Edit: I found it. It’s from Yurchak, Alexei. “Soviet hegemony of form: Everything was forever, until it was no more.” Comparative studies in society and history 45.3 (2003): 480-510.
The following examples are taken from a 1977 leading article, “The Ideological Conviction of the Soviet Person” (Ideinost’ sovetskogo cheloveka, Pravda, July 1, 1977). For considerations of space, I will limit this analysis to two generative principles of block-writing: the principle of complex modification and that of complex nominalization. The first sentence in the Pravda text reads: “The high level of social consciousness of the toilers of our country, their richest collective experience and political reason, manifest themselves with an exceptional completeness in the days of the all-people discussion of the draft of the Constitution of the USSR.” I have italicized phrases that are nouns with complex modifiers that function as “building blocks” of ideological discourse.
“the high level of consciousness of the toilers,” the double-modifier “high level” conveys not only the claim that the Soviet toilers’ consciousness exists (to be high it must exist), but also that it can be measured comparatively, by different “levels.” The latter claim masks the former one, thereby making it harder to question directly...
during the 1960s and 1970s… nominal structures increased and new long nominal chains were created. This increased the circularity of ideological discourse. In the excerpt from the same 1977 leading article; the italicized phrase (which in English translation is broken into two parts) is a block of multiple nominals: “The spiritual image of the fighter and creator of the citizen of the developed socialist society reveals itself to the world in all its greatness and beauty both in the chiseled lines of the outstanding document of the contemporary times, and in the living existence, in the everyday reality of the communist construction (I v chekannykh strokakh vy- daiushchegosia dokumenta sovremennosti, i v zhivoi deistvitel’nosti, v povsed-nevnykh budniakh kommunisticheskogo stroitel’stva raskryvaetsia pered mirom vo vsem velichii i krasote dukhovnyi obraz bortsa i sozidatelia, grazhdanina razvitogo sotsialisticheskogo obshchestva).”
nominals allow one to render ideological claims implicit, masking them behind other ideas, and therefore rendering them less subject to scrutiny or multiple interpretations. This nominal chain can be deconstructed into several corresponding verbal phrases, each containing one idea: “the citizen of the developed socialist society is a fighter and creator,” “the fighter and creator possesses a spiritual image,” “the spiritual image is great and beautiful,” etcetera. Converting these verbal phrases into one nominal phrase converts claims into presuppositions, presenting ideas as pre-established facts.
the 1970s discourse was special: its sentences contained particularly long nominal chains and only one verb, often simply a copula, with the sole purpose of turning these long chains of nominals into a sentence. This style created a notoriously “wooden” sound, giving ideological discourse its popular slang name, “oak language” (dubovyi iazyk).
That discussion is by people outside of DeepSeek trying to process the shock of R1. It is unclear what DeepSeek is doing currently.