An Irishman in Moscow

In this extract from his new book on his career as an 'Irish Times' foreign correspondent, Conor O'Cleryrecalls the thrill of opening a bureau in Moscow at a time Mikhail Gorbachev was beginning to dismantle the Soviet Union in the late 1980s

IN DECEMBER 1986, Conor Brady was appointed editor of The Irish Timesand asked me to open a staff bureau in Moscow and chronicle the changes stirring in the communist world. I didn't hesitate. I had been to the Soviet Union three times on assignment since 1979 and longed to go back. It was becoming evident that a political springtime had arrived in Russia, and we sensed the first tremors of the convulsions that were about to shake Soviet society, and in a few years bring down the Iron Curtain and end the Cold War.

I was always fascinated by Russia. As a teenager I read classic Russian novels such as Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishmentand Tolstoy's War and Peace. I managed to save half a crown a week, for five weeks, to secure a first edition of Boris Pasternak's Dr Zhivagoin the Belfast bookshop Erskine Mayne. Winston Churchill once described Russia as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, and the prospect of the opening up of a secretive totalitarian society created enormous interest throughout the world.

The previous year, the Soviet Communist Party politburo had appointed Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev as general secretary. In contrast to his hard-line predecessors, Gorbachev was personable, articulate and a reformer. He introduced glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), to try to revive the moribund Soviet economy. People in the West were seized with a great curiosity about life in a vast, hostile superpower that had failed to keep up with the modern world's technology and consumer advances.

In those days it took several months to get permission to work as a permanent correspondent in the Soviet Union, and it wasn't until March 23rd 1987 that I arrived in Moscow, my suitcase weighed down with the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Russia. I registered my presence with Mikhail Gorbachev's press secretary, Gennady Gerasimov, a tall, smooth diplomat, to whom I offered a bottle of Bushmills as a token of Irish-Soviet friendship.

"Aha! A small corruption. I'll take it," he said cheerfully, putting it in his desk drawer. I told Gerasimov that I would not put a question to him at his regular bilingual briefings for foreign correspondents - who invariably addressed him in English - until I could ask something in Russian. I memorised a question and addressed it to him soon afterwards, earning disapproving glances from some colleagues who thought I was showing off.

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IN THE EARLY STAGES of Gorbachev's rule, the control of society by the Communist Party and the KGB remained absolute. Foreign journalists were subject to Cold War restrictions. We had to apply for permission to make journeys out of Moscow, and many cities remained closed to outsiders. The foreign community in Moscow was largely confined to a dozen diplomatic compounds guarded by militiamen in sentry huts. Not surprisingly the western press corps tended to be paranoiac and insular. A correspondent for United Press International told me that he was under instructions not to file any human-interest stories about Russians, adding, "Hell, they never write anything nice about Americans."

The foreign ministry assigned me a tiny apartment on the top floor of a hideous new 17-storey apartment block at 1 Marksistskaya Street, a kilometre south of the Kremlin, with an adjoining single-room flat for an office. The lift sometimes didn't work and there were frequent power cuts. I had to install a telex machine on which I hammered out news copy, leaving my knuckles out of shape to this day. At least it was reliable. International telephone calls were sometimes delayed for hours. There were so few calls made between Dublin and Moscow at that time - the Irish community amounted to about a dozen misfits like myself and a few diplomats - that I was soon on first name terms with the international operators in Dublin. Garret FitzGerald tried to ring me once, and asked the Irish operator for my Moscow number, without saying who he was or whom he was calling. As Dr FitzGerald tells it, the operator replied: "Oh, Garret, Conor is out at the moment but he'll be back in an hour."

By opening a bureau in Moscow, The Irish Timesbecame the first Irish company formally to register its presence in Russia. The first Dáil in 1920 had recognised the Soviet Union and sent a small cash donation, but after that Ireland's attitude had been characterised more by prayers for the conversion of Russians than by any meaningful contacts.

With the excitement created by Gorbachev's reforms, it now became a fashionable destination for Irish visitors of all kinds, many of them delegates to conferences sponsored by Soviet institutions to discuss peace and disarmament. Bibi Baskin arrived to record her weekly RTÉ chat show, during which she asked me on air what I missed most. "Marmalade," I said. "You can't get it here." In the next couple of months I received several jars of marmalade brought by sympathetic Irish tourists.

