In Making Martyrs: The Language of Sacrifice in Russian Culture from Stalin to Putin, Yuliya Minkova examines the language of canonization and vilification in Soviet and post-Soviet media, official literature, and popular culture. She argues that early Soviet narratives constructed stories of national heroes and villains alike as examples of uncovering a person's "true self." The official culture used such stories to encourage heroic self-fashioning among Soviet youth and as a means of self-policing and censure. Later Soviet narratives maintained this sacrificial imagery in order to assert the continued hold of Soviet ideology on society, while post-Soviet discourses of victimhood appeal to nationalist nostalgia. Sacrificial mythology continues to maintain a persistent hold in contemporary culture, as evidenced most recently by the Russian intelligentsia's fascination with the former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Russian media coverage of the war in Ukraine, laws against US adoption of Russian children and against the alleged propaganda of homosexuality aimed at minors, renewed national pride in wartime heroes, and the current usage of the words "sacred victim" in public discourse. In examining these various cases, the book traces the trajectory of sacrificial language from individual identity construction to its later function of lending personality and authority to the Soviet and post-Soviet state. Yuliya Minkova is Assistant Professor of Russian at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

在《制造殉道者。从斯大林到普京的俄罗斯文化中的牺牲语言》中，尤利娅-明科娃研究了苏联和后苏联媒体、官方文学和流行文化中的封建化和中伤的语言。她认为，早期的苏联叙事构建了民族英雄和恶棍的故事，作为揭开一个人的 "真实自我 "的例子。官方文化利用这些故事来鼓励苏联青年的英雄主义自我塑造，并作为自我监督和谴责的手段。后来的苏联叙事保持了这种牺牲的意象，以宣称苏联的意识形态对社会的持续控制，而后苏联的受害者论述则吸引了民族主义的怀旧情绪。牺牲的神话继续在当代文化中保持着持久的影响力，最近俄罗斯知识分子对前寡头米哈伊尔-霍多尔科夫斯基的迷恋、俄罗斯媒体对乌克兰战争的报道、反对美国收养俄罗斯儿童和反对所谓针对未成年人的同性恋宣传的法律、对战时英雄的重新民族自豪感，以及目前公共话语中 "神圣的受害者 "一词的使用，都是证明。在研究这些不同的案例时，本书追溯了牺牲性语言从个人身份建构到后来为苏联和后苏联国家赋予个性和权威的功能的轨迹。Yuliya Minkova是弗吉尼亚理工学院和州立大学的俄语助理教授。