Flirting with Danger

by Siobhan Darrow

  Now, in 1991, it was all coming apart. I never really believed the people had the energy to unmask the big lie. Actually, it seemed to crumble under its own rotting foundations. It was as if the country had a collective nervous breakdown, left with no choice but to overhaul everything it had once believed in. I was curious to see what lurked beneath. I had the sense that Russia and I were about to embark on a journey of discovery together, and I’d learn what lay beneath my surface as well.

  The coup failed within days. For reporters, Russia was on the brink of a new and far more open society as the old ways unraveled. Newly reformed Soviet officials, anxious to behave like people in the rest of the world, started allowing us to go everywhere to film anything. The same stone-faced officials who for years had automatically said nyet to everything, now wanted to do things the way they thought they were done in the West, casting about for new rules to follow. Everything they had once believed, they were now told, was wrong. It was devastating to have to face the realization that their values, education, institutions, and way of life were built around a sham. They were like newborns in need of something to cling to. Naively and trustingly they looked to the West for all the answers. It took a few years before Russians realized the West wouldn’t be showing them the way, and that they would need to search for it themselves.

  A few weeks after the attempted August coup, the newly appointed KGB chief granted CNN permission to do a live broadcast from inside KGB headquarters. For decades Russians and Westerners had heard tales of the notorious Lubyanka prison underneath the building in central Moscow. During Stalin’s era, political prisoners had been tortured to death there. A monument to the Polish revolutionary who had founded the secret police, Felix Dzerzhinsky, had dominated the square for years, as if watching over KGB headquarters. Just days before our broadcast, crowds had toppled the statue. People cheered while Iron Felix, as the giant statue was known, dangled from a noose as a crane removed it from outside the KGB building, which for so long had terrorized ordinary Russians. Here we were, laying cables through dusty corridors, flinging open windows that had been shut tight for years. The old KGB guards stood around in a mixture of disgust and amazement as representatives of the enemy they had fought for decades demanded more electrical outlets. When we asked to shoot a nuclear silo training center, it was no problem. Government ministers were now giving us their home numbers, all in their zeal to be open and normal.

  Every day another previously hidden aspect of Soviet society was suddenly available to our cameras. The special Western-standard hospital, serving top party officials, let us in to film, as did the practically medieval hospitals catering to everyday citizens. We filmed psychiatric institutions, orphanages, atomic power stations. Before the breakup of the Soviet Union, we could get deported just for filming a bridge or other “highly sensitive” subject.

  After I had spent two months covering the Soviet dis-Union, my bosses at CNN called one day and asked if Alessio and I would transfer to Moscow as field producers. It seemed like a dream come true, a foreign posting for a news organization that was emerging as a significant player in world affairs. My job would be to come up with stories to shape CNN’s coverage, to travel throughout the country, to take care of the innumerable tasks behind reporting, shooting footage, and transmitting it for broadcast. I knew it was my chance to share the country I knew so well, which seemed so misunderstood in the U.S. media. I felt a sense of mission, to show the world that Russia may look big and threatening, but it was full of charm and delight. I also felt strongly that what happened in Russia was relevant and interesting to the rest of the world. The breakup of an empire was going to be a painful process, and Russians, often insecure and emotionally fragile, would need understanding from the outside world.

  Alessio and I excitedly packed up our comfortable life in Atlanta and headed to Moscow. Once we got there, however, things were harder between us than I had expected. I distanced myself from him almost as soon as I landed, throwing myself into reporting on the chaos of Russia. Part of me was uncomfortable in the normal world he and I had created, and was relieved to be back in mayhem. I picked on him and discredited him in my mind, faulting him for not loving Russia the way I did. He kept his distance from Russians: perhaps not feeling as comfortable in the chaos, he preferred hanging out with other expatriates.

  I quickly got swept up by life among Russian friends, old and new. Sasha Minkin, a theater critic who used to take me to underground theater when I was a student, was thriving under the new regime. In the Soviet days, the censors wouldn’t clear plays of questionable content, so they would remain in terminal rehearsal, sometimes for years. Sasha had been daring, writing on the borderline of what was permitted by critiquing the system in the guise of theater critiques, rendering his work relatively unnoticed. Now, with glasnost, Sasha’s criticism went far beyond the theater and he became a leading investigative reporter for the fledgling democratic press.

