Between Pravda and Istina

The coexistence of two lexemes denoting “truth” in Russian — pravda and istina — has been taken to imply a conceptual hierarchy of truth values. Pravda indexes a norm-based, performative truth, while istina is regarded as a moral and metaphysical truth. Aiming to explore presidential epistemic legitimation strategies in Russian political culture, this corpus-based study of Putin and Medvedev’s speeches examines how pravda and istina function in official discourse. Drawing on a corpus of over 43 million words in Russian (2000–2024), it employs corpus-assisted Critical Discourse Analysis to analyze distributional patterns, collocations, and concordances of the two lexemes. The study also tests whether the two words are interchangeable in presidential discourse and contributes to research on discursive aggression. The results reveal distinct collocational profiles and diachronic trajectories: pravda appears in pragmatic contexts and war commemoration, while istina is associated with transcendental meanings. Both lexemes serve ideological functions, albeit differently.