February 9, 2001   

This Date's Issues:   5082 • 5083

Johnson's Russia List
#5082
9 February 2001
davidjohnson@erols.com

******

the eXile
www.exile.ru
March Madness, Baby!
The eXile's 2nd Annual Worst Journalist Tournament Tips Off
By Matt Taibbi (exile.taibbi@matrix.ru)

They're all back in town again--all hyped up for the Big Dance. Throngs of
knob-polishing co-ed cheerleaders in two-tone skirts, ready-made trophies,
standing doe-legged and glassy-eyed at the end of the players' bench. Each
one watches the score and wonders: who will call her number tonight? A
starter, or a reserve? The sleek, crotch-grabbing two-guard with dreds, or
the white seven-footer with the highway of pimples down his back? Will the
call come from a winner or a loser--and will it make a difference? If the
game goes the wrong way, will she end up a fourth-paragraph mention in some
complicated police report involving a loaded Walther and a Super 8 suite?
Who knows? She doesnıt know. All she can do is watch the score. Shake the
pom-poms, do a midair split, land with a thud in a gay gymnastıs arms, and
turn around to face the scoreboard again.

Keep an eye on the score. That's all any of us can do. None of us knows our
fate--until the last buzzer sounds.

It's March Madness time again, and we at the eXile are feeling
cheerleader-level
anticipation. We canıt dance or do splits; we're more like the guys who sit
ten
rows back behind the basket, holding up posters that read, "Brick!" But just
like those guys, we're on the edge of our seats to find out whoıll win it
all--whoıll be named Moscowıs Worst Foreign Journalist
for the year 2001.

Last year's tournament was a nail-biter up through the Final Four, only to
end in a blowout victory by The Washington Postıs David Hoffman over John
"Dumb and Dumber" Thornhill of The Financial Times. This year is shaping up
to be a different affair entirely. With Hoffman hobbled by injuries all
year, and Thornhill leaving early to enter the NBA draft, the field looks to
be wide-open. This has been already been a bad year for journalism, and the
newsrooms of Moscow are teeming with contenders. Almost everyone in this
field is Bad Enough to win it all.

Sportswriters call a situation where anyone can win "parity." In big-time
sports, parity comes mainly as a result of the salary-cap agreement, a kind
of conspiracy between team owners guaranteeing that no owner can spend more
money on players than any other. Other high-level decisions also play a role
in securing parity--TV-revenue-sharing agreements, for instance, which allow
small-market teams to make as much money as those from New York, Chicago,
and LA. An equal level of competition is desirable for business. One-sided
games donıt put meat in the seats.

Journalism is the same way. Decisions made by star-chamber money-men sitting
in glass-paneled offices 10 stories above Ben Bradlee, men whose names only
the Delaware corporate registry knows by heart, insure the business against
the accident of talent. One paper is pretty much like the next. Every
article reads pretty much like every other one.

Just as it is in sports, the product is the business, not its parts. In
sports, most of the teams lose, but the business wins every time. And itıs
the same way with journalism. One paper may do better than another, and only
one reporter might win the Pulitzer Prize, but the correct consensus is
almost always reached by seasonıs end.

Since last yearıs tournament ended, the Moscow press corps has been doing
double-sessions in its push for consensus. What should we think about
Vladimir Putin? Is there a bright side to fascism? Are we being hysterical
about this free-press thing? Don't we all need a Strong State? These are
tough questions, and the good editor, like the good basketball coach, knows
you donıt solve them with one big play. No, youıve got to play all 40
minutes to get that one right, which in this case means getting back to the
fundamentals: clamp down on defense, set lots of picks, and throw it over
and over again down to the wire service guys in the post--Ron Popeski, David
McHugh, Jon Boyle.

That's the battle under the basket, the place where the game is decided. And
if things start opening up a little, give it to your stars on he wings, and
let them create. Michael Wines. Rob Cottrell. David Hoffman. A 360 jam with
time running out by any one of those guys can change momentum and put the
game out of reach. You can light your cigar and go home; you can take off
your pom-poms and head back to the hotel to wash and take your lumps. Thatıs
sports. Thatıs March Madness, baby.

The eXile's Worst Journalist Tournament follows a very simple format. We
took 32 of Moscowıs leading foreign correspondents and bracketed them into
pairs. The reporter who writes the worse article advances. Thereıs no
objective criteria involved: we just decide. We donıt even need a good
reason. A headline alone can send a reporter into the next round. Thatıs not
to say that weıve decided in advance whoıs going to win. This is as much a
process of discovery for us as it is for U, the fan. We ourselves are
curious to find out whoıs really the worst of the worst. The New York
Timesıs Michael Wines is our number one seed, and it wouldnıt surprise us if
he won, but even we donıt know if he has the right stuff--the stamina, the
will, the "intangibles." Lots of first-round picks end up on the CBA waiver
wire. Hell, Wines could even write one decent article and be gone by the
first round. Even the greatest athletes have down days.

This is the second year of this annual competition, and it coincides with
the eXileıs fourth anniversary. The beginning of this tournament finds
almost all of us here at the paper at the end of our ropes. While this is
psychologically painful for us, it should make for good entertainment for U,
the reader, because simple commentary, even on a scale as excessive as this
tournament, will no longer be sufficient to satisfy our aggressive urges.

There will be a surprise somewhere in this tournament, a big, messy one, and
we can pretty much guarantee that not everyone will find it all that funny.
Some of you will, however. So without further ado, hereıs the opening round
of March Madness 2001.


