Russian Words Creep into English

The first Russian words I picked up were from the pages of spy thrillers, some four decades back, during the Cold War.

Another source was the magazine Soviet Union (probably long gone) that we subscribed to in the 1970s, and whose pages made for good wrappers for school notebooks and text books. The smooth pages of the Soviet Union, for some bizarre reason, were semi-waterproof.

If you insist on knowing, nyet (no), dacha (country house, estate) and svinya (pig) were the earliest Russian words I learned. Then in college I picked up politically charged terms like Politburo, Gulag, Samizdat and the like.

Later, as I grew older, Vladimir Nabokov's novels were another source of Russian words though I probably picked up more French expressions from the Lolita author.

In recent years I picked up a whole bunch of Russian terms from a former CIA agent’s spy thrillers.

Over the decades, my Russian vocabulary has expanded to several dozen. Let’s consider a few of my Russian favorites:

• borscht
  Meaning: beet-based soup
  Example: The smell of borscht cooking on the stove never fails to put me in a good mood.
• Spetsnaz
  Meaning: Russian special security forces
  Example: Spy thriller books and movies portray Spetsnaz as fierce, ruthless killers.
• babushka
  Meaning: grandmother
  Example: When I was young my babushka would escort me to the bus stop every morning.
• Kulak
  Meaning: wealthier peasant
  Example: Stalin’s regime killed several million Kulaks portraying them as enemies of the state.
• Matryoshka
  Meaning: Set of nesting dolls
• samovar
  Meaning: traditional tea urn
  Example: Indians do not use a samovar to make tea.
• Tsar
  Meaning: Russian emperor
• Gulag
  Meaning: Soviet forced-labor camp system
  Example: Russian dictator Josef Stalin sent millions to the icy gulags on charges of being traitors.
• oligarch
  Meaning: Extremely wealthy and ipso facto powerful person
  Example: Oligarchs often covertly control the political system through their enormous wealth and campaign contributions.
• Glasnost
  Meaning: Openness/transparency, especially politically
  Example: Thanks to Mikhail Gorbachev, I picked up a new Russian word in the 1980s: glasnost.
• Perestroika
  Meaning: Restructuring
  Example: When perestroika came to Russia, many economists thought it was too late to fix the decaying economy.
• Tundra
  Meaning: Treeless Arctic/subarctic region
• Politburo
  Meaning: Political Bureau; top Communist governing body

The following Russian words have still not gained as much currency as the ones above but they’re slowly gaining acceptance in English.

• nekulturny
  Meaning: uncultured
  Example: The educated are not immune to nekulturny babble when they are among close friends.
• lichinki
  Meaning: maggots
• navoz
  Meaning: manure
• blad
  Meaning: prostitute, whore
• Yaitsa
  Meaning: balls, testicles
• odurelny (slang)
  Meaning: colossally stupid, crazy
• chert vozmi
  Meaning: shit
• Balalaika
  Meaning: Russian stringed musical instrument