tovarish

plural tovarishes · alternative tovarishch · alternative tovarisch · alternative tovarich

1. Comrade, especially with reference to the former USSR.

   The tovarishes bring along their harmonicas and balalaikas, their good voices and their good humor.

   1999, Livia Bitton-Jackson, I Have Lived a Thousand Years: Growing Up in the Holocaust, Simon Pulse, →ISBN

   4 more examples

   Instead of addressing them according to revolutionary etiquette as Tovarish (comrade), he asked them their Christian names and that of their fathers, while telling them his own.

   1919 December 6, The Times, p.10 col. C

   Touching one of them on the shoulder, she said, “Tovarish, these tovarishes want to know who you are.”

   1938, Margaret Sanger, Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography

   Jensen laughed, “My wife complains: ‘All day long they ring our door bell. Tovarish here, tovarish there. They come from Moscow, from Leningrad, from Berlin and Hamburg. They don't speak one word of Danish. Comrade Jensen, they say, fix us up with Danish passports.’ So it goes.″

   1940, Jan Valtin, Out of the Night, Kessinger Publishing Company, published 2005, page 436

   His Russian was derived from a fortnight's crash course. "You'd better see what this ah tovarish thinks he wants."

   1989, Anthony Burgess, “Pedwar”, in Any Old Iron, London: Hutchinson, →ISBN; republished New York, N.Y.: Washington Square Press, Pocket Books, 1990, →ISBN, page 173