Is Journalism Worth Dying For?: Final Dispatches (61 page)

She was surprised I only wrote for work, never for myself. I told her about how, when I was doing my Army training, the sergeant had pulled my diary out of my locker. He read it out loud to the entire unit. Now, I explained to Anna, I kept all my thoughts in my head where no buffoon in epaulettes could grope around in them. I never saw her keep a diary after that. Her diary was her articles. Writing what you think and not what pays is like keeping a diary.

We often had visitors, and there were theatres and the Conservatory near by. “I am my own independent creative unit!” she would say a little sadly, but with a smile, a phrase adopted from some journalism textbook. Everybody who visited us on Herzen Street remembers it, but nobody realized the extent to which it was to become her guiding principle.

She systematically investigated the theatres around us. All her friends and neighbours knew by heart the play,
Lunin, or the Death of Jacques
at the theatre on Malaya Bronnaya. The ideas of the Decembrist revolutionaries of 1825, and especially of their wives, were discussed passionately in our home.

Marina Goldovskaya, my journalism lecturer, made a film about our family for America. The film is mainly about Anna. Marina several times asked permission to show it in Russia but Anna was always opposed to that. Our friends have their own ideas about the film. In it I come across like the Red Commander of the civil war, Vasiliy Chapayev, only on the barricades of perestroika, saving the Fatherland. Anna is Anka the machine-gunner, lugging shells up to me and guarding the rear. It was just what an American audience wanted, but in Russia it was an embarrassment because of its unintentional support of the reformers’ myth-making. In this film,
A Taste of Freedom
, the machine-gunner, dissatisfied with her fate, talks publicly about divorce for the first time. Our favorite scene in
Chapayev
is the suicidal attack. The White Guards advance and are sprayed with machine-gun fire. “A fine advance,” and back comes the contemptuous plebeian reply, “Intelligentsia!”

My heroes are visiting. The entrepreneur Artyom Tarasov is telling us something about residual oil. We don’t understand his diagrams too well, but in the evening talk together about Russia, and an oil glut which will stand everything on its head. It is plain that the so-called Democrats are already dragging their weary bones to Millionaires’ Row on the Rublyovskoye Highway, closer and closer to Stalin’s favorite haunts. Corrupt officials are receiving state awards, and Anna is shocked when she sees the son of 1960s icon Vladimir Vysotsky handing an award named after his father to the Minister of Posts and Telecommunications, Nikolai Aksenenko. The FSB, Interior Ministry and Ministry of Defence wouldn’t dream of celebrating their anniversaries anywhere other than in the Kremlin. In the midst of a crime wave, the cops, using the money of taxpayers who are afraid to go out in the evenings, churn out television programs about how brilliantly they are fighting the criminals. The worse it is for some, the better it is for others. Perhaps an oil glut will give us a breathing space; otherwise portraits
of our beloved leader would already be hanging not just in every office but in every home. Anna says, “It’s lucky Martyn’s tail was docked when he was a puppy. He doesn’t chase it the way we do.” We talked about the “sovereign business” run by the wives of officials who make speeches about the struggle against corruption.

Anna’s first real victory was on the program
Vzglyad
[“Viewpoint”]. Volodya Mukusev and I came back from Minsk where we had been earning money by doing meetings with viewers. Anna turned out the pockets of my anorak before putting it in the wash. “Have you read this?” she asked. It was an urgent appeal for help, in a woman’s handwriting, in red ink, about the Belarussian Children’s Haematology Center. “This is addressed to you because of your Chernobyl,” Anna exclaimed. “We must phone immediately!” A week later I returned to Minsk. Blurred filming with an amateur video camera which can be taken anywhere without being conspicuous. The truth is being concealed. We dig out information. Parents’ tears.

I was away in a different part of Russia when Andrey Razbash edited the story, which swept Europe. In a short time millions were collected for the clinic. Anna insisted I should go back for an “inspection” trip to Minsk, and later to Germany where Russian doctors were being trained up. Raisa Gorbacheva visited the children’s hospital. Within a few years the doctors were no longer Russian, and the Haematology Center was the best in Eastern Europe. Anna was delighted to see the situation so radically altered. Before the program went out more than 80 per cent of the children there were dying. Only a few years later, roughly the same number were being cured and the remainder were in remission.

