Land of the Secret U.S. Embassy

Mikhail Gorbachev explains how things might have been.

We were standing outside the U.S. Embassy, the infamous Bug House, as Time once called it, when the embassy guard yelled at Darrell Bowling.

Yes, this is the embassy that was the subject of international reports in the late 1980s about razing parts of the building because it was so infested with electronic surveillance bugs placed there by the Soviets. Yes, the embassy’s address is easily found on the Internet.

Still, Bowling, a current Knight-Wallace Fellow and an MSNBC.com senior producer, was apparently breaking the law by taking a picture of the building. “Put the camera away,” the burly guard barked at Bowling.

“It’s secret building,” the guard said, breaking into a smile and adding a growling “heh heh heh.”

Welcome to Russia, a paradoxical mix of old and new, communism and capitalism, authoritarianism and democracy. Remnants of the Soviet system still appear in a country thawed by glasnost, warmed by perestroika and boasting of freedom even while journalists are being killed in the streets. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin still lies in reverential state in his Madame Toussaud-meets-monastery mausoleum, while across Red Square the Gum Department Store sells Prada bags, Gucci shoes and any mallrat’s expensive dreams of excess.

Thanks to two German miracle workers, Knight-Wallace Director Charles Eisendrath’s goal of traveling to Moscow was realized in February. Organized by former Fellow Matthias Schepp ’05 and KWF Assistant Director Birgit Rieck, the Class of 2009 left from Wallace House Feb. 13 and spent eights days in Moscow. Our host was Alexander Lebedev, a Russian billionaire and newly-minted media mogul, who owns Novaya Gazeta jointly with its staff and former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. We spent several hours on Feb. 16 at the Gorbachev Foundation, a think-tank he founded in 1992. Now 78 and a great-grandfather, Gorbachev was described by many of the Fellows as Clintonesque, having the same ability as the former U.S. president to connect with everyone on an individual basis. While not naming former President George W. Bush outright, Gorbachev was critical of the U.S. military buildup and said America needs its own version of perestroika. But he was clearly excited about the idea of President Barack Obama as a leader who would create great change, much like, well, himself.

Before any talk of glasnost, the Fellows were treated to some glamour the night before at a party at Lebedev’s dacha, a Hollywood Regency country house outside Moscow complete with snapshots of Lebedev with Elton John and Kevin Spacey.

Snow and skating enchant Red Square.

Lebedev, 49, is known in Britain as “the spy who came in for the gold.” He recently made headlines for his purchase of The London Evening Standard, a paper he reportedly read when he was working as a KGB agent there in the 1980s and early 1990s. A former member of the Duma (parliament), Lebedev described his media ownership to us as “just my dream” and called for cleaning up Russia’s corrupt government.

Big names aside, many of the Fellows were most impressed by a visit to Novaya Gazeta, the lone paper there critical of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Four of the paper’s reporters have been killed in mysterious circumstances or simply gunned down in the streets, most recently in January when Anastasia Baburova, 25, was murdered along with a human rights lawyer connected to the paper in what The New York Times called a brazen daylight assassination.

Russia is the third most dangerous place in the world for reporters, according to the Committee To Protect Journalists, following Iraq and Algeria.

“I was in awe to be in the presence of people who put their lives on the line for journalism,” said Fellow John Hill, an investigative reporter at The Sacramento Bee. Novaya Gazeta is published three times a week, with a circulation of 173,000 per issue. Sharing instant Nescafé coffee and pierogies in the conference room of the hardscrabble, smoke-filled offices, editor- in-chief Dmitry Muratov told us during an afternoon meeting that his paper is gaining ground because of its unrelenting exposés of corruption in the courts and government.

“They work so people will know the truth, so circulation grows,” he said of his reporters. “All the journalists of Novaya Gazeta are the stars.”

Three days later, Fellows watched coverage of the verdict in the murder trial of Anna Politkovskaya, the most famous among the deaths of Novaya Gazeta reporters. Politkovskaya, 48, a vocal critic of the Kremlin, was shot in her apartment building in 2006. On Feb. 19, a jury acquitted two Chechen brothers accused in her death, a decision that was praised by her family, who were critical of the case as poorly investigated. A probe conducted by her paper found Politkovskaya was assassinated by Russian special services officials.

Politkovskaya’s story was sobering, especially after the carefree atmosphere of our first day on the ground. Schepp, Der Spiegel’s Moscow bureau chief, insisted that we hit the Russian baths where we were beaten with the traditional venik, the fan-like fragrant bundle of leafy birch leaves. Although it’s supposed to be good for circulation and metabolism, some speculated that they might work wonders on bosses back home. Fellow Stephanie DeGroote, who worked for ABC News there from 1989 to 1995, recalled that the bath house looked exactly as it did 20 years ago. Well, with the exception of the big-screen TV on the wall.

After a bath, Schepp took us to a traditional dinner at a restaurant named Jolki Polki, a hokey-pokey mix of tradition and theme restaurant. A signature dish was “herring in a fur coat,” a salad with herring covered in layers of beets, potatoes and eggs. What Schepp didn’t tell us is what’s needed to appreciate Russian cuisine is a very strong stomach and lots of vodka.

