troika

Noun

troika (plural troikas or troiki)

1. A Russian carriage drawn by a team of three horses abreast.
   • A great writer of the last epoch, comparing Russia to a swift troika galloping to an unknown goal, exclaims 'Oh, troika, birdlike troika, who invented thee!' and adds, in proud ecstasy, that all the peoples of the world stand aside respectfully to make way for the recklessly galloping troika to...1880, Constance Garnett, chapter VI, in The Brothers Karamazov, book XII, translation of original by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, page 787
   • When Gogol wrote his great passage on the troika speeding across the steppes, he likened it to Russia itself, advancing across the earth.1960, Lesley Blanch, The Sabres of Paradise: Conquest and Vengeance in the Caucasus, Tauris Parke Paperbacks, published 2006, →ISBN, page 145
2. A party or group of three, especially a ruling council of three people in Soviet or Russian contexts.
   • The investigator suspected the poor dead bastards were just a vodka troika that had cheerily frozen to death.1981, Martin Cruz Smith, Gorky Park, Ballantine Books, published 2007, →ISBN, page 3
   • The bare troika of Boolean operators brought them into metaphorical being.1995, Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2, New York, N.Y.: Farrar Straus Giroux, →ISBN, page 71

   Synonyms:

   threesome, government