Introduction: Ideology and Carnival

In late December 2024, a Russian social media channel broadcast a new clip. A peaceful Christmas scene in Moscow is interrupted by the arrival of Santa’s sleigh in the sky, full of NATO missiles described as “presents” for Russia. The sleigh is destroyed by a Russian missile, and the Russian Santa, Ded Moroz (Grandfather Frost), tells viewers: “we don’t need anything foreign in our sky” (Mediazona 2024). At first glance, this was just another piece of crude ideological propaganda that reflected Russia’s current geopolitical messaging, but its juxtaposition of attempted humor, extreme violence, and farce was striking. The absurdity of the clip was further emphasised by calls from one activist for the authorities to declare Santa Claus a “foreign agent” (Life.ru 2024).

This article argues that such grotesque and absurd imagery and speech have become a recurring feature of Russian propaganda during the war against Ukraine. I explore why this kind of discourse became so prevalent in Russian media after 2022 and how it has been used to convey ideological messages. To understand the appeal and function of these surreal combinations of violence, absurdity, and dark humor, I draw on the concept of carnival, as developed by Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. In Bakhtin’s carnival, grotesque visuals, ritual spectacles, chaotic violence, and comedic rhetoric intertwine in ways that make ideological messages more palatable and harder to challenge. In today’s Russia, these carnivalesque forms have become potent vehicles for disseminating ideological content.

While Russia still lacks a formal state ideology, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 triggered an expansive ideological campaign. This included patriotic classes in schools and universities, state-sponsored media content, theatre and cinema productions, and youth programs promoting conservative, nationalist values (AllysonEdwards and Mathers Reference Edwards and Mathers2025; Goode Reference Goode2026; Laruelle Reference Laruelle2024; Lavrenteva Reference Lavrenteva2025; Mirovalov Reference Mirovalov2023). These initiatives have helped institutionalise a previously loose ideological framework that already played an important role in shaping state policy, particularly after 2012 (Lewis Reference Lewis2020; Laruelle Reference Laruelle2024; Suslov Reference Suslov2024).

However, the campaign’s impact on the population has been inconsistent. Despite polling data suggesting widespread support for “national-conservative” values, there is also evidence of latent opposition, apathy, or disengagement from official ideological messaging (Schulman Reference Schulman2022). The result is a fragmented ideological landscape in which state-promoted narratives often fail to resonate. Propaganda films have performed poorly at the box office, and the public response to new ideological curricula has been lukewarm (Mirovalov Reference Mirovalov2023). Military mobilisation appears to have relied more on material incentives than on ideological motivation.

This experience suggests that in Russia — as in other contemporary societies — mass ideological mobilization through conventional means is difficult, given the continued hold of wider social values of personal advancement, consumerism, and individualist achievement. Instead, propagandists of extremist ideologies and illiberal ideas in many countries have turned to more complex discursive assemblages, incorporating satire, humor, and laughter, in what Patrick Giamario (Reference Giamario2022) calls “The Age of Hilarity.” For Giamario, global politics has become an arena of “gelopolitics,” the politics of laughter, which has proved highly effective for many populists, including US followers of Donald Trump (Giamario Reference Giamario2022, 7). In the USA, Trump’s humor provided “the thrill of violating the rules of ‘political correctness’ without any of the social costs associated with doing so in a non-comedic register” (Giamario Reference Giamario2022, 162). Humor has often proved an important mechanism for the promotion of extremist ideologies because it provides deniability for activists and is a way to attract support from those who are not fully committed to the cause. It provides an indirect mechanism to inculcate an ideology, since understanding the joke requires the acceptance of a particular interpretation of reality and a particular ordering of contested concepts — in other words, an ideological framework (Sinokki Reference Sinokki2025).

A similar strategy now characterises Russian propaganda. I interpret this mechanism of ideological dissemination through Mikhail Bakhtin's interpretation of carnival, a conceptual framework that recognises the importance of humor but also includes a wider set of related discourses and practices. For Bakhtin, medieval carnival represented an alternative way of life in which laughter, mockery, grotesque imagery, and rituals of decrowning challenged and subverted the existing order. Russia’s wartime propaganda has echoed these dynamics, with the Russian authorities articulating a revolutionary challenge to global hierarchies, deploying dark humor and grotesque violence, celebrating transgression, and granting impunity to violators. Propagandists and officials routinely employ mockery and perverse humor, framing the invasion as an “inversion” of the world order and a symbolic “decrowning” of Western hegemony.

Interpreting the war through the lens of carnivalesque spectacle illuminates the interplay between state, ideology, and society. The carnival can mobilise participation by presenting war as exciting, materially rewarding, and a liberation from humdrum lives and everyday drudgery. The public can tune in and tune out, watch the crazy spectacle for a while, and then step back into the passive crowd. Carnivalesque humor distances both participants and spectators from the moral consequences of decisions. The carnival provides an array of masks behind which violators can hide and a set of ritualistic performances that displace moral blame away from those who enact the violence. What happens at carnival, stays at carnival. Yet the narratives of carnival are pernicious, dehumanizing internal and external enemies through mockery and symbolic violence, and reducing discourse to a genre of increasingly vicious call and response.

The article proceeds as follows. First, I discuss the concept of carnival in Bakhtin’s thought and discuss a critique that portrays Bakhtinian carnival as an oppressive dystopia, rather than a space of freedom and hope. Second, I analyse Russian wartime discourse as carnivalesque in three dimensions: revisionist international politics; language; and transgressive practice. The analysis draws on a range of texts and performances, including speeches by Vladimir Putin and other officials, the content of political talk shows on Russian television, and social media posts, including those of voenkory (military bloggers) and paramilitary groups, such as Wagner. I use textual excerpts from these sources to demonstrate how this discursive strategy reproduces ideological interpretations of the world. In a final section, I discuss agency in the wartime carnival, focusing on Russian cheerleaders for the war, its active participants, and the ambivalence of the watching crowd. I conclude with a discussion of the wider, global implications of this interpretation of war as a carnivalesque spectacle.

