My background

My parents were both “indologists”—Russian academic specialists on India who met in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, where I was born and spent the first few years of my life. I received my foundational education in India, Calcutta (Kolkata), where I attended the La Martiniere School for Girls (La Marts) from age 5 and where I learnt Hindi and the rudiments of Bengali, and made lifelong friendships. Meanwhile, my father edited the glossy propaganda magazine Soviet Land—West Bengal edition—on behalf of the USSR government, while privately deeply sceptical and loathing the Soviet system. My mother taught Russian at Gorky Sadan—the Soviet cultural centre. My sister Rada and I were the only Soviet children not attending the consulate school in Calcutta then—an early attempt to expose us to languages and, consequently, shielding from indoctrination.

The time in India had been punctuated with brief spells in Russia where I attended various schools, including one in Crimea, Ukraine, before going back to India to resume studies at La Marts and briefly in Delhi, where my father became press attaché. My high school years were in Moscow, in the final years of the Soviet Empire. I then went on to complete a degree in linguistics, with a specialty in Urdu, at the Tashkent Institute of Oriental Studies named after V. I. Lenin, picking up some Uzbek (and lots of cotton!) along the way. I supplemented my modest student stipend of 50 roubles a month by working as interpreter for Bollywood film stars, and later, the American Ambassador to Uzbekistan.

The USSR fell apart during my third year at university. I had a choice between residency of Islam Karimov-led sovereign republic of Uzbekistan or Russian Federation. I opted for the latter. As soon as I received my diploma of a linguist, I departed for America on a full fellowship to pursue a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Massachusetts. I then pursued a doctorate in politics at the University of Oxford, at St Antony’s and later Balliol College where I was a Jowett Senior Scholar. I then went back to America for pre- and post-docs at Stanford during the dot-com boom. Because I could not imagine spending more than 3 years in one country, in 2001 I seized a serendipitous opportunity to take up a job in Germany, as wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin at the Humboldt University in Berlin, where I spent 3 years mostly learning German—watching TV serials, reading German classics, and attending film festivals and concerts with German friends—before heading back to America for fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson Centre and World Resources Institute in Washington, DC, and then back to the UK, where I worked as lecturer at De Montfort University in Leicester, before acquiring the current academic post at LSE.