What did the Kremlin make of Henry Moore? Internship is an ethically knotty issue that has been widely debated over the last few months. We've certainly been hearing a lot about ambitious parents pulling strings and practising every sort of subterfuge to wangle their teenage offspring opportunities to twiddle their thumbs and open the mail in prestigious institutions, thereby window-dressing their CVs and increasing their chances in life. Julia Nicholson has done rather better than that. One day last year, this 20-year-old from Sussex, studying Russian at Cambridge, was called upon to stand by as an unofficial interpreter when the director of Moscow's Kremlin Museum, Elena Gagarina (daughter of the first Soviet cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin), was making a fact-finding visit to Britain. Boldly seizing her moment, she managed to ask Madame Gagarina if the Kremlin Museum ever offered internships. It didn't, but Madame Gagarina clearly took a shine to Julia and decided to give her one anyway. So last February she found herself in an office overlooking the Kremlin, involved for four months in the first Russian exhibition of Henry Moore's sculpture, tapestries and drawings, arranged in collaboration with the British Council and the Henry Moore Foundation. It was a cultural event of some significance. Ordinary Russians have never caught up with 20th-century Western art: the aesthetics of socialist realism put an iron curtain over modernism throughout the Communist era, and the man on the Muscovite omnibus still expects a painting to show a nice silver-birch forest or a lady in dungarees waving from a tractor. Moore's abstraction bemused the thousands who visited the exhibition, Julia thinks, but it intrigued them, too. Working every day in an office from which she experienced the pre-election riots, Julia shaped leaflets and press releases into decent English, as well as playing an important role in liaising between two linguistic camps. The atmosphere was professional but friendly, she says, and the Kremlin Museum has a reputation for being far better organised than the Hermitage. No, she wasn't paid for her labours, but she's come back with a glowing reference and a congratulatory kiss at the opening party from Madame Gagarina, who told her that they couldn't have done it without her.