#14 | August 14 - 27, 1997  

by Abram Kalashnikov

Your name is Billy Joe. You just got laid off at the plant-the third job you've lost in three months. On the way home you park your ancient rust-spotted Oldsmobile in front of the local bar to feed your growing alcoholic habit, then later drive home drunk and belligerent. Your wife, recently promoted in her job at a law firm, awaits you in a spiffy new business suit that shows off the shapely body that had been hidden for so long when she was just a housewife. You attempt intercourse with her but you cannot manage an erection and so, in order to complete the picture and become a total loser once and for all, you follow the OJ Simpson playbook and become a wife-beater.

Here's another variation of the same story. Your name is William Joseph, Staff Writer. You've been posted in Russia for the Palookaville Gazette for seven years, during which time Russia has become a much less important story worldwide and your career has begun to follow a sharp downward curve; you still haven't landed that job with the Palookaville City Desk back home. Meanwhile, Russians, about whom you once wrote indulgently as impoverished freedom-seeking peasants and intellectuals, now drive the kinds of cars you can't even afford to rent and are taking away all the women who a few years ago would have been desperate to marry you and your $8300 in savings.

You'd be a total loser if it weren't for one thing: you still haven't become abusive. But that's easily remedied, as Salma Azmeh of Reuters proved last week:

"KOMSOMOLSK-NA-AMURE, Russia - In this city 6,000 km east of Moscow, an imposing statue of Lenin gazes solemnly across the main square.
"Letters above a large gate welcome visitors to the Park of the Shipbuilding Workers, and the Palace of Culture still stands tall at the end of Peace Avenue.
"But the park is overgrown and the palace virtually empty [note the tone of disappointment that the palace is not totally empty- A.K.].
"Komsomolsk, which once embodied the ideals of the Communist Soviet Union founded by Vladimir Lenin, is in a sorry state."

Okay, let's leave aside the fact that Azmeh's "gazing Lenin statue" lead has been used, by my count, 937 times by wire service writers since 1991. Let's even forgive the strange hyper-redundant language in the phrase "Communist Soviet Union founded by Vladimir Lenin." I mean, bad writing isn't necessarily a crime.

What concerns me is the Western press's pathological insistence on returning to the same positively violent "rectum of the universe" theme over and over again, raining the same blows on Russia in story after story. Amzeh, after the introduction, leads the attack with a left jab: Komsomolsk is experiencing "economic hardships that go hand in hand with the near-closure of its factories." He follows with a right: "Once privileged, people now grow vegetables to survive." He concludes with an uppercut and a knockout blow: "A personal telephone in his flat is a luxury, a car an impossible dream."

How many times have we heard these exact same phrases? And for what? Certainly, these stories are not particularly relevant to readers of Western newspapers; the affairs of Komsomolsk have nothing to do with the West. And neither are they particularly interesting; in a country where people commit murders, dig huge underground complexes, and kidnap white slaves in order to produce contraband boxer shorts, telling tales of economic hardship in Siberia seems like a pretty weak way of producing lurid thrills.

No, there's something else at work here. In a foreign community full of highly-paid consultants, bankers, and financiers, there is only one thing that low-paid, undersexed, and usually physically unattractive Western journalists (as Hunter Thompson once wrote, "A group photo of the ten best journalists in the world would be a monument to human ugliness") have in their favor: citizenship in countries with high standards of living. And, like abusive husbands, they are very quick to go back to their one advantage when they feel down about themselves, as Azmeh colleague Adam Tanner of Reuters proved last week in his brutal 800-word bummer-gasm over the former Gulag town of Magadan:

"Yet even today the city is short on comforts," Tanner writers. "A gloomy array of badly-made prefab housing and abandoned construction sites, it rarely sees sunshine."

Tanner, just another average Joe in real life, in print apparently becomes a God who can block out the sun. Last I checked it was longitude, not plentitude, which governed the length of daylight.

Like today's communist leaders, bummer-seeking Western reporters are eternally grateful for the elderly. Tanner centers his piece around a group of septuagenarians who for one reason or another still live in the Gulag town where they were once imprisoned. One lived through the siege of Leningrad, another chopped logs in a different Gulag, another watched her husband die, another lost an arm in a mining accident. Statistics about the number of people repressed by Stalin are repeated a number of times, as are a host of Gulag misery-modifiers ("Komya's camps...were notorious for their bitter cold, isolation, and cruelty"), and the author takes advantage of every opportunity to hammer home the theme of doom and gloom.

Consider the following passage, remarkable for its relentless devotion to the cause of bleak, isle-of-death imagery. The italics are mine:

"Eva Onofrichuk, 70, today lives in just a few kilometers away from her former barracks, now a battered green structure surrounded by tall weeds in a police compound, which she frequently passes on one of Magadan's main roads.
"'About 200 women lived in these barracks,' she said on a visit as she looked into the abandoned interior filled with rubbish and old furniture [enough, already! A.K.]. 'I was sent 46 years ago and spent six years here.'"

My American schooling took place in New Jersey. I was treated to some sights there that made even Siberia look okay. But I never saw them written about with such glee in newspapers there.

The worst thing about all of this is that, like all abusive husbands, the Western press will prove impossible to escape from.

No matter what you do to make the news good, they'll find a way to make it bad. Because even if some of us in Moscow are beginning to look good in our spiffy new suits after years of being hidden away, we won't look that sharp abroad if we get black eyes in print.