Every historical breaking is followed by abolition or transformation of symbols which does not necessarily explain the meaning of such breaking. We are lucky if we can learn how contemporaries live in the given epoch, or, rather, how they orientate themselves in the given historical point. It is especially peculiar to compare different types of orientation when native speakers switch from one semantic system to another: as much as the common language differentiates them, their common non-verbal symbols unite them. Both in Soviet political rhetoric and in post-Soviet discourse the graphic/sensual dimension of this concept is permanently confronted by the abstract/verbal one; visual images having a propensity to become more abstract and symbolical (e.g. cliched pictures of Lenin), while the lexical family is often attributed with (sometimes paronymically or anagrammatically) specific-corporeal semantics (e.g. the word "steel" (<stal>) and its derivatives, the verbial form "became" (<stali>), a set expression "sparing no effort" (<bez ustali>) became "Stalinized" in mass media). After the break-up of the USSR the ideological message of the map of our Motherland in public discourse got enlivened enormously. On the one hand it is an image, a picture, a diagram; on the other hand it is a set of categories and numbers that belong to the field of verbal representation of ideology. Crossing of a verbal sign with a graphic- and/or corporeally schematic image creates a visul-cum-verbal ideologem, or, if we choose to use a neologism of Uwe Poerksen - a visiotype (Poerksen, 1997:10-11). The Poerksen's book shows that a link between the verbal and the graphic in a visiotype is more complex than a simple subjugation of one to the other or interamplification of semantic pressure. It is even more so as regards global visiotypes that comprise politico-geographical maps in different modifications. Let us take a look at the most widespread verbal-cum-numerical components of the ideologem of our motherland's map.

Here the key category is the border; the semantic field is represented in the language by few but set paroemias. I shall name them here as an almost exhaustive word family:

- foreign; abroad; the abroad; "even of shadows foreign and nocturnal I have no fear" (A.Blok);

- "clouds are gloomy on the border" (B.Laskin, 1937);

- borderland; "to this soldier in the distant borderland from Katyusha send my best regards" (M.Issakovsky, 1938);

- "the safety of our borders is breathing in every propeller" (P.Herman, 1924);

- illegal border crossing;

- over the cordon; leave over the cordon, from over the cordon;

- overseas;

- CTZ - control-tracking zone;

- no man's land; neutral zone; "incredibly beautiful flowers grow in the neutral zone" (V.Vysotsky, 1965);

- off-limits, restricted area;

- border zone, border stripe;

- frontier post; frontier guards;

- border-guard;

- frontier dog;

- trespasser, saboteur;

- young friend of frontier guards;

- "sentinels of Motherland are standing" (B.Laskin, 1937);

- "To protect the state border of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics - Go!" (order);

- foreign land;

- sacred boundaries of our Motherland.

The present list was compiled without taking into account comparative ideological valencies of different units. One only can note certain preferences based on the Soviet times' published sources. Thus according to the "Frequency Dictionary" compiled by L.Zasorina we may assume that the word "overseas" (зарубежный) is slightly more ideological than "foreign" (заграничный). On the other hand the very introduction of the word "overseas" along with the concept of "abroad" was a part of strategy manifested in one of the guiding maxims of the so-called first emigration: "We're not in an exile, we're on a mission". This post-revolution emigre "overseas" was considered to be a part of Russia that had taken away to their emigration everything including the very borders. Contrarywise inside Russia this term was used as a humiliating and threatening depiction of the renegades' location.

The late-Soviet discourse of the "overseas" just started apprehending this paradoxical semantic addition: the "overseas" retained (or may have retained) some values that had been lost here, e.g. pure Russian language, aristocratic habits, authentic orthodoxy etc. However when the political discourse of post-Soviet Russia started making use of terms "near" and in compariosn with it - "far overseas" - this brought "overseas" back into the semantic field of "alienation", "unfriendliness" and even "adversity". The set expression "near overseas" originally implied that the borders of the Russian state after the break-up of the USSR cannot be considered final and definitive. At the same time certain official statements were made in effect of a member of the president's council A.Migranian, deputy minister of defence A.Kokoshin and other representatives of the president and the government of Russia. The very form in which they were made looks ambiguous: "countries that are not totally or not really independent", "conventionally foreign countries", "our but already overseas territories".

