Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
All that said, I was hopeful Rose would arrive on a warmer day, for her sake and mine.
Novosibirsk is Russia's third-biggest city, with more than 1.5 million people. Approach-
ing it from the west reminds me of coming up to Denver from the east, passing miles of flat
empty land until suddenly this frontier-feeling city pops up, with its urban sprawl and tall
buildings.
One sign of hitting a major urban center is cell phone coverage, which kicks back in,
and a parade of unread e-mails arrives. One is from Olga Granovskaya, a professor of polit-
ical science I interviewed in 2011 in Vladivostok. I had a wonderful visit with her and her
husband at the end of my last Trans-Siberian trip and I had been corresponding with Olga,
eager to meet her again. She had written about how the radio piece I produced last time
from Vladivostok generated a lot of discussion on local news sites, with many people sug-
gesting that the comments Olga made criticizing her country were a figment of my imagin-
ation. I had asked Olga to send along the comments so I could read them. But in this new
e-mail there was something surprising.
Dear David,
You can read all the comments here. But they are in Russian. I can help you to translate them when we meet.
We had not any problems because of the interview. Putin is not Stalin, fortunately. But a man from the KGB
called my father-in-law (who is a German and an honorary consul of Germany in Vladivostok) and told him
that his wife gave an interview to American radio. My relative informed them that it was not his wife but his
daughter-in-law. So, I know KGB is not sleeping. Do not think that your visit would be inconvenient or frus-
trating. If so, I would not invite you.
I always assumed after interviewing people in Russia that they might get a phone call, a
subtle warning, from the FSB. But this is the first concrete evidence. It really bothers me. I
reported from Tripoli, Libya's capital, when Mu'ammar Gadhafi was clinging to power as
NATO bombs were falling on his city. Government spies were everywhere, tracking journ-
alists, eavesdropping on interviews. Each time I spoke to a citizen—especially if he or she
said anything critical of the regime—I honestly worried that that person would be hounded
afterward—interrogated or worse, punished. That happened here in Soviet times.
In today's Russia I worry less about a person's well-being. People are generally free to
speak their minds in public. Still, the element of fear remains. A follow-up call like this
may not intimidate Olga's father-in-law, a Western diplomat. (In fact I can't help but smile
thinking that the FSB really chose the wrong guy here!). But calls like this do intimidate
many people. Without a fair and reliable system of justice, what's your protection if you're
a citizen?
While the culture of fear in Russia today doesn't compare to that of Soviet times, while
there are far fewer victims, the threat is real. Oleg Kashin is a business reporter for a re-
spected Russian newspaper,
Kommersant
. He often wrote critically of the government and
in the fall of 2010, was beaten outside his home and nearly died. His attackers, among oth-
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