This book is not a conventional dictionary, and my approach to the material is not that of a linguist. My work is an experiment in what Soviet scholars call lingvostranovedenie—the study of a country and its culture through the peculiarities of its language. Intended for readers who are interested in the Soviet Union, it offers them an opportunity to explore some aspects of Soviet culture by examining a set of contemporary "Sovietisms"—terms and expressions shaped by events, ideas, and attitudes characteristic of the post-Stalin era.

Familiarity with Russian is helpful but not necessary for the utilization of this book. The entries are listed alphabetically in English transliteration (Library of Congress system) followed by the Cyrillic. In the process of acquainting themselves with the material, readers will learn new Russian words and may develop a corollary interest in studying the language. Those who know Russian may prefer to use the Cyrillic alphabet listing which I have appended to locate the terms included in the text.

The entries are of varying length depending on their significance. In each, an attempt has been made to provide a succinct but full explanation of the term and, whenever possible, to supply authentic examples of its use and cross-references to other entries. The lexicon may be read either sequentially or with the aid of the subject thesaurus, which divides the material into specific topics; some of the terms are broad enough to fit into more than one of the thesaurus headings.

Much of the material in the lexicon stems from my pedagogical experience. For a number of years I have been teaching a course for undergraduate and graduate students of Russian at the University of Minnesota entitled "The Current Soviet Scene." The aim of the course, aside from improving the students' language skills, is to enable them to understand something of the political, social, and cultural processes which have taken place in the Soviet Union since Stalin's death. The course is based on Soviet literary and journalistic texts and films and draws on my own experience as a native speaker of Russian who lived in the Soviet Union as a child and has revisited it many times as an adult.

As my students work with the course materials, they often encounter words and expressions which cannot be found in standard Russian-English dictionaries, or which have connotations not given in dictionaries. I keep a list of these items, augmenting it by what I myself discover through reading, exposure to the Soviet media, and contacts with Soviet citizens, recent emigres, and American colleagues in the Russian field. I have found that the explanation and discussion of such vocabulary is an effective method of bringing into focus some characteristic features of Soviet life and thought. Students tell me that the study of Sovietisms in my course helps them in their subsequent course work and research, and they often request copies of my master list for reference. As the present lexicon is based on that list, I have reason to believe in its educational value.

I wish to warn the reader that although I made an earnest effort to keep my work free of ideological bias, evidently I did not entirely succeed, at least not in the opinion of one American colleague. Having looked at my manuscript, he said that the material painted a rather negative picture of Soviet reality. I then recalled a joke I once heard in Moscow, according to which there are really only two words in the Russian language: ura (hurrah) and uvy (alas). Since the "hurrahs" are adequately dealt with in English-language dictionaries of Soviet Communist Party jargon, which I did not include in my lexicon for the reasons stated below, I suppose that I ended, albeit unintentionally, by writing mostly about the "alases."

Indeed, many of the unofficial Sovietisms of the pre-Gorbachev era reflect an attitude critical of life in the Soviet Union. This is not surprising, for in a society which until recently was highly repressive, the coinage and use of acerbic catchwords and pithy sayings was one of the few ways in which people could communicate their ideas and feelings about their condition with relative impunity. The same is true of humor. Anyone familiar with the Soviet culture of the post-Stalin era knows that there is a great abundance of jokes, anekdoty, which deal with various aspects of political and social life in the country. Sovietologists have found such jokes a useful resource for understanding the Soviet mind, and I have included them in my explanations of the terms where appropriate. The importance of the role of political jokes, for example, is illustrated by the term anekdotchik (literally, a jokester), which, in colloquial usage since the late Stalin era, refers to a person incarcerated for the telling of antiestablishment jokes. A joke has it that an anekdotchik, when asked to tell the shortest joke he knew, was arrested for saying "Communism." It should be noted that this situation has changed dramatically since 1985. Sovietisms reflecting critical attitudes now are used freely in official parlance, and political jokes no longer have to be told in whispers.

As the subtitle of the book indicates, the contents are selective. Compiling a lexicon of Sovietisms could be an undertaking either of encyclopedic proportions or of a scope circumscribed by more practical considerations of accessibility and convenient use; this work represents the latter approach. The selection offers a sampling of a broad range of topics in the areas of politics, ideology, the economy, education, arts and letters, social problems, and everyday life, as well as some language associated with the personalities and activities of individual Soviet leaders. Readers with special interests perhaps will find the coverage lacking in some ways. Those who are particularly interested in government, for example, might be disappointed not to see a greater number of political terms, whereas students of economics might wish for a stronger representation in their field, and so forth.

My friends and associates who saw the material when it was being prepared for publication were quick to make recommendations for additions or deletions, but, because of the personal interests and preferences of each, there was little agreement among them on the particulars. Subjectivity undoubtedly was a factor in my own choices as well. I did comply with the suggestions as much as the scope of this work would allow, but incorporating them all would have required a multivolume production. Despite its size limitations, I feel that the lexicon can be put to good use both as a source of general information about the Soviet Union and as a guide to further inquiry on a number of specific topics.

The process of making choices was not always easy. My learned colleagues sometimes disputed the meanings of certain terms or, having never heard of a particular term, questioned its importance. One especially memorable case of conflicting opinions took place at the International Russian...