John Jirik
Three American networks, NBC, ABC and CBS, as well as CNN, maintain bureaus in Moscow and compete with one another for whatever shots this jaundiced metropolis has to offer.
My first experience of the American networks was with CBS in May/June 1988 during the fourth Reagan-Gorbachev summit, the first to be held in Moscow. At the time I was a student at the Pushkin Russian Language Institute.
Dozens of students from various institutes were employed by the different American, Australasian and European networks as 'fixers' and translators. Fixers found paths for their employers through the labyrinthine bureaucracy which surrounded the event. Translators made sense of it for hundreds of non-Russian speaking staff who had been flown in for the summit. They interpreted for them a Moscow which even in its subdued moods confronts the senses as a kaleidoscope of clashing and alien imagery. Now, its mood was anything but subdued, two crazy weeks crowned by Reagan's five day visit to the 'evil empire'.
The American President stayed at Spasso House, the ambassador's residence. The week before Reagan arrived there was a burst of activity in the streets nearby. The buildings lining the streets along which the President's motorcade was to pass were spruced up and the streets themselves repaved.
Given the abysmal state of Moscow's roads in general and the fact that most buildings in the capital would be lucky to see even one proper coat of paint in their lifetime, the authorities were well aware that they were creating a fictional neighbourhood for the staging of the summit. Their behaviour was in keeping with a time-honoured tradition in Soviet and Tsarist diplomacy. This tradition is known as building "Potemkin villages" after Prince Grigorii Potemkin who erected stage-prop villages to impress Catherine the Great during a tour to the south in 1787.
The 'touching up' of the city for Reagan's benefit was a standing in-house joke amongst the media assembled for the spectacle. Yet this did not prevent them from according the visit itself public respect, even reverence. When the incident of painting the houses and repairing the roads was mentioned in official despatches, it was trivialised. Whereas it was in fact a perfect metaphor for the Reagan-Gorbachev summit: the degenerate leader of a powerful state meeting the powerful leader of a degenerate state. The one had the power to hide the decay of his domain from the other, while the other was either perverse or indifferent enough not to notice.
There were about two thousand foreign newspeople in Moscow during the five days Reagan was in town. I spent most of those five days in the CBS office by myself, apart from the Russian staffer, Boris Zakharov, from the UPDK (Embassies and Diplomatic Buildings Management), a section of the Foreign Ministry which controlled the supply of local staff to foreign embassies, businesses and media working in Moscow. At CBS I answered phones. Most of the time the bureau was empty since all of the networks had relocated to the Rossia Hotel across the road from the Kremlin. The networks were forced to move their bureaus due to the enormous numbers of extra staff they had brought in, nearly one hundred in CBS's case, to match the occasion.
It was clear from the urgency with which Boris was constantly being called to the phone by CBS staff in the Rossia and by the range of people ringing in, from dissidents to people close to Gorbachev, that he occupied a unique position in the flow of information through CBS. Time and again the depth of his knowledge and range of his contacts revealed the extent to which foreigners are dependent on their Russian staff not only for information and the infrastructural support which makes their presence possible, but for the less tangible forms of support which make their presence meaningful. People such as Boris do more than organise visas, allocate drivers, book hotels, arrange meetings, buy air tickets, translate at interviews and do research. For many foreign journalists, handicapped by their unfamiliarity with the language and terrain, they act as intermediaries between them and their subject matter without which they would be crippled.
The 'life support' system provided by UPDK and the Soviet Foreign Ministry was a particularly vivid working example of a bargain that any journalist reporting on politics anywhere strikes with local authorities in order to function. In exchange for being given a privileged position from which to observe the workings of the state, the journalist makes the state coherent to its own people and the outside world. In its analyses and criticisms, however harsh, the press brings the state to life, makes it real, and gives it a logic. When a journalist reports something they do more than register it as a fact. Insofar as the journalist is telling a story, the fact is given a value, whether true or false, and inserted into a narrative. And it is this, the rendering of a narrative with its particular history and characters, that lies at the heart of the journalistic function. More than any instrument of the state - the army, the police, the education system - the press is responsible for making the state visible to its people and the outside world.
For any state to function, public life need not register a truth, but it must be plausible. In the case of the Soviet Union, since the 20th Party Congress in 1956 and Khrushchev's destruction of Stalin's legacy, it has certainly been no secret that the public account of the country's affairs tended to the fictional. This was not important. What was important was that it remained a consistent, plausible fiction. A well written novel, something believable.
Journalists collude in this insofar as it is a question not of independence or objectivity but of narrative which is at stake. Forced by the rules of their profession to provide sources for their information, they are reduced to reporting the official fictions of the public record or the unofficial and therefore unsubstantiable lament of the private realm. As far as the Soviet authorities were concerned, any journalist could report whatever they liked about the country, quoting unidentified sources, public officials speaking off the record, private individuals whose opinions held no weight, without challenging the public fiction which was integral to the efficient running of the state.
