Pamela Potemkin

Quite a few russian leaders and eminences have left their imprint on our mother tongue.

We owe the idiom потёмкинские деревни (“Potemkin villages”) to Prince Grigory Potemkin, Catherine the Great’s favorite. Historical legend has it that during Catherine’s visit to Crimea in 1787, Potemkin, who was commanding the campaign in the South, had hollow façades of villages constructed along the desolate banks of the Dnieper, in order to impress the monarch and her travel party with the value of Russia’s new conquests, thereby enhancing his standing in the empress’ eyes. Thus have Potemkin villages become a synonym for показуха (window-dressing). Recently, Izvestia headlined an article about показуха in Russian hospitals (inspected on president Putin’s orders) Потёмкинские больницы (Potemkin hospitals).

Pyotr Stolypin, Nicholas II’s interior minister, was not one to put on velvet gloves when dealing with what he called great upheavals (великие потрясения). He was famous for the term столыпинские галстуки (Stolypin’s ties) – i.e. виселицы (nooses), which were used to execute revolutionaries and anarchists.

Stolypin’s contemporary, the writer Leo Tolstoy, developed a liking for peasant-style long shirts banded at the waist, and before long the shirt was nicknamed the толстовка. This word survived revolution and socialism and “reemerged” in market conditions: today a толстовка is a classic American-style sweatshirt with long-sleeves.   

Alexei Rykov, who headed the Soviet government after Lenin’s death, signed an epochal resolution abolishing сухой закон (prohibition). Then, in December 1924,  the Soviet state relaunched the production of state-distilled vodka. But it was just 30 percent alcohol, versus the classic 40 percent. Shortly the weak vodka was dubbed рыковка. Similarly, under Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov, distilleries launched a cheap vodka nicknamed андроповка. But neither рыковка or андроповка survived their creators and these words are no longer part of the active vocabulary.

Vyacheslav Molotov gave his name to the famous Molotov cocktail – a term coined by the Finns during the Soviet-Finnish war to mock Molotov.¹ During WWII, Soviet soldiers tossed the incendiaries at German tanks, but called them бутылки с зажигательной смесью (bottles with a flammable mixture). Only after the fall of the Soviet Union did some local historians begin to use the Western cliche – коктейль Молотова.

Molotov’s arch-enemy, Nikita Khrushchev, to whom we owe the term for the famous historical period known as хрущёвская оттепель (Khruchev’s thaw), bequeathed us another appellation: хрущёвка. These are the shabby, prefab five-story apartment blocks built with haste in the late 1950s and early 60s to get citizens out of barracks and communal apartments. While they were welcomed at the time, today хрущёвка is a pejorative term.

Such is not true of сталинский дом — Stalinesque building, which refers to the imposing buildings with pompous facades and high ceilings that even today are some of the most prestigious addresses in Moscow. Meanwhile, ousted Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov engendered the term Лужковское барокко (Luzhkovian baroque), which refers to tacky contemporary buildings trying to pass themselves off as Stalinesque.

So far, there do not appear to be any lingering linguistic contributions by Gorbachev, Putin, Yeltsin or Medvedev. But during a recent trip to the Tretyakov gallery, I discovered yet another enduring phrase from the tsarist era.

While contemplating a portrait of Петрова дщерь (Peter’s daughter) Elizabeth, whose tercentenary was in 2009, I uncovered the mostly-forgotten елисаветинский бюст (Elizabethian bust),² which idiom referred to putting one’s generous cleavage on display, as was en vogue in Elizabeth’s era. If you can’t picture Elizaveta Petrovna, think Pamela Anderson and you get the point. Although, as I understand it, that Andersonian бюст, was assembled with copious quantities of silicon...

Talk about a Potemkin village!