Bakhtinian Carnival as Authoritarian Politics

The idea that theatre, performance, and spectacle play an important role in political life has a long history (Rai et al. Reference Rai, Gluhovic, Jestrovic and Saward2021). The link between performance and politics has been especially strong in the post-Soviet world, influenced by Soviet and Eastern European traditions of dramaturgy. Russia’s class of “political technologists” often viewed themselves as choreographing performance in a “managed” democracy (Wilson Reference Wilson2005). One way to understand this type of theatrical performance is to consider it through the genre of carnival, the medieval festival that suspended normal rules and hierarchies for several days of festivities before the long fast of Lent.

The most developed theorisation of the phenomenon of carnival is that of the Russian literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin, whose study of medieval carnival in the work of François Rabelais (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin1965, Reference Bakhtin and Iswolsky1984a) has been widely used as a theoretical framework to understand forms of rebellion against official hierarchies and repressive orders (Mnatsakanyan Reference Mnatsakanyan and Edkins2019). Bakhtin views carnival as a holistic phenomenon, a temporary way of life, or “the people’s second life, organized on the basis of laughter” (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin and Iswolsky1984a, 8). This echoes Rabelais’ portrayal of “a second world and a second life beyond everything official, in which all medieval people were participants to a greater or lesser degree, in which they lived for specific periods of time” (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin and Emerson1984b, 6). During carnival time, society was liberated from everyday rules and norms, and ordinary people could freely express themselves and connect with each other, not primarily through speech but through pageantry, rituals, collective laughter, and a celebration of the body.

Carnival, in Bakhtin’s optimistic reading, is a state of freedom, which suspends “impenetrable hierarchical barriers” and instead introduces “free and familiar contact among people” (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin and Emerson1984b, 123). Carnival is “life turned inside out,” in which “the laws, prohibitions, and restrictions that determine the structure and order of ordinary … life are suspended” (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin and Emerson1984b, 122). It is the site of inappropriate mésalliances, which “brings together, unifies, weds, and combines the sacred with the profane, the lofty with the low, the great with the insignificant, the wise with the stupid” (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin and Emerson1984b, 123). It is characterised by “profanation,” “carnivalistic blasphemies and bringing down to earth, carnivalistic obscenities linked with the reproductive power of the earth and the body, carnivalistic parodies on sacred texts and sayings, etc” (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin and Emerson1984b, 123).

Western scholars often interpreted Bakhtin’s portrayal of carnival as a hardly disguised attack on 20th-century Stalinism, under which Bakhtin had been arrested and exiled (Holquist Reference Holquist, Bakhtin and Iswolsky1984, xv). In this reading, the carnival is a place and time of liberation from authoritarian hierarchies, offering an alternative utopian vision of equality and harmony. The carnival’s “culture of laughter” ( smekhovaya kultura ), resisted the “ ofitsioz ,” the world of official language and official culture disseminated and approved from above. Bakhtin created a simple binary between these two cultures that posited “laughter” against official seriousness and “the people” against an authoritative elite. He claimed that “fear never lurks behind laughter … and that hypocrisy and lies never laugh but wear a serious mask” (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin and Iswolsky1984a, 95).

In Bakhtin’s utopian view, “laughter could never become an instrument to oppress and blind the people” (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin and Iswolsky1984a, 94). Medieval seriousness, however, “was infused with elements of fear, weakness, humility, submission, falsehood, hypocrisy, or on the other hand violence, intimidation, threats, prohibitions” (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin and Iswolsky1984a, 94). Laughter offers an antidote: it liberates humanity from “fear of the sacred, of prohibitions, of the past, of power” (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin and Iswolsky1984a, 94). Tatevik Mnatsakanyan argues that Bakhtin’s interpretation of carnival, written at the height of Stalinism, implies that “spaces for resistance were present and ever-threatening even in the most dogmatic of systems” (Mnatsakanyan Reference Mnatsakanyan and Edkins2019, 291).

Yet this utopian view of carnival as a mode of emancipation and resistance has always provoked unease among a group of Russian critics, who question Bakhtin’s utopian view of carnival as freedom, and instead portray the Bakhtinian carnival as a dangerous, violent, and repressive form of social order. Historically, medieval carnival was very different from Bakhtin’s utopian fantasy. Carnivals were sites of violence, looting, and riot. Under Pope Sixtus V, the criminality was so severe at the Roman carnival that the authorities introduced a gallows and rack on the Piazza Navona (Mann Reference Mann1997, 7). Carnival worked as a mechanism that sanctioned violence by mobs against minorities and marginalised communities and individuals. For many, it could be “more repressive than liberating” (Emerson Reference Emerson2018, 165). Yet Bakhtin largely overlooks this potential for violence, leading Bakhtin scholar Caryl Emerson to comment that “Bakhtin’s reluctance to highlight the crucial role of violence during carnival baffled many of his readers” (Emerson Reference Emerson2018, 165).

