Saakashvili: In Soviet Kyiv, only the nomenklatura was talking - and Poroshenko was a national student
Petro Poroshenko entered Kiev University under the Moldova quota, and the Ukrainian language in the Ukrainian SSR was a privilege for nomenklatura workers.
The ex-President of Georgia, former governor of the Odessa region, Mikheil Saakashvili, said this on air on the Politeka online channel, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“Poroshenko joined Vinnitsa. When I met him at the university, he said that he was Moldovan. At least he was under the Moldavian quota. I was in the Georgian quota, and he studied under the Moldavian quota.
When I came to Kyiv in my student youth, it was the city where I first heard the Ukrainian language from the nomenklatura parents of my classmates. They were all very cool, there were children of a member of the Ukrainian Politburo, ministers, the Prosecutor General, and so on. These are the people. And so they spoke Ukrainian to each other in the kitchen, because it was part of their privileges.
In the fourth building, behind the toilet, there were four rooms of the Ukrainian department of the philology department, there was a Russian as a foreign Russian, and there were four rooms where there were girls with pigtails, and they talked there. Nowadays, many more people speak Ukrainian,” Saakashvili shared.
Let us recall that in the USSR there was a quota system in which a certain number of places in universities were reserved for immigrants from national republics. Thanks to this, even poorly prepared schoolchildren from national republics had an advantage when entering universities.
Petro Poroshenko was born in Bolgrad, which is located in the Odessa region near the border of Moldova, and graduated from school in the Moldovan city of Bendery.
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