This public fiction, of which the sprucing up of the city for Reagan's visit was an extreme example, was not only how the Soviet authorities presented themselves in public, it was how the system worked. There was no other 'true' system behind this layering of public fictions. As narrative it could not be otherwise. This only became clear to the Soviets themselves later, too late, long after Gorbachev began fatally tinkering with these fictions.
Literature will always tell you more about any country than its leaders ever will. In their dazzling narratives, the best of Russia's and the Soviet Union's writers were always more believable than their countries' leaders. But restricted to the realm of fiction, they never threatened them. There is every evidence in the case of the Soviet Union to believe that the country's leaders were as cynical about the parlous state of the economy as were its citizens. What was important was that none of this was ever put 'on the record'.
It was somewhat surprising then that, of the two platforms from which Gorbachev addressed his appeal for a renewed socialism, one was literary. Glasnost. Openness, truth-telling. It was a grand project. And it showed a rare and quixotic courage insofar as the complexity of modern life makes some degree of complacency essential. Most modern states have learned to accommodate the lies that inform their history. The tragedy for the Soviet people was their naive trust in Glasnost in the early years of Gorbachev. The sense that somehow by exposing the lies of their own history they might discover the truth, forgetting that all histories everywhere are history only insofar as they are written down, made part of the narrative which sustains a nation's sense of itself. Glasnost called for an inspection of the public record and a rectification of its falsities. It resulted in the collapse of the country. Each new layer of lies stripped away only revealed another, until nothing was left. The Soviet people erased their own history and hence erased themselves from history.
***
Nearly a year after Reagan's visit to the Soviet Union, I was getting ready to leave Xiamen, an island just off the south-eastern coast of mainland China, after spending the school year there teaching English. At my last meeting with my senior students they asked me how I thought the stand-off in Tiananmen Square between the army and the dwindling number of students still occupying the square would end. It was Wednesday, May 31, 1989. For some reason I said that I thought the army would kill the students. I still don't know why I said that. Because I don't think I really believed it. But I did say it, to my embarrassment, as my students shifted uneasily and several exchanged glances of genuine fear. I retracted what I had said, lamely, trying to soothe their anxieties. Our meeting ended on an uncertain note. The next day, I took the overnight ferry to Hong Kong, arriving on Friday, June 2.
Saturday night I was at a friend's place. We switched on the TV about midnight to watch the British soccer. The killings on Tiananmen Square were happening there, right in front of us. What was happening was so obvious yet so beyond comprehension, so meaningless, that none of us had anything we could possibly say. We sat dumbly, watching. Tanks rushing across the square, smashing through make-shift barricades erected by students and workers. APCs and buses burning. Dead and injured civilians being carried or dragged away from the site of the carnage, loaded on bicycles and carted off. The blur of green-uniformed soldiers rushing across the square, shooting on the move, their faces up close a mixture of fear and hatred. We watched in shock till the repetition of images became numbing. Only then did we wander home.
My single thought was whether to take the plane to Seattle later that morning as I had originally planned, or go back to Xiamen, to be with my friends and my kids at the school. In the end I realised that what had happened in Beijing was either too far away from Xiamen to be of consequence to people I cared for there, or if it wasn't, then my presence would only complicate what would be a precarious situation and that there was no point in returning. I decided to go on as planned to America.
Because of the time difference I arrived in Seattle not much later than I had left Hong Kong. News about Tiananmen Square had broken in the United States on Saturday morning. By Sunday morning the television coverage of the killings had cranked right up to speed. I arrived in Seattle to an orgy of blood. The same few dramatic scenes showed over and over again, sometimes from different angles, different voices but always saying the same thing. And the coverage went on for days. The same picture of the man standing in front of a column of tanks and blocking its passage appearing somewhere every hour. The same pictures of people with bloodied faces gesticulating at the camera. The same scenes of dead bodies being carted off on bicycles. And the same shot of a tank riding up over a barricade and smashing down the last symbol of defiance which the protesters had erected only a few days before the killings, the papier mache and plaster Goddess of Democracy which may have been modeled on a peasant but triggered an instant association with the American Statue of Liberty.
