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FROM A POLICE STATE A Moscow Cold War Memoir |
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In 1967, Associated Press reporter Michael Johnson was contacted during the leave of absence he had taken to pursue Russian studies--and was asked to take on a new assignment: AP correspondent covering the Soviet Union. He saw it as the opportunity of a lifetime, so he wasted no time saying "yes," even though it meant he'd be plunging into a tense, often hostile society with his young wife and their infant daughter--not knowing really what he'd find there. This is part of his story, excerpted from his work in progress, "Reporting the News from A Police State." --Ron Miller, Managing Editor, TheColumnists.com |
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for TheColumnists.com
Russia past and present has been an obsession of mine since I first grappled with the Cyrillic alphabet at San Jose State College in 1958 in a beginning Russian language class. It is one of the very few interests in my life that has never flagged, so varied and surprising, tragic and comic, is life there.
So when I conducted an informal poll of young adults in New York and London recently to check their memory of the events that undid the Soviet Union, I was appalled. They knew about Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev but most of them had never heard of Alexander Solzenitsyn (one Swedish blonde girl said, “Soldier who?”) or Andrei Sakharov. They had no awareness at all of the lesser-known figures who helped release Russia from 70 years of communist ideology. Yet the pressure for change in the tired, old, clapped-out Soviet Union did come in large part from within.
It was the courage of these men and hundreds like them that led to the opening up of Soviet society under Mikhail Gorbachev, and eventually to the eruption of pent-up frustration over the false ideology. The collapse of the Soviet Union followed, and the world was changed forever.
My posting in Moscow for The Associated Press coincided with the confused beginning of the Soviet opposition movement. Much of the unrest was out of view of foreigners, but in the 1960s and 1970s the movement began to break through the surface. Indeed, under the tight management of official information in the Soviet era, the daring of these people became virtually the only first-hand news available to us. This made for a very strange journalistic playing field. The world was clamoring for information on the thinking inside the Kremlin, but we were only able to provide stories based on the “approved messages” of the Information Ministry. Meanwhile we were digging patiently toward the biggest unofficial story imaginable--much bigger than we knew.
This book is part reminder, part tribute. It reminds the reader how low the Soviet Union had sunk in the treatment of its own people, and it brings renewed recognition to some of the outstanding figures who dared to cry, “We’ve had enough!”
My story recalls the shadowy beginnings of the opposition movement and the restricted life of the Western reporter in a particularly nasty phase of the Cold War. I have tried to recreate the atmosphere under which foreign correspondents were forced to work, and the impact of these constraints on the constant search for truth, that elusive goal that good journalists constantly seek. The thread that runs throughout this snapshot of life in Moscow is constant oppression, surveillance and harassment by the beefy representatives of Soviet power, the police--with and without uniforms.
How the protesters created and sustained their movement must not be forgotten. It is a lesson in the tempering of dictators’ urges and in bringing totalitarian regimes to heel. We know from grim experience that without opposition, power corrupts, prisons overflow, and innocent people are hurt and killed.
For this reason and others,
becoming a Moscow correspondent in the 1950s and 1960s was more
than a job. It was a mission. The international balance of power
seemed just about equal between the Soviet Union and the United
States in those days. Both countries were spending more than
they could afford on intercontinental ballistic missiles and
research into doomsday weaponry. Politicians and intellectuals
around the world debated the merits of capitalism versus communism,
and analyzed the variants of the ideology as practised in Europe,
the Americas, Asia and Africa. It was not clear who would emerge
dominant at that time.
Veterans don’t like to admit it but covering Moscow was also a big step toward career nirvana. Kremlin bluster made front-page news almost daily and this was the story every international reporter wanted to be involved in. Moscow was byline material, which meant seeing our names in bold type in prominent newspaper layouts thousands of times. And the greatest feather in one’s journalistic cap was to get expelled from Moscow for being a tough reporter.
On the personal side there was another secret. A Moscow assignment offered a very welcome financial advantage over other jobs in journalism. Salary went pretty much straight into the bank because lodgings were artificially low-priced, hardship allowances were generous and there was nothing to buy but enough food to stay alive. It was the world’s best enforced savings plan.