The thesaurus of "our motherland's border" includes now a set expression that was widely used in Europe during both world wars - the expression that used to be theatrical but became political after Winston Churchill used it in his Fulton speech in 1946 when he baptised the line that divided Europe into zones of influence as the Iron Curtain. For depiction of the USSR from the outside as a zone apart from the rest of the world -this metaphore was soon caught up by Soviet propaganda: the same year in his report concerning magazines "Zvezda" and "Leningrad" A.Zhdanov accused the West for its desire "to erect an iron curtain beyond which no truth about the Soviet Union could penetrate" (quote according to Dushenko, 1997:396). For native speakers of Soviet ideology "iron curtain" is a double-edged metaphore: "right, we didn't want it, but we erected our iron curtain of defence - as a response to their iron curtain a threat". Official implication of "iron curtain" quite easily entered the family of "state border under lock and key" with its usual semantics of "insurmountability", "rigour" and the permanent "danger" in relation to the border. Thus the concept of "the border" is based on the equilibrium of emotions of safety and fear.

That is why some native speakers will attribute a set expression "opening borders" to semantic field of "liberation", while others - to "abandonment", "desertion", "helplessness"; hence the question "who is to blame?", traitors hunt. The emotion gets substantiated.

The singled-out segment of ideological field "border-overseas" livened up in the heat of perestroika and dissolution of the USSR. Images of "border" or "frontier" collected from different sources of mass communication, mostly caricatures, have a humouristic intention quite appropriate to the genre.

However it also contains certain politico-historical implication that can be reconstructed based on the above-mentioned material. As the border, the "iron border under lock and key" is only one, any domestic demarcation is considered both a ridiculous misunderstanding and a terrible crime. As soon as in the end of 1980s the break-up of the USSR became an issue, the cartographic border lines jumped out of the heads into the newspaper pages.

Globality, infinity, vast boundless spaces substitute another horizon of the ideologem of "our Motherland". It builds on both words and symbols. The border outlined in bold fonts, red or pink lid of the globe occupied by the largest country in the world turn the map of the USSR and Russia into an especially powerful symbol: in the north the border crosses the ocean, the country borders on the outer space, although elementary comprehension makes one acknowledge that in the north Russia borders directly on the USA and Canada. However in real maps of the USSR and Russia strictly speaking the symbolical dominates the pragmatical, while every symbol is to a certain extent a falsity.

The spacial centre of the map is Siberia - one of the most deserted regions of the world. Densely populated regions to the west of the Urals (primarily the so-called Central Area) occupies not more than a quarter of the map. After the USSR broke up and the Ukraine, Baltic countries, countries of the Caucases and Central Asia left Russia the very structure of the map did not change. While the difficulty of Russia's global cartography turned out to be even more explicit. On new maps that stretch Russia along the Arctic circle the populated and more politico-geographically important regions of the country moved to an even less significant part of the cartographic field. The physical territoriality is still comprehended as more significant than economical, political or social reality.

At the turn of this century this problem was pointed out by D. Mendeleev (Mendeleev, 1905). The Great systematizer suggested a change of the basic principle of Russian cartography, i.e. to give up the habitual globalistic projection of "extention" from west to east in favour of "concentration" on more compact, and, what is more important, relevant for Russia axis South-West - North-East, so that the centre of the map should be closer not to the geographical centre (Turukhansky krai), but to the centre of the country's population (at the turn of the century it was under Tambov). However the communist ideology did not win by the force practical expediency but by making the surrounding world simple, clear and lucid. This lucidity was achieved by maximum distancing from the subject: as said about himself - a representative of the first generation of Soviet people – a "young communist" poet Mikhail Svetlov "every part of the world I can see".

An attempt to stick to the global approach elicits the central problem: every map of the USSR is neither geographical nor political, but geo-political - in other words it's a metaphore of a map; it is hard to use it for practical purposes. I am leaving beyond the brackets the issue of purposeful distortions in Soviet cartography aimed at protecting the state secrets and thus making all openly published maps of the USSR only censored depictions of maps. As an ideological object a map of the USSR constituted a construction of a star with beams. The periphery is drawn up by the beams and is represented by key paroemias of the Soviet time.

