The remark which propelled me into reading Modern Languages with a focus on Russian came from my father.
“Specialise in a language like Russian and you’ll never regret it,” he said. “Whenever you apply for anything, it’ll make your application stand out.” He could not have been more right. It opened doors all along the way, from a scholarship to Harvard to my first job at the BBC, to the opportunity to become BBC Moscow correspondent just as the Soviet Union was falling apart. I now offer the same advice to others: learn a hard language and you’ll stand out in a crowd, as well as having lots of fun and adventures along the way.
It was in my first year at Oxford as an undergraduate that I met Julie Curtis, both of us studying Russian. I took the more traditional route and went to LMH (still women only in those days), while pioneering Julie took up one of the rare places being offered to women at a few of the men’s colleges for the first time. Julie read Russian and History, so our classes did not coincide much. But I remember being impressed that she not only rowed, but was captain of Wadham’s first ever women’s crew. In their first outing in the Summer Eights, they smashed through the competition to claim Head of the River. Seriously intimidating.
We got to know each other better as postgraduates, both of us at St Antony’s, both of us studying 20th-century Russian literature. One wonderful, memorable year she invited me to share a little house with her off the Marston Ferry Road near Summertown. Called Laundry Cottage, it was as ramshackle and charming as the name suggests, down a leafy lane, surrounded by fields, with roses and honeysuckle climbing over it.
It was also extremely cold, with almost no heating and quite dodgy plumbing. I once ran a bath and a torrent of feathers from a blackbird which had died in the tank upstairs poured out of the tap. ‘Opryatnaya bednost’ or ‘well-kept but impoverished’ was how one Russian friend visiting from Moscow described it. Even by Soviet standards it was dilapidated, but Julie and I loved it.
We both separately spent postgraduate years in Moscow on British Council Scholarships, but after this our paths diverged. Julie was already lecturing and doing other teaching, embarking on her long and distinguished career as an academic, culminating in her position as Professor at Oxford University.
My year in Moscow in 1981-82 coincided with the last year of the ailing Kremlin leader Leonid Brezhnev. Even through the fog of Communist propaganda it was clear he was not long for this world. In Moscow there was a sense of foreboding that one way or another the Soviet Union was on the brink of momentous change. Most of my Russian friends thought that would mean a new crackdown and return to repressions; nobody could imagine that the old Kremlin guard would permit reformers to open up the country and usher in the upheavals that would lead to the end of Soviet Communist empire within a decade. But the sense that something was shifting spurred me into a career change. On my return to Oxford from Moscow I decided that rather than continue down the academic track I would become a journalist. So I joined the BBC.
My first job, producing daily news programmes for the BBC World Service, was exhilarating but utterly nerve-wracking until I got the hang of it. Before long I also found a niche as someone who spoke Russian and understood how the Soviet Union ticked. When Mikhail Gorbachev took over as Kremlin leader in 1985 and began his perestroika reforms, the BBC quickly realised that it needed Russian speakers to cover what was fast becoming the world’s most captivating story. For the next few years my language skills came to the fore, first as a reporter on numerous assignments, then from 1989 as resident BBC correspondent in Moscow, tasked with covering political events in Moscow and across the rest of the Soviet Union.
Highlights included covering the attempted coup by hard-line Communists in August 1991, witnessing close-up the final disintegration of the USSR, and then watching Boris Yeltsin and his fledgling Russian government struggle to impose control over the new post-Soviet Russian state. There were outbreaks of civil war in Georgia, Moldova and Tadjikistan. There was rebellion in Chechnya and in a quieter way in Tatarstan. There was a heady free-for-all of sorts in the political and cultural sphere, as well as a catastrophic economic crisis and a terrifying collapse of law and order. Later was to come the equally terrifying prospect of interviewing President Vladimir Putin, in Russian, broadcast round the world live from the Kremlin. Never did I think that all that time spent as an undergraduate honing language skills at prose translation classes in the Taylorian would be put to such good use.
Julie and I stayed in touch and remained good friends. As well as regular social get-togethers, our paths crossed occasionally at conferences and other Russia-related events. Now we inhabit the same world again, she in Oxford, and me in my post BBC career as head of a Cambridge college.
Both of us have made good use of our Russian degrees over the years in very different ways. But for me a high point of our paths crossing came recently in a BBC studio. She was one of my guests on The Forum, the weekly radio programme I host and which was looking at Mikhail Bulgakov’s masterpiece Master and Margarita. This was the focus of her DPhil and several books and she was a brilliant contributor. It remains in my opinion one of the best and most moving programmes we’ve done.
You can hear Bridget, Julie and other guests on The Forum here: BBC World Service - The Forum, The Master and Margarita: Devilish satire