Michael Wines (1), New York Times, def. Marc Franchetti, Sunday Times (UK)
When Franchetti talked to our surgically-altered black sideline reporter
Dwayne Steele before this matchup, he was not confident. "I donıt really
feel I can compete in this tournament against the American press," he said.
"Weıre an English broadsheet. We donıt really have what it takes. I mean,
theyıre The New York Times, for Godıs sake."

Indeed, if Franchetti hoped to depose number one seed Michael Wines, he was
going to have to do better than his January 28 effort, "Gorbachevıs in-law
left to rot in asylum." I mean, just look at the lead:
"The brother in-law of Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet leader, has
spent the past 13 years in a bleak psychiatric hospital in southern Russia,
abandoned by his family."

You canıt get away with play like that at the Big Dance; studs like Wines
will jump in the passing lanes every time, snatch the ball away, and race
down court for a breakaway dunk in three steps. To get through in this
tournament, you have to at least throw in a superfluous adjective somewhere.
Franchetti just didnıt make the plays, and suffered the consequences. He was
pummeled in the opener by Wines' January 21 effort, "Russiaıs Latest
Dictator Goes By the Name of Law."

This effort by The Times is yet another in a long series of "There are two
sides to every coin" pieces that have run in the mainstream press about
Putin. Wines, who last year wrote an atrocious 4,700-word blowjob profile of
Putin, takes here the position that Putin's "Dictatorship of Law" is just
that--a dictatorship in which Putin makes "pitiless" use of the law to impose
order. In other words, this is an authoritarian regime that exercises its
authority legally, if brutally. He address the brutality aspect later, but
early on in the piece, he makes it clear that there is an upside to whatever
the heck it is that Putin is doing:
"Through deft and sometimes pitiless use of Russiaıs convoluted legal
system, Mr. Putinıs Kremlin has managed to produce a measure of order and
even modest prosperity that his embattled successor, Boris N. Yeltsin, could
only dream of."

First of all, this is bullshit-by no rational standard could todayıs Russia
be considered "modestly prosperous." If oil prices were even a shade lower,
even the macroeconomic indicators in this country would be among the worst
in the world. Thatıs not even taking into consideration what life is really
like out there for most Russians, which is to say, not changed significantly
from the eat-your-own-feces Yeltsin years.

Secondly, Wines doesnıt even address the idea that Putinıs style of
government might be illegal. He doesnıt mention allegations surrounding the
apartment bombings of two summers ago, for instance, or bring up the
numerous beatings of journalists which seem very clearly to be the work of
Putin's people. Wines adds insult to injury farther down in the piece when
he brazenly rewrites history by saying that Yeltsin "rewrote an entire
constitution after putting down a communist putsch in 1993." The communist
putsch was in 1991, Michael. The ı93 uprising was led by what even the most
conservative observers usually called a red-brown coalition. And the real
putsch came when Yeltsin dissolved the parliament, not when the parliament
refused to be dissolved. Whatever. When youıre The New York Times, you can
be flexible about details. As Alice B. Toklas said, "A putsch is a putsch is
a putsch."

Actually, if you read Wines's piece closely, it appears as a massive and
shameless apology for dictatorial government. After listing all of the
various "prosecutions" now being undertaken, Wines writes: "The Kremlin
insists no one is being prosecuted unfairly, and in a sense, it may be
right. Everyone in Russia is guilty; the only issue is who gets caught."
Well, hell, if everyoneıs guilty. The next thing you know, The Times will
be calling for all Russians to turn themselves in to their local police
stations. For over a year now, Wines has been the chief apologist for the
new dictatorship, and that's why he was seeded first in this tournament.
Heıs living up to his billing. Wines through to round two; Marc Franchetti,
better luck next year.


Jon Boyle, Reuters, def. Fred Weir, Christian Science Monitor
About two months ago, I borrowed a book from Weir--a copy of Boris Yeltsinıs
first book, Against the Grain. I kept promising to return it, but never did.
Then about a week ago, I came home and found the book torn to shreds all
over the floor. I have this dog, a six-month old Dalmatian bitch, whoıd
eaten the fucking thing. I donıt walk her enough, so she eats everything in
the house. In any case, she tore the cover off of Weir's book, then ate the
top paper layer on the hardcover, then took a big bite out of the actual
pages in the lower corner. I beat the hell out of her, then didnıt bother
calling Weir to tell him. Boyle advances.


Ian Traynor, Guardian, def. Giles Whittell, Times of London
Giles "Hamburglar" Whittell, a darling of last yearıs tourney, wrote himself
out of this yearıs draw with the stunning lead of his February 3 piece,
"Russiaıs Smother of All Invention":
"Russiaıs most advanced artificial nose sits under a grey steel dome in the
bowels of a Moscow engineering institute, in need of some cocaine."

If nothing else, this is just about the weirdest lead youıll ever see in a
major newspaper. A crazy metaphor involving bowels, a mechanical nose, and
cocaine. For a major newspaper to suggest openly that anything needs
cocaine, even a machine, is already a plus, taboo-breakage wise. The bad pun
in the headline is a minus, of course, but theyıve become par for the course
lately.

Whittell had a good year. He was the first Western reporter to follow up on
The Moscow Times' expose on election fraud in the presidential vote. Unlike
most other reporters in town, he also tries a few things now and then.
His opponent in this first round, Ian Traynor of The Guardian, is
coincidentally, also a Brit writing about gadgetry, with a play-on-words
headline. His January 25 piece, "From Moscow With Love," is about a
hand-held computer toy. Both writers describe Russia as a place with plenty
of ideas, but not enough funding to realize them. Both also write in flowery
script; Traynor even breaks some kind of new ground by using the word
"beaver" as a verb. This is a situation where it is a shame that someone had
to win. However, it is worth noting that Whittell bought us lunch last year
to get out of the tournament, whereas Traynor hasn't given us the time of
day. Other entrants take note as non-lunch-buyer Tranyor advances.


