"FIVE YEARS OF RUSSIA -
TOO MUCH IS NOT ENOUGH"

continued from No. 35

This text was delivered by VOA’s Moscow Bureau Chief Peter Heinlein, on May 25, 2000 to the English Language Discussion Club in Anglia British Bookstore in Moscow to an audience of some 100 people. With the permission of the author, we are happy to print its text here for our readers. Peter Heinlein, after almost five years in Russia, is now working in Washington, D.C.

I saw first hand evidence of carpet bombing, in the town of Elistanzhi last October. I saw children whose lives have been ruined – and these were the survivors, many hundred were killed when Russian planes bombed their playground.
On my last visit to Grozny, in March, I heard from ethnic Russians who survived months of bombings, only to have federal troops come rampaging through their homes, killing elderly men and women. I saw the evidence, the dead bodies myself, and inspected the wounds. It wasn’t staged. It wasn’t a Chechen propaganda exercise.
I reported these things. So did many of my western colleagues. But the Russian media told a different story.
This is probably the most difficult issue for me to resolve in my own mind. Certainly truth is the first casualty of war. And government spokesman here say what they are doing is only the same thing that Jamie Shea and NATO did in Kosovo. I beg to differ.
The result is a shocking disparity between the way Russians and much of the rest of the world see the war, and see many other events. It is a great part of the reason for the profound misundersandings and misperceptions between, for instance, Russians and Americans.
How can we resolve our differences when we have such diametrically different ideas of what the facts are.

It hurts, because most Russians sincerely believe what they see and hear on their television screens, and when it comes to Chechnya at least, there is absolutely no common ground between their perception of events, and what foreign journalists who go there see.
We can’t say “here’s what I saw and heard in Chechnya”, because they won’t believe it. They think we’re lying, that we’re anti-Russian, that we’re supporting the enemy.
It pains me that many people think, because I work for the Voice of America, that I am some sort of US government agent, or even a CIA spy. I’ve been openly accused of it many times.
It’s a funny phenomenon, but Russians, and people in many other countries, simply refuse to believe that VOA correspondents are just plain old journalists.
An example is a friend I made, a retired Soviet intelligence agent. He was sure I went directly to the embassy when he gave me his old visiting card. No matter how much I protested later, when the issue came up, he just would not, could not believe that I did not take the card to the embassy and have him thoroughly checked out. In fact, that never crossed my mind.
Things like that happen all the time. Even Americans, western Europeans somehow want to believe that VOA has some “hidden agenda”. Or maybe a not-so-hidden agenda.

In thinking about what to say to you, I have engaged myself in a great debate. After all, I mean, I’m going to open myself up to questions from you after this speech is over. Should I tell you how I see Chechnya? You can tune into VOA and hear my reports, but the truth is, we foreign journalists talk about this a lot among ourselves. Because we cover the news first hand, and we see what Russian television tells its audience, and we know the coverage simply doesn’t square with what we see. The truth is, the Russian government is deliberately keeping the truth from its citizens.

Enough said. But it hurts. It hurts a lot to know that I try my best to report what I see, fairly and honestly, and to see the vast majority of public opinion in Russia hearing something absolutely opposite, and to know that no matter what you say, they won’t believe you.
And that is in a country where, just a decade ago, suspicion of the state-run media was widespread, where people went out of their way to try to find “the voices”.
There are a lot of things that hurt in Russia. It seems like I’m always writing about pain and suffering.
I often think about a particular woman I once interviewed in Krasnoyarsk.
I was at a job fair, and this woman was trying to find something that would meet her qualifications. She was way overqualified.
During the Soviet period, she had been the director of an important scientific research institute in one of the closed cities near Krasnoyarsk. Her career was her life. She gave up marriage and having a family to devote her life to the pursuit of scientific advancement. She felt she was making a difference.

But in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, funding for her institute’s research dried up. Salaries weren’t paid for months on end. She was forced to sell her apartment to pay her bills, and had to rent a small room to live in. Eventually, her institute was forced to close.
She’s now in her fifties, with no family, no job, no home. She is brilliant, well-educated, still in the prime of life, and the only job she has been offered is as a washerwoman, scrubbing floors. I can’t get her out of my mind, the look on her face, the tears in her eyes, when she said to me “the only option left for me is to kill myself”.
A few days before that I had gone to Norilsk. There I met a most wonderful old gentleman who invited me into his home in a pathetic old building where the ground floor entryway was covered in a sheet of ice. Indoors. But up in his flat, he served us champanskoye and vodka and cognac and told a story of how he had been sent to Norilsk originally during Stalin’s time, sentenced to 20 years hard labor because he had been accused of helping the Nazis during World War II. He said the charge was absurd, but there was nothing he could do. During his sentence, he had fallen afoul of some regulation, and had another ten years added to his sentence.

