This January I taught a group of prospective MGIMO students at the annual winter language session organised by the International School of Youth Diplomacy, and at the end of the one-week course we had a class dedicated to a foreign service career. I asked the students to think of the following question: ‘What are the qualities of a good diplomat?’ We made a list of qualities they had brainstormed in teams on the board, and then we watched a video in which a professor from SOAS University of London asks five people (a former under-secretary general and four academics) the same question, comparing the answers with our list. Many qualities mentioned in the video were the same or similar, but the important ones that our list didn’t contain were creativity, sense of humour and admiration for the other side.
Later I asked each team of students to think of one prominent Russian diplomat, past or present, and find five facts to present about them for the other teams to try and guess the person. One of the people was the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Some of the facts were as follows: he studied Sinhalese (the official language of Sri Lanka) at university; he likes poetry, and he is the author of MGIMO university anthem. During a similar class at the summer language session on the Baikal I’d asked each team of students to find a quote related to the foreign service and read it out for the other teams to try and guess the diplomat it belongs to. Among them were Alexander Gorchakov, Andrey Gromyko and Vitaly Churkin.
Speaking of Sergey Lavrov, when he was a guest on Ivan Urgant’s late-night show on 24 October 2012 (United Nations Day), he described finding out he’d be studying the Sinhalese language – something prospective students are usually, and understandably, curious about. I also can’t help thinking of an interview he gave to a CNN journalist in October 2016. I believe that it not only displays his perfect command of the English language, but his famous answer to the last question also shows some of the qualities mentioned above, namely creativity (language creativity in particular) and sense of humour. And speaking of Vitaly Churkin, I can’t help thinking of an obituary by Samantha Power which appeared in the New York Times in February 2017. In her moving article the American diplomat says Russia’s U.N. representative ‘was a masterful storyteller with an epic sense of humor’ and clearly displays admiration for the ideological enemy – another quality mentioned in the SOAS video.
What about you? What do you think are the qualities a diplomat should possess?
/Photo taken by me in January 2020 in the British Museum, which is five minutes’ walk from SOAS University of London/