The Motley Hack (8), Moscow Times, def. David Filipov, Boston Globe
This one was a laugher, a one-sided clash of opposites. Filipov is the
quintessential professional journalist; his copy is always clean, he knows
what heıs talking about, he speaks the language, he travels to hot spots, he
gets in and out of his subject matter as fast as he can without lapsing into
crude, Michael Wines-ian generalities, and he writes in a way that actually
evokes his surroundings, a near-impossibility given the editorial
restrictions and space constraints a major-league print writer has to
conform to. His January 29 piece, "He's Met Every Test of Time," was a
textbook work of feature-writing. In fact, it may be the only article about
Russia Iıve actually enjoyed reading in the last few years. I hate reading
about Russia. If I were shipwrecked on a one-tree island and a copy of the
eXile washed up on shore, Iıd wait six months before reading it. This is a
miserable country and all of us who work here are miserable losers and
everything we write about is miserable, horrible, and depressing. If my
little paycheck didn't depend upon it, I would never read another article
about this place, and would move to the Azores. That said, Filipovıs January
29 article, about the world's oldest man, wasn't half bad. It was so good,
you almost felt like you werenıt reading about Russia at all. Unlike almost
every other feature written by every other hack in this town, it didnıt rush
by paragraph three to some "larger conclusion" about "Russian reality" that
could be divined from the experience of its paragraph one subject, in this
case a very old man.

Instead, this was just a story about a person who had a long life, whose age
is a mystery (he claims to be 134, but his passport says he's 112) and who
lived through experiences like the Russo-Japanese War after puberty. Filipov
is generally economical and subtle in his use of witticisms--a necessity when
you work for the mainstream press, which confines "jokes" to the slots
occupied by canned yuksters like Dave Barry. About his subjectıs experience
running away to fight, Filipov writes: "He meant the Russo-Japanese war of
1905, when he was either 17 or 39." A short sentence with no laugh track,
just the way the texts in pieces like this should be written.

The Motley Hack, on the other hand, is Filipov's opposite. The column,
written by an anonymous member of the Moscow Press Corps, is meant to be a
view-from-the-inside diary of a what life is really like for a mainstream
journalist. But instead of saying more than his usual byline permits him to,
the Motley Hack says less. He tells stories that seem to take place floating
in space, involve no real people, and are centered around no real
incidents--a serious flaw in a column whose author has no name or
recognizable identity. The hack's tales recall Abraham Lincolnıs crack about
an opponent's speech: "Thinner than a soup made from the shadow of a pigeon
that starved to death."

Hereıs an example from the Hack's February 5 piece, "Prague Holds No Romance
for the Hack." In it, he describes being assaulted by a group of swans:
"No, they were all doing it. Alpha males, beta males, chicks, pups,
yearlings and ugly ducklings. They were all hissing at me! And then it
started.
"Swans swarmed around me, nipping at my coat, flapping their dreaded wings
in my face, stomping all over my suburb-bred sense of inner security. (I
mean, if a flock of swans can best me, what am I gonna do in the
post-apocalyptic street riots?)
"Luckily, all these overblown albino vultures wanted was the bag of
crackers. It was easy enough to solve the dispute. Flinging the bag deep
into to the Vltava, I bolted to my waiting rent-a-Skoda and drove off to
safety."

This is the Motley Hack at work--machine-gun volleys of rim-shot producing
one-liners about non-incidents provoking non-responses from an non-actor in
an issueless existence. From an anonymous column, I want something more.
Does the Hack beat his wife? Does he secretly hate his boss? Does he wish he
could just pack up and go to the airport one day and leave everything
behind, damning the consequences? Does he think about suicide? Does he have
potency problems? Does he lie in his day job? Throw us a bone here.
Inquiring minds want to know. Maybe they'll still find out: the Hack moves
on to give fans another look in round two. Incidentally, what a nom de
Guerre: the Motley Hack. I bet Carlos the Jackal is pissed he didnıt think
of it first. Certainly, he will have imitators. Maybe there will be whole
generations of successive Hacks, like the Dread Pirates Roberts, only with
backwards baseball caps instead of masks. Time will tell.


Andrew McChesney, Moscow Times, def. Andrew Higgins, (5) Wall Street Journal
McChesney, the new deputy editor of The Moscow Times, lives in my building
on Kotelnicheskaya naberezhnaya. I haven't seen him once. About two months
ago, I began to suspect that he was actively avoiding me, so I started to
get up early in the morning and wait near the entrance for him to come out
to go to work in the morning. Sometimes I even hide behind the doorway in
the hope of lurching out and surprising him from behind as he walks out. No
dice. Iıve asked the concierges about him, and they say I always just miss
him. Once or twice might be a coincidence, but this is getting ridiculous. I
hate to send Andrew Higgins out of the tournament, particularly since his
paper just published another loathsome "Putin-as-Pinochet" piece, but until
McChesney stops wasting my time with this cloak-and-dagger bullshit, Iım
going to have to keep sending him through.


