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FROM A POLICE STATE A Moscow Cold War Memoir |
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IN CUSTODY |
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This is an excerpt from a book-length work in progress by Michael Johnson, presented in this form exclusively by TheColumnists.com through the courtesy of the author, who reserves all rights. |
for TheColumnists.com
We never knew for certain whether we were being bugged at home, but now we have physical proof that the AP office was. I was back in Moscow in 1998 and met an American who was living at 13 Ulitsa Narodnaya (People’s Street) in the flat that we had used as an office. He was present during the remodeling work, and actually saw the microphones spill out of the plaster as a couple of the walls were taken down. One wonders what they did with the miles of tape they must have recorded as we joked around day and night in the office. They certainly never got anything useful. The last thing we were interested in was to create mischief for them and endless grief for us. Life was tough enough just working as an honest journalist.
That doesn’t mean we were always innocent. Our job was to look for cracks in the system, not the walls. Every complainer, every protester--foreign or domestic--was potentially news in those days.
I was once briefly arrested with five or six other journalists when another attempt at ideological contamination was organized by a pretty young girl from Bari, Italy. I've forgotten her name. She came to Moscow carrying a few hundred leaflets asking for the release of Pavel Litvinov and several friends from jail. Somehow the Customs people missed them in their routine search. Pavel was the grandson of Stalin's foreign minister, Maxim Litvinov. Pavel and friends went to jail because he organized a protest on Red Square against the invasion of Czechoslovakia. The arrest and the ensuing fuss all seems so petty and silly from today's perspective.
The Bari girl, a slight, blonde thing--very gentle nature, rather attractive--chained herself to the balustrade of the huge GUM department store, and flung her leaflets out over the crowd. She had alerted the Newsweek correspondent of her plans, and he had used his (illegal) copying machine to get the word around to his media colleagues. I was a good friend of his, so I was among those invited.
As the leaflets fluttered down from her perch, she could see the Russians diving for them and stuffing them in their pockets before hurrying away and getting lost in the crowd. Obviously they were going home to have a look in private. Then out of nowhere came the police. The Bari girl was subdued, cut loose and marched off to a waiting police wagon. Five or six of us journalists were grabbed and herded upstairs to a holding room. The Russians immediately informed us that they had determined that the girl was “mentally unstable.” How else could she do such a thing? This was almost always the Soviet explanation of the behavior of anyone who deviated from approved comportment.
As we were being taken into custody, the correspondent from the Washington Post was manhandled a bit--shoved from behind when he wasn't moving along fast enough--but nothing serious. We were put under the guard of a young policewoman (that hurt our feelings more than anything) for about four hours. I kibbitzed with her in Russian most of the time, and the other Russian-speaker in the room, Per Egil Hegge of Aftenposten, Oslo, also teased her. But we had no idea what they planned for us, nor how long they would hold us. I was mostly concerned for my wife and kids, who I thought were worrying about my fate.
Finally, after about four hours, the police managed to locate an official of the Foreign Ministry who came down to talk to us and determine that we were mere observers, not participants in the demonstration. We were set free, and reunited with our wives, who, it turned were not worried at all because they had been assured by the US Embassy we would not be forced into prison camps. The Bari girl was put on a plane for home the next morning, and the incident was forgotten. It was all a bit anti-climactic.
Until about 18 months later, when I saw an item in the International Herald-Tribune about a girl who had stood on a street corner in Bari, Italy, and taken all her clothes off to draw attention to some obscure controversy in Italy. Same girl.
Could she possibly have been mentally unbalanced? Very likely. Life is rarely what it seems.
Litvinov meanwhile got two years of “internal exile,” the equivalent of being sentenced in Los Angeles to spend two years in Buffalo. He was sent to Chita, Siberia, on the Chinese border, where it was felt his ideological microbes would be harmless among the tough natives.
© 2001 by Michael
Johnson. Note: This is actually Chapter 15 in Johnson's book.
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