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

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by 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.

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.

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

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.

Ah, that's interesting.

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

(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.)

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.