Despite these attractions, few correspondents wanted to stay more than two or three years. Police states can be interesting in an academic way but the strain of living there becomes oppressive very fast. In Moscow, the isolation and physical hardship were too great to bear for long periods. Family life was directly affected, as I have tried to describe in some detail. And professionally we all felt we were in some danger. Faceless eavesdroppers listened to our private conversations. Post from the United States took 10 days to two weeks, and was frequently steamed open by the Soviets. A Swiss friend told me his mother’s letters in the provincial Romanche language always took six weeks to arrive because Romanche readers were so scarce in Moscow.
The police wanted us to be aware that we were being watched and listened to. They had learned from many years of experience with their own people that fear is a powerful deterrent. Of course we had nothing to hide, but after a free and easy life in the West, the lack of privacy and freedom became an unwelcome constraint on day-to-day existence.
Moscow is not the friendliest of cities at any time, but the natives in the Brezhnev era were forced by their local Communist Party cell to be overtly hostile. Identify yourself as an American, and the deep freeze set in. Identify yourself as an American journalist and the Iron Curtain came crashing down. In every way, this town fit the U.S. State Department’s criteria of “hardship post”.
My four-year stay was not a record but it made me a true old-timer when I finally got away in 1971.
I have made several return visits since Gorbachev and found it exhilarating to walk the streets and talk openly with people. Criticizing the political leadership or the police in a chat with a foreigner, as many strangers did with me, would have been a serious crime when I worked there. Now you can’t shut these people up.
Was it possible to do a sensible reporting job in Moscow by U.S. journalistic standards in those days? Probably not. The quality of most journalists’ work from those days does not stand up very well. Our coverage was often superficial, cliche-ridden and one-sided. We tended to report in an overtly pro-American tone, following the line of American foreign policy and rarely attempting to understand what the Soviets were trying to do. In the debate over whether their armament was basically defensive or offensive, we chose the better story: offensive.
TO BE FAIR, there often were no facts to build upon. Interviews with officials were out of the question. All we could do was quote official publications and weave in a balancing historical nugget or two, perhaps dressed up in a quote from a “diplomatic source,” often one’s colleague, wife or self. We were dependent on official reports from TASS and the Soviet press, all of which were unabashedly aimed at furthering the aims of the Soviet state. If we did have a first-hand news source, he or she was likely to have something other than the truth in mind. Sadly, mistrust of all sources--including human rights sources--became our attitude.
In this book I have devoted special attention to the political dissidents, for they found within themselves the courage to oppose a murderous regime. The headliners were Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov, but today the forgotten names must also be recalled -- such historical figures as Elena Bonner, Yuli Daniel, Andrei Sinyavsky, Alexander Ginzburg, Yuri Galanskov, Larisa Bogoraz, Pavel Litvinov and Eduard Kuznetsov.
Given the cloak-and-dagger nature of Moscow reportage, we had problems deciding how the political dissidents fit into the Soviet jigsaw. Their methods were suspicious by nature. They met us in train stations or other noisy public places to foil the eavesdroppers. They whispered their second-hand information in conspiratorial tones. They seemed scruffy and idle and their motives were unclear. Most were minor writers or unknown self-described intellectuals. They feared their KGB watchers and therefore most of them would not allow us around their place of residence. They made well-trained American journalists uneasy because their information could not be double-checked.
Many of us in the press corps had read the classic “Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia” by the French Marquis de Custine, whose 1839 book resonated so strongly in the more modern setting. The book intrigued us because we found we were encountering the same problems in 1960s Russia that the Marquis had 150 years earlier: dishonesty, fear of foreigners, official secrecy, superstition, poverty, oppression, class divisions.
We were convinced, partly
because of the Marquis’ writings, that democracy would not
come to Russia for several generations because obviously this
place never changes. There was no democratic tradition for the
Russians to draw upon. Their fathers and grandfathers had lived
passively under oppression, tsarist or communist. The present
generation was also doomed to subjugation, we decided. How could
the forces for free expression win any ground when the other
side had all the guns? It was easy for us to take a superior
attitude to these politically underdeveloped people.
