His what-in-law?

Students. Sometimes they amaze you.

For some reason, lots of people working with Russian absolutely quake before the ordeal of using a dictionary like Ozhegov, Dal', or the Bol'shoy Tol'kovyy - in other words, a Russian dictionary, one defining Russian words in Russian. Instead, they stick to the Russian-English dictionaries. And this leads to them into deep and often very strange waters.

For instance, in an article by Vladimir Pribylovsky about Medvedev's first two years in office is this paragraph concerning the split of the Southern Federal District, headed up by Vladimir Ustinov, creating a new district needing a new envoy:

Возможно, именно Медведев выступил с инициативой назначить главой нового Северо-Кавказского округа Александра Хлопонина. Подозреваю, Игорь Сечин не советовал Путину отнимать у своего свояка (дочь Сечина Инга - замужем за сыном Устинова Дмитрием) половину округа. А уж если отнимать, наверное, советовал назначить не Хлопонина, а кого-то другого. Но Путин, выслушав разные мнения, склонился к назначению Хлопонина.

It's probable that it was Medvedev's idea to appoint Aleksandr Khloponin to head the newly created North Caucasus Federal District. I doubt that Igor Sechin advised Putin to take away half of a district from his svoyak (Sechin's daughter Inga is married to Ustinov's son Dmitry). And if it had to be taken away, then most likely Sechin would have advised the appointment of someone other than Khloponin. But Putin, after listening to all his advisers, agreed to appoint Khloponin.

The word in question here is svoyak (свояк), which, so say all the Russian-English dictionaries (or at least the vast majority of them, and all the older, hard-copy ones), means "brother-in-law". Some of them get more specific and say "wife's sister's husband" - yes, Russian has a special word for that. It's got, in fact, four words where English has one; along with svoyak there's zyat' (зять), sister's husband; shurin (шурин), wife's brother; and dever' (деверь), husband's brother); with sister-in-law words to match.

But check that again: Sechin's daughter is married to Ustinov's son. Even if you don't realize that the head of the SFD is Vladimir Ustinov, not Dmitry, that wouldn't make him Sechin's brother in law. Sechin's daughter's husband isn't going to be any kind of brother-in-law to Sechin. (I'm pretty sure the Old Testament and the Orthodox Church have some prohibitions against that sort of thing.)

But that's what it says! they cry.

Yes - that is what is says. So maybe your Russian-English dictionary is missing something.

And in fact, if you check out Ozhegov, or Efremov, or others, you find this:

свояк 1. Муж свояченицы. 2. разг. то же, что свойственник
svoyak 1. husband of a svoyachenitsa (wife's sister) 2. coll. the same as svoystvennik

And any dictionary will tell you that svoystvennik is "a relative by marriage".

And that just makes so much more sense.

So the moral of the story is: don't be afraid of that Russian-Russian dictionary. You know Russian. Learn to read definitions in it.

(Original story in Russian here,, and a searchable collection of Russ-Russ dictionaries here)