#IRFamily | Professor Richard Breffny Morgan
I am Richard Breffny Morgan, I am from Ireland, and this is the end of the fourth semester of my work here at MGIMO.
Well, the Cork thing – Cork is my hometown, and down there we would speak with a heavy accent, you know. I moved to America for university, and that is kind of where the Irish accent went away. I went there to study at Harvard because it was a good place, and they also had a very good sports program. “Akademicheskaya greblya” was my thing – rowing. After that, I went back to Ireland when I began a career in media, and I quickly ended up on TV doing a lot of shows and then a lot of advertising and radio work. After that, I randomly came for a holiday in 2012 to Moscow for New Year's, and I was very impressed by the city and the culture, so I went back to Ireland, packed my bags fully, moved over here, and have been here for 13 years. It is great, I like it here. This year is more interesting than others: my first Russian featurette movie came out – one I am featured in, one I am acting in – and I also got the invite to be a lecturer here in Media Studies and the Art of Public Speaking, so that has been fun.
I have started a band called “The Muzhiks” (Russian: “The Men”) – that is my hobby. For now, it is a hobby that is on the weekend. But thank you, there is lots of different things there, mostly just media, different types of media – that is what I have made my thing. I was kind of just working in academic writing and corporate writing in my first years in Russia, and then with the pandemic I did a bit of soul searching and had kind of an epiphany that after the lockdown is over, I need to do some more active, more public, more exciting projects, so the acting came back in, and now – the lecturing in front of the bright minds of Russia and other countries’ futures here. It is very public-facing, it is very intense, but that has been the plan since the pandemic – to not just be working from a computer at home but to be working in a very integrated ecosystem, and the university here is really that.
Taking your experience, packaging it in a way the youth – Gen Z – will understand, and creating an ethos of discipline and hard work, and I suppose, for many students, instilling a bit of bravery in them, teaching them the skills to be able to get up and present, perform, and represent themselves properly. That has been on the back of my mind since August 2023, when we got the project started.
It is funny you mention that. The terminology in the documents varies; it is sometimes referred to as "English for Special Purposes," "English for Professional Purposes," "Critical Analysis," or "Multipolar Media." This is the first course I did in September; now I am also doing the Public Speaking course. So Multipolar Media is basically a whistle-stop tour through all the different types of media that you are going to be encountering and engaging with, starting with news media, social media, personal correspondence, movies and TV, music, then miscellaneous content creation, and then kind of work on leadership and putting it all together so that they can finish their semester and be a bit more empowered and a bit more analytical, so they can engage in a piece of media and see through it - see its good parts, its bad parts. It is just a small bit of everything. How do you say... “shvedskiy stol” (a “buffet table"). And that is how the semester went.
The mighty third years and the Art of Public Speaking… They had to study a historic speech that changed the world and then write their response to it from a personal perspective, give their analysis, and give a message back to that historic speaker. Some of my students really embodied the kind of idea I had coming in here that this is the “theatre school” for diplomacy and people who work in national diplomacy and corporate diplomacy. Some of my students really impressed me, and this has kind of satisfied the hope and expectation I had coming in. Through their work, the dream in August is kind of a reality now, in small part; there is more work to do before they graduate, but I am pretty satisfied with their progress.
You are all just MGIMOshniki (MGIMO students), really, when it comes down to it. I mean, each class has their own class culture, and this is a product of them being together as a cohort, as a group of a dozen or maybe two dozen or three dozen people all together. So what I see is nuance in class culture, and that is down to the students themselves; that is down to their starostas (group prefects) as well. That is what I see.
