[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.

[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

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by johndallman

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.

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.

Originally Posted by johndallman

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.

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.

Originally Posted by johndallman

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

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.

[(E)]

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.

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by johndallman

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.

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.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by (E)

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.

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.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

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.

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.

[thrash]

Originally Posted by Icelander

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, ...

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.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by thrash

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.

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.

[Phil Masters]

"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.)