Thomas Goltz Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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What does it take to be what you have become, a journalist writer? It strikes me that it takes an awful lot of courage.
I'd say it takes a lot of luck.
Luck. Is luck what got you to the places that you went, namely, the Caucasus after the fall of the Soviet Union? You were the right person in the right place at the right time, if I may say so.
There's a lot of that. So I'd like to retract that word "luck" and substitute something like "fate." There is that murky thing of being the right person at the right time, having developed various skills that allow you to be that right person at that right time. I wouldn't like to say that my career is entirely dependent on fate or luck, but there's an element there that is undeniable. For example, my association with Azerbaijan -- after ten years of working in Turkey, I picked up a two-year grant to study the Turkic-speaking republics of then Soviet Central Asia. It was still in the time of the Soviet Union. I spoke no Russian at the time, and my grant was predicated on my knowing Turkish.
Today, looking backwards, if I had been on the granting committee, I would have rejected me, simply because, I mean, Turkish is not Uzbek; Turkish is not Kazak, and "This guy doesn't have any Russian, and he's never spent any time in Soviet Studies. I mean, come on, let's not choose him. Let's get somebody else." But I got the grant. That was the spring of '91, the time of Gulf War Number One. As a result, on my way to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, after shipping all of my things there, I went to Turkey. Because of the great Kurdish crisis at the time, suddenly northern Iraq had been opened up. So I was able to go down into northern Iraq and explore various Kurdish issues I had not been able to do for the decade prior to that, because Iraq was a very closed shop at the time.
Well, one result of this was that emerging from Iraq in June 1991, I tried to get to Tashkent in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Uzbekistan via Moscow, and the Aeroflot authority in Istanbul said, "No, Moscow is not on your visa. Go back to San Francisco and get a new one." Well, this was virtually an impossibility. So I rolled the dice and jumped on a flight from Istanbul to the capital of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Azerbaijan, Baku, on the advice of a friend, who said, "Evoke a little bit of pan-Turkic enthusiasm, and if you can talk your way through Soviet customs, my family will be waiting for you on the other side of the barrier." Well, this is what I did.
The assumption was that I was going to spend four days in Baku and go straight off to Uzbekistan. But I ended up spending two of the most fascinating weeks of my life there, identifying all these various things that would be in the Caucasus. When I got to Uzbekistan two weeks later, it was August 19, 1991, the aborted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, and the Soviet Union was collapsing. I took a look around and said, "Uzbekistan: this place is asleep. Where would you rather be to watch this historical moment?" And I said, "Azerbaijan." So, once again, without a visa, I doubled back to Baku.
What I mean to say in capsule there is that I had no business being in Azerbaijan, initially. It was simply a roll of the dice to try to talk my way into the Soviet Union when I didn't have any right to be there. That's the way it worked out. I would call that fate.
It sounds like you have a remarkable capacity to do a quick study of a place to get a feel for it -- its culture, its languages, and so on. Is that a fair statement?
"Quick" is not the word that I would use. To understand Azerbaijan, having a Turkic base was certainly advantageous. Azerbaijani is not that different from Turkish. I was able to make the lingual transition there. To make the cultural transition, that is something else.
What?
Malleability. Maybe this ability to listen, that you mentioned earlier. Possibly -- again, back to theater -- to take on a chameleon-like quality, that of being able to insert yourself, and in a legitimate and honest way, into a situation in a relatively quick or relatively speedy manner.
In your new book, which we'll talk about, you give a sense of the drama at work in a particular setting. Is that a fair statement?
Once again, I hadn't thought about it like that. Is this the "Elements of Drama 101" creeping into journalistic writing? Maybe so.
So help us understand, before we get into your new book, what the Soviet Union's collapse meant for this region that your works cover -- first, Azerbaijan, now Chechnya. What were the implications of Soviet rule for that part of the world? And then what happened when it all fell apart?
The result was chaos and war, usually described as "ethnic national conflict," but one could also describe it as war for various resources. The Soviet state was a centralized state where the state, theoretically, owned everything, and the citizen owned virtually nothing. So citizens had become used to stealing from the state throughout the entire Soviet period, especially toward the end. With the collapse of that structure, the thieving and stealing just carried on, despite the attempts of various leaders to reconstruct mini-states in the shadow of what had been the Soviet Union.
