A Russian conscript on the banks of the Sunzha river, Grozny 1995. The Hotel Kavkaz would have been to the right of this shot, overlooking the remains of the Presidential Palace, seen in the background. [My photo.]
An earlier post I wrote for this Substack featured an extract from Grozny: A Tourist Map, a book I wrote to work through memories of the war in Chechnya in 2020 when, a quarter of a century after the events in question, they started to cause me trouble in my mind.
Here is another chapter from the same unpublished work. I have edited the original lightly - when I wrote it, I hadn’t expected it to be seen by anyone except myself and possibly some close family and friends.
The piece spends some time considering the places you call ‘home’ when you’re very far from it.
By the time I was going in and out of Baghdad, the BBC would put up those of us willing to take the assignment in the Four Seasons in Amman, breaking up the journey into and out of Iraq. (It was unthinkable luxury, but a small relief after the tour in Baghdad, and cheaper for the licence fee payer than a month or two in The Priory.)
In the 90s, working for Associated Press Television, accommodation might be a lot less glamorous. For a wintry part of the Chechnya war in late 1994, we overnighted for weeks on end in a shed at an athletics centre in Dagestan, just over the border. Three of us shared a double mattress to keep warm. A competitor agency had a microwave to warm up small frozen pizzas which they didn’t share (neither pizza nor heating device). Our bureau in Moscow sent us a case of tinned fish and no tin opener. We commuted into Grozny from the sports centre each morning. It was the first ‘drive-in war’, perhaps.
Later this year, I am going with one of my sons to Bosnia and Serbia. He wants to show me Sarajevo, which I have never seen. I want to show him Belgrade, where I spent some strange nights during the anti-Milosevic protests during the periods I wasn’t going in and out of Chechnya.
The Hotel Kavkaz featured as one of the photos on the cover of the tourist map of Grozny I had bought on my first trip: a Stalinist-classical construction on Lenin Square that faced the former council building now restyled as the Presidential Palace.
The balconies possibly nodded to a regional architectural aesthetic, but the overwhelming impression was early-to-mid-Soviet heft. It was reminiscent in that respect, but in smaller measure, of the Moskva Hotel near the Kremlin, a stupendously unattractive edifice, of which the ugliness was explained by a story that may be myth, but may well not be: two terrified architects delivered two different set of blueprints to Stalin to choose from. The Great Leader signed off on both. So they built both buildings in one.
The Hotel Moskva in Moscow. A ‘Four Seasons’ chain spot nowadays. [Photo: Alex 'Florstein' Fedorov, CC BY-SA 4.0]
I regret never having stayed in the Kavkaz, though some journalists did, but Eurovision had set up in the Hotel Dinamo a short walk away, and if you were doing TV, you needed to be near their satellite dish if you didn’t have one of your own. (The Dinamo was next to a sports stadium of the same name at which the Moscow-approved head of Chechnya (Akhmad Kadyrov, father of the current despot Ramzan) was assassinated by a bomb under the bleachers a few months after the rebels were assumed to have been all but extinguished.)
Outside the world of television news, Eurovision conjures up ideas of lamé, sequins, stacked heels and a bizarre cult that takes seriously the supposed value of vapid lyrics and frequently appalling music.
For state broadcasters, Eurovision means first and foremost a video news exchange run by the EBU, or European Broadcasting Union, which organises collaborative business for them. It works the same way now as it did then, in Grozny in 1994: Finnish TV might have pictures of a big landslide in a remote bit of their country, say, but nobody else had a reporter in Helsinki; so in return for access to dramatic landslide aftermath shots, the Finns might get access to Russian video of the aftermath of a terrorist incident somewhere hard to pronounce like Mineralniye Vody or Kashirskoye Shosse. They would also be entitled to help themselves to anything else they fancied that day: the BBC’s footage of an annual cheese-rolling competition in the middle of Rutland, perhaps.
For impoverished agencies like APTV, Eurovision held out the promise of feeding our stories by satellite free of charge, so long as the video was newsworthy enough. Satellite transmissions cost thousands of pounds in those days. And Associated Press, along with competitors like Reuters and WTN, also had a commercial imperative to get stuff to our broadcast clients more quickly than the rest, the easier to make a marketing case for new business and lucrative contracts revolving around carnage sanitised for teatime news shows. Eurovision got one’s shots of mishap, tears and cripples to the widest audience as quickly and cheaply as possible.
