The paper considers the Russian culture-specific words which are repeatedly reproduced in Spanish newspaper discourse and modern literature and describe objects of everyday life related to the folk craftsmanship, some dishes of national cuisine, gambles, obsolete words, sovietisms and onomastic realia. The use of these language units in Spanish aims at making utterances (much) more expressive as well as at realizing the author’s different intentions. Moreover, it contributes to the formation of additional cultural senses, which are not peculiar to the Russian language. The important role of the associative culture-specific words, which are based on the background knowledge, is emphasized. The relevance of the present research consists in the detection of the associative potential of Russian borrowed words in the Spanish linguistic worldview.