Fast decline of the Communist party authority, violent ethnic conflicts, perestroika and, finally, the disintegration of the USSR – all the social upheavals that led to the crash of the ‘last empire’ have triggered sweeping changes in the Russian language. Linguists agree that one of the most salient of these changes is the activation of foreign words and phrases, in particular those borrowed from English (see, e.g. Kolesov, 1998; Kostomarov, 1994; Nesterskaia, 1997; Shaposhnikov, 1998). And this process is not limited to new borrowings but includes rejuvenation of lexemes absorbed by Russian earlier (Krysin, 1996: 142).

Material for this chapter was drawn from the media and Internet publications, and from literature in humanities and social sciences. In addition, since 1999 I have been recording Anglicisms in the speech of various interlocutors in Russia. I made notes about the context in which English insertions occurred and extralinguistic data that were relevant to the situations in which they occurred. Besides, my archive contains newspaper clippings with ads and cartoons, as well as photographs of the street signs, billboards and posters taken in Moscow and St. Petersburg. As data collection was not systematic and the initial criterion for selecting material for analysis was intuition of a native Russian speaker, I filtered the sample after consulting linguistic literature on language contact, bilingualism, foreign borrowings in Russian, as well as various dictionaries. The collected examples were divided into groups on the basis of the following categories: motivation for borrowing, semantic domains, semantic reanalysis and stages of integration into the language system. My primary concern was to trace the interaction of linguistic, social and cultural factors accompanying the current wave of massive borrowing from English to Russian. This seems to be of special interest in the period when post-Soviet Russian society is reassessing its position on the East–West axis.