A Return to Russia

Alexander Lebedev accepts Oliphant’s Obama.

Everything’s changed, yet nothing is different. Or is it everything’s different, yet nothing has changed?”

It’s a lot funnier in Russian, or at least it was when I heard it shortly after the Soviet Union evaporated into thin air and Communism was replaced by Western “democracy”— a term Russians took to mean “make a quick ruble.” Democracy found slippery footing. Oligarchy pushed it to the floor.

At first glance, I’m fooled by the bright lights, the glittering storefronts of Louis Vuitton and Gucci and the unsettling number of banks on the streets of Moscow, into thinking that the place has really changed. My sense of wonder grew slowly into dread as the days wore on.

Russia had not been so difficult a place to cover, just difficult to explain. And this came home to me in waves as we went from seminar to seminar, meeting former world leaders, eminent writers, popular nationalists, oligarchs. It was our version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: Gorbachev, Erofeyev, Dugin, Lebedev.

Nearly two decades after the demise of the Soviet Union, mainstream is now the fringe, the fringe is now the mainstream. Gorbachev is on the sidelines while the Russian Imperialist Alexander Dugin—who was 20 years ago considered dangerously nationalist—gets more airtime than any politician or celebrity. Dissident writers like Victor Erofeyev are now topping the best-selling lists and former KGB agents now stand at the top of the capitalist heap.

The “stranger than fiction” moment came as we pulled through the gates of our sponsor Alexander Lebedev’s dacha. A Russian dacha is akin to having a house in the Hamptons. It announces that one has “arrived.” And an invitation to a dacha is an invitation to the inner sanctum. Lebedev and his girlfriend Elena were impeccable hosts, allowing us to nose around their weekend retreat and to ask awkward questions.

Alexander Lebedev accepts Oliphant’s Obama.

I left Russia in 1995 after nearly six years of covering various political shifts and wars, not because I was nearly carjacked on my way to work but because I thought that a gun in my glove compartment would somehow have made a difference to my safety.

Moscow certainly seems to have lost the “wild west” feel it had then, but it has become infinitely more dangerous for journalists. When I worked in the former Soviet Union, the State controlled our movements and, ultimately, our coverage. The greatest threat was getting kicked out of the country for coverage that the government deemed unacceptable. There has never been a tradition of free press in Russia, so it comes as no shock that the people aren’t really clamoring for information. It’s not a “right to know” kind of society.

There has been, however, an intelligentsia that favors a dissident voice and that gives a glimmer of hope for the work of Novaya Gazeta. The journalists are truly brave and take great pride in exposing corruption or exposing what the Kremlin doesn’t want reported. Our meeting with the Novaya Gazeta editors was somber. They have lost four journalists to unsolved murders. In all, 15 Russian journalists have been victims of contract style murders since President Vladimir Putin took office, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Today it seems that the press is controlled by a phantom presence holding a gun or a bomb—a presence which, when you pull back the balaclava, could very well be the State. Maybe Communism was better for our health as journalists