In recent years, this term can be found on the pages of the press, heard on radio and television. Its meaning is " the mass extermination of Jews during the Second World War "(Krysin L. P. Explanatory Dictionary of Foreign Words, Moscow, 1998), "the death of a significant part of the Jewish population of Europe - during the systematic persecution and extermination by the Nazis and their accomplices in Germany and in the territories occupied by it in 1933-45" (Dictionary of Human Rights Moscow; Ryazan, 1997). The topic of the Holocaust has recently been discussed from different angles: from the socio-psychological (how did the extermination of such a large number of representatives of one nation become possible in the XX century?), ethical and moral (why did Europe "keep silent", knowing about the persecution of Jews in Germany?), religious side (is Christianity guilty and responsible as a religion for the extermination of Jews and Jews?).

The term Holocaust has long been known in European languages. Its etymological source is the Greek compound word holocaustos: holos "whole, whole, completely", kaustos "burning" < kaiein "to burn"; in late Latin, this form appears as holocaustum. Even in the biblical (Old Testament) history, the Jews had several types of sacrifices: the burnt offering, the sin offering, the guilt offering, the salvation or peace offering, the bloodless sacrifice, the purification offering, the jealousy offering, the drink offering; thus, the sacrificial procedure itself was carefully developed and lexically assigned to the corresponding designations in the absence of a single generalizing name. In unusual or extreme situations, sacrifices were sometimes made in huge numbers: from history it is known that Solomon sacrificed 22 thousand oxen and 120 thousand sheep at the consecration of the temple (Christianity. Encyclopedia, vol. I. M., 1993, p. 541).

In the New Testament, the very concept of the Old Testament sacrifice is reinterpreted: specifically, a physical sacrifice to God is replaced

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the sacrament of Communion, or the Eucharist (the first experience of this is at the Last Supper). The Greek noun holocaustos was used in the Bible to refer to the Jewish burnt offering. The procedure for this type of sacrifice consisted in burning everything in the sacrificial animal (it was considered only "clean", for example, goats and sheep, young bulls, at least 7 days from birth, and pigeons from birds), except for the skin that belonged to the priest. This sacrifice symbolized that the sacrificer gives God all of himself: both soul and body.

In the XII century, the Greek word enters the French language - holocauste (first mentioned in 1170 - "Book of Kings"). In this special sense, this word was used in French for quite a long time, until at the end of the XVII century it did not have a generalized meaning - "any sacrifice made in this way" (that is, by burning). It can be seen that this meaning referred the reader's mind to the biblical story and was associated with the native speaker's background knowledge. At the same time, the word develops a meaning that is no longer motivated by Jewish biblical history - "sacred blood sacrifice, execution performed for religious purposes" in the context of mentioning ancient beliefs and rituals of druids. However, the new meaning associated with the mass extermination of Jews during World War II has only been introduced into French, as in Russian, only in recent years from English.

In the Old Slavonic monuments of writing, two designations were used to convey the Greek term: barbarism olokautomata (Greek: barbarism olokautomata). ta olokautomata, plural - "burnt offerings" as a synonym for the concept of "sacrifice "(zhtva); see: Old Slavonic dictionary. Moscow, 1994. p. 411) and calques-participle-adjective vseszhagaem, noun vseszhzhenie (ibid., pp. 162-163). In the Old Russian language, these forms are also found, especially in the oldest translations or lists made from South Slavic manuscripts, and they are also used in the works of Old Russian authors (Kirill Turovsky). An attempt to get into the Greek designation from the content side is seen in new derivatives or new meanings that have appeared on the soil of the Russian language: burnt offering "that which is sacrificed" (Genad. The Bible, 1499), the burnt-offering "place of sacrifice" (ibid.), all-incinerators. view to Staroslav. burnt offerings "to offer as a sacrifice to God, burning something completely "(Mardariya Khonikova verses to the Front Bible.., XVIII century). It is in the Gennadiev Bible that the form olokaust (or olokaustum as a graphic rendering of the Latin holocaustum) is first recorded in Russian.

In the XVIII century, the forms of burnt offering, burnt offering, burnt offering became stylistically marked, characteristic of high bookishness. Interestingly, the word burnt offering was kept in the language for quite a long time.

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for a long time: as long as the Bible was assigned the role of a subject for compulsory education or active reading. The term is also recorded in Ushakov's Dictionary, accompanied by a characteristic mark - " knizhn.(oe) history.(historical) relig.(ioznoe)", BAS-1 gives it only for one purpose: to illustrate the use of" from Pushkin to the present day"; BAS-2 already excludes this designation from its composition.

The form of olokaust (um) as incomprehensible goes out of use even in biblical texts, becoming only a fact of the history of the Russian language and ancient translated literature. The return of this word to the Russian language after a long time is associated with extralinguistic factors. which will be discussed later.

