Elliott / Shukman Secret Classrooms

An Untold Story of the Cold War
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-30950-4
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 286 Seiten

'Here is a vivacious account of how in the 1950s, under Eden and Lloyd at the Foreign Office, some 5,000 young men doing national service were quietly siphoned off from their units, secluded in Cornwall and Fifeshire, or, more boldly, next door to the Guards depot at Coulsdon in Surrey, and put through crash courses in Russian till they could speak it fluently ...' M. R. D. Foot, Spectator Lambasted by the Soviets as a 'spy school', the Joint Services School for Linguists (JSSL) was a major Cold War initiative, which pushed 5000 young National Servicemen through intensive training as Russian translators and interpreters, primarily to meet the needs of Britain's signals intelligence operations. Its pupils included a remarkable cross-section of talented young men who went on to a diversity of glittering careers: professors of Russian, Chinese, ancient philosophy, economics; the historian Sir Martin Gilbert; authors such as Alan Bennett, Dennis Potter and Michael Frayn; screenwriter Jack Rosenthal; stage director Sir Peter Hall; and churchmen ranging from a bishop to a displaced Carmelite friar. Geoffrey Elliot and Harold Shukman, both of whom emerged from JSSL as interpreters, have drawn on many personal recollections and interviews with fellow students, as well as once highly classified documents in the Public Record Office, in order to reveal this fascinating story for the first time. 'A highly entertaining read ... No one interested in late 20th century theatre or literature can afford to ignore this book.' Spectator 'Elliott and Shukman write with style and wit ... They record something more than a byway in the history of the cold war, a true contribution to British history.' Michael Bourdeaux, Times Higher Education Supplement 'An engaging, quirky account of this strange offshoot of the Cold War ... a kind of Virgin Soldiers for clever clogs.' Michael Leapman, Independent

Geoffrey Elliott is a retired investment banker and an Honorary Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford. He is the author of I Spy: The Secret Life of a British Agent. Harold Shukman retired recently as University Lecturer in Modern Russian History at Oxford. His books include biographies of Lenin, Stalin and Rasputin and translations of the plays of Evgeny Shvarts and Isaac Babel.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Elliott, Geoffrey

Shukman, Harold

Leseproben

Introduction

Looking back at my childhood now, it seems utterly fated that I should have learned Russian and thereby fallen in love with all things Russian. Why otherwise should my first memory of print and pictures be of a feature on the Russo-Finnish War, in Picture Post magazine, when I was barely five? The photo of ghostly white-coated soldiers moving through a snowy birch forest stirred me mysteriously, as I sat in a small working-class Cornish bungalow. Vaguely I gathered that the Red Army were the enemy. But only a year later, they were our brave allies; which suited my father much better because, as a socialist, he admired what he knew of the Soviet system, though he had also spent ten years in California and loved American democracy from first-hand knowledge. Happily, in tune with my father, I followed the advances of Zhukov or Patton, pincering the Nazis, in News Chronicle maps. My father didn’t have much time for the class-ridden English.

He and I together listened approvingly to Sir Stafford Cripps giving a radio talk about the Soviet Union. Cripps had said to his escort, ‘These people look as if they own the streets!’, and his escort had replied, ‘They do!’ We became, for two years, emigrants to Australia; and there, while plastering with a White Russian immigrant labourer, my father heard a very different reality about the Soviet Union. For me too, a different Russia was entering my life – a few haunting bars of Rachmaninov, played every night on a ‘Popular Classics’ programme.

There were, then, these seemingly fateful early chords, many of them inevitable for a child of the Second World War. They would have lost their special significance in my memory but for an apparent misfortune. My family returning to England when I was sixteen in 1951, I won a place to read English at Oxford, but only after two years of National Service.

And so it was that I found myself, one bleak November day, on the windswept parade-ground of the Joint Services School of Linguists, in Bodmin, Cornwall. Still dazed from having escaped half way through the horrors of Basic Training, I was vaguely aware that we were assembled in three distinct groups. When we were summoned to ‘Get on parade!’, we soldiers advanced with exaggerated arm-swings and boot-thumps; the airmen moved with a nonchalant, easy superiority, as if they were Battle of Britain heroes; and the sailors … the sailors trotted a few yards in a rollicking, self-parodying way.

Geoffrey Elliott and Harold Shukman, authors of this history of JSSL, vividly depict the narrowness of our world. ‘Shirted by Viyella and Aertex’, we were youths ‘whose trouser belts had snake-shaped buckles, whose food and sweets had for many years been officially rationed, who collected bus and railway engine numbers with a zeal bordering on the manic …’ If our parents holidayed at all, it was in Paignton or Margate, ‘candyfloss “Kiss Me Quick” resorts … Over-indulgence in Guinness, Babycham or Merrydown Cider at 3/6d a bottle presented the biggest risk of substance abuse.’

