Is It a State or a Power?
True or false: yesterday, December 19, Russian President Vladimir Putin said he had done everything he could possibly do so that “Russian can be an independent, sovereign state”? I will simplify this question: did Putin use the word state in this response to Rosenberg from the BBC? In truth, Putin said держава.
Here is the full sentence, in Russian: “Я сделал все для того, чтобы Россия была самостоятельной, суверенной державой, которая в состоянии принимать решения своих интересов а не интересов тех стран, которые подтаскивали ее к себе, похлопывая ее по плечу, для того чтобы использовать в их целях.”
Here is BBC’s translation of this sentence in full: "I have done everything so that Russian can be an independent sovereign state that is capable of taking decisions in its own interests not in the interests of countries that were dragging it towards them, patting you on the shoulder so they could use you for their own purposes."
One dictionary, the open-source and manipulable Wiktionary, tells me that a “derzhava” is a “powerful, independent state.” This is not untrue; a “derzhava” is a state. Without getting too much into the subtlety of the term, it is the monosyllabic word “state” in the first line that allows for a great degree of transparency in a common official translation of the Russian National Anthem:
Russia is our sacred state,
Russia is our beloved country.
A mighty will, great glory –
Your dignity for all time!
Other dictionaries sort of agree. I would say that in context, this “derzhava” has similarities to the political term “power” as it is used to describe a certain kind of state. He wants Russia to be an “independent, sovereign power.”
Writing for The Hill in 2022, Jessica Graybill, the geographer and professor of Russian/Eurasian studies, noted: “In contrast, the English word for power has roots in French, where we understand the concept to be about ability or influence. [The root word in the term derzhava, Russia’s derzhat[,] is about the desire to have or hold land, people and resources at grand scales.”
As conciliatory as Putin’s suggestion may have been yesterday that Russia and the West fight a “high-tech duel,” the difference here is significant. Derzhava is indeed a central etymological component of the term “sverkhderzhava”—or superpower.
If you mistranslate this word “derzhava,” as the BBC did, you miss the fact that what Putin is saying is implicitly more along the lines of the unapologetic remark: “Russia is going to be big—and it’s going to be a big deal.” The Netherlands, for comparison, is merely a state. Practically nobody calls it one of the great “powers” or a great terrestrial empire, yet another formation that a derzhava connotes. Rather than a defensive crouch or appeal to universal values, his mood here would seem to be quite expansive.
Granted, the nature of that sentence in which Putin is doing everything he can so that Russia can be a power is tricky; someone translating this had to engage with the concept of capacity/power and may have found what I find to be engagement with the trope of power to be jarring and clumsy when brought to the surface. But Putin did mean that and he engages with different words having to do with power in rapid succession. How about this solution: “I have done everything I can so that Russia can exist as a sovereign, independent power…that is able to make decisions about its own interests and not the interests of those countries that dragged it toward them, patting it on the shoulder for the sake of purposes of their own.”?