The effect of television on what was happening in China was quite stunning. Every repetition of any event added to the cumulative effect that China was about to explode. Yet what I was seeing on television, and what I was hearing on the radio and reading in the newspapers bore little relation, as far as I could tell, to the China I had lived in for the previous year and which I had left three days earlier. Here in America though, there was no space for hesitation. The killing on Tiananmen Square erupted into the collective consciousness. Television isolated it as an act of barbarism which sundered the flow of time. 'Tiananmen Square' became an event. It had no history, only the moment of its happening. The impartial lens sweeping across events, isolating and framing them so that at our leisure we could inspect them and draw our own conclusions. Every time these scenes of people being killed were replayed on television, they reinforced an image of the Chinese leadership as something ever more inhuman, ever more bloodthirsty, ever more alien. At the same time they reinforced the viewer's impression of their own difference, civility, 'being-in-a-democracy-ness'. Even Singapore's authoritarian Lee Kwan Yew was heard lamenting that the same result would have been achieved had the Chinese leadership ordered helicopters to drop itching powder on the students.
***
I returned to Moscow. It was late 1989. The Communist empire centred in Moscow was collapsing. In October, Hungary abandoned Leninist ideology. The Berlin wall was torn down in early November. In late November, the Czechoslovak Communist Party capitulated. And on Christmas day Nikolai Ceausescu and his wife were executed in Rumania.
Six more months went by in which the shock waves generated by the events in Eastern Europe continued to buffet Moscow. My money had all but run out. If you are a foreigner in Moscow and you want to survive, you need a hard currency source. As beggars can't be choosers, I did the rounds of the networks and found myself a job translating at NBC.
It was the 28th Party Congress at which the sacred sixth article defining the Communist Party as the ruling party would be removed from the Soviet Constitution. At one point, as part of NBC's coverage of the Congress, their correspondent was interviewing Yurii Levada from the prestigious Institute for Social Research. He had Yurii repeat over and over again an answer about the threat of civil unrest in the Baltics. In order to fit the answer into the available time within the piece, the correspondent was asking Levada to compress his rather complex and long-winded answer, until Yurii was down to half a dozen words not so much now about unrest as about the outright possibility or not of civil war. What Yurii Levada had begun saying and what he had ended up saying were two different things. Many shades of grey had been distilled into a spot of black and white.
Following the 28th Party Congress, I stayed on at NBC. Over time I found myself caring less about the product in terms of its portrayal of a Soviet Union which is sometimes beyond my comprehension (I occasionally wonder if I am living in the same city as the Moscow I see in the spots that go to air), as I began to appreciate more the difficulties of putting the product together. The longer I worked in television, the better I understood this. The demands of the spot, which never goes beyond a couple of minutes unless it is exceptionally topical or sensational material, make it impossible to render anything except in relatively simple terms. The spot itself is the result of a huge and elaborate machine cranking into action. Sometimes the machine begins weeks, even months before the spot goes to air. Other times the spot is something which simply happens and demands to be turned into news that instant.
At the same time, it was becoming clearer that after almost six years, Glasnost had achieved at least one thing. Rather than renew faith in the Party through a spiritual cleansing which had been Gorbachev's original aim, Glasnost had undermined the monolithic fiction of the Party's necessity to the state. This monopolistic fiction had been replaced by the multiple fictions of the democratisation of public life: the Congress of People's Deputies, the co-operative movement, the rise of the Soviet bourgeoisie, the collapse of Soviet morality, the spread of crime, etc. This proliferation of fictions in the public sphere was otherwise known as Perestroika and it was creating chaos for a system which by early 1991 was close to breaking down completely.
The American President George Bush paid Moscow a brief working visit in late July to sign the START treaty. After his departure, NBC began winding down to a skeleton crew. As many people as possible were leaving on long delayed holidays. I stayed on to work the night shift while the regular night desk person took leave.
Bush left on August 1. The coup began seventeen days later.
For the skeleton crew left in the bureau, the coup was three crazy sleepless days and nights dominated by the logistics of coverage, getting to where something was happening and shooting it, getting someone for an interview, and getting the story fed out on satellite. There was little time to think about what was actually happening. Who were the members of the State Emergency Committee? Why had they removed Gorbachev? What were they hoping to achieve and how did they plan to achieve it? In one way the issues were simple. Gorbachev had been removed from power. A State Emergency Committee had taken over. Yeltsin was holed up in the White House, calling on the people to resist. All the essential ingredients of good television were there: colour, sound and movement: the red, white and blue of Russian flags fluttering in the breeze, piebald tanks and soldiers in camouflage uniforms rushing here and there, blood, the cry of Yeltsin's defiance, the answering roar of the crowd, people surging to the defence of democracy. It was clear what the stakes were and where the action was. It was just a question of getting to that place, getting one's camera in position and filming. Moreover, it was all happening about a ten-minute drive from the news bureau.
