apparat: literally: apparatus. The Bolsheviks began as an underground movement. To survive, the Party machine demanded solidarity and discipline. Members were known as apparatchiki, that is, men of the apparat. The term eventually came to mean the Soviet bureaucratic system and had a distinctly negative connotation.
apparatchik: a member of a Communist apparat; a blindly devoted Bolshevik official, follower, or member
Cheka: the secret police under the Tsar. After the Russian Revolution, although the Bolsheviks formed their own secret police with its own acronym, people still used the old name.
chistka: literally: cleaning or cleansing; a political purge
kulich: from the Greek: a roll or loaf of bread. It is a sweet yeast-risen bread with raisins, almonds, and candied orange peel. The recipe for kulich is similar to that of Italian panettone.
Nagant M1895: a seven-shot, gas-seal revolver designed and produced by Belgian industrialist Léon Nagant for the Russian Empire. The gas-seal system allows the cylinder to move forward when the gun is cocked, to close the gap between the cylinder and the barrel. This feature provides a boost to the muzzle velocity of the fired projectile and suppresses the sound of the weapon when fired, an unusual ability for a revolver.
nepman: businessmen and women in the early years of the Soviet Union who took advantage of the opportunities for private trade and small-scale manufacturing created by the New Economic Policy (NEP), which was instituted by Lenin as a response to revolts against meager rations in the USSR during the early 1920s under Lenin’s policy of War Communism. NEP encouraged private buying and selling even to, as one official put it, “get rich.”
oblast: county
OGPU (Joint State Political Directorate or All-Union State Political Board): the formal name of the secret police, it operated from 1923 until 1934, when it was replaced by the NKVD, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs
oprichnik/oprichniki: originally: a member of an organization established by Tsar Ivan the Terrible to govern the division of Russia known as the Oprichnina (1565–1572); modern usage: a functionary, a toady, a flatterer, a sycophant
pashka: a rich Russian dessert made of cottage cheese, cream, almonds, and currants, set in a special wooden mold and traditionally eaten at Easter
proletariat/prole: from the Latin: a citizen of the lowest class. In its long or short form, the term is used to identify a lower social class, usually the working class.
samizdat: an important form of dissident activity across the Soviet bloc in which individuals reproduced censored publications by hand and passed the documents from reader to reader. This underground practice to evade officially imposed censorship was fraught with danger as harsh punishments were meted out to people caught possessing or copying censored materials.
Stakhanovite: a worker in the Soviet Union who regularly surpassed production quotas and was specially honored and rewarded
tovarish: comrade (especially in Russian Communism); American equivalents: associate, companion, comrade, fellow, yokefellow
TT 30: a semiautomatic pistol, developed in the early 1930s by Fedor Tokarev as a service pistol for the Soviet military to replace the Nagant M1895 revolver
ukase: a proclamation by a Russian emperor or government having the force of law; an edict, an official order
ushanka (hat): literally: “ear hat”; also known as a trooper, it is a Russian fur cap with ear flaps that can be tied up to the crown of the cap, or tied at the chin to protect the ears, jaw, and lower chin from the cold. The hat provides some protection to the head should one fall on the ice.
zek: an inmate; a Russian slang term for a prison or forced labor camp inmate