Scott Peterson, Christian Science Monitor, def. Andrei Piontkowsky, Russia
Journal
Andrei Piontkowsky technically is neither foreign nor a correspondent;
nonetheless he goes into this Worst Foreign Correspondent competition as a
totally arbitrary wild-card entry. Piontkowsky is, of course, a big-league
talking head--one of those self-described "Russia Experts" who routinely
travels to Washington on someone elseıs tab to lounge around in his
underwear in three-star hotels, collect room-service receipts, and give
Weighty Opinions to panels of corpses. Whether or not he performs well in
this role is for somebody else to report, as I have no idea. What I do know
is that a key component of the whole Ricky-Nelson Travelin'-Man three-star
gravy-train lifestyle is the maintenance of a public presence, i.e.,
publishing a column somewhere. In the past, Piontkowsky fulfilled this
obligation at The Moscow Times, but about a year ago, he suddenly and
mysteriously moved to The Russia Journal, where publisher Ajay Goyal
doubtless encourages him to earn as much supplemental income as he can.
Goyal is also clearly a much more lenient boss than Piontkowskyıs former
editors at The Moscow Times. The columnist's appearance in this tournament,
in fact, is a result of an article Goyal & Co. somehow let through on
January 27, entitled, "The Merciless Russian Myth." Here is the lead to that
piece:
"At the beginning of October 1999, I wrote a small commentary that I'd like
to quote in full now. I think its subject-matter could be of interest in the
light of events that have taken place since then."
After these two sentences, Piontkowsky reached for the underscore bar on his
keyboard, punched out about six in a row, and then simply cut-and-pasted in
the old October 1999 column, which he presumably had stored in a
blast-resistant titanium bunker, so that rescue workers after the nuclear
attack could assign him his proper place in history.

Not bad for a week's work. Now here's the punchline. Piontkowsky tried to do
exactly the same thing at The Moscow Times last year, and was told to go
fuck himself. According to various sources at The Times, Piontkowsky wrote a
new top on an old piece last fall and tried to submit it as his weekly
column, one which would earn him his usual fee. The Times editors told him
that the whole point of a newspaper column was to produce new material every
week. Piontkowsky cried censorship and threatened to quit. The Times called
his bluff. A few weeks later, he was gone--left, as the saying goes, to
wander the wilds of the Russia Journal media empire.

Who says crime doesnıt pay? Meanwhile, Scott Peterson of The Christian
Science Monitor is not the type to go for self-plagiarism. His is a more
honest brand of cultural reporting, one which follows a grand tradition here
in Moscow. That tradition goes something like this: "It's January, Iım
tired, fuck it, I'll do the falling-icicle story." Every year in Moscow,
about ten poor saps have their heads caved in by icicles, and every year,
about five big-bureau hacks write the icicle story--usually right after the
"In Moscow [as opposed to the cities of civilized nations], Homeless People
Die from the Cold" story, the "Ice fisherman in Karelia get drunk and fail
to notice their ice floes going out to sea" story, and the "When will Russia
replace Ded Moroz with Santa Claus?" story.

The Falling-Icicle story is always written in the same tone, and always
contains the same elements. Most importantly absolutely required "humorous" tone. See, the thing is, a "falling icicle" story makes big
American papers not for its news value, but as "readers," i.e., as
entertainment, as comic relief. Some papers put their "readers" on the
bottom of the front page; The Wall Street Journal puts it right down the
center, adorned with a "funny" illustration.

If the icicle story had to make the news as news alone, it probably would be
written as a two-sentence bulletin:
"MOSCOW, Russia (Boring Wire Service)--Ten people died this weekend in Moscow
when a sudden warm spell after a month of cold weather caused enormous
icicles to fall from roofs and balconies onto crowded city streets below.
"Authorities said the deaths were unavoidable accidents of nature."
But thatıs not what you get. Instead, you get the Keystone Kops, as is the
case with Petersonıs January 24, 2001 story, "The cold war that Moscow
always manages to win":
"'Move your cars!' bellows Nadia Gulyeva into a megaphone to the sleeping
residents of a downtown apartment block. 'Icicles will be raining down!'
"Ms. Gulyeva--whose voice is so powerful that some residents snidely remark
that she doesnıt need amplification--is on the front lines of Russiaıs annual
war against ice.
"In a familiar Moscow winter ritual, men armed with shovels and spades
scrape the sloping tin roofs clear of snow and ice, sending down one
avalanche after another."

The needle on Petersonıs humor dial barely moves here, but it does flutter a
few times: with the old woman whose "voice doesnıt need amplification," for
instance, or with the exaggerated ice-removal-as-war metaphor (a "Cold War",
no less!). In the States, you donıt get to stand over the bodies of people
with icicle-ends in their foreheads and write leads like this: "I just flew
over to this accident site, and boy, are my arms tired!" The victims are too
close to home, their relatives too likely to interrupt your editorıs
platinum-card lunch with weepy phone calls. But you can do it from Russia. A
lot of these people donıt even have phones.

Beyond that, these stories should be banned in any case, if only because
theyıve been done so often. Rick Beeston from The Times of London by himself
did so many icicle stories, you could have melted them into a skating rink.
The AP uses the same one every year, I think, just changing the casualty
figures. Anyway, it was a close game, but Peterson advances, tiptoeing
around the red warning tape to a narrow victory.


Marcus Warren, Daily Telegraph, def. Patrick Tyler, New York Times
The key moment in this game came at 8:41 of the first half, when Warren
bravely tried to use the rhetorical device of humor in his Russian
alcoholism piece: "Dr. Onischenko is confident that Russia can cast off its
historical legacy, drink less, cure itself of the effects of alcohol
abuse--and survive the resulting hangover."

