What people don’t get is that they can’t just come to a person’s blog, skim a few posts, insult their professionalism, abuse the people they work with, and expect to be treated nicely in response. It is especially ludicrous to attack a Soviet woman and to expect not to be attacked in return.
We, the women who were born in the Soviet Union, are very powerful and aggressive. You try to bully us, and we will bully you right back in ways you are not likely to forget any time soon. Don’t expect a Soviet woman to crawl into a corner and feel all sad after she is insulted. If anybody is likely to sit there and cry in this situation, it’s the offender.
So if you want to offend people with impunity, you alighted on the wrong blog. Don’t say you haven’t been warned.
Clarissa's Blog 
If there is any logic at all to those kinds of insults –which I’m sure there isn’t–they’re designed to be what in martial arts is called “softening blows”. Some guy told me yesterday that he had the right to address me as an ignoramus and that to respond aggressively to that was patronizing to him. In the same speech, he stated that he was “twice” my age, which makes him 86.
I guess one shouldn’t be harsh on an 86 year old, as he is probably struggling with his sight and doesn’t know how to use the Internet yet.
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I especially like the sense of entitlement such folks have. They think they will spout any kind of garbage at you and you’ll just sit there meekly, grateful that they graced you with their attention.
I’m all for people having healthy self-esteem but this is way outside of what is healthy.
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I think they probably see substantial portions of their lives as having failed and are trying to recoup some of their losses for their own mistakes in life.
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Wowwww. I don’t understand why people wouldn’t think that a blogger would argue back. I also don’t understand why arguing and being opinionated makes one unprofessional. That’s what academia is built on.
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would she be considered one (strong Soviet woman)?
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Svetlana was a miserable, broken-down creature with a horrible legacy.
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well she at least seems to have rebelled in her own little way.
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Yes, the point of her entire life was to stick it to her father and she did.
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I find when I think of my father as dead, or of I having killed him, my blood pressure decreases by up to 40 notches.
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