1989

by Peter Millar

  The result was an unexpected ‘perk’ for the spouses of other accredited correspondents: the birth of the ‘hand-carry’. Because they too were in possession of that – for most Russians – unimaginable luxury, an unlimited multiple entry and exit visa, they could, literally, leave the country in a hurry. So whenever a TV company had a hot scoop that they reasonably feared might not make it out over the Soviet-controlled airwaves, they simply bought an instant business-class ticket and handed it, along with the tape and a ‘thank you’ of $100 cash to whichever spouse was head of the queue and had the time and inclination for a hand-luggage-only excursion to London. They were met at the other end by a TV company chauffeur who took the tape to the studio before depositing them at a West End hotel. Next day they were picked up again and taken back to the airport, though not before most had spent their $100, usually in Harrods food hall, though on one occasion the British wife of an American correspondent memorably brought back a vast takeaway curry. Who had thought heaven was chicken tikka and bhindi bhaji?

  These trips were frequent enough that before we finally left, my infant son, born a little over a year after our arrival, had accumulated more then 25,000 miles of British Airways flying time. Before his second birthday. But if our private lives had been marked by the happy event of a birth, work was an unremitting death watch. Andropov had not been a well man when he took over. Instead of a dynamic change from the slurred speech and stumbling gait of the senile Leonid Brezhnev, the new man in the Kremlin was more often on a dialysis machine in the Central Committee’s private hospital. Andropov had suffered from kidney problems for years but they were now acute.

  Within months of taking the top job he almost totally disappeared from view, leaving keynote speeches to be given by other politburo members, eagerly watched by those of us who styled ourselves – like Connie in John LeCarré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy trilogy – Kremlinologists. We would hatch theories as to what speech on which occasion, which nuance and what announcement of policy gave hints as to who might be next in line of succession to the all-important role of general secretary of the Communist Party.

  The American correspondents had barely managed to get their New York anchors to pronounce the Soviet leader’s name properly, with the stress on the second rather than first syllable when Andropov finally dropped off. His body was laid in state according to tradition for Soviet leaders since the death of Lenin in 1924 in the Hall of Columns in the Trades Union House, once a club for Tsarist noblemen. The Red Square funeral of this most unloved of late Soviet leaders was held on February 14th, 1984, Valentine’s Day. He was succeeded, however, by yet another dead hand: that of an ageing Brezhnev acolyte, Konstantin Chernenko. If anything it was a step backwards, but not one that looked like it would last long. Chernenko needed an escalator to be built to get him to the top of Lenin’s Mausoleum for Andropov’s send-off. He barely managed to stammer his way through the eulogy in a wavering voice. He had no sooner come to office than there were rumours that he was hospitalised with pneumonia. The Soviet Union’s supply of elderly leaders was gradually running out. Sooner or later – and the way things were going it looked like sooner – there would have to be a switch to a new generation.

  Even so, there were still a few of the older generation lingering in the corridors of power hoping for a chance to step into the big office, if they didn’t fall off their perch first. As a result every Kremlinologist in Moscow was constantly on the watch for changes in television programming – a switch from regular broadcasts to classical music was a surefire indicator someone big had snuffed it – or for Red Square being closed off at an unusual time (a preparation for a funeral). In November 1984 the defence minister Dmitry Ustinov, who had been in the job for eighteen years and was already in his mid-seventies, was added to the communal at-risk list after he failed to turn up at the annual Red Square parade to commemorate the 1917 revolution.

  Just before Christmas – which was of course unmarked in the Soviet Union, except by Orthodox Christians who celebrated it according to the old calendar on January 7th – several of the streets around Red Square, including Gorky Street where the Hall of Columns was situated, were unexpectedly closed off. Our youngest trainee correspondent was sent down to nose around and see if she could find anything out. An hour later she came back bursting with excitement and declared that she had been definitively told Ustinov was dead and they were preparing a lying-in-state. The duty man at the office, a slightly more senior reporter, checked her source, thought for a minute, then turned to his green computer screen and banged out a brief ‘urgent’ one-liner to London: ‘Soviet Defence Minister Dmitry Ustinov dead, reliable sources say,’ it proclaimed in classic simple Reuterese.