>From there, Warren ripped off six straight field goals, including two
three-pointers, to put the game out of reach. Tyler, filing from Chechnya,
called a quick timeout, but he never recovered, unable to even get off a bad
joke against Warrenıs swarming defense. His loss means that the
much-anticipated meeting between The Washington Post and The New York Times
in the next round will not take place. Oh well. As Katherine Graham would
say, if a French doctor told her her arm could not be reconnected after a
car crash in Provence: tant pis!


David Hoffman (4), Washington Post, def. David McHugh, Associated Press
Hoffman has been quiet lately. Probably this has a lot to do with the fact
that he has been finishing up his long-awaited opus on What Really Happened
in Russia over the last ten years. This shimmering beacon of truth will
doubtless be on the shelves all over the world very soon, and will also,
without a doubt, achieve a level of popularity exceeding the usual
parameters of the dull historical-analytical genre, landing Hoffman a place
in the annals of world literature as a great innovator who left behind a
legacy of vital, refreshing, daring prose, work that fairly leapt off the
page. In a hundred years Hoffmanıs book will be read not only by people who
were interested in Russian politics of the late 1990s, but by people with no
interest in Russia whatsoever.

In any case, The Washington Post claims that Hoffman is "completing" his
assignment here in Russia, which leaves open the question of whether or not
he will continue to perform in this tournament. He may not. He does,
however, have a first-round entry--the "internet chat" he gave on
Washingtonpost.com a few weeks ago.

Hoffman is going to advance into the next round mainly on the strength of
the moderator on the chat, i.e., the person who chose the questions. Like
Hoffman himself, The Post's "chatters" not only asked all the wrong
questions about Russia, but framed them in a way that guaranteed the
"correct" answer. Hoffman himself was famous for asking the rhetorical
question, "Did the U.S. do enough for Russia?," a question which by itself
excluded other questions like, "Did the U.S. actively sponsor corruption in
Russia?" Hoffman's chatters, carefully steered to him by his net moderator,
were exactly the same. Take for instance, this question by "MidWest":
"MidWest: Did the US sell Russia a bum deal on democracy? Though the whole
Cold War democracy was sold like once communism was gone Russia would be
brought into the same opulence that the US enjoys. Did we give them
unrealistic expectations of what reform would entail and what lifetime the
Russians would see the fruits of that reform?"
Hereıs the question that already contains the answer--the perfect
Hoffmanesque format. Within this question there is no possibility for
"reform" to have been, for instance, conceived from the very start as a
giant scam to steal from the Russian public. Itıs a yes-or-no answer: yes,
we gave them unrealistic expectations, or no, our expectations were
realistic, and Russia just failed to live up to them. Hereıs Hoffman's scaly
little answer:
"David Hoffman: Unrealistic expectations: yes. But we didnıt have to give
them, they had them already. From where? Our movies and popular culture, to
start with. Bum deal? No, I donıt think so. It was the right thing to do,
although it is painful to see and hear people who think it is time to pack
our bags."

There was, in addition, the question sent in by this chatter:
"Annandale, Virginia: Heard that you have a book in the works on the Russian
oligarchs. What can you tell us about it and when will it be in the
bookstores?"
I'd say this was Hoffman's girlfriend writing in, but I canıt imagine Hoffman
having a girlfriend. Maybe it was his accountant. Actually, I can most
easily see it being some poor Puerto Rican mechanic who fixed his car at
Jiffy Lube. Hoffman having given him an extra 15 bucks, negotiated down from
the original demand price of 20, to ask the question on-line.

Hoffman's opponent, David McHugh, is an old hand from The Moscow Times who
has made the successful evolutionary transition into a wire-service animal.
At The Moscow Times you at least knew where he sat, while with AP, you can
stare into the jungle for hours and never see him as he sits camouflaged,
quietly respirating on a tree-stump right in front of you. His January 30
piece, "Russia Worried about NATO expansion," was meat-and-potatoes wire
service stuff: collections of quotes, lots of connecting words and passages,
assembly-line literary style. It had one good gag line:
"Sergei Ivanov, the secretary of President Vladimir Putinıs powerful
Security Council, gave the blunt warning about NATO to German Defense
Minister Rudolph Scharping. Germany is a key member of NATO."

One can imagine all kinds of alternatives to that last line. My first
thought was to rewrite the passage this way:
"Sergei Ivanov, the secretary of President Vladimir Putinıs powerful
Security Council, gave the blunt warning about NATO to German Defense
Minister Rudolph Scharping. Underwear are garments that cover the genitals."
Or something like that. The wires always throw you off with those
auto-inserted passages. But otherwise, this piece was clean; McHugh played
it cool and didnıt try anything. Hoffman, last yearıs champion, stumbles
through round one with an uninspired performance.


Christian Caryl (3), Newsweek, def. Ed Lucas, Economist
Human rights activist Ravshan Gapirov is now rotting in a Kyrgyz jail,
probably being tortured on a daily basis with electrodes from car batteries
and innovative contraptions like the notorious "slonik," the gasmask rigged
to prevent the intake of air. It's Newsweek bureau chief Christian Caryl's
fault that heıs there, but not, as one might be led to believe, because he
writes using phrases like "the alpine foothills were stippled with color."
No, the reason Gapirov was arrested is because Caryl sent a photographer to
cover a demonstration Gapirov was involved with, and the photographer
attracted the attention of the Kyrgyz authorities. Thereıs nothing to be
done about that felt so bad about it that he wrote an article, the January 19, "Declining
Democracy." Here's his summation of the incident:
"When photographer Stanley Greene arrived to take pictures of the unrest for
Newsweek, members of the security service accused Gapirov of provoking the
demonstration. Within days, they arrested him.