"The beginning of the Earth

Is in Kremlin, as we know" (Maikovsky, 1927);

From southern mountains to the northern seas,

Our man is walking as the master,

Of Motherland of his, that's truly vast" (Lebedev-Kumach, 1935);

"Over Kremlin stars are shining,

Over Kremlin stars are up,

All our borders, all our shtetlach

From our enemies we'll defend" (Jewish folk songs, 1947);

- "huge is Russia, but there's nowhere to retreat - Moscow's behind us".

The dynamics of Soviet space - permanent extention and permanent dissolution of the borders - along with preservation of unviolable firmness of the frontier post serving as the younger brother of the main frontier post of Russia - the Spasskaya tower of Kremlin. Emphasising that the Country of Soviets occupied one sixth of the Earth, a homo ideologicus was supposed to develop this idea to the end, considering it desirable and natural to gradually enlarge this share. The notion of history as a progressive-expedient development did not contradict the notion of so-called "historically established borders", as every new expansion could be explained and was explained either as "restoration of historical justice" or as "execution of historical (age-old) aspirations" of people. It is clear that in the first case "the historical" implies borders that "have taken its final shape, if recently", while in the second case it means the "long aspired dremas that have only now come true". Such dynamics are respresented by certain paroemias of the Soviet time:

"One can't scope our cornfields by the eye,

Can't remember names of all our towns" (Lebedev-Kumach, 1935);

My address' the USSR" (Kharitonov, 1972);

- Whoever it wants!" (a joke recorded in the beginning of the Afghan war 1979, although, probably it is older and it dates back to Soviet intervention into Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968).

For the past decades Russian native speakers have had enough of this motive - it is very often played up in ironic poetry.

The revolutionary romanticism of border crossing aimed at export of revolution and extension of the communistic share transforms into poems that have been following several generations of Russian native speakers:

"I left my house, I went to war,

to give to peasants Grenada's land" (Svetlov, 1926);

But we have yet to die in battles,

So that from Britain to Japan

My dear Motherland may shine" (Kogan, 1941).

Others try to restore some romantic pathos, appealing to political education of their supporters: such is the programme of V.Zhirinovsky with his "Last rush to the South", where "Russian soldiers" would "wash their boots in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean and forever switch to the summer uniform" (Zhirinovsky, 1994).

This strategy combines the afore-mentioned ingredients of the complex "Motherland in her inviolable borders": "Motherland is vast, her borders are inviolable, but it's crowded and cold". Of course, a party activist and an elegiac poet give different answers to the question: "how to avoid the cram and cold"; what is important is that behind it there is a general image of people who "have finished their campaign" (Parfyonov, 1922). Then came the moment when the borders were locked from the inside.

The country, vast as it is, should be somewhat crammed for its inhabitants, "to live without Latvias or Russias - in a united world-community of men" (Maiakovsky). According to V.Zhirinovsky, or, to be more precise, according to the emblem of the Liberal-democratic party this vast Russia appears in the borders she has never had including Poland, Finland and Alaska at the same time.

After the dissolution of the USSR the map of Russia appears to be a very fragile, crumbling space. National and cultural autonomization or "parade of sovereignties" is compreheded as breaking the map, cutting off or tearing off its pieces. The destiny of Russia is pictured not as the destiny of the continent of Eurasia but as that of islands an archipelago scattering around, splinters of a glass ball scampering off: "We cannot paste together the country that fell off our hands" (Yevtoushenko).

Taking to heart resentment for the power that entered the age of decolonization so late reinforced certain motives popular in modern Russian political occultism - those of "Russia-island" (Tsymboursky, 1994a, 1994b) or of a "telluctratic centre" of the northern hemisphere (Dugin, 1996), or of "white Europe conquered by Asians" (Galkovsky, 1993). Analysis of the above named concepts is a task for another research that transcends the bounds of this article.

Stegmaier, W. (1994) Weltabkuerzungskunst. Orientierung durch Zeichen. In: Zeichen und Interpretation. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp