Boris V. Shekhtman, Who Taught Russian to Journalists and Diplomats, Dies at 77<br />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<br />that How to Impro<br />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<br />and a former journalist and diplomat, described the technique in an email.<br />"The first time I met Boris he didn’t talk at all about language," Lucian Pugliaresi, a former National<br />Security Council official in the Reagan administration, told The New York Times in 2001.<br />Clines wrote that Appreciation for the ordinary people, not the commissars<br />and party hacks, was the ultimate truth a correspondent could finally get out of that benighted place,<br />Taubman said that On another day,
