[1990-1991] UK Universities / Ways for a NATO Soldier or Spy to Speak Good Russian?
 

I suppose that as this is sort of a central issue for an upcoming campaign, it is actually worth a whole thread on its own.

Mysterious paymasters are forming a team to go into unstable Eastern Europe as the Warsaw Pact collapses and the Soviet Union falls, in order to recruit ex-USSR or other Communist country personnel with various exotic and valuable skill sets.

The recruiting teams need to consist of intelligence officers, but also soldiers, pilots and technical experts with enough knowledge of the specialties being recruited that they can form some opinion of whether those recommended by their sources are really good enough or are just pretending to have valuable skills in order to qualify for a life-changing job offer.

The recruiting teams also need women with undercover experience, intelligence, security and tactical training, because groups of fit Military-age Males (MaM) set off alarm bells for all security services and anyone wary of attack or arrest. Last, but not least, the recruiters and those with them on the teams need to speak Russian and perhaps some other Eastern European languages, which was a much rarer skill in the NATO countries of Western Europe back when there had until just now been an Iron Curtain over all of Eastern Europe for half a century.

During the Cold War, there are a few ways to have such knowledge of Russian while still being someone Western intelligence and security organizations might trust. Your parents or other relatives might be White Russian émigrés, you or your family might be more recent defectors from the Soviet Union or another country behind the Iron Curtain, you might be a trained linguist or intelligence officer taught Russian specifically for national security related reasons, or you might have studied Russian at university.

Any of these might apply for characters in this particular campaign, but for the last one, I'd quite like to know more about the universities in the UK where Professors who might know Russian at Native level are teaching and what Russian Literature department might be regarded as the best in Great Britain or the entire Commonwealth.

Does anyone know about any UK or other Commonwealth universities particularly associated with Russian language and literature studies?

In particular, schools which already had good Russian Literature or other departments offering expertise in Eastern European languages in the 1970s and the 1980s, before Russian-speaking academics could more easily have moved to English-speaking countries?

What? Who? And Why?

Most campaigns I run these days are set in the same campaign setting, which I've named 'Monstrum', consisting of the modern Earth at some point between 1980 to the modern day, with supernatural elements starting to emerge in subtle way, almost as if they are elements of other realities leaking through into our own as reality frays and tears, according to some occultists centered around certain geographic regions, as with the theories of biologist, cryptozoologist and paranormal writer Ivan T. Sanderson and his Vile Vortices.

Several such campaigns have involved occultists, investigators or Monster Hunters supported by a mysterious Texan-born and Caribbean-focused billionaire Patron, J.R. Kessler, first introduced in my campaign, Caribbean by Night.

Through a lot of layers of cut-outs and obfuscation, he and his organization are responsible for sending shady arms dealers to bribe formerly Soviet base commanders and warehouse guards enough to allow them to export all the cool Soviet ordnance and equipment they've always wanted, but they are also recruiting pilots, mechanics, ordnance and fuel techs and all the other experts needed to actually Soviet vehicles for paranormal paramilitary purposes. Hence this adventure, recruiting the specialists who'd infiltrate areas of operation ahead of the main teams or their support of Soviet gunship and transport helicopters, and set up aerial resupply zones, as well as Forward Arming and Refueling Points.

Other campaigns have been set in motion by my fictionalization of the late Queen Elizabeth II, with her being aware of the occult when almost no governments in the world were, and having around her a 'Shadow Court', as it were, a benign conspiracy to prepare Great Britain for the fundamental changes in the world when governments and people at large realize what is happening, as well as the self-dubbed 'Rangers' who feel that they must do what they can to protect the people until that happens.

Given that Kessler's people have the audacity to hire some of their recruiters from the UK, there is a non-zero chance that some kind of conflict or at least contact will occur between the two organizations. That will be an interesting possibility to explore and work out how it affects the world.

