Have You Heard the Show?

In late 2005 I saw an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum (the one in New York) titled Russia!. I'm not sure it warranted an exclamation point, but it's been said that our show on the state of press freedoms in Russia does.

Give a listen.

Many thanks for all your comments and insight (exclamation point)

Mr. Mayakovsky I Presume?

On the way back to Sheremetyevo yesterday morning, Brooke asked me which image, of all that I had seen while in Russia (okay, Moscow mainly), would be the most enduring.

Now it's one thing to visit a city as a tourist, check all the obvious boxes and leave with mental souvenirs of its most spectacular and emblematic sights. For example, I already posted a picture of St. Basil's Cathedral, but that was before Dylan captured it, more artfully, framed through the Iberian Gate:


I agree, it's beautiful.

But it's another thing entirely to walk into the offices and homes of well-meaning people and ask them politicized questions about the fate of their country. It's a different kind of sightseeing, one that gives YOU the tourist - both arrogant and naive - a rooted, proprietary stake in the fate of that fate. And so the most enduring image, for me, looks a lot like this:


That's Vladimir Mayakovsky, early 20th-century poet, standing proud in the lower left corner, and the Peking Hotel standing tall to the right. Down the Garden Ring, a few blocks straight into the photo, is a bakery that sells small quiches and chocolate croissants and cheese bread. Across the street is a grocery store with a surly checkout lady. Around the corner, teenagers drink beer and get affectionate (VERY affectionate) in the park. In the invisible foreground is the entrance to the Metro stop, Mayakovskaya, that is the neighborhood's mass transit connection to the rest of the city.

As Promised, Some Process

Well, we've done close to 30 interviews in the past two weeks (some for background), had a homemade meal at a dacha 10 miles outside of Moscow (cold roasted eggplant with mint and coriander, at least three kinds of marinated fish, a sour stringy cheese from the regions ... without question, the best food we've had so far) and attended a pro-democracy rally in the center of the city, at which riot police seemed to outnumber demonstrators two to one.

Much of what we're doing now is working with tape, tracking down transcriptions and structuring the show. In the wee hours of the night, it looks something like this:


First things first. Brooke asked me to tell you that only one of the beers on our makeshift work station was hers. Also, that is indeed a large silver yoga ball in the middle of our living room - what of it? And finally, let Viktor One buy you vodka at his restaurant on Partriarch's Ponds, but don't expect to get much work done. Viktor Two (no relation) will toast to the Rolling Stones.

The Dukes of Moscow

Dylan writes:
Huh?

Garry and Mike

Brooke writes:

"Other Russia" is a group of anti-Kremlin reformers whose most notable character (at least in the West) is the world champion chess master Garry Kasparov. Despised by Putin, he's not permitted on Russian State TV and is unwelcome in most public venues, so he threw this press conference in Moscow's House of Journalists in advance of rallies scheduled for St. Petersburg and Moscow. To his left is the Russian writer and leader of the National Bolsheviks Eduard Limonov, and further to his left our own Mike Vuolo diligently watching his recording levels.

Echo Chamber

Dylan writes:

Echo of Moscow is widely regarded as the last bastion of independent broadcast media in Russia. Two guests on their wall of fame seem to be getting the same inside joke:

And Then There Were Three

OTM technical director Dylan Keefe arrived on Saturday to provide a much needed infusion of vitality and good cheer. These past few days have been LONG, fruitful and arduous with a capital R, leaving little time to conjure up thoughts (let alone leave them here).

Whatever moments we spent planning this show - mapping out the hour on our whiteboard back in NYC - were, like a teenage infatuation, both urgent and quickly undone. With every next interview, the tone and texture of our story has changed. And so we've taken to Post-it notes, scattered on our apartment wall like movable parts in a two-dimensional Erector Set. Wait. Did I mention that Dylan arrived?


He brought not only good cheer but great inspiration, courtesy of Delta Airlines (apparently he slept eight hours and had a flash during the other one). Before he landed, Brooke and I went back to the Moscow headquarters of Novaya Gazeta to talk with editor Sergei Sokolov, who is investigating the murder of his colleagues. He is a sober, heavy-hearted man, buoyed only by a reporter's faith in plodding truth. Plodding, grinding, sluggish truth.

It Was Bound to Happen

Never mind that there doesn't appear to exist any such person as a NON-smoker in Moscow. Never mind that Mickey Mouse and Shrek stand sentinel outside the Kremlin:

And never mind that Louis Vuitton and Lenin's Tomb face off, EPCOT-like, across Red Square:

I've fallen a little bit in love with this city and its battle of ideas and ideology. Most in media here - be it reporter, editor or academic - are genuinely saddened by the recent erosion, either by law or by pressure, of press freedoms, and many candidly anxious about the coming years. Some, as Brooke pointed out below, believe Russia needs time, though it's not so easy, as a Westerner, to agree that an unfettered press requires any government to let it be so.

Principles, some argue, are for the prosperous. The rest of us need to catch a train.

