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In fact, an old view that all the Indo-Europeans started in the Caucasus helped give the name "Caucasian" to whites. Pushkin wrote a story called Kavkazskii plennik, which is usually translated something like "Captive of the Caucasus" instead of "Caucasian Captive" to avoid confusion.
Of course, fairly quickly the word spread to other language families, so that all Semitic speakers were also Caucasians.
Ethiopians and Somalis are Semitic speakers ("Semite" at one time also had the meaning "Semitic speaker"
, so that Ethiopians and Somalis were considered Caucasians, as well.
The word's otherwise shifted in meaning. Nobody seriously believes that all Caucasians originated in the Caucasus; nor that Ethiopians and Somalis were phenotypically of Caucasian racial stock, even though they still are Semitic speaking. Caucasians actually speak, well, mostly Caucasian languages, with some of the most complex consonant systems around (but often simplified vowel systems). The S. Ossetians are Caucasians but nonetheless Aryans in the older linguistic sense. They were SW Indo-European speakers, their language fairly closely related to Iranian languages; of course, "Iran" is ethymologically the same word as "Aryan". The Ossetians were the Sarmatians, perhaps Scythians, of yore.
As for Russian, chernyi means "black," but in a lot of cases it still just means "dark". I think of it as "swarthy" and if you're well tanned you're "dark". It's like Shulamith in the Song of Solomon, she worked in the fields so she wasn't fair. It's found not just in "black-and-white" tv but also in "back staircase" and "dirty work" and can mean "shifty"--and has for centuries. An old fashioned word for "asshole" (the actual opening) was "black hole", which was how some Russian astrophysicists took to referring to point singularities with gravitational fields strong enough to prevent light from escaping, and we anglophones picked up the word. I find that amusing. Even more amusing is the fact that the slang term picked up at conferences, made into an official astronomy term in English, was then the official Russian astronomy term. I find that even more amusing.
Other color terms have also changed their meanings over the years. English had no good word for "orange"--it apparently wasn't important to distinguish between orange and red until the 1600s. "Brown," IIRC, started off meaning "bright" and then moved to meaning "dark" before settling on the color we call brown now centuries ago. There's a whole typology of color systems--if you only have 4 color words, what are they going to be? If you have 5, how do you chop up the spectrum? Brown is not a common color; nor is orange.
A good example from Russian is "Red Square," which has nothing at all to do with "red". Krasivyi is the word for "pretty" or "beautiful." Notice that root, kras-. It shows up in words like krasit' "to paint, to color" and its derivatives. "Krasnyi" is the current word for "red"; but until the 1600s it just mean "pretty", as well. A house, an object could be krasnyi and completely not red.
Other than the monkey noises....right. 
Keep it classy Russian fans......
