Interview with alumnus Matthew Kupfer

They would say journalists write the first draft of history. It's kind of a cliche, but in reality, I saw that happening in real time. And I understood that I wanted to be a journalist. Not necessarily to cover war or ethnic conflicts, specifically, but that I felt that journalists were doing something important and helping us understand. So now I'm going home. Happy new year and a welcome back to Daniels Neverna. The Russian Studies podcast from Brandeis University. I'm your host, Addison Ansonov, and the man you've just heard speaking is alumnus Matthew Kupfer. We spoke about his time at Brandeis and his life as a reporter on the Russafone world. Because we discussed current events, it might be useful to note that the interview was originally recorded on the 14th of December, 2021. Hope you enjoy. I know you're on vacation, so sorry to have me start off with a question about work. If you could tell me a little bit about the day-to-day at your job. Right, so I'm the Central Asia Editor at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. Before that, I was the news editor at theCUBE Post, which is sort of an independent English language newspaper in Ukraine. It was recently, recently its entire staff was fired and it's now being relaunched under what looks to get more loyalist management and team loyalist to the owner or maybe to the government, hard to say what's going to happen. But I worked there for a long time. I was the news editor for about two years. I was a correspondent and just a news reporter for one year. Before that, I worked with some other independent English language publications here. Before that, I worked for the Moscow Times and Moscow for a year. Before that, I was at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace for a year as a junior fellow in the Russia Eurasia program. I did a master's degree at Harvard in their sort of Russian and Eurasian studies program. But that all sort of began at Brandeis, where I first started learning Russian with Professor Dubininat and really were it not for the foundation that that laid for me, both in class and also in my interactions with other student Russian speaking students and with the general Russian speaking community with the department. I would definitely not be here today because not be at this job, I mean because really learning Russian has become a pretty foundational component of my life. My day-to-day work is not very interesting. I have Zoom calls with journalists whom I work with, we work on stories together, we strategize how to do stories, I edit stories, there are large meetings, there's nothing particularly out of the ordinary here that you wouldn't expect from any other job that's being done most there remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. But I think the end results of the work of OCCARP Care very important, they reveal large-scale government corruption and organized crime activity in countries around the world. Some of the work, recent work that I'm most proud of personally has been at two investigations that I worked on with Turkmen journalists that revealed high-level corruption by members of the first family of Turkmenistan. This is a very big deal because Turkmenistan is one of the most authoritarian and closed-off countries on earth, it has no repressed in the country, it's suffering from a tremendous shortage of affordable food stuffs which means that large segments that Turkmen population, probably the majority population is struggling with food insecurity. If you have say dollars, yeah, you can buy enough food there, but what ordinary people can afford is very little, they have to stand in long lines to get subsidized food and just see you understand how authoritarian this country is, it's a place where the president is personally involved in basically every economic decision as well as things like the design of metals for the winners of dog shows and stuff like I mean it's not funny, I think people sometimes look at Turkmenistan and think oh that's funny, they have a president who plates the entire capital in white marble and its former president who died in 2006 had a golden statue of himself that always rotated to face the sun, yes it's very outlandish but it's actually a horrible situation for the people who live there and I'm very proud that some of our work can help to at least expose corruption which harms the general public of Turkmenistan, this is very important in my view. That's incredible, I don't know how much you'd be willing to say about like the process of like working with those journalists but what was that like? You know I think you probably imagine it to be more interesting than it is really ordinary journalism work and ordinary investigative journalism work, there's nothing I would say that's too wild about it, we're not the only ones doing that kind of work of I don't know of many others doing in Turkmenistan, it's a slow hard monotonous process that involves lots of reviewing information, lots of you know going through different source materials, sometimes interviews with people who you know could have insider knowledge or who think they have insider knowledge, sometimes it's going through documents we can find, sometimes combing different registries, you know it's like it's like solving a puzzle and Turkmenistan is specific where kind of you know anything you find could potentially be a sign of corruption because in a country that authoritarian with that little openness, basically anyone who's doing something big there, it raises serious questions, serious ethical questions. So in some ways it actually can be more straightforward I think than say you know investigating corruption and say the United States where there are lots of people doing legitimate business and there's lots of people doing legitimate business that's a little sketchy and there's some people doing illegal business and then there's some people doing you know illegal business maybe that benefits from some kind of corruption and then there's probably some really frightening corruption somewhere but there's a whole spectrum in the US and in many other countries