Sergei Chernov

The name Chernov is one of the big names in the interpreting profession. Like Kaminker, Herbert, or Seleskovich. So it’s no surprise that when I sat down with ​Sergei Chernov, now the chief interpreter at the International Monetary Fund, he started with a bit of a disclaimer:
Sergei: ​I am a second-generation interpreter. And my father was an interpreter and one of, well, what we might call the founding fathers of our profession. Interpretation, anticipation, inferencing, all that good stuff.
Sergei’s father, Ghelly Vasilyevich Chernov, was an eminent interpreter and a leading interpreting scholar. His most well-known publication is probably “Inference and Anticipation in Simultaneous Interpreting” - or “the good stuff”, as Sergei calls it. But there is a second disclaimer, actually, which has to do with Sergei’s job:
What we will be talking about here are my views, my personal views and opinions that do not in any way reflect the views and opinions of the International Monetary Fund.
You are listening to LangFM, and my guest today is conference interpreter Sergei Chernov. Of course, no one ​starts​ their career working as the most senior interpreter at one of the leading international organisations. So I was interested in Sergei’s roots.
When I was born in 1965, it was in New York, when my dad was at the United Nations. And I was, I think, less than two when that contract ended for him and we moved, well... back (to me, for the first time) to Moscow. I grew up in Moscow. I grew up speaking Russian. I did not have English from birth or natural bilingualism or anything like that. So English is an acquired language for me. And we did go back to New York, to the U.N., in 1975, when I was ten. And we lived behind the fence, so to speak. In the Soviet compound at the time. We actually lived right outside of the compound. But I went to school there. And, those being the 70s, you know, I had to be accompanied by my parents anytime I would be outside. And so we had very limited interaction with the outside world, except for television and [laughs] some of my horseback riding classes

 that I had sort of in the outside world. Although, it's interesting, you know, although we lived in New York in the 70s, really, the interaction was pretty much within the Soviet community at the time.
The year Sergei was born, Lyndon B. Johnson became President of a country engaged in a horrible war in Vietnam. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, cosmonaut Alexei Leonov was the first person to walk in space, for 12 minutes. Sergei grew up...
Sergei: ​... always surrounded by interpreters. You know, there was a time when I used to do my homework in the booth at the U.N. because [laughs] I would, after school, I would take the bus, the Russian mission bus to Manhattan. And I would wait for my father to finish his work. And I also had a karate class there. And I would spend my free time or the time that I needed to kill in the booth. I would sit there and it was an empty booth and would be doing my homework. I would be observing interpreters at work. I would spend a lot of time in the interpreters’ lounge where at that time, you know, people were playing chess and, you know, talking to interpreters. And even in the apartment building where we lived, our neighbour was Pavel Palazhchenko, who then became Gorbachev's interpreter, famous Pavel. This was my life, you know, basically surrounded by interpreters and language professionals all my life. My mom also. She was a teacher of foreign languages. She taught Spanish and Romanian at Moscow University. I grew up there. I mean, you cannot even imagine, you know, since my dad was also working on his doctorate dissertation. And so our breakfast conversations were about presuppositions and implicatures. [laughs] ​But, yes, you know, that was of course, it was America, you know, it was formative years. ​And I went back to Moscow. It was 1980. So I had to finish the 9th and 10th, so to speak; high school. In Moscow. And so this was 1980. This was the summer of 1980. The famous Moscow Olympics.
... further accused of rudely interfering with Olympic affairs. The roots of the nyet clearly go back to President Carter’s decision to boycott the 1980 Olympics in Moscow because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. East-West relations have further...
[​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9G_RQATFDZA​]
  