A Note from Brooke

I used to live here but I hardly recognize it, and not just because of the color and the traffic and the Manolo Blahnik store around the corner. Last time I was here, it was a time of sky-rocketing inflation, soaring corruption, national humiliation - and freedom. And most of us American reporters placed an arguably disproportionate emphasis on the freedom. Now, when many Russians are enjoying relative financial stability and resurgent national pride, we are focused on the LACK of freedom. Vladimir Mamontov, the editor of the durable pro-Kremlin newspaper Izvestia, essentially told us (in a polite way) to back off. He said that Russians see a different relationship between power and strength. That Russians believe freedom does not make you strong, that in fact strength makes freedom possible. He said most people here understand Russia needs time to get stronger before it can support an American-style press. Recent polls suggest he's right.

Many of the journalists we've talked with here say with some sadness that free speech has become associated with Yeltsin-era chaos. We have to keep reminding ourselves, as we report on the increasingly controlled media, restrictive rules for opposition candidates and the lack of justice for murdered journalists, that the majority of Russians see the lamentations of the "democrats" as just so much special pleading. What seems incontrovertible at home is an open question here.

Your Advertisements Beautify Our City

In an effort to kick-start consumer culture in Moscow after the collapse of Communism, billboards with the above slogan appeared around the city. That culture, now revving full throttle thanks to oil, is responsible for one of the most thoroughgoing urban dye jobs since neon hit Las Vegas. Walk just 20 feet in the center of Moscow and you’re bombarded with a profusion of brash reds and yellows and blues, hawking everything from Ocean’s Thirteen to Garnier anti-cellulite cream. In fact, walk just 20 feet anywhere in Moscow and you WILL see this billboard for Garnier anti-cellulite cream:

Now we could debate whether this constitutes “beautifying” what was once a comparatively drab palette. Indeed, as some Russians argue, there is a middle ground between gray and garish and you don’t have to explode the visible spectrum up and down every boulevard to sell products. Though even gray can be garish, especially when you use it to build an impossibly large Peter the Great depicted inexplicably as a seafaring Roman soldier. By some accounts, residents of the city wish he would simply sail away:

Of course, underneath it all, Russia has a long tradition of smart, eye-popping color, made the more dazzling by its neutral canvas. It’s this tradition that makes Moscow a truly beautiful city. But don’t believe me. Its advertisements say so:

Why We're Here

Tuesday provided a sharp reminder of what OTM is doing in Moscow. It was a busy day filled with interviews, including a conversation with Igor Yakovenko of the Russian Union of Journalists. His organization, which recently hosted an international gathering of media professionals, is threatened with eviction from the building it has occupied for 27 years. Government officials have cited a number of reasons for the eviction, including Yakovenko's office menagerie, which includes a rabbit, a mongoose, a raccoon and the animal pictured to the right.

The day ended with a visit to the Moscow headquarters of Novaya Gazeta, a fiercely independent newspaper that has lost three reporters -- Igor Domnikov, Yuri Shchekochikhin and Anna Politkovskaya -- to murder since 2000 (click on the photo below).











Addendum: To be clear, the visit to Novaya Gazeta was oddly heartening. Editor Dmitry Muratov, quoted by Nina Ognianova of the Committee to Protect Journalists, has said, "When Anya was killed, I called an emergency editorial meeting and wanted to close down the paper. I told my staff no story is worth dying for. But they wouldn't let me do it." Most sad was walking into Anya (as she's affectionately known) P.'s old office to find a small shrine. I'll spare you the photo.

Sheremetyevo's Revenge

Sheremetyevo International Airport (or the part of it that most foreigners see anyway) was opened in 1980 in anticipation of the Moscow Winter Games. That was the year that the U.S. men's hockey team upset the Soviet Union in the since-named Miracle on Ice, and there's little doubt that the airport is still seeking revenge.

An hour-and-a-half after landing, Brooke and I tracked down our luggage and our driver and were on our way to Moscow. The drive in is spotted with modest outposts of city life and the occasional plug-and-play quick-fab community of gated Russian-style McMansions, which our driver, pictured above, claimed are built with mafia money. Brooke did her impressive best to remember the Russian she had learned 12 years ago and carried on a long conversation (it's obligatory after all) with Alexei, who could hold the wheel and smoke and praise Putin all at the same time. As Brooke understood him, Alexei believes that his president "does what needs to be done for Russia."

We arrived at our apartment in the now-fashionable Patriarch's Ponds section of Moscow to find ourselves without phone or internet service (which, by the way, is why no blog post appeared here yesterday). And it soon became clear that John, a business man I befriended at the airport, was right. He told me to keep patience close at hand because "things move a little slower here and there's construction EVERYWHERE." One, of course, has something to do with the other.

Moscow is a city virtually molting its layers on every street corner, including not ten feet from our front door. The view from my bedroom window is a wide trench in the ground that doubles as a construction site. Even Anna, our fixer and translator who grew up here, has been wide-eyed at the pace of change. Buildings pop up seemingly in weeks and streets that were once two-way are now single file. And on the ring roads of market economy Moscow she sometimes finds herself boxed in by Lamborghinis and Maseratis.

I suppose it's all worth it when serendipity rains down from on high and blesses the skyline with the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour set against a Mercedes dealership.