In other locations of the world, there are nearly certainly other conspiracies of people in the know, benign or not. Some of them might be very small conspiracies, perhaps just an informal pact between a few friends to hunt monsters humanity doesn't realize prey on them. Others might be as large and well-connected as the Vatican. Certainly, Monster Hunter PCs, rivals, allies, antagonists and anything in between might exist anywhere in the world, and call themselves all kinds of names.

There might even be such things in Eastern Europe, but whether the PCs on this adventure encounter them remains to be determined. If they do, though, it would probably be helpful to be able to talk to them. Maybe quote some Tolstoy and Dostoevsky at them.

Re: [1990-1991] UK Universities / Ways for a NATO Soldier or Spy to Speak Good Russia
 

Finding out what a university department was like a few decades ago is kind of hard. I looked round a few universities that teach Russian nowadays, all of which combine it it with cultural and/or literature studies.

A few things jumped out. Learning Russian was harder in the 1980s or 1990s than it is now, because everywhere that it was spoken as a native language was behind the Iron Curtain. It's standard for students doing a degree in a foreign language to spend around a year in an environment where it's the everyday language. That builds proficiency and colloquial use in a way that teaching alone can't. Currently, British students of Russian spend that year in a post-Soviet country where Russian is widely used.

It was possible to spend that year in the USSR during the Cold War, since there were student exchange programs, but I suspect that the Soviets would have regarded students who'd done that study as persons of interest thereafter.

The difficulty in learning Russian seems to come from the grammar, which is complicated, with lots of context-dependent modifications. The vocabulary is comparatively easy, because it's quite small as compared on English. This makes sense of the widespread Russian appreciation of poetry; if you have the language at Native, you have all of it in a way you don't with English.

If you want someone British to have convincing Native Russian without having been to the USSR, I think you need them to have Language Talent. With that, the obvious universities for them to have attended are Oxford or Cambridge. Both seem to have long-standing Russian teaching, but the reason I mention them is their teaching system, which is different from other British universities. The tutorial system demands talented and motivated students, but it gets more out of them than other systems. Students studying Russian under that system will have enough gumption to seek out Russian exchange students studying other subjects at the same university and use them for conversation practice

Re: [1990-1991] UK Universities / Ways for a NATO Soldier or Spy to Speak Good Russia
 

What about White Russian émigrés? Some scholars who fled before the Iron Curtain closed fully might have been Professor Emeritus into the 1970s at a British university and any department where renowned Russian poets, writers or lecturers taught in the 1940s and 1950s might have a tradition of Russian scholarship bolstered by active cultural clubs or literary societies.

Due to the collapse of the whole Soviet system, the PCs will be more concerned with local criminals, gangs or former members of state organizations gone rogue than they are with a coordinated KGB counterintelligence effort. In early 1989, a Person of Interest visiting the USSR would require complicated visa approvals and involve full-time official minders, as well as a clandestine surveillance detail. In February to June 1991, there will be a lot of things these particular KGB men are worried about instead, including if they still have bosses somewhere or whether they are even going to be paid next month...

A character who went to to a Young Pioneer camp by the Black Sea ten years ago might bring pictures to show the border guard as they explain they are coming to see their friends, now that the borders are open and international amity reigns again. As long as they also bring gifts, as the border guard isn't sure either if they're still going to be paid at the end of the month.

The PCs are, to some extent, going to be undercover. It's just that the massive machinery of surveillance and repression has come to a grinding halt, and during the stoppage, it's being overwhelmed by changes. It's doubtful that paperwork about the entry of someone through a border station in Belarus, Odessa or Rostov makes it to St. Petersburg or Moscow particularly fast or leads to a coordinated response. 1990-1991 were times when the KGB fractured, stopped existing and also lost track of a lot of people travelling with improper paperwork.

One PC will have a degree in Russian Literature from Cambridge. Not decided yet whether he has Language Talent, but he is a citizen of the Republic of Ireland, not British, and his well-off Church of Ireland parents were Marxist, at least in their youth. It's not impossible he may have been an exchange student. If not for a whole year, a semester or a summer camp.

