“People in Black”: Semantization of the Concepts of Sectarian and Baptist in the Antireligious Campaign of 1958–1964
摘要
In the postrevolutionary period, the population’s adoption of the new political vocabulary demanded from the Soviet authorities to play the role of the interpretant. They engaged in the process of assigning meanings to new concepts through the mass media and fiction. Simultaneously, established concepts had to undergo reshaping to align with the new worldview of the “Soviet man.” The transformation of the semantic structure of the ideologically marked religious vocabulary reflected the shift in the fundamental values of Soviet society. This article, employing component and contextual analyses, explores the target semantization of key concepts during Khrushchev’s 1958–1964 antireligious campaign, specifically focusing on the concepts of sectarian and Baptist. Mass media and propaganda literature imposed a set of semantic features for these terms 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 a number of works of children’s literature reveals that the target audience—schoolchildren—determined the emergence of semantic primitives due to the radical narrowing of the semantics of the words sectarian and Baptist. This involved linguistic tools such as new lexical pairs (sectarian–Baptist, fanatics and zealots, saboteurs and villains) and linguistic markers related to color, sound, appearance, age, and location, which helped develop a negative image of a Protestant believer and ultimately transformed the concepts of sectarian and Baptist into political labels.