"Two months later, he remains in detention. His fate is unknown, but
human-rights workers familiar with the area fear he has been tortured."
I could almost see the animated illustration to Caryl's story: "And if
Gapirov had been tortured, human-rights experts say that scene would have
looked like this." And then the car batteries, the slonik, and so on.

Two facts bear observing here. One is that Caryl's piece came out two months
after Gapirov was arrested. The second is that Caryl's photographer came
down to Kyrgyzstan after Caryl did. Both facts add up to the conclusion that
Caryl flew in, did his interview, split, sent his photographer down to clean
up, and then never called again. In the meantime, his interview subject was
thrown in a medieval jail. Interview subjects often complain that
journalists never call back to say hello, but this is something else
entirely.

Meanwhile, Gapirovıs plight was almost certainly not improved by Caryl's
latest piece about his jailing. If he is indeed being tortured, one of the
questions theyıre asking him is almost certainly, "What the fuck does
'stipple' mean?" Or: "Arenıt all foothills 'alpine'? Talk!" Caryl is a
ponderous trader in journo-cliches, as surely even the Kyrgyz security
service agents can see. He is a person who can write a phrase like
"Democracy in Kyrgyzstan seemed to be flourishing" without pissing his pants
from pure guilt. All his phrases are canned, from the "volatile cocktail" of
Islam and poverty (how many "volatile cocktails" do Time and Newsweek crank
out every year?) to the description of Gapirov as a "self-styled human
rights activist" to the approving portrayal of the younger Askar Akayev as a
"thoughtful intellectual fond of quoting from the writers of the American
founding fathers."

Ed Lucas of The Economist, on the other hand, would never be impressed by a
Central Asian Khan quoting the American founding fathers. He would find it
as grotesque and undesirable as the poor hygiene he condemns at length on
the Johnsonıs list. Christian Caryl: he almost makes you understand the
British. Evelyn Waugh-creation Lucas massacred in round one: third seed
Caryl on for more.


Maura Reynolds and Robyn Dixon, Los Angeles Times, def. Geoff York, Globe
and Mail (Canada)
Reynolds and Dixon gain an automatic pass into the second round by virtue
of the recent reappearance of Carol J. Williams on the Russian reporting
scene. Her February 5 piece, "Ice Hardens as Russia, U.S. Security Officials
Wrangle," filed from Munich, smacks of UNLV-style recruiting violations.
When a team is stacked like this LA Times squad, you know the underclassmen
are driving shiny new Buicks and doing eightballs in the locker room. By all
accounts, Carol J. should have graduated and been drafted into the NBA years
ago. But she's still hanging around campus. Something stinks here.
York on January 27 wrote a piece about Alexander Solzhenitsyn's protests
over the elimination of the environmental and forestry committees. At last
someone put a thinking Solzhenitsyn in the news after he made his
embarrassing public endorsement of Putin last year. But of course, the
Canadians still know who Solzhenitsyn is.


Anna Dolgov, Associated Press, def. Matthew Fisher, Toronto Sun
A whim of a ping-pong ball was all that prevented a first-round meeting of
The Sunıs Fisher with The Globe and Mailıs Geoffrey York, also a West
conference entrant. The meeting would have been dramatic but bittersweet, as
the two Canadians are close friends, often seen holding hands while walking
the boulevard between Pushkin Square and the New Arbat. However, it was not
to be: instead of drawing each other, York and Fisher both drew heavyweights
in the first round.

A third-round meeting between the two Canucks was still theoretically
possible, but Anna Dolgov put an end to that with her first-round effort,
"Yeltsin Still a Compelling Presence" (January 31, 2001). In it, she writes:
"Yeltsin released a remarkably emotional, personal memoir last fall, in an
apparent attempt to counter the wave of hatred that engulfed him during his
last years in office."

Yeltsin not only didn't write Presidentsky Marafon, he probably didn't even
read it. As has been widely reported, the book was actually written by
Valentin Yumashev, with some assistance from Tatyana Dyachenko. You can say
just about anything you want about a ghostwritten memoir, but you can't call
it "remarkably emotional and personal," particularly when the purported
author routinely drools in his public appearances.

Fisher, meanwhile, continues to be a model all foreign correspondents should
follow. He likes hockey, so he writes about hockey. Whatıs so hard about
that? Stick to what you know. Here's an excerpt from his Feb. 2 piece,
"Russians Pine for Past Glory":
"The game, like most in Russiaıs premier and first divisions these days, was
typically Russian in that it had a high tempo and featured lots of passing.
But it was woefully short on skill or dynamic play. A few of the forwards
even had trouble skating."

The forwards had trouble skating. Thatıs maybe the most interesting thing
Iıve read all year in a Western news article. You pick up any political
analysis piece written by any Westerner, and you wonıt find a single
observation as keen as that. They don't notice anything, because they donıt
know what the hell they're looking at. But Fisher, at least he knows his
hockey. You can tell, he was genuinely disappointed--or maybe saddened is
the better word--to see that these guys had trouble skating. Anyway, he's
out; Dolgov moves on to the next round.


Colin McMahon, Chicago Tribune, def. Ron Popeski (6), Reuters
I have my secretary researching the etymology of the name "Popeski," on the
off chance that it means "little Pope." So far no results there. Meanwhile,
Popeski's opponent in the first round, Colin McMahon, whipped off a doozie
with his February 1 piece, "Russian System Isn't Coping at All with a Surge
in Mental Disorders."

