>>From: Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>
>>
>>It appears that Russians don't share your appreciation for Gorbachev at
>>all.
WWW.left.ru is weird, but anyway this is not an atypical Russian attitude... This should really have been edited. It's such Russified English...
Why I don't like Gorby By Irina Malenko
… Nobody in Ireland has asked our opinion while inviting him into this country. Yes, I know for quite a while already that our voices do not really matter here, but never yet was it so blatantly obvious as it is today.
How would the Irish people feel if Oliver Cromwell was granted freedom of Moscow? Any objections? Why not – he is a real historical figure and was very progressive at his time…
At the last Russian presidential elections in which he dared to participate, the Darling of the West, Mr. Gorby received just 0.51% of the vote. Not in a single region of my home country did he get even 2%. So, when I am expressing my opinion now, this isn't just my opinion. It is an opinion of the majority of my people, whenever you like it or not.
My relatives were lucky. If I was in Dublin on the 9th of January this year, the chances were big that I would follow the destiny of the Latvian schoolgirl Alina Lebedeva who is now facing 15 years in prison – for having symbolically hit British prince Charles on his face with carnation flowers – “flowers of the Revolution”, as we call them.
…Interesting, how many years can you get for this in Ireland?…
… I wouldn't choose carnations. Id pick up beautiful roses. With as sharp thorns as possible. Well, Mr. Gorbachev should have been used to it by now: it has happened to him several times in his home country where he appears now so seldom that we even started thinking that he has emigrated for good. Once, a young lady was giving him a bunch of roses, then she quickly turned it upside down I smashed him on his smiling face. And another time, it was a young man who has lost everything because of those “reforms” for which the West is so grateful to Mr. Gorby: work, security in life, opportunity to study, ability not to be afraid that you won’t be able to afford to be sick (do you know that in some parts of my country nowadays they already operate you without anaesthetics if you can’t pay in dollars?) ; basically, any form of a decent life for a human being for himself and for his children. He has powerfully hit the cheek of The Ex-Comrade Who Was Dreaming To Be Mister all his life, saying: “I have been dreaming to do that for a long time!”
http://left.ru/inter/january/malenko.html
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