Assignment Moscow

Reporting on Russia from Lenin to Putin

James Rodgers

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350356108
• eBook ISBN: 9780755601165
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Journalist Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The story of western correspondents in Russia is the story of Russia's attitude to the west. Russia has at different times been alternately open to western ideas and contacts, cautious and distant or, for much of the twentieth century, all but closed off. From the revolutionary period of the First World War onwards, correspondents in Russia have striven to tell the story of a country known to few outsiders. Their stories have not always been well received by political elites, audiences, and even editors in their own countries-but their accounts have been a huge influence on how the West understands Russia. Not always perfect, at times downright misleading, they have, overall, been immensely valuable.
In Assignment Moscow, former foreign correspondent James Rodgers analyses the news coverage of Russia throughout history, from the coverage of the siege of the Winter Palace and a plot to kill Stalin, to the Chernobyl explosion and the Salisbury poison scandal.

1

Sympathies in the struggle: Reporting Russia in revolution, 1917

Christ the Saviour told the story of Russia’s century. Blown up by the Bolsheviks in 1931, the cathedral on the banks of the Moscow River had been rebuilt in the 1990s, under the presidency of Boris Yeltsin – a former Communist party boss who came to play a crucial role in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yeltsin’s coffin now lay inside the cathedral, where his funeral service was shortly to begin. It was 25 April 2007. Some of us Moscow correspondents had been allowed to enter that morning, before the ceremony. Inside the white walls, bright in spring sunshine, and beneath the golden domes, I had seen the wreaths sent by mourners. There was one from the domestic security service, the FSB.¹ This successor to the Soviet secret police had outlived the president who had sought to curb their power. In Vladimir Putin, they now had one of their own in the Kremlin. For a city of some 10 million people, the crowds who came to mourn, or just to watch, were sparse. Many more had come the previous year to see a Holy relic saved from the godless Communists who would eventually destroy the cathedral. The relic was the hand of John the Baptist. It had been saved by the Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna, mother of the last Tsar of Russia. Months after the relic drew such crowds – queues hundreds of metres long, a wait of many hours – the remains of the Empress herself were returned to Russia, to be reburied alongside those of her son, Nicholas II; daughter-in-law, Empress Alexandra; and some of her grandchildren.

The ceremony for Maria Fyodorovna took place in late September in 2006, with the first distant hints of the Russian winter in the damp air. The service was held in St Isaac’s cathedral in St Petersburg. Almost ninety years earlier, a revolution had swept the Dowager Empress’ son from power. She fled to her native Denmark. The revolutionaries shot her son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren. In the early afternoon, as I rushed to my hotel room to edit a report for the BBC’s One o’clock News,² I tried to think of how to do justice, in a short news story, to all the history that city had seen, and of which I had been reminded during that brief visit: the Winter Palace, now the Hermitage Museum – at anchor in the river Neva, the Aurora, the ship which had fired the shot giving the Bolsheviks the signal to seize power. Approaching deadlines always give a burst of nervous energy, especially when, as that day, time is short. There was something extra then: something about being in St Petersburg. The story concerned the fate of just one of the millions of people – albeit one of the more prominent ones – whose lives had been forever changed by the revolution of 1917. With each step, the deadline drew nearer. I started drafting my script in my head, but other thoughts flashed up, too. What would my counterparts who had covered the revolution have made of what had happened that day? The matriarch of the Imperial family, mother of an emperor the revolutionaries reviled as a tyrant, honoured with great ceremony – in the city where the revolution began. What would they have made of the tabloid hacks not interested so much in the reburial, but in whether Crown Princess Mary of Denmark, there to represent the Danish Royal Family, was pregnant? (She was). Editorial priorities aside, Russia was still a country which inspired fear and fascination among first-time visitors, and the reporters and photographers from the Danish gossip magazines fell mostly into that category. They were the latest of successive waves Western journalists who had headed east to see and to tell. In doing so, they had helped to shape the relationship between Russia and the West: ideological adversaries in the Cold War, allies in two world wars.