We were only partly right. Gorbachev ended the one-party political
system in 1990, and that took the lid off. By the time the bad
guys tried to stop the reforms in 1993, the people had tasted
democracy and were not interested in going back. We could argue
the conflicting results of the social engineering--whether “they”
could ever be made to think and act like “us”--but
at least it is fair to say that human rights are trampled on
far less today than in the 1970s. Some 70 percent of the Russian
people have said in a recent poll that they do not know the meaning
of “democracy,” but at least a discussion of it is
out in the open. Yeltsin reasserted his authority, which he called
the democratic movement, from the top of a Red Army tank, and
various factions have struggled with reforms ever since.
Other things were going on as the old monolith began to shatter, including economic mismanagement and Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars program, but the movement for political reform was a decisive factor in the breakup of the Soviet Union.
As it turned out, the lack of democracy in their past has not held them back. Russia has had its transition problems but the movement is clearly in the direction of free expression and political pluralism. There have been setbacks under Presidents Yeltsin and Putin and there will be more, but times have clearly changed. Today, for example, there are multiple organizations in Moscow openly devoted to the defense of human rights. Thousands of Russians are publicly taking a stand when an abuse is identified. Putin is meeting intellectuals and even artists in the Kremlin. He has taken tea with Mr. and Mrs. Solzhenitsyn in their home. A mention of the KGB no longer provokes the panic it once did.
Only with many years of perspective have I come to realize that by reporting the rumblings within Soviet society in the 1960s and 1970s I was participating in something of tremendous historic importance. I now know that the rag-tag band of protesters we milked for copy were playing a more important game with us. They needed the Western press to get their message out to human rights activists abroad. We obliged without realizing what a key role we played in the process.
Several of these courageous men and women have since written their memoirs, and the pattern emerges clearly from their writings. They knew where they were going, and they were willing to give up their freedom, such as it was, or even their lives for it. From the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” in 1962 to the appearance of Sakharov in Parliamentary proceedings in 1989, it is possible to draw a straight line tracing the protestors’ buildup of momentum. Arrest followed arrest, protest followed protest, and finally Jimmy Carter got into the act, and Ronald Reagan followed him. Even George Bush threw his weight behind the movement.
Western journalists, led by Americans, British, French and Germans, were frustrated with the limits placed on our reporting activities--which the Soviets often considered a kind of spying. We sometimes erred on the side of caution to protect ourselves. Even the protestors were unhappy with much of our work. They wanted our full commitment to their aims. Solzhenitsyn was particularly testy. Early on, he recalls, he was livid over Le Monde’s refusal to publish his views on the appalling standard of living in rural Russia. And when he decided to go big time and invited Hedrick Smith of the New York Times and Robert Kaiser of the Washington Post to come in for an interview, he found their questioning to be of “surpassing triviality." God only knows what was going through his mind when I tracked him down at his hideaway in 1970 and asked him some obvious question such as, “How does it feel to win the Nobel Prize for Literature?” I could see the weary look in his eyes.
I had to fight off the temptation to conclude that Russia is unknowable. In a frequently quoted observation, the poet Fyodor Tyutchev wrote about 100 years ago, “The human mind cannot grasp Russia.....Russia must be taken on faith.” In fact Russia is knowable. It just takes a little longer. Dostoevesky, Tolstoy, Gogol, Chekhov, Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn are good starting points. The rest is a matter of accepting that Russia is not a Western country.
Even with the most serious intellectual preparations, any thinking person from the West who lived in Russia in the 1960s came away with emotions in raging conflict. Despite my academic training I had problems sorting out my feelings. In the space of a few years I was overwhelmed with anger, pity, compassion, love, admiration, irritation, sadness, Christian charity, and huge respect, in no particular order. Hardly surprising, I suppose, in a country that has cultural roots dating back 1200 years, sits astride East and West, and is imbued with xenophobia.
Of course Russia is difficult to understand. That’s what makes it fascinating.
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GOING TO MOSCOW |
© 2001 by Michael
Johnson. The Moscow series logo is from IMSI's Master/Clips Collection,
1895 Francisco Blvd. East, San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. The photo of Michael Johnson is courtesy
of the author.
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