Issue #11/66, June 3 - 17, 1999  

by Matt Taibbi

For almost six months now I've been spellbound by the continual and unabated employment of Anna Blundy, the Times of London's Moscow correspondent. I just can't believe this woman is still working. I mean, I just can't believe it. It's impossible, and yet it's so. She is the elusive perpetual motion machine unveiled at last. Nothing makes it go, and yet it goes. And goes. And goes.

Initially, Blundy for me was just an object of morbid curiosity, like a vagrant with a club foot, or two glass eyes, who turns your head on the street. But lately the perverse urge to peek at her latest letters from Moscow has metastasized into a full-blown illness.

It is a thing borne of a psychosis very similar to the one that keeps me up at night scanning the web for news of African epidemics, or"after" pictures from flesh-eating bacteria case-histories. For Blundy at her worst is as luridly fascinating as a car wreck or an anthropomorphic contagion: in her articles there is the same terrifying sense of an irrepressible, prehistoric, and sub-intellectual destructive force at work. She's like a horseshoe crab: vulgar, stupid, and perfect, a tiny mass of self-interested nerves buried behind a tough exoskeletar helmet.

Take her May 17 column, for instance, written in the wake of Yevgeny Primakov's dismissal. While the rest of the Western hack world was confidently sending home its predictable fusillade of mis-reports and crass stupidities, stretching its powers of rationalization to turn "baby-faced" Sergei Stepashin into Augusto Pinochet-- propaganda suitable for ingestion by educated adult populations-- Blundy in her Primakov-firing piece was making what looked a lot like a public attempt at passing her sixth-form English composition class. In 788 agonizing words she struggled, and ultimately failed, to assemble the two or three huge, clunky parts of a single rheotrical device: a simple compare and contrast essay, teaming Boris Yeltsin with Ivan the Terrible.

Her piece began as follows:
"Things have not changed much in Russia this millennium..."

Aside from the addition of Christianity and the demise of monarchy, that is. Blundy doesn't really mean to lead with this problematic opening phrase. Like a lot of bad writers, she feels like she needs to say something before saying something, and this is what she came up with. It's just bad luck that that first "something" has the reader scratching his head before he even reaches the first comma... In any case, the whole first sentence probably could have been junked, and she could have started with the second sentence, her actual lead:

"His early years were apparently 'constructive and progressive', but the later ones, when he was disillusioned, paranoid and infirm were 'characterised by extreme behaviour, uncontrollable rages and a harsh personal despotism'. "Guess who? Not Boris Yeltsin, who last week sacked his entire Government for the third time in just over a year and avoided impeachment by the skin of his teeth, but Ivan The Terrible, Tsar of Muscovy from 1533 to 1584, as described by John Paxton's Companion to Russian History."

Blundy's "comparison" is by this point already stillborn. Ivan the Terrible's rages were genuinely 'uncontrollable'; he murdered his own son by hurling him against a wall, drove scepters through the feet of messengers, and threw dogs off the Kremlin walls. Boris Yeltsin's rages, on the other hand, are the very definition of "controllable". He is able, as the recent sacking of Primakov showed, to nurse an insult over a period of weeks or months, lay the foundation for cunning political action in response, and bloodlessly effect a well-orchestrated campaign of revenge. The two approaches to anger are so totally opposite that either one could be held up as a sort of antonym to illustrate the other.

Blundy obviously realizes this, because in her next paragraph she shuttles out the fire-wagons to douse the flames engulfing the article's premise:
"This is perhaps not the subtlest of comparisons, and Ivan IV is more usually likened to Stalin, what with his destruction of the ruling classes, his secret police and his terrifying purges, but it is nonetheless indicative of the fact that, revolutions and democratic reforms aside, Russia's leaders are by and large an unstable bunch."

First of all, the comparison Blundy is trying to make is not "not subtle" at all; in fact, it's exactly in the spirit of the word "subtle", in the sense of its being not obvious, or "difficult to understand or perceive", as Webster's puts it. That's the first thing. The second thing is that Blundy is admitting, by the end of this paragraph, that this entire comparison hangs upon the fact that both Yeltsin and Ivan the Terrible are "unstable".

