Putin and Obama in St. Petersburg
The Curse of Russian “Exceptionalism”
Snowden’s New Identity
Did Putin Insult the Pope?
Why Journalists Frighten Putin
Open Letter to Margarita Simonyan, Chief Editor of Russia Today
My Expulsion from Russia
Putin’s Shaky Hold on Power
The Russian State of Murder Under Putin
Putin Is No Partner on Terrorism
Russia Questions for Rex Tillerson
The ‘Trump Report’ Is a Russian Provocation
Trump Gives a Boost to Putin’s Propaganda
From Russia With Chaos
Trump Must Stand Strong Against Putin
How America Helped Make Vladimir Putin Dictator for Life
Who Killed Boris Nemtsov?
100 Years of Communism —and 100 Million Dead
A Christmas Encounter With the ‘Russian Soul’
How to Answer Russia’s Escalation
Putin’s Aggression Is the Issue in Helsinki
The Satirist Who Mocked the Kremlin —and Russian Character
When Russian Democracy Died
Contribution to “We Need Sakharov”
Collusion or Russian Disinformation?
A Pioneer Who Witnessed Revolutions
Hold Russia Accountable for MH17
Afterword to English Language Edition of Judgment in Moscow
Abbreviations and
Administrative Delineations
FSB — Federal Security Service
FSO — Federal Guard Service
IMF — International Monetary Fund
KGB — Committee for State Security
RUBOP (formerly RUOP) — Regional Directorate for the Struggle with Organized Crime
SVR — Foreign Intelligence Service
Krai — Province or territory
Oblast — Region
Raion — District
Okrug — Administrative subdivision, for example, of Moscow or military district
Introduction
The Marquis de Coustine, writing in the early 19th century, said that it was possible for a foreigner to travel from one end of Russia to the other and see nothing but false facades. In June, 1976, when I arrived in Moscow as the accredited correspondent of the Financial Times of London, I was confronted by a country that resembled nothing so much as a giant theater of the absurd.
I spent six years in the Soviet Union, from 1976–82. During this period, I sensed the uniqueness of the situation and began collecting the personal stories of Soviet citizens with the intent of preserving them for posterity. I was banned from the Soviet Union after 1982, allowed back in 1990, and finally expelled from Russia in 2013 on the grounds that the security organs regarded my presence as “undesirable.”
During these years, I observed four different Russias which managed to differ radically from each other while remaining essentially the same. From 1976 to 1982, I witnessed the Soviet Union at the height of its world power and a people in a state of ideological stupefaction. With the advent of Gorbachev’s perestroika, the Soviet population was liberated from the unreal world of the ideology and the state hurtled to its inevitable collapse. When independent Russia emerged from the wreckage, the failure to replace the missing ideology with a genuine set of universal moral values led to Russia’s complete criminalization.
Finally, the unreal world of the Soviet ideology took its revenge in September, 1999 with the bombing of four Russian apartment buildings that made possible Vladimir Putin’s rise to power and the resurrection in Russia of the Soviet Union in a different guise.
The imaginary world of Marxist-Leninist ideology never really went away because the issue was never its validity but rather its political effectiveness. Mentally subjugated individuals can be treated as raw material for the purposes of the state which is why an ideology is so useful. By the time I was expelled from Russia in 2013, the re-propagandizing of Russia had been long accomplished and Russia is in a state of ideological control without an ideology to this day.
As Russia evolved, the conditions of work for a journalist also changed. During the Brezhnev period, all official information was organized to confirm the truth of the imaginary world. Real information was available but it was unofficial and getting it entailed taking a risk. This accounted for the unique role of the Soviet dissidents. They took it upon themselves—and often paid for their efforts with terms in Soviet labor camps—to provide truthful information about historical events and the conditions in the country to diplomats and journalists. The best informed foreign journalists were those with the closest ties to dissidents.
During the perestroika period, the regime itself began to release information that, had it been published months earlier by a dissident would have led to the latter’s arrest. Gorbachev wanted to use limited freedom to, as he put it, “unleash the potential of socialism”. This was only possible, however, by lifting the dead hand of the ideology which meant free information. For journalists, this situation was nearly incomprehensible. The regime seemed to be organizing its own demise. But journalists were not the only ones who were confused. Gorbachev’s effort to reform the Soviet Union by undermining the credibility of its ideology led inevitably to the Soviet Union’s collapse.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, journalists faced a country that, while no longer communist, was taken over by criminals and so was not truly free. If the Soviet Union was justified by the myths of communism, Yeltsin’s Russia was justified by the myth of democratic, anti-communist reform. Foreign journalists could travel and write freely (although Russian journalists were frequently killed) but they had to struggle to distinguish appearance from reality. The endurance of the belief that the Yeltsin period was the flowering of Russian democracy is a tribute to the fact that very few journalists passed that test.
