Russia Hands to Gather and Swap Stories at Reunion

Anita Snow and Fidel Castro

Russian President Vladimir Putin takes a call during a UN luncheon in September 2015. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Covering Russia in the 1990s was the highlight of my journalism career, so when Bill Holstein suggested that the OPC sponsor a Russia Hands reunion, I jumped at the chance. Since November, I have had a great time reaching out to old friends and colleagues and asking them to spread the word. By Feb. 18, over 170 people had signed up for the event, which is co-sponsored by Columbia University’s Harriman Institute and will be held there on Feb. 24,starting at 4:00 p.m.

The program includes two panels followed by a reception. The first panel, moderated by Harriman Director Alexander Cooley, will look at the challenges of covering Putin’s Russia. Panelists are Carol Williams, who has reported on every regime since Konstantin Chernenko in the mid-1980s for the Los Angeles Times; Vladimir Lenski, an anchor for Russian TV International; and Timothy Frye, a professor at the Harriman Institute.

The second panel is focused on the Communist era and the fall of Communism. Robert Kaiser, former managing editor of The Washington Post and a Moscow correspondent, will moderate. His Post colleague David Hoffman will join him on the panel, along with Ann Cooper, NPR’s first Moscow bureau chief, Tom Kent of the Associated Press and the Harriman Institute, and Seymour Topping, former correspondent and editor of The New York Times.

The gathering is an opportunity to reminisce with old friends as well as analyze Russia’s political and media landscape.

I fell in love with Russian history and literature in college. When McGraw-Hill abruptly closed the news service I was working for in Washington DC in early 1990, I decided to take the severance money and run to Russia. There was a visa war at the time, and the Soviet Foreign Ministry would not give U.S. news organizations permission to bring in more full-time correspondents. I was certain that if I could get myself there, I could get work. Thanks to my Russian teacher, who persuaded friends in Moscow to sponsor me on a private visa, I hopped on a plane in July, and stayed for much of the next decade. I worked my way up from stringer to Moscow bureau chief for BusinessWeek.

I look back on my time in Russia as one big adventure, and one that afforded me the privilege of witnessing history in the making. I will never forget being in the Russian White House in August 1991 when the mayor announced over the loudspeaker (in typically sexist Russian fashion), “All women and children must vacate the building,” because the hardline putsch leaders had ordered KGB troops to storm the building. (The troops defied the order, which spelled the end of the 3-day revolt.) When Yeltsin triumphantly returned to the White House and waved to the crowd, I was a half dozen yards away from him. (No one else would be able to pick me out in the crowd surrounding Yeltsin in the BusinessWeek cover photo, but I swear the figure in the white sweater with long hair is me!)

Two years later, after a hiatus back home, I arrived just in time to witness the 1993 uprising. My apartment was not far from the White House, and I awoke around 7:00 a.m. to the unmistakable sound of tank treads chewing up the tarmac on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, which I had first heard in 1991. I ran to the Hotel Ukrainia and soldiers shooed me away from the tanks that were circled on the road below along the Moscow River. Moving to the front of the hotel facing the White House, I felt bullets whiz by my ears, possibly from snipers across the river. Then the tanks started firing their big guns at the White House. Each time, the reverberation caused me and others nearby to jump a few inches off the ground.

As a reporter for BusinessWeek, I interviewed all of the so-called oligarchs of the Yeltsin era, several more than once. I remember the braggadocio of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was so proud to call himself “an industrialist,” and who ended up in a Siberian prison when he underestimated the wrath of Putin; baby-faced Mikhail Fridman, who ruthlessly manipulated local courts to take over companies he coveted; and the Donald Trump-like cockiness of Boris Berezhovsky, who thought anything good for him was good for the country.

Politicians of that era courted the Western press. I interviewed Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov in the White House, only to realize when I got back to the office that my slacks had been unzipped. Thank goodness the jacket had covered it! I, like many others who knew him, were sickened when a sniper killed him last year on a bridge near Red Square. Nemtsov had embodied better than anyone else the optimism of the early Yeltsin era.

Of course, many journalists also have been killed pursuing their craft in Russia. We still mourn Forbes reporter Paul Klebnikov. I am proud that I was a judge on the OPC panel that gave the brave Anna Politkovskaya her first award from an American organization. Investigative reporter Yuri Shchekochikhiin was a frequent guest at the BusinessWeek bureau.

On a personal level, the friends I made in Russia, both Russian and expat, are among my closest. I was delighted to find out that the daughter of close friends, who was 8 years old when I met her, was inspired by my friendship to become a journalist.

There are many other tales to tell, some not suitable for the Bulletin! Please join us on Feb. 24 and share your stories.

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