was on tenterhooks waiting to see whether he could force the Lithuanians into a referendum on the succession question followed by a slow transition over five years. The Lithuanians had just responded with an embargo of their own involving those products, such as small electric motors and television tubes, on which their factories had been given a near monopoly long ago.
Back in Moscow, Gorbachev’s adversaries were snapping at him, not only the communist old guard who distrusted reform, a group we heard less about in the West, but also the more highly profiled radicals who felt that the reforms were not proceeding nearly so quickly as they might. The most conspicuous of these was of course Boris Yeltsin, the brusque one-time construction foreman and former mayor of Moscow who periodically would accuse Gorbachev of becoming a dictator and who clearly wanted to set himself up as president of the core state, the Russian Federation that accounted for half of the Soviet Union’s population and four-fifths of its territory. At this time, a few months before he succeeded in that goal, his image in the West was still coloured by the visit he had paid to the United States and elsewhere in 1989, when he drank and talked prodigiously, and coloured, too, by an incident in Moscow shortly afterwards when he claimed he was abducted by thugs and thrown in the river. In Britain, therefore, he was being seen by some in much the same light as George Brown was regarded in the 1960s, while in Canada his big square head and rough-hewn manners often recalled Eugene Whelan, Pierre Trudeau’s perpetual agriculture minister. In fact, a closer approximation would have been a cross between William Lyon Mackenzie and René Lévesque.
When I arrived, Moscow was abuzz with the imminent swearing-in of a new mayor, Gavrill Popov, a free-market economist who had vowed to lease properties and businesses to organizations and individuals and otherwise move decisively towards a more workable economy, knowing that what Moscow does must inevitably be done in other cities and regions. When I got to know several leading journalists at Novosti, the state news agency, I asked whether these leases would be for long terms and whether they might one day be converted to freehold private property. “At the start, just leases,” I was told. “But wait a few months.” This was an answer I was to hear to several questions. For example, at that time there was still, officially, only one political party. But at the urging of Yegor Ligachev, the leading conservative in the Politburo, a number of radicals had been expelled before they could resign, and they were poised to set up their own party. They were already arguing about what the name on the letterhead should be. Similarly a green party was positioned to begin fielding candidates in the autumn, and there was a royalist party aborning, hoping to restore order by restoring the monarchy, as had happened in Spain. “In two months, you’ll see, there will be a dozen parties.” The number, like the timeframe, was arbitrary, but the thrust was accurate enough. There would no doubt be parties galore—reform and counter-reform, radical and reactionary, ones on specific issues, perhaps even religious ones; in time, they would probably be rationalized along economic and ethnic lines.
Most everyone I talked to was weary of the present and impatient for change, almost any kind of change, and yet at the same time fearful of what the immediate future would be like. Americans tended to interpret this unrest as a frantic desire to embrace Americanism, but that of course is ridiculous. People pursue some measure of democracy not out of the Americans’ cloying sentimentality about voting for its own sake but as a means of seeing a mixed economy in which their subsidized housing, unlimited education, and free social programmes might be enhanced by a convertible currency and a little decent food. The currency question was exceptionally thorny. To make the ruble convertible into dollars, Deutschmarks, sterling, and so forth would be instantly to erode the people’s pensions and savings. (And because there was so little they could buy in the shops, Soviets were champion savers, having put away 340 billion rubles in the state bank even though the interest was only 1.5 percent—this was in addition to an estimated 200 billion rubles in “under the bed” savings.) Yet inflation was quickly eating up this pile anyway. In 1989 the government deficit was estimated by an outside specialist at 120 billion rubles, up from only 20 billion in 1982; to service the debt, Moscow simply printed more currency at the rate of 50 million rubles a day, 18 billion rubles a year. The most imaginative idea voiced to date was to back the ruble with gold, of which the Soviet Union was the second-largest producer, thus bringing all the world’s savings and investment rushing in. Absurd of course, but wonderful. But the reason Gorbachev, the liberal reformer, could exist, and by existing save us by winding down the Cold War, was that he was a moderate who needed immoderates such as Yeltsin or the goldbugs to play himself off against. The phrase “five years” came to his lips as easily, and as frequently, as “two months” came to the lips of my newfound acquaintances in the press. I can only guess whether this carried an echo, in listeners’ ears, of all those long-ago five-year plans.
Friends at Novosti promised to help arrange some interviews and meetings, including one at the literary magazine Oktyabr, which I hoped I could turn into access to some of the writers and painters I desired to meet. I had also asked to observe the meeting between Gorbachev and Li Peng when the Chinese leader arrived in Moscow to pay his respects and discuss border problems, but the indications were that this would be difficult to arrange. Earlier the response had been favourable when I sought permission to interview Yeltsin and a few other politicos, such as the minister of culture, Vasily Zakharov. But in the present situation the possibilities had receded. Before I could get in to see him, for example, Zakharov had been replaced by Nikolai Gobenko, putting me back at zero, though there was a much bigger factor working against me. “They’re trying to keep foreign journalists away from politicians if they can,” said Slava Bogdanov of Novosti’s North American department with an admirable and characteristic frankness. He had been the press attaché in Ottawa but had returned home in 1988. He spoke perfectly idiomatic English and was the resident expert on English Canada. When I met him, he had just returned from three weeks in Vancouver and was soon to lead a delegation to a symposium in Ottawa.
Novosti is a difficult news agency to categorize. It was large, employing several thousand journalists to TASS’s several hundred, and in further distinction to TASS, which provided the official news from the party and the government, it was “public,” which the West usually interprets as meaning merely “semi-official.” It published informal books and slick pamphlets about every aspect of the Soviet Union in a variety of languages and responded to requests for customized stories from the overseas media. More important, it ran its own network of correspondents both domestically and worldwide, and acted as a clearing house, though not as a telegraphic news agency like TASS or Canadian Press. It was also the publisher of the important Moscow News, which was considered not just radical but sometimes quite fearless. Recently it had ventured into television as well. For example, it bought a regular 90 minutes of airtime from the state network for the broadcast of such programmes as the first-ever look inside KGB headquarters in Dzerzinsky Square. Its highly distinctive building in Zoubovski Boulevard, opening on a courtyard with terraced balconies, was also a communications centre from which Soviet figures and foreign heads of state addressed press conferences. “During the Moscow Olympics,” Bogdanov explained, sitting in a large meeting room with a bar, “this was full of TV monitors, and many distinguished sports journalists followed the various competitions from here, never venturing outside.” He pantomimed the chugging of alcoholic beverages and laughed wryly.
His colleague, Alexey Lipovetsky, was also part of the North American desk, which with 30 personnel was quite the smallest of Novosti’s branches. At 41 he was somewhat rumpled, with a drooping black moustache and a sly, cynical wit. Trained at the Moscow Institute for Foreign Languages to be a simultaneous translator, he was the agency’s specialist on Quebec and spoke English with a Québécois accent. He was the most experienced and productive kind of journalist, the sort you find a few of in the top ranks of the profession in every country: unstoppably curious, at ease with all types of people, and with a love of imparting all the accurate information he has at his fingertips but with a discriminating filter that automatically weeds out the patently false or illogical. We spent a good bit of time together, talking about, among other things, the press. More than a need for shop talk motivated my enquiries. It was clear that the press had become an engine of change as well as an instrument to measure it. One day we were walking through Gorky Park, very near where Alexey grew