In English, the word holocaust has been known since the 13th century; until the end of the 15th century, it was used only in the biblical sense. Since the end of the 15th century. its meaning expands, and it means a sacrifice, a gift to God in general, without associations with the obligatory burning in the fire. It was only in the 1940s, at the height of World War II, that the first references to the word holocaust appeared in the English press (most often in a metaphorical, allegorical sense) in relation to the Jews of Germany, but these uses were still clearly peripheral to the language and did not enter into speech usage. However, the activation of the word was promoted by historians who in the 50s, after the Nuremberg trials of 1945-1946. (international Court of Justice over Fascism), began to widely use this designation. Thus, having originated in the bowels of journalism, it soon got into professional speech.

The first use of the word Holocaust in the Russian language in a new meaning is the end of the 80s-beginning of the 90s: "[The Jewish people] suffered monstrous losses as a result of Hitler's Holocaust..."(Nash sovremennik. 1991. N 3); "The word' holocaust 'itself is extremely imaginative and powerful, and is interpreted most often as 'incinerating annihilation'. it became a symbol of the great sacrifices and sufferings of the Jewish people during the years of fascism "(St. Petersburg Vedomosti. 1998. 2 Sep.). True, the graphic form in English and its pronunciation norm provoke two types of spelling and pronunciation in Russian-Holocaust and Holocaust: "In Greek, "holocaust "("holocaust "is the English pronunciation) means"sacrifice by complete burning". All over the world, April 23 is the Day of Remembrance of Jewish Victims of the Holocaust "(Izvestia. 1998. 23 Apr.). There is also a variant of holocost (holocust) as an attempt to convey the European aspirative [h] to the Russian explosive [g]; the variant holokost corresponds to the traditions of the Russian spelling system when transmitting foreign-language borrowings with the initial [h]. The form holokost indicates a loosening of spelling norms, but compliance with the graphic appearance of a foreign-language word will obviously ensure its place in the Russian language.
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Nowadays, foreign-language borrowings, often without understanding their internal form, meaning, and original meaning, are beginning to adapt in the Russian language in the most unusual (or even ugly) way. The mentioned designation has already acquired a broad interpretation, not correlating in any way with the etymon, reflecting only an approximate, inaccurate understanding of the meaning: "Is an electronic holocaust waiting for us?" (If. 1998. March 30); compare also the use of this word as a proper name when referring to the scientific and educational center "Holocaust" in Moscow.

A related concept is the term genocide, which is used in European languages as recently, but more developed than the Holocaust. Genocide is a word made up of Greek. genos "genus, tribe" and the suffix -cide, which came to English, most likely, from the French language:- cide and goes back to the Latin suffix -cidium,- cida when referring to a person who committed a murder, or the desire for destruction, extermination (from the verb caedo "kill" < caedere "kill"); literally genocide - "destruction, murder of a clan, tribe". The word entered European languages from English; the first use is during the Second World War, the contexts are also associated with the description of fascist crimes. At first, it had to be interpreted. In English sources, it was explained as follows:" the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group "(destruction of nations or ethnic groups)," the extermination of racial and national groups " (extermination of racial or national groups - The Oxford English Dictionary. V. 6. Oxford, 1989. P.445). Public attention was drawn to this concept during the trial of Nazism (the Nuremberg trials in 1945-1946). In 1948, the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crimes of Genocide was adopted, which established the criminal liability of those responsible for this crime.

The word genocide quickly entered the Russian language, its first fixation - in the " Dictionary of Foreign Words "(1949). Modern dictionaries give such a definition of the meaning - " extermination of individual groups of the population, entire peoples for political, racial, national or religious reasons "(Big Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian language. SPb. 1998). In modern usage (especially in journalistic language, where the meaning shifts are most significant), there are figurative or expansive uses of the word (for example, when referring to the decline in the standard of living of people during the years of perestroika, harassment of people in general - even in the workplace, etc.).

Before the words genocide and Holocaust appeared, the Russian language used the concepts of "pogrom" and "massacre", for example, in relation to Armenians and Jews. Social circumstances contributed to updating the content of the concept of "pogrom" and giving it a socio-political sound. when in 1881, after the assassination attempt on Alexander II.

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it fell on the Jews. Looting of Jewish-owned stores and beating up people began. Later, pogroms were repeated in Russia in 1903-1917, in Turkey in 1915 against Armenians, in Germany against Jews (1938-1945; the latter designation gave way to the term Holocaust, and Jewish pogroms became only harbingers of this terrible phenomenon).