In contrast to the Western interpretation, many Russian critics portrayed Bakhtin’s concept of carnival as “destructive both of humanism and … Russia’s nascent liberalism” (Emerson Reference Emerson2018, 169). This critique often highlighted the complex historical role played by humor in Russian history. Sergei Averintsev rejected Bakhtin’s argument that “violence never hides behind laughter” and argued that in Russian culture, laughter traditionally belonged to the realm of the devil and remained “an unregulated and dangerous primordial element” (cited in Emerson Reference Emerson2018, 182–83). Far from the carnival challenging Stalinism, Averintsev rather asserts that, “the Stalinist regime simply could not have functioned without its own sort of ‘carnival’.” He notes the wider importance for totalitarian regimes of the materiality of the “grotesque” and imperfect body (Emerson Reference Emerson2018, 182). In the context of a different authoritarian system of the period, Benjamin Uchiyama also highlights the affinities with Bakhtinian carnival in the propaganda of wartime Japan (Uchiyama Reference Uchiyama2022). In their detailed historical study, Evgeny Dobrenko and Natalia Jonsson-Skradol argue that Stalinism was characterised by what they term “state laughter” ( gossmekh ), a comic form that is “not funny,” but which shows that “laughter can be a most efficient instrument of intimidation, a way to anchor the hierarchy, a powerful tool of totalitarian normalization and control” (Dobrenko and Jonsson-Skradol Reference Dobrenko and Jonsson-Skradol2022, 3). Dobrenko draws a direct line between Stalinist feuilleton writers such as David Zaslavsky and the contemporary style of Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova, who often uses offensive forms of “humor” to target Russia’s opponents (Saprykin Reference Saprykin2022). As Dobrenko comments, this work “falls into the category of humor but is not at all funny” (Saprykin Reference Saprykin2022).

The most trenchant critique of Bakhtin’s carnival comes from art critic Boris Groys (Groys 2022). As summed up by Alexander Zholkovsky, Groys concludes that “Bakhtin is not a sly, Aesopian, crypto-opponent of Stalin’s totalitarianism, the way he is portrayed by post-modernists, but a sophisticated […] apostle of the repressive carnival that does not leave any space for freedom” (Zholkovsky Reference Zholkovsky2017, 18). Some hints of this repressive side of carnival are already evident in Bakhtin’s own writings. Maureen Perrie builds on the work of Russian scholars to argue that Bakhtin identified the carnivalesque in the brutal reign of Ivan the Terrible (Perrie Reference Perrie2020). Here, the carnivalesque is the revolutionary mode through which Ivan IV “struggled against Russian feudal sanctimonious traditions and the methods of distribution of estates to the boyars” (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin and Iswolsky1984a, 270). As Ivan “broke up the old political and social structure and moral code,” he “could not escape the influence of popular forms of mockery and derision: travesties and masquerades that turned the hierarchy ‘inside out’, uncrownings and debasements.” For Bakhtin, even the oprichnina, Ivan’s brutal secret police, had “some carnival elements” (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin and Iswolsky1984a, 270). Bakhtin goes on to argue that:

This “spirit, hostile to stabilization” is integral to Bakhtin’s thought about carnival and reflects a more ambivalent view of the Bolshevik revolution and the Soviet regime than the simple anti-authoritarian interpretation of carnival would suggest. Bakhtin’s reading of Rabelais was always shaped by “the experience of revolution [and] the swirling up of meaning that it brought forth” (Lachmann, Eshelman, and David Reference Lachmann, Eshelman and Davis1988, 117).

Parallels between the oprichniki and present-day violence under Putin’s regime have become commonplace, with nationalist voices casting the oprichnina as “a symbolic force designed to struggle for ‘patriotic’ values against liberals and democrats” (Aptekman Reference Aptekman2009, 242). Figures such as Metropolitan Ioann (Ivan Snychev) and former Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky have attempted to rehabilitate the reputation of Ivan Grozny as a Tsar forced to take strong measures to maintain order and build an empire, rather than the “Russophobic” version of Ivan as a cruel dictator (Halperin Reference Halperin2017; Khapaeva Reference Khapaeva2021). Dina Khapaeva writes that some nationalists even viewed the oprichniki as “the embodiment of Russian democracy” (Khapaeva Reference Khapaeva2021). Vladimir Sorokin’s eerily prescient 2006 novel, Den oprichnika (Day of the Oprichnik), describes Russia in the year 2028 as an ultra-nationalist country, ruled by modern-day oprichniki, closed off from the West by a wall. Marina Aptekman notes that Sorokin’s dystopia is heavily influenced by Bakhtin’s carnival, with its ritualised violence, its sense of the grotesque, and its melange of languages suggesting the transition from one historic age to another (Aptekman Reference Aptekman2009, 242).

In the book, Sorokin has his characters use the archaic Russian word “ goida ,” alleged to be the battle cry of the original oprichniki. Actor Ivan Okhlobystin revived the word in a passionate, carnivalesque speech at a concert held on Red Square in Moscow on 30 September 2022 to mark the illegal annexation of four Ukrainian regions:

Thus, death and violence are justified — in echoes of Bakhtin — because they destroy the old and give birth to a new order and a new age.

Carnival as Revisionism

Bakhtin’s carnival mobilises practices of disorder, embraces the overthrow of existing hierarchies, and imagines the contours of a new world. For Bakhtin, popular festive images and celebrations were “the expression of the general joyous funeral of a dying era, of the old power and old truth” (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin and Iswolsky1984a, 95). In his reading of Rabelais, Bakhtin observes how the author deploys the imagery of popular festivity “to inflict a severe punishment upon his foe, the Gothic age” (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin and Iswolsky1984a, 268). Carnivalistic laughter, in Bakhtin’s view, was subversive of existing orders; it was always “directed towards something higher — towards a shift of authorities and truths, a shift of world orders” (Bakhtin, Reference Bakhtin and Emerson1984b, 127). Laughter, for Bakhtin, created alternative worlds: it “builds its own world versus the official world, its own church versus the official church, its own state versus the official state” (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin and Iswolsky1984a, 88). In reality, this notion of medieval carnival as both challenging and disrupting existing political orders is historically problematic. Carnival was more often a “permissible rupture of hegemony,” a temporary and sanctioned release that ultimately reinforced dominant structures rather than dismantling them (Eagleton Reference Eagleton1981, 148). Despite this, the notion that carnival possesses inherent revolutionary potential remains a foundational pillar of Bakhtin’s theoretical framework.

