We borrowed it from you guys, then. The proper Ukrainian word is actually "shmattya" and means a bunch of old rags literally. I think there was a lot of inter-borrowing between languages.

Yes,they did, didn't they?

Thank you! and yes! The Harvest of Sorrow - yes! That book! I cannot not tear up every time I recall just images from it. I do not need a book to learn of Holodomor though, my grandparents lived through it - just horrific, no words here really, no words…

precisely

Beets are good for you!

sadly not then. Two words : Walter Duranty

thank you!!

so true - they would not have any idea. But the irony - when they incredulously ask "how could the US go after food supplies?" - and yet the Stalin regime intentionally killed millions of Ukrainians by hunger for not falling in line with creation of "collective farms" instead of individual land/farm ownership

do soldiers in US Army exercise a modicum of independent thinking when ordered by their superiors?

do you feel bad about up to 200 civilians killed in US Mosul airstrikes?

Arex, I am not going to argue with you, you are missing the point. I responded to point out to my fellow Americans that Alexei did not live in "miserable" conditions in the USSR. (quote from a commenter: "having lived under terrible conditions")
Some might imagine his life was gloomy and bleak like making soup from a…

In this particular case, I think the symbolism is of another kind. In the USSR, oranges and tangerines (mandariny) were among the most coveted "deficit" goods. They were never sold in food stores in my big city in Ukraine, never ever one would walk into a store and stumble upon a shelf of oranges and tangerines.
They…

schmatta means "rag", a piece of cloth, in Ukie. Your grandma was probably from the Western Ukraine, closer to Poland, their language borrowed heavily from the Polish and had a lot of polonisms like that. We would say schmatta about a dish washing cloth or an old piece of cloth we would wash the floor with.

Not the owner, but the director. Nobody but the state owned everything in the USSR. All citizen just worked for the state in all sorts of jobs on a fixed salary.

That is very true. He had to make so many compromises and silently live his privileged life but never daring to express any opinion about anything. He is like a kid in a candy store right now.

Well, you don't just leave and go back to the USSR after such betrayal. Nobody would listen if you say that your husband forced you. The punishment could be pretty severe.

Nobody argues that the regime was oppressive and so on. However, some people belonged to the equivalent of "1%", ok, maybe "10%" who had it fine, not the "terrible, miserable" conditions that an average American would imagine.

as an aside, about "having lived under terrible conditions in" the USSR -
he was educated at one of the Soviet equivalent of Ivy League - probably Moscow University - and possesses a unique set of skills/knowledge to make him so valuable to the US. I don't think his (or his family's) life was so miserable in the USSR.…

There was no sex in the USSR :)) (USSR does not = Russia) - reference to one of U.S.–Soviet Space Bridges from the 80s

amen