The Russian Interpreter

THE RUSSIAN

INTERPRETER

Michael Frayn

Contents

Title Page

A Note on the New Edition

 

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About the Author

By the Same Author

Copyright

A NOTE ON THE NEW EDITION

I was once a Russian interpreter myself. This was in the early fifties, at the height of the Cold War. The Soviet blockade of Berlin in 1948 had suddenly raised the possibility of war with Russia, and the British government realized that, refugees of Russian descent apart, who might have divided loyalties, we had almost no one on our side who would be able to perform basic intelligence functions such as eavesdropping on enemy communications or interrogating prisoners of war. Always supposing, of course, that we survived the ensuing holocaust long enough for there to be any communications to eavesdrop on, or prisoners to interrogate.

Military service was compulsory in Britain at the time, however, so there was a good supply of young men available, many of them supposedly with language skills because they had just spent their schooldays trying (usually without much success) to learn French. So, over the next ten years, partly in old army camps and partly in two universities, London and Cambridge, some six thousand of us were taught Russian, and trained to be translators and interpreters.

Even though the novel is not in any way autobiographical, in spite of the title, it was the Russian that I’d learnt on the Cambridge course that first took me to Moscow, and introduced me to the world in which the story is set. This was in 1956, when I was back at Cambridge as an ordinary undergraduate, and studying philosophy. Three of us who’d been on the National Service courses, together with two women who were now studying Russian for their degrees, decided that we’d like to have a look at the land where the language was actually spoken. I suppose we were driven by simple curiosity about what was going on behind that opaque and tightly drawn curtain – perhaps also to get some practical return on our labours.

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.

That spring, though, the signs still seemed slightly encouraging. Our leader was a determined and indefatigable psychology student called Rex Brown, who many years later became well known as an authority on decision theory. It was he who did most of the work, so far as I recall, writing endless letters to Russian officials, to our own university authorities, and to people in the British government who might be able to help us. Against all the odds our efforts succeeded.

Or seemed to.