Acceso usuarios
Adriana Costachescu
The article focusses on the fate of Sovietisms in modern Romanian, i.e. the situation of words or phrases borrowed from Russian in the period of Soviet control over Eastern Europe (1945–1989). The borrowings reflect relevant concepts of Soviet-Communist economics, culture, politics and propaganda. Romanian received the largest number of Sovietisms of all Romance languages, mainly because of its close political relationship with the URSS. The use of terms which implicated a critical attitude towards the Soviet-Communist dictatorship (samizdat ‘samizdat’, aparatcic ‘apparatchik’, gulag ‘goulag’, etc.) was forbidden both in the URSS and in socialist Romania, but they passed into Russian and Romanian through western radio broadcasts, mainly Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Today, most of those Sovietisms are no longer in use in Romanian.