* * *
I travelled into work on the metro at about 7.30 am as soon as I heard there had been a coup. A friend had rung me frantically about half an hour earlier. "John, they've removed Gorbachev!" At first I thought she was joking. Almost in tears, she replied: "Would I have rung you at seven in the morning if I was joking?" I thought about this for a moment. It was true. No one who knew me rang me before lunchtime. I turned on the radio. Sure enough, the decree authorising the handover of power to Yanaev was being read out. I shaved and dressed, wondering whether the Metro would still be running. It was. The people riding it were quieter and more sombre than usual. The police who usually patrol the stations were nowhere to be seen and there was an absence of soldiers on the metro. But otherwise, nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
The mood began to change with the first appearance of tanks on the streets at about 9.30 that morning. The pictures coming in showed tanks manoeuvring near the Ukraine Hotel opposite the White House. People standing watching were clearly shocked. How could this be happening in our city, our Moscow? Recorded snatches of conversation registered the same thing: shock, transforming itself into anger that anyone dare bring tanks into the streets.
After the initial excitement of the appearance of tanks on the streets, the action shifted to the White House where crowds were beginning to gather and where Yeltsin had now holed up with his cabinet and advisers after denouncing the coup from the armour of an APC pulled up out front of the parliamentary building. Apart from the build up of people at the White House and the presence of APCs and tanks at strategic points in the city, the pictures coming in suggested that nothing much was happening.
The State Emergency Committee held a press conference at 5pm which gave the impression of an undergraduate protest meeting. Journalists were sprawled across seats, legs stretched out, or hunched over, switching between poses of interest and indifference. For the most part, they seemed to be paying the front table behind which Tizyakov, Starodubtsev, Pugo, Yanaev and Baklanov were sitting as little attention as possible. As though just by their posture they could register disdain for the junta. Yanaev was sweating and kept wiping his brow with an enormous white handkerchief. His hands were shaking. It was a pathetic performance for the new leader of a superpower. At the same time his lack of composure was somehow frightening. That someone so lacking in confidence could have so much power. Some of the journalists were becoming restless. Sensing the unease of the Emergency Committee, they too were beginning to feel unsure of themselves. There were a couple of lame and awkward enquiries from papers obviously sympathetic to the coup which allowed Yanaev to try and justify his position. But for the most part, the Emergency Committee was being met with hostility. Journalists from the more liberal papers were showing scant respect for the country's new leadership. The press conference reached a low point for the Emergency Committee when Alexander Bovin, Izvestia's chief political correspondent, asked why on earth had they involved Starodubtsev, Chairman of the Farmers' Union. As Yanaev groped for an answer, the cameras focussed on Starodubtsev. He was grinning and nodding his head slowly from side to side like a 'Laughing Clown' in an amusement arcade. Pop a ping-pong ball into my mouth. Win a teddy-bear.
***
Darkness fell, the tension mounted. Would there be some attempt to storm the White House? The New York news desk was asking for better coverage from inside the building. I made contact with a journalist from New Times, Veronika Khilchevskaya, and arranged for her to work with NBC. [9] It was a measure of the confusion already becoming apparent within the State Emergency Committee that they even left the telephone system functioning. In the White House Veronika managed to get access to a telephone with a direct international connection.
Meanwhile the manager of Visnews, a television news agency which shares office space with NBC, was frantically getting as much footage fed out as possible since he was expecting the transmitter to be shut down and all international communication links to be cut at any moment. The feed point had been running uninterrupted since early that morning. At one point tempers frayed when a two-minute technical glitch backed up every feed. In the very precise world of television programming and satellite feeding, two minutes is an enormous delay. It was quickly resolved. A new tape was rammed into the slot. The standing joke in the office was that as soon as the satellite was shut down, it meant the end of the story in television terms and we could all go home and get some sleep. Meanwhile though, the feed point in the back room was sending a story out by micro-wave to Ostankino, the Soviet television tower, for relay to the satellite every ten minutes.
News that Bush had thrown in his support for Yeltsin came through on the wire. I photocopied the transcript and faxed it through to Veronika. She told me later that she had made copies and given it to Yeltsin's aides. She added that it was the first news they received that Bush had come out in support of Yeltsin and that it had provided an important psychological boost.
Desperately tired, I logged out of the computer and wandered back to one of the other rooms, found a sofa and fell asleep for a couple of hours.
The second morning started lazily. One of the camera crews did a sweep around the city. All they could find were tanks parked at different 'strategic' points, newspaper offices etc., around the city, with kids crawling over them and soldiers chatting with the people. Viktor Alksnis from Soyuz (Union), a right-wing faction in the People's Congress of Deputies, came along to the studio at about 11am to give an interview outlining the other side of the story. I had been surprised to find out that he was not a member of the State Emergency Committee. Now, though he didn't come out in direct support of the Committee, he was brutally honest about the dire need for some sort of radical action to improve the lot of ordinary people. Presenting both sides of the story was proving difficult. Supporters of Yeltsin, English speaking, articulate members of the 'intelligentsia' were easy to find. On Tuesday morning, we began trying to track down the other side. It was proving an impossible task. The coup leaders' secretaries were not answering the phones and those that were politely put us off, saying that such-and-such was too busy or so-and-so was out.
