Tag: Radio 7

From Russia with lawlessness : 1994 : Metromedia, Park Place, Moscow

 “I am a paediatric doctor,” said the young woman cleaning the toilet bowl in the bathroom of my apartment. “I work at the hospital during the day but I cannot live on my salary, so I have to work as a cleaner every evening.”

I was embarrassed. Although the doctor had been cleaning my apartment nightly, this was the first occasion I had attempted to strike up a conversation. I had mistakenly presumed that my ‘cleaner’ spoke no English. How wrong I was! Maybe she assumed I was a snobby American corporate manager who had just been posted overseas. How wrong she was! I was an unemployed Brit forced to take some freelance radio consulting work abroad, having failed to secure a job in my own backyard. Both of us were having to do what we did to survive.

I felt disorientated here. It was my first time in Russia. I would never have chosen to work here. But it could have been worse. My client, American public corporation Metromedia, had initially told me my destination was to be Nizhny Novgorod. I had had to consult a map to even locate that industrial city on the Volga. Thankfully, instead, I was sent to cosmopolitan Moscow. But looks are deceiving. My surroundings gave the semblance of a modern city but almost nothing actually worked as it should. Here was an incomplete facsimile of Western capitalist infrastructure in which the Soviet state had copied the designs without implementing the mechanisms. It recalled the era when a ‘Made in China’ label was a surefire guarantee a product that might look good would quickly fail.

My one-bedroom apartment appeared quite luxurious, about three times the size of my poky second-floor flat in London, with floor-to-ceiling glass windows on an upper floor that looked out over the permanent pollution rising from Moscow’s busy streets. It was inside a huge, newly built trio of linked office blocks containing office spaces and 330 apartments intended for foreign businesses that required a secure location 14 kilometres from the Kremlin. It was like living in one of those vast complexes portrayed in American movies about the self-destructive life of a harassed corporate ‘road warrior’. Maybe it was designed to offer ex-pats that kind of bland fictional familiarity.

In January 1994, Metromedia had bought one of the least popular FM radio stations in Moscow, planning to turn it into one of the most popular. There was a hitch. The Americans were baffled by the radio market not just in Russia, but in the whole of Europe. They could hear 30+ stations broadcasting in Moscow but they could not fathom what they were doing on-air. This was not simply a language problem. It was a challenge because Americans were accustomed to tightly defined music or speech broadcasters in their commercial radio system. You only had to listen to the vast majority of American radio stations for around ten minutes to recognise their ‘format’. Europe was not like that, largely because ‘public service broadcasting’ had been legislated as the bedrock of its broadcast systems since the invention of radio.

Before my flight to Moscow, I had purchased a Sony all-band radio from an electronics shop in Watford for almost £100. It was now put to service all day while I listened hour after hour to a particular Moscow radio station, writing notes about the music played, the talk, the advertisements, the jingles and anything else I heard. I was used to listening to radio stations in languages of which I had no comprehension, having spent so many weekend nights as a schoolboy DX-ing radio stations from all over the world on a Trio 9R59DS radio receiver. I had also analysed local radio markets in the UK for groups applying for new licences, monitoring existing stations’ broadcasts and tabulating the results. It might be boring work but at least I was being paid to do it!

One morning I received an email requesting my presence at an important staff meeting to be held in the Metromedia office within Park Place. This surprised me for several reasons: I was not an employee, I had never previously been invited to such a meeting in Moscow and, most astonishingly, nobody had told me that Metromedia even had an office within the same building where I was living. I had to call the phone number on the message to ask where precisely this office was located within the complex.

After spending so many days alone in the apartment listening to my radio and writing copious observations, it was an adventure to walk through the building’s labyrinth of anonymous floors and numbered doors to eventually locate and knock on the Metromedia office. After weeks of perpetual solitude, it felt like coming out of prison to be greeted by a surprise party. The room was full of Americans of whom I had never been aware, let alone met, all chatting away noisily. None of them had the faintest idea who I was, requiring my explanation that I too had received THE email. They were very welcoming in the American way, despite probably wondering why on earth this unknown, scraggy Englishman was present.