that are authoritarian countries, sometimes that spectrum doesn't exist and that's a plus and a minus. Turkmenistan is a hard place to work but when you find something oftentimes you know what's going on there. It's really interesting and so I want to be like working for the OCCRP, does that differ a lot from like the day-to-day of like working at a newspaper or freelance thing, what's the difference? Oh I mean it differs a good bit because the biggest difference is that look you know some of the stories we've worked on we've worked on for months and months and months there's a story I've been working on for you know with a group of people for nearly a year and it's still going on you know at the key of post we were very very chained to the news cycle and there is good and there's bad to that. The good you really have a sense of completion you really feel like you're in tune with what's going on you understand what's happening you know in the society where you report you make a lot of contacts with people you learn interesting things. I feel like the three years I spent working at the key of post in particular and the year before that I spent working in Ukraine really taught me a lot about Ukraine. I know way more than I ever did even when I was doing research on Ukraine from my master's thesis and there's a positive side to all to being that kind of tuned into the news cycle. The negative side of being so tuned in is that you can lose the bigger more, not bigger but perhaps the more you don't always get to take that step back and look analytically at the situation to write a story that covers something bigger and more explanatory for the audience. When I worked at the Moscow Times we had sort of a we had sort of a in some ways an ideal situation at that time where we of course covered day to day news but we also were able to report on just stories that were interesting for no reason at all except they were interesting. A colleague of mine one day said let's do a story on Russian rap and then he and I did. I can't really imagine doing a story of that depth that looked into Ukrainian rap when I was the key of post because really we were so tuned into the news cycle and the other thing we're saying is that Ukraine is a really hyper fast news cycle. Russia at that time was less so and because it was also a very authoritarian country and a lot of the officials wouldn't speak to you basically kind of you basically had to there were more challenges in reporting on the stories but they're also limits and so rather than just reporting hard news which of course you did you also then focused on reporting things that were socially interesting and that would help people understand the general situation where people would talk with you because they're not government officials and that that was there are pluses and minuses to that but there were some fun aspects too like when we did a we did the entire story on Russian rap, we did a story on Russian drag queens an entire story on drag as a kind of social phenomenon in Russia my colleague and I traveled to Tuva a region in South Central Siberia that I wanted to visit for 10 years since I started learning Russian and basically since before I started learning Russian and we basically did a story on Cuban shamanism in the 21st century I mean that was all really cool and by contrast at OCCRP we focused extremely long term on on investigations we don't do a lot of day to day news and that's there's an advantage because you can really you know sink your teeth into a subject and work on it long term but there's a different there's a there's a disadvantage because you can get kind of bogged down in one story and you know spend a lot of time beating your head against the wall trying to make sense of it so that's you know that's kind of how work there is but it's not you know it's not I don't want you to think it's very swashbuck playing or it's just you know it's wild it probably you know if you were to make a movie out right a screenplay about it you'd have to exaggerate a little bit because most of the day to day work is ordinary investigative journalism stuff it's slow it's methodical involves a lot of fact-checking a lot of communication with other journalists a lot of cooperation. One of the things that I've been thinking about like preparing for the interview is like when you're writing coverage in English about stories in non-English-speaking areas how do you approach that is there are there like certain things are like how am I going to translate this interview or there are certain like what is the approach to writing stories in that manner? Sure I mean translation does pose certain challenges when you interview someone you want to quote them how you translate it that's some that is a challenge at the same time I should stress that something it's very common in Russian media is the question and answer interview and it's almost a nathema in English language journalism it's seen as a very weak format and most of the time it isn't used and generally you know in my work and a large you know in my work and in the work of my college and I was an editor we avoided that format so that wasn't the biggest challenge I will say that my whole career which has spanned everything from you know doing doing translation of investigative journalism from Russia way back when like you know eight years ago for an NGO to you know to kind of I did a little bit of work many years ago for a consulting firm I've seen a lot of different kind of translation and language issues and so you know there's always a certain degree of surprise when you encounter a word for example like scutha magilnik which is a burial ground a mass burial ground for diseased livestock in a text and have to find a way to translate that or I once translated a story when I was it this is in some way translation worked from way back when where there was a discussion of something called I think it was "Oh shit I'm a way it was spooky" these are these are like your utilities but not your utilities for your apartment they're the utilities you spend on like lighting in the corridor that's shared and heating in the corridor and once