Top Leaders
Russian top power sharing forced journalists to invent many terms in order to describe Putin and Medvedev’s duo: duumvirate, tandemocracy and even medveput. Recently I read a business letter where all above mentioned would look pretentious or over-ideological. I found there another term and I don’t know how to translate the flavour of it. There is expression in Russian: “первые лица” (“first faces”) meaning “top leaders” of a company, government etc. In the letter I saw all respect and laconism were put in capital letters so it was written “Russia’s Top Leaders” (Первые Лица РФ) which is particularly funny: along with Russian State Emblem (two-headed eagle) there is well-known expression “двуличие” which luckily has exact translation to English as “double-facedness”.
