He was dead. He was definitely dead, his face turned blue from the extreme cold. His body was lying face-up on the street, at the top of a staircase that led from the subway station below. I was amongst hundreds of commuters that morning who were forced to crowd to one side of the exit to avoid tripping over his corpse. Nobody gasped. Nobody said anything. Nobody stared. Nobody stopped. We all remained focused on our daily journeys to work, trying not to contemplate the precarity of our own lives.
My commute to work was arduous. I had to take two subways and then an overcrowded bus. The subway was complex to navigate and I sometimes discovered I had travelled the wrong direction or alighted at the wrong stop. I always boarded the bus at its rear door without a ticket. Not because I could not afford to pay, but because I had no idea how or where to purchase a bus ticket. The job of the bus driver was simply to drive the bus, not to sell or check tickets. During several years making this journey, I worried constantly that a ticket inspector would board the bus and bundle me away forever for having broken some law. But it never happened.
I arrived at work to be informed that this was a special day. Later that morning, a coach pulled up outside our workplace. It was no ordinary coach. It was huge, the size you imagine a football team might need, and it had darkened windows. I was amongst a line of colleagues stood waiting in the cold, opposite the door of the vehicle. It opened and several men in sunglasses and dark suits emerged, marched around the vicinity and eventually radio-ed that our location appeared safe. They completely ignored us. There was yet more waiting.
Then the coach door opened a second time and a frail old man walked slowly down the steps. He was eighty years old and his name was John Kluge. He had been named number one on Forbes’ rich list in 1987, the richest man in America. The previous year, he had sold his local television stations for four billion dollars to Rupert Murdoch, who had relaunched them as his Fox TV network. Kluge had used part of the cash to acquire all sorts of businesses, one of which he had deigned to visit that day.
Some minutes later, I was surprised to see a young woman coming down the steps of the coach. Despite the cold, she was dressed as if she had just spent the morning in a Venice Beach café. The contrast in age with Kluge could not have been greater. Maybe this was his daughter, I thought. Maybe his grand-daughter? Surely not his girlfriend? His ‘companion’? Possibly a future fourth wife? I am not certain I ever understood her identity. Apart from the ‘men in black’ and the presumed coach driver, this bizarre couple were the only passengers we saw exit the huge vehicle.
In between the parked coach and our offices located in an oversized hut, our American manager Mike Lonneke was warmly greeting his billionaire employer, overlooked by a stone bust atop a column … of Lenin. Extreme communism came face-to-face with extreme capitalism that day … on the outskirts of Moscow. We were in a large, high-security park where, only years before, a powerful Soviet radio ‘jamming’ station had created deliberate interference to broadcasts by the Voice of America and BBC. Post-Perestroika, Kluge’s business, Metromedia International, had acquired a radio station located within the park named ‘Radio 7’. Lonneke led the team charged with turning around the business from the least listened of Moscow’s 30-odd stations to top of the ratings.
Within the line of personnel greeting Kluge that day was Russian citizen Natalie Slepova. Following Kluge’s purchase of the station, its entire staff had been sacked and replaced … except for Slepova. Apparently, Russia’s arcane laws prevented employers from sacking single mothers, so she had remained on the staff. She printed her own Radio 7 business card with her preferred job title. She came to the office when she wanted, such as an occasion like today. A job in Soviet Russia had seemed merely to confer entitlement to an income, rather than an onerous responsibility to perform tasks that would be evaluated. No Annual Reviews there.
My work in Moscow required almost no interaction with Slepova, so it came as a complete surprise when one day she invited me to lunch. It would have been rude (maybe fatal?) to refuse. I was told to meet at her apartment, rather than at the radio station. Most Russian city dwellers lived in horrible high-rise concrete apartment buildings that resembled Britain’s worst post-War council estates. I found her building near the Kremlin to be a mini-palace with high ceilings, enormously wide staircases and gigantic ornate doors sized for giants. Think regal Paris chic rather than Ronan Point. If her circumstances were intended to impress me, they certainly did. But how could a single mother afford to dwell in such opulence?
We ate at a reputedly excellent restaurant in a city centre shopping plaza. The food was predictably awful. Slepova asked me dozens of questions, but not casual enquiries about me and my work. She wanted to know details about how Metromedia was organised and its long-term objectives. The only accessories missing from this inquisition were the rope around my chair and the spotlight in my eyes. I offered her no information, not only out of reluctance, but more so because I was merely a distant foreign contractor to Metromedia who knew next to nothing about its strategy. Despite my years working for the corporation, I never had a contract, a job title or even a letter of agreement. Lunch over, Slepova barely acknowledged me from then on. Evidently, I had proven completely useless to her.
To compare Moscow in 1995 to the Wild West is do it an injustice. It was much more frightening than that. Several unexplained ‘incidents’ I witnessed involved the radio station. Shortly after my arrival in Moscow, its American advertising saleswoman had been dining with potential clients in a restaurant when masked men stormed in, shot dead everyone at an adjacent table and ran off. The next day, she resigned and booked the next available flight back to the States. The restaurant cleaned up and reopened for business as if nothing had happened. So much could be witnessed in Russia that was never reported.
It was evident to foreign observers that Russian president Boris Yeltsin had been demonstrating increasingly erratic behaviour during his foreign excursions. Reputedly an alcoholic, Yeltsin had refused to leave his plane at Shannon Airport to meet the Irish prime minister in 1994. Bill Clinton alleged that, on a visit to Washington in 1995, Russia’s president had been found on the street drunk, in his underwear, trying to hail a taxi to a pizza restaurant. Yeltsin had already suffered several heart attacks and a quintuple bypass operation, so it was perceived as credible that he might die on the job.
I was asked by Radio 7 manager Lonneke to create a procedure for the station’s DJs to follow, should they learn that Yeltsin had suddenly died. He was concerned that, should a presenter continue with the popular music format following the president’s death, it could provide the government with an excuse to cancel the American-owned station’s licence. I wrote a list of instructions for the DJs, scripted appropriate announcements to be read and purchased CDs of sombre Russian classical music. My document was translated into Russian, placed in a plastic wallet with the CDs and taped to the wall of the studio under a large sign: “If the president should die, open and follow this procedure.”
Within a matter of days, I arrived at work to find unusually that the overnight DJ was still present and was upset. Apparently, in the middle of the previous night when he had been the only person present in the building, several men wearing balaclavas had burst into the studio. They seemed to know exactly where to find the instructions I had written in case of Yeltsin’s death, had ripped the plastic wallet from the wall and made off with it. They had neither identified themselves nor explained their actions. It was a dramatic raid on our little radio station.
The walled and barb-wired park in which the station was located always had armed government security guards at its only entrance, to whom I was required daily to show my identify card and clearance document. How had the masked intruders entered the property? The guards could offer no rational explanation. How did the raiders know where the station’s unmarked building was within the park? How did they know exactly where to find the document in the radio studio? How did they even know that such a document existed?
It was apparent that, as a result of us having contemplated the possibility that Russia’s president might die in service, we had attracted the attention of forces much bigger than us. The evidence pointed to the worrying conclusion that the overnight raid could only have been the outcome of a knowledgeable informant having observed intimate details about our radio station’s operations. We would never know for sure who that insider was ... but we could guess.
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