Бежать
Бежать is the determinate (unidirectional) form of the verb бегать “to run.” It is one of the four most irregular verb stems in the Russian language:
| to run | |
| Imperfective | |
| Infinitive | бежать |
| Past | бежал бежала бежало бежали |
| Present | бегу бежишь бежит бежим бежите бегут |
| Future |
буду бежать будешь бежать будет бежать будем бежать будете бежать будут бежать |
| Imperative | беги(те) |
Бежать is more specialized than бегать in that it usually talks about motion in progress at a particular time:
| — Сынок, почему ты бежишь? — Борька сказал, что изобьёт меня! — Подойди к папе. Я тебя защищу. |
“Son, why are you running away?” “Boris said he was going to beat me up.” “Come to Daddy. I'll protect you.” |
| Когда я увидел Таню, она бежала через двор. | When I spotted Tanya, she was running across the courtyard. |
Although the verb does mean “to run,” it's actually used in conversation more often to mean “to take a quick trip” or “to be moving quickly” instead of literally running. The same is true for the English verb “to run” as well, of course.
| — Где мама? — Она бежит в магазин. |
“Where is Mom?” “She is taking a quick trip to the store.” |
| Как быстро бежит время! | How quickly time flies! |
The verb is also used in the sense of “to precede prematurely”:
| Русская зима бежит впереди прогноза. | The Russian winter is running ahead of forecast. |
| Паника бежит впереди фактов. (source) | Panic is setting in before the facts. |
And of course the verb is also used in the sense of “to flee”. Although in English the thing you flee from can be a direct object (“We fled Cuba in 1965”) or the object of the preposition ‘from’ (“We fled from Cuba in 1965”), in Russian the thing you flee from cannot be a direct object; it must be the object of the prepositions из/с/от followed by the genitive case:
| Население бежит с Дальнего Востока. (source) | The population is fleeing from the Far East. |
| Капитал бежит из доллара в золото. (source) | Investors are abandoning dollars for gold. (Lit., Capital is running from the dollar to gold. |
| Жена Лужкова бежит с рынка недвижимости Москвы. (source) | Luzhkov's wife is abandoning Moscow's real estate market. |
| Олигарх мобильной телефонии бежит из России. (source) | Mobile phone oligarch flees Russia. (newspaper headline) |
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