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In Russian Empire the imperial court mostly spoke French so lower classes, aspiring to sound more like nobles, borrowed a whole lot of French words. Because of this many Slavic words now sound archaic or pretensions to a Russian speaker. E.g. тайна in Russian is more like 'enigma', definitely not 'classified/secret'.

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Thanks for this comment, this is exactly what I was wondering. It's similar to how Croatian adopted mostly English words for computer hardware, and the attempt by the government to push Slavic-rooted replacements ended up sounding silly.

> E.g. тайна in Russian is more like 'enigma', definitely not 'classified/secret'.

How about "государственная тайна" then?

It's an established idiom, same as военная тайна or, even better, тайный советник. Words that make up an idiom do not carry the same meaning outside one and vice versa.

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