a year having someone clean the facade of the building and that was an absolute nightmare to translate the bigger issue I think with working in this environment is that you encounter people with different I don't want to say given understandings of journalistic ethics they're all committed to ethical journalism but different kind of understanding sometimes of where what certain rules should govern govern how they approach a story and there can also be cultural miscommunications I once I once had a journalist in a story I was editing confused in Ukraine the what was then the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate to the with the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the key of Patriarchate now that's a pretty fundamental distinction with a fair bit of conflict and political significance and the reason when I spoke with this journalist later basically what she said to me was well you know I'm you know I'm at least nominally Orthodox Christian and I've and I've gone to Moscow Patriarchate churches and key of Patriarchate churches and I don't think it really matters to God which one you go to she said and it's very clear that you know for me as a foreigner who's not from Ukraine and not an Orthodox Christian that to me it was purely a technical and political distinction you know that's what that's and so we needed to make that clear in the story but for her she was not totally used to making that distinction in her own head and so it was easy to get confused and it mixed things up that's you know those cultural things cannot arise and you know also when you deal with sometimes very authoritarian states you have someone who's very extremely knowledgeable about it the journalist and they say you need to say how do you know that this person that person X did Y thing or person X is doing Y thing and they say well everybody knows that it's just something known by everyone well for journalism and particularly investigative journalism that usually doesn't cut it because because it's not proven it's just you know everybody knows it isn't isn't necessarily proof now if you can if you can point to a you know in a survey or some kind of a poll or study that indicates that yes that's strong that's pretty good for proof if you can point to a non non-governmental organization that does research on this or a researcher who's you know had access to information that's good for proof or if you have you know if a government stated officially that this is going on and that's that those that government statements are viewed as reliable for example like a I don't know you know like a British if there's some kind of British human rights state agency and they say there's a human rights violation in X country that has more weight than a guy saying well just everybody knows that's going on but that's you know that's I guess that's another one of the challenges that arises in working with across cultural lines and across language lines when did you realize that you wanted to be a journalist within this context was that something that you always plan on doing or did that become an idea later on or you know also kind of a complicated story basically I mean my dad was a journalist a long time ago he worked for many years as a journalist and so I always had sort of an interest in journalism and when I was in high school I was the you know co-editor of school paper but when I got to college I really wanted to try something else and I didn't think I would become a journalist I didn't do they have any sense of what I would do I think I was not very practical in a lot of ways I was kind of had a romantic orientation towards learning and and whatever activity I wanted to dedicate my time to and I wasn't really thinking about how to make myself the best possible professional perhaps but in 2010 I went to Kyrgyzstan to do an internship over the summer this is when I was still a student and a there was basically an option of the internet conflict in the city where I was and it was a very scary situation around 500 people were killed mostly for the ethnic loseback minority than entirely for me personally it was quite frightening because we you know we had machine gun fire very close to where I was staying I had to leave that place on foot basically going through going to a field with sub with the loseback people I was living with to go say with some friends who were you know in a safer part of the city Kyrgyzstan I mean it was it was very frightening and during that time this was 2010 in Kyrgyzstan so the level of internet internet connection in the country was lower and people didn't have smartphones at home and most people didn't have internet at home so not just smartphones anyway they didn't have smartphones so there wasn't this you know 3g 4g 5g and so once the electricity went off and there was no more TV news coverage really we didn't know very much and the we were I mean I was very reliant on journalists who reported on that on that situation or information even though I was witnessing a lot of it firsthand there were there was you know things coming from a global perspective I couldn't know so the statements of the official government statement the you know the statements from say rights organizations that were hearing things from the conflict zone and I became very reliant on that information understand what was going on and then after I got out of a wish to understand what had happened and so after that I was in this in the capital city of bishkek and I learned you know I kept learning was going on I was reading the news from from what was going on there and you know they always say journalists write the first draft of history it's kind of a cliche but in reality I saw that happening in in real time and I understood that I wanted to be a journalist not necessarily to cover war or ethnic conflicts specifically but that I felt that journalists were doing something important and helping us understand the world and that you know I could study this region from a university I could study it from you know reading about it on the internet I could talk with people there but there's something about being there on the