While travelling in the Ukraine in the fall of 1989, I met up with a fellow named Tom Koppel, a journalist working for a communist newspaper in Kyiv on an exchange program.
With Monday marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, 1989, I thought I'd excerpt an article I wrote for Bulletin, then the magazine of the Canadian Association of Journalists. It was published in the Fall 1990 issue and outlines how the paper that hosted Koppel covered the Wall story:
While working in the Ukraine last November, American freelance writer Tom Koppel turned on his radio one day and heard some electrifying news: The Berlin Wall, the ultimate monument of the Cold War, was coming down.
"I came rushing into working the next day and said, 'Did you hear? Did you hear?'," he said, excitedly asking his boss if she wanted something done on it.
But other reporters at the Ukrainian paper were very skeptical this had happened.
"There's been nothing on Tass yet," his editor grumbled.
When the story finally appeared, it was a tiny, six-column-inch wire story two days after the fact, although feature stories eventually followed.
Such was life on Robochaya Gazyetta, a Communist Party-controlled newspaper in the Ukraine that published 500,000 four-page papers six days a week -- when there was enough newsprint.
Koppel is a freelance magazine writer with a doctorate in Soviet studies. The American expatriate lives in the Gulf Islands in British Columbia. From November to February, he worked in Kiev as part of an exchange organized by the Canadian-Soviet Media Interchange Committee.
While glasnost has resulted in a change in content in the Soviet media, some of that change is illusory. Westerners like to see it as a fundamental change in the Soviet press, where in large part, it's more a reflection of the overall changes in Soviet society, he said.
"It's still an official press," and as such mirrors opinion, rather than being ahead of the politicians, he said.
Take the fall and execution of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.
"Ceausescu was a fraternal Communist Party leader. He may have been a very hated man, and of course was totally out of step with what Gorbachev was doing."
But because Romania was a neighbouring communist country, the media tended to be very polite about his transgressions, Koppel said.
"So there was not a breath, not a hint of criticism of Ceausescu anywhere in the press or on television -- until he fell. Then he was the evil dictator.
"On the day Ceausescu was executed, Vremya, the national Soviet newscast -- passed along Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's expressions of friendship and loyalty to the Romanian people and the Front for National Salvation.
But here's the quirk: "They hadn't announced he was dead yet." nor did they until mid-way through the item.
It was a very strange order of news priorities, Koppel concluded. ...
If you aren't familiar with Soviet-era terminology or have forgotten, here's a primer/refresher:
- Tass was the official Soviet news agency, sort of a state-controlled The Canadian Press.
- Glasnost is the Russian word for openness. It was an integral part of perestroika, or restructuring -- a program launched by then-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to try and reform his country's economic and political systems. From what I could see, the 1989 Soviets were at least 25 years behind the West
- Ceausescu was overthrown in a December 1989 coup. He and his wife Elena were executed by firing squad on Dec. 25.
As an example of the way things worked in communist states, here's an excerpt from a BBC story:
A day after ordering security forces to use deadly force against protesters in the western city of Timisoara, Ceausescu felt confident enough to leave for an official visit to Iran. But when he returned on 20 December, he found Romania in chaos.
Tanks were on the streets of Bucharest, the borders were closed and international condemnation of the bloodshed was near universal.
The next day Ceausescu addressed a vast crowd in Bucharest's central Palace Square, assembled to hear him denounce the "fascists and foreigners" leading the revolution.
But instead of the cheers he'd expected, he was booed and jeered. His stunned reaction to the taunts was captured on television before the transmission was suddenly halted.
I was back in Regina by this point, where some of us giddily engaged in some black humour about show trials. I came up with the ultimate communist offence - "Unspecified crimes against the people." I mean, how could you not be convicted?
But while I was still on the soil of my ancestors about six weeks earlier, Koppel will go down in history as the guy who broke the news to me that the Berlin Wall had fallen.
If I remember correctly, he dropped the bombshell as a sly aside. "By the way, have you heard the Berlin Wall has fallen?" he asked while we chatted over a drink in my hotel.
I must say the news had shocked me into temporary silence. I just shook my head in a classic WTF gesture, scarcely believing what I just heard before averring that no, I had not. I didn't have a shortwave radio with me, and I don't speak or read Russian or Ukrainian, so I was pretty much in a news vacuum.
Remember, these were pre-Internet times -- and in the middle of a foreign, communist country to boot. As a result, I got blindsided about one of the biggest news stories of the late 20th century.
Ukraine may well have a healthier media ecosystem today, but that doesn't mean it is healthy. In the 2009 Reporters Without Borders press freedom index, Ukraine is tied with Senegal for 89th place (Canada is in 19th place; Russia in 154th place).
A June 10 BBC story about Ukraine said it had a "relatively free media."
However, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty quoted Ukraine's President Viktor Yushchenko as saying the following on Oct. 7:
Speaking at a meeting of regional media directors in Kyiv, Yushchenko said that every day the "space of openness" is getting "narrower."
He added that if Ukrainian journalists do not protect freedom of speech then "tomorrow those who will tell us what to write and what to say will come."