A colleague of mine went to a Young Pioneers summer camp in the USSR, because his parents were Champagne Socialists. His older brother went there for more than one summer. It seems fairly plausible for an Irishman of similar family origins.

The only concern is whether it would have kept him from receiving the Irish version of a Top Secret security clearance. It almost certainly would do so for a UK citizen wishing to join the SIS, what with that whole embarrassing Cambridge Five thing, but the Republic of Ireland, as a neutral country, might not be able to bar their people from government service on the basis of their parents' politics.

Re: [1990-1991] UK Universities / Ways for a NATO Soldier or Spy to Speak Good Russia
 

Sporting groups and Russian speaking expats involved in various athletic endeavors might suit a PC with the stereotypical high physical stats.

Weightlifting, gymnastics, wrestling, martial arts are all sports where the soviets competed at high levels and many PCs will have a talent for these and similar sports.

Re: [1990-1991] UK Universities / Ways for a NATO Soldier or Spy to Speak Good Russia
 

In my experience as an international student in Europe, this is hampered by (1) English serving as a lingua franca in youth and college-educated spaces, so that you have to work hard to get chances hear and speak other languages, and (2) access to English-language Internet and old media services. Lots of people who studied in (redacted) made no effort to acquire conversational (redacted)-an. Maybe its different in say Georgia or Moldova.

I would think that in the 1980s a student in France would have less distractions from speaking and hearing French because there would only be one bookstore with a few English-language magazines and novels, and one English-language radio station (and the barkeeps, club bouncers, and cute girls / guys mostly don't speak English).

The Erasmus program only launched in 1987 and it started on a small scale. Today international students are disappear in a cloud of students from all nations and the Dane and the Romanian are likely to use English not the local language as their interlingua.

Re: [1990-1991] UK Universities / Ways for a NATO Soldier or Spy to Speak Good Russia
 

That's a good point.

Of course, from 1948 to 1989-1990, almost all Russian-speaking people (and the USSR limited emigration almost from the start, at least from the 1920s on) were legally forbidden from emigrating to the West, sharply limiting the supply of instructors. Those who did make it would have dramatically defected, maybe even with the help of a Western intelligence service. Though after their debriefing with serious intelligence and security officials, I can well imagine that a defecting Soviet athlete to the UK might indeed take up a career in coaching their sport.

The only border which was never really secured was Yugoslavia. While most people there spoke Serbo-Croat or Slovene, Russian was at least an optional foreign language in schools there, and there were some Russian scientists within Yugoslavic academia and Yugoslav students could apply for higher education within the USSR, making Russian as a second or third language popular for their top university students. It might well have applied to athletes, dancers and gymnasts there too, with the finest sports academies and dance instruction in Eastern Europe being mostly Russian-speaking.

Granted, for the most part, the people from Yugoslavia who chose to be educated in Russia or a Russian-speaking school were not the same people from Yugoslavia who chose to come to the West as Gastarbeiter, those really being somewhat mutually exclusive life paths, but someone might elect one and then change their mind after exposure to Russia.

Re: [1990-1991] UK Universities / Ways for a NATO Soldier or Spy to Speak Good Russia
 

I'm sure you're right, while I haven't personally been an Erasmus student. My sister got a graduate degree in Denmark and if she had wanted to avoid speaking Danish, it would have been easy, as CBS has enough international students to never deal with anyone Danish (in fact, one of my players also got a degree there and he never spoke with anyone Danish).

Two of my players did their medical specialty education and residencies in Denmark, as doctors, though, and that required Native fluency in the language. That's 5+ years and they were part of the Danish medical health system for the duration, so opting out of daily immersion in the language was not a possibility, as the patients often don't speak English.

