Because They Could: The Harvard-Russia Scandal (and NATO expansion) after Twenty-Five Years by David Warsh

Author:David Warsh [Warsh, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-06-19T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

The Generation of ’91

I met an old friend in the library one afternoon, a sharp old hand who had done time in Moscow many years before. It was the autumn of 2016; I had an armful of books. “What are you reading?” she asked. “Russia,” I replied, with some enthusiasm. “Oh, Russia! Who cares?” Relations between the two countries are the worst since in 1963. How did we get so far off the track? The US press must bear a certain portion of the blame.

1.

The Soviet Union had been a forbidding place for journalists during the Cold War, because it was so expensive of money and grit to maintain a bureau there – a plum assignment for up-and-comers, a haven for those passionate or curious enough to abide year after year. Like many others of my generation, I first learned about the country from The Russians, by Robert Kaiser of The Washington Post, and Russia: The People and the Power, by Hedrick Smith of The New York Times, both books published in the Watergate year of 1976. By the end of the decade, a somber mood had set in. Russia: Broken Idols, Solemn Dreams (Times Books, 1983), by David Shipler, a Times correspondent in Moscow from 1975 to 1979, reflected the developing Soviet sclerosis. The book was regularly confiscated from travelers entering the USSR.

After Gorbachev became party secretary in 1985, Moscow slowly came alive. A talented press corps assembled to cover the demise of the Soviet Union. By the early ‘90s, Moscow became an open city, a magnet for talented young journalists of all sorts. Representatives of the big papers still ruled the roost. A series of successful books shaped public perceptions: Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, by David Remnick of The Washington Post, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993. Down with Big Brother: The Fall of the Soviet Empire, by Michael Dobbs, appeared in 1997, after its author served successive terms in Yugoslavia, Poland and Russia for the Post. Serge Schmemann, of The New York Times, a highly influential Moscow reporter in those years, published his prescient Echoes of a Native Land: Two Centuries of a Russian Village (Knopf), also in 1997.

By then, a second generation had arrived to tell the story of the transition, of “shock therapy” and privatization. You can get a vivid feeling for the times from David Hoffman, of the Post, who published The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia in 2002; or from Sale of the Century: Russia’s Wild Ride from Communism to Capitalism (2000), by Chrystia Freeland, then of the Financial Times (today she is Canada’s foreign minister). A third excellent book – Rebirth of a Nation, An Anatomy of Russia, by John Lloyd, of the Financial Times – didn’t get nearly the attention it deserved when it appeared, only in Great Britain, in 1998, a harbinger of the disappointment that would set in.

By the time the husband-and-wife team of Peter Baker and Susan Glaser arrived for the Post, in late 2000, the narrative of disappointment was taking hold.

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