In this context, the carnivalesque may be expected to emerge during periods of profound transformation in the international order. It offers a discursive and performative mode through which political actors can promote radical, systemic change, while maintaining a degree of critical ambivalence and strategic uncertainty. This ambivalence allows actors to contest dominant norms and institutions, while refraining from a complete commitment to radical alternatives.

The revisionist dimensions of the carnivalesque may manifest through overt acts of transgression, including extreme violence, or through transgressive speech that challenges established conventions. Characteristic tropes of the carnivalesque often invoke the grotesque as a mode of symbolic resistance, accompanied by discursive and visual strategies of “decrowning” and mocking powerful figures and hierarchical institutions. In the carnival world, everything that claims to be permanent and finished is turned upside-down, back-to-front:

Bakhtin presents this sense of turning the world “inside-out” as a joyful moment full of emancipatory promise. Yet it is not difficult to identify the very opposite in historical cases in which a form of carnivalesque reversal manifests itself in brutal repression. Jean-Paul Himka, for example, identifies carnivalesque elements in the brutal Lviv pogrom of 1941, when mobs “relished role reversal, upturning the social hierarchy” as they forced Jewish professionals to clean the streets on their hands and knees, in the most demeaning ways (Himka Reference Himka2011, 243).

In contemporary politics, populist movements across Europe have deployed carnivalesque techniques as a mode of revisionist resistance to the dominant liberal paradigm (Klumbytė Reference Klumbytė2014, Reference Klumbytė2022; Janack Reference Janack2005; MacMillan Reference MacMillan2017, Reference MacMillan2020). Analysts have also invoked the carnivalesque to explain Donald Trump’s rise in US politics, highlighting his theatrical style, reliance on dark humor, focus on the physicality of the body, and use of discursive violence against opponents (Gaufman Reference Gaufman2018; Gaufman and Ganesh Reference Gaufman and Bharath2024; Mohammed and Trumpbour Reference Mohammed and Trumpbour2021). A similar logic has been identified in Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s political style. Suchi Chowdhury (Reference Chowdhury2024, 18) describes his rhetoric as built around “punch-down laughter,” a carnivalesque mode that is “anti-progressive, anti-democratic, and discriminatory,” reinforcing rather than destabilising existing hierarchies. What unites these politicians and their modes of expression is the use of carnivalesque genres to rebel against the orthodoxy of contemporary liberalism and accepted norms of political behavior. The effectiveness of the carnivalesque can be seen in the way it enables a distancing effect: the use of humor often permits politicians to undermine existing norms and institutions in ways that do not provoke a backlash, because the carnival mode creates doubt as to whether certain political statements should be taken seriously.

Carnival’s revisionist logic also extends to the sphere of international politics, where it is used to challenge the liberal international order and liberal institutions. Catherine MacMillan identifies a carnivalesque mode in Turkey’s dialogue with the European Union, in which the EU’s “monologic” stance elicits rhetorical responses from Turkish leaders that invert the established hierarchy of subject and object. Instead of the historic metaphor of Turkey as the “sick man of Europe,” these statements frame Europe as a decaying, dying continent in need of Turkey’s future-oriented dynamism. MacMillan characterises the carnivalesque as “a metaphorical mode in understanding the instances of transgression and unrest in international politics more broadly” (MacMillan Reference MacMillan2016, 121). In this framing, Turkey’s discursive strategy marks an early instance of carnivalesque discourses being deployed as part of a revisionist challenge to liberal hegemony, a tactic that would later become central to the discursive strategies adopted by other non-Western states, including Russia.

Russia’s revisionism became increasingly evident after February 2022, although it had been a feature of official discourse for more than a decade. Russian officials portrayed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as part of a wider struggle against a US-led world order, in which US domination of world affairs was interpreted as a threat to Russia’s very existence as a nation. In his speech on 24 February 2022, announcing the invasion of Ukraine, Putin accused the West of “an insolent manner of talking down from the height of their exceptionalism, infallibility and all-permissiveness.” He portrayed Russia as opposing the “so-called Western bloc formed by the United States,” which he dubbed an “empire of lies” (Putin Reference Putin2022a). Putin claimed that the war was a struggle against the old, declining West, which was marked by “insatiability and determination to preserve their unfettered dominance" and that “the world has entered a period of a fundamental, revolutionary transformation,” in which “new centres of power are emerging” (Putin Reference Putin2022b). Russia’s revisionism explicitly aimed to overthrow what Sergei Naryshkin called “the hegemony of the West’s liberal-totalitarian regimes” (TASS 2022). The carnivalesque offers a powerful arsenal of rhetorical weapons to enable Russia to recast the war as central to this global campaign to transform the international order.

Long before the current war, Russian media used black humor and satire to challenge the status quo and to draw attention to what Russia perceived as “structural injustices” in the international system (Crilley and Chatterje-Doody Reference Crilley and Chatterje-Doody2021, 284). Russian revisionist narratives have also been expressed through a discourse of satire, ambiguity, and prevarication that Xymena Kurowska and Anatoly Reshetnikov suggest is reminiscent of the “trickster,” the chameleon-like character of traditional folklore (Kurowska and Reshetnikov Reference Kurowska and Reshetnikov2021). During the war, this upheaval in world affairs, the dethroning of the West, was often articulated in more overt ways through mockery and language that celebrated the “decrowning” of political leaders, reminiscent of Bakhtin’s understanding of carnivalesque rituals that inverted hierarchy (the ritualistic dressing up of servants as priests or kings, for example).

