A room (kolhata) to rent advertisement in a newsagents window, King’s Lynn. The text is in Russian cyrillic and deliberately designed to appeal to prospective East European migrants tenants of a certain age. Anyone who went to school behind the Iron Curtain before 1991 learned Russian as part of the curriculum, and as part of the USSR’s cultural domination of its occupied territories. Although widely loathed and abandoned after the fall of communism, the practise of having a common language proved useful for migrants when those countries joined the EU under the A8 accession rules in 2004 and they were given the right to come to live and work in the UK. That meant Czechs, Latvians, Lithuanians, Slovakians, Slovenians, Poles, Hungarians and Estonians could communicate with each other. Quite useful if you’re trying to make yourself heard on a factory floor or field in the Fens. Even today If you go into any of the East European shops in the town the transaction will often complete with the assistant exclaiming “Spasiba”, the Russian word for thanks.