  Sure enough, however, before releasing this scoop to the world, the ever vigilant senior sub-editors on the World Desk in London came back on the internal telex with a service message: ‘Please detail nature of sources.’ In response back went a rewritten report: ‘Soviet Defence Minister Dmitry Ustinov dead, a cleaning lady at the House of Columns said.’

  Even as we watched the words chunter out on the teleprinter – which was still how they were transmitted after leaving the computer screen – we could hear the roars of laughter from the old stagers in London. The trouble was that in Moscow terms, there could scarcely be a more reliable source for a scoop that didn’t come from official announcements. Our young reporter who spoke excellent Russian – and had the advantage in this rare case of being female – had gone up to one of the dumpy babushkas with mops and buckets schlepping in and out of the grandiose old building which was, as everyone knew, the traditional venue for the lying-in-state of senior party members and asked, ‘Who is it this time?’ As a result, we had a genuine scoop. After ten tedious minutes of exchanging teleprinter messages with London, it was agreed that the report should be issued with the original – less specific – wording.

  With Ustinov down, the list of geriatric power-seekers was shrinking. One of the few remaining was Nikolai Tikhonov, who despite being nearly ninety could not be discounted as the next short-term incumbent of the top job. He was currently prime minister, a job to which in the past Western correspondents (and government leaders) had mistakenly attributed more power than was due. Because in the Soviet system the Communist Party had made itself the sole power in the state, real power derived from being head of the party – its general secretary – rather than any office of state. It was only towards the end of the Brezhnev era that the Soviets themselves had realised it was easier to make this clear by giving the general secretary the courtesy title of President of the Supreme Soviet, which was in theory just the speaker of the rubber stamp parliament but it meant that the Americans could refer to Mr President. The Russians felt (correctly) that this would make things easier for them to understand.

  Tikhonov himself was, however, also rumoured to be ill. By March 1985 Chernenko had not been seen in public for months. But nor had Tikhonov. As fate would have it, the bureau chief was on a trip to Geneva to see his girlfriend and I was the most senior of our little team when a rare telephone call came through from London in the middle of the night. It was, inevitably, one of the Princes of Darkness. His message was that the BBC’s monitoring station at Caversham in Berkshire had picked up a change to classical music on most mainstream Soviet radio programmes. We talked over the situation and as one of his former protégés I was entrusted with both an honour and a burden: he would set up the codes so that if and when an announcement was made, instead of my report going first to the World Desk in London, it would go out live. To the world. This might, just might, give us an advantage over our rivals, the American Associated Press and the French Agence-France-Presse. That way it would be Reuters who ‘told the world the news’. On such tiny things did the reputation of news agencies depend.

  There was, of course, one other thing: accuracy. I was on no account to get it wrong! Staggering downstairs in my dressing gown – in the claustrophobic atmosphere in which we all live
d the office was just one floor below our flat – I turned on the radio (it was still too early in the morning for television) and was treated to a neverending sequence of Tchaikovsky piano recitals. The boys and girls at Caversham had hit the nail on the head. Something was up. But with the weight of my direct filing powers lying heavy on my hands, could I be absolutely certain what it was. It certainly had all the hallmarks of a death, but was it Chernenko’s or Tikhonov’s. Or what about the third possibility – much discussed amongst the Kremlinologists of late – that Chernenko would simply step down citing ill health and pass on the mantle to one of the relatively unknown younger men? That would hardly merit the solemn music, would it? Could I be sure? There was no precedent.

  As a result I sat down at the computer screen and tapped out three alternative one-line reports, each of which properly ‘topped and tailed’ with the required codes so that if I chose it, it and it alone would go out to the world.

  The first had a UU priority (urgent) and said simply: ‘Soviet Prime Minister Nikolai Tikhonov dead – official.’ There was no way I was pressing the button on this occasion unless it was official.