My brother was immersed in the local language during his graduate studies, but as they were in London, the local language was English. When he was an Erasmus student in Leuven, though, he did pick up some French and Flemish, both of which have come in handy where he now lives, in Brussels.

I note that even during the 2010s and 2020s, while educated people in big cities in a few European countries may mostly speak English, you don't have to go very far from the main cities or even main streets to be immersed in people who offer no option of switching to English.

I exclude the Netherlands here, because that never happened there, but in Belgium, I've had to rely on the services of my brother as an interpreter occasionally, even in Brussels (with French-speaking taxi drivers, mainly, but in the occasional trendy bar with snooty French-speaking people, too). When travelling without my brother in Belgium, though, you could always find someone to interpret, though, even if a particular person didn't happen to speak English. Luxembourg was much the same.

German cities have English-speakers everywhere, but German or Austrian small towns might force you to rely on your school German. Oddly, I never recall that happening in Switzerland, as the Swiss seem to have someone who speaks English anywhere you stop, but that might have been luck, or maybe I've just never been in a Swiss small town that wasn't also a tourist skiing destination.

Taxi drivers and restaurant wait staff in Paris mostly speak English, at least nowadays, but go to a smaller city like Strasbourg, and... zero taxi drivers spoke English, and only about half the wait staff at restaurants we went to. Small towns in Alsace sometimes had English speakers, but, perhaps predictably, more often German-speakers. In the South of France, it sometimes took a little searching to find someone who spoke English, but the touristy focus of everything means that you're usually able to do so.

Strasbourg was a unique experience, though. I literally called the phone number advertised for the biggest taxi service in Strasbourg and no one at their switchboard could speak enough English to tell me they didn't speak English. They told me they did not speak English, in French, and hung up when I asked to be transferred to someone to who did speak English. German might have worked, but with characteristic French rudeness, the phone call did not last long enough to try. And the taxi drivers tended to be multi-lingual, but usually in French and a variety of other languages, among which neither English nor German were numbered.

Normandy was better than other places in rural France for the purposes of finding English-speakers, but I note that every small town I stopped at had lots of English-speaking tourists, either because it was the scene of battles from WWII or was a tourist draw from England for other reasons, like having the literal Bayeux Tapestry.

In Prague, walk like two streets away from the main streets tourists frequent and you can end up in a bar or restaurant where no one speaks English and the menu is only in Czech. In small towns in the Czech Republic, this is the rule, rather than an exception. Those who speak another language than Czech often speak French, German, Slovakian or another Slavic language, with English as the third language at best. I sometimes ended up being better able to communicate in the small towns just using German rather than looking for someone who spoke English. In Poland, the cities have a lot of English-speakers, but small towns... not so much. German works better there too. In Romania, I've used my Latin default for lack of a closer common language in restaurants, but the taxi drivers were all English-speaking, even back in the 1990s.

Italy has a lot of small towns where I need to rely on a default from Latin, and my near-native fluency in Italic hand gesturing while speaking, rather than be able to use English. Spain often forced me to rely on what might be some of the worst school Spanish anyone has ever spoken, while in Portugal, you usually find someone who speaks English, but I have actually been in a situation where the only English-speaker was a native speaker of Spanish, not Portuguese, but was able to interpret for me through the Spanish-Portuguese default.

Even in Scandinavia, you encounter people without English a lot, which requires me to use my rusty and awfully-accented Danish, which also works in Norway and Sweden. Helsinki has English-speakers everywhere, but once you drive out into rural Finland, you'd better be able to speak Swedish (or the closest approximation of it I could attempt, which was badly accented Danish), or you'll be unable to speak with anyone.

Countries where movies and TV are dubbed in the native language (or they catch broadcasts in another language, like Swedish for Finns or German for Czechs) usually have very few people confident in their English, even if they might have studied it at school.

Re: [1990-1991] UK Universities / Ways for a NATO Soldier or Spy to Speak Good Russia
 

For what it's worth, one of my fellow aviation students at US Army flight school in the late 1980s was a native Russian who was allowed to emigrate with his family because they were Jewish.

