Soviets Take Over U.S. Words

The Soviet Union adopted words as well as public relations techniques from the Americans at the summit between President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Briefing was one of the first words to be taken into the Russian language, about a year ago, when the Soviet Foreign Ministry began meeting regularly with correspondents in Moscow. In Russian, the new word sounds like breevink.

Now, as a result of this week’s events, press conference and press release have been Russified so they sound something like prezz konferenz and prezz relizz. Both new terms were used often during the Kremlin’s media offensive here.

Blackout was taken over by the French-speaking Swiss as well as by the Soviets after Reagan and Gorbachev decided to withhold reports on the substance of their meetings until Thursday’s closing ceremony.

New Term Coined

When Gorbachev decided to hold a news conference on the final day of his visit to Geneva, the Soviet officials coined a new Russian word: pressapul, which means exactly what it sounds like, press pool--a small group of reporters chosen at random to represent the entire press corps at an event and then file a report shared by the other journalists.

Soviet spokesman Vladimir B. Lomeiko, who speaks some English, clearly was annoyed at times by anti-Soviet remarks from people with journalist’s credentials.

He referred frequently to this as a violation of “journalistic rules,” but another Soviet official pulled another new word into the Russian language to explain what Lomeiko meant: Those dissidents disguised as reporters had violated the West’s tried and true groundrulz.