ground and reporting what's actually happening in the political environment in the society that that gives you a closer view of what's happening and a better understanding of things that are very important for that country and that should be important for the world outside that country and I'll just say say that you know one of the features of working in Ukraine and I think also in Russia to a lesser degree and certainly in central Asia is it's really a struggle to bring global public attention to what's happening here people don't care most of the time no they don't care people don't know because the media doesn't have the really to bandwidth to pay attention to it unless there's a war or unless something very big happens an election or a terrorist attack or a you know horrible tragedy or something and so a lot of the work we did at the Q post the most of the times that other place I worked before OCCRP was directed at you know offering that local perspective to a global audience in English. Turning off that I do at some point have to kind of address the elephant in the room of you know here in the States Ukraine has definitely been in the headlines more often than usual the past couple of weeks and I'm sure you have been taught to like in terms of coverage coming from like American journalists especially those who are connected to like American based publications is there something in the coverage that you find that tends to be missing or the bugs you around more positive notes and the coverage as well or for now I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to cut the international press a kind of I'm I mean let me raise that for now I'm going to cut the international press on slack on this issue because I think then I say this as a person has covered Ukraine for four years living in Ukraine as I watch the discourse surrounding the Russia massing its forces on the Ukrainian border the potential for invasion the um call between Putin and Biden um that the role of the EU in this in this situation I'm personally somewhat confused about what's going on myself and I think one of the problems here is that we really don't know what's going to happen and even when we are told or when we find out from a government you know press release or the statements of the press secretary of say you know of the White House or you know an EU type press secretary we don't actually always know what's really going on so case in point there was a report that the US with pressure Ukraine to um grant uh autonomy to the done done boss region of Eastern Ukraine that Russia has basically occupied through its proxies that it supports and even some of its own troops for since 2014 uh this was very controversial in Ukraine and then the White House uh press secretary Jen Saki denied it well there's there's a little bit of an elephant of the room here that I think most people don't understand which is that in 2017 and perhaps I am not sure that the earliest instance of this law but if the one I remember covering myself you know being involved in covering Ukraine passed a law on special status for the done boss that granted it some autonomy and um that law was renewed and I believe was renewed at the end of 2020 and still should be in in effect right now so if um whether or not the the US is pressuring Ukraine on autonomy for the done boss there is a fact that there is a law about that in effect right now so what does this mean is is the US just reiterating a position that everybody's agreed upon is the controversy that that position is very unpopular and that's the only that's the reason people are opposed to it is you know what's going on here I feel like in that case I don't really know how what supposedly the US was going to press for would be different from what was on paper in the law and now they deny that they're going to press for that so you know the question remains open and I think this is one of the big challenges right now you know Biden had his call with Putin I read some analysis from different experts smart people some some of whom I know personally in respect and one of them says this was it this is useless nothing good came out of it another person said it was an effective usage of you know the white house effectively addressed the situation to try to prevent a war we can't guarantee it won't happen but this likely decreases the odds and some people said it was a concession to the Kremlin because they got the call and they're going to have a meeting with some NATO or there's been a meeting between Russia and some NATO member states other people disagreed and said you know this is a diplomatic way to have a discussion and also potentially delay any kind of Russian invasion of Ukraine and there are a lot of different perspectives and I think one of the challenges for analyzing this is that we have to both admit that the goal of preventing a war is good but it's not the only goal I wouldn't say prevent a new first of all not a new war but a new outburst of warfare at all costs because there are there are values that are worth standing up for here but at the same time we also need to understand that the US and the EU have a limited number of tools in their toolbox there are different sanctions that can be imposed including sort of the nuclear option of sanctions which would be cutting Russia off from the international swift payment system or from other you know more serious financial sanctions that would basically make it difficult for Russia to do business internationally it would make it hard for Western companies to operate there and those are effective tools to a degree but also you kind of can only fire them once once you impose those sanctions if they if they don't work then or if they don't not if they don't work if they aren't effective enough if Russia feels it can withstand them then there's really nothing holding them back you know you can say don't ramp them a call don't ramp them any meetings because those are concessions but if you do that you have just thrown out another set of tools to use and I think for me I'm looking at this and I I'd love to say you know I feel confident that that the that the right