Hence decamping to the Hotel Dinamo, where the EBU had their sat-dish and their news exchange coordinators, like Bruno, or the lovely Rita, both of whom had travelled down from Moscow to organise things on the ground of the freshest war in the erstwhile Soviet space.
They were the nicest thing about the Dinamo. In any case, we had to leave it when the Russian foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, warned in no uncertain terms that the bombing campaign was about to start and that we were not on any maps currently used by the airforce. (That was the moment we removed ourselves to the shed in Dagestan.) Kozyrev always seemed charming, spoke excellent English and wore nicely cut suits. He was poorly matched to the tasks before him, which eventually included explaining the Stalingrad-style razing of the Chechen capital to astonished foreigners. He now lives in exile in the USA.
The shed we rented in Khasavyurt, Dagestan, was owned by Alikhan Djamaluddinov, a former Greco-Roman wrestler, who ran the athletics centre and lived on a house in the grounds that was incredibly luxurious, even by western standards. He was also a kind hearted man. When he found out my wife was expecting our first son, he gave me this handmade plate as a symbol of the fertility of family life.
Nice hotels (of which the Grozny ‘Dinamo’ is not the first to come to mind) can make producing grisly visual product easier on body and soul. The perfect example was another Hotel Moskva. This one was located in the centre of Belgrade. I used to visit after the first Chechen war and before Vladimir Putin confected the second. Serbia, entre les deux guerres, to cover protests against Slobodan Milosevic that were on this occasion to fail.
A truly nasty hotel, by contrast, was the Hotel Assa in Nazran, then the capital of Ingushetia, from which we tried to cover the second war in Chechnya. The only amusing thing about the Assa was the English version of the restaurant menu – ‘Entrancing Salad with a Cheese Hat’ was among the offerings.
One way in which the Belgrade ‘Moskva’ was superior to the Assa was that the secret services may have had a snoop around your room in the former, but if so, would had left things as you had left them. In the Assa, that wasn’t the way they did business:
Hotel Moskva, Belgrade – you get back to your room and a chap may have touched your neatly folded pants and toothbrush. OK, acceptable. Worse things happen.
Hotel Assa, Nazran – you get back to the room and the satellite phone is in the bathtub and the shower’s on full blast. And the men in tracksuits who’d done it were chilling in the bar when you got back from the war, and followed you up the stairs with their gaze, and watched you come back down again, with that ‘my fucking tech is knackered’ look on your face. Along with your ‘shit, how will I explain this to London tonight?’ look.
Somewhere between the two was the Grand Hotel in Pristina, where I stayed during the war in Kosovo in 1997. The secret service guys here got straight to the point:
Day one – the armoured Landrover you parked on the concourse suddenly didn’t have brake cables.
Day two – the armoured Landrover didn’t have a clutch cable.
Day three - the armoured Landrover had ‘Fuck TV’ sprayed across the bodywork.
Day four – it wasn’t there any longer.
(Day sixteen – you spot it at a police base garage near Lipljan, but what are you going to say? “Please may I have my armoured Landrover back, gentlemen, because it cost a lot and London is wondering where I left it?”)
An armoured Landrover parked outside the Grand Hotel Pristina, Kosovo. [My photo]
But before the fighting in Kosovo came the lengthy and futile campaign to oust Milosevic – Zajedno – in which I participated for 40 days and 40 nights on the cold streets of Belgrade. A different map would easily help me tell a tale about the Serbian capital instead of Grozny. I know the on-foot journey from the Hotel Moskva, via Knjez Mikhailovic, to Gospodar Jovanovic Street, as well as I can find my way around the Hundred Aker Wood in the end papers of my childhood copy of Winnie the Pooh.
This is in part because my sole daily reason for being on Gospodar Jovanovic Street was to see the doctor who’d put a penicillin jab into whichever of my buttocks was most receptive that morning, and you tend to remember things like that. Shortly afterwards, my cameraman got the same treatment – we had developed bronchitis, verging on pneumonia, thanks to water cannon, frost and Marlboro. That was problematic for us both, but his x-ray came back with news of a kink in the upper spine from carrying his Betacam rig for so long.
But back at the Moskva Hotel… I remember being chased about the middle of town by riot police, usually drafted in from a provincial town like Niš. We called them the ‘Farmers’ Boys’, which gave them the excuse for the extra wallop with which they brought down the rubber truncheon upon on your metropolitan head with genuine feeling. Or once your head and body were properly softened, bring it down on your camera.
“They turned it into a banana!” wailed Sergei from Reuters, and we wondered what he was talking about.
