ABSTRACT
The period from the second half of the 1980s to the early 1990s is comparable linguistically to the period after the October Revolution (the period after 1917). In both cases radical changes in social and political life gave a public voice to representatives of new social strata who lacked an adequate command of Russian and were at the same time relatively free of strict censorship and editorial constraint1. This resulted in the infiltration of official registers by colloquialisms and jargon and of colloquial registers by clichés and other elements of officialese. According to Shiriaev in Graudina et al. (1995:7), the post-Revolutionary threat to the language was averted by the efforts of linguists such as V.V.Vinogradov, G.O.Vinokur, L.V.Shcherba and others, and by politicians such as V.I.Lenin, who is credited with instigating the idea for the four-volume dictionary of standard Russian which was eventually compiled over the period 1935-40 under the direction of D.N.Ushakov.