Russian officials and commentators used derogatory and profane remarks about Ukrainian and Western leaders, often portraying them as animals, drug-takers, or Nazis. When Zelensky went to the US to meet President Trump in February 2025, Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of broadcaster RT, said he behaved like a “notorious pig” in his meeting, acting “as if in a pigsty” (Khrushchev Reference Khrushchev2025). When President Zelensky visited London, former president Dmitry Medvedev wrote on Telegram that the “Green intestinal worm crawled to its owners in England for more money” (23 June 2025, https://t.me/medvedev_telegram/593). Zelensky is portrayed as “the main Ukrainian clown” (9 August 2022, https://t.me/medvedev_telegram/158). Medvedev later writes: “Polite psychiatrists should give this idiot a preventative craniotomy” (6 October 2022, https://t.me/medvedev_telegram/189). There are frequent references to Nazis, often in an abusive comic-book language. In a typical post, Medvedev calls Zelensky the “Supreme Kyiv Nazi,” and Ukraine the “Schweinisch Bandera-Reich” (11 March 2023, https://t.me/medvedev_telegram/279).

Leaders of Western states are frequent targets for this “decrowning” in Medvedev’s posts. The West is led by “the elderly leaders of the Washington obkom and upstarts from NATO,” who “should at least occasionally turn on their softened brains.” Medvedev expresses hatred towards Western leaders – they are “bastards and inbreds” (7 June 2022, https://t.me/medvedev_telegram/105). European leaders are “Euro-imbeciles” (10 August 2025, https://t.me/medvedev_telegram/601) and President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen is “the disgusting old woman Ursula” (18 July 2025, https://t.me/medvedev_telegram/598). Medvedev uses a reference to a famous parable by Ivan Krylov to describe then German Chancellor Olaf Schultz as a yapping dog, barking helplessly at the Trump administration, and hoping to “bark on behalf of the entire pan-European kennel” (Leonov Reference Leonov2025; https://vk.com/wall53083705_55013).

This discourse is reproduced on television talk shows where guests vie to mock Western leaders, often in a ritualised call-and-response mode. In a mocking German accent, show host Vladimir Solovyov compared then German Chancellor Olaf Schultz to Adolf Hitler, saying “Herr Scholz visits his Banderite scum and begins to show them German panzers [tanks]” (Scarr Reference Scarr2022). Solovyov described Scholz as a “Nazi bastard who got away” and claimed that Scholz was trying to be like “his idol,” Adolf Hitler (Scarr Reference Scarr2022). A guest on his show says Scholz is “the second Adolf Hitler,” and describes then Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock as “Ribbentrop in a skirt” (Scarr Reference Scarr2023). This disturbing rhetoric is often accompanied by fake images. When President Zelensky visited Washington in December 2022, Solovyov reportedly showed a photoshopped picture in which Zelensky was shining Biden’s shoes, with the caption “the vassal has arrived.” On another show, a photoshopped picture showed Biden with his hand on Zelensky’s behind, a combination of the mockery of leaders and a focus on the body that is characteristic of the carnivalesque mode (Davis Reference Davis2022c).

These carnivalesque tropes do important ideological work in Russian narratives, delegitimising Western and Ukrainian leaders and, by implication, their criticisms of Russian actions. The denigration of Ukrainian and German leaders as “Nazis” dehumanises Russia’s opponents and also provides a further layer of legitimation for official narratives that compare the Russian war in Ukraine to the war against Nazi Germany. It also allows the authorities to make the far-fetched claim that the Ukrainian government is itself a “neo-Nazi regime,” which in turn is used to justify the Russian government’s war aims that include the “denazification” of Ukraine (Putin Reference Putin2024).

The Language of Carnival

Bakhtin emphasises that carnival “is not a literary phenomenon” but rather a “syncretic pageantry of a ritualistic sort,” with its own language, gestures, behaviors, and symbols (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin and Emerson1984b, 122. It goes beyond the textual to include “ritual spectacles,” such as “carnival pageants, comic shows of the marketplace” (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin and Iswolsky1984a, 5). Yet within this wider semiotic field, speech and language play a central role, including “comic verbal compositions” and “various genres of billingsgate: curses, oaths, popular blazons” (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin and Iswolsky1984a, 5). Carnival deconstructs authoritative language, the language of church and state, through exaggeration, hyperbole, parody, and nonsense. It deploys a transgressive register that often turns to profanity and abuse to shock and degrade; it involves a goading of the crowd, a call-and-response mode deploying repeated tropes and memes that are often extreme in nature and serve to mobilize emotion and intensify affect. In this sense, carnival speech works as a highly effective marker of common identity and social bonding, serving to distinguish between them and us, friend and enemy, the crowd and the excluded marginals of society.

Bakhtin presents the language of carnival as one half of a binary, drawing a contrast between the official language of church or state and the “public-square word,” the language of the marketplace and the crowd. This is “the cry of the barker, the quack, the hawker of miracle drugs, and the bookseller,” which combines “curses” with “ambiguous praise” (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin and Iswolsky1984a, 167). This portrayal of language is very different from Bakhtin’s work on heteroglossia, polyphony, and the dialogic. By contrast with the idea of dialogic communication, the carnival “is a place of monosyllabic obscenities and hawkers’ cries, more suited to a Dionysian book burning than a sedate book reading” (Emerson Reference Emerson2018, 167). Here, “the carnival word does not really communicate”; it is separated from “any grounding in the ethical speaking person,” and is instead associated with cunning, trickery, and even cheating (Emerson Reference Emerson2018, 167).

This carnivalesque marketplace was exactly the effect aimed for on Russian television talk shows. One former employee on Russian television talked about how management demanded "shoutiness" [oruchest'] as a key indicator of success for political talk shows:

This vocal bazaar, with everybody shouting at each other, was effective at provoking emotional reaction and engagement. But in this verbal sparring, state propagandists repeatedly deployed particular phrases and narrative constructs, including the small linguistic units that convey ideological positioning — what Bakhtin calls the ideologeme. For Bakhtin, “every speaker is an ideologue and every utterance is an ideologeme” (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin and Holquist1981, 429). These ideologemes — words, tropes, and phrases, referencing everything from gender to Nazism — were deployed in ways that conveyed a much broader ideological content.

