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

[Icelander]

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.