Assignment Moscow: Reporting on Russia from Lenin to Putin

257 Pages·2020·4.526 MB·English

by  James Rodgers

Assignment Moscow
ii
Assignment Moscow
Reporting on Russia from Lenin to Putin
James Rodgers
I.B. TAURIS
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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BLOOMSBURY, I.B. TAURIS and the I.B. Tauris logo
are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published in Great Britain 2020
Copyright © James Rodgers, 2020
James Rodgers has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. ix constitute
an extension of this copyright page.
Cover design Adriana Brioso
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regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have
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ISBN: HB: 978-0-7556-0115-8
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Dedicated to the memory of Ian Leverton, 1947–2009
A great teacher who inspired and encouraged both my love of journalism, and my
lifelong fascination with Russia and its literature.
vi
Contents
List of Figures viii
Acknowledgements ix
Foreword by Martin Sixsmith xii
Introduction 1
1 Sympathies in the struggle: Reporting Russia in revolution, 1917 7
2 ‘The press is lying, or does not know’: Russia goes to war with itself 29
3 From ‘A wild and barbarous country’ via starvation to Stalinism 53
4 Believe everything but the facts 79
5 But what a story everything tells here: The Great Patriotic War 95
6 Secrets, censorship and cocktails with the Central Committee 115
7 A window on the country: Reporting reform and ruin 131
8 ‘Free for all’: The Yeltsin era 151
9 Becoming strong again? 171
10 Russia: My History 189
Notes 199
Bibliography 226
Index 232
List of Figures
Morgan Philips Price (Getty) 14
The Winter Palace, Saint Petersburg 25
Marguerite Harrison (Getty) 62
Floyd Gibbons (Getty) 64
Walter Duranty (Getty) 66
The Moscow Radio Tower, Designed by Vladimir Shukhov 98
Soviet press pass issued to the author for the Gorbachev–Bush summit,
Moscow, July 1991 145
Grozny, Chechnya, April 1995 155
Curfew pass issued to the author by the Moscow Military Authorities,
October 1993 159
The author with the Russian Army in Chechnya, March 2000. Photo ©
Andrew Wilson 166
Russian soldiers in Grozny, March 2000 168
A Soviet-era crest of Lenin, Volgograd, 2019 194
Acknowledgements
My thanks go first to the Society of Authors for a generous grant which enabled
me to travel to Russia, to refresh my knowledge of a country I had not seen
for some years and to gather new impressions which were invaluable to my
research. I would also like to thank my employers at City, University of London
for permitting me to take sabbatical leave from the Journalism Department
while I finished the book.
I would like to thank Joanna Godfrey at I.B. Tauris for commissioning
the book, and Olivia Dellow and Tomasz Hoskins for seeing it through to
publication. I am grateful to Robert Dudley of the Robert Dudley Agency for
his assistance in preparing the proposal. Chris Booth, a former BBC colleague,
read drafts of large parts of the manuscript. His comments were invariably well
observed and very helpful.
An earlier version of part of the section in Chapter 1 on John Reed was
published in the British Journalism Review in June 2017 (Vol. 28, No. 2). An
article I wrote offering a more extensive analysis of the British newspaper
reporting of the February revolution was published online by the journal Media
History in June 2019, DOI: 10.1080/13688804.2019.1634526.
Valentine Baldassari provided excellent research assistance, especially in
transcribing and preparing interview material. Kevin Cummins helped me
prepare photographs for publication. Many thanks to them both.
Stephen Penton and Alex Asman from the library at City, University of London
gave me very useful advice: Alex in particular on electronic access to newspaper
archives. Els Boonen at the BBC written archives in Caversham was extremely
helpful, answering any questions I had, and also in suggesting material I had not
thought to request. Dominic Marsh and his colleagues at the Guardian Archive
at the John Rylands Library at the University of Manchester made research there
a pleasure. I would also like to thank Anne Jensen for her help during my visit to
the Times Newspapers Archive, and the Bishopsgate Institute where I was able
to read the papers of Sam Russell.
I would like to thank all my contributors for giving generously of their
time, and for their enthusiasm for my project. My thanks to Andrew Wilson
for also allowing the reproduction of one of his photographs. Families of