[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.

[Thökk]

https://youtu.be/L9fz50lQoZU?si=b4oP-RDYqy_G0e07&t=1320

It is not direct to your question and describes situation that happened in 2007-2009 and a person whose age we don't know. But it is still a short linguistic anecdote (from minute 22 to minute 24, continued at 35m15s, no more is needed) that might be interesting. There is even espionage involved. A kind of.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Thökk

https://youtu.be/L9fz50lQoZU?si=b4oP-RDYqy_G0e07&t=1320

It is not direct to your question and describes situation that happened in 2007-2009 and a person whose age we don't know. But it is still a short linguistic anecdote (from minute 22 to minute 24, continued at 35m15s, no more is needed) that might be interesting. There is even espionage involved. A kind of.

I'm sorry, but I don't watch Internet videos. Could you tell me the anecdote or direct me to a site where I could find the story on media using writing?

[Thökk]

Originally Posted by Icelander

I'm sorry, but I don't watch Internet videos. Could you tell me the anecdote or direct me to a site where I could find the story on media using writing?

The story is better to listen to, charisma and all, but yeah, can do that from a PC. But later.

*Checks the unsent comment.*

I guess later is now.

You might get an impression F:OL (Fallout: Oblivion Lost) is a neurodivergent art project but this is not the case and if it was i wouldn't be making fun of it in order to explain the context behind the strange language we need to go to space...

The (Stalker) game was released in 2008-ish, back then the gaming world was dominated by World of Warcraft.

Being a contrarian [*__*] I didn't play WoW and instead spent endless hours in EVE online

A Space MMO with a reputation. I was there - EVE was not like other girls - the players were allowed and even encouraged to scam lie and steal from one another. It was "dog eats dog" kind of environment. One of my online buddies was a guy from the UK who had an amazing education. I have never seen a foreign person command the Russian language with such elegance before or since.

So he decided to put his linguistic skills to good use by infiltrating a powerful Russian space guild in EVE, and this was when he made a, well, a scientific discovery.

They could understand him just fine but for some reason it didn't work both ways. He couldn't understand the half of what these people were saying.
Contrary to a popular misconception instead of speaking Russian they were speaking this [screenshot 1].. whatever this is [screenshot 2] - it doesn't have a formal name, it's a sociolect of unintentional drill tweets. Actually since it's used almost exclusively by males it's more like a genderlect - is that even a word? Yes it is [dictionary screenshot]! This game (F:OL) is unique because it's almost entirely written in this eurasian genderlect and then faithfully translated to English...

...Online story also has a resolution.

Impressed by his command of the language the Russians assumed that the "spy" was some kind of a learned man and put him into a minor leadership position within the organization. He immediately proceeded to grab everything that wasn't nailed down and then he turned off some of their star base defenses or whatever, paving the way for a space invasion.

Warlockracy, "Fallout: Oblivion Lost" mod video analysis, Youtube

[Icelander]

Assume that everything I know about online video games, I learned from books and interviews with victims. I'm just looking for whether any of the linguistic peculiarities would apply before the Iron Curtain fell and the rate of the spread of global culture accelerated exponentially with the popularization of the Internet and the terminally online.

I actually know more than I want about EVE Online, as a business and social pĥenomena, though I've never played the game or any other MMO. Eve Fan Fests are obviously held here in Reykjavík, CCP Games was a client of our firm almost since their founding, several of my friends were long-time players, one was an artist and writer for the game, etc.

But what does 'unintentional drill tweets' mean? Is the 'drill' meant in the sense of military drill, postulating a possible origin of the 'genderlect' within the military culture of conscript soldiers, a society that in the 1980s mostly or totally excluded females, and along with prisons are among the most likely institutions to house the development of a genderlect in an industrialized society?

And would that mean that some form of such genderlect should have existed in the 1980s and into 1990-1991?

[Thökk]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Assume that everything I know about online video games, I learned from books and interviews with victims.
...
I actually know more than I want about EVE Online, as a business and social pĥenomena, though I've never played the game or any other MMO. Eve Fan Fests are obviously held here in Reykjavík, CCP Games was a client of our firm almost since their founding, several of my friends were long-time players, one was an artist and writer for the game, etc.

Then you probably know about it more than I ever did, because I haven't spoken to a more than two EVE players in my life and the rest of it comes from news articles.

But what does 'unintentional drill tweets' mean?

It's what auto-generated subtitles wrote and it got me confused, but trying to type this line in search gave me this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dril so that would be phrasing in the style of that twitter account's posts, I guess. "Unintentional" here meaning that it's not intended to be an absurdist humour, but rather how such people think and the way they talk.

Is the 'drill' meant in the sense of military drill, postulating a possible origin of the 'genderlect' within the military culture of conscript soldiers, a society that in the 1980s mostly or totally excluded females, and along with prisons are among the most likely institutions to house the development of a genderlect in an industrialized society?

And would that mean that some form of such genderlect should have existed in the 1980s and into 1990-1991?

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.

I'm just looking for whether any of the linguistic peculiarities would apply before the Iron Curtain fell and the rate of the spread of global culture accelerated exponentially with the popularization of the Internet and the terminally online.

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. 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.

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?

[Thökk]

It's a haphazard answer, I hope it makes sense.

[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.