  A woman I knew from my student days, a professor of Marxism and Leninism at Moscow State University, had become the editor of a glossy magazine teaching newly rich Russians how to spend their excess wealth on the finer, more decadent things in life. Some of my old friends, black marketeers trading blue jeans in the 1980s, were now becoming multimillionaires in the new Russia, starting up oil companies or otherwise exploiting Russia’s vast natural resources.

  In a desperate attempt to keep my relationship with Alessio going, I had the idea that a bloodhound puppy might help us, or at least distract us from the estrangement that was settling in between us. Anyone who has had any contact with bloodhounds knows that, of all breeds of dog, they are among the most challenging creatures to love. Nobody would go out and choose to have one except from ignorance or psychosis. Perhaps our psyches constantly re-create our childhood dynamics, either in the hope it will all turn out better the next time or because it is simply familiar. Just as children of alcoholics often marry drinkers, children of bloodhound owners go out and willfully get bloodhounds. My mother had grown up with them because her mother had bred them. We had had one, named Doucette, when I was a child. Doucette died tragically as a puppy, falling over a cliff, and I had always longed for another one. Just as a woman whose husband died young at war might idolize him, preserving forever that first blush of love, never having had a chance to get to know his bad habits, I too remembered only the cute floppy ears and sad eyes and none of Doucette’s other more trying attributes.

  Alessio and I went to the Bird Market one Saturday morning in search of a puppy to bind us together. The Bird Market is a strange place in the center of Moscow. Under communism it was one of the few places where free-market capitalism flourished and continues to do so in the new Russia. People come to sell animals of all types. Babushkas beckon buyers with conspiratorial looks, opening their heavy woolen coats to display kittens and puppies huddled against the cold in the warm inside pockets. It is a delightful place with birds chirping and exotic animals of all kinds, though the pain of Russia is also on display. I once saw an old woman crouched on the ice with her sad old red-eyed Saint Bernard named Charlie, the thick folds of fur on his neck draped with the medals of dog-show championships. The two looked as though they had been through a lot together. Nevertheless, judging from the condition of the woman, Charlie was about to be sold so she could buy another bottle of vodka.

  There were no bloodhounds that day but we got word of where there was one for sale. We followed a lead to a typical Soviet apartment block, where a family of three shared their one-room apartment with three bloodhounds and a rooster, who was spitting seeds in a corner. Two dogs were lounging on the sofa and a third was curled up in a chair. I immediately fell in love with Sara. We took her home. She was big, slobbery, stubborn, and completely deranged. She also had a bladder problem that required a trip outside every two hours, even in the middle of subzero Russian nights. If anything, she contributed to Alessio’s departure from my life.

  “Siobhan, there are no bad dogs,” s
aid my mother when I called inquiring about some of Sara’s problems, implying that any canine shortcoming is the fault of its human companion. Sara regularly devoured silk scarves and countless pairs of shoes, the newer and more expensive, the better. She especially loved to gnaw on Alessio’s favorite antiques. Sara lumbered around dragging those long silky ears through the grime of Moscow’s streets. She was oblivious to any command, lost in her own peculiar world of scents. She was a giant nose and ears on legs. Sara was such a generator of slobber that I was amazed anyone would come to my house more than once. She greeted visitors by shoving her wet jowl and snout into their crotch to get a good whiff. And then, after they thought they’d escaped her, she would hurl some slobber at them from across the room. Nobody left my apartment without being slimed. I thought I should start offering raincoats at the door. Every time I was angry with her, she stared at me with those sad, bloodshot eyes and my heart would melt. She was difficult to love, but I did. When Sara escaped in Gorky Park one afternoon, my world stood still.

