The Cambridge Experience, 1993-1994, by Natasha Assa

From MemoryArchive

Who:Natasha Assa
What:The Cambridge Experience
When:1993-1994
Where:Cambridge, UK

To write lightly about Cambridge is to presume too much or too little. Recently a best selling author published a three volume historical fiction of early modern (Newtonian) Cambridge. Highly engrossing read. So without presuming anything I'd like to relate my own Cambridge Experience.

The opportunity to go and study abroad was presented to me by Gorbachev's "perestroika". Before, "study abroad" was what dissidents used to do (like Boris Pasternak) or Nobel Prize winning scientists (like Peter Kapitsa). It was certainly not what Marxist Philosophy graduates of Moscow State University did. And yet, somewhere in the back of my mind while studying all those volumes of Marx and Lenin I was sure that there was more to learning than what Soviet Universities were licensed to do.

An opportunity presented itself unexpectedly. I was invited to the IV World Congress of Slavic Studies held in Harrogate, England, in 1990. I was going to give a paper on the first free elections in Zaporozhye, Ukraine where my father ran for office as an independent candidate. There wasn't much new to report: the system was corrupt, the elections were fixed, the winner was the favorite of the local Party and KGB elite.

But the fact that I could speak about it to a broad public and scholarly audience was new and it was exciting. It seemed that Russia's fate (and Ukraine's for that matter) was now genuinely in the hands of intelligentsia, at home and abroad, and that speaking and exchanging ideas held an invisible force, stronger than any. While at the congress, I was struck by the idea of a graduate school. I never knew that you can still study after your first diploma (there is no such practice in Russia) and I thought that that would be a perfect opportunity for me to step into a genuine scholarship. I say "genuine" because of course for all the cold war histeria, western distortions of Russian history and culture (all those notions of Russia as a tyranical autocracy) were nothing compared to the sterilization they underwent at the hands of Marxist-Leninist professors. So I was eager and willing to immerse myself in the mysteries of "True Learning".

The problem was, I did not know at all where to begin my search, I had no money, no friends, no clue. Through several acquaintances I got the idea that I should above all try Cambridge. To me this was like flying to the moon, or even further, but here it was Cambridge, alive and well, after centuries of True Learning. I visited Trinity College on the invitation of the future bestselling author, then a Fellow of the College, Orlando Figes, who was kind enough to help me put together a proposal for my studies. I was going to write about early development of Civil Society in Russia and of Stolypin reforms.

I arrived to Trinity on a beautiful spring day when sunkissed Cambridge was smothered in flowers and gracious garden scents. I have never seen anything more magnificent than the Great Court with its cloisters and the medieval fountain allegedly (mis)used by the great romantic poet Lord Byron. One of the wings displayed a plaque saying that Lord Isaac Newton was a Fellow of the College. For a moment I thought I was on a cosmic time machine going way back into the Golden Age. But my new friend and mentor seemed totally casual about the great place and totally engrossed in meeting me. He appeared to think that I was more fascinating than any of the intellectual dignitaries who graced Cambridge.

And in a sense I was - a child of Gorbachev's new Russia. He arranged for me to stay at the College in one of the splendid Tudor guestrooms - the Queens Chamber - and I was able to browse some more through the town for a couple of days. The endless courtyards of the splendid colleges, the King's Parade, the Backs, the river Cam, the University Library. I felt that I have truly arrived. It took another year before all the documents were finally arranged for me to be formally admitted. By that time my country - the Soviet Union - no longer existed and people were looking to leave under any pretext. For me miraculously the reason to leave was the admission to Trinity College, Cambridge - and in the tourmoil one could not think of a higher purpose.