decision was made I feel confident there won't be a new kind of Russian invasion but I think it's very hard to judge at this point if if it prevents an invasion if Russia was planning to invade which we we may not ever fully know are where they actually planning to invade if they don't we certainly can't say that for sure but if this if this effort prevents a new invasion and decreases tensions and makes a minimal amount of concessions to Kremlin then I think it will be a very successful effort if it make if it prevents an invasion by making a lot of um my up concessions to Kremlin it will be successful at preventing a new invasion but it won't be very successful overall as it will have it will create shock waves um for other countries other US and EU allies and we'll have a big influence on the image of the US will make it look very weak and I think in the future their countries like Russia China will not be afraid of being aggressive towards neighbors knowing that there's only so much that can be done against them and the you know the worst case scenario will be is if this if there is an invasion and the US and EU are powerless to do anything to prevent it I think that will send a very similar message to to the concession but it's to what concessions would so um this is an extremely serious situation and there's always room to say the you know the Western international media could do a better job covering it but at the same time I'm I'm somewhat sympathetic to them because I know that many of the things in question here many of the many of the things under discussion here the Minsk uh peace agreements between Ukraine and Russia over the Dumbass um the um the uh the uh special status law for the Dumbass and Ukraine these things are confusing for those of us who work here and cover Ukraine they're not straightforward and when you're an international media that has good journalists on the ground but you have a limited amount of space to publish and limited audience interest in this it's tough to tell that whole story so I you know I think that that some of the issues we're running into with um with uh Western and international coverage of the situation are kind of inherent to the situation extremely complicated and at the moment not very clear some paper one paper described what was done as concessions to Russia others didn't I mean that's that's an interpretation issue it may you could say it's bias maybe but it's I mean it may be but I think it's it's the kind of bias that enters when you try to provide some analysis so the reader understands what's actually happening but when the situation itself is not very clear on the level of diplomatic discussions and you know laws and things like that thank you it's a very in-depth and incredible answer and I'm going to be thinking about that when I you know breathe the news tomorrow and so I I wanted to go back to you mentioned that you've been covering this region for a really long time what was your level of fluency when you first started covering this area of the world well I mean first not for a really long time I've been working full-time as a journalist for approaching six years now or so so that's not a huge amount of time and before that I did some freelance commentary pieces some freelance articles I did some blogging I was active on Twitter you know when I learned Russian when I went to Kyrgyzstan in retrospect my Russian was okay it was you know I could communicate but it was not amazing and I grew quite rapidly you know from speaking there in that situation you learn language not just by practicing it but you once you get the grammatical foundation and you know that well you need to then practice it because language is part you know the logic of grammar which you know in your head and then part of it is sort of muscle memory and there was a really wonderful language instructor named buddy Shakhman and I have the privilege of working with him very briefly when I was at Harvard he died a couple years ago he was originally from I think he was born in perhaps Azerbaijan or maybe Ukraine I forget where he was born he was from the former Soviet Union he was in immigrant the US and he had trained a lot of journalists sometimes US diplomats business people were going over to Russia to Russian speaking countries and needed to learn the language fast and his strategy was very smart and in some way it was something that I think I've kind of done intuitively when I was learning the language but it's a very nice thing to think about for anyone who's you know and to have in mind when you're starting and trying to learn language which is he said number one build islands of fluency so if you want to talk about politics if that's one of your interest and start learning the terms or the politics which is which is what I did there was a point where I could describe ethnic conflict in Kyrgyzstan better than I could describe how to make a cup of tea at home and that's not surprising actually many of the activities in making a cup of tea are difficult to describe in Russian and they're not things you usually talk about so you don't get to practice them so rule one was was build an island of fluency and rule two was when asked a question by a native speaker overwhelm them with with the voluability of what you say so to someone asks you what's your favorite film don't just say it's you know Star Wars or something say my favorite film is Star Wars you've probably heard of it it's a it's an action film about it's a section sci-fi film the director is a George Lucas it's pretty huge you probably know even if you don't like it so much it's really it's really fun there's a lot of adventure I can watch in a million times because when you say that much you create the illusion of fluency and someone who might get tired of the view if you say you know my my favorite film is Star Wars it's cool and they say oh really why well it's an action adventure sci-fi film okay you know goodbye it keeps them kind of pulled in and grace the illusion of fluency and that makes them want to talk to you more so but I've gotten it on a bit of a tangent when I started doing things related to journalism or