Citations:sovok

English citations of sovok

2013, Eugene Raikhel, “Placebos or Prostheses for the Will?: Trajectories of Alcoholism Treatment in Russia”, in Eugene Raikhel and William Garriott eds., Addiction Trajectories, Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, →ISBN, p 204:
Older patients, or “Soviet people,” were often described as being more suggestible than younger people, an ascription that draws on a common stereotype of the sovok (or homo Sovieticus) as conformist and prone to manipulation through political propaganda.
2012, Jennifer DuBois, A Partial History of Lost Causes, New York: Dial Press, →ISBN, p 9:
“The sovok here is Mikhail Andreyevich Solovyov,” said Ivan.
2010, Glen Scott Allen, The Shadow War, New York: Thomas Dunne Books, →ISBN, p 21:
Exhibiting a taste for Western styles back then was considered almost tantamount to treason: the short skirts, the bright colours, the high-heeled shoes. Not the tastes of a true sovok, a loyal Soviet citizen.
2010, Elena Gapova, “Anxious Intellectuals: Framing the Nation as Class in Belarus”, in Costica Bradatan, and Serguei Oushakine, In Marx’s Shadow: Knowledge, Power, and Intellectuals in Eastern Europe and Russia, Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, →ISBN, p 197:
Those who have retained liberal views are too often full of contempt for “the people,” whom they see as lowly and vulgar sovki, bearing the worst “Soviet” psychological makeup and not being able to embrace liberal values.
2007, Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia, New York: Metropolitan Books, →ISBN, p 16:
Recalling this austere atmosphere, Valentina describes it as a conscious element of her family’s intelligentsia principles (intelligentnost’)‚ and Soviet ideology. ‘We were Soviet people (sovki),’ she reflects. We lived for our beliefs in the future happiness of our society, not for the satisfaction of our own needs. There was a moral purity about the way we lived.’
2007, Tom Masters, Eastern Europe, Melbourne: Lonely Planet, →ISBN, p 85:
Rooms are run-of-the-mill sovok (Soviet-style), and the echoing old marble lobby, where guests sit in old leather chairs, seems like a weigh station for lost souls.
2006, Howell Raines, The One that Got Away: A Memoir, New York: Simon and Schuster, →ISBN, p 195:
He had a “peasant face,” embarrassing neckties from the ’70s, and he was depending on the “the Sovok vote.”

My radar went up. It did not take a lot of heavy parallel analysis to see Zyuganov as a Russian George Wallace and the Sovok vote as the redneck vote. I tried this out on Paulina as our distinctly un-Sovok waiter was sweeping in with the sturgeon.

“‘Sovok’ cannot be called the exact synonym of the word ‘redneck,’” she said. “It is becoming the Russian synonym for ‘a fool.’ We use that term when we’re extremely irritated. To call a person a Sovok is to insult. You see them on Sunday driving an old unfashionable car. They are crazy about gardening. You see them in their old cars hauling firewood or stumps or seedlings. They still manage to find shops that have the worst goods and to queue for them.

“Sometimes they’re young as well—youngsters who work at state factories who are very badly dressed or who have bad haircuts or if they try to dress expensively they buy the wrong things—made in India or China.” These young Sovoks, she believed, were polluting the newly freed marketplace with socialist work habits.
1999, Ronald Grigor Suny, “Southern Tears: Dangerous Opportunities in the Caucasus and Central Asia” in Rajan Menon, Yuri E. Fedorov, and Ghia Nodia eds., Russia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia: The 21st Century Security Environment, v 2, New York: EastWest Institute, →ISBN, p 149:
The turn back to symbols and institutions of the pre-Soviet past—the double-headed eagle, the imperial flag, the Orthodox Church, the reburial of the last tsar’s family (though not yet the revival of the Romanov anthem, “God Save the Tsar”)—met with resistance among many former sovki, not to mention the 20 percent of Russia’s population that was neither Orthodox nor ethnically Russian.³

3. Sovok (plural, sovki) literally means “dustpan,” but in the late Soviet period, it referred negatively to something or someone “Soviet.” It has come to be an ambivalent reference to a Soviet person.
1993, “Who Rules Russia?”, in New Statesman Society, v 6, nn 234–5, London: Statesman & Nation Publishing Company, p 11:
Russians have taken to using the word “sovoks”, a term of contempt for people conditioned by Soviet dogmatism and their isolation from the outside world. A sovok is someone who loves birch trees and believes they grow only in Russia. Sovoks love to forbid things, to say “no” to any request, to work in offices shut off behind padded doors.
1993, David Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, New York: Random House, →ISBN:
More and more, the worst insult you heard was sovok, a slang word for Soviet. If you called someone sovok you were saying he was narrow-minded, officious, weak, lazy, obsequious, a hypocrite.

Whatever skills they did or did not have, they had a unanimous contempt for all things sovok—the slang term for “Soviet.”
1992, Kunst & Museumjournaal, v 3, nn 4–6, Foundation Internationaal Kunst & Museumtijdschrift, p 22:
Particularly revealing is the fact that the every day honour of the “sovok” – his jokes and funny stories – had less to do with sex than with politics.
1991, New Accountant, vv 7–9, p 33:
Suit A person who habitually wears suits, as distinct from a techie or hacker. See loser, burble, management, and brain-damaged. English, by the way, is relatively kind; our Soviet correspondent informs us that the corresponding idiom in Russian hacker jargon is ‘sovok’, lit. a tool for grabbing garbage.

Citations:sovok

English citations of sovok

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