  The second had an RR code (a rush) and was accompanied by three little bell symbols which mean bells would actually sound on the teleprinter alerting chief subs on newspapers, radio and television stations that something rather important had just happened. It read: ‘Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko resigns – official.’

  The third – the biggie – had an SS priority, which stood for Snap, and was accompanied by a signal six bells, said: ‘Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko dead – official.’

  That was it. All I had to do now was hunker down with the cup of strong coffee my wife had brewed to wake me up, and a snifter of Irish whiskey to steady my nerves, and settle in for a long morning of Tchaikovsky recitals.

  It was nearly lunchtime before anything else happened. From about nine a.m. when television broadcasts had started for the day, both channels had shown only a red curtain and played similar programmes of Russian classical music. The TV men showed a slight preference for Rachmaninov. I thought I identified a snatch from his tone poem ‘Isle of the Dead’. But that might just have been wishful thinking.

  Then, virtually on the stroke of midday, the television went silent, as did the radio. The teleprinter which relayed to our office reports from the official government news agency TASS had ominously already stopped chuntering out its fill-in diet of agricultural reports and sports results more than twenty minutes ago. Suddenly it sprang into life, the printer key humming at the beginning of a line as my knees bounced with nervous tension under the desk waiting for whatever it was about to spring on me.

  And then it began to move. I watched as the little print head crawling along the paper spelled out the tidings, Cyrillic letter by Cyrillic letter, and most agonisingly of all with every bit of the tortuous bureaucratic pompous language in which all important Soviet official statements were couched. It was as if they were teasing me …

  M-E-S-S-A-G-E_F-R-O-M

  Clunk, and the teleprinter head shoots back as the paper whirrs and shunts up half a centimetre to start a new line:

  T-H-E_C-E-N-T-R-A-L_C-O-M-M-I-T-T-E-E_O-F_T-H-E_C-O-M-M-U-N-I-S-T_P-A-R-T-Y_O-F_T-H-E_U-S-S-R

  Clunk, whirr …

  T-H-E_P-R-E-S-I-D-I-U-M_O-F_T-H-E_S-U-P-R-E-M-E_S-O-V-I-E-T_O-F_T-H-E_U-S-S-R

  Clunk, whirr …

  I-T_I-S_W-I-T-H_G-R-E-A-T_S-O-R-R-O-W …

  My fingers flashed over the computer keyboard and deleted the Chernenko resignation option from the green screen. Sorrow was not an emotion reserved for resignations.

  T-H-A-T_W-E_A-N-N-O-U-N-C-E_T-H-E_D-E-A-T-H_A-T_1–9-2–0_O-N_T-H-E_E-V-E-N-I-N-G_O-F_M-A-R-C-H_1–0 …

  Yes, yes, yes, get on with it, I was almost shouting, taking in at the same time that whichever of them was dead had been dead for nearly eighteen hours before the authorities had got their act together to announce it.

  …1–9-8–5_O-F_T-H-E_E-S-T-E-E-M-E-D_K

  Zap! K, not N, Konstanin Chernenko, and not Nikolai Tikhonov. My heart in my mouth – and my life in my hands – I hit the key that sent the ‘Chernenko dead – official’ flash around the world. And immediately covered my eyes. It wasn’t Chernenko, all of a sudden I knew it wasn’t. It was going to be somebody completely different, Karl Marx, Kemal Ataturk, Klaud Rains, Kary Grant.

  But it wasn’t. I turned back to the teleprinter which had just finished spelling K-O-N-S-T-AN-T-I-N_U-S-T-I-N-OV-I-C-H_C-H-E-R-N-E-N-K-O, the full version of his name including patronymic and was now going on to list his titles. I breathed out a huge sigh of relief. I wasn’t out of a job. In fact, if I was lucky I might even be in for a herogram.

  It came through an hour later, by which time the bureau chief was winging his way back from Geneva in a flap while the three of us in the office were busy sending over full-length round-ups, including runners and riders for yet another succession race. It was characteristically terse and factual, but we knew that meant it was all the more genuine: ‘Congratulations Moscow Office, 45 seconds lead over AP’.