She sat distraught and frozen in my car next to the house where journalist Vlad Listiev had just been murdered. We had never been close, but a year before she had arranged an amazing party at our house. It was very crowded, another attempt to bind together something that was falling apart.

International Women’s Day, March 8, 1995, wasn’t the obvious day to choose. Vlad did not drink, went away to offer good wishes to the women of the world live on air, and came back to the party. Everyone
had had plenty to eat and drink and was in a good mood. Anna noticed a slight whiff of money. “You didn’t once mention Ivan Kivelidi. He gave you the start-up capital for your television company. You won’t last long at this rate.” That same year the charming Ivan Kivelidi was mysteriously poisoned.
^*

Sitting in that car, neither of us yet realized that an oil bonanza would send everyone into moral hibernation, that the mass media would glamorously and expensively expire in the hands of “natural monopolies,” whose naturalness was not obvious. I often heard on my assignments, “What a fearless namesake you have working at
Novaya gazeta.”
I was glad people could see that, and were aware of her commitment to her guiding principle. There were threatening signs. At home pistols were left in parcels at the door of our flat. Another time the fire hydrant in the attic above was turned full on. That was unambiguously directed at her.

By 1996 the whiff of money had become a stench. The mysterious “box of Xerox paper” containing half a million bucks for Yeltsin’s election campaign. Wealthy individuals who had built themselves mansions beyond the borders of Russia claimed that Russia was still their home. Anna was busy trying to save old people from a home in Grozny and told me on her return how a former friend of mine, by now a big official, had waited for ages by a corridor the old people were to emerge from, keeping well away from the gunfire like the coward he was, but well within range of the television cameras, in order to get himself filmed as their saviour and shown as such to the whole of Russia. To her great satisfaction, he failed, but it was symptomatic of a spreading web of vile behaviour. Anna always agreed with Dostoyevsky that you don’t get at the truth through lies and trickery, even as a temporary expedient, as our recent history has shown.

We had a stint working as a husband-and-wife team. Anna was the first journalist in Russia to cover the topic of totalitarian sects and got hold of a unique video. I followed her with a program in the
Politburo
series on the same subject. We both came to the dispiriting conclusion that the Russian state was the biggest sect of all, using the people’s own money to brainwash it. Very few were immune to the influence of all this garbage. We argued a lot. The Russian “market” was another name for individual greed. She was certain that greed could be managed, and that human beings were an end in themselves. They could be independent, creative units. I believed the individual could always be controlled. The genetic memory of a slave was in you whether you had a flashing light on top of your prestigious car and a bodyguard or whether you were a down-and-out on the status scrapheap. Anna was furious but had to agree. She had studied the experience of totalitarian sects only too closely. By definition, however, newspaper journalists delve deeper into their topics than television reporters, so I didn’t always win.

Lazy celebrity TV presenters would often plagiarise her texts without even bothering to paraphrase them. Our home was a press room with an engrossing weekly review of the news programs, which we compared against her articles.

Anna came with me when I next decided to visit my beloved Kamchatka Province. We worked in parallel, examining the cheerless results of privatisation. She flew back on her birthday. Local friends laid on a birthday party at the airport before she flew out and wished her a happy longest birthday she would have in her life as she flew westward with the sun.

She sometimes seemed to move faster than the clock. In August 1991 our whole family was in Svetlogorsk. In the evenings we drank with Yury Shevchuk. He sang his new songs for us. In the mornings we tried to persuade the women to join a new party called the Hungovers. Anna invented a title for our top party functionary, “The Seventh Day Hungover.” The holiday passed lightheartedly. On August 17 the season was to reopen at the Lenkom Theatre with Grigoriy Gorin’s
Prayer of Remembrance
, in the last scene of which our son Ilya played the violin. I flew back to Moscow with Ilya only for us to find ourselves in the middle of the anti-Gorbachev putsch. I was relieved that Anna and our daughter Vera were far away, and that Ilya was staying with Anna’s
parents, out of harm’s way. A day later I was astonished to hear from her parents that she was already in Moscow and preparing to take to the barricades in defence of democracy. Everywhere you heard Shevchuk’s “Last Autumn.” It proved not to be the last autumn, but only the beginning of things going wrong. Everything was about to become a business: management of the state, war, morality, elections, medicine, education. The real “Seventh Day Hungovers,” the secret policemen, were only getting started in the cellars of Moscow’s White House.