 The 1980 Olympic Games were remarkable, historic, because they were the first to happen in Eastern Europe, the only Summer Olympics (until today) to be held in a Slavic language-speaking country; and - until China in 2008, the only Olympic Games in a communist country. Only eighty nations participated, while 66 countries, led by the United States, boycotted the event because of the war in Afghanistan. For people in the Soviet Union, this international event, however, was a window out into the world.
The Olympics were quite open, you know, at that time. You know, you go round Moscow and there are Coca-Cola stands everywhere. But that went away very soon afterwards. You know, you switch on the television and you have Channel 1, Channel 2 and Channel 3. [laughs] Naturally, I started looking for other sources of information. I started tuning into “Voice of America” in English, and actually got into trouble in my Russian school, Soviet school in Moscow, because they asked me to do current events. And I dutifully looked through Pravda and Izvestia, and I did not find anything of interest. So I tuned in to shortwave, got all the latest updates about, you know, whatever it was at the time, the Iran-Contra scandal and those things. And, you know, did the current events and immediately was summoned to the principal's office for anti-Soviet propaganda. The Soviet Union was still a very closed place at that time.
Thankfully, Sergei can look back at that episode and laugh about it now. Having experienced New York in the 1970s, having grown up in the international profession that is conference interpreting, knowing the UN, and then living in Soviet Russia, Sergei kind of saw both sides of the Iron Curtain.
With his family background in languages and natural curiosity, you might say he was destined to become an interpreter.
Sergei: ​I don't think my parents gave me much of a choice, to be honest with you. It was a pretty much straight path into the profession. Neither my father nor my mom themselves personally did anything in terms of... I was probably the one who rejected any help or assistance and participation. So I tried to do things on my own there.
We already know how it all played out. But at the time, it wasn’t that straight-forward:

 Sergei: ​I didn't know what exactly I wanted to do with it. My dad especially wanted me to go into research. He really insisted that I go for the PhD. But this was the time; now we're in the late 80s, where perestroika is in full swing and things are happening. A lot of changes in the country. And I was not interested in that at the time, at all. So I said, I want to go and start interpreting. I want to be a practitioner rather than go into theory. And luckily, the Maurice Thorez Institute of Foreign Languages, where I went, was a place where you could, you know, sort of explore what you wanted to do. It had all kinds of classes, we did translation, we did interpreting. You could choose your languages.
Sergei had to interrupt his training to serve in the Soviet Army for two years. When he came back, he graduated from the Maurice Thorez Institute with English and Spanish. And then continued his studies:
Sergei: ​I went to the U.N. interpreting school that we had in Moscow, Which was quite exclusive, amazing training. Oh, my goodness. This was the best training ever you can imagine. I mean, now I compare, let’s say, look at Monterey, look at University of Maryland, where I now teach on Saturdays a little bit... The system is such that you don't get your six hours of practice every day. In the booth or just, you know, practice, practice, practice, which is what we had. And we also got the keys to the training room. So we practiced for eight hours and nine hours and ten hours, and as long as it was necessary. But also the motivation. If you think about it, this is still the Soviet Union. You have a group of six in the simultaneous group. And by the end of the training, right, what do you do? You’re posted to New York, Geneva, Vienna, nice places. So this was THE motivation: to be able to pass that U.N. exam at the end.
Alas, history was about to take a huge and unexpected turn.
News report: ​“Gorbachov’s dreams of holding the Soviet Union together may have received a death blow today. The Union’s three Slavic republics announced they’re forming a separate Commonwealth of Independent States. Russia, the Ukraine and Belorusia control much of the Soviet Union’s power; enough to challenge the rapidly fading strength of Gorbachov’s central government.

 Sergei: ​When we were about to finish the training, the Soviet Union started collapsing in earnest.
News report: ​... halfway through its evening news when it got the first details of the agreement signed in Minsk. Quoting from it, the anchorwoman announced: “The Soviet Union as a subject of international and geopolitical reality no longer exists.”
Sergei: ​This whole Soviet system of secondments that they had back then to the U.N. through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs kind of collapsed. And so we got the training, but we didn't get to go to New York and Geneva and Vienna, and the nice places.
News report: ​... Open to other former republics to join, it will be headquartered not in Moscow, but in the Belorusian capital Minsk.
Sergei: ​I stayed in Moscow and after a couple of months of painful reflection, unpacked my bags that were ready to go to New York and started freelancing. And that was a different world.
[Music]
Sergei: ​It felt like, you know, the world was finally opening up. It felt really great. I was at that right age at the time when, you know, all these changes sort of came naturally and were quite welcome by us. There’s, you know, that kind of... the lost generation of people about ten years older than me who, you know, maybe were sort of the dissidents back in the 70s and then also sort of welcomed all the changes, but then weren't able to adapt to the new life in the 90s and post-Soviet society, where it was all, you know, capitalism and market forces and a very different world. And some of those people are saying, oh, I want socialism back. Now, you hear a lot about that.​ T​ hat also created tremendous opportunities for interpreters, because, of course, when the country opens up, you have an influx of foreigners, from business people who want your services for oil and gas. The first Model U.N. came at that time to Russia, can you imagine? [laughs]
[Music ends]