  “Don’t let her off the leash,” I shouted to Alessio as he headed out with Sara for an afternoon walk. Hours later Alessio returned to the office, ashen and alone. He had let her off the leash and, sensitive to any sound, she had bolted when a band struck up in the open-air theater in the center of the park. He had spent hours hunting for her before steeling himself to tell me. I was crushed. She was a pain in the ass most of the time, but the thought of the poor thing wandering around Moscow’s busy streets alone and scared of every noise broke my heart. It was a good thing there was no news that day. I mobilized the entire bureau to recapture my runaway hound. Russians, usually the masters of sloth, can be transformed by a crisis: everyone, from the drivers and the cook to the workers renovating the office, stopped what they were doing to join the search. The cameramen took the TV lights out and roamed the park till three A.M. hunting for her. We put up flyers all over the park promising a ten thousand–ruble reward—equal to about a hundred dollars, and several months’ wages in those days—for her safe return. We heard nothing encouraging, although I had calls all day and night from grannies who thought they had seen her, or just to offer their sympathy and support.

  The staff in the CNN bureau put together a heart-wrenching video, pleading for Sara’s safe return. Our bureau manager, Lena, was a world-class dog lover who regularly rounded up Moscow’s strays and brought them into the office. We always had a number of homeless dogs living in the bureau, and I spent many hours calling around in search of homes among the expatriate community. One of our biggest problems with them occurred when we were broadcasting from the bureau: producers in Atlanta would ask what all the barking was about in the background. We usually lied and said it was packs of wild dogs in the courtyard below. We also made sure to clear out the kennel when the top brass came to visit. Lena, who I suspect may actually prefer that the CNN bureau forget news altogether and convert it to an animal rescue center, arranged to have the video shown on local television one evening. Meanwhile, I continued to ask everywhere about Sara. In the shops where customers were generally greeted with snarling indifference, the sales-clerks stopped what they were doing to speculate with me about where she may have gone. Finally one old woman called to say she had overheard salesgirls in a confectionery store on October Square talking about a stray dog they had been feeding. That old Soviet habit of eavesdropping and relaying suspicious information that kept the nation in a state of fear for decades finally worked in my favor. My favorite driver, Volodya, a large burly guy who had jowls rivaling Sara’s, rushed over there with me. We interrogated the staff, and learned that a stray bloodhound had turned up. A couple of guys across the way at the watch factory had taken her in.

  We dashed across the street to the factory, where we put up more posters offering the reward. Word spread fast that a desperate foreigner was hunting for her dog, and two slovenly types turned up clutching what looked suspiciously like Sara’s flea collar. In those days they didn’t sell dog food in Russia, and certainly didn’t have flea collars, so I knew they must have her. Dangling the collar in front of me as if it were a digit hacked from a hostage, they promised to deliver her once they were assured of the reward.

  “I’ll pay you anything,” I said. “Just bring her back to me safely.”

  I’ll pay you anything, just keep her, was what a part of me felt when they brought her. She immediately peed on the floor in her excitement at seeing me.

  In a city of eight million people, word of mouth had been enough to find my dog. Soon after, my fear of her loss was replaced by frustration at her annoying presence. It was hard to keep her in a small Moscow apartment, and I even hired a full-time dog nanny for her. After a year and a half together, Sara and I parted ways. My older sister, Alexandra, came to the rescue the way she often did in emergencies.

  Alexandra had grown up to live a quirky double life. She went from being a Peace Corps volunteer in the Philippines to the corporate world as a high-powered lawyer, albeit a slightly irreverent one. She climbed the ladder of success and became a supermom. She puts on Christmases fit for Martha Stewart, even if a slightly oddball one. She bakes homemade gingerbread houses and roast goose and trifle and then plunks down a menorah in the middle of a table laden with Christmas delicacies. She used her maternity leave to take her newborn son to Moscow in the dead of winter to fly MiGs with me. Learning of my dilemma with Sara, she managed to talk a family she knew in Athens, Georgia, into taking in a Russian-refugee bloodhound. When I flew with Sara to the States, it occurred to me that she was the second Russian I had aided out of that country. Sara later gave birth to eleven more of her kind, causing me some guilt for contributing to the bloodhound population of the world.

  One of the reasons I had originally taken Sara on was gone: Alessio and I had lived under one roof for some time, but my heart had shut down. After a while, I pushed him so far away that he moved out.

