September/October 2000 | Contents

A LETTER FROM VLADISVOSTOK
Who Could Love This Place? Maybe Only a Journalist

BY RUSSELL WORKING

Payday does not come every month at a Russian newspaper -- only when the ad revenue is sufficient and the publisher has not borrowed too much money lately from the safe. When the day arrives, there are no electronic deposits to your bank account, no editors wandering the newsroom distributing pay envelopes. Somebody dashes in and says, "They're paying salaries. Go, go, go, before they run out of money!" And everyone stampedes to beat the computer guys and cleaning ladies and publisher's driver. You line up at a tiny, barred window where an accountant with lipstick in her mustache counts out a month's pay, sometimes in coins. Then you stuff all the rubles in your pockets and a heavy-duty plastic bag and head back to your desk to finish a story on unpaid coal miners who are protesting by blocking the Trans-Siberian Railroad.

Never mind the irregularities. The chance to work at a provincial Russian newspaper was for me a stroke of amazing fortune -- and also a deeply troubling education. In my three years as editor of the Vladivostok News, a tiny English-language biweekly published by The Vladivostok, the largest daily in the Russian Far East, I had the adventure of a lifetime. I covered everything from Mafia killings to attacks on villagers by man-eating tigers. And by the time I quit this spring to free-lance full-time in this port city on the Sea of Japan, I had gained a rare perspective, for a foreigner, on Russian journalism in the provinces.

Vladivostok is a city in a region where the government owns the only major printing press, where the journalists' union hands out liters of vodka on holidays but says nothing when the staff goes unpaid for three months, and where thugs assault reporters who anger the political bosses. My experience has left me pessimistic about Russia's democratic experiment -- and about the prospect that an independent press will thrive here any time soon.

In January 1997, I arrived in Vladivostok, a city of 650,000 in Primorye, the finger of Russia bordered by China and North Korea. In the winter the sea freezes so thick that trucks drive on it, and fourteen-hour-a-day blackouts hit residential neighborhoods. My bosses provided me with an apartment and a typical Russian salary (it started at the ruble equivalent of $400 a month but dwindled to less than $150 after the 1998 fiscal crisis). I enhanced my income by free-lancing for Western media. Slowly, I began to learn the language.

Everybody knows that life in the former Soviet Union is drab, but the grime and poverty of provincial Russia were remarkable. Vladivostok's gray prefab apartment blocks resemble slum housing in America. Apartments tend to be clean inside, with VCRs, lacquered cabinets, and maybe a grapefruit tree growing in the kitchen, but in the stairwells the dogs defecate and the rats scuttle about. Throughout the Russian Federation, drunks seem to have reached a consensus that residential elevators were meant to double as urinals.

At our publishing complex, the landlord was fighting to evict Vladimir Shkrabov, a Communist editor who collected rent from some of the tenants, although he had no ownership rights (the building had once belonged to the Communist party). When a business weekly refused to pay up, Shkrabov chopped down its door with an ax and severed its computer cables. In an attempt to drive out the imposter, the real landlord cut off the water to the entire building for six months. Eventually we escaped by moving to our parent paper's new building, which our publisher financed in part by paying salaries months late.

So what kind of foreigner -- working by candlelight on his laptop late at night, deprived of bookstores with espresso bars -- could love a place like Vladivostok? Maybe only a journalist.

As a former reporter for several American dailies, I found that a Russian newspaper is both a strange and familiar place. The computers run on pirated copies of Adobe Pagemaker and Microsoft Word, yet police scanners are illegal, and reporters rely on a call from drinking buddies in the police department to find out when a murder or car bombing has happened. At the Vladivostok News, we often got tips from Russian journalists who wanted to make sure that a foreigner covered stories in which reporters might be at risk from the authorities. Last fall, for example, a reporter for a national daily called after the police, loyal to the governor, had raided the office of an opposition candidate, arrested his campaign manager, and beat up his staff.

