An piece in this week’s New Republic, not available for free online,
talks about the large Russian community around Brighton Beach, in New
York state. There’s a fierce battle going on between two Russian-
speakers for the Democratic nomination (and hence the seat in November).
The Russian community, interestingly, have been excluded from the
political process in the past, and that has bred in them a sort of
apathy that I find quite recognisable from disengaged people in the
UK. The speaker is Gene Borsh, a voter-education activist who works
with the Russians in Brighton Beach:
“The result is this terrible apathy.What will my vote
change?” He summed up the communal affliction as “pofigism,” a one-of-
a-kind Russian neologism that roughly translates as “I-don’t-give-a-
shit-ism.” Borsh’s colleague Marina Belotserkovsky described it as
trepidation before the unknown that became expressed as disdain: “We
stand apart—we don’t get involved in the things these idiots do.”
Pofigism – a word we have use for.