kind of interacting with this region of the world so to speak I was not super fluent I was probably intermediate maybe you know maybe upper intermediate I don't know and I grew a lot because I I mean first of all after I graduated I studied from brand I studied a year in Russia on a on a program there and also I really just was very engaged with the Russian speaking world Russian speaking internet I was you know messaging with people I had met I stayed in touch with people I read things online I read the news I had a number of different jobs some of them paid some of them unpaid you know early on I took part in in in a I worked for what was supposed to be a Central Asian newswire which didn't actually go anywhere but it was kind of a useful experience I reported my first stories I mean I just was very engaged and I think that's important you kind of have to be obsessive about the language to learn it well and you have to be willing to correct your mistakes and so in my last couple of years at you know really my last year at Brandeis and afterward because I don't think until my lap my senior year I don't think I had a smartphone I was always like I had probably open in Safari on my smartphone all the time um wictionary the Russian version to look up the conjugations of verbs and I would look up words I didn't recognize them if I didn't know them and if I thought of something I wanted to say but I didn't know how to say it I would look it up right away and that's that's very useful for learning a language let's get to know because my phone's not by me but I have also the same tab situation open so very good to hear from on my end how long have you studied Russian I took Russian 10 through Russian 40 and then I did a summer program this past summer and then I'll be taking an advanced language course next semester so where was the summer program it was online but it was through CLS it was based in Bishkek but I was at home taking lessons at like six in the morning which was a fun experience but I don't think my sleep schedule was ever recovered it was an incredible program we also had lessons in couriers once a week which was really interesting to like see other languages from the region obviously I'm focused in Russian so I don't you know have spend a lot of time exploring other languages actually that was one of my questions is do you speak any languages in addition to English and Russian I don't speak kyrgyz I'm jealous of you that you had less internet because I've tried to learn a little kyrgyz but I'm not that good at it I just really you know like kyrgyz down and I have a lot of friends there and so I've always sort of wanted to learn some kyrgyz but it's not it's not really practical for me and I don't really export at Harvard I started studying Ukrainian and I'm now I'm now I would say I'm proficient you know in Ukrainian I read it well I understand it pretty well you know I can watch TV in Ukrainian pretty well I can speak it not awful but I don't feel super confident Ukrainian and one of the challenges of you speaking Ukrainian and Russian is that these are actually they're not so similar like they're they're a significant differences but they're easy to mix up because there are a lot of similarities and in fact a large portion of Ukraine speaks something called Sureshik which is a mix of Ukrainian and Russian and it kind of gets a bomb wrap in in Ukraine as much as I think it's really interesting it's a sociological and linguistic phenomenon and you know Sureshik on the one hand there was there was recently I recently found out that Ukraine has a Ukrainian language learning portal which was basically as far as I could tell tell from my brief perusal of it was basically kind of dedicated to teaching you print you know people in Ukraine who speak Sureshik or more mostly speak Russian to speak Ukrainian without Russianisms which is to say without Sureshik and that always kind of surprises me because it seems like a lot of effort to put towards something something like that which is you know these people are not the ones the ones certainly the examples it gave in the in this in these videos were not like people who don't speak Ukrainian it was just certain Russianism that snuck in and weren't totally correct I should also mention that Sureshik has a interesting position here because there's a very popular avant-garde playwright an artist and writer named Nyspodirigansky who he himself the Ukrainian speaker I think and very anti-Soviet but his plays which are written to be read by one person namely him not usually be acted out and are full of obscenity and you know shocking transgressive content are all in Sureshik and and it's it's it's it's satire it's all you know it can't be translated and it's this kind of cultural thing you don't you won't get if you don't know ukrainian and Russian and even for me it's tough because it's so in between and so you know rooted in ukrainian and Soviet experience but I mean Sureshik is in that regard is really interesting I'm fascinated by Sureshik but but I don't think most ukrainians like it that much fascinating it's really interesting but by the way kyrgyz has a little bit of that too they now they refer to the movement of supporters for the president the jeppato who's kind of seen as like kyrgyz prompt they refer to that movement as de kansa which is a kyrgyz pronunciation of de kansa like to the end like we'll take this to the end kyrgyz also has its own certain specific manners of speaking russian so for example people in kyrgyzstan refer to a mobile phone as swatka swatka from swat I think such a void to the phone it's like a phrase I haven't said in years because it's not really used anymore it's like in the 90s people called a mobile phone that if you go to russia you pray in swatka is a hundred ruble or believe me bill um but there it's a mobile phone they also have this word scuff neat I think it's scuff neat which means to complain that's only used in kyrgyzstan and most likely it comes from the words scuff in english and probably someone went to the us have to like study and brought that word back and they started saying it and it spread at least that's the