During the first of those colossal conflicts, the world that the Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna knew was torn apart around her. Sensing that change was near, dozens of foreign correspondents were in Russia’s imperial capital. At the same time as it was fighting the First World War, Russia was struggling with political reforms unprecedented in its history. Those reforms, which followed the bloodshed of an earlier revolution, in 1905, were hamstrung by the fact that, for the parties involved, ‘the new order’ was ‘a deviation from the country’s true system, which for the monarchy was autocracy and for the intelligentsia, a democratic republic’.³ The Tsar-Emperor’s distaste for the parliament, the Duma, was evident. It took him ten years to bring himself to cross the threshold of the Tauride Palace where the assembly sat.⁴ In the twentieth century, Nicholas II was still a firm believer in the divine right of kings. This tension was not lost on those watching the Russian political system, which finally ripped apart under the strain. ‘In Petrograd, early in 1917, everybody felt that a revolution was impending,’⁵ wrote The Times’ correspondent, Robert Wilton, in his memoir published the following year. John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World, as he called his account of the October revolution which brought the Bolsheviks to power, was still months away, but the end of centuries of autocracy was at hand. The correspondents saw a huge story coming.

Yet when the revolution came – with the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II on the morning of 2 March 1917⁶ – Wilton and his colleagues found themselves cut off. Telegraph links with the outside world were severed. An American photographer, Donald Thompson, who had taken on this hazardous assignment promising to write every day to his wife in Kansas, got a warning of what was coming. On 8 March, he wrote that at the telegraph station, ‘the old lady in charge […] told me not to waste my money – that nothing was allowed to go out’.⁷ No telegraph meant no reports for the newspapers to print. That meant no news. It is almost impossible for us to picture a time when readers were reliant on printed papers for news. The results of exclusive investigations are an exception, of course – but who now looks to a printed paper for the headlines of a prime ministerial speech; a transport catastrophe; or a football result? It was not so in 1917. In fact, it is remarkable how little newsgathering had changed in the preceding century.⁸ Just two days before it was to celebrate the revolution in its news and editorial pages, the Daily Mail was stuck with the headline ‘NO NEWS FROM PETROGRAD YESTERDAY’. The news story which followed was barely fifty words, beginning, ‘Up to a late hour last night the Russian official report, which for many months has come to hand early, had not been received.’⁹

It must have been infuriating. One senses the editors’ frustration in the words ‘up to a late hour’. All the hapless writer was able to do, having presumably hung around until the latest deadline vainly hoping for a story, was to hint to the readers, by means of the words ‘which for many months has come to hand early’, that something out of the ordinary was underway. The reader was left to guess what that might be. For the American papers, the challenge was even greater. In the absence of any news by telegraph from Russia, they were reduced to reporting the fact that the Daily Mail, and other London papers, said there was no news. The ‘Up to a late hour’ non-story even formed the lead paragraph of The New York Times report, headlined ‘Petrograd silent; London mystified’.¹⁰

All this at a moment when the rest of the world – in particular, Russia’s First World War allies against Germany – was desperate for news. When communication was restored, the Reuters correspondent in Petrograd cast aside all pretence at impartiality, knowing that, to a country weighed down by war and winter, one thing mattered above all. The Reuters special report, carried on the front page of the Daily Express and in The Manchester Guardian and the Daily Mirror on 16 March, began:

The first duty of a British correspondent in these days of national upheaval is to assure his compatriots that ‘Russia is all right’ as a friend, ally, and fighter. The very trials she is undergoing will only steel her heart and arms.¹¹

When Petrograd emerged from the silence, the emperor was gone from his throne. Russia was taking the first steps along a road which would only fuel further the fascination which Western correspondents already had for the vast land on Europe’s eastern edge. Once they could, the newspapers made the most of what their correspondents sent – the delays evident from the datelines. The despatch cited above was datelined in the Express, ‘Petrograd, March 13th, received yesterday’. Reassuring readers that Russia would remain committed to the cause of war with Germany was a priority. In another delayed despatch from the streets of Russia’s revolutionary capital, the Mirror told its readers on 20 March, ‘The workmen express the determination to employ themselves on overtime in order to make up for all the work that has been lost, and are loud in declaring their intention of carrying on the war to victory.’¹² The Manchester Guardian expressed even greater optimism: ‘England hails the new Russia with a higher hope and surer confidence in the future not only of this war, but of the world.’¹³ Drawing mainly on London newspapers and other sources in the British capital at this early stage, The New York Times was caught up in the same bullish mood. Their despatch reported the belief in London that the new government’s policy would mean ‘the uninterruptedly vigorous prosecution of the war to a victorious end’.¹⁴

