I have a hunch that any journalist in any country will sooner or later experience a weird sensation, akin to a transformation into a bee. You fly quickly and haphazardly from one flower to the next, skim the nectar, bring it back to your beehive, and so on. Legwork and phonework are what counts, and brainwork gets reduced to a conveyor-belt skill.
For many Soviet and American journalists it was even worse. A long shadow of the Cold War hangs over our respective "beehives." Now that Mikhail Gorbachev has formally buried the Cold War at Fulton, Mo., many of my Soviet and American colleagues may be asking themselves how they can get away from the conveyor belt and expand their horizons by going to the other side of the old Iron Curtain.
Many have done it and keep doing it, including myself. I started to look for various fellowships and graduate schools back in 1989, and eventually I received a Democratic Institutions' Fellowship from NATO for 1991 and spent three months as a visiting journalist fellow at the University of Oxford in the autumn of 1990. Finally, last year I was married very happily in Seattle and started my graduate studies in political science at the University of Washington. If someone told me four or five years ago that my life would turn this way, I would have told them to get lost.
Which shows that where there's a will, there's a way. American journalists, even without any knowledge of Russian or some other post-Soviet language, can arrange, say, visiting scholar status for themselves at universities in the Commonwealth and apply for a Rotary International Foundation Scholarship. You will probably get $10,000 or so, and that will go a long way in the former "Evil Empire" -- unless you constantly shop at the hard-currency stores.
My mother, a professor of physics, makes something like $15 a month,and she says life is bearable. You can also arrange free accommodations with people who want to practice their English -- always a craze in the Commonwealth. Even if you have to pay rent, you can get a decent apartment for $30 to $50 a month. But generally, barter is the name of the game. My guess is that buying a fax or a copier for a university will get you a fellowship.
My post-Soviet colleagues need to get out and see how the media work here, especially from the economic perspective. As prices of paper, print and delivery skyrocket, a lot of newspapers are struggling just to survive, and they aren't spending a whole lot of time thinking of ways to send their staff abroad. Last year's fee for an annual subscription to one of the major dailies would hardly buy a pound of fatty bologna today.
Coming on an exchange trip is getting tougher, too. Aeroflot is raising prices again, and a traveler is going to need at least $550 plus a hefty four-figure sum in rubles just to get to New York.
As my experience shows, journalists from the Commonwealth are eligible for American and international fellowships. The key to success, however, considering the enormous difficulties in logistics, is personal contacts. Contacts and more contacts. The Dollar Curtain is almost as tough as the Iron Curtain used to be. Get in touch with your Western colleagues in Moscow. Help them to work on local stories. Try to make friends. Do not be shy to ask for referrals. I struck good relationships with Quentin Peel, a former Moscow bureau chief for The Financial Times, and Christopher Young of Southam News. They helped me in every way. They even let me use their direct international phone lines in an emergency. They wrote letters of reference that turned out to have weight with my fellowship sponsors. Try to meet some of the journalists who come in and out of the Commonwealth for brief visits. I know it is tough for the Slavic mind to open up and tell your story straight to someone with whom you haven't eaten a ton of salt, but try.
Network. Ask everyone. Open your heart. No one can guarantee you will succeed, but once you have a friend and colleague in the West, you can move mountains. For instance, they can put you on a plane to the United States for $940, and you can pay them back when you start cashing checks from your fellowships, speaking engagements and free-lance stories. Friends can help arrange shorter exchanges, too. Swap workplaces for a month or two. Several hundred newspapers in the United States might be able to do it. You may fail to get an editor of a metropolitan daily in the United States interested in the exchange by mail, but an insider friend can move and shake things. Develop human stories about your locality and bring them over. Be ready to share them with the readers. How about exchanging stories between sister cities? Share culture shocks.
Compare lifestyles and problems. Be aggressive, make proposals. It can be exciting. The end of the Cold War need not be all about the post-communist doom and gloom. Finally, bring your ideas to GlasNews. Make contact, contact and contact with us.
Mikhail Alexseev left his newspaper job in Kiev and now lives in Seattle.
The Glasnost Defense Foundation is a new Russian group helping to build a legal foundation for a free press and independent broadcasters.
Filmmaker Alexei Simonov, founder of the group and chairman of Russia's interim Broadcast Licensing Committee, told the San Francisco Chronicle that independent journalists are the best guarantee that aid to the former Soviet Union will be used wisely.
"To find out where the aid is really going, we need a free press, and a free press deserves all the legal support it needs," Simonov told the Chronicle.
Simonov's goal is to bring order to the chaotic post-Soviet system of press ownership and broadcast licensing -- without compromising freedom of the press. He is working with Internews, an American nonprofit agency, to create six independent TV news operations in cities across the old Soviet Union.
The Glasnost Defense Foundation's address: Russia, 125319 Moscow, Ulitsa Chernyakhovskovo 4-10. Its phone number: 151-52-26. Fax: 200-42-84.
Russia's news junkies now have the ultimate fix: CNN World News in their native language. Cable News Network has begun providing simultaneous Russian translation for its two-hour nightly international report in Moscow. Russian television stations and several upscale hotels have carried English-language CNN broadcasts since 1990. But the new show offers specially selected reports to viewers in their own language for the first time. The program is a joint venture with the Moscow Independent Broadcasting Co.
And there may be even more on the way: Turner Broadcasting System, CNN's parent company, and MIBC are hoping to operate Moscow's Channel 6 as an independent TV station, with film classics, nature series, sports, entertainment and commercials. The proposed joint venture must compete with other groups for a license to use Channel 6, the last VHF frequency available in Moscow.
Members of the GlasNews editorial board: Alan Boyle, David Endicott, Barbara Krohn, Carol Rogalski.
Contact: Carol Rogalski
Communication Northwest Inc.,
Seattle, Wash. 98119
Phone: 206-285-7070.
Fax: 206-281-8985Electronic transmission is courtesy of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Seattle-Tashkent Sister City Committee.