Dick Spring, then head of the Irish Labour Party, arrived in Moscow as a delegate to a meeting of the Socialist International Disarmament Advisory Council. I took him for dinner with Patrick Cockburn, then Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times, and afterwards set out to drive him back to his hotel in the Irish TimesLada. Halfway there I was stopped by traffic militiamen and fined 32 roubles (about 30 Irish pounds) for a traffic misdemeanour. I then got totally lost in Moscow's darkened streets, at one point stalling on tramlines as a tram approached, until a helpful citizen called Grigor climbed into the car and guided us to the hotel.

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SIX MONTHS AFTER I arrived, Aer Rianta, the Irish Airports Authority, began negotiations with Aeroflot officials on a joint-enterprise duty-free shop at Moscow's international airport, Sheremetyevo 2. At the time there were no duty-free shops anywhere in the Soviet Union. The only retail opportunity for passengers passing through Sheremetyevo 2 was a Berioshka (Silver Birch) store, selling Russian dolls, vodka and outsized art books for foreign currency only.

Aer Rianta faced stiff competition, particularly from the US airline Pan American, which on 16 December 1987 put in a $120 million bid for the concession. A Pan Am team of executives flew into Moscow and established itself on a whole floor of a city-centre hotel where it expected to conduct formal negotiations. Aer Rianta executives, however, had a better sense of the psychology of the Russians, with whom they had been doing business since the mid-1970s, when Aeroflot began shipping its own fuel to Shannon as barter for maintenance and landing fees.

Aer Rianta officials came regularly to Moscow, spent weekends at Aeroflot dachas and drank vodka and shared communal steam baths with their Russian counterparts. As a state enterprise, Aeroflot also found it more congenial to deal with a semi-State body like Aer Rianta, rather than a capitalist concern like Pan Am. Aeroflot had another reason for preferring the Irish. In 1983, when airports across the world banned Aeroflot flights for several days in protest against the shooting-down of an off-course South Korean airliner by a Soviet fighter plane, Shannon Airport had stayed open to refuel transatlantic Aeroflot flights. A top Aeroflot official told me that they had never forgotten that.

Within three weeks Pan Am conceded victory to the Irish. On February 16th 1988, Martin Dully and Liam Skelly of Aer Rianta signed a contract with their Russian friends in Moscow's main Aeroflot office. The Irish undertook to build and operate a duty-free store in record time, and also provide and maintain ground-handling equipment and a de-icing facility.

The two sides agreed on a logo: a combination of the shamrock with the spires of St Basil's Cathedral in Moscow. Several Irish companies got involved in spin-off contracts. Modern Display Artists designed the stores at each end of Sheremetyevo 2 and brought over the fixtures and fittings from Ireland in a fleet of 12 trucks. Part of the airport hotel was refurbished by the firm of Jim Woods from Newmarket-on-Fergus in Co Clare. I came across Irish bricklayers at the airport laying cement blocks flown in from the west of Ireland. Carpet-layers came from Ennis and electricians from Sixmilebridge. At Shannon Airport, Andrew Bromfield, a fluent Russian speaker who had lectured at Limerick Institute of Higher Education, gave rudimentary lessons in Russian to store assistants before they left for Moscow.

The duty-free store was opened on May 12th, less than three months after the joint venture was signed, and - something Aer Rianta executives like to boast about - almost two years before the first McDonald's opened in Moscow. Irish goods took pride of place on the shelves, including Jameson whiskey, Bailey's Irish Cream, Carroll's cigarettes, Waterford Glass, Henry White cashmere coats and Irish linen, smoked salmon, bacon and sausages. T-shirts with USSR emblems were supplied by O'Neill's of Dublin. (A plan to print T-shirts with the letters "KGB" was dropped when the spy agency demanded a 10 per cent cut.)

