The answer to the last is: you bet it's important, because the words deal with the new relationship between Russia and the other republics of the former Soviet Union. Tension on the border of Ukraine and Russia, for example -- with Moscow claiming influence over ethnic Russian brethren within Ukraine -- cannot be reported without the use of this big diplomatic term.
A fishhook in this space last month, citing a few not-so-early uses of near abroad -- the best translation of the Russian blizhneye zarubezhye -- drew some nibbles from sources more adept than me at the use of data bases.
The earliest use in Nexis, Fred Shapiro of New Haven writes, is an article in The Russian Press Digest of June 9, 1992, titled "Near Abroad Wants to Be Far"; by Dec. 7 of that year, Strobe Talbott -- then a Time magazine columnist, now Deputy Secretary of State -- had picked up the troublesome phrase: "Many Russians have not yet been able to accept the idea that the 14 non-Russian republics of the U.S.S.R. are today independent foreign countries. Russian politicians have even coined a new phrase -- the near abroad -- to distinguish between the former republics and the rest of the world."
Meanwhile, Mary V. McGlynn of Brussels was searching News Retrieval, a Dow Jones product, and scorning that service's discouraging word that near was a linking word used in searching and not usable as a keyword. She found: "With regard to conflict situations in countries of the near abroad," wrote Sovinfolink, The Soviet Press Digest, on Aug. 20, 1992, summarizing in English a piece in Nezavisimaya Gazeta, " [ Russian Foreign Minister Andrei ] Kozyrev is critical about attempts to threaten neighbors."
An earlier Kozyrev use was found by Paul Brock, a consultant for Dialog, Knight-Ridder's data retrieval service: "Foreign Minister Kozyrev warns that every Russian gesture of 'heroic patriotism' will trigger Russophobia in Ukraine," Mark Frankland wrote in The Observer on April 26, 1992, "and the rest of what Moscow now calls 'the near abroad,' that is the old Soviet Union."
That's the printed-citation winner so far of that phrase in English. Other translators in early 1992 were reaching for the best way to handle the Russian idea. Roger Donway, managing editor of Orbis in Philadelphia, culled the Foreign Broadcast Information Service for its translations of the Russian phrase. On Jan. 15, 1992, Izvestiya referred to "the concept of 'abroad close at hand,' " putting the phrase in quotation marks. Tass, on April 9, 1992, used "nearby foreign lands"; three days later, the Moscow Russian Television Network spoke of what the broadcast information service reported as "countries not far abroad, as they call it." Later that month, Interfax, in English, wrote of "the emergence of a new geopolitical entity, which is often referred to as the Near Foreign Countries."
The seminal phrase, blizhneye zarubezhye, was obviously giving translators a hard time. Blizhneye is the neuter of blizhniy, an adjective meaning "near" (Near East is Blizhniy Vostok), but "zarubezhye is a noun with no English equivalent," writes Kenneth Katzner of Washington, author of the English-Russian, Russian-English Dictionary, based on American English. "It is built around rubezh, a word meaning 'border.' The prefix za means 'beyond.' "
Mr. Katzner thinks that the translation near abroad, with or without capitals, is an abomination because abroad is essentially an adverb that should not be preceded by a modifier, and that the translator is someone "we should string up by his heels," apparently an old authoritarian custom.
This position is countered by Christian Caryl of Berlin, who writes: "Both German and Russian routinely and naturally use abroad as a noun. When confronted with near abroad for the first time, I remember wondering how I'd translate it into English, where abroad is so strictly adjectival -- the 'nearby foreign countries'? Imagine my delight when I began to see others blithely breaking the rules. Now abroad has entered English as a noun."
My Berlin correspondent says he noted in his diary on June 7, 1991, this explanation of the concept in Russian: " 'The term originally had an ironic nuance,' said the historian Ivan Ivanovich. 'People spoke of nastoyashchyeye za rubezhye, "the present-day abroad." But now the words have acquired a purely informational meaning, in order to distinguish the new states of the C.I.S. [ Commonwealth of Independent States, a title now in the dustbin of history ] from the "original" abroad.' "
To follow up the history of the phrase in Russian, without citations: "Near abroad was used extensively by Soviet dissidents in the 1970's and 80's," notes Terry Thompson of Ellicott City, Md. "Russians under Brezhnev used the expression in either ironic or wistful tones. The serious connotation of the phrase was that the Russian people had to sacrifice a higher standard of living to support their 'socialist comrades' everywhere."
William Bodie of Los Angeles first heard the expression in January 1992 from Paul Goble of the Carnegie Endowment as a term in use throughout political Moscow referring to the non-Russian republics of the recently defunct U.S.S.R. He sees the phrase as political rather than geographical or demographic.
"Rightly or wrongly," Mr. Bodie writes, "Russia's political classes have difficulty viewing the republics on its periphery as fully sovereign entities; use of the term near abroad, in addition to qualifying their independence, signifies to the 'far abroad' that Russia claims certain rights in the region that transcend traditional diplomatic conventions."
Many of the people in those adjacent countries, especially the non-Russians, reject this heavy-handed Russian version of the Monroe Doctrine that some Moscow officials call a "hen gathering up its chicks."
Mr. Bodie notes, "In Riga, Kiyiv and a dozen other capitals, the chicks consider Russian policy to be the Roosevelt Corollary as interpreted by Ivan the Terrible."
Thus, what we know so far about this most significant diplomatic coinage since the popularization of detente in the early 70's is that it made the jump into English in early 1992, and that near abroad means "the claim by Russia of political interest and influence in states adjacent to it that were once part of the Soviet Union." Some political lexicographers (namely, me) insist that it has a second sense of "ethnic Russians living as a minority, sometimes supposedly oppressed, outside the borders of Russia."
