|| -----Original Message-----
|| From: Chris Doss
||
|| I'm going to stop sending stuff on this thread to the list, as
|| it probably
|| has little interest to anyone but my interlocuter.
No go on, I'm interested too.
|| USSR fell apart. English was not a commonly studied subject in
|| the Soviet
|| Union -- hell, Bulgarian or Moldovan was more useful than
|| English. Moreover,
A lot of Soviet technicians came to Turkey in the 70's and it seemed to me that many of them were German speakers. I also see a lot of German-speaking Russians on Deutsche Welle. Also, thinking back to when the wall came down, my impression was most FSU people interviewed by the EU media spoke German. Am I right?
|| though Soviet education in general was superb (and Russian
|| education still
|| is; I have never seen a more highly educated group of people in
|| my life --
And one gift of capitalism was to give FSU women with PhD's the chance to earn a better living abroad, though their degrees had nothing to do with it, sad to say. In Turkey they're called "Natashas". I used to work in the digital dept of a photo studio here; many of our fashion models were from the FSU (cheaper), and many of them had postgrad degrees.
|| (Speaking of classes, one thing I like about Russia is that,
|| outside of some
|| ritsy apartment complexes, cities aren't divided into working
|| class/middle
|| class/poor neighborhoods. Factory workers/teachers/lawyers/managers/the
|| unemployed all share the same buildings. Russia doesn't
|| ghettoize its poor,
|| at least not yet.)
Same here: With my modest income I share the same street with a number of big shots in mansions with flash cars and security cameras. Some of their other neighbors are even poorer, living in rotting wooden houses. But it's really not so remarkable; there are a lot of unsegregated cities, or parts of cities, in Europe. Walk around Amsterdam's tourist circuit and you'll surely come across a red-lit worker in fishnets sitting in her window next door to a bourgie, also on full public display (they don't draw their curtains over there), reading his krantje or sipping his kopje.
Hakki