LOST IN TRANSLATION: “PEACE” IN ENGLISH AND RUSSIAN ARE NOT THE SAME
Lenin’s Tomb, Red Square, Moscow
President Trump has stated many times his intention for brokering an end to Russia’s war upon Ukraine is “peace.”
When these statements are translated into Russian by Russian media, our English word “peace” is translated into the Russian word “mir.” The two words do not mean the same thing. In fact, they are diametrically opposed.
It is the same – as President Reagan famously pointed out – with our word “freedom” and the Russian word mistakenly translated as freedom, “Svoboda.”
Svoboda means license, not freedom in our sense. There is an emotional aura around the word “freedom” that is positive for most any American. Say the word to yourself, and note your emotional reaction: feels good, doesn’t it?
But for the average Russian, the word “svoboda” has a negative aura around it: it feels frightening, threatening. It means the freedom, or license, to be socially irresponsible, to be selfish and egotistical, to be indifferent to hurting others for your own gain, to commit the unpardonable sin of seeing yourself as an individual instead of as a member of the kollektiv.
Individual liberty is not valued or respected in Russia; adhering to the perceived will of the Collective is. Pride of individual accomplishment is socially unacceptable and is sublimated into a pride of Russian state power, a thrill at the world trembling before Russian military might and intimidation.
The Russians’ fear of freedom makes it difficult for them to grasp the concept of individual responsibility and of a society based on it, i.e., a democracy founded on the consent of the governed and inviolate individual rights.
It makes them hard to see an alternative between anarchy and tyranny, between lawless anarchic chaos where every one is out for himself and the ruthless rule of the Kha Khan, the Czar, or now Vladimir Putin.
Thus the basic dictum of social life in America is “Live and let live,” while in Russia it still is Lenin’s “Kto-Kogo?” or “Who-Whom?”, who conquers whom, who wins, who loses? Playing win-win is unintelligible for a Soviet-educated former KGB agent such as Putin. If somebody wins, somebody else has to lose, it’s always zero-sum.
There is a inescapable reason Lenin’s corpse remains enshrined in his Red Square tomb. His thinking still dominates in Russia today.
So it is that our word “peace” does not translate into “mir” – instead, mir means order.
For Americans, peace means the absence of violence. In Putin’s Russia, mir means the absence of disobedience. That’s very different. For us, peace means freedom: people being left alone without violence so they can conduct their lives and work towards their goals peacefully.
For Putin and most Russians, ‘peace’ means obedience: Putin and his elite giving the orders, and everybody else obeys. When the ‘masses’ are all good little boys and girls and obey their masters, you have order, and then you have ‘peace’: mir.
The dictum on mir of the Soviet Military Encyclopedia was drilled into Putin’s mind for 16 years as a Soviet KGB agent: “Peace [mir] is impossible without socialism… A truly lasting peace is impossible and cannot be achieved without a proletarian revolution.” (Moscow: USSR Ministry of Defense, 1976‑1980, vol. 5, 1978, p. 316.)
President Trump and President Zelensky both want real peace, genuine absence of violence. For Russian President Putin, this is for him literally unintelligible, like wanting to have a square circle. Real mir can only come with the absence of Ukrainian disobedience, Ukrainian submission to Russian conquest.
Kto-kogo? Who conquers whom? That is the only question for him. Realization of this is a necessary condition for any fruitful negotiation with him.