Later that morning Nikolai, a friend, dropped by. His cynicism also helped bring some perspective to what was happening. He felt the coup was a pretty sick joke. What difference did it make anyway who ran the country, things could only get worse. Why torment the people even more by putting tanks on the streets? There seemed to be little to quarrel with in his assessment that what the people wanted was not more political game playing, but bread and sausage.
As the afternoon wore on, tension about a possible attack on the White House again mounted. We were all beginning to wonder what life would be like under a Brezhnevist regime. Eduard Shevardnadze was to be interviewed in his office where he would talk to the 'Today' show host, Bryant Gumbel, by phone. Everything went fine until Shevardnadze complained minutes before the interview was to begin that he could not hear in the ear into which the soundman had put the microphone. Luckily it was live to tape and not live to air. However it still had to be finished quickly since the tape would be rushed back to the bureau and fed out in time to get it on the show. A scramble ensued and instead of talking to Bryant Gumbel, Shevardnadze was interviewed by one of the local producers in Moscow. Despite the technical problem, it was a good interview. The flurry over it provided our excitement for the day.
Night set in. We were in constant contact with Veronika inside the White House. Around eleven o'clock news came in that there was some sort of disturbance down near the American Embassy. There had been shooting. Tanks were burning. Kyle Eppler was down there filming. In the newsroom people exchanged glances. We could only wait. Within minutes a producer rushed in cradling a tape and went through to the Visnews edit room.
Kyle had filmed a man lying dead a few moments after an APC had crushed him. Apparently two or three others had also died. The problem now was to work out whether the deaths were part of an assault or an isolated incident. The crush inside the edit suite made it impossible to see the tape being cut so I watched it on the monitors being fed out to London. One APC was repeatedly bashing into a barricade of parked trolley-buses. People were trying to attack this APC, throwing sticks, bricks, anything they could lay their hands on. Then a body was shown lying on the road, being picked up and carried away.
By now other tapes had come in, all from down near the Old American Embassy where Kyle had been filming. For the most part they showed the same material that Kyle's tape had, without the body. Even on the tapes of the fighting, it was always this one APC, No. 536, in the centre of everything. The other APCs were standing still, blocked, it would seem, by the people and the barricades. If this was an assault on the White House, it was a strange way to go about it. It looked more like panic on the part of both the people and the soldiers. But it was difficult to say without actually having witnessed the incident. And it was still not at all clear whether it was not part of a bigger operation. Already the wires were running frantic reconstructions of the incident. But none of them could give more than the facts: that there had been a spate of fighting down on the Ring Road where the tunnel runs under Kalinin Prospekt, that at least one APC and several buses had been set on fire and that between two and four people were believed to have been killed.
The minutes ticked by in the newsroom as we waited for whatever developments might follow. Veronika reported enormous tension inside the White House. According to her sources there, an attack by the KGB's Alpha Group could be expected sometime before 6am.
The night dragged on. The attack by the Alpha Group never eventuated. And when dawn broke on Wednesday the only incident had been the killings in the tunnel on the Ring Road. None of us had slept that night so the new day had a dreary edge to it which was mostly the result of our fatigue. We were too tired to feel anything but indifference anymore. Most of us just wished the whole thing was over.
The office was a pig sty with empty boxes from 'Pizza Hut' all over the place. The stench of cigarette butts overflowing from every ashtray was nauseating. Hundreds of tapes and papers were strewn about the different rooms. A couple of people dragged themselves off to sleep on the only two sofas the office possessed. The day which had begun in a grey haze of sleeplessness meandered on in confusion.
By early afternoon, rumours which had been coming in throughout the night and morning that the coup leaders were backing down began to look more substantive. Outside, a light mist was falling. I had a driver take me home. It was the first time I had left the office since Monday morning. There was a long column of tanks, engines idling, standing on the bridge on Prospekt Vernadskovo which crosses the Moscow River. They were pointing away from the city centre.
At home, I fell asleep immediately. But a couple of hours later I was woken by a telephone call from a friend, Sergei Popovskii. The coup had collapsed.
We agreed to meet at the Old American Embassy an hour later. There, the crowd was already thinning out. A single truck was parked in the middle of the street and a motley group standing on the back of it was taking turns at addressing the people. Not many were pausing to listen. Broken piping and concrete blocks that had been ripped out of the pavement were scattered along the sidewalk. The street itself was fairly clean. A steady procession of people was moving through the tunnel under Kalinin Prospekt, as many coming as going. Victory hung in the air. Nothing concrete, just this swirling headiness that something momentous had taken place. I wandered around. It was impossible not to smile. Laughter would ripple up first from one group of people, then another.
