Learning Russian From ‘Boris Badenov’

Learning Russian From ‘Boris Badenov’
Bill Keller, who covered the Soviet Union for The Times before becoming its executive editor: The thing
that made Boris a brilliant teacher, I think, was that he knew what you knew — he knew precisely where you were on the learning curve, so he could begin every lesson by pushing you higher.
Steven Lee Myers, former Moscow bureau chief; now a Beijing correspondent: I read this sad news on
an island — which those who have worked with Boris will appreciate — while studying Mandarin.
Just the other day I asked my tutor how to say the equivalent of Boris’s "Chto vy imeyete vvidu?" ("What do you mean?") — the question
he insisted you ask instead of saying, "Sorry, I don’t understand." The latter, he insisted, correctly, was a conversation killer.
For more than 30 years, the Soviet émigré Boris V. Shekhtman taught Russian to budding Moscow correspondents on assignment for The New York Times.
Felicity Barringer, former national environmental correspondent; wife of Philip Taubman: Bill is right — Boris’s genius was knowing what you knew.
Boris looked uncannily like Boris Badenov, the bad guy in "Rocky and His Friends" and "The Bullwinkle Show," popular cartoons of the early 1960s.