The meeting started soberly with an update on Metromedia’s progress attracting paying subscribers to its broadcast television service ‘Kosmos TV’ and mobile phone system it had apparently launched in 1991 in partnership with the state’s ‘Moscow Television & Transmitter Centre’. I had no idea that Metromedia had been operating in Moscow several years already and had been investing around US$5m annually in that particular joint venture business. The good news was its success in building a growing subscriber base. However, the reason for this meeting was the bad news that the Russian who had been appointed manager of the business had just disappeared with all its funds and had proven untraceable. There were long faces. Oh dear.

Welcoming the variation from my usual lonely routine, I spent the remainder of that day in the office chatting with some of my newly discovered Metromedia colleagues. At that stage, it seemed unclear whether the television business could continue and whether the office would even remain in operation. I met the corporation’s financial analyst Muema Lombe who shared my interest in pirate radio and he generously introduced me to the basics of Excel, the software that has been the mainstay of my analysis work ever since. We remain close friends since that chance introduction in Moscow.

On the way back to my apartment, I called in at the ‘Garden Ring Irish Supermarket’ in the Park Place lobby to buy my regular supplies. It was a smaller satellite branch of the bigger shop in the city centre that had opened in 1992. I was surviving on breakfast cereal, milk, bananas, tea and snacks, particularly American ‘Oreo’ cookies which I had never seen before. There was no cooking equipment in the apartment beyond a kettle, probably to encourage residents to eat in the complex’s vastly overpriced restaurant. Lacking a corporate expense account, I only ate there when my American line manager John Catlett was in Moscow, enduring hour-long waits to be served the simplest meals.

Although the Park Place shop’s range of food was limited, it felt too dangerous to shop outside as a foreigner. Russians bought provisions at kiosks where they could ask for the items they wanted, whereas foreigners like me had to frequent self-serve retailers where they became easily identifiable targets. In 1993, more than 7,000 crimes against foreigners had been reported in Russia, including the editor of the English-language ‘Moscow Times’ newspaper who had been robbed of cash and a laptop by men with knives outside the city centre’s Garden Ring Irish Supermarket. I had watched a ‘CNN’ report that Russia’s murder rate was three times higher than the United States’ and was only surpassed by South Africa.

Due to its success attracting foreign customers, the Irish Supermarket itself soon became a target. After its owners resisted a takeover by their Russian partner Dmitry Kishiev, there were reports of an alleged overnight explosion at its city centre store. The ‘Moscow Times’ reported: “Apparently fearing for their safety, the Irish partners then fled the country, urging their more than two-dozen expatriate employees to do likewise.”

Once Russians took over the ‘Irish’ supermarket, I noticed food on sale in Park Place marked with long gone expiry dates, the prices increased, customers deserted and eventually the shops closed altogether. Like everything else in Russia, ‘business’ was not considered a product of entrepreneurial spirit or managerial prowess. Instead, it was considered a lucky lottery ticket permitting almost anyone lacking relevant skills to intimidate, bully and exert power to enrich themselves over others.

Russia during the 1990’s was frequently referred to as the ‘Wild West’. There was a sense that just about anything you could imagine might happen there … and it frequently did. My corporate apartment felt like a haven of relative ‘normality’ within a crazed parallel universe. I cannot recall anyone being murdered at Park Place during my initial stay, unlike subsequent visits to Russia when I was given accommodation in hotels of variable quality and security. Never did I value boring old Britain so much as the days I would thankfully walk on the tarmac of Heathrow airport after yet another prolonged stay in Russia.

“A powerful bomb blast in the city’s centre on Saturday afternoon took the life of a Moscow student. The bomb which, according to police, had power equivalent to approximately 400 grams of TNT, had been placed inside a large metal dumpster on ul Bolshaya Spasskaya not far from Leningradsky train station. According to eyewitnesses, at the time of the blast, the 23-year-old female student of farming was walking by the dumpster. The strength of the explosion tore off one of her arms and blew out most of the windows in neighbouring buildings … Witnesses reported that just a few moments before the blast, several men had tried forcibly to enter a building next to where the explosion took place, but that after a doorman refused to let them enter the building, they threw a package into the dumpster.”