Re: [1990-1991] UK Universities / Ways for a NATO Soldier or Spy to Speak Good Russia
 

Yes! I totally forgot to mention Israeli diplomatic efforts behind the Iron Curtain, which yielded somewhere between one to two million Jews allowed to emigrate. I think most of them travelled to Israel, but once out of the Soviet Union or other Warsaw Pact country, nothing prevented them from moving to the US, UK or any other Western country where immigration was an option.

Statistically, at least one, if not more, of the people selected as recruiters would be from this population of Russian-speakers.

Re: [1990-1991] UK Universities / Ways for a NATO Soldier or Spy to Speak Good Russia
 

"White Russians" in the sense of refugees from the Revolutionary era would be getting on a bit by the 1980s, I don't think that they ever formed a particularly strong community in the UK, and they generally seem to have gone native, so most of their offspring (such as Helen Lydia Mironoff, daughter of Vasily Petrovich Mironoff) would likely look and sound quite British. They might have preserved some knowledge of Russian for old time's sake, but that wouldn't automatically mean that they'd pass as contemporary Russians very well.

I do know that the British armed services ran a pretty good Russian language school back in the '50s, the Joint Services School for Linguists, but that closed in 1960. (It produced some interesting alumni, mostly because smart, linguistically talented young men called up for national service regarded it as a more appealing posting than most, and worked very hard not to get flunked out.) Still, combine that with some high-quality university language departments, and you've probably got a pretty good pool of trained Russian speakers to call on, even if they would need a crash course in contemporary vernacular and accents.

(Stereotypically, the Intelligence Services had a bit of a bias in favour of recruiting from Oxbridge, allegedly through a network of good chaps among the tutors, because they were part of the establishment, so of course they'd go there. Whether it actually got the best people for the job is a whole other can of worms.)

Re: [1990-1991] UK Universities / Ways for a NATO Soldier or Spy to Speak Good Russia
 

While the ability to pass as contemporary Russians on command would be ideal, in practice, the ability to speak and understand conversational Russian should be adequate. At least with some facility with the language, they would, at least, not be unable to understand what was happening around them in situations which could turn dangerous, which would be an unacceptable risk.

The paymasters will simply be unable to secure enough people with the right skill sets and perfect idiomatic Russian, largely because most of those people are probably already working for an intelligence or security agency in the West trying to prevent the collapse of the USSR from turning into nightmare scenarios like loose nukes everywhere, and would be more likely to report an attempt to recruit them for private adventuring during sensitive times than to accept.

Those whom the paymasters do manage to recruit will have to adopt a variety of undercover and just low-profile identities during the course of their recruiting and characters who are totally unable to pass as Russians will likely resort to cover stories like:

• East European citizen who learned Russian in school, like East German, Czech or Croatian, visiting Russia as a tourist, as all former internal travel restrictions are now relaxed or at least hardly enforced,
• Ukrainian, Moldovan, Belarussian or other USSR-adjacent, semi-Russian-speaking citizen visiting Caucasian or other out-of-the-way parts of the former USSR, where few people will recognize their accents anyway,
• Descendant of Russian emigrants to Austria, Finland, France, Israel, Sweden, Switzerland, or the UK curious to visit their ancestral homelands, now that the Iron Curtain is down.

Ah, that's interesting.

There's a PC from Cambridge and one NPC whose alma mater I have not yet decided, but it will reflect impeccable breeding and exquisite class, as she's so aristocratic that her horses look down on racehorses, galloping for something as crass as prize money.

But those selecting recruiters would like to avoid approaching anyone who is actually still part of the SIS or the Security Service, though they'd happily snap up one of the Russian or Eastern European experts who were RIF-ed as Western democracies eagerly begin spending their 'peace dividend' on all sorts of things that are not the Cold War. Lot of spies and soldiers lost their jobs or are facing the prospect of doing so in the next few months. So, for the most part, they're turning to friends or friends of friends of the people they know in England (several have family there), of whom some are indeed part of the Establishment, the intelligence and security services, the Foreign Service and the military.