Another designation with a similar meaning is a massacre: "a fight to the death, a battle or murder with cold weapons, a great bloodshed" (V. I. Dahl. Explanatory dictionary of the living Great Russian language). The relationship between the concepts of "pogrom" and "massacre" is generic: the former is more general in meaning (generic), the latter (specific) is included in the content of the former. The first term - pogrom-has entered other languages in Russian form, without translation; this term is also used in international law - for example, in the Dictionary of Human Rights (authors A. D. Jongman and A. P. Schmid), the concept of "pogrom" is lexically designated by the Russian word-pogrom, in contrast to the concept of "massacre"- English massacre. Evidently, one of the first historical references that allowed the term "massacre" to enter the European political lexicon is St. Bartholomew's Night: a mass massacre by Huguenot Catholics on the night of August 24, 1572 in Paris, organized by Catherine de ' Medici and the Guises, representatives of the French aristocratic family. That night and the next few days, about 2,000 people died in Paris alone, and at least 5,000 in the whole of France. When news of such a brutal mass murder reached Muscovy, Tsar Ivan the Terrible condemned the religious massacre of innocent people.

In Soviet times, the terms pogrom and massacre were used with an ideological purpose-or in relation to the methods of solving the national question in the pre-revolutionary (tsarist, landowner, noble, police, Black Hundred...) Russia, or to characterize the imperialist approach to the national problem-both in contrast to the Soviet, socialist one. Modern discourse has changed the pragmatic orientation of these designations, returning them from the periphery of the language to the center of the lexical system. Here are just a few newspaper excerpts: Lithuania joined the EU statement on the massacre in Kosovo; the Yugoslav authorities blame KFOR and the UN civilian mission in Kosovo for the massacre in Staro Gradsko; French journalists also suggest that Albanians moved many of the corpses of victims of atrocities and they themselves committed a massacre on them; newly arrived refugees, Almost exclusively composed of women, children, and the elderly, there was talk of a massacre in Meja; the first hypothesis was that the massacre was a "blood feud" for the recent execution of a group of Jordanians in Iraq; such cynical actions of the rioters would hardly have been possible if they had been killed in Iraq.

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In the Latvian society, militant xenophobia was not inculcated from day to day, people would not be divided into "friends" and "strangers"; the rioters chose the city synagogue as their target, etc. These quotes show that in the journalistic and general language, the semantic boundaries between the words pogrom and massacre are often blurred due to the proximity of meanings that form the main meaning of these words. the structure of the meaning of terms, so it is so easy to replace them. The special language also uses the combined term "genocidal massacre", but it has not yet penetrated the pages of journalism.

New terms that have literally burst into the Russian language in recent years are the terms ethnocide and ethnic cleansing (ethnic cleansing). Both names are borrowed from the English language (or rather, its American version). The term ethnocide is formed on the model of the word genocide: Greek ethnos "people" + suffix -cide. It is the modeling of the term ethnocide according to the already existing structure that sometimes provokes its synonymization with the term genocide, but in international practice, ethnocide most often refers not to the physical extermination of people (genocide), but to the destruction of the culture of the people (Dictionary of Human Rights, Moscow; Ryazan, 1997). The appearance of the term was caused, in particular, by the discussion at the 39th All-American Congress on Indians (1970, Lima) of the problem of extermination of several tens of thousands of Indians in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso.

The term ethnic cleansing (more often-in the plural form) in Russian is a tracing paper of the English ethnic cleansing. In European politics, attention to the term began to revive in connection with the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992-1995; this name denoted the tactics of the Serbian militia, Croats and Bosnians in seizing new territories and strengthening their positions in the occupied lands, accompanied by murder, rape, torture of people, and maiming them. The phrase ethnic cleansing, which was activated in the early 1990s and was initially associated mainly with Serbs, is now very widely used. For example, here are typical phrases from journalism: ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia; genocide-ethnic cleansing in Abkhazia: figures, facts; the Congress of the peoples of Chechnya and Dagestan is ready to send a special brigade to Kosovo to prevent ethnic cleansing carried out by the Yugoslav authorities; Serbian radicals accused the international peacekeeping forces exchanged in Kosovo of condoning ethnic cleansing: the head of the Serbian The Orthodox Church and church and political leaders of the Kosovo Serbs have called on the US President, the UN and NATO to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. In contrast to the term ethnocide (used in scientific discourse), this designation behaves actively as in modern medicine.

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both in journalism and in Russian speech usage, freely used not only in public, but also in colloquial and literary speech.

In this article, we did not address the words denoting other forms of oppression - deportation, forced relocation (eviction), exile, exile (which became more active in the journalism of the mid-80s and early 90s), but only touched on the history of some concepts that name the most brutal and bloody forms of national oppression. However, even with such a small amount of material, it is clear that in the XX century, in the sphere of designating interethnic relations and - in particular - related to the extermination, extermination of representatives of another people, nationality, nationality, in the Russian language,there was a refinement of old concepts (pogrom, massacre) or replenishment of the lexicon (due to foreign borrowings: direct - genocide, genocide). ethnocide, the Holocaust, and Kalkan - ethnic cleansing). Taken together, they describe different degrees and phases of national oppression, indicate a fragmentation of concepts in this area, designed to qualify racial discrimination as accurately as possible, but at the same time, in mastering them in the Russian language, there is a tendency to unify ideas in the field of human rights, determined not by class and political, but by universal values.

Saint-Petersburg

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