The Pursuit of Power Goes by Many Names

There must have been a few grim smiles in the Kremlin when Dzhokhar Dudayev, the president of the breakaway Chechen republic in the north Caucasus, recently denounced the breakup of the Soviet Union.


The irony was in Dudayev's explanation: Following the fall of the union in 1991, power had been seized in the former republics by a number of avantyuristy, "unscrupulous politicians."


One might just as easily say that of Dudayev, who, backed by groups of shady mafia-style gangs, led Chechnya's drive to self-declared independence at the same time as the Soviet breakup and has been defying Russia ? some would say unscrupulously ? ever since.


However, Dudayev's remark, aimed at Russia's leadership, was appropriate in that it followed a cardinal rule of Russian political usage ? those in power call those who wish to unseat them avantyuristy.


Avantyurist in Dal's pre-revolutionary dictionary has nothing to do with politics in its definition: "A fortune seeker," "wanderer" or "rascal."


Only later does the word avantyura appear, defined by Ozhegov in his 1985 edition as an "unscrupulous, risky matter of questionable virtue, undertaken in the hopes of chance success."


The same dictionary calls an avantyurist "an unscrupulous person who undertakes avantyury" (Neither word has much to do with "adventure" in the sense of traveling to Machu Picchu or bungee jumping, which in Russian is priklyucheniye.)


St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sobchak was widely denounced as an avantyurist when he dared in 1989 to challenge Mikhail Gorbachev for the Soviet presidency.


That same year many establishment types began using avantyurist to describe disgraced former Politburo member Boris Yeltsin, whose rambling, grass-roots campaign for the Russian parliament was interspersed with an adventure or two.


Yeltsin has traveled the road from avantyurist back to establishment, as evidenced by a recent remark by State Duma speaker Ivan Rybkin.


Rybkin dismissed anyone trying to unseat Yeltsin by means of early elections as an avantyurist and a politikan.


Like avantyurist, a politikan is an "unscrupulous politician, and in general a cunning and unprincipled person, who acts out of petty motives."


Politicians, or politiki, have always been seen in Russia as a casteof rather unsavory individuals, a view summed up by Alexander Suvorov, the undefeated general of Catherine the Great and Pavel I, who once said Politika ? tukhloye yaitso: "Politics is a rotten egg."