I'm getting really tired of reading news reports about Russiaıs health care
system that donıt mention the fact that Western-sponsored reforms ended
subsidized medicine here. McMahon goes one further, attributing even
Russia's current health problems to "state-sponsored" medicine:
"Beyond that, Russiaıs state system cannot afford the newest generation of
drugs that have proven so valuable in treating depression, schizophrenia,
and other maladies in the West. What Galina and other doctors have on hand,
they dispense. What they lack, they prescribe, but few of Galinaıs patients
can afford such medicine."

It's not the state system, but the end of it that has so many loonies
walking the street, carrying hacksaw blades. It's the same in the United
States, where mental health facilities are being emptied as the state
"privatizes" mental health care. In the U.S., you canıt get insurance
companies to pay to take care of a plantar wart, much less for feeling sad.
This is a global problem, the brainchild of corporations that don't want to
pay for mental health costs, not an endemically Russian problem. Granted,
itıs worse here--the economy is terrible, and there are more reasons to go
crazy--but the place would be a lot better off if it was considered OK for
the state to pay for medicine.

Beyond that, McMahon included the following passage, describing one
psychiatristıs innovative treatment method:
"Goland uses inventive measures to treat his patients. One seasonal trick,
for example, is to hang a fir tree, complete with blinking lights and
decorations, upside down from the ceiling of his basement meeting room."
If I were sick enough to be hospitalized with schizophrenia and someone hung
a blinking Christmas tree upside-down in my basement room, I'd run straight
through the nearest window in a shower of glass, sprint to the road, and
commit a series of brutal highway slayings. McMahon couldnıt have said that,
of course, but he does seem to suggest such innovations as an alternative to
the government picking up the tab for more expensive forms of treatment,
such as lithium.

In contrast, Popeskiıs January 22 piece, "Putin Puts Changes to Criminal Law
on Ice," was more or less harmless. It even seemed to suggest that giving
the Prosecutorıs office unlimited powers might be a bad thing. The wires
continue to perform poorly in the first round; the No. 6 seed goes down, and
The Chicago Tribune advances.


Paul Starobin (7), Business Week, def. Andrew Jack, Financial Times
Starobin's high seeding was granted mainly on the strength of his
performance earlier this year in an article about the emerging middle class,
in which we caught him on the phone admitting that he wouldn't want to raise
his children in Samara, which heıd called in print "a wonderful place to
raise a family."

Subsequently we had complaints from various corners that Starobin had gotten
a bad rap, that he isn't such a bad guy and had just made an honest mistake.
It was even claimed that he is not such a bad journalist after all.
Starobinıs recent piece, the January 29 "The Trials of a Drug Czar," about
Vladimir Bryntsalov, is, indeed, not so bad on its face. He gives a good
description, in the lead, of Bryntsalov being the animal that he is in most
interviews, ripping the head off a sucking pig. He provides a wealth of
information about the Russian drug industry and about Bryntsalov himself.

Actually, there isn't much to say about this piece at all, except to comment
on this following passage:
"The institute gave Bryntsalov a $5 million insulin production line in 1998:
The line was purchased initially for the state with foreign credits
guaranteed by U.S. taxpayers' money through Eximbank."
Starobin doesn't follow up on this piece of information, despite the fact
that it raises an obvious question: if Bryntsalov is such an out-and-out
scumbag, how come the United States is in the business of providing loan
guarantees for him? Starobin didn't even call Eximbank for a comment; there
is not a single sentence more about Eximbank's connection to Bryntsalov.
That's enough to put him past Andrew Jack, who is going to have to get a lot
worse fast if he hopes to reach John Lloyd status.


Dave Montgomery, Knight-Ridder, def. Peter Graff, Reuters
Every now and then, it takes the national exposure of the March Madness
tournament to bring a great talent to light. Who in the world had ever heard
of Wally Sczerbiak before he threw in 43 in the first round of the Big Dance
a few years ago, to lead unheralded Miami (Ohio) over Washington? Nobody,
thatıs who. But now he starts for the T-Wolves, throwing alley-oops to Kevin
Garnett and running "Wally World" basketball camps in the offseason.
Something like that may be in store for the Knight-Ridder service's Dave
Montgomery, if he keeps performing like this. Knight-Ridder isn't exactly
the Hofstra or even the Miami (Ohio) of American journalism--it has a giant
chain of newspapers, including a few majors, like The Philadelphia
Inquirer--but when the big names of Moscow journalism come to mind,
Montgomeryıs tends not to come up. But make no mistake about it: this guy
has Game with a capital G. Check out this lead from a piece he wrote last
year on the Russian health care system:
"PSKOV, Russia--Yuri Lebedev, a cheery outdoor vendor in this north Russian
city, is an endangered species, a Russian male. He chain-smokes cheap
Russian cigarettes and suffers from heart disease. In just over a decade,
health statistics suggest, he could be dead."

Now if that isn't the dumbest lead Iıve ever seen, then I donıt know what
is. In just over a decade, he "could be" dead? He could be dead already. He
could live to 450. He could grow muttonchops, walk across Belgium on stilts,
and marry Paula Abdul. According to statistics, a lot of things are
possible. There are all sorts of other things wrong with the article (by the
way, is it healthier to smoke expensive French cigarettes than "cheap
Russian ones"?), but that lead. Jesus. Anyway, Montgomeryıs more recent
effort, the January 3, 2001 effort, "Dreams of Better Life End in Sexual
Slavery," is a perfect example of the Montgomery technique. Hereıs the lead:
"DNIEPRODZHERZHINSK, Ukraine--It was the simple dream of working in an honest
job for a modestly better life that got Yelena into trouble. Like so many
others, she ended up forced into sex slavery and imprisoned in brothels and
dreary hotel rooms while her captors stood guard."