It was a fascinating time, and it remains a fascinating time to take a look at the social development, construction, nation-building, national collapse. All these things continue on. Some states are doing better than others, but all are a little bit fuzzy right now. There's just been a spate of elections, for example, in the Caucuses, in Azerbaijan, in Georgia, in Armenia, and also, allegedly, in Chechnya. Every last one is a deeply flawed democratic experiment, as if many of the people in the region, quite frankly, don't care.
At the heart of all of this seems to be the re-sorting of different peoples in their relationship to each other and in their relationship to the former Soviet Union, now Russia.
At the time of its collapse, the Soviet Union consisted of 126 officially recognized ethnic entities, "nations," living in 55 officially recognized territorial units, ranging from the 15 titular republics -- Russia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Estonia, etc. -- down to a series of autonomous republics and even autonomous districts.
One of the things that happened at the time of the collapse is the top of the pinnacle was removed and everybody attempted to move up one level. Azerbaijan attempted and succeeded at becoming an internationally recognized state -- a member of the IMF, World Bank, UN, and all the various "clubs." The problem came with the autonomous regions that were smaller than the fifteen titular republics. One of those is mountainous Karabakh, where a war that was fought for control of territory that was disputed between Azerbaijan and Armenia. It goes on today, a frozen conflict. Another was the autonomous Republic of Abkhazia in Eduard Shevardnadze's Georgia, which was another nasty, nasty war that I ended up covering as well. And then in the Russian Federation was the autonomous Republic of Chechnya and Ingushetia, which then became, of course, the Chechnya conflict. There are those who argue that had it not been for a personality conflict between Boris Yeltsin and the first leader of the Chechnya Republic, Djohar Dudayev, that there would have been no war; that there were deals to be made about resources and things like this.
So it was a hellishly complex period, and it remains hellishly complex today, which is, paradoxically, a journalistic delight.
Now, go back a little to our discussion of journalism, because you wound up inserting yourself in Chechnya as a journalist to do a brief documentary of the events there. I get the sense from your book that you came to have an ambivalence about the news and its relationships to these events; you seemed to worry a lot [that] you were being forced by the role you were in to move from providing information to providing entertainment. Talk a little about that. We're now talking about the documentary you made and the news you were providing, as opposed to the book that you've written.
I sallied forth, perhaps, with an overly romantic view of Chechnya and the Chechens, people for whom I have the greatest respect and whom I still stand by in their hour of need. However, to suggest that I was not romantically engaged would be incorrect. I was off to find and illustrate the "Chechen spirit," how this little people could rally their resources to fend off the overwhelming force of the might of the Russian Army bearing down on them.
I also sallied forth with the pretense of changing the world. This is common to many journalists, young and old, namely, the belief that that article that you write, that that television program that you shoot, will be so effective that the viewer, the reader, will stand up and shout, "Stop! Stop this war! Stop this madness!" Maybe this is a pretense that you have to have at a certain point as a journalist, because otherwise it would be almost impossible to do your job in these extremely difficult situations. Not just myself, but a whole string of people have run up against the brick wall of impossibility, of the futility of doing this, of changing the world with that one article, or that series of articles, or that one television program. And that's where, I guess, a certain cynicism begins to kick in, and you start to wonder if you are only deemed an entertainer, and that violence is your tool to entertain.
I get the sense that when you're on the ground, you're covering something, and there is an important story you feel you need to tell about this particular battle or this particular village, that when you then try to take your product, your story or your film, back to the big boys in either Moscow or New York or London, they have no sense, everything is out of sync. What is important at a particular moment is not what they're interested in at that particular moment. And therefore, there's never a connection between the reality on the ground and the news that's being reported.
You're absolutely right. But the question is what to do about that? This is why God created editors. Not everything a journalist on the ground records at a given day, or a given week, or a given month is going to be "news." It may be intrinsically interesting to him or her, but it's not going to be intrinsically interesting to the viewing public back home.
I once had a mentor in the media many, many years ago, who referred to this process, oddly enough, as the basketball hoop syndrome. To make a swisher, you have to have the right-size story for the right hoop. It doesn't make any difference how well you throw or toss the ball. If you're throwing a medicine ball at a basketball hoop, it will never go through, and you're just wasting your time. And if you're throwing a tennis ball up into the basketball hoop, it may go swishing through, but nobody will notice because it is not the right ball for that hoop. So there is that reality of working in the media: If you're out in the field and you are assigned to do, let's say, a 10-minute video, you better give a 10-minute video. If you come back with an hour video, you're going to be trying to push a medicine ball through a basketball hoop.
Next page: Chechnya
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