Small story on PAGE SEVEN of the ‘Moscow Tribune’, 30 January 1996

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/07/from-russia-with-lawlessness-1994.html]

Rich man, dead man, radio man, spy : 1995 : John Kluge & Natalie Slepova, Radio 7 Moscow

 

He was dead. He was definitely dead, his face turned blue from the extreme cold. His body was lying face-up on the street, at the top of a staircase that led from the subway station below. I was amongst hundreds of commuters that morning who were forced to crowd to one side of the exit to avoid tripping over his corpse. Nobody gasped. Nobody said anything. Nobody stared. Nobody stopped. We all remained focused on our daily journeys to work, trying not to contemplate the precarity of our own lives.

My commute to work was arduous. I had to take two subways and then an overcrowded bus. The subway was complex to navigate and I sometimes discovered I had travelled the wrong direction or alighted at the wrong stop. I always boarded the bus at its rear door without a ticket. Not because I could not afford to pay, but because I had no idea how or where to purchase a bus ticket. The job of the bus driver was simply to drive the bus, not to sell or check tickets. During several years making this journey, I worried constantly that a ticket inspector would board the bus and bundle me away forever for having broken some law. But it never happened.

I arrived at work to be informed that this was a special day. Later that morning, a coach pulled up outside our workplace. It was no ordinary coach. It was huge, the size you imagine a football team might need, and it had darkened windows. I was amongst a line of colleagues stood waiting in the cold, opposite the door of the vehicle. It opened and several men in sunglasses and dark suits emerged, marched around the vicinity and eventually radio-ed that our location appeared safe. They completely ignored us. There was yet more waiting.

Then the coach door opened a second time and a frail old man walked slowly down the steps. He was eighty years old and his name was John Kluge. He had been named number one on Forbes’ rich list in 1987, the richest man in America. The previous year, he had sold his local television stations for four billion dollars to Rupert Murdoch, who had relaunched them as his Fox TV network. Kluge had used part of the cash to acquire all sorts of businesses, one of which he had deigned to visit that day.

Some minutes later, I was surprised to see a young woman coming down the steps of the coach. Despite the cold, she was dressed as if she had just spent the morning in a Venice Beach café. The contrast in age with Kluge could not have been greater. Maybe this was his daughter, I thought. Maybe his grand-daughter? Surely not his girlfriend? His ‘companion’? Possibly a future fourth wife? I am not certain I ever understood her identity. Apart from the ‘men in black’ and the presumed coach driver, this bizarre couple were the only passengers we saw exit the huge vehicle.

In between the parked coach and our offices located in an oversized hut, our American manager Mike Lonneke was warmly greeting his billionaire employer, overlooked by a stone bust atop a column … of Lenin. Extreme communism came face-to-face with extreme capitalism that day … on the outskirts of Moscow. We were in a large, high-security park where, only years before, a powerful Soviet radio ‘jamming’ station had created deliberate interference to broadcasts by the Voice of America and BBC. Post-Perestroika, Kluge’s business, Metromedia International, had acquired a radio station located within the park named ‘Radio 7’. Lonneke led the team charged with turning around the business from the least listened of Moscow’s 30-odd stations to top of the ratings.

Within the line of personnel greeting Kluge that day was Russian citizen Natalie Slepova. Following Kluge’s purchase of the station, its entire staff had been sacked and replaced … except for Slepova. Apparently, Russia’s arcane laws prevented employers from sacking single mothers, so she had remained on the staff. She printed her own Radio 7 business card with her preferred job title. She came to the office when she wanted, such as an occasion like today. A job in Soviet Russia had seemed merely to confer entitlement to an income, rather than an onerous responsibility to perform tasks that would be evaluated. No Annual Reviews there.