  Forty-five seconds! We were ecstatic. In the world most people inhabit, forty-five seconds is next to no time at all, but in the intense competition between international news agencies it was almost as big a result as Michael Schumacher winning a Grand Prix by a similar margin. Most importantly for me, despite the fact that almost all the papers the next day would run stories from their own correspondents and analysts, almost all of them would carry the little rough-edged image that we called a ‘rag-out’ of ‘how the world heard the news’. And at the end of it would be a simple sign-off: REUTER PYM. Not exactly fame at last, but one of the biggest adrenalin highs of my career. I was bouncing off the walls for hours.

  In fact I had only just about stopped bouncing, in time to get a cup of tea to sustain my energy levels – I had by now been in the office since three thirty a.m., having had barely three hours sleep before I had been awakened by the phone call from London – when the next shock hit us.

  My colleague Tony Barber was still working on a lengthy piece about the possible succession candidates, and the likely date of an announcement. Nobody really knew exactly how the so-called ‘election’ procedure at the top of the Soviet hierarchy was conducted, except that everyone was pretty sure that democracy played little part in it. Officially the Central Committee which numbered some 300 members would convene in a special session to choose its general secretary but effectively one of the dozen or so members of its executive, the politburo, had already stitched it up. Nonetheless we expected procedures to be followed and an announcement of a new leader in about two days’ time.

  So it was shock enough to have me spill my tea when Robert, our Armenian office assistant who had been studying every tic of the TASS teleprinter, suddenly ripped off a short three-line despatch which had just come up and waved it excitedly under my nose. I had already leapt to the computer to enter the same Snap codes as before – without asking London for fresh authorisation – with Robert still babbling excitedly in my ear: ‘Eto Gorbachev, Peter, Eto Gorbachev!!’ It’s Gorbachev! It was too. But even as I typed the six bells and the brief formulaic line: ‘Mikhail Gorbachev elected Soviet leader – official’, I had no idea how important those six words were going to prove. Nor had the rest of the world.

  8

  Back to Blighty, Back to Berlin

  The Gorbachev effect was still no more than two hazily understood words – glasnost and perestroika – by the time my spell in Moscow came to a truncated end. It was truncated at my own instigation, though as things turned out it was unlikely to have lasted much longer anyhow.

  I had finally done what I had been wanting to do for years: thrown myself off the Reuters treadmill of never-ending news cycles, feeding bare-bones stories into the maw of the global media machine. It was true we got to spread our wings occasionally – I had travelled into deepest Siberia to do a feature on the coldest inhabited place on Earth, and I had driven fro
m Moscow to Tbilisi over the Georgian Military Highway through the Caucasus Mountains – but as far as writing was concerned we were always strapped into the straitjacket of the terse Reuters house style.

  In the summer of 1985, I got an interview for the foreign desk of the Daily Telegraph through a word from my friend, their Moscow correspondent Nigel Wade. The man across the desk in the Telegraph’s grand but poky offices on Fleet Street was Peter Eastwood, the paper’s infamously tyrannical managing editor. The actual editor was a former minor Tory minister called Bill Deedes, who was something of a Fleet Street legend, partly because he was suspected of being the model for Boot of the Beast in Evelyn Waugh’s splendid satire Scoop, partly because he was the supposed recipient of the fictional letters from Margaret Thatcher’s husband Denis published in Private Eye, and largely because he would go on churning out wry, if rather inconsequential, eye-witness journalism until well into his nineties. But there was one thing that by common accord he was absolutely no good at, and that was being an editor. As a result the hard-headed, domineering Eastwood had taken the throne from beneath him and controlled every aspect of the Telegraph except for a couple of columnists and the editorials.

  To my surprise he seemed less interested in my journalistic credentials or ambitions than my place of education – Oxford was fine – my recommendation from Wade, and strangely, perhaps most significantly of all: what my father had done in the war. In fact he had been a mechanic in the RA F, which I doubt was what Eastwood was looking for, but it was my immense good fortune that he had been shot down over Burma. Burma was all Eastwood cared about. That’s where he had been.

  ‘What happened to him?’