How to use the genitive case to show possession in Russian?

The idea of possession, or ownership, can be expressed in a number of ways in Russian, but the genitive case is involved in most of them. Generally, the owner or possessor will be in the genitive case. For example:

In this post, we will look at how to use the genitive case in all of these structures in Russian sentences. Keep reading to find out more!

To translate a noun phrase with the possessive -’s in English into Russian, you will most often use the genitive case. So in a phrase like “the president’s cat,” the owner is expressed using the genitive case, as are any words that must agree with the owner’s case. For example:

As you can see, when you form these phrases in Russian, the possessor comes after the thing that is possessed, rather than before it.

The case of the possessed noun is determined by the sentence context. So if “Molly’s car” is the subject, then “car” will be nominative, but if it’s in another position in a sentence, it can come in a different case.

In Russian, we translate phrases using “of + possessor” the same way we translate the possessive -’s — by using the genitive case. As we saw above, the “possessor” is marked as genitive. In this case, the possessor is the noun that would normally follow “of” in English.

Here are a few examples.

Although the word иметь (transcribed iMYET, meaning “to have”) does exist in Russian, it is hardly ever used to express possession in speech. Instead, Russians prefer to express ownership using a phrase like у меня есть (transcribed oo miNYA yest), which literally means something like “by me there is…”

When using this construction, the possessor will always be in the genitive case, while the thing that is owned is nominative.

So here’s how to express possession when the owner is a pronoun in Russian:

When the “owner” is a noun or a noun phrase, you need to change the noun’s endings (as well as the endings of any words that agree with that noun) to make them genitive case:

Here are some examples of how Russians would say “had” or “will have” in colloquial speech:

In Russian, we usually express that someone “doesn’t have” something using a similar structure to the one we saw above, except that in these negative sentences you will use the genitive case twice — for both the possessor and the possession.

Of course, you also need to use нет (transcribed nyet, meaning “to not be”) instead of есть (transcribed yest, meaning “to be”), or the past or future forms of it.

Here are a few more examples of the use of the genitive case in such structures:

In this post, you have seen that you often need the genitive case in Russian to express possession. Here are the takeaways:

• When a noun owns or possesses another noun in Russian it will be in the genitive case.

• To express the possessive -’s or the possessive with “of” in Russian, put the owned thing first and then the possessor in the genitive case.

  genitive case

  сумка моей сестры

  Transcription: SOOMka maYEY sistRY

  Translation: my sister’s bag

  цвет сумки

  Transcription: tsvyet SOOMki

  Translation: the color of the bag

• To express that someone “has” something, you will usually use a sentence structure which literally translates to “By [possessor] there is a [possession].”

  • In a positive sentence, the possessor is genitive and the possession is nominative:

    genitive casenominative case

    У моей сестры есть синяя сумка.

    Transcription: oo maYEY sistRY yest SEEnyaya SOOmka

    Translation: My sister has a blue bag.

  • In a negative sentence, both the possessor and the possession are genitive:

    genitive case

    У моей сестры нет синей сумки.

    Transcription: oo maYEY sistRY тнуе SEEney SOOmki

    Translation: My sister does not have a blue bag.

Now that you know everything about the use of the genitive case to express possession, you can put all this knowledge into practice with the genitive case of possession in Russian below!