I had spent the most part of the past three days hunkered down over my computer console in front of the battery of television screens that dominate the newsroom at NBC. Now I had a belated chance to feel what I had only been watching. Unfiltered by the camera, the air was charged with conflicting emotions: pride, sorrow, wonder, anger, even a touch of fear. Was it really over? There was an uncertainty. So big a victory was frightening to contemplate.
Sergei turned up twenty minutes later with a couple of friends. I hadn't seen him smile so much in the year I had known him. First he was skipping down the street, then spinning in circles, then darting off to read a message of defiance, 'Smash the Coup' splashed in black paint on a wall. Then he ran back to where I was standing: "We really fucked them this time! Didn't we?!" I could only nod and smile. He was experiencing something I could not feel. But his joy was infectious and even as an outsider I felt myself being lifted up into the same realm of the senses. I too started to smile, then laugh and cry, tears of joy and then of pain. Down in the tunnel, blood stains strewn with flowers marked the spots where the three men had died. People were blessing themselves reverently and weeping openly.
Sergei Gerasimenko, who was with us, recounted the events of the previous night, the things he had seen. He showed us where the Molotov cocktails had been stored. One was still there, filled with petrol. I took it with me as a souvenir. He pointed out the hose they had dragged out of a first floor apartment to put the fire out on APC No. 536. The hose was still dangling out of the window. He described where and how the three had been killed. People who had spent the previous two nights at the barricades were sitting inside the crushed buses, smoking, wrapped in blankets, ashen exhaustion competing with defiant pride on their faces.
Walking down Kalinin Prospket towards the White House, the crowd and the noise level swelled. Here, where there had been no fighting, there was less sadness, more excitement. The Podmoskovskii OMON who had sided with Yeltsin from the start were being cheered as they marched out of the building into two waiting buses. They too looked tired. As did the soldiers from the Taman Tank Division whom Major Yevdokimov had led over to Yeltsin's side on Monday afternoon. Volunteers from the defence brigades were keeping the curious away from the tanks. A vacuum of silence surrounded them. I took some photographs. The river barges which had come up with fire-fighting equipment in case it was needed were still moored in front of the White House. Most of the barricades were still in place. Intermittent announcements were coming over the loud speaker system urging the people not to be overly enthusiastic, that there was still some possibility of a reversal. The whereabouts of the coup leaders were unknown. More than ever, vigilance was important right now. But clearly the people already felt it was all over. Standing there, you could feel the tension of the last three days dissipating.
But in at work it was still manic. I walked into the bureau chief's office to show off my Molotov cocktail. He wasn't very impressed, ordering me to get rid of it, mumbling something about burning down the bureau. I ended up pouring the petrol out onto the ground outside and throwing the bottle in the trash. I remember thinking, unjustly I suppose, that some people just don't have any sense of humour. One of the camera crews was basking in the limelight. They had been sent to the wrong airport by mistake to film Gorbachev's arrival back in Moscow and quite by accident Kyle Eppler had been able to get exclusive shots of the coup leaders' flight in a cavalcade of black Volgas and Zil limousines weaving through the traffic and the tanks trundling out of town. Because of the hopeless traffic jams created by the tanks departing the city, the soundman, Tom Dumsdorf, had left the car and taken the Metro to get the tape back to the studio in time for the feed.
Meanwhile, Gorbachev's arrival kept getting put back. Prognoses and retrospectives became the order of the day. By now the tension in the office had also dropped appreciably. The moment had almost passed. Eventually Gorbachev and his family arrived back in Moscow at 2.15am, Thursday. Once the pictures had come back from the airport and been fed out, we relaxed, put our feet up and drank some well deserved beers.
For the people of Moscow who had defended the White House, Thursday was one long celebration. In the afternoon, Andrei Kvardakov from Progress Television dropped in to the office for some tapes. Andrei works for Volodya Molchanov, one of the best investigative journalists in the Soviet Union. Now I went with Andrei back to their offices in the Progress Publishing House. Molchanov and the rest of the staff were toasting the failure of the coup with vodka. Someone from Yeltsin's office had just been on the phone to Molchanov offering him the job of head of the state radio and television ministry, Gostelradio, before Leonid Kravchenko, whose open support for the conservative and implied sympathies for the coup made him persona very non grata, had even been fired. Molchanov had declined the offer.
Joining them I learned that he was waiting for a phone call to see whether or not he was going to be allowed to interview two of the coup's leaders, Dmitrii Yazov and Vladimir Kryuchkov, in detention. The phone call came, permission denied. We all shrugged. But Molchanov was on a high, he was going to go and interview them anyway. He dragged the crew down the corridor, downing a shot of vodka as he went. He looked at me, to see if I wanted to join him. I glanced at Andrei. He was on his way home. He lives quite near me and was offering me a lift. I hadn't slept more than four hours since Monday morning. Now it was Thursday afternoon. I was torn between going with Volodya and an absurd sense that somehow I was sick of foreigners interfering in 'their' coup. The clatter of boots on the parquetry was fading as Molchanov and his crew disappeared down the corridor. I didn't move from my chair. Ten minutes later, Andrei and I left for home.
