"the plebs" (плебс)

Chekhov's own word, reported secondhand as part of the account of the crowd that attacked gendarmes near Strastnoy Monastery to free arrested students during the 1890 disturbances. "Плебс" is a class-marked borrowing from Latin "plebs" (the common people, as opposed to the patriciate), carrying a distancing, faintly contemptuous or at least sociologically clinical register in Russian rather than a neutral word like "толпа" (crowd) or "народ" (people). Kept untranslated as "the plebs" per the corpus's no-softening policy -- translating it as "the crowd" or "the people" would erase the specific class framing that is the word's whole point, both in Chekhov's narration and in the crowd's own quoted taunt about flogging (\S13). Compare for the corpus's parallel handling of another class/ethnically marked term kept at full force.