An important role of this carnivalesque language is to define enemies. Authoritarian regimes frequently resort to the use of “humorous” word concoctions to denigrate the enemy and vilify opponents. Grotesque humor acts as a mechanism to dehumanise the other, but also strengthens the boundaries of the in-group and excludes those who refuse to accept the premise of the “joke” or join in the mocking laughter. In the Russian post-colonial context, humor strengthens the division between the “laughing in-group” and Russia's neighbours, in ways that “endorse among the Russians the ruling logics of domination” (Minchenia et al. Reference Minchenia, Törnquist-Plewa, Yurchuk, Bernsand and Törnquist-Plewa2018, 226–27).

The language in which these divisions were delineated often used neologisms or strange and absurd juxtapositions of words. Bakhtin emphasises the ideological and revolutionary significance of carnival language: “All these word-linkages, even those that seem the most absurd in terms of the objects they name, are aimed primarily at destroying the established hierarchy of values, at bringing down the high and raising up the low.” Carnival language involves “the destruction of all ordinary ties, of all the habitual matrices [ sosedstva] of things and ideas” (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin and Holquist1981, 169). This notion — that it is “necessary to destroy and rebuild the entire false picture of the world” (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin and Holquist1981, 169) — makes clear the revolutionary implications of carnival language. It deploys ideologemes that are often rendered in distorted or transgressive forms, what Bakhtin describes as “monstrous and unexpected word-matrices” (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin and Holquist1981, 177).

The most obvious use of such linguistic forms was to attack Ukrainians. A succession of neologisms was used to describe Ukrainians as “ Ukronatsisty ” [Ukronazis], “ natsiki ” [“Nazis”], or the more familiar “ Banderovtsy ,” in addition to traditional derogatory terms such as khokhly . This denigration of Ukrainians was commonplace in Russian social media even before the war. Elizabeth Gaufman cites the "Anti-Maidan" social media channel as portraying Ukrainians variously as pigs, prostitutes, or effeminate homosexuals, and labelling Maidan supporters as “Maidauny,” a conflation of "Maidan" and a perjorative term derived from the Russian for Down’s Syndrome (Gaufman Reference Gaufman2023, 525–26).

Officially the goals of the war were defined as the “denazification” and “demilitarization” of Ukraine, terms that were already unclear in meaning and intent, but nationalist commentators played with these words to talk of “debanderovization,” “de-Europeanization,” and — finally and almost inevitably — “de-Ukrainianization,” developing neologisms to disguise an ideology that at times appeared close to genocidal (Sergeitsev Reference Sergeitsev2022). Ian Garner’s exploration of three Russian Telegram sites demonstrates how grotesque “humor” in language and imagery transmits ideologies of violence and genocide. Typical posts in the aftermath of Russian atrocities in Bucha included “grotesque images of pigs and rats in Ukrainian national dress,” images of Ukrainians with guns pointed at their heads, and calls to “destroy the satanists, no mercy.” The dehumanisation was literal in the term "neliudi" [non-people], which was often applied to Ukrainians by Russian ultra-nationalists in social media (Garner Reference Garner2023, 422).

In historical carnival, the enemy was often the focus of “displaced abjection,” the process whereby oppressed groups focus their anger not on the powerful actors responsible for their oppression, but on groups lower in the hierarchy — marginals, aliens, outsiders (Gaufman Reference Gaufman2018, 414; Gaufman and Ganesh Reference Gaufman and Bharath2024; Stallybras and White Reference Stallybras and White1986). Sexual minorities became a frequent target in Russian discourse, portrayed both as an internal enemy and as one associated with the West and therefore with profound geopolitical implications (Moss Reference Moss, Kuhar and Paternotte2017). Their portrayal was often embedded within a discourse saturated with grotesque and derisive humor, particularly centred on the body and sexuality.

This rhetorical strategy serves a dual function: it denigrates opponents while simultaneously affirming a state-sanctioned ideology that promotes “traditional values,” which are presented as a primary ideological motivation for the war. President Putin has repeatedly returned to the theme of gender politics in speeches, often employing language that blends mockery with populist appeal. For example, in one speech, Putin declared:

Similarly, Putin linked gender politics to the war during a meeting with the mothers of soldiers in November 2022, using his familiar “jokes” about gender:

Other Russian officials have taken up the theme. In January 2024 St Petersburg governor Alexander Beglov, on a visit to the front to meet soldiers, wrote that:

These dark jibes at the expense of sexual minorities work as ideologemes that promote a much broader ideological framework of illiberalism, both in domestic and international politics. “Jokes” about gender and transgender people serve as a bridge between different political communities, attempting to link broadly socially conservative views in the Russian population with the goals of the war, but also providing a bridge to right-wing populist movements in the West, who often use a similar carnivalesque rhetoric about the embodied politics of LGBT rights. Carnival laughter at the expense of marginal and minority groups aims to challenge liberal orthodoxy but ultimately becomes a tool of ideological closure and reaction.

