‘People in Black’: Semantization of the concepts ‘sectant’ and ‘baptist’ in the anti-religious campaign of 1958—1964

Abstract

In the post-revolutionary era, the population's adoption of a new political vocabulary demanded the Soviet authorities to play the role of the interpretant. They engaged in the pro­cess of assigning meanings to new concepts through mass media and fiction. Simultaneously, established concepts had to undergo reshaping to align with the new worldview of the 'Soviet citizen’. The transformation of the semantic structure of religious vocabulary, ideologically marked, reflected the shift in the fundamental values of Soviet society. This article, employing component and contextual analyses, explores the target semantization process of key concepts during Khrushchev's 1958—1964 anti-religious campaign, specifically focusing on 'sektant' and 'baptist'. Through mass media and propaganda literature, a set of semantic features for these terms was imposed on the children's audience in ideological contexts. The analysis of linguistic material from numerous sources such as the newspaper Pionerskaya Pravda, Pioner and Koster children's magazines, and selected works of children's literature reveals that the target audience — school children — led to the emergence of semantic primitives. This in­vol­ved significantly narrowing the semantics of the words 'sektant' and 'baptist.' Linguistic tools such as new lexical pairs ('sectarian-Baptist,' 'fanatics and bigots,' 'subversives and villains') and linguistic markers related to colour, sound, appearance, age, and location were employed. These tools helped develop a negative image of a Protestant believer and ultimately transformed the concepts of ‘sectant’ and ‘baptist’ into political labels.

Keywords

• target semantization
• sectarians
• baptists
• khrushchev's anti-religious cam­paign
• ideological primitive