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Russian Much of English is made up of words from other languages, and Russian is a small but significant contributor in this respect. English absorbed many words relating to prerevolutionary Russian life, from muzhik (peasant), through kulak (land-owning peasant) and boyar (member of the higher nobility), to tsar, the dacha, samovar, and troika, and, alas, the pogrom. The word ukase, an order from the tsar with the force of law, developed in English to refer to any decree by a self-styled expert. Soviet politics also provided a vocabulary able to travel beyond its original boundaries: the unquestioningly loyal apparatchik is found outside its ruling Communist Party; agitprop can be disseminated under other regimes; the gulag is available for dissenters anywhere, whether in totalitarian nations or unsavory work environments. The end of the Soviet Union gave the world glasnost (greater accountability, openness, discussion, and freer disclosure of information) and perestroika, which became able to refer to any political, economic, or bureaucratic restructuring.
Keen interest in - and often hostility to - Soviet politics and society led to many other Russian words becoming familiar to English speakers: Bolshevik, commissar, kremlin, nomenklatura, samizdat, and soviet itself, to name a few. Early Soviet successes in space gave us the sputnik (literally "fellow traveler") and cosmonaut, not in itself a Russian form, but modeled on Russian kosmonavt. Russia's vast landscapes have provided steppe (via German) and tundra (ultimately from Sami). Soil science is indebted to Russian for chernozem, podzol, solonchak, and other terms.
Translations of Russian literature, as well as travels and Russian émigrés, have brought awareness and enjoyment of Russian food and cuisine: blini, borscht, kvass, pirozhki, shashlik (ultimately from Crimean Turkish), and zakuski, for instance; knish and latke came via Yiddish. Russian also gave us vodka and beluga caviar. The dish bitok (fried ground beef patties served with a sour cream sauce) has come a complete linguistic circle: English beefsteak passed into French as bifteck then into Russian as bitok, only to be returned to English in a new guise.
Names of the many peoples and languages of European and Asian Russia have naturally come to English via Russian: Cossack (ultimately from Turkic), Evenki (via Russian from Evenki, a language of parts of eastern Asia), Kalmyck, Ostyak (via Russian from Tatar), Osset (via Russian from Georgian), Udmurt, and Yakut (via Russian from Yakut, a Turkic language), for example. Some names are formed from Russian words combined with English suffixes, as Ugrian and Ugric (from Ugry "Hungarians") and Zyrian (from Zyryanin).
Russian words appear in many places in English, expected and unexpected: the balalaika is a Russian string instrument and the borzoi a Russian dog; babushka, a word for "grandmother," applies also to a headscarf; parka came from Russian via Aleut; mammoth derives from an obsolete Russian word (the first remains were found in Siberia); shaman goes back through Tungus to Sanskrit, but was adopted into English from Russian. The suffix -nik, now thoroughly Anglicized, came from Russian, either directly or through Yiddish. Self-conscious awareness of Russian - and a Soviet stereotype - is manifested in the hybrid form nyetwork, "computer network that is not functional," from nyet "no."
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