I remember that first parade because the Regimental Sergeant Major – fearsome like all his kind – bawled me out for some slovenliness and, when I gave my name as ‘Thomas’, bawled even louder: ‘Thomas! I’ve heard of you! I’m going to be watching you!’ I knew I was no soldier, but the thought that I was already known as the worst soldier among these hundred or two mostly bespectacled and nerdish lads was pretty terrifying.

I began my Russian course with that ignominy; and ended it with equal ignominy when, through a crass error of vocabulary, I threatened a supposed prisoner of war with castration. His howl of joyous derision echoed around the whole camp. Small wonder I was finally graded ‘suitable for low-level interrogation after further training’. I suspect even that was over-generous, and I thank God I was never in a position where I’d have to ask some quaking Red Army private his name, rank and number.

We learn here that the Prime Minister himself, no later than 1950 – so presumably Clement Attlee – had ordered the creation of a school for Russian linguists. The Cold War was under way, and might easily soon turn into a hot war. Too few people could speak Russian. To the immense credit of all involved, the school was created swiftly, was organised intelligently, and staffed by teachers, both Russian and English, who were skilful and enthusiastic. In the ten years of its existence, 5,000 young men with competence in Russian were trained. And it is rare to find a school – especially run with military discipline and intensity – whose Old Boys speak of it with almost universal respect and affection. For many, including the dramatists Alan Bennett and Michael Frayn, the years at this school were indeed some of the best years of their lives. And that is because JSSL achieved far more that what it intended to achieve. It trained potential interpreters and translators – but it also changed people’s lives.

I described to the authors one proud moment I experienced. We had to recite a Russian poem. I think I chose a Pushkin, but it might have been Lermontov. Anyway, one of our tutors, Vera Grech, a former actress with Stanislavsky’s Art Theatre, had tears in her eyes, and was heard to say that I must have Russian parents. That was a compliment to me – I had a feeling for poetry and also had fairly good Russian pronunciation – but it was much more a compliment to our teachers, Vera Grech included, because they were able to communicate to us their love of Russia and her language. John Drummond, later Director of the Edinburgh Festival and Promenade Concerts, wrote of his time at JSSL: ‘I find it difficult even today not to feel deep inside that I am partly Russian … As baptisms go it was total immersion.’

Another term for it might be brainwashing, but our brains were being washed not with ideology – there was never any crude anti- Soviet propaganda, which is remarkable – but with the complex beauty of the Russian language. I wasn’t aware of it at the time;my attitude was totally pragmatic; I would have opted out of National Service if I could, it was a great nuisance; but since I couldn’t, this was as congenial a way of spending it as I could possibly hope for. Especially as, almost uniquely, I was near home and could have some home comforts almost every weekend. And if I worked hard, I might be among those selected to go to a quasi-university course at Cambridge.

This I managed to achieve. In Cambridge, we were addressed by the energetic and charismatic director, Elizabeth Hill, who told us we must rabotat’, rabotat’, rabotat’ – work, work, work – and if we did we would fall in love with ourselves. And if we didn’t – we would find ourselves off the course. By diligently learning word- lists, I clung on week by week. I fell in love, not with myself, and not with Russian, but with the music of Sibelius; for another invaluable aspect of the Russian Course for me was that my roommates, from much more cultured backgrounds, were already connoisseurs of classical music. We bought LPs, just invented then, and wildly conducted symphony after symphony in our room. There was never any class distinction; we seem to have been a remarkably democratic bunch. There were, it is true, one or two who stood out through intellectual distinction. On my Course the obvious leader – older, sophisticated, handsome, already with a Ph.D – a kind of admired Steerforth – was one A. K. Thorlby, later a distinguished academic. One felt he was on easy terms with Liza Hill and other tutors, and I envied him his air of insouciant superiority.

It was not until I had finished National Service and was well under way towards an English degree at Oxford that the full force of Russian struck me. Doctor Zhivago had just sensationally appeared in the West. It was my summer vacation; I had a job in my local library. I became so immersed in the wonderful novel that I would read it during my two-mile country walk to work. The weather was balmy; the book was stirring my own juvenile creative juices. I was walking to a library, and reading about Yury Zhivago entering a library and seeing his lost love, Lara, there. It seemed a defining moment. I was reading Zhivago in English – I could not have fully understood the Russian text – yet I felt I was reading a ghostly Russian underneath the English, and that I understood the Russian soul. And that the Russian language was my Lara – mysterious, often incomprehensible, maddening, yet forever loved.

As Secret Classrooms makes abundantly clear, there were hundreds if not thousands of young men whose lives were similarly enriched, even transformed, by that Russian Course. The numbers applying to the Slavonic departments in universities suddenly multiplied. The JSSL was created for a practical military purpose, to help defend against a Soviet attack that seemed then all too likely. It succeeded in that aim; but ultimately of far greater significance was that it created a generation of young and influential Britons who had generous, respectful and affectionate feelings for Russia – the eternal Russia of Tolstoy, Pushkin and Pasternak.

After reading Secret Classrooms, I am left with the regret that I did not work harder and learn more. I would like to do it all again!

D. M....