Good question. When I was a student at Harvard, I was just running around, getting my work done, and being an athlete. I did not really stop and think too much about the structure that I was a part of; I was just doing what I needed to do. Now coming back in as an instructor on the other side of it, I see the enormous amount of work that needs to be done, and that is done by the Dean's office. It is a lot of chaos that needs to be organised. You have got lots of brilliance – brilliant minds in the students and the faculty that work here – and putting them together, down from scheduling to communication to adapting to what is going on in the world – this is a lot of work, and I cannot compare the American system to the Russian system because right now I see everything from a much more attentive position, and I just commend the amount of administrative work that needs to be done that the students do not see.
That is right. They have to present themselves in front of the class for 60 to 90 seconds and then give their ethos word – something that represents their motivation, their philosophy, their character. Some people take love, responsibility, friendship, football. I wanted to understand how they see themselves and how their superego would look when they walk around, to know what ethos they want to project. I have got some lovely answers – love, peace, commitment, you know – so it just makes them stop and think: “OK. Who am I? What do I want to be in the world? What do I want to show?”
Will. It is not so much about the brains or charm, not even just the amount of work you do; it is the will to get something done. Someone who has the will, the “volya” (Russian for "will"), someone who has the “sila voli” (Russian for “willpower”) to go get that done, that is what matters, so when you have got to get up early and you have got to put in the work, it is will that helps you.
You say "reality TV" — but it’s not just reality; it’s a different kind of television. I’ve noticed that TV here still commands a lot of respect as a medium. I mean, a couple years ago, everyone was talking about Slovo Patsana (the hit 2023 Russian crime drama) — you couldn’t go anywhere without overhearing conversations about it. TV here stays on a pedestal. But when you say "reality TV," people still think, "Oh, “Dom-2”?" (Russia’s longest-running reality television program), you know? All this stuff. So it is a little bit more highbrow than that, but OK, fine, reality TV) – no, that is pretty much localized in Ireland, just before YouTube and stuff was getting big, so there is not that much stuff from local TV that made it on here, so no one was going to have seen any of my stuff—maybe a good thing. Someone did recognize me from some work I did with Skyeng (Russia’s largest online English language school); this is small. No, no one is going to recognize me from “Povelitel Vetra” (“Lord of the Wind”, a 2023 Russian biographical adventure film), because my part was very small, but it is a good movie if you want to go stream it. It has got Fyodor Bondarchuk in the role of Fyodor Konyukhov going around the world in the balloon, and we filmed this in Dagestan last year, and now it is out, so it is streamable.
Brilliant. Very professional. He is a consummate professional. The director, Igor Voloshin, – also very professional, and you had some other heavyweights there: you have Anna Mikhalkova, Andrey Burkovskiy... Just nice – a lot of long nights and days in a little sparse Dagestani desert that doubled for Australia, where Konyukhov did his thing. Just hard work, discipline, and good time-keeping; and then you have some moments where you get to make your choices, as the actors say, and show what you want. But the ethos of hard work – that is what I saw there, and now this year with this academic work, I see that too. I see a lot of hard-working people gathered together in MGIMO, so I would say that this country is full of hard work.
They can work together for now. Chestno govorya, samaya glavnaya tsel' sejchas – eto moj uzhasnyj russkij yazyk. Mne nuzhno [ego] uchit'. Esli ya [ego] vyuchu, to budet bol'she vozmozhnostej. (In Russian: Honestly, the most important goal right now is [enhancing] my terrible Russian language [skills]. I need to study. If I learn it, there will be more opportunities.) Skloneniya (the complex system of declension in Russian grammar) is tough! Skloneniya! You have got great language programs here. Sometimes you find a language printout left on a table somewhere, and you find yourself reading it – many good language departments here. I would love to read “Crime and Punishment” in the original. I would love to do that; that is the goal anyway. I want to use one of your generation's phrases – I want to level up my Russian; that is the only way to move on.
It is about learning Russian so that more doors will open. Just being very personal about it, that is my goal. If you want to be a productive, happy, and integrated immigrant in another country, you need the language. That is my goal – improving Russian. I would love to have more opportunities here. I get nothing but positive vibes when I come here, so bring it on.
