Richard Wortman has written a rare kind of book, something of a meditation upon his two-volume classic, Scenarios of Power; and upon the span of his career of exploring and studying, reading and writing Russian history. It is a book about words. Words and their meanings. Not just any words, but the ones that have threaded the major political tracts and manifestos, the ones that have captivated Russian thinkers and their media, from Peter the Great, to V.I. Lenin, to Vladimir Putin. This is a study of leaders as preachers. It is centered on the political cultures and didactic regimes of the emperors and empresses of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, though Wortman also finds some important bonds with Soviet culture and what has followed. Besieged by so many French, German and English borrowings, Russians found sanctuary in their own words. Their adaptations and our translations, Wortman argues, count.

The book begins with kulturnost΄ (culture), Peter the Great's aspirational standard of good conduct and thinking for his court and nobility, and one that often overlaps and interweaves with the other sets and subsets of terms here. They all relate to rhetoric, the effort to convince and manipulate through a vocabulary of power. The study moves on to a cluster of words that Empress Anna Ioannovna described as expressing chuvstvitel΄nost΄ (sensibility): radost΄ (joy), liubov΄ (love), umilenie (tenderness), and vostorg (rapture)—all signifying consent through community. Two substantial chapters cover lichnost΄ (personhood) as a measure of duty to tsar or state or people, through the self as either servitor or critic or eventually opponent. One case study surveys the super-charged and multivalent pravda (truth-justice), that most symbolic of words, perhaps the moral taproot of Russian culture. Wortman traces it masterfully from Feofan Prokopovich's The Justice of the Monarch's Will (1722) to Andrei Zviagintsev's film, Leviathan (2014). Through it all, he cites liberally from Peter and his successors, and their publicists; the populists and nihilists; the early Marxists; Lev Tolstoi and Fedor Dostoevskii and Vladmir Solov΄ev; and the thinkers of the Vekhi group. It is a fascinating pedigree, the high and the low joined by love or hate around the varied meanings of the same words. Tselost΄ (unity) refers to the supposed integrity of the Russian state, a mighty word confusing the imperial with the national, and one that still oppresses such national communities as the Ukrainians and Tatars today. For all these terms and their metaphors, Wortman reveals their charismatic and ritual power to evoke feelings (or pretend to) and to impose cultural and behavioral order, at least in official writing and public speech.

Wortman's sources range from an even wider array of polemicists and philosophers, from novelists and historians, with a rich and welcome selection of American, European, and Russian scholars as support. He studies various allegories of motherland and fatherland with special care. He makes references to the great dictionary by Vladimir Dal΄, though I wish he had done more with dictionaries, whose authors (like Aleksandr Shishkov and Dmitrii Ushakov) have been elevated as national heroes. Maybe this book is just that: an interpretive dictionary all its own, and one that scholars of Russian politics and culture will find indispensable. We need more like it. An image of a dying Peter the Great, in a painting by Ivan Nikitin, graces the front cover, and captures the theme of the study, as if Peter is obsessively replaying the empire of new words that he and his hagiographers have bequeathed to the Russian state and people. They seem to weigh heavily on him and on the history, this tyranny of commands, as beautiful as some of them are. The dying Lenin suffered in a similar way, we know from several testimonies, repeating over and over the incantations of the Marxist and Bolshevik lexicons.

We historians have been talking about a “linguistic turn” in scholarship for many years now: how to apply the insights and principles of modern linguistic science and literary criticism to our historical sources. Aside from the many easy references to the “languages” of class or gender, or all those fashionable references to “speaking Bolshevik,” few have really made this turn. Wortman has. He reminds us, in this fine intellectual and cultural history, that the actual words matter.