Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s interview for the documentary “MGIMO. In All Languages of the World” dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the Foreign Ministry’s MGIMO University, October 23, 2019, Moscow

Question: Mr Lavrov, I heard a legend that initially you were not going to enroll in MGIMO and had a different plan. Is this right or not?

Sergey Lavrov: To be honest, I was poised to go to the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute (MEPhI). The reason was simple. It is not that I was bent on natural sciences (I always preferred humanities) but S.I. Kuznetsov was my favourite teacher in the secondary school up to the tenth form. He taught physics and mathematics. Regrettably, he is not with us anymore. He simply made me and many of my classmates fall in love with him and his discipline. There are people who energise others with their devotion to their favourite occupation. This is what happened. I was about to apply to MEPhI but my mother said: “This is fine. If you want to go to MEPhI, go to MEPhI. But exams at MEPhI and the majority of other universities start on August 1. At MGIMO, the exams start on July 1. Why not try? After all, this does not rule out your vocation or affect your intention to go to MEPhI. Put yourself to the test in this area as well. Then you will know how versatile you are.”

This is what happened. I graduated from school with a silver medal and had to take just  two exams – on July 1 and July 3. I passed both and when I went to the school, where my classmates were just collecting documents to apply to the universities where the exams started on August 1, I was already my own master. I think what prevailed at that moment was the desire not to push my luck and so I spent July digging a pit for the future Ostankino TV Centre instead of cramming for the exams. This is how it happened. It was rather a chance occurrence.

Question: What memories do you have from this construction project?

Sergey Lavrov: We staged our first revue comedy sketch there. We were not yet even first year students but were sent to the construction site for three weeks as a mini construction team. We made a film about Fantomas. One of our future fellow students had a film camera – one of the first in the city – and we had a great time. So, we worked and had some fun.

Question: Does the film still exist?

Sergey Lavrov: Yes, it does. It must certainly be in the MGIMO archives. At any rate, I have a disc somewhere.

Question: Who helped you on the construction site?

Sergey Lavrov: That construction site? Helped? What do you mean? Who carried construction stretchers with me? One of my fellow workers was my good friend, MGIMO Rector Anatoly Torkunov. He worked in the same pit as I. We were laying the foundations for the highest technological capabilities that our television enjoys today.

Question: So it was enrolment, then construction. When was the choice of foreign languages made? Before the construction or right after it?

Sergey Lavrov: We were asked which languages we wanted to study. I signed up for French and Arabic. By that time I spoke pretty good English, and got an excellent grade in the entrance exam. But I wanted to speak French and Arabic, too. It was 1967, and a lot was happening in the Middle East. It was interesting and romantic, or I thought it was. So we submitted our choices and the language groups were posted on August 31. We were told to come in the day before classes start and check the lists hung out on the glass doors of our “old house on the Moskva River.” (Nowadays this building houses the Diplomatic Academy). So I came in, and there were eleven groups. The first one was “English and French” which was considered the most prestigious, and the first name on the list was Lavrov S.V. So I went home, or maybe to hang out with friends. On September 1, I came back and went up to the room indicated as the place of the first seminar of group 1. There was a roll call, and when the teacher called out “Lavrov,” two students stood up. He asked the other guy his first name, and he said “Sergey.” He asked me, and I said “It’s Sergey, too.” So he asked my patronymic, and I said “Viktorovich,” and he said, “Well, goodbye then.” As it turned out, the student on the group one list was Sergey Vladimirovich Lavrov. I was assigned to group 11, the last one. Contrary to all my wishes and dreams about French and Arabic, they gave me English and Sinhalese. Worse still, I was to take Sinhalese as my first foreign language, and English as the second. Later I switched to a programme that allowed me to complete English as my first. I also took French as my third foreign language, and I completed it as my second. That’s the whole story. I’ve heard that now at MGIMO, they decide this by drawing lots.

Question: They say they do.

Sergey Lavrov: Does it work? Does this lead to a better distribution of candidates, like in the Champions League?

Question: They gave me what I asked. I asked for German – they gave me German. Did you realise at that moment that you would spend your whole life in Sri Lanka?

Sergey Lavrov: I did not think about it at all. It was interesting and unusual – a new language, a completely different calligraphy, somewhat similar to the Armenian script. It is Sanskrit, a language with diphthongs. It was a lot of fun. Our teacher, Alexander Belkovich, who has also passed away now, was a charming person and did more than teach us Sinhalese. Even that was quite a challenge, though: he had never been to Sri Lanka or Ceylon (before it became Sri Lanka), but not for security reasons – there were difficulties with traveling abroad at the time. But he instilled in us an interest in that language; his way of teaching got us interested. We copied books by hand at night – he even gave us some kind of employment contracts for that. The Sinhalese language had no print, so books were handwritten – by those of the four of us who had the best handwriting. After classes, Belkovich introduced us to his friends, and we went out together and played football in a local pitch with our professor and his friends. It was a very eventful life, imbued with a spirit of camaraderie. Our professors, for the most part, were very popular simply because they had enormous knowledge and were very sociable

Question: Since you mentioned football, I have a question from President of Kazakhstan Tokayev. I spoke with him a couple of weeks back, and he said word for word the following: “Mr Lavrov is good at football, so I have a question for him. I remember when he was young he used a very good feint where he would feign a move to the right and then shoot for the goal area. Can he do such feints now? ”

Sergey Lavrov: We are now trying to stick to the centre rather than go to the left or to the right, because we know from practice that feints to the right or to the left never do any good, not only in sports.

Question: Do you still play football?

