The Soviet government traditionally rewarded prolific mothers with the title of “Heroine Mother” (423,000 Soviet mothers had received this award by 1990). The Communist Party itself (“partiia”) was often characterized as the “mother” of Soviet citizens in both official and unofficial lore.22
Ambivalence toward Mothers
There are widespread hostile, even sadistic attitudes toward the maternal image in Russian culture. These attitudes are all too often neglected by scholars of Mother Russia.
The most common way to swear in Russian, for example, is to make a nasty sexual reference about someone’s mother. This language is colloquially referred to as “mat” (which is related by folk-etymology to the Russian word for “mother,” i.e., “mat’”). The most widespread and ancient expletive in the vocabulary of mat is “eb tvoiu mat’,” which has many nuances of meaning and considerable linguistic peculiarity, and which may be very loosely translated as “go to hell!” or “goddamn it!”23 But the phrase literally means “[I] fucked your mother,” and it is obviously this underlying meaning which stirs emotion in both the addresser and addressee—so much emotion that, until only recently, the phrase was taboo in the Russian press, even for purposes of quotation or linguistic analysis. The attitude of Soviet authorities toward mat was essentially the same as that held by the Russian Orthodox Church and the tsarist censorship.
The Oedipal dimension of mat is not far below the surface, because it is usually spoken by a male to another male, and the third party is somebody’s mother. In effect, the most common mother oath may be translated as: “I fucked your mother, and therefore I might even be your father.” Such an expression automatically creates an Oedipal triangle, with antagonism between the father and child figures, as well as hostility toward the mother. A variant form, “Fuck your mother!” (“Ebi tvoiu mat’!”) admonishes the addressee to commit incest—also a clearly Oedipal idea.
The Oedipal suggestiveness of mat is expressed by an explicitly Oedipal legend from the Smolensk area about its origin:
Every person has three mothers: his natal mother and two great mothers, moist mother earth and the Mother of God. The devil “disturbed” one person. This person killed his father and married his mother. From that time on humankind has been swearing, mentioning the name of the mother in curses, and from that time this evil has spread about the earth.24
Boris Uspenskii cites numerous religious folkloric texts in which one’s own mother, mother earth, or the Mother of God is horrified and suffers greatly upon hearing mat spoken.25 An inescapable consequence of mat—at least in the fantasy life of the religious Russian—is maternal suffering. All of these texts are of course designed to induce guilt in the addressee. One should, like one’s mother, suffer.
This brings us to the pre-Oedipal aspect of Russian obscenities. When mat is used aggressively, the direct target (given in the accusative case) is the mother. But mat is always understood as being directed at the mother’s child as well. That is, to insult a person’s mother using mat is the same as to insult the person. The person’s honor depends on the mother’s honor. Why this should be so makes sense, psychoanalytically. After all, the person’s self-esteem or core narcissism itself derives from pre-Oedipal interaction with the mother. Indeed, it was during a period when the self was not yet clearly distinguished from the mother, when the boundary with her was not yet clearly established, that the child’s narcissistic core was formed. The insult “I fucked your mother” injures self-definition as much as it injures self-esteem.
A common variation on “I fucked your mother” is “I fucked your soul-mother” (“Eb tvoiu dushu mat’”). This adds a sacral or religious tone, as Uspenskii observes.26 But the extension is psychoanalytically revealing as well. The word “soul” stands in grammatical apposition to “mother” (they are both in the accusative case). Thus the soul as well as the mother are “fucked.” But the “soul” in question is that of the addressee, so the expletive’s target is equally the mother and the mother’s child. From the viewpoint of the addressee the self and the self’s mother are equally insulted. Again, mother and self are difficult to distinguish—which is a specifically pre-Oedipal problem.
Writer Andrei Siniavskii, when asked recently for a definition of freedom by a correspondent of Literaturnaia gazeta, replied: “Freedom is when someone tells you to go to hell [lit., go to your fucked mother—k edrennoi materi], but you go where you please.”27 This definition is perhaps not so whimsical as it seems. The insult calls on the addressee to return (psychoanalytically, regress) to the mother he or she was once bound to, but the addressee instead rejects that mother.
Apart from mat, there is much other evidence for hostility toward mothers in Russian culture. Russian autobiographers (e.g., Andrei Belyi in Kotik Letaev, Gork’ii in his Childhood) have a tendency to portray their mothers as psychologically treacherous, as has been established by the late Richard Coe.28 Matricidal fantasies abound in Russian literature, especially in Dostoevsky’s novels.29 Various Russian writers have expressed their extreme disillusionment with “Mother Russia,” including Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, who wrote an article characterizing Russia as “The Pig Mother” (“Svin’ia Matushka”),30 and Andrei Siniavskii, who castigated Soviet Russia for driving out its Jews: “Mother Russia, Bitch Russia [Rossiia-Suka], you will answer for this child too, raised and then shamefully dumped by you.”31 Maksimilian Voloshin characterized Russia as a “cruel infanticide” (“gor’kaia detoubiitsa”) for the way she treated Pushkin and Dostoevsky.32 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn quotes anti-Russian lines that were supposedly popular in the early Soviet period:
Similarly, Aleksandr Blok’s marching revolutionaries in his famous poem “The Twelve” shoot “Holy Russia” in her fat rear end.34
More examples could be adduced. Of those given, mother-cursing is probably the most important, because (mostly) men of all social categories everywhere in Russia do it. What is more, they do it from an early age, when interaction with the mother is still intense. According to Ol’ga Semenova-Tian-Shanskaia, for example, the Russian peasant child learned how to swear before it was even capable of speaking complete sentences. Such behavior was not only not discouraged in the peasant family, it was actively fostered. When the mother refused the child something, the child might call her a “bitch” (“suka”) right to her face—and the mother herself might then brag to her friends about her energetic little “ataman.” If a child beat on its mother’s apron with a switch, grown-ups would express their approval.35 A child might be beaten for many reasons, but swearing was not one of them (“Za skvernye slova ne bili”).36
Expressions of hostility toward the mother should not be separated from the adoration of Mother Russia—and of Russian mothers generally—that is more commonly and more openly discussed in the literature on Russian national attitudes. It can at least be said that ambivalence characterizes the Russian fascination with maternal imagery. The image of the mother can arouse feelings of both love and hate, submission and rebellion. What this ambivalence springs from in individual ontogeny is most probably the overwhelming control exercised by the person on whom one is totally dependent in early development.