#26 - JRL 2006-224 - JRL Home
Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006
From: "Paul Quinn-Judge" <pmqjknight@gmail.com>
Subject: Aleksey Shvedov

There is a story that dates back to the first Chechen war, told by someone who claims to have been there, that Shamil Basayev once asked Aleksey Shvedov to shut up for a couple of minutes so he could answer a journalist's question. Shvedov always denied the story, but it sounds authentic.He loved to talk, and this is what he seems to have been doing early this week when he died, suddenly, apparently of a heart attack. First reports say he was on the phone at the time. He was 54.

The only thing he loved doing more than talking was traveling. Restless, rootless, a perfect example of the Russian superfluous person, lishniy chelovek, he was the fixer of choice for those of us who were willing to pay the considerable psychic price of traveling with a character from Dostoyevsky who never stopped smoking or offering a freeform stream of philosophy, reminiscence and speculation, oblivious to hints, entreaties and commands to shut up. And of course, we always complained when we got back to Moscow. Now that he is not around to hear it, I have to admit: he was brilliant at his job,and definitely unique. He leaves a big hole.

My first long trip with him was in late 1990. With perestroika and the Soviet state going into a nose dive, we headed for Sogra, a small village in Arkhangelsk oblast, a hundred or so kilometers from the nearest paved road, a beautiful stretch of the glubinka where the school was former gulag hospital and local people spoke a dialect that harked back to pre-Petrine Russia. On the way our AN-2 biplane was forced down by freezing mist in a God-forsaken place called Krasnoye. We could be there for days, officials said. Sogra reports zero visibility. Shvedov pulled out a filthy notebook and persuaded the officials to let him call Sogra. How low is the mist, he shouted down the phone. How many grams is that he asked. We took off a few minutes later, still in near zero visibility. Sogra had revised the weather forecast. "We owe the Sogra control tower a bottle," he said. (Vodka, of course).

On and off for the next sixteen years we wandered through Russia, as far as possible from Moscow and its conventional wisdoms and sometimes sailing close to the wind in the North Caucasus. We experienced Beslan together __ despite his tough words about having no moral position on any story, he spent much of the next year working with Beslan teachers and kids. He was too discursive ever to give a chronological account of his own originas, but he started off life in the upper reaches of the Soviet nomeklatura. There was talk of the Smolny Institute in the family past, a Shvedova is listed as the co-compiler of Ozhegov's dictionary of the Russian language and there was a comfortable dacha in Nikolina Gora. The family had him declared insane to keep him out of the army, he said; they bribed a doctor, he recalled, adding however that sanity was a relative concept. For the past year his health had been failing. After the October 2005 Nalchik raid, our last trip together, he remarked that he could no longer run as fast as he would like under such circumstances. (While most colleagues were stuck on the edge of the city, Shvedov talked and cajoled our way into the very center of the fighting). Prison-camp strength tea and belmorkanal cigarettes had taken their toll. So was a sense that he was no longer needed. Editors had no interest in road trips, accountants worried about excessive expenses. Shvedov spent more and more time in Nikolina Gora, sunk in khandra, or disappeared to Ferapontovo, near Vologda, to stay with a friend he described as an alcoholic tibetan Buddhist. I noticed with some disquiet that he had stopped lobbying me to join him on a drive across Russia to the Pacific coast. A couple of weeks he sent me brief email. "I don't know what to do next with my life. Medical treatment is boring. Any ideas??"