Fiona Hill

So I had visions of myself sitting around, you know, listening to things in a big headset and, you know, basically translating perhaps at some, you know, future arms control summit.

Well, I mean, I read everything I actually possibly could about, you know, nuclear weapons and nuclear war.

And, you know, I started to try to teach myself, you know, Russian a little bit.

It was very much in the context of nuclear war at this particular point.

But also in historical context, because I knew that the United States and the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union had been wartime allies in World War II.

So I tried to understand all of that.

And also, like many other people, I'd read Russian literature in translation.

I'd read War and Peace, and I'd loved the book, actually.

I mean, particularly the story parts of it.

I wasn't one really at that time when I was a teenager.

I thought Tolstoy went on a bit in terms of his series of the great man and of history and kind of

social change though now i appreciate it more but when i was about 14 i was like this man needed an editor you know could he have just got on with the story what an amazing story what an incredible you know kind of book this is i still think he needs an editor but yeah well i think his wife tried didn't she but um he got um he got quite upset with her

And then I kind of thought to myself, well, how do I study Russian?

Because there were very few schools in my region, given the impoverishment of the region, where you could study Russian.

So I would have to take Russian from scratch.

And this is where things get really quite interesting.

Because there were opportunities to study Russian at universities, but I would need to have, first of all, an intensive Russian language course in the summer.

And I didn't have the money for that.

And the period is around the miners' strike in the United Kingdom in 1984.

Now, the miners of County Durham had very interestingly had exchanges and ties with the miners of Donbas going back to the 1920s.