Sergey Lavrov: I do. I just did yesterday. Of course, my running is different now, but the pleasure of receiving the ball and extending a pass so as to make the attack sharp, and the pleasure of being able to choose a spot that will allow you to take advantage of a classy pass and to score a goal cannot be compared to anything else.

Question: While we were waiting for you in this room, we did some arithmetic and MGIMO graduates were found to be in minority.

Sergey Lavrov: Here, among us?

Question: Here, among us and your colleagues.

Sergey Lavrov: Right, so journalism is going through democratisation.

Que Department of stion: I’m not even talking about journalism. I mean the Information and Press Department (IPD). The entire department of the Russian media turned out not to be MGIMO graduates.

Sergey Lavrov: In the IPD?

Question: Yes, you have masses of MGIMO graduates among your colleagues. Does it make your job easier?

Sergey Lavrov: At the Ministry? You see, the IPD is one of our most dynamic departments. Probably, there are more MGIMO graduates if you count all the Department employees. But if there are fewer MGIMO graduates at the Russian media department than graduates of our other universities, I think, first, that this is natural, because our other universities, such as the Journalism Department at the Moscow State University and other universities, focus on the Russian media in a more professional and substantive manner. At the same time, this is indicative of the trend in the Ministry in general, where we are unconditionally preserving our commitment to MGIMO and the Diplomatic Academy as our anchor educational institutions and personnel suppliers, our talent factory, but are interested in expanding the geography of employment at the Ministry. This trend has been gaining momentum throughout my career as a minister. We have graduates of both St Petersburg State University and the Ural Federal University, the Far Eastern Federal University and a number of others too. If we take those who are admitted to MGIMO, Mr Torkunov told me before September 1 that the student body is representing over 70 Russian regions now. Proportions vary, but it is nevertheless important that we feed our alma mater with talented people from all over Russia.

Question: Does the fact that you have talks with your fellow MGIMO graduates such as President of Kazakhstan Tokayev, President of Azerbaijan Aliyev, Foreign Minister of Mongolia Tsogtbaatar and others make your job easier?

Sergey Lavrov: Also Foreign Minister of Slovakia Miroslav Lajcak and Foreign Minister of Armenia Zohrab Mnatsakanyan. I don’t want to leave out anyone. There are many colleagues who graduated from MGIMO. Of course, it helps to break the ice and once that is done we’ll probably enjoy looking back on the old days, especially if we attended the same course, or different courses, but we were in the same year. We recall common evening parties and our student comedy acts, which we were famous for, and MGIMO in general. When we were first-year students, we had third-year students as our mentors. Right from the outset, in the first semester, there were several evening performances where we got the taste of the art of this sort of comedy which, as I already mentioned, we first tried out in the foundation pit of the Ostankino Tower when we were producing funny films.

Question: There is a well-known story about the anthem you wrote. But there was an anthem already at that time. How did you get this idea at all?

Sergey Lavrov: First, I was not trying to compete with anyone. I worked in New York at that time and after the holidays (especially if the work was abroad) we spent evenings in the old building that now houses the Foreign Ministry’s Diplomatic Academy. This happened every year or once in two years. It was impossible to imagine a party without a comedy act. We planned it remotely: I did it from New York and someone else from Paris. All this was later discussed, edited and coordinated by email. This was one of such parties (I’m not sure, most likely either in 1999 or 2000). I came back from another trip – we sailed on rafts down the Katun River. I flew home from Barnaul early in the morning on the day when we had a party for the graduates of my year. I did not think about the old anthem at all. I simply tried to compose a verse for each party, accompany it with three accords and show it to the guys in addition to our comedy acts. Let me emphasise this again: I certainly did not think of replacing or competing with the great song of the 1950s “The Old Building by the Moskva River.”  

“The Moskva River flows through the centuries.

The building leans over the river from old age

Years will pass

But our feeling for it will never change…”

I followed this plot because the building was by the Moskva River, although by that time MGIMO was in a totally different place. I simply wrote a dedication to my year. To be honest, I was a bit perplexed when some time later I was sent a disc where this song was performed by the Interior Ministry Chorus. This was the institute’s initiative. Anatoly Torkunov said there can be several anthems because this is not a state where everything must be strict but an institute that encourages pluralism of opinions, including in songs and verses. So, this is not a big secret at all.

Question: When you recall this old building near Park Kultury metro station, do you feel a bit sad, or am I wrong?

Sergey Lavrov: We had all parties in this building. Of course, we miss it not only because in 1967 the cafeteria on the fourth floor served beer – аnd that they really did serve it – but because these are memories from our youth, even teenage years (we were 16−17 years old). We loved our comedy acts and other parties, as well as the lecture halls. This is probably like the first love.

Every year I come to the new MGIMO building with pleasure. Now there is yet another new building and soon we will probably cut the red ribbon in the new dormitory. These are wonderful buildings that make it possible to conduct the academic process with the use of cutting-edge technology. But the first love is the first love. We felt comfortable, at home in the old building and this feeling stays forever.

Question: I walked along the gallery with the portraits of ministers. MGIMO is 75 years old but there was a long period when the Foreign Ministry was not headed by its graduates. Then Russia’s new history began: Alexander Bessmertnykh, Andrey Kozyrev, Yevgeny Primakov (also to some extent, because he came from the RAS Institute of Oriental Studies) and finally Sergey Lavrov. Will the next minister be a MGIMO graduate?

Sergey Lavrov: I won’t even try to guess because this decision is made by the President of the Russian Federation. His choice is based not on the degree certificate that a candidate keeps in his desk but on the qualities that he reveals in real work and life, including professional qualities, such as the ability to negotiate and make absolutely sure that everything is done in the interest of our country.

Question: Quick question. What three adjectives would you use to describe MGIMO?

Sergey Lavrov: Best, beloved and innovative.