I first went to Moscow in 1977, just before the Cold War got even colder.
I was making a film for the BBC about the Soviet military build-up. A few days before, I had been underground in the United States, at the headquarters of Strategic Air Command in Omaha, Nebraska, being shown what the US targets in Russia would be in the event of nuclear war.
In Moscow on May Day, I stood below the Lenin mausoleum, on top of which the geriatric leadership of the Soviet Union was assembled, led by Leonid Brezhnev.
In the four hours it took for the tanks, men and missiles, to go past I kept looking over my shoulder at Brezhnev but never saw his old, grey face move once. It was as if he was carved out of granite.
Afterwards, at a Moscow café, I talked to some Western correspondents about who was really in charge in the Soviet Union. No one knew.
Even the most experienced Kremlinologists itted they were guessing much of the time.
I was back in Moscow in 1993 and everything had changed. The Berlin Wall had come down, Gorbachev had effectively dismantled the Communist Party, and liberals were in power.
With my Georgian co-producers (we were making a documentary about the former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev), I was in and out of the Kremlin with barely a security check being made. Everyone was prepared to talk, even two former heads of the KGB who needed to supplement their meagre pensions.
They, at least, were still convinced Communists but were nonetheless willing to take cash to tell me how Khrushchev was overthrown by the KGB, and about the attempt to silence the author of Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak.
Today we seem to be back in a Cold War, and news blackouts are the order of the day. President Putin can disappear for over a week with nobody seeming to know where or how he was.
A leading Russian dissident is gunned down in front of the walls of the Kremlin and it is not clear who did it.
In this week I talked to the BBC’s Moscow correspondent about how difficult it is to report from Putin’s Russia and whether she is seen by many in the Kremlin as an agent of the British government working for a state broadcasting service.
You can hear our interview and the rest of the programme here.
This week I also talked to the BBC Trustee who has just conducted a review of the BBC’s Music Radio services. It recommends eleven ‘actions’ which it expects the management to take.
They are substantial and you can find a summary of their report, which is well worth reading, here.
Roger Bolton
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