PARTING SHOTS Russians on Yeltsin's passing
The death of a great statesman, however flawed he or she might have been, is an occasion for soft-focus nostalgia. But Boris Yeltsin's passing isn't stirring up any warm fuzzies in the hearts of his countrymen—at least not the ones who now reside in the Russian immigrant-dominated Brighton Beach neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York.
Monday Radar took a long subway ride from Manhattan to find out how the Slavic population is reacting to the death of a man who deserves much of the credit, and even more of the blame, for the Motherland's present condition. Here's what they said ...
"Oh, it's about time. I've known him for 30 or 40 years, and I've never seen him sober. I didn't know him personally, of course, but back when I worked for an oil company in Donetsk, and Yeltsin was the Party secretary in Sverdlovsk, we had to go to him to approve every order of metal, supplies, everything, and he was never there. He was always at his dacha."—Dina, a hefty, sixty-ish woman with bleached-blonde hair, interviewed on the boardwalk, where she was eating sunflower seeds