What felt strangest of all, in fact, was the invisible presence of the Primorye region's strongman governor in every newsroom.

Governor Yevgeny Nazdratenko, fifty-one, is a beefy former mining boss who has managed to consolidate his power through political muscle and use of the police and courts against his opponents. Since taking office in 1995, he has accomplished the seemingly difficult feat of helping to impoverish a region rich in natural resources that lies at the crossroads of the giant economies of Japan, South Korea, and China. A 1997 report by the Federal Security Service -- the main domestic heir to the KGB -- accused members of the Nazdratenko administration of demanding bribes and smuggling luxury goods through Chechnya in order to avoid tariffs in Vladivostok's port, as well as cultivating ties with killers and hiring mobsters to protect business interests and kidnap reporters. (The kidnappings, with beatings and torture thrown in, occurred in 1995, and were allegedly connected to the current vice-governor, Konstantin Tolstoshein, who has never been questioned about the matter).

The governor's office calls such reports political smears. Still, Nazdratenko brooks no criticism. He owns one television station and controls a second government channel. Most other newspapers accept cash in exchange for publishing his press releases verbatim, often disguised with reporters' bylines or as letters to the editor. The governor sues the few brave papers that try to report the other side of a story, and the courts seldom disappoint him. The governor and his allies in local government have sued the independent paper Arsenyevskiye Vesti twenty-two times in recent years. Nazdratenko alone has filed seven lawsuits against the paper, once for reporting that he had distributed 40 percent of the regional budget in secret, without any oversight. In late July, Vesti's editor was jailed for five days without a trial, on charges of "petty hooliganism," because the paper printed the profane rantings of Deputy Governor Tolstoshein. (Tabloid-style papers routinely print profanity and have never been charged with a crime.)

"It's getting worse right now," says Andrei Kalachinsky, director of the Vladivostok office of the National Press Institute, a nongovernmental media organization. "When Nazdratenko defeated all his major political opponents, he started to put more pressure on the press, and journalists keep losing these lawsuits to Nazdratenko in the courts."

Few papers fight Nazdratenko's influence. On the contrary, most editors -- who privately detest the governor -- have cooperated in building his Brezhnev-style cult of personality. Last year, Nazdratenko announced he had won a $1 million "World Aristocratic Governor of the Year Award" from a hitherto-unknown society of French noblemen, and the local press hailed the international recognition of Primorye's leader. This February, local editors and producers threw Nazdratenko a birthday party. They presented him with a dartboard decorated with the face of a political foe. And they sang a song about Nazdratenko, referring to him in the formal Russian manner, by his first and patronymic names:  

Yevgeny Ivanovich, attaboy.
The opposition has been destroyed.

The Vladivostok News alone was free to cover whatever we wanted. This was not due to any great courage on my part -- though it did take guts for my Russian staff, who did not have the protection of a U.S. passport, to call the mayor and a vice governor for comment on whether they ordered kidnapping and assaults. Rather, I suspect the governor's office thought a paper in a foreign language with a print run of 2,500 didn't really matter. (In October 1998, our print edition died, making us an Internet-only publication and, presumably, of even less concern to the authorities.) Only once did our publisher rebuke me, for writing an unflattering profile of Nazdratenko. As a punishment, my "vegetable money" -- an under-the-table bonus that is not reported to the taxman -- was almost eliminated that month. But usually, even my own bosses cared little what we published.

At times we even served as a pressure valve for our parent paper, the Vladivostok. One day in February 1998, a senior editor from upstairs dropped by with a tip. During a visit that week by Belarus's authoritarian president, Alexander Lukashenko, Nazdratenko had given his guest a tiger skin. There are perhaps only 450 tigers left in Russia, and it is illegal to hunt them, traffic in their parts, or transport their remains abroad. The Vladivostok had mentioned Nazdratenko's gift deep in a fawning story but insisted the pelt was accompanied by documents that somehow made it legal.

