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

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Icelander

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?

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