I love this question, thank you!
My father was convinced that we would one day move to an English-speaking country. This was back in the 1970s when the USSR seemed unbreakable. But my father was a visionary, so he started to prepare. He mastered English to such perfection that there was never a way to convince Americans he would meet after 1987 that he wasn’t from Texas. I remember there was this conference sometime around 1990 when an American scholar ran towards us across the room, exclaiming, “I had no idea there was going to be another Texan here aside from me!” It took a while to explain to him that my father has never been outside the USSR.
Try to imagine what it means to learn a language with such a degree of fluency in a country where you can’t talk to a native speaker under the penalty of a jail sentence and there’s nowhere you can legally hear the language spoken.
When I was born, my father decided to make things easier for me and teach me from cradle. He only spoke English to me when I was a child, and then he did the same for my sister. Again, imagine the effort of doing that for years, no matter how tired, busy, preoccupied, unwell, etc. Consider that you need to know the names of every household object, which is atrociously hard when you have never been to an English-speaking country and can’t watch TV or read magazines in English.
I learned to read and write in English before any other language. I could do beautiful English cursive by the age of five because we had this old textbook from back in the 1950s, and it paid a lot of attention to English cursive. Also, my father taught me about syntaxis and morphology by age four. Really, he did. We would play this game where he’d write a long sentence in English and I’d analyze its structure and underline different parts of the sentence with different types of lines. We also played lexemes and built trees of word families.
Of course, people didn’t always react positively to hearing another language spoken in their vicinity. My father was denounced to the KGB for speaking “the Jewish language” to a small child. The busybody neighbors had no idea how English sounded and drew their linguistic conclusions on the basis of my father’s distinctively Jewish appearance. But even this danger didn’t stop us.
Nobody would do all this for just any language. English to us meant freedom. It was a door to a different world.
I’d have to talk about other languages in future posts because this will turn into a dissertation otherwise.
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Fascinating… When did your father learn English? 50-ies? 60-ies? Must have been dangerous then.
By the time our generation came into existence Soviet Union mellowed a lot. So I suspect the incident with your neighbor was mostly a manifestation of antisemitism and not of the official 70-ies Soviet policies about foreign languages.
I grew up in a “closed city”. Large military base. Westerners were not allowed to stay the night there and had to be driven back and forth 180 km to the “approved” hotel in the capital of the respective Soviet Republic. Soviet citizens were not supposed to stay with the Westerners one on one, two soviet citizens were supposed to be present at all times to watch each other. Once upon a time the second soviet citizen got sick and my mother had to spend a day alone with a Japanese colleague/guest… Yes, she had to give explanations to the KGB after that. Formal explanations. No basements, no interrogation as they show in the movies, etc. One day they took me (aged 10, I guess) walking around town with that Japanese guy. Not as the second soviet citizen, but in addition. And the second soviet citizen was a colleague, not a KGB person. Nobody questioned that. And she was not even the member of the Party…
In the early 2000s I worked in one of the DOE research labs… They had a guy there whom all Eastern Europeans called the “KGB guy”, and I had to give a formal report to him after a conference in Canada (!!!) about whom I met (citizens of what countries) and what did we talk about, etc…
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I had a friend in our apartment building, this was early 80s. Her dad was serving a jail sentence for once talking to two Americans. He was Jewish, so yes, I think it was different for Jews. That was not the only time my father was questioned by the KGB. Once he and q friend composed an anti-Soviet poem, and my father was questioned but the friend wasn’t. He was Russian. There weren’t any beatings or anything like that but it was still unpleasant.
My father had a phenomenal English professor at the university. She was the sister of the man who authored one of the most important math textbooks in the USSR, and I keep forgetting their last name.
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I think it is also STEM versus humanities. Soviets generally allowed STEM people to do their thing, as long as the products of STEM kept coming and STEM people did not make public anti-soviet statements, like Sakharov.
I know multiple people who did postdoc in the West, in Soviet time.
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