Re: [1990-1991] UK Universities / Ways for a NATO Soldier or Spy to Speak Good Russia
 

https://youtu.be/L9fz50lQoZU?si=b4oP-RDYqy_G0e07&t=1320

It is not direct to your question and describes situation that happened in 2007-2009 and a person whose age we don't know. But it is still a short linguistic anecdote (from minute 22 to minute 24, continued at 35m15s, no more is needed) that might be interesting. There is even espionage involved. A kind of.

Re: [1990-1991] UK Universities / Ways for a NATO Soldier or Spy to Speak Good Russia
 

I'm sorry, but I don't watch Internet videos. Could you tell me the anecdote or direct me to a site where I could find the story on media using writing?

Re: [1990-1991] UK Universities / Ways for a NATO Soldier or Spy to Speak Good Russia
 

The story is better to listen to, charisma and all, but yeah, can do that from a PC. But later.

*Checks the unsent comment.*

I guess later is now.

Russian Dialect / Genderlect - What Are 'Unintentional Drill Tweets'?
 

Assume that everything I know about online video games, I learned from books and interviews with victims. I'm just looking for whether any of the linguistic peculiarities would apply before the Iron Curtain fell and the rate of the spread of global culture accelerated exponentially with the popularization of the Internet and the terminally online.

I actually know more than I want about EVE Online, as a business and social pĥenomena, though I've never played the game or any other MMO. Eve Fan Fests are obviously held here in Reykjavík, CCP Games was a client of our firm almost since their founding, several of my friends were long-time players, one was an artist and writer for the game, etc.

But what does 'unintentional drill tweets' mean? Is the 'drill' meant in the sense of military drill, postulating a possible origin of the 'genderlect' within the military culture of conscript soldiers, a society that in the 1980s mostly or totally excluded females, and along with prisons are among the most likely institutions to house the development of a genderlect in an industrialized society?

And would that mean that some form of such genderlect should have existed in the 1980s and into 1990-1991?

Re: Russian Dialect / Genderlect - What Are 'Unintentional Drill Tweets'?
 

Then you probably know about it more than I ever did, because I haven't spoken to a more than two EVE players in my life and the rest of it comes from news articles.

It's what auto-generated subtitles wrote and it got me confused, but trying to type this line in search gave me this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dril so that would be phrasing in the style of that twitter account's posts, I guess. "Unintentional" here meaning that it's not intended to be an absurdist humour, but rather how such people think and the way they talk.
It existed and evolved in USSR's existence, particularly as criminal culture became a part of prison culture (with dissident culture mixing in) and then poured back into workers culture (although the more intellectual dissident intelligentsia aspects got washed out or developed into something else in recent years). And you could say there's additional "petri dish" of soviet military culture and lingo.
The criminal precursor to it has the name "fenya" which has it's own history.

I'm not speaking as a scholar here, more like trying to gather my impression from being in observation distance from said phenomena. But it definitely existed in the in the last 50 years more or less in an unbroken continuum. If you are not part of it, you definitely know how it sounds and could know the meaning of some words through cultural osmosis of sorts.
To be perfectly honest I think after the 90s, it stopped being a semi-uniform genderlect a went to being more genderlect/sociolect hybrid. Only mostly men spoke it, but in fewer spaces. It's hard to say how widespread it was but there were always subcultures even in USSR, plus simply knowing of something doesn't mean practicing it. And since the collapse of the Union the pluralization and atomization began to happen at increasing rate (uhm, depends on which ex-republic we're talking about or which part of it). But in the nineties you could be exposed dayly to a mix of cultural references from the 30s communist propaganda "memes", jokes about Hitler, jokes about native people of Chukotka peninsula, love of soviet cartoons, veneration of soviet, french and italian movies from the 60-70s (many of the soviet movies being quotable infinitely), enchantment by 80s american action movies, much more other stuff and also this weird socio-genderlect. So, even assuming you can perfectly speak the language of Soviet school curriculum, you'd still be missing about 70 years of cultural background familiarity, that would be kinda hard to absorb even if you have spoken with Soviet immigrants and escapees.