 Sergei: ​I started freelancing, but I also found a fulltime job for a short period of time with The Washington Post Moscow bureau. David Remnick, who is now editor in chief of New Yorker magazine, was the bureau chief at the time. And so through the eyes of The Washington Post Moscow bureau, I saw the real changes happening, you know, the attempted coup against Gorbachev, the collapse of the Soviet Union. So this was the time that I really got to see everything first hand, you know, being on those barricades, and the Moscow White House, all that stuff. I told David at the time - because he would ask me to interpret, you know, say, live coverage from the State Duma deliberations or, you know, the parliament and things like that. And so I would just switch on the live transmission on television, I would put on my earphones and I would interpret. And he would sit there with his computer and he would type. And I said, David, if I could type that fast, I'd be a millionaire by now. You know, for official situations, they would prefer interpretation, translation; it made it faster for them. Everything had to be in real time. They found this interesting way of using my interpretation skills and their extremely fast typing skills to turn those news pieces around very, very fast.
It was very, you know, up close, right? And these changes were unraveling right before our eyes. And yet until the last moment, I don't think, in my mind, I could imagine that the Soviet Union would actually collapse. It seemed very unrealistic, but when it happened, it just happened. It just happened.
So many things “just happened” during those tumultuous times in Russia. Helping American journalists cover all that was going on was probably about as interesting as it gets. And yet...
Sergei: ​... freelancing would be much more interesting and... also from the financial standpoint. So I quit that. I still did some work for them as a freelancer, but I started working for many different organizations and just kind of threw myself out into the open freelance market. And it took me all around the former Soviet Union. I mean, from Sakhalin for oil and gas projects, or beyond the Arctic Circle for the same, or to the deserts of Turkmenistan, you know, with the World Bank missions and the Caucuses,

 the Central Asian countries - everywhere! I really got to know the former Soviet Union at that time quite, quite well. This was an amazing experience. It lasted for about four years. I did all kinds of things. I mentioned the model U.N., you know, other conferences. There was a lot of Russian-American contacts at the time. Space exploration, oil and gas, all kinds of people coming from northern California with their humanistic philosophy lectures and esoteric training sessions for all kinds of people. You can imagine. And I remember there was one conference - something about esoteric training - where they would be playing flutes to the grasshoppers and channeling light through different mirrors, and​ a​ ll that in the context of some humanistic philosophy and inventing their own terminology. It was a lot of fun; linguistically it was quite challenging, actually. [laughs]
Then the IMF and World Bank missions started coming in. And I took their test. So they came and selected a pool of freelancers. And I became part of that and started working for the IMF missions until basically around nineteen ninety three early 94 when I was offered a job at the World Bank. And I went to Washington. And I've been there since.
Talking to Sergei about this personal and professional life, I couldn’t help but notice how he and his family seemed to be travelling back and forth between the Soviet Union, or later: Russia, and the United States. Where did he think he belonged? Or was it neither here, nor there?
Sergei: ​It was a little bit like that because I want to say that I felt at home in both places. Also at the time I got my U.S. citizenship back, if you will. And I said, do I need to take an oath or something? They said, no, it's not that we're giving you citizenship. It's just a recognition of the fact that you've always been an American citizen, you know? So imagine that circumstance.
I was offered a job, a freelance assignment, with the Russian Ministry of Aviation to go to Florida for a month where they were going to negotiate the installation of American avionics on Russian airplanes. And they asked me, oh, you need to give your passport, you know, to process the visa. And I didn't, of course, need a visa at the time already. So I told them, no, I already have a visa. No, you don't need to worry about it. But I had no clue how it was going to work. And so I went to the airport with the two passports. And put them both on the desk of the immigration officer. And immediately the red light