  Georgian Hospitality

  By 1992 my personal life was in shambles, but my career was taking off. CNN prized breaking news—in a war zone above all. I got my first taste of war coverage with Christiane Amanpour, whom I had known in Atlanta, and who was already on her way to becoming a star correspondent for CNN.

  At the time I was a rookie producer in the Moscow bureau, and Christiane had been sent in to help cover the collapse of the Soviet Union. We went to Almaty, a city in Central Asia where Boris Yeltsin and leaders of the newly unshackled republics were meeting to form a loose political union. About to fly back to Moscow, we learned that civil war had broken out in Georgia, the former Soviet republic, where the president had become so dictatorial that his rivals tried to overthrow him, reducing the capital, Tbilisi, to a war zone. Tom Johnson, CNN’s president, was in Moscow to supervise coverage of the breakup of the Soviet Union. When we discovered that there were no direct flights to Tbilisi, Tom told us to charter a plane to get there.

  I had never been sent to cover a war before, and was apprehensive, but as a new producer I wanted to hide my fear. It was my job to make all the arrangements to get us there and find a way to cover the story, and I didn’t want to let on that I hadn’t a clue what that would entail in a war zone. Christiane seemed confident and unfazed, as did Jane Evans, our camerawoman. Jane had lived through the worst of the fighting in Beirut, and Christiane had made her name in the Gulf War. I didn’t want to let these two experienced war hands see how much of a chicken I really was.

  We arrived late at night, and Tbilisi had completely shut down. There had been days of fighting in the center of the city. Zviad Gamsakhurdia, a poet turned president turned dictator, was holed up in the Parliament building. Opposing forces were dug in at a movie theater across the street. The once-fashionable Rustavelli Street looked like a shooting gallery. None of the taxi drivers at the airport wanted to go anywhere near downtown Tbilisi, so we were stranded until I tracked down an old friend, a Georgian doctor named Coco.

  Georgians are among the most hospitable people in the wo
rld. They believe that a true Georgian must spare nothing to accommodate a guest, even if they are caught in the middle of a civil war. So without a second thought, Coco rounded up a van in the middle of the night and came and got us. He wanted to take us home and give us tea and food first, but we insisted that we had to get to the story, so he drove us into the thick of the fighting. We filmed the sounds of gunfire and burning buildings, and, with a couple of interviews, we filed a story within hours of arriving on the scene. Coco insisted on staying by our side at all times and introducing us to all the rebel commanders. He was horrified that we wouldn’t stop to eat and was always trying to drag us home so his wife, Nina, could wine and dine us and he could show us off to his friends. We occasionally relented, knowing his wife had slaved all day preparing a feast for us.

  Tbilisi is such a tiny place that everybody seems to know everybody else. They were all so friendly that I even wondered if they were actually shooting at one another, or simply aiming over one another’s heads. As far as conflicts go, to a first-timer, this one seemed relatively benign. Nevertheless, rebel forces were shooting at Parliament, trying to oust the president, who had suddenly developed a totalitarian streak reminiscent of that other famous leader from Georgia, Joseph Stalin.

  For days, Coco took us to see a ragtag group of rebels, sometimes led by a doctor from his hospital or some childhood friend. The Georgians had lived under the yoke of communism for so long that they weren’t about to tolerate a new dictator now that the Soviet Union had dissolved. They are born entrepreneurs and have a deep independent streak. Nestled in the Caucasus Mountains, Georgia has a warm climate, and the verdant landscape contrasts sharply with the austerity of Russia. Many hills are covered by vineyards that produce famous wines, and Georgians boast that Winston Churchill’s favorite wines were Georgian. Georgians are Mediterranean in nature and enjoy abundant and rich food, like shish kebab and spicy vegetable ragouts, unlike in Moscow. The Georgians we met were such devoted hosts that when we showed up, rebels would stop fighting in order to feed us. Whether it was a simple hacha puri, doughy bread with melted cheese and a fried egg in the middle served with wine, or a full-fledged eight-course feast, they could never let a guest go away with an empty stomach.