Among the many strange linguistic forms that marked Russia’s wartime language were numerous esoteric religious and spiritual references. A convention of the World Russian People’s Council (WRPC) in March 2024 issued a resolution calling the war against Ukraine “a Holy War, in which Russia and its people carry out the mission of the ‘Restrainer’ [ Katechon ], defending the world from the attacks of globalism and [preventing] the victory of the West, which has fallen into Satanism” (WRPC 2024). Secular officials and commentators frequently began to refer to “Satanism” in the West and in Ukraine. In November 2022, Dmitry Medvedev wrote that Russia’s war aimed “to halt the supreme potentate of hell, whatever name he uses — Satan, Lucifer or Iblis” (BBC News Russian Service 2022). Putin also launched similar attacks on beliefs that he termed “pure Satanism” (Putin Reference Putin2022b). Other politicians also railed against the diabolical: parliamentary deputies claimed to observe an increase in “infernal phenomena" and called for a struggle against Satanism (Jego Reference Jégo2024). This language often appears absurd and hyperbolic, but it nevertheless opens up a discursive space in which threats to Russia may be perceived as existential or apocalyptic and extreme responses — such as the use of nuclear weapons — may become accepted or even celebrated.

In Bakhtin’s carnival, language is suffused with expressions of profanity and vulgarity, which also serve to destabilise the careful decorum of official discourse. From very early in his career, Putin used profane language to convey an image of an authentic political figure intent on challenging the status quo. His famous comment in 1999 regarding Chechen terrorists — that he would “wipe them out in the outhouse” (“mochit’ v sortire”) was striking because it was such a break with traditional Russian public discourse, but a mix of criminal jargon with expletives has since become accepted language in Russia, even from political leaders. Talking about how President Zelensky and Ukraine should submit to the Minsk agreements, Putin used a phrase that sounded like an innuendo for crude sexual violence: “ Nravitsya, ne nravitsya—terpi moya krasavitsa ” (Like it or don’t like it, just endure it, my beauty) (Aron Reference Aron2022; Gaufman Reference Gaufman2023). Profanities are widely used on Russian nationalist and militia-linked channels, reflecting the language used by soldiers in real life. Social media clips are full of the expletives used by Russian civilians as they watch Ukrainian drones fly overhead. Far from being marginal, unofficial discourse, the profane has become normalised in everyday life.

This recourse to the profane is typical of a certain brand of contemporary populist authoritarianism that uses language to undermine existing norms of speech and behavior. Former President of the Phillipines Rodrigo Duterte used profanity as an instrument to gain support for his authoritarian populist regime, in which swearing and “hostile humor” served to construct a shared identity with his supporters (Montiel, Uyheng, and de Leon Reference Montiel, Uyheng and de Leon2022). Visoka and Lemay-Hébert argue that Duterte’s use of “swear words never printed previously” led to “emulation by government officials and a reconfiguration of everyday life,” part of a much wider resistance to status quo behavior in domestic politics or international relations (Visoka and Lemay-Hébert Reference Visoka and Lemay-Hébert2022, xi). Duterte’s use of profanity — or Donald Trump’s resort to the speech of the “locker-room” — is not only designed for domestic consumption, but contributes to a disruption of what is considered “normal” in political and diplomatic discourse.

These linguistic tropes may not appear at first to construct a coherent ideology, but this language distorts reality in ways that open up new ideological possibilities. As Bakhtin argues, grotesque and abusive forms of language subvert existing modes of speech, dominant discourses, and accepted ideologemes. In doing so, carnival language also delegitimises existing ideological positions. By destabilising the hegemonic discourse, this array of profanities, bizarre word formations, and abusive language also begins opening up space for new ideas and new language that can serve as the building blocks for a new ideological order.

Second, the carnival nature of the language — the humor, the neologisms, the absurd word forms — all offer a useful disguise for ideas that invoke violence and repression, and help make extremist ideas acceptable to a wider audience. Carnival language allows the speaker — and the listener — to partially disavow the violence inherent in this language, while also permitting extreme and repressive ideas to enter the discourse of contemporary politics. It is a highly effective mechanism to shift the "Overton window" to include previously taboo authoritarian and illiberal ideas.

Third, carnival language serves to define groups and boundaries, and helps to construct a shared identity around frequently repeated discursive tropes promoting nationalism, militarised forms of masculinity, and cultural and social conservatism. These act as mechanisms both of social bonding and of exclusion. Since much of the language enacts the dehumanisation of the enemy through grotesque caricature, it also introduces the Schmittian logic of the friend/enemy distinction, transforming ideological opposition into existential enmity. These friend-enemy distinctions became central to Russian political thought during the war against Ukraine and were deployed repeatedly in Russian official discourse in ways that provide meaning to the conflict, at least for some part of the population (Lewis Reference Lewis2020, 100–116).

Carnival as Transgression

Bakhtin’s carnival has often been studied as a celebration of transgression, especially following the work of Stalybras and White (1986), who encouraged scholars to use the carnival concept as a frame for the critical study of transgressive social behavior (Humphrey Reference Humphrey, Brandist and Tihanov2000). The forms of transgression in Bakhtin’s work are often embodied in gluttony, drinking, or the celebration of the “grotesque body,” which offers “a guaranteed triumph over classical form, institutional oppression, and individual death” (Emerson Reference Emerson2018, 167). The grotesque and the physical — even grotesque forms of death — all contribute symbolically to the deconstruction and disordering of an oppressive status quo. Bakhtin argues that “to confront a foe as powerful as the medieval worldview it was necessary to resort to grotesquerie” (Morson and Emerson Reference Morson and Emerson1990, 437). Transgression is both deconstructive of the existing order and also generative of alternative identities and modes of belonging. Miles Evers makes a similar argument in international relations, arguing that “rebellious and celebratory acts of noncompliance” play an important role in asserting state identities: “states will overtly and self-consciously violate international norms to either assert their identity as being inside or outside international society or contest those boundaries altogether” (Evers Reference Evers2017, 791).

