DIRTY WORDS.(Russia's street argot known as mat)

In the Russian State Duma building, at the center of Moscow, I showed my visitor's pass to a set of sullen guards, shot up to the fourteenth floor on an express elevator, and opened the door to a waiting room, where I discovered an Asian woman speaking on the phone in a language that sounded like Chinese. "Kaadyr-ool Alekseyevich is expecting you," she chirped, covering the mouthpiece of the phone with her hand.

Kaadyr-ool Alekseyevich Bicheldei, the State Duma deputy from the republic of Tuva, in the mountains of southern Siberia, had recently become famous throughout the country as the primary author of draft legislation designed to make Russian the only ...