Now, going back through history, there's one thing one can say unequivocally about the rulers of nations: they're usually either unstable, or they're not. In fact, most people, rulers or not, fit that same criteria. If lumping together two people who happen to fall on one of the two sides of this fence is all it takes to justify a Times article, why don't they compare Andrew Jackson to Nero? Boy George to Cesar Borgia? Gary Coleman to Cole Porter? Blundy could be writing these same kinds of essays for the next eight centuries!

The article doesn't get any better from there. A few paragraphs later, Blundy writes, "The profound insecurity shared by Ivan and Boris is evident in their memoirs." In the former case, she is referring to a biography of Ivan the Terrible written by historian John Lawrence, which begs the question: why hasn't the Times editorial staff pitched in to buy this woman a fucking dictionary? Hey, Anna (Imagine me screaming now, like Sam Kinison), sound it out! Mem-o-ir! From the French memoire! From the Latin memoria! A narrative based on personal experience! On stuff you REMEMBER! Biographies written four centuries after the fact don't qualify.

Blundy goes on to unintentionally parodize the worst excesses of the reform-cheerleading era of Western press coverage out of this town when she claims, insanely, that Ivan the Terrible was (like Yeltsin?) a reformer! "Ivan, many of whose reforms were brilliantly conceived, was unable to surround himself with trustworthy people, partly because everyone knew that if they were in favour now, they might not be tomorrow."

Even the most shameless propagandists among this city's Western journalists are already two or three years past the time when they would dare to call even Yeltsin, who only bombed Chechnya, a reformer in public. But Blundy has the guts to attach the label to a man who publicly roasted prisoners of war in giant frying pans. Amazing. Also, the second half of that last sentence of hers doesn't make sense, I don't think. By definition, all people who are in favor today might not be tom--mais je divague. I'll stop with that article there.

That's what reading Blundy is like; just as you've finished protesting one passage, the next one rushes in to sap your resolve, until at last she exhausts you completely. While you're sitting there, temples throbbing, teeth clenched, breakfast ruined, she's picking up her Times paycheck and heading to the Slaviyanskaya to feed. Like the horseshoe crab in the evolutionary war, she always wins in the end.

Her other articles are filled with similar atrocities. At one point in a May 10 article about dacha shashlik parties, in which she argues convincingly and at length that Russians occasionally eat outdoors, she describes a deserted brick factory as "picturesque in a Gogolian way". I'm at a loss to imagine exactly what she means by this. Nature for Gogol seems to me to have been a huge mirror in which he saw projected everywhere the outward manifestations of his hypochondria, agoraphobia, and podophilia. He describes the scenery behind his characters the way a condemned man might describe the last things he saw before the hood was thrown over his head. Gogol's world is the horrifying opposite of "picturesque". Not since Vanora Bennett compared Anatoly Sobchak (that's the former mayor of St. Petersburg, Anna) to Akaky Akakievich has anyone fumbled a pretentious allusion so badly.

May 31: Blundy describes a street kiosk. "Their goods are all off the back of a lorry," she writes. As opposed to the front? Aren't all stores filled with goods delivered by truck? April 26, from an article about Russian advertisements: "Happy milkmaids, fields of corn, golden light and lots of old men vaguely modeled on Leo Tolstoy." Are just the old men modeled after Tolstoy? Are they modeled after Tolstoy himself, or the descriptions of men in Tolstoy's books? She never tells us. Same article, farther down: "Cheese was cheese [isn't cheese always cheese?]... and a soft drink was a soft drink. There was only one word for it-- water. Anything non-alcoholic came under this name." Well, actually, Anna, there was and still is the word "napitok", and vodi is just...well, never mind, it doesn't matter. Still farther down, same article, a Maheshewarian description of a TV ad: "The most toe-curling of these involves a little boy on in-line skates." Note the ugly, discordant arrangement of toes and skates here, basking in the glow of "toe-curling", a first-class malapropism...God, this is bad writing. It's almost thrilling, it's so bad.

I can't help but be puzzled as to why the Times of London, the proverbial paper of record for all Europe, is keeping this woman employed. If anyone out there knows, please write me and let me know. I'm all ears. Or rather, as Blundy would say, I'm mostly sense organs, located somewhere on my head.