But when he got out, in the early 80s, he decided to stay. By that time his whole life was there, and he was able to get a job that paid better than what he could have found if he went back to his hometown. In those days, people were clamoring for those jobs, they would come and work for a few years, make enough money to live comfortably, and go. A person with a flat could always sell it when he wanted to leave, because there were always people wanting to come.
But now, the people not only weren’t being paid several wages as they were during Soviet times, but wages weren’t being paid at all, and nobody wants to come to Norilsk anymore; so if he wants to leave there’s nobody to sell his apartment to, so again he’s effectively a prisoner. He can’t leave, and he’s got basically nothing except his vodka and cognac to look forward to. And a very fine man, too. Delightful fellow.
Vodka is another sad, depressing element of life in Russia. I recall attending a conference where a group of doctors, scientists and researchers from Russia and western Europe were presenting the findings of an exhaustive survey of Russia’s high morbidity rate among men. They study produced incontrovertible proof, using the most careful standards, that alcoholism is far and away the biggest killer in Russia, that even considering every other possible factor – smoking, stress, heart attacks, poor diet, everything – this team of highly-respected researchers had found that alcohol poisoning is directly responsible for the overwhelming majority of all male deaths in Russia.
They said the average consumption of vodka by Russian men amounts to the equivalent of half a liter of vodka per day.
But then, a most amazing thing happened. After the team of scientists had completed their presentation, laying out incontrovertible evidence to back up their conclusions, government officials began to REFUTE the findings. They REJECTED the data, saying it could not be true. They said, “No, the study must be faulty, because it did not fully take into account the effects of stress on the Russian male”. One after another, bureaucrats got up to say they would not accept the conclusions. They said that in a society where four out of five males smoke, it is ridiculous to assert that smoking, as well as the stress of post-Soviet life, were not major contributing factors. When the researchers explained that all those factors HAD been taken into account, and STILL alcohol was found to be the main cause of death, the bureaucrats scoffed and ended the conference. And the next day, coverage of the report was buried in almost all newspapers, and the television stations hardly mentioned it, if at all.

Those are among the many troubling things about Russia, the things that bother me every day. I ask myself over and over how a country that was so skeptical, even cynical, about state-control of the media during the Soviet period, could now so meekly accept the government’s version of everything. For an American, it is so difficult to understand how a Russian can tell me he feels comforted because the government controls the media. He doesn’t have to worry about the excesses of the free media because the government is there to ensure that what he sees and hears is correct.
My brain goes on overload when I hear people, average people, say they are horrified at the prospect of further privatization and private ownership of property. I can understand the process of privatization has gone horribly wrong, but frankly don’t see any alternative to the eventual introduction of a free market where individual property rights are respected. But it’s hard for western minds to come to grips with the realities of Russian history that make private property anathema to people here.
Another thing that horrifies me is the use of terms like “democracy” and “free press” to describe Russia today. Sometimes I wonder if these terms are being used cynically. For 70 years, this country lived under a Communist system. When life was less than satisfactory, Communism was at fault. Communism got a bad name.
So 10 years or so ago, what happened? Nothing much, really. The name of the system was simply changed. It used to be called Communism. Now it is called a free-market democracy. I don’t have to tell you that life for most Russians has not gotten any better since then. It has only gotten worse. So why is anyone surprised that many people here have concluded that Communism and Soviet rule were better than the current system.
My sense is that westerners are naпve to think that western-style democratic capitalism will suddenly break out in Russia. What is developing here, what will develop, is a unique system unlike anything in the west. (And it will take at least a generation or three to develop) But right now, whatever exists is being CALLED democracy, and as a result, democracy is getting a bad name.
And that seems to suit the powers that be just fine. I read a brilliant analytical article about President Putin recently. The headline was “Indifferent to Democracy”.
But Putin aside, as trite and cliched as it sounds, Russians are a great nation. A bit too patient and longsuffering, but really beautiful people. As I’ve said, I will miss the excitement, though not all of it.
I won’t miss the late night phone calls that ruined my holiday plans.
Last year, for instance, I planned to take a long weekend off for my birthday, which is September 9th. But someone else had other plans for that day. No sooner had I dozed off than the phone rang. It was 2 o’clock in the morning. What could it be? A bomb. Ulitsa Guryanova. Septemer 9th is now a day etched in infamy in the annals of Moscow.

100 people murdered in their sleep. And then another one four days later.Who could have committed such a horrific crime? I suppose we may never know. This is not the time or the place to pursue that question. It is truly incendiary. I would only pose the question. Who benefited from it?
So I prepare to leave Moscow... at once exhilarated by the experience,... a little nostalgic,... maybe even sad at all the wonderment that will evaporate when the last page is closed.... But at the same time glad…. It’s hard to say the word glad, but yes, glad that it’s over.
Maybe for a foreigner, five years of the Russia experience is enough. We must admit that we are guests here. We are not Russians, cannot be Russians. And frankly, probably cannot fathom the depths of the Russian “dusha”, the soul.
But as I leave, I take with me the immortal words that seem to sum up the essence of this troubled land, the words of that great articulator, Victor Chernomyrdin, who said:
“Hatili kak lucha, poluchilos kak vcyegda.”