Needing to shed our fishy fur coats, we walked up to Red Square late that Saturday night. Suddenly the onionshaped domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral appeared ahead, Russia’s most recognizable building encased as if in a shimmering snow globe. It was Valentine’s Day, and lovers ice-skated at a rink erected in the square or strolled around holding hands and carrying roses and tulips. We played tourists taking pictures, and maybe it was the buzz brought on by vodka and jet lag, but we felt as if we were extras in a scene from Dr. Zhivago.

Another highlight was the Foreign Correspondents’ Dinner February 17, where Eisendrath presided over a table of 80, including journalists from the world’s top wire services, newspapers, magazines, and television and radio networks. Fellow Geoff Larcom, a columnist from The Ann Arbor News, was seated near a New York Times reporter, a correspondent from the Los Angeles Times and a Czech radio journalist. Larcom likened the event to a state dinner.

KWF’s dinner draws a “Who’s Who” of the foreign press.

“The setting was amazing, the longest and most elegant table I’ve ever seen, amid marble and under a chandelier’s bright lights,” he said. “It was a superb place for all-world schmoozing and fun.”

This trip being an Eisendrath production, we were also exposed to culture. On one of our last nights, we were guests at Galina Vishnevskaya’s opera house for a production of Carmen. (Vishnevskaya is a famous Russian soprano who was married to the late Mstislav Rostropovich, considered one of the best cellists of all time. Rostropovich, who came under fire by the Soviets for his political views, was the musical director and conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C., from 1977 to 1994.)

With the show sung in French while Russian subtitles flashed on big screens, we were all a little confused. (Does Carmen love the military guy or the hot bullfighter?) But Vishnevskaya, who met with us after the opera, was wonderfully entertaining. Ever the grand dame, she told us about running her school for singers and diplomatically turned down Eisendrath’s request to visit Ann Arbor and sing at Hill Auditorium. She also played the diva. When Fellow Erica Johnston, a Washington Post editor, asked her to tell us about her life, Vishnevskaya replied: “Read my book.”

Perhaps the Muscovites need opera— or any other form of entertainment— because it is, as Eisendrath said, a tough town. In addition to the constant cold, always-gray days and severe traffic jams, the news we read that week was depressing. Conservatism and hatred for ethnic minorities are on the rise, unemployment hit its highest point in five years and the life expectancy for men is 53 years old— thanks, in large part, to alcoholism.

Charles Clover ’06, Moscow bureau chief for the Financial Times of London, introduced us to Alexander Dugin, a leader in Russia’s neo-imperialism movement and a professor at Moscow State University. Once considered a crackpot of the far-right movement towards nationalism, Dugin has moved mainstream, and broadcasts a plan for what he describes as a new anti-bourgeois, anti-American revolution. Backed by the state, Dugin calls for a land mass of Russia and the Middle East —which he calls Eurasia—that is connected to the Russian Orthodox Church and which fights Western values, including freedom of speech.

Despite the economy’s battering by a drop in oil prices, dozens and dozens of billboards advertising the American movie Confessions of a Shopaholic covered Moscow, the surprised face of actress Isla Fischer lit up under the Cyrillic text. Still, the Russian writer Viktor Erofeyev, who met with us during an informal night at Schepp’s apartment, remains hopeful. Erofeyev, who contributes to The New York Times and The New Yorker, said he believes the country isn’t suffering from an economic crisis, but rather a moral crisis. And no matter what kind of crisis is exploding, Russia is a paradise to journalists looking for problems to expose, he said.

Finally, on the Fellows’ last night in Moscow, a brave crew that included Rieck, Jonathan Martin of The Seattle Times, Laurie Copans of the Associated Press, Voice of Israel’s Danny Zakum, Robin Pomeroy of Reuters and Ferhat Boratav of CNN Türk set out for what seemed unattainable here: a good dinner. Boratav, a faithful foodie, had read that Georgian food was “an oasis on the pickled prairie of Russian cuisine,” as Martin put it, and so the group faced the dangers of the subway system and finally found nirvana after two transfers.

Although they were denied Georgian wine (that pesky import ban on Georgian goods imposed by the Kremlin), the restaurant offered Georgian flags, tourist pictures of Tbilisi on the walls and a delicious meal. But the group was shocked to hear, mid-way through the meal, the hubbabubba rumble of an Elvis impersonator. There he was, Russian Elvis dressed up in a pompadour, sporting a shiny shirt, waving his hips—and singing “Go Down Moses.” In English with a Slavic accent. Seems the Russian Elvis was singing the American spiritual to a drunken wedding party, who began to dance, along with some of the Fellows.

“Russian Elvis apparently sensed the diplomatic thaw, and next pulled out the chestnut, ῾New York, New York,”’ Martin remembered. “After a week of terrifying foreign policy lectures, exhaustion, pickled beets and too much vodka, we were all going to make it there, make it anywhere.”

And somehow, on a cold late night in Moscow, the contradictory Russias seemed just one graced land, as long as Elvis was in the building.