Aesopian language (or Aesopian speech) is an important component of Soviet language culture, a cultureof expression under surveillance and censorhip that invented various modes of the  circumlocution and euphemization of politically sensitive topics. In this chapter, I am illustrating some of the innumerable ways of organizing communcation under the sign of (sometimes imagined) prosecution. I am describing various practices of Aesopian circumlocution and summarizing theoretical work in Soviet literary history that addressed this peculiar phenomenon in Russian and Soviet literary tradition. I am also discussing the aesthetics and politics of Aesopian language and its role as a means of expressing political dissent as this was seen by its practitioners inside the USSR and by the theorists who worked with the matters of language and power in the West.