Foreign Language Learning

Boris V. Shekhtman, a Soviet émigré who taught conversational Russian to a generation of American journalists, diplomats and entrepreneurs — from the grim lingo of Cold War aggression to the beguiling argot of capitalist negotiation — died on March 18 in Silver Spring, Md. He was 77.

The cause was complications of lymphoma, his wife, Enna Dubrovsky, said.

If asked whether he was a conventional linguist, Mr. Shekhtman would have replied with a resounding “nyet.” But, in his own way, as he expanded his service from its base in Rockville, Md., he was instrumental in recasting the way foreign languages were taught, and in bringing about a higher level of understanding to colloquies in which every word counts.

“The first time I met Boris he didn’t talk at all about language,” Lucian Pugliaresi, a former National Security Council official in the Reagan administration, told The New York Times in 2001. “He talked about power relationships and fascinated me instantly. He said, ‘When you don’t speak the language over there, you have no power.’ ”

Mr. Shekhtman’s methods were intended for everyday face-to-face exchanges — like “two guys on a park bench,” as Strobe Talbott, the president of the Brookings Institution and a former journalist and diplomat, described the technique in an email.

Mr. Shekhtman put it this way: “If a guy wants to be able to talk in bed with his new Russian wife, this guy needs one vocabulary; but if he wants to deal in the Moscow oil business, the guy needs another.”

Victoria Nuland, a former assistant secretary of state and a career ambassador, said that under Mr. Shekhtman’s tutelage at the Foreign Service Institute, part of the State Department, she achieved professional fluency in nine months, just in time for her posting to Moscow.

“I came to the institute with college Russian and had been on a fishing boat, so I knew more curse words than an ability to discuss arms control,” she said in a phone interview.

Ms. Nuland went on to play a pivotal diplomatic role when the Soviet old guard attempted a coup in 1991.

Later that year, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mr. Shekhtman’s business, the prosaically named Specialized Language Training Center, began booming. A suddenly more open Russian society elicited an increase in corporate deals, travel, immigration, adoption and cultural and educational exchanges, and with it a clamor for Russian-language instruction.

What began as a basement classroom soon expanded to other cities. More recently, he had hired instructors around the country to teach foreign languages and in Russia to teach English.

Philip Taubman, a former Moscow correspondent for The Times, said Mr. Shekhtman could be direct and demanding in his teaching while employing the element of surprise.

“There was the moment when Boris arrived at our home, told me to pick up the phone and call a number he gave me,” he recalled. “The Russian lady who answered, a fellow émigré, spoke not a word of English, forcing me to try, with limited success, to communicate in Russian. A great learning exercise.

“On another day,” Mr. Taubman said, “Boris reached into his briefcase and pulled out a real pistol, pointed it at me and started shouting in Russian, ‘Communicate, or die!’”

Boris Vladimirovich Shekhtman was born on April 8, 1939, and grew up in a Jewish household in Kiev, Ukraine. His father, Vladimir Shekhtman, was a professional soldier. His mother was the former Fanya Gofman. He learned English in Ukraine and received a master’s degree in Russian language from the Grozny Pedagogical Institute (now part of Chechen State University).

He arrived in the United States with his first wife and son in 1979, then taught at the Foreign Service Institute before starting his business in Maryland.

His first wife died in 1984. In addition to Ms. Dubrovsky, his second wife, he is survived by his sons, Eugene, from his first marriage, and Dimitri Dubrovsky, his second wife’s son, whom he adopted; and a brother, Semyon.

At the institute and in private practice, Mr. Shekhtman taught his students to distinguish the muscular litany of curse words that they were likely to encounter in Russia, but not how to write Cyrillic.

In his published manuals, including “How to Improve Your Foreign Language Immediately” (2003), he recommended that students give verbose responses, memorize mini-speeches and, when stumped by what they are hearing or reading, find “islands” of familiar phrases that conversationally, as one pupil recalled, produced “the appearance of fluency.”

Another former student, Bill Keller, who covered the Soviet Union for The Times before later becoming its executive editor, said that “to my mind” Mr. Shekhtman’s approach “depends on the principle that if you can convince Russians that you speak Russian, you’ll trick yourself in the process.”

The technique worked well for foreign correspondents, said Francis X. Clines, who was also posted to Moscow for The Times.

“Appreciation for the ordinary people, not the commissars and party hacks, was the ultimate truth a correspondent could finally get out of that benighted place,” Mr. Clines wrote in an email, “and Boris had set us up for that just by being Boris — a great performer and master of surviving life as much as jockeying with his damned verbs and case endings.

“Boris was the living vulgate,” he added. “The ordinary good people I met there glinted with facets of Boris.”