Hi Joy
I'm not sure how useful Russian will be in the former Soviet republics. They were all required to learn Russian in school and all street signs were bilingual (Russian + the native language) - there was and still is a lot of resentment toward Russians.
I was there as a guest of the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1979, and spoke Russian pretty well at the time. Except for people from Ukraine, every non-Russian I met refused to speak Russian. When I arrived in Vilnius with my personal KGB agent, I was greeted at the airport by the director of the institute I was scheduled to visit. He spoke Lithuanian and had a translator who put his words into English. I replied in Russian. He looked me in the eye and asked me in German if I could speak German. I could, and told him so. "Good", he said (in German). "We will speak German. Russian is a foreign language."
Two years ago, I visited Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania. The anti-Russian sentiments were still obvious, and expressed openly. Educated people all spoke English or German in addition to their native language.
Anyway, if you still want a Russian speaking lackey, nobody works for less than I do.
Steve Price
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