I have spoken of vzyali quite a few times on this blog. I learned the term from my Scoutmaster when I was a boy scout as a teenager. Greg (I used his first name for security reasons) had escaped from the Soviet Union in the 1950’s as a teenager when his parents managed to smuggle him across the border in the trunk of a car. He never saw his parents again, they were vzyali.
He used to tell me stories of what it was like to live in the Soviet Union. How they used to spy on and watch everyone, to the point where you were required to bring your unsealed envelopes for mailing to their post office. The officials would read your mail to ensure it contained nothing disloyal before sealing and passing the envelope on.
Vzyali is one of the most chilling linguistic phenomena of the Soviet era, particularly during Stalin’s Great Terror in the 1930s. In that context, “Vzyali” translates more accurately to “They took [him/her/them]” or “They’ve taken.” It was used as an absolute, terrifying euphemism.
- The Unspeakable “They”: Everyone knew exactly who “they” were—the NKVD (the Soviet secret police, later the KGB)—but naming them aloud was incredibly dangerous. By omitting the pronoun or noun, citizens avoided speaking the name of the state security apparatus, which could invite suspicion upon themselves.
- Avoiding Legal Terms: People rarely said “arrestovani” (arrested) because “arrest” implied a legitimate legal process, a charge, and a system of justice. “Vzyali” stripped away any illusion of legality; it meant a person was simply plucked from their life, usually in the dead of night, never to be seen again.
- The Atmosphere of Fear: The word captured the arbitrary, predator-like nature of the regime. To say someone was “taken” meant they had vanished into the Gulag system or been executed, and their family was left to live in terror of being “taken” next.
This linguistic coping mechanism is famously documented in Soviet dissident literature, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago and Anna Akhmatova’s poem Requiem, reflecting how totalitarianism alters language itself to express trauma.
Our scoutmaster was a good man, but he passed away a few months ago. He and his wife became good friends with my own parents. They lived a few miles from us, and I remember they used to visit often. Pat’s specialty was mango pies, Greg’s specialty was teaching me skills like living in the woods, washing dishes without water, and other useful skills. His wife Pat died a few years ago.
No one hated communists more than Greg, and he would let you know why. All you had to do was get to know him. He loved the US with everything he had, and did more to serve this country than most who were born here. He left a lasting impression upon me, and is a huge reason why I am as opposed to the communist movement that the left has become.
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