Deputies Are Proving Duma Equals Dummy

"Do you know what the people call us?" The senior legislator in the State Duma lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "They call us dumaki."The guests recognized the play on the word durak, or fool, but were wondering how to respond to such self-deprecating humor from someone so high up when the lawmaker continued."And do you know what they call our aides, people who work for deputies (pri deputatakh)? They call them pridumki," said the legislator, finishing his joke on another pun: Pridurok also means "fool" or "idiot."Puns aside, there was a bittersweet truth to what our host was saying. The Gosudarstvennaya Duma has accomplished little, earning scorn from anyone watching closely, and contemptuous ignorance from the rest of the populace. All this combines with Russians' traditional mistrust of those in power to make the gosdumtsy perhaps the least respected, least beloved government officials since the False Dmitry.Not even the people's deputies of White House bombardment infamy suffered the widespread diffidence afforded the dumtsy.True, certain hardline supporters of Boris Yeltsin invented a name for the president's antagonists in the former Syezd Narodnykh Deputatov, the Congress of People's Deputies: syezdyuki. We won't tell you what syezdyuki means here (why don't you go ask your Russian friends), but believe us: It is far, far more vulgar than dumak.In fact, the word durak is not exclusively used as an insult. The hero of many Russian folk tales, Ivan Durak, is a fool only in the eyes of his conniving, entrepreneurial brothers. In fact, they are the true bad guys, while Ivan does nice things for people and risks his life for his beloved, usually Yelena Prekrasnaya ("the extremely beautiful") or Vasilisa Premudraya ("the very wise"). Ivan Durak always gets the girl.A durak can be someone who is so out of control as to be unpredictable, and therefore frightening to conservative Russians. This connotation lives on in the sayings durakam zakon ne pisan ("the law is not written for fools") and ot chyorta krestom, ot medvedya pestom, a ot duraka nichem ("fight the devil with a cross, the bear with a club, but you can't fight a fool with anything.")But we think lack of respect is what the people had in mind when they coined dumak. Lack of respect, and perhaps a little fear of what might happen if the dumtsy ever get their act together. As the saying goes, Zastav' duraka bogu molit'sya, on i lob passhibyot: "Force a fool to pray, and he'll break his head."