 came on and comrade major steps out and says, you know, what is this? And the soldier says, well, there’s a Russian passport with no American visa, an American passport with no Russian visa. What do we do? The major looks at me and says, you know how come? I say, well, you know, I was born in the US, but my parents were Soviet citizens. So he says, oh, don't worry. So, soldier, you treat his American passport as his visa, let him go. And then on arrival, Fort Lauderdale International Airport, was my first time after many years back to the US. And I land, of course, I also was a little bit apprehensive, what was going to happen now that I'm with this brand new American passport that has no visa stamps or anything. And this immigration officer: “Welcome home, son.” And that was the realization, that moment, that, you know, this is the second home. Eventually I think I'm now - 25 years later - realizing that by now maybe home was neither here nor there.​ ​Although it's also in both places. But you kind of feel a little bit as a foreigner in both places.
In any case, Sergei found a new professional home. First, at the World Bank, and then at the International Monetary Fund.
Sergei: ​So I took a position at the World Bank and it wasn't until 2000 that I moved to the IMF where I am now. So we have a service where we have interpreters and translators, and translators are pure translators. But anybody who is an interpreter has to be an interpreter/translator. There isn't enough interpreting work every day at headquarters to have a dedicated interpretation service and therefore all interpreters have to translate. But then the chief interpreter can pull out interpreters from their translation assignments any time something happens at headquarters or you need to send someone on mission. And of course, for our annual meetings, the spring meetings, we have a separate arrangement where it's a huge team of interpreters that needs to be assembled for that, a combination of staff and freelancers.
In terms of language regime, neither the IMF nor the World Bank have official or, well, official languages. The working language is English in both organizations. The lack of official languages, basically means that the language policy is quite relaxed. So anything goes. You need Georgian, you get Georgian; you need Vietnamese, you get Vietnamese. Although for the annual meetings, there is a more restricted list of languages, which is pretty much U.N. plus Portuguese.

 One thing had stuck with Sergei from his freelancer days in post-Soviet Russia: missions. That’s interpreter jargon for a business trip, where we accompany one or more people outside of comfortable, climate-controlled meeting rooms.
I've done a lot, a lot of missions. Hard to even count. This was really my favorite kind of work, because this is the environment where the role of the interpreter is incredibly important. And you can feel it every single day. It's a very intense, an IMF mission is a very intense assignment of about two weeks where you are in the country with a group of IMF economists who are negotiating either a program - what we call a program, a financial assistance package - or just taking stock of the country's economy - which we call Article 4 surveillance missions, etc. And in that environment, the interpreter also does translation and has really the ability to experience interpretation in all modes.
I’m nodding heavily as Sergei tells me this. I also really enjoy the direct contact with clients.
But again, in the context of my work back at the World Bank and now the IMF, we have a lot of interaction with our principals, with our clients. Because a lot of interpreting happens outside of the booth. There's a lot of bilateral meetings, a lot of missions. In fact, that's the overwhelming majority of the work that we do - outside of the booths in very close contact with our clients.
From consecutive or whispering during the actual meeting to simultaneous, maybe at outreach events or press conferences, to written translation late night in the hotel room. The whole package! This is what I like, is really to be able to exercise every muscle. Not just be in the booth and be far away, detached from your clients, but to be there, to be on the ground, to see the results of your work. It's an amazing feeling, actually.
What can I say, but: Yes, exactly. Being able to exercise all interpreting muscles is what makes this job so much fun.
It was a real pleasure to ask Sergei about his professional career so far. We also talked in detail about the history of interpreting... in Russia. So while you’re here, I suggest

 you listen to the bonus part of this episode. There are lots of links and book recommendations that you should also check out.
For today though, this has been LangFM with Sergei Chernov and me, Alexander Drechsel. All earlier and future episodes of this little podcast can be found on my website and in pretty much any podcast app. If you like the show, do recommend it to a friend or colleague. I’ll talk to you soon, on LangFM!

 Conversation about the history of interpreting
[Music]
Alex: ​Now, you said in one of your emails that you have done quite a bit of research into the history of of simultaneous interpreting, particularly. And earlier you said you wanted to become a practitioner first. So at some point, I suppose the interest in research came back up. Or how did that happen?
Sergei: ​I always thought that I did not want to write yet another dissertation on the use of the definite article in something or other. And frankly, that was always my premise, and my aversion to research, having seen too much of that type of... But then it so happened that a few years ago, I stumbled across an archive. And when I saw it, when I opened up those documents, I realized that I was looking at something extremely important to our profession. It was almost like stumbling across a treasure chest full of gold coins.
And what it was, was a digital archive of Edward Filene, who was the founder of Filene's department store, and the chain, Filene's Basement, in the US. It's now closed. But he was also the inventor, so to speak, of simultaneous interpreting systems back in the 1920s. And among other things, he was also a founder of the American Credit Union Movement and the first chairman of the National Credit Union Association.
So the archives of the Credit Union Association (​CUNA​) in Madison, Wisconsin, have this folder on the telephonic interpreting system that Filene invented in the 20s. And then I started looking at those documents, and I saw the original patent that he took out for the Filene-Finley interpreting system. I saw his correspondence with people like Thomas Edison, with Watson, Thomas Watson, the founder of IBM. Amazing things, you know, and the story, interviews with him. Somebody in the League of Nations and at the ILO in the 30s, talking to him. And him telling the history, the story of how he invented simultaneous interpreting, what led to it. And I thought, this is incredible, this is absolutely incredible!
 
