Abstract
Foreign correspondents find the true pulse of a nation when they escape the elite of capital cities in favour of conversations with real people
The missed and misunderstood stories of Brexit, and Donald Trump's triumph in the US presidential election – as well as political correspondents’ failure to predict Theresa May losing her parliamentary majority last year – have all led to soul-searching about whether journalists are too close to the elite. In his MacTaggart Lecture at last year's Edinburgh Television Festival, Jon Snow described his own background and said: “We are comfortably with the elite, with little awareness, contact, or connection with those not of the elite.”
Foreign correspondents often come into closer contact with those “not of the elite”. While the political upper class may want to talk to foreign media to get their international message across, these are more likely to be rare, set-piece events. In consequence, reporters overseas seek out other stories – those of the ordinary people who will more readily speak to them. Ryszard Kapuscinski, the veteran Polish journalist and author, was famous for this approach. It was also one often followed by western reporters in Russia in the early post-Soviet era.
It may seem strange, in this era of confrontation between the UK and Russia, to write this, but I have Vladimir Putin to thank for the experience which has led me to develop the argument I am going to put forward here. For it was during his own formative years as a politician – Russia's troubled 1990s – that we western journalists based in Russia were left much to their own devices. Senior politicians did give interviews, but the chaotic world of Boris Yeltsin gave them plenty of their own worries with which to deal.
This was when a large part of the political elite were keen to show that they were breaking from the Soviet past, promoting a western-style idea of a free press, a “fourth estate” permitted to speak truth to power. Russian journalists enjoyed then freedoms unknown before or since. We did, too. The restrictions on travel which had been part of the Soviet police state were mostly gone. Travelling close to military installations without permission was an exception, as I discovered in 2009 when the FSB arrested my colleagues and me for visiting some glasshouses which happened to be about 20km from a naval dockyard.
Kept at a distance from the Kremlin's innermost power struggles – as foreigners generally have been throughout Russian history (remember Churchill's “Kremlin political intrigues are comparable to a bulldog fight under a rug. An outsider only hears the growling, and when he sees the bones fly out from beneath it is obvious who won”) – and allowed to explore the biggest country on earth, we had the chance to learn more than other generations of western journalists covering Russia. Going somewhere that your news organisation has never been before is always a help pitching a story, and travel – thanks to the troubled rouble – could be incredibly cheap. The weak currency did throw up some absurdities. One fight from St Petersburg to Moscow is memorable because the sandwiches in the airport café cost almost the same as the plane tickets.
With air travel literally as cheap as chips, and Russia's overnight trains even cheaper, we took advantage. There was then a huge appetite for learning about Russia, with which we were enjoying much better relations. That has changed since. As I write this in late March, the talk – following the poisoning in Salisbury of the Russian former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter – turns to tension between Moscow and London. The foreign ministry spokeswoman in Moscow has warned that British journalists will be expelled from Russia should RT (the Kremlin-backed channel formerly known as Russia Today) be closed down in the UK. It was different then. In the late 1990s, colleagues and I travelled to Siberia to do a story on forest fires; to the far north east, above the Arctic circle, where blocks of fats, abandoned after their residents’ jobs went with the collapse of the planned economy, were being buried by massive snowdrifts. With Allan Little, I produced for the BBC's Newsnight a lengthy report on how people of the southern Russian town of Rostov-on-Don coped with an economy that had largely ceased to function: workers at one of Russia's biggest agricultural machinery factories got jars of gherkins instead of wages. On that first trip to Siberia we also interviewed a coming strongman in Russian politics, the Afghan war veteran Alexander Lebed, then governor of Krasnoyarsk. He later died in a helicopter crash, but his growing popularity provided a clue to the direction Russia might later take.
The consequence of these trips was that we saw how the country was changing. It was not changing in the way that many people in the west hoped. There was relief that the Cold War had ended without nuclear or other major military confrontation. There was an assumption, too, that now we were no longer enemies, we would eventually come to be friends and follow similar political systems. The way that the Cold War ended – with triumphalism in some quarters in the west, followed by what Sir Tony Brenton, a former British ambassador to Moscow, would later describe as “insanely neoliberal economic advice which produced economic chaos and collapse” – made this difficult. Speaking to ordinary people whose jobs had disappeared in that “economic chaos and collapse” made that clear. Talking to members of the political elite, as we did sometimes, brought admissions of challenging circumstances – but also confidence that these were little more than natural teething troubles of a huge country in a time of enormous transition. Like many elites in capital cities, though, they rarely travelled to the grim towns where the only employer had gone bust; the factories where only a fraction of the shop floor was functioning; the workers at the roadside selling what they had made because that was the only way they could get cash.
