Sarah Rainsford (MML 1992) explains how her talent for Russian led her to a career as a foreign correspondent.
I
come from a state school education in the Midlands and didn’t really know what to expect from Cambridge at all, or understand the system. I remember my admissions interview with Professor (Anthony) Cross on the panel. I had no idea then that he was the head of the Russian department at the University. I remember it was all pretty intimidating and my friends studying elsewhere seemed to be having a much better time than me. I was just working hard to keep up with all the clever people. What did I do? Worked hard, went to the bar, and played football. The first match I played was against Churchill. Unfortunately, I was enthusiastic rather than skilful and I broke a girl’s collarbone. I got the nickname Crusher after that. I met my husband, Kester Aspden (History 1994) at Fitz, at the quiz machine in the bar. He was doing a PhD. Now he’s a writer and travels the world with me. A portable husband is a rare species in foreign
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correspondent circles. When we were in Istanbul he wrote The Hounding of David Oluwale and it won a Gold Dagger award for crime non-fiction. He can also thank me for taking him to Havana for three years, when he learned to dance salsa. Now he’s planning to write about that. I loved languages at school. I did French, German and Latin then at Sixth Form College there just happened to be a teacher who had learned Russian in the military. It sounded exotic. He had this slightly dull way of teaching, insisting on learning the grammar first and holding up flash cards he’d made himself. It took us a year before we learned a single sentence. But it was extremely effective. Then a Russian girl, Natasha, came to stay as part of an exchange programme. In January 1992 I spent six months in Moscow. It was the most amazing time to be there. The Soviet Union was falling apart around me. You could travel to places that were suddenly independent republics. We flew to Uzbekistan for a dollar, then got stuck there with no flights back because
nobody knew how to operate independent airlines. In Georgia we ended up in a hotel full of refugees from the civil war, with a lad called Spartak throwing roses up on to our balcony. I finished university with Russian and French, then worked at Bloomberg TV starting off as an intern and becoming a producer. After that, I got a job with the BBC Russian Service, calling correspondents to record their reports then cutting the quarter-inch tape with a razor blade. I first moved out to Moscow for BBC News in August 2000, right after the Kursk submarine sank and at the very beginning of Vladimir Putin’s time in power. Two days after landing, I found myself covering that disaster and I haven’t looked back. I was a producer, initially, getting other people on air. But I always wanted to be behind the microphone or in front of the camera. I started reporting at the weekends, finding features, and got my break when the Nord-Ost theatre siege happened in 2002. A group of Chechen militants stormed a Moscow theatre in the middle of a musical,