 But then I encountered, I found this book. I started reading on the subject. I read his biography, and then I found a book by Jesús Baigorri-Jalón, “​From Paris to Nuremberg​”, which at the time was available only in French and Spanish. It's now available in English. And I started looking at the book and I said, oh, everything that I wanted to say is already said about this!
Alex: ​Too bad.
Sergei: ​Then I got in touch with Jesús and we started communicating by Skype regularly at some point. And he encouraged me to dig deeper into that research and to see what are the nuggets in that particular archive that we could find. And so I started doing that. And at the same time, it led me to start asking the question of what was happening in Russia, Soviet Russia at that very same time in the 1920s. Because the story of Filene and the League of Nations and the ILO is the Western story. And yet there was the Communist International, the COMINTERN, which was the nemesis of the League of Nations and kind of existed at that very same time, and also functioned as an international organization, and also used interpretation, and interpreters, and simultaneous interpretation.
I remember there was an article in one of the Russian interpreting/translation journals in the 60s by Yevgeny Hoffmann, who was one of the Soviet interpreters at Nuremberg, who briefly told the story of simultaneous interpreting in the USSR, where he mentioned that, for the first time, simultaneous interpreting in the USSR was used at the sixth Congress of the COMINTERN in 1928. And that the newspaper Krasnaya Niva from that year shows a picture of interpreters wearing headphones. And that was just a brief mention of that. And it's sort of, that quote was, you know, went around the different research articles on the history. Everybody was just kind of going back to that one-sentence quote. But by then, you know, we're now in a different world and you can actually go to the library, unlike the Soviet times, where you could not ever see old newspapers. For some reason, they were classified... Not anymore!
So, you know, a quick look in the library, of course, reveals the front page of Krasnaya Niva from 1928 with a very nice picture of an interpreter. No headphones, but a
 
 microphone hanging around the person's neck. And an article. What was it...? “Technology at the service of the communist revolution.” The first time in the world, it says, interpreters are speaking simultaneously with the speaker, interpreting into multiple languages at the Sixth Congress of the Communist International, etc, etc. And so, of course, once you see this, you have to dig deeper. Right?
Alex: ​Of course!
Sergei: ​And this is where curiosity really led me on an incredible journey, with the help of my sister, who actually spent a lot of time in the archives because I was only able to visit once every few months for a short time and then kind of look at documents in a more pinpointed way. But she was the one doing the sifting through the myriads of documents that were there in the archives. We saw pictures and documents about that time period, about interpretation, how it was organized. And there was even some information about the very first, the “Russian Filene”, the very first inventor of a simultaneous interpreting method and a proposed system in Russia.
So if you think that the original method proposed by Filene was a little bit unusual by modern standards, because what he proposed in 1925 was to have an interpretation booth, interpreters sitting in the booth, but instead of interpreting from what the interpreter was hearing, it would be the stenographer who would be listening to the original. And the interpreter was supposed to be trained to read the stenographic notes.
Alex: ​Oh, I see.
Sergei: ​And he’s also using the stenographer as a relay and then interprets. So this was the original. It was modified, but it was that was the original idea proposed by Filene. So if you think that was a little bit strange, imagine how strange the Russian proposal was. It was proposed by a physician and a medical doctor by the name of Epshtein who suggested that you would have a three-interpreter method of simultaneous. She would have three booths and one interpreter in each. And each interpreter only takes care of a very small segment of what the interpreter hears.