Two years passed and after another putsch I was asked to come to the Ministry by a certain highly placed official. The Minister himself came outside the building, gave me my documents, and warned, “Take care. Did you speak out against the shelling of the White House? Everything is just beginning.” Back home I tried to persuade Anna to take out the American citizenship she was entitled to, because she was born there. She strongly objected to my suggestion. She hadn’t much liked America after our trip there in 1991, but agreed to it after our daughter came home from school with the news that some of her friends were no longer talking to her. Society had split into people who were on side, and the others who weren’t. It was only later that emotions cooled, people started using their brains again and realized they had been taken for a ride. I was no longer allowed to broadcast. Anna raged but, as tends to happen in Russia, our telephone rang less frequently. I tried to explain to the children that their surname might cause them problems. They didn’t see that, and on the contrary were rather proud of the situation. They saw the point later, the first time they ran up against “on side” cops. When they casually mentioned it to their mother, she was furious.

In my worst nightmare I could never have imagined that the citizenship of the body in the coffin would be held against Anna by our “patriots,” and used as a frightener by the “sovereign Russia” brigade. Her books, like the
Unpublished Letters of Marina Tsetayeva
all those years ago, are well known in the civilised world but not to be found on the shelves of Russian bookshops.

The main investor, receiver and allocator of favors in Russia is once again that well guarded fortress in the center of Moscow. Anna tells
me how the fat cats fight for the right to a flashing light on their car, and how, if they decide to give it up, they make a major “democratic” fuss about their magnanimity. Celebrity brains do not function until hit over the head by a revived special operations militiaman.

Our marriage lasted 21 years. I managed to lose. We separated. Life under a permanent storm front came to an end. We separated but did not divorce, in order that our colleagues who work to get money from the bosses should not be given a news break. There were plenty of enemies. They didn’t often sue because they knew what she wrote was the truth, but they pelted her with filth.

She was invited to a forum in Eilat devoted to the end of the century. It was our last tour. I accompanied her. In the bus our guide, an ex-Soviet, insisted that Judas was only acting his part in a play which had already been written. “That’s rich!” Anna said, and laughed. We didn’t take him to task.

We travelled through the Holy Land. Orthodox Christmas. Rain in Bethlehem. Anna and I stood next to the Temple. Everybody was pushed aside. Moscow cars with flashing lights. Did I imagine it? We squeezed into the building and there, sure enough, sitting in chairs in the middle of the Temple as if they were in a theatre, were Yeltsin, Chubais and Arafat. The service was being played out in front of them like a performance. Had they come to beg forgiveness for their sins? It was totally monstrous. Horrified, we came out and heard in the repulsive drizzle a sweet voice. In the square we were confronted by another extraordinary sight. From our youth, like the brave little tin soldier, a wet Demis Roussos was rushing about on a stage in the almost deserted square. Not a single New Russian to be seen, only a few Israelis, and nobody was collecting cash, as they would be in Russia. “Goodbye, my love, goodbye.” “He’s taking the piss,” Anna whispered. In the darkness we were surrounded by émigrés under umbrellas who wanted to ask us about perestroika.

It would have been good just to talk without them, and not about perestroika. We had to work on the perestroika of our family relations. We found it just as difficult to get unused to each other as to put up with each other in the same flat.

A few days later, the intimate meeting again in the church, at the
funeral service, the dissipating gossamer of incense with its hint of bitterness. The priest pronounced the last word. I suddenly had the feeling that she was arguing with me again, and such a wretched emotion came over me that, as I remembered the tears I had caused this woman to shed, I couldn’t proceed to the coffin to go through the motions of a helpful ritual. Whether it was the diary of the brave little tin soldier, or Gavroche going his own way and forced to spend nights in the ruined bowels of a monumental elephant … An independent creative unit. Tsvetayeva’s noose. In the evening I remembered the first amazing words of the prayer, “Make me an instrument of your peace.” Hers was my surname; how significant it was that I had taught the words of that prayer to a schoolgirl.