Vsem sestram po ser'gam

[Olga Meerson]

I second Sveta's opinion. It feels to me that, when used negatively, the expression is simply given a tint of irony, but that inherently, it denotes and connotes something positive.  The problem is not native speakers vs. foreigners but people prone to take positive things ironically vs. those taking them at face value. The latter group, paradoxically, interprets the irony of use in a particular writer's idiolect as more marked. Irony, in general, seems to be the more marked the less inherently idiomatic the use. In other words, Robert, the fact that grossman uses the expression as connoting something bad is marked by his own irony, not by something accepted and unmarked in the Russian language of his time per se. Such as least is my perception of the expression as a native speaker. On the other hand, Lena Ostrovskaia, also a perfectly apt native speaker and philologist. disagrees. This may be a matter of a generational gap: Lena is younger, and since my times, the language !
 se!
ems to have evolved into treating many OTHER positive things with irony--in other words, to have become more cynical :)

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