theory kyrgyz people have given me this is one of the most interesting kind of linguistic mysteries of kyrgyzstan in my opinion but you were asking me about do I speak other languages I speak kyrgyzstan not bad you mentioned a little bit earlier like if you could contextualize like your time in the russian department at brandaise it was in your career there's anything else that you want to say on the subject my time in the russian department was was really fantastic um i mean i just i know i sound kind of i'm using trump adjectives to describe it like superlatives but really i don't have anything negative to say it's it's a fantastic department with wonderful professors you know i've had a lot of different russian instructors over the years i had at least two at brandaise i've had some in russia i mean i've seen a lot of instructors in my time i've never encountered a language instructor better than eating the opinion of not seriously i mean she's really not just a fantastic person but really a great um professor of russian who makes the language very accessible and um helps you to learn it in a way where you can use it and i also add that you know this the second fiddle in this ensemble of her language teaching is the textbook you guys use which is among all the russian textbooks i've encountered probably the best and kind of one of the secrets of learning russian is that russian language instruction in america is much better than in russia and probably kyrgyzstan in ukrain but you need the experience speaking with native speakers in those places to grow you may be of encountered russian language textbooks from that part of the world it's a lot of stuff like teaching you russian through the poetry of pushkin or through poetry plays a big role and a lot of it is poetry that's a big part of the russian language childhood about nature well if you're from texas i'm from arizona i don't really need to know the names of 10 different types of trees shaman in russia because i grew up in a place where none of them are there there are two that i really need biryosa birch and doob um oh these are the ones that are really central to russia the other ones you'll learn along the way that isn't the first thing you need to know what i learned that the way i was taught at brandis by any of you in that was i think very pragmatic and there was there was of course plenty of instruction in the grammar which is necessary to be able to speak and understand the language but there was also a set of vocabulary that is tied with things you were actually going to talk about in real life for the most part and if you ever watch those videos from the that go along with the textbook which we um i'm sure you have right the life from russia yeah yeah but we love to make fun of those videos with that you know lackey american and is uh you know and is two russian love interests i mean you know we love to make fun of that but it was actually it was helpful stuff like it was a very good instructional instructional approach for language but beyond that i don't want to just i don't want to rapsodize but the textbook that sounds weird you're also there were also other you know great professors i took the course on the bulk of with professor pal stock which i'll never forget and another thing that was really that really played a central role in my experience was the russian club and the the other students who were at brandis you know brandis at least at that time had quite a lot of heritage speakers of russian for me the people i met there played a really um big role in my learning the language too kind of appointed me with russian culture albeit a very in a lot of ways intellectual version of it before i ever had visited russia or ukrain or kyrgyzstan for that matter you know it's uh that was very important too because there was an environment in which russian was spoken and which it was alive and used language which is not something you'll always get when you study a language in in a university context since you are a seasoned journalist you're probably very used to asking questions and knowing what people want to talk about so i feel like i'd be remiss to ask if there's anything the questions that you wanted to answer that you haven't had a chance to yet or anything that you feel you want to say before we uh reach the end of the interview not not really wow i mean not not often people call me a seasoned journalist thank you since since since this is the podcast for people at Brandeis in part um i think but one thing about my college experience was at Brandeis was that i missed out on a lot because i had um i had preformed judgments about myself and about other things and people in discipline not like you know racial prejudice i mean things like you know that way as i thought things i didn't think were interesting things i didn't think i wanted to know you know things i didn't think i should try because i didn't think i could do them people who i never really became friends with right didn't keep up relationships with because i thought we didn't have so much in common and in most of those cases i um in some to some degree i've regretted it later on um i don't want to say you should be you know chasing every single thing and you should be just you know open to everything we all have different preferences we all things that are important to us but i think you should be very open to learning about any you know anything that might strike your interest or if you if you think it could be useful for you should try to learn something about it you know the joke the joke i would sort of tell people is that i never want i never had any desire to be an accountant and i still have no desire to be an accountant but i sometimes wish i'd taken like accounting 101 because i think as a journalist who's coupled with an investigative journalist but even as a journalist who's covered business it would have been really useful be open to learning new things and having new experiences and meeting people and befriending people maybe you don't think you have a lot of in common with because i think it will will really enrich your life in ways you can't necessarily expect.