My work in Moscow required almost no interaction with Slepova, so it came as a complete surprise when one day she invited me to lunch. It would have been rude (maybe fatal?) to refuse. I was told to meet at her apartment, rather than at the radio station. Most Russian city dwellers lived in horrible high-rise concrete apartment buildings that resembled Britain’s worst post-War council estates. I found her building near the Kremlin to be a mini-palace with high ceilings, enormously wide staircases and gigantic ornate doors sized for giants. Think regal Paris chic rather than Ronan Point. If her circumstances were intended to impress me, they certainly did. But how could a single mother afford to dwell in such opulence?

We ate at a reputedly excellent restaurant in a city centre shopping plaza. The food was predictably awful. Slepova asked me dozens of questions, but not casual enquiries about me and my work. She wanted to know details about how Metromedia was organised and its long-term objectives. The only accessories missing from this inquisition were the rope around my chair and the spotlight in my eyes. I offered her no information, not only out of reluctance, but more so because I was merely a distant foreign contractor to Metromedia who knew next to nothing about its strategy. Despite my years working for the corporation, I never had a contract, a job title or even a letter of agreement. Lunch over, Slepova barely acknowledged me from then on. Evidently, I had proven completely useless to her.

To compare Moscow in 1995 to the Wild West is do it an injustice. It was much more frightening than that. Several unexplained ‘incidents’ I witnessed involved the radio station. Shortly after my arrival in Moscow, its American advertising saleswoman had been dining with potential clients in a restaurant when masked men stormed in, shot dead everyone at an adjacent table and ran off. The next day, she resigned and booked the next available flight back to the States. The restaurant cleaned up and reopened for business as if nothing had happened. So much could be witnessed in Russia that was never reported.

It was evident to foreign observers that Russian president Boris Yeltsin had been demonstrating increasingly erratic behaviour during his foreign excursions. Reputedly an alcoholic, Yeltsin had refused to leave his plane at Shannon Airport to meet the Irish prime minister in 1994. Bill Clinton alleged that, on a visit to Washington in 1995, Russia’s president had been found on the street drunk, in his underwear, trying to hail a taxi to a pizza restaurant. Yeltsin had already suffered several heart attacks and a quintuple bypass operation, so it was perceived as credible that he might die on the job.

I was asked by Radio 7 manager Lonneke to create a procedure for the station’s DJs to follow, should they learn that Yeltsin had suddenly died. He was concerned that, should a presenter continue with the popular music format following the president’s death, it could provide the government with an excuse to cancel the American-owned station’s licence. I wrote a list of instructions for the DJs, scripted appropriate announcements to be read and purchased CDs of sombre Russian classical music. My document was translated into Russian, placed in a plastic wallet with the CDs and taped to the wall of the studio under a large sign: “If the president should die, open and follow this procedure.”

Within a matter of days, I arrived at work to find unusually that the overnight DJ was still present and was upset. Apparently, in the middle of the previous night when he had been the only person present in the building, several men wearing balaclavas had burst into the studio. They seemed to know exactly where to find the instructions I had written in case of Yeltsin’s death, had ripped the plastic wallet from the wall and made off with it. They had neither identified themselves nor explained their actions. It was a dramatic raid on our little radio station.

The walled and barb-wired park in which the station was located always had armed government security guards at its only entrance, to whom I was required daily to show my identify card and clearance document. How had the masked intruders entered the property? The guards could offer no rational explanation. How did the raiders know where the station’s unmarked building was within the park? How did they know exactly where to find the document in the radio studio? How did they even know that such a document existed?

It was apparent that, as a result of us having contemplated the possibility that Russia’s president might die in service, we had attracted the attention of forces much bigger than us. The evidence pointed to the worrying conclusion that the overnight raid could only been the outcome of a knowledgeable informant having observed intimate details about our radio station’s operations. We would never know for sure who that insider could have been.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/03/rich-man-dead-man-radio-man-spy-1995.html]