“Look!”
And he offered for inspection his Betacam - he was right, they’d twatted it so hard that the fixing between lens and body was crooked now. Twenty US grand gone in an angry flourish by a farmer’s boy. Almost 50k if you include the lens.
Sergei had brought the physical evidence of his Betacam’s demise to one of the duplex rooms in the Moskva where we would hang out after the final Eurovision exchange was over with and inter-agency competition was parked for the night.
The editor would get a duplex, because it gave us a workspace and gave him a raised bed separate from the fags and booze and Sony edit kit. You had repro furniture, and a full drinks cabinet with an elderly television squatting on it. Sometimes, those bulky riot police officers would chase you right up to the doors of the Moskva, but they’d never come in. It was like playing ‘tag’ when you had a ‘home’ where you were safe.
The Hotel Moskva in Belgrade
The other thing about Belgrade’s Hotel Moskva – what was on those antiquated TV sets. Most of time it was the staple fare of eastern European state television. Dated films, often about war, and imported Mexican soaps, interspersed with a man or woman with big hair telling you the news.
“Milosevic did this today… his wife Mira Markovic has done something else. Also today. All this happened. Today. Even more shall happen tomorrow. Here is the sports, and next will be weather. Goodnight, dear viewers.”
But after midnight, on of the television channels turned into a no-holds-barred, magic lantern featuring unbridled, hugely athletic, hardcore porn. This was a state-funded channel, but it was showing action that would have cost quite a lot of money if you were dependent on black market smut-shops or on VHS cassettes brought in by your brother Mirko who had a porn habit and a comfy job in the US to fund it.
But after midnight on this channel, there was no need to retune the TV set or slip in a tape: the ladies and gentlemen were doing it to one another, with substantial gusto, for free. Paid by the taxes of your brother Slavs.
I gather the idea was that by putting pornographic films on the television was to keep young men indoors, off the streets and away from the protests. It was as if BBC2 switched from Open University lectures to ‘Busty Belgrade Babes’ at the witching hour. The offer was this: would you rather listen to Vuk Drasković in the rain, and likely get your arse whacked by the Farmers’ Boys; or settle back into your sofa, get out some tissues, and tune in to the latest adventures of ‘Bored Housewives and the Plumbers from Peč’?
Most evenings at the Moskva ended in some editor’s room, with a film like ‘Big and Bad in Novy Sad’ on the telly. I wasn’t then, and am not to this day, a porn fan. It’s not my thing. But it was very much part of the soundtrack of those bizarre days in Belgrade.
Me? I was keener on the little 50ml bottles of plum brandy you could get in any kiosk on the street those days, even in the heat of a mid-sized demo, verging on riot. There was always an old boy behind the till amid the CS gas. A few dinars surrendered and you got a dose of slivovice – cap off, down in one – and you were warmed up ready for another game of tag with policemen in riot gear.
And once everyone had got a bit oiled, there’s was a chance you might get out of the opposition’s producer what their plan was for the next day, and thereby beat them to it, or at least be in a position to match their Eurovision offer.
Whether your edit was accepted depended on many things, but most of all on the judgment of the Eurovision coordinator on the day.
“Sorry, Chris, Reuters piece is better, so they get an exclusive,” might say Lovely Rita, the doyenne of EBU Moscow, and one of the coordinators who had been in charge of the satellite dish in Grozny.
“In what way is it better? I’ve seen the spot and it’s shaky and shot on a Betacam 200, and ours is on a 400. Also their edits are too tight to be re-cut by clients.”
Lovely Rita was under no obligation to justify her choice, but with gentle pressure she occasionally would:
“They had better vox pops.”
“Rita, who gives a damn about vox pops? Nobody uses them. They get cut out and chucked away. The broadcasters only care about the wide shots with bang-bang and the close ups of weeping kids that they can pass off as their own. And our weeping kids are better.”
“Sorry, Chris. I am giving Reuters the exclusive.”
And that was that. London immediately on the phone: “Why couldn’t you match Reuters?”
“Because we didn’t have their crappy vox pops.”
“Well go and get some!”
“It’s too late and too dark.”
And I’m too drunk, and the Reuters and Eurovision people are in the same room as me now, watching the same episode of ‘Horny in Kragujevać’.
Wow. What a time that must have been. Surreal to think that happened here not so long ago. Aside from some rather militant anti-Kosovan graffiti on a few walls, Beograd feels quite charming now. Also, can’t imagine what it must have been like in Dagestan — that must have been nuts.