I WENT TO WORK IN MOSCOW IN August 1988 as a young correspondent for the Reuters news agency. My wife, Roberta, and I arrived in the city after a road trip across Europe and through Ukraine that took us perilously close to the Chernobyl nuclear plant, which had exploded two years earlier. Our shiny new Volvo estate car was piled so high with supplies that when we opened the back doors they began to cascade out. Stashed away beneath the jumble of clothes and shoes and household appliances were more than a hundred bottles of wine. I had been warned by my future colleagues that it was difficult to find any wine – or anything much else for that matter – in Russian shops. They were right.
Home was a gloomy little ground-floor flat in a complex for foreigners near the Rizhsky Market in the north of the city. Just up the road was the Exhibition of the Achievements of the National Economy (VDNKh), which by then was turning into something of a joke. A policeman in a cubicle at the gate of our compound checked the documents of everyone who came in and out. The Reuters office was in a rather grander complex in Sadovaya Samotechnaya Street, known among the expat community as Sad Sam. We wrote our stories on primitive computer terminals that turned our words into holes on a punched tape that we fed into a telex machine. A team of three interpreters, hired through the Directorate for Servicing the Diplomatic Corps (UPDK), the all-powerful organisation that took care of foreigners, watched over us in shifts. They all also worked for the KGB. At night we went to parties with an extraordinary fin de siècle feel.
When we drove around Moscow in the Volvo, now bearing number plates that began K001 – ‘K’ for correspondent and ‘001’ for Great Britain – we took it for granted that we were being watched. Returning home, we often found the drawer in which we kept our documents had been left open. Sometimes the phone would ring a few minutes later: there was never anyone there. Nina, who visited every morning to teach me Russian, structured her grammar questions in such a way as to extract details about my private life; she was especially interested in our Russian friends. When we wanted to travel outside Moscow we had to give our handlers twenty-four hours’ notice – or forty-eight in the case of sensitive places – to allow them time to arrange surveillance teams.
The Soviet Union, even in its final days, was a curious place in which nothing worked quite in the same way as it did in the West. But, thanks to Mikhail Gorbachev, who had come to power in 1985, it was changing fast. In the years that followed, I had a privileged front-row seat as the political, economic and socialist system built up since the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917 unravelled before my eyes and something wild, new and untested emerged to take its place. There was a sense of freedom and exhilaration in the air, but also a sense of foreboding mingled with that perennial Russian fear of chaos. When I left for good in 1995 the country’s future path seemed uncertain.
The Moscow to which I returned in 2016 to research this book was a very different city. People complained about the collapsing rouble and Western sanctions and how tough life had become. But I couldn’t get over how affluent the place looked compared with my time there. In the intervening two decades Russians had come to take for granted the shops, bars, restaurants and other trappings of a modern developed economy that had seemed so exotic when the first McDonalds opened in Moscow in 1990. Yet the optimism and euphoria that had reigned in my early days in the city had long since been replaced by a sense of resignation, grievance and wounded national pride.
This book sets out to track how Russia has changed over the past quarter of a century through the prism of its relations with the West. It is a story of high hopes and goodwill but also of misunderstandings and missed opportunities.
Peter Conradi
London, December 2016