Internet in the 90s was a very niche, very different place, so it was its own culture for a while, back then, having roots in Fidonet, and the mass adoption only began at around late 00s, I think?

Re: [1990-1991] UK Universities / Ways for a NATO Soldier or Spy to Speak Good Russia
 

It's a haphazard answer, I hope it makes sense.

Re: Russian Dialect / Genderlect - What Are 'Unintentional Drill Tweets'?
 

Fenya I know about and as the PCs will rely on smugglers and black market contacts as their sole local support network, complete lack of familiarity with it will hobble even most of the characters who both have Stretwise and know how to speak Russian, as if they learned Streetwise and studied Russian in Western countries before the fall of the Iron Curtain, there would be almost no overlap between their Russian language knowledge and the Streetwise they learned in 1980s London, Manchester, Glasgow, Belfast, Paris, Marseille, Barcelona or Naples.

It's true that the collapse of the Iron Curtain and loosening or ending of internal travel restrictions for many years, combined with the effects of pop culture being ever more easily copied, to mediums getting cheaper and more widespread at a rapid pace (VHS, DVDs, BluRay, zipped video files on flash drives and downloads, etc.) basically means that reconstructing how regional culture used to be, and how physical borders used to correspond with cultural zones, can be difficult.

In a campaign set in 1990-1991, basically none of the PCs will have learned Russian through immersion in contemporary Russian culture. At the absolute best, they have spoken with people who left Warsaw Pact countries at some point in the 1980s, but more likely, the Russian culture they learned alongside their language education was the culture of pre-Communist Russian literature. Either their teachers, or the people whose sensibilities influenced their teachers, would have spoken an archaic, literary, aristocratic version of Russian, the kind of Russian you'd use to recite Pushkin and Lermontov, and read aloud from Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy.

Aside from the heroic efforts of the French YMCA Press, in publishing Solzhenitsyn's seminal work and Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, banned and censored in their home countries, respectively, the most modern Russian literature which most of them would be likely to know would be Pasternak and Nabokov, with the latter even writing his most celebrated works in English.

Before the Berlin Wall came down, not a lot of people in the West had spoken to Soviet immigrants to their countries. For a Russian or any citizen of a Warsaw Pact country to even make it to a NATO country required an elaborate escape from countries where even internal travel required lots of paperwork and security checks, let alone crossing guarded borders, where the border guards had instructions to shoot anyone who attempted to cross without official travel permits.

During the time most Western people who spoke Russian in 1990-1991 were learning their language skills, Soviet defectors were rare and often employed by the intelligence agencies who helped them to defect. Exceptions would mostly be Jewish people from former Warsaw Pact countries, granted permits to emigrate to Israel. Probably the only country accessible to Western powers where colloquial, modern Russian could fairly easily be found spoken in the 1980s would be Israel, and even then, most of those who emigrated from behind the Iron Curtain to Israel would be learning to speak Hebrew, not trying to maintain currency in Russian slang trends as they happen in the countries they left behind.

Characters who learned their Russian from the Defense Language Institute (DLI) or went through advanced courses as part of their work in Western intelligence, military or security agencies would probably have spoken with defectors who spoke modern Russian. Or, at least, Russian which was modern when they left, which might have been many years before. Characters who have a degree in Russian from Cambridge, Oxford, Cornell, or one of the constituent universities of Sorbonne University, will probably only have spoken to people who speak the literary, pre-Soviet Russian of expatriates.

Yes, for the purposes of a campaign set in 1990-1991, the Internet is irrelevant.