Now we heard a different story. "There were no documents," the editor said. "It was completely illegal."

"Why aren't you guys writing this?" our deputy editor, Nonna Chernyakova, asked.

"We can't," he said. "Bashkin" -- the publisher -- "wouldn't let us."

Alone among Vladivostok's media, we reported the story. Even the environmental prosecutor, who routinely seeks jail terms for poachers who kill tigers, wouldn't touch the matter. "I don't have the authority to interrogate the governor," he said.

The press response was more complicated in the case of Capt. Grigory Pasko, a Navy journalist arrested in 1997 on treason charges after he reported on the dumping of nuclear waste in the Sea of Japan. Amnesty International adopted him as a prisoner of conscience. Local media covered the trial, but in ways that infuriated Pasko (he later sued our parent paper). One of Pasko's lawyers accused Nazdratenko of pushing the Navy to prosecute Pasko because the reporter had been investigating the alleged disappearance of Japanese funds intended to help Russia process its nuclear waste. But apart from the Vladivostok News, local media ignored these comments. In 1999, Pasko was convicted of unmilitary conduct and released after spending twenty months in jail. Given Russia's restrictions on the press, this was considered a victory.

Some media that defied the authorities suffered more physical pressure. Radio Lemma, an independent local station, persisted in interviewing critics of the governor on the air, despite a direct warning from Acting Mayor Yury Kopylov, a Nazdratenko appointee. One night last summer, Yury Stepanov, Lemma's editor, was walking home when he came upon a van blocking the alley. As he passed it, two thugs jumped out. They knocked him to the ground and began kicking him in the head and the chest. Then they tried to stuff him into their van.

Stepanov broke free and ran. Stumbling into to his apartment stairwell, he yelled for help, and his assailants retreated.

When I interviewed Stepanov, he was holed up behind the steel door of his apartment, unable to sit without groaning in pain. Two of his ribs were broken, he was suffering from a concussion, and his face was covered in bruises. Moscow papers covered the assault, but most Primorye media ignored it.

I hoped that the publicity about Stepanov in Moscow would make the thugs back off. But late in November, a month before last year's parliamentary and gubernatorial elections, the phone rang. It was Marina Loboda, then a reporter for the local edition of the national paper Moskovsky Komsomolets. "The mayor is shutting down Radio Lemma," she said. "Get over here."

Nonna, our deputy editor, and I dashed over and found the building surrounded by armed police. A handful of reporters from the national media were demanding admission to the building, but cops blocked our way. A young police lieutenant said he was compelled to act because of a fire hazard: the station was storing gasoline to run a generator. And why did it need a generator? Because the mayor had cut off Radio Lemma's electricity. Radio Lemma was silent for two months, until after the election.

This spring, the time came for me to leave the Vladivostok News. Over the past year, I have traveled to Japan, Mongolia, China, South Korea, and many parts of the Russian Far East to write free-lance stories. Editing a tiny Internet paper was beginning to seem like a hindrance.

I seldom cover Vladivostok politics any more. But in June, not long after a mayoral race marred by ballot-stuffing, I dropped by a large hotel to work out at the gym. In the lobby I ran across a group of reporters. I asked one of them what was going on, and she explained, "All the opposition mayoral candidates are holding a press conference to protest election fraud by Mayor Kopylov."

I hesitated for a moment and thought, "Where could I sell this? The Baltimore Sun? The Moscow Times? The South China Morning Post?"

Then it hit me: nobody cares. I headed on to the gym and spent an hour working out on the weight machines.

Russell Working decided to come to Vladivostok after meeting several Russian journalists, including a future girlfriend, when they visited his newspaper, the Tacoma News Tribune, in Washington state. Prior to that, he worked in Oregon for the Medford Mail Tribune and the Grants Pass Daily Courier. His 1987 collection of short stories, Resurrectionists, won the Iowa Short Fiction Award.