Amidst the optimism – and the wishful thinking was understandable – there were already signs that the assurances to compatriots that Russia was ‘all right’ might be premature and ultimately inaccurate. Hard news was hard to come by and dangerous to gather. The Petrograd press corps of that time contained some correspondents whose knowledge of Russia, and fluency in its language, was peerless – Harold Williams especially excelled in this latter category. As with so many massive international stories, there were also correspondents, like Thompson, who were new in town. Thompson – who spoke no Russian – relied on Boris, ‘a Russian boy who was working at the American Embassy in 1915’¹⁵ to be his ‘fixer’, as modern journalistic slang would have it. Thompson used Boris to help him interpret not only the language, but what he saw around him. In one of his letters to his wife, Thompson gave an account of the activities of an apparent agent provocateur, a ‘Secret Service man’, dressed as a worker, ‘who was deliberately smashing windows’ and ‘trying to push soldiers’.¹⁶

Faced with the constant threat of an explosion of violence, Thompson was resourceful. He became a pioneer of secret filming, saying at one point that he concealed his camera in a bag, in which he had cut a hole, so he could ‘get pictures with this gyroscopic camera of mine without anyone knowing what I am doing’.¹⁷ This was a wise move. To walk the streets of the revolutionary capital was to risk your life. Death came violently and suddenly to officers as their soldiers switched sides. An Associated Press despatch from earlier in the week gave such dramatic detail that it received a good run in The Manchester Guardian and The Daily Mirror despite being days old. ‘Regiments called out to disperse street crowds clamouring for bread refused to fire upon the people, mutinied, and (slaying their officers in many cases) joined the swelling ranks of the insurgents,’¹⁸ ran one of its top paragraphs.

As his paper luxuriated in the restoration of communication, The Times’ correspondent was permitted almost 6,000 words for a story headlined ‘History of the Movement’. Even so, in introducing this ‘remarkable series of despatches’,¹⁹ The Times was forced to admit that ‘we are still without news of the first outbreak’. In other words, they were printing what they had, but they were missing the very beginning. Indeed, the first section of the article – headlined, perhaps misleadingly in the light of the admission noted above, ‘The First Volley’ – the correspondent begins ‘The events of Friday were multiplied manifold yesterday.’²⁰ Robert Wilton was the correspondent at that time although, in keeping with the common convention of the age, he was not given a by-line. His narrative unfolded in a mixture of crisp, tightly written, copy which would be completely at home in a news agency report a century later, and the occasional Edwardian-era flourish. Wilton was born in 1868, so, given that when he covered the world-changing events in Petrograd that year he was almost fifty, it is not surprising that he retained in places some of the approach of a more verbose period in the history of journalism. Once the piece got going, he matched his colleague from the Associated Press for drama and a sense of danger. His punchier lines made his story race along even if the passive voice might jar with some modern editors. ‘Warnings not to assemble were disregarded. No Cossacks were visible.’ Then Wilton was right at the heart of the action

as the armoured cars, which all appear to be in the hands of the revolutionaries, have been dashing through the streets around The Times office, fusillading the Government machine guns, all attempts to get from one place to another were attended with the greatest risk.²¹

Wilton’s account suggested that he made every effort to get around the city even so. His reporting combined accounts of the chaotic danger of armed insurgency with moments of diplomatic nicety. He tells readers that he ‘had just called on Sir George Buchanan’ – then the British ambassador, who, perhaps rather embarrassingly, had just been on holiday – and ‘was walking through the Summer Gardens when the bullets began to whiz over my head’. While even today The Times’ delight at receiving such colourful eyewitness reportage after days of nothing can easily be imagined, the paper’s coverage remained focused on the main reason why the events in Petrograd were so closely followed in London. The shorter piece leading into Wilton’s day-by-day account reported that Andrew Bonar Law, then a member of the war cabinet, had explained to the House of Commons that the revolution ‘was not an effort to secure peace, but an expression of discontent with the Russian government for not carrying on the war with efficiency and energy’. This may have been reassuring to the political establishment and others involved in the war effort. It also, given the Bolsheviks’ later, and ultimate, revolutionary success with slogans such as ‘Peace-Bread-Land’, suggests a good deal of wishful thinking. Nowhere do the correspondents of the time communicate the sense that offering to prosecute the war more vigorously would gain the revolutionaries greater popular support. Inst...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword by Martin Sixsmith
• Introduction
• 1 Sympathies in the struggle: Reporting Russia in revolution, 1917
• 2 ‘The press is lying, or does not know’: Russia goes to war with itself
• 3 From ‘A wild and barbarous country’ via starvation to Stalinism
• 4 Believe everything but the facts
• 5 But what a story everything tells here: The Great Patriotic War
• 6 Secrets, censorship and cocktails with the Central Committee
• 7 A window on the country: Reporting reform and ruin
• 8 ‘Free for all’: The Yeltsin era
• 9 Becoming strong again?
• 10 Russia: My History
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint