Lying on my aching back, on the cobbles of Moscow’s Red Square, I was amazed at the beauty of my prone perspective. My vertebrae throbbed where they collided with the granite paving stones, but with Lenin’s purple-and-red step pyramid mausoleum to my right and the nine towers of the jewel box Saint Basil’s Cathedral to my left, I realized I had never been thrown out of a more beautiful place.
On September 1, 1998, I had been compressed into a bus with about thirty other White House correspondents pulling up to the 630-year-old walls of the Kremlin.1 President Bill Clinton was meeting Boris Yeltsin for a ceremonial greeting at the start of a two-day summit. For me, that trip was another in a lifelong attempt to decipher the country that Winston Churchill described as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma...”2
My first visit to Russia was seven years before to witness the fall of the Soviet Union. CBS News declined to assign me to this epic story so I took vacation, collected my wife and went anyway.3 “Wanna go to Moscow?” I asked Jane.
“Sure, when?” she said.
“Tomorrow,” I replied.
“Okay, let’s go.”
This was no small thing, she was four months pregnant with our first child and we were heading to Russia in December. But neither of us wanted to miss this titanic pivot in history. To get a sense of what it was like to be a Soviet Muscovite, Jane and I joined a long line outside a cheese shop on a cruel, cold day. After more than an hour we reached the clerk, who was handing out meager rations. We were amazed to see she was totaling purchases on an abacus. Later, we took the Red Arrow Express, the overnight train to St. Petersburg. Only six weeks before, the former imperial capital had returned to its historic name after sixty-seven years as Leningrad. I suspected the olive drab Red Arrow had once hauled Lenin’s Bolsheviks into battle. It seemed January’s subzero frost also had a ticket and was assigned to our compartment. The great green hulk pulled from the Moscow station more out of habit than dedication. Reluctant cars resisted and complained through the night. Days later, Jane wanted to return to Moscow by Aeroflot, the Soviet national airline. When I mentioned Aeroflot’s dismal safety record in those days, Jane concluded that dying on Aeroflot was preferable to returning on the Arrow.4 As we were departing the St. Petersburg airport we were led through a snowstorm to our plane on the tarmac. The ground crew was deicing our airliner with a novel machine apparently of their own design. A jet engine had been placed on a stand and bolted into the bed of a pickup truck. The truck drove around the taxiway training hot jet exhaust on frosty wings. Like so many things in the Soviet era it was blunt but effective.
Now, seven years later, looking out from the windows of the press bus, I could see Moscow improvising freedom, opportunity and hope. Red Square was returning to the original meaning of its name. It’s “Red” not because of the Bolsheviks, but because the word krasnaia, in seventeenth-century Old Russian, meant beautiful as well as red.5
The press corps bus was on roughly the same course through the square that Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles had taken in each May Day parade. A White House deputy press secretary braced herself in the pitching aisle to relay a request from the Kremlin press office. “They’re making a point of asking that none of you interrupt the ceremony with questions,” she told us. I was mildly offended. We’re reporters, not the Mongolian barbarians who compelled the construction of the Kremlin walls.6 We do not, would not, interrupt a ceremony involving heads of state. But that never means we will hold off after the ceremony. The cacophony of shouted questions following a presidential event is tradition in Washington.
Yeltsin was planning to present President Clinton with a tray of bread and salt, a Russian tradition representing prosperity (bread) and good luck (salt). Mr. Clinton, at that very moment, would welcome a loaf of prosperity. The day before, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had fallen 512 points or 6.4 percent.7 At the time, it was the second largest single-day point loss in the history of the index.8 Mr. Clinton hadn’t spoken publicly about the market swoon. The question was pressing even if it had to wait until after the diplomatic nosh. In the Russian president’s office, bread was presented, broken, dipped in salt and ground behind formal smiles. Also served up were a few ambiguous words of friendship. None of the reporters said a word. Then we received the familiar twin signals of the curtain dropping on the performance: the deputy press secretary deadpanned, “Thank you, press,” languid, insincere words of dismissal, and the lights for the cameras (controlled by the White House Communications Agency) were switched off. Snap! With the event irretrievably concluded, I raised the question on behalf of a jittery American public.
“President Clinton, yesterday the Dow...”
That’s as far as I got. Two plainclothes security men grabbed me, one under each arm, lifted me off my feet and pulled me, backward, out of the room. I assumed that was that, but my journey was only beginning. We flew through a corridor, down a stairwell (my heels banging each step) and came out to a courtyard. A door opened in the Kremlin wall. The security men hauled me out the door, through the shadow of the Spasskaya (Savior) clock tower and heaved like Olympic shot putters on steroids. Upon my landing, one of the security men reached down, grabbed my White House press credentials and snapped them off my bead-chain necklace. Back through the walls of the citadel the security men went, having dispensed with another barbarian. So, there we were, the two of us, laid out in Red Square—me and Vladimir Lenin.
Yeltsin had once planned to throw out Lenin’s waxy, seventy-four-years-past-its-prime corpse. The leader of the Bolsheviks was to be buried in St. Petersburg. But the next Russian president, Vladimir Putin, interred the idea. In later years, after Putin transformed the workers’ paradise into the oligarchs’ playground, I wondered whether the overseers of Lenin’s mausoleum had to strap his body down to keep him from spinning.
Muscovites stubbornly embrace their fabled Russian depression. Younger residents are heartbroken that the new Russia didn’t bring the democracy they expected. Older Muscovites miss the Soviet Empire. One January morning, in 1992, when even the air seemed frozen, I walked past the honored dead in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. One memorial had by far the largest mound of fresh flowers. I was surprised to see it was Joseph Stalin, who is remembered by some not as a murdering tyrant, but as the man who won World War II and built the Soviet Union into a modern industrial power.
A few years later, I met a nostalgic Leonid Shebarshin, the last director of the feared KGB intelligence service. To him, the Cold War was something to be savored. Our interview was tough to get through because Shebarshin was also savoring chain smoking. When I mentioned the cigarette pack on his desk, Marlboros, he drew the burning end of the cigarette to his eyes for close inspection and said, “Yes, the Americans will kill me yet.”9
More recently, I met the up-in-smoke dreams of the next generation of Russians at a dinner. I was seated by the wife of a government official. I told her about the visit Jane and I made during the democratic revolution in 1991. As I spoke, tears welled up in her eyes. She was upset, fighting to maintain dinner-party diplomacy. It occurred to me that she must have been nostalgic for the Soviet Union and resented my American enthusiasm for the change. How could I have been so insensitive to her feelings for a system she had been taught to respect? Then, she surprised me. I had misread the tears. “We had so much hope [for the end of communism],” she said. She searched her reflection in the bone china before her. “It could have been so much better.”
Vladimir Putin became a new czar. Even the Romanovs would marvel at today’s excess. Political opponents of the regime find themselves in prison or dead under “mysterious circumstances.” Russians remain, as they always have been, a people ruled not by law but by power. Eighteen years after my Kremlin ejection, I returned to Moscow. In 2016, I was driving by the 1907 Hotel Metropol where Lenin had once rattled the atrium panes with revolutionary hectoring of the masses. On an exterior wall of the hotel, along Teatralnaya Street, there is a bas-relief of Lenin to commemorate the Bolshevik era. Next door resides the Bentley dealership selling $250,000 automobiles to Russians with cash.
No questions asked.