After Perestroika: The Era of Rasstroika

Abstract

Russian is not the quickest of languages master, but one feature that enables students of Russian amuse themselves as they attempt absorb a large and often forbidding vocabulary is the readiness with which the language allows the formation of different words through the addition of prefixes and suffixes. Thus it is possible take a slang verb in English, either translate or transliterate the root into Russian, and start adding various prefixes create a plethora of non-existent yet meaningful words. I recall a class in which one student took the English word to fudge, used the productive suffix for creating new verbs arrive at fudzhirovat', and then started in with prefixes: zafudzhirovat' (to begin fudge), perefudzhirovat' (to fudge again), nafudzhirovat'sia (to have one's fill of fudging), etc. Some verbs in Russian are (or were) naturally more productive in this regard than others. The verb to build (stroit ) in Russian is among those from which many other verbs are derived by the addition of various prefixes. Perestroit' has the basic meaning ofreconstruct but can also mean re-design, re-shape, re-form (in the military sense), and re-tune; the noun formed from this verb, the by-now familiar perestroika, a word that no longer needs be italicized in English, potentially has all these meanings in Russian, but during the Gorbachev era came be used most often mean something like the reconstruction or reform of political, social, and economic institutions. Solzhenitsyn, in making a 1990 pronouncement about the direction in which he felt Russia should go, chose a somewhat different verb, the unusual obustroit', which contains the same root and two prefixes, oband u-.' Now Solzhenitsyn has been a student of the Russian language himself, going so far as put out a dictionary of linguistic expansion (Russkii slovar' iazykovogo rasshireniia) containing little-used or forgotten words which he thought should come back into the language in order enrich it.2 Obustroit' is not easy find in dictionaries of the literary language, but the native speakers with whom I have checked seemed familiar with the word. In the past it has most often been used about a living space; the verb takes the basic meanings of ustroit' (to construct, but also establish, fix up) and, apparently, enlarges them with the sense of around that can be expressed by the prefix ob-. The basic meaning then is something along the lines of fix up one's surroundings or make a place livable; Solzhenitsyn's usage seems unusual because he applies the word a locale as vast as an entire