Fiona Hill

Because most people speak Russia there as the lingua franca.

I mean, in the North East of England, of course, everyone spoke English, but lots of people were Irish speakers, Gaelic Irish speakers.

Some of them might have certainly been Welsh speakers.

There was lots of Welsh miners who spoke Welsh as their first language who came there.

But they created an identity.

It's the same in Belfast, in Ulster, the northern province of the whole of the Irish island.

part of Ireland that is still part of the United Kingdom.

That was also a heavily industrialized area.

High manufacturing, mass manufacturing, shipbuilding, for example, people came from all over there too, which is why when Ireland got its independence from the United Kingdom,

Ulster, Belfast and that whole region kind of clung on because it was, again, that melting pot.

It was kind of intertwined with the larger industrial economy and had a very different identity.

And so that, you know, for me growing up in such a specific place with such a.

special in many respects, heritage, gave me a different perspective on things.

When I first went to the Soviet Union in 1987 to study there, I actually went to a translator's institute, what was then called the Maurice Therese, which is now the Institute of Foreign Languages.

I was immediately struck by how similar everything was to the north of England, because it was just like one big working class culture that sort of broken out onto the national stage.

Everything in northern England was nationalized.

We had British steel, British coal, British rail, British shipbuilding, because after World War II, the private sector had been devastated and the state had to step in.

And of course, the Soviet Union is one great big giant nationalized economy when I get there.

And it's just the people's attitudes and outlooks are the same.

People didn't work for themselves.