 So the speech begins and the first sentence is interpreted by interpreter one in booth A, consecutively. So the interpreter listens to the chunk that he is comfortable receiving, then switches on a light, or a buzzer, which signals the interpreter in the next booth to start listening, all the while the interpreter in the first booth is interpreting. And then the second interpreter finishes listening to his junk, passes it on, passes on the relay to the third interpreter, and by that time the first interpreter will have finished his or her segment. The second interpreter starts, and then the third interpreter starts, and then it goes back to the first one.
Alex: ​Interesting.
Sergei: ​So it's sort of simultaneous with each of them doing consecutive of very short segments. Now, I can imagine that once they tested it, it did not work that way either because in 1928 everything converged to a very different method, pretty much similar to the modern ​chuchotage,​ if you will. And then it developed further on. And it's interesting to learn when the first interpretation booths started appearing. I actually have an amazing photograph from the Moscow Archives of interpretation booths that date back to 1934, and they look like like canvas tents with a funnel microphone that the interpreter speaks into. No earphones, again, but the shape, the shell shape of the booth that's facing the podium kind of channels the sound into it because they're in the first row, in the front row, and they're interpreting into these funnel microphones to not interfere with each other. And we even got to the archives of radio and television and found footage. So it's not just photos. It's also moving pictures. And I have created a presentation out of it, which I did at the ​ATA conference in Miami in 2015​, then recently in New York for the Nuremberg Expo (“The birth of the profession”). And so I'm really taking the show on the road. And I do also write a chapter in a book, “​New insights into the history of interpreting​” that Jesús Baigorri-Jalón and Kayoko Takeda edited. And so I have a chapter in there called “​At the dawn of simultaneous interpreting in the USSR​”.
But how many copies of Benjamin's literature are sold around the world? Not many, to be honest. And I think it's important to popularize that history because even interpreters nowadays, a lot of them think that simultaneous started at Nuremberg. Going back to the roots, to the early history, I think is very important because this is when we really
    
 learn our roots. Where we came from, why conference interpreting became simultaneous interpreting, you know, the introduction of multiple languages, the democratization of international conferences at the turn of the century, basically after the Paris Peace Conference right at the end of World War One. This is really the start of conference interpreting in the modern, 20th century sense of the word. And who knows? You know, maybe it was the profession of the 20th century and maybe we're now seeing the tail end of it when those.
Alex: ​Yeah. But I think you're completely right because I did look into it a little bit for a talk I gave two years ago, I think and I found it striking that, I mean, this was more about the Comintern and Nuremberg as well. And I tried to show that especially the people at Nuremberg, actually, it was a very tough job for them, not only because the technology wasn't as good as it is today, but also because some of them had been, you know, victims or they had lost family members to the Nazis. And they still had to interrupt that, day in and day out, for weeks and months. And I saw some similarities to nowadays that that people refuse to even engage with new technological developments. And of course, back at the day, as you know, there were many people who said, well, simultaneous will never work. And they are just, you know, “telephonists”. And they had these bad words for these people that actually, as you rightfully said, sort of almost created a new profession or brought the profession to a whole new level. So I found that there were a few interesting parallels. But what I was wondering: We know quite a bit about Filene and Finley and the other people involved. And you mentioned this Mr. Epshtein. He was a medical doctor? Do we do we know more about him and why he did this? And Were there any other people involved that we know something about nowadays?
Sergei: ​We know about him. Well, we really know very little about Epshtein. I'm going to use the Russian way of pronouncing his name, just to differentiate him from all the other Epshteins.
Alex: ​There are a few, yes.
Sergei: ​We know he was a physician because at the time, the term doctor could not be associated... the title of doctor could not be associated with a doctor of philosophy or a

 academic degree, as we have now. At the time in Russia, those people would be called professor. And so the only person who could have the title of doctor could be a medical doctor. And from that realization, I tried to look in the archives of the medical world at that same time, and we found that a medical doctor with the same initials, V Epshtein, was working for the Kremlin polyclinic. So the Kremlin hospital. And it is my theory that he might have been stationed at the Comintern congresses as part of the little onsite emergency medical unit for participants. And he would be observing what was happening was consecutive interpretation the same way Filene was observing consecutive.
Alex: ​At the League of Nations.
Sergei: ​Right. And being very frustrated with the slowness of the process. Again, the very same ideas are echoing in his memo to the executive committee of the Comintern from 1925, precisely the same week as Filene sends his letter to the general secretary of the League of Nations
Alex: ​Wow.
Sergei: ​And echoing exactly the same issues with consecutive and proposing a system and method that would speed it up, that would use technology, that would turn this into a very different thing. And so he, just like Filene was working with Finley, who was his engineer, the same way, Epshtein was working with an engineer by the name of ​Goron​. So Goron was a young engineer at the Moscow telephone exchange and he was tasked with helping implement Epshtein's system in actual life. But Goron is a very known historical figure actually. There's a Wikipedia article about him. He is known mostly to our colleagues in the audio-visual world because he ended up being sort of the father of Soviet hi-fi systems, if you will. You know, the first tape recorders. The LP records, Melodia factory, that produced LP records in the Soviet Union. He founded that. He founded also a recording studio on Moscow radio. So he was the father of radio. He was also behind the the Soviet wired radio, which was something that, you know, it was like a, well... every Russian house or apartment had a little radio unit that was plugged into the wall and that would be switched on automatically at six o'clock in the morning
 
