What does “sam sebe tsar” mean in Russian?
Почему молодые становятся социалистами
C1 Russian listening practice · Standard Russian · Picked for people who know a lot
Why do the young lean socialist? Political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann draws a sharp line. The grown adult, she says, quoting Brodsky, is «сам себе царь и верблюд» (“his own tsar and camel”), self-made and self-governing. The young are not yet: they live inside conditions built for them, by parents, by schools.
That’s her whole explanation: because the young depend on a system they didn’t create, fairness (справедливость) matters more to them than to the self-reliant adult. The idiom сам себе царь (“one’s own tsar”) means being fully your own master, beholden to no one, ruler and subject at once. Grow into being сам себе царь, she hints, and the politics tends to drift.
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Source: wordfreq 3.1.1 (general) · OpenSubtitles 2018 (HermitDave) (spoken). These numbers are close, not perfect.
- ▸On Russian humanities and lecture platforms where this kind of analysis lives, like Arzamas and PostNauka.
- ▸Behind the clip’s opening aphorism, traced by Quote Investigator and variously pinned on Guizot, Clemenceau, and Churchill.
- ▸Everyday Russian for being your own boss: сам себе хозяин, сам себе господин, сам себе режиссёр.
- ▸In Russian debate over why political views tend to shift with age.