A Lesson for the Remain Elite
If western policymakers didn't pay enough attention to the kind of anger this generated, one man then on the edge of the Russian elite did: Vladimir Putin. Having watched what had become of the country which, as a KGB officer, he had sworn to serve, he understood the humiliation of people whose wages and pensions disappeared, whose savings evaporated in sky-high inflation. The roots of the current confrontation lie right there. This was not just a few tough years. This was an age when many Russians felt that the democracy imported from the west was a failure – perhaps even part of a deliberate attempt to kick Russia when it was down. That would eventually have foreign policy and security implications.
I am not making a case for ignoring political elites. Talking to those in, or close to, power is an invaluable part of any correspondent's understanding of the place they are covering. As any country which has experienced a revolution or other sudden, huge, political change can tell you, though, the elites themselves are often not aware until it is too late.
So it was with the west's recent political earthquakes: the UK's decision to leave the European Union; the electoral victory of Donald Trump. Neither outcome was widely expected; neither predicted by much of the press or pollsters. Both have left the countries in which they occurred bitterly divided. Could they have been foreseen? In the UK at least, there was little sense beforehand that Leave could carry the day. No one was expecting that Remain would win by a landslide but most people seemed to think they would get home quite comfortably. Given the economic and social background of many journalists – especially those working for the national media – it is probably fair to assume that most of them voted Remain. Their own views may have clouded not just their reporting, but their coverage choices during the referendum campaign too. Journalists from another country might have brought their own preconceptions but they would not have had their judgment confused by being too close to the leading lights of the Remain campaign. As neither they nor their readers had votes, the political elite would not have time to talk to them – leaving them to seek out other sources. Anyone who had done so extensively enough might have seen Brexit coming. On the other side of the Atlantic, similar conclusions appear to have been drawn. Marty Baron, executive editor of the Washington Post, recently told an audience of journalism students at City, University of London, that, post-Trump, his paper had “created an America team. Their job is just to get out in the country, exploring issues there”.
That has not always been an opportunity that correspondents have had. In the worst cases, foreign correspondents find themselves cut off from the inner circles of power, and barely permitted to ask questions of the mass population outside them. In 1930s Moscow, foreign journalists – where they were permitted accreditation at all – were often reduced to reproducing what they, or their KGB-vetted translators, had read in the Soviet press. Travel was rarely permitted.
The Kremlin's close embrace did provide some memorable successes. Walter Duranty of the New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting of the Soviet Union under Stalin. He is credited with the first use of the word “Stalinism”. He accompanied the Soviet commissar for foreign affairs, Maxim Litvinov, to the United States for the negotiations which would lead to Washington's diplomatic recognition of the USSR. Today Duranty's reputation is controversial. For all his prize-winning success then, he is remembered for not reporting the famine in Ukraine. That was left to a young Welshman and sometime secretary to Lloyd George, Gareth Jones. He was later murdered in circumstances which have never fully been established – but which later research has suggested might have been a consequence of his exposé of the deadly cost of building Stalin's version of communism. History has not judged Duranty well. His 1990 biographer, SJ Taylor, called him “Stalin's apologist”. There has been a more recent campaign to take away his Pulitzer Prize posthumously. Whatever his ethics – he took the lead in discrediting Jones – his journalistic talent was not in doubt. It might arguably have been better used had he been able to see more of the country for himself.
As relations between Russia and the UK continue to get worse, British and other international journalists are unlikely to enjoy improved access. Despite the apparent early chumminess between presidents Trump and Putin, US journalists are not faring well either. Late last year, Washington declared RT representatives “foreign agents”. Moscow responded by placing similar restrictions on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America. More such moves would be a matter of great regret. Whatever one thinks of RT's coverage, banning it would doubtless lead it to claim to be a martyr for free speech – and would also lead to further severe consequences for international journalists in Moscow. Deeper understanding of Putin's Russia came from those journalists who were able to travel to see it taking shape. With experts already wondering what comes after Mr Putin – who will be 71 when the six-year term he has just won expires – we need this kind of insight to continue.
