The Russian Interpreter

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Or possibly because we knew it was going to be so tantalizingly difficult to do, and would be such a triumph if we could bring it off. In 1956 the Soviet Union was still closed off from the rest of the world. There were no student exchanges, no private tourism. The only way to go was as a member of a ‘delegation’, sponsored by a fellow travelling organization, invited by some organ of the Soviet state, and limited to a strictly controlled timetable of visits to factories, collective farms, et cetera, et wearily cetera. We wanted to go under our own steam, like normal human beings. Our proposal was to spend a month at Moscow University following courses in our own subjects, then have five students from Moscow back to Cambridge for a month. We wanted, in short, to set up the first genuinely independent student exchange between any British and any Russian university.

It was perhaps a good moment to try. Stalin had died three years earlier, his successor Malenkov had come and gone, and the reign of Nikita Khrushchev had begun. No one knew much about him, until in February 1956, in a closed session at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, he made a secret speech acknowledging for the first time the terrible excesses of Stalin’s terror. The speech was soon disseminated around the Soviet empire. In Britain the Observer newspaper got hold of it, and devoted an entire issue to it – the first inkling the western world had that something in Russia was perhaps beginning to change. This gleam of hope was going to fade very soon. Only six months later, when the Hungarians rebelled and overthrew the Communist government that the Russians had imposed upon them, Soviet tanks would be sent in to restore it.

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