ABSTRACT
There is only one past tense in Russian. However, both imperfective and perfective verbs can be used in the past tense. Imperfective verbs in the past tense describe an ongoing action, a general statement/fact or an action in progress. Perfective verbs in the past tense describe a completed single action or the result of an action that occurred in the past. Russian and English tenses do not fully correspond. Therefore, translation to/from English depends on understanding the context and meaning of the Russian verbal aspects. Past tense verbs do not conjugate (agree with a subject in person and number). Instead, all Russian past tense verbs function as short-form adjectives and agree with the subject of the sentence in gender and number. Both the imperfective and the perfective verbs are formed in the same way in the past tense. However, two different infinitives, imperfective and perfective, are used to form, respectively, imperfective and perfective past tense verbs.
