ABSTRACT
Although 1917 has traditionally been regarded as a major watershed in the development of the Russian vocabulary, the language had in fact been evolving continuously since the end of the nineteenth century and into the early years of the twentieth, but had not undergone a thorough-going revolution. The previous period had been a time of intensive economic and technological progress, unremitting political movements, including the Revolution of 1905 and the First World War (1914-18), all of which stimulated lexical activity. The October Revolution of 1917 intensified certain processes in the Russian vocabulary: the removal of words from active use, the addition of new words to the vocabulary, semantic transformations and stylistic shifts.
