#5 | April 10 - 23, 1997  

by Abram Kalashnikov

Abram Kalashnikov is a Russian journalist and a veteran of several Western news bureaus. His Press Review is a new regular feature in this space.

Channel-surfing in Dublin the other night (I had nothing to do after the pubs closed), I came upon a TV show in which players were given a concept they could talk about for 20 seconds. Their chances of winning increased with every word they said that matched a description provided by the show's producers. Among the things players had to describe were: unicorns (easy), Tipperary water (harder) and Russia. The hapless contestant saddled with the latter "riddle inside a mystery wrapped in an enigma" (or whatever it was that fat English drunk called my country 50 years ago) responded by firing off, at breakneck speed, Boris Yeltsin, vodka, the cold, bears, the Kremlin and the ballet. He missed with most of those.

The producer's list of associations included, apart from Boris and the cold, words like "red," "communist," and "Soviet." Vodka wasn't on the list. The producers must have been Mormons.

I can't blame these people. Tipperary water they've drunk or at least seen. Russia? It's not that they don't want to know, it's just that no one wants to tell them.

These days, major news organizations hardly cover Russia at all. When they do, the end product is usually either a political report full of sports or American movie analogies, or some jewel like a recent Los Angeles Times story that began:
"Like giant white serpents, two huge pipes emerge from the ground and wind their way 500 yards down Raskovoi Lane...They... are a monument to waste, inefficiency and centralization that illustrates how far the New Russia must travel to build a market-based economy."

The passage described the temporary overland heating pipes that Moscow city authorities put in when underground pipes rust away during the winter. Anyone who has done any digging in sub-zero temperatures knows it's harder and takes longer than when the soil is warm and soft.

The LAT only got away with its ridiculous passage because they and other foreign bureaus have conditioned Western readers to find "monuments to waste" where Russians are really only making concessions to common sense.

Another example: the day after Yeltsin reshuffled the Russian cabinet, hiring and firing new ministers like mad, The Wall Street Journal Europe ran a story mentioning only one principal appointment, that of Boris Nemtsov.

The story, however, was full of stuff about Yeltsin mouthing off against NATO. It seems that business people, who are supposed to be reading the WSJ, are more interested in what Yeltsin has to say about Clinton's international ambitions than in who is going to run an economy that includes Europe's most lucrative capital markets.

The Financial Times ran a story on the reshuffle that actually named some names (although not all the major ones). But on Page 2-for balance, I suppose-it ran a piece entitled "Russian mafia chief arrested in Italy" about the Italian police nabbing a Russian guy who is supposed to be chief of a mafia called "the Brigade of the Sun."

Never mind that the story says that the guy is a gangland boss before he gets his day in court. Hey, he's Russian, he won't even read the story, right? But what the hell is the Brigade of the Sun?

The FT probably meant the Solntsevo gang. "Solntsevo," of course, has the same Russian root as "sun," but it's actually a dreary Moscow suburb. Couldn't the FT editors have called the newspaper's reasonably well-staffed Moscow office to check the reference?

What's frightening is that it's entirely possible that they did- and no one in that office knew the Solntsevo Gang from Adam.

Western news bureaus in Moscow have downsized in recent years. Some of them prefer to hire locally so they can avoid paying enormous "hardship benefits" to staff brought over from New York or London.

Six years ago, my boss at an American news bureau had more than the hardship allowance-he had two full-time translators, a maid, a nanny for his kids, a driver, two cars, an office and an apartment all paid for by the newspaper. Now, some correspondents are forced to work out of their own apartments. They just don't feel special anymore. So why work especially hard? Why write that extra feature? Why try to sell a good story to the editors, when it's easier just to crank out the same old schlock?

It's too bad. Russia remains a huge country with a wealth of interesting stories still remaining left undone (though serpentine heating pipes aren't among them). With a little prodding, editors back at home might have realized that. But there's no one out there to do the prodding. People seem to be saving their energy for the lecture circuit instead.