This lead reminded me of a little bit of a movie spoof from the Zucker
brothers film Kentucky Fried Movie. They did this trailer for a fake movie
called Catholic High School Girls In Trouble, which showed a huge pair of
tits being mashed over and over again against a glass sliding door in a
shower, along with the voice-over: "Never before has the beauty of the
sexual act been so crassly exploited!" Montgomery couldn't wait even a
sentence before he started mashing those tits against the glass door. Now,
everyone knows the press is sensationalistic, that what sells papers is war,
plane crashes and hot, dripping snatch. But most reporters for "respectable"
newspapers at least throw hats over their hard-ons before they put this
stuff in print. They at least pretend that there are real issues at stake.
Theyıre hypocrites, of course, but so be it. Montgomery doesnıt try to be
less of a hypocrite--heıs just too dumb to hide his true nature. The result
is a bizarre combination of perverted ravings hidden under a clumsy and very
thin veneer of faux-concern. The boys at Knight-Ridder must love him. Take
this passage from the piece, when he describes the experiences of a
15-year-old St. Petersburg girl-- "blond with a ponytail-whoıd been forced
into prostitution:
"another girl persuaded her to meet two Azerbaijani men at a cafe near a
St. Petersburg subway station. Looking downward as she clutched a small
black and white stuffed dog, Julia recalled the terrifying two weeks that
followed."

The little black-and-white stuffed dog is the giveaway here. No detail
Montgomery could possibly have thought up would have been more guaranteed to
send his middle-aged male readers in Philadelphia reaching for their
peckers; theyıd be acting out of the Pavlovian response developed after
years of reading passages just like this one on websites like
frightenedlolitas.com and chicksincages.de. Montgomery writes the word
"terrifying" here, but if he felt even a second of anything like terror,
then Iım a gay pastry chef. This is an article that was typed with one hand,
that's guaranteed.

Montgomeryıs opponent, Peter Graff, is a rank amateur in comparison. He
shouldnıt even be in this tournament. His February 4 article, "Russia Frees
U.S. Aid Worker Gluck in Chechnya," was a total disaster from a
basketball-journalism point of view. There were no defiled 15-year-olds with
stuffed animals in it at all--just a bearded ex-hostage and a yawning quote
from overworked FSB spokesliar Alexander Zhdanovich. Montgomery on to the
next round; get your glass slippers ready folks, itıs Cinderella time.


Robert Burns, Associated Press, def. Laura Belin, RFE/RL
Burns isnıt really a Moscow-based reporter, although he did file a
Russia-related story from Munich last week, having been at the same presser
as Carol J. Williams. Burns is, however, the namesake of a famous Scottish
poet, which should not escape the attention of The Moscow Times. The Times a
few weeks back ran a series of eight-square ads for some kind of "Robert
Burns Night" at the Baltschug-Kempinskaya, then mysteriously ran a "Weekend"
inside section piece about the event just before it happened. Somebody has
to pay for that, and it isnıt going to be Laura Belin.


Rob Cottrell (2), Financial Times, def. Masha Gessen, U.S. News and World
Report
Cottrell earned the eXile's eternal enmity with his piece a few months back
asserting that Putinıs KGB past "only adds to his allure" because it "makes
him sound all the more plausible when he promises the smack of firm
government." That piece, in addition to the fact that he is the inheritor of
an exalted office that in the past has been held by the likes of such
famously bad journalists as John Lloyd and John Thornhill, guaranteed him
the second seeding in this tournament. In fact, there was a popular movement
in town to give Cottrell a bye into the semifinals for his relentless
ass-licking vis-ŭ-vis Putin in the last few months. The calls resounded with
even greater fury when his predecessor, John Lloyd, published an article
called "The Miracle Worker" that depicted Sibneft headcrusher Roman
Abramovich as a sort of Santa Claus, dispensing goodies to the needy in
Chukhotka. Given all of these circumstances, it would have taken a
remarkable piece of work indeed for Cottrell to get himself out of Worst
Journalist contention early on. He failed, writing the loathsome January 27
article, "Putin Offers Yeltsin Gift of Immunity."

In this piece, Cottrell argues, as he has repeatedly, that Putin's
strong-arm policies have been designed to subdue "headstrong" elements of
society in order to restore order and bring about prosperity, happiness, and
Peace on Earth. In this particular article, he implies that an "obsequious"
gangster is better than a loud one:
"Mr. Putin has already chased the most headstrong of the old oligarchs,
Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky, out of Russia, using legal actions
or the threat of them. The businessmen who came to the Kremlin on Thursday
were, by all accounts, a more obsequious bunch."

Cottrell goes on to depict Putin as a sort of Christ among apostles,
dispensing his charges with the instruction to do good works:
"Mr. Putin told them to stop buying political influence in the Duma, give
money to charity, and trust him to deliver decent laws."
Presumably Putin also told them to be kind to stray animals and to call
their mothers.

I had thought that Cottrell's opponent, Masha Gessen, had gone missing when
I saw her picture hanging on the wall of a New York City post office a while
ago. But it turned out the missing person was a 10-year-old Turkish boy. My
mistake. Also, Gessenıs January 29 piece, "Russia's Boys Behind Bars," was
solid as usual. Cottrell advances.

Next week: The Sweet 16!

********

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Johnson's Russia List Archive (under construction):  http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson