беспредел (bespredel)

What it means

1. 1.

   Lawlessness; conduct with no restraint of any kind. Used of police, officials, landlords, employers — anyone acting as though rules do not apply to them.

2. 2.

   One of the clearest cases of camp vocabulary entering the mainstream: in the prison world it named a specific offence, the breaking of the thieves' own code, and it kept that flavour of a broken agreement rather than a broken law.

Literally: without limits

Examples with translations

• Это уже полный беспредел, а не проверка.

  That's not an inspection, it's daylight robbery.

• В девяностые тут творился беспредел.

  In the nineties this place was completely lawless.

  Note: The nineties are the word's home decade and it is still most at home describing them.

Where it comes from

Camp argot of the Soviet penal system, from без предела 'without limit'. It crossed into ordinary Russian in the late 1980s and became one of the defining words of the following decade.

First attested: Soviet camp argot; mainstream from the late 1980s

Other forms

Romanised as:

bespredel