A New KWF Destination: Looking into the Eyes of the New Russia

By Charles R. Eisendrath ’75

That’s a wolverine you’re wearing—or maybe vice versa.

Then there’s the one about the doctor, the architect and the politician arguing about which profession is older. The doctor says, ‘We took Adam’s rib and made a woman.’

“‘We brought order out of chaos,’ says the architect.

“‘That’s nothing,’ says the politician. ‘We created the chaos.’”

Mikhail Gorbachev was by turns serious, regretful, angry and jocular during a two-hour session scheduled for half that length of time. What we heard later from some of the many Russians who deprecate him for failing to construct a new economic system along with political “openness” seemed like Northerners faulting Abraham Lincoln for freeing the slaves without also providing an economic plan for eternity. A huge and courageous step forward in human rights is enough to merit thunderous applause, all by itself.

We also learned that influential Russians who are attracted to the new conservative movement hold individual human rights as neither universal nor particularly important. I’m not naming names here because Wallace House off-the-record rules apply to me, too. Suffice it to say that we were shaken by their matter-of-fact tone. We were unsure whether the shock resulted from not having paid enough attention to Russian affairs, or from a false impression based on reporting that failed to impart a hugely important political development. Look into Vladimir Putin’s eyes during his next public appearance and you will easily imagine what we heard.

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KWF is proud to be working with Alexander Lebedev and Novaya Gazeta, the newspaper he owns jointly with Gorbachev and the paper’s staff. I said that to him at a cocktail discussion at his “dacha” and again at KWF’s dinner for Moscow’s foreign press corps, which drew 50 guests from the principal news organizations of the world. As always, I asked all to introduce themselves and was pleased by Lebedev’s obvious pleasure at the turnout for his working partners from Ann Arbor.

There are no braver journalists than those at Novaya, who run risks comparable to Iraqis working for Western agencies during the insurgency or Colombians covering the narco-warlords. Three weeks before we arrived, Anastasia Baburova became the latest of the paper’s four casualties in recent years. The 25-year-old reporter was murdered in broad daylight in central Moscow. The day before we left, three accused assassins went free. We literally could not leave our hotel without being reminded of what goes on behind a façade of normalcy: A little black plaque kitty-corner from our Holiday Inn marks the building where journalist Anna Politkovskaya was killed in October 2006 for her reports on the Chechnian war.

Our access surprised many resident correspondents but not me. Matthias Schepp ’05 and Charles Clover ’06, respectively Moscow bureau chiefs of Der Spiegel and the Financial Times, arranged KWF’s schedule with a powerhouse named Olga Lebedeva, Lebedev’s cousin and key assistant. Schepp and Clover had been on KWF trips to Buenos Aires and Istanbul. They know how to open eyes, and the value of doing so.

SPRING 2009 MAIN PAGE