To my horror, when I got into work at about 10pm that night, everyone was talking about an exclusive interview which ABC had fed showing Kryuchkov calmly saying he wasn't guilty. I almost died. I was terrified that it would somehow come out that I had been with Molchanov before he had gone out and got the interview. And not only had I not gone, Molchanov had sold the bloody thing to ABC, NBC's arch-rival.
It had never occurred to me when I was agonising earlier in the evening about foreigners interfering in 'their' coup that he would sell it at all. I had been torn between a foreigner being there and them having their own little bit of glory. It was their coup. We were the outsiders.
I did what I could to rectify my mistake. I rang Andrei first thing Friday morning to find out if there were any other interviews. He told me to call Molchanov's producer, who said he had an interview with Yazov as well. I had him bring it in, hoping against hope that somehow it had been shot later and that ABC did not know about it. But when we ran the tape we saw it was all the one interview. Kryuchkov and Yazov. The only difference was that Kryuchkov had been unrepentent and quite prepared to go on camera, the part ABC had shown, whereas Yazov had been too ashamed to show his face and all you could see were his boots as he mumbled something about his stupidity. I slunk out of the edit room.
It was as though the previous three days had become my whole life. All the stresses and lack of sleep were combining to distort my perception of my own position to the point where I felt completely traumatised by what had happened. Not until Sasha Lyubimov from 'Vzglyad' gave NBC one of the four copies of the Gorbachev home video from Foros which trumped ABC back did I begin to feel any better. At least the heat was off NBC to come up with something to match the Kryuchkov interview.
***
For me, that was the end of the coup. What I saw of the coverage of it was neither substantively nor formally very different from the television I had seen in America following the Tiananmen Square massacre. As in Beijing when the whole of recent Chinese history was filtered though, in some ways reduced to the killings on the square and the enormous demonstrations which preceded them, the killings in Moscow on the Ring Road and the crowds defending the White House were an easy focus for television.
Television news is addicted to the image of violence. And the images I watched being fed out of Moscow and the images of Tiananmen I had seen in America two years earlier were similar enough to be interchangeable. In neither case was any attempt made to place television within the dynamics of the event itself. On the contrary in both instances the event was isolated, elevated out of its particular history and reduced to the dynamics of television. In the case of Tiananmen, due largely to the influence of television, world-wide revulsion at the killings led to a wave of political and economic sanctions being levied on China by the outside world. Over the next two years, these sanctions were quietly withdrawn as the wave of revulsion subsided, while the students who led the protest movement have largely been forgotten. In Moscow, television restricted its focus to the crowds at the White House and the killings on the Ring Road. Bouyed by words like 'freedom', 'democracy', 'repression' and 'totalitarianism', an uncritical impression was produced of the brutality of the State Emergency Committee and the legitimacy of Yeltsin's position, an impression which still remains taboo to question in the West. The immediate impact of this impression was evident in popular and official reactions from abroad to the coup. No real attempt was made to place the killings on the Ring Road in the context of the three days of confusion in which they occurred. Little attempt was made to understand the rationale behind the coup leaders' actions. That their actions in bringing tanks into Moscow were ultimately responsible for the violence on the Ring Road is beyond doubt. At the same time, bloodshed was certainly not the goal of the State Emergency Committee. As with Deng Xiaoping's transformation of China over the previous fifteen years which ultimately produced Tiananmen, the complex history and processes associated with Gorbachev's Perestroika in the Soviet Union were pushed to the background.
Television ignored this bigger picture. For television it was a simple story. In each case people living under the oppressive yoke of communism had finally taken to the streets despite the danger to their lives and had confronted the armies of their country's governments and demanded freedom and democracy. Television saw two very similar events. Yet the two events could not have been more different. Tiananmen was a convulsion triggered by the distortions emerging in Chinese society as a result of an ongoing shift towards a market economy. Soviet history ended with the coup. Some other yet to be defined history is happening now.
Television registers none of this. Locked into the two minute spot and increasingly ignorant of national boundaries as its only limitations become the technologies of dissemination, television reflects a shift in information processing away from localised and fictive to global and increasingly autistic narratives as communication increasingly gives way to visualisation. Bite size chunks of information perfectly suited to synthesizing a complex and rapidly changing world for easier consumption. The immediacy of television reduces historical processes to digestible moments which can be fitted into one's daily routine with minimal disruption, focussing the viewers' attention, if only momentarily, on images from other worlds. Reflecting briefly on these alien worlds, one's own world is momentarily threatened but then, in the space of an advertisement, or a promo, again made familiar and mastered and lent a stability which is comforting.
I had different experiences of the two events. In the case of Tiananmen, I was in Xiamen, 1300km away from the political centre. I had spent the year there watching the development of events in the capital with the space distance provides for reflection. Though I was fascinated by the development of events right across the country which culminated in Tiananmen, I only felt personally involved or affected inasmuch as my students and Chinese friends occasionally expressed some interest in what was happening.
In Moscow, the situation for me was reversed. I did not have the distance that reflection requires. Nor did I have the time in the frantic need to tell the story as it was happening. As a result, at no point during the coup did I feel that I understood much of what was going on. Moreover, being so close to the event, I could not but be emotionally involved. I had never experienced euphoria until the afternoon the coup collapsed and I went walking down on the Ring Road and around the White House. And it was obvious, looking around me, that everyone was experiencing the same thing. That afternoon and the following few days, Yeltsin's supporters were literally drunk with optimism and a sense of rightness about what they had done.
As a result I am forced to ask myself whether the students in Tiananmen did not also experience euphoria in their confrontation with the government before it turned tragic. And if so, was their struggle not good in itself whatever the consequences.
On the other hand the euphoria and sense of optimism which the collapse of the coup generated in Moscow were premature. If anything, the Emergency Committee's fears, that if they did not act to stop the disintegration of the Soviet Union then, the results would be a tragedy for all, are looking more justified with each passing month of greater economic hardship and escalation of inter-ethnic and inter-republican violence.
Though the sense of optimism has largely dissipated, one aspect of it does remain. As later events have shown, the coup really did mark the end of Soviet history. Not only in that the Party was dissolved and the state collapsed. Post-Soviet history marks out a space in which the development of a genuine civil society is not ruled out. Whether Russia throws off the medieval vestiges of its Soviet past and emerges as a modern state depends now on the development of that space.
As for the journalist, his or her role will not be made any easier. With the end of the cold war the easy categorisation of events into appropriate ideological categories has become more difficult. The journalist's narrative no longer has that easy stamp of authority which reporting from the enemy's heartland conferred.
***
An image of the way television works lingers. About two hours after the tape had come in with Kyle's pictures of the dead body, the New York desk informed us that ABC had some stunning shot of something or other, I forget what. The bureau chief came out into the newsroom saying: "We have to match that shot!" It was a normal reaction. But it betrayed more than anything the single biggest problem facing television journalists. Under increasingly competitive conditions the focus of their work becomes not losing to the competition, rather than reporting the news. For the most part the one amounts to the other. It is only when one or another network gets a break on the competition that the real relationship of television news to the market is betrayed. And the bottom line is that news, like any other product, is only viable if it is profitable. The contradictions with which the people who make television news are constantly struggling were brought out by the ratings for the three nights the coup was on American television. NBC, to their credit, made the coup priority coverage. The ratings for three special reports on the coup were as follows (source: NBC):
* [table] CBS News Special, 8/20 – presumably on the attempted Soviet coup, although the ratings did not indicate this.
Seeing the ratings back in Moscow, one of the camera-men joked "Why bother?" wondering out loud about the people over there in America for whom he was here risking getting himself killed. Yet, despite its lack of appeal compared to Miss Teen USA, Doogie Howser, Jake & The Fat Man and the football, the coup was an event made for television. Columns of tanks and APCs trundling about the streets, lines of soldiers cordoning off different strategic points, people surrounding tanks and soldiers, reasoning and arguing with them, coup leaders who felt impelled to give press conferences to explain their actions, Boris Yeltsin astride an APC defying the coup's plotters, prominent and world famous people, Yelena Bonner, Mstislav Rostropovich, etc., making emotional speeches to the crowds gathered in the square in front of the Russian parliament, dead bodies, burning tanks and buses, soldiers cornered by a crowd baying for blood, the terrified looks on their faces freeze-framed into unforgettable images.
That the American public made every effort to ignore the coup, if anything, points to the quality of NBC's coverage of it. If it failed to attract viewers, then it was also failing to reduce the world to a set of stereotypical images of other worlds and lives which could be digested over supper with a hot cocoa before heading off to bed. Which suggests in the end, that something of the three days of the coup may have troubled, rather than simply entertained.
At different times most of the people with whom I work voice uncertainties about what they are doing, yet have solid enough arguments for still doing it. They have a loyalty to what television news could be, even if this and what it is remain for the most part poles apart.
[9] Ms. Khilchevskaya's account of her involvement with NBC can be found here. She notes that she contacted NBC in New York after she and her husband went to the White House in support of Yeltsin. This makes sense, as I must have had a number to dial in to at the White House, and she would have given that number to the NBC desk in New York, which would then have relayed it to Moscow.