Whilst it is wrong to generalise about cultures, it must be said that Russian students are relentlessly intriguing. Perhaps it is something to do with growing up during the Cold War, when all we saw of Russians were intimidating Soviet women shotputters and grim communist march-pasts in Red Square. By the early-to-mid nineties the trickle of students into England from the former Soviet republics became steady, as did the resulting frequency of bizarre interludes.
Firstly, there was G, a huge, twenty-one-year-old bear of a Muscovite and avid boxer who excelled at telling macabre stories that invariably involved him fighting his brother, a lot of blood being shed and without exception ended with jolly descriptions of his distraught mother helpless to intervene to stop the carnage. Such tales were regularly recounted whatever the subject of the lesson, and any gaps in his vocabulary were filled by him standing up and reconstructing the conflict, swinging wild punches and viciously kneeing imaginary groins. This brutal pantomime was accompanied by chortles and snorts of delight, whilst reserved Japanese students looked on with genuine trepidation.
Then came A, a discernably odd Russian girl whom we suspected had been packed off to study English to see if the experience would dispel the psychological demons with whom she seemed to be doing perpetual battle. The first thing you noticed about her was her makeup. It looked like she’d put her lipstick on during a ride on a big dipper, in the dark. To complete her pornstar-chic look, she took to wearing mini-skirts that barely covered her bare necessities, and each week she’d appear with a different shade of dyed hair. Her dream was to become a model, her physical limitations making this all but impossible without drastic cosmetic surgery. When staff once telephoned her home in Russia to speak to her parents about several problems they were concerned about, not least her increasingly risqué fashion habits, they had to hang up with the issues unresolved due to a gruesome wailing and caterwauling in the background drowning out any attempt at communication.
It was hard to tell if S, a fellow Russian student, was extraordinarily bright or a bit of a dying star intellectually, as her English was virtually unintelligible, not because she couldn’t speak, but because she’d form phrases in the strangest of ways, subverting the rules of grammar with glorious abandon. She’d regularly baffle teaching staff with ideosyncratic questions, such as when she piped up that she’d appreciate an explanation of the difference between “male”, “female” and “email”.
By far the most memorable episode, however, was the arrival of the first student anyone could remember from Kazakhstan. Her English was very limited, and when asked by a colleague if she had a Kazak – English phrasebook she replied yes, producing a battered photocopied volume from inside her bag. It contained such everyday phrases as, “He’s an overeater”, “A large hooter she has” and the sublimely inventive, “This sucking weather kinks for a shuffling”. We could only presume that she’d accidentally handed over a copy of a KGB codebook, and that somewhere in Eastern Europe raincoated men were meeting on park benches to make cryptic conversation about a fat man’s eating habits, a girl with a large nose or the generally poor weather conditions.
Thank God the Cold War's over.
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