In Russia’s war, transgression took multiple forms: physical violence, including sexual violence and mutilation of the body; violations of the norms and laws of war; the humiliation, torture, and killing of civilians and prisoners of war; attacks on schools, hospitals, or cultural targets; looting, destruction, and pillage of property, including churches, graveyards, and monuments. Many of the violent acts in Russia’s military campaign had grim elements of the ritualistic and the grotesque that were reminiscent of the carnivalesque (Garner Reference Garner2023; Lewis Reference Lewis2025; UN HRC 2024).

Extreme violence by Russian forces often focused on the extremities of the body, highlighted by Bakhtin as an important element in carnival: “the parts through which the world enters the body or emerges from it, or through which the body itself goes out to meet the world … the open mouth, the genital organs, the breasts, the phallus, the nose” (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin and Iswolsky1984a, 26). In her study of Trump as a carnival figure, Elizaveta Gaufman reminds us that “Carnival … brings the shamed and forbidden practices and body parts to the fore” (Gaufman Reference Gaufman2018, 413).

A video published on social media in July 2022 appeared to show a Russian soldier castrating and killing a Ukrainian soldier. A social media post was captioned: “A quick change of sex for a new European in field conditions” (Bellingcat 2022; Telegram post, https://t.me/FastFocus/27179). Another image on social media purported to show the decapitated head of a Ukrainian prisoner mounted on a pole, alongside two severed hands hung on metal fence spikes outside a house in Popasna after it was seized by Russian forces (Harding Reference Harding2022). Such killings fit Bakhtin’s description of “a truly carnivalesque death by dismemberment” (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin and Iswolsky1984a, 268).

Social media outlets linked to the Wagner group broadcast a video in November 2022, purportedly documenting the murder of a former Wagner fighter, Yevgeny Nuzhin, by using a sledgehammer to crush his skull (Faulconbridge Reference Faulconbridge2022). In subsequent stunts, representatives of Wagner dispatched a supposedly blood-stained sledgehammer to the European parliament (OCCRP 2022). Yevgeny Prigozhin gifted one to politician Sergei Mironov, and the sledgehammer became a widely used symbol of the Wagner group (Mironov Reference Mironov2023). Wagner's entire history was replete with transgressive, carnivalesque images and practices, culminating in the ritualistic spectacle of Prigozhin’s own death, recorded in a video showing his plane plummeting to the ground north-west of Moscow, apparently deliberately downed by a bomb on board (Wall Street Journal 2023a).

Images of extreme violence in the public domain became normalised in Russia. In March 2024, Russian television showed the public torture and mutilation of suspects detained after the Crocus City terrorist attack, in which gunmen killed at least 150 people at a concert. In a 24-second video released by the security services, an armed man appeared to cut off part of the ear of one of the detainees, force it into his mouth, and then punch him in the face. Another video showed the suspected ringleader of the attack lying on the ground with his trousers pulled down and a military field telephone connected to his genitalia, assumed to be giving him an electric shock (Human Rights Watch 2024; BBC 2024).

These events were a public manifestation of practices that had become commonplace in Russian prisons and in places of detention in the occupied territories against Ukrainians (Lewis Reference Lewis2025, 135–141). The UN reported numerous cases of “rape and attempted rape, sometimes with the use of objects, beatings, electric shocks, burns, or other attacks on genital organs, forced nudity going beyond possible security requirements, threats of sexual mutilation and castration, and intrusive body searches” (UN HRC 2024, 9–10). These acts were carried out with impunity — a further characteristic of carnival violence. Bakhtin describes violent acts in Rabelais as immune from punishment because the violent blows “were showered on the old world … and contributed at the same time to the conception and birth of the new world” (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin and Iswolsky1984a, 269). In the framework of carnival, violence is condoned when it accompanies the birth of a new order.

Historical carnival was often accompanied by looting, an act that was not only about material gain, but represented another form of “upside-downness,” a deliberate humiliation of property-owners and rich elites. In areas of Ukraine occupied by Russian troops, there was looting everywhere (Allison and Lewis Reference Allison and Lewis2025; Lewis Reference Lewis2025, 222–223). Some was on an industrial scale: the Ukrainian company Metinvest claimed that Russian forces stole as much as $600 million worth of products from their plants (BBC News 2022). But most looting was destructive, petty, and vindictive. To pick just one case from thousands, Russian soldiers looted Anatoly Danilchenko’s house in Avdiivka, where they stole medals, two televisions, a microwave oven, an electric oven, and cat food. From other houses, they took a telephone, a car, and a motorised saw. One soldier stole a red moped and drove around the village at 90 km an hour (Vazhnye istorii Reference istorii2022). There was often a gross physicality in Russian looting and destruction. When Ukrainian troops regained control of buildings at the Chernobyl nuclear power station, they discovered that Russian soldiers had defecated in every room (Salama and Golubenko Reference Salama and Golubenko2022).

Transgressive practices ranged in scale from local acts of pillage to global threats to destroy the world. It became common for officials to “joke” about nuclear war or missile strikes on European capitals. On a talk show, a speaker advocated launching a nuclear strike on the UK: “One Sarmat missile, and that’s it, the British Isles are no more.” The other presenters object mildly, but these kinds of statements are framed in a semi-comical, carnival mode, which makes it difficult to be sure whether they should be taken seriously and, therefore, how to react (Davis Reference Davis2022a). This almost slapstick routine over the use of nuclear weapons became normalised on Russian television, complete with graphics showing ballistic flight paths and zones of destruction (Davis Reference Davis2022b). The TV host Vladimir Solovyov regularly called for nuclear strikes, on one show fantasising: “It would be so beautiful, the beauty of that wave, the glow of radiation, and then the Augean stables of British imperialism washed away” (Scarr Reference Scarr2024). These almost ritualistic, carnivalesque riffs might have been dismissed as irrelevant rhetoric, but they were accompanied by serious policy proposals from leading academics for Russia to target European countries with nuclear strikes (Karaganov Reference Karaganov2023).