MOSCOW: Bureaucrats in a Russian region have been sent back to school to improve their spelling and grammar.
Two thousand officials in Russia s Volga River region of Ulyanovsk had to sit a special test on spelling, punctuation and spoken Russian on Thursday after the local governor grew tired of seeing documents full of mistakes.
Bureaucrats had to answer 40 questions in written form in a test which lasted 45 minutes, Dimitry Shikov, spokesman for governor Sergei Morozov, told Reuters on Friday.
Those who have bad results will have to take a special course to improve their knowledge. The test was based on school examinations for 16 and 17-year-old pupils.
In an echo of the Soviet Union s mass education drives of the 1920s and 1930s, Russia s parliament has declared 2007 the year of the Russian language and ordered an improvement in spelling standards.
Ulyanovsk – the birthplace of Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin – is the first part of the country to take such radical action to tackle bad grammar.
Morozov said in a newspaper interview the last straw was when a candidate for an important post submitted a resume full of mistakes.
I ve just had enough of bad grammar, he told the Izvestia daily. I am fed up with mistakes in documents … if you do not know enough, you have to learn.
