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18 The Linguist Vol/61 No/1 2022
thelinguist.uberflip.com
The author of Nemesis and McMafia speaks to
Miranda Moore about the role of languages in his life
As an undergraduate studying drama with
German at the University of Bristol in the
mid-1970s, Misha Glenny got involved with a
group of activists fighting censorship in the
Eastern Bloc. "They would smuggle books
and dismembered Xerox machines to the
opposition," explains the author of McMafia
and DarkMarket. As his fascination with the
politics of Eastern Europe grew – galvanised
in part by his father's interests as a translator
of Russian literature – so too did his thirst for
knowledge of the countries and their people.
H already knew that he wanted to be a
foreign correspondent. Where he differed
from other young idealists emerging from
adolescence at the time was in his conviction
that gaining an in-depth understanding of
the area would involve learning at least one
of its languages. He opted for Czech out of
pure convenience: while living in Berlin as
part of his university course, he made friends
with a Czech man who was able to cross the
border freely because his wife was German.
They spent a week touring Prague together.
"It was a very dramatic time politically,
with [the human rights advocacy group]
Charter 77 having got off the bat, so I
started teaching myself Czech," he says. A
month-long summer school in Prague and
10-month postgraduate research trip saw
him reach relative fluency.
Now a professor at UCL and consultant to
governments on transnational organised
crime, he also speaks Portuguese and Serbo-
Croat, plus rudimentary Hungarian, Albanian
and Russian, and can communicate in most
Slavic languages. As we talk about his life –
from BBC Central Europe Correspondent
during the 1989 revolutions to public speaker
covering topics such as cyber crime and fake
news – it becomes clear that Glenny's
primary motivation for language learning has
always been a burning interest in the related
politics and people. "I was so interested in
Germany, Central Europe, Russia, South-
Eastern Europe – Yugoslavia in particular –
and that is what drove me to learn languages.
I didn't see it as a burden; I really enjoyed it."
As a child, his home was filled with books
in Cyrillic script and languages that he didn't
recognise. Before Glenny's father, Michael,
became a translator and academic, he was a
European sales manager for Wedgwood, and
the family travelled to Belgium, Germany and
Spain for holidays, as well as staying with
family in the Netherlands. "We were
swamped by a sense of being European –
something I feel very, very strongly about to
this day." (He is relieved to have kept his EU
citizenship via an Irish passport "by dint of
the intelligence of my paternal grandfather in
being born in Newry, County Down").
It is not by accident that his sister also
became a linguist, studying Russian at Sussex
and Harvard universities, while Glenny was
absorbed in international affairs and the Cold
War by the age of 12. It was his father, of
course, who taught him to read Cyrillic, but his
mother Juliet who found him a three-month
placement in Germany that would have a
lasting impact. After years of studying French
(which he "was never that fond of") and then
MISHA GLENNY
AND THE SEARCH FOR KNOWLEDGE
©
TERESA
WALTON
