Boris V. Shekhtman, Who Taught Russian to Journalists and Diplomats, Dies at 77
that If a guy wants to be able to talk in bed with his new Russian wife, this guy needs one vocabulary; but if he wants to deal in the Moscow oil b
that How to Impro
He said, ‘When you don’t speak the language over there, you have no power.’ " Mr. Shekhtman’s methods were intended for everyday face-to-face exchanges — like "two guys on a park bench," as Strobe Talbott, the president of the Brookings Institution
and a former journalist and diplomat, described the technique in an email.
"The first time I met Boris he didn’t talk at all about language," Lucian Pugliaresi, a former National
Security Council official in the Reagan administration, told The New York Times in 2001.
Clines wrote that Appreciation for the ordinary people, not the commissars
and party hacks, was the ultimate truth a correspondent could finally get out of that benighted place,
Taubman said that On another day,