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A GOAL OF foreign correspondents in those early days of reform was to get an interview with Mikhail Gorbachev. He had a practice of meeting personally with one reporter from a country he was about to visit. When Gorbachev announced that he would stop off in Ireland in February 1988, on his way to a summit meeting in Washington with US president Ronald Reagan, I applied for an interview. I was turned down. The visit to Ireland was not important enough: it was just a two-hour layover at Shannon Airport while Gorbachev's plane was being refuelled - an event that he tactfully insisted was not a "stopover" but a "milestone" in relations between the two countries.

However, the Soviet foreign ministry told me that, as I was travelling with the Moscow press corps, Gorbachev would expect, and answer, a question from me at a photo-opportunity at Shannon Airport. I duly asked a question, on Soviet attitudes to Northern Ireland, which elicited the rather surprising response from Gorbachev, given Russia's critical reporting of the British role there at the time, that Northern Ireland was "the internal business of Great Britain". In putting my question, I addressed the Soviet leader as "Mikhail Sergeyevich", using his first name and patronymic, which is the formal style in Russian. Afterwards an Irish colleague complimented me for being on such close terms with Gorbachev that I could call him by his first name.

The red flag fluttered over the airport terminal that day, the first time it had been raised in the west of Ireland since the short-lived Limerick Soviet of 1919. Limerick TD Jim Kemmy, leader of the Democratic Socialist Party and a lifelong socialist, said: "I never thought I'd see the day - and not an anti-communist bleat out of anyone."

• May You Live in Interesting Times, by Conor OClery, is published by Poolbeg, €19.99

'A steppe in the left direction' The Abbey Theatre goes to Russia

The new openness brought about a cultural thaw in Russia, and the communist world became a popular destination for western singers, rock stars, orchestras and theatrical groups. The former Tass correspondent to Dublin, Yuri Ustimenko, wrote in his 1970s book on Ireland that "to visit Moscow is a dream that never leaves the Abbey Theatre Company". As Irish interest and excitement in Gorbachevs Russia grew, the Abbey Theatre decided to make this dream come true, and take what actor Eamon Kelly described as "a steppe in the left direction".

In February 1988 a 40-member Abbey troupe arrived in Leningrad, now St Petersburg, accompanied by seven journalists. The Red Army helped transport the props sent from Dublin, including 100 Irish spuds for a potato-gathering scene. The Abbey brought two plays. One was The Great Hunger, an adaptation by Tom MacIntyre of Patrick Kavanaghs poem about spiritual hunger in rural Ireland. Directed by Patrick Mason, it presented the tragedy of a middle-aged bachelor, Paddy Maguire, played by Tom Hickey, in a grotesque characterisation of country life in the 1940s. The other was John B Keane's The Field, directed by Ben Barnes, with Niall Tobin playing the part of the Bull McCabe.

Theatre-goers in the Soviet Union who hoped that the Abbey would bring a classic Irish drama, such as a Sean O'Casey play, for its first Russian performance were disappointed . . .

I enjoyed The Great Hungerand sat through all four performances, two in Leningrad and two in Moscow. But I noted that a few members of the audience, perplexed by the black humour and the parody of religious practice, didnt return after the interval. A Soviet expert on Irish theatre, Valentina Ryabolova, said: "To me, all these people on the stage were very strange. I didn't feel empathy with any of them." I quoted in my report a comment by Niall Tobin to me and two other journalists about the mixed reception for the play, I dont even think it should be staged. Its not theatre at all. Its a lot of wasted effort and I dont mind saying so. (In his 1995 memoir, Smile and be a Villain, Tobin wrote that an actor sometimes relaxed and forgot that a journalist is "never off-duty till he's dead".)

Patrick Mason defended the choice of The Great Hunger, arguing that the Abbey Theatre was not a museum theatre but was dedicated to new Irish works. The controversy over The Great Hungercaused considerable strain between the Abbey touring group and the Irish reporters, with both sides seeing the other as having a "great obsession" about its merits or demerits. Mason accused me at a dinner hosted by the Irish Ambassador in Moscow of trying to split the Abbey group. ( The Great Hungerlater got a similar reception months later in New York where Irish Timestheatre critic David Nowlan reported "walk-outs" and general bewilderment about what the play was about.)