#24 | December 18-29, 1997  

by Abram Kalashnikov

An American journalist once wrote that the only things you need to be a successful sportswriter in the United States are a) a lobotomy and b) a Thesaurus, to avoid using the same descriptive phrases twice in the same article.

If you have those qualities but don't like sports, you can move to Russia. People who read the sports pages in the States at least watch the games on TV and can tell if you don't know what you're talking about. But if you can find a hundred different ways to say "it's cold," then you're guaranteed a captive audience and can find a good career here-as a writer of news features, or "readers."

If writing straight news articles is the art of saying nothing, then writing "readers" is the art of saying nothing and making it sound like you're saying something. These pieces, which tend to be longer, more modifier-laden, and centered around some "average" person, are ostensibly intended to provide newspaper readers with a feel for life in the subject country. More to the point, "readers" fill the lower halves of the front pages of most newspapers and serve to palliate nervous editors on slow news days.

A peculiar characteristic of leads in "Russia" readers is the almost absolute certainty with which one can predict the use of cold-weather imagery to provide that real-life feel. Last week, for instance, I knew to reach for a thermometer the instant I saw the headline "Siberia's Latest Challenge: Capitalism" over New York Times staffer Michael Gordon's reader piece:

"NORILSK, Russia - Hardship is second nature for the residents of this Siberian enclave. Winter sends the temperature plunging to minus 45 degrees Fahrenheit and drops the sun below the horizon for months at a time.

"It was Stalin who established this arctic city and dispatched hundreds of thousands of political prisoners here to extract the metal ore from mines so deep they seemed to run to the very center of the Earth."

Russians get upstaged by their cold weather even in the safety of their own homes, where writers like Vanora Bennet of theLos Angeles Times turn the tables and use "warmth" as the scene-setter instead of cold:

"MOSCOW - Glass breaking, overturning furniture, muffled thuds. A woman screaming from a downstairs apartment: 'I'm being killed! I'm being killed!'

"It's midnight, and three floors up, in a cozy kitchen with a kettle on the boil and pipes gurgling behind the curtains, neighbor Tania Kucherenko shrugs off any suggestion that she should call the police."

And you can't have a discussion of Russian "cold" reader without mentioning the queen of the genre, modifier-mad consumerist LA Times Bureau chief Carol. J. Williams. Almost every piece Williams writes between October and April includes cold in the lead. A typical one was a recent mall-ver-ture entitled "Consumers Come in From the Cold at New Moscow Malls":

Reporters, much like real people, only resort to talking about the weather when there is nothing else to say. And that's what readers are all about. In fact, they differentiate from formulaic, opinion-stifling news articles in only one important way. In news articles, something happens. In readers, nothing does.

So in a vacuum of incident, the big bureaus in Moscow leave it to rich creative minds like Mitchell Landsberg (another cold-weather lead proponent) of the Associated Press to perform the dual functions of filling space and providing readers that vibrant, dogma-free "slice of life" they all feel such an ache in their chilly bones for:

"MOSCOW (AP) - On a slushy corner in central Moscow, Irina Goltsova is doing her part for Russia's economic reforms. The retired nurse is selling potatoes and sauerkraut to supplement her meager pension."

A paragraph like this can fail to seem ridiculous only to a Westerner. To a Russian, Landsberg's lead sounds a lot like the work those great on-the-ground TASS correspondents filed from the U.S. in the sixties and seventies: "Dwayne Brown, a young negro textile worker, had been unconsciously yet cheerfully doing his part to further the cause of capitalist oppression. But after years of working in the factory, he was no closer to buying the Cadillac he dreamed of than he was when he started."

Landsberg continues with his TASS-esque narrative:

"'Sure, they've reformed my life,' she says sourly, referring to President Yeltsin and his team of...advisers.

"A few blocks away, Sergei Itkin is also taking part in Russia's free-market reforms. Itkin, a dentist in private practice, is buying a silk scarf for his wife at an expensive boutique.

"'People complain, and so do I, but the most important thing the reforms have given many of usÉ is some freedom of choice,' he says. 'Some of my colleagues do not wish to work hard, so they complain about the prices and instability. I choose to work.'"

Landsberg's narrative technique has all the subtlety of a slide-projector instructional film on hygiene shown to junior high students. One can imagine Itkin in a later paragraph showing Landsberg his gingivitis-free gums-and pointing sadly at his necrosis-suffering neighbor, who neither flosses nor believes in economic reform.

But for the introduction of adjectives and "real" people, readers for the most part follow the same formulaic rules as news stories. Great lip service is paid to balance and impartiality; neither Gordon nor Bennet nor Landsberg will ever make an assertion in his or her pieces without making a counter-assertion. So while Landsberg, who has in this piece anyway graduated from the restraints of straight news reporting, has the freedom to write,

"So what exactly has reform done for Russia? The short answer is: a lot."

É he is not yet free to write that without the necessary qualifier. I found that qualifier quickly just by scrolling down to the first sentence that began with the word "but":

"But for all that, Russia remains a country with huge economic problems." But again, just as it was for Timothy Heritage, this balancing act is just for show. Landsberg lets you know where he stands as he winds down his piece: "Reformers argue the problems have their roots in the old communist system, not in reform.

"'The reality is that the economic decline in Russia began many years earlier, and the economy was sustained through the '80s by increased oil production and inflated oil prices,'" said Charles Blitzer, a former World Bank economist who studies the Russian economy."

Landsberg drags out doctrinaire hack Blitzer to tip the scales in favor of reform. TASS reporters used to call Marxist professors to make sense of American labor disputes. Americans laugh now when they read those articles, but for some reason they take the AP seriously. Landsberg continues: "Some economists fear the worldwide financial jitters set off by the crash in Asian currency markets could hold back Russian growth for another year. And some, especially in the West, fear that if Yeltsin gives in to pressure to fire Chubais, it could derail reform."

Landsberg had destitute potato-seller Goltsova scaling the cliffs in his lead and is by now unloading Anatoly Chubais from an amphibious vehicle onto a secure rhetorical beach. It's an amazing reach, but he pulls it off with military precision. All that is left is to look high into the skies above for an air salute to those cherished American values of hard work and perseverance: "In the meantime, most Russians struggle on, exhibiting that most Russian of traits: patience.

"Georgy Yefimov, a retired mechanic, is among the legions selling vegetables in Moscow to get by..."