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

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Thökk

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.

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.

Originally Posted by Thökk

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.

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.

Originally Posted by Thökk

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.

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.

Originally Posted by Thökk

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?

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