had used “a major”. However, in the original Russian, Putin used
“the superlative “крупнейший”, not “the positive form “крупный”, which the Kremlin would have used if it had meant “a major”.
And to put the boot in, Åslund continued:
“As any scholar of the Soviet Union and Putin’s Russia knows, such an official softening when translating Russian into English is just too common. That is why serious scholars of Russia make their own translations from the Russian original, though that requires sufficient understanding of the Russian language.”
Armstrong responded, citing a specific grammar: Pekhlivanova and Lebedeva’s (1994) “Russian Grammar in Illustrations”. According to this, the declension Putin used was where “an object possesses some quality in extraordinary degree, without comparing it to other objects”.
Armstrong then went on to add:
“There is the argument from common sense: no Russian would ever say that any “geopolitical disaster” was bigger than the Second World War. His tongue couldn’t even form the syllables.”
And further:
“One must assume that Putin chooses his words carefully and knows what they mean especially in a formal speech like his address to the Federal Assembly in 2005 from which the sentence is taken.”
Other people weighed in on the discussion. Steve Shabad (“a Russian-English translator for my entire adult life”) wrote:
“While this issue is a question of nuance, with all due respect to Mr. Aslund, it is Mr. Armstrong and his authoritative source who catch that nuance precisely… the nub of the translation problem is that there is no exact English equivalent for the suffix “-eishii.” [ i.e. the -йший ending in Cyrillic] And I must admit that when I translate an adjective containing it, I pause and translate according to context. Most often, it should be translated by applying ane (sic) adverb like “highly” in front of the English adjective. In the case of “krupneishii,” I would choose the word “major.” Sometimes it is possible to use the English form “one of the [superlative].”
Shabad agreed that context can be important to getting the nuance right — and supported Armstrong that in this case, the Second World War made it clear that Putin did not mean ‘the greatest’.
Serge Markov (Former editor in the Voice of America Russian Service) wrote:
“any educated native Russian speaker will tell you that krupneyshaya katastrofa can be rendered either as “a major” or as “the greatest catastrophe” depending on context. Methinks the context of Putin’s address favors “a major” which is also happens to be the official translation”
Were does this leave us?
Quotes pop up in academic life too — and one of the things I’ve learned — is that it can pay to dig up the original comment. Sometimes I either simply know the quote is incorrect, or feel suspicious enough to go and check it (I can be a suspicious bastard) — and find words rather different from what were placed within quote marks. I guess that sometimes these incorrect quotes are just the result of a lazy author regurgitating something he or she thought someone else said. Sometimes it makes no difference to the meaning, but sometimes it does. You take the trouble to include a quote is because you are discussing something where the exact words matter. That’s the point. But all the cases I’ve struck, are just plain English. You can tell without any doubt that a quote is either correct, or it’s not.
Translations into English from very different languages take the issue of ‘quotes’ to a completely different level. Another disclaimer — I know just enough Russian that if was parachuted into Siberia tonight, I wouldn’t be entirely freaked out. I could hold a very basic and broken dialogue with the locals. That’s it. I have no personal competence with the details of Russian, but simply reporting on stuff I’ve come across. But it seems like Russian is clearly one of those languages where a lot of skill can be required to accurately translate.
So there you have it. Putin either said “a major geopolitical disaster”, which seems to make sense, or he cunningly said “the biggest geopolitical disaster” to Russians (who would collectively have gone “wtf?”) and got the Kremlin to write “a major” in its English translation, just to introduce some ambiguity.
This is a difficult post to write, as burrowing down to see if Putin was misquoted, can give the reverse of the reasoning given earlier — that it may exonerate him on that point, and therefore it’s not evidence that he’s ‘trying to recreate the Soviet Union’. When, in fact, it seems pretty clear that trying to bring at least some of those ex Soviet states back in to the Kremlim’s fold, is exactly the long-term plan.
Over to you.
(And pass me a glass of something, please. This geopolitics stuff is too much)
References
Blake, H. 2019. ‘From Russia with Blood. Putin’s ruthless killing campaign and secret war on the West’. William Collins.
Christian, R.F. 1961. Some Consequences of the Lack of a Definite and Indefinite Article in Russian. The Slavic and East European Journal, 5: 1–11.
Cohen, S.F. 2019. ‘War with Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate’. Hot Books.