 with the national anthem. The people wake up with it and people would go to sleep with it.
Alex: ​I didn't know that.
Sergei: ​It was also the same type of wired radio that was also installed outside in the streets with the huge loudspeakers. So if you can imagine that. So Goron was, you know, behind that technology. And again, when you start reading his biography, there is always this line somewhere that in 1928, he was in charge of developing the first Soviet system for simultaneous interpreting of the Comintern. And yet nobody paid attention to it. That line, I guess, nobody from our world, from the interpreting world, ever looked at it from that perspective or had the interest of looking into his biography. So I tried to. He passed away not so long ago in the late 80s, and there were still people who were his students because he taught at the Moscow Radio-Electrical Institute, and his students were still still alive, of course. And I got in touch with one of them, who is now the chair of that department, who said, yes, well, Goron explained to us when we were students how he put that system together. And he worked with Epshtein, who was a physician, a medical doctor, and he confirmed that.
Alex: ​So that closes the circle.
Sergei: ​That completed the circle. Unfortunately, we know really very little about Epshtein. And there is one photo which actually I have also in my book, in my chapter, of three people standing in front of this unit, which is the sound rack for the interpretation system, and testing the sound. And one of them, I believe, is Epshtein, but it's not entirely clear. So hopefully, in time, we will be able to find more information about him. But at this point, it seems like we've hit a dead end a little bit.
Alex: ​But do you still have archive material or do you still have resources that are not, that you haven't gone through, that you're still working on, or is this it now?

 Sergei: ​I think this is it for the Russian part. But there is another interesting branch, which you might be interested in, that started developing quite recently. As I was looking at Filene's correspondence on the acquisition of patents for his system, before he sold his invention to IBM, he wanted to make sure that you got patents for it. And he took out a U.S. patent and he took out patents in Switzerland and France. And then, when it came to Germany, the German patent office wrote back to him saying, well, we cannot give you a patent because we already have something like this.
Alex: ​Oh!
Sergei:​ Yes. And what was it? It was the Siemens-Halske system. Siemens Halske AG. That system was used in 1930, if I'm not mistaken, ​at the Second World Power Congress in Berlin​. And it might have been the first time when it was used there. And I have some material about that. But the interesting thing is that ​Elke Limberger​ - I don't know if you know her...
Alex:​ I think I’ve heard the name.
Sergei: ​... who is also behind the Nuremberg expo project, “The birth of the profession.” So I wrote that to her. That little piece from... because I had a little exchange with the chief historian of Siemens and I received some technical specifications of that particular system. But then, she and her colleague, I guess, went to the Siemens archives to explore deeper. And there is now correspondence from Siemens, from Mr. Siemens himself to Filene, telling him that their company started looking at this from 1918. Much, much earlier. We're tracing this back to 1925, and now this is 1918. So who knows? I mean, this history keeps being pushed back further and further. This is something that needs to be explored. I mean, I don't speak German at all. So it's definitely not for me to do it. But other colleagues, I'm sure, should go and explore this because this is just another wave. And so, you know, I was looking at it as the Russian-American kind of thing. But it's not just that, there's the German connection as well.
   
 Alex:​ Yes, it's fascinating. It's a bit like genealogy, because I've done this for a while and looked into family history and then you sort of... you keep digging and you find another [inaudible] and you go back even earlier and earlier and earlier. But it's it's extremely fascinating. Absolutely.
Sergei:​ It's like the thing they used to say about Russia during perestroika. That's quite a famous saying at the time that many countries have unpredictable future. But Russia has unpredictable past.
Alex: [laughs] [Music]