Wednesday, December 08, 2004

This is indeed very funny:

Born in 1960, in Dnepropetrovsk, a Russian-speaking village that was also the birthplace of Leonid Brezhnev, Tymoshenko trained as an economist before amassing a huge fortune through her dealings in the energy industry.


Dnipropetrovsk (Dnepropetrovsk is a transliteration from Russian) has population of over 1.1 million people - it is not a village.

Leonid Brezhnev was born in Dneprodzerzhinsk (formerly known as Kamenskoye), a town nearby, population over 250,000 people. (I've been to Dneprodzerzhinsk a couple times in the late 1980s, at tennis tournaments: we were there in winter and the town had no fresh air at all, and I can imagine how bad it smelled during the summers... Then, after the Soviet Union collapsed, many local metallurgic and chemical plants became too impoverished to continue functioning, and the air now is a lot cleaner.)

(Thanks to the two anonymous posters for pointing out Tymoshenko's profile in the Independent and the Dnipropetrovsk goof. Also, thank you, Don, for the link to Tymoshenko's family pictures - her daughter is so beautiful!)


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